Oral history: reproduction of socio-cultural reality

Abstract

The article is an attempt to analyze the application of the method of oral history in order to actualize the understanding of the past on the example of the stories of people of Polish origin living in the Zhytomyr region. Through individual memory to recreate the collective memory, which scientists consider as a set of individual memories, which is created by the individual taking into account the influences of society and a particular social group in the process of everyday communication. In world science, the question of what socio-historical values, knowledge, patterns of behavior, elements of folk art should be preserved and passed on to future generations to ensure effective development and to preserve social order. Collective memory is not only the main mechanism of cultural unity of the community, but also the mechanism of "archiving" the most important components of cultural and mystical experience and the spiritual world of the nation. Collective memory is a systemic factor in "connecting" the past to the present, an important tool for updating the history of the national community. Thus, national identity is impossible without a developed collective memory as the ability to preserve and consciously reactivate previous experience. The theory of "spiral of silence" was used as an explanation of the social behavior of the population of that time in order to save their own lives and avoid repression.