Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds

361 Pages·2001·1.85 MB·English

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds
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Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Identity and Agenycy
in Cultural Worlds
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Dorothy Holland
William Lachicotte Jr.
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Debra Skinner
Carole Cain

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
1998
Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Identity and agency in cultural worlds / Dorothy Holland . . . [et al.].
p. cm.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-81566-1 (alk. paper)
1. Culture. 2. Identity (Psychology) 3. Agent (Philosophy)
I. Holland, Dorothy C.
HM101.I28935 1998 C
306—dc21 98-19269

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Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Contents
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Preface vii
I ON THE SHOULDERS OF BAKHTIoN AND VYGOTSKY
1 The Woman Who Climbed up the House 3
2 A Practice Theory of Self and Identity 19
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II PLACING IDENTITY AND AGENCY
3 Figured Worlds 49
4 Personal Stories in Alcoholics Anonymous 66
5 How Figured Wo rlds of Romance Become Desire 98
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III POWER AND PRIVILEGE
6 Positional Identities 125
7 The Sexual Auction Block 144
IV THE SPACE OF AUTHORING
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8 Authoring Selves 169
9 Mental Disorder, Identity, and Professional Discourse 192
10 Authoring Oneself as a Woman in Nepal 214
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V MAKING WORLDS
11 Play Worlds, Liberatory Worlds, and Fantasy Resources 235
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12 Making Alternative Worlds in Nepal 253
13 Identity in Practice 270
Notes 289
References 317
Credits 339
Index 341
Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Preface
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In Marxism and Literature Raymond Williams says:
The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is
this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished
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products. [. . . It is misleading to habitually project endings] not only
into the always moving substance of the past, but into contemporary
life, in which relationships, institutions and formations in which we
are still actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode,
into formed wholes rather th an forming and formative processes. (Wil-
liams 1977: 128–129; quoted in Harvey 1996: 24–25; interpolation by
Harvey) m
Williams’s admonition is important for cultural studies of the person
and for our focus on identity. Identities—if they are alive, if they are
being lived—are unfinished and in process. Whether they be specific to
the imagined worlds of romance or the careers of mental illness, or
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generic to ethnic, gender, race, and class divisions, identities never ar-
rive in persons or in their immediate social milieux already formed. They
do not come into being, take hold in lives, or remain vibrant without
consideraxble social work in and for the person. They happen in social
practice.
Cultural studies of the person, in particular, need to move more sol-
idly to process. They must be predicated upon continuing cultural pro-
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duction: a development, or interlocking genesis, that is actually a co-
development of identities, discourses, embodiments, and imagined
worlds that inform each moment of joint production and are themselves
transformed by that moment. It is this processual understanding of iden-
tity and agency that we seek to build, through concepts offered by two
scholars of society and the person, whose work began in the aftermath of
the Soviet Revolution of 1917, L. S. Vygotsky and M. M. Bakhtin.
Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
viii Preface
Although not, as far as we know, directly intertwined, the intellectual
lives of Bakhtin and Vygotsky were influenced by the sayme currents of
thought in 1920s Russia. The two men addressed the common questions
and objectives that characterized the great ferment of social theory about
the “new society” and its inhabitants, the new “socialist man.” Each had
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a thoroughly sociocentric view of human thought and feeling, and both
saw speech, language, literature, and art as the pivotal media through
which consciousness and subjectivity develop. Bakhtin relied upon some
of the same concepts as Vygotsky did, sucho as the important notion of
“inner speech,” but Bakhtin’s center of gravity remained in the areas of
sociolinguistics and literary criticism, while Vygotsky turned to the task
of building a sociohistorical school of psychology. Bakhtin’s search was
less for a social science of what we wCill call heuristic development—the
contingent formations of subjectivity over time—and more for the social
grounds of “personal” creativity and authority. Vygotsky and Bakhtin
together articulated a powerful version of human life as necessarily me-
diated: as produced by social interchange among persons whose activity,

however circumscribed by material and social circumstances, and how-
ever cast in forms of dismcursive and practical genres, nonetheless re-
makes these conditions. Theirs is a social world that is necessarily per-
sonal, not automatic; a world of agents and of hope carried forward from
the Revolution. It still has much to say to us today.
Williams’s admonition against supposed endings reminds us of our
manuscript. This book has been in process for a long time, and the
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intellectual projects it reflects are certainly not finished. Carole Cain,
Dorothy Holland, Renée Prillaman, and Debra Skinner started talking
about the subject matter more than ten years ago. Because of work and
family obxligations, Renée Prillaman had to drop out of the project, but
the book profited from her ideas. Meanwhile, William Lachicotte joined
our discussions and writing.
The plan for the book has remained fairly constant. We wanted to
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develop our ideas about identity collectively through our discussions of
other scholars’ writings and through our own research projects, which
we undertook individually or in pairs. The result is a book that some-
times plays havoc with current notions of authorship, just as our view of
subjectivity must surely grate against common ideas of identity and per-
sonhood.
If authorship of a collective venture is hard to square with individual-
Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Preface ix
istic notions of cultural production, so too are our acknowledgments. A
multitude of people have contributed to our field researchy, among them
the residents of the area in Nepal where Holland and Skinner lived and
worked, the members of the Alcoholics Anonymous groups attended
by Cain (especially those we call Hank, Ellen, and Andrew), the clients
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and staff members of mental health institutions who gave their time and
assistance to Lachicotte, and the students of the two universities where
Holland learned about the figured world of romance. A host of readers,
listeners, and partners in discussion have alsoo been crucial to the devel-
opment of our ideas. We cannot name them all. Our solution is to thank
the following people, who have significantly aided one or more of us:
G. B. Adhikari, Richard Ashmore, Alan Benjamin, Katherine Bunting-
Howarth, Roy D’Andrade, Robert DCaniels, Mary Des Chene, Margaret
Eisenhart, Glen Elder, Sue Estroff, Terry Evens, Judith Farquhar, Alison
Greene, Marilyn Grunkemeyer, Erin Hannan, Jean Harris, Peter Hervik,
Lee Jussim, Willett Kempton, Jean Lave, Bradley Levinson, Robert Levy,
Tanya Luhrmann, Donald Nonini, Alfred Pach III, Maheswor Pahari,

Steven Parish, Jim Peacock, John Peterson, James Poling, Laurie Price,
James Reeves, Bob S., Smapana Sharma, Claudia Strauss, Renu Lama
Thapa, Julia Thompson, Jaan Valsiner, Joanne Waghorne, and several
anonymous reviewers.
Funders for our research projects were crucial as well: the National
Science Foundation (BNS-9110010), the Fulbright Foundation, the Na-
tional Institutes of Mental Health (Grant RO1 MH40314), the National
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Institute of Education, the University Research Council of the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill Dissertation Fellowships. Thanks also to the Nepal Offices of
the Unitexd States Educational Foundation and Save the Children, U.S.A.
We dedicate this book to some special people whose voices we
brought with us to our task: Ashby Gaines Holland; William S. Lachi-
cotte Sr.; Willard Skinner; Mack and Delores Cain. They are part-authors
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of this story and shape it still in ways not even we can fully tell.
Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Copyright © 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College