Читать книгу The Sociology of Identity - Wayne H. Brekhus - Страница 9

Why should sociologists study identity? Answering this question relates both to why they should concern themselves with something that is already extensively studied in psychology and to why they should examine the seemingly personal issue of identity rather than the big structural questions that drive much of the sociological research.

People often think of identity as a very personal, unique, and individual thing. Given individualist notions of identity and our cultural tendency to think in terms of personal identities first, psychologists have typically been regarded as the identity specialists. Just as economists study the economy and political scientists study politics, psychologists are well suited to studying human personalities and an individual’s sense of self. Sociologists have a significant role to play, however, as identities are fundamentally social. We construct, negotiate, and narrate our selves in social networks and cultural contexts. Identities have important consequences for how we live our lives and whom we include in or exclude from our social networks. Identities shift and change as we move from one setting to the next; we respond to the cultural influences and cultural audiences of different social and geographic sites of performance. The salience of competing attributes changes across settings and across the life course according to our experiences and the people we interact with. Identities are heavily tied to social power and to privilege and marginalization. Understanding identity therefore requires examining the social complexity of identities in their multiple social forms and in the varied social and cultural uses they are put to.

Sociologists often study big-picture aggregate issues and large-scale social problems. The massive issues of social inequality, globalization, migration, environment and environmental change, education, political systems, and organizations are central to the concerns of contemporary sociologists. On the surface, identity can appear like an interesting micro-sociological issue, but one that may not be integral to the really big issues of our time. This is a perception perhaps shaped in part by earlier, more individualist strands of symbolic interactionist theories of identity and by the initial political stance of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, which presented its interests in the local and interactional as a challenge to mainstream sociology and to its wider emphases. While the study of identity has traditionally attracted micro-level sociologists of everyday life (in the tradition of Erving Goffman) and symbolic interactionists (in the traditions of Mead, Blumer, and Cooley), identity is not limited to those interested in self-presentation and symbolic interaction. Identity is also relevant for many of the big issues.

Take for instance the strongly nationalist political cultural and turns now current in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Italy. These movements may form around big issues such as immigration, the economy, resource allocation, organizations, crime and criminal justice, race, and class; but they are also—and intensely—about identity. They are both about the individuals’ perceptions of self-identity and about constructions of national and ethnic identities. Even the problem of gun access, an especially prominent topic in the United States, is significantly tied to identity, as owners of concealed carry guns often construct for themselves moral identities that are tied to tacit assumptions about the race, class, and masculinity of “good guys with guns” and about who needs protection and who falls outside the boundary (Stroud 2012, 2015). In a multicultural, globalizing world in which prominent issues of inclusion and exclusion appear in a wide variety of forms—for example, in immigration debates and controversies, in the British Brexit vote to exit the European Union, or in the rise of white nationalist identity politics in the United States and Europe—issues of identity are pushed to the forefront of sociological interest and concern. Identity provides a mechanism through which we can understand macro phenomena.