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Chapter 8 The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori Uquid Moments Anthropologists tend to think of people as living "in" culture or "in" history. In this chapter I shift perspective to reveal culture and history in a person. I highlight the ways in which Eduardo Mori, a Brazilian of Japanese descent, engages and transcends social facts. 1 In so doing, I seek to complicate our vision of the relation between persons and history and to suggest a fruitful approach to questions of identity. Eduardo Mori was born in Brazil toJapanese immigrants and grew up among Brazilians of many races and ethnicities. He now lives and works in Toyota City, an auto-manufacturing center near Nagoya, where I met him in late 1995. The combination of Japanese descent, Brazilian upbringing, and Japanese residence is a recipe for identity quandaries. I focus on Eduardo's doubts and deliberations about his ethnic affiliation and its meanings. From his vantage point, history presents itself as personal experience, grist for the mills of consciousness and action. My account is an example of person-centered ethnography, a corrective to anthropologists' longstanding tendency to fetishize sociological abstractions, the seductive top-down theories that are our most highly valued professional commodities. I introduced and illustrated personcentered ethnography in my discussion of Oscar Ueda in Chapter 2. In that chapter, a cautionary note from a psychological anthropologist to historians, I emphasized the hazards of inferring subjectivities from symbolic detritus. Here I grapple in a more sustained way with the general anthropological question of how, utilizing a double lens, one might conceive and explore the intricacies of identity-making. As I argued in Chapter 7, the need for a double perspective is especially compelling in studies of identity. Seen as collective phenomena, identities are categories ground out through sociohistorical processes. But it is wrong to imagine that society fills those categories with individuals who adopt them as personal identities. Person-centered ethnography The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori 165 reveals the engagement between social category and personal appropriation . It illuminates how people apprehend, reinterpret, and qualify categorical ascriptions; how they navigate among them; and how they sometimes invent new ways of seeing themselves and others. From afar, Eduardo Mori appears, like everyone else, to live in a world he did not make. Up close, we learn that Eduardo makes of the world his particular life. Shifting the focus to Eduardo Mori compensates for the sociocentric tilt in theory, but it raises new and perplexing issues, hard to formulate in the usual terms of the human sciences but equally hard to ignore. I refuse to reduce Eduardo Mori to a social product. But neither do I consider him a psychological product, a psychodynamically or cognitively driven automaton. During conversations with Eduardo, I was struck by his critical, creative presence. Such idiosyncratic aliveness presents a challenge to deterministic social and psychological theories. I do not dismiss the search for explanatory social forces or mental operations-the pursuit is, in the last analysis, a matter of philosophical preference-but I do wish to underline the fluidities in Eduardo's reflections. They suggest to me that we should theorize people with caution, rendering forthrightly their moments of uncertainty and equivocation. The prominence of such moments in Eduardo's life, I believe, lends credibility to a consciousness model of the person that underscores the potential for self-transcendence. To put the matter baldly, I am suggesting that people have the ability to step outside their so-called culture and, in a manner of speaking, outside themselves. Such self-transcendence can, I suggest, be precipitated when there are sharp, distressing, and unexpected disjunctions between one's perceptions of oneself and others' perceptions, categorizations, and attributions-chronic situations facing Brazilian migrants to Japan. While I believe we can specify conditions such as these that seem propitious to self-transcendence, its actual occurrence and its results seem highly indeterminate. Unlike most models of the person, the consciousness model makes a space-a big space-for unexpected, significant discontinuities in identity. Eduardo's move from Brazil toJapan has an ironic counterpart in his tentative, fitful passage fromJapanese to Brazilian. The latter trajectory is what I term his identity path-his sequence ofidentifications with various national and ethnic categories.2 I believe that Eduardo's identity path could have followed a different course and that its future direction is uncertain. The unpredictability is a sign not of Eduardo's postmodern insubstantiality but of his gravitas. Eduardo occupies the liquid moments. Our...

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