We're all Onions

Donkey: Hey, what’s your problem, Shrek, what you got against the whole world anyway, huh?
Shrek: Look, I’m not the one with the problem, okay? It’s the world that seems to have a problem with *me! People take one look at me and go “Aargh! Help! Run! A big stupid ugly ogre!” They judge me before they even know me - that’s why I’m better off alone… *

Wenger talks about an identity being a “layering of the events of participation and reification” (p.151), which made me think of Shrek when he was describing himself to Princess Fiona so he would not be judged by what she assumed by only seeing his outer layer…

We are all “onions”, as it were, with the crisp outer veneer of thin skin that we show to the world. Wenger continues, “The experience of identity in practice is a way of being in a world” ( p. 151). We are constructed and defined by our layers of experience that we collect from our participation in the various communities and communities of practice as we move through life in this world. As I am Shrek-like in my articulation, I will borrow Wenger’s rich prose, “As we encounter our effects on the world and develop our relations with others, these layers build upon each other to produce our identity as a very complex interweaving of participative experience and reificative projections”(p. 151).

Who defines this identity? WE do. Each individual takes the collected experiences and finds meaning from participation, and WE construct who WE are. Identity is not a tangible that can be objectified. It is “the constant work of negotiating the self”. [My favorite line] “It is in this cascading interplay of participation and reification that our experience of life becomes one of identity, and indeed of human existence and consciousness” (p. 151).

What Shrek was really trying to explain by using the onion metaphor was Wenger’s trajectories. As Shrek was constantly re-inventing himself as he moved between life contexts— the royals, the nursery rhyme folk and his forest dwellers— he struggled to reconcile the “familiar, understandable, usable and negotiable” with the “foreign, opaque, unwieldy, and unproductive”(p. 155). In this case study, Shrek’s identity resided deep within self. Peeling the onion is where the metaphor breaks down, because as layers are removed, other layers are added with each engagement in practice.

The trajectories Shrek encountered on his journey forced him to re-negotiate who he appeared to be, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not-so-successfully. Sometimes he had to reach down deep in his layers and show the aspect of his identity that would affiliate him with the community that he was engaging in at the moment. Some identities we only construct if we are peripherally engaging with a community and its practice, and this identity may not become prominent. As Shrek was inbound to the royal community, he was a newcomer and his identity was invested in future participation with this culture as future husband to a princess and leader of the common folk. In his relationship with Fiona, his identity was also on an inbound trajectory as a loved-one and person who cares deeply about others (opposed to the Ogre identity of hatred of all and self).

On an insider trajectory with the fairy tale community, Shrek was constantly reinventing his identity, not resting on laurels as the needs changed and evolved for his participation in that group. Wenger postulates that new events, new demands, new inventions and new generations all create occasions for “renegotiating” one’s identity. New friends, such as
DONKEY, can also serve to shape the re-negotiation.

Shrek was even less a “peeling onion”, but a broker of sorts as he spanned boundaries between communities of practice while sustaining his identity. His confusion and lamentation about himself and where he belonged and how he should behave is very typical of the delicate balance that brokering individuals must sustain and examine while engaged in a boundary trajectory.

As the Shrek story line finally resolves in the third part of the trilogy about finding self, making life journeys and the like, Wenger’s trajectory theme can be evoked one more time to include the outbound track. The way out of a community of practice “involves developing new relationships, finding different positions with respect to the new community, and seeing the world and oneself in new ways” (p. 155).

If you have seen all the movies in the Shrek trilogy you have witnessed Wenger’s notion that the temporal quality of identity is neither merely individual nor simply linear. “The past, the present and the future are not in a simple straight line, but embodied in interlocked trajectories” (p. 156) . Socially, across multiple contexts the trajectories are shaped by the effort of living and finding meaning. Past, present and future all serve equally in real time to contribute layers of identity. Therefore, although most tales like Shrek’s and Fiona’s end happily ever after, according to Wenger, the identities possessed at the conclusion of the last movie are fleeting and could set the stage for many, many more sequels….