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There are also some well-known processes in social psychology for managing these tensions and conflicts: passing, or making one community the shadow for the other; splitting, or having some form of multiple personality; fragmenting or segmenting the self into compartments; becoming a nomad, intellectually and spiritually if not geographically (Larsen (1986) covers many of these issues in her exquisite fiction). |
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One dissatisfaction we have with these descriptions is that they all paint each community of practice as ethnocentric, as endlessly hungry and unwilling collectively to accommodate internal contradictions. There is also an implicit idea of a sort of imperialist über-social world (the mainstream) that is pressing processes of assimilation on the individual (e.g., Americanization processes in the early twentieth century). Communities vary along this dimension of open-closedness, and it is equally important to find successful examples of the nurturing of marginality (although it is possible that by definition they exist anarchically and not institutionally-bureaucratically). Here again, feminism has some important lessons. An important theme in recent feminist theory is resistance to such imperializing rhetoric and the development of alternative visions of coherence without unconscious assumption of privilege. Much of it emphasizes a kind of double vision, such as that taken up in the notion of borderlands by Anzaldúa (1987), or the qualities of partiality and modesty of Haraway's cyborg (1991). |
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Charlotte Linde's book on the processes of coherence in someone's life stories also provides some important clues. She especially emphasizes accidents and contingency in the weaving together of a coherent narrative (Linde 1993). The narratives she analyses are in one sense meant to reconcile the heterogeneity of multiply naturalized object relations in the person, where the objects in question are stories-depictions of life events. Linden (1993) and Strauss (1959) have made similar arguments about the uncertainty, plasticity, and collectivity of life narratives. |
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In traditional sociology this model might have overtones of functionalism, in its emphasis on insiders-outsiders and their relations. But functionalists never considered the nature of objects or of multiple legitimate memberships. If we think in terms of a complex cluster of multiple trajectories simultaneously of both memberships and naturalizations, it is possible to think of a many-to-many relational mapping. |
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The mapping suggested here pushes us further into the analysis of the cyborg. On the one hand, cyborgs as an image are somehow |
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