Self-Construction in a Nightly Gathering of Culture and Person: Rendezvous or Conflict?

Abstract

Psychology has provided a variety of ways to conceptualize the relation between culture and person. In order to study the ‘work of culture’ in the person, or, as I prefer to say, the person’s ‘work on culture’, the vantage point for a psychological analysis is necessarily the person’s experiential world. According to the cultural psychologist Boesch, the person’s experiential world—the fantasmicsystem—is guided by cultural suggestions: myths. Fantasms are understood as personal, and thus novel transformations of myths. In this commentary, I interpret the four Samoan dreams presented by Mageo (2002) in two ways. First, they are examples of personally constructed fantasms, guided by a variety of conflicting and opposing cultural myths in a postcolonial world. These dreams, however, can also be understood as accounts of a multivoiced, conflicting (and thus non-dialogical in the strict sense of the term) self, which is far from integrating heterogeneous voices of the traditional and colonial past and postcolonial present. Thus, the dreams are not a peaceful dialogue between person and culture—a nightly rendezvous—but rather represent the person’s struggle and fight for selfhood and identity. Mageo provides convincing empirical evidence for the assumption that change in historical times is experienced on a personal level—in the person’s self- and identity-formation. Her idiographic analysis is an important step in finding general laws—nomoi—that are applicable to human beings rather than to variables.