Individual’s Identity in a Cultural Context —the Investigation of Mutual Constitution Between Individual Identity and Culture Essay Example

When being asked about whom they are, people often started off by their names, and then will follow assertions such as “the son of my father”, or “a nice person who cares about others”. The statements of who they are, in fact, reflect the essence of individual’s identity, which is being mutually constituted with the context, or, in a broader sense, the culture that they are in, woven into the complex symbolic systems, social practices and engagements, and cultural artifacts. In this paper I will explain the relationship of mutual constitution between culture and individuals’ identities within that culture. More specifically, I will focus on the construction of individual identity in a specific cultural context. I will use the difference between Westernized individualistic culture and Eastern world collectivistic culture as an example to illustrate this topic.
So, what is an individual’s identity? To define identity in the context of this paper, I would first assume that identity and self are the same. Identity, or self, according to Leary, has five different definitions (2004). The first one related to the person, as one’s self refers to that person. The second one is about personality, which is, according to Tesser, “a collection of abilities, temperament, goals, values, preferences that distinguish one individual from another” (2002; as cited in Leary, 2004, p. 2). The third one is about the self-as-subject, which refers to psychological processes that underlie one’s self-awareness, or reflexive cognition. The fourth one is about the self-as-object, which refers to the perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, evaluations, and feelings people have about themselves. The last one regards it as the decision-maker, which is responsible of the regulation of people’s behavior. For the purpose of this paper, I integrate and adapt some of these definitions to best fit in the context of a cultural discussion and define individual’s self or identity as a collection of thoughts,