Daniel E. Benett (University of California, Berkeley)
This paper considers different narratives of identity formation that inform different names within my family. I consider 3 family names — Benett, Bitchacho, and Diller — that hold different memories of experiences prior to immigration to the United States and carry different hopes for the future. I use a combination of auto-ethnography, interviews with family members, fragments of family members' writings, and transcriptions of some family-favorite jokes in order to consider ways that narrative traditions have formed and continue to form aspects of each of these identities, which in turn inform aspects of myself.
Part of 01-15 Analyzing Traditions of Naming, Thursday, November 02, 8:30 am–10:00 am