Signs of Identity

The Anatomy of Belonging

Martin Ehala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351985055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Signs of Identity presents an interdisciplinary introduction to collective identity, using insights from social psychology, anthropology, sociology and the humanities. It takes the basic concept of semiotics – the sign – as its central notion, and specifies in detail in what ways identity can be seen as a sign, how it functions as a sign, and how signs of identity are related to those who have that identity. Recognizing that the sense of belonging is both the source of solidarity and discrimination, the book argues for the importance of emotional attachment to collective identity. The argument is supported by a large number of real-life examples of how collective emotions affect group formation, collective action and inter-group relations. By addressing the current issues of authenticity and the Self, multiculturalism, intersectionality and social justice, the book helps to stimulate discussion of the contested topics of identity in contemporary society.

1

The conceptions of collective identity

The foundations of identity research

Even though the topic of this book is collective identity, some understanding of what identity is in general, and what other identities there are besides collective identities, is unavoidable.

The systematic study of identity began in the middle of the 20^th century with the seminal work of Erik H. Erikson. Born in 1902 in Germany as an extramarital child of a Jewish mother from Denmark, finding his true self might have been difficult for Erikson. He was not very successful at school and did not go to university, but traveled around the country with his friend as a wandering artist. At the age of 25 he got a position as an art teacher at a school associated with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. While there, Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna encouraged him to study psychoanalysis. His training at this institute was the only academic education he ever obtained. When the Nazis came to power, and attacks on Jews and scholars of psychoanalysis increased, Erikson emigrated to the United States. He established a child psychoanalysis practice in Boston and soon gained recognition. During his long and fruitful academic career, he held positions at Harvard Medical School and Yale, and was a professor at several other universities.

The focus of Erikson’s work was personal identity and its developmental stages, but he also analyzed social identity and theorized on how different layers of identity are related to society (see Erikson 1966, 1994). Broadly speaking, Erikson developed a comprehensive theory of identity, which due to its high level of generalization remained fairly non-elaborated in several sub-domains. Despite this, or maybe because of this, his writings inspired extensive research, resulting in a family of identity theories (see Schwartz 2001). Due to the all-encompassing nature of his approach, it is still a very good starting point for a general introduction to identity-related issues.

In Erikson’s theory, identity is connected to one’s sense of self, called the ego. The ego, in psychoanalysis, is the conscious part of one’s personality – how one understands oneself. The main focus of Erikson’s work is ego identity, which he defined as an accumulated confidence that “one’s ability to maintain inner sameness and continuity (one’s ego in the psychological sense) is matched by the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for others” (Erikson 1994, p. 94). Ego identity, in other words, is a feeling that I am what I think I am, and that other people seem to agree on what I am, and that this general consensus regarding what I am is relatively stable over time.

This does not mean that identity was static and unchangeable for Erikson. He argued (Erikson 1960) that ego identity was in a continuous process of development throughout one’s life, from childhood to adulthood to old age. Identity development goes through eight developmental stages, at each stage involving movement from identity confusion to identity synthesis. Identity confusion is the state of the self where individuals are unsure about who they are, what they want and what their purpose in the world is. Identity synthesis is a state where a person has developed an integrated understanding of him/herself that includes beliefs, preferences, tastes and career choices, which all fit harmoniously together, providing a general sense of meaning in one’s life, and a sense of where one is going in the future. When a young person matures, ego identity moves from confusion toward synthesis, and this is believed to be the most intense period of searching for identity synthesis. When a person goes through an identity crisis later in life, ego identity moves temporarily from synthesis to confusion again.

Erikson (1950) distinguished three layers of identity. Ego identity is at the deepest and most intimate layer. Ego identity is quite private and not often revealed; some of it, such as temperament, is even largely unconscious. The second layer is personal identity. Personal identity is what one shows to society. It includes career preferences, tastes and hobbies, and everything that can be labeled as personal style. Personal identity is that which other people know one by. The third level of a person’s identity is social identity, which consists of the preferences that come from solidarity with the groups to which one belongs. It also includes characteristics that have been obtained through one’s immersion in the social context one operates in: native language, professional and social subcultures, etc.

These three layers of identity show different levels of immersion of the self in the social context. Ego identity is the most intimate and the least influenced by contextual factors: it includes the most basic and hard-to-control properties of the self. Personal identity is consciously shaped for others, and also shaped by others. Its main goal in society is to identify the person as a unique individual. Social identity is the most contextually influenced and its main function is to express belongingness to groups and sameness with other individuals who also belong to these groups.

Sheldon Stryker (2008) refined Erikson’s tripartite classification of identities by postulating a fourth identity type: role identity. Role identity is broader and more contextually shaped than personal identity, being in this respect close to social identity. Even though the same role is taken by many people, the individuals who play the role do not necessarily look for belonging among a set of people who share this role. This is how role identity is different from social identity. Furthermore, role identity is always characterized by a specific function that the role fulfills in society, but not all social groups and categories have distinctive roles in society. In this sense, role identity is closer to personal identity: it characterizes a person in respect to what he or she does in society. Role identities differ from personal identities since each personal identity is unique: there cannot, in principle, be two living human beings who have the same personal identity.

To make the distinction between role identity and social identity clearer, many current scholars prefer to use the term collective identity instead of social identity (see Ashmore, Deaux and McLaughlin-Volpe 2004). This is justified, because personal identities and role identities are also largely social in nature. Therefore, in this book, I will mainly use collective identity when referring to identities characteristic of groups and categories.

In this book, a broad distinction between ego identity, personal identity, role identity and collective identity occurs throughout. There are, of course, other types of identities, such as gender identity, ethnic identity and virtual identity, but these are subtypes of one of the four broad categories. Therefore, the four basic types are useful as a mental map of what is in principle possible in the domain of identities.

Since Erikson’s ego identity approach stems from psychoanalysis, it naturally emphasizes the psychological nature of identity. Thus, for Erikson and many theorists influenced by him, even collective identity is a psychological phenomenon, characterizing a person’s subjective identification with a group. These theoretical approaches that study the individual as a carrier of collective identity may be called micro-level approaches.

Micro-level approaches are distinguished from macro-level approaches, which see collective identity as a shared collective construct, not a person’s identification with a group or even a sum of individual identities. In macro-level approaches, collective identity “is the image that the community has of itself as a historical and legitimate group” (Landry, Allard and Deveau 2010, p. 32), and it manifests itself in the public discourse: in history textbooks, political speeches, media, fiction, poetry, etc.

There are also accounts that incorporate both the micro and macro levels in collective identity, and explain how they interact. These theories are particularly useful in explaining how social structures scaffold and constrain individual identities, and how individual identities influence social interaction which in turn shapes social structures. The two-level theories help also to understand the dynamic processes of group formation and mobilization.

Next, I will give an outline of some prominent theories in each of these three approaches as a panoramic view of the state of the art of identity research. This overview does not aim to be exhaustive, but to provide a general understanding of the possibilities of how identities can be understood. However, several of the many theories that are not covered here are outlined in subsequent chapters when discussing different facets of identity.

Micro-level approaches

According to a well-known definition by Henri Tajfel, one of the leading figures in identity research in the 20^th century, collective identity is “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (1978, p. 68). According to this definition, collective identity is something mental that an individual has, and consequently it is studied as a psychological property of humans.

It must be noted at this point that Henri Tajfel and his followers use the term social identity instead of collective identity, and the definition above is part of a theoretical framework known as the Social Identity approach (for a recent overview, see Hornsey 2008), incorporating two related theories: Social Identity Theory (SIT) conceived in Tajfel and Turner (1979), and Self-Categorization Theory (SCT) proposed by Turner (1982).

At present, the Social Identity approach is perhaps the most widely known theory of collective identity in social psychology. Besides the Social Identity approach, there are other micro-level theories that explain aspects of collective identity not touched on by SIT and SCT. Two of them – the Optimal Distinctiveness theory and Identity Complexity theory – will be reviewed in some detail.

Social Identity approach

In the 1970s, Tajfel ran a number of experiments in which people were divided into two groups and asked to give credit points to the other participants in the experiment, both to those who were in their own group (called the in-group) and to the members of the other group (the out-group). He observed that subjects favored members of their in-group, despite the fact that no one knew each other before the experiment, and everybody was assigned to the two groups randomly by simply flipping a coin. Because the group members had nothing in common except the fact that they were assigned to the same group, Tajfel inferred that the bias to favor in-group members must be a very basic social psychological tendency evolutionarily hardwired into the human brain. He called it the in-group bias.

On the basis of this and other experiments, Tajfel hypothesized that there is a group effect in the interaction of individuals, and its impact can vary across contexts: in some contexts, two people may interact as just two individuals, without their group affiliations much affecting the interaction, for example when two friends go hiking; in other contexts, people interact as representatives of their respective groups without paying much attention to each other’s personal properties, as for example soldiers on a battlefield.

According to Tajfel, the group effect on human interaction depends on whether the collective identities are salient at the time of interaction or not (salience in this context means awareness). Tajfel claims that when one of a person’s collective identities becomes salient, the individual becomes acutely conscious of the beliefs, values, norms and stereotypes associated with this identity, and will most likely interact with other people in relevant contexts so as to enact these values. Thus, the higher the collective identity salience, the more likely individuals belonging to different groups are to interact as representatives of their groups rather than as just unique individuals.

Identity salience may in some situations be low and in some situations high, or anywhere in between. For example, in a peaceful multicultural society, ethnic identities usually are not salient: in Toronto, arguably the most multicultural city in the world with about half of the population born outside Canada, when two people interact, it does not matter much whether one is Polish and the other Chinese; they will probably communicate as two individuals in a cosmopolitan city. In a society where interethnic relations are problematic, identity salience is higher. For example, in Rwanda, because of painful memories of the ethnic cleansing in 1994, the interaction of two strangers on the street is still very much influenced by whether both are Hutu, both Tutsi, or they belong to different ethnicities.

According to SIT, our group affiliations affect our behavior in other ways, too. For example, as people generally strive for high self-esteem, they are highly conscious of the status and image of the groups they belong to. Groups in society constantly compare and compete with each other in order to establish their relative prestige. To enhance their self-esteem, people are motivated to contribute to the status and image of the groups they belong to. In-group bias is just one of several such means. For example, negative stereotypes of out-groups are often created, and the members of out-groups discriminated against. Tajfel and Turner (1979) distinguish three strategies to improve collective self-esteem: social mobility, social change and social creativity.

Social mobility is a strategy employed when a member of a low-status group abandons his or her in-group and tries to become a member of a high-status out-group to raise his or her self-esteem. For example, a minority-language family may dissociate itself from the cultural practices of its heritage community, and adopt the culture and language of the majority. Social mobility is the main cause of assimilation of ethnic minorities into mainstream societies.

The ease and speed of such assimilation depends on the permeability of boundaries between groups in a society, so that one can move to a higher status group and be accepted there as a member. Boundaries are permeable if both high- and low-status group members have favorable attitudes toward the other group, and the racial, linguistic, religious and cultural differences between the groups are not very large. The general tendency is that the more permeable the boundaries between groups and the larger the status differences between groups, the more eager the members of the low-status group are to disassociate themselves from their in-group and join the high-status group. In many cases, this has led to the complete assimilation of low-status minorities. For example, many white ethnic immigrant communities in North America and Australia have almost completely assimilated to the mainstream English-speaking societies.

Of course, inter-group boundaries are of different levels of permeability, and sometimes are not permeable at all. For example, in societies with acute inter-group conflicts, it is very hard to change one’s group affiliation, as in this case the person leaving the old group could be considered a traitor, and might still not be accepted by the new group members because of his former affiliation with the conflicting out-group. Inter-group boundaries are also rigid in cases where the groups are very different racially, culturally or by religion. In this case it requires very large investments of time to acculturate oneself to the level that fits the new in-group cultural prototype (Ehala 2010). Therefore, if group boundaries are rigid, social mobility is not a plausible strategy for the members of the low-status group attempting to enhance their self-esteem. According to SIT, in these cases the use of either social competition or social creativity could be more successful.

Social competition is a strategy where group members build their self-esteem through direct competition with the out-group. For example, a weak football team could try to play better the next season and improve its relative rank, or a new nation could try to establish a strong economy. This strategy inevitably raises inter-group tensions when the competition is over scarce resources. Whether social competition is seen as a viable strategy does not depend solely on the impermeability of inter-group boundaries, but also on whether the low-status group members perceive their group to be strong enough to challenge the existing inter-group power relations, and whether these relations are perceived as unjustified.

A vivid example of social competition is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. After the introduction of free speech as a part of Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost, the legitimacy of the Soviet power started to be questioned by referring to Stalinist crimes, including annexation of sovereign states, such as the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, into the Soviet empire. Perceptions of illegitimacy combined with the perception of economic and military weakness of the Soviet central government created a fruitful setting for social competition among the non-Russian nations and ethnicities against their unjust low status. As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the status of non-Russian nations in all their newly emerged states rose, while the high status of Russians living in these parts of the former empire was lowered to the same extent (see Zabrodskaja and Ehala 2015).

There can also be situations in which inter-group boundaries are fairly impermeable and the inter-group power situation is perceived as relatively stable, i.e. the power differences between the high- and low-status groups are so large that it is unrealistic to try to override them, and the legitimacy of these power relations is not questionable. In these situ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The conceptions of collective identity
• 2. The nature of social phenomena
• 3. Identity as sign
• 4. Identity signals
• 5. Identity meanings
• 6. Identification
• 7. Identity negotiation
• 8. Hot and cold identities
• 9. Epilogue
• Index