RC Question 19 Explanation
DISCUSSION: The pre-contact Native Americans had a communal identity. Individuals were related to their tribe, their land, and the universe. (lines 15-19)
___________
- This is individualistic. A communal culture might instead change someone’s name when they join a new community.
- CORRECT. Lines 18 said that individuals were linked to the cosmos; a picture of a constellation fits with that. And this artifact is similar to those mentioned in the third paragraph.
- This doesn’t tell us if the new names are communal or individual. Different communities within Western culture have similar rituals too.
- This is individualistic. Each person is clearly identified.
- So? That may just mean they’ve lost track of the origins of the shield. This could be true of a shield in any society.
I feel like D is also consistent with the ideas about identity. Native American identity was “relational to a society” and by you not being allowed to have the same name as another in your community, your name choice is chosen in relation to the community.
While it’s true that Native American identity is described as relational to a society, the idea in D does not align with the notions of identity the passage attributes to pre-contact Native American cultures.
The passage emphasizes that identity was inclusive, “not merely individual”, and relational to a society (lines 16-18). It also highlights that personal history was dynamic (lines 28-31) and collaborative (beginning of last paragraph). People could rename themselves to reflect significant life events etc, so we know that names were not static or singular but could change over time.
So, from all of this, the reasonable inference is that identity was a fluid and expressive process. In contrast, D suggests a rigid, static approach to naming, where a name cannot be shared within a community.
There are many ways that identity can be relational to a society. The connection that you make is simply too broad/vague to be a reasonable inference we can make from the passage, but also directly contradicts with the characteristics of identity that were discussed and demonstrated in the passage. Hopefully that helps!