I am reminded of how a little over 7 years ago, just before the September 11th terrorist attacks - maybe a week or ten days prior to that - I had this ominous sense of doom. I still remember where I was sitting - on my bed, back in Calcutta, in my room - and I was looking out of the window. I don't even remember if the day was grey and overcast, but in in my head that's what I saw. A grey, overcast day and it was half-drizzling, visibility was low, and in my head I kept seeing the NYPD folk in their identifiable navy jackets walking around in a city where things had gone somewhat around the bend. I remember too that this cracked image was not a figment of my imagination as many things were/are (or else I later say they are even if I don't entirely believe in my self-confessed disbelief) for I was writing a letter to a very close friend of mine who was living in Boston at that point, and I told her about the unsettling images that I was seeing inside.
I can't say I felt any streak of ominous unsettledness last week when I put up my last blogpost. I was writing my responses to a book in the hope that I wouldn't forget everything about it a year from now - that's all. And I was thinking about violence and nationalism, and identity - that part is true enough. The news about the latest terrorist attacks (when I got to know about them) left me feeling a bit fazed and over the last couple of days I've been reading the news and some blogposts that are connected to the ones that I follow everyday.
This year has got to be one of the most muddled up years in some ways (personally speaking) and somehow I can't get rid of the feeling that it still hasn't shown all its cards. I'm reminded of a couple of blogs that I regularly visit. Early on this year, a friend (Pots) had expressed her sense of doom in a post titled "Two Obits". Being in the middle of a steady roller-coaster high at that point had still not made me completely immune to the creepy scratching fingers in the corner of my bone-head and then there was much more to come through the year, and the year is still not over.
I know sometimes we sense things and sometimes we don't - which is fine (I grunt). Sometimes things happen as we see them and sometimes they don't (which is not fine, I grunt!). I still remember the time that I visualised a blue feather (most people will remember Richard Bach's Illusions). I don't know why I went alongwith a blue feather instead of being a tad more imaginative - but that's what I went with. An intense image of an exceptionally bright blue feather and it had been floating around in my head. And then lo and behold, not a week later I found a real feather. A bright blue feather on the concrete pathway leading out of my parent's apartment complex in Calcutta.
I'm also reminded of dreams for some reason, and there are multiple reasons for this - and not all of them are entirely unpleasant. I'm reminded of a bright bit of an essay titled "Dreams and Daydreams". I'm also reminded of how sometimes, and in fact most of the times my dreams (that is, the "unconscious ones") are terribly mundane or just boring and repetitive. I don't any longer have the recurring nightmare that I used to have as a kid (a red car very much like a Maruti would drop me off at this humongous factory....that's how the nightmare would begin) but sometimes I have been known to have fallen asleep on the lawns dreaming about eating a salad at the school cafeteria. Believe it or not I have woken up and headed straight for the cafe and eaten a salad. Only while consuming the salad I realise with a sense of astonishment that that is exactly what I'd done five minutes ago in a ridiculously boring dream! Talk about deja vu....(chortle-chortle).
Every now and again though I go through a patch when I dream interesting dreams. The nightmares come and go. I don't really remember dreaming explicitly happy dreams. If I do dream happy dreams I don't remember them until later on in the day when something tickles my memory cells and I glint and say "oh, that was nice." (The "that" referring to the dream in question). Sometimes I wake up feeling less dense and heavy and ponderous - and so I assume that I had less stifling dreams. Just recently I had an interesting dream even though it was slightly strange because there were no people in it. But what was contained in the dream was so real and vivid that I woke up looking for it!
I must say that I'm not given to being pessimistic and gloomy - not all the time at any rate. But this year gives me the shivers for some reason, and I'm not so sure why. There are some good things that have happened surely - but it's not about good or bad. There's just something that is peculiar about this year. The whole year seems to be "not-real", strangely suspended in the middle of nowhere. It seems as though it can swing wildly and widely - this way or that. Or maybe that really is my imagination. I can't really see anything "great" coming of it - as long as there is no more negative excitement (as Pots put it...), I think I'd just sigh with relief. That's all.
End of post. Good luck to some who need it....
28 November 2008
25 November 2008
The Identity of Violence?
I finished reading Amartya Sen's book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny last week, and have (and had) been thinking about the issue of identity in relation to fundamentalism, sectarian violence, and also in relation to nationalism and the nation (and of course I like ruminating upon violence anyway). This is not really a review of Sen's book, but some musings related to his book and otherwise. But let me make some observations....
1. Sen's book is wonderfully woven together, and his major thesis is how advocacy of a single identity – including but by no means limited to religious identity – is employed to sometimes initiate and justify continuous instances of violence and how this unique and single identity receives special focus to the exclusion of all other identities that an individual may possess.
2. This advocacy for a “belligerent” identity is not just employed by the religious fundamentalists and the proponents of religious violence – but the curious thing, as Sen points out is that the same religious identity and the same religious component is employed by also those who effectively seek to fight religious extremism/violence/fundamentalism of different kinds – in this instance most specifically that of Islamic fundamentalism, and the content of the particular discourse ranges from either bashing up the said-religion or in trying to find a middle-ground, which consists of locating the “true” voice of the religion (Islam). But as Sen notes why use religion or the religious identity alone to fight against religious fundamentalism? Why harp on this singular identity based on religion? Why not instead concentrate on the many other identities that Muslims have apart from their Islamic faith based identity?
3. Sen also points out how social theories (and I had always imagined that social theories never really get to the public!), which do explicitly divide the world into divided categories of “us” and the “other/s” and claim to have “discovered” pre-existing social boundaries, and therefore the lines of contention and confrontation, have a particularly insalubrious effect in that these reductionist theories are welcomed and used by the extremists to further their own goals of promoting fundamentalism (case in point: Sen points out to the annoying and rather revolting theories of Samuel Huntington and not just his infamous Clash of Civilizations..., where he is considered by many from his own discipline to be at his confrontational best – but also see “Twenty-first Century America: Vulnerability, Religion, and National Identity” in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2004 – where he starts off by talking about extremist Muslims (and I don't really remember how they exactly enter the picture) but then out of nowhere all Muslims are suddenly viewed as harbouring hostile feelings and sentiments of envy and animosity towards the U.S because of the latter's wealth and economic progress).
This is a perfect example of social construction. The social categories are created, defined, and hardened through the said social theory; the social lines of separation are reified through the process, but then these categories, the boundaries, and the lines of confrontation are seen to have a reality of their own. The social theory and its proponents then use the said theory to defend the same categories that are created by the theory in the first place!
Sen's theory is simple and exceptionally elegant. Even if one were to go out and conduct an empirical study and find instances that were to confirm his theory or to locate instances where his theory did not hold good – that would be hardly as interesting or as elegant an operation as the theory itself. But more about this later.
4. The parts that I found particularly enlightening, fascinating, and indeed captivating were the threads that he pulled out of historical “storage spaces” in relation to how non-western societies – including India, The Middle-East, and China have contributed to the very foundations of the European enlightenment, and how the Eastern contributions to what is now known as western science and mathematics have been completely forgotten (scattered bits and pieces I have not been completely unaware of – yet the origins of the term sine was a particularly delightful example among many others in his book), and how “democracy”, if one starts with what it means (“public deliberation and reasoning”) instead of the unbroken linguistic concept or as certain practices related to the concept can be seen to have existed in different countries in the east (such as India and Japan), and how when Akbar was speaking of religious tolerance in India, across Europe heretics were being burned at the stake and The Inquisitions were not making for happy lives....
Sen does not flinch from giving the western world credit where it is due as he takes us through a historical journey tracing the travel of ideas from East to West – and not just spiritual ideas but fundamental ideas and concepts central to mathematics and the sciences, and he cites many more instances related to the same through chapters 3-7 of his book. Yet he does so in an extremely well-balanced, matter-of-fact, and inoffensive way – even when he points out to the complete and utter ignorance of some of the British colonial ideas regarding the Indians or to the more recent instance of provincialism contained in the “blaring” of U.S Lieutenant General William Boykin) – a far cry from the rather belligerent tone adopted by many post-colonial scholars or subaltern study specialists.
5. The above pointer is used by Sen to demonstrate in the main that Muslims have many other identities (mathematician, scholar, poet, artist, scientist...) so there is no reason for either Muslims themselves to view themselves through their Islamic faith based identity nor for the rest of the world to engage in the same although it may jolly well make sense for the extremists themselves to view themselves through this singular identity.
6. Another point that I personally found pertinent is that a secluded cultural community or one that is given the “freedom” to remain sequestered ends up by not providing its members with the freedom to choose (so much for practicing cultural relativism/celebrating multiculturalism!), while the chapter connecting poverty, globalization, identity, and violence was an illuminating and absorbing read.
7. Sen's focus is on the main that of the singularity of religious identity although he does touch upon other instances where a single identity is stressed – he briefly touches upon the clash between the Hutus and Tutsis, but in the main Sen provides a rubric, a general-enough social perspective wherein he decries the advocacy of a single identity, any single identity, given the fact that human beings are a composition of multiple identities. And of course he writes amazingly well, is stunningly lucid, never uses a jarogonized term, and is very witty in a wry and quiet way right from the priceless prologue.
So far so good. Now, it's time for my own musings I guess.
1. As elegant a perspective that it is – I am left wondering about some related and semi-related things. Theoretically it makes sense of course. Being viewed or viewing others in terms of a single identity ends up as being an extremely partial (and also untrue!) view of human beings - in most cases. Even in the simplest terms, an individual, as Erving Goffman said (four decades ago), has as many identities as the roles s/he plays. That identity can and should be seen in contextual terms, even in everyday encounters, has been talked about.
2. Social psychologists have been talking about the hierarchy of identities within our identity pyramids for a while now. The problem is that not many social psychologists write popular books, and many of the frameworks which start out by being interesting are waylaid by academicians who just end up making the focus of concern exceptionally narrow. A neat theoretical idea “introduced” by Sheldon Stryker (who was initially influenced by G.H. Mead’s work on identity) – which started out as neat anyway – was the notion of identity salience, which talked about the importance of taking into account the multiple identities of an individual and of looking into the salience/prominence of an identity depending upon the particular context. Salience was connected to the individual investment in the projection of a particular identity in a given context. In many ways the theory became much more complex than it needed to be (there were some layers that do make sense) and there was the in-built need to make it appear very scientific and it was therefore made messier and very smartly quantitative but in its bare bones this is how it stood. The problem also lay in the fact of how identity salience was measured and what it was used to study. And maybe this is why many social psychological studies (and I can think of at least a couple of really interesting and insightful ones), including the ones on identity never did become as important as they should have and could have been. Although some studies by Henri Tajfel in particular and also by John Turner looked into the relation between discrimination and identity and the construction of in-groups and out-groups based on identity.
Maybe indeed it does take somebody like Amartya Sen to redirect our attention to something that the social psychologists have been working on for years (!) and to explain it in a lucid and meaningful manner.
3. All this said, I somehow feel that Sen seems to refrain from commenting on the rapid and rather scary outbursts of religious intolerance that have been felt over India over the last three decades and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in its current form. Sen points out that India “has produced very few homegrown terrorists acting in the name of Islam” and for this Sen gives thanks to the “nature of Indian democratic politics, and to the wide acceptance in India of the idea, championed by Mahatma Gandhi that there are many identities other than religious ethnicity that are also relevant for a person’s self-understanding and for the religions between citizens of diverse backgrounds within the country” (168). So that explains why we don’t have homegrown Islamic terrorists but I don’t know whether it’s just me who’s left wondering – for he indeed does mention the recent instances of religious riots – how then does he explain the explicit advocacy of the Hindu identity by the Hindu fundamentalists or am I just picking at something that shouldn’t be picked at?
4. In conclusion: I’ll end off with one of my musings in relation to the highlighting of a particular identity: the reason it seems to me that the religious identity/ethnic identity is the specific identity that is invoked is because that this is the identity which becomes the most pertinent and prominent one given the specific context under consideration. And then again it seems to me that in every “social” movement, individuals are and have been categorized both by themselves and also by others by that primary identity, which the social movement is said to “represent” – be that the women’s/feminist movement, the civil rights movement, or even a particular environmental movement or a class-based movement. One cannot of course say that a terrorist movement is a social movement in the same sense but the issue of the primary/prominent identity (or if we want to call it the salient identity) does remain constant across all instances.
It’s not that I don’t think Sen has a point in saying that to invoke a single identity is insular – and more so by the very individuals intent on addressing/resolving the problem, and that they must at least refrain from picking on that one identity - yet the differences that are framed in any movement, (and particularly those that involve violence) are framed around a particular social identity (be that of race, caste, religion, sect, class). If that category and the differences seen to be “contained” within that category were not made explicit then the particular identity would not be invoked – for in some sense it is that particular social identity, which is bringing people together to form a collective identity. So this is true of “peaceful” social movements too. A single identity is resorted to as being the most prominent identity. The fight for certain rights is structured around this primary/prominent identity. However, once violence enters the picture – and systematic violence of any sort is engaged in between one identifiable social category and another then the question is how do so many others “buy” into the notion of a singular identity so much so that they are willing to engage in violence against the other group? I am not even sure that identity and identification with that single identity has much to do with it at this stage – not even by the ones who are engaged in violence. So I’m not really sure whether remembering that an individual is composed of more than just one identity would help curb widespread and intense ethnic/religious violence. There is much good in the sentiment per se, and I’m sure if we adopted a less insular view and stopped pegging people into single identity holes and desisted from stereotyping people based on a social identity much good would come of it otherwise – but I don’t know whether it can help address race/ethnic/religious/nationalistic conflicts and particularly violence….and the violence that we see today is of course not something that emanates out of nowhere. Where then does it come from?.......
I’ll have to end this right here with the above question.
There are many other thoughts that would like to be written and others that are yowling to be written about but the problem for the nonce is that I need to come up with a decent idea for a class that I’m taking on Nation and Nationalism. After all the class readings and the other assortment of stuff that I’ve been reading, skimming through, and whatever and what-not (in my usual way) – I’m still scratching my head to find a lucid, interconnected, and interesting idea. Maybe that’s because for the nth time I’m left thinking that the most important things have been said 97, 7799 times at least, which is not entirely disconnected from something else I read today.
P.S: Incidentally, this book by Amartya Sen has been my favourite one out of the whole pile of academic and related readings....
1. Sen's book is wonderfully woven together, and his major thesis is how advocacy of a single identity – including but by no means limited to religious identity – is employed to sometimes initiate and justify continuous instances of violence and how this unique and single identity receives special focus to the exclusion of all other identities that an individual may possess.
2. This advocacy for a “belligerent” identity is not just employed by the religious fundamentalists and the proponents of religious violence – but the curious thing, as Sen points out is that the same religious identity and the same religious component is employed by also those who effectively seek to fight religious extremism/violence/fundamentalism of different kinds – in this instance most specifically that of Islamic fundamentalism, and the content of the particular discourse ranges from either bashing up the said-religion or in trying to find a middle-ground, which consists of locating the “true” voice of the religion (Islam). But as Sen notes why use religion or the religious identity alone to fight against religious fundamentalism? Why harp on this singular identity based on religion? Why not instead concentrate on the many other identities that Muslims have apart from their Islamic faith based identity?
3. Sen also points out how social theories (and I had always imagined that social theories never really get to the public!), which do explicitly divide the world into divided categories of “us” and the “other/s” and claim to have “discovered” pre-existing social boundaries, and therefore the lines of contention and confrontation, have a particularly insalubrious effect in that these reductionist theories are welcomed and used by the extremists to further their own goals of promoting fundamentalism (case in point: Sen points out to the annoying and rather revolting theories of Samuel Huntington and not just his infamous Clash of Civilizations..., where he is considered by many from his own discipline to be at his confrontational best – but also see “Twenty-first Century America: Vulnerability, Religion, and National Identity” in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2004 – where he starts off by talking about extremist Muslims (and I don't really remember how they exactly enter the picture) but then out of nowhere all Muslims are suddenly viewed as harbouring hostile feelings and sentiments of envy and animosity towards the U.S because of the latter's wealth and economic progress).
This is a perfect example of social construction. The social categories are created, defined, and hardened through the said social theory; the social lines of separation are reified through the process, but then these categories, the boundaries, and the lines of confrontation are seen to have a reality of their own. The social theory and its proponents then use the said theory to defend the same categories that are created by the theory in the first place!
Sen's theory is simple and exceptionally elegant. Even if one were to go out and conduct an empirical study and find instances that were to confirm his theory or to locate instances where his theory did not hold good – that would be hardly as interesting or as elegant an operation as the theory itself. But more about this later.
4. The parts that I found particularly enlightening, fascinating, and indeed captivating were the threads that he pulled out of historical “storage spaces” in relation to how non-western societies – including India, The Middle-East, and China have contributed to the very foundations of the European enlightenment, and how the Eastern contributions to what is now known as western science and mathematics have been completely forgotten (scattered bits and pieces I have not been completely unaware of – yet the origins of the term sine was a particularly delightful example among many others in his book), and how “democracy”, if one starts with what it means (“public deliberation and reasoning”) instead of the unbroken linguistic concept or as certain practices related to the concept can be seen to have existed in different countries in the east (such as India and Japan), and how when Akbar was speaking of religious tolerance in India, across Europe heretics were being burned at the stake and The Inquisitions were not making for happy lives....
Sen does not flinch from giving the western world credit where it is due as he takes us through a historical journey tracing the travel of ideas from East to West – and not just spiritual ideas but fundamental ideas and concepts central to mathematics and the sciences, and he cites many more instances related to the same through chapters 3-7 of his book. Yet he does so in an extremely well-balanced, matter-of-fact, and inoffensive way – even when he points out to the complete and utter ignorance of some of the British colonial ideas regarding the Indians or to the more recent instance of provincialism contained in the “blaring” of U.S Lieutenant General William Boykin) – a far cry from the rather belligerent tone adopted by many post-colonial scholars or subaltern study specialists.
5. The above pointer is used by Sen to demonstrate in the main that Muslims have many other identities (mathematician, scholar, poet, artist, scientist...) so there is no reason for either Muslims themselves to view themselves through their Islamic faith based identity nor for the rest of the world to engage in the same although it may jolly well make sense for the extremists themselves to view themselves through this singular identity.
6. Another point that I personally found pertinent is that a secluded cultural community or one that is given the “freedom” to remain sequestered ends up by not providing its members with the freedom to choose (so much for practicing cultural relativism/celebrating multiculturalism!), while the chapter connecting poverty, globalization, identity, and violence was an illuminating and absorbing read.
7. Sen's focus is on the main that of the singularity of religious identity although he does touch upon other instances where a single identity is stressed – he briefly touches upon the clash between the Hutus and Tutsis, but in the main Sen provides a rubric, a general-enough social perspective wherein he decries the advocacy of a single identity, any single identity, given the fact that human beings are a composition of multiple identities. And of course he writes amazingly well, is stunningly lucid, never uses a jarogonized term, and is very witty in a wry and quiet way right from the priceless prologue.
So far so good. Now, it's time for my own musings I guess.
1. As elegant a perspective that it is – I am left wondering about some related and semi-related things. Theoretically it makes sense of course. Being viewed or viewing others in terms of a single identity ends up as being an extremely partial (and also untrue!) view of human beings - in most cases. Even in the simplest terms, an individual, as Erving Goffman said (four decades ago), has as many identities as the roles s/he plays. That identity can and should be seen in contextual terms, even in everyday encounters, has been talked about.
2. Social psychologists have been talking about the hierarchy of identities within our identity pyramids for a while now. The problem is that not many social psychologists write popular books, and many of the frameworks which start out by being interesting are waylaid by academicians who just end up making the focus of concern exceptionally narrow. A neat theoretical idea “introduced” by Sheldon Stryker (who was initially influenced by G.H. Mead’s work on identity) – which started out as neat anyway – was the notion of identity salience, which talked about the importance of taking into account the multiple identities of an individual and of looking into the salience/prominence of an identity depending upon the particular context. Salience was connected to the individual investment in the projection of a particular identity in a given context. In many ways the theory became much more complex than it needed to be (there were some layers that do make sense) and there was the in-built need to make it appear very scientific and it was therefore made messier and very smartly quantitative but in its bare bones this is how it stood. The problem also lay in the fact of how identity salience was measured and what it was used to study. And maybe this is why many social psychological studies (and I can think of at least a couple of really interesting and insightful ones), including the ones on identity never did become as important as they should have and could have been. Although some studies by Henri Tajfel in particular and also by John Turner looked into the relation between discrimination and identity and the construction of in-groups and out-groups based on identity.
Maybe indeed it does take somebody like Amartya Sen to redirect our attention to something that the social psychologists have been working on for years (!) and to explain it in a lucid and meaningful manner.
3. All this said, I somehow feel that Sen seems to refrain from commenting on the rapid and rather scary outbursts of religious intolerance that have been felt over India over the last three decades and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in its current form. Sen points out that India “has produced very few homegrown terrorists acting in the name of Islam” and for this Sen gives thanks to the “nature of Indian democratic politics, and to the wide acceptance in India of the idea, championed by Mahatma Gandhi that there are many identities other than religious ethnicity that are also relevant for a person’s self-understanding and for the religions between citizens of diverse backgrounds within the country” (168). So that explains why we don’t have homegrown Islamic terrorists but I don’t know whether it’s just me who’s left wondering – for he indeed does mention the recent instances of religious riots – how then does he explain the explicit advocacy of the Hindu identity by the Hindu fundamentalists or am I just picking at something that shouldn’t be picked at?
4. In conclusion: I’ll end off with one of my musings in relation to the highlighting of a particular identity: the reason it seems to me that the religious identity/ethnic identity is the specific identity that is invoked is because that this is the identity which becomes the most pertinent and prominent one given the specific context under consideration. And then again it seems to me that in every “social” movement, individuals are and have been categorized both by themselves and also by others by that primary identity, which the social movement is said to “represent” – be that the women’s/feminist movement, the civil rights movement, or even a particular environmental movement or a class-based movement. One cannot of course say that a terrorist movement is a social movement in the same sense but the issue of the primary/prominent identity (or if we want to call it the salient identity) does remain constant across all instances.
It’s not that I don’t think Sen has a point in saying that to invoke a single identity is insular – and more so by the very individuals intent on addressing/resolving the problem, and that they must at least refrain from picking on that one identity - yet the differences that are framed in any movement, (and particularly those that involve violence) are framed around a particular social identity (be that of race, caste, religion, sect, class). If that category and the differences seen to be “contained” within that category were not made explicit then the particular identity would not be invoked – for in some sense it is that particular social identity, which is bringing people together to form a collective identity. So this is true of “peaceful” social movements too. A single identity is resorted to as being the most prominent identity. The fight for certain rights is structured around this primary/prominent identity. However, once violence enters the picture – and systematic violence of any sort is engaged in between one identifiable social category and another then the question is how do so many others “buy” into the notion of a singular identity so much so that they are willing to engage in violence against the other group? I am not even sure that identity and identification with that single identity has much to do with it at this stage – not even by the ones who are engaged in violence. So I’m not really sure whether remembering that an individual is composed of more than just one identity would help curb widespread and intense ethnic/religious violence. There is much good in the sentiment per se, and I’m sure if we adopted a less insular view and stopped pegging people into single identity holes and desisted from stereotyping people based on a social identity much good would come of it otherwise – but I don’t know whether it can help address race/ethnic/religious/nationalistic conflicts and particularly violence….and the violence that we see today is of course not something that emanates out of nowhere. Where then does it come from?.......
I’ll have to end this right here with the above question.
There are many other thoughts that would like to be written and others that are yowling to be written about but the problem for the nonce is that I need to come up with a decent idea for a class that I’m taking on Nation and Nationalism. After all the class readings and the other assortment of stuff that I’ve been reading, skimming through, and whatever and what-not (in my usual way) – I’m still scratching my head to find a lucid, interconnected, and interesting idea. Maybe that’s because for the nth time I’m left thinking that the most important things have been said 97, 7799 times at least, which is not entirely disconnected from something else I read today.
P.S: Incidentally, this book by Amartya Sen has been my favourite one out of the whole pile of academic and related readings....
21 November 2008
Runners and a cross
I remembered another thing today - and so I'll put it up. It's been coming back every now and again to my head, and so maybe if I write it out here - it'll stop bothering me (you know something like being able to sing a song the whole way through - that way the tune doesn't keep playing in your head. 'Course the problem is that you have to know all the lyrics, and not just two annoying lines which just keep "singing" in your head over and over again!).
Many months ago Hubert - a very interesting friend (who has gone away to Bloomington) - had written on our whiteboard in the computer lab under the heading "Quote for the day": Shilpi says, "This lifetime I may learn Polish. Next lifetime I'll win the 100 metres Gold", in relation to one of our bizarre conversations that we were having. The second part of my "quote" is something that really irritates me.
Right until the time I was 15 - I never did run as fast as I could in any running race. I just wouldn't. I would take part every now and again, but would run very slowly, and that was that. I was petrified that if I did run as fast as I possibly could, even then I would still be the last one or somewhere near the last one to cross the finishing line, and so I never did run my fastest until I was in Class -X. Then in that last running race that we had I ran as fast as I could, and to my immense relief I beat some of the fastest runners in our class.
Now, for some bizarre reason, I'm quite sure that I could have been an Olympic Gold Medalist for India in the 100 metre sprint if I'd started training early enough. I'm not kidding. I've had this feeling for the last three years. Even if I'd started training seven years ago, I might have made it. I know I still run fast - but that's not the point. I don't know why I've been thinking about this over and over again. It's been playing like a stuck recorder in my head, and so I had to get it out.
I don't know why this is one "career choice" that I miss having missed. I can think of many things that I had dreamt of being - but at this age, I can't imagine why it's the missed chance of being a 100 metre sprinter that keeps coming back! If it were something like being an artist or a sketcher or an accomplished writer I would have understood the sentiment. But I can't figure this one out...
The other thought for my 33rd birthday has been:Jesus was nailed to the cross at 33.
I'll end this post here.
Many months ago Hubert - a very interesting friend (who has gone away to Bloomington) - had written on our whiteboard in the computer lab under the heading "Quote for the day": Shilpi says, "This lifetime I may learn Polish. Next lifetime I'll win the 100 metres Gold", in relation to one of our bizarre conversations that we were having. The second part of my "quote" is something that really irritates me.
Right until the time I was 15 - I never did run as fast as I could in any running race. I just wouldn't. I would take part every now and again, but would run very slowly, and that was that. I was petrified that if I did run as fast as I possibly could, even then I would still be the last one or somewhere near the last one to cross the finishing line, and so I never did run my fastest until I was in Class -X. Then in that last running race that we had I ran as fast as I could, and to my immense relief I beat some of the fastest runners in our class.
Now, for some bizarre reason, I'm quite sure that I could have been an Olympic Gold Medalist for India in the 100 metre sprint if I'd started training early enough. I'm not kidding. I've had this feeling for the last three years. Even if I'd started training seven years ago, I might have made it. I know I still run fast - but that's not the point. I don't know why I've been thinking about this over and over again. It's been playing like a stuck recorder in my head, and so I had to get it out.
I don't know why this is one "career choice" that I miss having missed. I can think of many things that I had dreamt of being - but at this age, I can't imagine why it's the missed chance of being a 100 metre sprinter that keeps coming back! If it were something like being an artist or a sketcher or an accomplished writer I would have understood the sentiment. But I can't figure this one out...
The other thought for my 33rd birthday has been:Jesus was nailed to the cross at 33.
I'll end this post here.
18 November 2008
My Master and a Subject
For my Master's at Purdue, my thesis which I rather hastily scrambled together (why it was hastily scrambled together is a different story), was titled “The Madman and the Mystic”. That I ended up doing this study was almost an “accident” and got done “by accident”. My initial idea was to explore creativity and genius. Creativity gets the short end of the stick within sociology (as does genius) and it's not too hard to uncover the reasons, although sociology does remain interested in exemplary leaders and social movement pioneers and in fact leaders of all sorts – even the demagogues, and it has a particular penchant for barmy cult leaders who have engaged in bloody and grisly acts of mayhem and murder (Charles Manson is one of the favourites) – not to mention tyrannical dictators, the more brutal, the better. ....I'm being a tad facetious here.
Creativity though, (and I remember Sulloway did do some work on creativity), and creative geniuses by extension do get sidelined though within sociology. Nothing funny or untrue about this. Creativity is a process which requires solitude and a great degree of "inwardness" and introspection, and probably comes across as too individualistic and too personal and too "elitist" a phenomenon to garner much serious interest, and so maybe that's the reason that sociology neglects it or lets "others" deal with the same. And so that was one of my reasons – to look into creativity because I didn't see why the creative geniuses should get left out of sociology. Of course then the question was creativity, creative genius and what?
The “natural” thing for me was to put in some aspect of “barminess” into the picture.
Why it “was” natural is rather interesting enough, and so I'll make a little observation. The choice of the 13 students who did go on to finish their Master's project would've been an interesting aspect to study in and of itself. Very many of us ended up choosing something deeply (almost embarassingly) personal and most of the students who did a qualitative study did something that they weren't "just" interested in but something that related to a very personal part of their Selves. (My original topic which I let go after pounding it out for a month and three days was of even more of a personal nature. I gave up on it because I was much too attached to the topic and knew that there was no hope of doing something that was balanced and sensible).
One of my friends did her Master's study on children of alcoholic parents; another friend did a study on the nature of memory in relation to participating in a social movement. I ended up studying schizophrenics and spiritual leaders (of course). I've noticed a similar trend in succeeding batches. There is one student who is doing a study on “Fat people”; another student finished dong a Master's thesis on the socialization of African-Americans students by their college student bodies; another very nice and interesting friend did a study on homosexuality among male Polish immigrants; I know of one annoying student who is doing a study on GLBT gatherings; yet another very glamorous and physically stunning British student did a study on (believe it or not) fashion parades in Paris. Finally, to end off with one last example - I also know of a very good friend who is studying violence against women during ethnic riots and the portrayal of violence in Indian literature.
Maybe my sample size is rather biased – for I seem to remember those studies where the personal aspect was so obvious that maybe it's just a matter of selective memory. Yet, whatever it is, in a way I think there are many students working within the social sciences who attempt to “objectively” and academically look at a problem, which is/was a part of themselves in a very obvious way. It's like studying rape if one has been raped or studying violence during war while one has been in the midst of it, or studying boot camps after one has been through some regimented training in some totalitarian institution or studying stigma in relation to some physical characteristic or handicap.....the list is endless.
In some ways - I'm wont to think – at least for some students, the academic poking and prodding at a personal issue helps them to create some emotional distance between themselves and the personal issue or gets them to thinking about something intellectually without emotion and sometimes even helps them to deal with/manage whatever that personal bag contains. Sometimes it helps one to understand the “thing”/ “aspect”/ “process” from different angles and in hopefully a more holistic way. For yet others it might be the knowledge that there are “others” out there like me (maybe there is a sense of companionship).
For yet others I think, studying sociology is simply a waste of time. I cannot and never will be able to see the sociological point of anyone studying fashion parades. But that’s an easy one. Not many would. What about studying fat admirers? Now what’s this all about? It’s studying men who find obese women physically attractive. Hmm. Of course you do bring in a fair bit of gender theory into it, and “ta-da”. How bizarre can things be!
For some students the same feature of the personal and the academic follow through during their Ph.D years as well. For some it shifts completely. For others there's somewhat of a reframing/restructuring/reconstructing if not a complete overhaul. Yet others find/discover other stuff that seem interesting, and others just get bored at the thought of dwelling on the same topic for yet another three straight years and just hurry out (or in) to find something else.
To return to the point regarding my Master's. During the first month, I was getting acquainted with the literature on creativity, and so I was quite sure that there was plenty of space for me to do “something” on creativity and mental health. I remember the first summer I went back home and was talking with a friend up on the terrace, and was rambling about what I was planning to do. My friend's reply was “creativity is linked to being slightly off-kilter, of course...” I nodded and then the conversation went on to other things. I found out later that there were quite a number of interesting studies and some extreme (as is usual) studies which looked into creativity and mental health – especially creativity and what is known as bi-polar disorder/manic-depression.
Some authors loudly attacked others who did not see a link. Other authors loudly protested against any connection between being bi-polar and creativity. One author claimed that the idea that there could be any connection between a deadly disease and creativity was outrageous since the two conditions were absolutely opposed to one another (Albert Rothenberg). One clinical psychologist, who in recent years, explicitly drew a connection between the two, is the very famous (and sort of infamous) Kay Redfield Jamison. She cooked up a veritable storm in the 80s with her theory that bi-polars were more creative than the “normals” (and guess what? Yes of course. She had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder). One of her books Touched by Fire has been cited till kingdom come – and quite frankly I wouldn't mind not hearing her name again. Very many others have critiqued her book till kingdom come saying the usual stuff: that she used a biased sample, that she didn't really have much evidence to carry her argument, that she was completely value-laden in the discussion of her results, and the unusual but not the unexpected: that she was a monster for now putting pressure on the poor folk who were bi-polar by making them feel that they were obliged to be creative! In any case what Jamison said wasn't entirely novel. Some folks had dabbled with similar perspectives – but Kay Redfield Jamison is the one who “made it”.
One study (published in 1992 in the American Journal of Psychotherapy) by Arnold Ludwig, I greatly enjoyed reading (and still remember!): he demonstrated and quite satisfactorily (I thought) that an overwhelming number of people who were bi-polar were to be found within the spaces of the creative arts and related fields where the said individuals had a certain (and greater than usual) degree of freedom in when and how and where and why they worked. Thus, it wasn't so much that creative people were bi-polar or that bi-polar people were creative but that “simply speaking” bi-polars were somehow aware that they weren't fit to work in routine 9-5 jobs, and so found jobs where they could choose their own working hours; or, to see it in funny terms – the bi-polars who did end up surviving and made it in the “real” world made sure that they didn't have 9-5 routine jobs within a tiny cubicle. Soon enough (so many years ago!) I was reading a tidy pile of books by some known and some middling but no-less interesting authors – Laing, and Sasz, Jung and Maslow, Huxley and Timothy Leary, William James,and Foucault, Walsh, Daniel Nettle, Hershman and Lieb, some Benedict and Bourginon, and a bit of Howard Gardner and others. I enjoyed reading most of the literature, and raced through entire books, some of which were outrageously funny (and most of them were actually not strictly sociological textbooks, although they did belong to the broad category of social science) even the halfway medical ones, and plodded through some articles as well. By and by, as enthralled as I was by the process of creativity – and as full as my head already had been with all the information and “knowledge” regarding at least two broad categories of mental illnesses – schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, I hit upon a couple of theses of my own.
1. It seemed that the writers and artists and composers who had been “barmy” were better able to deal with their condition/manage their condition for a certain period of time at any rate (till they dropped dead or walked out of the game of life on their own terms) in comparison to the scientists who had been afflicted by some strains of “barminess”. Yet the creative artists didn't do as well as the spiritual prophets.
2. The spiritual prophets seemed the ones who had been able to deal with their mental states with an unbelievable degree of grace, self-confidence, an absolutely shining "arrogance", and composure (among other things).
3. The spiritual prophets manifested symptoms that were alarmingly close to some of the most marked characteristics of schizophrenia, while the creative artists definitely sounded more manic-depressive than schizophrenic, while the scientists were difficult to peg (small sample size and well-documented instances were fewer for this category) – but seemed, tentatively speaking to display more schizophrenic traits than manic depressive traits.
4. Spiritual prophets wrote the least about their mental journeys (although they wrote volumes on their spiritual philosophy), scientists came a very close second, writers did engage in writing a fair bit, as did musical artists (in the form of letters and memoirs and personal essays); but the maximum number of memoirs/full-fledged books were written by the mad – both, schizophrenics and manic-depressives. The last category had produced an outstanding and bewildering collection of memoirs – some of them notable for no other reason other than the fact that the individual had gone barmy – that was his/her claim to fame; I have no idea “how well” such books did in the regular market.
I realised quickly that my first three theses although they made a great deal of intuitive sense (I still stand by my original hunch that I had for points 1, 2, and 3) – were impossible to study really. Maybe it's not impossible – but I didn't find any ways of really formulating a research study and getting it done. Afterall I couldn't talk with dead people, and the live ones were no good to me. Points 3 and 4 stuck to my head though, and the Masters got done in the end because I was taking a qualitative course that same semester, and I wrote a research paper using bits and pieces of ideas 3 and 4.
In retrospect I realise that I had great fun while writing up my Master's. There was also a tongue-in-the-cheek aspect about the whole study. One of the concluding paragraphs in my completed thesis reads,
"....what can be undeniably accepted is that prophets, saints and true charismatic, spiritual leaders (as defined in the literature review) are definitely creative in that they bring in new ways of understanding life. Also it can be accepted that they are hardly “dysfunctional” or “pathological” – insofar as they can negotiate between their inner insights and external reality. In this they do display the element of “creative self-awareness” which can be differentiated from the schizophrenic’s heightened sensitivity, hyper-reflexivity and keen awareness in that for the mystic these attributes are fully realized and fully manifest; the mystic is able to wield these and employ these in a manner which results in his full potential being realized within different spaces of social reality – even if these "spaces" relate to the philosophical, religious and cosmic dimension....the schizophrenic and the mystic thus while they have similar experiences and even insights, they have radically different means of dealing with the aberrant, the unusual, and the unlikely...."
I should most likely apologise for the above post. I had really wanted it to be more informative and now I realise that I've hardly made it clear as to what schizophrenia is all about or how it has been classified or how I made connections between charismatic spiritual leaders/mystics and schizophrenics or how the study actually got done. Some may wonder about my presumptuousness, my level and degree of absolute self-centredness or even wonder why I bothered doing the study in the first place. Yet others may wonder why I bothered talking about my Master's.
But it's not so much about being presumptuous or being self-obsessed or maybe it is. As I finally get around to going out and collecting my data for my Ph.D I was in the mood to ruminate on some aspects about my Master's and how I zoned in on a subject of my choice. And funnily enough, as I'm reluctantly nearing the end of a beautiful book by Amartya Sen, I'm reminded too of the number of ways that our multiple identities are not just formed but made manifest. For many students and researchers even the specific choice of subject/topic of research is an expression of their "identity" (for some it may be an entirely sub-conscious process, although I doubt it) and for others it's absolutely open and self-claimed (feminist scholars, holocaust/genocide scholars are some examples that immediately come to mind) - and which identity? Most likely the one that is the most salient. (I'm reminded of the game with which I started off my social psychology class a year ago: a game in which the students write 20 points to the question "Who am I?") Given the existence of multiple identities - I somehow feel that there is one identity (at least for some people) which emerges as the "primary identity". Sometimes there is a problem with that - but it really depends on what that primary identity is. Depending on what that primary identity is, I would argue that having a primary identity or a single identity may not be a problem.
I think I'll end this post for now. Some other day I'll write more on identity and identity salience, on choosing of research topics and what choices go out of the window and maybe I'll write something about choices as well.
P.S: I made an egregious mistake in not mentioning three of my professors without whom I could not have finished my Masters. My advisor Professor Eugene C. Jackson, who supported me and allowed me to go around hunting, exploring, and experimenting - and put up with my barminess; Professor Harry Potter who never seemed "too busy" for some long, rambling, and interesting conversations, and Professor Jack Spencer who had and has given me chances when I didn't think I deserved them.
21st November 2008
Creativity though, (and I remember Sulloway did do some work on creativity), and creative geniuses by extension do get sidelined though within sociology. Nothing funny or untrue about this. Creativity is a process which requires solitude and a great degree of "inwardness" and introspection, and probably comes across as too individualistic and too personal and too "elitist" a phenomenon to garner much serious interest, and so maybe that's the reason that sociology neglects it or lets "others" deal with the same. And so that was one of my reasons – to look into creativity because I didn't see why the creative geniuses should get left out of sociology. Of course then the question was creativity, creative genius and what?
The “natural” thing for me was to put in some aspect of “barminess” into the picture.
Why it “was” natural is rather interesting enough, and so I'll make a little observation. The choice of the 13 students who did go on to finish their Master's project would've been an interesting aspect to study in and of itself. Very many of us ended up choosing something deeply (almost embarassingly) personal and most of the students who did a qualitative study did something that they weren't "just" interested in but something that related to a very personal part of their Selves. (My original topic which I let go after pounding it out for a month and three days was of even more of a personal nature. I gave up on it because I was much too attached to the topic and knew that there was no hope of doing something that was balanced and sensible).
One of my friends did her Master's study on children of alcoholic parents; another friend did a study on the nature of memory in relation to participating in a social movement. I ended up studying schizophrenics and spiritual leaders (of course). I've noticed a similar trend in succeeding batches. There is one student who is doing a study on “Fat people”; another student finished dong a Master's thesis on the socialization of African-Americans students by their college student bodies; another very nice and interesting friend did a study on homosexuality among male Polish immigrants; I know of one annoying student who is doing a study on GLBT gatherings; yet another very glamorous and physically stunning British student did a study on (believe it or not) fashion parades in Paris. Finally, to end off with one last example - I also know of a very good friend who is studying violence against women during ethnic riots and the portrayal of violence in Indian literature.
Maybe my sample size is rather biased – for I seem to remember those studies where the personal aspect was so obvious that maybe it's just a matter of selective memory. Yet, whatever it is, in a way I think there are many students working within the social sciences who attempt to “objectively” and academically look at a problem, which is/was a part of themselves in a very obvious way. It's like studying rape if one has been raped or studying violence during war while one has been in the midst of it, or studying boot camps after one has been through some regimented training in some totalitarian institution or studying stigma in relation to some physical characteristic or handicap.....the list is endless.
In some ways - I'm wont to think – at least for some students, the academic poking and prodding at a personal issue helps them to create some emotional distance between themselves and the personal issue or gets them to thinking about something intellectually without emotion and sometimes even helps them to deal with/manage whatever that personal bag contains. Sometimes it helps one to understand the “thing”/ “aspect”/ “process” from different angles and in hopefully a more holistic way. For yet others it might be the knowledge that there are “others” out there like me (maybe there is a sense of companionship).
For yet others I think, studying sociology is simply a waste of time. I cannot and never will be able to see the sociological point of anyone studying fashion parades. But that’s an easy one. Not many would. What about studying fat admirers? Now what’s this all about? It’s studying men who find obese women physically attractive. Hmm. Of course you do bring in a fair bit of gender theory into it, and “ta-da”. How bizarre can things be!
For some students the same feature of the personal and the academic follow through during their Ph.D years as well. For some it shifts completely. For others there's somewhat of a reframing/restructuring/reconstructing if not a complete overhaul. Yet others find/discover other stuff that seem interesting, and others just get bored at the thought of dwelling on the same topic for yet another three straight years and just hurry out (or in) to find something else.
To return to the point regarding my Master's. During the first month, I was getting acquainted with the literature on creativity, and so I was quite sure that there was plenty of space for me to do “something” on creativity and mental health. I remember the first summer I went back home and was talking with a friend up on the terrace, and was rambling about what I was planning to do. My friend's reply was “creativity is linked to being slightly off-kilter, of course...” I nodded and then the conversation went on to other things. I found out later that there were quite a number of interesting studies and some extreme (as is usual) studies which looked into creativity and mental health – especially creativity and what is known as bi-polar disorder/manic-depression.
Some authors loudly attacked others who did not see a link. Other authors loudly protested against any connection between being bi-polar and creativity. One author claimed that the idea that there could be any connection between a deadly disease and creativity was outrageous since the two conditions were absolutely opposed to one another (Albert Rothenberg). One clinical psychologist, who in recent years, explicitly drew a connection between the two, is the very famous (and sort of infamous) Kay Redfield Jamison. She cooked up a veritable storm in the 80s with her theory that bi-polars were more creative than the “normals” (and guess what? Yes of course. She had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder). One of her books Touched by Fire has been cited till kingdom come – and quite frankly I wouldn't mind not hearing her name again. Very many others have critiqued her book till kingdom come saying the usual stuff: that she used a biased sample, that she didn't really have much evidence to carry her argument, that she was completely value-laden in the discussion of her results, and the unusual but not the unexpected: that she was a monster for now putting pressure on the poor folk who were bi-polar by making them feel that they were obliged to be creative! In any case what Jamison said wasn't entirely novel. Some folks had dabbled with similar perspectives – but Kay Redfield Jamison is the one who “made it”.
One study (published in 1992 in the American Journal of Psychotherapy) by Arnold Ludwig, I greatly enjoyed reading (and still remember!): he demonstrated and quite satisfactorily (I thought) that an overwhelming number of people who were bi-polar were to be found within the spaces of the creative arts and related fields where the said individuals had a certain (and greater than usual) degree of freedom in when and how and where and why they worked. Thus, it wasn't so much that creative people were bi-polar or that bi-polar people were creative but that “simply speaking” bi-polars were somehow aware that they weren't fit to work in routine 9-5 jobs, and so found jobs where they could choose their own working hours; or, to see it in funny terms – the bi-polars who did end up surviving and made it in the “real” world made sure that they didn't have 9-5 routine jobs within a tiny cubicle. Soon enough (so many years ago!) I was reading a tidy pile of books by some known and some middling but no-less interesting authors – Laing, and Sasz, Jung and Maslow, Huxley and Timothy Leary, William James,and Foucault, Walsh, Daniel Nettle, Hershman and Lieb, some Benedict and Bourginon, and a bit of Howard Gardner and others. I enjoyed reading most of the literature, and raced through entire books, some of which were outrageously funny (and most of them were actually not strictly sociological textbooks, although they did belong to the broad category of social science) even the halfway medical ones, and plodded through some articles as well. By and by, as enthralled as I was by the process of creativity – and as full as my head already had been with all the information and “knowledge” regarding at least two broad categories of mental illnesses – schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, I hit upon a couple of theses of my own.
1. It seemed that the writers and artists and composers who had been “barmy” were better able to deal with their condition/manage their condition for a certain period of time at any rate (till they dropped dead or walked out of the game of life on their own terms) in comparison to the scientists who had been afflicted by some strains of “barminess”. Yet the creative artists didn't do as well as the spiritual prophets.
2. The spiritual prophets seemed the ones who had been able to deal with their mental states with an unbelievable degree of grace, self-confidence, an absolutely shining "arrogance", and composure (among other things).
3. The spiritual prophets manifested symptoms that were alarmingly close to some of the most marked characteristics of schizophrenia, while the creative artists definitely sounded more manic-depressive than schizophrenic, while the scientists were difficult to peg (small sample size and well-documented instances were fewer for this category) – but seemed, tentatively speaking to display more schizophrenic traits than manic depressive traits.
4. Spiritual prophets wrote the least about their mental journeys (although they wrote volumes on their spiritual philosophy), scientists came a very close second, writers did engage in writing a fair bit, as did musical artists (in the form of letters and memoirs and personal essays); but the maximum number of memoirs/full-fledged books were written by the mad – both, schizophrenics and manic-depressives. The last category had produced an outstanding and bewildering collection of memoirs – some of them notable for no other reason other than the fact that the individual had gone barmy – that was his/her claim to fame; I have no idea “how well” such books did in the regular market.
I realised quickly that my first three theses although they made a great deal of intuitive sense (I still stand by my original hunch that I had for points 1, 2, and 3) – were impossible to study really. Maybe it's not impossible – but I didn't find any ways of really formulating a research study and getting it done. Afterall I couldn't talk with dead people, and the live ones were no good to me. Points 3 and 4 stuck to my head though, and the Masters got done in the end because I was taking a qualitative course that same semester, and I wrote a research paper using bits and pieces of ideas 3 and 4.
In retrospect I realise that I had great fun while writing up my Master's. There was also a tongue-in-the-cheek aspect about the whole study. One of the concluding paragraphs in my completed thesis reads,
"....what can be undeniably accepted is that prophets, saints and true charismatic, spiritual leaders (as defined in the literature review) are definitely creative in that they bring in new ways of understanding life. Also it can be accepted that they are hardly “dysfunctional” or “pathological” – insofar as they can negotiate between their inner insights and external reality. In this they do display the element of “creative self-awareness” which can be differentiated from the schizophrenic’s heightened sensitivity, hyper-reflexivity and keen awareness in that for the mystic these attributes are fully realized and fully manifest; the mystic is able to wield these and employ these in a manner which results in his full potential being realized within different spaces of social reality – even if these "spaces" relate to the philosophical, religious and cosmic dimension....the schizophrenic and the mystic thus while they have similar experiences and even insights, they have radically different means of dealing with the aberrant, the unusual, and the unlikely...."
I should most likely apologise for the above post. I had really wanted it to be more informative and now I realise that I've hardly made it clear as to what schizophrenia is all about or how it has been classified or how I made connections between charismatic spiritual leaders/mystics and schizophrenics or how the study actually got done. Some may wonder about my presumptuousness, my level and degree of absolute self-centredness or even wonder why I bothered doing the study in the first place. Yet others may wonder why I bothered talking about my Master's.
But it's not so much about being presumptuous or being self-obsessed or maybe it is. As I finally get around to going out and collecting my data for my Ph.D I was in the mood to ruminate on some aspects about my Master's and how I zoned in on a subject of my choice. And funnily enough, as I'm reluctantly nearing the end of a beautiful book by Amartya Sen, I'm reminded too of the number of ways that our multiple identities are not just formed but made manifest. For many students and researchers even the specific choice of subject/topic of research is an expression of their "identity" (for some it may be an entirely sub-conscious process, although I doubt it) and for others it's absolutely open and self-claimed (feminist scholars, holocaust/genocide scholars are some examples that immediately come to mind) - and which identity? Most likely the one that is the most salient. (I'm reminded of the game with which I started off my social psychology class a year ago: a game in which the students write 20 points to the question "Who am I?") Given the existence of multiple identities - I somehow feel that there is one identity (at least for some people) which emerges as the "primary identity". Sometimes there is a problem with that - but it really depends on what that primary identity is. Depending on what that primary identity is, I would argue that having a primary identity or a single identity may not be a problem.
I think I'll end this post for now. Some other day I'll write more on identity and identity salience, on choosing of research topics and what choices go out of the window and maybe I'll write something about choices as well.
P.S: I made an egregious mistake in not mentioning three of my professors without whom I could not have finished my Masters. My advisor Professor Eugene C. Jackson, who supported me and allowed me to go around hunting, exploring, and experimenting - and put up with my barminess; Professor Harry Potter who never seemed "too busy" for some long, rambling, and interesting conversations, and Professor Jack Spencer who had and has given me chances when I didn't think I deserved them.
21st November 2008
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