Amanda Bruczkowska
It was a pretty, sunny day. Here, in Copenhagen, sun is a rare guest, so whenever it appears, it makes you happy and joyful. I was standing at a bus stop, listening to the radio, observing other people waiting for a bus. They were smiling and I was smiling too. I was enjoying the weather and the situation of being one of them - we were all happy, and we were all waiting for a bus. Then the bus came, I got in, showed my ticket, and I wanted to go ahead, but suddenly the bus driver asked me a question. It was a question that I did not learn on my Danish language course yet, so I had to say: "Undskyld, jeg kan ikke tale dansk", and immediately I felt like a stranger, a foreigner among Danes. I felt as if I had suddenly changed, in a few seconds I became a different person. Just because of one question asked by a driver.
Our self-identity has many dimensions and many levels. On a very deep level it can be defined as constant, stable and unchanging, but on the superficial level it is flexible and variable. When asked who you are, you usually answer by using some more or less general categories that describe your appurtenance to some group or class.
The deep level identity contains these appurtenances, which are obvious, essential and fundamental, like humanity, sex, to some extend nationality, etc. These features are more or less stable, at least some of them and: you can change your nationality and even your sex, but it would be rather hard to cease being a human being. But on the other hand there is also a large collection of temporary distinctive marks, which can change easily, for example: being a student, a tourist, being young or blond. Of course these two kinds - deep and superficial identities - establish continuity, a scale with extremes on both ends and mediate stages in the middle.
Thus there is the deep level and the superficial level distinction in our identity. But there also exists another phenomenon, which runs across this division. In a definite situation when we are suddenly forced to think of our identity and define who we are - we pick up a few features from a giant sack. We take them from the deep level collection as well as from the superficial one. What is the key of our choice? Here appears the issue of context. Our identity depends entirely on the context. It does not matter, what we have in our giant sack of possible identities - the most important is which of them we decide to use in a certain moment.
When I take a picture of the Little Mermaid I am a tourist; when I speak to an old man I am a young girl; when I speak to a child I am an adult; when I am apply for my CPR I am Polish; when I speak to a sociologist I am an ethnologist; when I get into a bus I am simply a passenger, but if a bus driver asks me something in Danish, I immediately pick up another feature from my sack, and I become a foreigner. Whatever I do, I always choose some elements of my identity and use them to build my provisional, temporal identity. The notion of permanent identity is artificial, it does not exist, or if it does, then only as a reservoir of possible features to be picked up when needed.
How is it connected with the theory of context?
The first association I had, was with the Gestalt theory and its figure-ground model (Tsur 2000). Figure-ground relationship can be very useful to understand and explain the phenomenon of flexing identity. The ground as a kind of context, and the figure as a kind of text, are exchangeable. According to the way we perceive a picture or a phenomenon, we can focus on a certain fact - by focusing on it we make it a figure, and at the same time we decide that the rest is the ground. Then we can switch and focus on another element, the one which has just been the ground, and change its role into the figure.
In his article Tsur gives four element model of figure-ground relationship: an element might become a figure with respect to some ground; a ground for the figure; a figure with no ground at all; or a ground alone, without any figure. This observation can be useful, because it shows in some differentiation and complexity - bigger than it was in the two-element figure-ground model. But even this four-element model seems to me to be a simplification. Normal, everyday life situations are much more complex, the text or figure contains many elements, as well as the context or ground.
Although I found figure-ground theory very interesting and convincing, I would rather treat it as an inspiring point of departure for discussion on text and context shifts. Its first defect, already mentioned above, is simplificatory and two-dimensional character of this theory, and as a result - lack of continuity: it contains only extremes, without the middle stages, an element may be the figure or the ground, but nothing between these two stages. The second fault, in my opinion, is that this theory neglects the problem of the source of figure-ground switches. It is necessary to have some kind of stimulus, without which such a shift is impossible. In my case it was the driver's question. And I think that this interference from outside is a very important element of the figure-ground situation. It seems to me that this situation is rather stable in itself, and that the big switch, which puts everything upside down, comes always from outside of this quite static situation.
A good reference to this situation is the text "Underlying Frameworks of Organisation" by Fredrik Barth (1959). Barth does not mention explicite the notion of context, but he clearly uses some categories like casts, territory and lineal descent groups, in the meaning that we would nowadays call context. For his predecessors, structural-functionalists, these three notions were definitely texts, so Barth's way of thinking was a true revolution. These three categories are none other that what I previously called elements of identity. They are some points that we can refer to, but we don't always need to refer to all of them. The situation itself determines, which of the features or appurtenances (to the land, to the cast etc) is at the moment the most important for us. Usually it depends on the level on which we want to differ from people that surround us or to show that we are of the same kind. We pick up our spatial or family origins or any other distinctive mark and we use it to create the effect that we want to attain. Context is connections as well as disconnections, by using these categories we show what something is and what it is not.
Of course, all these categories, elements of identity and others, are artificial analytical tools, made and used by anthropologists, but not existing in normal life. In normal life all of them are inseparable and hard to define. All these frameworks and boundaries have been created by theoretical analysis. It should always be borne in mind that we can not analyse culture without analytical tools, but it is also necessary to remember that they are only tools, not reality.
The third text I would like to refer to is not very closely connected with the issue of changes of identity in according to different contexts, but I decided to include it here, because it seemed to me very interesting and inspiriting. Written by Marilyn Strathern, it is entitled "Out of Context: The Persuasive Fiction of Anthropology" (1990). Marilyn Strathern describes characteristic features of Frazer's work - those, which were the main reason of him being criticised by other anthropologists: he was accused of putting things out of context. Frazer used to pick up some cultural facts from any time and place and put them in his evolution line of human development. He did not care about all the whole complex surrounding of the fact, and about its meaning among other notions of this particular culture. For the next decades anthropologists criticised him, and later did not even bother to criticise, because the thing was too obvious to be a point of discussion. The importance of setting things in their social context was gaining weight, and anthropologists were becoming more and more conscious of it.
But then new times came, bringing doubts and causing changes in our approach to the fieldwork, to our informants and to ourselves as observers. As Strathern puts it: "In short, that powerful modernist frame, the distinction between us and them which created the context for positioning the writer in relation to those he/she was describing, has become thoroughly discredited" (p. 111). In the highlight of this new situation we can't (and we do not really want to) say what exactly is the context that certain phenomena should be put into. "The postmodern mood is to make deliberate play with context" says Strathern. In this respect we can indeed be considered as to some extent closer to Frazer than to post-Malinowskian anthropology.
Such is, then, the situation in anthropology. But I would say that we can observe something very similar in everyday life as well. It is a kind of paradox: the contemporary world, globalised, mixed, and so small, with such weak boundaries, is even more heterogeneous then it used to be in times of imperialism. It could be compared to a big pot of soup with all kinds of ingredients inside: Indian skirts, rings with Jing-Jang symbol, French wine, Buddhist religion, Thai food, American films, Egyptians amulets etc. Zygmunt Bauman compared our condition with a situation of customers in a huge market place: we walk from one cultural-stall to another and we pick up any piece of any culture, just as we like. They are, of course, absolutely out of context, nobody cares about the meaning that they once had in their original culture. I do not really know if it is a lack of context or rather a big mess and mixture of many different contexts. One thing is obvious: in a contemporary world we can not expect to see a clear situation of a thing or phenomenon that can be put into its own context. There is no more such a thing as its own or its original context. We can not clearly differentiate texts from contexts, and one context from another. We can take anything and establish it as a text or a context, it depends on us, on our aims and our will. So here, again, we face this paradox: the world is fragmentarised more than ever and at the same time it is unified more than ever - and only the combination of these two elements can create this strange situation of a total context mess.
Things do not happen in context, but they are immediately put into some context by their observers. Context is secondary in relation to phenomena. And nowadays there are no strict rules that would impose what the choice of context we should put the phenomena into. We have a wide spectrum of possible contexts, and it all depends on our choice. We also have a much bigger choice of possible texts or events that are allowed and tolerated, than we used to have in the past. We are fated to live in a world of things taken out of context and put again into a new context. And to a great extent we are fated to do this recontextualization by ourselves.
Bibliography:
Barth, F. 1959
Underlying Frameworks of Organisation, in: Political Leadership Among Swat
Pathans, p. 13 - 30, London.
Strathern, M. 1990
Out of context: Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology, in: Marc Manganaro [ed.],
Modernist Anthropology. From Fieldwork to Text, p. 80 - 130, Princeton, New
Jersey.
Tsur, R. 2000
Metaphor and Figure-Ground Relationship: Comparisons from Poetry, Music, and
Visual Arts