Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities: Social Categories, Social Identities, and Educational Participation

Chapter 2. Essentialism and Cultural Narratives: A Social-Marginality Perspective

Chapter 2 Essentialism and Cultural Narratives: A Social-Marginality Perspective Ramaswami Mahalingam U sing an interdisciplinary perspective, I propose a life-span developmental framework to study social marginality. This framework will help further our understanding of the unique developmental changes in the lives of children and youths from marginalized communities. Social marginalization is experienced at multiple levels, often because of the minority status of a group or the low social status of a majority group. For instance, in India and South Africa, the dominant groups (Brahmins and whites) are numeric minorities, but they have a disproportionate stake in power, which is maintained through various institutional mechanisms (for example, the institutionalization of slavery in the United States and the practice of untouchability in India). Cultural and institutional practices also play a critical role in the social marginalization of various groups (O’Connor, De Luca Frenández, and Girard, chapter 8, this volume). In India, apart from the practice of untouchability, cultural preference for sons results in the social marginalization of girls and, in extreme cases, the extinction of female children in the form of female feticide and female infanticide (Miller 1981). Immigration also heightens individuals’ awareness of their marginalized social status (Mahalingam 2006b). Irrespective of their status in their home country, for immigrants, displacement to a Western society creates a marginalized status and a self-awareness of the disparities in the cultural and economic resources of both their “home” and their host communities. How does the experience of being marginalized mediate cognizance of self and others? How can we incorporate power into our theories of human development? How does social marginality affect identity development ? How does it affect development of self? What is the role of 42 cultural narratives in articulating the complexities of marginalized experience ? What are the implications of a marginality perspective in cultural psychology for the study of minority children and youth? To answer these questions, we need a developmental perspective that is sensitive to power differences between social groups, in order to understand how marginalized experience produces certain embedded subjectivities at the intersections of race, class, gender, and caste. In this chapter, after introducing the key concepts, I delineate a social -marginality perspective that integrates various strands of research on essentialism, critical theory, and social cognition. Marginalized social members essentialize their identity in four different ways to negate their marginalized social status: internalization, resistance, disidentification , and transcendence. Using my quantitative as well as qualitative research with Dalits in India, I discuss the usefulness of a social-marginality perspective to study ethnic minorities. Finally, I explore the implications of the social-marginality perspective to study the academic achievement of marginalized social groups. Social Marginality E. Robert Park’s seminal work, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” (Park 1928), has stimulated interest in the concept of social marginality for several decades (Antonovsky 1956; Green 1947; Mahalingam 2006b; Stonequist 1935; Weisberger 1992; Ziller, Stark, and Pruden 1969). Park argued that marginalized group members are “cultural hybrids” who creatively integrate the dominant and marginalized cultures. According to Park, African Americans and immigrants are two groups that exemplify the notion of cultural hybrids. Park proposed that by studying the minds of marginal people, “We can best study the process of civilization and progress.” E. Everett Stonequist (1935) had tried to characterize hybrid personalities. According to Stonequist, ambivalence, a sense of inferiority, hypersensitiveness, and compensation reactions characterize hybrid personalities. Using German Jewry of the Wilhelmine era as an example, Adam Weisberger (1992) argued that marginalized group members cope with the pressures of cultural negotiations in four different ways: assimilation, return , poise, and transcendence. Assimilation refers to the integration of the dual cultural values, and return refers to the longing to go back to one’s roots. Poise refers to simultaneous rejection and acceptance of the dominant and marginalized cultures. Transcendence refers to a fourth way to overcome the oppositions of the two cultures. Although most of the sociological research on social marginality has been rich in its theoretical articulation, very few studies have empirically tested the tenets of social marginality outlined by Park (1928) or Stonequist (1935). Essentialism and Cultural Narratives 43 By contrast, several psychologists have examined how social marginality influences various psychological processes. Using a projective task, C. Robert Ziller, B. J. Stark, and Henry O. Pruden (1969) found that those who viewed themselves as marginalized were less dogmatic and more creative in their ability to integrate...