Keepin’ It Real, Keepin’ It Tight: Narrative Identity in Fields of Cultural Production

• In Event: 365 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Narrating the Self; Embodying Culture

Abstract

Recent research in cultural production and consumption has stressed producers’ and consumers’ relationships with cultural goods through time: aesthetic careers in which individuals use cultural objects as material for “agency building” (Benzecry 2011). An existing concept in cultural sociology that provides the aesthetic career concept additional analytical purchase is narrative identity (Somers 1994, Gross 2008). Using interviews with aspiring rappers in St. Louis, Mo., this article explores how respondents consume and use biographical material of successful rappers in accounts of their own careers. We find two genres of account: authenticity accounts (which explain other rappers’ success in terms of biographical continuity and appropriate self-representation) and achievement accounts (which explains other rappers’ success as a result of their talent, hard work, and persistence). Furthermore, we find that these narratives have two functions in the lives of our respondents. First, narratives have a communicative function in that aspirants use such narratives to associate themselves with successful rappers and the ideals that narratively explain this success (e.g., authenticity). Second, narratives have a pragmatic function in that aspirants use narratives to organize their own action and engage in autobiographical work. We argue that the different genres of account vary in how they influence the “temporal orientations” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998) of our respondents in which aspects of their own biographies they regard as salient and seek to manage.

Authors

• Kyle Puetz, University of Arizona

• Michael Gibson, University of Arizona