Culture and Identity in a Muslim Society

Culture and Identity presents an alternative to the individualist vs. collectivist approach to identity. Unlike most psychological and anthropological studies of culture and self, it directly studies individuals, using study of lives-style interviews with young adults living in villages and small towns in southern Morocco. It analyses the life-narratives of two men and two women, building a theory of culture and identity that differs from prevailing psychological and anthropological models in important respects. In contrast to modernist theories of identity as unified, the life-narratives show individuals to articulate a small set of shifting identities. But in contrast to post-modern theories that claim people have a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of fluid identities, the narratives show that the identities are integrated by repeated use of culturally-specific self-symbols, metaphors, and story-plots.