CULTURE, PERSONALITY, AND THE MULTIPLICITY OF IDENTITY - EVIDENCE FROM NORTH-AFRICAN LIFE NARRATIVES

This article investigates identity in two autobiographies and two life -history interviews from North Africa. The autobiographies show, the c entrality of ''key'' self-representational symbols which the authors s electively draw from their cultural lexicon but invest with idiosyncra tic affective meanings. The Life narratives show, how the ''structured ambiguity'' of self-symbols allow them to be reconfigured to articula te contrasting identities, amend which cite narrators shift. Generativ e models of musical cognition describe crucial features of this multip licity. Against both modernist and postmodernist views of culture and self, narrative data argue for a distributed model of culture and for a theory multiple identities integrated by ''key'' cultural symbols.