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.