The name is absent

CHAPTER XXIII

AREA III¹: INTERACTION BETWEEN SELF AND SOCIETY,
BETWEEN SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY -
ABORIGINAL IDENTITIES MODELS II AND III

Nobody ever comes round just to be friends,
to talk to us as if we were people instead of Aborigines
(Dianne Barwick, in Reay, 1964:25).

I always found that if you didn ^,t have a good boss,
actually you was nothing, an Aboriginal

(Betty Watson, in Gilbert, 1977:179).

23.1 Introduction

Berger (1971:96) asserts that every society contains a repertoire
2
of identities that is part of the 'objective knowledgeof its members .

As the individual is socialized ’’the objective reality, as defined

by society, is subjectively appropriated”. There is symmetry between           І
objective and subjective reality, objective and subjective identity.

It has been pointed out that for the Aboriginal person there
are possibilities other than that symmetry or asymmetry with particular
identities offered by the dominant group.

There is also the possibility not only of asymmetry, but of

rejection of the identity offered, with the structuring of an alternative

-_j ʒ
identity .

See p. 48 ff. above for an account of the theory underlying
investigations in Area III.

I
1

H
j

2

See page 48.

Merton’s (1968) essay ’’Social structure and Anomie” provides
a framework for understanding processes of adaptation where there
is a disjunction between the goals held out by society, and the means
to attain them.

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