Portelli's foundational 1979 essay cites no Halbwachs, drawing its theoretical apparatus from narratology, folklore studies, and sociolinguistics instead

oral-historycollective-memoryhistoriographysource-verificationhalbwachsportelliintellectual-lineage

Alessandro Portelli's essay "What Makes Oral History Different" — first published 1979 as "Sulla specificità della storia orale" (Primo Maggio), reprinted 1981 as "The Peculiarities of Oral History" (History Workshop, no. 12), and again as the opening theoretical chapter of The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (SUNY Press, 1991, pp. 45–58) — lays out Portelli's own theoretical foundations for oral-history method. Read in full, including its original endnotes, via a licensed reprint in The Oral History Reader (Perks & Thomson, eds., Routledge, 1998, ch. 6, pp. 63–74): the essay's 11 endnotes cite Gérard Genette (narrative theory), Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition (oral-tradition studies), Roman Jakobson and Piotr Bogatyrev (folklore theory), William Labov (sociolinguistics), Dan Ben-Amos (folklore genre theory), Boris Tomashevsky and the Russian Formalists (fabula/plot theory), and Luisa Passerini (Italian oral history). Maurice Halbwachs does not appear anywhere in the body text or the note list. A representative endnote (no. 7, "On genre distinctions in folk and oral narrative") reads: "Vansina, Oral Tradition, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, [1961], 1973" — the kind of reference the essay actually reaches for.

This is a single essay within a multi-decade body of work, so it cannot establish that Portelli never engaged Halbwachs anywhere in his output — only that his single most reprinted methodological statement, the essay that defines his approach, does not. It bears directly on claim-halbwachs-collective-memory-is-shared-ancestor-of-interpretive-forgetting's [unverified-mechanism] claim that Halbwachs is Portelli's direct theoretical ancestor; see question-verify-halbwachs-direct-lineage-into-portelli for the open verification thread this feeds, and claim-green-2004-portelli-halbwachs-external-frame for the companion finding on how later scholarship connects the two.