Abstract
This article encompasses an underlying notion of personal identities and processes of interaction, which distinguish essentialist identity from relational identity in contexts involving subjects, fields of possibilities, and cultural metamorphosis. It addresses the idea of the individual and her/his transformations: “I am who I want to be if I can be that person.” Any one of us could hypothetically have been someone else. The question of the reconstruction of individual identities is a vital aspect in the relationship between objective social conditions and what each person subjectively does with them, in terms of auto-construction. The complexity of this question reflects the idea of a cultural kaleidoscope, in which similar social conditions experienced by different individuals can produce differentiated identities. The title and structure of this text also seek to encompass the idea that in a personal life story, the subject lives between various spheres and sociocultural contexts, with a composite, mestizo, and superimposed or displaced identity, in each context. This occurs as the result of a cultural metamorphosis, which is constructed both by the individual as well as by heterogeneous influences between the context of the starting and finishing points at a given moment. This complex process of cultural metamorphosis—the fruit of interweaving subjective and objective forces—reveals a new dimension: the truly composite nature of personal identities.
Highlights
To better understand one of the key concepts of this text, that of cultural métissage, derived from the French and absorbed into the English language through the concept of mestizo, I begin with a short autobiographical account of my own scientific, professional, and cultural métissage
I am using the concept of métissage following Laplantine and Nouss (1997), who have dedicated themselves to the theme of “cultural métissage,” itself close to the concepts of Deleuze’s “rhizome” (1968/1994) and Amselle’s “connections,” the latter concept—in the latter author’s classic work Mestizo Logics (1998)—being based on electrical communications, to emphasize the open nature of cultures and detaching it from the biological connotations of hybridism
We understand that cultural métissage results from acculturation processes, in the sense of transformation, as referred to by Roger Bastide in his works on Afro-Brazilian cultures (1955, 1968/1979)
Summary
To better understand one of the key concepts of this text, that of cultural métissage, derived from the French and absorbed into the English language through the concept of mestizo (via Spanish), I begin with a short autobiographical account of my own scientific, professional, and cultural métissage. This is why I speak of education between schools and homes, and why I affirm that scholastic success and failure are constructed socially (Vieira, 1992): “Schools first have to seriously research the cultural categories of the local people before teaching the bourgeoisie knowledge that has little to do with the understanding of a mind that believes”
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