on Identity

I think the isolation and refinement and (indeed) development of the ego along the lines of "I think therefore I am" where thinking is the condition and justification for being is also what is quintessentially Western.

I don't want you to think that I am making my comparisons on the basis of some emotional reaction, ie. "hurt feelings" -- a mode of reacting that is somehow separate from thinking... However, it seems that the polarisation of consciousness into EITHER 'thinking' OR 'reacting' can also be identified as quintessentially Western. (And this, in turn, links with the development of ego as the prime decision-making faculty that not only "decides" but also furnishes the basis for a sharply delineated identity that is separate from others.)

Conversely, weak identity, which renegotiates its position in every new situation is something that I -- rightly or wrongly -- identify with my African upbringing. This is not "I think therefore I am", but the reversal of this equation. It is, "I am, without a doubt, and therefore, sometimes I may think."

Identity is, in the latter case, something that is incipient, that emerges within a social situation and endures for as long as that social situation endures.

That is why the questions concerning fatalism (as per the responses to the post on my blog) are interesting but somehow seem to miss the point of what I was trying to say. Because the kind of fatalism I was describing was not, as I saw it, a feature of choice or of identity, but was rather much more linked to the principle of "I am therefore I think." In other words, the identity that comes into being is determined by fate, and not by an overt act of thinking (ie. "let me go and live in Africa, so that I may...." and "my justification for this is..."). Rather, the basis for thinking are the already existent modes and traditions of the community. (It does not seem overwhelmingly productive to speculate about the origins of that community and how it got its fatalism to begin with. At least this approach would be in danger of suggesting a false identification between original motives for colonial migration and the kinds of cultures that the migrants alighted upon and assimilated as their own.)

This seems to imply a union between mind and body (along with less of an emphasis on control over life) that historically precedes Freud's Discontents of Civilisation. The narrowing of the ego is what produces discontent in association with imperfect control over one's destiny (despite the sacrifices one has made for this, in conformity with the demands of "civilisation"). By contrast, "primitives" live in a less ego-developed state and are to that degree without neurosis as well as without presumption to control their environments.