ABSTRACT
Western literatures have emphasized how identity is deeply embedded in social and cultural contexts (Adams, 2003, 2007; Lawler, 2008). Lawler (2008:8), for example, maintains that identity should be understood ‘not as belonging “within” the individual person, but as produced between persons and within social relations’. In his work Self and Social Change, Adams (2007) criticizes ‘extended reflexive modernists’ for their tendency to universalize the constitution of the self and its relation with social change, without considering the positioning of social groups and individuals relative to social structures. He (2003:224–5) maintains that ‘if reflexivity is a product of a particular culture, then clearly our knowledgeability is shaped and compromised by the ‘limits’ of that culture’. Adams (2007:163) concludes that ‘the self is constructed according to established patterns, set by the cultural norms, traditions and sanctions in which one’s self-development takes place’. What he tries to maintain is the continuity of patterns in terms of social practices that are lived out in the process of social change.
