Making the Right Choice by Asha L. Abeyasekera

I illustrate how at first people's stories about who they are appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable, that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom. In this paper, I draw from the life-histories of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka to question the assumption that ‘modernity’ is producing similar kinds of selves in various parts of the world. People's narratives emphasising the freedom to choose demonstrate how being ‘modern’ is a deeply salient issue for ordinary people. At the same time, the anthropological literature on marriage and kinship has theorised that the ideal of companionate marriage is attendant to the emergence of the 'individualised self' wherein agency is the hallmark of modern identities. While in the past the South Asian person, characterised as having fluid permeable boundaries-a 'relational' self, has been contrasted with the autonomous indivisible person in Western social and psychological theory-the 'individual' self, more recent scholarship has shown that the same people may hold different senses of personhood, sometimes presenting the self as constituted by a network of relationships, and at other times stressing the self as a robustly bounded individual.

Understanding cross-cultural concepts of the ‘self’ and the ‘person’ and how they contribute to the formation of people's identity has been a rich source of inquiry within anthropology.

Making the Right Choice by Asha L. Abeyasekera