Storylines

The author explores questions such as: what do we mean when we refer to our "identity", and how do we represent it in the stories we tell about our lives?. He analyzes the interviews with five crafts artists, who reflect on their lives and their efforts to sustain their form of work.

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What do we mean when we refer to our "identity", and how do we represent it in the stories we tell about our live? Is "identity" a sustained private core, or does it change as circumstances and relationships shift? In this book, a recognized master of research interviewing explores these questions through analyses of in-depth interviews with five crafts , who reflect on their lives and their efforts to sustain their form of work as committed artists in a world of mass production and standardization. The artist describe their families of origin and the families they have created, and the conscious decisions, chance events, and life experiences that entered into the ways they achieved their adult artistic identities. Exploring these continuities, discontinuities and unresolvable tensions in an analysis that brings new sophistication to a much-used term, the author suggest that "identity" is always dialogic and relational, a complex of partial subidentities rather than a unitary monad. More a verb than a noun, it reflects an individual's modes of adaptation, appropriation, and resistance to socio-cultural plots and roles.