Social identity and identification are of great interest to the wider public sphere.
Interest in cultural identity, nationhood, cultural change, identity politics, and ethnicity has grown tremendously worldwide.
Topics such as multiculturalism, politicized religion, cultural hybridity, affirmative action, culture and human rights, national self-determination, and the plight of indigenous peoples are major preoccupations in almost every country.
Anthropologists play a varying role in this field, but anthropology's importance as a research subject is undisputed in making sense of identities and group dynamics.
Studies of ethnicity, nationalism, minority issues, and cultural complexity have been at the forefront of anthropological research for decades.
Anthropological perspectives have exerted considerable influence elsewhere.
Many anthropologists, such as Ulf Hannerz (1996) and Arjun Appadurai (1996), have explored the new identities resulting from globalization.
In some countries, anthropologists are visible in the public sphere, involved in debates about minority rights, immigrants, and cultural changes.
The chapter aims to show how anthropologists have engaged with issues of identification, rather than delving into current 'hot' issues.
The Social
In anthropology, identity (or identification) always refers to social identity.
Social identity refers to:
The groups a person belongs to.
Who they identify with.
How people establish and maintain boundaries between "us" and "them".
Questions concerning social identity and group cohesion have been fundamental to social anthropology since the beginning.
Durkheim’s sociology addressed group integration as a chief problem.
Increased interest in identity studies in anthropology may be due to the importance of group issues in politics worldwide.
Examples include ethnic and nationalist politics, minority rights claims, separatism, and religious revitalization.
Feminism and the civil rights movement in the USA were important social movements that expressed concerns with identity.
These movements defined the group based on a shared identity (gender, color, place/nationality) and insisted that the meaning and significance of their shared identity should be redefined.
Since the 1970s, the indigenous rights movement has become vocal, visible, transnational, and recognized by the United Nations and many governments.
Bases for social identity that give a sense of belonging include:
Language
Locality
Kinship
Nationality
Ethnic membership
Family
Age
Education
Political views
Sexual orientation
Class
Religion
Gender
Gender and age are the most fundamental sociologically; no society exists where they are not socially significant.
In some societies, like segmentary lineage societies, clan segments become important.
In a city, the local neighborhood may be the main site of community feeling.
To some, professional identity may be more important than national identity.
Conceptual work is needed to understand the chaos of criss-crossing identifications.
Culture and Identification
Ethnic identity seriously entered anthropology towards the end of the 1960s.
Fredrik Barth and his collaborators contributed to a lasting change in the approach to ethnic identity.
Before then, people’s group identities were taken for granted.
Barth and his collaborators presented a more dynamic model of ethnicity.
The boundaries between groups were more flexible and less easily observed than formerly assumed.
There is no simple one-to-one relationship between culture and ethnic identity.
There are ethnic groups with great internal cultural variation.
There are clear boundaries between ethnic groups whose mutual cultural differences are difficult to spot.
Often, the variation within the group is greater on key indicators than the systematic differences between the groups.
Example: Yugoslavia, where wars between Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats were described as ethnic or national but were not caused by cultural differences.
Differences between town and country were greater than between Serbs and Croats sharing the same territory.
Harald Eidheim (1971) argued that there were minimal cultural differences between Sami and Norwegians on the sub-Arctic Finnmark coast, even if the ethnic boundaries were socially crucial.
Sami and Norwegians had very little informal social contact and lived segregated from each other.
What matters in practice is not the objective cultural differences but the kinds of relationships that exist between the groups (competition, complementarity, collaboration, or conflict).
An important part of this relationship is the perception of difference.
At the ideological level, it may be important to maintain negative stereotypes of the others.
Identification draws its justification not so much from actual differences as from the differences which become socially relevant because people highlight them.
Even if they are wholly or partly fictitious, act as though they are real.
An important reason that Europeans for years believed that many African peoples were cannibals, was that their neighbours had told travellers that they were (Arens 1978).
Although cannibalism is well known from historical records, it is unlikely to have existed as a cultural institution in the recent history of Africa.
Relational and Situational Identification
Identification happens both through establishing perceived similarities with others (identifying with them) and through establishing differences to others.
Contrasts are important for all identification.
Without the other, I cannot be myself; without the others, we cannot be us.
If groups and communities are not given by nature, it is necessary to ask:
Why certain kinds of community appear and not others.
Why some become especially important while others do not.
Why group membership seems to shift as one moves from situation to situation.
The reason that group membership shifts is that identification is relational and situational.
Since it is only in relation to others that it is possible to define oneself, it follows logically that identification changes depending on who one currently has a relationship with.
This is well described in sociological role theory, which emphasizes that each person can be many different 'persons': father, son, colleague, jazz lover, etc.
Most people have a privileged and multi-stranded relationship with their parents, which lasts until the parents die.
A person may be young in relation to her parents, old in relation to her children, a woman in relation to men, a townsperson in relation to rural people, a southerner in relation to people from the north, and an Asian in relation to Africans.
In anthropological research, the relational aspect of group identification has often been studied through examining social situations.
If one wants to find out about a person’s group memberships, one must follow them through a plethora of situations where they enter into contact with others.
One will then gradually obtain a picture, or a model, of the groups the person belongs to and their relative importance for him or her.
It is often unclear in a given situation which relationship should be regarded as the most relevant one.
Suppose a male anthropologist employed by a Spanish university has a supervision meeting with a female, Lebanese MA student who writes a thesis about group conflicts in the Middle East. Of course, their relationship is primarily defined as a teacher– student one, but it is very unlikely that the student’s nationality, ethnic or religious origin, gender and topical specialisation would not also affect the relationship.
Professional women in western societies may complain that they are being treated more like women than like colleagues, in other words that their gender identity is given primacy in situations when they themselves deem it irrelevant.
In such cases, there may be negotiations over the definition of the situation, where the parties at the outset have definitions of each other which match badly.
At a Nordic conference on identity issues some years ago, a sociologist working in Sweden, but who was born in Pakistan, asked the others in the room ‘What do you perceive me as? A Pakistani, an immigrant, an immigrant sociologist or simply a sociologist?’
Identification is created both from the inside and the outside, in the encounter between one’s own presentation of self and the perceptions of others.
Imperative and Chosen Identity
An often-mentioned paradox in Barth’s model of ethnicity is that he argues that ethnic identity is both imperative and situational.
This would entail that it is both enforced and chosen, which seems logically impossible.
Ethnic identity is imperative in the sense that one can rarely rid oneself of it entirely; if you are a Nuer, a Trobriander, a Sikh or an Englishman, you always will be.
What is possible, however, is to negotiate strategically over definitions of situations, and to choose the situations one enters into carefully, so that ethnic identity (or other imperative identities, such as gender or age) become more or less irrelevant.
In certain societies, and in certain historical situations, it may nevertheless be nearly impossible to escape from ethnic identification. It comes from outside, from the state, or from the more powerful groups which set the agenda in society.
Somali refugees in western Europe, a stigmatised group of immigrants, can hardly avoid being regarded primarily as Somalis.
To migrants from other European countries, who are not visibly different nor victims of strongly pejorative views, it may be easier to undercommunicate one’s ethnic identity.
Generally, in societies where politics are strongly ethnicized, like Fiji or Mauritius, ethnic identity may be the first thing one notices when meeting a new person.
In this kind of situation, ethnic identity is more imperative than situational identity, or rather, the possibilities for situational selection are narrower than elsewhere.
(Note that ethnicity does not necessarily have anything to do with appearance; Croats, Serbs and Bosnians look the same.)
The question concerning coercion and choice – the imperative and the situational – is a complex one.
The Scandinavian school in ethnicity research has been criticized for emphasizing individual choice too much, thereby neglecting external pressures and structural inequalities in the study of identification.
How much of the identity package of any individual is chosen, and how much is enforced?
It is common to think that some group memberships, like kinship, ethnic identity, mother-tongue and gender, are imperative (enforced), while others are chosen relatively freely.
If the content of, say, gender identity is subject to negotiation, then how enforced is one’s gender (or sex)?
‘Female rebellions’ are, perhaps, chiefly associated with modern feminism, but they are far from unknown from non-modern societies as well.
In contemporary western European societies, a powerful popular opposition towards arranged marriages has emerged over the last few years – a custom practised among some immigrants (and, naturally, in their countries of origin).
The argument against arranged marriage is that marriage is supposed to be based on free choice and true love.
Many studies show that people marry within their social class and their cultural milieu, and that powerful informal norms regulate the relationship between the spouses.
A difference is that arranged marriages involve entire kin groups woven together through ties of reciprocity, while ‘love’ or freely chosen marriages only involve two individuals.
Another important difference is that the price of refusing an arranged marriage can be much higher than the price for choosing to live alone in a context where freely chosen marriages are the norm.
Imperative identities are rarely completely imperative – it is always possible to twist or manipulate their content – and chosen identities are not entirely chosen either.
Yet it may be relevant to distinguish them from each other.
In general, the imperative element is stronger in traditional societies than in modern ones.
Most actually existing societies are mixed, complex sociocultural forms, where there are ongoing conflicts, compromises and competitions between what we may call different criteria of identification.
In most places where people live – from Indonesian kampungs to Colombian cities, from South African townships to Alaskan hamlets – tugs-of-war are being staged between values presented as traditional and values which emphasize choice and individual freedom.
The context is always local and thereby unique, and both the power of tradition and the actual freedom of choice varies dramatically from Borneo to Minnesota.
Yet it can be important to insist stubbornly, and to show, that these tensions between the security of tradition and the freedom of modernity have a universal aspect enabling meaningful comparison.
Degrees of Identification
The internal cohesion of a group depends on the degree of external pressure.
This principle, formulated early in the twentieth century by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, is sometimes spoken of as ‘Simmel’s rule’.
This simple principle is very useful and often relevant in analysis.
It may help us to understand why group identity can be strong or weak.
In societies with considerable discrepancies between the social strata, such as the classical western class society or the Indian caste society, group identifications along the lines of class or caste will presumably be strong, especially to those who perceive the system as oppressive.
If one is born into an ethnic group which has for centuries been kept down by stronger majorities (such as Gypsies), it is likely that one will have a clearly delineated ethnic identity.
Simmel’s rule may shed light on the fact that Muslim identity has become so visible and pronounced globally, often in politicized ways, during recent decades, why the inhabitants of small countries like Catalonia and Estonia by and large have a much stronger national identity than those of larger countries like Germany and Spain, why gender identity is more often associated with women than with men, and likewise why ‘race’ somehow seems to concern blacks more than whites.
It is because it is the members of these groups who perceive the pressure from outside most strongly.
The struggle to survive as an identifiable (and dominant) social entity has hardly been a problem to the English since the Norman invasion, and this is part of the reason that the Welsh and Irish have historically had a far more visible and outspoken ethnic or national identity than their more powerful neighbor.
A minority is reminded of its minority status every day, unlike a majority.
A Turk in Turkey rarely needs to reflect on his Turkishness; take him to Denmark and he is confronted with the fact that he is Turkish several times a day.
Regarding Islam, it is worth noticing that religious identification – as a social, emblematic form of identity – increased among Muslims after the formation of Israel and the wars engaged in by the Israelis, and it also seems to be intensified through increased western military activities in Muslim countries, as well as through social exclusion perceived by Muslim immigrants in Europe.
Simmel’s rule does not merely offer a vantage-point for studying the relative strength of group identification; it also invites studies of the kind of group that is formed.
The character of the group depends on where the pressure is perceived as coming from.
There are often rival views within any group in this regard.
A classic predicament in the European labor movement is the contrast between class identity and national identity.
For instance, should German workers have supported the German war preparations in 1914, or should they rather have denounced a war which forced German workers to shoot at their French comrades? Where was the pressure perceived as being the strongest, from the bourgeoisie or from enemy nations?
In the novel The Wall of the Plague, written towards the end of the apartheid period, the South African author André Brink describes the encounter between a black freedom fighter and a white feminist, and shows how the struggle between two liberation causes is played out; the white feminist admires the political vision and sense of justice displayed by the anti-apartheid activist, but positively detests his view of women.
The principle of external pressure and internal cohesion may shed light on segmentary forms of organization.
Evans-Pritchard’s segmentary model of Nuer politics has been referred to earlier: when the pressure comes from my brother (we argue about our paternal inheritance), it is him against me; when the pressure comes from our cousins (they claim cows we think belong to us), it is my brother and me against them, and so on.
Following the outbreak of civil war in Sudan in the early 1980s, between the Muslim North and the non-Muslim South, not only was the entire Nuer people politically united, but they also cooperated uneasily with other southern Sudanese peoples, including their arch-enemies, the Dinka.
The pressure was now perceived to exist at such a systemic level that the group kept together was far larger than any earlier political alliance in the region.
Simmel’s rule also enabled the prediction, which proved accurate, that the alliance would falter following the end of the struggle.
The chronic political instability of independent South Sudan since 2010 is to a great extent framed as a Nuer–Dinka conflict.
External pressure alone does not decide the internal cohesion of a group.
There must also be something about the internal composition of a group which creates loyalty and commitment.
Otherwise, the external pressure will only lead to dissolution and internal conflicts.
For a group to function, it must have something to offer to its members, and it must place legitimate demands on them.
This ‘something’ does not have to involve political or economic resources; it may also be intangibles deemed necessary for a meaningful, self-respecting existence.
But there must be something which creates a willingness to sacrifice, and a sense of solidarity and loyalty among the members.
There must be reciprocity and trust.
Some kind of resources must flow within the group, it must have a structure of authority which ensures that the norms are followed, and it must justify itself ideologically; it must legitimate its existence.
Ethnic leaders appeal to notions about shared origins and blood ties.
Religious groups promise eternal salvation and threaten eternal damnation.
Other groups may promise honor, wealth, jobs or influence, or they may simply offer security and stability.
In stable, traditional societies, these mechanisms were rarely challenged.
They all make you feel, as a member, that you matter.
They offer recognition.
And it is in situations of change, where old values are confronted with new ones, and where a multitude of opportunities become visible to the individual, that such processes are most easily seen.
The degree of belonging in a group depends on what it has to offer, both in terms of resources and in terms of sanctions.
An extremely tightly integrated group offers practically everything to its members; a place of residence, political influence, a profession or its equivalent, a useful network of trustworthy contacts, a spouse and an overarching religious meaning to life.
The price to pay if one opts to break out of such a group is, naturally, high; one risks losing everything, moving back to square one in one’s life.
An extremely loosely integrated group, on the other hand, may offer nothing but an annual party to its members; the rest of the year, the group members must draw on their other networks of commitment and group memberships.
This distinction reminds us of the fact that ethnic identity among Swedish-Americans in the Midwest is something quite different from ethnic identity among Jews in Tunisia.
Destabilized Boundaries
There are people who do not fit in, and that group boundaries may be less fixed and crisp than the classic perspectives seem to imply.
Until recently, ‘ethnic anomalies’ have received scant attention from anthropologists.
This may be explained historically by the subject’s double heritage: the Boas school’s emphasis on the patterned, regular nature of cultural forms, and the European tendency to study factors contributing to the integration of societies.
There are both centripetal (integrative) and centrifugal (divisive) forces at work in any society, from the smallest to the largest and most complex, and they are not least visible in situations of rapid change (Eriksen and Schober 2016).
Since identification hinges on contrast, most social identities are of the either-or kind.
One is either man or woman, either Mexican or Guatemalan, either black or white, Christian or Hindu.
The real world is much less well ordered.
The population in Trinidad consists of two large ethnic categories (apart from a number of smaller ones), namely Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians.
Those of African origin are mostly Christian (Catholic or Anglican) and are associated with certain cultural values and practices such as the calypso and carnival.
The Trinidadians of Indian origin are largely Hindu (but considerable numbers are also Muslim or Christian), and are associated with other cultural values and publicly visible practices such as Indian films and dance.
Most Trinidadians fit into one of these large categories, but when one looks closely, few individuals are ‘typical’ representatives of their group.
Among Africans, there are important variations concerning class and colour (which is socially significant in the Caribbean), and among Indians there are perhaps even greater variations following the divides of town/countryside, religion and values associated with individualism versus collectivism.
The relative importance of ethnic membership to an individual in ‘multi-ethnic Trinidad’ varies from hardly anything to nearly everything.
In addition to the largest ones, several intermediate categories exist.
The largest consists of the people known locally as douglas.
The term comes from bhojpuri (the Hindi dialect spoken by most of the Indian immigrants to Trinidad in the nineteenth century), and means ‘bastard’.
Douglas are ‘mixtures’.
They have both African and Indian ancestors; usually, they have one parent of each kind.
A calypso from 1960, written and performed by an artist who simply used ‘Dougla’ as his soubriquet, made explicit the frustration so many Trinidadians felt for not belonging to a clear-cut group or category.
A dougla, the singer goes on to relate, has no place to find protection if there is ethnic fighting, no parties to vote for, no team to root for, no networks higher up in the hierarchies of society.
The dougla was a non-person, an ethnic anomaly, the pangolin of ethnic classification.
All identity systems have their douglas, functioning partly like the third element in Lévi-Strauss’s binary schemes.
Ethnic anomalies are those who are both-and and neither-nor.
They are neither black nor white, neither Russian nor Chechnyan, or they are both Christian and Palestinian (like the late Edward Said), both Pakistani and English.
Many years after the performance of the aforementioned calypso, Trinidadian intellectuals spoke metaphorically about the ‘douglarisation of Trinidadian society’.
They meant that there was by now such a bewildering array of cultural and social mixtures in Trinidad, that it would soon no longer make sense to speak of a purely Afro or Indo way of life.
Cultural mixing has received more attention in anthropology than the social anomalies, and both kinds of phenomena indicate a world in which boundaries, and indeed identities, are being destabilized.
Anthropologists have explored cultural mixing in many societies, using concepts like hybridization, creolization or syncretism to describe them.
Such processes of mixing create new cultural forms, help the ambiguous gray zones proliferate, and make it increasingly difficult to know where to draw the boundary between this group and that.
On the one hand, it is clear that creolization and the proliferation of people who ‘don’t fit in’ have deeply challenged the formerly unquestioned emphasis on boundaries and group cohesion as constitutive of collective identities.
On the other hand, it is equally clear that boundaries are being re-created and sometimes strengthened as a reaction to the tendencies towards their erasure and relativization.
In Mauritius, another multi-ethnic society with strong tendencies towards cultural mixing, the Archbishop of the Mascareignes expressed it thus: ‘Let the colors be clear and distinct for the rainbow to remain beautiful’.
Recent research into social dynamics in complex societies, moreover, indicates that ethnic boundaries are becoming blurred in new ways.
Noting that many cities across the world had become, in the early twenty-first century, diverse in new ways, Steven Vertovec (2007) coined the term superdiversity.
His point was that mobility had made the ethnic maps of contemporary cities more unstable and volatile than previously; that temporary workers, students, tourists, asylum seekers, and various intermediate groups, plus the internal mobility within the cities, created a relatively unpatterned urban space that was less stable and regular than terms like ‘pluralism’ or ‘multiculturalism’ might suggest.
Decades of detailed studies of inter-ethnic processes have nevertheless shown that there is no reason a priori to assume that cultural exchanges and shared public spaces lead to the quick dissolution of identity boundaries.
Both hybridization and superdiversity, and a heightened awareness of traditions and boundaries result from increased contact.
In fact, it is often the case that the more similar people become, the more concerned they are to appear different from each other.
And, one might add, the more different they try to be, the more similar they become!
For there exist some standardized ways of expressing uniqueness and difference, which are recognized and globally accepted, and which make different groups comparable.
In the process of rendering oneself comparable, one risks losing some of the traits that, perhaps, made one distinctive in the first place.
Clothes, food, folk music and folk history are elements which recur in identity politics almost everywhere.
The grammar drawn upon to express differences is becoming globally standardized.
Anthropology is a particular way of thinking about the world and the human condition.
It is concerned with how humans make sense of their world, emphasizing the power of symbols and narratives; and how social life can be regular, predictable and a source of security, emphasizing the importance of trust and reciprocity.
Anthropology can teach important lessons about the world and the global whirl of cultural mixing, contact and contestation – but it can also teach us about ourselves.
Anthropology takes part in the long conversation about what it is to be human, and gives flesh and blood to these fundamental questions.
It is a genuinely cosmopolitan discipline in that it does not privilege certain ways of life above others, but charts and compares the full range of solutions to the perennial human challenges.
In this respect, anthropology is uniquely a knowledge for the twenty-first century, crucial in our attempts to come to terms with a globalised world, essential for building understanding and respect across real or imagined cultural divides.
Anthropology holds out the keys to a world which has the potential of changing the lives of those who choose to enter it.