This book addresses the central problem in anthropological theory today: the paradox that humans are products of social discipline yet producers of remarkable improvisation. Synthesizing theoretical contributions by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu, Dorothy Holland and her co-authors examine the processes by which people are constituted as agents as well as subjects of culturally constructed, socially imposed worlds. Ethnographic illumination of this complex theoretical construction comes from vividly described fieldwork in vastly different microcultures: American college women "caught" in romance; patients in U.S. institutions of mental health care; members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and girls and women in patriarchal Hindu villages in central Nepal. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds offers a liberating yet tempered understanding of agency, as it shows how, despite the force of cultural and social traditions, people improvise, redescribe themselves, and re-create their cultural worlds.