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The bricolage of the here: young people's narratives of 

identity in the countryside 

Michael Leyshon a & Jacob Bull b 

a 

College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, 

Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9EZ, UK 

b 

Centrum för Genusvetenskap, Box 634, 751 26, Uppsala, Sweden 

Available online: 13 Feb 2011 

To cite this article: Michael Leyshon & Jacob Bull (2011): The bricolage of the here: young people's narratives of identity in 

the countryside, Social & Cultural Geography, 12:02, 159-180 

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Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 12, No. 2, March 2011 

The bricolage of the here: young people’s narratives of 

identity in the countryside 

Michael Leyshon 1 & Jacob Bull 2 

1 College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Penryn, 

Cornwall TR10 9EZ, UK, mleyshon@exeter.ac.uk and 2 Centrum för Genusvetenskap, Box 634, 

751 26, Uppsala, Sweden 

Introduction 

Memories are crucial to our construction of place. They simultaneously offer an anchor 

for identity and different temporalities to encounters with landscapes. Memory allows 

different spaces, pasts, and futures to become embedded in particular locales. Yet the 

spontaneous assemblages of meaning that memory enables are not apolitical. Thus the 

mechanisms and processes by which meaning is articulated in these encounters are 

fundamental to our understandings of place. This paper, therefore, brings together the 

work of Henri Bergson on memory and Paul Ricoeur on narrative, to examine the stories 

individuals produce which define the self. By drawing on research into the lives of young 

people in the countryside, the paper does three things: it discusses the role of memory in 

creating identity; it examines the political process of narrative by which memories become 

woven into understandings of place and create a bricolage of the here; and finally, it offers 

the ‘storied-self’ as a resolution of the competing constructions and experiences of 

personal continuity and the inconsistencies and constant change in the project of the 

individual. 

Key words: youth, identity, memory, narrative, storied-self. 

It’s just like ... you don’t even realise they are there 

half the time, until you see them and think who the 

hell is that? [laughter]. Um, you know, you just 

don’t realise ... (Joe, 14, personal interview) 

To forget, to not ‘realise’ they are there half 

the time. To question. To realise. Joe is talking 

about the people with whom he shares his 

village. People he does not know. People he 

knows are there and of whom he is occasionally 

reminded. These tensions between here 

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/11/020159-22 q 2011 Taylor & Francis 

DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2011.545141 

and there, presence and absence, known and 

unknown, centres on a series of personal, 

social, cultural processes. Ordinarily these 

processes are unobtrusive, and Joe is not 

forced to confront the issues around not 

knowing with whom he shares his village; his 

life operates on a level which accepts and uses 

this absence. On occasion he is forced to reevaluate 

the stranger before him and fit this 

stranger into his wider understanding of the 

village. This stranger is accommodated; placed 

within the unknown spaces behind a front door 

and the coherent story of village life can


160 Michael Leyshon & Jacob Bull 

continue. Caught up in these stories are 

rhythms and temporalities which simultaneously 

instil continuity and disrupt the 

stability. These rhythms/disruptions are based 

on memory—the repeat of daily life filled with 

the practicalities and mundane happenings of 

existence contrasted with the interjections 

which cause unfamiliar faces to re-emerge 

from ‘deeper’ memories and re-spatialise the 

here and now. Joe’s story, to which we return 

later in the paper, demonstrates how we are 

occasionally forced to realise the significance 

of memories in our lives—when we recognise 

the inconsistencies in our understandings of the 

here and now and realise the ‘depth’ of 

personal and social memories which have 

built up in particular places. By attending to 

the agency of memory and the process by 

which memories are incorporated into the 

sense of self, the paper will extend our 

understanding of the ways in which young 

people in rural areas experience their identity. 

We begin by discussing the position of rural 

youth, memory and identity, before outlining 

our methodology and then discussing the 

theoretical work of Bergson and Ricoeur, 1 

followed by our empirical data. 

Positioning (rural) youth, memory and 

identity 

The contested formation of young people’s 

identity, their memories of place and the extent 

to which they are included or excluded within 

rural communities remains little understood 

(notable exceptions being Findlay and Boyle 

2007; Leyshon 2008; Panelli 2002; Vanderbeck 

and Dunkley 2003). Contemporary research on 

rural youth has entrenched the idea that young 

people in the countryside are only able to take on 

‘bit part roles’ in the social fabric of rural 

communities because of their exclusion from 

social, communal and political services (Hubbard 

2000; Jones 1999; Matthews et al. 2000; 

Pavis, Platt and Hubbard 2000; Tucker and 

Matthews 2001). Similarly, studies on rural 

restructuring, lifestyles, poverty and social 

exclusion (e.g. Jentsch and Shucksmith 2004) 

have shown the extent of social differentiation 

in the countryside. In these accounts (only 

briefly outlined here, but for more detail see 

Geldens and Bourke 2008; Sibley 1998), young 

people seem not to exist except as the clients of 

services and institutions and are only visible to 

the researcher in terms of their relative neglect 

by these services. In contrast to these rather 

deterministic views of young people, some 

recent research has begun to offer an alternative 

view of rural youth as active agents in the 

production of their lives (cf. Leyshon 2008; 

Riley 2009). In this paper, we draw on this 

perspective and conjoin it to that of memory and 

narrative (Jones 2005) to call attention to the 

creative processes of producing memories of 

place, in which young people learn to feel both 

included and excluded from the countryside. In 

so doing, this paper responds to recent calls by 

Philo (2003), Jones (2005), Leyshon (2008) and 

Riley (2009) for a greater understanding of 

memory in the lives of young people and to 

recognise that it is not only adults who have 

powerful memories of place(s) (Degnen 2007). 

Young people also create memories through an 

emotional engagement that is ‘acted out’ in the 

landscape (Jones 2005: 215). 

Young people employ a variety of strategies 

to create a sense of self that is intimately 

bound into rural space(s). These relationships 

to the countryside are characterised by 

conflicting feelings produced through memories 

of belonging, longing, ambivalence and 

abhorrence (Leyshon 2008). We argue that 

rural youth produce their identities through a 

narrative process of story-telling founded on 

fleeting as well as deeper attachments to, and


memories of, (rural) places. These stories are 

the co-production of multiple experiences 

including defining others and their cultures 

as different or abject, sensory responses to 

place, or making sense of relationships with 

adults and peers (cf. Leyshon 2010). 

While this paper draws on research conducted 

with young people in rural areas, we 

suggest that memory, memories and narrative 

processes are significant beyond this particular 

group. Indeed, the production of a narrative 

storied-self, we argue, is intrinsic to identity 

formation. As Leyshon (2008) and Reay and 

Lucey (2000) have suggested, telling stories to 

the self is a central part of this process and is 

predicated on the iterative production of 

defining the self in opposition to others. This 

is not to challenge Jones’ (2008) concept that 

children are always other to adults experiences, 

but rather to extend this notion by 

suggesting that children are always already in a 

process of othering, not only in relation to 

adults but to each other and to space(s). ‘Storytelling’ 

should not be considered as ‘frivolous’ 

or a ‘childish indulgence’ but is crucial to 

understandings of the self at any age (McNay 

2008). As Price (2010: 207) has noted ‘stories 

can perform pedagogical, emotional and 

taxonomic work’. But rather than attend to 

the wider social narratives to which Price 

alludes, this paper focuses on the personal 

accounts of young people in the countryside. 

For us, these are not the spatialities of returns 

to childhood as seen through adult lenses (and 

indeed Philo 2003 questions whether we can 

truly relive past remembered experiences). 

Rather, these are memories that help coconstitute 

present moments (Game 2001) by 

warping time to draw close-in pasts that 

produce (re)emergent knowledges and 

interpretations of self and place (Probyn 1996). 

As Hopkins and Pain (2007) have 

observed, researchers working with young 

Identity in the countryside 161 

people frequently treat them as a group apart 

and hermetically sealed off from others, such 

as adults. Whilst such work draws attention 

to young peoples’ issues, it presents them as 

static actors amongst flows of interactions 

rather than positioning them as reflexive 

agents capable of producing a sense of self. 

However, research by Leyshon (2008) has 

begun to tease out how young people make 

their own identities, sense of belonging and 

histories of life through a process of producing 

memories of place via repeated contacts 

and experiences. These contacts and experiences 

are then narrated back to create a 

logical sense of self. This understanding of 

youth hinges on the idea that the 

relationship between identity, memory and 

place is dependent upon the accumulation of 

experiences, including complex social interactions, 

both with and within places (Travlou 

2007; Valentine and Skelton 2007). 

The focus on memory is not to suggest that 

everything is remembered or that there is no 

scope for ‘the new’; we suggest quite the 

opposite. This paper seeks an understanding 

of memories as active in the assemblage of 

space, place and identity. It looks to unpack 

the significance of the constant redefinition of 

the self in line with the ongoing agglomeration 

of memories, and seeks to unpack the 

process of narrative, of story-telling, in the 

creation of a cogent sense of self-in-situ. In 

particular, by deploying the work of Henri 

Bergson and Paul Ricoeur, this paper further 

develops our knowledges of how memory is 

patch-worked into space, place and identity 

to create ‘hybrid landscapes with other 

places’ (Jones 2005: 217). By focusing on 

theories of memory and narrative we examine 

how the self, representation, places and 

emotion get appropriated into the articulation 

of events.



Image, method, meaning 

Methodologically, the research draws on contemporary 

debates in children’s geographies 

regarding the power of the researcher over those 

being researched (see the special issue of 

Children’s Geographies Volume 6, Number 2, 

2008), with a particular focus being paid to 

issues of working with young people (cf. Holt 

2004; Leyshon 2002) when exploring why place 

matters (Anderson and Jones 2009). Building 

upon this work, this research examined the 

memories of young people by exploring their 

personal subjectivities in ways in which were 

deliberately open-ended and emergent, involving 

the researcher, youth workers, adults and 

young people in the co-production of knowledge 

(Jones 2008). Through recognising and 

valuing intergenerational relationships the 

research is an attempt to expose the extent to 

which the underlying material consequences of 

inclusion/exclusion affects the memories and 

identities of rural youth. 

In conducting the research for this project 

we worked alongside rural youth service 

agencies (both state and voluntary organisations) 

in three counties in the south-west of 

England that work with young people aged 

13–19. These youth agencies helped to locate 

young people in sparsely populated areas and 

to legitimate our presence in communities to 

both the young people and their parents. 2 In 

total we recruited thirty-three young people, 

eighteen of whom were interviewed further 

over a three-year period, and who were in 

regular contact with a rural youth service. All 

the participants volunteered to be part of the 

research and described themselves as being 

‘rural’. For the purposes of anonymity, but to 

reflect that these interviews are personal 

accounts, all of the respondents have been 

given pseudonyms. 

The young people were engaged using a 

variety of auto-ethnographic techniques, 

including self-directed photography (both stills 

and video), personal diaries, one-to-one interviews 

(repeated over a two/three-year period) 

and walking tours around their villages. We 

conducted interviews on street corners, in 

pubs, in the back of youth service mini-buses, 

and in fields and woodland. Cameras, either 

disposable stills or video cameras, were sent to 

the participants with the instruction to photograph 

or film their experiences of rural life. 

These images were then used as part of an 

interview through which they were discussed, 

commented on and annotated. 

The images resulting from this ethnography 

depict routines and repeating moments in the 

individual’s life history (Chaplin 2004), giving 

insight into the lived realities of the experiences 

of individuals in the ‘rural’space. Furthermore, 

the artefacts pictured within the photographs 

are loaded with sentiments that are more than 

visual (Whincup 2004). Images produced in 

this way cannot be considered as simple 

illustrations. The process of illustration 

suggests a linear and logical progression of 

knowledge transfer, in an almost tautological 

re-iteration of accompanying words. Berger 

(1997: 46) suggests that private images are 

used in a more-than-illustrative manner. The 

role of image therefore is a dynamic and fluid 

process which creates temporary and fluid axes 

along which memories can connect, infuse and 

be reiterated in different, multiple and sometimes 

antagonistic narratives. They can be 

considered as moments in a narrative and 

hence ‘departure points’ from which stories of 

the self can be (re)built (Barthes 1977). This 

‘storytelling’ (Fish 2004) is crucial to the 

methodology but also reflects how experiences 

of landscape are remembered and given 

cogency to create a bricolage of the here. 

Developing the politics of creating stories of


identity, the following sections discuss the 

formation of such a bricolage of the here. The 

first section underlines the relevancy of 

memory to understandings of the self-in-situ 

and how such a bricolage might be formed. 

The second section discusses the inherent 

politics of creating a bricolage through the 

narrative process, while the third section 

integrates both of these concepts to discuss 

the implications for identity. 

A bricolage of the here: memory 

It is in many ways axiomatic to state that 

memory is a crucial factor in the affective and 

emotional response to place (see also Wylie 

2009), yet the significance of memory in 

geographical academic accounts of identity is 

largely under-represented (see Bull and Leyshon 

2010; Cloke and Pawson 2008). Working with 

Bergson’s theoretical approach to memory 

(notably Matter and Memory 2005 [1908]), 

three aspects of memory can be identified— 

reflex, cognitive and narrative. Reflex memory 

is a combination of the evolutionary memory 

embedded in the body which sustains life, 

combined with the habitual responses to certain 

stimuli. In contrast, cognitive memory is the 

temporally anchored memories of particular 

events (Bull and Leyshon 2010). The reflex and 

cognitive memory feed into what Bergson 

termed the ‘memory-image’. The memoryimage 

is a spontaneous re-emergence of reflex 

and cognitive memories. However, this spontaneity 

and the resultant assembly are not 

apolitical. Memory is an active process, 

constantly reaching out along the various lines 

of experience. It is to the narrative of identity 

and the creation of the memory-image which 

this paper attends as it re-spatialises cognitive 

and reflex memory. 

The reflex and ‘pure’ cognitive aspects to 

memory may in themselves confound represen- 


tation and in this regard we may, as Thrift 

suggests, consider ‘the human’ to be an unstable 

project (2009: 82). However, the pluri-temporal 

landscapes that memory creates are articulated 

and performed. Such performances require 

some level of coherence in order to be 

communicable. This coherence draws on memory 

in a temporal dynamics of place. As such, 

memory is an actor in the definition of identity, 

with different memory-images which can be 

used, shaped and interacted with to create a 

logical and coherent sense of self through an 

evolving and fluid encounter with the world. 

These memory-images are to a certain extent 

spontaneous, in essence, found; however, the 

way that they are put together is an articulation 

of their meaning. Thus the manner in which the 

spontaneously emerging reflex and cognitive 

aspects of memory are assembled into a 

coherent memory-image is crucial. In this 

regard, the assembly of found memories with 

their emergent meaning can be best described as 

a bricolage of the here (or memory as it 

happens)—a narrative of what is at hand. This 

memory-based approach becomes a useful 

geographical tool as it begins to access the 

hermeneutics of place. 

An individual’s sense of self is a tenacious 

attempt to contain the dynamics of temporal 

life, whilst providing a framework for her- or 

himself to navigate through the complexities 

of his or her existence. This fluid concept of 

identity provides an intriguing addition to a 

phenomenologically sensitive geography, in 

that it allows for a type of self that can shape 

and be moulded to the various transitions or 

openings of life. Specifically, memory can 

bring meaning to periods of radical transformation, 

and allow for an individual to 

interpret her or his life through a range of 

multifarious discourses of place. Here, memory 

has the potential to provide a window on 

existing concepts of human identity in relation



to reflexively lived lives. As discussed earlier, 

this paper engages with the political process of 

assembly, so crucial to the bricolage of 

identity. This process of assembly we recognise 

as being the formation of a narrative of self 

(storied-self); the creation of logical stories 

about our emotional response to place. 

A bricolage of the here: narrative 

In this paper we are interested in how lived 

memory is remembered, and shaped, by visual 

references which in turn reconfigure our notions 

of self and identity. By considering the politics of 

how individuals mobilise memories in understandings 

of space, the main challenge of this 

paper is to question how individuals are able to 

reconcile their notion of identity with the 

undeniable reality of personal change. To 

answer this dialectic of selfhood as sameness, 

and selfhood as temporal difference, we will 

explore the approach of the ‘storied-self’ found 

in the writings of Paul Ricoeur (for an excellent 

review see Venema 2000). Ricoeur’s writing 

attempted to understand the relationship 

between individuals’ sense of place in 

society/nature coupled to notions of identity, 

memory and knowing (Simms 2002; Vanhoozer 

1991). In his essays Time and Narrative (1988) 

and Oneself as Another (1992), Ricoeur tackles 

these problems of self-constancy in time through 

what he calls ‘narrative identity’. Ricoeur 

constructs a notion of identity which is situated 

within the temporal and physical continuum of 

the narrative life. His aim was to reconcile the 

‘tension between the objective-self (socially and 

physically embodied) and the subjective-self 

(psychologically and spiritually constituted)’ 

(Delashmutt 2009: 592), through a hermeneutics 

of selfhood in which human agency is 

understood by the self through processes of 

meaning-rich narrative reflection. Ricoeur 

argued that the lived-self is given meaning and 

structure through self-narration and is an 

attempt at unifying human action itself with 

the causation of those actions. Hence the textual 

encounter is not simply an interpretive mechanism, 

or indeed a post hoc (re)imagining of an 

encounter but rather an intrinsic process 

essential to our personal narratives around 

selfhood. Thus a politics of identity can be 

understood through an engagement with various 

sensory modes of being as well as the 

textual understanding of these affectations. 

Geographers have engaged with the literature 

on narrative. Valentine (2000), drawing on 

the work of Somers (1994), argues that people 

should be seen as cultural agents embedded in 

social processes producing their own narratives 

of their everyday lives. Through bringing social 

conditions to the foreground it therefore 

becomes possible to examine the significant 

differences between individuals and groups of 

people as they experience life. Wiles, Rosenberg 

and Kearns (2005) suggest this is possible 

as narrative has a dual function, first, it is a way 

of representing the world and secondly, it 

serves as a mechanism of reasoning to ourselves, 

helping to mould our perceptions of 

ourselves and our place in the world. In this 

way narrative is both a story of the self and a 

tool kit for understanding the world. It is, in 

Corazzi’s (1993) terms, the medium though 

which cultural expression is organised and 

learned. Ricoeur’s interpretation of narrative 

identity is situated in phenomenological understandings 

of the everyday through a hermeneutic 

interpretative framework (Ricoeur 

1988). Narratives for him form the building 

blocks from which our individual understanding 

of the world is constituted and communicated, 

not only to ourselves but to others, and 

not necessarily in that order. 

Having identified the significance of narrating 

the self it is important to identify that


narrative is much more than a synonym for 

discourse; it is an active process through 

which coherence is woven through the 

complexities of everyday life (Fish 2004). 

Furthermore, it must be recognised that 

narrative is ‘a prodigious variety of genres, 

themselves distributed amongst different substances—as 

though any material were fit to 

receive man’s [sic ] stories’ (Barthes 1977: 79); 

that narrative is an interplay between the 

materialities of space, and the social, cultural 

and historical positioning of human lives. 

Therefore what is apparent is this narrative 

process operates on every level and is 

embedded in and distributed throughout 

every material and social relation. In essence, 

narrative is the process by which the chaos of 

circumstance is given cogency. The narrative(s) 

we are discussing for this paper are 

infinite, personal and evolving. Yet the 

variable and changing status of narrative 

does not undermine its usefulness. 

In order for a story to function, as Barthes 

(1977) argues, it needs to be communicable 

(though not necessarily communicated). It 

must conform to the social and cultural rules 

that enable the story of identity to be repeated 

both to others and the self. A narrative 

approach to identity therefore facilitates 

understandings of our emotional response to 

place through the various materialities, memories, 

and representations of place in a 

bricolage of the here. The next section 

develops this theory of narrative to reconcile 

the complexity and contingency of identity 

and the coherence of a sense of self-in-situ. 

A bricolage of the here: identity 

Geographers have identified how the interactions 

between spaces, places and identities 

are not just negotiated but in a constant state 


of negotiation as the ‘unstable points of 

identification or suture’ (Hall 1990: 226) are 

constructed or contextualised within power 

relationships (Castells 1997). This fluid understanding 

of identity, however, is problematic 

as it is in tension with how people come to 

know themselves. de Certeau (1988) provides 

an insight into this problem by arguing that 

although identities are in a state of flux, they 

are located within a swirl of interconnections 

between individuals and others that gives the 

appearance of stability. Although we may 

believe, on an epistemological level, that 

identity is contingent and ‘constructed from 

a mix of elements’ (Hekman 1999: 18), an 

individual’s identity cannot be experienced as 

fragmented, unstable or totally fluid (Leyshon 

2008). Experientially, individuals must, or 

come to, know themselves as a stable self, as a 

continuous being negotiating the disparate, 

fluid and dynamic elements of life. Identity is 

in itself not radically contingent, but rather a 

referential frame within a contingent world. 

The opposite would be ‘to court madness’ 

(Hekman 1999: 20). Put another way, 

identities, whether of young people or adults, 

are not constructed as inherently unstable, but 

rather from a position of stability within 

contingent space. Individuals therefore formulate 

belief systems which they (at the very 

least) believe to be stable, solid and truthful to 

themselves; belief systems which can be 

affirmed by everyday actions. Individuals act 

on the basis that they know a self, which in 

turn is predicated on firm and believable 

interpretations of the world around them. 

Glass (1993) argues that identities are not 

fragmented, ruptured, fluid, or forever split, as 

this is predicated on disorientation, disembeddedness, 

rootlessness, routelessness and a 

sense of being incomplete. Instead, Glass 

suggests a stable identity is necessary because 

it ‘locates the self in the world; it defines



emotional and interpersonal knowledge; it 

frames the self in a historical and situational 

context’ (1993: 48). Glass’ research usefully 

draws attention to the idea that individuals 

must necessarily experience themselves as a 

coherent entity, historically located and contingent, 

but enduring through time. This is not 

to suggest that coherence is necessarily 

complete, static and unchanging. Neither is it 

necessarily a ‘happy’ or even content rational 

framing. The memory-infused subject can be 

filled with discordant harmonies and incongruous 

events. But it is logical as it draws on 

experience to locate a sense of identity which, 

in turn, allows the individual to place 

themselves in a historical and geographical 

context; to cope with the contingencies of 

existence. What becomes important for identity 

formation therefore is the stories we tell 

ourselves that help us to locate who we are and 

how we come to understand the world around 

us (Somers 1994). 

It is through this process of internalisation 

of experience that individuals have the 

capacity to draw upon memories, however 

discordant, to piece together an emergent and 

consistent life-narrative, in which we appear at 

the very least as whole to ourselves. In this 

way Ricoeur offers us a way to reject the ‘selftransparent 

autonomous subject of Descartes’ 

idealism of cognito and shatters the idealised 

transcendental ego of Husserl and Heidegger’ 

(Delashmutt 2009: 592). He favours instead a 

Kantian metaphysics in which the immediacy 

of being is denied by arguing that the self is 

only accessed and given meaning through a 

detour into and through a world of materiality 

as well as cultural and social phenomenon. 

This detour is produced through a mimetic 

cycle of prefiguration, configuration and 

refiguration of the self that is in a constant 

state of being constructed and re-constituted 

through an interpretative framework of an 

individual’s past, their experience of the 

present and projections of the self-forward. 

The self in this way is always an iterative 

reflection of the reconfiguration of the selfbecoming; 

a constant retelling of interpretations 

of the external world back to oneself to 

produce a meaningful whole. In this sense life 

is refigured through autobiographical confessional 

self-narration (Reynolds 2004). 

However, these ‘confessions’ need not be 

‘truthful’—they are an articulation of what 

has been and what might be—they use the reimmergence 

of the memory-image to create 

logical stories. As we will illustrate below in 

the case study material, identity is a process of 

tale-telling to oneself of life as it happened, as 

it happens and future projected happenings; it 

is an explanation of the movement between 

different places and different times. In this way 

individuals may manage their life of constantly 

changing encounters and memories through 

employing a hermeneutic understanding of self 

that reads/re-interprets life by way of a greater 

context. People create themselves in an 

ongoing process by which events are reconfigured. 

Through remembering and refiguring, 

individuals can embody the creative act of 

lived reminiscence. Therefore, through framing 

the portrayal of life as ‘autobiographical’ it 

is possible to capture some of the reflexive 

reinterpretation of the self (Reynolds 2004). 

Ricoeur (1988: 243)suggests framing autobiographical 

accounts of self through the 

reflexive lens of ‘narrative time’ in which he 

asks us to place value on time’s function rather 

than its nature. In Time and Narrative Ricoeur 

(1988) interlaces psychological time and 

cosmological time to explain that narrative 

time is the mechanism through which an 

individual can articulate both the experiences 

and transactions of time through language. 

Narrative time is therefore how human agency 

and action is constituted by individuals in


fictional/non-fictional narratives of the self. It 

is not cosmological time per se, but the 

experience of time in the body. In this way 

Ricoeur positions cosmological time as a 

‘fictive stage’ that individuals assume exists 

and which they use to tell temporary tales of 

the self through a resilient narrative identity— 

a storied-self through which individuals’ 

identities are created in an ongoing, iterative, 

reflexive, autobiographical process from fictional/factual 

and experiential sources. Time, 

Ricoeur (1992) argues, is ‘time for’ the 

articulation of the self rather than ‘time to be’ 

the self, as experiences and the transitions of 

time are produced in and through language. In 

this understanding there is no phenomenological 

disparity for an individual’s encounter of 

time within the fictive ‘world’ of the text or the 

memory-image and their experience of time 

within the factual ‘world’ of the self. That is to 

say that individuals work at producing a 

resilient narrative identity—a storied-self 

through which their identities are made. A 

storied-self is a mimetic cycle of introspection 

and the fundamental stuff of agency (Ricoeur 

1992). For Ricoeur, the narrative story of one’s 

life is something of value, something worth 

being retold, and retold not only for the benefit 

of audiences, however small, but for the benefit 

of the individual. The type of life to which 

Ricoeur alludes is an amalgam of corporeal 

and emotional/experiential realities. When 

Ricoeur describes the stuff of life he does so 

through the language of body and selfhood. We 

need to be careful to avoid the functional 

dualism of simply separating out the body from 

the life of the self. Rather we need to recognise 

that both are ontologically undifferentiated 

spheres of the lived-life, i.e. the lived-life is a 

symbiotic simultaneous relationship of experiential 

happening, the production of memory 

and the self-narrative of the world. 

A resilient narrative identity enables an 

individual to place her- or himself in space 

both temporally and physically, and produces 

the desired effect of harmonising to the 

subjective/objective dialectic of existence. 

Narrative identity in this way is the production 

of the self of place(s), included/excluded, 

experienced/imagined, here now/here 

past/here future and so on. Being in the world 

is therefore only accessed through emergent 

route ways into the objective world of cultural 

and social structures, which are ‘read’ as the 

subject’s surrounding context. Reading of 

context or the creation of a coherent storiedself 

then is an everyday device that individuals 

utilise to coordinate the fluidity of encounter 

into a cohesive and self-meaningful whole. We 

argue that a resilient narrative identity places 

value on the redescriptive power of imagination 

(Ricoeur 1988: 1(xi)) through which 

individuals recognise themselves and the 

places and spaces they encounter via the 

stories they tell themselves (Ricoeur 1988: 

3(246–247)). These stories are not necessarily 

time specific or indeed without time, but 

rather are constantly reworked in the now in 

an ongoing encounter of self and other that 

has a depth that cannot be determined. Whilst 

the stories are temporally constructed in a 

narrative hermeneutical methodology, they do 

not have to be consistent or preclude the 

holding of contradictory perspectives. 

Narrative as place 


A storied-self, we argue, can only be understood 

through an interpretation of ‘contexts’. 

In this section we discuss how images of 

intimate and personal landscapes produced by 

young men and women growing up in the 

countryside give the illusion of everyday life as 

stable, resilient, cared for and enjoyable, when



rather the images they have created were 

intended to illustrate another very different 

narrative of otherness, vulnerability and 

ultimately project a vision of escape. 

This section is primarily about two young 

people, Ellen and Joe, who live in villages we 

call Willow Hill and Yewley. Ellen (14 years 

old) acutely feels a sense of otherness based on 

her parent’s position in Willow Hill—she lives 

with her parents in a council house 3 on the 

outskirts of the lower village. Willow Hill is a 

linear village on the escarpment of some 

upland hills with a population of just over 400 

people. The village is in two parts: the upper 

section, located near the church and manor 

house, is on the high ground and is populated 

by prosperous retirees and professional people 

who work in nearby towns and cities. The 

lower half of the village is at the base of the hill 

and comprises a council estate (twenty-five 

houses) and four light industrial units (providing 

employment for twenty-one local people). 

The lower village is one mile from a major 

road, which is seven miles from the nearest 

town. Whilst there is no shop in the village, a 

regular bus service travelling to the nearest 

town can be caught every hour throughout the 

day. Julie (17 years old) described the village as 

‘uninteresting, boring and there’s not a lot of 

night life ... there’s one street light in the 

whole of the village ... it’s surrounded by 

empty fields and forests and whatnot’ (personal 

interview with Julie). Alex (15 years old) 

conversely reflected ‘its alright ... not bad, cos 

like I’m into fishing an’ shooting and going 

up top with my uncle an’ getting us some 

rabbits’ (personal diary). However, from both 

Julie and Alex’s perspective the village is 

divided between a wealthy upper area and the 

poorer lower village, as Julie commented ‘I 

dislike the whole sort of separating the 

community. But we can’t do a lot about it, 

it’s always been like that’ (personal interview 

with Julie). The majority of young people live 

in the lower village (seventeen in total). Ten of 

them meet once a week at the village hall for a 

youth group run by a local charity. Some of the 

older youth work part-time in the summer 

months cleaning second homes and holiday 

lets in the upper village, beating for grouse 

shooting parties in August, or on one of the 

many local fruit farms surrounding the village. 

Joe (14 years old) lives in Yewley, a small 

village some fifteen miles from the nearest 

town, comprising a population of approximately 

100 people of which twelve are young 

people aged between 14 and 18. As far as the 

young people of the village are concerned it is 

‘a dump’, ‘boring’ or ‘crap’ (Yewley discussion 

group), and as Emily (17 years old) remarked 

the ‘only way of ensuring intelligent conversation 

is to talk to yourself’ (Emily’s personal 

diary). For Joe the village is divided not only 

geographically, ‘the north-west half ... is 

quite separate from the south-east’ (Joe’s 

personal diary), but also socially. The northwest 

section is dominated by a post-war 

council housing estate whilst the remainder of 

the village is a mix of newly built architecturally 

designed houses and renovated farm 

buildings. One of the main problems young 

people encounter in the village is the tension 

between them and an ageing population, in 

particular, the way in which the adults regulate 

the young people’s use of village space. The 

demise of agriculture, with its attendant social 

importance, within the villages is partly 

attributed to an influx of an aged retired 

community, as demonstrated in the following 

discussion: 

Emily: Old people retire here. 

Tom: People with caps. 

John: And lots of wellingtons. 

Tom: And farmers who walk around like 

Richard’s Dad with the braces [all laugh].


Ben: And lives in a bungalow [more laughter]. 

(Yewley, in-depth discussion group) 

Ellen and Joe’s sense of self can usefully be 

explained by applying theories of memory, 

narrative and emotion to their experiences. We 

start our analyses from the position that the 

spaces of both villages are topologically 

complex, multiple, contingent and temporal 

(Massey 2005). Within these fluid spaces 

young people produce themselves through 

interpreting their sensual and/or representational 

accounts of their villages. Through 

this process young people build memories of 

places that can simultaneously position them 

across an array of senses and emotions from 

being included and excluded, vulnerable and 

confident, happy and sad, bored and interested 

in the same times and spaces. Their memories 

are part of a creative process in which 

they learn to be themselves, and challenge or 

accept their lives. This is a constant and 

iterative process of being embedded and 

disembedded within the social structures of 

place. 

Academic understandings of how young 

people gain a glimpse of their selves has tended 

to draw on the role of families and social 

networks (Lee 2001; Mayall 2002) to the 

detriment of thinking through personal conceptualisations 

of space and in particular 

spaces which engender ‘trust’, the belief at 

some level that the environment can be a 

nurturing one while we take the risks involved 

in growing up. In contrast, while bucolic ideals 

may exist, village life for these young people is 

filled with complexity. Tensions in both 

villages between young people and certain 

older members of their community led to 

young people feeling marginalised. Tanya 

(aged 16) found this conflict very repressive, 

as she explained: 


Well the village I like some things and I don’t like 

the others. I like the freedom, but freedom is a 

paradox because you’re not meant to go in the fields 

... But you know there is a sense of you can look 

out on green stuff, and in the city you have to walk 

through the suburbs to get a park and see green stuff 

rather than you know walk out your door and 

you’ve got the field and stuff and but people [adults 

in the village] are always moaning and complaining 

about us, they stop you doing everything. (personal 

interview with Tanya, Yewley) 

Village spaces are not formally controlled by 

by-laws or other means of legally restricting 

access, but they are clearly coded by adults as 

spaces in which young people are out of place 

and in which their activities are unwelcome or 

inappropriate. Therefore finding an ‘enabling’ 

place in which to belong becomes a constant 

struggle. At some level, therefore, the parent 

must serve as a starting point for the 

construction of a ‘good enough’ environment 

in the young person’s early years. Thus when a 

young person witnesses the harassment of 

their parents, the conscious and unconscious 

communication of their parents’ fears and 

sense of powerlessness (through for example 

being openly patronised in the village pub) 

diminishes young people’s sense of their parent 

as a site of emotional and material safety and 

protection (cf. Luttrell 1997; Skeggs 1997). 

For Ellen we suggest that witnessing the 

routine humiliation of her father, an estate 

gardener at the local manor house, by 

Mr Wilson (local squire), 4 does engender a 

sense of shame and a sense of being out of 

place for her. Similarly, Joe felt embarrassed by 

his parents as they were viewed by villagers, in 

Joe’s words, as ‘different’ and ‘not normal’ 

because they lived an alternative lifestyle. 5 

Both Ellen and Joe captured their sense of 

displacement within their villages through 

making short video diaries.



Ellen’s short film, a walking tour of the 

lower village, demonstrates how marginality, 

memory-images, narrative and identity are 

intrinsically linked. Through viewing the 

video, which lasts only thirty-eight seconds 

and is a series of blip-verts 6 or clips strung 

together, we see the heterogeneous nature of 

her life and how the divisions within the 

village are felt emotionally. Ellen uses the 

video camera almost as a stills camera, the 

result being a series of images which move 

very quickly across the screen. We have taken 

stills of these. According to Aitkin (1998) and 

Alvermann and Hagood (2000) this sort of 

multi-tasking filming is indicative of new ways 

of learning by young people, i.e. young people 

flick quickly from one television channel to 

another in search of new entertainment 

amongst a televisual backdrop of repeats. 

The video is in the style of a documentary with 

a brief narrative introducing each section. It 

can be condensed into four main images of the 

village—all are of the lower half where Ellen 

lives. The first image (Figure 1) shows Ellen 

sitting in front of the family television watching 

MTV. This is quickly overlain with a series 

of images of the children’s playground, 

including the swings, climbing frame, football 

goals and slide (Figure 2). The third set of 

images focuses on Ellen climbing a tree 

(Figure 3), and finally, the remainder of the 

video is a panoramic view of the upper village 

shot over the cricket field from the road 

outside Ellen’s parental home (Figure 4). 

On initial viewing the brevity of the film 

suggests that Ellen’s life in Willow Hill 

(a picturesque village associated with poets 

and artists) is very dull and unfulfilling—it 

seems that there is so little to do here that Ellen 

requires only thirty-eight seconds worth of 

video. Indeed, how could she video a nonevent 

or show how nothing means something 

(Olwig 2007). But this is far too simplistic an 

explanation of the images; the video diary calls 

Figure 1 Watching MTV. ‘It’s a school holiday and we’re sitting in’ (Ellen and her friend Alice).


Figure 2 Children’s playground. ‘This is where we play games on a good day with the youth 

group.’ 

Figure 3 Up a tree. ‘It’s easy to climb trees.’ 

Identity in the countryside 171



Figure 4 The border. ‘This is our local cricket pitch, we’re not allowed on the square but we’ve 

got the top left-hand corner to play in. That’s not really enough space for us to play but we put 

up with it anyway.’ 

up Ellen’s memories and sense of self beyond 

the assembly framed in the image. The video 

illustrates how a young person’s way of seeing 

makes the past a part of TV culture’s curiosity 

shop of fragments (Dienst 1994) with one 

image overlapped by another in quick succession. 

Images are problematic but by focusing 

on the awkward, already commodified, 

already positioned, already meaning saturated, 

already violent practices of envisioning 

in making video diaries it may be possible to 

escape a romanticism of popular images of the 

countryside. Indeed Ellen’s video highlights 

the more fertile idea of the production of new 

imagined spaces and enabled her to talk of 

otherness rather than using video to enframe 

the other as exhibit (Crang 1997). 

These blip-verts operate as a metaphor for 

Bergson’s memory-image; the fragments, 

instantaneous moments appear dislocated 

but are pluri-temporal landscapes inherently 

connected to a variety of locales and moments. 

As these images illustrate, Ellen lives a lot of 

her life beyond the village; she did not include 

many scenes of the ‘countryside’. She spends 

‘as much time as possible’ (personal interview 

with Ellen) in town either with friends, her 

older sister, her parents or at her grandmother’s 

house, ‘going to shops and doing 

stuff you can’t do around here’ (personal 

interview with Ellen). However, the video also 

shows that Ellen does hang around the village, 

indeed she likes the village and the peace and 

quiet it affords her. Her family are from 

Willow Hill and she has many close relatives 

still living locally. There are people in the 

village who make her feel safe, and it offers the 

spaces required for private communications 

between friends.


Yet there are also elements of the village she 

does not like—the clear structure between ‘the 

wealthy people on the hill and us down below’, 

and the new houses which ‘only rich people can 

afford’ (personal interview with Ellen). Here 

we begin to witness Ellen’s sense of marginality. 

Whilst she does not feel marginalised by 

incomers per se or their conspicuous wealth 

(although she did comment that she was 

embarrassed that her parents did not own a 

car), it is their attitude she finds repressive, in 

particular their dismissal of the rural poor as 

‘bumpkins’. 

The cumulative effects of the restrictions 

placed on Ellen and her friends by ‘those who 

run the village hall’ leaves her with little space 

in which to play—the children’s playground 

(Figure 2), a few trees near her home (Figure 3) 

and a corner of the cricket field (Figure 4). 

These memory images reflect instantaneous 

sections in the general stream of being and 

highlight how different memories are overlaid 

and re-spatialised in different spaces. The 

bodily performance of climbing trees is an 

illustration of the reflex memories which 

enable the movement through the tree—a 

learnt awareness of what branches can be 

trusted, which trees can be climbed. Equally 

the cricket pitch illustrates the pluri-temporal 

landscape of the memory-image. It highlights 

how Ellen’s awareness of the power structures 

in the village butt up against the bodily reflexes 

of play to create competing spatialities of 

cognitive and reflex memory. These competing 

varied and variable memory images play out 

across the landscape of the village; all these 

sites are in the lower half of the village in 

public view and Ellen feels she is under 

surveillance within them. Whilst she recognises 

that private space is hard to find in the 

countryside, especially as a number of adults 

know her in the lower village and because she 

shares a bedroom with her older sister, she also 


feels unable to occupy the more secluded 

spaces, such as the woods, in the upper half of 

the village. When she expressed that she felt 

unable to move into such spaces, she said that 

‘it would be hard for her mum and dad, it’d 

make trouble for them’. 

Ellen felt a border existed in her village 

between the council estate and the upper 

village, and that the border was patrolled by 

incomers and defended against young people 

from the council estate. She also felt the border 

was insidiously encroaching on her household. 

For instance, the neighbouring home, formerly 

an estate house, had been sold to people 

working in Bristol. Thus while the village at 

one level provides a safe environment for her 

to play and climb trees, surrounded by people 

she knows and trusts, at another level she feels 

marginalised and frustrated. Her tactic for 

coping with this sense of marginality is to 

spend ‘as much time as possible’ in the nearby 

town (personal interview with Ellen). When 

she is unable to physically walk out of the 

countryside to affirm her identity in ‘urban’ 

spaces, she avidly reads ‘youth’ magazines, 

listens to the radio and watches youth culture 

programmes (e.g. MTV, VH1). Ellen enjoys 

life away from the village, stating that ‘I’m no 

bumpkin’ (personal interview with Ellen). The 

town is very important to her and her sense of 

identity is located between home and there. 

Here we witness the creation of ‘hybrid 

landscapes with other places’ (Jones 2005: 

217). These places each have a multiplicity of 

temporal meanings, and different meanings 

which can re-emerge, become re-spatialised in 

the variety of the contexts which constitute the 

now. Ellen is living with inconsistency, the 

overlaying of space with the multiple meaning 

that memory affords. Her bricolage of the here 

is made up of the multiplicity of memory 

images in part drawn from MTV, the town, 

and the multiple places of Willow Hill.



Ellen’s video is about structuring absence— 

her absence of self-esteem within the village 

and the absence of her life elsewhere. For her 

the countryside does not afford her the 

opportunity to perform her identity, therefore 

the sites she chose to video were all signs of 

survival—indexical signs showing a passage of 

time before she moves on (cf. MacDougall 

2006), a movement she expects to achieve. 

Ellen believes the countryside is a good place 

to be, both psychologically and physically, if 

you can find space—as with other rural youth 

studies (Leyshon 2008; Vanderbeck and 

Dunkerly 2003), for example, she appreciates 

the countryside and while not desperate to run 

away from it, she expects to leave in the future. 

Through her storied-self, the fragments of 

rurality which constitute Ellen’s life are apparent: 

she locates part of her identity in urban 

space, which is positively affirmed, and partly in 

rural space, which is negatively recognised as a 

space in which she is prevented from performing 

aspects of her identity and is subject to the 

repressive social regimes in play in the village. 

Yet she identifies positively with many aspects of 

life in Willow Hill. This is evidence for how 

messy individuals’ connections to multiple 

landscapes can become. However her accounts, 

and the ways in which she connects the blipverts 

of her walking tour, exemplify her ability 

to utilise a poetics of narrative to attempt to 

reconcile the tensions present in her life. In her 

account, Ellen creates a storied-self which 

erodes the lumpy inconsistencies of her 

emotional response to the material world and 

its oppressive politics, and her simultaneous 

connection to rural and urban spaces. 

Joe has experienced similar exclusionary 

aspects and strategies in Yewley. He is actively 

excluded by the other young people in the 

village as he is frequently referred to as a ‘nerd’ 

or described as being ‘odd’, but here we wish 

to illustrate how Joe finds consolation in his 

othered position by identifying with unknown 

others in the village and beyond. In his video 

diary Joe walked and filmed his village and 

layered on a narrative of belonging and not 

belonging. To explain how he felt Joe took one 

of us on a walking tour of the village which he 

used in his video diary. 

Interviewer: So where are we? 

Joe: Err ... that’s the council houses. 

Interviewer: What’s significant about that? 

Joe: Well, I don’t know anybody in there. 

Interviewer: No? 

Joe: No ... and I don’t know anybody apart 

from Hoskins further up ... and I don’t know 

many people in the village. 

Interviewer: Um ... why’s that? 

Joe: I don’t know really, I just don’t. I mean to 

start with it’s not very, it’s not as sociable as it 

could be, I mean there are things like the fete 

and the summer teas and other jolly good 

English things, you know everybody does 

come round for a ‘do’ but even then they tend 

to stay in their own group, so you never meet, I 

mean you never see the people in the council 

houses. 

Interviewer: How do you feel about not 

knowing them? 

Joe: I don’t know really. It’s just like ... you 

don’t even realise they are there half the time, 

until you see them and think who the hell is 

that? [laughter]. Um, you know, you just don’t 

realise ... I guess others round here must see 

me the same way ... we don’t belong [laughs] 

... I spend a lot of time by myself down by the 

ponds, shall we go there now? 

Interviewer: Sure. 

Joe: I just like to have a look and sit around for 

a while ... by myself really cos I ... is this 

how black people feel in the city? 

Interviewer: I don’t know Joe. 

Joe: There’s no black people out here, have 

you noticed?


Interviewer: Yeah. 

Joe: Humm, why would they? I mean they 

wouldn’t be welcome would they? 

(personal interview with Joe) 

In the above dialogue Joe is able to affirm and 

normalise his identity by demonstrating that 

there are others in his village in a similar 

position. This discussion engenders a Ricoeurian 

narrative identity as he attempts to create 

some sense of self-consistency through an 

autobiographical discussion with himself. 

Joe cares for others he does not know as he 

points to a perceived class divide in the village— 

between those people who live in council houses 

and the rest. The assumption here is that there is 

a working-class minority in the village. Joe also 

highlights the problems of rural racism previously 

identified by Jay (1992), Dhalech (1999) 

and Duncan and Duncan (2003). The prevailing 

stance, as Joe suggests, is that black and 

minority ethnic people in his village would be 

seen as out of place, ‘alien’ (Agyeman 1989), 

polluting white rural space (Kinsman 1997) and 

as such they would be systematically 

excluded—sensations Joe felt himself. 7 For Joe 

rural racism and class divisions are entrenched 

in rural communities. Below he articulates this 

belief at the start of the walking tour: 

I just look at anything out of my window and it 

makes me feel isolated ... I do feel attached to 

Yewley although I don’t know why. I’ve been up to 

London and looked around, and yeah, it made me 

feel better about myself. People seemed different 

there, and I’m different. (Joe’s walking tour) 

Through this quotation Joe is dealing with the 

aporetics of life, the messy inconsistency, 

the sense of attachment and isolation, with 

the poetics of narrative to simultaneously 

connect his sense of self to Yewley and London. 

Joe’s video is a glimpse of his storied-self, which 


is an ongoing process. He frequently walks and 

talks to himself to both remember and create 

new understandings of his place. 

I have particular feelings for a few places in the 

village as well as a few outside. To start with there is 

the pond, it’s where I sit and think. The old ruin, this 

is an old house which has been demolished and all 

that is left is a 4 foot high old stone wall with trees 

growing around it. Me and a few of my long term 

friends used to spend a lot of our time ‘playing’ 

down there. The wall is another place we used to 

hang out at when we were younger. It’s just a break 

in the hedge row along the road and an old dry stone 

wall is there. I value these places a lot as they make 

me think about who I am. (Joe’s personal diary) 

This dialogue is a process infused with a rich 

reflective narrative. He walks in the countryside 

(to the ponds) to help him make sense of 

the village and to find a place within it and 

although he views himself as different, and 

recognises that he is viewed as different, he 

continues to struggle to fit in. In part he is able 

to do this through acknowledging that he 

could be worse off, as he stated he could be 

‘black or poor, and then like it’d be horrible’ 

(personal interview with Joe). As Little (1999) 

has shown, signs of displeasure, hatred and 

vilification are directed towards people who 

are ‘different’ to the white middle-class norm. 

To challenge the norm becomes a constant 

struggle. However, it is worth noting that Joe 

and Ellen both have a variety of places in their 

villages to root their sense of identity. These 

multiple temporal spaces form part of their 

narrative construction of the self. They 

illustrate how Ricoeur’s concept of a storiedself 

operates to create a Bergsonian memoryimage—an 

intersection in the emergence of 

being—which can be used as a totem of the 

stable self and permit these young people to 

deal with the complexity of personal change.



Although both Ellen’s and Joe’s personal 

video diaries are a unique journey, they only 

exist through the interaction of innumerable 

elements, which are constitutive of the place 

being explored. These elements of memory, 

practice and performance are what define and 

produce places for young people. They are ‘an 

instantaneous configuration of positions’ 

(de Certeau 1988: 116) that appear as a stable 

order of coexistent elements. These video/ 

snapshots become ‘space’ upon the addition of 

variables of velocity and direction. It is through 

this participation in the creation of space, or of 

the countryside/city, that both Ellen and Joe 

experience place. In this sense they become 

walkers/travellers producing a storied-self 

(Bauman 2004). The stories they narrate to 

themselves and others are always in a state of 

becoming and represent an identity project of 

individuals that is paradoxically the avoidance 

of being fixed—to an identity or to a place—but 

rather a consequence of striving for a sense of 

belonging and resilience to change. 

Conclusion 

Our argument is not that more attention should 

be paid to identity per se. Rather, we suggest 

that through exploring how individual’s produce 

their identities and histories of life via 

experiences and the narrative use of memories, 

they arrive at an understanding of identity that 

is a story. Indeed the ‘work’ that place does (to 

borrow a term from Mitchell 2000) for people 

in their construction, articulation and maintenance 

of identity is derived from the interplay 

between the material and the remembered. In 

this way the ‘here and now’ is overlaid with the 

‘there’ and ‘then’ (see Rose, Degen and Basdas 

2010). 

Returning to the bricolage of the here in 

terms of identity, this paper has discussed the 

implications of identity as a process of constant 

negotiation. This iterative reworking and 

redefining of the self, while epistemologically 

relevant, is riven with tensions between the flux 

of negotiation, the pressure of structure(s) and 

the appearance, at least to the self, of a stable 

identity. The understanding of the self as a 

stable and coherent image hinges on the idea 

that the relationship between identity and place 

is dependent upon the ability to be able to 

narrate contextual stories back to oneself and 

others. The project of identity therefore 

becomes infused with a poetics of narrative 

which brings cogency to the competing 

pressures of the material and social worlds. 

This stable sense of self should not be assumed 

to be synonymous with a ‘good’ or ‘happy’ 

life—neither should it be considered as 

unchanging and unchangeable. For Ellen and 

Joe their sense of ‘out of placeness’signifies that 

they have tried to create roots in the countryside, 

but ultimately they realise that they will 

have to move on. Their future projections of 

self are with a strong resilient sense of rurality 

that is temporal and marginal to the discourses 

and practices of village life. As the case studies 

illustrate, a sense of self is historically located 

and is logical and communicable. Thus the 

formation of the stable subject can be 

considered as a process by which the inconsistencies 

of life are dealt with through an 

autobiographical narrative. The production of 

a storied-self is a constant and personal process 

drawing on memories of places, events, 

experiences and emotions. Indeed, we do not 

only tell stories when we set out to tell stories; it 

is a permanent and ongoing process. Memories 

then create potentialities in stories by helping 

to frame (re)interpretations of events of the 

here and now. 

Through the paper we have suggested that 

this process of creating coherent ideas of 

identity is a narrative process. Narrative


performs two (interconnected) roles—it is 

both a mechanism for representing the world 

but also a process by which messiness and 

inconsistency is explained. We focus more on 

this second aspect for the purposes of this 

paper to highlight that narrative is not the 

same as discourse. Narrative is a process of 

story-telling rather than, as in the case of 

discourse, a set of statements that provides a 

language for talking about ‘a particular kind 

of knowledge’ (Hall 1992: 291). Thus while 

discourses have the potential to limit the ways 

in which a topic can be constructed, they are 

bounded and external. In contrast, narrative 

not only has movement but also has direction 

and velocity and is connected and intersectional. 

It explains events, encounters and 

experiences as connected to a story. Thus 

identity becomes for Ricoeur a hermeneutic 

process by which the storied-self is produced. 

This storied-self becomes reflexive, as people 

have the ability to respond to themselves, to fill 

in or extrapolate from the selfhood project 

(McNay 2008). But this also opens 

up opportunities for discrepancy—both that 

individuals can hold contradictory narratives 

about themselves and that there can be a 

gap between the stories and acts created and 

performed by an individual. 

The storied-self reflects what Bergson terms 

the memory-image and that we have suggested 

is the product of the narrative process. It is a 

narrative memory which creates an image, a 

bricolage which interrupts the general stream 

of becoming to offer a semblance of consistency 

and coherence in the messiness of 

existence. What then is the spatiality of these 

images—where do they exist and how are they 

influential? Following Bull and Leyshon 

(2010), the memory-image is made up of the 

cognitive memory and the reflex memory that 

produces three forms of memory (cognitive, 

reflex and memory image). These memories 

map on to different spatialities. Cognitive 

memory connects to the spaces of representation, 

reflex is ingrained in the spaces of the 

body and the memory image is our emotional 

response to place. Thus narrative should not 

be interpreted as merely words—its modes of 

expression are varied and variable—it is not 

an analytical product but an embodied, 

emotional and relational experience of the 

world. Thus what becomes significant is how 

the bricolage of the here is assembled; the 

politics of how memories, spaces and experiences 

blur the boundaries between the social, 

the self and the body. 

Acknowledgements 

We would like to thank Catherine Leyshon for 

reading and commenting on an earlier draft of 

this paper. We would also like to thank the 

Editor and two anonymous referees for their 

critical and constructive comments. 

Notes 


1. The work of Bergson and Ricoeur has not been 

brought together in this way before but doing so 

increases the interpretative leverage over the empirical 

material in this paper with novel outcomes for 

research on memory and identity formation. 

2. Our choice of case study villages was limited to the 

ones in which the youth agencies were already 

conducting outreach work, therefore enabling us to 

get to know the young people well. The villages 

discussed in this paper are located in different counties 

and separated by approximately eighty miles. They 

represent two very contrasting rural environments. 

Willow Hill is an upland escarpment village with a 

large retiree population and Yewley is a lowland 

village surrounded by large-scale agri-businesses. 

3. Council houses and council estates are state-built 

and -managed social housing units. 

4. In a rural context a ‘squire’ is an English country 

gentleman who is usually the principal land and 

property owner in a district.



5. Joe’s parents were active members of Greenpeace and 

observed a strict regime of ethical shopping. They 

organised recycling of waste in the village and 

collected scrap from other residents. 

6. A blip-vert is taken from the 1985 film Max 

Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future and describes 

a short high-speed, concentrated, high-intensity television 

commercial lasting about three seconds. 

7. N.B. this is a discussion of landscape and rurality in 

the British context. We suggest neither that this applies 

to all rural/countryside contexts nor that the British 

landscape is uniform and homogenous. 

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Abstract translations 

Bricolage de l’ici : récits des jeunes de l’identité de la 

campagne 

Les souvenirs sont essentiels à notre construction des 

endroits. Simultanément ils offrent une ancre pour 

l’identité et des temporalités différentes aux rencontres 

avec les paysages. La mémoire permet aux 

différents espaces, passés et futurs de devenir 

implantés dans des locaux particuliers. Pourtant les 

assemblages spontanés de la signification que la 

mémoire rend possible ne sont pas apolitiques. Par 

conséquent les mécanismes et les processus par 

lesquels la signification est articulée dans ces 

rencontres sont fondamentaux dans nos significations 

de l’espace. Cet article, donc, réunit le travail d’Henri 

Bergson sur la mémoire et de Paul Ricoeur sur le récit, 

pour examiner les histoires que des individus 

produisent qui définissent le soi-même. En utilisant 

les recherches dans les vies des jeunes dans la 

campagne, cet article fait trois choses: il discute du 

rôle de la mémoire dans la création de l’identité; il 

examine le processus politique du récit par lequel des 

souvenirs deviennent tissés dans des compréhensions 

de l’endroit et créent un bricolage de l’ici, et 

finalement; il offre le “storied-self” comme une 

résolution des constructions en concurrence et des 

expériences de la continuité personnelle et les 

divergences et changements constants dans le projet 

de l’individu. 

Mots-clefs: jeunesse, identité, mémoire, récit, 

“storied self” 

El Bricolaje del Aquí: Los Narrativos de Jóvenes de 

Identidad en el Campo 

Las memorias son cruciales a nuestro construcción 

de lugar. Se ofrecen a la vez un sostén para identidad 

y temporalidades a encuentros con paisajes. La 

memoria se permite que diferentes espacios, 

pasados y futuros llegan a ser incrustados en locales 

particulares. Aún los ensamblajes de significativo 

incrustados por la memoria no son apolíticos. Así 

los mecanismos y procesos por el cual se articula 

significativo en estos encuentros son fundamentales 

a nuestro conocimiento del lugar. Por tanto este 

articulo se junta el trabajo de Henri Bergson de la 

memoria y lo de Paul Ricoeur del narrativo, para 

examinar los cuentos producidos por individuos 

que se definen el yo. Utilizando investigaciones de 

las vidas de jóvenes en el campo, el articulo se hace 

tres cosas: se discute el papel de memoria en crear 

identidad; se examina el proceso político de 

narrativo por el cual memorias se llegan a ser 

parte de conocimiento de un lugar y se crean un 

bricolaje de aquí; y finalmente, se ofrece el ’yocontado’ 

como una resolución de las construcciones 

que se compiten y las experiencias de continuidad 

personal y las contradicciones y cambio constante 

del proyecto del individuo. 

Palabras claves: Juventud, Identidad, Memoria, 

Narrativo, el yo-contado

The bricolage of the here: young people's narratives of identity in the ...

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