Post #3: Identity

            The assigned reading in the text by Holliday is about the different factors that go into determining someone’s identity and how much of a person’s identity is tied to how they speak or write. Looking at narratives is a way to demonstrate or determine someone’s identity. The reason why is because “when we speak or write, we always take a particular perspective on what the ‘world’ is like” (101). When we write our trajectory papers for this class we will be writing a type of narrative that will show a part of our identity. In my opinion, using a narrative to describe who we are makes sense since so much of who we are is because of the experiences that we have had in our lives. As the quote says, when people speak and write about their experiences, they demonstrate their personal view of the world. This perspective of the world includes factors such as what we believe to be “normal,” “acceptable,” or “real.” I agree that if another person was to listen to or read an account of someone’s experiences they would know the person to a certain extent but I don’t think that they would know their entire identity. A person’s identity is so much more than experiences and spoken words it is also how the person perceives and reacts to these experiences and conversations. People’s actions, how they think and interact, depends on the situation that they are in. There are behaviors that are considered appropriate for certain situations. For example, a person doesn’t act the same way during school and when they’re with their friends outside of school. According to Gee, these are called “Discourses.” “Discourses” are “socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting, in the right places at the right times with the right objects” (106).

            Chapter two by Hall describes the different understandings there are of cultural identity and the connection that it has to culture and language use. The author talks about how culture is treated as being separate from language and the idea that individuals can demonstrate their own culture but that it does not necessarily inhabit them. Individuals can reflect their own culture but don’t actually define culture themselves. Hall uses the idea of a cloak to create a metaphor about cultural identity. She describes cultural identity as being a cloak that people can put on or take off (32). I think that using a cloak to describe this complex concept of cultural identity is a good idea since it explains how people can either choose to show their own culture or not. Hall also talks about social identity in this chapter. She describes someone’s social identity, or their belongingness to a group, as having two different layers. The first layer of someone’s social identity is established when we are born, we are automatically members of several different social groups such as gender (male or female), race, religion, and socioeconomic status (low, middle, or high class). The second layer of a person’s social identity is determined by the individual since it “develops through our involvement in various activities of the social institutions that comprise our communities” (32). This is an interesting way to look at someone’s social identity. It didn’t even occur to me that some parts of our identity we don’t necessarily get to choose. But this doesn’t mean that someone’s social identity cannot change over time since that is what was described with a story in the article by Norton. In the story about Eva, who immigrated to Canada without speaking English, over time her conception of herself as an immigrant changed as she began seeing herself as a “multicultural citizen.”