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).