Читать книгу The Sociology of Identity - Wayne H. Brekhus - Страница 10

Identity is a central component of social life. It is the basic cognitive mechanism that people use to sort themselves, individually and collectively (Jenkins 2014). It helps us to develop a sense of who we are, how we relate to others, and how we make sense of the world. It is used to confer status and to mark stigma—in a word, to establish social positioning (Campion 2019).

Identities are socially and culturally constructed and are negotiated in complex, multidimensional ways. Their complexity is tied to cognitive and interactional dimensions of sociocultural privilege and marginalization. Multidimensional identities are constructed in both collective and individual forms, and privilege and marginalization are also negotiated both collectively and individually. Performing and defining the authenticity of one’s identity, emphasizing the multiple dimensions of one’s self or category, and shifting identities in a mobile fashion across space and time are just some of the ways in which complex identities are negotiated.

This book will orient readers to sociological approaches to understanding social identity, placing particular emphasis on concepts and ideas that arise from the sociological study of identity. While there has been much literature on self-identity from psychological, social psychological, and developmental perspectives, and while studies concerning the self, the social role, and the status of individuals have been ongoing, this book emphasizes identity as an inherently social phenomenon. The primary focus here is on the sociology of social identities rather than on the psychology of the self or on the experimental psychology and social psychology of self-identities. I will introduce and synthesize cultural, qualitative, and interactionist sociological approaches to the topic, emphasizing the complex social and intersectional nature of identities. The book is organized both around social influences on multidimensional self-identities and around collective identities of social forms other than individuals. In advancing a social and sociological concept of identity, I will highlight new and emerging notions of identity, while also calling attention to the foundational roots of more recent developments.

What is the nature of the self? How do we negotiate multiple identities? Is identity achieved or ascribed, self-appointed or other-defined? How do we construct boundaries of inclusion and exclusion through identity? How do power and privilege, oppression and stigma factor into identity? How do we negotiate multiple identities? How do identities shift from one setting to another? What is the role of place in constructing identity? How do cultural categories and patterns of cognitive attention and inattention shape identities? How is identity influenced by and managed through new technologies? How is identity mobile and fluid in a fast-paced, globalizing, multidimensional world? How do ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism affect self-identity and collective identities? These are some of the questions that the present book will explore.

As a sociological account, the interactional accomplishment of identity in response to social settings and to cultural influences will be a significant focus. Identity is fluid, and it is negotiated, accomplished, and reaccomplished in social environments and cultural settings. Rather than focusing on it as something static and essential, I will place an emphasis here on the symbolic interactionist idea that identity develops through our relational interactions with others. With their notion of “doing difference,” West and Fenstermaker (1995) advance an understanding of difference as an ongoing interactional accomplishment. They build on West and Zimmerman’s (1987) conceptualization of gender as a routine, methodical, and ongoing accomplishment achieved through perceptual, interactional, and micro-political activities, to argue that, as organizing categories of social difference, gender, race, and class are all interactional accomplishments as well as comparable mechanisms for producing social inequality. West and Fenstermaker focus on race, class, and gender, but their approach is broadly relevant to categories of social difference. A sociological conception of identity is informed both by an interest in the social accomplishment of difference and identity and by a concern with how the accomplishment of difference (and of sameness) plays into the politics of exclusion and inclusion and produces and reproduces social inequalities. Combining interactional understandings of doing difference with cognitive sociological understandings of how we negotiate authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility through the deployment and code-switching of marked (socially salient) and unmarked (socially taken-for-granted) attributes is a key element in this approach. The overall argument is that identities are socially created and negotiated (1) by performing, constructing, and navigating authenticity; (2) by balancing multiple attributes of privilege and marginalization; and (3) by deploying identity in a mobile, flexible, and fluid fashion across space and time. Identity is a strategic resource for negotiating boundaries and for managing power relations at both the individual and the collective level.

The material is organized as follows.

In chapter 1 I introduce and discuss major sociological traditions in the study of social identity. These traditions are symbolic interactionism, Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, Bourdieu’s theory of dispositional habits, modernity and postmodernity traditions, feminist standpoint theories such as intersectional analyses, and cultural cognitive symbolic boundaries traditions. Introducing these multiple approaches will serve to demonstrate the scope of theoretical research that explores the social and cultural dimensions of identities and to show how these traditions complement one another in painting a picture of the dynamic social character of identities. At the same time, these very traditions constitute a range of approaches that can inform one another and enhance our conceptual and empirical understanding of the sociology of identities. The various approaches presented in chapter 1 can be brought into greater overlap and dialogue with one another to explicate our understanding of social identities as collective, complex, and multidimensional; and the unifying themes of authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility cut across the variety of traditions.

In chapter 2 I look beyond the individual, to discuss the many collective forms that identity takes. Identity is constructed not only in individuals but in collective social forms as well. Nations, communities, social movements, subcultures, families, generations, professions, and organizations form and build identities and have identities attributed to them by others. This chapter emphasizes several forms of collective identity. Examples include national identities, subcultural identities, social movement identities, city identities, neighborhood identities, organizational identities, and ethnic and racial category identities. These examples will highlight non-individual ways in which we construct identity. Key concepts discussed in the chapter will be collective identity, the identity of collective social forms, imagined communities, social movement identity, organizational identity, place identity, and communities of belonging.

Chapter 3 looks at identity boundary work and negotiations of authenticity. Performing and defining the authentication of one’s identity are two of the ways in which we erect boundaries of inclusion and exclusion and boundaries of belonging and not belonging. Analyzing the authenticity of identity across a range of contexts and across different levels of analysis highlights ongoing issues of boundary building and maintenance. The chapter will explore authenticity, authenticity disputes, symbolic belonging, and inclusion and exclusion work across a range of identity contexts, demonstrating that collective and individual performances of authenticity are an important part of identity boundary maintenance and exclusion. Key concepts addressed are identity authenticity, self-authenticity, “false” and “true” selves, group authenticity, negotiating identity, subcultural capital, identity disputes, contested identities, ethnic fraud, and ethnic authenticity.

How do we negotiate multiple identities? How do power, privilege, and marginality intersect and shape the presentation of identity and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion? In chapter 4 I will focus on the multidimensionality and intersectionality of self-identities and collective identities. Intersectional analysis in the sociology of identity draws on foundational traditions in feminist standpoint theories (e.g. Smith 1987; Crenshaw 1991; King 1988; Hill Collins 2009) as well as on “social mindscape” cognitive sociological traditions (see Zerubavel 1997; Brekhus 2007), which in turn explore Simmel’s (1969) interest in webs of intersecting identity affiliations and multiple standpoints. While social interactionist perspectives emphasize the social nature of identity by locating it within the social context, social standpoint intersectional perspectives add to our understanding of the social nature of identity by introducing social power and social location. Social location refers to the position where the demographic and social characteristics of a person, a social group, or a community place them within a status hierarchy. Our social selves are composed of competing group and demographic attributes, which correspond to different forms of politics of inclusion and exclusion and to various degrees of privilege and stigma. Modern identity scholarship is increasingly interested in the multidimensional character of identities, especially as this multidimensionality relates to social inequalities. Chapter 4 will highlight this property of identity and the negotiation between unmarked normative privilege and marked, accented marginality in identities, examining the multiple influences on identities and the interactional presentations of multidimensionality. Key concepts featuring there will be multidimensionality, intersectionality, social standpoint, marked difference, accented particularization, non-inclusive universalization, unmarked privilege, and the interactional reproduction of social inequalities.

The fundamentally social nature of identity means that it is not only complex and multifaceted, as is modern social life itself; it is also fluid and shifting in a multicontextual world. Identity is a multidimensional resource deployed across a plurality of social contexts. In chapter 5 I will look at how multidimensional identities are mobile and transitory across time and space and are deployed as shifting resources by the multifaceted social actor. Identity is mobile and individuals can draw upon context and specific forms of cultural capital, which are valued as identity currencies in some settings and devalued in other settings. The chapter highlights the strategic deployment of identity across time and space, emphasizing the mobile, fluid nature of multiple identities. The previous concepts of identity authenticity and multidimensionality, addressed in chapters 3 and 4, are here understood in relation to the ways in which we use time and space to organize authenticity and multidimensionality. Key concepts discussed here are identity mobility, fluidity, identity currencies, place-based identities, and temporal identities.

In the conclusion I focus on the relationships between identity authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility, discuss research that reflects on and elaborates on these relationships, and invite you, the reader, to examine your own identities and the social groups that forge them.