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susanstinsonThe individual is helpless without a cultural heritage to work on...Creation is a bending of form to one's will, not a manufacture of form ex nihilo.*
Anthropologist Edward Sapir, quoted by Esther Newton in "My Butch Career," from Margaret Mead Made Me Gay.
Esther Newton quotes this as part of an explanation of why she claims butch identity -- also, "...to paraphrase Stuart Hall, to claim an identity is to place oneself in a narrative of history."
I'm thinking about it right now as a way to talk about why I'm writing about Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, about eighteenth century New England Calvinists. I'm an inheritor of that cultural form, and it feels important (and pretty scary) to me to try to understand at least one story of what it has made in me, in my culture, and what I can make of it.
* ex nihilo means "out of nothing."
Anthropologist Edward Sapir, quoted by Esther Newton in "My Butch Career," from Margaret Mead Made Me Gay.
Esther Newton quotes this as part of an explanation of why she claims butch identity -- also, "...to paraphrase Stuart Hall, to claim an identity is to place oneself in a narrative of history."
I'm thinking about it right now as a way to talk about why I'm writing about Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, about eighteenth century New England Calvinists. I'm an inheritor of that cultural form, and it feels important (and pretty scary) to me to try to understand at least one story of what it has made in me, in my culture, and what I can make of it.
* ex nihilo means "out of nothing."