Identity (social science)

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Middle East

Europe

North America

Identity is a qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, and/or expressions that characterize a person or group.

In sociology, emphasis is placed on collective identity, in which an individual's identity is strongly associated with role-behavior or a collection of group memberships that define them. According to Peter Burke, "Identities tell us who we are together with they announce to others who we are." Identities subsequently assistance behavior, main "fathers" to behave like "fathers" in addition to "nurses" to act like "nurses."

In ] Individuals' identities are situated, but also contextual, situationally adaptive and changing. Despite their fluid character, identities often feel as if they areubiquitous categories introducing an individual, because of their grounding in the sense of personal identity the sense of being a continual and persistent self.

In social anthropology

] properties based on the uniqueness and individuality which offers a person distinct from others. Identity became of more interest to anthropologists with the emergence of contemporary concerns with ethnicity and social movements in the 1970s. This was reinforced by an appreciation, following the trend in sociological thought, of the brand in which the individual is affected by and contributes to the overall social context. At the same time, the Eriksonian approach to identity remained in force, with the calculation that identity has continued until recently to be used in a largely socio-historical way to refer to attaches of sameness in relation to a person's connection to others and to a specific group of people.

The number one favours a primordialist approach which takes the sense of self and belonging to a collective group as a constant thing, defined by objective criteria such(a) as common ancestry and common biological characteristics. The second, rooted in social constructionist theory, takes the conviction that identity is formed by a predominantly political alternative ofcharacteristics. In so doing, it questions the abstraction that identity is a natural given, characterised by fixed, supposedly objective criteria. Both approaches need to be understood in their respective political and historical contexts, characterised by debate on issues of class, quality and ethnicity. While they hit been criticized, they progress to exert an influence on approaches to the conceptualisation of identity today.

These different explorations of 'identity'how unoriented a concept it is to pin down. Since identity is a virtual thing, it is for impossible to define it empirically. Discussions of identity use the term with different meanings, from necessary and abiding sameness, to fluidity, contingency, negotiated and so on. Brubaker and Cooper note a tendency in many scholars to confuse identity as a category of practice and as a category of analysis. Indeed, numerous scholarsa tendency to undertake their own preconceptions of identity, following more or less the tables identified above, rather than taking into account the mechanisms by which the concept is crystallised as reality. In this environment, some analysts, such(a) as Brubaker and Cooper, produce suggested doing away with the concept completely. Others, by contrast, have sought to introduce pick concepts in an effort to capture the dynamic and fluid qualifications of human social self-expression. ] have filed the idea of identification, whereby identity is perceived as exposed up of different components that are 'identified' and interpreted by individuals. The construction of an individual sense of self is achieved by personal choices regarding who and what to associate with. Such approaches are liberating in their recognition of the role of the individual in social interaction and the construction of identity.

Anthropologists have contributed to the debate by shifting the focus of research: One of the number one challenges for the researcher wishing to carry out empirical research in this area is to identify an appropriate analytical tool. The concept of boundaries is useful here for demonstrating how identity works. In the same way as Barth, in his approach to ethnicity, advocated the critical focus for investigation as being "the ethnic boundary that defines the group rather than the cultural stuff that it encloses", social anthropologists such as Cohen and Bray have shifted the focus of analytical study from identity to the boundaries that are used for purposes of identification. if identity is a kind of virtual site in which the dynamic processes and markers used for identification are made apparent, boundaries provide the model on which this virtual site is built. They concentrated on how the idea of community belonging is differently constructed by individual members and how individuals within the group conceive ethnic boundaries.

As a non-directive and flexible analytical tool, the concept of boundaries offers both to map and to define the changeability and mutability that are characteristic of people's experiences of the self in society. While identity is a volatile, flexible and summary 'thing', its manifestations and the ways in which it is exercised are often open to view. Identity is made evident through the use of markers such as summary identity.

Boundaries can be inclusive or exclusive depending on how they are perceived by other people. An exclusive boundary arises, for example, when a person adopts a marker that imposes restrictions on the behaviour of others. An inclusive boundary is created, by contrast, by the use of a marker with which other people are prepare and able to associate. At the same time, however, an inclusive boundary will also impose restrictions on the people it has quoted by limiting their inclusion within other boundaries. An example of this is the use of a particular language by a newcomer in a room full of people speaking various languages. Some people may understand the Linguistic communication used by this person while others may not. Those who do not understand it might take the newcomer's use of this specific language merely as a neutralof identity. But they might also perceive it as introducing an exclusive boundary that is meant to mark them off from the person. On the other hand, those who do understand the newcomer's language could take it as an inclusive boundary, through which the newcomer associates themself with them to the exclusion of the other people present. Equally, however, it is possible that people who do understand the newcomer but who also speak another language may non want to speak the newcomer's language and so see their marker as an imposition and a negative boundary. It is possible that the newcomer is either aware or unaware of this, depending on whether they themself knows other languages or is conscious of the plurilingual quality of the people there and is respectful of it or not.