9 Between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
Introduction
We live, simultaneously, in two worlds. On the one hand, we live in a world occupied and defined by our close relationships – those of family, neighborhood, and community – in which we cooperate with others who are very much known to us, sometimes in intimate detail. At the same time that we inhabit this world, we inhabit another world in which the food we eat, the garments we wear, the buildings we inhabit, and the technology we deploy are produced by multitudes of others distant and unknown to us. As producers in this world, we cooperate with countless others, again unknown to us, to bring about the goods and services we offer. Depending on the kinds of goods and services we produce, we may never directly encounter those who benefit from our efforts.
The first world, the world that the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called “Gemeinschaft,” is the sphere in which solidarity and the moral approbation of one’s fellow men matters. It is the world that the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek described as the “intimate order” or “micro-cosmos” – the world in which people possess a great deal of local knowledge about those with whom they interact. Both Tönnies and Hayek tended to associate this world with the pre-modern era, a world that has diminished in importance with the emergence of the modern forms of association.
The second world, the sphere of social interaction Tönnies called “Gesellschaft,” is the context in which social relationships are means of satisfying individual aims and purposes through impersonal mechanisms, such as those found in market capitalism. Hayek described this world as the “extended order” or “macro-cosmos” – the world in which people make increasing use of knowledge they do not possess directly, but that is instead fundamentally dispersed across countless producers, suppliers, financiers, investors, and consumers. Although both thinkers described distinguishable spheres of social life as well as the tensions their juxtaposition suggest, it is fair to say that Tönnies and Hayek viewed this second world differently.1 Tönnies was concerned that the forces of Gesellschaft were eroding the solidarity we find in smaller communities. Hayek was concerned that the rules and attitudes fashioned within the intimate order would erode the marvelous productivity of the extended order.
As some scholars have pointed out, however, the intimate sphere of Gemeinschaft is far from retreating into a dim historical past (Garnett 2008; Storr 2008; Boettke and Storr 2002; Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright 2000; Cornuelle 1965, 1991, 1996). While the global extended order has indeed become increasingly complex and extends farther than it ever has in the past, individuals are still embedded within (admittedly changing) local, intimate orders in which solidarity matters a great deal. Critics have also challenged the notion that these two spheres are clearly distinct and separate from one another (Garnett 2008; Storr 2008; McCloskey 2010). As McCloskey notes, “The market is not the monstrously disembedded monster that both left and right have imagined. ‘Market society’ is not a contradiction in terms. Gemeinschaft intertwines with Gesellschaft” (368). Elements associated with the intimate order, such as the nuclear family, extended kin groups, neighborhood, ethnic and religious groupings, and so on, are essential nodes within the extended order, providing the local on-the-spot knowledge that is necessary for broader patterns of impersonal social cooperation (Granovetter 1985, 2005). Likewise, operations within the extended order can foster closer connections within the intimate spheres (Gudeman 2001). For example, the development of telecommunications as well as social media has dramatically lowered the costs of maintaining connections in the intimate sphere (Storr 2008).
It is thus problematic to view particular social contexts as being typified by Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. It is, however, still beneficial to use these distinctions to mark different modes of social engagement and human cooperation.
One of the important ways in which these two worlds differ from one another is in how people navigate them. Different narratives (or paradigms, or mental models) guide our thinking and action in these two spheres. Obviously, our motivations will tend to be different across the two spheres. For example, direct beneficence toward close friends and kin is often the driving motivation within the intimate sphere, whereas the search for profit is a common motive operating within the extended order. But the motivation that inspires an individual to act is not the same as the narrative that guides the individual’s thinking and strategizing. The motivation tells us what the aims and purposes are; the narrative shapes the strategy and therefore the course of action by which one aims to achieve one’s goals.
For the sake of argument, suppose that we possessed a single motivation, which is to benefit others. The question would then be how to achieve this aim. But the answer would depend upon whether we were operating within the intimate order or the extended order. Within each of these spheres, a different set of narratives would guide us. In the world of the intimate order, the narratives might include moral prescriptions such as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or “treat every man as your brother.” The narratives that guide our action in the intimate sphere might also include personal stories recollecting experience with hardship, or stories of how the intended beneficiary of our action is particularly deserving of our beneficence. In the world of the extended order, on the other hand, the narratives that are likely to guide our way will be quite different, even if the motivation – to benefit others – is still the same. In the extended order, the narrative may include moral prescriptions such as “benefit others by lowering the cost of acquiring something they desire,” or “benefit others by developing a new product or service they never before imagined.” The narratives that guide our action in the extended order might also include personal stories recollecting examples of others who benefited others and became wealthy through their hard work, or stories of how innovative and successful entrepreneurs are held in esteem. The point we wish to emphasize is that the narratives that tell us what particular course needs to be taken are different depending upon whether we are operating within Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft. As described above, this is the case even when the motivation is the same. The narratives guiding our action in each sphere will be all the more distinct when different motivations are taken into consideration.
Most of the time, we switch between these spheres without thought or effort. The production or purchase of a T-shirt calls forth one sort of narrative. The choice of a gift bestowed upon a loved one calls forth another sort of narrative. And, in the territory between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (e.g., our responsibilities towards others within a moderately sized city), we make reasonable judgments about which set of narratives is most applicable. In daily life, this sort of navigation becomes so routine that it tends to escape our investigative eye.
There are moments, however, when the terrain between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft appears to us as less well-worn, less familiar. The puzzle of how we navigate effectively under such circumstances becomes more pronounced. During these moments, the narratives we would ordinarily call upon no longer seem to fit. As we argue below, the aftermath of catastrophic disaster is one such circumstance. The post-disaster moment is one in which the social systems that make ordinary life “work” no longer function. Operations of the market, for a time, do not function in the manner we ordinarily expect. Similarly, the operations of government and civil society are often incapacitated. The narratives that guide our thinking and action often no longer serve us. Though our capacity to help others known to us may be severely diminished, suddenly so many of the “unknown others” of the extended order seem intimately close both in terms of their need and our responsibility to them. Our narratives that would ordinarily set a course of action fail us.
And yet, we do act in such moments. How are we able to act in the post-disaster moment? What guides us as we navigate this unfamiliar terrain between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft? As we argue below, storytelling – the drawing upon and cultivation of narratives that fit the new context – guide us as we navigate this unfamiliar terrain. The analysis presented here is part of a multi-year ethnographic study of the political, economic, and social factors affecting disaster preparedness, response, and long-term recovery. Much of the empirical work conducted for the project took the form of in-depth qualitative interviews across multiple communities in the Greater New Orleans area and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Combined, the field studies involved 301 subjects in the greater New Orleans area and in Hancock and Harrison Counties, Mississippi, and interviews and/or surveys of 103 New Orleans evacuees who were still living in Houston, Texas, three years after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one of the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States. The New Orleans field studies included Central City, Gentilly, the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards, New Orleans East, Broadmoor neighborhoods, and St. Bernard Parish, a community that lies to the east of the Lower Ninth Ward. A principal theme of this project is how residents and other stakeholders leverage socially embedded resources in their redevelopment efforts (Chamlee-Wright 2010; Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009a, 2009b, 2010b). As we argue below, the stories residents and other community stakeholders heard, told, and created were among these resources.
In the next section we briefly review the various literatures that address the role that stories play in guiding human action, with particular attention directed toward the middle ground between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The third and fourth sections present narratives that guided the strategies of people who returned to participate in the rebuilding of their communities following Hurricane Katrina. Specifically, we describe how returnees developed narratives with plots emphasizing their resilience and their damaged communities as central characters as a means of navigating the newly problematized middle ground between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The final section offers concluding remarks.
How stories define who we are and guide our way
We are all storytellers and we are the stories we tell.
(McAdams, Josselson, and Lieblich 2006, 3)
Across the social sciences, interest in the role that narrative and story play in the development of self and perspective, in our understanding of how we as individuals connect to the broader social world, and in how such narratives guide our actions has grown significantly since the 1990s. Narrative scholars from a variety of disciplines seem to agree that stories help us filter and make sense of the complex and conflicting information we encounter; that stories help us gain clarity around our aims, purposes, and identities; and that storytelling and story listening are essential to civic life (Berger and Quinney 2005; McAdams et al. 2006; Nussbaum 1997).
Economists frustrated by the extremes of rational choice theory are among those who pay attention to the ways in which narrative frames our perspective, guides our action, and ultimately shapes the world. New institutional economists such as Denzau and North (1994) and North (1981, 1990, 2005), for example, draw our attention to the mental models through which human beings decipher their environment. Pre-existing beliefs about how the world works even more so than pure reason, they explain, guide our action. As North (1990, 20) points out, “we find that people decipher the environment by processing information through preexisting mental constructs through which they understand the environment and solve the problems they confront.” These “preexisting mental models” may be passively conveyed through an unconscious process of enculturation, a process of deliberate ideological investment, or some combination of passive and deliberate transmission mechanisms (North 1981).2
Economic anthropologists have also investigated the role that mental constructs play in shaping economic choices and socio-economic outcomes. Gudeman (1986) and Bird-David (1990, 1992) have argued that dominant metaphors within a community shape exchange and production with one another and with the ecological environment.3 Storr (2004) has imported this concept of the “primary metaphor” to his analysis of Bahamian economic culture. Storr (76–77) describes the primary metaphor of the master pirate.
[I]n the Bahamas piracy evolved as a dominant model for attaining economic success and a primary metaphor for doing business. Many of the successful industries in the Bahamas (piracy, wrecking, gun smuggling, and rum running) were piratical in nature. And, at various times in the Bahamas’ economic narrative, the master pirate has been the principal figure in the plot (the driving force of the economy and the primary agent of change in the tale).
Storr observes further that because slaves in the Bahamas enjoyed greater autonomy than their counterparts in Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti, or Cuba, they could contract out their labor, securing them a higher standard of living and health. Storr argues that these peculiarities of Bahamian slavery meant that the “enterprising slave [also] evolved as a dominant figure in the Bahamas’ economic story” (77). Together, Storr argues, the primary metaphors of master pirate and enterprising slave have shaped economic culture since the colonial period.
According to McCloskey, the economic effects of narrative can be powerful indeed. In Bourgeois Dignity, McCloskey (2010) argues that narrative, not technology, not science, not trade, not Protestant accumulation, not geography, not human capital, not even social institutions like private property rights, is responsible for the sixteen-fold increase in prosperity we have experienced over the last two to three centuries. The narrative of dignity (with its requisite accompaniment liberty), she explains, allowed for the acceptance and even praise of bourgeois experimentation and innovation. As McCloskey writes, “It is not science that was the key to the door to modernity, but the wider agreement to permit and honor innovation, opening one’s eyes to novelty, having a go” (371). Of course, the European Enlightenment was part of the story of this astonishing rise in the standard of living. “Yet, without a radical change in attitudes toward innovation for optimistically hoped-for glory in a society newly admiring the bourgeois virtues, with (for you) a little monetary profit on the side, the sheer intellectual awakening in Europe would not have enriched the world” (372). And, as McCloskey argues, the narrative worked its magic from within as well as from without, leading to a new bourgeois economic self-identity. “The new bourgeois society was pragmatic and nonutopian, but also a little mad – the madness that overcame European men and women once they came to believe that they were free and dignified and should have a go” (372).
Economics is clearly not the only social science discipline to awaken to the power of narrative in understanding complex social phenomena. Narrative psychologists, for example, use the phrase “narrative identity” to describe the ways in which people deploy stories to construct their identity and convey that identity to others. Some narrative psychologists theorize that stories serve an integrative function, providing, over time, a sense of unity, and purpose (Erikson 1963). McAdams (1985, 1997) argues that by bringing together different strands of one’s experience, narrative identities lend a sense of coherence to one’s life as a whole.4 Major life events, such as illness, the death of a family member, divorce, or a catastrophic disaster, how we reacted to such events, and the lessons we draw from them, help to make up our narrative identity. This identity, in turn, helps to shape the way we understand and respond to future events.
In the interdisciplinary terrain investigating the development of moral capacity, Nussbaum (1997), MacIntyre (1981), and Coles (1989) emphasize the important role the stories of our childhood and the stories of great literature play in connecting us to others within our circle, to our community, and to the broader social world. After describing the archetypical characters and lessons of fairytales, MacIntyre asserts, “Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources” (1981, 216). Drawing upon this narrative stock, our lives become our own great stories, “stories in which characters must overcome great obstacles to find something of great value” (Taylor 2001, 21).
Herein lies an important clue as to how stories help us navigate the unfamiliar terrain that is created when our Gemeinschaft narratives and our Gesellschaft narratives no longer seem to fit the circumstances. Nussbaum (1997) argues that by encountering stories of others in vastly different circumstances than our own, whether it is Sophocles’ Antigone or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, we develop our narrative imagination, extending our capacity for compassion beyond what our immediate intimate-sphere experience would afford. For example, as Nussbaum describes,
The tragic festivals of the fifth century B.C. were civic festivals during which every other civic function stopped, and all citizens gathered together … Tragedies acquaint the young citizen with the bad things that may happen in a human life, long before life itself does so. In the process they make the significance of suffering, and the losses that inspire it, unmistakably plain to the spectator; this is one way in which the poetic and visual resources of the drama have moral weight. By inviting the spectators to identify with the tragic hero, at the same time portraying the hero as a relatively good person, whose distress does not stem from deliberate wickedness, the drama makes compassion for suffering seize the imagination.
(1997, 93)
This increased capacity for compassion, Nussbaum argues, is essential for robust civic life. Civic life requires the ability to imagine one’s self in the place of the unknown other. Stories serve as a bridge that extends the reach of our imagination and allows us to apply what we know about acting in the intimate sphere to action taken beyond the intimate sphere, at least to some point.
Beyond the content of stories, narrative scholars have emphasized also the important role storytelling (and story listening), and the practiced art of each, play in the development of the moral imagination that builds toward social cohesion (Coles 1989; MacIntyre 1981; Taylor 2001), or, for our purposes, builds a bridge between Gemeinschaft narratives and Gesellschaft narratives. As Taylor (2001) argues, the telling and hearing of stories not only allows us to form our character and identity; shared stories serve as a sort of social glue that connects us to one another as the storyteller and listener co-create meaning. As Taylor observes, everyday storytelling, such as gossip, nostalgia, and reminiscence, is an attempt at being understood within the social context. Sometimes, this kind of storytelling can rise to the level of the richest stories found in the great works of literature and can profoundly shape the moral imagination and identity of a community.
Elsewhere, we examine the role that collective narratives such as these have played in community rebound after disaster. Stories of displacement, relocation, and rebuilding within New Orleans’ Vietnamese-American community, for example, rendered the post-Katrina context more familiar and less daunting and paved the way for a remarkably robust recovery (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009a, 2010a). Further, stories that captured a particular cultural trait or set of values at work within the community, such as adherence to a strong work ethic, affirm for the storyteller and impart to the listener lessons of “who we are” as a community. For example, stories celebrating St. Bernard Parish’s working-class roots, attitudes, and values were a source of resilience within that community (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2011).
Thus, stories wield an incredible force in the social world. The stories we hear and the stories we craft and tell shape who we are, give us perspective that helps us make sense of the world, directs our action, and connects us to one another. As we will discuss in greater detail below, the stories we craft, tell, and hear also help us navigate the unfamiliar terrain that emerges when the old stories no longer fit the context.
The development of plot in the Katrina narrative
Ethnographic researchers, particularly those who deploy in-depth interview techniques, are essentially asking their subjects to tell their stories. This research methodology is particularly well suited to a post-disaster context because people often come to terms with a major life event by weaving it into the arc of their life story (McAdams 1985, 1997). How, for example, have the disaster and their responses to it interrupted and/or fit within the plot of their life story?
When conducting the fieldwork that informs this chapter, our practice was to tell our interview subjects that we had some specific questions we wanted to ask about their neighborhood, their life, and community before Katrina, and the steps they had taken and the frustrations they had encountered after Katrina. “But mostly,” we would say, “we want to hear your story,” so that the interview subject would know that they were welcome to deviate from the “script” of the interview questions if those questions were not the questions that would tap the relevant details of their lives and circumstances. In the early stages of our fieldwork, it became clear to us just how accurate the “storytelling” frame actually was. We were in fact asking them to be storytellers – to not merely offer the flow of events leading up to, during, and after the storm, but to help us make sense of those events. We were indeed eager listeners seeking to understand why, for example, an interview subject ignored calls to evacuate, or why a pastor chose landscaping as his first priority in the effort to rebuild his church, or how an elderly woman of modest means managed to be among the first in her neighborhood to rebuild her home. And, for the most part, they were also eager in their storytelling – an eagerness (often mixed with anger, anxiety, frustration, and sorrow) to articulate a coherent plot that made sense of all that had happened and rendered their own actions intelligible.
Consider the Katrina narrative of James Ray Cox in Waveland, Mississippi.5 Situated in Hancock County along the Gulf Coast, the city of Waveland was considered “ground zero” for Katrina’s landfall and the 26-foot storm surge that ravaged Mississippi’s coastline. Cox lived with his wife and three children in Waveland and worked as the manager of the Waveland Wal-Mart Supercenter. Assistant manager Jessica Lewis had won this particular Wal-Mart a certain celebrity status in the days following the storm after using a bulldozer to break through the ruins of the store, pushing undamaged merchandise into the parking lot for residents to take what they needed. Unable to reach her supervisors, Lewis also took it upon herself to break into the pharmacy in order to supply the local hospital with critical prescription medications (Rosegrant 2007; Horwitz 2009). In the telling of his own Katrina story, however, Cox focused his attention on the longer-term recovery of the community. The plot of Cox’s story centers on the reopening of the Wal-Mart under a tent in the store’s parking lot just 19 days after the storm, which paved the way for a fully functional supercenter by Thanksgiving two months later.
Cox’s home was destroyed by heavy wind damage and nine feet of water and, at the time of the interview, he and his family were living in a trailer on their property. Cox could have asked Wal-Mart to assign him to a different store in another part of the country but he decided to stay in Waveland. Cox had become an entrenched part of the business community, serving on the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce.
A significant aspect of Cox’s narrative is that he traverses and weaves together what might otherwise be considered three fairly distinct spheres. As the manager of a Wal-Mart store, he acted on behalf of what is arguably the ultimate symbol of the impersonal forces of Gesellschaft and he never conveys any doubt that those interests must be served. At the same time, Cox was concerned for his own family and the close network of personal and business ties we would associate with the intimate order of Gemeinschaft. He was also concerned with the middle ground between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, the Waveland community as a whole.
One way to interpret this is that for Cox, Waveland was part of what he considered the intimate sphere – that it was perfectly natural in the post-disaster situation to extend a sense of solidarity to other members of his community. We should keep in mind that pre-Katrina, however, Waveland’s population was 6,674. Arguably, had one of those 6,674 people come into the store asking for special assistance prior to Katrina, Cox would have likely called upon the narratives of the extended order to guide his response. In a post-disaster context, however, the narratives we might ordinarily call up often don’t seem to fit. As Cox describes,
You see [your fellow business] people, they’ve lost their homes and they totally lost their business. And now, they’re self-employed. … If you don’t do something to help this community and give them a place to buy groceries and give them a place to buy the necessities of life to rebuild their lives, … it probably would not be worth your while to [rebuild]. Would you as an individual expect someone to live here? You know, if you have to drive twenty, thirty, forty miles every three or four days? Is it worth your time to rebuild what was destroyed? … So that’s one of the things we looked at, you know, we have to do something. Granted, you know, our customer base probably was cut more than in half. But it probably would be decreasing today had our store and other businesses not decided, you know, just take a stance and come home, you know, and build this thing and get it back up and running as fast as they can … You have to take a stance, because you have a vested interest in the community. You have a home.
Both of my children have been – they were born in New Orleans in Tulane Hospital – but they’ve both been raised here, are being raised here. I have a son who’s four, will be five … and my daughter turned two in November. My wife and I chose to have children here and we want to raise our children here. There’s some days we second-guess that now. But I mean it’s fine, I mean it’s gonna be fine. And I think the resilience of the people here in Hancock County will help to beat that.
In describing the murky post-Katrina social context, Cox borrows mechanisms and metaphors from both the extended and intimate spheres in an effort to attend to the middle ground that lies between. Here, the focus of Cox’s narrative is on how he was able to serve his fellow businessmen and the broader Waveland community, but his means for doing so is to sell them groceries and supplies. He frames the reopening of a box store as “taking a stance” in favor of community. He is, in essence, deliberately extending the impersonal mechanisms of Gesellschaft to foster the rebirth of community. Further, Cox’s narrative uses the metaphor of “home” to connect the intimate sphere of family and personal ties to the broader Waveland community, noting that costs have been borne by one (the intimate sphere of his own family) in his efforts to serve the other (the Waveland community). Thus, Cox is navigating this middle ground between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft by drawing upon the mechanisms and metaphors of each.
According to Cox’s narrative, then, Wal-Mart has become a key player in Waveland’s civic life. But, recalling Nussbaum (1997), robust civic life requires that we are capable of extending our narrative imagination beyond our immediate experience and relationships.
Soon after he returned to Waveland following the storm, Cox recalled feeling as though his dreams had been shattered – that he had worked tremendously hard and had been so proud to be the manager of a gleaming new supercenter, only to be wading through muck and devastation. He then noticed a woman with an infant who had asked to borrow a shopping cart. As Cox recounts,
… to see a lady carry a baby that didn’t have clothes. The lady didn’t have any shoes on and she was asking to borrow plastic bags so she could make shoes out of it. And then she asked to borrow a shopping cart, so instead of carrying her baby four miles home she could roll him … Things like that will teach you, when you see a person just in shambles. I’ll never forget my son crying when we walked back home to take his things [to the dump]. Things like that will teach you.
The sight of the woman in his store plays two roles in Cox’s narrative. First, it was a reminder to him that feeling sorry for his own plight was not what should be occupying his attention. Second, and we see this in the seamless transition from the woman and her child to thoughts of his own, he has extended his narrative imagination enough to gain a sense of empathy and compassion for this person who is unknown to and socially distant from him. The cultivation of an extended sense of compassion, which Nussbaum (1997) attributes to great works of literature, unfolds for Cox in this bit of real-life drama played out in his store. It is in moments such as this that Cox can imagine what role a Wal-Mart supercenter can play in rebuilding civic life, in traversing that middle ground between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.6
When asked to follow up on his observation that people in his county were particularly resilient, Cox describes the excitement that he and his staff felt in the days running up to the tent opening. Here again Cox borrows values ordinarily associated with Gesellschaft to attend to the needs of the community that is at the center of his Katrina narrative. As Cox recalls,
… within days after the storm when all the law enforcement from Florida and all over the US and Virginia and all those guys were here, they’re like, how in the world is it that y’all are excited about putting up a tent knowing your store was destroyed and your house was destroyed and you should be home working on your house and you’re doing this with a smile and enjoying what you’re doing. I don’t know. We just get up and do it again. You know, you just do it. I mean you just do it. And maybe it’s because our hearts are big. I don’t know. We just do it. We got up, pulled up our bootstraps and just went to work. You do that, because you see your friends and neighbors and they’re in [trouble] and in some ways, they might not be able to provide for themselves. So you gotta help them and provide.
Notice that immediately after describing an ethos of self-reliance, i.e., they “pulled up [their] bootstraps and just went to work,” he connects that work ethic to a responsibility to provide for others within the broader community (known and unknown) who cannot provide for themselves. Here, Cox is creatively weaving self-reliance and work ethic, often associated with individual achievement, with “having a big heart” and providing for others. This formula works because the sense of solidarity and intentional beneficence usually associated with the intimate sphere has been extended up to the broader community.
Cox concludes the narrative by drawing our attention back to the important role the store played in the community’s rebound and recovery. As he explains, “In my opinion, we made a statement when we decided to open the tent and move back into this store – that we were committed as a company to this community and helping rebuild. I mean, in my opinion, that’s a very strong commitment.”
Here again, the traversing of the middle ground between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is accomplished by reimagining a business as a civic leader. With the store badly damaged and the future of the city in considerable doubt, such an outcome was not preordained. It was likely that Cox’s deft adaptation of narratives from the intimate and extended orders had a great deal to do with Wal-Mart playing this role.
New Orleans as a character in the Katrina narrative
As we describe elsewhere, the vast majority of interview subjects who had returned to New Orleans after Katrina professed an overwhelming devotion to their city and neighborhood (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009a, 2009b, 2011). This was true of those who lived in fashionable upscale neighborhoods in the heart of the city, stable (but architecturally uninspiring) neighborhoods in the outlying suburban tracts, and some of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. The pronounced sense of place was commonly expressed by white, black, Arab, and Latino residents and by members of the Vietnamese-American community who considered their New Orleans neighborhood to be their “second homeland.” Such expressions of devotion were as common among business professionals and pastors as they were among working-class residents. In short, most of our interview subjects believed, as was often repeated, “There’s no place like New Orleans.”
But, of course, Katrina and the flooding that followed devastated New Orleans. Eighty percent of the city experienced significant flooding. More than 200,000 homes were destroyed either from the immediate surge of floodwaters or the standing water that remained for weeks before it could be pumped out. Upon their return, residents more often than not found their homes in ruins, some incurring flood depths of eight feet or more, all festering from the effects of toxic floodwaters and the ensuing mold. In many communities, municipal services were completely absent for months (in some cases years) following the storm. This meant that storm debris (which might include boats, downed trees, parts of wrecked homes, and a countless variety of other materials) blocked road access and littered the community. The debris from gutted houses sat for many months on the roadside. Safety was a constant concern. Given this level of devastation, it would have been understandable if the sense of place residents had attached to their neighborhoods and city pre-Katrina had been wiped out completely.7 And yet, at least for most residents who chose to return, this did not seem to be the case. The city of New Orleans was, thus, a key character in the narratives that displaced residents deployed after Katrina.
The cost–benefit analysis of a return to New Orleans was anything but clear. While it is true that for many residents their home was their only asset and therefore might inspire a return if this were the only consideration, a decision to return and rebuild came with significant costs. This was particularly true for those who returned early on. Remediation and renovation were expensive in terms of time, materials, and professional services, public and private services were meager at best, insurance payouts (if any were forthcoming) were bogged down in bureaucratic wrangling, employment opportunities within one’s own profession were often non-existent, the post-disaster policy environment left residents confused around the basic questions of whether and how they would be allowed to rebuild, and it was early returnees who bore the costs of uncertainty, as only time would tell if their neighborhoods would be viable in the long term (Chamlee-Wright 2007; Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009c). In short, on a narrowly rational basis, the cost–benefit calculation did not generally favor a decision to return and rebuild.
And yet, many did return. Clearly a pronounced sense of place was a reason for returning, but such a choice is difficult to understand within the narratives we customarily deploy in the context of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. According to the narratives of the intimate sphere, for example, narratives of solidarity and shared purpose, it makes sense to endure great hardship and personal cost for a loved one. In this sphere it makes sense to engage in a strategy of intentional beneficence. But as we discuss above, commitment to the rebirth of a city reaches beyond the scope of what many of us consider to be the intimate sphere of Gemeinschaft, either in terms of our ability to extend our compassion or our ability to make a demonstrable impact on the eventual outcome. On the other hand, it was not clear that the decision to return fit the narratives of Gesellschaft either, as for most people bearing the costs associated with the decision to return and rebuild (particularly an early return) just didn’t make sense based on cold rational calculation.
Interview data suggests, however, that following Katrina, an alternative common narrative seemed to emerge. This common narrative cast New Orleans as a central character in returnees’ Katrina stories. Described by words and phrases like “love,” “devotion,” “commitment,” “part of who I am,” the character that was New Orleans possessed qualities reminiscent of a beloved family member, placing it firmly within the context of the intimate sphere. In some Katrina stories, New Orleans took on a matriarchal quality as the provider of home, food, nurturing, and comfort. As a beloved and intimate character within one’s story, the narratives of solidarity, commitment, and sacrifice made sense.
When asked to recall what their community was like pre-Katrina, many interview subjects responded like Catherine Parker†,8 a resident of New Orleans East, who notes,
There’s nothing like New Orleans. Nowhere else is nothing like New Orleans … There’s an aura about New Orleans that you can’t get anywhere else. You really can’t.
Or as Broadmoor resident Kate Lyons† observes,
New Orleans is much more than a city to us. It’s more like a facet of your personality. It’s part of who you are. I just love everything about the city. I love the spirit and the attitude of the people. I love the diversity of the city, which is totally unrecognized nationally. I love the blend that makes it unique. I love the music, the food, the festivals, Mardi Gras … It’s just the best place on earth.
In their recollections of pre-Katrina life, New Orleans as a character played a particular kind of role for New Orleanians that was different from the role she played for visitors. To a visitor, New Orleans had long been a place in which one’s ordinary responsibilities could be suspended for a time. But to New Orleanians, New Orleans was much more than that. New Orleans was indeed the hostess, but the gatherings were the block parties of neighborhoods, the Mardi Gras balls, and after-church socials, as much as the nightlife on Bourbon Street. Like the family matriarch, New Orleans provided food that could be found nowhere else.
Most importantly, like the family matriarch, New Orleans provided a sense of home. After describing her extended family as possessing a rich bond that was both “familial and familiar,” Central City resident Renee Lewis† observed,
Well, the city that I love and the reason that I don’t want to live nowhere else – it’s not a perfect place – [is that] it is extremely unique in that its history and its culture kind of keep saying these two descriptive [terms]: familial and familiar. There is so much oldness that informs today, like the music and like the food and like the traditions that every New Orlean’s commercial or public view puts forward in a very one-dimensional kind of way. But it’s so much deeper than that … When we were away from the city for a long, long time and were able to come back just for an evening, something that was going on at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center … [W]e went to this event and [with] the drums [and music] … it was like the heartbeat had got started again and I didn’t realize how much of that I missed or how it was missing in my life. I guess what I didn’t realize was how important it was for me to hear that – to kind of enliven my spirit, to quicken my heart.
For Lewis†, New Orleans possessed the same familial and familiar qualities that her deeply connected extended family possessed.
Of course, any good story needs an antagonist. And, in the post-Katrina context, there were plenty of characters to fill this role. Not surprisingly, the hurricane itself served as a principal antagonist. As Lewis† describes, “The storm took effect. It casts us out like stray pennies in your purse that you just throw up on … a dresser … [A]s Katrina passed and the levees broke, our home was stolen from us.”
The disaster as antagonist would fit any post-disaster context, but New Orleanians also perceived that their city was the target of unprovoked attacks from powerful corners, such as the national media that portrayed New Orleans as a city of welfare recipients and thieves. Among New Orleanians, the narrative that emerged was one in which a cherished member of the family – the matriarch, no less – was being picked on and bullied by forces far more powerful than she. Such a story tends to inspire, in any morally upright listener, a desire to leap to the victim’s defense, save the beloved character, and vanquish the enemy. Describing his response to a State Farm Insurance agent who mocked New Orleans, for instance, Pastor Jack Green† recalls,
I just ripped into him coz I [was] so angry. He said “do you think that people in other parts of the country should have to help New Orleans, you know, by paying more for insurance?” I said absolutely! I said without the city of New Orleans, the rest of the country [would suffer because], a) this is one of the only cities with unique character and b) it was one of the most important ports in the entire country. Absolutely!
Political elites at all levels served as another set of antagonists that helped to explain the slow pace by which recovery assistance was getting into the hands of residents (poor residents, in particular), the slow return of municipal services, and the uncertainty related to the redevelopment planning process. Eleanor Shaw’s† Katrina story includes a political economy analysis that helps her understand and explain why city officials have stepped up eminent domain proceedings against her neighbors who have not yet returned to New Orleans. As she describes,
If [homeowners] don’t come and do something with the property, [the city is] going to give them a deadline and all this type of thing. … I think [the city] just wants to confiscate their property.
When asked to clarify why she thinks the city is taking these actions, Shaw† explains,
That’s money. For instance my house here, if somebody can come along and confiscate my house. My husband and I have worked all our lives and spent money and deprived ourselves in order to have [this]. And then somebody is just going to take it? That’s not right. And come time for taxes and what not, we paid taxes … And [the city says,] “you didn’t take care of your property, so we’re going to take it.” Then [the city will] turn around and sell it for three times what I paid for it. And that’s what’s going to happen to the money.
When pressed to explain what she believes will happen to the money, Shaw† concludes, “They’re going to pocket it. What do you think is going to happen? It’s not [like] they’ve done nothing worthwhile with it.” More than a political economy critique, however, Shaw’s† analysis helps to explain her own stubborn defiance. By deploying resources embedded within her extended family, this 88-year-old woman was among the first residents to return to her Lower Ninth Ward home (while the question of whether people should be allowed to rebuild in the Lower Ninth Ward was still under heated debated). Her Katrina story is clearly one that illustrates the important role of socially embedded resources, but it also explains why she was not willing to bow to what she perceived to be the will of powerful elites to take over the neighborhood she loved.
With New Orleans cast as a treasured member of the family, and an extensive cast of antagonistic characters in play, many of the storytellers felt it incumbent on them to help to save the city. Some returnees framed their role as part of a Divine plan, such as the owner of a diner who declared that God would give her the tools to start her own non-profit. “I’m gonna raise money and I’m gonna build at least so many of these homes myself and show the government that, ‘This is what you should be doing.’” Or, as Pastor Randy Millet of the Adullam Christian Fellowship pledged,
I can tell you it’s a closely-knit community, and for me, if this is what God’s chosen for me to do, then so be it, because I want to see our community returned. Now, I’m one pastor doing one small part, but whatever I’m called to do, I want to be faithful to do my part … And I believe it like this: great men are put in circumstances and they have to make choices.
In the name of rescuing their city and neighborhood, some of these heroes achieved astonishing results, such as the St. Bernard Parish school superintendent who drew people home by rebuilding the parish schools, or the registered nurse who drew people back to the Lower Ninth Ward by building a health clinic, the first facility of its kind in the community (Chamlee-Wright 2010). But most of the heroes were ordinary citizens who saw their own return as a small but significant step in the rebirth of the city, such as the Ninth Ward businessman who understood that his laundromat and convenience store served as a safe and hospitable social space for his neighbors; or the retired couple Jordan and Irene Walker†, who returned to their Ninth Ward home to, in their words, keep their home and community alive. They observed that as long as people stayed away, it would only be “half a New Orleans.”
IRENE WALKER†: You need your neighbors to come back and redo their houses. I want my neighbors back. I really do.
JORDAN WALKER†: For a house to be alive, it needs people living in it. A house that doesn’t have people living in it is gonna deteriorate. And if people are living in it, then it’s gonna have life and it’s gonna survive.
And thus, with every neighbor that returns, this narrative asserts, another step is taken to save the central character of many returnees’ Katrina story.
While solidarity, personal sacrifice, and intentional beneficence would not ordinarily fit the Gesellschaft context of a large metropolitan area, such narratives fit perfectly if the central character is drawn from the Gemeinschaft sphere of family.
Conclusion
Scholars have long posited that we live simultaneously in two very different spheres: the sphere of the intimate order of Gemeinschaft, in which narratives of solidarity and intentional beneficence toward known others guide our actions, and the sphere of the extended order of Gesellschaft, in which narratives of narrowly focused self-interest guide our action and result in patterns of unintentional beneficence through impersonal signals and market mechanisms of exchange. Under ordinary circumstances, our ability to switch between these two spheres, to navigate the murky territory in between, and to deploy the appropriate narratives tends to escape our notice. Because it blurs the boundaries defining Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft so dramatically, and renders unclear the territory between these spheres, a post-disaster context offers a particularly robust opportunity to understand this navigation process.
In this chapter, we discussed how people deploy narrative as a means of navigating these two spheres of social life. Further, we examined how people cultivate and deploy new stories when the boundaries defining and the territory between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are problematized. Building from interview data gathered in the post-Katrina context of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the analysis presented above suggests that when external events disrupt the boundaries that define the intimate and extended spheres of social life, people deploy their capacities for story craft and storytelling in order to find new narratives that guide their way. In the context of the post-Katrina environment, such capacities were a significant source of community resilience.
Notes
1 Gudeman (2001) employed a similar distinction. For Gudeman, the economy is divided into two transactional realms, each governed by different kinds of relationships (9). On the one hand, there is market epitomized by the corporation, where relationships are characterized by anonymous exchange and rational calculation. On the other hand, there is community epitomized by the house, where relationships are characterized by sociality, reciprocity, and mutuality. According to Gudeman, these two spheres can, do, and must exist simultaneously but the growth of one is necessarily at the expense of the other (22).
2 In essence, the mental models that guide our interpretation of circumstances and our action in response to them function exactly in the way that humanists have described the role stories play. As Taylor (2001, 29) observes, “even those of us most committed to logic and rationality do not so much reason our way to our views and values as use reason to justify what we find ourselves believing and valuing. And those beliefs and values are likely to have been formed by our stories.”
3 For example, Bird-David (1990) examines the metaphor dominant within the South Indian hunter-gatherer Nayaka community, who cast the forest in the role of “parent” and one another in the role of “siblings.” This metaphor, in turn, dictates a variety of specific rule-following behavior intended to keep the community in balance with its environment.
4 For examples of narrative psychology that emphasize narrative identity as being multi-vocal, see Gergen (1991) and Hermans (1996).
5 For ethnographic details related to the field studies conducted for the broader project, see Chamlee-Wright 2010.
6 The central role that Wal-Mart’s reopening played in Waveland’s recovery was acknowledged by residents as well. As Waveland resident Jessica Fallows† observed, “It was Wal-Mart under a tent. We were all thrilled. Oh, we can go buy pop, or we can get, you know, our essentials. So we were really happy about that. That was a forward motion. And then Sonic opened. We had the busiest Sonic in … the whole United States. It made more money in a shorter period of time than any Sonic did for a year in the United States. Amazing. It was like fine dining. Ooh, this is wonderful, you know, coz there was nothing else then. There was no stores. There was nothing that was even halfway resembling normal. I guess when businesses open up and they start being fully operational, it reminds us what normalcy used to be like” (Chamlee-Wright 2010, 50–51).
7 In fact, this was the reaction of some former New Orleans residents who evacuated to Houston following the storm and were still there three years later. Approximately half of the Houston-based respondents said that they preferred New Orleans over Houston; 22% of these respondents said that they had not returned because the city no longer had the character, amenities, and appeal of the pre-Katrina New Orleans (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009b).
8 Whenever possible, we protect the identity of the interview subject. Names with the ‘†’ superscript are pseudonyms. Because of the details of their narrative, it is sometimes impossible to obscure the identity of interview subjects. In such cases, we obtained permission to use the subject’s real name.
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