The remaining chapters

I will not be able to review the whole book in the essence it deserves.  There is too much here in this rich ensemble of theory and practice.  I will thus summarize the remainder of the book in the following paragraphs in order to put closure to my blog.

Chapter 4 are personal stories in Alcoholics Anonymous. I already gave a summary in my previous chapter.

Chapter 5 Figured Worlds of Romance Becomes Desire.  Americans often speak of romance as though it were a “natural” and intrinsically motivating activity that most people, by the time they reach a certain age, engage in at a reasonable level of competence.  The larger issue here concerns how figured worlds come to engage people, to shape and be shaped by their actions.  Not only the skills and competencies involved in cultural performances but also the meanings and salience of such activities and the desire to participate in them vary from person to person.

Section III Power and Privilege

Chapter 6   Positional Identities.  Up until now the authors have emphasized our lived worlds as culturally constituted of conventional events, improvised but recognizable acts, and talked-about characters.  But there is another facet of lived worlds – that of power, status, relative privilege, and their negotiation.  The authors use the example of an incident where in Naudada, the owner of the house that Debra was renting, entered and began accusing the three girls who were being recorded by Debra of eating fruit and cutting fodder from her property.  This turned out to be untrue but had more to do with the position of the property owner and her right as a power figure in the community to restrict the freedom of others’ social positions.

Chapter 7 is about the sexual auction block.  This was based on a study of female students at two different southern colleges.  Several female students were interviewed about their world of romance.  These women’s identification within the world of romance entailed that they form a sense of social value of both self and others in that world.  Identification with that world meant taking, to varying degrees, of “symbolic violence” into one’s self and perpetrating (and perpetuating) it against others.  Settling social position is a matter of struggle, often muted or even unrecognized, whose effects live on in personal and social history.

Section IV   The Space of Authoring. 

Chapter 8.  Authoring Selves. 

Bakhtin’s vision of self-fashioning, which we call the “space of authoring,” resonates with what the case studies have told us about identity formation.  The cases belie any simplistic notion that identities are internalized in a sort of faxing process that unproblematically reproduces the collective upon the individual, the social upon the body.  Bakhtin’s concepts allow us to put words to an alternative vision, organized around the conflictual, continuing dialogic of an inner speech where active identities are ever forming.

Chapter 9.  Mental Disorder, Identity, and Professional Discourse

The authors took a mental health case that was taken from a survey and focused on one man in particular who had been diagnosed with boarderline personality disorder.  From the several interviews and many conversations with this man over a period of 2 ½ years, they saw how easy it was for people who become separated from their “normal” worlds to readapt their identity around their diagnostic world.

Chapter 10.  Authoring Oneself as a Woman in Nepal

This is a case study that shows how the culture portrays and raises girls to be and act a certain way.  The identity associated with the “good Hindu woman.”  When under the surface, women also felt anger and resentment toward the ways this narrativized world defined them as women.

Section V  Making Worlds

Chapter 11.  Play Worlds, Liberatory Worlds, and Fantasy Resources

This chapter takes the concept of a figured world and shows how one can pull out any assortment of positional identities in a society.  People’s lives take shape among the identifications, figured and relational, that are arranged within the space of their activity.  The chapter looks specifically at how “Courtly Love” was first initiated in the south of France by upper nobility and practiced by them through the use of poets called troubadours.  In the 11^th century, this was a new form of poetry and entertainment.

This chapter also discusses how modern nationalism can be considered as an example of the development and proliferation of a figured world.   Benedict Anderson explains this idea in his book, Imagined Communities (1983).  By an imagined community Anderson means a potent and effective sense of commonality, of membership in a categorical social body – a social body that exists despite the absence of direct or even indirect social intercourse among its members.  

Counter worlds also are a movement from play world to figured world, from a world without a public to a world with communities, imagined or otherwise, often accomplished by the figuring of the opposition.  These counter-worlds rarely show us what a lived world should be but rather what it should not be, what threatens us, and they position the persons presumed to inhabit them as relationally inferior and perhaps beyond the pale of any imagined community we would ever want to join. 

Chapter 12 – Making Alternative Worlds in Nepal

In 1990, two of the authors attended an annual festival for women called Tij.  In the beginning these festivals were rituals to benefit the health of their husbands and to wash away the impurities of menstruation in accord with Brahmanical texts and the patriarchal ideologies and practices that shaped life in large of Nepal.  In later years, the Tij became more of a place where women sang songs that criticized the male privilege in the family.  The songs of the Tij groups also shifted from criticism of women’s positions in the family to criticism of the government and its treatment of women.  Thus, Tij songs over the years have become a medium for describing women’s worlds and the position of women in those worlds. It has helped them to articulate a critical commentary on the world of domestic relations and on the world of the state.  Over a period of time these groups became less tied to the festivals.  The songs became disbursed into songbooks.  In the space of the Tij festival, women were authoring new worlds and in turn new selves.  They forged a path toward a new world of gender relations and gendered identities in Naudada. 

Chapter 3 - Figured Worlds

Chapter 3

Figured Worlds

What if gender relations were defined so that women had to worry about whether or not they were attractive?

What if, as in the Trobriand Islands, bundles of banana leaves were so important that older women spent much time and energy assembling them?

What if there was a world called academia, where books were so significant that people would sit for hours on end, away from friends and family, writing them?

Many of the activities that engage human energy and interest have an imaginative component.  John Caughey believes that humans enter imaginary worlds – via dreams, daydreams, or spectatorship, to model possibilities, to inspire new actions, or even to provide an escape or withdrawal from action.  Benedict Anderson even goes so far as to see nationalism as an “imagined community.”  Thus, people’s identities and agency are formed dialectically and dialogically in these “as if” worlds.

In 1978,Vygotsky wrote a paper that expanded his notion of children’s potential for development.  He explained the usual fascination of manipulating their worlds by means of symbols, i.e., a couch becomes the hideout for the bad guy.  He goes on to explain that children will be motivated to participate in that imaginary scene that goes beyond their immediate surroundings and enter the imagined world.  For example, a piece of candy becomes a jewel and the child will not eat it.  Children may also run a race, the goal to win, and ignore their fatigue and pain in order to win.  This, he says, is a conceptual world that differs from the everyday events of the world. 

Vygotsky explained that children’s mental and emotional faculties are culturally formed.  If we look at the role of tangible objects, made collectively into artifacts by the attribution of meaning, we can see them as tools that people use to affect their own and others’ thinking, feeling, and behavior.  Through habitual use these cultural tools become resources available for personal use, mnemonics of the activities they facilitate, and finally constitutive of thought, emotion, and behavior.   This is the “pivot” or symbolic prop.  Toys, even sticks assigned the status of horse, can be the pivot.  The symbol will eventually be discarded and the child can continue without the physical prop.

As the child grows older they may participate in games that have more rules and less fantasy.  Still the child must shift himself into a conceptual world beyond his immediate surroundings in order to become the actor in the game and treat its events as real.  This is the precursor to living an institutional life.  Individuals are treated as scholars, bosses, or at-risk children and events such as the granting of tenure, a corporate raid, and the self-esteem of at-risk children are taken in all seriousness.  But to see imagination extended so is simply to recognize that it pervades cultural life. 

In chapter 4 of this book, the authors consider the world of Alcoholics Anonymous.  In AA meetings participants tell stories about their lives before they join the organization.  They collect tokens (poker chips), for the periods of time they have remained sober.  They come to name themselves, and often see themselves, as “alcoholics” and not just drinkers.  All of these elements of AA are meaningful in, relevant to, and valued (or not) in relation to the frame of meaning, a virtual world, a world that has been figured. 

In the world of AA the poker chips were not won by holding a straight flush.  Rather, they were meaningfully revalued to a world where the stake, the thing at wager, was staying sober; the chip became an emblem of a different achievement, another kind of success – The difference between picking up and not picking up a chip is, for some, the difference between a good and a bad life.

By “figured world”, then, the authors are referring to a socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others.  By means of such appropriation, objectification, and communication, the world itself is also reproduced, forming and reforming in the practices of its participants.

Chapter two - part two

Socially Constructed Self

As a result of how anthropologists approach their study group this has provoked a powerful dialogue about the self.  Discourse theory sees the self as being socially constructed both interpersonally and institutionally AND is “inscribed” from a dominant society onto a person.  Such examples are tax forms, census categories, and the curriculum vitae.

Social constructivists emphasize that our communications with one another not only convey messages but also make claims about who we are in relation to one another.  Genres such as censuses or curriculum vitae require us to present ourselves according to a category obligatory on the form.  This oftentimes constrains us to make a choice – to comply or resist. 

The social constructivist can no longer be placed in the old universalist-culturalist debate but chooses to see that this dialogue has now fallen into a new category called “essential self”.  “This essential self, a durable organization of the mind/body, is perennially suspect as a product of “essentialist” thinking, while the socially constructed self remains a paragon of anti-essentialism,” (p. 27).

The culturalist version of the essential self no longer holds a popular view:  this saw cultures as stable and enduring that were set in place through rituals and other socializing practices which instilled core values.  These are seen as being able to persist through time, regardless of change in their social and material conditions. 

In contrast, the socially constructed self is subject to positioning by whatever powerful discourses they happen to encounter – changing state policies that dictate new ways of categorizing people in the census, educational diagnostics that label students, or even new forms of racist discourse taken up from right-wing talk shows.  “Social constructivism conceives discourses and practices to be the tools that build the self in contexts of power, rather than as expressions of stable interpretations of world and values that have been imparted to the person through enculturation,” (p. 27).

The remainder of this chapter continues on this line theory of self as it discusses the emerging directions of the study of the self, the selves in practice, to finally following a different possibility for understanding the “suturing” of person to position.  This co-development links the development of people, cultural forms, and social positions in particular historical worlds. 

Chapter Two - Practice Theory of Self and Identity

Part I

Discourses and Practices of the Self

There are ways of talking about the self (or selves).  These are conventional means for representing how our person’s actions are shaped.  This whole shaping develops through the medium of behavior, objectifying, monitoring, and evaluating the stances that a person sometimes takes towards their behavior.  This discourse about “selves” takes on many forms: 

• A subjective sense of oneself as an actor/subject
• It may be embedded in claims about others, or
• Expressed directly in pontifications about the self by specialists. 

This idea of “self” can take on different meanings depending on the culture.  For example the Newar ethnic group of Kathmandu regard the self as “heart”.  “Memories, thoughts, and feelings were stored in the heart (nuga),” (p. 19).  Because this sense of self is so widely varied on a universal level the questions researchers are now asking what they signify. 

The Critical Disruption

Around 1980 there began a critical examination between Anthropologists and their subjects.  The main criticism was that researchers, as colonial powers, were looking more closely at male-centered activities.  There was also a criticism that anthropologists were using the “ethnographic present” which means they were writing about their subject in the present tense and thus suspending them in time and ignoring their relationship to history as if they were just specimens of science.  Foucault depicted social and psychological sciences as constructing, rather than objectively studying their subjects.  As a result, this way of scientifically managing people automatically placed them in categories that ultimately determined how they were treated in institutions such as prisons, mental institutions and schools.  Because there is such a strong bond between the scientific and the institutional, such findings are subject to a forced reductionism in institutional settings, (p.24).

In the past, anthropologists often focused on the male role as power and knowledge without regard to other structures in place.  As a result of feminist theory and critiques who see cultural discourses as impositions, new approaches are now seeing men and women as being pushed into behavior that is compatible with the structures and institutions that favor members of one social category or another.  Now, as we study contemporary ethnographers, we are scrutinizing their strategies in research.   As a whole, the approach to conducting ethnographies has now completely shifted away from the larger stereotypes such as Samoan Culture, American Culture, or any other culture taken as a whole.  Now, Anthropologists are less willing to treat the cultural discourses and practices of a group of people as indicative of one underlying cultural logic.  They now place the circumstances in a historically and socially situated text or form.  The bottom line here is that cultural forms come in many shapes and variety.  

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds

After much deliberation about which book I wanted to present I have chosen Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, by Dorothy Holland, Debra Skinner, William Lachicotte Jr., and Carole Cain.

This is a book devoted to identity and its impermance - "Identities -  if they are alive, if they are being lived, they are unfinished and continue to be in process", (p.vii). 

Chapter One -

Identities are based on how we tell ourselves who we are and then act as though we are who we say we are (p.3).  Oftentimes situations beyond our control define our identities.  We produce, from the available cultural resources, understandings from social situations that are respective of our experiences.  Sometimes histories contine to settle in us and we can be caught in a web of tensions with the present discourse.  But the bottom line is that our identity is constantly refashioning itself which ultimately paves the way towards agency.

Out of the endless theories, this book is taking the definition of identity from the perspective of anthropological cultural studies adapted to 'sociogenic concepts of personhood', an idea claimed by G.H. Mead.  These theories approach self consciousness and self reflection as beginning in early childhood development.  As the child grows, she takes on the stand pont of others 'as she learns to objectify herself by the qualities of her performance and eventually identifying herself to social positions such as mother, student, good person, etc.  Their more proactive identities will come from the stand points from which they are more emotionally attached.   Thus identities are the key means throught which people care about and care for what is going on around them, (p.5).

The authors of this book have taken on the task of looking at contemporary cultural studies, joined with  feminist  theory's engagement with issues of identity, and also by the intellectual tradition of the great Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky and his students and M. M. Bakhtin, the critical theorist and semiotician. 

Bakhtin's work was inspired by a new-Kantian tradition of philosophy that emphasized aesthetics that continued to move into two different directions.  First, studying literature and art - looking closely at the means for representing characters and ultimately their authors.    And secondly, he took on the study of sociology of human expression, which these authors believe belongs more at home in the contemporary cultural studies than the social science or literary stuies of the time. 

Vygotsky came to his study of persons from interests in literature, art, and linguistics.  He carried a fascination with symbols into his psychology and organized his later studies around social interaction, as so many ways in which people free themselves from the tyranny of environmental stimuli, (p.6).

Thus, the authors take Bakhtin's concern with the social weighing of expression and the creative life of association, combined with Vygotsky's emphases on historical development and on the potentiality of symbols for (re)formation, affords a means by which 'cultural studies of the person' may avoid a common conceptual dilemma - one that traps persons permanently, either in 'cultural logic' or in 'subject positions' or in some combination of the two. 

Identity in this book is not so much referring to a "cultural identity" such as ethnicity, gender, race, nationality, and sexual orientation, but are taking the definition to a broader level and are focusing on the development of identitites and agency specific to "practices and activities situated in historically contingent, socially enacted, culturally constructed 'worlds': recognized field or frames of social life, such as romance, mental illness and his treatment, domestic relations, Alcoholics Anonymous, academia, and local politics" (p.7).

The authors of this book move away from the more traditional Western ideas of identity as a prototype of a coherent, unified, and originary subject.  The authors here are delving into feminist and later psychodynamic approaches, both of which recognize those social forces which make such an integrated subject an extremely unlikely occurence.  They argue that people are composites of many, often times contradictory, self-understandings and identities that are not so much confined to the body but spread over the material and social environment. 

This book is framed by following Bakhtin, a dialogic one; following Vygotsky, a developmental one,.  Then they build upon the culturalist and the constructivist to understant people's actions and possibilities.  All the perspectives will assume that the behavior is mediated by senses of self or what the authors call 'identities'.  "In the older of the two approaches that we work to transcend, the person is driven by an internalized cultural logic; in the more recent, by social situation," (pp. 8-9).

Two Perspectives on Identity

The authors describe an incident that happened to Dorothy Holland and Debra Skinner in Nepal.  They are using this incident as an example of the two perspectives on identity.  Holland and Skinner were interviewing people for a small research project in central Nepal.  Naudada is a rural hill community that is occupied by people of different caste/ethnic groups.  While the researchers were interviewing a range of women from different levels of castes they were inviting them to be interviewed at Debra's house.  While this was already an uncomfortable situation for the women to be in the same room with others of different castes one woman actually followed the laws of her caste and did not enter the house by the front door, which entailed passing by a hearth and the kitchen, which according to their beliefs would contaminate the food, she instead scaled the walls of the building and entered the second floor balcony from the outside. 

From the Culturalist perspective, the woman Gyanumaya's actions justifies her painstaking attention to all of the details of caste, pollution, sin, dharma and other related concepts.  From a Constructivist position, we emphasize the soical positional that goes on whenever people interact.  Thus gyanumaya, by entering the house through the kitchen, would mean assuming a higher position than her caste would allow.  It is a claim about a social position.  "It invites notice of the improvisation as a sign of positioning by powerful discourses," (p. 16).