Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America

5. Ethnicity as Choice? Roots and Identity as a Narrative Project

 C h a p t e r f i v e Ethnicity as Choice? Roots and Identity as a Narrative Project How far is the person free to affirm or deny the constitutive components of identity? If all or most is fixed, what is the possibility of choice; if all or most is chosen, what is the possibility of constituting a certain identity? The further more complicated question is: how much choice does the political agent have in the construction of their own story as against the effects of contingency or chance as well as the limitations of given characteristics? —MaureenWhitebrook, Identity,Narrative,and Politics [I]dentity is the product of historical contestation, a response to oppression or part of organizing to retain or regain power or privilege, essentially the emotive component of political action—or inaction. —Micaela di Leonardo,“White Ethnicities, Identity Politics, and Baby Bear’s Chair” Individuals connect on many levels with personal, familial, regional, and immigrant pasts to claim an ethnic identity.The discourse on roots,in particular, guides the quest of fashioning an identity out of the past, in fact requiring that a meaningful identity is shaped out of what necessarily becomes a usable past. Roots orient individuals researching family biography and engage them with ancestral cultures and histories of immigration. In this sense, they entangle individuals with a number of options (the kinds of pasts one explores and the manner in which one explores them, for example) and social determinations (the social probing to search for roots in the first place and deeply embedded cultural attachments that may privilege the exploration of certain pasts and marginalize others).Therefore, narratives detailing the quest for roots offer themselves as Ethnicity as Choice?  convenient sites for exploring an individual’s complex entanglement with agency and the determining forces of history and culture. In other words, they help us understand the degree to which the element of choice influences the assignment of meaning to the past and the extent to which social discourses interfere with, or even override, the element of choice in the process of constructing an identity . But, why, after all, should one feel compelled to assess the place of choice and determination in the making of identities? The importance of choice for white ethnicity has been most systematically addressed by symbolic ethnicity, an influential strand within sociology.The leading commentators on this issue,sociologists Herbert Gans and Mary Waters, conceive of white ethnicity as a pool of available cultural resources (ethnic traditions , family customs and lore, consumer culture, and the media) from which individuals voluntarily draw to create personally enriching identities and temporarily connect themselves with larger collectivities.In this respect,the chosen traditions serve as usable pasts that enmesh individuals in webs of meaningful connections: they provide a feeling of uniqueness, a venue for connectedness, and a forum for socially legitimate creative expression.Their function is seen in sociopsychological terms. “Symbolic ethnicity fulfills this particular American need to be ‘from somewhere,’”Waters (1990, 150) writes. It mediates “a dilemma that has deep roots in American culture,” namely the tension between individual uniqueness and social conformity.The capacity to sustain, temporarily , a sense of ethnic belonging counteracts what is perceived as modernity’s deadening uniformity and anomie. Symbolic ethnicity privileges the autonomous subject who exercises free will, reason,and knowledge to choose among available“ethnic options”(Waters,1990). Though social circumstances may influence specific choices, the individual operates as a sovereign subject who acts rationally upon ethnic identification.The subject surveys the benefits that accrue from the adoption of a specific identity (social prestige, personal relevance) to rationalize the choice. Nowhere is this emphasis on sovereignty and control more apparent than in the contextual manipulation of identity to maximize social prestige and personal fulfillment for the individual choosing to adopt an ethnicity. Understood in this manner, symbolic ethnicity offers a new angle to approach identity: the polar opposite of ethnicity as determiner of behavior.“SymbolicArmenianness is voluntary, rational, and situational, in contrast to the traditionalArmenianness of the immigrant generation, which is ascribed,unconscious,and compulsive,”Bakalian (1993,6) writes,drawing a rigid dichotomy between immigrant ethnicity and the model ofAmerican white ethnic identities unencumbered by history, culture, and the unconscious.  c o n t o u r s o f w h i t e e t h n i c i t y But it is precisely because it stresses this disembeddedness...