Re: michal roth's intro; four contradictions and children's play

From: Wolff-Michael Roth (mroth@uvic.ca)
Date: Sun Oct 10 2004 - 06:48:17 PDT


Hi Alisa,
THe very bottom of your mail you pose a question, (rhetorical) but
this question is ill-posed. You need to take identity as a dialectical
concept, and narrative identity is only one aspect. An important one,
but only one.
        I found both Damasio, from a neuroscientific perspective, and Ricœur,
from a philosophical perspective, have done some tremendous work to
assist us in understand the complexity of this concept. Ricœur is
clearly dialectical in his thinking...
Michael

On 10-Oct-04, at 1:06 AM, eliza@pob.huji.ac.il wrote:

> Hi,
> Concerning what Mike wrote:
>> One ardent non-poster on the list has been known to define identity as
>> stories
>> people tell about themselves. Others (I see a note from Wolff-Michael
>> waiting
>> a little down the queue) talk about identities as related to selves
>> and
>> still others relate this to individual subjectivities and get unhappy
>> about
>> activity theory because it presumably does not allow for analysis of
>> individual subjectivities.
> In my present research on cultural identity as reflected in literacy
> and
> personal book collections, I have found that people tend to define
> themselves
> in one way but behave de facto in a different way. For example: When
> asked the
> person will define himself as a member of a certain Jewish religious
> community
> but after analyzing his collection I have found core literature of a
> different
> Jewish religeous community. After I asked the person to explain this -
> the
> person would admit that he de facto belonged also to the other
> community but
> this side of him was less concious. My research population are middle
> aged
> adults who have changed their intra-religious affiliation and they tend
> conciously to define themselves in terms of their new cultural
> identity and
> ignore their previous identity - but de facto they are still very much
> connected to their previous identiy - so after the change they create
> a kind of
> hybrid cultural identity for themselves.
> The question is: to what extent can a person's identity be defined "as
> stories
> people tell about themselves" - after all the subconcious also plays a
> major
> role in a person's social and cultural behaviour?
>
> Alisa
>
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