Abstract
Drawing on Barbara H. Rosenwein’s work and the history of emotions more generally, this article considers the significance of emotional boundaries within the context of oral history interviews. I examine how, in my own interviews with Irish Canadians in Winnipeg, interviewees navigated these unspoken social codes when they told stories of religion and spiritual experience. Widely shared understandings among the emotional communities of Canadian society, the Irish community in Winnipeg, and the interview itself meant that some stories about spiritual experiences required an invitation while others did not. When interviewees discussed landscape and nature, they drew freely on spiritual language to relay their experience of the sublime within particular spaces. Discussion of religion, however, tended to focus on its historical and political significance within the Irish community, unless an invitation was offered to broaden the emotional boundaries of our conversation. I argue that as oral historians and co-creators of these boundaries within the interview space, it is important to consider the boarders of the emotional communities that shape our interviews. If we combine oral history methodology with the work of historians of emotion and religion, we may open up new possibilities to examine the understudied role of faith and religion in interviewees’ lives.