"Good Enough" Ethnography Harvard "Wendy Luttrell"

Luttrell, Wendy (2000). Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 70 No. 4 Winter, 499-523.
“Good Enough” Methods for Ethnographic Research
Wendy Luttrell
In this article, Wendy Luttrell reflects on key decisions she made in her own research in order to illuminate reflexivity
for other ethnographic researchers. Luttrell addresses the crisis of representation in ethnography, advocating that
researchers name the tensions, contradictions, and power imbalances that they encounter in their work, rather than
attempting to eliminate them. The author reexamines her own study of working-class American women’s life stories
to make the case for what she terms “good enough” research methods. Through her own self-reflective lens, Luttrell
describes several key realizations she made throughout the research process, and traces seven decisions she made as a
result.
1 Researchers of culture and consciousness who use narrative are caught between the proverbial rock and a
hard place. On the one hand, we strive to listen and represent those we study on and in their own terms. On
the other hand, we recognize that our role in shaping the ethnographic encounter is huge; consciously or
not, we listen and make sense of what we hear according to particular theoretical, ontological, personal, and
cultural frameworks and in the context of unequal power relations. The worry always exists that the voices
and perspectives of those we study will be lost or subsumed to our own views and interests. Given all this, it
is understandable that some researchers see no way out of this dilemma. But I advocate a different way of
looking at [begin page 500] the problem. I don’t believe that researchers can eliminate tensions, contradictions,
or power imbalances, but I do believe we can (and should) name them. I like the way feminist
researchers Natasha Mathner and Andrea Doucet (1977) put it:
The best we can do then is to trace and document our data analysis processes, and the choices and decisions we
make, so that other researchers and interested parties can see for themselves some of what has been lost and
some of what has been gained. We need to document these reflexive processes, not just in general terms such as
our class, gender and ethnic background; but in a more concrete and nitty-gritty way in terms of where, how and
why particular decisions are made at particular stages. (p. 138)
2 I have written elsewhere (Luttrell, 1997a, 1997b) about how my own background (as a White woman who
grew up in mostly midwestern suburbs with a working-class father and middle-class mother of Irish and
Scottish decent) affected my relationships, identifications, and exchanges with the White and Black working-
class women I studied.2 In this article I focus on seven key decisions I made during my fieldwork and
subsequent analysis. I want to make a case for what I call “good enough” methods, whereby researchers
view their fieldwork as a series of ongoing realizations that lead to complex choices and decisionmaking. By
“good enough” I mean thinking about research decisions in terms of what is lost and what is gained, rather
than what might be ideal. Accounting for these good enough decisions is, in my view, the nitty-gritty of
researcher reflexivity.
Author’s note: The Harvard Educational Review has a policy of capitalizing the racial identifiers White and Black. In my view, this
writing convention is inadequate, if not misleading in some cases, and can encourage an essentialist view of racial identities. The
meaning of Whiteness and Blackness is complex, contingent, and embodied in a web of everyday relationships and structures of
power. Representing these complexities is made more difficult by the reified marker, the capitalized labels of White and Black. In
this article, I advocate thinking about what is lost and what is gained by the research and writing decisions we make, and in this
same spirit I have asked the HER Editorial Boartl to rethink she convention. In the meantime, the article is being published using
their current policy.
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3 My research, reported in Schoolsmart and Motherwise (Luttrell, 1997a), is based on the life stories of two
groups of working-class American women who were enrolled in adult basic education programs, seeking
high school diplomas. In retrospect I have identified several key realizations that shaped my research process,
analysis, and write-up. In this article I trace the when, where, how, and why of seven decisions I made
as a result of these realizations.
Tracing the Steps
4 I began my study profoundly influenced by the ethnographic study of working-class high school boys by
Paul Willis (1977). I was especially intrigued by Willis’s analysis of the lads’ knowledge — what he called
their “cultural penetrations.”3 According to Willis, the lads had insights into their futures as working-class
manual laborers that led them to reject certain school values. These insights were not fully conscious — the
lads were not aware that their resistance to school knowledge and values, their rebellious attitudes toward
teachers’ authority, and their hypermasculinity were all part of the shop floor culture for which they were
destined. Willis’s contribution to the study of culture and consciousness was to suggest that the links among
structural determinants, cultural beliefs, and individual agency were far more compli- [begin page 501]
cated than first imagined. He represented the lads as being neither dupes of nor rebels against an educational
system designed to keep working-class students in their place. Willis’s work provoked a flurry of
school ethnographies, including my own, in which researchers set out to discover pieces that he had left out,
particularly, regarding gender and race.4
5 From 1980 to 1983 I observed and interviewed women who were enrolled in a community-based adult education
program in Philadelphia. Like Willis, I wanted to learn how the women saw themselves in relation to
school, in the present and in the past. I began the project by conducting short, semi-structured interviews
with two hundred women, asking them why they were returning to school and what earning a high school
diploma meant to them. Their responses generated a series of issues I wanted to probe with a smaller sample
of women. For example, I was especially interested in understanding what it meant that so many women
said they wanted a high school diploma so they could “become somebody,” and that they believed that
returning to school would make them better mothers (80% of the women offered this as a reason they had
enrolled in the program). I wanted to unpack the women’s understandings of the relationship between education,
betterment, and mothering, which was not a topic I had initially planned to study.
6 As an ethnographer, I believed it was important to investigate the women’s responses as part of a larger fabric
of social life and cultural beliefs.5 I had already gathered some clues from my previous experience as a
teacher in the adult education program. I began taking daily field notes on classroom settings and everyday
conversations and interactions in the program, as well as my conversations with women in the neighborhood.
In all three contexts (short interviews, classroom observations, and everyday interactions inside and
outside the program), the women provided me with examples of what might be called a cultural model of
education and success — that there are those who are expected to “become somebody” and those who
aren’t. There are people who do the right thing (e.g., finish school, get married, get a job with a steady
income) and those who don’t (or can’t), which explains who gets ahead and why. There are those with
brains, ambition, and drive who can make it in school, while others are lacking in these and therefore cannot
succeed. In one sense, I understood these beliefs in the context of “American individualism” — the
common and unreflected-upon view of the individual as the only or the main form of reality; a view of individuals
that stresses self-sufficiency and independence as the most salient characteristics of the “free,”
American adult subject.6 But I also noticed that embedded in this shared talk about education and success
was a critique of the American model of success and “betterment”:
Just because a person has a college degree doesn’t mean he is any better than me, it doesn’t give him the right to
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talk down to me with any less respect than a college professor. But I want a high school diploma so I can feel like
I’m somebody.
[begin page 502] I wanted to probe this equivocation, expressed over and over by the women I spoke with and
observed.
7 I selected fifteen women who would represent (generally speaking) those enrolled in the program to interview
in depth.7 Everyone I asked to participate in the study agreed. These women were all White and had
been born and raised in the neighborhood.8 They had attended local schools (two-thirds went to public
school and one-third went to parochial school) and had moved in and out of the labor force as waitresses,
factory hands, and clerical workers. Because a relationship between schooling and mothering had emerged
so saliently in the short interviews, I decided to interview women who were mothers with children still living
at home.9
8 I interviewed each woman at least three times in her home over the span of a year. The “official” portion of
the interview lasted from one-and-a-half to three hours, but often the women invited me to stay for tea and
more discussion after I packed away the tape recorder. I transcribed the taped interviews and wrote up field
notes after each interview, including my own reactions and interpretations.10
9 My interviewing strategy was open-ended, interrupted only by clarifying questions. For the first interview I
opened by saying, “Tell me what you remember about being in school.” In the second interview I followed
up on issues left over from the first interview (there were always questions I overlooked or events about
which I needed clarification). In the third interview we talked about why the women had returned to
school, what if any events had led to their decision, and how they would describe their experiences. I tried
to follow the women’s lead, to consider apparent “tangents” as important clues. For example, many of the
women talked about their early work experiences when I asked what they remembered about being in
school. Rather than redirecting the conversation to discuss school, I pursued these work experiences, which
turned out to shed important light on the women’s class, race, and gender concepts of knowledge and
authority.
10 In rare cases, when a woman did not offer an example to illustrate her point, I would ask for it. For example,
one woman said that what she remembered most about school was that teachers treated students like her
differently. She said she didn’t have much more to say than that school was “boring” and she didn’t like
being treated differently. I asked, “Can you remember a time when you were treated differently? What happened?”
She proceeded to tell a string of stories about the cruel punishments she had suffered, including
being locked in a closet. But usually I did not have to prompt the women; they offered up story after story
about their experiences in school. I came to view the women’s passionate storytelling, what I called their
“narrative urgency to tell it like it was,” as an expression of the emotional salience of school and its formative
role in shaping the women’s identities and self-understandings. [begin page 503]
Decision No. 1: Collecting Life Stories
11 I explained to the women selected that I was doing a research project about women’s education and that I
was interested in learning about their school experiences as girls and what it was like returning to school as
women. My request for their school experiences was most often greeted with the refrain, “You want to know
about my childhood? I could write a book about my life. . .” Sociolinguist and life-story theorist Charlotte
Linde (1993) would not have been surprised by this response, but I was. Linde argues that the life story is a
taken-for-granted interpretive device, a discursive category furnished by American culture — the idea that
we have a life story to exchange with others. She says, “In order to exist in the social world with a comfortC:\
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able sense of being a good, socially proper, and stable person, an individual needs to have a coherent,
acceptable and constantly revised life story” (p. 20).11 When I realized that the interview material I was collecting
was in the form of life stories, I decided to look for coherence, particularly in how the women sought
to present themselves as acceptable. This search for coherence would become a hallmark of my analytic
strategies — but I am getting ahead of myself.12
12 Collecting, interpreting, and narrating life stories is a common tool in the anthropological kit, and has
gained increasing prominence in the post-modern era since the oft-noted postmodern turn. Falling somewhere
between autobiography and biography, the narration of these stories is meant to provide the listener
with a sense of what life is like or what it means to be a member of a particular culture.13 James Peacock and
Dorothy Holland (1988) divide the anthropological use of life history into two types: the “portal” approach
and the “process” approach. I saw myself using both approaches. In the first instance, I was eliciting life stories
to learn something external to the women and their stories that their stories were presumed to mirror
— in my case, to learn about the institution and culture of school. I was also using the “process” approach,
paying close attention to the structure, coherence, and discourse forms the women used to tell their stories
— in this case, to learn about the women’s identities and self-understandings. As I discuss later, I also
turned to a psychoanalytic approach to life-story telling, listening for a deeper understanding of what I was
hearing.
13 Collecting and then transcribing the women’s life stories was the most comfortable part of the research for
me — it was when I felt most at ease as a researcher, listening and responding to what I heard. During this
stage I felt that mistakes could still be corrected. If I listened to a taped interview and realized I had not followed
through on a topic or had missed an opportunity to probe for information and understanding, I
could go back and ask more questions.14 The next stage of research — the classification and winnowing out
of the interview material — was more anxiety-ridden for me. I worried about the enormity of the analytic
task (more than five hundred pages of [begin page 504] transcribed interview material) and feared that I
would “get it wrong.” In addition, at this stage in my research, increasing numbers of scholars had begun to
write about the highly constructed nature of oral testimony and life stories. The more I read from these
scholars, the more I questioned my epistemological premises. I found myself moving between two ways of
thinking about life stories. On the one hand I saw these stories as factual accounts of the women’s experiences,
views, and values about schooling. On the other hand, I also understood that these stories represented
what the women wanted me most to know and what they construed as being worth talking about
(which is not to say that these stories were fictions, but that they were told with particular points in mind). I
decided against taking an either-or position on these two forms of ethnography — realist and reflexive.
14 While I believe there is an important distinction between these two forms, I don’t believe that researchers
must choose to do one or the other. Part of the challenge of my research was finding a way to do both — to
make realist claims about school culture and organization, the material conditions of the women’s lives and
their cultural beliefs, and to make reflexive interpretations of the ethnographic exchanges between me and
the women I studied.15 I designed a three-step coding procedure, in part to relieve my anxieties and in part
to sustain what I saw as a necessary tension between realist and reflexive research.16
Decision No. 2: Developing the Coding Procedures
15 I provided each woman with a copy of her interview transcript to see whether she wanted to make any
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changes. Most women told me they weren’t interested in reading the transcripts; they wanted to read what I
wrote about them (which only increased my anxiety level).17 After gaining their permission to proceed, I
read through each woman’s set of transcripts and looked for an overall point, the gist of her life story. During
this reading I took note of recurring images, words, phrases, and metaphors as each woman talked
about growing up. I listened for what sort of person I thought the interviewee wished to present, not just in
school, but also at work, in the community, in her family, and to me.
16 During my second reading of each woman’s set of transcripts, I focused on all the passages referring to
school and to educational views and values —what I called their school narratives. I noted the sequence of
the string of stories the women told (stories about teachers’ pets and teachers’ discipline routinely came
first, followed by stories of rebellion or acquiescence). I also looked for coherence among the string of stories
— what theme(s) tied the stories together? I paid particular attention to how each woman named her
difficulties in school and how she sought resolution. Then I grouped stories related to the problems the
women identified.18 My main aim was to gain insight into how each woman understood herself in school
from the stories she [begin page 505] told. For example, Doreen described herself as having an “attitude
problem” in school. I grouped this story with one she told about being the class clown, which won her the
respect of her friends but not of her teachers (thus, she was never a teacher’s pet). Later she told about having
a “problem with authority” and “resenting school rules and regulations,” which she explained was part
of her decision to leave school when she became pregnant at age sixteen. From her perspective, getting
pregnant wasn’t her problem in school — the school regulations were. Still later she talked about her
dilemma as a mother raising children who, she hoped, would “speak their minds,” but not get in trouble
with their teachers. She said she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or to cry about some of the disciplinary
problems her children brought home from school because “they’ve been taught to speak up when they
think something is unfair.” I viewed these stories as being related, tied together by her concern with/conflict
about authority relations. Needless to say, a story could fit into more than one category. For example, the
class clown story also fit into a string of stories Doreen told about how she often used humor to ease tensions
at home or on the job.
17 During my third reading I looked for patterns across all fifteen women’s school stories. All fifteen mentioned
three conflicts without any prompting on my part:
18 1) They all talked about having common sense, but not being “school-smart.” This distinction emerged in
each woman’s narrative of school, albeit not in the same way. My request for school memories seemed to be
a catalyst for critical self-appraisal. Their unstated assumption seemed to be that there was a story to be
told, and this story was about comparing oneself to others through school-based eyes about who was better,
smarter, or more worthy. At times the women sounded defensive as they described the gap between having
common sense and being school-smart. For example, the women would often make it a point to say that
“real intelligence” has nothing to do with schooling, that, in fact, too much schooling could ruin a person’s
common sense. The smartest people they knew were those (working-class men) who could “make things
work,” who were “good with their hands.” The fact that the women cited only men as examples of those
people with “real intelligence” unsettled me. And as I began to ask more directly about this gap between
common sense and real intelligence, I discovered that gender and class were wedded together in the
women’s definitions and values about knowledge. The women were aware that they held values about
knowledge that differed from what they believed to be school values. But they were not necessarily aware
that their explanations of these opposing genres of knowledge (school-smarts and common sense) could be
seen as a critique of class and gender social relations.19
19 2) All fifteen women told stories about teachers’ pets, describing why they had or had not been chosen as a
pet. Some women could vividly recall the names, demeanors, and outfits of the girls who had been chosen
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as pets. 0th- [begin page 506] ers told about how they didn’t like the girls who “acted cutesy,” and that they
had refused to join the pet contest. Each woman also offered her own version of how teachers selected their
pets — but all agreed that teachers liked girls who were both smart and submissive. These stories were told
with strong feelings of envy and guilt, and sometimes with flashes of embarrassment for expressing so
much emotion. In Gloria’s words, “I still remember that girl’s name; can you believe all these years and I still
can’t get over how the teacher treated that girl?” Like their stories about common sense, I heard the women
blaming themselves for not being “pet material” and defending themselves against what they felt were
unfair school judgments or expectations about working-class femininity. As Debra put it, “You couldn’t be
prissy and make it on the streets.”
20 3) The third conflict they all mentioned was about aspirations. Each woman mentioned the same set of
career options that she saw available —“you could either be a secretary, nurse, nun (if you were Catholic),
or mother.” Nevertheless, each woman told about her childhood dream of “becoming somebody” (such as
a judge, fashion model, or lawyer). Each then proceeded to explain difficult and often discriminatory circumstances
and events in school that interfered with the realization of these aspirations. For example, one
woman talked about having been placed into a vocational track called “kitchen practice — the lowest of the
low” despite her success in junior high. She lamented that at the time she had not challenged this school
placement.
21 These conflicts about aspirations and obstacles resonate with Linde’s observation that “people show enormous
zest for discussing their experiences in high school, however horrific the stories they tell may be”
(1993, p. 25). She attributes this zest to the prohibition within American culture to talk about class as a legitimate
explanation for why people end up in the particular position that they do. Instead, there seems to be
an unspoken assumption that important life decisions are made in schools, decisions that people feel compelled
to incorporate and explain as part of their life story. The women’s stories also echoed the work of
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972), whose interviews with White, working-class men had produced
what they called “confessions” and “defensive” stories about the role of formal education.20
22 Symbolic interactionists (Burke, 1954, 1969; Foote, 1951; Hewitt & Stokes, 1978; Mills, 1940; Scott &
Lyman, 1968; Weinstein, 1980) might call the women’s school stories “accounts” that they used to explain
what others might perceive as unexpected or inappropriate behavior. People are said to use different
accounting strategies, such as “credentialling” (Hewitt & Stokes, 1978) (which serves as a way for people to
establish qualifications so that their behavior won’t be viewed negatively) or “disclaimers” (to counteract in
advance the possibility of being seen as not exercising good judg- [begin 507] ment).21 Across the interviews,
the women used the same accounting strategies in their school narratives. First they would explain
that as young girls they had often thought about going to college, but that financial difficulties had made it
impossible to consider seriously (a disclaimer if applying an accounts framework). But the discussion
would not stop there. As if an explanation based on a lack of financial resources were not enough, each
woman would also go on to describe how she did not “feel comfortable” with “those” kinds of students —
students who were “real smart,” or had money, or acted superior because their parents were professionals.
These feelings of discomfort were described in idiosyncratic ways, from feeling a lump in one’s throat when
walking on a college campus to being worried about not wearing the “right” clothes or saying the “wrong”
things among people with higher class status. Those “other” kinds of people (including me? I wondered)
were “different from” them. These women felt more affiliated with people who had common sense, who had
graduated from the “school of hard knocks,” and who shared common interests and concerns (a credentialling
strategy if applying an accounts framework.)
23 Paying attention to the women’s accounting strategies made me return to the school narratives one more
time, noting how often the stories were framed in class-based “us” and “them” terms. For example, knowledge
was presented in us-them terms — being “schoolsmart” was associated with certain types of people,
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specifically “professional people,” who were not necessarily better, just “different from us.” When talking
about school, middle-class female teachers from the suburbs (understood as “them”) were pitted against
working-class girls (understood as “us”) who shouldered considerable family and work responsibilities and
resented being treated as if they “had nothing to do but go to school.” (This also explained why stories
about work were salient in their school narratives.)22 These same middle-class teachers chose as their pets
only those girls who met traditional middle-class standards of femininity (i.e., those who could afford nice
clothes, acted “cutesy,” and were obedient). The teacher’s pet contest was an us-against-them struggle —
and for the women I interviewed a key conflict was choosing which side they were on.23
24 It struck me that these us-them stories about school served dual purposes. On the one hand, the stories
explained the women’s failed social mobility (disclaimers). On the other hand, the stories affirmed their
working-class affiliations and identities (credentialling). I interpreted (and then narrated) the women’s stories
to illustrate these shared class-based meanings. The women shared the view that school is a sorting
mechanism, dividing students into two types — those who will succeed and those who won’t. They also
shared a set of personal experiences of school as a place in which they learned to defend against feelings of
loss, ambition, and envy, and to affirm themselves and their working-class, female identities. [begin 508]
Decision No. 3: Designing a Comparative Study
25 As I wrote about the interview material, I felt torn between reporting individual life stories (which could not
so easily be reduced to a main point) and building a case for the patterns I was detecting.24 At this point I
made a decision to focus on patterns, not individuals, and as a result something was lost and something else
gained. I lost the capacity to see each woman primarily as an individual with her own story to tell, but I
gained clarity on what I came to understand as links between the social and the psychological in the
women’s narratives. I think the alternative approach (developing more complete and holistic case studies of
individual women) would have had certain benefits. Some might argue that such an approach is more consistent
with feminist epistemologies.25 The trade-off, as I saw it, was that insofar as the women’s individuality
(the personal context of their stories) would be lost, building a theory about how school structure and
culture shapes identities and self-understandings would be gained. To trace and explain these links I needed
to cast the ethnographic net further and investigate at least one other kind of school and another group of
working-class women. I had moved to North Carolina, where I was employed in a workplace literacy program.
This job presented unique opportunities to conduct a comparative analysis.
26 My decision to do a comparative study came at a particularly contentious time in the historical development
of feminist anthropology.26 Some people were focusing on commonalities in women’s experiences of
gender inequality, while others were focusing on the differences among women and the context-bound
nature of gender inequality. Still others were arguing against using the analytic category “women” altogether.
I was taken with Ruth Behar’s observation of the opposing tendencies within feminism — “to see
women as not at all different from one another or as all too different.” She warned that “to go too far in
either direction is to end up indifferent” (Behar, 1993, p. 301). Naomi Quinn (2000), reflecting on this
debate, has argued that feminist anthropology had reached an impasse, in part because of academic politics
and in part because of the feminist turn from universalism to particularism. At the time when feminist
anthropology was close to generating a theory for explaining gender inequality (having identified a set of
“near universals”), it became unfashionable to develop explanations that could be tested or confirmed. In
the context of these debates, my decision to focus on institutional, psychological, and cultural patterns,
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rather than on individual particularities, meant taking a position favoring one side over the other.
27 My responsibilities directing a workplace literacy program at a North Carolina state university included
teaching, curriculum development, and research. This program had traditionally served the predominantly
African American housekeeping, landscaping, and maintenance staff, mostly female housekeepers.27 I followed
the same research protocol I had used in the Philadelphia study. I conducted short interviews with
fifty program participants about why they were returning to school. Then I selected fifteen women to
[begin 509] observe and interview. These women had all been raised in southern rural communities, growing
up mostly on tenant farms. Their past schooling had been sporadic, in part because of the demands of
farm work, and in part because of racial discrimination. All had attended segregated one-room schoolhouses.
The women were all employed as housekeepers; most had also worked as domestics; some had been
waitresses and factory workers.
Decision No. 4: What’s in a Label?
28 Critics warn us that labels (i.e., Black and White, working-class and middle-class, men and women). can fix
our understandings of how race, class, and gender shape self-understandings and identities. Moreover, such
naming practices make us think of separate variables rather than integrated categories of belonging. My
thinking about what would be lost and gained by my decisions about how to refer to each group of women
evolved over the course of my research. Initially I described the two groups as the “white, working-class and
the black, working-class women” (Luttrell, 1989). This stark contrast between “White” and “Black” had the
benefit of stressing the powerful effects of race. The North Carolina women (who labeled themselves Black)
had spoken a great deal about their personal experiences of racism and negotiating the color line as darkskinned
women. I understood their labeling themselves “Black” to me, a White woman, in the same terms
as Patricia Williams, who writes about her own decisions on categories:
I wish to recognize that terms like “black” and “white” do not begin to capture the rich ethnic and political diversity
of my subject. But I do believe that the simple matter of the color of one’s skin so profoundly affects the way
one is treated, so radically shapes what one is allowed to think. . . I prefer “African-American” in my own conversational
usage because it effectively evokes the specific cultural dimensions of my identity, but in this book I use
most frequently the term “black” in order to accentuate the unshaded monolithism of color itself as a social force.
(1991, p. 256)
29 Using the term “Black” for the North Carolina women does emphasize the power of color in shaping their
lives. But it doesn’t capture the complexities or subtleties of the women’s experiences of the color line, especially
within their Black communities, nor does it speak to the profound effects of rural poverty. The
women’s self-definitions feature the intertwining effects of race, class, and region (being poor with country
ways and being dark skinned in race- and class-segregated southern rural towns), which cannot adequately
be conveyed by the single label of “Black.” Meanwhile, the Philadelphia women did not label themselves
“White” in our conversations (Whiteness was unmarked, except for the very few observations in which I
directly asked about race relations).28 They referred to themselves as “women from the neighborhood,”
“working-class,” or “blue-collar women”; “Catholic” (in two cases) and “Irish” or “Polish” (in five cases).
The women’s ease with class-based identifi- [begin 510] cations defies the conventional wisdom that most
Americans see themselves as middle-class. Their uneasiness with racial identifications is an issue I regrettably
did not probe at the time of the interviews. Again, using the term “White” seemed inadequate for representing
these women’s complex and changing understandings of the social forces shaping their identities.
30 I wanted to use meaningful yet parallel labels for the two groups of women, so I settled on terms of regional
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origin (i.e., “Philadelphia” marking the women’s urban roots in a city of neighborhoods, and “North Carolina”
marking the women’s rural southern roots). This decision had unanticipated consequences. I quickly
learned that some listeners/readers of my project held certain racial expectations and images about “place”
and were inclined to assume that the urban, northern women were Black and the southern, rural women
were White. This occurred frequently and created some confusion despite my best efforts to be explicit
about each sample. I came to realize that by referring to the interviewees as the Philadelphia and North
Carolina women I was disturbing certain audience expectations, and that this could be a productive writing
strategy. This label had the benefit of allowing me to feature a more integrative analysis of race, class, and
gender as shaping forces in the women’s identities.
Decision No. 5: Attending to Variations
31 I used the same three-step procedure to analyze the North Carolina women’s interview material, only this
time I had the Philadelphia women’s stories at the forefront of my mind. I quickly learned that the North
Carolina women offered the same skeletal school story as the Philadelphia women did. They too cast school
as a battleground and in us-them terms, but with two key variations on these themes. Paying close attention
to these variations enabled me to develop a more nuanced analysis of the inseparability of race, class, and
gender, and a fuller appreciation for school context.
32 Variation 1: Like the Philadelphia women, the North Carolina women told stories that pit their middleclass,
Black female teachers against students like themselves (in this case, students who had “country ways”
and darker skin color). But embedded in these us-them stories were examples of “good” teachers who had
treated them with special care and “bad” teachers who had belittled them or made them feel ashamed of
themselves and/or their parents. These stories had to do with teachers’ efforts to make up for or correct the
women’s country ways (in terms of speech, deportment, or clothing). I later learned that this was a cornerstone
of the “racial uplift” mission of the all-Black rural schools the North Carolina women had attended.
Teachers were “good” if they provided students the means for uplift (such as clothes, books, hair ribbons,
and other traditionally feminine accessories) and “bad” if they made fun of students’ deficiencies. These
links led me to return to the Philadelphia women’s interview material to see what criteria they had used
[begin 511] to assess their teachers. The Philadelphia women also told good-bad teacher stories, but their
assessments had to do with teachers’ efforts to discipline students (i.e., teachers were “good” if they were
strict but fair; teachers were “bad” if they were arbitrary or cruel). In light of the urban-bureaucratic school
mission to prepare students for the industrial work force, this emphasis on discipline made sense. I began to
realize that each school organization and mission had its own version of authority and discipline. In the
rural school, teachers’ discipline focused more on “personal” attributes like manners and habits, whereas in
the urban school, discipline was more focused on “public” (i.e., work) attributes, like punctuality and obedience.
Moreover, the women’s critical self- appraisals could be linked to the disciplinary code of each
school context. The North Carolina women saw themselves as personally deficient, whereas the Philadelphia
women saw themselves as having a “bad” attitude toward authority.
33 Variation 2: The teacher’s pet contest was an organizing theme in the North Carolina women’s school stories,
as it had been in the Philadelphia women’s stories. But rather than seeing themselves as potential contestants
in the race for the teacher’s approval and affection (as had the Philadelphia women), the North
Carolina women said that because of their poverty, country ways, and dark skin color they would not have
been chosen as a teacher’s pet, even if they had wanted to be. The teachers’ pets — the light-skinned girls
with the “good” hair and nice clothes and professional parents — were set against dark-skinned girls who
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were “passed over” by the teachers, made to feel “invisible.” The North Carolina women’s metaphor of
invisibility made me look for the metaphors the Philadelphia women had used. I discovered a pattern that,
again, I had not been attuned to before. When describing their conflicts in school, the Philadelphia women
used terms related to voice — how they had a “mouth,” how they resented not being able to speak their
minds, etc. These contrasting metaphors of visibility and voice reflected the women’s response to the disciplinary
code of each school context (i.e., being invisible is one way to defend against personal attacks, and
being silent is one way to avoid being seen as a threat to authority).
Decision No. 6: A Turn to Psychodynamic Understandings of
Self-Other Relationships
34 My argument — that school context produces its own set of student identities, critical self-appraisals, and
anxieties — was based on an analysis of the variations in the women’s narratives. Yet striking similarities,
especially the women’s split sense of self, deserved examination. Both groups of women made persistent references
to feeling torn about how best to present themselves in school. They talked about their different
sides — for example, the side that could “con” the teacher or “put on the dog” versus the side that resented
having to play the game; or the side that wanted the teacher’s ap- [begin 512] proval versus the side that
sought peers’ approval and felt disloyal if chosen by the teacher as a pet. Moreover, it was not easy to resolve
these two sides. In one woman’s words, “I felt bad because I felt like I had conned them, like it wasn’t really
me who they liked.”
35 Initially I had understood the women’s us-versus-them stories about school in terms of class and race conflict.
Drawing on a culturalist Marxist tradition, most specifically E. P. Thompson (1963), I argued that the
women’s us-them view of knowledge — their pitting common sense against school knowledge — reflected
their class and race consciousness.29 The women spoke about knowledge in the same way that Thompson
defines class consciousness, as the way people “feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between
themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs”
(Thompson, 1963, p. 9). These women’s notion of class and race consciousness, like Thompson’s, was
embedded in relationships that are “embodied in real people in a real context” (Thompson, 1963, p. 9). Real
people and real school contexts were at the heart of the women’s stories and the explanations they gave for
why they felt allied and “comfortable” with some groups of people and not with others. But another layer of
description did not seem to fit into this class- and race-consciousness framework. This layer had to do with
the women’s split sense of self — the tenacious pattern whereby they would break themselves or others into
two parts, where one side was idealized (“good”) and the other devalued (“bad”). To help me understand
this splitting I turned to a psychodynamic understanding of self-other relationships.
36 Psychodynamically speaking, this process of splitting is integral to how we attach meaning and feelings to
our relationships with others. In object-relations terms, it is our earliest experiences with those upon whom
we are dependent for survival (usually maternal caregivers) that shape what we take in as meaningful,
important, fearful, or fanciful about ourselves (introjection), and what we project onto others (projection).
These early emotional or fantasy meanings about-a person, object, or idea become part of who we are and
how we relate to others. From this perspective, I began to reconsider the salience of the women’s stories
about their mothers — stories that I had not probed with the same fervor as I had the stories about teachers
and students. I also realized that a psychodynamic understanding of the women’s life stories meant rethinking
my own identifications and emotions as a listener. This decision also brought me full circle from focusing
on individual lives, to focusing on overriding patterns, back to focusing on individual lives (including
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my own).
Decision No. 7: A Psychoanalytic Listening to Life Stories
37 Within psychology, and particularly psychoanalysis, the analyst elicits and ties together life stories (referred
to as case histories) as insight into a per- [begin 513] son’s development or illness, as clues to both the care
and cure of the patient. The foundation for this notion of the life story is that there is a “normal” developmental
path against which everyone’s life can be evaluated. Many critics of psychoanalysis, including psychoanalysts
themselves, have pointed out the “class-blind, politically pacifying, and apparently ahistorical
myth of human development” (Phillips, 1998, p. 39). Still, what appeals to me about psychoanalysis is the
attention paid to how individuals make sense of this “normal” story of development and how they infuse
their life stories with particular emotions, fantasies, images, associations, and feelings.30 I found Juliet
Mitchell’s description of the psychoanalytic life story useful:
The patient comes with the story of his or her own life. The analyst listens; through an association something
intrudes, disrupts, offers the “anarchic carnival” back into that history, the story won’t quite do, and so the process
starts again. You go back, and you make a new history. (1984, p. 288)
38 Intruding associations — especially about mothers — disrupted many interviews. Sometimes the women
would be taken back to images and feelings from childhood, realizing that the story would not quite do. In
one particular case, Kate, a North Carolina woman, asked that I turn off the tape recorder before telling
about a memory that she said still “has a hold on me.” In relating her memory Kate tried unsuccessfully to
keep from crying, apologizing several times for the fact that she couldn’t tell her story without emotion. At
the end Kate thanked me for being willing to “hold” her memory, but then said she wished we had taperecorded
it so she could hear it for herself. We agreed that I would return the next week to record the story.
Not surprisingly, the taped version took some new turns, but again she focused on her regrets about not
having been nicer to her (now-dead) mother. Initially I filed this entire exchange as tangential a disruption
unrelated to my research topic. In another case, Tina, from Philadelphia, was remembering an incident at
school in which she had felt compelled to make up a story to cover for her mother’s negligence. As she was
telling the story she started to cry and then angrily said, “Why did you make me remember all this? I don’t
like thinking about my mother this way.” Feeling guilty and wanting to avoid conflict, I apologized, turned
off the tape-recorder, and said I knew how much she cared for her mother. I suggested that we should stop
for the day. This only made Tina angrier. She turned the tape-recorder back on and said she had a lot more
to say about her mother and that I wasn’t getting off that easily. We talked for over an hour about how certain
of her mother’s actions haunt her to this day and how she continues to feel anger and guilt about herself
in relation to her mother. At the end she said that I shouldn’t “feel bad if people get angry” and that I
shouldn’t be “afraid to ask more about mothers.” “I’m the first to say that I love my mother and that she did
the best to raise me, but . . .”
39 Identifying my reluctance to deal with strong emotions and mixed feelings about mothers — what could be
called counter-transference in my fieldwork [begin 514] relationships — marked a major breakthrough in
my thinking and in my research process.31 I again returned to all the interview material, and through this
recursive process I discovered a range of maternal images and mixed feelings that the women had
expressed, but that I had minimized in my analysis of the links between structure, culture, and agency. Psychodynamically
speaking, these ever-present yet varying maternal images and memories could be said to
reflect the women’s identificatory struggles in the gender and self-making process (Benjamin, 1988, 1993;
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Chodorow, 1978, 1989, 1995; Flax, 1990).32 But why had the request for school memories evoked these
maternal images and conflicts? What structural or cultural aspects of schooling might produce such associations?
And what might the connection be between the women’s split sense of self, the particular school
context, and their stories about mothers?
40 Two theories about the gendered organization of schooling helped me to see the women’s stories in a fuller
light. The first was Alison Griffith and Dorothy Smith’s (1987) observation that schools are organized
around the unacknowledged and devalued work of women (as teachers and mothers). The second was
Madeleine Grumet’s (1988) observation that teaching and learning are unconsciously associated with
mothering despite great efforts on the part of schools, teachers, and students to deny and repress this connection.
33 Both helped to explain why the women might express mixed feelings about the role of women (as
mothers and teachers) in their life-story telling. The women’s stories, which drew upon a vivid world of
women (teachers, mothers, daughters), revealed a knowledge about how the world works that the women
themselves did not know they knew (Willis would call this a cultural penetration). One insight I drew from
their descriptions and associations about school was that each school context had, in its own way, fostered a
divided sense about a whole host of issues: about school-wise knowledge; about themselves as female
objects of desire (“pets”); about their class and race affiliations; and about their future lives as mothers, to
name a few. While the process of splitting (specifically, the idealization and devaluation of women’s role)
had helped the women deal with these mixed emotions, it had also deflected the women’s attention away
from the effects of social inequality in their lives.34
41 A psychoanalytic listening to women’s narratives also allowed me to realize how mutually engaging and
intersubjective the process of fieldwork is, as well as the extent to which my own subjectivity shapes the
research.35 When I entered the field I was best prepared to think about issues of access and rapport, and to
negotiate my multiple roles as a researcher, a teacher, and as a mother (I often brought my children to interviews),
36 saw these multiple roles as positive because I believed they enabled me to tap into the women’s life
worlds and perspectives.37 Now in retrospect I can also see that I was hearing the women’s stories through
several layers of identification — [begin 515] not the least of which were my own complicated feelings as a
daughter and schoolgirl.38
“Good Enough” Reflexive Methods
42 The epistemology of social science demands a distinction between researchers and researched, observer
and observed, and at the most abstract level, between subject (self) and object (other). But this distinction
need not break down into research relations of domination and submission, or idealization and devaluation,
or detachment and (over) involvement.39 I agree with George Devereux (1967), who argued that traditional
research methods help researchers overcome threats posed by making connections and relationships
with the objects/subjects of their research. For example, he says that methods of detachment are a way for
researchers to bind their anxieties and not necessarily a means to discover truth about an “other.” Ruth
Behar takes this observation one step further:
Because there is no clear and easy route by which to confront the self who observes, most professional observers
develop defenses, namely “methods” that “reduce anxiety” and enable us to function efficiently. . . This is especially
the case for situations in which we feel complicitous with structures of power, or helpless to release another
from suffering, or at a loss as to whether to act or to observe. (1996, p. 6)
43 But how do we prepare ourselves effectively to negotiate self-other ethnographic relationships? I propose
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that we strive to develop “good enough” methods in the same spirit that pediatrician and child psychoanalyst
D. W. Winnicott (1965) called for “good enough” mothering. He argued that the perfect mother (like
the perfect researcher) is a fantasy, a projection of infantile wishes that cannot be met by any real person.
Moreover, efforts to attain perfection (either for one’s self or for another) can stand in the way of healthy
tensioned human relations.
44 It is possible to be a “good enough” researcher — that is, a person who is aware that she or he has personal
stakes and investments in research relationships; who does not shy away from frustrations, anxieties, and
disappointments that are part of any relationship; and who seeks to understand (and is able to appreciate)
the difference between one’s self and another. The good enough researcher tries not to get mixed up
between one’s fantasies, projections, and theories of who the “others” are and who they are in their own
right. Good enough researchers accept rather than defend against healthy tensions in fieldwork. And they
accept the mistakes they make — errors often made because of their blind spots and the intensity of their
social, emotional, and intellectual involvement in and with the subject(s) of their research. The many times
that they will do it right can compensate for these mistakes. [begin 516] I believe that students of ethnography
during anthropology’s “double crisis” — in terms of the challenges to ethnographic writing and feminism
— need both reassurance and direction. Students need practice in order to learn how to be attuned to
questions of relationship, position, and social complexities, and how to turn resulting tensions into data,
analysis, and eventually into theories. Being reflexive is something to be learned in terms of degrees rather
than absolutes (a good enough ethnography is more or less reflexive, not either-or in my view). I think of
being reflexive as an exercise in sustaining multiple and sometimes opposing emotions, keeping alive contradictory
ways of theorizing the world, and seeking compatibility, not necessarily consensus. Being reflexive
means expanding rather than narrowing the psychic, social, cultural, and political fields of analysis.
45 In terms of gathering life stories I suggest that researchers concentrate on the specifics of life events. Frigga
Haug et al. (1987) call this “memory work” and argue that it is not so much a question of respondents “having
a good memory” as practicing it. They write:
Once we have begun to rediscover a given situation — its smells, sounds, emotions, thoughts, attitudes — the
situation itself draws us back into the past, freeing us for a time from notions of our present superiority over our
past selves; it allows us to become once again the child — a stranger — whom we once were. With some astonishment,
we find ourselves discerning linkages never perceived before: forgotten traces, abandoned intentions, lost
desires and so on. (p. 47)
46 In this way I am a realist ethnographer, believing that buried memories can be recovered. I have listened
countless times to respondents say, “I haven’t thought about this in years. Now that we are talking about it I
can remember . . .” and then proceed to describe in rich detail a scene they had long forgotten. The passion
with which the women recalled (and in some ways emotionally relived) their pasts makes me an advocate
for facilitating interviewees’ “memory work.”
47 Two listening strategies are particularly useful toward this end. The first is paying attention to and pointing
out interviewees’ self-evaluative language, and the second is taking note of interviewees’ meta-statements.
Examples of the first from my research are statements like, “I guess you could say I just didn’t measure up,”
“I didn’t work to my potential,” “I didn’t try hard enough,” “I gave up on myself.” Asking for details and
examples — “Can you tell me about a time when you felt like you didn’t measure up? What happened?” —
often opened up the space for the women to draw conclusions about their past selves (for example, reconsidering
what they valued and what they thought others valued, or how they were told to act and how they
felt about themselves when they did or did not act that way). Examples of the second, or meta-statements,
occurred when the women spontaneously commented about what they had just said, as if they were considering
their statement from an outsider’s (my own?) perspective. It was common for the [begin 517] women
to say things like, “I know this might strike you as strange” or “that was a crazy thing. . .“ or “there’s no tellC:\
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ing why such and such happened.” On the one hand, paying attention to these meta-statements alerted me
to specific class, race, and gender dynamics to probe further. On the other hand, the frequency of these
meta-statements made me realize the extent to which the women held their own images of me as the
researcher and audience of their stories. Perhaps these meta-statements (ways of hooking me as a listener)
would not have been necessary had I not been viewed as an outsider, or as a “college-educated” person.40
The process of analyzing the women’s meta-commentary made me become more aware of how l was being
positioned as a mother (who often brought her children to the interviews) and as a daughter (who wanted
to avoid negative feelings toward mothers). Nonetheless, I often found it difficult to ask why they thought I
might consider something strange. At times it seemed improper (that is, not the kind of question a
researcher asks) and at other times I felt vulnerable. But if I were to be a narrator of these stories, I felt it was
necessary to take the risk to find out who they thought I was. When I began to ask or perhaps I should say
when it became impossible for me not to ask more about how the women thought they should feel about
their mothers and how they actually felt (thanks to interviewee Tina who pushed me on this point) only
then was I able to tap into a range of complicated maternal feelings and to connect these feelings to the gendered
organization of schooling.
48 Finally, in collecting the women’s life stories I learned to worry less about whether the women were “telling
the truth” than in listening for gaps, inconsistencies, and associations. Noting these out loud allowed both
the women and me to rethink and reconstruct our stories. Here, the reflexive side of my ethnographer self
predominates. For whatever else can be said about it, I believe that ethnographic research is about making
meaningful connections with others who may or may not be like us. Karen McCarthy Brown puts it this
way:
Ethnographic research is a form of human relationship. When the lines long drawn in anthropology between
participant-observer and informant break down, then the only truth is the one in between; and anthropology
becomes closer to a social art form, open to both aesthetic and moral judgment. This situation is riskier, but it
does bring intellectual labor and life into closer relation. (1991, p. 12)
49 Many things influence how a researcher shapes her or his social art form —one’s research questions, study
design, and theoretical-explanatory approaches, coupled with one’s particular temperament, personality,
and intended audience. I strongly endorse the use of a variety of methods to bring intellectual labor and life
into closer relation: clinical, phenomenological, historical, cross-cultural, linguistic, and discourse analyses.
At its core, ethnographic research is creative, inventive, emotionally charged, and uneasy. “Good
enough” researchers find ways to sustain all these aspects. [begin 518]
Notes
1. Many people have written about different forms of this dilemma. Behar and Gordon (1995) describe the
dilemma in terms of anthropology’s “double crisis,” which, they argue, has its roots in the postmodern turn
and critique of the “realist” tradition in ethnographic writing, and in the critique of White, middle-class
feminist versions of women’s experience that lesbians, women of color, and working-class women have been
so effective in making. Debates about ethnographic representations and the politics of “writing culture”
have led to much hand wringing and spilt ink. I agree with Fay Harrison who has observed that despite
these problems she does not want to give up on written representations of culture or to refashion ethnography
as a “literary enterprise” (Harrison, 1993, p. 403),
2. My book provides examples of how my middle-classness and Whiteness became topics of conversation
during my fieldwork (for example, see Luttrell, 1997a, p. 15, for an exchange with an interviewee in which
our class differences were crystallized). These conversations had two effects: first, they served to highlight
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the women’s views about “others” (in this case, me) and varied meanings of race and class difference; and
second, they made me more aware of my position and how I was being positioned by the women as White
and middle class, which then influenced how I interpreted their life stories. One of the points I hope to
make in this article is that class and race identifications can evolve over the course of research, as both the
researcher and the researched come to see themselves and each other in new ways. This is an issue about
which some White researchers are beginning to write more reflexively. See Fine, Weis, Powell, and Wong
(1997); Maher and Tetreault (1997); Perry (1998); and Thompson and Tyagi (1996) for examples.
3. The term penetration struck me as quite masculine. I was interested in finding more gender-neutral ways to
describe the knowledge people hold about how the world works, knowledge that they are not always aware
they hold. Feminist versions of psychoanalysis help in this regard.
4. Willis was successful in showing that structure, culture, and agency are linked, but he failed to explain how
they are linked.
5. I am making a distinction here between an interview study (in which the interviews may be more or less
structured and more or less directed by the interviewer, but in any case are the main source of data) and an
ethnography. Interviews are but one tool in the anthropological kit for studying people who attach cultural
meaning to their individual experiences. See Atkinson and Silverman (1997) and Atkinson (1997) for a discussion
of the limitations of interview studies that do not take context or long-term engagement with interviewees
enough into account.
6. See Linde (1993, p. 200) for her discussion of ontological individualism in American culture.
7. I selected women who represented the basic demographic profile of women in the community, including
marital status, occupation, income, educational level, religion, and race. I also selected women who represented
a range of program participants in terms of age, family situation, past attendance, type of school,
academic achievement, and level of community or civic participation.
8. The neighborhood was known for its stability, and yet was experiencing tumultuous community conflict,
especially in terms of increasing drug use, racial violence, and domestic abuse. The year I started working
in the local Lutheran Settlement House, all three issues were at the top of the social service agenda, which
was the impetus for opening the Women’s Program.
9. I did not realize, even when making this sampling decision, that I was taking a theoretical step in my conception
of the research as a study of the relationship between mothering and schooling. This realization
would come later. [begin 519]
10. See Kleinman and Copp (1993) for a good discussion of “notes on notes” in which fieldworkers record their
doubts, moods, and worries, as well as their emerging theories about what they are seeing.
11. Linde defines the life story as consisting “of all the stories and associated discourse units, such as explanations
and chronicles and the connections between them, told by an individual in his/her lifetime” (1993, p.
21).
12. Another lesson to be drawn from my fieldwork is the extent to which respondents shape the research process.
I didn’t plan my project to be about life stories, but the subjects of my research had their own notions
of what my project was about.
13. The use and meaning of life stories collected by anthropologists is the subject of much debate, particularly
when anthropologists bring certain expectations about what should constitute the life story of any particular
person. See Rosaldo (1989) for his inability to “elicit” from his subject; Tukbaw, what he considered to be
an appropriate narrative of the “self,” about inner life as we understand it. Similarly, Behar (1993) writes
about how her subject, Esperanza, refused to talk about certain matters, such as sexuality, which is a key
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subject that we have come to expect to find discussed in women’s lives. Behar says, “Her life story, as she told
it to me, was not a revelation of the real ‘truth’ of her inner life but an account of those emotional states
(which were also often bodily and religious States) that she construed as worth talking about — physical
suffering, martyrdom, rage, salvation” (p. 12).
14. This is a stage of research during which asking for feedback from more experienced interviewers is important.
I advocate teaching courses in research methods so that ethnographers/interviewers can develop and
practice skills before entering the field. I disapprove of the “sink-or-swim” approach to fieldwork.
15. This either-or thinking has, in my mind, fueled the long-standing debate about whether such a thing as a
“feminist ethnography” can exist. I think a more useful approach is to reframe the question to ask, “In what
ways is or is not a particular ethnography ‘feminist’?”
16. I have seen this anxiety in my own students who get to this stage. After collecting extensive and rich interviews,
they feel overwhelmed about what to do next, hoping that their coding scheme will ease their worries.
17. Two women did read and comment on their transcripts. The first said she was surprised, if not a bit embarrassed,
about how much time she had spent talking about her mother, and the second asked for an additional
interview so that she could fill in the gaps of her life story — events she had “shortshrifted,” like how
she had met her husband.
18. This was before the availability of computer programs for doing qualitative research. I have yet to become
proficient in the use of such programs and prefer a more “hands-on” approach, which includes colored
highlighting, cutting and pasting, and filing and refiling.
19. This is an example of the women’s “cultural penetration” — a knowledge of the way the world worked that
they didn’t know they held.
20. Linde notes the evaluative property of life Stories — that life stories allow the narrator to reflect upon
whether his or her self is (or was) good, proper, worthy, etc., and thus to have confessional qualities. As Sennett
and Cobb found, “Confession may be good for the soul, but it is also excellent for the self-image”
(1993, p. 124).
21. See McLaren (1985) for her use of the notion of accounts in her study of working-class British women’s pursuit
of education.
22. In Luttrell (1997a) I show that the women spoke “in the voice of”’ and “in the image of” their peers, often
referring to themselves in the plural, as in “We knew what we wanted.”
23. Aspirations were also described in us-against-them terms, as in “We knew we were going to become secretaries.
We weren’t like those girls who were going to college.” [begin page 520]
24. “Was my focus on the women or on the schools they attended?” one kind critic asked after I had completed
writing up the Philadelphia study in the form of my dissertation (Luttrell, 1984). I wanted to do both, I said,
but was not sure how to do this.
25. I had this same conversation (about my decision to focus on the Philadelphia women as a group and on the
patterns that emerged throughout their stories, rather than on individuals) with some of the Philadelphia
interviewees. One interviewee, after hearing me speak about the interview material at a conference, said she
wished I had focused more on her individual life story. Another interviewee, who was also at the conference,
disagreed, saying she didn’t want me to write her story; if she wanted her personal story told she
would write it herself. She preferred her experiences being used to illustrate larger points about “workingclass
women’s lives” (her words). See Luttrell (1997a, pp. 17-18) for more discussion of this conversation.
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26. See di Leonardo’s introduction to Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge for an excellent review of the
feminist project in anthropology, which she rightly says has “flown under several flags” (1991, p. 1). In this
piece she traces the shift from the anthropology of women, to the anthropology of gender, to feminist
anthropology, to feminist-inspired anthropological research and writing on gender relations, and how these
shifts reflect changes in the academy, political economy, and the critique of ethnography (1991, pp. 1-48).
27. My choice of a comparative site was influenced as much by practicalities as by theoretical considerations.
When I learned that most of the North Carolina literacy students had grown up in rural counties and had
attended one-room schoolhouses, I thought the urban-rural contrast of past schooling would be especially
interesting to examine.
28. For example, one woman explained that her mother had forbidden her to attend a magnet school for academically
achieving students because it was in a “bad neighborhood.” When I asked whether she thought
that this was a good example of how racism can disadvantage White people as well as Blacks (the neighborhood
in question was known to be a “Black” neighborhood), she said she had not ever thought about it in
this way.
29. I develop this argument in Luttrell (1989).
30. Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992) write that no other science pays such close attention to the life story as does
psychoanalysis, whatever its limitations. I found the following works on narrative in psychoanalysis most
useful: Steedman (1986), Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992), and Mishler (1986).
31. See Kleinman and Copp (1993) for an excellent discussion of emotions and fieldwork, particularly the section
on researcher identifications with those being researched, entitled “The Costs of Feeling Good.” I also
found helpful Hunt’s (1989) discussion of the role of transference and countertransference in fieldwork
relationship. Thorne’s realization that her own memories of being a schoolgirl made her over-identify with a
particular girl she was observing (1993) also enabled me to rethink my reactions.
32. See Chodorow (1995) for her observation that
guilt and sadness about mother are particularly prevalent female preoccupations and as likely to limit female
autonomy, pleasure, and achievement as any culture mandate. . . . Similarly women’s shame vis-à-vis men,
whether of dependence or of discovery in masculine pursuits, is certainly situated in a cultural context in which
such pursuits are coded as masculine in the first place. But this shame is also experienced in itself, inflected with
many unconscious fantasies that stem from a time in development well before such coding could be known. It is
a conflict in itself, and it inflects the general sense of self and gender as well as interacting with specific cultural
expectations and meanings. (1995, p. 540)
33. See Shaw (1995) for her more recent discussion about the relationship among school organization, anxiety,
and gender. [begin page 521]
34. See Luttrell (1997a, pp. 91—107) for a full discussion of how the cultural and personal myth of maternal
omnipotence and idealized images of the perfect mother work in the context of schooling.
35. In graduate school I had studied symbolic interactionism as a theoretical and methodological approach to
fieldwork. While I was fortunate to take courses with Nancy Chodorow, who exposed me to psychoanalysis
and feminism, when I entered the field I did not see this perspective as guiding my research questions or
approach. Only in retrospect and in revisiting parts of my field notes have I been able to see the connections
among the theoretical traditions I have just outlined.
36. See Luttrell (1997a), especially chapter two, for some discussion of how bringing my children to interviews
influenced what I learned. I have written elsewhere about how my role as a mother affected my relationships
with the subjects of my research and my subsequent analysis (see Luttrell, 199Th).
37. What I like about this (classical) sociological view of the researcher as negotiator of roles and actor learning
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a social script is its emphasis on consciousness and intentionality. Insofar as I made conscious choices and
acted in certain ways based on what I learned in the field, I could extend this notion of consciousness and
intentionality to the subjects of my study.
38. See Luttrell (1997a, pp. 13—23) for more discussion of my multiple identifications with each group of
women.
39. This is the research version of splitting.
40. See Riessman (1993) for her discussion of the teller-listener relationship in narrative analysis. Her work
(and her Comments on this article) have been very influential in my thinking.
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