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Negotiating Cultures and Identities

University of Nebraska Press

Contents

List of Exercises in Part 1...................................................................................................ixPreface.......................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments...............................................................................................................xvPart 1: Issues and Methods in Life HistoryIntroduction: Salma's Stories.................................................................................................31. Individuals and Their Cultures.............................................................................................72. Methods in Life History Research...........................................................................................233. Individual Identities, Multiple Cultures...................................................................................444. Negotiating Conflicting Cultures and Competing Values......................................................................605. Writing Multiple Cultures in Life History..................................................................................77Part 2: Readings in Life HistoryIntroduction: Reading Life Histories..........................................................................................951. Being Indian in America: My Ethnic Roots and Me Lila Shah.................................................................972. Conversations with Paolo Melissa Landsman.................................................................................1023. Needle and Thread: The Life and Death of a Tailor Barbara Myerhoff........................................................1134. Lessons on the Road: The Life of a Hobo Douglas Harper....................................................................1305. "That Really Happened": Ethnography and the Hobby of Twentieth-Century War Reenacting Jenny Thompson......................1386. A Chameleon-Like Approach: Successful Negotiations of Multiple Cultural Traditions Joshua C. Woodfork.....................1567. The Sound of It Stayed in My Ears: Life History with African American Domestics Elizabeth Clark-Lewis.....................1778. My Mexican Friend Marta Who Lives Across the Border from Me in Detroit Ruth Behar.........................................1919. Routes to Identity: Life History Dialogues on Race and Adoption Sandra Patton-Imani.......................................201Notes.........................................................................................................................235Suggestions for Further Reading...............................................................................................243List of Contributors..........................................................................................................251Index.........................................................................................................................253

Introduction

Because this book is about the cultural study of individuals, I want to begin with the description of a particular life. Much of the traditional and even contemporary discussion of individuals in cultural studies still involves the assumption that individuals know, think, feel, speak, and act with one culture, the culture of the community or society to which they belong. While sometimes useful, such a perspective seriously obscures the issues that we will investigate in this book.

Consider Salma. When I met her several years ago, she was a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Maryland. Born in Pakistan, tall and graceful, she "looked South Asian" and was a Pakistani citizen. But she also had spent more than half her life in the United States. Her father's work in banking led the family to move back and forth regularly between Karachi and Washington DC.

Salma was fluent in American English, and much of her secondary and high school education took place at American public schools in a middle-class suburb of Washington. A senior when I met her, she wore trendy American clothes, including skirts and shorts, and was very hip to the ways of American college students. But she also regularly returned to Pakistan. There she spoke fluent Urdu, donned the shalwar kameez and jewelry of young Pakistani women, played out the nuances of etiquette rituals, and slipped easily out of American individualism into the warm communal embrace of her extended and extensive Pakistani family. She dreamed of being successful in terms of both cultures. For example, although she knew it was out of the question, one of her daydreams was to win an Olympic gold medal in track for Pakistan.

At the time I knew her, Salma had serious concern about her real options for the future. As graduation approached, she had to make a choice. As a communications major she thought she might take up a career in local television. With her degree and internship experience, the idea of making her way as a single career woman in Washington seemed exciting, attractive, and quite practically possible. But it was a hard choice. The alternative, which also appealed to her, involved a return "home" to Pakistan as her parents wished. There, as is the custom, they would complete the arranged marriage that they and her wider family wished to make for her with a distant cousin she had met but once. There she would reconnect with her many close family members but live in the home of her husband's extended family. His conservative Muslim family would never approve of her making a career in the disreputable world of media.

What is Salma's culture? The question is absurd. Obviously, she knows and is fluent in the ways of two very different cultures. When in the United States she can operate fluently with American concepts, rules, values, and customary ways of behaving. On visiting Karachi she can switch fluently into a traditional Pakistani mode of speaking, acting, and feeling.

And where are Salma's cultures? In one sense, of course, they are located on opposite sides of the world in the two different societies where each prevails. When Salma is in one place she encounters the culture of that society and engages, adjusts, and blends in with it. But the situation is not this simple. When she steps into her Pakistani family home in the Washington suburbs she usually speaks Urdu rather than English and operates in a Pakistani daughter's role with her parents. They cope well with life in the United States but are much less "Americanized" than she. In a sense Pakistani culture prevails in her home, as it does in the Massachusetts Avenue Muslim mosque and other zones of the Washington Pakistani immigrant community. Occasionally, too, while in Pakistan, Salma may switch to an American mode, as in attending a function at the U.S. embassy, reading an American novel, or receiving a long-distance phone call from one of her American friends.

As these example show, Salma does not leave Pakistani culture behind in Karachi when she returns to the United States. Both cultures are "out there" but also exist within her mind, her consciousness, and her heart. Mentally and emotionally she can switch from one language and culture to another, but being bicultural means she carries the knowledge,...