Identity as a Useful Category of Analyses - Essay Example

?Identity as a Useful Category of Analyses Introduction The term ‘identity’ in psychology and sociology refers to an individual’s conception and expression of his or her own individuality or group connections (Jun & Kyle 2012, p.354); in this respect, identity may be both the unique individual features or the distinctive characteristics common to all members of a group. However, the term may also refer to social categories, thereby suggesting that social categories are inevitably intertwined with the origins of a person’s understanding of their self. Usually, individual’s form their identities by identifying with significant others, particularly their parents and other connections they encounter in the course of their biographical experiences as well as their groups (Bergh & Erling 2005, p.377). Erikson postulated that identity is a function of the intricate equilibrium between identity synthesis, the combination of various components of an individual’s self-cognition, as well as identity confusion, the lack of consistency or harmony among the distinct components of a person’s sense of self. According to Brubaker and Cooper 2000 (p.5), there is no doubt that identity is a ‘category of practice’, however, they dispute that identity can be a useful ‘category of analyses’; this paper analyses their argument to its logical conclusion. Additionally, this paper extends this argument even further by considering a different own perspective that identity can possibly be used as a useful category of analyses by drawing evidence from various sources. Brubaker and Cooper’s argument Following their argument, Brubaker and Cooper contend that the term ‘identity’ may mean a lot in a broader sense but its meaning is highly constrained when one looks at it in a narrower sense; still they claim, ‘identity’ may not mean anything particularly because of its ambiguity. In this respect, Brubaker and Cooper 2000 suggest that irrespective of its suggestiveness and indispensability in strict practical situations, the word ‘identity’ cannot meet the demands of social analysis satisfactorily given that it is too ambiguous, caught up in between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ senses, essentialist connotations as well as constructivist qualifiers (p.3). According to them, the concept of ‘identity’ undertakes a lot of genuine and crucial analytical work but remains largely unsuitable for that work because it is full of ambiguities, riven with conflicting meanings, and is laden with reifying connotations. This can be attributed to the fact that in the contemporary period, many terms that were once exclusive have progressively become more porous, less restrictive, and less bounded (Briggs & Way 2008, p.362). The constructivists’ position that identities are established, fluid, and multiple diminishes the justification to refer to ‘identities’, thereby constraining the examination of ‘hard’ subtleties and the essentialist arguments of modern identity politics (Hearn 2013, p.8). While constructivism allows the establishment of putative identities, it also leads to the devaluation of the potent analytical capacity of the term ‘identity’ since it loses particularity. Brubaker and Cooper make very fundamental commentaries in regards to the question of identity; for instance, they argue that if identity is widespread, then it is nowhere in particular. Brubaker and Cooper question the ways in which self-concepts emerge, solidify, and mature if indeed identity is fluid, as well as, the nature of the powerful forces of external identifications while investigating the appalling uniqueness that is often sought considering that identity is multiple. Identity and social analysis Brubaker and Cooper 2000 acknowledge that indeed identity is a core principle in modern politics as well as social analysis, but are quick to point out that this does not impose the use of the term as a category of analysis (p.5). Furthermore, they claim that the pervasion of the term identity in contemporary politics does not impose the view that all people need, pursue, establish, and negotiate identities; Eryigit, & Kerpelman, 2011 (p.43) contend that individuals gain insights regarding themselves from their social environments by initially experimenting with various types of behaviours before finally adjusting to stable patterns in particular contextual situations. According to Brubaker and Cooper, using the term identity when one is referring to all sorts of similarities and connections, all kinds of belonging, interrelationships, as well as all understandings of the self is inadmissible since the term is not differentiated well enough to serve all those purposes. In this respect, misusing the term identity inevitably affects both the language and the substance of social analysis, thus, necessitating the need for more unambiguous analytical classifications. Brubaker and Cooper 2000 (p.4) use the phrase ‘categories of practice’ in reference to classes of daily social experience that regular social actors have created and deployed, unlike those categories used by social analysts, which have no experience relations. They use the expression ‘category of practice’ because its implied sharp contrast between native or folk categories and scientific categories notwithstanding, there is a reciprocal relationship between the practical and analytical usage of such concepts as race, or ethnicity. Brubaker and Cooper highlight that ‘identity’ has often been conceptualized as both a category of practice as well as a category of analysis; lay actors employ the term ‘identity’ in some daily situations to conceptualize themselves, their conditions, as well as both their similarities and differences with others. Political actors too, often use ‘identity’ to convince people to picture themselves alongside their interests and situations in certain ways, while claiming a common identity that is different from the rest (Shamsul 2001, p.356). In as much as the daily identity discourses and identity politics, the mobilizations that relate to politics, culture or identity, are genuine and necessary, the modern salience of the term identity as a category of practice does not impose its use as a category of analysis (Bernstein 2005, p.47). For instance, they contend that in as much as appeals and claims such as self-determination have been a core focus in politics for many years, nation, a pervasive category of socio-political practice cannot be used to analyse and understand such appeals and claims. In this respect, Brubaker and Cooper argue that we cannot assume categories in the practice of nationalism to be the core of the theory of nationalism; this implies that individuals can engage in discussions about a nation and politics at the national level without necessarily speculating that nations exist. Similarly, Brubaker and Cooper are convinced that one need not talk about identity and identity politics with a framework that identities exist; the ball of contention, they claim, is not that the word identity is used, but how it is used. The term identity has been used analytically in the same senses it has been used in practice thereby implying the existence of a multiplicity of identities; the pervasive trend of inadvertently replicating and strengthening reification by assuming categories of practice to be categories of analysis is what Brubaker and Cooper condemn. Brubaker and Cooper 2000 (p.5) further contend that recent efforts to avoid reifying identity by perceiving identities as multiple, disjointed and fluid does not help solve the ‘identity crisis’ either since it only adds up to the overburdening of the term ‘identity’. For instance, in that respect, ‘identity’ not only refers to non-instrumental modes of action, but also the self-concepts while designating similarity among individuals or over time; additionally, identity is used in reference to the centrality of selfhood. It is applied to emphasize the procedural establishment of unity and shared self-understanding while underscoring the fact that the modern concept of the ‘self’ is highly fragmented. In this respect, Brubaker and Cooper posit that identity not only bears a multivalent but also an inconsistent hypothetical drain. However, Brubaker and Cooper suggest that the term ‘identity’ is actually indispensable by sketching a number of idioms that can also carry out the crucial tasks previously allocated to identity without the confusion it entails. Soft versus strong ‘identity’ Identity, according to Brubaker and Cooper, tends to have both broad and narrow implications, both of which are self-contradictory; a strong understanding of the term identity focuses on the common-sense conceptualization of sameness that emerges over time or across persons. Most forms of identity politics agree with the strong sense of the term, but they fall short by making a number of erroneous assumptions; for instance, that all people and all groups have identity since they cannot do without it, and they consciously pursue it. Additionally, a strong sense of the word identity also implies that people and groups can have it without being conscious of it, and elucidates the strong sense of group sameness or homogeneity of groups. However, Brubaker and Cooper 2000 (p.10) that the soft understandings of the word identity conflicts with its everyday meaning with the increasing awareness and distaste of the hard implications of everyday experiences of identity among scholars. The first problem of the soft understanding of identity is that it is accompanied with regular qualifiers, which indicates that it is not only multiple, but also unsteady, always changing and dependent, besides being constructed and negotiated. The second weakness of the soft understanding of identity, according to Brubaker and Cooper is that it merely suggests a considerable degree of sameness even if the rest of other things are changing, thereby diminishing the sense of the word. Most importantly, Brubaker and Cooper are of the opinion that the soft conceptualization of the term identity may not be sufficient for analytical work since it has progressively become so elastic because of the insistence on the existence of multiple identities that are malleable and fluid. Alternatives to ‘identity’ Brubaker and Cooper 2000 (p.14) attempt to unbundle the vastness of meanings that have come to be associated with the term ‘identity’ by passing them over to other less burdened terms such as identification and categorization. ‘Identification’ does not have the pervasive reifying connotations of ‘identity’ and instead requires specification of the particular agents that do the identifying; unlike identity, identification does not presume that identifying leads to sameness inwards, uniqueness, or commonality that political actors normally pursue. Brubaker and Cooper imply that identification of individuals or groups is inevitably the core of social life, particularly because in many instances, individuals are usually called upon to identify or characterize themselves in relation to others. According to Brubaker and Cooper, the identification of one-self and others varies considerably between different situations and contexts, which abound in contemporary settings that present multiplied interactions between individuals. Furthermore, Brubaker and Cooper propose the use of ‘self-understanding’ a dispositional term that defines set subjectivity such as an individual’s sense of who they are, their social position, as well as their potential responses, instead of identity. Unlike identity, the term ‘self-understanding’ has no connections with the inimitably modern concept of the self as a uniform, restricted single entity, particularly because individuals may have more than one understanding of their self-concept. Brubaker and Cooper argue that individuals often understand and discover themselves in various social processes; sometimes individuals may comprehend and experience themselves in the sense of interconnected categories or in the sense of relationships of different proximity and intensity. Brubaker and Cooper contend that self-understanding does not have the reifying connotations associated with identity and still is not bound to situations of flux and instability since different people understand and experience themselves differently in varying situations. Brubaker and Cooper further contend that instead of collapsing all the self-understandings into one concept of identity, more differentiated analytical language with terms such as commonality, connectedness, and group-ness should be used instead. Whereas commonality refers to some shared attributes, connectedness encompasses the social ties between different people, while group-ness suggests belongingness to a unique, limited solidary group. A sense of group-ness that is strongly bound is embedded in the definite harmony as well as the accompanying feeling of belonging together with slight connectedness or in the absence of connectedness. Brubaker and Cooper ‘s argument goes that the habit to objectify identity does not leave any analytical advantage since it makes it impossible to treat ‘group-ness’ as well as ‘bounded-ness as rising properties of certain structural settings instead of as properties that are ever there already in some sort of form. For instance, in their line of thought, it would automatically imply that talking about let us say ‘Canadians’ or ‘Israelis’ as though they were sharply restricted and uniform within the group, as is often the case in the thoughtless ‘group-ist’ language prevailing in everyday life today, progressively weakens social analysis. Discussion From their discussion of the many burdensome tasks that have been bundled on the term identity and their evaluation of the effectiveness of the term in carrying out those tasks, it is evident that the term has been deployed to carry out a large quantity of work that is not only genuine, but also crucial. However, it is also evident that the term identity is largely constrained in these uses particularly because it is laden with many reifying connotations and all the attempts to qualify the term by using adjectives and insisting on multiplicity does not only fail to address the problem, but also leaves a mere suggestive oxymoron. For instance, it would seem that by qualifying the term ‘identity’, one is insisting on some sort of manifold distinctiveness or further still, to some sort of fluid solidity; it does not make sense at all, to try and impose all these and much more usages on one term if alternative idioms can best serve the analytical purposes. According to Brubaker and Cooper, identity indeed is a significant category of practice but does not qualify as a useful category of analysis since the term is rife with conflicting meanings, and is laden with reifying connotations due to a great deal of ambiguities. Like Brubaker and Cooper, this paper does not question the validity or significance of particularistic claims; rather, it takes an issue with the shallow claims that are conceptualized by the multi-purpose ‘identity’. In my opinion, the fact that people will often espouse similar ties or self-understandings, or histories, among other things, which inevitably influence the sort of claims they establish, does not qualify them to be homogenous as the term identity suggests. Brubaker and Cooper’s criticism of the use of ‘identity’ in social analysis does not overlook the significance of particularity, but rather tries to understand the arising claims and possibilities in a slightly more segregated fashion. The gist of their argument is indeed the recommendation for more theoretical lucidity that is more appropriate not only for social analysis alone, but also for political understanding; according to them, the fictional universality claims that are pervasive in the use of the term in social analysis today indicates that the practice has inevitably surrendered to the term identity. Theoretical foundations However, according to the identity theory, social forces influence the ‘self’ but society cannot be regarded as a somewhat homogenous and cooperative entity and this reinforces the proposition that society is obviously differentiated and highly organized at the same time (Hogg, Terry & White1995, p.256). In my opinion, the self is a multi-faceted and organized concept, and the multiple parts of the self are what is referred to as identities in general or ‘role-identities’ in the particularistic sense. The identity theory agrees with the symbolic interactionism perspective that the self is inevitably a function of social interactions since people come to know who they are through their interactions with the significant others. The implication of such multi-layered components of the self is the multiplicity of role identities played by individuals since their self is as varied as their different groups whose opinions matter a great deal; Reitzes & Jaret, 2007 (p.392) contends that multiple roles support individual wellbeing. In that case, the self is not an autonomous psychological unit but a complex social construct that is determined from the different roles or positions occupied by individuals in society. For instance, a man may be a father, a husband, a son, while at the same time he is also an engineer and a blood donor; all these can be regarded as role identities or definitions of the self that people use to describe themselves due to the multiple roles that they play in society. Collectivism, one’s regard for the growth and development of the group to which they belong, has been hailed as one of the most fundamental features of racial identity as within the African American community (Carson 2009, p.327). Collectivism is based on the dictum ‘I am because we are’ and it is regarded as peoples’ cognition of their connection to and obligation to look after members of the group; collectivism for that matter offers security and safety for its members. Racial identities based on races describes members of a common racial heritage; the African American theory and research contends that an individual’s identity is multi-layered and originates from the interactions with significant others, as well as with the surrounding environment. Collectivism as a significant aspect of the African American has foundations in the group’s cultural roots since over the years it has been reiterated as a tool for preserving survival of the tribe while protecting members from alienation and loneliness. In this respect, collectivism enables particular groups of individuals to focus entirely on the shared priorities and responsibilities while warding off the subtleties of percipience and labelling. Cultural identities are not only essential, but also crucial to human experience, understanding, as well as interaction, particularly because they offer a structural basis along which individuals’ as well as ‘others’ experiences are organized and interpreted, thereby promoting both the self-cognition and emotional wellness of the group (Lind 2001, p.112). According to the social identity theory, individuals usually declare their membership to certain groups and since cultural identities are organizing and interpretive foundations, they automatically guide the distinctive and social sensitive individuals to given discourses more easily. The emerging shift in the discipline of socio-linguistics has implied that individuals and groups today construct and display images that are neither independent of nor that exist before the social practice (De Fina 2007, p.371). This suggests that members of a group will undertake similar work or social activities and that neither identity categories nor their social implications can be assumed; identities are negotiated and constructed or shaped by the practices that define a community. The identity theory proposes that the ‘self’ reveals the wider social structure since it reflects various identities that draw from the role identities occupied by the individual (McFarland & Pals 2005, p.290); society assigns meaning to individual’s through allocation of role positions, which not only give one a sense of themselves, but also determines their social behaviour. The identity theory discriminates among identities basing on their hierarchical position in an individual’s framework of identities, thereby explaining the inherent distinctions between behavioural choices; similarly, the significance of each identity depends on the counts and strength of role-related social positions. Social identity theory postulates that social categories such as nationality as well as political associations in which individuals belong help to define them; individuals have a collection of discrete category memberships that vary significantly in their overall significance to their self-cognition. Each of the subtle category memberships is captured in a person’s mind as a social identity that does not merely describe, but also prescribes the particular characteristics that suit a group. Conclusion Ultimately, the identity and social identity perspectives notwithstanding, this paper takes a stand akin to that of Brubaker and Cooper that identity may be undoubtedly a valuable category of practice but it does not make a useful category of analysis. The term ‘identity’ may have a lot of implications in a wider sense but its meaning is still limited when one looks at it in a restrictive sense, or it may not mean anything at all because of its ambiguity. Brubaker and Cooper contend that irrespective of its implied suggestiveness and indispensability in bounded practical senses, the term ‘identity’ does not qualify to be used in social analysis since it is often too ambiguous, caught up in between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ senses, essentialist connotations as well as string of adjectival qualifiers. This paper also acknowledges that indeed the concept of ‘identity’ conducts a whole lot of genuine and crucial analytical work but is largely unfit for that work since apart from ambiguities, it is rife with conflicting meanings, and is laden with reifying connotations. References Bergh, S. & Erling, A. 2005, "Adolescent identity formation: A Swedish study of identity status using the EOM-EIS-II", Adolescence, vol. 40, no. 158, pp. 377-96. Bernstein, M. 2005. Identity politics. Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 47-74. 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A history of an identity, an identity of a history: The idea and practice of 'malayness' in malaysia reconsidered. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 32(3), 355-366.  Read More