Abstract
In Exiting the Extraordinary: Returning to theOrdinary World after War, Prison, and OtherExtraordinary Experiences, Frances Moulder examines “extraordinary experiences” through a perfectly ordinary and plodding analysis that mixes social scientific categories with narratives from a hodgepodge of individuals. Although parts of the book would be excellent assignments for undergraduate introductory or social conflict courses, the ultimate contribution to a theory of identity is very murky. I appreciated Moulder’s meticulous and thorough attempt to organize the narratives, pulling in the stories of everyone from former Communists and Weathermen to civil rights activists and nuns, veterans and felons to Holocaust survivors and war correspondents. But overall the rich phenomenological texture of their stories drowns in the book’s labored prose.
I admire simple and efficient framings of complex problems, and I strongly share Moulder’s interest in the malleability of identity, especially in response to trauma. But the book’s analytic conceptualization is tough to buy. Isn’t the “extraordinary” in the eye of the beholder? Don’t we become sociologists because we’re fascinated by the communities and dynamics that we find extraordinary?
The oral history material cited by Moulder illustrates how radically identities can change or be adopted or discarded. The parts about surviving concentration camp life and about undercover agents and veterans were especially compelling. There were early fragments of the book that I wanted to immediately assign to my students, believing that the vivid accounts would fascinate them, too. For example, one interesting point of departure for a class discussion about interaction, routines, and identity: “Having faced death, or being challenged to one’s limits, physically and emotionally, returnees [from extraordinary experiences] feel a certain distance from the seemingly petty concerns of others, a distance that usually needs to be kept under wraps, in order to avoid conflict” (p.75). Like many of my colleagues, I spend a lot of time trying to show my students that much of what they believe to be “natural” or “normal” about human identity is actually the result of historically contingent and fluctuating social and cultural processes. Significant parts of Moulder’s book illustrate this point powerfully through her subjects’ accounts of their experiences and adaptive strategies.
My issue with the book is that soon enough it becomes difficult to determine what is “extraordinary” and what is not, especially given that we can all find a way to acclimate to even very unusual circumstances. I realize that world wars and mass genocide are events that—thankfully—not everyone endures. But what about involvement in a gang or sex work? In my mind, these are extraordinary experiences that happen every day, for many people, and that involve similar moments of violence, abuse, and trauma. In a much milder example, perhaps when we first became grad students or professors we even found the academy to be an “extraordinary” community of minds, formality, and customs. But after years of lectures, receptions, faculty meetings, and thesis defenses, it’s all quite quotidian to us. Just another day at the office, right?
Something else nagged me while reading Moulder’s well-researched work: virtually everyone will encounter an extraordinary experience at some point in their life. If you’re reading this journal, it’s not likely that you’ll end up as a prisoner of war or in a religious order, but you could conceivably be divorced from your spouse or choose to leave the academy and pursue work elsewhere or even be incarcerated. Each of these would be an intensely jarring process for us, one that would require the shedding of a past self and total immersion into a new one.
It’s plausible that I was asked to review this text because of my nightlife research. It’s a world of outrageous performers, topless go-go dancers, bottle girls, and club kids, a scene of spectacle that some colleagues might see as “extraordinary,” unusual, or over the top, as I definitely first did. But after five years of clubland fieldwork, it’s all become rather normal and commonplace. An interviewee who’s a performance artist and now a close friend of mine will ram a few pages of Vogue into her anus with a plunger, on stage, and then she’ll clean up and we’ll go have omelets at an all-night diner. All parts of social life can become prosaic, even the extraordinary.