For Americans, it is often assumed that an integral part of one’s identity is his or her job, the work that one does. This question arises at dinner parties, where typical interactions go something like this: “Nice to meet you! What do you do for a living?” It also appears more strictly, on questionnaires and on job applications (to get a new job, the person hiring you must know where you’ve worked before). It seems as though a good way to get to know a person – whether it is a friendly inquiry or a formal application – is to ask what one does for work. This conflation of work and identity may stem partly from the industrial period in the United States, when workers in Ford’s factories, for example, were not just working the assembly line, but were enmeshed in the rise of the great American spirit of industry. What I am struggling to understand, especially after reading this week’s article and chapters, is how this job-as-identity reconciles itself with authenticity, a true selfhood deeper than what one does every day between nine and five.
In his chapter “Authenticity and the Self,” Charles Lindholm discusses the contentious nature of work, authenticity, and identity. He gives the example of an airline attendant, who either chooses to wear the mask of nurturer, caring individual, and sexy employee without truly believing in it, or chooses to actively convince herself that she is this way, with or without the job (67). Lindholm states that to take on this latter stance, an airline stewardess “Had to conceal her management of her expressivity from herself, for fear of turning her deepest reality into a thing to be manipulated. The result was profound confusion in identity (Lindholm 1998: 67).” In this sense, Lindholm is arguing that it seems impossible to reconcile workplace identity with an authentic self. By stating that “Some escapes from this condition are possible (Lindholm 1998:67, italics my own),” he makes clear this contention is but a condition to be escaped through art, food, other forms of self-expression. This sentiment is also echoed in Lindholm’s Introduction, with his discussion of capitalism taking full force and wage labor no longer echoing the true sentiment and identity of its workers (5). Here he argues that with the rise of capitalism and Enlightenment thought, authenticity comes in the form of “Familial intimacy, spontaneous emotional expressivity…a sacred and universal moral self, existing beneath the social framework (Lindholm 2008: 6).” Again, Lindholm is making a clear distinction between labor and an authentic self. According to him, one’s identity cannot be defined by on one’s job, because authenticity is not inherently found there. With this in mind, how did we get to where we are today, standing at a dinner party, fielding questions about the work that we do?
Perhaps Lindholm is wrong about the inability for a worker’s identity to be an authentic one. If we take an example like Starbucks, where an employee shouldn’t just seem happy to work there, but actually be happy to work there (trust me – I worked at Starbucks, and I received reprimands for only seeming to be happy I was taking drive-through coffee orders at 4:30 a.m.), Lindholm’s argument may stand. However, after completing my fieldwork with cattle ranchers in rural Southern Arizona, I would argue that in some cases, authenticity, work, and identity can co-exist, even thrive. Ranchers would often express their deep connection with the land and the animals they worked with and state that ranching is the only job they could have, the only thing they could ever imagine themselves being. They would cringe at the thought of working in another profession that offered them less freedom and less hard labor. For ranchers, ranching is not about making profits for themselves or their cattle operations, like laborers in 16th century urban capitalist societies would have to be concerned with. Ranchers would consider their work their true expression of self, and thus, their work and identity can be considered truly authentic.
In a sense, it is easy to refute Lindholm’s subtle argument that work, identity, and authenticity are intrinsically at odds by looking at the cattle ranching industry and seeing how these concepts are intertwined in ranchers’ notions of selfhood. However, I am still unsure how to reconcile the way our modern American discourse frames work - all work, not just rural cattle ranching - as an inherent aspect of personal identity, even though it seems to deny a true expression of our creative selves, our private selves, our non-exploited selves, our authentic selves.
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