Identity
Concepts of the Individual, self, person in
anthropology
• Individual as member of humankind
(biologistic)
• Self as locus of experience (psychologistic)
• Person as agent-in-society (sociologistic)
Identity and Subjectivity
• Social order -- arrays of identifications
jockeying for position, gaining and losing
strength, clashing with others, aligning with
still others, and defining the texture of social
action in their activity.
• Subjectivity – complex negotiation of
representation & experience
• constructing the subject, constructing agency,
constituting subjectivity
Discourse, Subjectivity, Power
• Discourse -- the bearer of various subject positions
• Subject positions -- specific positions of agency and identity in
relation to particular forms of knowledge and practice
• Subjectivity --produced within discourse, subjected to discourse.
• subject position--[for us to become the subject of a particular
discourse, and thus the bearers of its power/knowledge] we must
locate ourselves in the position from which the discourse makes
most sense, and thus become its 'subjects' by subjecting' ourselves
to its meanings, power and regulation.
Culture
• Richard Fox -- culture is in a constant state of
becoming/in-the-making
• unitary set of rules & meanings continually are
in-the-making through oppositions & struggles
among groups
• Fox – “culture always is, but it has always just
become so”
Race and Ethnicity
• races are ethnic groups assumed to have a biological
basis, but actually race is socially constructed, there are
social races
– There are no biological human races
• up until 14th cent. in Europe cultural & social evolution
based on the idea of progress from kin-based societies
to civil society through governance & law
• after 16th cent. in Europe dispositions of blood
distinguished the character of difference (racist notions
of social & cultural evolution)
ETHNICITY
• forged in the process of historical time
• subject to shifts in meaning
• Subject shifts in referents or markers of ethnic
identity
• Subject to political manipulations
• ethnic identity is not a function of primordial
ties, always the genesis of specific historical
forces that are simultaneously structural &
cultural
Ethnicity
• ethnicity is founded upon structural inequities
among dissimilar groups
• based on cultural differences & similarities
perceived as shared
• identification with & feeling a part of an ethnic
group & exclusion from certain other groups
because of this affiliation (endogamy &
exogamy)
building blocks of ethnicity
• associated with distinctions between language,
religion, historical experience, geographic
isolation, kinship, notions of race (phenotype)
• markers of ethnic identity may include collective
name, belief in common descent, sense of
solidarity, association with a specific territory,
clothing, house types, personal adornment,
food, technology, economic activities, general
lifestyle
Ethnicity and Boundaries
• where there is a group there is some sort of
boundary
• where there are boundaries there are
mechanisms for maintaining boundaries
– cultural markers of difference
– cultural markers of difference must be visible to
members and non-members
ethnogenesis
• "fluidity" of ethnic identity - ethnic groups
vanish, people move between ethnic groups,
new ethnic groups come into existence
• ethnogenesis - emergence of new ethnic group;
part of existing group splits & forms new ethnic
group, members of two or more groups fuse
PLURAL SOCIETIES
• society in which ethnic distinctions persist in
spite of generations of interethnic contact
• economic niche & plural society
• no assimilation
• peaceful (??) coexistence of different ethnicities
• many contemporary plural societies the result of
colonialism
The Nation (-State)
• modern nation-state a more recent phenomenon
– most have appeared since the end of WWII
• communities of people who see themselves as “one
people” on the basis of common ancestry, history,
society, institutions, ideology, language, territory, and
(often) religion
• anthropology questions this reality while recognizing
the power of the idea
• differences are suppressed in modern nation-states
The State, The Nation, and Ethnicity
• 181 states but 5000 nations?
• idea that nation and state coincide is rare
• The appearance of ethnicity and the rise of the nationstate
• (Nash) nation-state responsible for the rise and
definition of social entities called ethnic groups - last
500 years
– grew out of the wreck of empires, breakups of civilizations disruptions of mechanic societies
– within borders of nation-state - social and cultural diversity
NATION & NATIONALITY
• nation was once a term that referred to tribe,
indigenous people, or ethnic group - collectivity
sharing single language, religion, history,
territory, ancestry, kinship (Herder & volk)
• nation comes to mean the state = a country, but
a sociopolitical form, the modern state
composed of diverse ethnic groups
Nation as “Imagined Community”
• "it is imagined because the members of even
the smallest nation will never know most of
their fellow members, meet them, or even
hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives
the image of their communion" (Anderson
p.15)