Читать книгу The Sociology of Identity - Wayne H. Brekhus - Страница 7

What exactly is identity? A precise definition of this term is hard to come by. No single formula adequately encompasses the range of ways in which the concept is used in the social sciences or in everyday life. Identity can be understood both as something that is relatively fixed and essential and as something malleable and fluid. It can be regarded as something deeply etched or as something that appears at the surface. The etymon of the term “identity” is the Latin pronoun idem, eadem, idem (“same”), which suggests that an important component of its meaning is a degree of sameness across a category that it conveys (see Jenkins 1996: 3; Lawler 2008: 2). At the same time identity also implies an individual’s uniqueness and difference from all others (Lawler 2008: 2). Tensions between sameness and difference illustrate the complexities of identity and require us to appreciate and understand the nuances in how identity is understood, assigned, claimed, enacted, and deployed. The contradiction between sameness and difference is often played out in identity–authenticity claims. When making claims of authenticity vis-à-vis an identity category, individuals often emphasize their similarity to other members of that category—ways in which they are, say, like other Italians, Texans, Christians, distance runners, alcoholics, vegetarians, gun owners, abuse survivors, or soldiers. Yet when they make claims of “self-authenticity” individuals often highlight their distinctiveness from others. In group identification, individuals often emphasize their similarities to other in-group members, while when it comes to self-identification they consider personal uniqueness a first priority.

One challenge to the study of identity is that the term is used in a wide variety of ways by different scholars. Many scholars take a personal and individual approach, looking at personal identity or self-identity as the feature that individually differentiates one person from others. Other scholars are interested primarily in social identity and the ways in which individuals internalize collective categorial identifications (see Jenkins 2014: 114). And still others who are interested in collective categorial identifications want to understand not only how individuals internalize them but how collectives and non-individual social forms such as nations, schools, neighborhoods, and organizations also have their own collective identities. To understand identity it is thus important to recognize that it can refer to self-identity, to social identity, or to collective identity. Although analysts separate these different forms of identity to demonstrate the multiple layers of the concept, such forms are often intertwined in everyday life. That is, collective and social identities influence personal identity and, likewise, personal and social identifications factor into collective identities.

In arguing against the concept of identity, Brubaker and Cooper (2000) make the point that the term has multiple meanings. Identity, they argue, is a concept distinct from interest. Interests are instrumental and have a clear goal, while actions related to identity have meaning-oriented rather than instrumental goals. Identity, in one reading, designates how action—individual or collective—is governed by particular self-understandings rather than by universal self-interest (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 6). When understood as a collective phenomenon, it indicates an important sameness among members of a social category; when understood as a product of social or political action, it sheds light on the interactive development of the kinds of collective identifications and self-understandings that make identity politics and collective political action possible. For Brubaker and Cooper, the sheer number of uses of the concept of identity makes it analytically fragmented and unusable as a concept. They assert, for example, that, “if one wants to argue that particularistic self-understandings shape social and political action in a non-instrumental manner, one can simply say so … If one wants to examine the meanings and significance people give to constructs such as ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘nationality … it is not clear what one gains by aggregating them under the flattening rubric of identity” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 6). Brubaker and Cooper point to the widely different, and sometimes diverging, uses of identity and assert that this variety makes the concept unusable.

According to the two authors, combining race, ethnicity, nationality, and other social constructions under the single rubric of identity brings little gain. This provocative statement is important—not because it precludes the study of identity, but rather because it requires us to be explicit about the analytic benefits of a unifying rubric such as identity. There is in fact much to be gained by studying such different collective identifications as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and subculture for their analytic similarities and to look at self-identity, collective identity, and the identity of non-individual forms searching for parallel processes of identity construction and identity marking and unmarking. Here, rather than seeing race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, subculture, and other constructs as too dissimilar to be studied together, we can acknowledge their substantive differences while still valuing their formal, general analytic similarities. The ways in which people navigate social constructs to organize their selfdefinitions, to generalize about others, and to participate in the boundary politics of inclusion and exclusion are worth studying not only in their separate, individual substantive areas or in their separate and specific uses (e.g. personal identification, collective mobilization), but for analytic similarities and tensions between them across domains and uses.

In this book I analyze the broad range of categories around which we construct identities. Although identity is diverse in its forms, the latter are often similar in their organization and in their general analytic qualities. I therefore bring together the insights of symbolic interactionist ethnographic studies on particular types of identity with the analytic advantages of a cognitive sociological approach that identifies general patterns through comparisons across specific forms.