The big evolution of identity 2/3

Last week, we tried to describe "identity" as a social object. Were we successful? I would argue... that we were not really! We now know that identity is something personal as well as something we might share to some extent with a group. Most importantly, we learnt that the very concept of identity did not always have the same meaning throughout time. So we try a second approach, looking at the birth and evolution of one's identity. Maybe we will get some more information on the dialectic group-person at play in this social object.

How did you end up with this identity? How did you build your-self?

Someone’s identity seems to be what we usually call the self. It has several dimensions (a collective one and a personal one) and refers to things that we feel but that are hard to objectively define as a set of fixed attributes. Thus, it might be interesting to explore how the self is constructed in one’s life. Sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists’ early-on investigations on identity linked the thing to the social group. Doing so, they ruled out the possibility that we are born with a given, unchangeable identity (Michel Castra, 2017).

One of the first thinkers to shed light on the mechanisms of identity building is Dr Sigmund Freud. In the psychology theory he developed in the early 20th century Vienna (Austria), the self or the Ich is the result of a constant conflict between the Es (literally the “that”) which is unconscious and the Über-ich (literally the “over-me”) which is our internalization of societal rules. This process takes place mostly during our childhood, and continues for the rest of our lives. In other words, individual identities are built from the group, where the societal norms come from, to the individual (Anthony Giddens, 1995).

The same idea that identity is being constructed through interactions is apparent in Ervin Goffman’s sociology and in the so-called interactionist sociologists’ theories that arose in the second half of the 20th century. Here, the main idea is that individual identities are not fixed; they are built along interactions,that is to say along contacts with the society, either through cooperative behaviors or through oppositions. Ervin Goffman developed the concept of stigma: a visible mark that helps others to label a person. The stigma is often eventually used by that person as a central benchmark of her identity. An easy example would be a female character among an assembly of males. Her gender makes her stand out, be outside of the norm. It is thereby a stigma. As a result, she would be referred to and judged upon by the group as “the woman”. And she would then probably build her identity around the fact that she is a woman. Simone de Beauvoir famously expresses this very idea when saying “On ne nait pas femme, on le devient” (We are not born women, we become women)

In this theory, identity is not something that merely comes from the group and is internalized by the person. The person is much more active, he builds up narratives : an identity has to make sense to other people (Paul Ricoeur, 1985), it is the story one tell another person when they meet. People thus engage in a process of sense-building: in other words they are using their stigma to build their identity (Manuel Castells, 1998).

This helps explaining how communities are formed. Identity building also seems to be a two-way process: from the group to the individual and from the individual to the group.

Some sociologists considered the place of the body in the construction of one’s identity. It is indeed nothing less than the most visible manifestation of who we are. Richard Jenkins suggests that the body creates the continuity between the outside world and the self; it is an index of one’s collective similarities - you look like a woman so you belong to the “women” social group, if such a social group exists - and differences - I lived in China and I have a Caucasian appearance: as a consequence, every person I met asked me assumed I belong to the “foreigner” social group (Richard Jenkins, 1996).

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Sources:

Michel CASTRA, « Identity », in 100 words of sociology, 2017

Dr. Fidel Molina LUQUE, "Between identity & identification : a complex matter in sociological research on inter-culturality", in Sociétés n°76, 2002

Robinson Baudry & Jean-Philippe Juchs, « Définir l’identité », in Hypothèses, 2006

« Identity », Encylopaedia Universalis