Social Identity

Richard Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134586769
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social Identity explains how identification, seen as a social process, works: individually, interactionally and institutionally. Building on the international success of previous editions, this fourth edition offers a concise, comprehensive and readable critical introduction to social science theories of identity for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates. All the chapters have been updated, and extra new material has been added where relevant, integrating the most recent critical publications in the field.

As with the earlier editions, the emphasis is on sociology, anthropology and social psychology; on the interplay between relationships of similarity and difference; on interaction; on the categorisation of others as well as self-identification; and on power, institutions and organisations.

Written in clear, accessible language, and informed by relevant topical examples throughout, this fully updated new edition will be useful for students interested in social identity throughout the social sciences and humanities.

1

IDENTITY MATTERS

Many of us, much of the time, are able to take identity for granted. We seem to know who we are, we have a good enough working sense of who the others in our lives are, and they appear to relate to us in the same way. Sooner or later, however, a time arrives when identity becomes an issue …

Someone calls your name and you turn round. His face is familiar, but that’s all. There are no clues. He seems to know who you are, however: he knows your name at least. You ask each other how it’s going, and agree that meeting up for a drink sometime would be good. ‘I’ll call you’, he says. He’s got my number? ‘Say hello to Alan’, he says and then you each go your separate ways. With luck it’ll come back to you.

It’s a cold Friday night, rainy and windy. You’re dressed for dancing, not the weather. Finally, shivering, you reach the head of the queue outside the club. The bouncer – or, as he prefers to be known, the doorman – raises his arm and admits your flat mate. He takes one look at you and demands proof of your age. All you have is money. But you don’t have enough. You walk home alone.

You hand your passport to the immigration officer behind her glass screen. She looks at your nationality, at where you were born. Your name. She checks your visa. She looks at the photograph, she looks at you. She asks you the purpose of your visit. She stamps the passport and wishes you a pleasant stay. Already she is looking over your shoulder at the person behind you.

Finally you get through to the order line of a clothing catalogue. You want to buy a new jacket. The young woman who answers is called Angela, although her voice suggests an origin in the Indian subcontinent. She asks for your name, address, credit card number and expiry date, your customer reference number if you have one, establishing your status as someone to whom, in the absence of a face-to-face encounter, goods can be dispatched in confidence. And also, of course, putting you on the mailing list if you’re not already there.

Others may speculate about our identity without us noticing it, or it becoming a particular issue.

On a train, the stranger in the opposite seat smiles and excuses herself: she has noticed you reading last week’s newspaper from a small town several hundred miles to the east. You explain that your mother posts it to you, so that you can keep up with the news from home. She recognised the newspaper because she is married to a man from your home town. You, it turns out, were at school with her sister-in-law, and can remember, vaguely, her husband. He was something of a bully, if memory serves, but you don’t tell your fellow passenger that. Before leaving the train she gives you her telephone number. On balance, you aren’t going to use it.

In situations such as the above identity is, or has to be, established or verified but the stakes are not high, one way or the other, and life goes on much as before. Identification is not always so mundane or trivial, however.

One of the central themes of this book is that identification, whether of ourselves or of others, is a process; something that we do. As a consequence, we may get it wrong, particularly when we consciously try to influence how other people see us, and it may matter:

You’re getting ready for a blind date with a woman who you have ‘met’ on the lonely hearts page of a national newspaper. It’s the first time you’ve dipped your toe in the pond since a messy break up seven months ago. You are very nervous. You’ve showered twice, the second time to scrub off some of the overdose of eau de toilette and aftershave. But what to wear? Not too smart or she might think you’re a bit full on. Too casual and she’ll think that, well, that you’re too casual. It takes hours, or so it seems. Clothes are scattered everywhere, but eventually you get it about right. You think so, anyway. That grey cotton-linen mix jacket you picked up in a sale last year, the black Dockers that you bought last week, a plain white button-down Oxford shirt. Should do the trick. It’s a nice night, no risk of rain. Off you go. The wine bar where you’ve arranged to meet is about ten minutes away, and just before you get there you stop and have a look in a shop window. Fine. Then you look down and you can’t believe it. How did you do that? Nerves? Absent-mindedness? You’ve put on your favourite trainers. Trainers, for goodness sake. Scruffy, old, favourite trainers. Smelly trainers. Too late to go back and change. You take a deep breath. What will she think? Just got to hope that she really does have a GSOH.

There are, however, many situations in which we only have a limited ability to influence how others identify us.

The morning of your sixty-fifth birthday, in addition to birthday cards and presents, brings the prospect of imminent retirement: a pension instead of a salary, a concessionary public transport pass, and special rates every Tuesday at the hairdresser’s. Beyond that, free medical prescriptions and invitations to the Senior Citizens Club at something called the ‘Day Centre’ are intimations of dependence and disability. Death. It may be the same face you see in the bathroom mirror but you will no longer be quite the person that you were yesterday. Nor can you ever be again.

It is the annual company dinner. You have always gone alone, and always left alone, early. This year, however, you have someone to bring. What will your colleagues, the MD especially, think of her? There is a promotion coming up in February, and you know what they’re like about that kind of thing. You take a deep breath, push open the glass door, and walk into the bar of the hotel restaurant that has been booked for the evening. Your boss, smarmy Mark, comes across, hand out, glass of red – certainly not his first – in his hand: ‘Susie, lovely to see you.’ He turns slightly, there is a question in his eyes … Big deep breath: ‘Mark, this is my partner, Alison.’

You hand your passport to the immigration officer behind her glass screen. She looks at your nationality, at where you were born. Your name. She checks your visa. She looks at the photograph, she looks at you. She types something into her computer terminal. She asks you the purpose of your visit. During the conversation she checks again the screen beside her and presses a button under her desk, to alert airport security. Abruptly you find yourself being removed from the queue of incoming passengers by two male officers and led away to an interview room. Already she is dealing with the person who had been in line behind you.

A rainy afternoon in Belfast in 1973 and you leave work early to discover that the buses are off. Finding a public phone box that works you try for a taxi. Your usual number has nothing available: a bomb scare’s tying up the traffic. Do you walk home? No, it’s too far and it wouldn’t be safe. You find what’s left of the phone book and start dialling other taxi companies. Eventually you get one. Ten minutes later it comes and you settle in for the ride home. It doesn’t take you long to realise that instead of heading up Divis Street to the Falls Road you’re driving over the bridge into Protestant East Belfast. The next afternoon, when you come round in hospital, a distant voice that you don’t recognise is telling you that you’re going to be alright. You were lucky to get off with a shot through the kneecap, some burns and a bad beating.

So, who we are, or who we are seen to be, can matter enormously. Nor is identification just a matter of the encounters and thresholds of individual lives. Although identification always involves individuals, something else – collectivity and history – may also be at stake.

Mass public occasions such as the Sydney Mardi Gras, or Gay Pride in London, are public affirmations that being gay or being lesbian are shared, as well as individual, identifications. For participants these occasions may, or may not, affirm their individual sexual identities, and it may also be an occasion to have a good time, but they are also shared rituals, celebrations of collective identification and political mobilisation.

Imagine a contested border region. It might be anywhere in the world. There is a range of ways to settle the issue: violence, a referendum, international arbitration. Whatever the means adopted, or imposed, the outcome will have consequences for people on both sides, depending on who they are. While some will accept it, some may not. Populations may move, towns and regions may be ‘cleansed’, genealogies may be rewritten. The boundaries of collective identity may be redrawn.

Finally, here are two cases that are not drawn from my own experience or general knowledge. They illustrate the interplay of individual and collective identity, the consequences of identification, and the magnitude of the historical themes that everyday situations may evoke.

In 1935 a fair-skinned Australian of part-indigenous descent was ejected from a hotel for being an Aboriginal. He returned to his home on the mission station to find himself refused entry because he was not an Aboriginal. He tried to remove his children but was told he could not because they were Aboriginal. He walked to the next town where he was arrested for being an Aboriginal vagrant and placed on the local reserve. During the Second World War he tried to enlist but was told he could not because he was Aboriginal. He went interstate and joined up as a non-Aboriginal. After the war he could not acquire a passport without permission because he was Aboriginal. He received exemption from the Aborigines Protection Act – and was told that he could no longer visit his relations on the reserve because he was not an Aboriginal. He was denied permission to enter the Returned Servicemen’s Club because he was.¹

When Youssra’s three-and-a-half-year-old son started nursery school, he really wanted his mum to come on a school trip. So she signed up to help out on a cinema visit. She buttoned the children’s coats outside their classroom and accompanied them to the front hall. But there, she was stopped by the headteacher, who told her, in front of the baffled children: ‘You don’t have the right to accompany the class because you’re wearing a headscarf.’ She was told to remove her hijab, or basic Muslim head covering, because it was an affront to the secular French Republic. ‘I fought back’, she says. ‘I brought up all the arguments about equality and freedom for all. But I was forced home, humiliated. The last thing I saw was my distressed son in tears. He didn’t understand why I’d been made to leave.’²

Each situation above illustrates how identification affects real human experience: it is the most mundane of things and it can be the most extraordinary. Whichever way we look at it, identification seems to matter, in everyday life and in sociology.

BUT … DOES IDENTITY MATTER?

It isn’t enough for me simply to insist that identity matters. Some contributors to the literature have expressed serious doubts about whether identity and identification matter as much as social science appears to think they do. Their scepticism has some justification, and is a useful reminder that we should not take identity for granted.

First, and most fundamentally, there are doubts about whether identity, in itself, actually influences or causes behaviour. Martin, for example, has insisted that despite the high profile of ‘identity’ in accounts of recent conflicts, such as in the Balkans, it ‘fails to provide an explanation … [for] why actors are making certain utterances or why certain events are happening’ (1995: 5). This was a response to claims that explicitly connected identity to actions, assertions that under the circumstances the people concerned could not have done otherwise (and were, hence, blameless). Subsequently Malešević (2006) also put forward arguments broadly similar to Martin’s.

In order to begin thinking about this issue, we must decide what we mean by ‘identity’. As a very basic starting point, identity is the human capacity – rooted in language – to know ‘who’s who’ (and hence ‘what’s what’). This involves knowing who we are, knowing who others are, them knowing who we are, us knowing who they think we are and so on. This is a multi-dimensional classification or mapping of the human world and our places in it, as individuals and as members of collectivities (cf. Ashton et al. 2004). Ethnomethodologists, developing the work of Harvey Sacks, call this ‘membership categorisation’ (Eglin and Hester 2003; Housley and Fitzgerald 2002, 2009; Leudar et al. 2004; Stokoe 2003). It is a process – identification – not a ‘thing’; it is not something that one can have, or not, it is something that one does.

So, following Martin and Malešević, it cannot be said too often that identification doesn’t determine what humans do, although this claim is often made by politicians and others. Knowing ‘the map’ – or even just approximately where we are – does not necessarily tell us where we should go next (although a better or worse route to our destination might be suggested). However, without such a map we would not know where we are or what we, and others, are doing.

The matter is made more complex by the fact – which is also something that the literature on ‘membership categorisation’ referred to in the previous paragraph teaches us – that classification is rarely neutral (something that I discuss further in Chapter 9). At the very least, classification implies evaluation, and often much more. Humans are generally not disinterested classifiers. This is spectacularly so when it comes to classifying our fellow humans (and them us). Cognitively, classification is organised hierarchically: A and B may be different from each other at one level, but both are members of the meta-category C. Classification is also hierarchical interactionally and socially: one may be identified as a C in one context, but as an A in another. In addition, because identification makes no sense outside of relationships, whether between individuals or groups, there are hierarchies or scales of preference, of ambivalence, of hostility, of competition, of partnership and co-operation, and so on.

From this perspective, identification and motives for behaviour might seem to be connected: to identify someone could be enough to decide how to treat her. This is one of the claims made by social psychology’s ‘social identity theory’, discussed further in Chapter 9. However, our classificatory models of self and others are multi-dimensional, unlikely to be internally consistent and may not easily map on to each other. Hierarchies of collective identification may conflict with hierarchies of individual identification, which means that the following can make complete interactional sense: I hate all As; you are an A; but you are my friend. Taken together, these points suggest that categorical imperatives are unlikely to be a sufficient guide on their own, and that the ability to discriminate between others in subtle and fine-grained ways is an everyday necessity.

A further issue, to which I will not give extensive attention here because it is discussed in Chapter 14, is the emotional charge that may, or may not, attach to identification. There are perhaps two things to say about this, the first of which is that, even allowing for social psychological studies of identity (see Chapter 9), we do not have a clear picture of the relation between emotion and identity. Perhaps the most that we are entitled to say at the moment is that emotion appears to be bound up with identification – typically through attachment – in some circumstances but not in others (Ashton et al. 2004: 90-92). The second point, which can perhaps be made with greater confidence, is that where identity does appear to be an emotional matter – and hence capable of influencing actions – this does not seem to be inevitable, or natural. Identification has to be made to matter, through the power of symbols and ritual experiences, for example. Flags and other symbols of collective identification may, probably as a result of early socialisation and not necessarily obviously, call forth the ‘inarticulate speech of the heart’ in powerful and consequential ways (Jenkins 2007, 2012a: 115-51).

So, while identification may be connected to motivation and behaviour, the connection is neither straightforward nor predictable. Which suggests that when Rogers Brubaker, for example, insists that ethnicity is a cognitive matter, of classification and categorisation (Brubaker 2004: 64-87; Brubaker et al. 2004), the key point is not that he is wrong – because he isn’t – but that other factors must also be taken into account. To repeat, classification is rarely disinterested.

This raises the question of the role of interests: is it the pursuit of interests, material or otherwise, which matters, or is it identity? This debate has a considerable history, and the alternative positions appear in useful contrast if we compare two influential perspectives on identity: Barth’s social anthropology (1969) and Tajfel’s social psychology (1981a). Despite points at which their understandings of identification resemble each other – not least in their emphases on process – they differ sharply in this important respect. Barth argued that identification and collectivity are generated as emergent by-products of the transactions and negotiations of individuals pursuing their interests. He was dissenting from a taken for granted, structural-functionalist orthodoxy in social anthropology that explained what people did by reference to their identity, in particular their membership of corporate groups or ‘cultures’, such as lineages, clans and tribes. Tajfel, by contrast, argued that group membership – even if it was only arbitrary assignation to a group under laboratory conditions – is sufficient in itself to generate identification with that group and to channel behaviour towards in-group favouritism and discrimination against out-group members. He was taking issue with social psychological accounts of identity (e.g. Sherif 1967) that emphasised ‘realistic competition’ and conflicts of interest as the basis for co-operation and group formation.

In fact, identification and interests are not easily distinguished. How I identify myself has a bearing on how I define my interests. How I define my interests may encourage me to identify myself in particular ways. How other people identify me has a bearing on how they define my interests, and, indeed, their own interests. My pursuit of particular interes...