Читать книгу The Sociology of Identity - Wayne H. Brekhus - Страница 8

To synthesize a wide range of sociological conceptions of identity and to compare identity across the many substantive forms and purposes in which it expresses itself, I follow Eviatar Zerubavel’s (2007) social pattern analysis—a concept-driven cognitive sociology approach to general sociological theorizing. This kind of formal sociological theorizing is characterized by lack of interest in singularity and in isolating unique phenomena and by a concern with cross-case, cross-level, and cross-phenomenal comparisons. Zerubavel (forthcoming) argues that, in contrast to more substantively oriented types of scholarship, such as historical or descriptive ethnographic work, a formal sociological analysis transcends the specific and the concrete in order to focus on general and abstract commonalities. Social pattern analysis is a concept-driven sociology that illuminates sensitizing concepts (see Zerubavel 2007). I combine this general formal theoretical approach, however, with specific, empirically interesting micro-sociological cases of identity enactments and performances studied by symbolic interactionist ethnographers. I draw significantly on ethnographic researchers who study specific identities, roles, and groups, because the concepts they develop in specific settings such as punk authenticity (Force 2009), or black cultural capital (Carter 2003), or protean racial identities (Rockquemore and Brunsma 2002) are analytically applicable to other kinds of settings and generalizable to other kinds of cases. Applying social pattern analysis to punk authenticity and black cultural capital, for instance, allows us to extend insights from these specific types to other kinds of authenticities and cultural capital. Here I apply the general theoretical concerns of social pattern analysis to theoretically focused ethnographies that are analytically portable, speak to larger macro-level issues, and build upon other ethnographies and research studies (see Fine 2003).

The three major, sensitizing concepts labeled in this book “identity authenticity,” “identity multidimensionality,” and “identity mobility,” which I use to frame an understanding of the sociology of identities, are general theoretical concepts that demonstrate analytic commonalities and generic formal similarities across very different kinds of identity. These concepts are important for understanding the power dimensions of identity and the role of identity constructions in producing and reproducing inequalities, marginality, and privilege. In the course of exploring these three properties of identity, other analytic concepts will also be highlighted and discussed in connection to their broader relevance to the sociology of identity. Those analytic concepts have developed in the specific contexts of sociological ethnographies and identity literatures, but they apply across different types of identity.

Bringing together theoretical traditions to analyze the sociology of identity is an ambitious task, particularly given that the term “identity” is used in multiple ways by analysts. Rather than provide a single definition of identity, my goal is to present identity and identification in the pluralistic ways that they are employed by social actors and described by social analysts and to explain the interactional and social boundary work that identity does. This means that the text will move between relatively thin, weak forms of identification and thick, strong forms of identity, between the conscious use of categorial identities as strategic resources and the unconscious expression of them as a tacit presentation that does work (even when what it does goes largely unacknowledged), and between expressions of self-identity and group identity. The concepts of authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility will be explored through a cognitive sociological lens, illustrating how these concepts relate to one another and to the ways in which we interactionally perform identity. Organization around these themes and around the key concepts that cut across theoretical perspectives in identity studies provides an overview designed to spark new insights and fresh ideas for exploring the stakes of identity. An emphasis on how these themes relate among themselves and to social inequalities further frames why identity is an important topic for sociological study.