Dorothy Holland – författare

The papers in this volume, a multidisciplinary collaboration of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, explore the ways in which cultural knowledge is organized and used in everyday language and understanding. Employing a variety of methods, which rely heavily on linguistic data, the authors offer analyses of domains of knowledge ranging across the physical, social, and psychological worlds, and reveal the importance of tacit, presupposed knowledge in the conduct of everyday life. The authors argue that cultural knowledge is organized in 'cultural models' - storylike chains of prototypical events that unfold in simplified worlds - and explore the nature and role of these models. They demonstrate that cultural knowledge may take either proposition-schematic or image-schematic form, each enabling the performance of different kinds of cognitive tasks. Metaphor and metonymy are shown to have special roles in the construction of cultural models. The authors also demonstrates that some widely applicable cultural models recur nested within other, more special-purpose models. Finally, it is shown that shared models play a critical role in thinking, allowing humans to master, remember, and use the vast amount of knowledge required in everyday life. This innovative collection will appeal to anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, philosophers, students of artificial intelligence, and other readers interested in the processes of everyday human understanding.

This landmark book addresses the central problem in anthropological theory today: the paradox that humans are products of social discipline yet producers of remarkable improvisation.Synthesizing theoretical contributions by Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Bourdieu, Holland and her co-authors examine the processes by which people are constituted as agents as well as subjects of culturally constructed, socially imposed worlds. They develop a theory of self-formation in which identities become the pivot between discipline and agency: turning from experiencing one's scripted social positions to making one's way into cultural worlds as a knowledgeable and committed participant. They emphasize throughout that "identities" are not static and coherent, but variable, multivocal and interactive.Ethnographic illumination of this complex theoretical construction comes from vividly described fieldwork in vastly different microcultures: American college women "caught" in romance; persons in U.S. institutions of mental health care; members of Alcoholics Anonymous groups; and girls and women in the patriarchal order of Hindu villages in central Nepal.Ultimately, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds offers a liberating yet tempered understanding of agency, for it shows how people, across the limits of cultural traditions and social forces of power and domination, improvise and find spaces to re-describe themselves, creating their cultural worlds anew.

Recently anthropology has turned to accounts of persons-in-history/history-in-persons, focusing on how individuals and groups as agents both fashion and are fashioned by social, political, and cultural discourses and practices. In this approach, power, agency, and history are made explicit as individuals and groups work to constitute themselves in relation to others and within and against sociopolitical and historical contexts.Contributors to this volume extend this emphasis, drawing upon their ethnographic research in Nepal to examine closely how selves, identities, and experience are produced in dialogical relationships through time in a multi-ethic nation-state and within a discourse of nationalism. The diversity of peoples, recent political transformations, and nation-building efforts make Nepal an especially rich locale to examine people's struggles to define and position themselves. But the authors move beyond geographical boundaries to more theoretical terrain to problematicize the ways in which people recreate or contest certain identities and positions. Various authors explore how people—positioned by gender, ethnicity, and locale—use cultural genres to produce aspects of identities and experiences; they examine how subjectivities, agencies and cultural worlds co-develop and are shaped through engagement with cultural forms; and they portray the appropriation of multiple voices for self and group formation. As such, this collection offers a richly textured and complex accounting of the mutual constitution of selves and society.