Embeddedness/Embedded Identity

Defining Embedded Identity

Embedded identity assumes that we are derivative creatures. We are not self-made persons who pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Instead, we are the product of the stories, culture, and people that shape us. When Ernest Boyer was the head of the Carnegie Institute for Teaching he was asked the following: “What is the best predictor of success for students coming from lower-status home environments?” His answer was that researchers have found that SAT scores, school grades, and even letters of recommendation are not the primary predictors of success. What predicts success for a student from a socially challenged home is one basic ingredient: a mom, dad, brother, sister, friend, neighbor, coach, priest, teacher, someone who in every action toward that student says, “Come hell or high water, you will make it, and I will make sure you do.” The following story illustrates this: A dad from such a family while driving his son, the first in the extended family to attend college, to college, said, “Your task is to do better than us.” When the son was tired and wanted to stop studying, that statement rang in his head over and over again. When he completed his MA and PhD in 3 years, a friend asked, “How could you have done that?” For the first time, and not the last, the son answered, “I am my father's son.” As Boyer noted, our identities are embedded with the stories and people we know, and sometimes we are fortunate recipients of a life that was given to us by the life of another. Embedded identity is not an abstract academic idea; it lives in the heart of all of us for ill, at times, and, at others, for a good we have not earned. The notion of embedded identity is taken for granted by most people until it is disrupted and we find ourselves rootless, living within a sense of “existential homeless.”

Existential Homelessness

Understanding the power of embeddedness begins with reflection on its absence. It is unlikely that we think about our identity as embedded within a given set of narratives providing practical ground for understanding who we are until there is a challenge to our identity. The notion of existential homelessness can inflict the lives of the wealthy [Page 242]just as quickly as those with little. Existential homelessness is a loss of a sense of “why” for human life. Friedrich Nietzsche was often quoted that a person can bear any “how” if he or she has a “why.”

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