On the Social Underpinnings of Personal Identity

On the Social Underpinnings of Personal

Identity

Nick VittumSocial Science Capstone

12/14/14

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the place of personal identity

within its broader social environment. What is the

relationship between social context and personal identity?

Why is personal identity so closely guarded, especially in

the age of celebrated “individualism?” The answer seems to

lie in the role that personal identity plays in traversing

the “social map.” Personal identity turns out to be a kind

of internal navigation system that allows its possessor to

negotiate his or her social world. The essay analyzes,

compares and contrasts Nancy Chodorow’s book The Power of

Feelings, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, and Zygmunt

Bauman’s Liquid Modernity and Liquid Times – all of them authors who

have contributed unique perspectives to the debate over

identity. In the final analysis, as social context become

less stable or predictable, as the borders and contours of

the “map” begin to blur, or as more social forces come along

that appropriate or exploit this important tool, personal

identity becomes dysfunctional, leaving its owner

disoriented and vulnerable.

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THE SOCIAL UNDERPINNINGS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

In early November of this year, more than three-thousand

people showed up outside of TCF Bank stadium in Minnesota to

protest the arrival of the visiting team – the

controversially named Washington “Redskins” (Cox 2014). It

wasn’t the first protest ever held at a “Redskins” game, but

it was certainly one of the largest. Critics of the name

have long argued that it can only be interpreted as

derogatory to native americans, and are appalled by the

team’s refusal to change it to something less offensive.

Supporters, meanwhile, can’t see how a team name could

possibly generate such hostility, and often react with

defiance, flaunting Redskins attire, chanting, and mocking

their opponents.

More importantly, supporters of the name dismiss critics

as overly-sensitive. It is just a name, after all! But this

dismissal overlooks the fact that thousands of people take

umbrage, and have found it in their interests to actively

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campaign to change it. At its most basic level, the

controversy demonstrates two groups whose personal

convictions have manifested in vastly different directions.

Individuals on both sides feel that a specific aspect of

their personal identity has been violated by the

antagonistic actions of the other.

Controversies like these are prevalent in modern society.

Pervasive images, labels, advertisements and other messages

that seek to sell a brand, product or idea often lead to

conflict over whether those who create it have the right to

do so. At the root of this conflict is a struggle to

protect identity from real or perceived appropriation,

exploitation or fraudulence. Protesters of the “Redskins,”

for example, feel the team exploits a policy

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of Native extermination – carried out by European settlers

in centuries past – by appropriating a demeaning epithet. In

so doing, they refer to a time when Native identity was

severely injured – an injury, they argue, that may never

heal. If opponents were to succeed in their forcible

rebranding campaign, the significance of that oppressive

history could, at the very least, no longer be made light of

in this particular fashion.

Personal identity greatly affects our lives, how we live

them, and who we associate with, but countless examples

demonstrate that it is vulnerable – capable of being

tarnished, distorted, even obliterated. Moreover, in times

such as ours – when “individualism” is so celebrated – one

has to wonder if our identities have only become more

vulnerable. This paper explores personal identity, its

significance, and its connection to the broader social

environment in which is resides. More specifically, it asks:

what is the relationship between social context and personal

identity?

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A better understanding of this relationship could help us

to recognize how the symbols we communicate can and often

do have a profound effect on others. If personal identity at

first seems insignificant, a closer look reveals its

importance, even in seemingly trivial matters such as the

naming of a sports team. What seems innocuous to one group

can be a cause for grief and consternation to another.

Personal identity, then, because it is so personal, is easily

misunderstood or disregarded. But what is it that makes a

sound identity so crucial to the human experience? I argue

that personal identity is a kind of internal navigation

system that allows us to situate ourselves on, and negotiate

our social “map,” or environment. In other words, personal

identity keeps us abreast of social developments and alerts

us to hazards where they exist. Exploitation,

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appropriation, or (as we will see) social disintegration,

can cause this “social GPS” to falter.

Three authors specifically address personal identity.

Nancy Chodorow, a feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst, is

author of the book The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in

Psychoanalysis, Gender and Culture (1999). She argues that social

experience is always being interpreted by internal

psychological processes, thus its influence on personal

identity, while always present, is largely subjective.

Margaret Mead was an American anthropologist who took an

interest in cultures that were (as yet) relatively

uninfluenced by the modern, western world. Her book Coming of

Age in Samoa (1928) is a study of over fifty adolescent and

pre-adolescent girls who lived on the Pacific island of

Samoa. Mead takes a socially deterministic view – one’s

social context is the basis for his or her development of

personal identity.

Finally, Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist who, in his

books Liquid Modernity and Liquid Times (1999;2007), argues that

contemporary notions of personal identity are the result of

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a transition to individualism and uncertainty in postmodern

society. “Social context” today is insubstantial, defined by

an absence of the social/communal bonds that were once, but

no longer essential for survival.

Bauman, Mead and Chodorow contrast on some important

aspects, such as sociocultural determinism, the boundary

between social and personal identity, and whether the social

environment is fixed or fluid. Their disparate perspectives

will certainly highlight the complexities involved in the

attempt to understand personal identity. But they also show

that, without question, any investigation of personal

identity

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is necessarily incomplete if it ignores the significant role

that social context plays in its development.

The essay concludes by discussing further the idea that

personal identity is a social navigation system. Zygmunt

Bauman’s theory of liquidity can assist in highlighting the

realities that individuals must contend with in today’s

social environment. The disintegration of social/communal

bonds leaves us with a heightened awareness of our

uniqueness, but it also cripples our ability to navigate the

social world. The unpredictability of a “liquid” social

environment puts our social GPS on the fritz, as it

desperately attempts to recalibrate itself to account for

changes in a chaotic environment.

NANCY CHODOROW: THE PERSONAL IS, WELL, MOSTLY PERSONAL

As a feminist psychoanalyst, Chodorow’s work could easily

be a resource for anyone exploring the question of identity.

Chodorow, in her book The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in

Psychoanalysis, Gender and Culture (1999), argues for the importance

of psychological processes in the creation, or construction,

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of personal identity. The psychological phenomena she has

observed in her “analysands” throughout her career has

inspired in her a belief that, despite claims of many of her

academic contemporaries, an individual’s identity is not

just a reflection of his or her social context.

Chodorow’s arguments pertaining to identity are

frequently supported with examples of gender construction.

She invokes the psychoanalytical concepts of transference,

introjection, projection and unconscious fantasy to argue

for a view of gender that to her mind, “. . . accords with

contemporary feminism . . . people create their sense of

gender

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by emotionally and conflictually charging recognizable

cultural meanings, their personal experience, and their

bodies with unconscious fantasy” (1999:112). An important

aspect of Chodorow’s theory can be gleaned from the above

quotation. That “people create their sense” of gender is a

telling phrase. If gender identity is constructed by the

conscious attachment of meaning to objective social

experience, the psyche must have considerable autonomy.

Indeed, Chodorow states in her introduction that her book

is primarily “. . . an argument for the existence of an

irreducible realm of psychological life in which we create

unconscious personal meaning in the experiential immediacy

of the present” (1999:1). The irreducible realm she refers

to here is, by and large, the realm of “transference” – that

unique psychological sphere wherein each of us projects our

emotions onto others, internalizes the emotions of others,

and finally weaves intricate webs of subjective meaning. Due

to this subjectivity, though, the fibers of our “web” are

composed as much of imagined social reality as they are of

the objective sort. This has unfortunate implications for

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the proposal that personal identity serves as social

navigation system: quite simply, that it is wrong. If

personal meaning – which Chodorow would argue is a

foundational element of identity – is based on skewed

interpretations of social reality, individuals would be

hard-pressed to rely on such a nebulous mechanism to

negotiate the social environments they inhabit.

Chodorow is clearly critical of those who would see an

individual’s psyche as microcosm of their social world.

However, she also believes that many in her line work are

also guilty of reductionism. She opposes not only the

socially-deterministic

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viewpoints in other disciplines, but also the psychic-

determinism present in classic Freudian psychology. She even

goes so far as to reject that idea that we can pinpoint an

exact relationship between the personal and the social,

stating: “Theories . . . need to situate development in an

internal and external relational matrix . . . they need not

tell us what is set down, enacted, and determinative for

psychic contents and the modes of functioning” (1999:51). To

Chodorow, every facet of a person’s life is constructed and

upheld by a unique combination of objective experience and

psychodynamic processes that endlessly mitigate present

reality. Certainly no two individuals, according to this

belief, could ever be exactly alike – neither in

psychological nor social profile.

The link between social environment and personal identity

is further obfuscated by Chodorow’s unwillingness to presume

a definition of, or hardly even use the term “social.” The

“cultural” and the “personal” are put (early and often) into

dialogue with one another in The Power of Feelings, but it’s

difficult to define exactly what she is referring to when

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that distinction is made. Consider, for instance, one of

literally hundreds of statements she makes about the

interwoven nature of the cultural and personal. She writes,

“People create cultural selves and emotions and animate

cultural meaning and interpretations individually and

idiosyncratically, but it is nonetheless specific cultural

selves, emotions, and meaning that they animate. Specific

cultural patterns are always given an individual cast”

(1999:225). The claim that a person idiosyncratically

“creates” a culturally specific self and, what’s more,

culturally specific emotions (which I had previously assumed

were universal), leaves a lot to be resolved. Culture, to

Chodorow, seems to be a default terms to describe the

outside world. But

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her lack of precision with the term leaves the reader to

constantly wonder in what sense she is using the terms.

Occasionally, she talks about culture holistically, but

other times she uses it parallel to “gender” or “history,”

suggesting that one’s culture is separate from their gender,

history, etc. This causes great confusion when examining

quotes like the one above. Does a “culturally specific” self

encompass one’s history, one’s gender? Or does a person also

“create” a historically specific and gender specific self?

In general, it is unclear how much of one’s social

environment is cultural and how much is personal, because

Chodorow spends most of the book discussing these concepts

in this obtuse fashion.

Perhaps the clearest example to be found, or the most

basic answer to our question is Chodorow’s insistence that:

“Identity depends not simply on identifying with others but

on being confirmed and recognized by others as a particular

individual in a particular universe” (1999:229). The

statement can be construed as a simplification of the

relationship between personal identity and social context.

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Personal identity has us recognize others, subjectively and

objectively, while social context is simply the process of

others confirming and reciprocating this identification.

Meanwhile, interactions are informed by senses, emotions,

culture, meanings, and other “identities” (of which Chodorow

believes there are many).

What is certainly clear from Chodorow’s book is the

rebuttal of sociocultural determinism. Statements like

these: “The demonstration that we create personal emotional

meaning from birth throughout life challenges and

potentially affects all culturally determinist or

exclusively cultural accounts” (1999:130) continuous drive

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home the point that what is personal is not simply a

reflection of what is cultural. What this means for our

purposes is that social context and personal identity are

essentially a chicken and an egg. The question seems to be,

then, how much do our subjective identities alter the social

information we receive, vice versa, and is that even

measurable?

MARGARET MEAD AND THE POWER OF CONTEXT

Mead’s book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) is an account of

life in what she might have called an “uncomplicated” social

environment. This is not to say that the Samoan girls she

studied were not complex individuals. Rather, the society in

which they lived didn’t leave much room, or perhaps even the

inclination, for them to discover or reveal their

idiosyncrasies. Mead argued that the Samoan lifestyle and

attitude – which she claimed were generally free of discord

– was only possible due to a sociocultural uniformity that

would be incomprehensible to an individual living in the

western, multi-cultural world. The Samoan social environment

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not only housed the personal identities (which she tends to

refer to simply as “personalities”) of the girls she

studied, but also afforded them their overall character.

Coming of Age in Samoa has a subtitle, but one wouldn’t know

it unless they were to inspect the book’s front matter,

where it is buried: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western

Civilisation. The problem with this subtitle, and perhaps why it

is not included on the cover, is that the psychology of

these girls is not actually knowable, according to Mead.

Rather, a collective social mentality conceals much of what

we could

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discern from the individual. No doubt the use of the word

“psychological” would have caused readers to feel misled

when they realized this.

Personality, argued Mead, is important only insofar as

it contributes to reinforcing social ties and traditions. In

Samoan society, it was a rare and unwelcome occurrence for

an individual to voluntarily distance their self from the

group, or become obstinate. She says, “There is one word

musu which expresses unwillingness and intractability,

whether in the mistress who refuses to welcome a hitherto

welcome lover, the chief who refuses to lend his kava bowl,

the baby who won’t go to bed, or the talking chief who won’t

go on a malaga [traveling party]” (1928:87). Musu is a

powerful term that encompasses a wide range of behaviors,

and demonstrates the pressure that the community places on

the individual to conform. Someone labeled musu is met with

“fatalistic” acceptance of that person’s abnormal or

irrational behavior and quickly condemned.

Conversely, those who align themselves with the

community are more easily forgiven. Mead states: “The well-

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integrated individual who approximates closely to the

attitudes of his age and sex group is not accused of

laughing, crying, or showing anger without cause” (1982:90).

To be “without cause” is to have a disposition

uncharacteristic of the average Samoan, which can ostracize

the individual. It’s easy to think that, in a community so

ready to disregard those who diverge from the social stream

as “musu,” individuals must be forced to suppress their

emotions and bury their opinions or desires. In Mead’s view,

however, the reality is less sinister. Mead didn’t believe

that the girls in her study were repressed – far from it,

even. The personality of a Samoan was simply

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unimportant in the collective scheme, and the “average”

individual had no dissent or deviation to hide.

Mead’s description of this personal-social dynamic lends

itself towards a socioculturally-deterministic view – that

one’s personality is established largely by his/her

adherence, or lack of, to cultural attitudes/expectations.

Yet, it does not explain the the considerable autonomy of

the “well-integrated” individual (considerable in comparison

to the individual in institutionalized society, at least).

One of the major theme’s of Mead’s study is that the girls

in her research seem to be freer and far more happy than

their American counterparts. Their social context allowed

them more freedom as social actors, with relaxed and

informal cultural practices that allowed for more

exploration and experimentation.

This is not, however, to say that the girls has no

agency. Instead, it means agency denotes behavior that is

carried out on behalf of society, rather than in opposition

to it. Mead writes, “The Samoan child measures her every act

of work or play in terms of her whole community; each item

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of conduct is dignified in terms of its realised

relationship to the . . . life of a Samoan village”

(1928:158,159). Whereas Mead saw a “complex” social context

as full of antagonistic interests all vying for influence,

and whereas agency in that society might be defined as an

individual act that defies social expectations, she regarded

Samoa as more “primitive” and unified in its motivations.

Thus, it was practically unthinkable for a Samoan villager

to want to deviate from the given set of standards. To do so

would be to go against one’s own interests. What follows

from this is an overwhelmingly consensual social climate,

where identity is intricately linked to one’s

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position amidst the collective – psychological difference is

of little concern, while behavior that promotes social

integrity is held in high regard.

Individual traits (e.g. emotions, attitudes,

dispositions, etc.) in Samoa were, according to Mead,

generally only referred to in language that related it to

society. “The whole preoccupation is with the individual as

an actor, and the motivations peculiar to his psychology are

left an unplumbed mystery” (1928:91). Social integrity,

then, reduces the awareness one has of the their personal

identity, and raises one’s collective consciousness. But

does that mean personal identity is non-existent? Mead

seemed to believe that if it did exist, it was insignificant

in strong communities. The argument she makes, in fact, is

one that criticizes American society for creating

pathologies related to a heightened sense of one’s

“individuality,” which is itself a myth. Mead didn’t believe

we could divorce our individual selves from the community

without suffering serious consequences. For example, she

brings up the isolating nature of the nuclear family. She

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states: “The children in all three of the biological

families in the three villages showed more character, more

sharply defined personality, greater precocity and a more

personal, more highly charged attitude towards their

parents” (1928:100). Without that broad social context,

notice, not only does personality become more “sharply

defined,” but it becomes more problematic. Mead suggests

that these smaller, more confined families often placed

pressure on the children at a very early age, and denied

them the proper exposure to their social environment. This

sort of deprivation, in Mead’s view, reduces identity to

something purely individualistic, and “precocity” or

“character” are just ways of saying that a child is

alienated.

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Drawing on Mead’s explanation of the comparative

differences between American and Samoan adolescents, one can

see that she is dubious at the idea of a “sharply defined”

personal identity as a natural, or healthy part of any

society. Take, for instance, the following conclusion about

her Samoan informants: “With the differences in temperament

equal to those found among us . . . they showed a surprising

uniformity of knowledge, skill and attitude, and presented a

a picture of orderly, regular development in a flexible, but

strictly delimited, environment”(1928:127). What is truly

different, then, is that one social environment has promoted

an “orderly” and “regular” collective identity, while the

other has promoted an unnatural, isolating individuality.

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: DROWNING IN OUR OWN LIQUIDITY

Zygmunt Bauman has argued that the chief characteristic

of our modern, globalized society is its volatility. His

recent books examine the labile social conditions of our

present-day – consumerism has spurred a crisis of meaning,

an obsession with security, and an addiction to desire.

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Individual self-concept, in Bauman’s opinion, has

transformed under an increasingly “liquid” social milieu.

Bauman argues that contemporary notions of identity, which

he says are the result of a transition to individualism and

uncertainty in postmodern society, have lost much of their

social qualities.

Bauman believes the social environment we experience

today is defined by an absence of the collective bonds that

were once, but no loner essential to identity construction.

He describes “fluid” or “liquid” society as “a condition in

which social forms (structures that limit individual

choices, institutions that guard repetitions of

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routines, patters of acceptable behaviour) can no longer

(and are not expected) to keep their shape for long”

(2007:1). The individual today is forced to remain at the

ready, to endlessly adapt to the flow of social currents.

Instead of pressure to conform or stay rooted to a lifestyle

one might not otherwise choose, the individual is presented

with ever-changing life-choices – new products, new paths,

new relationships.

Bauman argues that to possess an “identity” in liquid

times has a fundamentally different meaning than it does in

an era where social stability reigns. Whereas identity in

pre-modern (even early-modern) times might be a fixed

association with a specific community, ethnic group, guild

or union, or otherwise, it has now become that which

distinguishes the individual from the group. He writes: “. .

. the way individual people define individually their

individual problems and try to tackle them deploying

individual skills and resources is the sole remaining

‘public issue’ and the sole object of ‘public interest’”

(2000:72). Since we no longer identify as a collective, the

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“community” has been replaced by “public,” which consists of

a multitude of individuals who might relate to one another’s

problems, but have no real interest or ability to solve them

collectively.

In light of this fact, Bauman believes the very concept of

personal identity becomes suspect – if at one time

“identity” was an adhesive that held social bonds together,

how could it possibly have morphed in modern times to mean

the exact opposite? The answer lies with our transition from

producers to consumers. He states, “In a consumer society,

sharing in consumer dependency . . . is the condition sine

qua non of all individual freedom; above all, of the freedom to

be different, to ‘have identity’’ (2000:84).

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Consuming together, it seems, involves less social cohesion

than producing together. Personal identity, then, is only

entirely personal in a consumer society.

Strong social connections may have been necessary for

those whose task it was to produce (and reproduce) their

material existence, but Bauman doesn’t think this is so when

it comes to consumers. Instead, individualistic consumption

is linked with personal freedom, notably the freedom from

having to commit to any one identity. “The opportunity to

‘shop around’, to pick and shed one’s ‘true self’, to ‘be on

the move’, has come in present-day consumer society to

signify freedom” (2000:86). We see here how, in Bauman’s

view, the pursuit, the fulfillment of individual whims,

becomes more than just something that is associated with

identity – it actually becomes the definition of personal

identity. But this definition is only partial. Along with

the consumer aspects of identity-creation comes a certain

desperation.

Underlying the quest for individuality is a deep desire

to finally achieve a continuity of character. According to

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Bauman: “That work of art which we want to mould out of the

friable stuff of life is called ‘identity’ . . . the search

for identity is the ongoing struggle to arrest or slow down

the flow, to solidify the fluid, to give form to the

formless” (Bauman:2000:82). While the endless search to

“find” ourselves is played out in an endless cycle of

consumption, there is a component of modern identity that

implores the individual to seek some type of order/security.

For Bauman, with each act of consumption comes a futile

attempt to hold fast, to find contentment and meaning in (to

identify with) whatever it is that is being consumed. But

consumption leaves mere residue behind, the shells of

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that which was consumed. Caprice and abandonment leave no

basis for a strong self-conception, so the cycle

perpetuates.

Our social context, according to Bauman, clearly lacks

adhesive that would bind the person to his or her to the

community. One must instead remain “an individual”, which

requires them to be a chameleon who adapts to the rapid pace

of technological and social change, while simultaneously

keeping their “essence” in tact. For Bauman, this is an

impossible task that leads to an identity that it

necessarily fragmented: “The destination of individual self-

constructing labour is endemically and incurably

underdetermined, is not given in advance, and tends to

undergo numerous and profound changes before such labours

reach their only genuine end: that is, the end of the

individual’s life” (2000:7). Individuals may feel compelled

have an essence that they can point to as indicative of

their uniqueness, but Bauman believes that this is an

impossible proposition for someone who is faced with

infinite choices.

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Identity-construction in liquid times ultimately

reflects an individual response to growing competition and

uncertainty in society. Deregulation and competition

introduced by global capitalism has transformed our modern

social context from something that might have once been

called “robustly democratic” into a nightmarish free-for-

all. He states: “Once competition replaces solidarity,

individuals find themselves abandoned to their own –

pitifully meagre and evidently inadequate – resources . . .

decomposition of collective bonds made, without asking their

consent, individuals de jure” (2007:67). In light of this

social breakdown, the individual, as we’ve seen, is

constantly attempting to latch onto something he/she can use

to create personal meaning

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– to be in control of, if nothing else, the self. What

(Bauman:2000:83) this equates to, then, is an

individualistic, ritual “shopping for identity” as a stand-

in for what, under different social circumstances, might

have been civic-engagement or religious worship – that

either way serves our innate need to feel secure.

It was only when individuals were divorced from

locality, from the politics and the lasting relations of

communal life that self-interest was great enough to make

“identity” a phenomenon that individuals could recognize in

themselves. Today’s social environment, in Bauman’s study,

removes all sense of the responsibility to be socially-

committed. This came about as a result of a set of social

conditions that promoted individualism and competition. If

social conditions had promoted a different set of values, it

seems likely that identity would reflect those values as

well. Social context, then, relates to personal identity by

shaping its strength and character.

PUT ‘EM TOGETHER AND WHAT DO YOU GET?

(MOSTLY A LOT OF DISAGREEMENT OVER THE IMPORTANCE OF THE COLLECTIVE)

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We’ve looked now at three authors whose work has in some

way contributed to the discussion of personal identity.

There is no question that the projects undertaken and views

espoused by Bauman, Chodorow and Mead are motivated by

different questions asked in different times for different

reasons. Where Mead concerned herself with cultural impacts

on adolescent psychology, Chodorow is concerned with mental

processes that transform sociocultural inputs into personal

meaning. Where Bauman seeks to highlight modern social

patterns that come and go quicker than any individual

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could recognize them, Mead believed instead that social

patterns are weaved into the fabric of static culture, and

personal identity is merely the internalization of those

patterns. During this examination, however, all three

authors have presented arguments that suggest a relationship

between social context and personal identity.

We can examine areas of overlap by asking three

questions of them. First, does the nature of the

relationship ever change? In other words, do the kinds of

social qualities that influence individuals fundamentally

change in different social contexts? To tackle this

question, we will need to ask a different question first: is

society/culture a concrete entity? Second, is personal

identity necessarily individualistic, or if it is somehow

intrinsically linked with social, or collective, identity?

And lastly, is social context the only determinate factor

that shapes an individual’s sense of identity, or rather, do

any of our authors take a socio-cultural-deterministic view

of identity?

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Neither Mead nor Chodorow make any mention, as Bauman

does, of society or culture as a fluid, or emerging,

phenomenon. Instead, they speak of culture as a fixed set of

environmental conditions. Mead straightforwardly depicts

culture as the all-encompassing, uniform state of society.

She writes: “Each primitive people has selected one set of

human gifts, one set of human values, and fashioned for

themselves an art, a social organization, a religion, which

is their unique contribution to the history of the human

spirit” (1928:11). One unique set of characteristics,

presumably unchanging (except, of course, when that

“primitive” culture is infiltrated by another equally

unique, if exploitative, culture), defines the group. The

pressures exerted on individuals by their culture, in that

case, must be static as well.

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Chodorow never submits more than a vague definition of

“culture” in The Power Of Feelings, but her lack of clarity on

the matter is significant in itself. Consider her discussion

of gender identity: “As [cultural] meanings are constructed

and reconstructed in personal gender, [they] become

entangled with the specifics of individual emotion and

fantasy, with aspects of self, and with conscious and

unconscious images of gender, fostered by particular

families” (1999:88). Here we find culture categories

“constructed” and “reconstructed” inside the minds of

individuals– an idea suggestive of the authors belief that

culture is a external object. In fact, Chodorow refers over

and over again to culture as a set of categories or types;

meanwhile personal meanings shift and change without hope of

being reduced to either of these. Theory, in Mead’s book, is

mostly overshadowed by empirical accounts, so it is

difficult to say whether Mead agrees that culture is

“constructed and reconstructed,” but that construction of

culture, in Mead’s view, would look more like the

reinforcement of existing culture. In any case, both authors

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would generally agree that those constructions are definite.

In other words, they agree that culture, no matter its

permutations, has a distinguishable form.

They diverge more markedly, however, on the discussion

of the personal. Consider Chodorow’s description of emotions

as cultural versus personal phenomena. She writes: “Anger,

shame, hope, fear, envy, love, and hate may be evoked in

particular ways in different cultures and in reaction to

culturally typical experiences, but these emotions are also

evoked differently by different members of the culture and

differently for the same member in different internal and

external contexts” (1999:165). It seems that fluidity, if

there is such a concept to Chodorow, rests with the ever-

changing internal processes of

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individual psychology, or the tendency for individuals

within the same culture to be radically different from one

another. Mead, by contrast, rejects that fluidity even when

it comes to individual psychology. She writes that the

Samoan “disregard of personal [sexual] relations is . . .a

reflection of a more general cultural attitude in which

personality is consistently disregarded” (1928:153). It is

clear, then, that the “fixedness” Mead believed in extended

from the culture to the individuals who constituted it.

Next, we ask: is personal identity is necessarily

individualistic, or is it somehow linked with social, or

collective, identity? Here we find Chodorow’s perspective in

partial alignment with Bauman’s. Where Mead found identity

to be little more than the extension of collective society,

Bauman and Chodorow disagree. Instead, they take the view

that personal and social identity exist independently of one

another. According to Bauman, in situations where social,

collective bonds are undone, personal identity becomes a

distinct part of individual reality. This is a key feature

of Bauman’s theory of liquidity. He says, “We are presently

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moving from the era of pre-allocated ‘reference groups’ into

the epoch of ‘universal comparison’, in which the

destination of individual self-constructing labour is

endemically and incurably underdetermined, is not given in

advance, and tends to undergo numerous and profound changes

before such labours reach their only genuine end: that is,

the end of the individual’s life” (2000:7). Bauman believes

that, in that the era of “pre-allocated ‘reference groups,’”

collective ambitions or coercive pressures ensured that

“individuals” were a part of a greater network of social

actors, whose interactions and expectations were the

(strong) building blocks of personal life. That, however,

does not mean that personal identity is non-existent in this

or any other social

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environment. There is, rather, a balance that he argues has

been disrupted in modern times. Mead, for her part,

recognizes that this social collective has disintegrated,

but she does not think it natural to have a sense of

personal identity that exists complimentary to to social

identity, rather that individuality manifesting itself in

society is abnormal and problematic.

Chodorow, like Bauman, thinks that social and personal

identity are separable. She criticizes theorists like Mead

for not recognizing this separation in their work. She

accuses the work of many anthropologists of being oblivious,

writing: “These accounts are unable to conceive

theoretically, even as they describe ethnographically,

individual psychological processes of personal meaning

creation, nor can they acknowledge theoretically that

emotion-laden self-experience can be inextricably personal

and cultural at the same time” (1999:161-162). Thus Mead’s

refusal to acknowledge the personal aspects of identity

ignores entirely the biological realm that is responsible

for creating us. As a psychoanalyst, Chodorow is far more

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interested than Bauman or Mead in the psychological

processes that divide collective and personal

identification. But we see that Bauman and Chodorow are

closer in agreeing that these two realms do, in fact, exist.

Our third question asks whether social context is the

only determinate factor that shapes an individual’s sense of

identity. Here will finally situate Bauman and Mead on

common ground. Unlike Chodorow, Mead and Bauman de-emphasize

the ability of the individual to create subjective meaning

based on internal dispositions/processes. Mead cites the

behavioral discrepancy between adolescent females in the

U.S. and Samoa. She writes that “If the same process takes a

different form in two different environments, we

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cannot make any explanations in terms of the process, for

that is the same in both cases. But the social environment

is very different and it is to it that we must look for an

explanation” (1928:137). There was no question in Mead’s

mind about the importance of one’s social environment. In

her view, the variance in trends of human behavior between

cultures was evidence enough of its cultural primacy in

determining identity. Our biological similarities simply

could not possibly account for these wide variances.

Bauman’s determinism isn’t quite so readily detectable,

but consider his description of the postmodern individual as

lost and helpless. He writes, “The dream of making

uncertainty less daunting and happiness more permanent by

changing one’s ego, and of changing one’s ego by changing

its dresses, is the ‘utopia’ of hunters – a ‘deregulated’,

‘privatized’, and ‘individualized’ version of the old-style

visions of the good society . . . “ (2007:107). Bauman

believes that hard as we may try as individuals to be self-

determining, we are at the mercy of our social environment.

Even when we think we are in control, as those psychologists

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in Mead’s book who were so certain they could “fix” their

problem adolescents, of our environment, it is actually our

environment that controls us.

By now, We’ve hopefully placed our authors on a wider

spectrum of debated over identity. Bauman and Chodorow share

the belief that individuals have distinct, unique

identities; Chodorow and Mead both believe that culture is a

fixed, objective phenomena, though how they reached this

belief differs considerably; Mead and Bauman place social

context as the all-important factor in determining identity.

In the following section, I explore what I have learned from

this debate, and how I have come to my conclusion that

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personal identity is instrumental, characterized by its

function as a tool for social navigation.

CONCLUSION: RESETTING THE COORDINATES

If the authors above have taught us anything, it is that

personal identity is a concept that holds different

applications for different theorists. If there is not even a

consensus on whether personal identity is at root social,

physiological, psychological or otherwise, we can hardly

expect there to be an agreed upon definition, or a

singularly operative usage of the concept itself. Further, I

do not pretend to have gotten to the “bottom” of the

relationship between personal identity and social context in

this modest essay. However, the idea that identity operates

as a kind of internal GPS to help us navigate the social map

is one I think should be explored further.

Originally, I was perplexed by the differences between

self, personal, social, individual, collective, role and

other types of “identity” often practically interchangeable

in the social sciences. I learned over time that no matter

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the modifier, the operative word in all of these is

“identity.” If we represent the sum total of interpersonal

behaviors and ideas that influence individual actors, our

“social context,” on a metaphorical map, on that same map

the “individual” is just a blip -- a blinking, behaving

thing which moves in relation to the other blips and is

hindered by natural and “man-made” limitations. But identity

is the workhorse of the social map. It is identity that

drives where these little blips attract, where they repel.

So where does identity exist? Mead would likely have argued

that it exists in the collective. But I do not agree with

Mead on this point. I think

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identity exists within the individual. Identity and

individuality, however, not synonymous. Individuals carry

with them an inherent means of negotiating their social

worlds, and this we can call “identity.” It seems identity’s

only purpose is the aforementioned function.

Bauman’s assessment of modern society – the idea that we

social beings are somehow surviving despite the near-total

disintegration of collective social bonds – led me to

consider if it was possible that identity could disintegrate

in a similar fashion. I found, however, that identity is not

so tangible as that. Identity, unlike observable social

reality or unseen psychological processes, is simply the

abstract idea that connects these two concepts.

I think Nancy Chodorow’s insistence that psychological

processes are as important to personal identity as

sociocultural factors is closer than my other authors to

“getting it right,” simply based on her willingness to

acknowledge both. However, I think an important aspect of

this debate has been overlooked. What about the importance

of identity on social construction? The way we parse our

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worlds, who and what we gravitate towards, and whatever it

is we’re referring to when we say “I” is simply a totality

of these abstract conduits that allow the individual to

operate within the group.

This, however, is where I leave behind the metaphysical

considerations of my thesis, and instead return to the

example of the “Redskins.” It’s obvious that the debate over

identity – its origins, its role etc. – will not be ending

any time in the near future. But I believe that the view of

identity as a social navigation tool could have beneficial

results

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when applied to debates over identities importance.

“Redskins” fans clearly identify closely with the name of

their football team, but do so at the expense of another

group of individuals. In order to recognize the impacts of

identity-appropriation upon others, they must first

understand what it means to have an injured identity. Those

in positions of privilege have the responsibility to know

how the symbols they communicate reinforce prejudices.

Moreover, the refusal to change the derogatory name of a

sports team speaks to the desperation that Bauman spoke of

that plagues our liquid times. If Washington fans need cling

so tight to something so seemingly trivial, they might want

to consider the areas where their own identities are

lacking.

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Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA. Polity.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty.

Malden, MA. Polity.

Chodorow, Nancy J. 1999. The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in

Psychoanalysis, Gender and Culture. New Haven, CT. Yale University

Press.

Cox, J.W. 2014. “In Minnesota, thousands of Native Americans

protest Redskins’ name” washingtonpost.com, Nov. 02.

Retrieved Dec. 2, 2014 (http://

www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-minnesota-native-

americans-march-rally-to-

protest-redskins-name/2014/11/02/fc38b8d0-6299-11e4-

836c-83bc4f26eb67_stor y.html).

Mead, Margaret. ([2001]1928). Coming of Age in Samoa: A

Psychological Study of Primitive Youth For Western Civilization. New

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York City, NY. HarperCollins aPublishers Inc.