Identity's Moments: The Self in Action and Interaction

Robert Peribanayagam’s latest volume realizes his full potential as a mature scholar. The text spans the humanities in making sense of the manner that human beings come to terms with action in the world; and it is written with what Ortega y Gasset characterizes as ‘courteous clarity.’ This commitment to making the subtle idea as transparent as possible expands the potential readership for the book–one no longer needs to be a substantial scholar to come to terms with Peribanyagam’s ideas, and the ideas of those he references. Peribanayagam shows that he is not only the best sociological reader of Kenneth Burke to date, but quite possibly (and indeed for this reason) the best reader of Kenneth Burke thus far.

Early chapters make strong claims for language as the key to human communication . . . and Perinbanayagam delineates numerous ways language figures into social life and self. This appears to me as . . . [a] strength . . . of the book.