Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds Holland, et al

We are interested in identities, the imaginings of self in worlds of action, as social products; indeed, we begin with the premise that identi- ties are lived in and through activity and so must be conceptualized as they develop in social practice. (5)

We focus on the development of identities and agency specific to practices and activities situated in historically contingent, socially enacted, culturally constructed “worlds”: recognized fields or frames of social life, such as romance, mental illness and its treatment, domestic relations, Alcoholics Anonymous, academia, and local politics.  (7)

The constructivist position emphasizes the social positioning that goes on whenever people interact. Constructivists extend to all behavior the point that sociolinguists and ethnographers of communication have made about linguistic behavior. No matter what one person says to an- other, there is always more to the message than its semantic content. How the message is said—through accent, tone, or tempo, what lan- guage or dialect it is said in, what style (formal or informal), what mode (whether phrased as a question or command)—all these index the relationship among speaker, addressee, and audience and constitute signs of the speaker’s claim to social position.(11)

Feminist poststructuralists emphasize that women and other oppressed people are especially subject to situations like Gyanumaya’s, situations replete with contradictions. Oppressed people are constantly climbing up houses. (16)

In our view, improvisations, from a cultural base and in response to the subject positions offered in situ, are, when taken up as symbol, potential beginnings of an altered subjectivity, an altered identity. (18)