Development of Personal and Cultural Identities

Abstract

This chapter is about dualisms: dualisms in general, and, more particularly, about those dichotomies of thought that set selves apart from society, and conceptually isolate individuals from their communities. Because these familiar cleavages between persons and collectives can only be understood in the context of centuries’ worth of commitments to substance dualisms more generally, the chapter begins with an introductory detour through earlier crash‐sites of contested claims about the alleged vices and virtues of dualistic thought more generally. It is obviously not enough, however, to simply document and bemoan the isolationist tactics common to most anthropologies, psychologies, and sociologies, as each (with its own unique and nonoverlapping units of analysis) continues to pass one another like proverbial ships in the night. Rather, it is argued, a promising first step out of this doctrinaire dilemma gets its footing by treading on common concepts that already exist at the margins of those paradigms governing such usual disciplinary divides. The concepts of personal and cultural continuity are offered up as provisional examples of such shared constructs, and are enlisted in the service in a post‐Durkheimian account of differential suicide rates in Indigenous and non‐Indigenous cultures.

On stories, conceptual space, and physical place: Considering the function and features of stories throughout the narrative ecology

“…Narrative identity affords the author with a sense of self-continuity through time and across contexts (e.g., Dunlop, 2015;McAdams, 2013). We contend that continuity possess es the rare characteristic of being a 'satellite' concept (Chandler & Dunlop, 2015), one that carries relevance for stories throughout the narrative ecology. 3 Just as a definitional property of persons is that they possess an identity that persists through time, so too is it definitional of social relationships through whole cultural communities (e.g., Ashmore et al, 2004;Emery et al, 2021;Usborne & Taylor, 2010;Yampolsky et al, 2021).…”

“…A problem emerges, however, when we realize that a sense of sameness in change or, continuity, is required for us to remain committed to the promises of yesterday and the hopes of an as-yet unlived tomorrow. It is for this reason that self-continuity is an interpretive achievement rather than something to be assumed by default (Chandler & Dunlop, 2015;Chandler et al, 2003).…”

“…(e.g., Dunlop et al, 2018Dunlop et al, , 2020aDunlop et al, , 2021McLean, 2015). As we have written elsewhere (Chandler & Dunlop, 2015), few concepts possess such scope, range, and flexibility. This, we attribute in part to what Sarbin (1986) called the narrative principle, the notion that, "human beings think, perceive, imagine, and make moral choices according to narrative structures" (p. 8).…”

Sorting Through, and Sorting Out, Anthropomorphism in CSR

“…Several CSR scholars, however, have argued that the intuitive folk mind-body dualism theory is not directly demonstrated, highly interpretative, prematurely accepted, or just downright wrong (Chandler & Dunlop, 2015;Hodge, 2008;Hodge & Sousa, 2018b;Horst, 2016;Lindeman, Pyysiäinen, & Saariluoma, 2002;Nikkel, 2015Nikkel, , 2018Rottman & Kelemen, 2011). One of the reasons I propose underlies these experimental findings is that the folk, ceteris paribus, are far more interested in the mental lives of others than they are in the mundane bodily states and functions of others.…”