Martina Koegeler-Abdi
Anecdotes, gossip, and hearsay are not sources in a scholarly sense. However, we should not entirely dismiss or ignore that they may play a role in informal knowledge production that can shape researchers’ relations to their subjects— for better or worse.
As researchers looking into the politics of family secrecy in 20th century Denmark, our group would often find information on family secrets in indirect ways: in the absence of a documentation that should have been there, in the traces of hidden personal stories submerged in archival files or in the memories and testimonies of individuals who uncovered a secret in their own family histories. Secrets leave traces. Acts of concealment create reproducible knowledge that may soundly inform scholarship. However, practices of secrecy within families may also contain hearsay, gossip, perhaps even lies. How should we approach this kind of informal, and unverifiable, knowledge?
Gossip reflects power dynamics in a family and the value of a given information in the community. It may tell us less about the person/secret that is the target of the gossip, but more about the person telling and their possible motivation. Despite this information value, gossip is highly problematic as a source. Apart from the difficulty of verifying gossip, there will just be too many ethical transgressions involved in most cases. For example, in my own sub-project on family secrets emerging from the German occupation of Denmark, I had a strange encounter with a member of the public who repeatedly emailed me about not his own, but his friend’s past. He claimed that his friend had been a member of the Danish national socialist youth movement and insisted I should talk to him. Despite my clear rejection of this proposal, he kept following up for over a year. The appeal of the gossip he believed himself in a position to share appears to have been too strong.
The appeal of anecdotal information, broadly conceived, cuts both ways. While I had to block unethical revelations from others as in the example above, I had to also stop myself from relying on hearsay. Working with personal testimonies and memories about a family secret commonly involves people or events beyond the given informants’ own experiences. As official information on, for example, adoption practices around children born to Danish women and German soldiers during the WWII occupation is extremely limited, experiences of the adoptees themselves are one of the few available sources. I found myself wishing I could use what I heard from interviewees about certain institutions even though in the end I had to admit to myself I could not. Even if these insights were true and I trusted my informants, I simply could not provide the necessary backing.
Despite all these clear limitations, I also experienced that anecdotal information can have a productive potential for scholarship too. Occasionally an anecdote may change your perspective in ways you cannot take back. This new knowledge then alters how you see and understand the evidence you have, even though the source for this new perspective remains anecdotal. When I was working on the transnational adoption history of biracial children, born to African American soldiers and German women in 1960s Denmark, I came across the term ‘mulatto’. Biracial adoptees at the time were called ‘mulatto children,’ which I primarily read as a signifier of their racial difference from ‘white’ Danes. Over lunch with a friend, she mentioned her mother went to school with some of these children and that it was important for them to call them ‘mulattos’ to indicate they were ‘part-white.’
This may be a false memory. I cannot verify whether my friends’ mother’s views represent a then wide-spread attitude toward the ‘mulatto’ children and make this a historical argument either. But this information has changed my analytical perspective on the possible valuations of hiding/highlighting ‘Germanness’ as a construction of ethno-racial difference in the adoptee testimonies I work with. One may call incidents like this serendipity or an inspiration scholars depart from. But it was also a source of knowledge. If we accept the latter view, then we need perhaps a broader discussion on the criteria for scholarly engagement with anecdotes that would enable us to distinguish and acknowledge cases that have informed our own work in ethically sound and productive ways.