Identity Construction of Roman Catholic Religious Sisters in the ...

sense of who she was. Initially, she narrated I-as Indian as an identity story when exploring
the macro-context of relatedness which was pushed to the background but in relation to
arranged marriages she took up a variability emphasising the need for integration of I-as
American born Indian who desires to reconcile the conflict of not being included in the
choice of whom to marry. In this case she integrated both I-as Indian/American toward
constructing identity. This kind of positioning reflects what Robertson (1995) calls
―glocalization‖ (cited in Hermans & Hermans-Konokpa, 2010, p.23): an instance of blending
two or more cultural values into a coherent construction of self and identity.
Generally there is a need to explore the multiple sites of identities constructed at the interface
of cultures (Bhatia, 2002; Bhatia & Ram, 2001; Hermans & Kempen, 1998; Lugones, 1994).
This facet is important to this study as it provides the framework for understanding how
Catholic religious sisters who live at the interface of cultures (African culture versus religious
culture) negotiate the different culture I-positions. Moreover, Hermans (2004) expresses that
―cultural actions and the construction of identities take place not in the ‗middle‘ of the
dwelling but in the contact zones between nations, peoples, and locales‖ (p.306).
4.13 The Self: Globalisation and Identity
Globalisation in terms of increased movement of goods, services, technology, ideas and
people has real social and economic consequences (Baylis & Smith, 2002; Held & McGrew,
1999; Manners, 2000) but above all it influences the process of identity construction both
within the individual and society at large (Hermans, 2004; Hermans & Hermans-Konokpa,
2010). The dialogical self describes that spatial and temporal process of positioning is neither
‗here‘ nor ‗there‘; thus the self‘s ‗I‘-positions are ―distributed in a spatial world‖ (Hermans,
2002, p.298). Like a traveller, the self located in a global world (post-modernity) takes a
variety of perspectives where some positions are opened and others closed off. The
121