5 - Styling social identities

Summary

SOCIAL IDENTITY, CULTURE AND DISCOURSE

The last three decades have seen a general shift in social scientific theorising of identity, away from relatively static models towards dynamic models. A significant voice arguing for this realignment was that of George Herbert Mead in the early days of social psychology (Mead 1932, 1934). Mead argued that social interaction was where people's appreciation of social forces could be seen at work. He stressed people's understandings of the social implications of their actions in specific situations. He said that agentive social action was a necessary focus for psychology. Much later, in anthropology, Frederick Barth argued a similar line, challenging a static, structural–functional understanding of the social world (Barth 1969, 1981). In his historical review of anthropological research on ethnicity, Richard Jenkins says that Barth's perspective has become the dominant one in that discipline (Jenkins 1997: 12). Barth suggested that we should not treat identities as fixed social categories associated with different cultural traits. Rather, we should focus on relationships of cultural differentiation and the sorts of ‘boundary work’ that people do in practice.

Many contemporary perspectives on social identity in different disciplines take this general line, stressing the need for a dynamic approach to identity as an active discursive process. Anthony Giddens says we need to see identity as a personal ‘project’ pursued reflexively by people as they go through the events and stages of their lives (Giddens 1991). Theorists in cultural studies have argued vociferously against the assumption that people inhabit unitary identities.