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Interview with Sam Schrager

Recent Teaching History
Natural Histories: Botany, Biography, Community; 2000-1; 1998-99
American Community; 1999-2000
Restorying the West; 1996-97

Subject Areas of Competence and Interest

Community and Cultural Studies.
There was a time when folklorist Sam Schrager believed he invented the term, "oral history," and therein lies the clue to his faith in his students’ ability to learn. As he says, "I’m interested in helping students equip themselves to explore social life, community, the social world. So, I teach fieldwork: how to go about doing field work. Students learn about stories by listening, learning how to listen to people tell stories. I’m happiest when students are out doing work ‘in the field," spending time hanging out in places, meeting people, and taking the time to sit down with people, listen to them and ask them decent questions. This comes out of my own experience. My conviction of how good it is [for students] comes out of how good it was for me. . . . [This work] then prepares them to go on and take a larger look at the social scene. I am not interested in making it theoretically complicated at all. . . . Students often learn more from that one experience of actually beginning to understand someone else’s life from their point of view--as they see it--they learn more from that than probably anything else that I can teach them."

Sam had come out West to go to Reed and because, "I wanted to discover the country. I wanted to experience the country. Those have proved to be enduring desire. I moved to Idaho to get into the real country. Portland was all too developed for me and the forest service gave me a way to get back there--and the 70’s was a good time to be there." It was a good time to be there because, "one of the great defects of coming of age in the 60’s was the sense that we had a privileged understanding. How we got to believe that, I think, is partly the arrogance of youth, and partly it was the evils of the government, that led us to these convictions. Much of what we believed was right, but we didn’t have a grounding in experience so we believed that we were the first generation to really crack this. So living in Idaho was probably the most important part of my growing up."

What Sam discovered is that the old people whose stories he heard, and then decided to record, were so real, and so reflective of their lives that he felt he could have stayed there and never stopped learning. But he had to decide what he was going to do with his life so, largely in order to keep doing what he was doing in some form, he went to Penn and got a Ph.D. in folklore. When he got to graduate school he discovered that he had enough experience "in the field to be able to assess what it was I was being taught in a different way. So about a year of it was good for me because I was learning how they talk about it and I needed that because I was working in isolation in Idaho. I mean, for a brief time I thought I invented the term ‘oral history.’" Sam is now writing a book about life in logging country in the period between 1890 and the depression, using the stories he got before he knew there was such a thing as an academic discipline in which you record and study the stories of ordinary people.

This explains why Sam spends a lot of time persuading students that "they’ve got ideas that are worth pursuing and they need to learn what these are; and those that aren’t they need to learn to set aside." Eventually, under Sam’s tutelage, understanding replaces second-hand abstractions. Sam adds: I just finished writing a book on trial lawyers as courtroom performers, and in it I cover a lot of what interests me in cultural studies; what the great American mythologies are and what personal identities we invent for ourselves in relation to them; how we live out the meanings we seek, for better and worse; and what we can do to nourish community and democracy in the face of money-and-power driven capitalism.

"Some of my favorite authors for teaching," he says are: "Philip Selznick (social thought), Ralph Elison (American culture), Mikhail Bakhtin (discourse), Susan Sontag (art), Barbara Myerhoff (ethnography), Erving Goffman (interaction), Gary Snyder (the West), Americo Paredes (folklore)."

When asked how he characterizes his style, Sam hesitated and then asked me what I thought it was. "Low key but ruthlessly supportive," I offered. Since he didn’t come up with his own formulation, I stand by that. Sam doesn’t give up; he tries to reach all his students.

In their evaluation of him students report that his obvious love for his subject opens for them a way to embrace the subject themselves.

Interviewer: Pete Sinclair

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Last Updated: March 15, 2007