Desiring nature: Identity and becoming in narratives of travel

Abstract

This paper explores the cultural value of desiring nature through reading the travel narratives of Val Plumwood and Alphonso Lingis with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). As Game (1991) suggests this textual practice produces different ways of writing the social that undoes the nature/culture opposition informing popular discourses and much cultural theory. Rethinking the value of nature/culture relations has tended to be the domain of environmental philosophy. Yet a cultural analysis also has much to contribute to current debates around value and identity, embodiment and representations of desire. Such a shift requires rethinking the sensory relation between self and nature through the mediation of language. Two quite distinctive experiences of awe provide texts for this analysis. In the desire to know non‐human nature as other, Lingis and Plumwood are moved by a wish to become nearer, to move beyond the bounds of an identity premised on a cultural relation of mastery over nature. These are compelling narratives, for they do not simply indulge the reader in a romantic appreciation of nature's wildness, as if nature was simply an object of aesthetic contemplation and background to the unfolding drama of human identity. These journeys involve disturbing transformations of self; Plumwood travels into the dangerous waters of the crocodile's territory in Kakadu National Park, Australia, while Lingis encounters the uninhabitable terrain of the Antarctic. The reverberating effects of awe produce a movement of becoming ‐ becoming‐animal, becoming‐nature, which contests the Hegelian desire for mastery of nature and the teleological structure of desire itself aimed at unity. Awe as a profoundly disturbing relation, threatens to undo the dominant fantasy of human identity as pure culture, separate from the realm of nature, body and materiality.     

Surface Tension: Boundary Negotiations around Self,Society, and Nature in a Community Debate over Wildlife

This study draws on extensions of a Meadian framework to explore the possibility of nature as a “generalized other” that is experienced through a dialogical eco‐self. The author revisits Mead's work, tracing an emerging literature on the eco‐self, and investigates constructions of human–nature boundaries using interviews from a community reacting to the human destruction of a cattle egret nesting colony. She introduces the concept of “surface tension” to capture the fluid, negotiated, and often contradictory quality of narratives about nature and the self. The findings highlight the eco‐self as an emergent and ongoing accomplishment that is not reducible to any one formulation.     

“I Was Always This Way…”: Rhetorics of Continuity in Narratives of Conversion

This article is concerned with identifying, comparing, and accounting for the principal rhetorical conventions within Pagan practitioners’ narratives of conversion. Applying key insights from studies on narrative identity and drawing on 15 months of fieldwork and 25 in‐depth interviews with Pagan practitioners, I first outline formal similarities in the content of participants’ narratives, arguing that these narrative conventions together constitute an ideal typical conversion narrative: what I call the rhetoric of continuity. This narrative form depicts the process of conversion as a rediscovery or uncovering of a temporally continuous and essentialized Pagan self. I suggest that while all conversions involve both change and continuity, adherents of different faith traditions vary in the degree to which they stress self‐transformation and/or self‐continuity. I then argue that the rhetoric of continuity reflects and reinforces practitioners’: (1) perspective on the locus and nature of the authentic self; (2) claims to legitimacy and social acceptance; and (3) understanding of the nature of religious truth.     

Positive Effects of Talking About the Negative: Family Narratives of Negative Experiences and Preadolescents' Perceived Competence

Family narratives about the past are an important context for the socialization of emotion, but relations between expression of negative emotion and children's emerging competence are conflicting. In this study, 24 middle‐class two‐parent families narrated a shared negative experience together and we examined the process (initiations and collaborations) and function (the expression and explanation of emotions) of co‐constructed narratives in relation to preadolescents' perceived competencies and self‐esteem. Family narratives in which specific emotions were expressed and explained in a collaborative fashion, especially negative emotion, were positively related to preadolescents' reported competencies and self‐esteem, whereas family narratives that expressed general positive emotion were negatively related to preadolescents' perceived competencies. Implications of family narratives about emotional events, specifically the ways in which families discuss emotion, in relation to preadolescents' self‐development are discussed.     

Parenting Disputes After Separation and Divorce: Who Needs a Family Lawyer?

Australia's family law system continues to be plagued by serious delays. This article acknowledges the need for legal interventions in post‐separation parenting disputes in which individuals may be at risk, or in cases of genuine emergency. The article next contrasts cases involving significant risk or urgency with the many ‘ordinary’ (even if sometimes complex) post‐separation disputes over parenting in which these circumstances are not present. I argue that in such cases, legal advice, legally informed dispute processes, and court hearings are remnants from earlier attitudes to separation and divorce. These interventions are expensive, frequently destructive of ongoing parental relationships, and at their heart, inappropriate for considering the needs of children. They also divert time and resources from the critical investigative and legal decision‐making processes needed in urgent or risk‐related cases. I propose that legal narratives in ‘ordinary’ post‐separation parenting disputes be replaced by narratives focused on the main drivers of these disputes, which are invariably expressed in terms of relationship difficulties. Such narratives are amenable to facilitative, therapeutic, and systemic interventions aimed at achieving self‐determined resolutions. They contrast markedly with narratives reflecting common law notion of normative resolutions derived from the application of legal precedent. Key issues in the first section of the article are then teased out via the reflections of an imaginary separated parent in an ‘ordinary,’ albeit difficult and emotionally intense, dispute about how to care for the children. In the final section, I offer brief clinical and systemic reflections on past practice and on future narratives focused on individual self‐determination.     

Narrative Manhood Acts: Batterer Intervention Program Graduates' Tragic Relationships

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self‐narratives that signify membership in the category “man” and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self‐narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture—especially “bitch” imagery and sometimes racialized discourse—to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre‐making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.     

Alternative Worldviews and the Utilization of Conventional and Complementary Medicine*

We use the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) database and an expanded Anderson model that incorporates health beliefs, including sacred worldviews as predisposing factors, to explore conventional and complementary and alternative medical (CAM) service use. Findings are that health care need, especially the number of chronic conditions is positively associated with both conventional and CAM services use. However, net of need, health beliefs and sacred worldviews differentiate CAM users versus nonusers or the number of different CAM practices that are used. Higher self‐rated spirituality is associated with being a CAM user and, if a user, with adopting a wider range of practices. Individuals with higher self‐rated religiosity are not more or less likely to be CAM users but adopt significantly fewer techniques, if users. We discuss the attraction to very different faces of health care, on the basis of religiosity, spirituality, and other health beliefs, with implications for policymakers and care providers.     

Profaning the Past to Salvage the Present: The Symbolically Reconstructed Pasts of Homeless Shelter Residents

Homelessness presents challenges for maintaining a positive self-concept, and those seeking help from homeless shelters face a particular irony: establishing service-worthiness requires them to present themselves as homeless, not self-sufficient, and genuinely in need of help, yet also morally worthy of that help. How do shelter residents manage this tension and salvage the self within the institutional context of the shelter? A theoretical framework linking Mead, Goffman, and narrative helps clarify strategies of self-presentation and salvaging the self within the homeless shelter context. Drawing on interviews with 44 shelter residents, this paper demonstrates that residents construct narratives that symbolically reconstruct the past from the standpoint of the present, and draw on the stages of the shelter's moral career to present a temporally-divided self, allowing residents to strategically profane the past self while keeping the present self separate and sacred. Implications for research on other institutional selves are also discussed.     

The Influence of Child Sexual Abuse on the Self from Adult Narrative Perspectives

The impact of child sexual abuse on the adult self is not yet clearly understood. We explored adult perspectives through the use of narrative interviews (N = 30). Three key themes or views of self were identified in all narratives to varying degrees: the worthless self, the self as unknown, and the potential/developing self. Ambivalence and tension were present in all narratives. Individuals were challenged to integrate the sexual abuse experience in a constructive way and develop a more coherent perception of the self. The narrative method highlighted the dynamic nature of peoples’ experiences at the same time recognizing that the narratives themselves are in progress. Reactions to disclosure, social support, and interpersonal connections are crucial at every turn.     

Gendering the Research Self: Social Practice and Corporeal Multiplicity in the Writing of Organizational Research

This article examines the problems inherent in taking a reflexively gendered position in writing research accounts. Such socially constructed accounts typically require researchers to do one of two things: to suppress the feminine and write implicitly as male, or to adopt a textual position as ‘woman’ that fails to do justice to the complex and unstable multiplicity that underpins the research self. It is argued that this shifting multiplicity is stabilized by the relationship between self and research text being corporeally grounded and gendered in practice. Three possible approaches to gender are considered: the discursive/textual approach (as developed by Foucault); the performance/social practice approach (as developed by Judith Butler) and the corporeal multiplicity approach (as developed by Elizabeth Grosz and Dorothea Olkowski). The article concludes by suggesting a tripartite approach to writing self‐multiplicity in research to extend the possibilities opened up by the social practice approach: re‐citing (redeploying discursive resources in intertextuality); re‐siting (changing the positioning of the self in power relations by reinscribing) and re‐sighting (opening up new, virtual visions of possibility).     

The Last Stitch in the Quilt

The patterns of our working lives are fluid and often unpredictable. They are linked to the process of identity forming that we understand as a recognizable, but continuously changing pattern of actions and developments within our lifespan, which includes our career choices. This interpretation allows us to identify the multiple temporal trajectories within a working life and to see how an analysis of temporalities can help us to understand the gendered nature of our careers. By using a number of retrospective narratives of older women about their working lives, we ascertain how an externally imposed and chronologically organized linear (life‐) career story breaks down into a number of a‐chronological trajectories, each of which is personally marked by the identity of the narrator. The theme of self‐care emerges and turns into a binding notion for working women from different generations.     

Social Constructionism and Supervision: Experiences of AAMFT Supervisors and Supervised Therapists

A phenomenological research process was used to investigate the supervision experience for supervisors and therapists when supervisors use a social constructionist perspective. Participants of the one‐to‐one interviews were six AAMFT Approved Supervisors and six therapists providing counseling to individuals, couples and families. The findings suggest supervisors were committed to their self‐identified supervision philosophy and intentionally sought out congruence between epistemology and practice. The shared experience of therapists indicates they associated desirable supervision experiences with their supervisors’ social constructionist perspective. Our findings also indicated that supervisors’ and therapists’ understanding of social constructionism included the more controversial concepts of agency and extra‐discursiveness. This research has taken an empirical step in the direction of understanding what the social constructionist supervision experience is like for supervisors and therapists. Our findings suggest a linkage between epistemology and supervision practice and a satisfaction with the supervision process.     

ENGLISH MUD: TOWARDS A CRITICAL CULTURAL STUDIES OF COLONIAL SCIENCE

In order to analyse colonial science as a form of culture, we must tell the multiple, tangled narratives of race, class, gender, nation and scientific progress together. The construction of ideas of nature in British colonies, for instance, intersects with the construction of ‘primitives’, the privatization of land, the scientific management of forests, their products and their inhabitants, and the political economy of global exploration. Excavating archival records of Ootacamund, a British hill station in South India, I read popular narratives of mud, flowers, forests, tribals, plantations, labour, disease and progress. These interlocking narratives must be read together if we are to understand the cultural construction of colonial science as part of a larger system in which a global political economy and a scientific epistemology were being simultaneously legitimated.     

Social capital as collective narratives and post‐disaster community recovery

This paper examines how social capital aids in post‐disaster community recovery and redevelopment. While previous studies on social capital and post‐disaster recovery have tended to focus on social networks as a source of necessary assistance, the primary focus of this study is on how social capital in the form of collective narratives affects post‐disaster recovery. We argue that collective narratives can shape the recovery strategies that individuals adopt. To illustrate this we examine the post‐Katrina recovery efforts in St. Bernard Parish, an area devastated by flooding and significant environmental damage. In particular, we focus on the shared narrative that dominated qualitative interview data collected in St. Bernard, namely, its shared identity as a close‐knit, family‐oriented community comprised of hard workers. This narrative led community members to adopt a strategy that emphasized self‐reliance.     

From the Freak Show to the Living Room: Cultural Representations of Dwarfism and Obesity1

This article examines how cultural representations of deviant bodies vary based on historically informed narratives of bodily stigma. Using content analysis of 40 episodes of reality television programming, I contrast cultural representations of dwarfism and obesity. Over time, dwarfism became constructed as an identity project with the aim of bodily acceptance, whereas obesity became regarded as a body project with the goal of body transformation through weight loss. The mostly positive historical characterizations of dwarfs allowed them to easily adopt the tenets of the disability rights movement as they evolved from freak show performances to television as an educational platform. They have adopted a social model of disability, positive social identity, self‐acceptance, and full social participation. By contrast, the past and contemporary representations of obesity have been overwhelmingly negative. Obese freak show performers were openly mocked, and classifying obesity as a disability has not yet gained traction as a civil rights movement. Instead, obesity is viewed through the lens of individual responsibility and limits of social participation are emphasized. Body modification through weight loss constructs an identity based on self‐change. Generally, this article suggests that cultural representations as de‐stigmatization projects are enabled or constrained by historical factors and the nature of the bodily stigma.     

Broken and Becoming God‐Sized: Contemporary Metal Music and Masculine Individualism

Using a symbolic interactionist framework, this study is a narrative analysis of song lyrics from sixteen of the most popular heavy metal bands since the early 1990s. The data set for this study constituted 603 songs from fifty‐two long play (LP) recordings. Given that the overwhelming majority of metal music listeners are young males, these data were analyzed as texts of contemporary masculine identity. The contents of the data suggest that such identity is expressed in at least two ways. First, representing the “masculine crisis” identity, the data contain narratives of the self's hopeless domination from subjective and objective forces. Second, narratives representing the “traditional” masculine identity describe the cultivation of inner strength and the consequent conquering of perceived foes. Such narratives often predict the domination of a generic “you” and illustrate how the invocation of the “you” projects a future self. Both of these narratives, which depict either the subjugation or domination of the self, are argued to represent an ideology of individualism.     

Sexual satisfaction and sexual self‐disclosure within dating relationships

This study examined dating individuals' self‐disclosure about their sexual likes and dislikes to their partner. Forty‐seven college men and 52 college women in a dating relationship of 3 to 36 months completed a questionnaire measuring sexual exchange variables, sexual satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, sexual communication satisfaction, and sexual and non‐sexual self‐disclosure with their partner. Both sexual and nonsexual self‐disclosure were at the level of revealing some detail but not fully disclosing personal attitudes and feelings. Participants reported self‐disclosing significantly more about non‐sexual than about sexual topics. Sexual and nonsexual self‐disclosure were related to sexual satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and sexual communication satisfaction. Sexual self‐disclosure was uniquely related to sexual communication satisfaction when nonsexual self‐disclosure was controlled, but was not uniquely associated with relationship satisfaction or sexual satisfaction. The study provided evidence that both sexual exchanges and relationship satisfaction mediate the relationship between sexual self‐disclosure and sexual satisfaction as proposed by Cupach and Metts (1991). The results of a series of analyses suggest that self‐disclosure affects sexual satisfaction through two routes. First, sexual self‐disclosure may increase sexual rewards in the relationship. Second, it may increase overall relationship satisfaction. Both increased sexual rewards and increased relationship satisfaction, in turn, enhance sexual satisfaction.     

Transnational Families: Memories and Narratives

This introduction to a special issue of the journal explores not only the role of memory and narratives in understanding gender and transnational families, but suggests how such families use and understand their memories to construct coherent narratives of the self and kin. In common with renewed thinking about the multifaceted nature of migration, the complexities of the process, and the continuing dialogue that migration establishes between the old and the new, the past and the present, those who engage with oral history/life story methods are increasingly aware that such data provide a ‘value added’ to rich empirical detail. These methods reveal the use of memory and its role in the continuing emotional adjustments in which most transnational experience is embroiled. They show how the multi‐layering of memory, language and narratives are indicators of the ways in which culture shapes recall and recounting. Families themselves become sites of belonging, part of the imaginary unity through which a transnational family may seek its identity. Equally, oral histories can tease out ways in which gender differences impact on, or are impacted by, transnational lives. The introduction situates the subsequent articles within a brief overview of oral history and migration.     

Standpoint Epistemology and the Uses of Self‐Reflection in Feminist Ethnography: Lessons for Rural Sociology*

Abstract We explore how feminist researchers informed by standpoint theoretical frameworks employ the process of self‐reflection to counter the reproduction of inequalities in ethnographic investigation. Although it is not a cure for this dilemma, we argue that researchers can be self‐conscious about the ways in which they reproduce power in the course of their work; furthermore, sustained attention to these dynamics will enrich ethnographic accounts. We begin by outlining the diverse ways in which feminist ethnographers draw on standpoint epistemology to generate strong reflexive methodological strategies. Then we describe challenges posed by postmodern and postcolonial critics, and outline how feminists have contributed to these debates and have responded with innovative methodological strategies, especially in relation to self‐reflexive techniques. In conclusion, we discuss how rural sociologists might incorporate these methodological insights into their ethnographic investigations.