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CEEL Projects
Changing Places: Life-style Migration, Refuge, and the Quest for Potential Selves in the Midwest's Post-industrial Middle Class
-- Brian Hoey, Associate Faculty at the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life
On a warm and breezy spring day a year following an afternoon spent conceiving
this project at my desk back in Ann Arbor, I began chatting with a voluntary
corporate refugee named Mark about becoming what some folks now know locally
as "The Pie Guy." We are in his store across from the city fire department
and on the main street that runs through Traverse City's historic downtown
positioned at the bottom of Grand Traverse Bay. Mark smiles comfortably
as he takes off his apron and emerges from behind the long counter. Beyond
him several large racks are filled with cooling pies. Each shelf is labeled
with appetizing names like "Old Mission Cherry," "Lakeshore Berry," "Farmer's
Market Peach" and "Autumn Harvest Pecan." 
His
hands are dusted with flour as he presents me with a cup. While we sit
sipping our locally roasted coffee and relax in the cozy, cafÈ-like corner
within his busy pie shop, the bells on the door jingle in announcement
of each customer's coming and going. We are surrounded by the rich smells
of brewing coffee, baking fruit, and browning crust on this sunny afternoon
which, after a lingering winter of cold and snow, seems full of the promise
of long summer days. Basking in the warm glow, thoughtful expressions
on our faces as we grip our steaming drinks, this life-style migrant begins
to explain his story to me.
The story begins as a young man grows up in Michigan's state capital of Lansing in the 60s and 70s. In 1980 he graduates from Michigan State University in East Lansing looking to find a job in an economy now staggered by the Oil Crisis and the now wide reaching impact of accelerating deindustrialization and a more heavily globalized market. The city of Lansing lies in the swath of industrial areas that span south central Michigan from Detroit to Muskegon an area dominated by the big three auto manufacturers. It is part of a vast stretch of places across the northern tier of Midwest and Northeastern states that comprise what is referred to as the Rust Belt to conjure an image of a well-defined region undergoing decay and decline.
Although
parts of these former industrial landscapes are attempting various forms
of renaissance, in the early 1980s the harsh reality that former glory
was now a bygone era was really just sinking in for most. As with all
places in the Belt, Lansing is an area that has had to deal with post-industrial
economic restructuring. Like many of his peers, he had anticipated work
in the automobile industry which had defined Southern Lower Michigan when
he began his studies twenty-five years ago at a time when the mid-seventies
recession had only really just begun. Mark earns a degree in engineering.
Thinking back to that time, he says:
"There was not much going on in the Midwest in terms of growth. The auto industry was down. Not a lot of opportunity. California was booming ... and I had a certain amount of just 'Hey, I lived twenty years here.' One of my friends went to work at Oldsmobile [based in Lansing]. Being an auto town, through the generations they just get into Olds and that's IT. You're done. Man ... I couldn't think of that. I'm going to get into this job and that's the rest of my life, you know?
Career was generation to generation and these guys would just go in on that line the ones that went to college really didn't so much but they'd go to work for the State of Michigan or they'd work for another fairly, you know, SET company and that's IT."
Defining oneself by way of a job was the model of the generation of Mark's
father. Now there is neither a guarantee nor expectation for the durability
of such a definition because the world of work upon which it had been
based appears unstable and unpredictable, more fluid and boundless. These
have become the very qualities that are valued in today's workers. 
They
are asked to be forever learning, adaptable, and multi-tasking in a distinct
departure from the ideal worker of the more standardized and regular industrial
world of the past. Mark and his wife, Diane, choose to voluntarily drop
out of the corporate lifestyle, despite a well paying job and benefits
in sunny California, so that they could start their own small business
in northern Michigan. Why would they do such a thing?
My research attempts to answer questions like this through
an understanding of present-day social and structural transitions obtained
by exploring the meaning of relocation for middle-class working families
away from metropolitan areas to growing rural communities high in natural
amenities. This relocation is a manner of negotiating building tension
between personal experience with material demands in pursuit of a livelihood
within the flexible, contingent new economy and cultural conventions for
the good family and community life as the basis for defining individual
character. My fieldwork considers how accounts of life-style migrants
are part of a larger moral story of what constitutes the good life when
basic social categories and cultural meanings are shifting. I argue that
this migration is a continuation of long-standing American traditions
of starting over rooted in a belief that we can remake ourselves through
sheer force of will. At the same time, it is also a uniquely modern expression
as people respond to the challenges and opportunities of a flexible economy
based increasingly on contingent work. Their accounts are related to both
narratives of travel and conversion where downshifting and displaced corporate
workers pass through a period of critical liminality as they attempt to
redefine themselves through relocation to places believed to provide necessary
refuge and inspiration for the discovery of an inner, authentic self.
This research shows some of the ways that social and structural changes are impacting individuals, families, and communities and how people and places are reacting, devising new strategies for coping or for challenging. I have also connected the present with an understanding of significant historical trends in, for example, local and national patterns of migration. My approach has been to weave the level of the person with mid and macro-levels of social structure and analysis. I have explored the lives of individuals present, past, and imagined through careful observation and lively conversation in the contexts of home and work. Placing these lives in the mid-level is my intimate understanding of the local community as a place I have come to call home. At the macro-level are the social/cultural and economic/structural changes taking places that are a vital part of the context for both individual and community decision-making. It is particularly through looking at place and personal meaning of work life that we see how the individual level is intersected by broader changes that must be interpreted at that point. It is about locating and positioning lives in time and place and enriching our ability to interpret stories through recording and effectively conveying the details of context in the broadest sense.
