History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities

1 History in Person An Introduction

3 In October 1995, the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, hosted an advanced seminar titled “History in Person.”1 As co-chairs of the seminar, we began with the proposition that pervasive , long-term, transformative struggles are telling sites for the study of “history in person.” Our topic was the mutually constitutive nature of long and complex social, political, and economic struggles and the historically fashioned identities-in-practice and subjectivities that they produce . Long and overwhelming situations of conflict in Northern Ireland and South Africa and the contested rise of powerful multinational corporations are obvious examples of long-term struggles, but there are other, more circumscribed, yet equally persistent and riveting conflicts in workplaces, households, and academic fields. Whatever the circumstances, we cannot understand enduring struggles as crucibles for the forging of identities unless our accounts encompass the working creativity of historically produced agents and the interconnected differences among their interests, points of view, and ways of participating in the production of ongoing struggles. During the seminar we brought our ethnographic research on enduring struggles together 1 History in Person An Introduction Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave with our attempts to address practices of identity in those struggles. Nine participants were involved in this project: Begoña Aretxaga, Steven Gregory, Dorothy Holland, Michael Kearney, Jean Lave, Dan Linger, Liisa Malkki, Kay Warren, and Paul Willis.2 In the following chapters, which are revised versions of the papers discussed during the seminar, Aretxaga writes about the politically sexualized transformation of identities of women who were political prisoners in Northern Ireland; Warren, about the changing character of political activism across generations in a Mayan family in Guatemala; Holland and Debra Skinner, about the changing fields of struggle of Hindu women in Nepal and their effects on the divisiveness of women’s identities; Gregory, about struggles between state and grass-roots activists over the exploitation of local communities in New York for the sake of more powerful class constituencies elsewhere; Willis, about cultural forms generated in and mediating struggles of working-class men on shop floors in England; Linger, about the everyday struggles over identities of nationality of Brazilians of Japanese descent living in Japan; Kearney, about enduring, contradictory struggles between classand ethnicity-based transnational communities and the Mexican state; Lave, about the struggles of British wine merchant families, long-term residents of Portugal, to sustain their enclave as a living monument to their version of the past and themselves as the masters of its future; and Malkki, about the social consequences of Central African violence among Hutu exiles in Montreal and their social imagination of the future. The seminar developed from the organizers’ shared theoretical perspective, which is grounded in a theory of practice that emphasizes processes of social formation and cultural production. We began with the tenet that the political-economic, social, and cultural structuring of social existence is constituted in the daily practices and lived activities of subjects who both participate in it and produce cultural forms that mediate it. Claims that such relations lie at the heart of social investigation are at the same time claims that they are historical processes—that both the continuity and the transformation of social life are ongoing, uncertain projects. For us, one central analytical intention of social practice theory lies in inquiry into historical structures of privilege, rooted in class, race, gender, and other social divisions, as these are DOROTHY HOLLAND AND JEAN LAVE 4 brought to the present—that is, to local, situated practice. In practice, material and symbolic resources are distributed disproportionally across socially identified groups and generate different social relations and perspectives among participants in such groups. With their impetus from the past, historical structures infuse and restrain local practices , whether they be—to take examples from this volume—shop-floor relations (Willis), community meetings with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (Gregory), or activities that go under the rubric of the Tij festival in Nepal (Holland and Skinner). Historical structures also provide resources for participants and their practices and leave traces in their experience. Nonetheless, as Willis (1977) and Bourdieu (1977, 1990), among others, have elaborated, history in institutional structures and history in person are never simple equivalents. Nor are they related to each other in unmediated, symmetrical, or predictable ways. Instead, especially in cases of obvious struggle, the two come together, again and again, in...