A - Holland, Dorothy et al. Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1998. (Chapters 1-3, 8, 13)

A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets store, are connected with fighting and victory. The presence of this medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then in fact when he is strong enough. As he fights he wins approval and advancement; as he refrains, he is disliked, ridiculed, shut out from favorable recognition. It is not surprising that his original belligerent tendencies and emotions are strengthened at the expense of others, and that his ideas turn to things connected with war. Only in this way can he become fully a recognized member of his group. Thus his mental habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his group.
(John Dewey 1966 [1916]: 37)

Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone in scratch wig, squarecuts, stock lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and shufflers... (my emphasis -- channeling Ray McDermott Joyce 1939: 51)

1. What are anthropologists to do with individual persons?
   1. A classical problem
      1. in the evolution of cognition and other intellectual abilities
         1. the "primitive mind" and its limitations
      2. in the production of particular types of persons
         1. personality (as product of culture)
         2. cognition and knowledge
         3. dealing with difficulties and change
      3. in the production of particular types of neurosis and disabilities
         1. from Malinowski on Freud
         2. to ...
         3. to poverty
   2. Classical answers
      1. Late culture and personality (Erickson, Henry
      2. The Parsonians
2. Psychological anthropologies (anthropologies of the psyche)
   1. Cognitive (about knowledge and perception): D'Andrade, Romney, etc. For example:
      1. color
      2. literacy (Goody 1968)
   2. Personality (about emotions and thinking): Mead, Wallace, Whiting, etc.
3. The anthropology of identity, the self, personhood and figured worlds
   2. Holland:

      In our developmental approach, thoughts and feelings, will and motivation are formed as the individual develops. The indivitual comes, in the recurrent contexts of social interaction, to personalize cultural resources, such as figured worlds, languages, and symbols, as means to organize and modify thoughts and emotions. These personalized cultural devices enable and become part of the person's "higher mental functions," to use Vygotsky's terms. (Holland 1998: 100)

4. Figuring worlds and the authoring of a life
   1. Inscribing a life in space and text (self)
   2. Telling the experiences of life with other people's languages (I)
      1. Merleau-Ponty on "The prose of the world"

         For a mode of speech to be understood, it must be a matter of course it must be generally accepted. This ultimately presupposes that a mode of speech has its analogue in other forms of speech based on the same pattern, But at the same time it should not be habitual to the point of becoming indistinguishable. It must still strike someone who hears it used, and its whole power of expression derives from its not being identical with its competitors.
             To express one is, therefore, a paradoxical enterprise, since it presupposes that there is a fund of kindred expressions already established. and thoroughly evident, and that from this fluid the form used should detach itself and remain new enough to arouse attention. (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 35)

5. Practice, from the point of view of the actor at the time of practice
6. Communities of practice and "learning" as incidental to movement through participatory fields
   1. not simply, from "peripheral" to "full"

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For more on my take on the fundamental issue see my blog entry for January 25, 2020 on "A warning to apprentice anthropologists: On 'Identity' in the New York Time"