Identity and agency in cultural worlds
Editorial HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Mainland Spain
- Publisher HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
- ISBN13 9780674815667
- ISBN10 0674815661
- Type BOOK
- Pages 349
- Published 1997
- Bookbinding Cloth
Subjects
Anthropology. General ThemesIdentity and agency in cultural worlds
Editorial HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Mainland Spain
Book details
This book addresses the central problem in anthropological theory today: the paradox that humans are products of social discipline yet producers of remarkable improvisation. Synthesizing theoretical contributions by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu, Dorothy Holland and her co-authors examine the processes by which people are constituted as agents as well as subjects of culturally constructed, socially imposed worlds. Ethnographic illumination of this complex theoretical construction comes from vividly described fieldwork in vastly different microcultures: American college women "caught" in romance; patients in U.S. institutions of mental health care; members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and girls and women in patriarchal Hindu villages in central Nepal. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds offers a liberating yet tempered understanding of agency, as it shows how, despite the force of cultural and social traditions, people improvise, redescribe themselves, and re-create their cultural worlds.