The big evolution of identity 3/3

Can we speak our identity out? How do we get to the unconscious part: those cultural things that we have internalized so much that we do not consider them as distinctive signs of who we are? And why does it even matter to study identity?

Where does one’s identity show itself?

Don’t judge a book by its cover! This saying exists in multiple languages - at least in French, in English and in Mandarin, probably in your own language too. It teaches us that you can not claim to know a person by only knowing what he looks like. To continue with my previous example, maybe I didn’t identify myself with other foreigners in China. By only seeing me, people would thus make a wrong assumption on who I am. This might sound like common sense to you, but then how do you investigate one’s identity?

Sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists all use interviews to get to one’s identity. Yet an identity is not only about conscious characteristics, it is also composed of internalized attributes. For instance, one doesn’t control the way one speaks, yet the way one speaks is an indicator of one’s social origin. That’s when semantic analysis comes into play. Semantic analysis is the analysis of the words picked by the interlocutor; it is primordial to identify what are called identity strategies, those being conscious or not.

Identity = put people in boxes?

In his essay In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, the Lebanese writer Amine Maalouf opens the question of multiple identities. Writing about “national” or “ethnic” identities, he argues that imposing an exclusive identity has dramatic consequences on the ones it has identified (1998). Berger and Luckman develop the idea of “multiple identities”, assessing that individuals might belong to several social groups. As an illustration, am I a woman, a French, a student, a youngster, a foodie, a Caucasian? Each of these words above contributes to define who I am, but none of them is sufficient. Put in these terms, this assessment seems quite self-evident. Yet, it sheds light on how individuals create identity strategies in nowadays “network societies”.

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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