Storylines: Craftartists’ Narratives of Identity 9780674041134

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S T O RY L I N E S

S T O RY L I N E S Craftartists’ Narratives of Identity

ELLIOT G. MISHLER

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2004 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mishler, Elliot George, 1924– Storylines : craftartists’ narratives of identity / Elliot G. Mishler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–674–83973–0 (alk. paper) ISBN 0–674–01586–x (pbk.) 1. Artists—Psychology. 2. Artists Interviews. 3. Identity (Psychology) 4. Discourse analysis, Narrative. I. Title. NK1110.M58 1999 745´.092´2—dc21 99–38230

For our grandchildren, Max, Raphael, Nikolai, Mara, Eli; beginning their life stories, they have already changed the course of ours

Acknowledgments

At the center of this inquiry are the life stories of five craftartists whom I interviewed in 1986–87. I am deeply indebted to them for consenting to talk with me about their work and lives. Generous with their time, patient with my questions, and forthcoming in their responses, they entered into the spirit of the inquiry and helped to shape its direction. Respect for their privacy and the standard constraint of confidentiality preclude acknowledging them by name. Pseudonyms used in later chapters will have to serve, but since they will recognize themselves, I hope they will hear me thanking each of them personally: Adam Daley, glassmaker; David Farber, furniture craftsman; Beth Rivers, fabric designer; Carla Stone, artistpotter; and Fred Wharton, furniture craftsman. About the same time I began this series of interviews, I also initiated an informal discussion group about narrative research. The Narrative Study Group, which includes researchers from different universities and disciplines, continues to meet monthly. Membership has been remarkably stable, changing slowly, with occasional losses balanced by new participants. Our discussions of one another’s studies are collegial in the best sense, marked by a blend of constructive criticism and support. It has been the primary intellectual context within which my own thinking and research on narratives has developed during the past decade. Sections of this book reflect discussions of earlier drafts of this as well as of other participants’ work from the time I began writing, in 1995. I wish, therefore, to acknowledge specifically the contributions of those who participated in these discussions: Kathleen Adams, Jane Attanucci, Michael Bamberg, Susan Bell,

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Sara Dickey, Mark Freeman, Arlene Katz, Kristin Langellier, Brinton Lykes, Alyssa McCabe, Angeliki Nicolopoulou, Eric Peterson, John Rich, Catherine Riessman, Ellen Rintell, Irma Rosenfield, Jill Taylor, Lucie White. For the past few years, I have consulted with the research group of the Victims of Violence Program in the Cambridge Hospital Department of Psychiatry. We have been exploring the value and limitations of narrative methods for studying the course of trauma and recovery of sexual abuse survivors. This collaborative work sensitized me to problematic assumptions in narrative research, particularly about the continuity and coherence of life stories, and my approach to these issues bears the imprint of our discussions. I wish to thank Mary Harvey (Director of VOV), for inviting me to join her, Patricia Harney, and Karestan Koenen in their work, and each of them for helping me learn about the meaning of sexual violence in women’s lives. The impact on victims/survivors of various forms of violence was also a central topic in a Seminar/Workshop on Narrative Methods I offered over the past few years. My understanding of the complexity of these issues and of ways to adapt a narrative approach to conduct research on them owes a great deal to presentations and discussions of their studies by Trudy Duffy, Karestan Koenan, Jane Liebschutz, Beth Myers, Branca Ribeiro, and John Rich. Sol Levine, an old and dear friend, died in November 1996. For many years we had been arguing the relative merits of qualitative and quantitative research methods. As a highly proficient and productive quantitative researcher, he was puzzled by my turn to qualitative and narrative approaches and pressed me to clarify the assumptions, limits, and value of the methods I was proposing. A few years ago, he invited me to consult on the development of a community survey of health and well-being among different social class and ethnic groups. He wanted me to bring my perspective into the work to see what could be learned from combining the two approaches. We both understood this was another way to continue our dialogue, an opportunity for us to examine together the adequacy and relevance of my approach in a real context. With his usual, legendary generosity, he gave me permission to use materials from the study in my own work—indeed, encouraged me to do so. I take up his offer in the analysis of two interviews from the study presented in this report. Working on them became a way of continuing our dialogue. Thank you, Sol.

Acknowledgments / ix Responses to an earlier draft by two anonymous reviewers directed my attention to various problems of organization and content that I have tried to resolve in this revision. They are not responsible, of course, for the result, but I hope they will find I was as attentive to their questions and suggestions as they were to my work. Elizabeth Knoll, the Behavioral Sciences Editor at Harvard University Press, was a close and patient reader, recommending changes that always led to improvements in the text. I am pleased to acknowledge her support and guidance in bringing this book to completion. Vicky Steinitz has been at my side throughout the work, offering her trademark blend of support and candor. Her readings of successive drafts gradually reduced the levels of ambiguity and obscurity in the text. To the extent I have managed to achieve some clarity and succinctness, both the readers and I are indebted to her efforts. There is, of course, much more to it than that, much more that could be said. But that would carry us far beyond the boundaries of this book into the life we share together, and that is what I wish most to thank her for.

Contents

Preface 1 / Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists: Identity and Narrative

xiii 1

2 / Sources and Routes: Variable Pathways in Identity Formation

21

3 / Contingencies and Turning Points: Discontinuities in the Life Course

53

4 / Tensions and Contradictions: Revisiting Claims for Coherence in Life Stories

83

5 / Identities in/as Relationships within the Family and at Work

111

6 / Narrative Studies of Identity: A Forward Look

145

Notes

165

References

173

Preface

A preface is the threshold of a book, a place of exits and entrances. As I prepare to leave the work behind, I invite you—prospective readers—to enter it. It is a charged moment. Feelings of protectiveness intersect with the need to say what the book is about. Our initial meeting may mark the beginning of a more extended dialogue, and the foyer is not a place to linger long. My task is to draw a floor plan, briefly trace the history of the work, and map out what you can expect to find ahead. It may seem strange to introduce a report focused on analyses of personal narratives, a genre of discourse, with architectural tropes.1 Nonetheless, images of building and constructing surfaced when I looked back at how this book came to have its final shape. It has been long in the making, and to characterize the process as revising a text seemed inadequate to the work of constructing and rearranging units of meaningful discourse larger than words, sentences, or paragraphs. As my understanding of narrative and identity—key thematic concepts in the work—changed through successive stages of analysis, I added, revised, deleted, and rearranged sections, continually modifying the overall structure. The interpenetration of form and content suggested in this metaphor of building anticipates the perspective that informs the work. In good part, the complexity of the process reflected the plurality of content areas addressed in the study: the crafts and the work and lives of craftartists; methods of narrative analysis and their application to life history interviews; the process of adult identity formation. These keywords in the book’s subtitle are of equal importance; each, however, has its own

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history as a general topic and field of inquiry and as a particular domain of personal interest. How to bring them together, to create a unified whole from several quasi-independent parts, was the central problem. The profusion of interests made this an exciting task but also posed risks that became evident in an earlier draft, which was overly complex in structure and thematically diffuse. Addressing these problems required radical renovation. The current version is more unified, with the aim of clarifying the central argument and making connections between parts more visible and easier to follow.2 Readers will be the final arbiters of whether and how well this aim has been achieved. Now, to the promised floor plan. The core of the work, the foundation that remains in place through earlier changes and the latest renovation, is a number of life history interviews with five craftartists I conducted about a dozen years ago. Selected transcripts of these interviews are the data for this study, and their detailed analysis is the basis for my exploration of the value of a particular approach to narrative analysis for understanding adult identity formation, which is the central problem of the study. My interest in the crafts as a form of “nonalienated labor” and in the work and lives of craftspeople antedated these interviews. The ground for the foundation was prepared ten years earlier, when I photographed and talked informally with several craftartists as they did their work. My fantasy of a photo-essay on this project never materialized, but the experience stayed with me, and I began to learn more about the history and current place of the crafts in society. My initial notion of what might motivate craftartists to pursue their work in a society that was relatively unreceptive and provided little in the way of social status or economic rewards was expressed in a draft research proposal (Mishler, April 1987), written after the interviews discussed in this book. It began with a quotation from William Morris, the godfather of the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement that valorized “handicrafts” in the context of a critique of the dehumanizing impact of industrialization and mass production (Morris, 1966/1883). I made the bridge to the Marxist concept of alienation via C. Wright Mills’s analysis of the loss of craftsmanship in modern bureaucratic society (Mills, 1953). The aim of the proposed study, reflected in its title, “Work and identity: The lives of craftspersons,” was to contribute to research and theory on the crafts as a form of creative work and to reflect on the general problem of relations between work and personal identity.

Preface / xv The concept of adult identity formation is the scaffolding of this report. Each chapter—with all of them directed to the analysis and interpretation of the interviews—focuses on a particular problem in the study of identity. This term, relatively unspecified in the original proposal, was elaborated over the course of the work. For example, in my first report on one interview (Mishler, 1992), I proposed that “identity” be defined as a collective term referring to a set of sub-identities (among them a work identity), urged attention to the process of identity formation, and pointed to the significance of disjunctions and discontinuities in lifetime work trajectories. Echoes of this preliminary formulation will be found in the core analytic chapters, respecified as a set of problems in identity research and theory that became apparent as I examined, comparatively, the formation of my respondents’ current work identities as craftartists: universality vs. inter-individual variability in personal and career trajectories (Chapter 2); intra-individual continuities vs. discontinuities in the achievement of adult work identities (Chapter 3); coherence vs. tension and contradiction in life stories (Chapter 4); individual vs. relational conceptions of identity (Chapter 5). In each instance, I try to make the case that the second term in this series of polarities offers the most productive and appropriate perspective for theorizing, studying, and understanding identity formation. My work on narrative analysis began before this study (Mishler, 1986a; Mishler, 1986b), but developed concurrently with it. It is the third axis around which the book revolves, less a distinctive focal point than a shaft running through all the parts and holding them together. Narrative research is an umbrella term that covers a large and diverse range of approaches, the result of the rapid expansion of this area of inquiry over the past dozen years (Mishler, 1995). My own approach is a sub-genre, defined by specific theoretical assumptions and methodological procedures. These will be detailed in Chapter 1 and the analytic chapters, and are listed here in an abbreviated, slogan-like form as a guide to what follows. My attention was first drawn to stories in my studies of medical interviews (Mishler, 1984), in which I found that patients’ stories of their illness experiences were ignored or interrupted by physicians. My initial attempt to develop systematic methods to analyze narrative accounts in research interviews (Mishler, 1986a) relied on the sociolinguistic model proposed by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky (Labov & Waletzky, 1967). The widespread influence of this seminal paper on other narrative

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researchers is documented in a recent Special Issue of the Journal of Narrative and Life History (Bamberg, 1997a). Although my approach has changed owing to limitations of the LabovWaletzky model for dealing with embedded, lengthy, and multiple stories found in unstructured life history interviews, it remains grounded in sociolinguistic methods (Gee, 1991; Schiffrin, 1994). That tradition assigns special significance to the structure of speech and texts, and provides methods for specifying the linguistic features of different types of discourse units and the various ways in which they are tied together into larger units of meaning: for example, words into clauses, clauses into sentences and stanzas, stanzas into narrative episodes. This entails close listening to tape-recordings of speech and close reading of carefully prepared transcripts. This is the fundamental methodological principle for the analysis of interviews presented in this report.3 These structural descriptions of speech are not themselves transparent. Their construction is only the first, though necessary, step. Interpretation of their psychological, social, and cultural functions depends on additional theoretical assumptions. Two are of particular importance in my attempt to learn about identities from the shape and content of narratives. The first is that an interview is a dialogic process (Mishler, 1986b), a complex sequence of exchanges through which interviewer and interviewee negotiate some degree of agreement on what they will talk about, and how. My respondents’ accounts of their life experiences are situated in that context and may therefore be viewed as co-produced. This requires the readers to pay as much attention to an interviewer’s questions and statements as to an interviewee’s responses. This stance allows us to explore how a respondent’s stories may be influenced by their location in the course of the interview, given the social relationship established during its course. The second assumption that guides my interpretive approach is that narratives, and other discourse genres, are social acts. In speaking, we perform our identity (Langellier, 1999), making a “move” in the field of social relationships (Labov, 1982). This pragmatic view of language highlights what we are doing as social actors in selecting and organizing the resources of language to tell our stories in particular ways that fit the occasion and are appropriate for our specific intentions, audiences, and contexts. The principle of structural analysis and the assumptions of dialogue and performance constitute the theoretical and methodological framework of this study, a study of “narrative as praxis.”

S T O RY L I N E S

1 Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists: Identity and Narrative Craftsmanship is the heartbeat of human time. . . . an object that lasts a long time but also one that slowly ages away . . . and can be replaced by another object that is similar but not identical. The craftsman’s handiwork teaches us to die and hence teaches us to live. —Paz, 1974

My love affair with the crafts goes back a long way. I tend to date it from the late 1960s when I began doing photography, which I always regarded as a craft: buying a serious camera with interchangeable lenses, learning to develop and print in my first basement darkroom, taking workshops and courses. There was a surge of interest in the crafts during that period of widespread cultural and political turmoil, and my own involvement was undoubtedly stimulated and shaped by those larger forces. By making pictures I was learning to “see,” to be more attentive to the visual features of the world around me. I recall my first purchase in the early 1970s of handcrafted objects: two coffee mugs hanging on a rack in a cluttered “collectibles” store in a southern Maine town. The urge to have them was irresistible. I was hooked and wanted to meet the potter. Following directions down country roads to an old farmhouse and barn where she had her studio, we met her and her husband (who had built her kiln and mixed her glazes), talked the afternoon away, and became friends. This emblematic story is one possible beginning for the study reported here, but much has happened during the past 25–30 years, and that episode of first love might better be thought of as a pre-beginning.1 Five years later I photographed several craftartists at work, talking with them and tape-recording our conversations—a second candidate for a prebeginning. In this instance, I was myself a craftsman—a photographer— doing a student project in a photography workshop. Our conversations

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were informal—about their backgrounds, interests, goals, problems in doing their work and making a living—not research interviews. Later, I considered putting my pictures and excerpts from their comments together as a photo-essay on the crafts. That remained a fantasy, but the project deepened my prior interest in the lives and work of craftartists. Nonetheless, another ten years passed before I transformed that interest into a more formal study, the research on life history interviews that are the basis for this book. Further, the relevance of the earlier project to this work is not a function of their temporal order—our usual assumption about causality—but depends reflexively on the development of the current study. That is, the significance of events in the early and mid-1970s for what happened in 1986 and later is retrospectively constructed, not prospectively given. This perspective—the trope of the double arrow of time where the present (and future) anticipations shape the past as well as the reverse—informs the approach adopted here to the analysis and interpretation of life history narratives. Concurrently, during this same period of time, my approach to research and theory in the human sciences also changed radically. I shifted away from quasi-experimental, quantitative models and methods applied, for example, in a study of family processes and schizophrenia (Mishler & Waxler, 1968), to qualitative methods for studying discourse (Mishler, 1972; Mishler, 1984), to sociolinguistic methods of narrative analysis (Mishler, 1986a). This trajectory of change paralleled my developing interest in the crafts, but they were separate and relatively autonomous plots, complicating the story and pointing again to the uncertainty and ambiguity in the choice of a beginning. These features of my “story”—discontinuities, multiple plots—foreshadow issues that will be central topics in this study of craftartists’ life stories. In the fall of 1986, with the aim of bringing these two sets of concerns together, I interviewed a number of craftartists. Planned as a pilot, the study was designed to explore ways of applying methods of narrative analysis to “stories” elicited in unstructured life history interviews. I could have chosen any sample for this purpose, but decided to talk to craftspeople because of my special and continuing interest in their work. In the spring of 1987, after a small series of interviews, I drafted a research proposal entitled: “Work and Identity: The Lives of Craftspersons” (Mishler, April 1987). The following sections of this chapter focus on the three major components of the study that began with this proposal and con-

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 3 tinue in this book: the crafts and craftartists’ lives; issues in adult identity formation; methods of narrative analysis.

Romancing the Crafts William Morris was the influential godfather of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England and the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. My research was in part inspired by his romantic, redemptive, and utopian view of handicrafts, and my proposal began by quoting the following famous passage that summarizes his conception of the “craftsman ideal.” The pleasure which ought to go with the making of every piece of handicraft has for its basis the keen interest which every healthy man takes in healthy life, and is compounded . . . chiefly of three elements: variety, hope of creation, and the self respect which comes of a sense of usefulness; [and] that mysterious bodily pleasure which goes with the deft exercise of the bodily powers. . . . Now this compound pleasure in handiwork I claim as the birthright of all workmen. (Morris, 1966/1883, p. 174) He concludes that those who “lack” this will be “degraded,” less than “slaves,” “machines more or less conscious of their own unhappiness.” Morris’s valorization of handicrafts and his conception of the craftsman ideal reflected a deep, wide-ranging critique of the dehumanizing impact of industrialism and mass-production. I noted that his views were often referred to and echoed by other social critics and cited, as an example, C. Wright Mills’s classic analysis of white-collar work (Mills, 1953). Mills links Morris’s view of handicrafts to the Marxist concept of alienation, arguing that “craftsmanship” is a “historically important model of meaningful work and gratification” whose “realization” in the bureaucratic, market-driven work settings of modern society is impossible for whitecollar workers (p. 220). Early on I came across an eloquent essay by Octavio Paz on the depth of human feelings and experiences evoked by mundane, useful crafts objects, from which the epigraph to this chapter is drawn (Paz, 1974). His reflections on their effects complement Morris’s emphasis on their making. Paz assigns special significance to the crafts, contrasting them with the fine arts

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as a source of redemption, sounding wistful yet hopeful that they may yet save us from the “ruins of industrial society.” Arguing that handmade objects are “beautiful things because they are useful things” (p. 17), he asserts: “The thing that is handmade . . . follows the appointed round of days, it drifts with us as the current carries us along together, it wears away little by little, it neither seeks death nor denies it: it accepts it. Between the timeless time of the museum and the speeded-up time of technology, craftsmanship is the heartbeat of human time. . . .” (p. 24). These are powerful images, imbued with spirituality and moral claims. William Morris had a more materialistic perspective. The fundamental value of the crafted object was located in its making, the source of a “healthy life” embodied in the “compound pleasure of handiwork” that is the “birthright of all workmen.” Paz is concerned with an abstract “humanity,” Morris with real workers. In their different ways, however, each expresses a utopian vision of the crafts, one that aligned closely with my own values and framed the initial stages of this study. For example, I wanted to explore such questions as: How do craftartists sustain a sense of nonalienated work when faced with market demands and the problem of making a living? Do the requirements of craftwork conflict with other obligations and responsibilities to their families? Do the craftworkers view their work within the contested definitions of it as art or craft? Further, the situation of contemporary craftartists had to be placed in historical perspective, located in the context of developments since Morris’s vision achieved some degree of realization a century ago in the Arts and Crafts Movement (Boris, 1986; Kimmel, 1985; Lucie-Smith, 1987). Morris was a multi-talented, multi-faceted man: novelist, translator of Icelandic sagas, political activist, socialist, entrepreneur, publisher, and a fine craftsman in his own right (Thompson, 1955/1976). He organized and ran a successful business, establishing a working community of craftspeople that produced high quality handmade furniture, weavings, books, wallpaper. But the ideological aim of the venture—to raise the quality of life for working people—was not achieved. His products were too expensive and could not compete in the mass market of standardized, factory-made objects. His customers were educated, urban, and well-to-do.2 This sort of failure turned out to be endemic. It was the fate of many similar enterprises spawned during the heyday of the Arts and Crafts Movement. In the United States, although several of the original societies survived and are still active today, the movement gradually lost momen-

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 5 tum and its influence declined radically before the start of World War I. The story of the crafts in the United States since then, as told by critics and historians (Hall, 1977; Lucie-Smith, 1987), traces their decline in the twenties, followed by a period of government support in the thirties for a revival of local folk arts (an economic, not an artistic policy), and a new burst of activity after World War II that included a transformation of the field and continues into the present. The expansion/transformation of crafts during the last half of this century was initially fueled by government support of education and training through the GI Bill of Rights, and gained further momentum from the counter-cultural critique in the 1960s and 1970s of the alienating effects of the bureaucratic, corporate, stratified, and standardized mass-society features of the country—an echo of Morris’s Romantic revival vision. Commenting on the recent renewal of the crafts, one observer was optimistic: “By mid-century the stage was set for the full flowering of American crafts. Art schools and universities were beginning to provide sound economic security for craftsmen. The ongoing influx of European talent gave the craft scene fresh ideas and energy. American technology was being harnessed to new aesthetic possibilities, and the booming American economy was providing a new affluence and leisure for a population that had at last turned its attention to patronizing artists” (Hall, 1977, p. 17). My desire to study the work and lives of these artists came out of my own involvement in and love of the crafts, and was compounded by the utopian vision of Morris and others who gave craftwork broader social significance by locating it within a general ideological critique of modern industrial capitalist society. In talking with craftspeople, seeing what they made and how they worked, I was “romancing the crafts.” I did not conceal this perspective from my respondents by adopting the neutral mask of a researcher. Rather, as will be seen in the interviews in the following chapters, I was explicit about my views in my introductory remarks about the aims of the study. Further, I relied initially on Morris’s triad of variety, creativity, and self-respect derived from useful work as a guide for what I would be looking for in the experiences of contemporary craftspeople— what motivated and sustained them in their work. As with many romances, there was the morning after. The world in which my respondents work, live, and try to earn a living differs considerably from that of one hundred years ago. Although they understood my perspective and seemed to share it, they located their problems within the

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current socioeconomic and cultural context. They made no connection between what they did and the Arts and Crafts Movement. They were not craftworkers who learned their trade as apprentices, they were craftartists with advanced degrees from art colleges and graduate crafts programs. Rather than taking up the options then available to earn a living from either industrial, mechanized labor or “handiwork”—Morris’s “birthright of all workmen”—they struggle with the distinction between the crafts and the fine arts. This polarity is long-standing and constantly changing (Becker, 1978), and in a world where whether you are called a craftsperson or an artist makes a significant difference in your social and economic standing—a world of academic degrees, craft museums and galleries, craft curators and collectors—my respondents claim a dual identity as craftartists. Their motives for doing what they do are not distinguishable from those we usually attribute to artists: creativity and autonomy. Their one-of-a-kind objects bear their signatures, and they wish to be recognized as “original.” Resistant to working for someone else, or in the “system,” the few occasions they report of doing so were unhappy experiences. Though knowledgeable about work in their fields—they go to galleries and fairs, read professional journals, attend workshops—they do not see themselves as members of a community and have no desire for such involvement. Further, they do not work to meet the needs of a local community but market their wares through fairs, mail order catalogues, distant distributors, and galleries. All of this is a far cry from Morris’s image of a community of craftworkers living and working together. Living as they do in the United States in the late twentieth century, they seek to realize their creativity and artistic integrity as they try to make a living and support their families within a consumer-oriented, massmarket society. They work long hours on schedules that conflict with family needs and responsibilities, and, on average, earn very little from sales of their work. A 1980 national survey of the estimated 150–180,000 “professional” craftspeople in the United States, defined as those who “sell or exhibit their work professionally,” documents their dismal financial situation (Cerf, Citro, Black & McDonald, 1982a; Cerf, Citro, Black & McDonald, 1982b). Less than a quarter reported their primary income as coming from crafts-related activities that included teaching as well as production. Mean gross income from these sources was $2,800; mean net income, earnings minus expenses, was $345 with a significant number re-

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 7 porting losses. Mean household income, however, was $28,900—above the national average. Clearly, they are being supported by spouses and/or working at other jobs. It is no wonder they rate “nonpecuniary” factors such as the opportunity for creative expression as more important motivations for their work than financial rewards. And, like that of my respondents, their list of “barriers” to personal satisfaction includes obligations such as family demands, and lack of money, time, public appreciation, and marketing opportunities.3 Their reality challenged my romanticized image. Nonetheless, the utopian impulse at the core of Morris’s craftsman ideal retains its cogency, informing my effort to understand the situation of the contemporary craftartists I talked with and the current position of the crafts in society. Concluding her history of the fate of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the United States and its failure to change society, Eileen Boris expresses a view close to my own: The discrepancy between the visions of Ruskin and Morris and the American practice of moral aesthetics and handicraft was probably inevitable. . . . the existence of the craftsman ideal still questions the necessity of the current organization of production. The hegemonic culture tends to contain and trivialize efforts to oppose it, but moments still occur when the utopian element breaks through, offers inspiration. Put into practice, the vision of Ruskin and Morris lost its utopian power; as a vision, however, the craftsman ideal has retained an emancipatory potential for the individual, if not the society. (Boris, 1986, p. 193)

Crafts Identities and Life-Course Trajectories The concept of adult identity formation is the second component of this study. More precisely, an understanding of how my respondents’ adult work identities as craftartists were shaped and achieved over time—the trajectories of identity formation—is the central problem. If this were a quantitative, variable-centered study, I would label it as the dependent variable. There is an enormous amount of research on the concept of “identity,” sparked by and still dominated by Erik Erikson’s original concept of ego identity (Erikson, 1950) and his model of identity development

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(Erikson, 1959). Several studies undertaken within the Eriksonian framework will be cited at relevant points in the following chapters, but I will not attempt to review this literature. Rather, my intent is to specify the features of my approach that serve as the scaffolding of this study. Although I had been as intrigued by Erikson’s work from my first readings of his studies in the early 1950s as were so many others in my own and later cohorts of psychologists, it was not central in various studies I undertook in succeeding years. When I started planning this study, however, it seemed obvious that “identity” was the prime candidate for framing the questions I intended to explore through life-history interviews. It appears in the title of the original proposal, but was relatively unspecified in the text—a taken-for-granted concept I implicitly assumed everyone would understand well enough for the purposes at hand without further explication. This allowed me to bypass the inevitable ambiguities and complexities that would attend a concept put to use for many different purposes by researchers and theorists and that had, as well, been incorporated into the popular culture. The complexities emerged quickly. My first analysis of one of my interviews confronted me with problems that were difficult to resolve within my understanding of Erikson’s model. I am well aware that it was my understanding and I make no claim for it as an authoritative reading, but it was the one I had to work with. One problem had to do with this craftartist’s erratic career trajectory, marked by shifts that seemed unrelated to the sequence of stages in this model of identity development. A second was the degree to which his work identity appeared to be only one of several relatively distinct and autonomous axes of self-definition. A conception that directed us to search for a singular, totalizing IDENTITY did not seem as useful as one that recognized a plurality of sub-identities.4 Metaphorically, we speak—or sing—our selves as a chorus of voices, not just as the tenor or soprano soloist. As a result of these findings, in my first report from this project (Mishler, 1992) I proposed that identity be defined as a collective term referring to the dynamic organization of sub-identities that might conflict with or align with each other. I urged that primary attention be given to the process of identity formation—a term I preferred over development, which is often theoretically tied to a stage model—rather than to an individual’s identity at particular times. Finally, I stressed the significance for

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 9 the formation and achievement of work- and other sub-identities of lifecourse disjunctions, discontinuities, and transitions. This initial perspective provided a place to stand as I searched for a way to organize findings from this comparative case study of five craftartists, whose narrative accounts of their work histories and life experiences differed in many important respects. The framework that emerged through successive phases of analysis focuses on a set of problems in identity research and theory that became apparent as I came to understand both similarities and differences among my respondents in the ways they arrived at their current work identities. The following brief description of the four problems around which the book is organized is intended as an introduction to the study of identity formation through an analysis of respondents’ life stories, which forms the substantive core of this work. Each is phrased as a polarity, representing alternative theoretical positions and research approaches, and each is addressed in separate chapters.

Universality vs. Inter-individual Variability in Personal and Career Trajectories In a field as complex and diverse as the study of human development, we would expect to find alternative approaches to theory and research. Nonetheless, although there are different and contending perspectives, my own assessment is that the positivist research paradigm that has long been dominant in psychology and the social sciences (Mishler, 1979) frames much of the work on stability and change from infancy through adolescence to adulthood in cognitive, linguistic, and personality variables. Within this tradition, “science” is defined as the search for general laws through the application of experimental and quantitative methods. When adapted for research on identity, the approach specifies universal, progressive stages of development that are assumed—often implicitly—as invariant across different cultures and historical periods. Many investigators dispute this view and, usually through qualitative research and case studies, have documented different paths of identity development related, for example, to social class (Steinitz & Solomon, 1986) or gender (Gilligan, 1982; Miller, 1976; Personal Narratives Group, 1989). These two streams of research tend to go their separate ways with little commerce between

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them, segregated from each other as distinct “search cells” or “language communities” (Koch, 1976). My emphasis on variability in work trajectories and patterns of adult identity formation among the craftartists I studied falls within this alternative research tradition. I was puzzled, however—and had been for some time—by the persistence of the dominant paradigm in the face of the obvious, that is, the remarkable diversity among individuals along all dimensions and throughout their lifespans. Some years ago, I asked some developmental psychologists why there was a neglect of longitudinal studies of patterns of relationship among, for example, measures of cognitive and linguistic competence, and of how changes in these patterns varied among individuals over time. Their answer was clear and sobering: there were no methods available, within the dominant paradigm, for systematic research on this problem. They did not dispute the importance of such research, nor discount the limitations of available methods for understanding variation in development. They also recognized that many of the prominent theoretical models informing work in this field were based on case studies—the work of Freud, Erikson, and Piaget—but pointed out that this was not viewed as a “scientific” approach.5 Instead, classification systems derived from these theories were adapted to fit the requirements of more acceptable experimental and quantitative research methods. The good news is that the situation is changing, slowly at first but now more rapidly. More than twenty years ago, George Miller made an observation on the discrepancy between cross-sectional and longitudinal findings from a study of the development of children’s linguistic competence (Miller, 1977). Briefly, analyses of cross-sectional studies of children’s mean scores at different ages confirmed a hypothesis about a sequence of stages in the growth of competence. However, he states: “When the same data were analyzed longitudinally (that is, tracking each child over time), no evidence could be found that these were successive stages in the development of any individual child’s understanding” (p. 138).6 This was the paradox I could not resolve. Twenty years later, I could demonstrate unequivocally—as, I soon discovered, others had before— that individual trajectories could not be specified on the basis of crosssectional aggregate data. Further, using a recently developed method called “optimal matching,” which specifies a way to measure degrees of “sequence resemblance” among cases that may be described as a “sequential list of events” (that is, any “history” including the “life cycles of indi-

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 11 viduals and families” and I would add, narratives [Abbott & Hrycak, 1990, pp. 144–45]), I “tracked” individuals and found considerable variation and several distinct patterns in the development of children’s narrative competence (Mishler, 1996). This work confirmed the viability of an alternative to the dominant variable-centered model of research, even for the statistical analysis of measures on large samples,7 which I call case-centered research. The distinctive feature of this approach, and its fundamental requirement, is that individual trajectories of change are retained through all stages of analyses.8 Findings, therefore, do not refer to measures of variables aggregated across groups of individuals but to similarities and differences among intra-individual or intra-case patterns of change; for example, in the achievement of linguistic competence or in the intricacy of the plots of their stories. The specific method of “optimal matching” I used in my study of children’s narrative competence is inappropriate for analyzing the small number of cases in this study of craftartists, but the same general perspective applies. Rather than suppressing the variability among my respondents in how they achieved their adult identities, this approach retains and respects their differences and addresses them within a comparative framework. Further, the findings support the argument for replacing universality with variability as the central assumption in all human development research.9

Continuity vs. Discontinuities in the Achievement of Adult Work Identities Twenty years ago, Jerome Kagan asked why it was that though “change is a salient characteristic of living entities, . . . social scientists, especially psychologists, invest so much effort searching for threads of continuity in the growth of living forms and inventing a connectivity between past and present” (Kagan, 1980, p. 26). Proposing that the roots of this orientation lie within the Western philosophical tradition and its “presupposition of connectedness,” he argues that the “explanatory mode typically chosen by developmental theorists is mechanistic; each event is related to a succeeding event through a long, gradual chain that necessarily links events and processes that can be detailed. Finally, the developmental theorist prefers gradual change and is resistant to abrupt discontinuities” (p. 30).10

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There is a concordance between this critique from the “inside” by developmental psychologists who tend to work within the dominant experimental/quantitative research paradigm, and the observations made by life history and narrative researchers using qualitative methods and case study approaches, particularly in studies of adult identity development. For example, Mary C. Bateson (Bateson, 1989) characterizes the lives of women she studied as “composed” and “improvised,” documents the importance of “serendipity” and “discontinuities,” and argues that we need to “explore the creative potential of interrupted and conflicted lives” (p. 9) and recognize that “many people lead lives of creative makeshift and improvisation” (p. 16). Drawing on her longitudinal study, which allowed her to “observe the metamorphosis of identity as women age from 21 to 43” (Josselson, 1996, p. viii), Ruthellen Josselson focuses on the multiple “pathways” they followed in “revising” themselves, and concludes that no “fixed sequence” of “definable ‘stages’” was evident (p. 239). John Kotre’s detailed analysis of “life stories” drawn from a small group of both men and women leads him to emphasize the pervasiveness and significance of “second chances” that “are felt to initiate new segments in a life” (Kotre, 1984, p. 88). He proposes the concept of “moments and episodes in lives” in place of “stages,” denying that there is a “proper age” for the appearance or ascendancy of particular motives and arguing instead for the need to “make room for accidents . . . chance encounters that dramatically alter a life’s direction . . . for surprise.” This conceptual shift would avoid the “developmental determinism that has been the occupational hazard of life-span psychologists from Freud on down and from behaviorists’ unwarranted expectations of prediction and control” (p. 262). And, a last example: George Vaillant recalls that at the start of a longitudinal study of a large group of college men there was “hope” it “would allow prediction” and guide college counselors advising sophomores on “what they should do with their lives” (Vaillant, 1977, p. 373). After following them for twenty-five to thirty years into mid-life, he asserts: “This was not to be. The life cycle is more than an invariant sequence of stages with single predictable outcomes” (p. 373). He rejects prediction as a goal for life-span developmental research and emphasizes change and discontinuity: “If we follow adults for years, we can discover startling changes and evolutions. We can discover developmental discontinuities in adults that

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 13 are as great as the difference in personality between a nine-year old and what he becomes at fifteen” (p. 372). These studies, representing different approaches, show the breadth and diversity of criticism of the continuity assumption. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that many critics believe they stand in opposition to the dominant view in developmental research. It is a contested issue, as is the premise of universality. The two are, to some degree, interdependent, since the possibility of general laws depends on stable patterns of agerelated changes that are consistent across individuals. My critique of the universality assumption applies equally well to that of continuity, and there is no need to repeat details of my earlier argument. What is relevant to my own approach—an alignment with the discontinuity side of the debate—is that it emerged, as did my emphasis on variability, through the course of this study of craftartists’ accounts of their career trajectories. For example, Fred Wharton, a furniture-maker, made a number of moves from one type of work to another. Some were not related to woodworking or furniture-making, and I referred to them as “detours,” “off-line” from the path to his current work identity; others were “on-line” and included both returning to an earlier interest and progressive transitions along his career trajectory (Mishler, 1992). When I turned to other respondents’ stories, I found that discontinuities and disjunctions in career paths were typical rather than unusual. They took different forms: a hiatus between an early interest and initial entry into the work they later pursued; a disruption in mid-career and a later return; a deferral until mid-life of serious commitment to work that had earlier been a side involvement. Further, these changes were often occasioned—or at least set in motion—by other events or experiences in their lives that seemed relatively independent of career demands and contingencies: divorce, depression, dissatisfaction with current work, a move to another city. Personal relationships were a significant factor, for example, in initiating change in the context of support and encouragement from teachers or spouses, as well as in difficulties experienced in sustaining a new direction of work that might require renegotiation of a marital relationship. My study is one more among those that document the centrality of discontinuities in adult identity formation. Collectively, these studies may contribute to a paradigm change that would allow us to focus our full at-

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tention on studying diversity and change in lives without the distraction of having repeatedly to criticize the persistent assumption of continuity.

Coherence vs. Contradiction and Tension in Life Stories The assumption that the meaning of a story depends on its coherence plays an important role in narrative studies. More specifically, the degree to which different parts of a story—or any other genre of discourse—fit together in some consistent and orderly way is used as a criterion for assessing its meaningfulness. The degree to which this criterion is achieved in an individual’s life story may also be evaluated in moral terms as an index of personal adequacy and of a positively valued identity: for example, “ego integrity,” the last of Erikson’s stages, as the “fruit” of earlier ones marking “acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions” (Erikson, 1950, pp. 231–32); “identity stability is longitudinal consistency in the life story” (McAdams, 1985, p. 18); “What is better or worse for X depends upon the character of that intelligible narrative which provides X’s life with its unity” (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 209). This assumption is problematic if our perspective on identity shifts from a conception of unity to “nonunitary subjectivity” and the dynamics of sub-identities, or multiple selves, or “shifting social identities” (see note 4). The meaning(s) of coherence must be unpacked to arrive at an alternative approach to the problem of how we—narrators, audience, and researchers—understand and make sense of stories. A first step is to recognize the fundamental and intractable ambiguity and fuzziness of the term coherence. Dictionary definitions attest to these properties: “sticking together, cohesion”; “Connection or congruity arising from some common principle or relationship; consistency.” This is indexicality in full bloom (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970), suggesting why coherence is usually left undefined, a “taken-for-granted” feature whose meaning competent language users are expected to know without further specification. Sociolinguists, with more technical interests in how parts of language are tied together to allow for mutual understanding, have proposed coherence criteria, but they do not resolve the problem. Thus, in her authoritative text on discourse analysis, Deborah Schiffrin observes that coherence became a topic for systematic attention by linguists when they moved beyond clauses and sentences to the study of discourse, that is,

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 15 sequences of clauses (Schiffrin, 1994, p. 360). The goal of discourse analysis used to be “to discover how it is that discourse differs from random sequences” (p. 18), and this goal is retained in recent analyses. Randomness, however—with the exception of its abstract definition in mathematics—may be as much of a presence in the eyes and ears of readers and listeners as coherence, as we learn from another linguist’s observation. He reverses the direction of linkage from the structural properties of discourse to our “intuitive” understanding: “If a text strikes one as intuitively coherent, then coherence relations can be found linking its various parts. More precisely, a text will strike one as coherent to a degree that varies inversely with the degree of ‘difficulty’ the inferencing operations have in recognizing some coherence relations” (Hobbs, 1979, p. 69). The tautological reasoning in this statement brings us back to ground zero. We get no further with other text-centered approaches that aim to establish formal, general rules and criteria for coherence based, for example, on syntactic features (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 383); or the temporal ordering of events (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Linde, 1993).11 Concluding her comparative review of alternative models of discourse analysis, Schiffrin specifies a “single set of underlying principles” shared by all of them, and offers a more promising direction for resolving the problem of coherence (Schiffrin, 1994). She asserts that “coherence cannot be understood if attention is limited just to linguistic forms and meaning,” but that “they work together with social and cultural meanings, and interpretive frameworks to create discourse” (p. 416). Her emphasis on the reflexivity of coherence when assessed as an achievement of participants’ work echoes the fundamental “study policy” of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). This perspective informs and guides my approach to the interpretation of “meaning” in the stories that emerged in my interviews with craftartists. These stories are produced through our dialogue, co-constructed in the ongoing process of our trying to make sense to each other. An important implication of this orientation is that analyses of life stories must be attentive to the specific contexts within which they are produced, for example, to the interviewer’s role in the achievement of a coherent story.12

Individual vs. Relational Conceptions of Identity When I was a doctoral student in social psychology, I often wondered why it was viewed as a specialized sub-field within psychology rather than the

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reverse. I found it ironic that the study of individuals isolated from their social and historical contexts was assumed to be the basis for a scientific understanding of human behavior, when it seemed obvious to me that we are social beings from the very beginning of our lives. This has been the touchstone of my earlier work and is the guiding principle of this study: family and work contexts in which my respondents are embedded, and the ways they position themselves within them, are central to my analyses of their life stories and identity paths. The approaches of identity researchers vary in their particulars, but the importance of locating individuals within the social and cultural matrix is well recognized. Although I tend to focus primarily on the specific, local features of family and work settings, I also attend to how they are, in turn, located in and influenced by the larger historical and sociocultural context. The latter serves as an interpretive resource for investigators who may account for differences found between men and women in developmental trajectories by referring to general cultural definitions and prescriptions about gender-appropriate roles and behaviors. This perspective, implemented in various ways, is a step toward a relational conception of identity that contrasts with a view of identity as immanent or indwelling within a person, stable and consistent, carried into and expressed across situations. Nonetheless, even with my orientation, I found it difficult to avoid the usual dichotomy between individual and context that treats the former as the active agent influenced by external conditions and forces. The problem is compounded in case studies that focus on each person’s life story. But the problem goes deeper. Available models of identity development, that is, the theoretical discourse that frames our studies, specify the process as within the individual. For example, in Erikson’s influential model, successive stages are specified by intrapersonal conflicts: trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame, identity vs. identity diffusion. An emerging, alternative conception opens up a way to think about and study identity development as an inter- rather than intrapersonal process. From this perspective, our identities are defined and expressed through the ways we position ourselves vis-a-vis others along the several dimensions that constitute our networks of relationships. Emphasis shifts from inner conflicts and their resolutions to the social production of our multiple sub-identities and the dynamics of their relationships. And this, in turn, shifts our attention in theory and research from the assessment of

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 17 “personality” variables to the study of forms and contexts of discursive genres, such as personal narratives and life stories, within which identities are produced and performed. Alternative versions of a relational identity model have been proposed, but discussions remain largely programmatic, with little specification of either theory or method. In Chapter 5 I explore the implications of such a model for understanding the process of identity formation. Revisiting earlier analyses and examining two additional cases, I address questions such as how respondents position themselves vis-a-vis others, align or contrast themselves with them, mark the boundaries of their relationships, resolve or fail to resolve conflicting demands. The findings do not contradict but supplement earlier interpretations, and they support the general argument for recentering theory and research about identity around a relational model.

Narrative as Praxis The expansion of narrative studies in the human sciences and other disciplines during the past two decades has been rapid, surprising, and somewhat disconcerting both to those of us engaged in and committed to the work, and to those critical of this development. One active narrative researcher observes that investigators in many fields appear to be “in the grip of a kind of ‘narrative mania’” (Freeman, 1994, p. 201). Others, including researchers who depart from the positivist paradigm in their own studies, are less sanguine. They argue that emphasizing personal narratives and life histories valorizes individual agency at the expense of a critical analysis of macro-structural features of our “interview society,” in which confessions and personal tales deflect attention from issues of power and oppression (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997). The breadth and diversity of studies that fall under the “narrative” rubric confounds any attempt to specify a canonical definition of what it is and how to analyze it. It is an umbrella term, which disturbs some proponents and critics, but I am opposed to any effort to police the boundaries of this area of work. It would be misguided and useless. More importantly, the excitement of doing narrative research is owing to, in some degree, the multiplicity of approaches and the clash of different perspectives. This is not the place to review and compare alternative models and methods.13 Instead, to provide some context for analyses presented in the following

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chapters, this section introduces some key concepts and assumptions that have guided my work. My approach to studying life stories and identities is embodied in and represented by the details of the methods and procedures applied to describe, analyze, and interpret my interviews with craftartists. I intend no irony by that statement, nor does it signal an attempt to evade the task of explaining how the work was done. However, I am suggesting that this section be read as a gloss, a place-holder that provides a brief introductory sketch of several assumptions informing my research practices. That is, the analytic procedures specify the implications of these assumptions, and their clarification is an ongoing process that I can only begin here. The phrase that heads this section, “narrative as praxis,” is my most general assumption and can serve as a summary of my theoretical perspective. Its implications for research are mediated through three subordinate assumptions, stated here in propositional form. Personal narratives and life stories are: socially situated actions; identity performances; fusions of form and content. I borrow the term “praxis” from the Marxist lexicon. In my understanding, it refers to the dialectic interplay between our dual positions as subjects, first as active agents making and transforming the world, which then becomes the “objective” conditions to which we must then respond, as we adapt, make, and transform both ourselves and these conditions. What is the relevance of this concept for discourse and narrative research? First, it directs our attention to the fundamental status of narratives as purposeful, contextually situated human action, countering the poststructuralist view of a disembodied Discourse or grand master narrative that “speaks” through the person. Second, it recognizes that we are not “cultural dopes” (Garfinkel’s term) but “rule users” who do not simply follow cultural plots in storying our lives but adapt, resist, and selectively appropriate them.14 Third, it extends Schiffrin’s argument (Schiffrin, 1994) about the “reflexivity” of coherence assessments, in the sense that coherence does not depend solely on linguistic forms and meanings but on how the participants “work together” with social and cultural frameworks of interpretation, resulting in an “achievement” of our joint production and understanding of stories through our dialogue with each other. More could be said, but these three points are a beginning. They are supplemented by three more specific assumptions, discussed below, that

Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists / 19 indicate how my theoretical perspective on “narrative as praxis” was shaped into the research strategy used in this study. Narratives are socially situated actions. In earlier work, drawing on proposals by ethnolinguists, I defined interviews as “speech events” (Mishler, 1986b). The dialogic process through which the meaning of questions and responses was negotiated was a central topic in those studies, and it is equally central in this one. I have respecified the original term and call it “socially situated actions” to emphasize the more general functions of narrative accounts and other discourse genres, and their location within an ongoing stream of social interaction, the “unfolding scene” of talk within the context of interviews (Lynch, 1985).15 From this perspective, it is clear that analyses of life stories that emerge in interviews must be more inclusive than is typical in such studies. We must attend to more than the “text” of a respondent’s story; we must, for example, note its placement within the sequential order of exchanges and mark the utterances of both interviewer and interviewee as they negotiate a mutual understanding of what they are talking about. These are the study “policies” I follow here. Narratives are identity performances. We express, display, make claims for who we are—and who we would like to be—in the stories we tell and how we tell them. In sum, we perform our identities. Describing his studies in the “ethnography of oral performance,” Richard Bauman proposes a “performance-centered conception of oral literature” that views it as “situated, its form, meaning, and functions rooted in culturally-defined scenes or events,” and asserts that in ethnographic studies the “performance event has assumed a place beside the text as a fundamental unit of description and analysis” (Bauman, 1986, pp. 2–3). Kristin Langellier, a speech and communications scholar and researcher, states that the “full meaning of narrative is performative rather than semantic, located in the consequences of narrative as well as its meanings,” and further that “The performance approach to narrative asserts that every performance is unique, and therefore every narrative identity multiple, fragmentary, and unfinished. Identity is a performative struggle, always destabilized” (Langellier, 1999, pp. 30–31). This focuses attention on the question of how we speak our identities, that is, on the rhetorical strategies we employ that achieve this effect. Answers to this question require analysis of the different ways stories may be organized, of what their structural units are and how they are put together,

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through an “ongoing contextualization process” reflecting “negotiations between participants in social interaction” (Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 68). These authors observe that understanding this process requires study of “the textual details that illuminate the manner in which participants are collectively constructing the world around them” (p. 69). The model of analysis used in this study, and described more specifically below, represents my attempt to satisfy these requirements. Narratives are fusions of form and content. Hayden White entitles a collection of his essays The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (White, 1987). He observes that historians traditionally viewed their task as that of retelling individual and collective stories “in a narrative, the truth of which would reside in the correspondence of the story told to the story lived by real people in the past.” Stylistic features—the “ways” of telling—were only “embellishments that rendered the account vivid and interesting to the reader” (p. x).16 He argues that “far from being a form of discourse that can be filled with different contents,” narrative “possesses a content prior to any given actualization of it in speech or writing,” which is what he means by the “content of the form.” This parallels the argument by Helen Vendler that an adequate understanding of a sonnet’s meaning—and this applies as well to narratives and other genres—depends on analysis of it as a “verbal contraption,” that is, discovering “all the language games” that enter into its construction (Vendler, 1997, p. 11).17 My emphasis on the structure of stories rests on this assumption, which I call the “fusion of form and content.” It entails the use of a systematic transcription procedure that represents paralinguistic features of speech and the interaction between speakers, and parses the story into its constituent units of lines and stanzas (Gee, 1985; 1991). Transcripts are included in the text, providing readers with the evidence on which I base my interpretations.18 This chapter is an “Orientation,” in Labov’s well-known model of narrative analysis (Labov, 1972; Labov & Waletzky, 1967). It sets the scene for the “Complicating Action,” the story of the study to which we now turn that unfolds in the following chapters.

2 Sources and Routes: Variable Pathways in Identity Formation [Earliest memories?] They go back to early, early childhood. Both my parents were and are artists. . . . The earliest experiences . . . I can remember from like three or four years old . . . we were always painting. . . . So that I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been involved in the arts. —Adam Daley, artist-glassmaker

[Early memories?] Oh yes, always since I was little. Always. . . . I was always making things when I was a kid. . . . I lived in a household where my mother is an artist too. . . . My dad also has a good eye for artistic design. . . . I had a very artistic upbringing I think. —Beth Rivers, fabric designer

The primary aim of my interviews with craftartists was to learn about how they came to their work, what it meant to them, and how it functioned in their lives. Within the wider compass of adult identity formation, I was interested in learning how their work identities were achieved and sustained. The interviews were relatively unstructured, offering opportunities for respondents to tell their stories in their own ways to someone whom I hoped they would view as an attentive listener. In accord with this aim, I asked each of them about their earliest memories of artistic interests. I was looking for beginnings, making an assumption about a form of stories that I later came to recognize as problematic. Adam Daley traces his beginning back to “early, early childhood,” and Beth Rivers to when she “was little . . . a kid,” and both locate them within their family contexts. These exchanges occur at different points in lengthy, open-ended life history interviews. Their recollections of “always” being involved in artistic activities are identity claims, which are central topics for this inquiry. My analysis of their developmental trajectories is framed within a comparative approach and addresses such questions as: the types

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of claims made and how they are warranted; how the craftartists specify their identity claims and how these function in their lives; and how their identities are performed and situated in the ongoing discourse of the interview. This is a complex task, and the epigraphs suggest both directions and obstacles for such work. Though brief, the answers are richly implicative for studying identity claims. But their openness to interpretation, their unrestricted meaning potential, reflects their fragmented, decontextualized character. Extracting them from the flow of their respective interviews, displacing them from their “situatedness,” removes constraints on interpretation. It allows us to do too much with too little, like the game we play among friends of making up stories about a stranger glimpsed through the window of a bus. Knowing nothing more, we are free to fantasize about who she is or why she “did it.” Of course, this will not do for an empirical inquiry where I, in turn, will be making and warranting claims about findings. On the other hand, realizing how much may be implied in so few words offers encouragement to proceed. This cannot simply be a matter of expanding the text by adding more words. Rather, it requires contextualizing and situating what is said so the interpreter may have something deeper, stronger, and more precise to say about what it means. The analytic task is to introduce constraints that specify and limit the range of reasonable and credible interpretations and thereby strengthen my own validity claims (Mishler, 1990). That is the promise I read in these initial, abbreviated identity claims by Adam D and Beth R, while recognizing that its fulfillment is uncertain. The signpost reads: Proceed with caution. Detailed analyses of interviews in this and the following chapters will document my approach to the pervasive and inescapable problem of interpretation. At this point, I will review briefly some of its general features, with the intention of providing a preliminary orientation to issues explored and developed more fully in the analyses, such as the dialogic process of interviews, the situatedness and co-production of respondents’ accounts, and the use of narrative methods in the study of life histories. First, it is evident that by categorizing these early memories as identity claims I am making more of what they said than would be found in a literal reading. I could, for example, simply code them as positive answers to my question: “Yes,” they say, “I do have early childhood memories of an interest in the arts.” This might seem an adequate answer, a direct re-

Sources and Routes / 23 sponse to my inquiry. Coding responses in this way is the method of choice not only in standard survey interviews and observational studies— where codes serve as the basis for quantitative measures of variables—but in various qualitative approaches, for example, grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). It is not the path I will follow. The limits of coding need not be rehearsed in detail here,1 but one feature is worth noting since it motivates my search for alternative methods such as the form of narrative analysis employed in this study. The purported strengths of coding procedures restrict their relevance and applicability for studying how individuals construct meaningful accounts of their lives. Driven by the imperative of standardization, coding requires the isolation of questions and responses as if each exchange were independent of the ongoing, developing course of the interview as a dialogic conversation (Mishler, 1986a; Mishler, 1986b). The sequence and patterning of successive exchanges is deleted from the analysis. This radical decontextualization of discrete exchanges removes from view and analytic attention exactly those textual strategies that provide coherence and organization to respondents’ accounts as representations of their lives. These are, of course, the very ones I am interested in studying and understanding. Second, my interest goes well beyond and is not captured by the surface content of my question about early memories. That is only one of many ways in which the more general question informing the study may be asked, and indeed is asked throughout the interview. Reframing their responses as identity claims reflects my broader aim of understanding how they define and achieve their identities as particular types of craftspeople. It also points to how conceptual orientations are unavoidably and inescapably present at every stage and in each methodological procedure, including the transcription of the discourse of the interview as well as the relevance assigned to specific questions and responses. Further, theorizing is not the sole prerogative of the researcher. Respondents also reframe their experiences in the act of retelling their stories to fit the immediate context. Their intentions and understandings are grounded in personal and cultural categories, concepts, and assumptions. Their response to each question reflects a general orientation or responsive stance, an intent to present themselves in a particular way and give a sensible account of their experiences. A specific answer is a choice among many possibilities—an analogue to the general underlying interest expressed in my questions. Thus, by rooting their artistic interests in their childhoods and

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families, Adam D and Beth R align their biographies with a prevalent image of artists. “Artists are born not made” is part of our folk wisdom, reinforced by media portrayals of celebrated prodigies like Mozart and Picasso, whose careers serve as exemplars of such wisdom and thereby confirm it. This “master narrative” locates identity within a developmental framework, one that includes the nurturing context of their families. But it does not contextualize it culturally or historically. Their fuller accounts show a more complex process of identity formation than can be captured by the notion of a continuous expression of early talents. Early signs to which Adam D and Beth R now refer did not foretell what they later became, but took on their meaning through the course of their development. Structured, constrained, and facilitated in networks of family, social, and work relations, their identities were formed through a dialectic of accommodation and resistance as they responded to the limits and potentials of their situations and experiences. This complex process of interpreting and reinterpreting the “meanings” of past events in the light of one’s present situation is particularly evident when we examine successive retellings in a series of stories that mark changes over time, where initial self-presentations may be elaborated and changed (Attanucci, 1993; Bell, 1988). As Beth R and Adam D extend their stories forward in time in other sections of the interview, larger contexts become more apparent. Gender, for example, figures explicitly in Beth’s account of how the life course of her work was affected by her being girl and daughter in her family of origin and wife and mother in her own family. Gender effects are there as well for Adam, though they tend to be marginalized and masked by what is taken for granted for a man—the unmarked cultural gender category—as they often are generally in men’s reports of their lives. In addition, each of their accounts brings out the ways that crafts careers are structured by training institutions, by current distinctions between crafts and the “fine arts,” and by the market economy of late capitalism—a mass-production and massconsumption society within which those who make non-standardized objects one by one and by hand must find a way to sell their products. These outward movements suggest an alternative to the developmental framework that apparently grounds identity claims in childhood memories. Moreover, discussion of particular circumstances brings out the limits of a view of identity framed by assumptions of universal stages and the continuity of development. Understanding identity formation through

Sources and Routes / 25 analyses of life stories requires a critical vantage point that contextualizes the individual life course—culturally, socially, and historically. This directs our attention to particular ways in which culturally available forms for representing oneself are both appropriated and resisted. That is, the configuring of an identity—in this case, that of a craftartist—is responsive to but not simply derivative of what is provided by an abstract, idealized, and homogeneous “culture.” As I hope to show, each career trajectory is a variant reflecting a particular intersection of different and often conflicting forces. Michel de Certeau’s concepts of “practices of everyday life” and “secondary production” (de Certeau, 1984/1974, p. xiv) emphasize how individuals reappropriate and transform for their own purposes the images and representations that circulate within the larger sociocultural and political space of society. When these images are put into practice in real space and time, they take the forms Certeau calls “trajectories” of sensemaking. Retelling the story of one’s life is a practice of this kind, and it varies depending upon particular settings, circumstances, and aims. It is useful to look at life history interviews from this perspective. I have argued elsewhere (Mishler, 1996) that variable-centered, population-based methods of statistical analysis are inappropriate for the study of temporally ordered sequences of events such as narratives and histories. De Certeau makes a similar point, observing that “statistical investigation remains virtually ignorant of these trajectories, since it is satisfied with classifying, calculating, and putting into tables the ‘lexical’ units which compose them but to which they cannot be reduced” (p. xviii). As an alternative, I proposed the application of case-centered analyses that retain the temporal patterning of events such as the sequence of narrative episodes. This allows us to retain the variability of life history narratives while at the same time recognizing them as modes of “secondary production,” drawing on and redoing culturally available plots to construct their own distinctive stories. It alerts us, for example, to how gender as a culturally defined category may differentially inflect and inform men’s and women’s stories such as those of our two respondents.

Adam D: “It was an everyday kind of thing, really” Adam Daley’s early memories of “always” being involved in the arts came at the beginning of our interview. After completing the Informed Consent procedure, I referred back to a question he had asked about the “basis” of

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the study before I turned on the tape recorder, initially deferring my response until—in my view as researcher—the interview really began. But I registered his question as important, viewing it as an opening to tell him about the background and aims of the study and the form of the interview. My opening statements to other respondents were similarly intended to provide an orientation to the interview, but they varied in length and emphasis. I wanted them to be clear about my intentions and the rationale for an open-ended interview where I would be guided by what they were saying rather than asking predetermined questions. Responding to Adam D’s question, I began by contrasting this study, in which I did not have “specific hypotheses, propositions,” with the “usual sort of ah social science research,” and then specified my interests and aims: I really . am interested primarily in the ways that craftspeople both do their work/ and sustain their work/ in a ah culture which does not provide a great deal of support for them. So: I am interested in what motivates you craftspeople/ how you got into the work/ .hh what keeps you in it ah in the face of problems/ what those problems are/ you=know how they’re managed. ah And you=know I hope that the work will both uh .hh contribute in some way to general understanding of crafts/ and- ah and I kind of think of it as celebrating the crafts/ since it comes out of my own interests in craftswork and craftspeople/ ah .hh and at the same time ah would contribute to some understanding of ah forms of work in society that people engage in/ ah inthat are not part of corporate or bureaucratic or factory systems/ that has to do- you=know individual work.2 It is clear from this excerpt that my orienting statement goes far beyond the stance of neutrality and objectivity traditionally prescribed for researchers. I present a perspective on work in the crafts that locates it within a larger socioeconomic context and criticizes a nonsupportive culture that marginalizes “individual work.” Further, I suggest that the larger purpose of the work is to contribute to a wider understanding of the value of craftwork, and perhaps (implicitly) to a change for the better in their overall situation. The rhetorical functions of my remarks are as important as their content. I am presenting myself as someone who is knowledgeable about the place of crafts in society, and thereby I make my own claim for

Sources and Routes / 27 authority. And although I cannot make a similar claim for authenticity as another working craftsman, I represent myself as full of interest, empathy, and support for their struggles. This extended quotation makes available to other researchers more than my general theoretical orientation. A specification of my perspective on the crafts, tailored for this particular occasion, it is what Adam D knew when we began. There are several reasons for giving the statement this much attention even when it does not include a question and might be viewed merely as a precursor, a prelude to the interview. First, by situating the crafts within an inhospitable society, I am suggesting a compatibility of views between us that might serve as the basis for our relationship in the interview. Although I had not met Adam D before, I clearly did not expect him to contest or argue with my views. More is being done than is connoted by the usual notion of rapport. My statement and his implicit assent point to shared background assumptions, a mutual tacit understanding within which our conversation will proceed. In this way, I believe, we established a provisional basis for trust. I will return in later analyses to how this influences the interview and functions as a constraint on interpretation. There is a second reason for highlighting this opening exchange—and it is an exchange, for though silent, he is an attentive listener. Including it as a critical part of the interview, as “data,” is not usual research practice. It tends to be invisible in research reports as, most often, are the actual questions asked when they depart in radical ways from those listed in questionnaires and interview schedules. Their exclusion removes them from analytic attention, for we cannot ask how they function to facilitate, guide, or limit respondents’ accounts. Defining interviewing as a dialogic process requires their inclusion. Finally, the rhetorical function of statements and questions is neglected in psychological and social research, in which interviewing is viewed primarily as an information-gathering procedure and questions and responses are treated as equivalents of stimuli and responses in the standard behaviorist paradigm (Mishler, 1986b). I am suggesting that beyond, but through, the “informational” content of my statement, I made claims for authority and authenticity that served as significant parameters of the relationship context of the interview. Rhetorical strategies have recently become an important topic in anthropology (Clifford, 1988; Clifford & Marcus, 1986), particularly with regard to ethnographic texts. Their role in interviews and in other types of discourse merits more attention.

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When I concluded my opening remarks, Adam D asked whether my interest is “more for the love of crafts or for the exploration of why there’s this subculture ex(h)ists in our society?” His question reflects how closely he has been listening. He picks up the central duality of my interests—to “celebrate” and “contribute” to a general understanding of the crafts. I say “It’s closer to the first,” comment briefly on changes from the late-nineteenthcentury Arts and Crafts Movement to today—adding to and buttressing my authority claim—and restate my interests as a sort of Coda, bringing us back to the interview. “And so I am interested in the relationship of- the- ah work to the larger society/ but there is very much a- ah a beginning- the beginning of it is in terms of the love for crafts/ and wanting to understand ah um you=know how people do their work and why.” I then reaffirm the “open exploratory nature” of the interview, designed to “really find out . . . what the world is like and what the life is like” for him, and explain that its lack of “structure” is to allow me “to find ways of ah following along with you as you talk about your work.” In response and just prior to the excerpt in the transcript below, he remarks that it will probably take “a little while” for him to “just sort of loosen up . . . things have been pretty tight.” R: I’m trying to relax into this interview because I too am very interested/ ah in what- in ah why I do this (laugh) [I: Yes.] and why other people do it as well. um Firstly I- I think it’s . for myself . it’s- it’s been an evolution. There’s- there’s been no a:ah specific reason and the reasons continually change and evolve as my life changes and evolves. .hh ahum If you would like to steer this at all please .hhI: Well let- let me ask about that- what- what’s your- your sense of ah early on. I=mean what are your earliest memories of ah an interest- ah R: Well they go back to- they go back to ah um early early childhood. Both my parents ah were and are- and are artists ah um they work in different areas

Sources and Routes / 29 ah um different fields in the arts. My mother no longer really practices. ah My father is involved in ah graphic design and ah um for many years was a- was a watercolorist and ah occasionally you=know/ he- he does sit down and do ah andand paint. ah um So my earliest experiences werethe earliest ones I can remember from (more) than like three or four years old ah being involved in- in the arts and ah um I: What- what sorts of things were you doing then? (. . .) R: (throat clear) Well we were always painting. [I: mm hum] We always had ah I: Wha- Was your mother a painter as well? or (. . .)R: Yeah she was a fashion ah- [I: mm hum] designer and painter and ah a portrait artist ah um so we were always painting. And as we got a little older and- and could sit a little longer we went out into the field around here/ and you=know (the) seashore and harbors and ah went painting with my father . summertimes. And ah I seem to have always been involved in some kind of arts classes be they sculpture or painting or design or- or ah ah just drawing/ ah with various artists and friends of my ah mother and father/ all through school so that .hh I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been involved [I: mm hum] in- in the arts. And th- the way that we as a family approached the arts is that ah um it’s not something that you put your smock on and sit down to.

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It’s conducted throughout your daily life. When it’s a birthday time/ you- you don’t sit down and make cards and you don’t make a little birthday cake/ and write happy birthday on it you make a cake in the shape of a submarine/ or a flower/ or whatever it is and- and so it was ah um an everyday kind of thing . really. I was not clear at the time why Adam D felt tense or apprehensive about the interview. It had been prearranged to be convenient for him, but appeared to be an added burden to his busy schedule. In retrospect, I now hear/read his remark as carrying a hint of apology. Respondents generally take seriously the “contract” they have entered into by agreeing to be interviewed. Their self-assumed role is to help interviewers accomplish their tasks, so they try to answer questions as best they can. As I observed earlier, Adam D and I had already moved into the interviewer-interviewee relationship—a level of trust had been established and he had actively probed the scope of my interests. Now he is, I believe, concerned he will not do as well as he might under less “tight” circumstances, that he will not meet my—and his—expectations for a good respondent. Independently of my aims, however, he is “very interested” in the reasons that he and other craft artists do the work they do. The interview is an occasion to explore this, and he wants to be relaxed so as not to waste the opportunity. He begins, somewhat hesitantly, with a relatively abstract and nonspecific formulation of his own reasons for doing what he does. I remain silent, not taking up the opportunity (offer? request?) to ask a question or probe for specifics after he finishes his opening statement. It is significant that I have not yet asked a question. His expressed concern about wanting to relax follows immediately after my explanation for the openness of the interview, in which I would be “following along” and responding to what he said rather than structuring it through specific questions. His initial statement of reasons is not an answer to a question but an attempt to address the general problem of motivation, which, he infers from my introductory remarks, is my primary interest. At this early point, we seem to come to a stop. His statement does not lead anywhere—no question from me, no development or further details from him. Generating a sense of closure rather than functioning as an in-

Sources and Routes / 31 vitation to continue, his opening does not help him gain confidence about how well the interview will go. My silence adds to the difficulty, and he now, somewhat reluctantly, adopts another strategy, asking me politely to steer the interview, that is, to take some control. This, of course, runs counter to my intentions. However, I do not argue the point but now ask, awkwardly and in a stumbling way, a more direct though still relatively open-ended question about his earliest memories of an unspecified interest. I am picking up on his report of changes over time and offering a place to start, namely, at the beginning. The content of this interest is unstated but clearly understood as we see from his response. In this exchange, we negotiate our way through an impasse. He is finding it difficult to continue without more structure, and I depart from my passive, nonquestioning stance and ask a question I hope will get us going, staying within my preferred mode of being responsive to what he says. He follows my lead, marking the beginning as “early early childhood.” The nature of his interests is initially undefined and unspecified—“they” is the referent. But he begins this process of clarification indirectly, referring to both his parents as artists working in different fields, concluding by noting their respective and different levels of current artistic involvement. Only after presenting this background does he return to his own involvement in the “arts,” the earliest experiences he can remember, when he was “like three or four years old.” Thus he defines the implicit content of my question and of his childhood memories at the end of this sequence of stanzas. I have not used the terms “art” or “artistic involvement” in either my earlier statement of interests or my question. But respondents often address what they understand to be the general aims of the interview, as Adam D does in this instance, rather than simply answer a question. His elaboration goes beyond my question in yet another way. He introduces an important component of his work identity claim: namely, that his work is embedded in a general interest and involvement in the arts that stretches back to his parents and early family experiences. I am apparently still unclear about what “involvement” refers to, and when he pauses again, I ask about “what sorts of things” he was doing. He responds, “we were always painting.” Prompted by the “we” in his answer, I ask whether his mother was also a painter. He offers a descriptive list— fashion designer, painter, portrait artist—and concludes by repeating his earlier statement that they were “always” painting, prefacing it with “so”

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that both serves as an intensifier of this activity and confirms that this reflected the interests and work of both parents. Adam D then elaborates on the activities, answering my implied question about what constituted “involvement in the arts,” qualifying his key word “always” by the continuity of artwork through time and its centrality in his family’s life. In addition, there were—again “always”—different types of arts classes and “just drawing” with artists and friends of his parents. The “so” that begins the last line of the stanzas that form this episode in his story marks this account as an explanation for why he “can’t remember a time” of not having been involved in the arts. He then specifies how the arts functioned within his family, not as a marginal activity but something “conducted throughout your daily life.” Standard family rituals, such as celebrating birthdays, received more than a routine response: not a typical ordinary cake, for example, but one shaped into an artistic design. The excerpt concludes with a summary of his family’s approach: “And so it was ah um an everyday kind of thing . really.” The shift to present tense in the last two stanzas—“put,” “sit,” “make”—further emphasizes the persistence of this pattern throughout his childhood, a criterial feature of a genre referred to as a “habitual narrative” (Polanyi, 1985; Riessman, 1990). In this form, the usual focus on temporal sequence is muted (Mishler, 1995), and the recalled past is repetitive and static—time seems to stand still as he “always” and “everyday” and “throughout” his “daily life” is doing something in the arts. In this first section of our interview, Adam D locates the origin of his artistic interests and his work(which, he told us earlier, were nonspecific, continually changing and evolving) in his childhood experiences within the framework of his family’s practices. In de Certeau’s terms, these were tactics and ruses through which his family’s orientation to and engagement with the arts provided an alternative space for development. Rather than holding the typical, conventional view of the function of art for children as a marked-off site for play and self expression, Adam D’s family treated art seriously. The family did it together. It was an integral part of daily life (they were “always painting”) as well as of special occasions. In this way, his family resisted the usual separation of the arts from daily life. Rather, daily life was permeated with the arts. In representing his childhood and his family as a time and place where engagement in the arts was “an everyday kind of thing . really,” Adam D anchors his identity claim as a craftartist within a perspective on art as a form of life.

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Beth R: “I did the best I could with the times” My interview with Beth Rivers, like the one with Adam D, begins by my answering her question rather than my asking one—an unexpected coincidence. As we complete the Informed Consent procedure, she asks: “Is this going to be your version of working?” Caught off guard, I respond somewhat flatly: “This is my version of working.” I have misunderstood her question, and she clarifies her intended meaning, somewhat apologetically: “No, no I don’t—don’t mean that the way it sounded. I meant the book Working by Studs Terkel. . . . I didn’t mean of working. Obviously I know you’re working.” I express surprise that Terkel did not include anyone in the crafts—another instance of my rhetoric of authority. “Well,” she says, “he ignored the arts.” “The arts and crafts both,” I add, and she affirms: “That’s right.” Starting off on the wrong foot, we have reached some common ground. My orienting remarks to Beth R are similar to those I made to Adam D, though briefer, and include a bit more personal history: my long-standing interest, friendships with some craftspeople, and my earlier photographic project. I explain that this study is an effort to turn my personal interest into “more of a focus” in my research, where I can learn “how people go about doing their work and the relation between their work and their life.” And ah for craftspeople in particular I’m interested in ah how you sustain ah you and other craftspeople sustain a kind of work/ which is not ah ah you=know deeply supported within the society/ in- [R: Right] in the sense of what you do/ so how is it people go about doing work/ under conditions which are not always ah supportive/ [R: uhm um] And ah you=know what- what keeps them in the work/ what brought them into the work/ ah what the work is/ how you go about doing it/ how it relates to other parts of your life/ ah I’m a social scientist/ I’m interested in ah relationship of people to their culture/ to their societies/ and- and ah interested in adulthood/ and in the place of work um you=know for adults. My brief critical comment on the lack of social support for the crafts is the same I highlighted in my introductory statement to Adam D. She responds, “Right,” marking some level of agreement. I emphasize my interest in the relation of her work to “other parts” of her life and describe my

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primary role in the interview as “listening” rather than asking “a lot of specific questions.” Though there are “general topics” I would like to hear “something about,” “mostly” I want to hear her own account of her work, so “as much as I can I’ll try to keep you talking and—and listen.” Beth R acknowledges her understanding, “Okay,” and then a concern: “If I—if I’m headed in a direction that doesn’t—doesn’t you=know sound right—.” This echoes Adam D’s request for me to “steer” the interview. Both express the typical wish of respondents to meet interviewers’ expectations. I reassure her: “Given what I’m interested in what—you=know what sounds right is what— what you have to say about what you do— [R: Yah].” I then ask my first question, offering it as “perhaps a start.” The transcript begins at this point. I: But perhaps a start ah . let me ask you how- how do you ah describe yourself as- as a crafts person in the kind of work that you do? What ahR: What short little phrase do I use/ when people say “what do you do?” um Well I- I used to say I’m an artist and I say that to some people but I usually say that I design fabrics. um And I design clothing which I produce and sell ah through stores and also retail. And I’ve done that for about six years and my background was ah . ah degree in art and painting/ at the University of X. And I was um a teacher for several years/ before I was married. It was in the fifties/ when . you- you prepared yourself your parents told you “You’re either a teacher or a secretary and . in case something happens to your husband.” So at that point I got married and I had three sons. I did continue with my work/ all through that time . although it was very difficult to do with children. um

Sources and Routes / 35 I: With your work? R: With painting. [I: Um hm] R: um hm I- I continued with the painting um I did it constantly although as I said with great difficulty ’cause I had to get baby sitters to take care of the kids outside so I could paint inside. And I never had the funds to have ah . a separate studio and you know hindsight tells me/ there were- there would be lots of things I would do differently but it was the fifties and I did the best I could with the times Responding to my question about how she “describes” herself as a “craftsperson,” Beth R lists different options. The “short little phrase” she uses with some people is “artist,” but “usually” she says that she designs fabrics or clothing. The initial position of artist in her list suggests this is her preferred self-definition. Beth R seems to be asserting this identity claim as a preliminary frame for our interview, an interpretation strengthened by her characterizing her “background” in the next stanza as a university degree in art and painting, and the further specification of her “work” as “painting,” which she did “constantly” throughout her life despite great difficulty of doing so in the context of her family obligations. Additional evidence for this function of her identity claim comes up in the compressed biography she offers, which includes teaching, marriage, and sons, but focuses on her efforts to continue with her painting—even in the absence of a defined studio space that would allow her to “paint inside” without having to attend to her children. The impact of conventional gender roles surfaces at the beginning of the interview. Though her degree was in the arts, she followed her parents’ suggestion to “prepare” herself for marriage and motherhood and still be able to support herself “in case” something happened to her husband. She taught for several years before she married, and then raised three sons. Though it was “very difficult,” she continued with her work “all through that time.” With “hindsight,” she feels she might have done things differ-

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ently but concludes: “it was the fifties and I did the best I could with the times.” She talks for the next 30–35 minutes about her experiences after marriage, expanding on her initial remarks and focusing on efforts to pursue her work, meaning painting: she remarks on the difficulties of doing so; describes the support she got from a painting class and the instructor; tells how she began to paint fabrics and design clothing; and speaks of her persistent and currently successful efforts to market her work. I will return to these topics at a later point.

Beth R: “I had a very artistic upbringing I think” When she ends her review of her work trajectory, I move our conversation back to when she majored in art and painting in college, and ask where that interest came from “in terms” of her family and about early memories. The transcript of this conversation begins at this point. I: In- back ah- the furthest step in your- when you went to X University [R: um hmm] you majored in art [R: um hmm] and in painting. [R: Right.] (. . .) act- actual work. Where- where did that come from? I mean in- in terms of your family orR: The desire for that? I: Yeah. I mean do you have early memories of ah- of that kind of interest . of-? R: Oh yes . always. Since I was little . always. I’m- I’m a doer I’m a project person. I’m always doing I was always making things/ when I was a kid. And I lived- I was lucky I lived in a household/ where my mother is an artist too although because of her time/ she didn’t pursue it other than as a hobby but she did always do that. And she always had a wonderful eye for art

Sources and Routes / 37 and she always pointed out- I mean she is so observant and would always point out isn’t that beautiful and look at that. She always- I think her very best- the best example of what she does in her home is the arrangements she makes. She makes gorgeous arrangements of art objects all over the house. It’s a work of art . her home. Um and she always had all kinds of stuff she’s a pack rat much more than I am even and I am. And so anything I needed/ she had. If I wanted old buttons/ old felt/ old fabric/ anything it was there. And she was always- she was the perfect mother the perfect caretaker in the sense that she always provided whatever I wanted she’d get it out. I’d be sick/ I’d love to be sick because I could do these projects at home and make things which I did all the time. And my dad- um my dad also has a good eye for- for artistic design particularly in nature he really appreciates it. [Deleted: father—engineer, patient teacher, interest in outdoors] um so I- I had a very artistic upbringing/ I think. My- my home was artistic my parents designed every home that we lived in we lived in three homes that they designed. Like Adam D, Beth R locates the origin of her artistic interests in childhood and her family context and characterizes her experience as “always

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doing,” “always making things” since she was “a kid.” She describes the support and encouragement she received in idyllic terms: she had been “lucky” to live in a household where her mother, an “artist” who only pursued that as a hobby, had a “wonderful eye for art,” and her father appreciated artistic design. Describing her mother as a “pack rat” who was a constant source of supplies, providing everything she wanted for her own projects, Beth R, refers to her as “the perfect mother . the perfect caretaker.” In this retrospective view, she concludes that she had “a very artistic upbringing.” It is important to take note of an important difference in how her and Adam D’s families functioned in relation to the children’s early artistic interests. Beth R’s projects were solitary activities. Her mother provided the necessary “stuff” but did not join her in the activity nor were the projects part of the more general family life. This separateness is underlined by her comment that she used to “love to be sick” because she could then do her projects. In contrast, Adam D’s family engaged collectively in their artistic activities. Painting and making things for celebratory occasions like birthdays were integral parts of the family as a social unit. There is a hint in this distinction, to which I will return, between a perspective on art as a form of life in Adam D’s family and the separation—perhaps opposition—of art from “real life” in Beth R’s family. Both root their long-standing, life-long artistic interests and current work in their childhood experiences, and each recalls a supportive family environment. But the striking difference between how those interests were defined and where they were located within their respective family spaces had important implications, as we shall see, for their work trajectories and the development of their work identities.

Beth R: “Art you=know . has always been my love” The struggle to continue painting in the face of her responsibilities as wife and mother had precursors in Beth R’s earlier family life. It surfaces in her account of what she did in high school and her story of how she came to major in art in college. Shortly after the above excerpt, wondering about ways her “artistic upbringing” may have been expressed outside the family, I ask if she had “any association” with a local art center in her home town—one with a national reputation. Although they lived within walking distance, she didn’t “actually do that” until after high school “’cause” her parents wanted her to take a full academic program so she could graduate and go on to college. She took no art courses in high school. After starting

Sources and Routes / 39 college, she went over to the art center “all the time,” and refers to it as a “source of- oh peace and inspiration.” Beth R’s story of her application and admission to college has the form of a fairy tale. In accord with her parents’ wishes, she applied to the college “lit school.” But, apparently, her unconscious took over. Her personal statement was “all about art” and her “love of art.” Her resistance was indirect and perhaps covert—she may not have shown this part of her application to her parents or, if she did, they may not have viewed it as significant since her high school academic program supplied proper credentials for college admission. R: I- I remember when I got into college and that was interesting I digress . butI applied to be in the lit school (. . .) and then I wrote my ah biography I wrote my- is that right? Yeah? I: um hm Your autobiography . your application where they ask you for a personal- you=know. [R: Yeah . right.] R: Well . when I wrote that ah it was all about art and my love of art and they- I’ve never heard of this I’m sure it wouldn’t happen again I- I like to see it as one of those things/ that’s meant to be they put me in the art school. They said “We think that’s where you need to be.” They didn’t even ask me they didn’t- they wouldn’t do that now/ I don’t think. They certainly would have you come in/ and consult with you. Well I loved that idea. So that’s what I did I was in the art school I did really well in the art school.

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I don’t think I would have made it through college had I been in lit school because I’m not an intellectual student I’m much more of a doer. And art you=know . has always been my love and it really was.

As in traditional folk tales, in which the good fairy or wise magician appears at a critical point in the heroine/hero’s journey and bestows a gift, the admissions committee “put” her in the art school, without asking or consulting her, confident in its own judgment that it was where she belonged. Her reflections on this pivotal event accent its magical quality. She “never heard” of anything like it, and would “like to see it as one of those things that’s meant to be.” It turned out to be a wise decision. Beth R “loved that idea,” did well in art school, and believes she might not have made it through “lit school” because she is “not an intellectual student” but “much more of a doer.” The childhood context for her identity claim turns out to be more conflicted than appeared in the epigraph to this chapter and in the previous excerpt, although the conflict is foreshadowed at the beginning of the interview. Her engagement with art was fraught early on and in her adult life, with tensions and struggles reflecting cultural definitions and expectations about gender. Doing her work required resisting demands and pressures from her parents, and later her husband, to be a proper girl, daughter, wife, and mother. These less supportive undercurrents reframe her valorization of her “perfect mother.” Moreover, parental concerns for her to be prepared for “real life” when she might have to support herself led to the academic focus in her school years, and this delayed her pursuing art, which had “always” been her love. The magical event of being “put” in art school interrupts her parents’ expectations. The admissions committee’s perceptiveness and willingness to respond to her indirectly expressed desire allow Beth to do what she really wished. But, we already know, this is not the end of the story. After graduating from college, she returns to the track projected by her parents of teaching, marriage, and children. We will learn later, in more detail, how this conflict between doing what she loves and her family responsibil-

Sources and Routes / 41 ities—between art and domestic life—gets played out over the course of her adult life.

Adam D: “I was really hooked on it. It was like a drug” The early stages of Adam Daley’s developmental trajectory toward his identity as an artist-glassmaker contrast in significant ways with Beth Rivers’ path. In the supportive environment of his family he had opportunities to explore other forms of artistic activity in addition to the graphic arts, and took both ballet and music lessons for many years. I ask if there was any early “channeling” toward working in glass, wondering how he moved in that direction from this diverse background in the arts. Although he can recall an episode from his mid-teens of being “fascinated” by a glassblower blowing Christmas ornaments, and retained a “germ” of interest from this experience, he did not “really” get into working with glass until his senior year at Z Art College. By then, his interests had shifted from painting and graphics to working in a “sculptural format.” He details his growing involvement with glassmaking below. R: So whether I was interested in actually sculpture or the processes available to me at the time is a- a real good question. but by the time we had built these ah glass furnaces I had become totally infatuated with the material/ and the idea of exploring it that I just did that all the time/ literally day and night I lived there. I: Was- there was not anyone there doing glass at the time? (. . .) R: No. No there wasn’t. [Deleted: occasional workshops by prominent glassmakers]. R: We were sort of on our own literally and we didn’t know much/ other than a few workshops and I knew that that’s what I wanted to do I wanted to go to graduate school/ and explore it further. [Deleted: applied and accepted at graduate school; beginning of glass studio movement].

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It was very- it was terribly exciting ah it was terribly exciting in- in a lot of different ways. I think I had- I have been w- ah fascinated with heat processes and transformation of- of materials um and this was the ultimate in this glass. You can throw this stuff in there you can heat it to temperatures of Hell and then you make something with it you=know and it was terribly exciting you=know. [Deleted: a few people had seen this in factories]. I think one of the things that appealed to me/ is the ah the fact that it is so spontaneous and so unforgiving that having come from working with clay/ where you can make a form and you=know as long as you keep it wet/ you can keep changing that shape within reason and you can work on something for weeks or months/ and then you have to dry it/you have to dry it carefully and then bisque it/ or glaze it/ or- and then fire it again. I=mean but glass you go up there and you just do it and- and it’s either good or it’s bad or it’s- doesn’t make it at all. You=know you get one chance to do it and you follow that through and the results are the results you=know you don’t have an opportunity to change them. You can have an opportunity to do it again if you=know if you have the time but- and- and the materials available but that immediate ah spontaneity still fascinates me you=know.

Sources and Routes / 43 It’s like you’re laying it out on the line/ when you’re doing it it’s like music it’s like dance. [Deleted: like watercolors but even more unforgiving]. So that aspect of it ah was certainly ah sorta really sucked me right in you=know I was really hooked on it it was like a drug you=know and I- and I re- literally lived there you=know. We made this raunchy little loft/ .hh heh heh .hh and we’d sleep there and we worked there around the clock whenever there was glass hot and space to anneal. The school had few facilities for glassmaking, and students built their own glass furnaces. Adam became “totally infatuated” with exploring its possibilities and “just did that all the time.” He “lived there,” a characterization that appears early in this account and is repeated as he concludes this excerpt. Sleeping in a “raunchy little loft” with other students and working “around the clock,” he reproduces his family pattern in which art and life were intertwined. His figurative language evokes a love affair— “infatuated,” “fascinated,” “terribly exciting,” “spontaneous”—with the same risks of failure that add to the excitement: “one chance to do it,” “results are the results,” no “opportunity to change them.” The immediacy and spontaneity of the process still fascinate him: it is like music or dance. He invokes a metaphor of addiction: he was “really sucked in . . . really hooked on it . . . like a drug.” The surface similarity between Adam D and Beth R in the origins they claim for their artistic interests—childhood and family encouragement— fade into the background when we see that their first steps toward their adult work identities were markedly different. The tensions Beth R experiences between her “love of art” and parental pressures to achieve and prepare herself for a traditional woman’s role do not trouble Adam D. He is unconflicted about art—it is his life. It is particularly noteworthy that his family disappears from his account of his progressive movement toward

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glassmaking. He does not locate his choices within his family context but presents them as immanent, that is, having their sole source in his own interests and expertise. Nor does he depend on the magical wand of an admissions committee to pursue training in the arts. He knows what he wants to do, puts together portfolios of his work, applies to several graduate programs in glass, is accepted, and goes on to a degree. Gender is as absent from his account as family. The invisibility of these factors is understandable, as they are intimately and indissolubly bound together. Nonetheless, his account is gendered as pervasively as Beth R’s, but since maleness is the unmarked cultural category, its effect on his representation of his identity trajectory is implicit. As a woman, Beth R seemed to find it necessary to “explain” her choices—why, for example, she took no art courses in high school and applied to the college “lit school” though art had “always” and “really” been her love. She provides a framework within which we can understand this—her family’s view of what she needed to do as a girl/woman. Adam D does not feel the need to explain what he did and offers no reasons beyond his own interests. He draws his scenario from the cultural repertoire of stories about male development. He presents himself as independent agent, acting without family ties, pressures, or obligations. His motives are internally generated—his fascination with glass is the driving force in his work, and he succeeds through his own efforts. Finally, compared to Beth R’s generalized “love for art,” he focuses on the technical aspects of glassmaking and the unforgiving features of the process. The integration between life and art Adam D ascribed to his family continues within him as he moves into the world beyond. I do not mean to suggest that his was a “fuller” life. There is an absence of reference in his account not only to parents and family but to other personal and social relationships. Nevertheless, he does not suffer the division within the self with which Beth R struggles. Despite her persistent efforts to continue with her work, it remained a side involvement for many years, marginal to her serious, adult responsibilities as wife and mother. In contrast, for Adam Daley, to be involved in art was at the same time to be engaged in the serious business of life. In highlighting the implications of differences in their family contexts for how Adam D and Beth R began and continued to do their work, I do not wish to reduce their rich developmental narratives to gender stereotypes. Rather, I am trying to show the usefulness of a comparative ap-

Sources and Routes / 45 proach that focuses on variability among persons in the detailed ways in which they ground their identity claims.

Carla S: “It had always been there in my life . . . so I never even thought of doing it” Carla Stone, an artist-potter whose story I reviewed briefly in an earlier paper (Mishler, 1996), provides a third example of the impact of the family on career trajectories and identity formation, and the diversity of ways it can stimulate an early expression of artistic interests. She too reports early memories of a childhood involvement in art, but for her it served a different function in the dynamics of family life than it did for either Adam D or Beth R. Further, it had different consequences for her career trajectory, which will be explored in more detail in the following chapter. In this section, I focus on the meaning and significance of art in childhood and adolescence. I do not ask about her early memories until quite late in the interview, after we have been talking for about one and a half hours. My question about whether she recalls “personal meanings” of “drawing or doing a piece of work” during her childhood begins the next excerpt. It follows up on our immediately prior discussion of the personal meanings for her of each individual piece she makes—she is not a production potter and does not make multiple copies. My question has another intention as well. It marks an effort to return to and learn more about her family situation. With the exception of a few brief remarks earlier in the interview, and then only in response to my direct question, she has not referred to her family—a clear contrast with Adam D’s and Beth R’s accounts. I begin the interview by asking about the “beginnings” and “history” of her work in crafts, about what led her into it, and how her work has gone since then. Carla S responds with a lengthy, detailed, and chronologically organized story about her shift to art in her last year of college and the development of her career since then (see Chapter 3). At no point does she refer to her family. When she concludes by bringing us up to the present, I ask directly whether there was “anything” about her family “in terms of their support” for her work. She replies that her family wasn’t involved in her life from the time she was seventeen and did not give her much emotional or financial support. She did not have a very good childhood and was “abused physically,” which is why she left home “as soon” as she could. Her family makes no further appearance in the interview until I again ask directly about them at this late point.

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I: Do you have any ah early memories/ from when you were a child . adolescent about- that had anything of this tone of- of the meaning of drawing/ or doing a piece of work/ or- ah I mean the- what you’ve been talking about at various points of the- the feeling for the work/ and the- and the importance of- or meaning [R: Um hm] in the work for you/ and very often personal meanings in what must- that (. . .) have early memories- . . . I’m- I’m thinking back to your earlier statement/ about what childhood was like/ [R: Um hm] because in various senses an- an unhappy- [R: Um hm] Was the drawing/ or- or other kinds of work/ did that have meaning for you then in the same way/ or- [R: Yah] Do you have any memories for that? R: Yah. I think that um one of the reasons probably why I didn’t go to art school right away was the fact that creating had always been in my lifein a very personal part of my life. It was a way that I could escape it was a way that I could get my emotions out. um I- for instance I started writing a journal/ when I was thirteen and I’ve continued to write journals and you=know very kind of childish poetry and very emotional/ when I look back on it now. And I- I’ve kept all of them and it’s- it’s- um it’s kind of funny. But um that and the drawing and painting/ that I was doing in high school really were- um really kind of helped me/ through some difficult times in my life and were- and definitely were a key for me/ to be able to express what I was feeling because it was so emotionally packed for me/ in those years of my life that um it was a way that I found inner peace. It was a way that I found my way through the situation

Sources and Routes / 47 and- and maintained some kind of emotional stability I know it was- it was very- ah it was very important to me. And it had always been there in my life and I never- so I never even thought of doing it. um The abusive and punitive childhood Carla S describes is closely intertwined with her early involvement in art. The reason she didn’t go to art school “right away” was that “creating,” in various forms, had always been a “very personal part” of her life, a way to “escape,” to “get her emotions out.” The drawing and painting she did in high school defined an enclave, a safe place that helped her through “some difficult times.” They were a “key” for her to express what she was feeling, how she found “inner peace” and “emotional stability” in an abusive family environment. Although art was “always” in her life, she “never even thought of doing it,” by which she means pursuing it as a serious option, a restatement of why she didn’t go to art school earlier. Her initial characterization focuses on her creative activities as strategies of “escape,” rather than on specifics of her family situation. As she continues beyond this excerpt to talk about what was happening as she grew older, it becomes clear that the space she built for herself was neither freely chosen nor tension-free. She and her siblings were “encouraged” to do “quiet” things like drawing, “not big noisy things,” so they would not disturb her mother. The minimal positive response she received from her parents for her art diminished when she was in high school: “the situation changed and things got worse.” Her art wasn’t important to her parents, who were interested only in her “bringing home A’s.” They “knew [I] could do A’s,” and she learned very quickly that she had to do that or would be severely punished—as happened one term when she “got a beating” for getting “a C and a D.” There was no reward for doing well. Rather, the expectation for good grades was a “threat”: “It wasn’t anything like ‘You’re doing a great job’ . . . It was more like ‘I know you can do this so you better do it or it’s the rap’ you=know.”

Carla S: “It wasn’t until later . . . that I realized I could do it . . . in my own way” The worsening family situation when Carla S was in high school reflected a serious downturn in her mother’s psychological state. On the plus side,

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her mother left her alone as long as she took the college course and got A’s. Her teachers provided some active support and encouragement for her art, although this seems also to have depended on her doing well in her academic subjects. One art teacher was particularly important during that period, and she took all her art courses with him. He was “very encouraging,” and the first teacher who helped her see she “did have some talent.” We might gloss this as a Cinderella story: an abused child supported and protected by the teacher-prince who recognized her talent. R: So you=know at this point to- my mother was really- I guess mostly my mother . she was really- ah really suffering emotionally- she was very emotionally sick very emotionally unstable and- um so she kind of left me alone in school and you=know as long as I took- I started to take the college um course in school and get A’s. And um . I tried to take things like sewing and typewrite- typing and they kicked me out and told me to take another art course ”We hear you’re good in art/ go take another art course.” ’Cause I wasn’t very patient with typewriters or with sewing machines I always managed to break them somehow without trying ah they were just frustrating for me. So the school was- the school was kind of like- they- they saw me in the art room as a safe place. You=know “She can- she does well in there/ let’s not make her learn typing.” And so a lot of pressure was taken off of me because I was doing so well in all my other subjects that I was allowed to go to the art room and take you=know art courses.

Sources and Routes / 49 And my high school art teacher- I took him all the way through/ didn’t even try any other teachers/ was just excellent/ very encouraging and um was really you=know probably the first teacher that I had/ that um really kind of helped you=know me see that you=know II did have some talent and that you=know I- I definitely needed a push to get into it ’cause I did have quite a few teachers saying keep going . keep going you=know. Because it’s something that- I mean the arts are so unpredictable it was something that you=know I wasn’t quite sure if I could do it and be successful and (. . .) you=know it wasn’t anything that I was real sure about doing. And it wasn’t until later and I’m glad it wasn’t until later on you=know in my twenties that I realized I could do it and find a way of doing it in my own way/ to- to take my own approach. Her uncertainties about taking art seriously are evident here. She definitely needed a “push” to get into it, despite the encouragement of teachers saying “‘Keep going . keep going’.” Earlier, she attributed her delayed entry into art school to the personal meaning of creating and its functions in her life. Here, she refers to art as unpredictable and of not being “quite sure” she could be successful at doing it. It was only in her “twenties” that she realized she could do it in her “own way.” Her emphasis on her own way is, I believe, a restatement of the personal meaning of art to her, something that was initially a barrier to her seeing it as an “option” in her life. Well aware of the costs of art’s defensive and escapist functions for her, she needed to be “pushed,” encouraged by those who recognized her talents—a theme that will recur in her late decision to go to art school. Her family world and the basis of her interest and work in art while she was growing up clearly differ from those of Adam D and Beth R. It is therefore surprising to find parallels in how she grounds her identity claims in early experiences. In her account of an abusive family environment, Carla S also talks about herself and her siblings being “encouraged”

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and given art materials, although the aim was to keep them “quiet.” From her more extended account, not included in this transcript, we learn that she believes she was “influenced” to have an interest in the arts by her mother’s being “very color conscious” and able to “draw amazingly well,” and by her father’s acting as something of a “role model,” “always at his drawing board, drawing drawing drawing.” Although “it wasn’t like living with two parents that were artists” (as in Adam D’s case), “there was that undertone” (a weaker version of Beth R’s “artistic upbringing”). And, as Adam D and Beth R acknowledged in reference to their siblings, Carla S asserts a familial talent: “In all of my brothers and sisters there’s um this little flair, this little artistic flair in all of us.”

Narrative and Identity: Notes on a Research Perspective This chapter focused on beginnings. Adam Daley, Beth Rivers, and Carla Stone all recall “always” doing art from when they were very young children. Hence it is not surprising that they emphasize the importance of their parents and families in the development of their interests. I referred to these statements as identity claims, and my analyses of their different family situations within which they “did” art were directed to problematizing these claims. That is, their apparent equivalence was recontextualized and reframed by showing how the meanings of having “always” been doing art differed in forms of expression and function related to the particular dynamics of their respective families. Thus the integration of art and life in Adam D’s family contrasted with the separation between art and the world in Beth R’s family, and each differed from the dialectic of punishment and defensive safety that Carla S experienced. Further, these differences left their mark on their career trajectories and the ways their craft identities were shaped: an unambivalent and unconflicted path of development for the first; a genderbased continuous struggle to maintain her “work” in the face of competing responsibilities as a wife and mother for the second; and a resistance to taking up the work seriously because of its defensive, escapist functions—with consequent discontinuity and delay—for the third. This initial exploration was directed to several issues that will recur in further analyses—issues of method, interpretation, and theory. First, the aim is to develop an approach to the analysis of personal narratives and life history interviews that both works out from respondents’ “ways of telling” and, at

Sources and Routes / 51 the same time, locates their representations within a broader cultural and social context. I refer to this as a critical analytic perspective. Second, the approach seeks to preserve the variability among identity trajectories rather than construct an idealized, abstract scheme of development. The model for such an approach, as many others have pointed out, is the classic distinction in linguistics between “langue” and “parole,” or “competence” and “performance.” As an analogue to the linguistic model, I am proposing that culturally defined categories, repertoires, and trajectories for identity are “realized” by individuals in various ways. That is, culture is not a template from which lives are stamped out but is more like the syntax of a language, which individuals use to “make up” their lives in ways that parallel the infinite variety of sentences formed from a limited grammar. Identity formation is, in de Certeau’s phrase, a process of secondary production. Individuals achieve “realizations” of their identities through the varied ways in which they appropriate, adapt, and resist culturally defined definitions of selfhood. Third, this perspective highlights the distinctive way in which narrative forms of analysis contribute to the study of lives. It contrasts with dominant, variable-oriented, positivist models that use coding procedures and aggregate scores across samples of cases with inter-group differences assessed statistically (Mishler, 1996). Such approaches lose the pattern, form, and structure of trajectories of development, all of which constitute our central interest. The use of a narrative approach within a comparative framework allows us to move towards generalizations that respect both the integrity and the variability of these trajectories. Fourth, narrative accounts are not simply expressions of a story, the one true story already and always inside the person. Rather, all “stories” are situated retellings. They are responsive to the contexts of their production, in our case, a life history interview. In this respect, they may be thought of as co-produced, as developed within the ongoing dialogue between interviewer and respondent. An important implication of this view is that it requires close examination of the details of that dialogue, the ways both parties enter into the production of the story. This strengthens the argument made earlier, about the necessity for analyzing the structure of stories, the “textual strategies” through which a particular story is constructed and coconstructed, in order to understand its meaning, that is, interpret it. A final cautionary note. I borrowed familiar tales from folklore to summarize and contrast respondents’ ways of emplotting their lives: Adam D’s

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immersion in glassmaking as a “love affair,” the college admissions committee’s recognition of Beth R’s love of art as a “fairy tale,” Carla S’s escape from her abusive family with her teachers’ support as a “Cinderella” story. These labels provide rough-and-ready readings of their life stories, but they do not “explain” them. Rather, their appropriateness as glosses depends on our first having understood the stories. If we take them too seriously, we risk treating them as a resource, that is, as unexamined assumptions in our interpretations, rather than as topics requiring further critical analysis. In the course of telling our life stories we may draw, implicitly or explicitly, on folk tales or other cultural plots, but interpretive work must be attentive to how their meanings change in different historical, social, and research contexts. Their relevance, their “fit” between the reality of people’s lives and its imaginative re-enactment in a contemporary version of a culturally grounded tale, is not simply found but must be made. Whether or not a cogent argument can be made for such a fit, for example, my characterization of Carla S’s account as a “Cinderella” story, must be decided case by case. Robert Darnton’s analysis of historical and cultural contexts and functions of Mother Goose stories and other folk tales provides a fund of wonderful examples that document how the “same” story changes over time and in its travels across cultures (Darnton, 1984).3 These transformations make it “unwise to build an interpretation on a single version of a single tale, and more hazardous still to base symbolic analysis on details” (p. 18). It is equally unwise, as I have argued, for narrative researchers to assume the story they hear in the particular contexts of their interviews is the one “true” story. Nonetheless, although I would not be surprised to learn that my respondents’ stories varied as they retold them to others in different contexts, I was stunned to discover that “Little Red Riding Hood” did not have a hood in the original version nor, alas, was she saved by the hunter at the last moment but was eaten by the wolf. To update the warning of the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale: “Beware of wolves, particularly in grandmother’s nightgown,” we might append: “Beware of loose analogies, particularly when clothed in uncritical common-sense assumptions.”

3 Contingencies and Turning Points: Discontinuities in the Life Course It just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. —Fred Wharton, furniture artist-craftsman

I had al- always done . um art . . . but never really thought of it as an option of something to do in my life. —Carla Stone, artist-potter

I sort of got side-tracked you=know . . . just seem to be things I was doing to avoid really doing what I felt that I had to do. —David Farber, furniture artist-craftsman

I opened my interview with Fred Wharton, a furniture artist-craftsman, with a variant of my standard introduction about my interests and the aims of the study: my long-standing interest in the crafts; the “last dozen years” of “just hanging around the shops or the studios” having informal conversations with craftspeople about their work; and my decision to pursue these interests “more formally” as a research project. I then go on to specify what I’d like to talk about with him and describe the form of the interview. After his “Okay, fine” acknowledgment, I ask him to “begin . at the beginning. ah How did you ah . get into the work?” The transcript of the interview begins at this point. I: But . maybe one thing t’do is to . begin . at the beginning. ah How did you ah . get into the work? What ahR: Arright. I- I hope this is going to be of benefit to you in that . ah I don’t consider myself just a craftsperson

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I consider myself a designer um committed to craftsmanship (both laugh) in a way ah and I do a- a number of various things and uh .hh uh .. I do lead a partial life as a craftsman. .hh ah . My . beginnings were in uh- I did a little bit of wood working when I was a kid/ mostly with wooden boats but um I started uh in an undergraduate program as an architect and then became a landscape architect and became involved in the . design world that way. I: Where- where was this? R: It was at (Atlantic State University) um graduated in 1970 (sigh) and ah after school I . had a job for a while with a firm ah the firm . ran into some trouble and collapsed/ folded. and uh I met an architect and he and I decided to design some geodesic domes and do that kind of thing. And I bought some wood working equipment and .hh uh took off in that direction for a short time and uh- and then he and I stopped doing that. And I met a third generation craftsman in Indiana who uh allowed me to share his shop space with and ah that’s when I really started to do wood working. Fred W does not answer my question directly but begins with how he defines himself and the work he does. As we saw with Beth Rivers, such self-descriptions may be complex and shaded: he is not “just a craftsperson” but a “designer” committed to craftsmanship, who does various things and leads “a partial life as a craftsman.” He refers briefly to doing some woodworking as “a kid”—with his grandfather, we learn later—a relatively weaker claim of early origins than we found with other respondents. He then summarizes his training and work experiences chronologically, starting with college and, in this excerpt, to when he “really” began woodworking. He continues this chronology through the next twenty

Contingencies and Turning Points / 55 years, bringing us up to his present situation, and concludes his story with a Coda about recently changed expectations for his work and life. Although Fred W represents his progression along a time-line—a typical narrative convention—his career trajectory is neither linear nor continuous. Shifting from his first college major in architecture to landscape architecture, which was his entry into the design world, he worked briefly after graduating, first as a landscape architect and then as an architect, bought “woodworking equipment” and did that type of work for a short time; stopped; then worked with an experienced craftsman in a shared shop space. His initial account is punctuated by phrases marking changes and transitions, the sort of shifts in direction I refer to as “detours” (Mishler, 1992). Extracting these change-markers from the flow of talk gives us a schematic picture of the dynamic fluidity of the movement toward his current work identity: “I started . . . and then became . . . had a job for awhile . . . decided to design . . . do that kind of thing . . . took off in that direction for a short time . . . stopped doing that . . . that’s when I really started to do woodworking.” R: .hh Well uh several things happened after ah close to two years. One was that I started buying a tremendous amount of material lumber . like- like piles and piles of lumber/ stacked out on a farm field/ and machinery and I felt like I was becoming locked into (Milltown, Indiana) for the rest of my life. And uh I also uh had a minor accident on a machine and I started worrying about my hands and I felt like I was wasting all my- my ah schooling as a landscape architect. So at that time (Amy) and I moved to ah (Granit) where I started working as a landscape architect and did that for five and a half years. [Deleted: date, wife’s schooling] ’n ah . I was a landscape architect .hh and I wasn’t totally happy with that profession but I thought well a lot of it’s my inexperience and the kind of work I’m doing.

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And .hh eventually I ended up working in (Granit) in- for a good firm ’n good projects and .hh all that and ah it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. [Deleted: clarifying question.] So I did a- a search and uh decided to go to graduate school in furniture. These changes in direction, which seem to reflect chance and opportunity during this early period, continue into the next phase of his life; here, however, the change-markers are more motivated and directed. He lists “several things” that led rather quickly to a significant change in his work trajectory: the feeling of being “locked” for the rest of his life in a small town; an accident that led him to worry about his hands; the feeling he was wasting his college education. He moved to another city and began working as a landscape architect. Although he was not “totally happy” with that work, he stayed at it for five years—the longest time at one job among the many that preceded it. Realizing that landscape architecture was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his life, he decided to apply to graduate school to learn to make furniture. After mentioning this, he reviews the course of his graduate studies, from a fine arts program at one university to getting a degree in crafts at another. This was a three-year period altogether, during which he totally invested himself in the “furniture world as a craftsman,” being less interested in function than in the “visual impact of a piece,” treating furniture as an “art form.” I ask if he had been doing any “woodworking or furniture-working” during the five years he worked as a landscape architect. His response clarifies his decision to leave that field and take up graduate studies in the craft of making furniture—a major life-change. Although he tried to continue making furniture on the side, he found that as he got older, he had less time or energy for that. Along with this sense of aging—he was only about thirty at the time—another significant factor was his realization of his limitations as a landscape architect, in contrast to his sense of having a particular talent for making furniture. He had an “intuitive sense” about woodworking but lacked the “real sense” of good landscape architects, who

Contingencies and Turning Points / 57 could make the “right” decisions about selecting and positioning trees. On the other hand, he “knew exactly” whether a board should be used for a table top or a table leg. He was optimistic about his decision, although he did not think very much about the options available for earning a living after completing his studies. I: Had- had you been doing any wood working or furniture working during the time you were in the landscape architecture? (. . .) R: I did- I did what I could. I uh- I had my tools. I had small shop spaces here and there. .hh ah There (. . .)I: Were- were you selling all the time at- ah R: No/ no. No I was doing .hh . . . . things like this. (laughs, points to table) .hh ah and the older I got/ the more I found I- I didn’t have enoughas much time or energy/ . outside my- my career so to speak to devote to that So- . ah I made- I made that decision. [Deleted: side comment] R: I made the ah- the decision to ah go into furniture just in that I had an intuitive sense about wood working which I didn’t about landscape architecture. uh Some landscape architects could ah . if- if they were supervising site construction/ they’d go to a nursery and select trees just the right kind of tree and they’d bring it to the site and they . position it just in the right place and have it rotated just the right way. They had it- a real sense of- of how that should be and I didn’t. uhm Whereas if in- talking about woodworking

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I- I knew exactly looking at a board/ whether it should be used for a table top or a table leg I just knew that felt very comfortable with it. What I didn’t- what I didn’t ah .. think about too much was ah . . . . . . what kind of ah options there were . in a real sense/ on getting a degree in- in crafts. I thought well maybe I could teach maybe I could do production work maybe I could do studio work. And I was very optimistic about that and- ah but I didn’t look at it in- in terms of dollars and cents so to speak. It seems to me that in addition to opting for his love of woodworking and furniture-making, Fred W was also evaluating the likelihood of success in his chosen career. While he felt he was not as good as competent landscape architects, he was confident about his intuitive sense and skills as a furniture craftsman. Thus, although he didn’t think much about the options for work or in terms of “dollars and cents” after getting a crafts degree, he was optimistic about the possibilities of teaching or doing production or studio work. His decision was pragmatic and realistic, a marriage of desire and ambition. He was going to do work he wanted to do and, at the same time, would have a better chance of getting ahead in this new career than in the old one. In retrospect, Fred W made the right choice. He has had a successful career as a furniture craftartist: teaching, exhibiting in juried gallery and museum shows, selling, gaining recognition within the field. But as he brings us to the present, at the end of his story, he is beginning to have doubts about the payoff from his intensive investment in the work. I use financial terms since his doubts stem from the difficulty of any “financial reward” from it. I have already reported national survey data which show that the large majority of craftspeople cannot make a living solely from their work, so his situation is not unique. Nonetheless, the problem arises in a particular form for him, and at a particular point in his life. He is nearing middle age and observes that his “expectations” changed for what he wanted out of life.

Contingencies and Turning Points / 59 R: .hh uh but at any rate I- I started ah teaching at the school and ah . . . . . . I collected more equipment and set up the shop here. uh And we bought this house and uh ah ‘n started doing some shows and commission work and that all went pretty well. ah But ah . . . . .hh my . expectations of what I wanted out of life changed and I worked a lot I mean I- I- my- my whole life I’ve worked a lot. ah And ah that uh didn’t bother me until probably around uh three years ago ah where I guess I (. . .)- I keep doing this and there other things I want to do. I want to travel .hh and I found a sport that I absolutely loved in (rock climbing) and I didn’t have enough time to devote to that or even money to buy the equipment I wanted to buy. And I thought you=know I’ve got eight years of education behind me and I work in a pretty good school and all that but ah my work is .hh so time consuming/ so labor intensive that it’s very difficult to get any- ah any financial reward from it. You can get by. I mean you can make a living and you can- and you can exist but I want to do a bit more than that. Until recently, he had not been bothered by the fact that he has worked hard his “whole life,” but now there are other things he wants to do: to travel and to dedicate time to a sport he “absolutely” loves, which he has neither enough time or money for at present. After all his years of education and a good teaching position, he finds the work is so time-consuming and laborintensive that he cannot get any “financial reward” from it. He knows he “can get by,” “make a living,” but he wants to do a “bit more than that.”

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The course of Fred W’s life is unique. But the types of changes and discontinuities he describes seem more the norm in all our lives than are notions of continuity and progressive change that tend to be emphasized in standard models of identity development. The assumed predictability of adult character from the sketch traced out in childhood is problematic, as we know from classic accounts of conversion experiences such as those by St. Paul and St. Augustine. But one need not be a saint to change one’s life. The maxim to “expect the unexpected” applies equally to lives as to horse races, and deserves serious attention by scholars working in identity theory and research. As we all do, craftspeople experience accidents, unplanned changes, and unforeseen events that lead to shifts of course and respecifications of what they are about and who they are. Confronted with the unexpected, they reshape and reconfigure their identities—always works-in-progress—either through efforts to maintain a sense of continuity with their previous mode of work or by changing direction. These changes may be sudden and dramatic or gradual and less total than conversion experiences, but they are all significant in their effects on the individual’s work and life. Near the sudden-dramatic pole of change, for example, we find accidents of “self discovery” appearing frequently in interviews with prominent craftartists (Jeffri, 1992). As they tell it, these “turning points” (Kotre, 1984; Mandelbaum, 1973; Mishler, 1992; Rutter & Rutter, 1993) were often matters of chance: they just “happened” to go by the glass studio or “dropped in” to a ceramics exhibit, and this changed their lives. Other craftworkers report similar experiences. A potter told me that during a between-term college vacation, depressed over the breakup of her relationship, she “happened” to see an announcement on the student center bulletin board about an introductory, non-credit, two-week ceramics course. Looking for something—anything—to do to take her mind off her troubles, she enrolled. Years later, by then a full-time studio potter, she recounts that as soon as she put her hands on the clay she knew “this was it.” A metalsmith told me a similar story of self-discovery. A graduate school dropout, he had just received an offer of a highly regarded fellowship to return to school. But when he saw the work of an established potter, at that moment he “knew” that all he wanted to do was to be able to make such “beautiful” objects. Turning down the fellowship, he apprenticed himself to the potter, went on to teach himself metalworking skills, and continues to pursue his life in crafts.

Contingencies and Turning Points / 61 Other changes are less dramatic, and may perhaps happen less often— though we do not know this—to persons as unprepared by past interest and training as these people were. Neither the potter nor the metalsmith had an “artistic upbringing,” and the former cannot recall any “art” in her home. Given their uncertainties about their lives at the time, we could say they were “prepared” in a general sense, that is, ready to respond to possibilities for change. Nonetheless, among the well- and the less-well prepared, accidental self-discoveries—of suddenly and unexpectedly “finding” one’s medium and life work—seem to be fairly widespread, judging by individuals’ representations of their life histories. The frequency is certainly more than we would expect if we think of identity formation as a progressive development from childhood to adulthood, and of personal narratives as functioning primarily to provide a sense of continuity by reframing and smoothing over the impact of discontinuities and disruptive events (Cohler, 1982). The suddenness of discovery was muted in Adam Daley’s account of his choosing glass as his medium. Although he traced back his first “fascination” with glass to a singular memory in adolescence—seeing a demonstration by a glass-blower—he did not pursue this attraction seriously until his senior year in art college, when he became “totally infatuated” with it. Since his interests had already shifted from graphic arts to more sculptural work, we might view him as more “prepared” for this shift in direction than those who had sudden revelations of previously unknown interests and talents. Nonetheless, his “getting hooked” on glassworking resonates with the intensity of others’ moments of self-discovery. In contrast to the artistic family environments Adam Daley and Beth Rivers recall, Fred Wharton states later in the interview, in response to my question, that there “wasn’t anyone” in his family who provided “artistic input” to support either an artistic or woodworking direction. His grandfather, who “made boats throughout his life,” was the sole exception, and Fred W’s helping him make a “rowboat” for his fourteenth birthday is apparently the source of his reference to the “little bit” of woodworking he did as a “kid.” Given the shifts in his career trajectory and the extended length of time until he turned to furniture-making, it seems unlikely that this incident had the significance in his life course that others report when they tell of their extensive childhood experiences with art within their families. At the time of the interview, Fred W is thinking about making another change. He talks later about having already made some exploratory forays in new directions, for example, publishing articles on furniture design and

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designing furniture for mass production. Both moves reflect his general interest in “educating” the general public and increasing its awareness of the qualities of good design. Further, they mark his growing concern with “broader issues” at a different “scale,” particularly about the environmental impact of traditional materials and techniques used in making furniture. In view of widespread social problems, emphasizing “style seems silly right now.” Instead, he wonders whether there may be “another step that can be taken on a broad scale that improves our situation, to get the people more options of what they have, what they live with, what they can afford, and how it can be better used.” Despite all these changes along the trajectory of his work history, his motivation and his practice as a creative artist/furniture-maker are strong, persistent themes. Fred W was “always”—as our other respondents said of their work—doing woodworking, even in his own time when he was otherwise employed. Though it has become somewhat modulated with the passage of time, his initial “drive” to make “beautiful objects,” which was “just something [he] had to do, was- there’s no other choice” continues to have meaning for him. These themes are, of course, central to the identity claim he made at the beginning of the interview of a “designer” “committed to craftsmanship”—a claim represented in and constituted through his narrative of his work history. This deep creative current provides a degree of unity and coherence to a life story with many changes and discontinuities. In highlighting the latter in this discussion, I have been trying to build an argument for their importance in life-history studies. To understand the process of identity formation, we must attend to the dialectic interplay, often even tension, between what we might think of as centripetal and centrifugal forces, between (in Fred W’s case) the conflict between his creative desire and practice and the necessity of his making a living, of not “wasting” his education, of pursuing other interests. The variant forms of his practice are efforts to resolve this dilemma: woodworking projects, one-of-a-kind pieces of artistic furniture, teaching, writing, designing. Thus his “identity” is neither fixed nor progressively developing but is continually reshaped and reconfigured in response to his changing circumstances. Discontinuities take many different forms. If we treat them seriously as having a part in identity formation, we are required again to attend to variability as a given. The different types and functions of disjunctions, gaps, and changes in direction cannot simply be glossed as error or vari-

Contingencies and Turning Points / 63 ance as they are in models that stress continuity and conceptualize development in terms of general or universal stages.

Carla S: “I decided well I’m gonna, gonna do this. I’m gonna see it through to the end. I’m gonna get my degree.” Carla Stone, the artist-potter whose early family history I reviewed in the last chapter, tells us at the beginning of the interview that she had never thought of art as an “option” for the work she would do. Although she had “always”—the adverbial modifier that recurs again and again in these respondents’ accounts—done artwork in childhood and high school, she did not pursue it as a serious activity as Adam Daley did in his progressive movement into his work. Nor did she struggle (as Beth Rivers did) to maintain artwork while meeting other responsibilities or recursively return to it from other work (as Fred Wharton did). Rather, there is a hiatus—a break in continuity between her early involvement in art and her later decision to make this her life’s work. I: Right. Well perhaps if we might- a:ah for me it’s useful/to ask you to begin at the beginning [R: hm hm] since I’m interested in ah the history of your work in the crafts/ what brought you into it/ and= [R: Okay] =how the work has gone since then. [R: OKAY] How did you ah start doing the work that you’re doing? What- ah what led you into . the work? R: um:m . . . . Probably just from attending school. and ah .. I- . at the very end of my undergraduate . um . studies/ I took an art class and I had al- always done . um art/ when I was in high school and .hh .hh was doing it but never really thought of it as an option/ of something to do in my life. And I took it- I took an art class and on the encouragement of .hh the teacher/ I uh . transferred . schools and en- and ended up transferring majors um and started all over again. (laugh) .hh So I actually can- you=know . [have] one bachelor of fine arts

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and if I wanted to I could go back and get an- another bachelor’s degree I ended up with that many credits. .hh um at that point/ I just um got very enthusiastic/ about . . . um working in all different kinds of mediums. I was- I blew glass for . . . three years and uh worked with clay and got my uh bachelor of fine arts . in clay. At that point I was very fascinated with learning tech- technical parts/ of- um .. how to make uh a good bowl or how to make a good cup and really getting to know my material and .hh really wanting to uh do very very good functional . ware. I open our interview by asking her to “begin at the beginning,” tell me what brought her into the work, and relate how it has gone since then. In contrast to other respondents who begin with childhood artistic interests and activities, Carla S begins at a later point, her switch to an art major at the very end of her undergraduate studies. Prior to that, we learn later, she had been majoring in Special Education. She continues with a wellorganized chronological story that takes her through graduate studies, development of her own style of work, success in exhibiting and selling her pieces, and ends with her present situation—she is pregnant and her work has “definitely slowed down.” This “core story” (Mishler, 1986a) takes 12–13 minutes, and I neither interrupt nor interject comments during her narration. Her work trajectory includes various changes, which I reviewed in an earlier paper (Mishler, 1997b). Here, I will focus on the significant discontinuity she refers to in her response to my opening question. She starts with the paradox of not thinking of art as an option for her life although she had always done it. The reasons for taking an art class as she neared graduation from college are unstated. Encouraged by her art teacher, she transferred to another school, changed her major to art, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in clay, with enough credits for a second degree. This switch in majors was costly in terms of time; she mentions “three years” of blowing glass and working with clay. But there is no evidence of complaint about this extension of her college years. Rather, she talks of becoming

Contingencies and Turning Points / 65 “very enthusiastic” about working in different media, “very fascinated” with technical aspects of the work and the material, and interested in making “very very good functional ware.” Her radical change in direction appears to have resolved the paradox; that is, she could now view art as a serious “option.” After getting her degree, Carla S began working as a potter. Response to her work was positive. She was able to sell her pieces, but was not able to earn a living from her work, which was “frustrating,” and she was “kind of unhappy” just working alone in her studio and selling her pieces. She supported herself with other jobs such as waiting at tables, which she felt had “no kind of intrinsic social value.” This is another paradox—one shared by many craftspeople who cannot make a living from their work—of how to earn enough income to continue practicing their craft while working at jobs that are not in themselves trivial or personally meaningless. R: um .. I still wasn’t making a living of off- (laugh) .hh my work which was- which was frustrating. And I just found myself um . kind of unhappy with just . working alone in the studio/ an’ selling these pots and uh then getting a job/ a- a waitressing job that you=know I felt had no kind of intrinsic social value to it and wanted to do something else. um I waited a little while/ . a year . a year and a half and I made a decision that um . I wanted to continue with school and I wanted to continue with school because I wanted to . teach to be able to do . something else . besides just do my work/ just do those pots. And um . because I knew I couldn’t rely on just the money for the pots and I wanted to have a job where it would be . of more substance so I went to graduate school. Carla S’s solution was to go to graduate school in the arts, a decision reflecting her wanting “to teach” or do something else besides make “pots.” A second important factor was that she knew she couldn’t rely on, that is, live on, the money she made from her work and wanted an income-

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producing job with “more substance.” This move consolidates her shift to art as an option. At the end of Carla S’s lengthy, uninterrupted story of the development of her career as an artist potter who makes one-of-a-kind pieces and is relatively successful getting into juried shows and selling through a gallery, she brings us up to the present. The transcript that follows includes her reasons for doing what she does rather than being a production potter. Instead of going “full fledge” into production work and trying to get many pieces out to galleries, she wanted to do one-of-a-kind pieces that “meant something” to her. Although she doesn’t have a steady income from selling her “sculptures,” she feels this is much better than the “grueling,” “boring” work of being a production potter. Her satisfaction comes from making pieces that mean something to her and she gets the extra benefit that they are then exhibited in a art gallery, and she does not have to look at twenty versions of the same piece on her shelves. R: um .. and I was basically doing that/ and setting up shows when we moved here and that’s when . I decided that I would take it slow and . satisfy myself by doing one of a kind pieces that meant something to me instead of trying to go full fledge into a production studio and make these sculptures/ .hh .. ten . twenty and try to get them out to all these different galleries in the country and stuff like that. [Deleted: “very successful” selling through one gallery, setting up shows.] uh The- the money comes in slowly/ from . . . the sculptures uh .. but that’s alright/ . it’s alright. I’ve worked for production potters before and I know what they have to go through on a day to day basis and it’s just- it’s grueling and it’s boring. And um I get more satisfaction out of being able to do a piece and have it have some kind of meaning to me

Contingencies and Turning Points / 67 and be able to finish it and put it in a gallery and you=know not have to look at it twenty times on my- on . . .. So- um . and so that basically takes us up until the point where um I had some medical problems/ and then the pregnancy. So the work is- has definitely slowed down and I’ll hopefully resume (cough) probably as- as soon as the baby goes on schedule (laugh . . .) I’ll be able to start up again/ and- and do some work. And- the last show I had was la- last March. um .. I had a show at the uh (X) Arts Center/at the women’s studio workshop in (W) and uh that was- uh that was very nice to be able to dig- get- get together/ and get a show again/ and stuff like that. So . I’ve missed it. (laugh) In her Coda, she tells us her work “has definitely slowed down” due to medical problems and pregnancy. Her last show was about a year before the interview, and she hopes to start up again as soon as the baby—due shortly—“goes on schedule.” Her feelings about this interruption in her work are clear: “So . I’ve missed it.” She has come to the end of her story but, as it turns out, we continue to talk for another two hours. As the interview proceeds, her story gets elaborated and contextualized, and we gain a fuller understanding of her decisions and what motivated them than is apparent from the career trajectory she traced for us in her opening account. Carla S pauses after this last comment, a discourse marker letting me know she has finished her story, which offers me an opportunity to make the next move. I take it up with a question reflecting my puzzlement about the suddenness of her “transfer” between schools and majors and her move into art, which she specified as the beginning of her work. I ask where she had been going to school before her transfer. The next transcript begins at this point. I: Can I come back uh a little bit to what you were mentioning early on? Where- where were you going to school in the beginning? The place you went before you left?

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R: I got my bachelor of fine arts at (V). I: But you had been somewhere else before? R: Oh I was studying um I’d say in several different places but I was basically getting my (Special Ed) degree from (T) and I transferred for one semester . to (V) and I just- . I got there/ and I took a lot of uh (Special Ed) courses. But I also took . two . basic non major- a design and a drawing course and at that point my drawing teacher . encouraged me very very strongly ’cause he felt that um I had an ability to- I just had drawing ability that he didn’t see very often. And he- he really- you know- it was- it was his encouragement “Get your portfolio together/ you know you’re really good/ you- you just try applying.”’ And you=know I got in/ and everything like that. But- um the school was- uh (V)-/ I don’t- I don’t know if its still the same- had a pretty . intense foundation for its beginning students and it was difficult to get in. If you didn’t know how to draw/ they really- they really didn’t want you in there they wanted people that had some good ability/ before they went in. So:o. I want to stress again that the particular content of my question is only an indicator—one of many possible ones—of my deeper, general aim of learning how she came into her work. I had no special interest in where she had been going to school before nor in what year, which I next ask her. Further, these questions are not directly connected either to the overall narrative line she has followed or to what she has just said in bringing her story to a close. I mark this disjunction by an introductory metacomment about coming “back” to what she was “mentioning early on.” I was trying to make sense of this radical change in her life, and these concrete, narrowly focused questions were apparently intended to get more of an objective “fix” on her situation.

Contingencies and Turning Points / 69 Although the end of her story was an appropriate place to introduce a new topic, my questions returned us to a prior one. They might have disrupted the flow of the interview, but from her response it is plausible to argue that my metacomment mitigated its potential disruption and gave her a way to “hear” what I was trying to ask. She seemed to recognize I was interested in more than “where” and “when.” Thus she skips briefly over “where” to tell me about what was significant to her and more in response to what we both implicitly understood was the real point of my questions. She mentions that she intended to stay at V only for one semester and took “a lot” of Special Ed courses, thus continuing with her previous major. She also took elective design and drawing courses, but does not give reasons for doing this. Subsequently, her art teacher recognized her unusual “drawing ability,” encouraged her to get her “portfolio together” since she was “really good,” and urged her to apply to art school. This dual theme—recognition of her talent and a teacher’s encouragement—is a recurrence of her high school experience. Additional confirmation that this was now a realistic option for her came with her admission to the highly selective art school. In this exchange, she is not simply answering my question but teaching me what my question is or should really be about. This is a particular instance of how respondents transform questions asked into those to which they can give meaningful answers, a feature of the dialogic nature of interviewing in which meanings of questions and responses are negotiated in the ongoing discourse (Mishler, 1986b). She is not contradicting her core story but expanding and clarifying it, and in this way begins to transform it. Her expansion goes beyond a direct response to my question and addresses what lies beneath it, namely, my apparent puzzlement about why she suddenly transferred schools and majors. After the excerpted section above, I ask when she transferred to the new school and began the art program. She again expands on her original story, saying that although she initially transferred for only one semester, the school was “more than happy” for her to stay since she had high grades and was a good student. Moreover, the art school’s excellent facilities and equipment “really opened [her] eyes.” She “really” became serious, deciding she was going to “see it through to the end” and get an art degree. Despite all this new information, I was still puzzled by the apparent ease and rapidity of her transition to art at this late stage in her undergraduate studies. She had not given any reasons for taking design and drawing

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courses, and I ask if she had “any sense” of why she took them when she transferred—a question motivated by her report of continuing with her original Special Ed major. I: What- do you have any sense- any sense of why when you went out there/ you took a course in- ah in art . in drawing? I mean had you gone out before that? R: Me . yah . well no . the- the- um the woman that- when I was at (T)/ I took one ah . was it beginning drawing and design course . or-um I: It was just an elective? R: It was ah . I had to make up a requirement for ah some- I don’t know what it was and I just decided- and I had been doing art/ I had been drawing I had- all the way in high school I had been doing it but I never thought that it was an option. I- I was into studying (Special Ed) and was doing very well and very excited and along with- a few events happened. Along with that um I had a job doing social work and got disillusioned um withI was work- actually working with teenagers/ in a (Special Ed) program and I was very unsatisfied. [Deleted: disillusioned with field, not enough to leave it.] So . That- and I started doing this art at- at the same time in my life/ I had .. uh:m recently left my husband. I had been married for a couple years a brief and not- not very happy (laughter) marriage so I had left him. So I- uh .. and he was still there/ he was going to school there.

Contingencies and Turning Points / 71 So one of the reasons why- uh:m the teacherI was getting disillusioned I really kind of wanted to leave the area. And the- the teacher- the first art teacher that I had at a college level/ strongly suggested that I go to (V) just for one semester/ and take a look. Because she felt that I . had . motivation and I had some talent/ and she wanted me to continue and she felt that there weren’t a lot of options available . for me/ uh:m at (T) as far as the art department but at (V) there were many more. uh:m It didn’t take much to persuade me/ to go out there and when I got out there/ it didn’t take much to persuade me to stay because . it was so beautiful. [Deleted: area like where she grew up, unhappy about her living situation, abusive childhood, lack of interest or support from parents.] When I went to (V) that’s where I met (Roger)/ who I’ve worked with for almost nine years now. So that was another reason why I didn’t want to go back because I met him immediately going up there and ah we’ve been together ever since. Carla S’s initial response is hesitant, with pauses and false starts. She does not actually answer my question about “why” she took these elective courses at V, but instead refers back to an earlier art course she took at T to “make up a requirement.” She decided to do that because she had been “doing art” all through high school, but—repeating what she said at the beginning of the interview—“never thought” it was an option. She was doing well and was excited about her Special Ed studies, but then—in an echo of Fred Wharton’s comment about why he left the small woodworking shop—“a few events happened.” Carla S lists a series of these events, beginning with her getting “disillusioned” and “unsatisfied” with her work with teenagers in the Special Ed program and with the field itself. Turning to her “personal life,” she reports leaving her husband after a short, unhappy marriage while he was still attending T. Her first college art teacher,

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in the required course she took in her senior year, recognized she was motivated and talented and encouraged her to continue. Also, being aware of her growing disillusionment with Special Ed and of her “really” wanting to leave the area, this teacher urged her she go to V and “take a look” since there were more options available there in art. It “didn’t take much to persuade” her to go and then to stay. It was “beautiful,” like the rural area where she grew up, and she no longer enjoyed living in the city where daily life had become “a little bothersome,” a euphemism for it being somewhat dangerous. At this point, cued by her passing reference to growing up, I ask whether her parents had supported her move toward art. My question, somewhat out of the blue and tangential to what she has been saying, reflects another area of my puzzlement, namely, the absence of any reference to parents and family during her long story, in striking contrast to Adam D’s and Beth R’s stories. Her response is brief, referring to a history of abuse and lack of contact with or support from her parents. (Her childhood and relationship with her parents was reviewed in detail in Chapter 2, and her summary comment here is deleted.) She then gives us “another reason” she did not want to return to T and the city, namely, meeting the man with whom she lived at first and later married. Roger has supported and encouraged her work and is “one of the most positive influences” in her life. This extended dialogue that began with my “where” and “when” has fleshed out and complicated the story of her transformation from a Special Ed student to an art major to a practicing potter. This shift in direction brought an end to the hiatus in her development during which art was not something she thought of as an option. As she provides particulars about what was happening in her life, we gain a fuller understanding of the multiplicity of events and forces that motivated and supported the process of reconfiguring her identity. Such “turning points” for our other respondents are equally complex in their dynamics.

David F: “I sort of got sidetracked you=know . . . to me now they just seem to be things that I was doing to avoid really doing what I felt that I had to do” David Farber, another furniture artist-craftsman, was the oldest of my respondents, in his mid-sixties at the time of our interview. He grew up in a small rural town, and his life experience includes five years of army service during World War II. Responding to my opening question about the begin-

Contingencies and Turning Points / 73 ning of his work, he hesitates and then remarks: “it’s strange.” Coming from a “working-class background,” he felt his options were “pretty limited,” so he entered a trade school program in the local high school, where he began doing woodworking. But he “always” was interested in making things, for example, “experimental” airplane models when he was younger. I: And uh I’d like to start by asking you uh about the beginning/ uh how you u:uh got into the . work that you now do. What was happening then? a:ah What led you into it? R: hm hmm . . . .. . . .. . . . .hh well it’s- it’s strange It ah- it ah- When I first started ah doing woodworking I got into a program in- in a- a trade school/ in high school level and (sigh) it kin- I was from a working class background so .hh the options seemed to be pretty limited to me. But I always had an interest in building even when I was in grammar school. I was always building at night you=know like making airplane models and things like that. Those were the things tha- IThen I got to a point where I began to get experimental and more interested in uh doing things on my own so I would sort of design the airplane/ and build it you=know/ and see if I could make it fly that kind of thing. But then- and so my- to continue my interests/ I got into the woodworking program in the- in the- in the trade school and it- I got bored stiff you=know. Just- uh they- they took patterns down off the walls/and you=know it- uh build tha- that kind of thing. I wasn’t very interested in rebuilding like reproductions and things like that so . . . .hh I- I quit that. I was there for about two and half or three years and I quit/ and joined the Army

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because ah I was feelin- really didn’t like thiswhat was the prospects for me. And I guess I was um . . . . . . impressed with the Army propaganda . at that time coming from a working class background that’s what . they hit they- they really aim it towards people like that. At a later point in the interview, when I ask about his family background and whether there was any support for his interests, he says “nobody” in either his family or community did anything of this sort. He did it because it made him “feel good” and served as an “escape” from a difficult family situation with an alcoholic father and anxious mother—an echo of Carla Stone’s defensive use of art. His parents didn’t “discourage” him from doing art, but they “certainly didn’t encourage” it either, and he started doing it as an “isolated kind of thing.” Although he hoped to continue with his interests in making things in the trade school program, he got “bored stiff” because they worked from standard patterns and there was no opportunity to pursue his own ideas— a theme that will recur as a source of continued dissatisfaction in his account of his later work history. He “quit” before graduating and joined the army, mentioning again his concern about the lack of prospects for someone with a working-class background and saying he had been “impressed” with army propaganda aimed at people like himself. He stayed in the army for five years, and it took him years to “get back” to woodworking. Army service gave him the necessary support, through veterans’ education benefits, to continue his education: he got a “regular high school” degree and then attended art school for five years, where he studied painting. R: And . I was married by that time/ my wife was pregnant and . so I got a little . place up on (H Street)/ a little- kind of abandoned grocery store and opened up a little shop there and that’s the way I started . (. . .) You=know .hh very little opportunity to build and sell things that- my own ideas and things but uh I learned a lot by . repairing . antiques and stuff like that for a couple of years.

Contingencies and Turning Points / 75 [Deleted: studied painting at art school, no woodworking at school.] I: . . . but except for the- ah this sort of vocational trades program in high school . what must have been almost fifteen years before that . ah you had not taken other formal work in ah furniture making or woodworking? R: N:o . no. I feel that this kind of work is a kind of thing you can pick up yourself. It’s kind of self evident you=know . you look at it/ and you see what you have to do and then you practice doing it. ah It just became very natural for me to do. That wasn’t the main problem that I saw. The main problem that I saw was to design things and get- you=know and get- make a contribution in terms of ah my ideas about it. After art school, married and with his wife pregnant, he opened a “little shop” to repair and restore furniture and antiques; this, he states, was the beginning of his work, the way he started. Although he “learned a lot” over the next couple of years, it was not a situation that offered opportunities to build and sell things he had fashioned according to his own ideas. I was puzzled by what seemed to be a shift in direction from his art school painting courses, and asked if he had any other “formal” training in furniture making or woodworking since the trade school program fifteen years earlier. His “N:o . no.” response represents his view that this is the kind of work “you can pick up yourself . . . kind of self evident.” He is referring specifically to technical aspects of woodworking, in which “you see what you have to do and then you practice doing it.” This is “natural” for him. The “main problem” is not technical skill but a conceptual or aesthetic one: “to design things” and make a contribution in terms of his ideas. At another point, he says that painting courses at the art school were a good basis for what he tries to do, an evaluation that is consistent with his view of the “main problem” in his work being an aesthetic one, and of his implicit self-definition as an artist, or artist-craftsman, furniture maker. Thirty years had elapsed between the time David F opened his furniture repair shop and the time he began to devote himself fully to his current

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work, designing and making one-of-a-kind pieces. The shop had certain advantages. In particular, it allowed him to develop and follow through on his own ideas about what he did; this was very important both because he could not “tolerate” being told what to do by someone else, and because it gave him “some freedom” to do his own thing and become known for it. At the same time, he had to make a living from the repairing part of the business since the couple now had young children. This proved difficult, and after a few years he opened another shop that remained financially marginal, but he continued “scraping along, making a living at it.” R: But anyway ah I did the- the repairing and th- and star- just a- a- a combination of two things . uh . I had to have a situation where I could . . . .. generate my own ideas about what I was going to do hah hha heh nobody- I did- I couldn’t tolerate the situation/ where somebody else was telling me what to do. So . I began repairing antiques because it gave me some freedom .. in terms of my own- uh .. my own life and I always had this:s . aim- this:s objective of getting- you=knowof doing my own thing and becoming known for it. I: So the- the repairing was a way of making a living? //Were you-// R: //Ye:ah// cause my- you=know we were starting to have a family by then I had to have money. . . . .(cough). . . .. . . . . . But then . what happened was .. that I moved .uhm to (K) and had a shop there for a while. It was a marginal operation/ never really very . successful . financially but I was you=know scraping along making a living at it. But then I went into a partnership with another person which is probably around (late 1950s) . I don’t know and . that . I did for twelve years, until about (early 1970s) I guess. That we got- that got fairly big.

Contingencies and Turning Points / 77 We employed like thirty people at one time and we were doing architectural woodwork. But I was still interested in my own work and I- frustrated . and unhappy . in that business. . . . .. . . . . . Matter of fact ah um .. I just sort of walked away from it you=know I had to- I gave- uh it was uh killing me a little. Struggling with the financial . situation all the time an’ too tired and distracted to do my own work most of the time. There was a- not a very good period. Since there was little improvement over time in his economic situation, David F and a partner started an architectural woodworking business that became fairly big and successful. Despite this, he was “frustrated,” unhappy and “too tired and distracted” to do his own work. He left after twelve years, “just sort of walked away from it” since it was “killing” him. The degree of his personal unhappiness is evident in the intensity of this statement. He sums it up as “not a very good period.” The decision to “walk away” was not an easy one. Afterwards, David F still had problems getting back to his own work, got “side-tracked,” took on various odd jobs he now believes were ways to “avoid doing” what he felt he “had to do,” not wanting to put himself “to the test.” And although he doesn’t see them as entirely a “waste of time,” these activities certainly were not central to his interests. I return to when he was in the business and ask if he had been making any furniture during that period. He was “distracted” and had neither the energy or the “peace” for that, building only three or four pieces a year for shows, “so it was kinda spotty.” R: And then I rented the space here/ this was seven years ago and I started . . . . designing and building again . . . .. . . . . . got back into it very seriously/ and extremely more organized and perhaps more intense than I’d ever been before even at it . I mean I just got- I sort of got side tracked you=know. That- kind of experiencing that business/ and doing interior work/and (a building project) seemed to be- to me now they just seem to be things that I was doing to avoid really doing what I felt that I had to do.

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.hh huh huh huh he hh. And I guess I just didn’t want to put myself to the test. ah- They- they seem like distractions you=know. I guess I don’t look at em exactly as waste- as a waste of time but they certainly weren’t central to my interests. [Deleted: question about own work during period in business.] R: Uhm I got to a point where . somewhere or other . . . . I couldn’t find the energy and uh my mind was so distracted from the business part of that thing and- I didn’t have any peace it seems to be able to do it so I did very little . during those times. I’d build a piece/ maybe three or four pieces a year for a show or something that I keep showing in the shows of the uh (V) Crafts Association and once in a while I’d be in another show at someplace . . . .. so it was kinda spotty. David F’s personal difficulties during those years included a drinking problem that he believes started when he was in the army, for which he entered treatment and managed to get “a hold of” after a “long time.” He was “kind of depressed,” referring to this as a “mid-life crisis,” and realized he had not done what he “really” wanted to do, had just sort of “pissed it away.” Although he continued working, things were “chaotic” and it was “hard to bring up a family.” At this point, he again mentions his difficult family background with an alcoholic father, and of his having had a “vision” of how “it should be.” He is vague about the “it” but seems to be referring to what it means to have work and support a family. His sadness surfaces, and he says: “None of it was like that, .hh (near tears) none of it . . . it was all different . . . so that was hard to deal with.” R: I- I was kind of depressed for a while .. I got very- .. um . . . . I think it was probably a mid-life crisis . of some kind you=know where I realized- I got to a point where I could- I began to see this thing as- as finite

Contingencies and Turning Points / 79 and I realized that I hadn’t done what I really wanted to do I had just sort of pissed it away. And in- in some ways by continuing to drink and continuing to get involved into things- in things that were distracting me it’s a kind of personal emotional . thing for me/ that I was able to get a hold of but it took me a long time. [Deleted: history of alcoholism, treatment.] But I- I continued to work. um .. It was chaotic it was hard bringing up a family ’cause my father was alcoholic you=know/ and I- I just didn’t know much aboutI had this vision about how it should be and none of it was like that/.hh (near tears) none of it. It was all t- it was all different and ah (usual voice) so that was hard to deal with. [Deleted: quitting business, wife’s support of decision.] .hh But anyway .. in some way or other although these are problems that a lot of people experience it just seemed to be . for me personally-/ it seemed to be wrapped up in my attitude towards my work you=know what I was going to do and I almost waited too- too long you=know to do it. huh huh .hh . But you can look at it another way you just say you have to be in a frame of mind/ in order to be able to . take it on and uh it took me a long time/ to get into that . .hh frame of mind to understand what was happening to me. Reflecting on the history of his problems, he recognizes others have them as well, but feels that for him “personally” the trouble seemed to be “wrapped up” in his attitude towards his work. He clarifies that this refers

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to what he hoped to do and that he almost waited “too long” to do it. On the other hand, he observes, a person might have to be in the right “frame of mind” to deal with such problems, and it took him a long time to understand what was happening to him. The terms I’ve used earlier to refer to discontinuities—detours, hiatus—seem too weak to characterize David Farber’s career trajectory. Nor does the notion of a sudden shift of course seem applicable to his slow, troubled move into a “frame of mind” that permitted him to understand what was happening, a realization which in turn allowed him to get back to his own work, but only after waiting almost too long. The distractions he mentions repeatedly reflect a mix of personal problems, uncertainties about what he wanted to do and how to go about it, and his feelings of obligations as a husband/father to earn a living and support his family. Their cumulative impact led to a serious drinking problem and depression. We might label this type of discontinuity as a disruption.

Identities in Process: Devising a Research Strategy The close examination undertaken here of the career trajectories of three craftartists—from what they define as their beginnings to the time of our interviews—provides strong evidence for the critical importance of change and discontinuity in the formation, re-formation, and transformation of adult identities over the life course. We can easily extract chronologies from their accounts, the sequential orderings of events and episodes linked together by the familiar narrative conjunction “and then.” But it would be misleading to read them as progressive, that is, as a linear, continuous movement through developmental stages. Rather, chance events and encounters, the omnipresent contingencies of life, loom large. I am not arguing that our lives are chaotic, nor suggesting we cannot construct meaningful narratives of our experiences—our life stories. However, if our stories are to represent our lives with any adequacy, then they must leave room for the complex interplay of multiple, and sometimes competing, plot lines. And, to bring the point closer to the concerns of this study, this requirement applies with equal force to theory and research in human development. Respondents’ accounts show that they navigated through the shifting currents of their lives with full awareness of the import of changes, often unexpected, in their situations. They struggled to find resolutions of dilemmas they faced and had their own theories as to what held them back

Contingencies and Turning Points / 81 or allowed them to move in new directions. The research strategy adopted here, a specification and amplification of an alternative approach outlined at the end of Chapter 2, allowed these individuals to express the complexities of this process. In the earlier chapter, centered on how identity claims were made and grounded, I emphasized the importance of variability among career trajectories. The widespread assumption of universality of developmental stages was the target of that critique. I argued that focusing on the sequential ordering and patterning of events offers a more appropriate and stronger methodology for studying life history narratives than standard variable-centered approaches, and that this form of analysis permits the discovery of variability. I also highlighted the importance of detailed analyses of the discourse of interviews, of the dialogic process through which interviewers and interviewees co-produce the stories. In this chapter, the target has been another prominent but contested assumption of developmental theory and research, namely, the continuity of development. But the two issues are closely linked. Looking at discontinuities re-emphasizes the importance of variability. Fred Wharton, Carla Stone, and David Farber differ in the form of discontinuity displayed in each of their lives. I have glossed these differences as detours, hiatus, and disruption. The argument I made above about the need for an alternative research strategy to find variability applies here with equal strength. There must be a place for discontinuities in developmental theory, and we need methods that will find them, describe them, and assess their similarities and differences. Taken together, the components of an appropriate research strategy for studying such issues as variability and discontinuity constitute a set of assumptions about our objects of study and modes of inquiry—the traditional topics of ontology and epistemology—and emphasize the importance of contexts within which data is embedded and generated, that is, the general problem of applying conceptual definitions in empirical research. Further, the critical analytic perspective adopted in this work means that at every point each aspect of the model and its associated research procedure is treated as problematic. Thus, though my central conceptual object is “identity”—the quotation marks are necessary—the particular features that have adhered to it from years of theoretical and empirical work are open to question, indeed must first be questioned before the work can go forward. These include such assumptions as continuity in identity development, the primary point of issue in this chapter.

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In arguing for the significance of variability and discontinuity in career trajectories I am, of course, making ontological claims, albeit empirically grounded ones. But assertions about what the “world” is are inseparably bound to and constrain and direct the ways we study it. That is, they set the requirements for an epistemological stance. Briefly put, the methods we choose must provide a way to “see” the relevant features, in this case variability and discontinuity. The first requires a comparative approach, such as that used here, in which similarities and differences among respondents’ accounts of their careers are central topics; the second requires a way to collect, describe, and analyze individual life histories that is sensitive to process and the temporal ordering of life events. Methods of narrative analysis meet this requirement. Finally, the third component of the research strategy, contextualization, was specified at two levels of analysis and interpretation: the interactive production of narrative accounts and the larger sociocultural contexts of respondents’ lives. Adopting this research strategy does not guarantee we will find variation in career paths, or disruptions and detours in developmental patterns. It does, however, open up possibilities for observing both change and continuity that are closed off by traditional methods. Theory and method go hand-in-hand. The search for overarching, universal “laws” of development and the pervasive, long-standing, and relatively intractable assumptions of linearity and continuity (Brim & Kagan, 1980; Kagan, 1980) have fit snugly into the dominant research paradigm with its emphasis on prediction. The valorization of prediction supports research strategies modeled on the idealized classic experiment, strategies that are variable-centered and quantitative, using population-based research designs and analytic procedures (Mishler, 1986b). Finally, conceptual models that map on to “findings” from such approaches depend on primitive notions of causality that have no relevance for biological processes such as growth, social and historical change, or psychological processes such as identity development. We need to stretch beyond the limits of these models and draw on perspectives that attend to complex, self-organizing, temporally dependent, context-sensitive processes—history, evolutionary biology, discourse pragmatics among others—if we are to move to a deeper understanding of developmental trajectories and how they are crafted as stories.

4 Tensions and Contradictions: Revisiting Claims for Coherence in Life Stories When we moved here um I had a- a- a hard time . . . the rug was pulled out from under me in terms of the progress I was making with the art . . . And I decided . . . I’m going to be true to myself . . . not going to compromise myself um in a relationship as much as I have in the past. —Beth Rivers, fabric designer

[Connection between crafts and working with people?] Ya . . . they’re very connected on a lot of levels . . . they help balance me . . . when you try to help people- I mean you do the best you can and you might see results . . . because I’ve been trained as an artist to look at a problem and find its solutions, not one solution but many solutions . . . that has allowed me when I’m working with a kid to try and find a creative approach . . . they complement each other for me. —Carla Stone, artist-potter

Beth Rivers’ decision to “be true” to herself and Carla Stone’s affirmation of how doing art and working with kids “help balance” her are ways to resolve competing demands, not only on their time and energy but also pressing on their identities. They are not referring simply to alternative activities that may be required or appropriate in different situations. They are telling us how their identities as craftartists function in their lives, particularly how they conflict or fit with their other identities—respectively, as wife and mother or as teacher and counselor. Their solutions differ. Would it be useful to consider them as alternative “coherence strategies” (Linde, 1993), ways of achieving a unitary sense of self in the face of life changes and disparate activities? How does the notion of coherence, a pervasive theme in theory and research on both identity development and narrative, help us understand how individuals resolve tensions and reconfigure their identities?

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Coherence is the third shibboleth in these fields of inquiry, forming a fundamental triad of assumptions alongside universality and continuity. Referring to how a piece of text or discourse is organized so as to be meaningful and understood, coherence is often applied as a criterion for assessing the adequacy or “goodness” of narratives and life stories. This is a deeply problematic assumption requiring critical examination. We need to unpack and clarify how the term is defined and used, ask whether we need it or can do without it, and if we discard it, what we can put in its place. Earlier I argued that coherence is an essentially and intractably ambiguous concept that defies any effort for formal and precise definition, whether we look to how it is defined in a dictionary or by linguists, language philosophers, or narrative researchers. A summary of that argument is presented here as a context for analyses reported in this chapter. As an “indexical” term, coherence is used in many ways and often left undefined, on the assumption that competent language users “know” what it means without further specification. As with all such terms, its meaning is situated, grounded in the contexts and conditions of its use. Our understanding of what is intended when the term is applied to a life history narrative, for example, relies on a host of tacit assumptions. Our ability to make appropriate, context-relevant inferences about what is or is not coherent is the mark of our membership in a shared linguistic culture. Indexicality is not a problem to be solved, but an inescapable feature of our practices as competent speakers and listeners, writers and readers. Among linguists, coherence became a topic for systematic attention when they began to study discourse, that is, sequences of clauses rather than the structure of single clauses or sentences. Early on, they proposed “non-randomness” as the criterion for coherent discourse (Schiffrin, 1994, p. 18). Their task was to determine the underlying “principles” used implicitly by speakers in the course of their natural, everyday, mundane use of language, to distinguish between random sequences of sentences and coherent discourse. Different types of principles, rules, and coherence relations have been proposed: syntactic features, thematic links, temporal ordering, causality, implicativeness.1 The assumed equivalence between coherence and non-randomness that informs work in discourse analysis does not take us beyond the imprecision of the dictionary definition. In the end, it boils down to the notion that if we can “make sense” of a passage—any kind of sense—it is ipso facto coherent. A central problem lies in the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of imagining any collection of

Tensions and Contradictions / 85 words that could not under some circumstances be “recognized” as nonrandom or coherent. The arts and literature offer countless examples of ways earlier criteria of what is coherent and “makes sense” are disrupted and replaced by new forms of representation that become understandable when we “learn” how to see and read them. For example, surrealists and dadaists explicitly violated standard, taken-for-granted coherence “rules” and “principles”: Tristan Tzara cut up existing texts and took the words “randomly” from his hat to make poems; André Breton wrote a novel that discarded the basic “strategies” of temporal ordering and causality, substituting “coincidence, the curious overlap of details that make apparently discrete domains seem to match,” as its “principle of selection” (Ray, 1995, p. 77). Texts are not coherent; we make them so. Our “recognition” of a story or some item of discourse as coherent requires reframing and recontextualizing the object, not only in the arts but in and through the activities of daily life. This significance of different frames and the difficulty of understanding is particularly evident when speakers do not share a linguistic culture or have conflicting aims and interests.2 The primary import, I believe, of Schiffrin’s conclusion about the essential reflexivity of coherence assessments is that such reframings are negotiated “achievements” of participants. This offers a critical and cautionary guide for assessing analysts’ attributions of coherence in studies of narrative and identity. First, it directs our attention as researchers to the “artful” practices through which speakers “do” coherence.3 Second, it points to how different claims for coherence may function to define social relationships among speakers. For example, in asserting that “Nature and the universe do not tell stories; we do,” historian William Cronon suggests the implications for the particular stories we tell as “members of communities”: “We tell stories with each other and against each other in order to speak to each other” (Cronon, 1992, pp. 1373–74). Third, the claims we make as researchers for the “coherent” meaning of our analyses and interpretations are also “achievements,” reflecting our participation with our subjects in a dialogic circle of interpretation, all of us relying on the same resources to create coherent discourse. The problematic of coherence tends to be suppressed in grand pronouncements about the “virtue” or “authenticity” of the self as dependent on the achievement of a coherent life story (MacIntyre, 1981; Taylor, 1989; Taylor, 1991); or serving as a mark of maturity and integrity in attaining an

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“identity” (Erikson, 1950); or as the criterion for successful psychotherapy, which replaces internal conflict by a unified, integrated self-narrative (Schafer, 1980; Schafer, 1992; Spence, 1982). No clarification of the meaning of coherence is provided in these arguments. Rather, the term functions as a carrier of the cultural values and social ideologies of the theorists. The faults that attend an uncritical reliance on the concept of coherence, among both linguists and personality theorists, are no different than those found in applications of other formal, abstract rules to situated practices. I am not arguing that speakers do not have access to and do not rely on various resources and strategies to make themselves understood. But, to draw on another ethnomethodological maxim, it is not that our discourse practices are determined or guided by rules, but that we are “rule users.” We may, for example, alter or resist linguistic and cultural conventions for appropriate and “coherent” speech. Making sense is an achievement that depends on circumstances in that it reflects the complex intersection of the intentions of multiple participants, the process of negotiating which rules are relevant, the level of understanding required for the task at hand, and many other factors. The difficulties in specifying coherence outlined here place a special burden on analyses of life histories. Clearly, it is too vague and ambiguous a concept to serve as a presupposition for explaining “why” individuals represent their lives in particular ways. Nor can we assess the relative coherence of different stories by their use or non-use of “universal” linguistic strategies. My informants made sense, to themselves and to me, within our ongoing discourse in a dialogically structured interview. They were not simply connecting sentences and episodes together through linguistic devices like conjunctions. They were trying to clarify how they managed conflicts and tensions among their alternative sub- or partial identities, constructing a story within the constraints of the interview to help me understand what they did. As in earlier analyses, I shall focus on differences among them in how they went about warranting their identity claims. Whether or not coherence is a necessary or useful concept for understanding this process is a question I’ll return to below.

Beth R: “I’m going to be true to myself ” As we saw earlier, a recurrent theme in Beth Rivers’ life story is the tension between her gender-defined role as a woman, wife, and mother, and her desire to pursue her artistic interests. She refers often to her struggle to

Tensions and Contradictions / 87 find space and time to do her art, a conflict that takes various forms and is resolved in different ways at successive periods in her life. But there are also similarities in how she managed these competing claims—in childhood and adolescence, in early adulthood, and the years of marriage and childrearing. Traditional cultural views about gender-appropriate behavior were filtered to her through her parents’ eyes and specified by their assessments of her life chances. Being a dutiful child, she followed her parents’ wishes in high school, focusing on academic studies so she would be “prepared” in case she was left without the support of a husband. She continued to follow their wishes in her college application, but (as in a fairy tale) the Admissions Committee waved its magic wand and placed her in the art school. This was an important turning point in her life, but not a self-initiated choice. She was not rebelling against the life course trajectory her parents envisioned for her future and, after college, art was again pushed into the background and she taught school for several years until her marriage. It is not until her mid-forties that Beth R makes her own decision to give precedence to art that, in her earlier poignant declaration, had “always” been her love. This marks another turning point in her life, for which she now explicitly claims personal agency. She had been talking about various moves from one city to another during her marriage, all occasioned by her husband’s job changes. The most recent, several years prior to the interview, was from Moortown, a city where she had been involved for an extended period of time in a community art course and had a close relationship with the teacher and other students. I ask why she moved. She describes her husband as very successful, “always” receiving offers, getting “tired” of his work situation, and deciding it “was time for a move.” She observes that once again he’d “like to go somewhere new” but has stayed in Eastwood because he knows she doesn’t want to go elsewhere. She wants “roots” and finds it much harder than he does to “start over again” with new people. She makes a brief mention of a group of women she met in Eastwood who are important to her, and then talks about how difficult the last move was for her. The transcript begins at this point.

R: And I- when we moved here um I had a- a- a hard time not only because I was- you=know . the rug was pulled out from me in terms of my progress I was making with the art.

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um The kids were at a real tough time . high school you=know that was- we just had a awful time with the kids. They were- they were difficult and (Earl) and I had a hard time with each other . very hard. And I- I guess because I- because we moved here and I gave up so much and I was so aware of what I gave up that it was almost like all of the- my ability to cope with things that I wasn’t satisfied with also left. And ah . and I decided I’m going to have- I’m going to be true to myself. um How should I put it . not going to compromise myself um in a relationship as much as I have in the past. And ah . I guess the whole- the whole women’s lib movement affected me a whole lot . a whole lot um a lot while I was in (Moortown) a lot there. But by the time I got here/ because I’d lost that whole other community of people who supported me I ah don’t know really know how to put it I just ah . let’s see . there’s a movie called A Thousand Clowns/ ah and the main character says ah “I- I’m not gonna stan- stand it anymore”/ . something like that. And that’s how I felt. In this excerpt, Beth R inverts the prior hierarchy of commitments in her life, in which being a wife and mother was dominant and art was a side-involvement that fit into the space and time left over from other responsibilities. Forced to move because of her husband’s change of jobs, she had “a hard time” with her husband and kids. Her repeated use in the first two stanzas of intensifiers—“hard,” “real tough,” “awful”—express the depth of her pain and unhappiness at that time. Her marriage, she adds at a later point, was “really in jeopardy.” Through these linguistic devices that mark the unusual severity of her experience, she is providing a rationale for me to understand the radical change she made in her life.

Tensions and Contradictions / 89 Beth R then describes how her own “ability to cope” with the unsatisfactory situation had diminished. She expresses a keen awareness of her losses because of the move, of having given up “so much,” not only that “The rug was pulled out” from under her with regard to the progress she had been making in her art, but also that she lost a supportive community of people. She refers to having been affected by the “whole women’s lib movement” in Moortown, again marking the force of its impact by repeated intensifiers: “a whole lot . a whole lot,” “a lot,” “a lot.” Beth R resolves this crisis by changing her life. This is not too strong a characterization of her decision to “be true” to herself, to no longer “compromise” herself in a relationship. Searching for a way to explain what she felt and did, she quotes a character in a movie who asserted he was not “gonna stand it anymore.” Using this indirect quotation from a movie character is another linguistic device that intensifies the meaning of her decision. Beth R is “performing” it for me rather than simply telling about it (Langellier, 1989; Peterson & Langellier, 1987). It was not an easy decision in the context of her past life, when she submerged what had “always” been her love and had not been “true” to herself. Through her repeated use of intensifiers, she conveys the seriousness of the situation that led her to act in a radically different way from what she had done in the past. By framing and grounding her course of action in the context of her sense of loss and her new determination, she is trying to ensure that I will understand it from her perspective at the time. Relationships figure prominently in Beth R’s account of her life. The intersecting responsibilities of her multiple roles as daughter, wife, and mother structured her primary identity as a woman. But this identity was also defined in opposition to her artistic interests. I have already noted the split in her parents’ perspective between family and art. The first, treated as the serious business of life, had to be prepared for; risks had to be anticipated and minimized. Art was a distraction, perhaps even a danger to a fragile and vulnerable family matrix that needed constant protection. Such vigilance required clear boundaries. Art was beyond the line of proper and appropriate behavior, particularly for a girl. It was acceptable only if clearly domesticated—her mother’s hobby, for instance, her making an “artistic” home and arranging for play activity for little Beth when she was sick. Relationships are equally important in Beth R’s midlife shift of priorities, in the recentering and reconfiguring of her identity around her art.

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We shall see later how her decision has altered her marital relationship. Here, she highlights the special significance of a supportive community by how she structures her account of the impact of its loss, beginning the last stanza with that loss, expressing uncertainty as to how “to put it,” and ending with the intensifying quotation noted above, which she embraces as her own feeling. While the loss of her Moortown community was central to both the crisis and to her drawing a line in the sand, finding a replacement was equally critical in enabling her to follow through on her decision. Her reference to the effects of the “whole women’s lib movement” contrasts markedly with her earlier explanation of why she had followed a conventional path in early adulthood. There, she told us it was “the fifties,” when you prepared yourself for marriage or for being able to support yourself. Reflecting on the persistent struggle to do her work while raising children, “hindsight” told her there were things she might have done differently, but she concluded that as it was the “fifties,” she did the best she could in those times. Her personal history intersects with broader cultural changes, and both her crisis and the choices she makes reflect the general impact of the “whole women’s lib movement” in the radical shift from the fifties to the eighties in our views about gender and the social positioning of women in the family, in work, and in society. When Beth R describes her new “friendships” with the group of women she met in Eastwood, it becomes clear that her decision to rearrange her priorities is not simply a matter of spending more time on her art. Rather, as we see in the transcript below, she recognizes it as a more comprehensive change, a change in her identity. Beth R marks this change explicitly, a time when her life changed a “whole lot,” and she began to care about her “body,” “exercising,” how she spent her time, and many other things. In contrast to her former supportive community, the new group’s focus is not art but “outdoor activity,” “hikes,” “biking.” They begin “real early” in the morning, take lunch with them, and “stay all day.” She feels it was “pretty unusual” for women to go on hikes and she “loved that idea.” Her account of what they do is structured through a series of three-line stanzas—one of four lines that interrupts the flow is an aside, a general metacomment about when and how often they go out together. This repetitive, poetic form (Tannen, 1990) is another instance of her using an intensifying device to express how important this experience is to her.

Tensions and Contradictions / 91 R: And um during that time my life changed a whole lot/ because I- I began to care about my body/ . my exercising ah my friendships with women um how I spent my time a whole lot of things. I cared before but it- I- the focus became on this outdoor activity which I really liked. It was different for me . very different. [Deleted: always an outdoors person; family nature-oriented] And so I began going with these people who had already- they already knew each other and they already went on hikes. I loved that idea women going on hikes that was pretty unusual. So every Friday in the Fall they still- they do it every Fall they do it- like we went out yesterday but we hadn’t been out for at least a month and a half together but it’s very constant. In the Spring we go biking and ah they know a lot of places to go so we go wonderful places. We take lunch. We stay all day. We leave real early in the morning. We’ve gotten so we stop somewhere and have a wonderful dinner on the way home so we get home late. Even that was hard to do because of the guilt because you’re not there providing dinner for the family but I loved that.

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And of course you=know women when they’re together talk all the time/ about feelings and goals and all sorts of things and work. So that’s a real important group for me. But there is much more than sharing outdoors activities, she reminds us, for a group of women who spend long days together. One consequence, with serious import for her changing marital role, of their leaving early, staying out all day, and then stopping to have a “wonderful dinner,” is that they get home too late to be there “providing dinner for the family.” This still arouses “guilt,” but the guilt pangs are not strong enough to restrict her movement into a new life, since she immediately asserts that she “loved” doing that. Finally, she points to our shared, common-sense understanding (“And of course you=know”) that women use these occasions to talk all the time about “feelings and goals, and all sorts of things, and work.” This makes the group really important to her. After this comment, I ask if she considers it a consciousness-raising group. She says this was not its explicit purpose, but that was one outcome as they did these other things together and talked about their various “situations.” Her decision to change her life, to reorder her priorities, takes various forms that tend to reinforce each other. All of them are directed to loosening the constraints of her gendered family role. She does not reject her past commitments as wife and mother, but she is actively renegotiating the terms of her marital relationship. Older feelings persist, but she can now manage them in ways that are more satisfying to her. Thus, rather than being guilty for not making dinner, she celebrates her liberation. These changes are part of an extended process, and since identities are rooted in structures of relationships, the ramifications of her decision to be “true to herself” go well beyond spending more time on her work. As we see in the transcript below, they deeply affected her marriage, as she and her husband learned how to follow separate interests without feeling threatened, knowing that each was still “loved.” R: He’s on a committee at the- in the (local society) now. He’s an (officer) which you- he’s never done any of this before he’s an (officer) now.

Tensions and Contradictions / 93 So the (officers) had to provide the- ah main dish at the (.) ah annual meeting last night. This is a pretty good synopsis of how our relationship is now. He made the- the casserole that they told him to make/ . he did that. Now I had to tell him how and I stood there/ and you=know sort of watched. But he did it he wanted to do it and say that he’d done it. And then as it turned out this annual meeting which didn’t interest me much at all because I’m not- I don’t care so much about ah the high- the functioning of the (society) as an organization as he does. He loves the community of the (society) loves being there and seeing the whole community operate. And he wanted to go to that and I didn’t. Now I’ve always gone with him in the past. He did use the guilt line he always uses with me . “But don’t you want to be with your husband?” And I had been going to a class on Jung which fascinates me I’m just so drawn to it. The last class was last night. I said “No . I really want to go to this class.” Well he tried the guilt line only once but he never did it again. In fact when he left yesterday and took his beef stew to work he said something about how ah he’d- he’d see me later/ and he hoped I had a good time. He just- you=know he let go of it. And I thought that was really good/ . really good.

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It’s been a long time getting to that. For us to be able to do separate things and still know we’re loved is a good thing. This sense of confidence and stability did not happen overnight. It took a long time, including counseling at an earlier point to avoid the “break-up” of their marriage. Her husband also gradually shifted his priorities, becoming less of a workaholic and more involved in a local society that he “loves.” The delicate balance between their new separateness and their continued, firm commitment to each other and the marriage is evident in her story of how they dealt with her refusal to go with him to an annual meeting. Beth R describes it as “a pretty good synopsis” of their present relationship. To her husband, as an officer of the association, this was an important occasion. He was responsible for preparing a “casserole,” and she helped by telling him how to do it, but then “stood there” and “sort of watched.” Further, he enjoys being at the meetings and seeing how the whole community works. Although she doesn’t feel the same way about it, she had always gone to these meetings with him, and he was expecting that to happen again. Instead, after helping him make the obligatory casserole, she then states her own plan: to go to the last session of a class that “fascinates” her. So she said, quoting herself, “No. I really want to go to this class.” He makes an effort to get her to change her mind, but “tried the guilt line only once,” and then was able to “let go of it.” When he left for work on the morning of the meeting, he said only that he would see her later and “hoped” she would have a good time. Beth R assesses this incident as “really good . really good,” observing that it took a long time to get to this point where they can do “separate things and still know we’re loved.” I began this chapter by questioning the usefulness of coherence for understanding the structure and meaning of life history narratives. Would it make sense to apply any of the proposed coherence criteria to Beth R’s story of a critical juncture point in her life, her resolution of a crisis, and its implications? What features of her story characterize it as more or less coherent, and what would we gain by doing that? How would such an assessment differentiate our respective roles in the co-production of the discourse? How could we take into account my further reconstruction of “the story” told through my selection of certain stretches of talk, my form of transcription, my interpretative framings—in short, my re-presentation of it?

Tensions and Contradictions / 95 At every step, Beth R and I found ways to make sense of our ongoing conversation. Its “coherence” is not the result of an abstract discourse strategy to minimize “randomness.” Rather, we continually made and remade the sense of what we were saying and hearing. Our shared “achievement”—our mutual understanding—was locally situated, sensitive to when “something” was said in the stream of successive, contextual embeddings of the “whats” we were talking about. I am also arguing that this process does not end when the interview ends, but continues into the analysis of it.

Carla S: “It’s gonna be hard you=know in the first year or so . . . especially with a newborn . . . but um it can be done” The tensions and contradictions in Carla Stone’s life and the artistic identity she forges differ from those of Beth Rivers. We learned earlier of the defensive, adaptive function of art in her childhood and adolescence: a safe place protecting her from her mother’s abuse, a way to maintain “emotional stability” and “inner peace.” “Always” doing art to escape her family’s emotional turmoil, she “never” thought of it as an “option” for her life. This led to a hiatus, a disruption in the development of her career and identity as a craftartist. She did not revise this view until she shifted to an art major in her senior year in college. This change reflected the complex interplay of many factors: break-up of her early marriage, disillusionment with her Special Ed program, hazards of life in the city, encouragement of an art teacher who recognized her talent, the quality of the facilities and art program at another school, and her meeting and marrying her current husband. Beth R’s conflict between her gender-defined role and her art brought her to an impasse. To be “true to herself ” required a choice, moving her work from the periphery to the center of her life. This issue is not present for Carla S. Twenty years younger and a soon-to-be mother at the time of the interview, she has not yet directly faced the burdens of childrearing nor the process of renegotiating the division of responsibilities around work and family established in the past history of her marital relationship. In her only comment on the impending change in her life, at the end of her opening story, she seems to see it as a minor and temporary interference with her work, which she observes has “definitely slowed down.” The impact is softened by her hopeful expectation to resume her work as soon as the “baby goes on schedule.”

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She makes no further reference to this until the very end of the interview. We have already moved toward closure, and I ask if I might return, perhaps to observe her working in her studio. She replies that would not be a problem and then says she wants to ask about what I am doing. I respond at length, talking for the next eight to nine minutes, summarizing my teaching and research activities, my interest in studying language and conversation, and what led me to the study of craftartists’ life history interviews in which she has just participated. I refer to the problem of getting funds to support research on the crafts, and she remarks that makes it difficult for me to know “Where it’s going to go.” I respond that it will “go somewhere” but will take longer if I don’t get funding. She offers encouragement, hopes I will find some support, but points to the general lack of support for the arts in this society and observes that people always have a “very romantic idea” of what it is like to be an artist or craftsperson. They think it is “nice,” but in the end there is very little financial or emotional support for anyone “really trying” to do something with their art. She maintains that an individual has to have a “strong constitution” to make a commitment and “keep going” with it, able to accept all the “hardships” that come with this form of work. The transcript below begins with my response to this remark, offering what I thought of as “some kind of summary reflection” of what she had been saying in the interview. That she “wouldn’t change this for the world,” that “there’s a sense you have to do it.” I: But it seems to me, and this could be some kind of summary reflection of this- I’ve been listening to you that- I mean you wouldn’t change this for the world. [R: No.] I mean- [R: No . no. I- I enjoy what I do.] Well it’s even more than that. [R: Right.] I mean there’s a sense you have to do it. R: Yes there is that sense to- (laughing) ya. I want- I need to. I need to/ . I know I need to. I know that it keeps- there’s a part of me . that it keeps me in balance. and you know . it certainly has bothered me in the last few months that I haven’t been able to get in there/ and do it. And people have made comments for you=know

Tensions and Contradictions / 97 and I’ll- I’ll just go up and paint and draw and then they come and it’s like “Well can’t you get in there for a little while. It might help your mood.” But ah I also realize that the pregnancy’s been rough and um I do need to rest a lot and I’ve been told by the doctor and I do get a reward in the end. and I’ll be able to do my work again. [Deleted: excited about the baby; unexpected pregnancy] So . um but I’m looking forward to getting back in there and doing my work again and- um and I’ll- I’ll always do it. I’ll always- I know I will in some form or another. I might switch mediums or I might do something different but um there’s a part of me that- that wants to and kind of needs to. And ah you=know I could be doing worse things with my time that’s the way I look at it. Carla S readily assents to my observation, emphasizing that she “needs” to do her work by repeating the phrase and adding that it keeps her “in balance”—a phrase she later repeats in describing connections between her art and her work with kids. She has been “bothered” by not being able to do her work during the last few months of a “rough” pregnancy, when she needed to “rest a lot” (her doctor’s advice). Despite this slowdown, she and Roger are “very excited about the baby.” At the same time, she is eagerly looking forward to doing her work again, and “knows” she “will always do it” in some form or another, since a part of her “wants” and “needs to.” She ends with the wry comment that she could be doing “worse things” with her time. At this point, I ask if she knows other craftswomen with children and families and whether they can “continue with their work.” I introduce the question with a metacomment that we should have “picked up” earlier on differences between the lives of craftsmen and craftswomen, and that I am now “struck” by the issue, presumably in response to her expressed need to get

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back to work after the baby comes. In this concluding section of the interview—a post-termination phase, since we had already “finished” with a Coda about my work—she refers to other women she knows who were able to do this. There might be a recovery period where you “have to kind of give up awhile,” which you “just know” you have to do and “that’s it.” In the transcript that follows she turns to her own feelings and expectations. R: I- I have- ah I know from my own . kind of personal health/ I’m gonna need to be doing my art work and I think that that’s very- I realize that it’s very important that I do that for the baby also because if I don’t have that balance/ I know that I won’t be happy and if I’m not happy that baby’s gonna know it. I mean I’ve worked with kids long enough so that I know that I need that. So um I know it can be done. um I’m very fortunate here to have a situation where I can walk right out that door and I’m in my studio and so if the baby’s taking a nap I can go in there and work. And ya it’s gonna be hard you=know in the first year or so because the- especially with a newborn/ and the needs of a newborn are very very demanding but um it can be done. And I’m just really glad that I don’t have to you=know go to ah a big warehouse down the street and try to bring the baby in a crib. um Several of my friends also have- ah ah around my age are preparing to um have children and they are artists and they have every intention of continuing to do their work um and also keep some kind of ah small job as an income. And ah and that- that it’s- it’s a good healthy thing/ to you=know be able to recognize that I want to continue this and that I can you=know stop for a little while/ and have a child

Tensions and Contradictions / 99 and then be able to go back to it and that’s alright. [Deleted: more support today for women to have children and careers; whole concept of giving birth and having children has changed]. So I think on that level it’s much easier for women that are involved in the arts today to be able to have children and continue on with their life. And that’s something that I’m- I’m thankful for ’cause I’d hate to feel like I’d have to give everything up/ just because I had a child you=know. And- ah and I don’t feel that way you=know. I’m excited about both returning back to work and the delivery. (laughing) I’m looking forward to it. SoI: What’s your sense from other women you know who’ve gone through the experience? . . . Is (it) that they find a way to make this work andR: Definitely . they definitely find a way to make it work. And ah I’ve met very few women that they have regretted the decision to continue work and I- I haven’t met any women that- that’s regretted continuing to do their art work and um having a child you=know. They’ve all been- managed to to make accommodations and- and separate the- the child in the- in the work and um really felt the child- the child has enriched their life um and that- you=know I can’t- I can’t think of anyone who would oppose that. I’ve heard nothing but good things/ about how much a child does for your life and um how you can do it. You can make it work

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and can still do what you want. And um that’s- it’s kind of neat/ that- that you=know women areare doing it now is so much more freedom you=know. It’s- it’s a nice feeling. So she’s gonna help me wedge clay when she’s three I’ve decided. I know it’s a girl/ that’s why I said she. From her sense of her own personal health, Carla S knows she “won’t be happy” if she doesn’t continue with her art, and that will neither be good for her or the baby, since “that baby’s gonna know it.” From her current work with kids in a residential school, she “knows” she needs to do her art and that it can be done. In these first two stanzas she repeats the verb “know” five times, a strong assertion of confidence in her being able to deal with this problem. She expects it will be hard with a newborn whose needs are “very demanding,” but feels “fortunate” to be in a situation where she “can walk right out that door” and be in her studio. Several of her friends are planning to have children and have “every intention” of continuing with their work. She takes a positive view of stopping for a “little while” to have a child and then going back to work, and comments that changing views in society provide more support for women with children to continue with their careers. She is “thankful” that it is easier to do this now than twenty years ago, for she would “hate to feel” that she had to give up “everything” just because she had a child. Instead, she is excited and looks forward to “both returning back to work and the delivery.” I ask if she knows whether other women who have had this experience were able to make it work. Carla S affirms that they have, repeating her “Definitely” for emphasis, and says she hasn’t met any women who “regretted” continuing their art work and having a child. They “make accommodations,” and she has heard nothing but good things about the effects of having a child: it has “enriched their life.” She again expresses confidence that “You can make it work” and still “do what you want,” which is “kind of neat” and a “nice feeling.” The interview ends on a note of joyful anticipation that her daughter is “gonna help me wedge clay when she’s three.” Carla S’s expectations, confident and upbeat, contrast with Beth R’s retrospective report of competition between wife/mother responsibilities and

Tensions and Contradictions / 101 her art—a contest in which the latter was displaced until her midlife decision to be “true” to herself. I am not suggesting that Beth R did not experience “enrichment” of her life by having and raising children. She does not depreciate those parts of her life but wishes she had been able to create more space and time for her own work. At this point in her life, however, after she has succeeded in raising a family, and in the context of an interview focused on her art and ways of sustaining it, she attends primarily to the costs of her earlier primary involvement in childrearing and taking care of her family. She feels she did “the best” she could, given the expectations for women in the “fifties.” Carla S and Beth R have similar views about how society has changed so women now have more support to pursue careers while having children. The younger woman’s confidence and “nice feeling” about women now having “so much more freedom” resonates with Beth R’s statement about being affected “a whole lot” by the “women’s lib movement.” For both, this deep cultural change in views about and support for women to pursue careers provides an explanation for what they are now able to do—in one case after her baby comes, in the other after she decides to redress the imbalance in her life.

Carla S: “Doing pots wasn’t enough. I wanted to make stronger statements with my art . . . I wanted to be in a position where I could try helping people” But more must be taken into account than this cohort effect, which both women recognize, to understand their different ways of dealing with tensions and conflicts between their artistic and other identities. One important factor is how they define themselves with respect to the ambiguous, contested, and ever-shifting boundary between art and craft. When I asked about this distinction, all my respondents said it was a much-discussed and much-argued about topic in the craft world. However, they tend to resist this categorization, preferring to characterize themselves as artists working in traditional craft media: clay, fabric, glass, and wood. I have finessed the issue by hyphenating artist and craftsperson or calling them craftartists, trying to reflect their sense of straddling or crossing the line between these forms of work and their associated identities. Nonetheless, given that this is a diffuse and blurred boundary, there are various ways to approach it that allow for different types of artistic/crafts identities. Carla Stone is clear and definitive about where she stands and

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who she is: an artist who makes “statements” with one-of-a-kind pieces she refers to as “sculpture.” She places herself at a distance from production potters, that is, traditional craftworkers who make multiple copies of functional wares. Beth R is less categorical. Although she may say she’s an “artist,” she usually responds, when asked what she does, that she designs and produces fabric and clothing, which she sells retail and to stores. Her answer captures her own uncertainty, as well as the inadequacy of hardand-fast definitions in this complex and heterogeneous domain of work. The difference between Beth R and Carla S in how they position themselves in the art/craft space—a socioculturally constructed space reflecting both market forces and competing discourses within these fields—and the type of artistic identity they adopt is specified in the many different ways they talk about their work. Although Beth R is just as concerned as Carla S with issues of autonomy, creativity, and originality, she does not talk of herself as making statements with/through her work. The objects she produces are functional, not symbolic. The problems she relates have to do primarily with marketing and pricing, and she reports in detail on developing successful strategies to sell her work—at craft fairs, to retail stores, and to individual clients. Carla S also wants to sell her work and make a living from it. But she focuses on the “meaning” of her pieces and the development her particular style. Her primary audience and outlets are typical for artists: art and craft galleries and museum shows. When she talks about selling her work, at one point in the interview, she seems more interested in “who” bought it and what they felt about it than in its being sold. It is important for her to know where each of her pieces is and that it is owned by someone who “cares” about it. And there are occasional pieces with such deep personal meaning for her that she doesn’t plan to sell them. Finally, she can also see herself in the future working in other media than clay, because it is the expression of her artistic vision that is important rather than any particular medium. Artistic identities are embedded in a matrix of other part- or subidentities. The tensions, conflicts, and compromises that arise among them have been central to this discussion. Further, as I showed by contrasting Beth R and Carla S, there are different types of artistic identities, and we would expect them to function in different ways in people’s lives. Their diverse impacts surfaced in the respective views of these two women about being able to do one’s work while raising children. Carla S empha-

Tensions and Contradictions / 103 sizes “needing” and “having” to do her work even when faced with the demands of childcare. Anticipating future conflict, she explicitly rejects Beth R’s “compromise” where art was put on the backburner, since she would “hate” to feel she gave “everything” up because she had a child. Carla S also expresses the centrality of her identity as an artist when she talks about connections between her art and her work in her current job at a residential school. As we will see below, her way of resolving potential problems of conflicting responsibilities contrasts with Beth R’s sharp separation between her work and family obligations. This excerpt comes about 45 minutes into our interview, following a relatively detailed discussion of her and Roger’s financial situation, including how they pool incomes, divide up and share expenses, and the importance to her of being able to earn a living through her own work. They are pleased with their current arrangement at the school; things have “worked out perfect” for them. I then ask whether she feels “some sort of empathy” with the kids she works with because of her “background,” a question that both follows up her positive characterization of her situation and harks back to her brief mention earlier in the interview of having been physically abused as a child. She feels that personal experience has given her and other teachers at the school with similar histories an advantage in working with troubled children. She can understand more easily what’s happening and is able to deal with displaced anger without taking it “personally.” For this work, her own difficult childhood has “definitely” and “certainly” helped her. My next question, which is the start of this transcript, moves away from this linkage between her own and the kids’ backgrounds, with her assertion of its value for her work with them, and focuses instead on whether she sees a connection between that work and her art. I suggest a contrast between these “dual interests,” referring to the second by a series of terms such as “art,” “aesthetic interest,” “work in the crafts,” and to the first as “working with people.” I wonder whether they are “sort of complementary parts.” I: Is- is there for you some connection between these sorts of dual interests and activities that you have, the art ah the aesthetic interest [R: Um hm] work in the crafts, the working with people [R: Um hm] is it- are they sort of complementary parts? R: Ya . they’re very- they’re very connected on a lot of levels

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and they really balance- they help balance me. um I’m not the type of artist that can go into my studio for days on end/ and see nobody. I would go nuts. I really would. I’m just not that type of person. And when I was doing it and there have been periods in my life when I was doing that/ and having like a waitressing job I- I really started feeling guilty/ it’s like what am I do- big deal . I do sculpture you=know. I’d start feeling like you=know there’s more and I’m not saying that you=know I’m a savior/ or a miracle worker/ or anything like that ’cause I know the reality of- when you try to help people I mean you do the best you can/ and you might see results. But um it’s the same approach that I guess I take with- doing pots wasn’t enough I wanted to make stronger statements with my art and that’s why I ended up doing sculpture/ or doing something a little bit different with a pot. To make a statement. um Staying in my studio all day long wasn’t enough I needed something else. um So they’re- they’re connected in that way that I felt like I wanted to be around people and I wanted to be in a position where I could try helping people. [Deleted: reason for wanting to teach, interacting with people; taught art at a community college; has a teaching position here] The other thing- the other connection that there is . between the arts and what I do here is that because I’ve been trained as an artist to look at a problem/ and find its solutions not one solution/ [pounding table for emphasis] but many solutions

Tensions and Contradictions / 105 and to look at a problem/ and try and take a creative approach. That has allowed me when I’m working with a kid to try and find a creative approach to try to find a way to solve the ah situation that relies on looking at something from all different angles and all different approaches. [Deleted: artistic training as reason for her success in the work; directors don’t want to “lose her” even when she “got pregnant”] So that’s- that’s- you=know I think that that really has helped me/ . the training that I got. um You=know if something goes wrong you keep trying or you try this and you try that whereas I’ve seen a lot of other staff members get real stuck/ because they’ve come across a problem . “What should I do?” “What should I do?” And it’s like- well you sit down/ and try and think of a lot of different things and then you come up with one or two things/ and they might not work so you might have to go to the third or the fourth you=know but I think on that level it’s- it’s very connected. To my question about her two work activities, she responds that her needs for doing art and working with people are connected on a “lot of levels” and help “balance” her, since she’s neither the type of person nor artist who could spend “days on end” in her studio without seeing anyone; she would really “go nuts.” Earlier in her career, when she did that and also worked as a waitress, she felt “guilty.” With a flash of irony, she recalls feeling what was the “big deal” about doing sculpture. She wanted to do more than that, and although she did not see herself as a “miracle worker,” this referred to trying to “help people.” From her perspective, there is a close connection between that and her orientation to her art. “Doing pots wasn’t enough.” She wanted to make “stronger statements” with her art and turned to doing “sculpture,” and since it was not enough to stay alone all day in her studio, she needed a situation where she could be helping people. Both are ways of making statements.

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This connection provides an important additional clue for understanding her choice of Special Ed as a college major, and it is also relevant to the “hiatus” in her pursuit of art. At those earlier stages in her life, she alternated between her art and doing something that might help people with their problems. Her art gave her a safe place, but she did not see it as an “option” for her life. Instead, she chose a program of studies that would train her to work as a psychologist or counselor. Through a complex chain of events, as we learned earlier, she switched late to art, went on to graduate training, and has continued to pursue her career as an artist-potter. In this process, her identity as an artist was consolidated. Most importantly, the mode of work she chose—one-of-a-kind sculptural pieces—has allowed her to heal the breach between the two parts of her self. She can now simultaneously do her art and help people, since both are ways to “make statements.” Carla S has achieved what we might call a conjunct identity, has struck a balance between the two persistent and strong motives in her life. But the union shows some asymmetry, some tilt on the side of art. Pointing to another connection, for example, she attributes some of her success in her work with children to her training and practice as an artist. Taught to look at problems and find not one but “many solutions” allows her to be creative and look at a situation from “different angles.” Rather than feel “stuck” like other staff members, she has learned through her training that when “something goes wrong you keep trying.” Although working with kids balances her solitary work in the studio, she does not assign it any role in her art. In this sense, her art is a more central point of reference in her dual, conjunct identity. There is further evidence of this imbalance in her response to my later question (at the beginning of the next transcript), about how she thinks these potentially conflicting arenas of work fit together: whether they could possibly be “at odds with each other,” since in one she is “really working” by herself, and in the other she is “engaged . . . with kids, with other people.” I: Now one- one of the things I’m- I’m being struck by is that while it takes time, and certainly in that first year it sounds like it took a great deal of time, you don’t talk about them as being um sort of at odds with each other, or in conflict or competitive at this point. Did- [R: My art work and my-] and the- and what you’re doing

Tensions and Contradictions / 107 here. [R: Ya] That somehow or other these fit together for you in some way and ah [R: Um hm] and they’re- they’re different and yet there’s some connection. I mean, that is, in the one you really are working by yourself on material [R: Um hm] and the other you’re engaged you=know with kids, with other people. R: um hm They really- they complement each other for me. And that’s something- that’s- I would spend years struggling with-/ if what I was going to do with- you=know . how to make an income how to keep doing my art the way I wanted to and not subject myself to that production routine or making cute little things that would sell for ten dollars. uhm There were times where I felt I would never achieve it you=know. There were times where I just felt like you=know I should just give up the art or I should just you=know leave (Roger) and go away and get a big studio and just you=know fill it with all this production ware and it- it was- it was really difficult. But ah it came together you=know and it’s coming together more and more. And it’s something that um once it started happening and you=know I realized that even when I was working the number of hours I was working and you=know was very emotionally involved with the kids I mean if you can imagine some of the things that go on. And some of the- that I could go home and- and walk into my studio and just concentrate and there’s my work. And ah even on really bad days when things are really you=know you’re pulling your hair out by the end of the day and you’re just so upset

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and so tired and for me going home/ and being able to be alone and just concentrate on my pieces and um was- just really helped me you=know. They were both kind of helping each other. My question is lengthy and awkward. I am still puzzled about the lack of conflict between the two areas of her work in her description of the fit between them. Carla S reaffirms their being complementary, but then reframes my question. Rather than address problems in her current situation, she refers to earlier years of “struggling” to earn money while finding her own way in her work. She resisted the alternative route of becoming a production potter, although there were times she felt she should do that. Now, things have come “together”; she earns an income from her job at the school and can do her art at the same time. This is not a complementary relation equivalent to the influence of her artistic approach to her work with kids; that is, there is no reciprocal effect from her job to her art. Further, although she concludes by remarking that both are “helping each other,” her prior comments all have to do with how being able to do her art provides a space free of the tensions of the work with kids. Despite working many hours while upset and tired, on “really bad days” she can leave the school for her on-campus house, go into her studio and concentrate on her work, and that really helps her. Here again, it is her art that serves the primary function of balancing her. The parallel is worth noting between how she uses her art to contain and distance the emotional turmoil and tensions of her current work with kids, and the role art played in her childhood and adolescence, when it provided safety and “inner peace” in an abusive situation.

Conclusion: Situating Coherence I began by raising questions about the widely used notion of coherence to characterize the orderliness and hence the sense of narratives, particularly life stories. Pointing to the ambiguity of the term and its implicit assumptions was intended to make it problematic. And that in turn allowed us to explore without a priori judgments the various ways in which individuals try to manage and resolve tensions and contradictions in their lives.

Tensions and Contradictions / 109 Analyses of Beth Rivers and Carla Stone’s accounts document how they define their respective partial or sub-identities and how their ways of accommodating them to each other changed over time. I chose these two women as a contrast pair for comparative analysis because they are alike in one important respect, as women craftartists, but different in other ways that make comparison fruitful for understanding how gender intersects with age, marital situation, work history, and artistic identity. Yet the conflicts they experienced among competing demands and obligations are found as well among our male respondents, although they differ in form and particulars. David Farber, for example, told us of his many years of anguish and depression when he had to put aside his “own” work as a creative furniture craftsman to run a commercial woodworking business to support his family. Fred Wharton’s shifts and detours in his work history were, in large part, responses to his need to make a living while trying to find time to pursue his artistic interests. At the time of the interview, he was ready for another change. And Adam Daley, whose account of his early artistic development showed more consistency and continuity, reports a current conflict between his wishes to spend time with his family and the requirements of glassworking, running a business, and making a living. At the very end of our interview, I ask him for any “thoughts” he might have about what would make the “life of a craftsperson a little easier.” He responds that this would require changing the “entire social system,” a readjustment of the “social fabric” of the United States, perhaps by using a “big Allen wrench.” He goes on to stress the importance of people being responsible for what they do, as craftspeople are, and of educating children in particular about the value of “handmade” objects that “people put their guts into.” He paraphrases a quotation he recalls: “If children aren’t allowed to touch beautiful objects how can you expect them to become beautiful children, beautiful people.” I remark that the statement is a “good place” to end, and the interview concludes. The minimum definition of coherence proposed by discourse analysts, that of non-randomness, is clearly inadequate to the task of understanding how people construct their life stories. Certainly the interview segments I’ve examined meet this criterion; they are not random collections of disconnected sentences. But their apparent orderliness, which allows me and other readers to “make sense” of what the respondents are saying, does not display any single, scalar dimension that would permit us to evaluate one

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story or the other as more or less coherent. Rather, the orderliness is situated in the dialogic encounter of the interview, co-produced and jointly recognized by me and them. In this process, we together draw upon, sometimes expand on, and sometimes make inferences from our culturally shared stock of knowledge. I know, for example, what an “Allen wrench” is, but knowing only what a generic wrench is would still allow a listener/reader to understand Adam D’s statement. Further, no account is complete. Respondents included only a small sample of their life experiences, selecting what seemed appropriate in the context of the interview and appropriate to the course it took. As the researcher, I followed a similar path, transcribing only some of what they said according to whether or not it “fit” with my analytic aims. I am also trying to tell a coherent story. But, as with theirs, there is no specific set of rules for this. In their absence I work with a range of cultural and disciplinary models for writing that I hope will generate a quasi-dialogic relation with readers, to which they can bring to bear what they know, so that they can not merely read the words but read between the lines as well. The outcome of these reflections is a recommendation to put aside the criterion of coherence as either an analytic or evaluative concept. It is not “in” the text, but is an interactional achievement, an “artful” accomplishment. Produced through and embedded in the dialogue, it is a source of mutual understanding that allows the talk to continue. The ways in which it is accomplished are wonderfully variable, as we learned from listening to Beth R and Carla S. And it would trivialize how they struggle with and attempt to resolve contradictions and tensions in their lives to judge one or the other’s life story as more coherent. We would do better to look closely at the complex and differentiated ways narratives can be organized to serve their meaning-making functions, rather than continue to search for some singular defining feature of a “good” narrative, such as coherence.

5 Identities in/as Relationships within the Family and at Work

Several theorists have recently proposed a social or relational definition of identity, viewing it as constructed and performed in and through discourse. This perspective takes various forms, the self or identity being characterized, for example, as “dialogical” (Hermans, Kempen, & VanLoon, 1992), “discursive” (Harre, 1989; Harre & Gillett, 1994), “narrated” (Sarbin, 1986a), or “relational” (Gergen, 1994). Clearly, these different terms overlap in meaning.1 They represent a radical shift in viewpoint, from the autonomous individual as the locus of identity and the source of its stability and constancy over time and across situations, to the socially situated production of identity and to the ways individuals position themselves vis-a-vis others (Bamberg, 1997b; Davies & Harre, 1990; Talbot, Bibace, Bokhour & Bamberg, 1996). The study of personal narratives becomes a focus of attention, since they constitute a particularly significant genre for representing identity and its multiple guises in different discursive contexts. This notion of identity as socially distributed or as existing only within a matrix of changing relationships is not easy to grasp, particularly since it runs counter to traditional, deeply entrenched views of identity as coterminous with and “belonging” to the individual person. A further problem for our inquiry is that proposals for this new direction tend to be programmatic, with little elaboration of the conceptual framework or specification of methods. Applying this alternative relational conception of identity to the study of personal narratives requires a more detailed examination of conceptual and methodological problems involved in translating it into researchable questions and productive research strategies.

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This chapter is directed to this task. It is a preliminary and exploratory effort to clarify the implications of this new perspective, guided by the aim of learning what it may add to our understanding of identity. I will focus on how individuals make identity claims on the basis of their social position, aligning or contrasting themselves with others; how they mark out boundaries and limits of their relationships; how they resolve, or fail to resolve conflicts between their needs for autonomy and responsibilities to others; and how they manage conflicting demands of work and family sub-identities. Analyses of identity trajectories in earlier chapters traced the influence of work histories and both early and current family relationships, sometimes in detail as in the discussion of Beth Rivers and Carla Stone’s accounts. A relational conception of identity is congenial with those analyses and might be inferred from it, but it played no explicit role there. Nonetheless, my critique of problematic issues in developmental theory and research suggests the need for and the potential value of the new perspective, and provides a context for drawing out its implications for the narrative study of identity.

Identity Space I: Family Relationships David F: “I used it as an escape because of this you=know family situation where- an alcoholic father and a mother who was overly responsible . anxious and worried all the time” David Farber had little to say during the interview about his family background. One notable exception was his account of a “mid-life crisis” and depression, when he was drinking heavily to “anesthetize” himself from “terrible realities.” He was referring to the burden of financial responsibilities for his growing family and the emotional drain of his woodworking business. During this period he got “sidetracked,” distracted by the demands of the business that left him without any “peace” to do his own work. I ask him what was “going on” in his family “during this period,” and he says his wife took the family responsibilities “more seriously,” but he “always provided money” though there was not much of that. Although he continued to work, it was “chaotic” and hard to bring up a family. At this point he refers again to his father being an alcoholic and remarks that nothing in his life fit his “vision” about the right way to go about working and raising a family, so it was hard for him to “deal with” that.

Identities in/as Relationships / 113 This topic does not surface again until we near the end of the interview. I had been asking for his thoughts about his own and other craftartists’ motivations for their work, about what sustains them in the face of difficulties in earning a living, and about my own sense that it was something they had to do. He affirms my observation, saying that in order to stay in the work for very long an individual has to have a “strong kind of desire to do it.” This echoes Carla S’s comment about needing a “strong constitution” to make a commitment and keep going, given all the “hardships” that come with the work. I then ask David F if there was anything in his “family background” or history related to his interest in “making things.” He is from a “family of farmers” and “nobody” either in the small town he lived in or his family did what he does. Neither “discouraged” or “encouraged” by his family, he started doing it by himself as an “isolated” activity. At another point he says he did it because it made him “feel good” and that he used it as an “escape” from his difficult family situation. He doesn’t elaborate and I do not follow up by probing for more details—in retrospect, a failure I now regret. Pursuing his own interest was a way to distance himself from the chaos and strain of family relationships that revolved around an alcoholic father and an “anxious” mother. His strategy parallels Carla S’s turn toward art and creative activity when she was a child, and the source of family tension was an abusive mother. “Creating” served as an escape for her too, helping her get through “difficult times” and find “inner peace.” David F and Carla S’s reflections on how, through their art, they tried to cope with difficult family situations point toward some of the questions that emerge from a relational perspective on identity development. One question to ask, for example, is: what are the axes or dimensions along which individuals may position themselves vis-a-vis others? Hidden barely below the surface of parent-child relationships are the dynamics of power and domination. Children do not have the means to resist abuse directly, to fight back, to claim rights as equals. Nor can they simply leave the field. One solution, as we have learned from our two respondents, is to withdraw psychologically—to create a space of one’s own, protected to some degree from assault by abusive parents, where the self can express itself and thrive. Both David F and Carla S left their families early. In neither case did their departure seem directly related to their artistic/creative activities. The former left the vocational high school he attended to join the army, a solution to the lack of prospects he saw for someone from a “working class background.” After five years of service, he used his veteran’s educational

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benefits to begin formal training in art. He does not refer at any point in his interview to any continuing relationship with his natal family, hence we do not know whether the bonds were completely severed or only attenuated. It is also important to keep in mind his age at the time of the interview; he was in his late sixties, his parents may have been dead, and the effects on his work of his early relationship with them may have been less salient than was the case for younger respondents. David F’s wife and children replaced them as the relevant others, the social matrix of relationships within which he positioned himself. The tension between doing his “own” work and supporting his family was a central theme in his story. Carla S’s departure from her family seems more purposive, with both negative and positive aspects: she not only left home at seventeen but left to go to college and married shortly thereafter, against her parents’ wishes, making another significant act of separation. Alienation from her parents, a relationship defined by coolness and distance, were key features of her account; they were not involved in her life, did not come to her shows, and gave her no support, either financially or emotionally. The impact of the defensive functions of her art in childhood and adolescence persists after she leaves home, evidenced in her inability to think of art as a “serious option.” Despite support from a succession of teachers, it took an accumulation of several critical events, including the breakup of her marriage and dissatisfaction with her college major, before she could choose art and construct her adult identity around it. Escaping from her family required more than simply walking out the door, just as it required more than withdrawing into her own space to find “inner peace.” The support of her husband and her early success confirmed and buttressed the choice she made. Her life is now relatively secure and stable, and she can reposition herself vis-a-vis her parents, moderating her feelings of alienation and accepting the distance between them, recognizing their limitations. Though they “weren’t there” for her, she can now say “that’s alright . . . you learn to love and accept your situation.”

Beth R: “As I got older I felt real sadness that my mother was not able to use her talents . . . (and) resentment of my mother for not being a better role model to me” Tension and conflict were not absent in Beth Rivers’ relationship with her parents, as we saw in earlier discussions of her oblique movement toward art. Yet the alienation, distance, and separation that characterized family

Identities in/as Relationships / 115 relations in David F and Carla S’s accounts are noticeably absent. Further, Beth R’s connections with her parents do not appear to have been sundered early, as theirs were. At various points she refers to her adult relations with them. And although she is clearly separated from them and centered on her independent adult status as wife, mother, and working craftartist, the struggle she reports at midlife to be “true to herself,” to no longer “compromise herself in a relationship,” and to pursue her work seriously and have it recognized as such mirrors earlier family conflicts. The complexity of her relationship with her parents and the persistent effects of their lack of acknowledgment and respect for her early artistic interests and later career choice are evident in an episode she relates from a time when her own children were in elementary school. I had asked if her parents responded to her childhood projects with encouragement, and whether they were “critical” or “enthusiastic.” She felt her mother was “critical” of what she did; what she wanted was “unbridled enthusiasm,” but “hardly ever” did she receive it. She illustrates this with an example of her drawing paper dolls and clothing for them when she was about ten, the clothing reflecting her “glamorous idea” of how girls should look. They weren’t the “cute little thing” her mother would have preferred, and she criticized her efforts, saying “yes that’s nice but”—and the “but” was all Beth R heard. She always felt that hesitation in her mother’s response, and although she believes her mother now “loves” her work, it took a long time for her mother to acknowledge that what she does is of “professional quality” that she could be proud of, “not just a nice hobby.” Beth R observes that she knows “now” her mother’s response may have reflected more of a “criticism of herself ” than of her, that it came from her “feelings about herself.” I ask when she began to realize her mother may have been expressing “possibly disappointments of her own.” Beth R “struggled with that a long time” and the story she then tells suggests that she did not arrive at this new understanding of her mother until her own children were young, and only after “many hours on that subject” with her sister and in personal therapy.

R: As I got older I felt real sadness/ that my mother was not able to use her talents ’cause I think she had considerable talent I know she did.

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She does wonderful wonderful creative expressions of her artistic ah sense of design. She’s very good. And I remember vividly once saying to my mother- now this was- ah this was after- this probably was when my kids were in elementary school so you=know this- this- this was fifteen to twenty years ago. um I was walking with my parents outside of this home that they’ve retired to And mother had done some beautiful stone panels fromShe’s a great collector. She’s got all kinds of stones, driftwood, pieces of wood that she’s collected. They’re everywhere . she’s bags of them. They’re- I don’t know what we’ll all do with them. But she has made these stone wall pieces And they’re on the outside of her home and they’re framed in rough wood and they are just beautiful. And we stood there . my mother and dad and I . and I said “Mother that is so good. That reminds me of something Georgia O’Keefe would do. You really could have done a lot.” And my dad piped right up and said “Oh now honey she takes care of me and that’s all she has time for.” And I thought you- you betcha That’s exactly right. And that’s the thing I had to really struggle with. My resentment of my dad for that. My resentment of my mother for not being a better role model to me/ . and doing her own thing. And I really worked on that/ I- I was in therapy working on that one. Beth R’s story is emblematic of her lifelong struggle, first with her parents and later with her husband, to take herself seriously as an artist and have that status acknowledged and respected by significant others in her life. Her “real sadness,” with which she begins, that her mother was unable to use her own

Identities in/as Relationships / 117 “considerable talent” and her sense of artistic design combines with her ending this story with “resentment” of her father for resisting her mother’s artistic pursuits, and of her mother for not being a “better role model.” Her mother’s view, remarked on shortly before this story, was that the most important thing to do is “raise your family.” For Beth R, what most mothers think is that “work is nice” but the family is more important. After she compliments her mother on her “stone wall pieces” and says she really could have “done a lot,” her father “piped right up” and said she “takes care” of him, which is all she “has time for.” It does not require too much of an imaginative leap to hear his statement as referring as well to an earlier time in their lives, when all her mother had time for was to take care of the family. Beth R does not seem ready for an open confrontation, though by this time her own children were already in elementary school. She feels her resentment but does not express her sarcastic thought: “You betcha. That’s exactly right.” She appears to have internalized her mother’s perspective on the primacy of the family, with ambivalence and increasing dissatisfaction and frustration with the constraints of her roles as mother and wife. This balancing act persists until the breaking point at midlife, fifteen to twenty years after this episode, when she decides to take her art seriously and give it priority in her life. Beth R’s empathy for her mother and her sadness over the waste of her talents is colored by residual feelings of blame. That is, she holds her mother at least partially responsible for the problems she faced in her own life and her difficult struggle to avoid the same fate. Although the reasons she gives for her own subordination of artistic interests to her roles as wife and mother include reference to the cultural climate of the “fifties” when she did the best she could, she came to feel that she might have been able to act differently if her mother had been a better role model. But her mother’s acceptance and affirmation of the primacy of family roles and the consequent submergence of her own artistic talents served to reinforce cultural definitions of appropriate gender roles. When, many years after this episode, Beth R confronted these issues directly, she did do things differently, acted purposively and at some risk to her marriage, to restructure her relationship with her husband and develop her separate and autonomous role as a craftswoman. In terms of the relational perspective on identity I am exploring, her account emphasizes the importance of repositionings of the self not only within the context of present relationships but also through “restorying” of the past. In her effort to transform herself, Beth R redefined the charac-

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ter of her family of origin. Although in other passages in the interview her memories of childhood form a somewhat idyllic picture—an “artistic upbringing,” a “perfect mother” with a “wonderful eye for art” who provided “everything she wanted,” and an appreciative father with a “good eye” for “artistic design”—here she points to the destructive effect of rigidly defined gendered roles, to the hidden conflicts in Eden.

Adam D: “(Susan) and I met . . . the year before I went to graduate school . fell madly in love and ah got married . . . she was taking glass classes too . . . but she worked . . . and supported me that way” While Adam Daley pursued his crafts studies full time in the early years of their marriage, his wife, Susan, was also taking courses in glassworking but, at the same time, worked as a secretary to earn money while he fulfilled his “scholarship obligations.” This is a familiar image, the traditional gender-based division of labor in which a wife supports her husband during his non-earning or low-income period of training for his profession. More generally, marriage signifies a critical life-course transition, marking a shift of the relational matrix within which identities are located and defined from families of origin to adult families. We have already explored how early family relationships influenced these craftartists’ identity claims and career trajectories. Here, I want to look more specifically at parallels and differences between forms of relationship in their past and present families and the impact of the shift from one to the other on the continuing process of identity development. My respondents vary in how they modulate the linkages between past and present—for example, in whether and how they align or disengage them from each other. Thus we saw earlier that Carla S and Beth R followed different paths as they tried to resist replication in the families they established of early family dynamics and their consequences: abrupt, early separation and distancing for the former, and a longer, ambivalent struggle for the latter. We learned from Adam D that his early artistic interests were nurtured and supported within a family in which art was part of daily life. Nonetheless, in his account of Susan’s working to support him and the associated downgrading of her own interests in “artistic and crafts expression,” we can hear an echo, though slight and oblique, of a difference between his mother and father in the relative significance of art in their lives. Talking about his childhood, at the beginning of the interview, he says both his

Identities in/as Relationships / 119 parents were and are artists. As he elaborates, however, we learn that his mother “no longer really practices” but his father, who had been a “watercolorist,” is currently “involved” in graphic design. Likewise, in his description of his early financial difficulties as a student there is an echo of his mother’s nurturant role in Susan’s working to support him. He did not have any money and had to take loans to go to undergraduate school and work to pay his way. Accepted at schools he could not afford to attend, only the “great support” from his family made it possible. On weekends when he went home, his mother would “load” him up with groceries. I am not suggesting his mother no longer practices because she is supporting his father or that his father resisted her artistic efforts. We have no information about her reasons or about what else she might be doing. I am merely suggesting that a gender differential in the seriousness with which artistic interests are supported and pursued may be an important feature of the cultural context within which craft identities are shaped. It was evident in Beth R’s account of her mother’s “wasted” talent and her own efforts to claim her identity, to be able to say “I’m an artist” and have that be acknowledged. We find it, as well, in Carla S’s characterization of her family as artistic when she pointed out that all her siblings have this little artistic flair and that she saw brief signs of her mother’s talent when she was growing up, her ability to “draw amazingly well, even though she doesn’t do “anything” with it at all. Yet it was her father, a draftsman, who was her “role model,” always “drawing, drawing, drawing.” The gender-based division of labor defines an important relational axis for development of artistic work identities. It also suggests the complex intersection between them and other important sub-identities located within the family obligations and responsibilities. The balance between them is fragile, the boundaries permeable, and the primacy of one or the other shifts back and forth. Adam D is well aware of potential conflicts between work and family demands and explicit about decisions he made when they did arise and the reasoning behind his choices. After he describes the arduous and time-consuming glass production process, I ask him what his normal work day is like, whether it’s a “twelve-hour day?” He replies that generally it runs between eight and eleven but “probably averages nine.” This leads me to wonder about effects of this daily work schedule on his family, since he mentioned having a young child, and I ask about the relationship between the demands of his “family life and-.” My question is incomplete but has

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been understood, and he responds with his general view and an account of what he did when his wife was pregnant with their first child. R: Yeah . That too is interesting. .hh .hh As always .hh ah uhm it’s not a question of one or the other. It’s more a question of integration. ah uhm There are times when one does take precedence and the other suffers. ah uhm For me ah it’s important to have a job but it’s more important to have f- family relationships. So there have been times when I have shut out the business sort of ah uhm not walked away from it but put in less than- less than the number of hours that I ought to. ah uhm One of the times was before- ah before my daughter was born . I spent a lot of time with my wife . And the business suffered for it. ah uhm But those were the choicesThose were some of the reasons that I am in business for myself so that I can make those decisions. Adam D makes his priorities clear. Although having a job is important, and we know the strength of his commitment to his work, family relationships “take precedence.” There have been times he “shut out” the business, not walking away from it but putting in fewer hours than might have been necessary. For example, although the business “suffered,” he expresses no regrets about having “spent a lot of time” with his wife during her pregnancy. Rather, this choice affirms his reason for running his own business, a situation that allows him to make such decisions. I remark that it must be “very important” to have a partner. He agrees but qualifies it by adding that one has to have an “understanding partner.” He and his current partner work well together, and when he feels the other needs to “escape” he will “boot” him out the door. Although it’s a business and they have to make a living from it, they are in it primarily for the “life style.” It is a life style they try to keep in “balance,” that is, they try to keep earning a living in perspective. If they wanted to “amass a pile of money,” they would be doing something else.

Identities in/as Relationships / 121 Two other features of this family/work arrangement Adam D and Susan have constructed suggest that it is a complex result of centrifugal and centripetal forces. At a later point, I ask him about my impression that as craftspeople get older, that is, approach midlife, they seem to reassess the relationship between their work and personal lives and consider changes to reduce the demands of their work. Referring to the difficulty of surviving economically, he responds that for people who have worked in the crafts for a number of years this reassessment might reflect their “getting older.” He has always tried to maintain a “separation” between his life and business and “spent many a year deliberating” whether or not to have his business in the same place where he lived, always deciding against it. For example, he chose to commute “ten miles” when he was going to school to give himself some distance from his work, to ensure some chance of a “reasonable life” safe from being “swallowed up” by the continual demands of “entrepreneurship” associated with manufacturing. This drive toward separation is counterbalanced by Susan’s direct involvement in the business, a move that appears to tie family and work closely together despite the long drive home. She became an employee/partner about seven years before the interview. He “begged” her to take over the retail aspect of the business because he could no longer operate that and its wholesale part. She took it on and now runs the retail store, does all the purchasing and buying, hires and fires the salespeople, sets their salaries, helps set prices. We might view this as a replay of Susan’s supportive role earlier in their marriage. She manages the “front end of the business,” which frees Adam D to put in his nine-hour average day designing and producing their glass wares. But the relation is more complex, with a level of reciprocity and equity obscured by this conception. She draws a salary as a full partner in a business in which selling is as important as making. Moreover, Adam D is clear and unambivalent about “family relationships” being “more important” than his job; thus he in turn supported his wife when she needed help during her pregnancy, although the business suffered. The intertwining of work and family in the life style the couple has been jointly constructing and reconstructing suggests several implications of a relational conception of identity. First, it means a shift away from the assumption of singularity, that is, the view of an individual as having “an” identity, a one-dimensional unity of self. Rather, we need to consider a conception that allows for different degrees of integration and differentiation. Identity is a multiplex rather than a simplex, organized around a plurality of nodes of relationships that carry various, and often conflicting,

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demands, obligations, and responsibilities. Second, it means emphasizing the dynamic, changing pattern of this matrix of relationships. Identity is not static, a stable achievement of adulthood that resolves the uncertainties and diffusion of adolescence. It is less like a snapshot than a movie, one with several sub-plots. A structure in tension, it is always in process of change and reformation. Finally, given the interconnectedness of its parts, which are variable in form and strength, a change in one part of the field is consequential for all other parts. This is evident in all our respondents’ accounts, in which efforts to change direction in their own lives depended on restructuring their relationships with others.

Beth R: “It took me awhile to break even . . . Now that I’m making some money it’s- I love it . . . I need it for my ego . . . know that if I wanted to live on my own I could and I do know that” The close partnership between Adam D and Susan, with its intimate linkage of work and family, is only one of many possible forms for this complex twodimensional relational matrix. They are both dependent financially on the business, and its success or failure determines whether they can achieve their desired life style. Other respondents report a greater degree of relative autonomy: independent lines of work, various levels of financial contribution, and variation in whether and how they pool their separate incomes for family expenses. The increase in dual-career families (Rapoport & Rapoport, 1971; Rapoport & Rapoport, 1976) suggests that these issues are not confined to craftspeople. The internal economy of the family, sensitive to larger economic forces, is another dimension of the work-family identity space. Beth R “loves” making some money; it is good for her “ego” and also for the assurance it gives that she could live on her own. She has no wish to do that, but wants to feel “that independent.” Talking of selling her work at crafts fairs, which is difficult and “physically stressful” since she has to “look wonderful and sell all day long,” she mentions a “really stressful” three-day fair with long hours. But this was all right because she made a “lot of money,” which is a “major goal.” Her work is not “just for pleasure”—although we know how much pleasure she derives from it—but she wants enough income from her work to be able to contribute more to their home expenses. She is now confident she can do this, and also that she could support herself living on her own, since she is “selling a lot.” R: So . It was really stressful

Identities in/as Relationships / 123 but I made a lot of money in that hunk of time too which is also a goal of mine. To have some support come from this. And ah I mean it’s a major goal. I’m not doing it just for pleasure. I need to get something from it. The world measures our value by what we’re paid and if my value is measured by my income I- it wouldn’t be much of a value. But I want some income. I want some expendable income from this. And . in fact I’m- I’ve been doing so well lately that I might even be able to- I have been sharing some- the expenses here at home which I- I really want to be able to do at this point. And I’m going to be able to do much more because ah of the retailing I’m selling a lot. On the surface, Beth R’s satisfaction with her financial success may seem like a repetition of her parents’ early directive that she “prepare” for the eventuality of having to support herself in case something happened to her husband, which led to her teaching for several years before marriage. But the tone and import of the two statements are quite different. Her current goal of making enough money to share expenses and, if necessary, to support herself is an assertion of independence and autonomy, not the unwelcome option faced by a woman who did not attain or lost the financial support of a husband.

Carla S: “I feel pretty strongly that I don’t want him to be supporting me . . . and if for some reason I wasn’t with (Roger) then I don’t want to be stuck with nothing . . . years of depending on him . . . I mean having nothing at all.” We find a similar emphasis on independence based on the ability to earn her own way in Carla S’s account of financial arrangements in her mar-

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riage. Although she has always worked, when she was in graduate school Roger’s income provided the support for them as a “household.” I ask if they pooled their incomes for expenses, and she says not at the beginning, even though they were living together. They kept some things “separate”; for example, she put herself through undergraduate school with scholarships and worked, usually at two jobs, and at that point their money “wasn’t together.” This changed when she went to graduate school. She had to take out loans because there were no scholarships or fellowships available for a graduate arts student, and they then pooled their incomes because she got “one chunk” from the bank. He “definitely helped” financially during that period, and right after school she got a waitressing job and was “just working, working, working.” There have been very few periods in their life together where she has not worked or did not contribute a “substantial amount.” I ask whether she views “paying off” her student loans as her responsibility from her own income, and she responds that they “definitely” are: “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. . . . Ya ya that’s my responsibility.” I ask for more specifics about their current pooling of incomes, whether they put in equal amounts or keep some things separate. Their approach is pragmatic, with some flexibility in paying bills separately and jointly; beyond this, they “figure out” what each needs. The responsibility is never “clearly divided” with separate checking accounts, and Roger is “more relaxed” than she is about who is responsible for paying for what. She was “always very aware,” much more than he was, of what she needed for her own expenses. She attributes her husband’s relaxed, unconcerned attitude to his always having made more money than she did. But her own higher level of awareness reflects her feeling “pretty strongly” that she doesn’t want him supporting her. Nonetheless, she feels secure in knowing that if she needed financial support, he would be “more than willing” to help her out. She regards herself as “pretty realistic” about life and their relationship, and if something happened and they were no longer together, she doesn’t want to be “stuck” after years of depending on him to end up having “nothing at all.”

R: It’s almost like (Roger) has his bills/ . I have my bills and then we have our bills together you=know like when we are paying utilities then we have our bills together. Then we figure out what each of us needs.

Identities in/as Relationships / 125 And I was always very aware- I mean he really- he always made more money than I did so he really never was that- oh you=know concerned aboutI was much more concerned about it . “Well I need this, this and this you=know for my dentist . for my doctor . for my-” you=know. And so ya . I was always very aware of what I needed a month/ much more so than what he was aware of. um And it’s never that clearly divided like he has a checking account and I have a checking account. We have a- we have ah a joint checking account and I- he’s much more relaxed about it than I am you=know. If- if it- you=know if I needed more financial support/ I know that he’d be more than willing to help me out but I feel pretty strongly that I don’t want him to be supporting me I mean- that’s not- you=know. I: He probably feels that on his side as well although it doesn’t quite come out that way. R: Like- uh ah exactly . you=know I’m pretty realistic about life/ and things like that and if for some reason I wasn’t with (Roger)/ then I don’t want to be stuck with nothing you=know. I don’t want to be stuck with years of depending on him/ and just doing my little sculptures you=know. I mean having nothing at all. With all the differences between Beth R and Carla S in their life histories and current circumstances, they are alike in the importance they attach to being able to support themselves, to be independent. Carla S has supported herself since leaving her family and going off to college. Her early economic independence combined with success in selling her work gives her confidence that she could make it on her own if she had to—she is “pretty realistic” about what she can do. Although Beth R worked for several years before marriage, she has since then been supported by her husband. It is only at midlife, when she is “making some money” and “selling a lot,” that she can reach this point, to “know” that if she wanted to, she could live on her own. But her resolve is as strong as Carla Stone’s.

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It is not surprising to find that the family economy is gendered. The support-dependence arrangement of husband and wife is the hallmark of the traditional family—although that term itself is fraught with ambiguity. It takes on particular significance for identity research, since it so clearly demonstrates that the placement of family members along the economic axis can only be understood in relation to each other. Wanting to “live on one’s own,” to need no support, are inherently relational statements in the context of the family. They have no meaning at the level of an autonomous, independent individual. Further, how a couple manages the internal economy of the family complicates our understanding of one member’s sub-identity as a craftartist. Although Beth R and Carla S are motivated by a strong drive for creative expression, and they both love and have to do the work they do, it is not “just for pleasure.” Variation in economic goals, for example, whether to “share expenses” or “contribute a substantial amount,” “support” oneself or do better than just “make a living,” enter into the process of identity formation. They are integral components of this process, not simply add-ons.

Fred W: “I feel pretty comfortable with that- that income division . . . sense of pride in what you should do to take care of yourself . . . I don’t like the idea feeling like I’m being supported” The culturally framed gendering of financial independence as a central component of a valued identity cuts both ways. In dual-career families where wives’ earnings are important in achieving a preferred level of living, and all respondents’ families are of this type, the definition of sole income provider becomes blurred and ambiguous. If the respective contributions of husband and wife to the family’s total resources are unequal, each must find a way to minimize whatever friction or sense of unfairness may arise from the imbalance. We all know that many families do not succeed at this task. For women, with a long history of being on the lower side of the inequality equation, one choice is to make whatever contribution they can, even if it is minimal. For Beth R, the immediate goal is to “share expenses” with the hope of increasing the amount as her business does better. But her longer-term goal is similar to Carla S’s. Both want to earn enough to feel they could be independent, able to support themselves and live on their own should they choose to do so. When men find themselves in situations that were and still are more typical for women, that is, earning less than their wives, their ways of dealing

Identities in/as Relationships / 127 with it are much the same as women’s. When David F was in the hard middle period of his life, no longer earning a steady income after he “walked away” from his business, his wife provided the primary support for the family. But immediately after saying this, he adds that he “always provided money” though he was not “earning much.” At a later point, he asserts that despite the long period of marginal jobs and little income, in the end he fulfilled what he viewed as his financial responsibility: he “paid her back the money that we- she used for that period, but she was bringing the money in for awhile.” The uncertainty in pronominal reference is worth noting, that is, whether “we” or “she” used the money that she brought in. It suggests the difficulty David F still has about not having been the primary breadwinner and reveals his residual discomfort at having lived on his wife’s income. Like Beth R and Carla S, he would rather not be supported. At the time of the interview, his wife held a stable full-time job. However, the impact of the income differential between them has been ameliorated: their children now live on their own, and David F contributes his monthly Social Security check to household expenses. Most of what he earns from occasional freelance work and sales goes into “supporting” himself and his business, “buying materials and stuff like that.” We learned earlier from Fred Wharton that as he approaches forty, his “expectations” of what he wants out of life have changed. He has become increasingly dissatisfied with the combination of labor-intensive hard work and lack of “any financial reward” for what he does. Wanting to do more than just “exist,” he has turned to other ventures, such as writing and designing for large-scale production. He earns less than his wife, and this disparity plays a significant role in his feelings about the limitations on his life of making so little money from all the work he does. His wife, Amy, began graduate school when he started working as a landscape architect and five years later, when he went to graduate school in another state, she stayed behind. They viewed what he was doing as an “experiment,” and she did not want to “give up her profession” if he was going to “back out” of his decision after a few months. In the end, his graduate training took three years, and I ask how he supported himself during that time. He’d saved a little money, Amy was working and helped a “little bit,” and he had occasional jobs. Although he says they now “pool” their income “in a way,” it turns out this means they divide up their household costs with each paying for different categories of expenses, and then each covers his or her separate personal expenses from their own incomes.

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Fred W remarks that the “discrepancy” in his and his wife’s incomes has its effect when it comes to “money left over” for their separate “personal needs.” I ask whether this way of handling their finances developed because of this income differential. It began earlier, when he went to graduate school and they got “used to taking care” of themselves financially. This history lies behind his feeling “pretty comfortable” with how they do this, a “sense of pride” in being able to “take care of yourself ” and, further, he would not like to feel he’s “being supported.” I: . . . Has the ah problems of earning a living . the problems of doing your work . has that been a source of strain in the relationship . has that ah? R: um ya. It um there are times when I’m under a tremendous amount of pressure to meet- to meet deadlines and I can’t- I can’t spend enough time with her or can’t spend time doing social things. ah Luckily . though . we’re both very very busy/ .we both lead very busy lives and that- ah most of the time that balances out but there are times when it just seems like you get overloaded and you can’t deal with- you can’t deal with life. ah Financially there’s an imbalance thatah ah (Amy) has followed her route where she is ah ah oh she’s at a professional level and she’s developed her own private practice and she gets paid quite well for that. So um there is a ah ah separation that at least at this time is pretty apparent and ah um that’s a little bit difficult for me psychologically in that you=know in our culture a man’s supposed to be a provider/ and ah and all that stuff and ah just- just- ah you=know it’s not true to how I perceived things when I was young (laughs) you=know/ it’s not. um um if- um We both have the desire to travel

Identities in/as Relationships / 129 and a lot of that is kind of limited to how much money I can make. You=know she could probably afford to go places more than I could really. She could afford to buy nicer clothes or she could afford to go out to dinner more than I could. Although Fred W supports himself and meets his part of their joint financial obligations, the difference between him and Amy in their respective amounts of “money left over” has nontrivial consequences. When I ask, at the beginning of this transcript, whether problems of earning a living and doing his work have been a “source of strain” in their relationship, he first refers to time pressures. They are both very busy, though that usually “balances out,” but he then refers to effects of the financial “imbalance.” Amy gets paid “quite well” for her work, and even when Fred had a designing job for a furniture company that paid “really well,” he relates at another point in the interview, he had to “invest three hours” in his shop for every hour she “invests” in her office. This is the source of the income differential that is now difficult for him “psychologically.” He cannot fulfill the cultural role set for a man as “a provider,” and this does not match his youthful expectations: it “is not,” he repeats for emphasis, how he thought things would be. In addition, because of the separation they make between joint and personal expenses, his own income limits what they can do together for vacations or other activities: she can more easily afford to “go places” than he can, “buy nicer clothes,” “go out for dinner.” The repetition of “could afford more” in this list is a linguistic marker of the intensity of his feelings about the disparity in their incomes. Clearly, the widespread change in the traditional gendered division of labor within the family, in which the husband was the provider and the wife the homemaker, has a deep impact on family dynamics and relationships. Among its many consequences is the blurring, if not breakdown, between what had been relatively autonomous spheres of life, that is, work and family, and their corresponding identities. A relational conception of identity is a necessary beginning to our being able to describe, represent, and theorize this complex process. How our respondents manage income disparities, define separate and shared responsibilities, achieve a sense of fairness and equity in what they contribute to and take out of the household financial base, and balance levels of dependence and independence—

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all of these frame, specify, and enter directly into the particular form of identity each claims as a craftartist.

Identity Space II: Crafts Sites and Practices Carla S: “People always have this very romantic idea of what you’re like if you’re an artist or a craftsperson . . . when it comes right down to it there’s- there’s very little kind of financial or even emotional support” Various audiences, kinds of work, and objects come together to constitute the social space within which craftspeople practice their particular crafts and pursue their careers. One important axis that structures this space is the distinction between art and craft (Becker, 1978). Each respondent contested the legitimacy of this distinction. Nevertheless, as makers of one-ofa-kind pieces, they straddle this boundary and have to find ways of positioning themselves that satisfy their personal aims and motives for doing the work they do. Their identity claims, that is, how they define themselves—as artists, craftspeople, or designers, and they use all these terms— also define the relevant “others,” the audiences whose response to their work has to be considered: the general public, gallery owners, potential collectors, other communities of craftspeople in their own and different specialties. The crafts/arts axis partitions the world of crafts work. It determines how they price their work and whether they show and sell at crafts fairs or art galleries. Their work identities are grounded in this difference and, given the depth and pervasiveness of its effects, it might be useful to view it as an analogue to the gender differential in the world of the family. Carla S’s view of a public with a “romantic idea” of artists—which nonetheless provides little emotional or financial support for their work— is coupled with her sense of how difficult it is to survive as an artist. To keep at it, she said, requires a “strong constitution” to face all the “hardships” that come with the work. As we might expect from her desire to “make a statement” through her one-of-a-kind sculptural pieces, she tends to talk of responses to her work in personal terms. When I ask her about problems she finds in showing and selling her pieces, bringing work that is very important to her “personally” to others, making it “public,” she talks about her feelings of “vulnerability” since this opens her to “criticism.” She then tells a story about asking a respected teacher in graduate school how to deal with another teacher’s criticism of her work. His “ad-

Identities in/as Relationships / 131 vice” helped her and “stuck in her mind,” serving her well with later critical responses: “You know what’s a very good thing to say when somebody says ‘I don’t like your work,’ say ‘Well thank you, I’m glad I didn’t do it for you.’” She “can handle” it now if someone says that to her. Sometimes, when people see her work, “there’s dead silence and they don’t say anything.” Because some of her pieces are “very, very strong,” even close friends may be “repulsed” and say “How could you do something like that?” She has learned to respond, to accept that: “Okay you don’t like that. Alright . fine . but this meant something to me. I know you’re not judging me you=know and if you are that’s your problem. You shouldn’t be judging me as a person.” Other respondents, with less of a personal orientation to the “public,” see themselves as educators, teaching people about good design and the distinctive qualities of handmade objects. Fred W, initially concerned with the “visual impact” of furniture as an “art form” rather than its functionality, and whose primary goal was to make “beautiful objects,” has shifted in this direction. His recent work—writing about design and designing prototypes for large-scale production—is oriented toward helping the public understand the value of well-crafted furniture. He feels that a general lack of understanding of what craftspeople do and the special qualities of hand-crafted furniture and other objects plays a major role in the precarious economic and social situation for those in the crafts. I ask whether he has any thoughts about what might make “life better, easier for craftspeople” in our society. After a lengthy pause, he says those who produce work “collectible by the elite population” can gain a “certain amount of success,” but there’s only so much work that can be sold that way, and galleries take a large percentage of the sales price. The only course he can see is for the general population to become more interested in owning craftwork and seeing the value in it. He has thought of curating a show that would contrast handmade and production furniture, “Because people don’t understand, they just don’t understand the differences.” Adam D responds similarly to the question of what could make the “life of a craftsperson a little easier,” but expands the scope of his answer to the general issue of responsibility for oneself and others. Our “social fabric” needs radical “readjustment.” People do not take responsibility for “what they say and do.” Craftspeople, he asserts, are responsible in just this way, implying they might serve as a better example than “a president who doesn’t want to be responsible for what he says or does.”

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I: .hh have any thoughts about what could make the- the life of a craftsperson a little easier you=know theirR: A rearrange- orientation of the ah entire social system of the United States. (I: laughs) The social fabric of the United States has to be readjusted. Someone should get in there with the big Allen wrench. (I: laughs) You=know- ah um .hh I think if people were more responsible for what they say and do across the board in society that everybody would be better- particularly .hh craftspeople .hh because craftspeople are responsible for what they say and do. You=know I mean- we even have a president who doesn’t want to be responsible for what he says or does you=know. And what kind of example is that? .hh I think you=know I think that to make the craftsman’s life is- ah more easier or anything better is- .hh is- has to do with people appreciating the efforts of other people starting out with kids you=know. And one thing that we have always tried to do here .hh is to educate people that these objects are handmade and people put their guts into them. There’s even a little sign downstairs somewhere that says .hh “If children aren’t allowed to - I can’t exactly quote - but if children aren’t allowed to touch beautiful objects how can you expect them to become beautiful children?” Beautiful people or something like that. So I- I think- I think that starts at the beginning.

For a craftsman’s life to become easier and better requires appreciation of his efforts. Here, I think, Adam D is alluding to how craftspeople work—their care, skill, time, effort—and his sense of the lack of appreciation is another variant of Fred W’s complaint that “people don’t understand.”

Identities in/as Relationships / 133 He suggests that craftshows have an educational aim , and proposes “starting out with kids” to help people learn to appreciate that the objects are “handmade and people put their guts into them.” Our interview closed with his utopian vision of children, and implicitly adults as well, becoming “beautiful” if they/we are “allowed to touch beautiful objects.” David F adds another dimension to these concerns about the public’s lack of understanding and appreciation of the distinctive qualities of crafted, handmade objects. He locates the problem historically within the class structure and its division between the “ruling class” and “working class people,” an issue he has “been doing a lot of thinking about and even some writing about.” He views the furniture field as “always” and “still” dominated by the values and interests of the ruling class, who control what is “shown,” “seen,” “written about,” and “accepted” as good and bad furniture. Even though we don’t have an “aristocracy” in the United States, working-class people have “internalized” the dominant view about furniture and think that is the only one “worth even mentioning.” He concludes: “There’s no democratic furniture in this country.” I: Yo- you do one of a kind pieces? OrR: Well . we’ll talk about that too. I do do one of a kind pieces. But another thing that I have been doing a lot of thinking about and even some writing about is the idea that furniture has been tied into the ruling class/ and theah the ah aristocracies And it has- that has- that is the furniture that always been written about, talked about, and saved. And the pe- the- ah the working class people have thought that that was the only furniture that was worth even mentioning/ or to be interested in. And even though we don’t have an aristocracy in the United States this whole pattern has spilled over into this century and we’re still doing it. ah And there’s a very strong kind of hold on it yet by the people who have control over what is shown, what is seen, what is written about

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and what is accepted as good furniture and bad furniture. .hh There’s no democratic furniture in this country. This class perspective recalls David F’s early self-presentation as someone from a “working class background,” who enlisted in the army before graduating from high school since he was uncertain about his “prospects.” Although other respondents (Adam D, Carla S, Fred W) report limited financial resources and having to borrow money and work extra jobs, they do not position themselves within the class structure. For David F, however, the concept of class structure is central to his views of his own work and the problems he has with both other furniture makers and the market for their work. He criticizes the current emphasis on “expensive wood and fancy wood,” catering to the preference of a “ruling class” that can afford it. In the early period of U.S. history, he remarks, instead of using “all this wonderful wood here like walnut and cherry,” they imported “mahogany” to build their furniture. He is now less interested in the wood itself than in using other materials that have become available in the twentieth century, such as plastics and metals. His recent pieces include exposed steel structural elements, bolts, and joints—all anathema to most other contemporary artist furniture makers. He is not optimistic about the situation changing, believing it’s an “impossible problem” and thinking sometimes that attempts to change it are “doomed to failure.” Although he retains the hope that his type of furniture, which is designed to take advantage of inexpensive, strong materials, could find a market if someone with money to produce and promote it saw its value, he is well aware of the barriers to having a “more democratic” furniture, in terms of its origin and how it is perceived. He believes “taste” is largely manufactured by the ruling class and then “consumed” by working-class people who do not think their taste or interests are “worthwhile,” unfortunately a “very widespread” view. The art/craft dimension we found earlier, which partitioned the crafts world and specified the relevant “others” in it, is not prominent in David F’s account. Nor was it salient for Beth R. Among the respondents, they were least involved in academic training centers, whereas the others have graduate degrees in the crafts. The distinction between art and craft may reflect the disciplinary concerns that accompany the professionalization of the field, so that one gets “certified” as a craftartist by virtue of having a degree rather than by apprenticeship to a master potter or weaver. This

Identities in/as Relationships / 135 places the art/craft division in a broader historical and social context. It both enlarges and complicates the relational space we have to take into consideration to understand how individuals position and align themselves, and how their identities are shaped through the dynamic interplay of both large- and small-scale forces.

Relational Identities I began this exploration of the social/relational perspective on identity by pointing to the need for closer examination of how it might be translated into useful research questions and strategies. This chapter is a step in that direction, providing some confirmation of its value by documenting how this approach directs our attention to influences on identity formation that are usually not addressed. One area that merits further examination, for example, is the intricate relation between family and work spheres and how that in turn relates to the economics of craftwork. By focusing on details of social arrangements in a comparative framework, we can begin to discern how lines of force that radiate from the wider cultural context, such as the normative patterning of gender relationships, enter into the particular ways individuals construct their complex family/work identities. Mapping changes over the course of their lives through evaluating the relative strength of different forces showed how individuals managed conflicts between competing demands and responsibilities to achieve a new, unstable, transitory but workable balance. The research strategy adopted in earlier analyses also proved useful when applied to the study of relational identities. To reach some understanding of the complex notion of identity as socially situated and interdepedent rather than anchored in an autonomous individual requires some form of case-centered approach (Mishler, 1996). The use of a comparative framework allowed us to recognize the range and sources of variation in how identities are constructed; at the same time, similarities between individuals directed us to features of their shared sociocultural contexts. Thus the economic situation of craftartists is common ground for our respondents, but the particular impact on their identity trajectories depends on the normative structuring of gender roles. The difficulties they all face in earning an adequate living are mediated by the culturally defined gendered division of labor and its collateral differences in obligations and responsibilities, and therefore the economic impact differs for men

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and women. In a similar way, we found that the general notion of a “public” was mediated and defined by how individuals framed broader problems of society, such as lack of individual responsibility or the divide between the “ruling” and “working” classes. These different specifications amplify and multiply the social contexts within which we must consider the implications of identities as “positioned.” These findings deepen our understanding of the trajectories of identity development described in earlier chapters and underscore the value of a relational approach. Its general potential for theory and research on this topic can only be assessed through studies of other populations using alternative research strategies. Some years after completing the interviews with craftartists, I participated in another, quite different study that gave me an opportunity for such an assessment. Analyses of a sample of interviews from this study revealed a dynamic process through which one’s identity may be shaped in opposition to another person. This finding, reported in the following section, extends and complicates the theoretical meaning of the key term “relational.” It offers additional grounds for the claim that the usefulness of this perspective is not limited by the particulars of my study of craftartists.

Relational Dialectics: Negative and Positive Identities The two interviews examined below suggest a particular dynamic in the relational process of identity formation that supplements findings from my interviews with craftartists, namely, a dialectic of opposition where one’s claim for a positive identity may be justified by contrasting it with another’s negative identity. These interviews were part of a survey of health, illness, and the sense of well-being among people of different social class and ethnicity.2 Questions focused on the impact of acute or chronic illness on respondents’ family, work, and social lives, issues that are clearly different from those in my study. I did not conduct these interviews myself, although I consulted closely with the research staff on the design of the interview schedule, training of interviewers, and data analysis. The positive-negative identity dynamic that surfaced in them gives us an opportunity to illustrate the general relevance of a relational conception of identity. This analysis focuses on how this work of identity polarization is shaped through the respondents’ narratives of their experiences.

Identities in/as Relationships / 137 Ellen R is an Italian-American woman in her fifties; Anna W, an AsianAmerican woman in her forties. Though their interviews differ markedly in particulars, they are strikingly similar in structure. Specifically, each represents the differences between herself and her husband through two intersecting and contrasting storylines. Although the core issues are distinct—serious illnesses for Ellen R and conflicting cultural values for Anna W—each sets up an opposition between her own “success” in adapting to her problems and her husband’s “failure.” The women’s stories interweave those of the husbands, and their own identities reflect the dialogue with them, a lived-through “conversation” marked by tension, resistance to being pulled down/back by their husbands’ problems, a struggle toward independent lives. The interviewer begins her interview with a metacomment that she wants to get a “sense” and a “picture” of Ellen R’s life, and then asks her to describe what “yesterday was like,” saying she was interested in her thoughts and feelings as she “went through the day.” Ellen R responds: “Okay. Yesterday was not a typical day.” Her specification provides a context for the interviewer to understand what she did. As we shall see, it also serves another important function. Its atypicality is a critical indicator of problems in her life she will later elaborate. She may be preparing us for the story she will tell or, alternatively, after having read her story we may recognize the significance of this question-specifying comment. But at this point, the interviewer cannot know what it will come to mean. Ellen R starts to list her activities sequentially, beginning with a doctor’s appointment and then shopping, which she remarks was unusual, and repeats her opening phrase that it was not a typical day. The repetition is an intensifier, pointing us again toward the significance of its atypicality. Since her initial items and those she continues to list include only what a listener might think of as quite ordinary, routine, “typical” activities, it seems to me that her repetition of it’s not being a typical day marks her effort to have the interviewer understand that for her they are not ordinary or routine. Her list includes, for example, her morning shower, breakfast, going downtown, a routine doctor’s appointment, shopping, lunch downtown, cooking, supper with her husband, phone calls to her mother, a friend, and a daughter, choir practice, a cup of tea, and then to bed. The details document the mundane ordinariness of her day, which contrasts with her characterization of it. We begin to learn why this was an “atypical” day from her response to the interviewer’s next question asking to describe a more typical day. This

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time, the list includes sewing, housework, seeing family members, errands, and “perhaps a friend will stop in- a neighbor after supper or so-”. She breaks off at that point and offers us the first clue to her meaning of atypicality: her husband had a stroke several years ago and while he “does fair,” he neither works or drives so, as the “only real driver,” she spends much of her time doing errands. The interviewer does not follow up mention of her husband’s stroke, but asks about the errands she does, gets back a list of routine activities, and then asks if she now has a “good picture” of her life. For the first time, we hear about Ellen R’s own illness: she “got sick” ten years earlier with a “neuromuscular disease,” the cause of which was unknown and which came on “suddenly.” She had to stop full-time work and takes on occasional part-time jobs, but is “really doing fine with it.” To reduce the occurrence and severity of symptoms, she tries “not to get terribly overtired,” to “pace out” her day, and is “kind of careful about health.” The interviewer asks about her involvement with children and grandchildren, and after an extended response returns to her husband’s stroke: “What does that mean in your life?” Ellen R’s response is immediate and unequivocal: it has “changed” her life a “very, very large amount.” Asked if she can “talk” about that, Ellen R first details how “difficult” it is for her husband who “recovered fairly well” from a “heart attack and a stroke on the same day,” but still has many effects of the stroke despite “rehabilitation for a long time.” She lists his stroke-related disabilities and then points to a more general problem: except for taking walks and talking with retired but younger friends, he has a “boredom problem” because there are not “many things he wants to do.” She describes his daily routines and limitations in doing household chores and cooking for himself, weaving into her account the problems she faces that result both from her husband’s physical disabilities and from his relatively ineffective adaptation to them. For example, since he is always at home, it is “very hard,” “difficult,” and “frustrating” for her because she has no privacy if friends visit. The “biggest thing” is that within her own house she is “never here alone.” After a while, the lack of “freedom” to have “people in for lunch” does get to her. She knows “it’s not his fault” and tries to encourage him to spend time with other people, but finds she has “to stay and carry the conversation” because her husband doesn’t initiate “small talk.” Observing that he seems afraid of making a mistake speaking, that he may accept or reject her help

Identities in/as Relationships / 139 if he has a problem remembering something, she feels “like betwixt and between.” She repeats how difficult it is when people have a stroke since their “personality does totally change.” In her view, his physical problems are relatively minor in comparison to his restricted mode of living, since she can “work around” the former, but she wishes for both his and her sake that he had something “constructive to wake up to in the morning, to get dressed quickly, and even if I had to drive him to it.” Ellen R’s account of her husband’s problems and its effects on both their lives takes up almost ten percent of the interview. It ends with examples of her trying to get him out of the way when she does housework— situations she refers to as “temporary”; things that she tries to “roll around”—a strategy she recognizes as of limited value for the deep, pervasive problems in their relationship. She does not see any way to deal with this problem other than for her to “carve out a separate life” where she would do things by herself and with other people. Her efforts to do this include joining neighborhood and church groups, which take her out of the house and allow her to socialize with other people. We learned earlier that she has a serious chronic illness, but she does not refer to its impact on her life until much later in the interview, and then only in response to the interviewer’s direct question about whether there were times when she was not able to work because of her health. She talks about having to “pace herself ” so as not to get too tired, a state which brings on the symptoms of the illness, and reports one such episode that was “very scary.” She had to “just stay in bed for like two weeks until it gradually disappeared.” Her children are a “very good support system” if she ever has “any health problems.” Later, when asked if she feels she has control over the “good things and bad things” in her life, she responds that she has “some control” over “a lot of good things”: to drive, network with other people, and then adds that she doesn’t have too much control over her husband’s illness. He sets the pace of things and she wishes she could motivate him to do more for himself, but she “can’t force” him to do certain things, so she has “no control” over that. Throughout the interview, she minimizes problems resulting from her illness and emphasizes her adaptive strategies. This contrasts with her description of her husband’s lack of motivation, withdrawal from social activities, and the effects on her life of his change in personality after his stroke. It is not until the end of the interview, from her response to a standard questionnaire, that we learn of other health problems she has, such as

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arthritis, cataracts, and a serious episode of tendonitis. None of this was referred to during the interview itself. In a follow-up interview, the interviewer begins by asking if “anything had come up” about what they talked about or whether she had any “other thoughts.” She responds that there were a “couple of things” she should have “mentioned,” and begins by referring back to her husband’s heart attack and stroke: he is “Okay but he’s not really still wonderful.” The remainder of the interview focuses almost entirely on his problems, how he has changed and the effects of this on her life. He is “overweight” and smokes, and she has been relatively unsuccessful in getting him to diet or stop smoking. Her goal is to keep him healthy so he will be at less risk for “more heart attacks,” but she sees no chance of “changing him”: “that’s just the way it’s gonna be.” She wishes it were different, that he were motivated to do “more healthy things,” but feels that is beyond his control because his “brain was affected in the stroke.” She reaffirms her earlier statement that “his personality completely changed.” Before the stroke, he was “very outgoing,” “almost loud,” “participated in everything,” but since then he “holds back” in conversations, is “shy and quiet,” and seems to feel he will “have trouble saying” what he wants to say. Asked whether, beyond his problems in talking, he has changed “in terms of who he is,” she says he is “not truly the way he was” and attributes this to something that “happened in his brain.” He has difficulty doing simple tasks and does not initiate “doing things on his own.” This has changed how she behaves toward him, since she finds it “aggravating” and becomes impatient. Her husband’s own view of the stroke’s effects is, “what’s gonna be will be.” She feels he’s “very depressed” because he can’t work or drive. Although he’s “conscientious about taking pills,” his attitude about changing his diet or stopping smoking is: “if I die I die.” She cannot understand how he can be motivated to take his pills but not do other things, and “it gets very frustrating.” For her, the stroke “changed life completely.” He became a “really different sort of person.” He seems “older than he should be,” has “just aged,” which makes it necessary for her to do things she “had never done before.” She has to make all the decisions and feels “alone.” She agrees with the interviewer’s statement that there has been a “loss of the relationship” she had with him before. She does not talk with him about this be-

Identities in/as Relationships / 141 cause she “would hate to make him feel worse,” and in the end, “Nothing would change so it’s kind of like that’s just the way it is.” Later, the interviewer returns to the question of how much control she feels she has in her life. She observes that Ellen R adapted to her own illness by taking control, for example, of her diet, smoking, and fatigue, but that with regard to the effects of her husband’s illness she feels her “only option” is to “carve out separate activities and kind of a separate life.” “Right,” Ellen R answers. Although she tries to arrange things they can do together, “really basically” she can’t change him, so she has to change the way she “rolls around” with it. She does not ever want to feel that she is “sort of martyred to being here.” Thus she may go away for a weekend leaving him instructions, or have him come with her on a family vacation, but it would be “nice” if he enthused about something they did. Going back over her responses to the questionnaire and her sense of what being “down in the dumps” means, she says “like totally depressed,” and although she herself has ups and downs, she has never experienced that. When she is feeling down, “one small bit of good news could cheer me up.” The early part of Anna W’s interview focuses on health. She reports no serious problems for herself or her family. Asked about her adolescent daughters and whether being Asian-American affects them in any way, she says they are like “anybody else,” and then adds she is American-born and her husband is not, and that they “do things different.” Her first example is his “pushing” them to speak their native language at home rather than English, which is a source of conflict within the family. He also feels that the “only life for them right now is school,” and although she tries to tell him they “need some fun, some recreation,” he doesn’t like them to “run around on their own” with their friends. It is “not easy to talk with him about these differences, since he always thinks he’s right and will only “listen to what he wants to listen to,” so to “keep peace” she just ignores it. Money comes up at this point as a major source of difference between them, and problems about it appear repeatedly in her two interviews: they think “entirely different” about money. He feels she spends too much and she feels he’s “too tight.” For example, if her kids are enjoying an outing she feels if “they want something silly let them get it,” but his “philosophy in life” is “food in your mouth, roof over your head, and clothes on your back.” This difference between them made things harder when there was only one income, but now that she is working and has “her own money,” she can “do the extras” she wants to do. He cannot say anything about

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what she does with it after she pays her share of household bills. Although they continue to have some arguments, “basically” he does what he wants with his money and she does what she wants with hers, “as long as the bills are paid.” Generally, she feels he has always been like that with money, always “thrifty.” He has not been as successful economically as his brothers and sisters. They “enjoy life” and take “vacations,” but he says that even if he had the money he would not “waste it on a vacation.” She views it as “two different ways of thinking.” He came to the United States as a young adult twenty years ago, and she feels has been here long enough to adjust to what life is like here. His family is supportive and understanding of her because “they know” what he is like and what she goes through. They tell her to “hang in there for the sake of the kids.” She’s “learned to live” with the situation: it will not “disappear” nor is she “gonna run out and get a divorce,” because she does not think that would help matters “as far as the kids are concerned.” They still “look up to him” and “will never turn against him no matter what he does,” so the only course is to “make the best of it.” Early in a follow-up interview, Anna W refers to long-standing problems between her family and husband: he “doesn’t get along” with her family and will “have nothing to do with them” when they visit. This bothers her but she accepts it as a “way of life,” and her family doesn’t “make a big issue” out of it for her sake. They ignore him and go about their business. He “blames a lot of his misfortunes or failures” on her mother, problems that go back to disputes about money early in their marriage. When her children were small and she was not able to work, she felt restricted and it was a difficult time, but as they got older and she began working part-time, she regained her “confidence” and “selfesteem,” knowing she could do more on her own and not have to “ask him for everything.” The relationship between her and her husband “is not very good,” although it changed a bit for the better when they moved closer to the city and she began working: “everything was in reach” and she could “do anything, go anywhere” on her own without having to depend on him. She felt a lot better once they moved, and now feels generally “fine” physically and emotionally: there are “good days and bad days,” which is “normal with everybody,” since nothing is going to go “smooth all the time.”

Identities in/as Relationships / 143 Asked whether she does anything to help herself with her feelings, she responds “No.” Once she started working and had “more independence” and her “own money to spend” on what she wanted, she felt “better” about herself. She “blocks” off her problems with her husband, feeling that if she “dwelled” on it she would probably “grow an ulcer.” It’s not worth the trouble, because she knows she “can make it without him” and “he knows it too.” Because of her independence, she feels “a lot better now” than “in past years”. She knows she “can move on” and do what she has to do without him if she “really needs to.” “Blocking out” is the primary way she deals with problems with her husband and marriage, and when asked about effects of these problems on her “emotional health” or her work, she comes back to this mode of adaptation: it doesn’t affect her work because she blocks it off as she has for many years. When her close friends ask how she can “stand it,” she says “it’s just a way of life.” She knows nothing is going to change, and she doesn’t think it would be “healthy” for her children or her to “dwell on it”; if she “cried about it every night,” it would not do any good. She doesn’t tell her mother about “a lot of things” because “it upsets her more than it upsets [me],” and she evades his provocation and attempts to “pick a fight” on “bad days” when he is in a “rotten mood” and makes everybody “miserable” complaining about “everything and anything.” She recommends to her children that they follow her ways of responding and “ignore” him when he is “in his moods or starts going in a rage.” To avoid trouble, “Don’t say anything.” Her feelings of independence, based on working and having her “own money,” allow her to consider future possibilities that go beyond ignoring him. The more she contributes to household expenses, the less she “needs” him, and one day if she can “pay it all” she can “throw him out.” She feels it will end up that way, but now she needs to “build up” a little more money. Later, she remarks that their financial situation is relatively good, but he is “insecure” about money and this is a source of contention. She acknowledges that the situation “does bother” her but repeats it is “just a way of life” that she knows will not have “to go on like this forever.” Once her children are older she will be able to go on her own and “let him go his way.” In the end, although she realizes others with his background are not like him and have been successful, she attributes his feeling that “money is everything” (his “weakness”) and the differences between them to his cul-

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tural background: the culture “really clashes” because he’s from the “old country” and his way of thinking is “so bizarre.” There are marked cultural differences between Ellen R and Anna W, and equally strong differences in the particulars of their problematic marital situations. Nonetheless, the dynamic process of identity formation we find in each of their accounts is very much the same. The primary axis in their family relational space is defined by a poorly adapting husband at one pole and their own more successful mode of behavior at the other. They point out the polarity and assert their sense of agency in dealing both with their own problems—Ellen R’s serious chronic illness and Anna W’s family responsibilities—and with those resulting from their husbands’ failures to adjust effectively to their respective problems. Their sense of competence and their ability to “carve out” independent and separate lives are, at one level, survival strategies. But they go beyond that. The positive identity claims they make—agentic, realistic, independent—are structured dialectically and take on their meaning in contrast and in opposition to their husbands’ negative identities. Ellen R’s ways of managing the symptoms of her various illnesses, such as pacing herself, stopping smoking, avoiding risks, and her active engagement with her family, friends, and social activities is framed by contrast with her husband’s passivity, lack of motivation, resistance to trying new things. Anna W’s recognition of the need to adapt to American cultural patterns, of the value of vacations and other pleasurable activities and the importance of maintaining good family relationships, counters her husband’s obsession with money, his resistance to adapting to American ways, and his “bizarre way of thinking” that reflects his being “from the old country.” Our understanding of their stories as identity narratives depends on a relational conception of identity. How they define themselves, “who” they are, reflects the particulars of their social space and their ways of positioning themselves within it. In addition to supporting the relational approach applied in this chapter to craftartists’ trajectories of identity formation, these analyses extend it by specifying an important dynamic: the dialectic of negative and positive identities.

6 Narrative Studies of Identity: A Forward Look

Endings, like beginnings, can take various forms. Authors often rely on a rhetoric of authority, offering definitive summaries of what was done to suggest the work is finished and complete. This closure of the conversation with readers is something I wish to resist. The study reported in prior chapters is a work-in-progress, and I would like this concluding one to serve as an opening for others to enter into a dialogue about narrative and identity. The book is my “turn,” and I hope others will be interested in taking theirs. Readers are undoubtedly as diverse in their interests and perspectives and the sources and paths to their particular research identities as was my small group of respondents. I have argued elsewhere (Mishler, 1990) that whether researchers treat a particular study as a springboard, that is, a taking-off point for their own studies, depends on their assessment of the “trustworthiness” or credibility of the work and its findings. My claim to have met this criterion does not ensure that collective judgment. If others grant some provisional measure of credibility to the work, however, they may be prepared to draw upon it in pursuing their own interests. By this hope for a continuing conversation I neither intend or envision that other investigators will replicate the study, wholeheartedly adopt its methods, or rely on it uncritically. That would be treating it as a template, a way of production which, as David Farber observed, is neither interesting nor creative and hardly worth the necessary investment in time and energy. Rather, I assume those who choose to enter the dialogue about narrative and identity will have found something in the study relevant to

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their own work: a perspective that suggests new questions or methods applicable to their problems, or they may be more skeptical about its value and view their work as a critical response to it. Ideally, whether they see it as a resource or a target, they will recognize early on that differences between our respective studies may require them to modify and adapt the approach, making something of their own. Rereading the book, as I made final revisions, I found myself more attentive to problems that remained rather than to those I had found ways to resolve—always provisionally and tentatively—to get on with the work. Unasked and unanswered questions leaped out between the lines; limitations were glaringly obvious. I was, of course, anticipating and trying to ward off readers’ responses, since once the work entered the public arena, it would be vulnerable to criticism. Carla Stone’s mantra, the advice she follows in responding to someone who doesn’t like her work: “Well thank you, I’m glad I didn’t do it for you,” was appealing but not applicable. It closes rather than opens a conversation. On reflection, I came to see the problems I was finding as clear signs of the unfinished nature of the work, potential openings and points of departure for others in their own studies. My interior monologue of “What else needs to be done” items is a reflexive gambit within the “climate of problematization” (Curt, 1994) in which narrative research is situated. These questions intend neither to anticipate what readers may find nor to pre-empt their discoveries in favor of my own, but rather to represent my effort to turn an ending into an opening. The chapter is organized around the triad of issues with which I began, although I have reversed the original order: narrative analysis, identity formation, and the place of craftwork in contemporary society. In each section, the discussion focuses on the limitations of what “was done” and includes suggestions for future directions of work.

Narrative Analysis In reviewing the history of this project in the introductory chapter, I referred to the expansion and increased diversity of narrative studies in the human sciences during the past decade. The paucity of studies I could draw upon as a resource in my first explorations of a narrative approach has been replaced by a large corpus of research in many disciplines, representing a wide range of perspectives, models, and methods (Mishler, 1995). Narrative research is now a significant sector of work in many

Narrative Studies of Identity / 147 fields, a strong and recognized competitor to quantitative studies as well as to other forms of qualitative research. In psychology, to choose a representative example that is especially relevant to my own studies, this shift began in the mid- to late-1980s with several independent proposals for narrative inquiry as an alternative to traditional behavioral and cognitive models (Bruner, 1986; Mishler, 1986b; Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986a). This development changed the context for my work. It required that my approach to the study of narratives explicitly locate it within, and clarify its relation to, other types of research within this area of inquiry. I outlined a set of assumptions about interviewing and analyzing the resulting narrative accounts that would guide the study: interviews as dialogues; casecentered models of analysis; narrative as praxis; the analytic significance of narrative structure; stories as identity performances. These assumptions are reflected in several distinctive features of the study: presentation of and reliance on detailed transcripts of interview excerpts that display their structural features; attention to the co-production of accounts through the dialogic exchange between interviewer and respondent; a comparative approach to interpreting similarities and differences among respondents’ life stories. I believe that findings from this study about trajectories of identity formation among craftartists provide some level of confirmation of the value of the approach. Nonetheless, reviewing the work makes me cautious about claiming definitiveness or certainty about my findings and interpretations. In this post-study reflection, I do not wish to rehearse its virtues but instead will focus on limitations and problems that have become apparent—intended “openings” for further discussion and work. Hence I address the problem of drawing implications from the study, pointing to constraints on interpretation and generalization that reflect several of its specific features: the sample of respondents, mode of interviewing, and method of narrative analysis. Sample of respondents. The ad hoc process through which I selected respondents fails to meet the criteria of any recommended sampling procedure. I made no effort to ensure randomness or representativeness. Of the two “grand methods” for psychological research, I was “testing specimens” rather than “casting nets” (Runkel, 1990). Although my procedure might have been justifiable for the exploratory pilot study originally envisioned, it no longer serves this function since the five craftartists’ stories

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analyzed here are the basis for my claims. The questions are: What warrants are there for making generalizations, extrapolating beyond the particulars of these five “cases?” How can we specify the limits of such generalizations? What do we most want to learn more about regarding craftspeople, adult development, identity, and which types of “new” samples would be productive for answering these questions? In these pages and elsewhere (Mishler, 1990; Mishler, 1996), I have argued the merits for theory development of exemplars—models for studying problems in science (Kuhn, 1962/1970)—and case-centered methods of analysis. These arguments inform and undergird the approach I have followed, but they do not in themselves certify the value of my series of cases nor assure the “trustworthiness” of my findings and interpretations. Given the particular features of this group of respondents, what can we say and what can’t we say about questions of interest? First, they are similar to each other in viewing themselves as artists as well as craftspeople; with one exception, that of Adam Daley, who operates a production glass studio, they make one-of-a-kind objects. This places them in a specific sector of the larger crafts field, one where tensions between art and craft identities intersect (Becker, 1978). What we learn from them about the effects of such strains—which are part of a larger historical and cultural discourse, and built into training institutions and marketing venues—has implications for theories of adult development and identity formation. We can also, I think, have some reasonable level of confidence that such strains might appear in the lives of other persons who face analogous but different identity conflicts. The respondents also differ in gender, age, craft medium. I made more of the effects of gender differences, as they show up in conflicts between family and work demands and responsibilities, than of other dissimilarities. Beth Rivers, for example, had to struggle against her gender-defined family roles to find a way to justify pursuing her “love of art.” Men did not have to justify their choices. Both Beth R and Carla Stone stressed the importance of achieving financial independence, of making it “on their own.” For the men, motives for earning a living took another form—that they be able to support their families—and when this proved difficult, as for David Farber and Fred Wharton, they felt frustrated and unhappy. These differences are rooted in the larger sociocultural context of normatively defined gender roles. Variation in these definitions along, for example, axes of social class, ethnicity, and religion are important to con-

Narrative Studies of Identity / 149 sider in any work on this topic. But I assume provisionally that my respondents are “members” of the large, white, middle-class, collegeeducated sub-group in our society (often viewed as the dominant one), who live within the same general framework of gender specifications. Our few cases may therefore be considered “representative” not in the statistical sense but within the alternative rubric of “exceptionless lawfulness” proposed by Kurt Lewin in his argument for individual case studies as a counter to the “frequency equals lawfulness” assumption of mainstream psychological research (Lewin, 1935). From that perspective, we can reasonably expect to find some version of these differences and their associated impacts on identity development among other women and men members of the group to which our respondents belong. These examples make the general point that implications for theory and some empirical generalizations can be drawn from a small number of cases, and suggest ways to do this that are sensitive to the constraints and limitations of their special characteristics. We can say very little, however, on other topics that reflect particularities of this respondent sample and have a more limited range of reference than gender. For example, the career trajectories of these craftartists, who are similar to each other in being relatively successful and having had academic training in the arts and crafts, may be—are likely to be—quite different from those of massmarket production craftworkers, such as studio potters, folk-artists, or part-time home handicrafts makers. My sample is too narrow and restricted to permit generalizations to their situations. Moreover, I cannot compare craftartists with other types of craftspeople nor contextualize their lives and work experiences within their larger occupational sphere. As a consequence, I cannot justify on the basis of my interviews alone statements about the place of crafts in society. But I have made such statements and will continue to do so, drawing on other information and others’ studies. Nonetheless, my findings add very little to what is already available. Clearly, more work needs to be done here; most obviously, studies of the lives of other types of craftspeople. It would be particularly valuable to collect life histories from individuals who started working in the crafts and then stopped at some time. This would help us understand more clearly both the motivations and resources of those who continue despite obstacles, as my respondents did. This is not a trivial issue, since we know that a large proportion of students who complete arts degrees do not pursue careers as artists (Freeman, 1993a).

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Mode of interviewing. My approach to interviewing as a dialogic relationship developed as a critique of “standardized” survey-type schedules and questionnaires that relied on a stimulus-response model of the questioning-answering process (Mishler, 1986b). I urged the importance of attending to how respondents and interviewers together negotiate the “meanings” of questions and responses, and to the effects of different forms of researcher-subject relationships. I followed my own recommendations in this study. They are intended to: redistribute the usual hierarchical power relationship between interviewers and respondents; allow interviews to be respondent-guided so we may listen to their ways of telling—their “voices”; and represent the process through which accounts are produced more fully than is usual. One critic of this approach, which he labels “postpositivist,” argues that it still relies on positivist research assumptions that there is “a ‘reality’ out there that the researcher can accurately capture or represent, given the use of improved research methods” (Scheurich, 1997, p. 66). As an alternative, he proposes a “postmodernist” approach that would acknowledge the “radical indeterminate ambiguity or openness that lies at the heart of the interview interaction itself, as the lived intersection of language, meaning, and communication” (p. 74). I do not wish to spell out a counter-critique, although I believe my approach attends to multiple “realities” rather than a singular one, but I am certainly guilty of the reparative aim he criticizes, of wanting to “improve” current methods. I cite his postmodernist line of criticism to call attention to an approach further away than my own from the positivist tradition, which, on reflection, I recognize as having influenced my initial movement toward narrative studies (Mishler, 1997a). Scheurich offers a more distant anchor point for considering and assessing the relative values of alternative methods and aims of interviewing. I have become aware, in the years that have passed since I interviewed the craftartists included in this study, of two further limitations of my interviewing procedure. Regrettably, I did not follow one of my standard recommendations to students and colleagues engaged in studies of personal narratives or life history research, namely, that they interview their respondents more than once—twice at a minimum. Second interviews, separated by relatively brief intervals of time in studies focused on specific life events or bounded domains of interest, turn out to be particularly rich. Responses to the first interview may be clarified, elaborated, and sometimes changed in important ways. Multiple interviews are routine in

Narrative Studies of Identity / 151 ethnographic case studies and are often found in longitudinal research on development and identity, as in examples I referred to at an earlier point (Cairns & Cairns, 1994; Kotre, 1984; Vaillant, 1977). I believe they should become the default standard in all interview research, but their value has become particularly clear in studies of the impact of traumatic, life-changing events, such as chronic illness and violence (Bell, 1988; Bell, 1998; Rich, 1996). Adaptation to trauma does not follow a linear, progressive course that is projectible from a one-shot interview at any point in the process. Successive interviews—their number and spacing depending on what happened and the aims of the study—are necessary to understand how identities change as alternative modes of adaptation and strategies for living are explored and tested. This was not clear to me when I began my “pilot” study, however, and although I asked respondents if I might return to talk to them again, I never followed up. Despite my emphasis on the situatedness of “tellings,” which argues against any conception of one “true” life story and emphasizes the importance of discontinuities in life trajectories, I have only one “telling” at one point in time. I have no way of knowing how these stories might have changed with retellings, or how my interpretations might require revision. I am stuck with what I have. The usual caution about the provisional, tentative nature of any one study’s findings must be underlined. This critical reflection is not intended simply as a mea culpa but as a strong recommendation to other researchers. The second failing has to do with the relationship I established with my respondents. On many occasions I have been critical of the lack of reciprocity and mutuality between researchers and subjects endemic in studies in psychology and the social sciences. An asymmetry of power is the relational context within which we pursue our interests and tend to turn our subjects into “objects.” One explicit aim of my “reparative” efforts, of my turn away from standard interviewing procedures toward listening to stories in informant-guided interviews, was to reduce the usual hierarchical relationship and “empower” respondents—a position initially motivated by my studies of clinical encounters and then extended to research interviews (Mishler, 1984; Mishler, 1986b). Although I tried to follow my own advice, this study does not represent a radical change in the research relationship. In other respects than my mode of interviewing and analytic focus on narrative, I did what researchers have always done, making sure I still “owned” the work: for example, I did not share transcripts of the in-

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terviews with my respondents for review and discussion, nor did I send them advance copies of this book’s chapters for their comments; they will see it for the first time after publication. This is a far cry from proposals made and implemented for forms of “participatory” or “collaborative” research, particularly by feminist scholars and investigators (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger & Tarule, 1986; Bell, 1988; Lykes, 1997; White, 1998). This type of research is complex and difficult. Nonetheless, if we seriously intend our work to be a resource for people in their efforts to change the world and better their lives, then we need do more than simply change our methods of interviewing. We must find ways to enter into partnerships with our subject-collaborators, reconstructing our perspective on science and research and turning it into a joint enterprise. Method of narrative analysis. There are many forms of narrative analysis, and reviews of the field compare them in different ways (Cortazzi, 1993; Mishler, 1995; Riessman, 1993; Toolan, 1988). I adapted a sociolinguistic model proposed by James Gee that focuses on speech markers for parsing discourse into hierarchically nested units of analysis and attends to both content and structure (Gee, 1985; Gee, 1991). His approach is inclusive, allowing us to track both well-bounded stories and other types of discourse common in relatively unstructured interviews. Beyond procedures for transcribing and representing speech, which are only partially specified by any analytic model (Mishler, 1991), all researchers face problems of selecting and organizing for presentation what is always too much data. My approach reflected the case-centered comparative approach I used and was guided by concerns with theoretical and research problems in studies of adult development and identity. In sum, I wanted to compare career trajectories and identity claims among my several respondents in ways that were relevant to general issues in work on life-span development. These considerations served as initial selection criteria, and they became more precise as I specified particular issues that moved to the forefront of the study, for example, universality vs. variation and continuity vs. discontinuity in achieving identities as craftartists. In the end, only a small part of each interview appears in the book. For example, a 100-page doublespaced transcript, the text of my two-hour interview with Carla Stone, is represented in twelve separate short transcripts. The amount of material presented from her interview is at the high end, so a rough-and-ready esti-

Narrative Studies of Identity / 153 mate would be that my analyses are restricted to about ten percent of each interview. This radical reduction of available “data”—an omnipresent feature of narrative studies—accompanied a more thematic form of analysis and interpretation than is found in many sociolinguistically oriented studies, which also use small pieces of text but focus on syntactic or other linguistic components of discourse and story structure (Capps & Ochs, 1995; Schiffrin, 1996). The Gee model lends itself well to a thematic approach, since grouping lines into stanzas depends on their being about the same “topic.” Interview excerpts used in the analysis were selected on the basis of their issue-relevance, for example, whether they referred to early childhood memories of artistic involvement, as in the chapter on variability in sources of and routes to their adult identities. The import of this selection strategy as a constraint on interpretation may be clearer if we contrast it with the choice of materials on the basis of their apparent importance to the individual. As it turned out, the childhood experiences selected on the basis of relevance were recalled as important by some respondents but not others. For the former, it was possible to relate and compare these early signs to the development of their adult work identities, but we do not know what the others might have counted as important and consequential childhood experiences. On the other hand, we know that an early start is not a prerequisite for achieving an identity as a craftartist. The advantages of a comparative approach were evident, I believe, in what could be said about the assumption of universal stages in developmental theories. But the advantages had their costs, as happens in the choice of any research strategy, which limit the range of inferences that can be made. In addition to these methodological issues—sampling, interviewing, and analysis procedures—some critics of narrative research regard the value placed on personal narratives as problematic. Their argument is directed to questions of theory and interpretation and provides a bridge to the following section on identity formation. Instead of taking narrative researchers to task for their lack of scientific rigor (a frequent complaint of mainstream positivist researchers), these critics view them as inattentive to and uncritical of the larger sociocultural context within which telling personal stories to interviewers and other strangers has become a culturally sanctioned activity. Rather than providing access to the “authentic” self (a view they attribute to narrative researchers) personal narratives are

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“strategies for the cultivation of the self” (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997, p. 319). “Romanticizing” the self, we narrative researchers are said to fail to locate this pervasive activity within an “interview society” and its “confessional culture.” Our uncritical view of the “subject” becomes an “implicit endorsement” of the dominant ideology, since we lack a critical vantage point from which to question its “taken-for-granted modes of reproduction” (p. 322). What can we learn from this line of criticism that might clarify, deepen, and strengthen our studies? Although it is not difficult to find studies that uncritically assume the “authenticity” and singularity of a life story as a “revelation” of the “true” inner self, many narrative researchers recognize these are problematic assumptions. For example, I referred at earlier points to various approaches to the “non-unitary” nature of the self that emphasize the multiplicity of life stories, the cultural “master” narratives they appropriate and resist, and the effects of the contexts in which they are produced. But we need to be more explicit about the new assumptions we substitute for those we discard or avoid. What is the “fit” between different tellings of one’s life? What are the consequences of these differences for theories of human development and identity? Which narrative models and methods are most useful for comparative analysis, whether applied to one person’s stories or to those of several people? These questions merit more attention, not simply to answer criticism of our “privileging” of the self, but as problems that require clarification if our work is to go forward.

Identity Formation The center of gravity of this book, to which all its parts converge, is both a critique of several prevailing assumptions in studies of life-span development and the presentation of an alternative perspective. The methods adopted for analyzing and interpreting personal narratives were intended as a beginning step toward building a new model of identity development centered on: inter-individual variability, discontinuities and turning points, the multiplicity of self-definitions, the relational grounding of identities. Despite the limitations of a one-shot interview study for examining life-course development, I believe it provided grounds for claims about the inadequacy of such assumptions as universal stages and continuity. Fleshing out the proposed alternatives, however, requires more detailed studies of developmental processes and sequences.

Narrative Studies of Identity / 155 Significant moves in this direction are already evident in several studies cited in earlier chapters, such as Thelen’s proposal of a “multicausal” model of development, based on detailed laboratory studies of the variable paths followed by infants in learning to reach for and grasp objects (Thelen et al., 1993); Magnusson’s “holistic perspective” (Magnusson, 1993), used as a theoretical resource in the Cairns’s longitudinal study that tracks individual developmental trajectories (Cairns & Cairns, 1994); Kotre’s comparative case study that proposes an alternative to universal stage models of identity development (Kotre, 1984); and Vaillant’s largesample study of life histories that documents the inadequacy of the assumption of predictability across the life course (Vaillant, 1977). In this brief review of new directions in research and theory, I have explicitly noted the types of designs and methods used to highlight the variety of alternative approaches and the intimate relation between method and theory. Although we may distinguish analytically between the latter pair of terms, they are mutually dependent. Relations between them are reciprocal and dialectical, with cross-cutting arrows of influence. For example, the dominant model for human development research is embedded in a network of assumptions about scientific criteria, laws, and warrants for assessing the applicability of findings to the “real world,” that is, the generalizability of findings beyond the confines of the laboratory and other presumably equivalent data-production settings. Among the key assumptions, as we have seen, are (1) the conception of a scientific “law” as a proposition based on the frequency of occurrences, and (2) the central place of prediction, in the specific sense of a statistical association between variables. The use of large “representative” samples, standardized instruments to measure variables, and methods of aggregate statistical analysis— the signifying features of mainstream psychological and social science research—fit well with the frequency-law model of science. These methods are also well adapted to serve the needs for predictability of administrators, policy-makers, marketing strategists, and others who rely in their work on information about the composition and movement of populations, but are of less value for theoretical understanding of lives and the intricate processes of identity formation. Critics of the dominant research model in psychology have argued that it leads to the “abandonment of the search for universal psychological phenomena that apply equally to all people” while concentrating on general causal statements that refer to populations. These claims do not “necessarily apply to the in-

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dividual” and hence are of “foremost interest to the state and its administrators” (Gigerenzer et al., 1989, pp. 89–90). Changes in method, theory, and practice are mutually implicative. My recommendation for case-centered as an alternative to variable-centered research (Mishler, 1996) includes both a specification of methods for studying sequences of events and an argument for theories that take into account alternative trajectories or types of developmental progression. The relevance of this work is apparent for educational policies and practices, as well as for medical specialties and other fields that focus on changes across the life span. My proposal is in close accord with Magnusson’s “person-centered” holistic model that emphasizes the dynamic interaction of sub-systems within individuals and leads to methods for discovering different “patterns” of development and clusters of individuals that follow different paths (Magnusson, 1988; Magnusson, 1993; Magnusson & Bergman, 1990). Several innovative studies that more directly address the relation between narratives and identity provide new theoretical understandings of how our identities are situated and performed. Rather than relying on the usual researcher-subject distinction to study how social categories of color and race influence “shifting social identities,” Brinton Lykes and Amelia Mallona interviewed each other (Lykes & Mallona, 1996). This “co-interview” revealed to them that their respective awarenesses of being “white” or “brown/ mixed/mestiza“ took multiple and diverse forms at “different historical moments and within different social contexts” (pp. 312–313). They challenged and questioned each other’s perceptions and interpretations, an approach that departs radically from the usual notions about researcher neutrality and objectivity and the sharp demarcation between interviewer and interviewee. Exploring how “the root metaphor of color was reinscribed in place and time” led to a more complex level of understanding: “Whiteness was identified as both a system of structural relations linked to privilege as well as a mobile self-identifier that changes through lived experience of race, gender and social class and through praxis” (p. 319). Arlene Katz and John Shotter take another approach to deconstruct the traditional researcher-subject relationship, which they call the “practice of a social poetics” (Katz & Shotter, 1996, p. 919). It involves the intervention of a “cultural go-between” who “mediates” between doctors and patients in diagnostic interviews, adopting a “relational, dialogical stance” to listen for “special kinds of ‘arresting’, ‘moving’, ‘living’, or ‘poetic’ mo-

Narrative Studies of Identity / 157 ments” that may occur but go unnoticed in the usual medical frame of such interviews. They argue that if such “moments of epiphany” are “responded to appropriately, patients can be invited to live out in such interviews a relation to their illness meaningful to them” (p. 919). This takes seriously the conception of narrative as praxis. In the ensuing coconstruction and re-construction of stories, the hierarchical dichotomies of researcher-subject, patient-physician dissolve. Patients’ stories, situated in a new relational space, are elaborated in ways that enlarge and deepen our understanding of what they mean. “Human agents” are viewed “less as a locus of representation, and more as engaged in embodied dialogical practices,” acting “in and on the world around them, from within specific relational involvements with others” (p. 919). The key minimum requirement for this type of research/practice is a “poetic sensibility,” not only a “special sensitivity to the language of self and other, but also to the positions of speakers and their addressees” (p. 928). Mark Freeman suggests an approach to studies of narrative and identity he calls a “poetics of life history” and applies it to the analysis of autobiographical texts (Freeman, 1993b). He argues that poets “do not customarily strive for a mimetic representation of the world” but “rewrite the world” in ways that allow readers to find themselves “learning or seeing or feeling something about it that might ordinarily have gone unnoticed or unexplicated” (p. 222). He proposes that this could serve as well as a model for understanding personal narratives and life histories: “the narrative imagination engaged in the project of rewriting the self, seeks to disclose, articulate, and reveal that very world which, literally, would not have existed had the act of writing not taken place. . . . life histories are indeed artifacts of writing” (p. 223). From this perspective, he critiques the notion of development as “adhering strictly to the forward-looking arrow of linear time.” Rather, it is “bound up” with narrative and “thoroughly contingent on the backward gaze of recollection” (p. 224). We must be “willing to read the text of a life both backward and forward” (p. 226). Freeman asserts that the value of this mode of inquiry lies in its being “attuned to the poetic figuration of life itself—both as lived and as told,” which opens up an “enlarged understanding of self and world” (p. 231). This triad of studies radically challenges fundamental assumptions about theory and research in the human sciences, opening up new spaces for inquiry beyond the amorphous boundaries of current narrative research. What we can learn from such border crossings is not only how

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much remains to be done to fulfill the early promise of the “narrative turn,” but how many interesting paths there are to explore. The hope is that these works will turn out to be harbingers of new theory-methodpractice matrices within which researchers will situate studies of human development and identity.

Craftwork in Contemporary Society The American Craft Council (ACC) is the pre-eminent U.S. national crafts organization. It founded the American Craft Museum in the mid-1950s, organizes annual juried crafts fairs, grants awards to eminent craftartists, publishes a bi-monthly magazine, American Craft, and has been in the forefront of efforts to raise the status of crafts by legitimating its claim to be a form of art. This orientation is evidenced in the evocative title of the inaugural exhibition and accompanying catalogue celebrating the museum’s move in the mid-1980s to a new building: Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical (Smith & Lucie-Smith, 1986). Poetry is emblematic of the fine arts, of high culture. Accenting this feature of the “physical,” the materiality of the craft object, places beauty above the traditional primary criteria in the crafts field, that is, virtuosity and utility (Becker, 1978). Crafts exhibits at art museums, which have become more frequent in recent years, often express a similar view about the “artistic” qualities of contemporary crafts, but may give it a different spin. For example, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, mounted a show about the same time as the American Craft Museum and called it The Eloquent Object: The Evolution of American Art in Craft Media since 1945. (Manhart, Manhart & Haralson, 1987). This title directly shifts and respecifies the boundary between the arts and crafts: “art” made of wood, glass, ceramics is still ART and has a legitimate place in an art museum, and pieces by “real” artists stood side-by-side with those by craftartists. Becker describes various types of shifts back and forth across the art-craft border, and attendant reframings of criteria that specify what work belongs where. The Philbrook show is a good example of what he refers to as “Art invades craft,” where artists are not only indifferent to the utility criterion but “want to make sure that the works they produce cannot be used as people have been accustomed to using them” (Becker, 1978, pp. 867–868). Contesting views about the line of demarcation between art and craft may be elided by exhibits that focus on an earlier period in the crafts, be-

Narrative Studies of Identity / 159 fore World War II and its postwar university training programs and academic degrees. Within the context of other exhibits of contemporary crafts as art forms, these “histories” serve implicitly to support a view of progressive change and transformation in the meaning of crafts. For example, an exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—also in the 1980s— was titled “The Art That Is Life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920 (Kaplan, 1987). The opening essay in the MFA catalog begins by pointing to the quotation in its title as a “succinct expression of the ideal underlying the Arts and Crafts movement.” The shade of William Morris hovers approvingly in the wings: “Convinced that industrialization had caused the degradation of work, Arts and Crafts reformers created works with deliberate social messages. Their designs conveyed strong convictions about what was wrong with society and reflected prescriptions for living.” The movement was not “monolithic,” not so much a “style” as an “attitude toward the making of objects.” Some participants urged a return to “medieval craft systems” while others “retreated to utopian communities.” The exhibit aimed at inclusiveness, with work by all who shared this broadly defined movement goal: “rationalizing, simplifying, and unifying work and environment” (p. 52). Though less prescriptive and more wistfully hopeful than utopian, an ACC fund-raising letter for the “Generations to Come” program it established, echoes that early ideal: “As the most industrialized century in history draws to a close, crafts stand as testimony to a belief in the value of works of the hand. Your gift greatly enhances the Council’s ability to create an environment where craft will be cherished by this and future generations” (personal communication). This appeal is in support of a craftsappreciation and education project for young people, alerting them to possible careers in the crafts, fostering interest in and appreciation of craft objects, and with the more implicit aim that if they learn to “cherish” them as children they may as adults become buyers and collectors. I am not being ironic or disparaging their long-term goal of developing a market for crafts. The difficulty of earning a living from their work was omnipresent for my respondents, and the situation is no better for the vast majority of craftspeople as we learned from a national survey of their incomes. We also know that the utopian dreams motivating participants in the Arts and Crafts Movement were shattered by the discovery that only the well-off could afford to buy what they made. They could not compete

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in the mass market of factory-produced products, and most of the businesses they started failed soon after. This does not mean that the rhetoric of the Poetry of the Physical or the Eloquent Object is suspect, to be understood primarily as a marketing strategy. My respondents did what they did because they wished to make beautiful, expressive objects. The deep, intractable problem is the high cost this entails: the expense of training and higher education, of equipment and space, marketing, and time. Selling one’s work at the highest price the market will bear does not ensure turning a profit, much less making a livable income: the survey noted above calculates the mean net income of craftspeople as $345, with many reporting losses. It may seem odd that in concluding a study focused on life stories and the developmental trajectories through which craftartists achieve their adult identities, I turn to economic factors and the institutional structure of arts and crafts as socially constructed spheres of work. Yet these are the contexts that condition and shape what they do and who they are. I do not want to leave an impression of them as alone in their studios, expressing their talents and interests, and telling me stories. Rather, I wish to place them within the concrete, material circumstances of their lives. Defining themselves and gaining public recognition as craftartists are not simply matters of personal preference. To do so locates them within a particular sector of the arts and crafts worlds that in turn defines the audience and market for their work. Their tales of problems and achievements express strategies of adaptation and survival. These stories are like manuals of instruction for how to work and live within the limitations and possibilities of contemporary society, in much the same way folk-tales served eighteenth-century French peasants: not an “arbitrary figment of some collective imagination,” but an expression of “the common basis of experience in a given social order” (Darnton, 1984, p. 23), a way to “make sense of the world,” showing “how the world is made and how one can cope with it” (p. 64). This perspective does not fully resolve my own dilemma but helps to clarify it. I began this project after completing a study of medical encounters (Mishler, 1984), deciding to interview craftartists with the conscious intent of doing research on a “happier” topic. I came to it, as I have mentioned before, with utopian yearnings and a somewhat romantic image of the crafts as a form of nonalienated labor in an otherwise alienating society. The late-nineteenth-century critiques of Marx and Morris that in-

Narrative Studies of Identity / 161 formed the “craftsman ideal” of the Arts and Crafts Movement also framed my approach. I may have viewed the crafts as redemptive, though this is not a term I would use and still shy away from its religious-moral connotations. The utopian vision retains its hold on me, a viable counterpoint to forms of work required by the market-driven economy of late capitalism. But redemption is too heavy a burden to place in the hands of craftartists; it is unrealistic and even patronizing in assigning to them the task of “saving” us. My respondents had a less romantic image of what they were about, were keenly aware of the constraints of “how the world is made,” and tried to find ways to continue with their work within that reality. It is hard and demanding work, they all acknowledged—frustrating, as Fred Wharton said, to work hard all one’s life, investing so much time and energy, and end up just “getting by.” At the same time, none of them would willingly give up their work. As Carla Stone told us, this is what she “had to do.” They also felt they had something distinctive to contribute to society. In the words of Adam Daley, for children to grow up to become “beautiful people” depends on their being able to see and touch “beautiful objects.” These artists know the world will not easily be remade, that it is constructed tightly to serve some interests and not others. David Farber hopes for “democratic” furniture designed to reflect the lives of the working class rather than society’s elite, but he is pessimistic about realizing that possibility. Adam Daley says someone should “take an Allen wrench” to society to change it. The dilemma I referred to above has to do with the gap between reality and the utopian vision—something that is neither surprising nor unique to the crafts, since if we lived in paradise we could not possibly have dreams of a better life. But if the crafts cannot be redemptive, what value do they have for us? I believe their significance lies in their potential subversiveness, my preferred, more secular and socially focused concept meaning “to overthrow from the foundation.” This fits a portrayal of the crafts as alternative forms of work that collectively resist “the necessity of the current organization of production,” offering “inspiration” and giving us a point of reference for those “moments” that “still occur when the utopian element breaks through” (Boris, 1986, p. 193). This closing meditation on the crafts would be incomplete if I failed to acknowledge its import for my own work. I honed my craft as a narrative researcher in this study as I learned from craftartists how and why they did

162 / S T O R Y L I N E S

their work. In a sense, I was their apprentice. To think of research as a craft or a skilled practice is not too big a stretch. I became aware of certain analogies with crafts that may deepen our understanding of how narrative research differs from other forms of inquiry. For example, narrative researchers focus on the particulars of individual cases, constructing them through our analyses as one-of-a-kind “objects.” We try to be sensitive to our “materials,” designing our methods to fit what we observe and hear rather than applying a one-shoe-fits-all approach. We may even learn (though we are still far from this) to take pride in the fact that our work bears our “signature” rather than being concerned that it doesn’t look the same as all the other studies in our field. Finally, the most important implication of aligning ourselves with the crafts is the recognition that we share a subversive intent. We must continue to reaffirm the initial inspiration for narrative studies as a “moment” of resistance to the dominant research paradigm. This utopian element, the “warm current” that is “intrinsic to any radical project” (Mishler, 1998, pp. 4–5) will continue to move the work forward, keep it fresh and imaginative, and sustain us through uncertain and difficult times.

Notes References

Notes

Preface 1. I assume anyone engaged in a long-term project develops a metaphor to capture the process. Nonetheless, it was somewhat uncanny to come across this statement by the German film-maker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder: “I would like to build a house with my films. Some are the basement, others the walls, and still others are the windows. I hope that by the end we will have a house” (Boston Globe, October 2, 1997). Tony Kushner, the Angels in America playwright, offers a more “opulent” image: “Baking lasagna has long been my own personal paradigm for writing a play. . . . A good play, like a good lasagna, should be overstuffed: It has a pomposity and an overreach . . . It is pretentious food” (Kushner, 1995, pp. 61–62). 2. Elsewhere, I argued that various forms of “inquiry-guided” research were essential features of scientific practice, found pervasively in experimental and quantitative studies as well as qualitative research (Mishler, 1990). The changes noted here are only one of the many ways in which this study changed in response to findings from earlier stages. This instance of “renovation” of a draft manuscript suggests that in addition to data collection and analysis procedures, “writing” deserves to be recognized as a research practice, and readers’ responses viewed as an analogue to “findings.” It is thus worth noting that the significance of different forms of textual representation in reports of scientific findings has received considerable attention in social studies of science (Haraway, 1989; Lynch & Woolgar, 1990; Mishler, October 1994; Pickering, 1992; Simons, 1989). 3. The analysis of structure is a prominent motif in literary criticism. Helen Vendler argues that the meaning of a poem—its “moral world”—cannot be understood unless we first answer the technical question of how it works as a “verbal contraption,” including “not only the semantic units we call ‘words’ but all the language games in which words can participate” (Vendler, 1997, p. 11). This is an equally strong requirement for our understanding of life history narratives.

166 / Notes to Pages 1–11

1. Studying the Lives and Work of Craftartists 1. The problematic of beginnings and the textual strategy of beginnings are explored by Robert Ray (Ray, 1995), who in turn borrowed them from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (p. 1). 2. Well aware of the limited possibilities for social change in the emphasis on handiwork, Morris shifted his attention and energies in later years to more direct political activity, campaigning and writing for the nascent British Socialist party. Never giving up his utopian vision, he reframed the significance of craftsmanship in terms of a more general movement for social/political liberation and a “protest against intellectual tyranny.” See Boris, 1986, p. 12. 3. A more recent national survey of “artists” (Jeffri, 1998) reports income data for 1988 and 1997. Although not directly comparable to the 1980 study, since craftspeople are included in the sample but not distinguished from other artists, and the data are presented in a slightly different form, the overall findings paint an equally bleak and unchanging financial situation. About half report a yearly income of less than $3,000 from their art; one quarter earn less than $500. Median gross income, including other sources, was between $25–30,000 as in the earlier survey, though it is not clear whether this was individual or household income. 4. My concept of sub-identities and the problematic of their reciprocal relationships resonates with alternative framings of the same problem proposed by feminist researchers, who suggest different terms: “multiple selves” (Josselson, 1996, pp. 243–44); “shifting social identities” (Lykes & Mallona, 1996, p. 313); “nonunitary subjectivity,” a postmodernist formulation to “theorize the subject as a ‘site of identity production’ (quoting Gilmore)” (Bloom & Munro, 1995, pp. 99–100). 5. Donald Campbell, one of the most sophisticated methodologists in psychology, dismissed case studies as nonscientific in the influential monograph on quasiexperimental designs he co-authored with Julian Stanley (Campbell & Stanley, 1963). Later he came to view case studies as having distinctive value, but he based his reassessment on a model of statistical reasoning that retained the Fisherian model of experimental design and the analysis of variance and thus did not break with the dominant tradition (Campbell, 1979). 6. That this problem is not peculiar to cross-sectional studies of “stages” in cognitive or linguistic development is evident in John Kotre’s observation about longitudinal case studies within the Eriksonian framework. Rejecting the strong version of Erikson’s stage theory, he states: “Elegant and compelling though stage theory is, it has fit poorly any life I have studied” (Kotre, 1984, p. 262). 7. Twenty years after Miller’s observation, alternative theoretical models have been proposed that focus on variation in developmental pathways (Cairns & Cairns, 1994; Cole, 1996; Magnusson, 1988; Magnusson & Casaer, 1993), accompanied by a proliferation of methods for studying trajectories of complex change in individuals and social systems. For psychology see Collins & Horn, 1991; for sociology and comparative history see Abbott, 1983; Abbott & Forrest, 1986; Abbott & Hrycak, 1990; for neurobehavioral development see Thelen, 1995; Thelen, Corbetta, Kamm, Schneider & Zernicke, 1993; Thelen & Smith, 1994; and my own and others’ work on personal narratives Mishler, 1995. 8. This requirement is rarely satisfied even in case studies and other forms of “qualitative” research. Typically, investigators use coding procedures to select and cat-

Notes to Page 11 / 167 egorize speech or textual units, extract them from their contexts, and then assemble them across individuals as “themes,” derived either from a priori theories or through induction. The logic of this analytic approach is no different from that used in statistical analyses and has the same consequence: individual stories and event sequences are displaced by group-based totalizing categories. Polkinghorne (Polkinghorne, 1995) makes a similar point. Relying on a distinction between “paradigmatic” and “narrative” ways of knowing (Bruner, 1986), he distinguishes between two contrasting types of narrative studies that correspond to the two forms of cognition: the “analysis of narratives” and “narrative analysis.” The former is paradigmatic in its methods of description and analysis—focused on themes and taxonomies, it moves from “stories to common elements”; the latter moves from “elements to stories,” configuring events or episodes into plots (p. 12). The “analytic task” of the second approach is not to construct general categories but to “discover a plot” that links elements as “parts of an unfolding temporal development culminating in the denouement” (p. 15). 9. Recent studies of motor development in infants and young children provide an instructive example how close observation of individual cases may shift the direction of research and theory in a field of inquiry (Thelen, 1995; Thelen et al., 1993; Thelen & Smith, 1994). Finding that each child follows a distinctive path to competent reaching and walking though all in the end achieve competence, Thelen observes that their “account of early reaching would have been impossible with cross-sectional group data or traditional analyses. . . . infants were so variable that averaging them together on any measure would have only obscured their individual solutions” (1993, p. 1093). Thelen proposes a “multicausal” model of development: “developmental change is not planned but arises within a context as the product of multiple, developing elements” (1995, p. 82). Their “hallmark” is “the formation of patterns, often themselves complex in time and space, in an entirely self-organizing fashion. . . . This organization arises only from the confluence of the components within a particular environmental context” (p. 83). She raises serious questions about theories of development that rely on built-in structures “expressed” in some fixed sequential order: “. . . cognition is emergent from the same dynamic processes as those governing early cycles of perception and action. . . . higher order mental activities, including categorization, concept formation, and language, must arise in a self-organizing manner from the recurrent real-time activities of the child just as reaching develops from cycles of matching hand to target. . . . just as hand trajectories are not computed, but discovered and assembled within the act of reaching, so too does thinking arise within the contextual, historical, and time-dependent activity of the moment. The web of causality is intricate and seamless from the moment of birth” (p. 92). 10. Kagan’s critique has been repeated at various intervals. For example, see a review of developmental psychology by Bronfenbrenner, Kessel, Kessen & White, 1986. They observe that the field “has been committed to the proposition that human development is regular and progressive” but this “old notion . . . won’t wash any longer. . . . is irreversibly no longer even marginally tenable” (pp. 1218–19). They link their argument to a methodological failing in the field: “After infancy, developmental psychology becomes the study of variables, not the study of systems, organisms, or live things living” (pp. 1219–20). Michael and Marjorie Rutter (Rutter & Rutter, 1993) concur with this view of the continuity assumption as problematic and emphasize the significance of two types of discontinuities: “transitions” and “turning points” (p. 357).

168 / Notes to Pages 15–20 11. Even the taken-for-granted notions of events and temporal order in narratives have been called into question, particularly by anthropologists. Thus the coherence of accounts by Liberian oral historians depends not on the chronology of events but on shifts in geographic and social/political positions of families and clans (Tonkin, 1992); the story of a hunt is shaped by the affective trajectory of the hunt rather than the sequence of episodes (Rosaldo, 1986). 12. Interviewers are not immune to the cultural imperative for “coherent” stories. Lawrence Langer’s analysis of Holocaust survivors’ accounts of their experiences in Nazi death camps during World War II shows the impact of this imperative (Langer, 1991). Although survivors reported “living through” unpredictable, life-threatening, chance events that made no sense in any ordinary meaning of that term, interviewers pressed them to tell coherent stories with beginnings, middles, and ends—preferably happy endings of liberation. Langer argues that the “placid” and “innocent” conception of identity (Taylor, 1989), grounded in an understanding of “what it is to be a human agent,” denies the experience of the Holocaust whose survivors show “what it meant (and means) in our time to exist without a sense of human agency. . . . the consequences of . . . an estrangement from nature until one is alienated from the self that Taylor equates with identity” (p. 199). 13. Several reviews and edited collections are useful guides to alternative approaches, with the caution that collectively they do not cover everything (Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995; Martin, 1986; Mishler, 1995; Riessman, 1993; Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992; Sarbin, 1986b; Toolan, 1988). 14. Michel de Certeau refers to the “tactics,” “ruses,” and “procedures of everyday creativity” that constitute the “practices of everyday life” as a process of “secondary production” through which we “poach” upon culturally available images and representations, reappropriating and transforming them for our own purposes (de Certeau, 1984/1974, p. xiv). 15. Michael Lynch’s characterization of laboratory “shop talk” applies more generally: “The sensibility of laboratory shop talk was achieved as a situated relationship of the talk in the unfolding details of laboratory projects. . . . [It] relied upon a hearer’s competence with, or sensitivity to, the temporal occurrence of an utterance in an unfolding scene of organized shop practices” (Lynch, 1985, pp. 161–62). 16. There has been much debate in recent years about issues of reference and representation—the larger discourse that frames White’s concerns. The “crisis of representation” sparked by the postmodernist critique of the transparency of language and assumptions about its referential adequacy has been a contentious topic among historians (Berkhofer, 1995), sociologists of science (Mishler, October 1994, for a review), and researchers in various disciplines in which empirical inquiry is highly valued. 17. Vendler sharply criticizes the notion that “paraphrasing” a poem, and thereby ignoring its structure, can reveal its meaning: “any respectable account of a poem ought to have considered closely its chief formal features. A set of remarks on a poem which would be equally true of a prose paraphrase of that poem is not, by my standards, interpretation at all. Commentary on the propositional content of the poem is something entirely different from the interpretation of a poem, which must take into account the poem’s linguistic strategies as well as its propositional statements” (Vendler, 1997, p. 40). Paraphrase is widely used in qualitative research on narratives

Notes to Pages 20–52 / 169 and life histories. It takes different forms, each of which deletes structural features: using coding categories or general themes to summarize stretches of talk; restating respondents’ statements in researchers’ words; presenting severely edited fragments of talk, often only for illustrative purposes. I believe Vendler’s stricture merits serious attention from narrative researchers. It seems to me a more productive path to follow than continuing to neglect the role of structure in the “meaning” of stories. 18. Compared to other approaches for transcribing speech (Jefferson, 1978; Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Mishler, 1991; Psathas & Anderson, 1990), Gee’s method allows us to track stories over extended stretches of talk that are prominent features of unstructured interviews.

2. Sources and Routes 1. In earlier papers I develop a more extended critique of coding procedures, including such problems as decontextualization, standardization, reliability, use of ad hoc assumptions(Mishler, 1979; Mishler, 1984; Mishler, 1986b; Mishler, 1990). 2. Transcription is not simply a technical procedure but a critical step in the analysis of discourse, reflecting theoretical perspectives on language structure, function, and meaning (Mishler, 1991; Ochs, 1979). I have relied primarily on Gee’s sociolinguistic model for analyzing the “narrativization of experience in the oral style” (Gee, 1985; Gee, 1991), modifying it to fit my specific aims and interests. This approach is particularly appropriate for describing, displaying, and analyzing extended stretches of speech found in in-depth, unstructured interviews. The fundamental unit of speech—the “idea unit”—is a “prosodic phrase” marked by a “pitch glide” that “signals the focus of the sentence, the information that the speaker wants the hearer to take as new or asserted information” (1991, p. 21). In a hierarchical structure of levels of meaning, idea units are grouped into “lines” about “one central idea, or topic or argument” (p. 22). Lines “pattern into various larger units across a narrative”: “stanzas” or a “group of lines about a single topic,” the “basic building blocks of extended pieces of discursive language” (p. 23); and “related pairs” of stanzas, called “strophes,” which turn into “parts” that “make up the story as a whole” (p. 23). Gee marks the end of idea units that are not full lines with a slash (/), but is not concerned with and omits from his transcripts various nonlinguistic features of speech such as pauses, false starts, or repetitions that are of special interest to other discourse researchers and Conversation Analysts (Jefferson, 1978; Psathas & Anderson, 1990). I believe these may indicate important aspects of the dialogue between respondents and interviewers (Gee also omits interviewer speech) and include them using the following notation: length of pauses by dots, each representing one second (. .); false starts by a hyphen (I think- I think that); overlapping speech where a second speaker comments while the first is talking by brackets ([R: Okay]); latched words by an equal sign (you=know); also vocalizations are retained (hm, ah); and breath inhalation is noted as (.hh). In addition, all identifying names of persons and places are changed and put in parentheses in the transcripts (Amy). The parentheses are omitted in the text if the misidentifier is not part of a quotation. 3. Darnton’s point is that “folktales are historical documents” and cannot be “flattened out . . . in a timeless contemporaneity” (Darnton, 1984, p. 13). Belonging to a “fund

170 / Notes to Pages 52–111 of popular culture” (p. 17), they express a “common-sense notion of the world . . . a social construction of reality which varies from culture to culture. Far from being the arbitrary figment of some collective imagination, it expresses the common basis of experience in a given social order” (p. 23). Thus, it is not accidental that the tales which come down to us from eighteenth-century rural France are filled with wicked stepmothers and unwanted children sold to passing strangers or sent off on hazardous journeys. This reflected the reality of endemic poverty and class oppression, when village life was a struggle for survival, life was short, and infant mortality high. The tale “corresponds to everything that social historians have been able to piece together from the archives. The picture fits, and the fit was a matter of consequence. . . . the tales helped orient the peasants. They mapped the ways of the world and demonstrated the folly of expecting anything more than cruelty from a cruel social order” (p. 38).

4. Tensions and Contradictions 1. Among the many coherence criteria for texts we find: temporal, causal, or logical ordering (Linde, 1993); implicativeness (Young, 1984; Young, 1987); deep binary structures underlying surface plots (Greimas, 1983; Levi-Strauss, 1963/1958; RimmonKenan, 1983); sequential order of different tropes (White, 1989). These “coherence strategies” are assumed to function for tellers and listeners, writers and readers, who rely on them implicitly to tell stories that will be understood as coherent. Showing how they actually do this is not an easy task, as we see how narrative analysts labor to demonstrate the adequacy with which their analytic redoings of the original text represent its sense or meaning. 2. The relevance for discourse and narrative analysis of reframing is exhibited in Branca Ribeiro’s detailed analysis of a patient’s responses during a psychiatric admitting interview (Ribeiro, 1994). She shows how the apparent incoherence of a patient’s talk can be understood if we attend to how she shifts back and forth between the “institutional frame” of a psychiatric interview—the clinician’s “communicative context”— and the frame of her “psychotic crisis” wherein she expresses various aspects of her social roles and family relationships. In each alternative “reframing” the patient “coherently performs a series of moves that reveal the frame of talk she has created” (p. 234). “On this level of analysis, she never ‘misfires,’ which is rather unexpected from a ‘thought-disordered patient’” (p. 235). 3. This statement echoes the “study policy” for ethnomethodology proposed by Harold Garfinkel, which takes “the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment of the concerted activities of daily life, with the ordinary, artful ways of that accomplishment being by members known, used, and taken for granted.” Given that this is “practical sociology’s fundamental phenomenon, it is the prevailing topic for ethnomethodological study” (Garfinkel, 1967, p. vii).

5. Identities in/as Relationships 1. A prominent line of theory and research in recent feminist studies also centers on relationships in identity development (Gilligan, 1982; Miller, 1976; Miller & Stiver, 1997). The primary focus of this work is on the importance of relationships in women’s development in contrast to men’s identity development, which may be orga-

Notes to Pages 111–136 / 171 nized around autonomy, justice, or power. This emphasis differs from the approach proposed here, which treats identity as inherently relational for all persons rather than as a marker of gender differences. The specific relational bases of identity discussed here are the axes of family and work, and they manifest themselves particularly in how conflicts are resolved between work and family sub-identities. 2. The “Health and Ethnicity Project” was part of the research program on Society and Health of the Health Institute at the Tufts New England Medical Center. I wish again to acknowledge the invitation of Sol Levine, director of the project, to serve as a consultant on the study and the courtesy and support of the research staff. As I noted in my formal Acknowledgments, my analysis is a response to Sol’s suggestion that I explore the application of narrative methods to the interviews, and represents a continuation of our dialogue about alternative approaches.

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