Identity's Moments

The Self in Action and Interaction

By (author) Robert Perinbanayagam

Publication date:

12 October 2012

Length of book:

206 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739172407

The work is an examination of the role of language in the constitution of self and in the presentation of identity. Following the path laid out by George Herbert Mead, Kenneth Burke and Mikhail Bakhtin the work presents self, identity and meaning as ongoing accomplishments between human actors who participate in what may be termed the dramas of human relations. Human agents use language as symbolic actions with which they transform themselves and others, as well as places and things, clothing and money etc into meanings with which they conduct their lives.

Preface
Chapter 1: The Drama and the Dialectics of Identity
Chapter 2: The Relations of Identity
Chapter 3: TheScenes and Agencies of Identity
Chapter 4: Interaction and the Drama of Engagement (With E.Doyle McCarthy)
Chapter 5: The Meaning of Uncertainty and the Uncertainty of Meaning
Chapter 6: The Coinage of the Self: Page 211
Chapter 7: The Other in the Game: Interactional Processes in Mead and Wittgenstein

Early chapters make strong claims for language as the key to human communication . . . and Perinbanayagam delineates numerous ways language figures into social life and self. This appears to me as . . . [a] strength . . . of the book.