Status Updates From Identity and Agency in Cult...

Back to the beginning with Gyanumaya climbing the side of a Chetri's house, that gets re-examined from a culturalist and constructivist points of view, revealing something missing on both parts. Identity and agency rely on a combined sense of improvisation that subverts social and political oppression. The point is brought home by recalling particular moments from preceding chapters, many of which I wrote about here!

There is a certain sense of closure with the authors' return to Nepal, and their investigation of the Tij festival that presents an alternate world, through dukha (family struggles) and rajniti (political) songs. It is no surprise that women in the 1990's would be brandishing sticks, smashing alcohol bottles and chasing loutish husbands out of the gambling dens. Like research-based theatre, art has the power to move!

Finally, the book has turned into my kind of research: taking examples from literature, in this case medieval courtly love and 20th century nationalistic newspapers, and examining the connections to human activity. Not that I don't value case studies that interview human subject; it is just I would rather prefer to understand the figured worlds that a society produces, not the people who make up this or that society.

Are there really such brutish men in Naudada, reminiscent of the figured world I first encountered of Nepal: Marion's tavern in Raiders of the Lost Ark? It should be no surprise, then, that alcohol, gambling and spousal abuse takes place in this anonymous village, and Skinner examines the women who adapt and resist this man's world where the imposed identity of a "good woman" keeps women in this scary place.

The amount of effort that Lachicotte's subject Roger puts into authoring himself in a borderline discourse makes it hard to imagine him doing anything else but looking for mental health problems. Yet it could be a more honest and authentic search for self than most of us, claiming to be psychologically fit, are willing to put ourselves through. Like the reverse of hypochondria, we only go so far creating an identity.

Identity-making in the sense of authoring oneself is the idea discussed in the groundbreaking psychological studies of Vygotsky that get mashed up with the discourse analysis of Bakhtin. As with most revolutionary Russian thinkers, there is more than just the one name attached to the theory, and I enjoyed to read about respective collaborators Luria and Voloshinov in the dialogue on how we author our cultural worlds.

Forget all the "eye of the beholder" bollocks, the research team lead by Holland discover some gendering issues in positions of privilege and power. They work out a way of dealing with the ad-hoc rules of attraction with favoured popular people that didn't involve grade three-level name-calling. This study also includes a critical look at David Mamet's play Oleanna as proof that institutional change happens.

As the authors shift focus to power and privilege, it is good in a disheartening way to reflect upon how I did not have to experience life as a lower-caste girl in Nepal, an African-American high schooler in Washington DC or an outspoken wife in Nicaragua (who reportedly was raped by a "reluctant" gang of men for breaking one of their rules), but still very impressed with the positions both subjects and authors take.

A good indication of how people playing the figured worlds game adapt the rules as they play. The world investigated here is romance at two southeastern colleges, and parts of it are as mysterious as the fictional Emily Dickinson College in the 1978 movie Animal House, fortunately from a researcher's theoretical frame rather than naughty frat boys' point of view. Wonder where these interviewed women are now?

There are people who believe that alcoholism only affects people in North America, and that Europeans seem to be immune to the adversities of the bottle. Of course this is a myth, with plenty of examples in literature from the old world as proof of Europeans just as powerless against drinking. Still there is something about the disease of alcoholism, investigated by Cain, that could only be the result of prohibition.

Glad to have picked up this book again as I start writing my final papers, especially as both of them look at virtual reality, a big topic back in the late 1990's that has been put on the backburner over the past two decades. Very impressed with the constant reconnecting to Vygotskian self-authoring based on sociohistorical figured worlds. Even the alcoholism in next chapter may relate to Internet addiction in Japan.

While investigating the self with her collaborators, it seems like Dorothy Holland is throwing an anthropological party and inviting some big-named scholars like Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Bourdieu (most of whom I recently read) to liven things up. Great discussion on semiotic mediation, and I might just stick around to see how figured worlds play out, and if there is any connection to the online virtual worlds, I'm sold!

More or less a preview of following chapters for a collaborated investigation of culture, Holland makes an impressive start of combining critical and cultural perspectives on the discourses that shape our identities. She also gives the chapter a seemingly abstract title which turns out to have actually occurred during field work somewhere in Nepal and then she extracts a moral of oppressed people who climb up houses.