Bucknell University

Department of Sociology/Anthropology

atriley@bucknell.edu

[This text is a slightly modified version of an essay I wrote for my students to provide some direct instruction on how to think sociologically about one's own identity]

It starts for me, as for all of us, with many factors that completely eluded my control.  I was born and grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the capital of the state but memorable, unfortunately, for little else except very good OSU football teams during the 1960s and 1970s (sports trivia question: who is the only NCAA football player to win two Heismans? answer: OSU's Archie Griffin, who was considered a kind of godlike figure in Ohio when I was a kid--this was before his incredibly disappointing career in the NFL). My father was and still is a musician (one of the clearest childhood memories I have is watching his band practice in our basement while the neighborhood kids gathered around the windows outside to listen in), my mother a hairdresser or beautician or aesthetician or whatever the correct term is these days (the smell of the chemicals used to sterilize combs and brushes is another strong childhood memory). I am the oldest of three children and, as the only male, I was more or less by definition the dominant child in the house. The crude sociological facts of my seniority and my gender undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping my character and development, as I was allowed a certain privileged freedom and autonomy that my sisters did not have in quite the same degree. My family is a mixture of Irish and Hungarian immigrants. My father's mother's parents were first-generation Hungarian immigrants and all of their kids spoke Hungarian. My grandmother taught me a little bit of Hungarian when I was a child, but I have long since completely forgotten everything.

As my father was mostly a musician of the unemployed variety, we never had much money and we moved a lot. I can remember at least seven different houses/apartments by my third grade year, and I am pretty sure there were more than that. My parents had a tumultuous marriage that somehow lasted ten years despite the fact that, as I remember, they fought just about all the time and separated several times. Most members of both sides of the family had predicted a significantly shorter term, given that perhaps the central reason they married had to do with the fact that my mother became unexpectedly pregnant with me and both families had pressured them to marry. They divorced in 1976, on very bad terms, and my father (a musician, I remind you) quietly disappeared when it became apparent that he would not be able to pay child support unless he put down his guitar and got a regular job. My sisters and I lived with our mother and didn't see our father much for the next ten years or so. With no contribution from him, it was extremely difficult for my mother to make ends meet. She usually worked two jobs (doing hair by day, tending bar by night), and sometimes three (doing odd cleaning work when it was available) but still generally didn't make enough to keep us much above the poverty level. I do not mean to exaggerate our poverty, as we were never hungry and we always had a roof over our heads, thanks to my mother's seeming ability to dispense with sleep and work around the clock. Still, I think I learned a particular kind of asceticism and a very general uneasiness about the world from my childhood. Material things, I came to understand, could not be much relied upon because they could disappear quickly and seemingly for no reason, so one had better learn how to get along without them. (This is incidentally a very good lesson to have learned for someone teaching for a living, as it makes coping with a scandalously low salary a bit easier).

Beyond this lesson of asceticism, I think the material uncertainties of my childhood nudged me in the direction of intellectual concerns at an early age. Reading and thinking about questions of ultimate meaning in life and death were, among other things, a means for me to establish some control, at least within myself, over the otherwise confusing and seemingly chaotic events that frequently seemed to unfold in my family. This early interest in things intellectual included a very fervent religious hunger, although both my parents were indifferent to religion. My paternal grandmother was influential here, as she seemed to radiate a pure, simple spirituality in her every word and act. Religion helped me (as it has helped many others) to answer to what Peter Berger has described as our need for 'world-construction,' which simply means our need for meaning in our lives. Although I lost my faith during my teens and would now classify myself as a skeptic or an agnostic on religious matters, I have remained fascinated with religion's role in providing meaning in human life to this day largely as a result of the vast importance it had for me in that capacity when I was a youth. I should add that there are also reasons not simply intellectual behind my interest in this deeply human activity--at least part of my desire to know more about how religion works is about developing better strategies than we currently have for curbing the dangerous consequences of at least some religious expression.

When looked at objectively, the environment in which I grew up would not seem to be the ideal one to produce an interest in intellectual matters, at least according to standard social scientific accounts of who is likely to become an intellectual and who is not. Those accounts generally argue that the deprivation of working- and lower-class children means they will be exposed less to the world of the intellect than will children of the middle- and upper-classes, and, even when they are, they will see it as an alien world in which they don't belong. Yet I was drawn to literature, music and the arts from as early as I can remember. So far as I recall, no one in my family read very much, and no one in my family had attended college with the exception of an aunt who took enough courses at a few community colleges to earn a few associate's degrees. My mother has a high school diploma, while my father dropped out in the ninth grade. I did well academically through high school despite the fact that I was something of a disciplinary problem. My sense of humor and irreverence were not highly appreciated by some of my teachers, and I spent a considerable amount of time in the office of the principal explaining myself. I hung out at school mostly with vaguely (and not so vaguely) counter-cultural types, smalltime criminals (one of my best friends in high school made his spending money by stealing car stereos and selling marijuana), and musicians. Compared to many other students in the rough urban public schools I attended, though, my disciplinary problems were a relatively minor concern for school authorities. I always had a sense of being torn in two seemingly contradictory directions, that of the rule-obeying and 'proper' intellectual/model student (who could perhaps get ahead in the world if only he listened carefully to the authorities and did his homework) and that of the anarchistic and bohemian rebel (who didn't care about getting ahead because this would constitute a 'betrayal' of his roots and his real nature, and anyway causing trouble was much more fun). It was a thrilling moment when I discovered at some point later in my life that sociology provided some ways for me to inquire into that seeming contradiction in my identity, not only in myself but as a broader phenomenon experienced by many others.

My good high-school grades coupled with our low family income meant that I qualified for enough academic and need-based grant money to be able to head off to college at Northwestern University near Chicago. I was very excited when I arrived the summer before classes, believing I would here finally be able to pursue all the fascinating questions about life and its meaning that I had been trying to puzzle out in my own idiosyncratic manner. However, I wound up thoroughly hating college, or at least the part of it that happened in the classroom. My expectations were high, and the actual experience was a great disappointment. I found that the place was mostly about things that had little to do with learning: taking three hour exams in which you wrote as much as you could until your hand felt as though it were going to fall off, then forgetting everything you'd written before you even left the room; listening to stunningly boring people turn topics that should have been interesting into an insomniac's paradise; jumping through various bureaucratic hoops and fulfilling lots of requirements that seemed to have nothing to do with education of any kind. I also frankly felt out of place at the university. There seemed to be few people like me (i.e., working-class kids) there, and I had little in common with most of the typical NU students, who were from affluent backgrounds. I vividly remember one guy who lived in my dorm during my freshman year. He seemed to have an endless supply of new clothes. I am relatively certain that if I had conducted a study by noting his dress for an entire quarter, I would not have seen him in the same shirt twice. I found this genuinely astounding, as I owned about five shirts at the time. I increasingly had the sense that there was a social pecking order on campus, established by how you dressed, the way you spoke, where you were from and other such things, and I realized I was somewhere toward the bottom of this order. Needless to say, this was not a pleasurable realization. I began to feel torn between my gratitude at having been given this opportunity no one else in my family had been granted and the failure of the reality to live up to my expectations. Transferring to another institution did not change any of the depressing facts. I came to hate academia as a place that purported to be about thinking and growing intellectually but that was really about games of social status and ranking. I was so utterly disillusioned by the start of my senior year that I contemplated leaving school. Only a series of death threats from my mother prevented me from taking this course of action.

One of the central interests in my life at that time was music, and I have no doubt that something of this must have come from being raised in close proximity to musicians. The influence was not as direct, though, as my father would have liked it to be. He often disappointedly tells the story of how, when he and my mother were still together, he tried to interest me in music by placing a guitar in my room to see if I would try to play it. I ignored it completely, as, at that point in my life (I was perhaps 9 or 10), I was much more interested in Marvel comic books,horror movies, and sports (especially baseball—big Reds fan when I was a kid). A few years after my parents divorced and my father disappeared, however, one of my sisters talked my mother into buying a cheap pawn shop guitar (a black Les Paul copy, as I remember, with absolutely terrible action, almost impossible to play) for her as a birthday present. In a process that nobody really questioned, I somehow just took possession of the instrument (she fooled around with it for about two days, then moved on to some other momentary fascination) and taught myself to play. Later, to my mother's everlasting regret, I bought a drum set with money I had saved from a newspaper route and bashed about on it in an effort to learn to play. From that point until I was in my early twenties, I thought with some seriousness about trying to make a career as a musician. 'Career,' let's be clear, in the sense of 'spend my life doing this,' as opposed to 'make a lot of money doing this,' as my musical tastes gravitated almost automatically to genres that were not the most lucrative. This was the late '70s and early '80s, and punk/hardcore and hip hop were just emerging, and I was interested in the aggressive, caustic nature of both. I was also drawn to the deeply counter-cultural, anarchic tendencies (inherited from the cultural rebellion of the 1960s) in much psychedelic and heavy rock music of the 1960s and 1970s. My poor mother was assaulted by a constant bombardment of the likes of Black Flag, Black Sabbath and Boogie Down Productions, and, though I fear she thought we were basically insane, she even allowed various bands I was in to practice (very loudly) in the basement. I played in a series of groups while in high school and college, ranging from hardcore/speed metal to early Pink Floyd-esque psychedelia to improvisational electronic stuff (using all manner of sound processors and effects in addition to various percussion instruments) that we had to play at avant-garde art gallery openings because no one else would tolerate it. One immaculately dressed young woman at such an event came up to me after our set had ended and told me that our performance was the most horrifying thing she had ever heard. I took that as a compliment.

When I graduated in 1988 from college utterly disgusted with higher education and with much of the rest of the mainstream world, my best friend and I (we had been in several bands together) left for the West Coast to 'make it' as musicians. The short version of that story is that we didn't. We lived in his van for a while, eating cold cans of pork and beans and showering very infrequently while looking mostly fruitlessly for similarly inclined musicians and clubs in which to play our unique music (which too many people we encountered insisted was in fact not music at all). Worse yet, my friend wound up taking his drug experimentation to the level of heroin addiction and he quickly became a challenge to deal with. He eventually died tragically in 1994 at the age of 25 after taking heroin that had been poisoned. Well before that point, though, I became discouraged by the whole situation and was more and more convinced that the life of the music world was likely going to leave me in the unhappy situation of my father, i.e., disgruntled and rejected with no success to show for years of effort. I decided to hang out with friends in Ashland, Oregon, a kind of late '80s-early '90s, small-scale version of Berkeley in the 1960s, in order to 'get my head together,' as the '60s phrase goes. There, I spent a few years in full retreat from 'the real world,' just sitting in the woods, reading a lot and thinking about what I wanted to do with myself for the rest of my life.

The more I thought, the more it seemed apparent to me that what I really wanted to do was to inquire into the facts that had led me to be the kind of person I was. In the doctoral dissertation I was to write some ten or so years later, I would discuss how the lifelong scholarly interest in religion of the great sociologist Emile Durkheim stemmed in part from the fact that his father was a rabbi and he himself intended to become one until he lost his faith. I think my own relationship to music and artistic creativity and individuality in general is very similarly motivated. I too was going to 'follow in the footsteps of the father' until I 'lost my faith' (i.e., decided I wouldn't make it as a musician) and then turned instead to the serious attempt to intellectually understand this thing that had so fascinated me.

Amazingly, given the fact that I had so hated higher education as an undergraduate, I decided I would have to go to grad school to pursue these questions. I would be lying if I said I understood why or how this decision took place. At times, when that earlier disgust for some of the games and the stupidity of the academic world reappears, I’m not even sure that it was a particularly good decision. But a decision it was. I chose the sociology department at the University of California campus at San Diego, as this was a department generally known across the country to be among the most 'eccentric' (this translates here roughly as 'interesting'). I knew it was one of a very few departments I wanted to work in, as most graduate programs seemed to me concerned with matters that were comparatively unimportant. The department had been founded in the 1960s by symbolic interactionists and other intellectual radicals within the discipline, and it later became a center for ethnomethodology and other explicitly and deeply philosophical schools of sociology. They were asking just the kinds of questions of meaning and identity that I wanted to ask.

A very significant element of my experience in graduate school had to do with my exposure to societies other than my own. San Diego is situated twenty minutes from the border with Mexico and I began to spend a lot of time on 'the other side/al otro lado,' practicing my Spanish and absorbing as much as I could of Mexican culture (and eating a lot of great authentic Mexican food, which, I learned fairly quickly, has almost no connection with what one finds at Taco Bell or just about any other ‘Mexican restaurant’ in the US). Mexican culture would become even more centrally a part of my identity when I met the extraordinary woman who later became my wife during a visit to the Baja city of Ensenada. She and our baby daughter have changed my life in every way, cultural and otherwise. I have been working on a book about my Mexican experiences for the last few years. It takes the form of a kind of autobiographical novel, fictional narrative blended with actual experiences I have had in an exploration of the interaction between an individual (me) marked by his own social history and a culture that is not his own. I also spent a considerable amount of time in France as a result of my choice of dissertation topic, and this too gave me the opportunity to see how radically different human cultures and ways of understanding the world can be. As I said earlier, I have always felt something of a 'divided' identity here in my own society, and my experiences abroad magnified and further complicated this phenomenon. I experienced in Mexico and France the contrast and tension between 'insider' and 'outsider,' trying hard in both cultures to learn as much as I could and to become as 'Mexican' and 'French' as I could while also feeling certain elements of my American identity very clearly emerging and affirming themselves.

The same questions continue to confront me: Who am I, essentially? What made me what I am? And, more generally, how much is one the product of one's history and environment, and can one learn enough about the process by which one is 'formed' to have a greater input into it? At the bottom of it all, I have come to believe, is a search for a real, substantive individualism. Not a simplistic idea of being ‘free from society,’ whatever that might mean, as I think more and more that such a ‘freedom’ is illusory, but rather an awareness of the inevitable presence of society in our identities that simultaneously endeavors to know as much as possible about precisely how society shapes us so as to be more fully cognizant of the process and even to be capable of changing it sometimes. Bennett Berger nicely summarizes this kind of individualism as "not the individualism of isolation and detachment...[but a] conception of the individual who exists at the intersections of his or her group affiliations and...at a historically located biographical intersection."

All this, then, and more has gone into making me someone interested in sociology, and in the particular kind of sociology outlined above, which Roger Pol-Droit defined splendidly, in an obituary for one of the great sociologists of the late 20^th century, as "an extremely powerful instrument of self-analysis that allows one to better understand what he is, by giving him an understanding of his own social conditions of production and of the position he occupies in the social world."Ultimately, there is a significant difference between the idea of sociology as a neatly defined 'scientific discipline' with a professional association and a nice, neat organizational bureaucracy that defines clearly which topics are sociological and which are not, and the idea of sociology as a 'form of consciousness,' as Peter Berger and Karl Mannheim have defined it, which can be applied fruitfully to just about every aspect of our lives but which must be careful not to fall into simple dogmatic social determinism. In this sense, again following Mannheim, sociology is in fact a kind of hybrid of philosophy, history, and cultural analysis/criticism. Given that definition, I believe one can ask some interesting questions about oneself and the world one inhabits and at least begin the process of providing answers to them.