This book brings a breath of fresh air into the otherwise unimaginative social discourse on 'social identity' that reigns in anthropology and psychology in our time. The perspective outlined in the book is a practice theory; practice conceived not merely as what human beings do, but also what they imagine in conjunction with doing. The authors restore the centrality of personal positioning in the contruction of cultural worlds, and bring anthropologists and psychologists together after their long intellectual separation.

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds is a work of keen intelligence and originality, carefully and clearly written. The authors make an impressive argument about the way in which agency and structure are tangled up in each other, and provide a specific guide to sorting out their various skeins. An essential book for contemporary anthropological theory.

Inventive and interdisciplinary...an excellent volume that deserves a wide readership and will be of considerable interest to a number of psychology's researchers, theorists, practitioners, students, and subdisciplines.

(A) clear and informative account of how people reshape their sense of self, negotiate their cultural or "figured" world, and rebel against social norms The ethnographic examples include the efforts of undergraduate women to navigate the world of romance; the contested plights of women, especially lower-caste women in Nepal; creating an Alcoholics Anonymous identity by telling the right sort of narrative about one's life; the struggles to survive of persons suffering from mental disorders...Recommended at all levels.