Just as with professional acting, so with other professions and social roles.
Norms and expectations attached to them may differ markedly from one socio-
cultural system to another. People who move between two systems, therefore,
feel that to present their self in everyday life they have to act differently,
adjusting to the stage directions of the place where the scene is set. Those who
are able to do so easily have been said to switch between two identities, while
those who are not may feel, and be perceived as, out of place in one of the
settings or in both.
Culture and personal identity
Psychologists would typically diagnose a person who displays a fragmented
identity as abnormal. Such a state, however, is not the same as the ability to
move from one stage to another and to perform with similar effects in front of
different audiences by acting differently. This is not necessarily pathological, but
can be evidence of bicultural competence. A simple example is the tactful tourist
who knows to cover her shoulders in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and her head in
the Jama Masjid in New Delhi. It is easy to avoid being offensive, but it takes
cultural knowledge to blend in and present the person you want to be in different
settings.
This has been overlooked for a long time, since psychological theories of
personal identity were predicated on universalist assumptions, although they
were developed in Western societies for Western people. Yet, Freud’s concept of
the superego and similar concepts derived thereof that relate social influence to
psychic development inevitably raises the question of socio-cultural components
of individual identity.
Research suggests, for instance, that Japanese American women—the very same
individuals—act more assertively in the US than in Japan. This is in keeping
with stereotypes and generalizations about the position of women in both
societies. People behave in different ways with different people without thereby
betraying their ‘true self’ or plunging into an identity crisis.
Since few psychologists subscribe to unmodulated genetic determinism of
individual development, culture occupies a place in personal identity theory. You
are born as a biological being, but what it means to be a white woman or a black
man or a ‘bastard’ you only learn in a society that calls one that. The variables