Plato was able to claim that "the soul is most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself" (Phaedo, 80a, Grube’s translation). Thomas Hardy could assert (in ‘After a Journey’) I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers. earning Leavis’ praise for his "tenacious simplicity of character" (‘Hardy the Poet’ in The Critic as Anti-Philosopher [London: Chatto & Windus, 1982, originally 1940]). But nowadays we seem unable to endorse such affirmations, finding, like Hume, nothing permanent in our inmost selves, only fragments, improvisations, "multiple drafts", as Dennett has it (Consciousness Explained [London: Penguin, 1993]), by an elusive, protean bricoleur.

The collective offering under review presents an attractive rendition of such a perspective on selfhood in an anthropological context. The authors interweave accounts of women in Nepal, female university students in the toils of romance, a case of "borderline personality disorder", and members of Alcoholics Anonymous, all in the US, and a review of courtly love in mediaeval Europe, with theoretical discussions of ideas they have appropriated mainly from Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.

A recurrent example is "the woman who climbed up the house", a low caste Nepalese woman invited by Holland’s colleague to join her on the balcony of a house owned by a higher caste family when the owner’s wife was visibly present. Instead of waiting to be accompanied through the kitchen, the woman scaled the outside wall of the house and made her way through a small opening in the railing. Her unusual resolution of conflicting pressures (compliance with a request from non-traditional anthropological visitors, pollution to the kitchen of the house they were temporarily living in) is first used to point up a contrast in anthropological understanding between a culturalist approach (that sees the culture of caste, pollution and other meaning systems as "an essential force … directing her behaviour" [p. 10], "a caste identity embodied in her" [p. 11]) and a constructivist perspective (that "emphasizes the social positioning that goes on whenever people interact" [p. 11] and supposes the accidental proximity of higher caste persons to be the dominant explanation, "a caste identity imposed upon her" [p. 11]). By the end of the work, both perspectives are given their due but "neither [is] sufficient or comprehensive" (p. 274). They overlook "the ways in which creativity is collectively enabled…. By focussing only on the social constraints, we would have missed the significance of her improvised departure from a routine path. By ignoring the constraints, we would have missed the forces that made the path obligatory and the pointedness of her deviation" (p. 275).

The tool-box these anthropological bricoleurs have put together comprises four main items or contexts of identity/action:
figured worlds – socially identified "frames of meaning in which interpretations of human actions are negotiated" (p. 271), "imaginary worlds" (p. 49) such as the academia where people write books (or online reviews). Their gloss owes much to Vygotsky’s appeal to the use of things as symbols in children’s play and elsewhere throughout human life. They also invoke Fillmore’s notion of "frame semantics": why is it odd to ask whether the Pope is a bachelor? The word brings with it a figured world of marriage with typical scenarios; as an avowed celibate, the Pope is not a character in any of those constructions.

positionality – Bakhtin’s idea that all personal activity is marked by its place in a network of possible actions, and reflects a perspective and position within hierarchies of status and power. The investigation of Alcoholics Anonymous explores the ways in which people adopt, or fail to adopt, a particular view of themselves as non-drinking alcoholics. But positioning is not only a matter of adopting a particular narrative, it is often a matter of being constrained, included or more likely excluded, as from higher caste kitchens.

space of authoring – this is again "Bakhtin’s rendition of the normal world faced by any person or collective. The world must be answered-authorship is not a choice-but the form of the answer is not predetermined" (p. 272). Here people have to make what they can of what comes to hand, reshaping themselves in the process.

making worlds – this notion brings us back to the first since it is a matter of "serious play" through which people create new figured worlds.

The authors avoid tedious wrangling with alternative perspectives but devote a fair amount of space to showing how these and other notions do justice to the relative and variable openness of human agency and, in particular, to the details of their chosen cases.

One quibble. The authors endorse Bourdieu’s rejection of rules to explain behavior (p. 279). No doubt some theorists have exaggerated what rules can do, but that is no reason to drop them entirely. To take a Chomskyan contrast, we can characterize linguistic competence as knowledge of a set of rules without supposing that those or any other rules will determine performance. Or, to take an undoubted case, knowing the constitutive rules of chess certainly does not give me any advantage over the computer programs that regularly beat me. Rules typically set constraints; they do not determine action.

© Ed Brandon, 2001

Ed Brandon is, by training, a philosopher, and now is working in a policy position in the University of the West Indies at its Cave Hill Campus in Barbados.

Categories: Philosophical