Each module contains a Supplemental Reading Post where students must submit one post per week. The goal of the post is for the student to describe the lessons learned in the material which they believ

http://ann.sagepub.com/ of Political and Social Science The ANNALS of the American Academy http://ann.sagepub.com/content/642/1/228 The online version of this article can be found at:   DOI: 10.1177/0002716212438198 2012 642: 228 The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Brandon Berry Possessions Reflections of Self from Missing Things: How People Move On from Losing     Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of:     American Academy of Political and Social Science can be found at:

Science The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Additional services and information for         http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:   http://ann.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:   http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints:   http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions:   What is This?  - Jun 4, 2012 Version of Record >> at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from 228 ANNALS, AAPSS, 642, July, 2012 When people fail to locate a personal belonging, it often evokes disturbing reflections of self that they will seek to overcome. While ethnomethodology once manufactured breaches in the taken-for-granted order to reveal the implicit rules of social life, this article explores how people try to recover from such breaches occurring naturally in their material environment.

Drawing on a database of about five hundred cases of naturally occurring losses collected through several ethnographic techniques, this article demonstrates how people get back to life as usual through four unique paths. Through each, individuals resolve or avoid the disturbances caused when their taken-for-granted sense of what objects are immediately available to them breaks down.

Keywords:

self; memory; material culture; loss; social psychology; ethnography W hen attempts to locate an object fail, they offer insights into social psychology. After realizing that an object has gone missing, indi- viduals are often troubled by unsettling reflec- tions of self. They can no longer count on the practical and emotional enhancements of self that the object affords or, more disturbingly, rely on their customary sense of competency in managing their possessions. As they try to find the missing object, individuals also search for ways to escape or forestall these forms of dis- quiet, sometimes preserving or restoring their sense of self by relinquishing the effort to find the object. Every response, from apathetic resignation to endless searching, involves a folk theory of what has actually been lost and an informal Brandon Berry is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work is in the naturalistic social psychology of memory, material objects, aging, loss, and the self.

NOTE: I thank Jack Katz, Eli Anderson, Noriko Milman, Bob Emerson, and the Yale ethnography group for their support and useful criticisms of a previous draft.

DOI: 10.1177/0002716212438198 Reflections of Self from Missing Things: How People Move On from Losing Possessions By B RANDON B ERRY at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 229 experiment in what it takes to resist or defuse the negative reflections\ of self that the loss threatens to generate. Through strategic maneuvering, individua\ ls find ways to avert the tumult aroused by the loss, though each comes with its own pitfalls and sacrifices. Recovering the lost object does not necessarily\ bring reso- lution, and sometimes the situation is resolved without finding the obje\ ct at all.This study analyzes four different ways in which individuals overcome th\ e challenges posed by losing such personal possessions as a cell phone, a \ set of keys, a wedding ring, or a purse or wallet and manage the uncomfortable reflec\ tions of self that are provoked by the discovery of their loss. Moving On from Breaches in the Taken-for-Granted Sociologists have documented what happens when the tacit, taken-for-granted order of social life comes under threat, but few have examined how peopl\ e move on from these unsettled states. In his effort to tease out the underlying rules of sociality, Harold Garfinkel (1967) set up “breaching experiments” to exam\ ine how violations of the accustomed order evoke moral responses in their perceived vic- tims. He reported the awkwardness that individuals feel when someone ent\ ers an elevator and stands facing the “wrong” way. He showed that some people become angry when their tic-tac-toe competitor erases their mark and substitute\ s his or her own. He identified the upset unsuspecting families experience when o\ ne of their members suddenly exhibits amnesia and ignores the familial bond, t\ reating the home as a hotel. Garfinkel was interested in the underlying rules of social interaction that become visible when they are violated, and he did not e\ xplore, in any great detail, what people do after they notice that the social order\ has been disturbed. These experiments provide some clues, however, that individuals experiencing a breach in the orderliness of social interaction may take remedial actions that alleviate frustration and calm anger. In an experiment in which subjects were led to believe they were participating in a study of a novel kind of counsel\ ing, for instance, each was paired with a person who was portrayed as a counselor\ -in- training. The person posing as the counseling trainee responded to the subject’s genuine questions with random “yes” and “no” answers, giving\ them what at times amounted to contradictory advice. Although some subjects expressed con- fusion and frustration over the apparent contradictions, many tried to m\ ake sense of the answers, and some actually reached such an understanding despite the randomness of the responses they received. In making some kind of sense \ from the counselor’s answers, subjects typically moved toward a resolution of their initial confusion and dismay. Shifting from experimentation into naturally occurring social life, Melv\ in Pollner (1974) described the paths a person charged with a traffic vio\ lation and a police officer take when they meet in traffic court to maintain a larg\ ely taken- for-granted sense that they do in fact share a world in common despite thei\ r at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from 230 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY disagreement over what happened on the street. Rather than perceiving a \ breach in their assumption of a shared reality, they transform the ontological challenge, the struggle over whose account is true, into a moral one. In a variety \ of ways, each levels a claim about why the other, due to some kind of defect in their power of observation or honesty in reporting it, must be unable to tell the co\ urt what “really” happened. Pollner’s study shows how individuals attempt to restore an untroubled sense of intersubjectivity when flirting with its breach.Following in this tradition of work, this project focuses on the effort \ to move on from challenges to individuals’ taken-for-granted grounding in the material environment that arise from losing track of a material object. In docume\ nting how individuals seek to recover the sense of untroubled possession in th\ e face of their discovery that their mastery of objects may in fact be tenuous or \ illusory, it shows the ways commonplace material things elicit particular kinds of se\ lf- consciousness. It shows that individuals’ sense of self is dynamicall\ y intertwined with how their possessions are arranged around them. Losing personal belong- ings creates a breach in their expectations, and their responses to this\ predica- ment suggest that a resolution may form through an effort to retrieve th\ e lost object, even if it is unsuccessful. Methods Part of a larger investigation into the nature of property loss, this st\ udy is based on just over five hundred cases of people losing everyday items. The data come from four distinct collection strategies pursued from 2006 to 2008 in Lo\ s Angeles and several other cities. First, I observed forty-four naturally occurri\ ng losses in public places, eavesdropping on and sometimes speaking with folks at the\ booths, offices, and service counters that handle inquiries about lost and found\ objects at airports, malls, grocery stores, coffee shops, farmers markets, festival\ s, sporting events, museums, concerts, and similar venues. The second strategy involved soliciting and receiving 397 first-person n\ arra- tives of recent and vivid experiences of property loss. Four-fifths came from people who had posted a solicitation on a lost-and-found Web site such as craigslist.com and lostandfound.com. About one out of four responded to \ my request for a step-by-step description of the event. These narratives av\ eraged two and a half single-spaced pages in length, and about half of the info\ rmants responded to follow-up questions whereby I tried to clarify murky descriptions and patch incomplete narratives. In an effort to obtain the whole story, I requested updates from a third of all informants either three months, on\ e year, or two years later. I also completed forty-four face-to-face interviews with people who had \ recently lost something. Participants were selected either through a sno\ wball sampling procedure or a chance meeting. During these open-ended, semistr\ uc- tured interviews, I asked my informants to describe the details of a recent at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 231 experience in which they had lost an object from beginning to end. Typically, these interviews lasted 10 to 20 minutes and were recorded as jottings i\ n situ.Fourth, I had twenty undergraduate students keep a journal of their ever\ y- day losses and related experiences over the course of a month. These “lost things journals” were an attempt to get at the personal experiences o\ f loss that people would otherwise not reveal to others because the events were triv\ ial, fleeting, or embarrassing. On average, each student reported about ten l\ osses within the one-month period. The study’s findings derive from the technique of analytic induction as described by Charles C. Ragin (1994) and Howard \ S.

Becker (1998). Ways of Moving On In contrast to Garfinkel’s experiments, which were about how unsuspecting people respond to having the rug pulled out from under them, this study is about how people regain their balance and move on. It reports how individuals \ evade the social-psychological obstacles aroused by losing personal belongings. I found that they pursued one of four paths: (1) moving on without searching for the lost object, (2) resolving the problem by successfully recovering the lost \ object, (3) moving on despite failing to find it, and (4) moving on by replacing i\ t. Typically, the paths toward moving on from property loss are paved with obsta- cles deriving from one of three dimensions of self-reflection: how indiv\ iduals see themselves in light of having lost personal possessions; how individuals\ imagine FIG uRE 1 W ays of Moving On Loss Discovery Search Recovery (2) Failure (3) Replacement (4) No Search (1) at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from 232 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY others see them; and how individuals experience their world without the \ sym- bolic and/or practical scaffolding conferred by the lost object.

Moving on without searching To find closure without searching is the shortest path, and often the first to emerge after discovering a loss. It affirms that one’s current course of conduct is greater than the value of potentially recovering the missing object. All\ egiance to one’s ongoing path and resistance to the effort that searching entails moves\ an individual on in one of two ways: either to deny that the object is permanently lost and imagine that it will reappear on its own or to embrace the idea\ that the object has been lost irretrievably. The first route emerges when, realizing that a possession has unexpectedly disappeared, individuals avoid a sense of loss and the damning reflectio\ ns of self it evokes by denying that anything is threateningly absent. They believe\ , and at times hope, that the thing is probably around the house, the office, the\ car, or wherever, but at the moment is hidden from them for some reason. They might still want the item, and can imagine a time in the not-so-distant future\ when they will really need it, but they decide to allow the item to reveal itself \ naturally. They go on with life as usual, suppressing anxieties that might compel them t\ o search for it immediately and betting that it will turn up in the course of the\ ir normal routine. They go on with a sense that the object is not at risk of becoming even more thoroughly concealed or, worse, permanently lost. The absence does not point to a failing in the person because they feel \ that chaotic forces have descended upon them temporarily. They point to conditions that make it difficult to find something: the fact that their house is a\ bit messy or that they are engaged in a consuming project at work and cannot keep pro\ per track of things. Maneesh, a 30-year-old graduate student in economics living in San Diego, preserved a sense of self-efficacy in his management of objec\ ts. After briefly looking around for his misplaced laundry room key and feeling mildly frustrated, Maneesh decided, “No big deal, I’ll just wait until th\ e key pops up on its own. The place is a mess; it’s around here somewhere.” He noted that he would rather wear “slightly soiled clothes” than spend his time se\ arching for a “needle in a haystack,” especially since he was sure that the key \ would show up eventually. By avoiding a search in this way, individuals maintain a self that is independent from the absent object. Putting off the search affirms the idea that who they really are is not affected by the object’s absence. Maneesh put off searching for the key for a week, effectively saying that not having the\ key and, by extension, being unable to wash his clothes did not unsettle him enou\ gh to require immediate action. Another way to put off a search and to hold on to the sense that one’\ s self has not been fundamentally affected is by understanding that internally deri\ ved chaotic forces, such as feeling tired or having consumed too much alcohol, are temporarily getting in the way. Katie, a 21-year-old student in Boulder, decided at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 233 not to look for her keys until the next morning since she has trouble fi\ nding things when she is “beyond buzzed,” as she put it. That she cannot readily find something is not a sign of anything deficient about her abilities; rathe\ r, she had other things going on at the moment.Moving on derives from the individual’s sense that the thing will reappear eventually, that in the normal course of life it will serendipitously reveal itsel\ f—a belief that suggests a kind of metaphysical connection between self and \ object that will make a difference once the chaotic forces pass. Individuals de\ monstrate this sensibility when they redirect their initial concern about an absence and set- tle on a strategy of serendipity. When Renee realized she had not seen her Kodak digital camera for a suspiciously long time after returning from a ski t\ rip, she reasoned, “My ski jacket has an inner coat and outer shell, each with\ pockets. My ski pants also have pockets. Then there is the question of whether it wa\ s in the boot bag, my purse, my carry-on backpack, or a pocket in my suitcase. Th\ en I wondered if it had fallen out of a bag and was in my brother’s car or had slipped under the bed. With so many places where it could be stashed, I truly believed it would just show up without me having to look for it.” If and when the thing reemerges on its own, individuals get a double rew\ ard.

The loss or gap is plugged and their hunch is confirmed. The latter can \ also con- vey a supportive emotional sense that the universe is conspiring in their favor.

But when the absent object does not reappear or is not forgotten, indivi\ duals reevaluate the object’s absence and reconsider whether life without it is okay or they need to begin a recovery effort. When seeing the absence as unthreatening does not appear compelling, ind\ i- viduals shift to the second method of moving on without searching: accep\ ting a sense that the self is powerless to retrieve the object as a safeguard a\ gainst a sense of self enmeshed in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. Sensing one’s impo- tence in the face of possibly surmountable obstacles feels humbling but \ also freeing compared to the imagined alternative of a self mired in a diffic\ ult recov- ery effort with no guaranteed exit strategy. People discover the impotent self as an attractive identity project thro\ ugh cost-benefit analysis, either reflectively or through a gut feeling. The\ y weigh the value of the object against the imagined effort that searching for it re\ quires.

Sometimes this calculation depends on their schedule, whether they have \ time to suspend belief in its unrecoverability and check things out. For inst\ ance, when Pedro, a 24-year-old living in Boston and working for an educational non- profit, was out running, he noticed his watch was missing and momentaril\ y ran in place as he considered its value and the cost of a recovery effort. I\ n the end, he chose to search for it. “I check my watch . . . to see how I’m \ doing . . . and it’s not there. Fuck! I think back . . . that must have been the sound I he\ ard. Shit, now I’m going to be late for my date, I’ve got to run all the way \ back to where it fell . . . and it’s a nice watch, sitting right there on the sidewalk. I’d be lucky if it was still there. After moping for about 10 seconds, I turn around and\ run back.” at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from 234 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY Through other calculations, the loss emerges as such an unwanted burden \ that people immediately try to forget about it, angling their whole dispositi\ on against making any effort to recover it. When Hassan, a 25-year-old Brooklyn filmmaker, discovered that his half-rimmed glasses were missing, he was straining t\ o find his iPod, cell phone, and cigarettes—what he calls his “various metro-\ centricities”— in the diminished light of a setting sun. When he realized that his glas\ ses were missing, he instantly deduced what likely happened to them. “I had a lot of walk- ing ahead of me, as I was walking from Chelsea to u nion Square. I was feeling particularly good, as I had just dropped off a movie I’d been working\ on to be sent to Sundance. I stopped at a crosswalk and took off my blazer and slung it over my canvas shoulder bag. The top end of the jacket was hanging upsid\ e- down, behind me, over the bag. It was in the following 10 minutes of wal\ king that I must have lost my glasses.” Though Hassan knew he could return to that loca- tion, he was not motivated to do so. “I had some time to kill. But I \ took it more as a sign that perhaps it was never meant to be. I could just picture my\ self, my head down as I walked, retracing my steps, scanning the ground through c\ rowds of rush-hour on-foot commuters, bumping into grumpy, self-righteous suits. And then either (A) not finding them, or, even worse, (B) finding them broken. No thanks. So I went to u nion Square and ate some Thai.” For Hassan, resigning himself to a life without his glasses felt easy. He noted that, having found them just recently after they had been missing for four years, the loss seeme\ d less a chance occurrence and more the fate of those particular glasses. From hi\ s point of view, he’s simply not meant to have them. While some draw on their troubling history with the current and other lo\ st objects, others sense a host of circumstances pacifying their motivation\ to search.

When Amy, a 25-year-old teacher living in Boston, realized she had dropped her keys, “it was later in the evening and I had no energy to make the 20\ -minute and two big hills bike trip back in the dark to search out the keys along my\ route. I actually had duplicates of my important keys, which made things easier. This was probably the reason I didn’t ever go back to search the route for my keys. I fig- ured if they were there, I probably wouldn’t see them, being under a car along the road or they were already crushed by city traffic.” In deciding n\ ot to try to recover a mislaid object, some people are convinced that any effort to r\ etrieve it would be futile, pacified not by the insignificance of the item but rath\ er by the opposite. Nick, a 26-year-old business consultant living in San Francisco, dropped his wallet during the “annual Bay to Breakers event, at which thousan\ ds of people run or walk a designated route in San Francisco from one body of water t\ o another. I recognized that any one of thousands of people could have found my wallet, so it didn’t seem useful to do a physical search of the park route.” By cast- ing the lost object as unrecoverable, individuals continue on their path\ . Individuals who move on after losing an object without searching may eit\ her evade a sense of a threatening absence by seeing the missing possession \ as likely to return on its own or embrace a sense of their own impotence to recove\ r it. But if they are unable to sidestep their loss, individuals may invest in a search effort. at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 235 Moving on by recovering the lost object There is no guarantee that finding the lost object will bring immediate closure.

Individuals must transcend the experience of loss for the object’s recovery to move them on. They must believe that the thing that has returned is esse\ ntially the same thing that disappeared, despite recovering it from what they perceive to be polluted hands or in a different working order. They must believe that the loss was somewhat of a fluke and they are not at an ongoing risk of losing the object again because of its extreme delicacy. They cannot remain baffled by the mysterious route through which it ended up in a particular location or passed through someone else’s hands. They must also overcome any sense of embarrass- ment about not recovering it sooner, or overlooking what in hindsight appear as tell-tale signs of its now-obvious hiding place. Individuals reach a firm resolution through recovery when the object is recov- ered from a location that suggests it was reasonably mislaid and reasona\ bly not looked for there, even when the initial vanishing was baffling. When JJ,\ a per - sonal chef in her 40s living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lost two rings\ , the mysterious circumstances overwhelmed her. “I was absolutely confident that I had put them where I always do. Not having done that has shaken me horri\ bly. I feel completely distracted and crazy. I wander from room to room in our tiny apartment, looking over and over again in places I have looked so many t\ imes before.” When she happened upon the rings by chance some days later, the recovery provided the clues she needed to defuse her anxiety. Like the abrupt resolution to an ancient Greek tragedy, the thing plays the part of deus ex machina, resolving the otherwise inexplicable problem with its sudden reemer - gence. She reported, I have a few aprons, which live on a hook in the kitchen. I checked the \ pockets over and over in my search to find my rings, but yesterday when I was straighteni\ ng up a cup- board I found one that had been misplaced with my dish towels, which I use all the time.

In grabbing at them, usually in a hurry to get at something hot, or to w\ ipe my hands and keep cooking, this wandering apron had been pushed to the very back of the bunch.

When I found it yesterday I hung it back on its hook. Later when I was m\ aking dinner I grabbed for an apron and it was at the top of the pile. While I was do\ ing all of my evening tasks I heard something in the pocket. I reached in, thinking “maybe . . . ?” but sure I was going to pull out two dimes, or buttons, or anything but my r\ ings, as I had so many times before. And then there they were, in my hand, and I had to lo\ ok at them for a good 15 seconds to be sure.

In other cases, rather than defusing inexplicable details of its vanishing, the successful recovery unearths them, transforming the loss of the object i\ nto a loss of reasonable expectations. When Crystal, a mother in her early 40s livi\ ng in Washington, D.C., lost her wallet, for several days she scoured all the places she thought it could be, but when “six little skateboard dudes” showed\ up at her house with the soggy wallet she was baffled. The missing details gnawed \ at her as she tried to fashion a reasonable explanation. at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from 236 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY I asked the boys where they found my wallet and they said “near the s\ ewer across the street.” Apparently one of the boys lodged his skateboard in the sewe\ r and while getting it out he noticed my wallet lying in a puddle of water. Right across the street from my house? How did it get there? I told them where I had thought I lost it, \ which was several miles away, and they couldn’t believe where they found it either. The location where it was found raised more questions than answers. Had I lost it in the driveway? If so, how did it get across the street and down a ways? I recalled the recent fore\ cast, thinking, it hadn’t rained recently. I thought maybe the person who found it came by my house but saw me at home and didn’t want to get in trouble for taking the $100 so they threw it across the street, thinking that would be good enough for me to find it.\ . . . I still want to know the full story of where my wallet had been. As if it had been on\ an adventure without me and I was entitled to know every detail. The wallet had a lif\ e of its own.

These puzzling recoveries compel individuals to hunt down explanations t\ hat abide by the laws of physics that do not allow things to disappear and r\ eappear willy-nilly. If it is not mysterious forces and their baffling reflections of self th\ at recoveries alternately pacify and excite, recoveries regularly evoke reflections of\ self as care- less or otherwise incompetent that must be dealt with in moving on. When\ indi- viduals recover a lost possession from a place they have already looked or know they should have looked, resolution comes by dealing with these apparent\ short- comings in their investigative measures. When Nicki, a 24-year-old social worker living in Toronto, lost her wallet somewhere in the city, she searched exhaustively but failed to recover it. In a last-ditch effort, she called the local t\ ransportation authority’s lost-and-found office, which informed her that it had been turned in several days earlier. “It is difficult to describe the mix of emotions I felt then, but it was a mix of relief, joy, and embarrassment that I hadn’t just called that number in the first place.” A successful recovery also fails to grant an immediate sense of resoluti\ on when individuals perceive themselves as having cried wolf. When individuals get others involved in recovering a lost object and then they themselves find it so\ mewhere obvious, resolution comes by dealing with how they suspect others will s\ ee them in light of the recovery. After Randi, a 25-year-old living in San Diego, lost her driver’s license—or “drinking permit,” as she calls it—and ransacke\ d her whole house, she came up empty-handed and decided to make the dreaded trip to \ the DMV for a replacement. After expressing her irritation with the ordeal t\ o her housemates and asking them to check a few places for her, she stumbled onto the card in what seemed an obvious location. “There it was, sitting right\ underneath [my] jeans. I was happy and irritated. I was going to the DMV and everyo\ ne knew it. I was half tempted to tell them I went anyway. But that seemed like too much effort and I just explained that I’m mildly retarded and it was exact\ ly where I had thought it had been.” While individuals are cooling out unsavory reflections of self as they s\ earch for an object, they must also resist other lines of closure. Finding closure through recovery means doing whatever it takes to maintain the belief that success is pos- sible and repressing the impulse to give up. In some cases, that means r\ esisting at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 237 getting a replacement because that seems like an admission of defeat. Wh\ en Nicholas, a 24-year-old writer and musician living in San Francisco, lost his spiral notebook full of creative ideas for stories and songs, he reports, “I\ did no writing for the entire week. I had nothing to write in. I couldn’t find the strength to buy a new notebook because that would mean admitting the old ones were truly\ lost.

If I started a new one now, I’d have to commit to it, and I wasn’t ready for that because I hadn’t finished the old ones. So I tried to busy myself with other work and pretend it didn’t matter, but the loss was slowly sinking in. I refused to believe yet that they were gone for good.”A successful recovery of the serendipitous sort may fail to bring indivi\ duals to closure, not because of its unsettling revelations, but because they hav\ e already found some kind of peace with the object’s absence. For instance, after Emmanuel, a 27-year-old web developer living in Denver, lost a journal, he slowly made peace with its absence and then, several years later, happened upon it in his martial arts studio. “It was a very nice thing to find my [\ journal] finally, but I had spent the last couple of years starting a new one and trying t\ o redo all of the writing I had lost, that it didn’t make such an impact to find it again. It was fun to flip through and review my old writing, but that was about it.”\ He expressed surprise and happiness about its return, but conceded that he was not freed from any unresolved feelings. When individuals move toward closure after recovering a lost object, they work to control the forces that threaten to keep them in a state of loss\ . But when recovery does not seem immediately forthcoming, individuals may find a k\ ind of closure through failure. As with successful recoveries, individuals must\ overcome a set of recurring challenges to self for failure to take them back “\ home.” Moving on by abandoning a failed search While there is no guarantee that a successful recovery will automaticall\ y bring a sense of closure to individuals who have lost something, with the righ\ t condi- tions in place an unsuccessful effort will. People recurrently move towa\ rd closure without having found a lost object by developing a sense that they have \ put in a “good effort,” that they have done what any reasonable person coul\ d do in such a situation and do not have to bear the burden of a guilty conscience. A\ s the unsuccessful search can theoretically go on as long as someone lives, at\ some point the strategy to find the thing turns into a strategy for getting o\ ver the effort to find the thing. As all search projects start a narrative thread that \ implies an ending, individuals sense that doing something to try to find the thing prepares them to give up trying to find it. Through such resolution-producing, yet failed recovery work, individuals\ dis- cover a reflection of themselves as careful and thorough, as people who,\ though they occasionally lose something, are still deserving of nice things. Wh\ en Michael, a 31-year-old Broadway actor living in New York City, lost his engage- ment ring after he “carelessly” placed it in a shoe before taking \ the field at a at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from 238 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY softball game, he felt “very guilty” for losing such a “treasur\ ed item.” After thor- oughly, but unsuccessfully, searching the dugout and field with a metal detector purchased from Radio Shack the next day, he felt a sense of resolution, but his fiancée, Eva, did not. “Eventually we decided to quit [looking], c\ onvinced that we’d done everything we could. If there was a ring there still we wou\ ld have found it. I felt a sense of closure after the extensive search, but Eva \ began to get upset. She’d really thought that we’d find it with the metal detec\ tor and was now mad at me for being careless with the ring. There were definitely better\ places to store it than a shoe, and it probably would have been just fine on my fi\ nger anyway.” Though the “good effort” path to resolution is not something individuals regu- larly cite as a strategy guiding their treatment of a loss, in some sear\ ch situations people know full well that it will let them sleep at night. Anna, a 28-y\ ear-old graduate student at Emory u niversity, reported, “I figured if the hat was gone, I could deal with it if I knew that we checked every possible place I had \ been that night.” The sense of having put in a “good effort” also emerges when a sea\ rch effort must end prematurely because of what individuals sense to be legitimate \ obsta- cles. For instance, when individuals imagine that the lost object could \ be almost anywhere and any effort appears futile, they may cite needle-in-a-haysta\ ck cir - cumstances as an insurmountable obstacle that effectively excuses them f\ rom further effort. Vicky, a 27-year-old manager at a company in New York City, conveys this sentiment after coming to multiple dead ends in her search \ for her bracelet. Clearly the bracelet is so gone. Maybe it fell off in the first restaura\ nt or the second, maybe it got swept up unnoticed or maybe a waiter found it, maybe it tum\ bled off while I was walking and some passerby caught the light gleaming off the gold a\ nd picked it up in a most lucky turn of events for him, maybe it fell off into the subwa\ y tracks. . . . The possibilities are endless, far too endless, and after a week of contemplating every con- ceivable way I could have lost it, as though I could at least reconstruc\ t the exact moment of loss, I am done.

While some, like Vicky, find closure through what they perceive to be insur - mountable practical obstacles to a search, others end unsuccessful searc\ hes and relinquish the possibility of recovery to leave an unsettling image of s\ elf behind.

While looking around the dance floor of a crowded nightclub, Andrea, a 2\ 1-year- old art student in New York City, worried about what others thought of her as she and several others tried to track down her errant cell phone.

[My friend] had gone the extra mile: she’d recruited the help of the bouncer. They were busy bobbing between the crowd, peeking around the high-heels and traine\ rs with his trusty mini-torch. That made me incredibly embarrassed. . . . Losing my \ cell phone was one thing, but looking like “that girl” is another. You know that girl. You don’t want to be that girl. That drunken, idiot who loses her cell phone in a bar. . . . But I didn’t say any- thing besides “thank you very much anyway” when they returned empt\ y-handed. at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 239 Andrea’s embarrassment pushed her toward closure by forbidding her from searching further for her cell phone. While catching a reflection of themselves as “uncool” prompts some\ to aban- don their search, others end their effort by catching an unsettling refl\ ection of themselves when they meet people with relative expertise in lost propert\ y. A few days after Lizzie, a 41-year-old journalist living in Santa Barbara, lost her gold ring “somewhere around town,” she tried the local pawn shop, “b\ ut those guys seemed amused that I’d think I could find my ring there. One said if \ my ring was stolen, it was in Mexico getting new documents and that the gold had pro\ bably been reduced down by now. I felt a little naive in front of those guys at the thought that I could just walk in there and find it.” Beyond the social pressures to give up, search efforts also come to an e\ xcusa- ble end when people run into access issues deriving from the seemingly c\ ircui- tous lost and found procedures of a place of business or public institut\ ion. Rather than feeling guilt for stopping a search prematurely, losing parties feel frustrated by a sense of impotence in the face of greater powers. For instance, whe\ n Javier, a student at the New School, believed he had left his violin on a commuter train, he encountered difficulty with the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA’s) lost- and-found office. “I call MTA to see what their policies are about lost and found items. After trying the number many times over . . . I manage to get hold of someone only to discover that you must wait 7 to 10 business days before\ you should call them. They do not get daily updates. As absurd as this seems\ I could do nothing short of traveling from station to station along the route as\ king every- one in the ticket booths if something had been returned.” While Javier moved toward closure after hitting a seemingly insuperable \ bureaucratic obstacle, others bring their recovery efforts to an excusab\ le, though begrudging, end when they uncover signs that the item was stolen and is \ virtually irretrievable. Faced with this conviction, individuals may give up. Pat,\ a 48-year- old freelance graphic artist living in Berkeley, reconstructed how she had lost a piece of jewelry: “After I dropped off my daughter I stopped at a gas\ station . . .

and got out of the car forgetting the ring on its chain was on my lap. T\ hat is how it happened. The ring simply fell off my lap when I got out of the car. I am pretty sure I will never see that ring again. I noticed at that time that on th\ e ground at the gas station was a little tiny zip-lock bag used for the distribution\ of metham- phetamine or crack cocaine. I just know that some junkie took my ring.”\ Convinced that any recovery attempt was hopeless, Pat treated the object\ as stolen. In addition to ending a search because of a sense of impotence and to av\ oid disconcerting reflections of self, individuals stop searching because th\ ey do not want the loss to burden those around them. When Mike, a 33-year-old pastor at Valley Christian Fellowship in Northern California, lost the receipt to h\ is church’s projector, he enlisted his staff to help locate it so they could take a tax write\ -off.

“They were all completely invested for an hour. And I could’ve looked for another hour or two easily but I quit because I didn’t want the staff bothered by it at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from 240 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY anymore. If I was looking, I know they would have demanded to help. But \ . . . I didn’t want to burden them with it.”When individuals reach a sense of closure through a failed search effort\ , they often see the lost object as having purely sentimental value, something \ that can- not be replaced. But when individuals reach a sense of failure without a\ sense of resolution, they often try to get on with life by replacing it.

Moving on by replacing the thing Replacing a lost item is no guarantee that individuals will overcome the\ bur - dens of having lost it. If they turn to a replacement too early, individuals feel wasteful, as if they are just throwing one thing away and picking up another. If they replace something with what turns out to be an inadequate substitut\ e, the loss continues to bother them. By trying to replace something that has i\ rreplace- able value, individuals sense the ineffectiveness of their efforts. When Rob, an American software engineer on a business trip in London, lo\ st the wedding ring he had worn for 20 years, he put in an exhaustive searc\ h before deciding to replace it with an exact replica made by a jeweler in London\ . But the replacement never quite felt right, and he continued to make phone inqui\ ries to lost-and-found offices around London. He noted, “I wear that one now, but it is not the same. I still make efforts, no matter how futile, to find it.” Jackie, a realtor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, replaced her nearly 30-year-old charm bracelet, hoping that it would assuage her feelings of loss. But after duplicating\ some of the original charms, she begrudgingly conceded that the “meaning is n\ ot there.” For some, the shortcomings of the replacement will spur another round of\ searching. While some discover that their lost objects have irreplaceable value by \ actually replacing them and then feeling the inadequacies of the substitutes, oth\ ers sense right away that the lost object cannot be satisfactorily replaced. When \ Laura, an adjunct professor of graphic design at a southern university, lost a memory chip from her camera filled with hundreds of “artsy” photos documenting\ her and her son’s trip through Germany and France, she scoffed at someone’s suggestion that she could replace them. “Someone said I could just collect some pictu\ res off the Internet or gather some pictures of those who accompanied me on the trip\ . But, bottom line: they are someone else’s memories. Not mine.” Those who replace lost objects may find that does little to resolve a se\ ntimen- tal loss or to repair negative images of self derived from losing something, espe- cially when their competency is already suspect. When JP, a 28-year-old aspiring comedian living in Boston, lost his cell phone, he had difficulty findin\ g the humor in the situation. Having recently told his disapproving family that he w\ as going to pursue a career in comedy, he felt that telling them he had lost his only means of communication seemed like “evidence that I was not in fact a creative person trying to pursue a dream, but an immature fuck-up with delusions of grandeur who couldn’t keep things in his pocket.” Several days after the loss, JP checked\ a at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 241 few more places and began considering a replacement. What he found most \ dis- turbing was the damage to his sense of credibility. “It seems really strange to me, because at the same time I recognize how inconsequential [the loss] is. \ I can buy a new phone, probably a nicer one, and try to keep in mind that one piec\ e of plastic and circuits is easily replaced by another. But there’s a nagging feeling that by losing the phone, the status symbol, the lifeline, that I’ve someh\ ow taken a step backwards from being a responsible adult.”Chloe, a former corporate analyst in Manhattan, also knows that a replac\ e- ment will not repair the damage caused by a loss that signals incompeten\ ce. She had just moved to Maui to “take a break from my high-pressure work hi\ story” when she lost her new employers’ keys. She had presented herself to t\ hem as a highly skilled organizer who had “a reputation for knowing where thin\ gs are, why they are there, and where they will go next . . . and for being supremel\ y qualified not only to keep track of things, but to determine if they are really ne\ eded to begin with.” When she had to contact her employers while they were aw\ ay and enlist their help in finding spare keys or replacing them, she felt humi\ liated about messing up the very task that she claimed was her strong suit. Soon Chloe deduced why the mishap had occurred and concluded that the problem could\ be resolved only by quitting her job. Let me tell you, I felt bitch-slapped by the great goddess Karma. I don’\ t know what offended her more, my arrogance about how far beneath me this job is, or\ my lack of concern about honesty in the reporting of my work hours. But either way, I was severely reprimanded. Therefore, this story has not one but two morals, and both \ are horribly clichéd. Any job worth doing is worth doing well, and honesty is the best policy. Did I take these morals to heart? Well, in a manner of speaking. As far as the honesty goes, I shorted my hours for the second week to make up for what I had overcharged the first week. With regard to the “any job” moral, I decided that this was not a j\ ob worth doing, and gave my notice well in advance of my actual date of resignation, so \ as not to leave them in the lurch. And immediately felt better about the entire situatio\ n.

under circumstances like those JP and Chloe encountered, replacing the lo\ st object cannot repair the damage caused by the loss. For others, replacement soothes a glaring absence or restores a taken-fo\ r - granted and comforting intertwining of self with thing. When Gina, an ex\ ecutive of a Fortune 500 company living in New York City, lost her ankle bracelet while “drinking and gallivanting across the city,” feeling its absence stirred her from sleep and irked her for the next five days. “It was strange getting d\ ressed . . . put- ting on my shoes especially, without the anklet there. . . . I hardly ever really noticed it, but suddenly my ankle felt very naked without it. Its absenc\ e was so obvious. At the jewelry store where my parents bought the original gift \ I bought a replacement . . . five days after it disappeared, which at least got rid of that naked ankle feeling and gave me something to fidget with in all the odd \ ways I had never consciously realized.” Replacing a lost object works only when the replacement does not act as \ a reminder of the loss. Ryan, a 21-year-old college student living in Minnesota, lost at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from 242 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY his much-loved jacket. “Two days later, after giving up hope of finding the jacket, I ordered the exact same $150 jacket from Cabela’s, even though it was going to be a stress on my finances, because I knew that I enjoyed that jacket so\ much that if I were to get another of less quality and value I would always think \ of the one that I lost and how much better it was.” Individuals may move toward \ closure if the replacement puts the lost item in a less attractive light, however. When Marcy, a 51-year-old pediatrician living in New York City, begrudgingly began the process of replacing her lost camera, she found its loss much easier to \ accept. “I learned that it was an old model and was shown the new lighter, higher-pixel replacement. Funny that the camera I had loved which took amazing pictur\ es in sunlight now seemed a bit obsolete!” Conclusion Despite the uniqueness of individuals’ responses to losing personal b\ elong- ings, people always move on by overcoming recurring challenges that are intrinsic to the path they take. Sometimes moving on entails pacifying u\ nset- tling feelings or sidestepping them altogether. If and when these feelings develop, they do so by portraying the self in a deficient light, leaving\ individuals to revive a sense of an adequate self. But what it takes to get them bac\ k to a more settled place is often not entirely known by individuals at the out\ set.

Every loss presents itself as a kind of riddle through which losing part\ ies come to see, through subsequent steps and even stumblings, a route for getting back to life as usual. When first realizing a loss, individuals feel or logically deduce whethe\ r they must embark on a recovery effort or can calmly put their concerns aside \ and back away. When they choose to invest effort in searching, they may learn that su\ ccess is not enough to enable them to move on. The reemergence of the thing mu\ st be pacifying, not a damning commentary on self. Yet counterintuitively, failure to recover the object may provide an escape from the burdens of loss, provi\ ded that individuals feel they have made a genuine effort. When all else fails, replacement solves the practical deficits created by the object’s sudden absence, but leaves one in the lurch when its powers derive from its provenance. Each way of moving on constitutes a different way of imagining the relat\ ion- ship of self and thing. Moving on without the thing, whether by sidestep\ ping a sense of loss entirely or through a failed search, becomes an effort to \ disassociate self from thing and reimagine an adequate life despite its absence. Movi\ ng on with the successfully recovered thing becomes an effort to ignore or dis\ arm the continued existence of troubling forces that could cause the loss once again.

Moving on with a replacement becomes an effort to lose oneself once agai\ n in the thing while pacifying a sense that the connection is artificial. To move on from a breach in one’s taken-for-granted grounding in the material environment is to play with a notion of where the self ends and the world begins. at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 243 References Becker, Howard S. 1998. Tricks of the trade. Chicago, IL: university of Chicago Press.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Pollner, Melvin. 1974. Mundane reasoning. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4 (1): 35–54.

Ragin, Charles C. 1994. Constructing social research: The unity and diversity of method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. at US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on August 25, 2013 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from