| Note: | SUMMARY: The article illustrates the relationship of Slovenian historiography with oral sources both before the 1990s and after Slovenia’s independence, and above all highlights the practices of memory that have developed over the last thirty years in this country and the media’s use of witnesses. In the Slovenian case, a long period of reluctance of historiography towards oral history could be observed due to a historicist approach tending to privilege archival sources as the foundation of any historiographical reconstruction. Oral sources were mainly collected and used on the fringes of historiography, in museums and amateur settings or in border areas, where historical research had been confronted since the early post-war years with the absence of archival and written sources. Thus, until the end of the 1990s, oral history in Slovenia remained an exotic, historiographically unreliable and therefore useless practice for “real” historiography, which in the contemporary sphere continued to be predominantly concerned with the topics of political and institutional history, even if prompted by anthropological, ethnological and sociological studies that in the meantime have rehabilitated oral sources in dealing with historical events. Despite an increasing number of oral history researches carried out in the last decade especially in the Italian-Slovenian border area, despite a multi-ethnic and multilingual presence, the cross-border approach has remained almost completely absent. / KEY WORDS: oral history, border history, practices of memory, slovene-italian border, slovene historiography |
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