ABSTRACT
Postcolonial anthropological scholarship, engaged with understanding the social through subjective and reflexive perspectives, interprets identities as constructed in response to historically constructed power fields, and thus neither essentialized nor frozen in time and space (Bayart 2005; Chomsky 1998; Moore 1994; Anderson 1991). Concepts such as “nations,” “ethnicity,” “ethnie,” “race,” “caste,” “gender” and also “self ” and “other” are understood as politically informed and historically situated terms that have no out-of-context reality. Answers to questions such as “What am I?” and “Who am I?” emerge out of a contested relationship between inner subjectivity and the effectiveness of external controls. Humans do not appear in the social world as metaphorically unclothed: they are socially constructed into bodies. Socially perceived bodies are coded to present a visual and cognitive imagery that corroborates hierarchy, yet the correspondences between social expectations and inner realizations are less than perfect. The more dynamic and fluid the social situation, the more the likelihood of successful contestations of identity that in turn lead to social movements and protests that attempt to change the normative pattern of these codes, though with varying success.
