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Making Marriage Visible:
Wedding Anniversaries as the Public Component of Private Relationships
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz
Professor of Communication
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Kenosha, WI 53141-2000
wendy.## email not listed ##
1. Introduction
Narratives do not just describe reality, they help to create it. As Miller, Potts,
Fung, Hoogstra and Mintz put it, stories ‘provide one widely available means by which
people create, interpret, and publicly project culturally constituted images of self in face-
to-face interaction’ (1990: 292). As a result, narratives are used to socially construct
identity, for individuals and for family members (Ochs 1997; Jorgenson and Bochner
2004; Schely-Newman 2002; Schiffrin 1996, 2000). Narratives about family do not just
describe a family’s history, they help to create the family as they tell about it (Andrews
2002; Bennett, Wolin and McAvity 1988; Langellier 2002). To date, most of the
research into the use of narratives has studied casual conversations, looking in particular
at the collaborative telling of shared past experience (Boggs, Watson-Gegeo and
McMillan 1985; Duranti 1986; Goodwin 1986; Norrick 1997; Schegloff 1992; Schiffrin
1984; Watson 1975). One goal of this research is to expand the context in which
narratives are studied beyond casual conversation to formal rituals, such as wedding
anniversaries.
Theoretically, this study takes a social constructionist stance. Social
constructionism examines the ways in which people jointly make meaning of the social
world for themselves and others; it emphasizes social facts rather than physical facts,
Convention