Narratives of Identity and Place by Taylor Stephanie;

Author:Taylor, Stephanie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Behavioral Sciences
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2009-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

A place for the future? Trouble in identity work

Not so long ago I was saying to my Mum about people that grow up in a place and never move away I find that quite confining really.

(Participant P9)

5.1 Introduction

This is the second of four data analysis chapters exploring the narratives of identity and place constructed in the talk of the women who were my research participants. In Chapter 4, I discussed participants’ references to remembering and memories about places in their lives. I argued that both direct and indirect references to memories in participants’ talk could function to construct continuity from past to present. This is part of the discursive work to make an identity for oneself, reflexively, in the kind of project outlined by Giddens (1991). As I described in Chapter 2, this discursive identity work is not a simple matter of life planning and self-presentation to accommodate the changes of a late modern world. Instead, it involves a complex negotiation of, on the one hand, established ideas and values, about the kind of person it is desirable to be and how life should unfold, and on the other, life circumstances which may be very difficult to interpret in terms of these established ideas or to reconcile with them.

I suggested that my participants’ talk, including the ways in which they positioned themselves in relation to place, and their interpretations of their former and current experience of place, invoked an ideal of continuity. This ideal derives from the discursive resource I am calling the born and bred narrative, with the connections which that offers between place as home and an identity of belonging. The analyses I discussed in Chapter 4 also showed how by discursively constructing a current or former place of residence in certain terms, for example, in relation to family or to history, a speaker could present her life narrative as more closely approaching the born and bred narrative. I suggested that people retrospectively interpret their past experiences in terms of the narrative in order to position themselves as belonging to a particular place. In this chapter, I will look at their discursive work to construct a forward narrative for their lives and at trouble in this work. I will also look at the limits of discursive work.

The chapter presents further extracts in which participants construct versions of their lives which resemble that narrative. Two sets of resources are prominent in the extracts I discuss. The first is established ideas of the conventional family, including the available identity positions for women as daughters and mothers of successive generations. The second is established ideas around the contrast between, on the one hand, cities and urban life, and, on the other, rural life and the places of landscape and nature. I suggest that the construction of continuity from the past up to now in a participant’s life narrative also creates a possible forward projection, that is, the extension of continuity from now into the future. I look at the possible trouble

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