Studies on the Social Construction of Identity and Authenticity

J. Patrick Williams, Kaylan C. Schwarz, J. Patrick Williams, Kaylan C. Schwarz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429648120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement des arts et des sciences humaines

As identity and authenticity discourses increasingly saturate everyday life, so too have these concepts spread across the humanities and social sciences literatures. Many scholars may be interested in identity and authenticity but lack knowledge of paradigmatic or disciplinary approaches to these concepts. This volume offers readers insight into social constructionist approaches to identity and authenticity. It focuses on the processes of identification and authentication, rather than on subjective experiences of selfhood. There are no attempts to settle what authentic identities are. On the contrary, contributors demonstrate that neither identities nor their authenticity have a single or fixed meaning.

Chapters provide exemplars of contemporary research on identity and authenticity, with significant diversity among them in terms of the identities, cultural milieu, geographic settings, disciplinary traditions, and methodological approaches considered. Contributors introduce readers to a number of established and emerging identity groups from sites around the world, from yogis and punks to fire dancers and social media influencers. Their conceptual work stretches from the micro-analytic to the ethno-national as authors employ a variety of qualitative methods including ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing, and the collection and analysis of naturally-occurring interactions. Several of the chapters look directly at identification and authentication while others focus on the social and cultural backdrops that structure these practices – what unites them is the adoption of social constructionist sensibilities.

This book will appeal to anyone interested in understanding identity and authenticity.

1 Introduction to the social construction of identity and authenticity

Kaylan C. Schwarz and J. Patrick Williams

Authenticity is a timely topic, having steadily saturated various dimensions of everyday life for the last few decades. As examples, authenticity is now a sought-after characteristic and marketing claim in the culinary sphere – imbued into local foods, craft beverages, traditional recipes, and “ethnic” cuisines (Ceccarini 2014; Lu and Fine 1995; Sims 2009; Thurnell-Read 2019). Travelers seek to locate authenticity when they visit heritage sites, regional festivals, and theme parks (Connell and Rugendyke 2010; Lovell and Bull 2017; Waysdorf and Reijnders 2018). Whether or not someone is an authentic member of some social group or subculture often evokes spirited debate, sometimes even outright conflict (Hannerz 2015; Palmer 2007; Weninger and Williams 2017). Authentic self-expression is a concern within the confessional cultures associated with social media, memoir, and reality television (Abidin 2017; Aslama and Pantti 2006; Edwards 2014). Across these domains and others, authenticity typically connotes a coveted status, a “positive value, revered and sought without ambivalence” (Lindholm 2013:364).

Attempts to theorize the authenticity of people, objects, places, and experiences is now widespread as well. Scholars across the social sciences and humanities have increasingly incorporated the term into their vocabularies, associating it with a range of synonyms including “sincere, true, honest, absolute, basic, essential, genuine, ideal, natural, original, perfect, pure, real, and right” (Lindholm 2013:362). We see authenticity research in the fields of sociology (Brekhus 2003; Grazian 2003; Peterson 1997), anthropology (Fillitz and Saris 2013; Theodossopoulos 2013), archaeology (Jones 2010), history (Brædder et al. 2017), art (Anthony and Joshi 2017; Fine 2004), folklore (Bendix 1992; Feinberg 2018), museum studies (Varutti 2018), consumer studies (Carroll 2015; Koontz 2010), tourism studies (Cohen 1988; MacCannell 1973; Wang 1999), communication studies (Androutsopoulos 2015; Duffy 2013), and education (Cumming and Maxwell 1999; Darling-Hammond and Snyder 2000), among others. Such work moves beyond the colloquial use of authenticity as an everyday word and instead addresses authenticity as a social science concept that requires both elaboration and specification. Such work has also helped to clarify the extent to which issues of authenticity appear to be “a pervasive part of our culture, our institutions, and our individual selves” (Erickson 1995:121).

While many scholars are interested in authenticity, it can be a challenge to use a concept “so broad and elusive” (Bendix 1992:104) and “so bloated with meanings that the hope of true definition is nearly futile” (Martin 2014:14).¹ Indeed, the difficulty of delimiting its meaning leads Straub (2012) to ask whether “authenticity [is] still a productive, substantiated concept, or has it become obsolete and redundant – a mere husk of a word?” (p. 11). On the one hand, it is the richness of potential meanings that fuels authenticity’s broad usage in scholarship. On the other hand, employing a concept this pluralistic in one’s own work requires care and analytic focus.

As the title spells out, this book is not intended to deal with authenticity in a broad way. Rather, it is specifically about authenticity as it relates to identity, a concept that has similarly experienced tremendous theoretical expansion since the early 20th century (Lemert 2019). A century ago, Freudian psychoanalysis posited the existence of hidden or repressed identities, which shaped a tradition of developmental psychology via Erik Erikson in which identities became seen as essential parts of ourselves that develop in stages across the life course (Frosh 2019). Scholars such as William James and Charles Horton Cooley influenced a cluster of social-psychological and micro-sociological perspectives interested in the social basis and significance of the self, including symbolic interactionism (Burke and Stets 2009), social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 2004), and conversation analysis and its associated strands (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998; Hester and Eglin 1997). Working from a neo-Marxist perspective, cultural studies scholars position identities as discursive constructs embedded in modes of power, as popularized by Michel Foucault (see Hall 1996). Similarly, for theorists attentive to the postmodern condition, identities have been framed as increasingly self-determined rather than ascribed and subject to ongoing revisions amid rapid societal changes (Bauman 2000; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Giddens 1991). Like authenticity, “identity straddles this terrain of inside and outside, self and other, subjectivity and objectivity” (Elliot 2019:3) and scholars must therefore be mindful when using either term.

This volume offers readers insight into social constructionist approaches to identity and authenticity, a paradigm that credits Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) landmark text The Social Construction of Reality as a sociological forbearer and is today engaged across a number of disciplinary traditions. Collectively, the contributors illuminate the myriad ways through which identities are authenticated (or inauthenticated) across a range of social milieu, from yoga communities to social media settings to biomedical research. There are no attempts to settle what authentic identities are. In fact, all the studies collected here demonstrate that neither identities nor their authenticity have a single or fixed meaning. Instead, authentic identities are seen as “a fluid set of cultural ideals that people in different situations and groups construct through interaction” (Williams 2013:105). In this introductory chapter, we equip the reader with some of the necessary background information relevant to our perspective. After providing a brief historical sketch of authenticity, we distinguish between critical realism and social constructionism as paradigms, linking the former primarily to psychological studies of the authentic self and the latter to sociological studies of authentic identities. We then raise three methodological considerations for social constructionist research related to representation, informant selection, and conceptualization. Finally, we introduce the remaining chapters in the volume, highlighting their theoretical and empirical significance.

The rise of authenticity

Authenticity is often traced back to ancient Greek philosophy, where scholars were preoccupied with discerning the nature of reality as created or “authored” by the gods. This early view of authenticity was unrelated to human beings or their subjective understandings of the world. On the contrary, authenticity was something transcendental, such that “regardless of the individual’s intellectual capacities or virtues, they can only ever hope to reflect an authenticity that is wholly external to the individual person. Authenticity resides elsewhere, out there in the immaterial realm of idealized forms” (Fordahl 2018:304). During the European Enlightenment, however, the deterioration of institutional frameworks that had once supplied authorial meaning (e.g., the church, the monarchy) resulted in new conceptualizations wherein authenticity came to be regarded as an essential aspect of the human condition rather than as a supra-human concern. Philosophers such as Rousseau placed trust in the consciousness, autonomy, and morality of the individual self and framed authenticity as “wholly contained within the sphere of human action” (Fordahl 2018:304) and “existing outside of, beneath, or beyond the social framework” (Lindholm 2013:371). Fordahl (2018) argues that authenticity’s meaning has shifted successively inward during the modern era: “whereas Plato’s authenticity had been external, and Rousseau’s individual, the authenticity of the twentieth century would be personal” (p. 305, emphasis added). This can be seen clearly in the development of existentialist philosophy, in which Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre maintained a “focus on the individual as the locus of concerns about authenticity” (Pierce 2015:437). Their work highlighted the significance of free will and placed a strong emphasis on the obligation to search for, awaken, and engage with one’s authentic self. The advent of industrialization and mass consumer culture and the alienation it supposedly engenders have only accelerated this inward turn (Arnould and Price 2003).

To balance the inward turn, other contemporary scholarship has increasingly recognized authenticity’s relationship to social and cultural forces. Pierce (2015), for example, demarcates “subjective” or “first-person” authenticity from “intersubjective” or “second-person” authenticity, while Weninger and Williams (2017) differentiate “self-authenticity” from “social authenticity.” Carroll (2015) further delimits the concept’s social and cultural features by distinguishing between “moral” and “type” authenticities. Such work helps reveal that there are multiple theoretical trajectories in authenticity research, that “the conceptualization of authenticity is inextricably linked to the relative significance attributed to personal versus social dimensions of human existence,” and that these approaches have led to diverse empirical questions and answers (Bessant 2011:18, emphasis in original).

Paradigmatic approaches

While the focus of this book is on the social rather than the personal aspects of authenticity, we nevertheless need to discuss both approaches in more depth to highlight their differences. To do this, we begin with the concept of paradigms. All social science research is guided by paradigms, even if scholars don’t realize which paradigm is guiding their work. A paradigm is the broadest framework in the philosophy of science and refers to:

A set of basic beliefs… . It represents a worldview that defines, for its holder, the nature of the “world,” the individual’s place in it, and the range of possible relationships to that world and its parts… . The beliefs are basic in the sense that they must be accepted simply on faith (however well argued); there is no way to establish their ultimate truthfulness.

(Guba and Lincoln 1994:107, emphasis in original)

Because paradigms frame understandings of the social world, they also comprise the ontological and methodological assumptions that shape research practices. Here we will discuss the ontological bases of two paradigms – critical realism and social constructionism² – to illustrate distinct approaches to the study of identity and authenticity.

Critical realism in the social sciences subscribes to some of the main points of positivism as practiced in the natural sciences: furtherance of scientific knowledge is the goal; theory often comes before observation; falsifying hypotheses whenever possible is seen to improve subsequent hypotheses, which ideally leads to more comprehensive theories of and generalizable claims about the social world (Danermark et al. 2002). Unlike positivism, however, critical realism acknowledges that human beings do not behave automatically or instinctually; they act based on interpretations about the meanings of things. Consequently, critical realism does not propose that the social world can ever be fully apprehended or predicted. Yet many critical realists do believe that social science can strive for objectivity by reducing phenomena to variables, specifying rigorous protocols for measuring those variables, and limiting researchers’ influence on the research process (Lieberson 1991). Thus, by following principles of logic, critical realism aims to provide improved approximations of truth (Fox 2008). In recent decades, critical realism has increasingly incorporated qualitative or mixed methods in the search for emic understanding, yet it treats such understanding as data that “assist in determining the meanings and purposes that people ascribe to their actions” (Guba and Lincoln 1994:110, emphasis added). In this sense, the meanings people give to reality, their own experiences and their actions are secondary to the meanings imputed by the informed researcher (Lincoln, Lynham, and Guba 2018).

In social constructionism, there is no singular, absolute, or verifiable “truth.” In contrast to critical realism, context-specific knowledge is given credence over generalizable findings, and theories are developed inductively rather than deductively. Because the nature of reality is seen as constructed instead of “really real,” research does not begin with hypotheses about the potential significance of isolated or correlated variables. The goal of inquiry is to understand how individuals and groups produce relevant knowledge about their social world. Some scholars fear that adopting a social constructionist approach requires “succumbing to the humanist dogma that everything is socially constructed and only socially constructed” (Munro 2011:2, emphasis in original). This is not the case, though social constructionism is more explicitly hermeneutical than some critical realists prefer because the significance of social phenomena is rooted in the meanings that participants hold, not just in what researchers decide is significant (Lincoln, Lynham, and Guba 2018). Social constructionists do not deny the existence of objective reality, but they often set it aside in favor of studying subjective meanings. Such bracketing occurs “when feminist scholars [distinguish] between biologically determined sex and socially constructed gender” and “when medical sociologists [distinguish] between biologically determined disease and socially constructed illness experience or disability” (Weinberg 2014:7, emphasis in original). Rather than treat social phenomena as social facts, social constructionists, “to the best of their ability … enter the phenomenon, gain multiple views of it, and locate it in its web of connections and constraints” (Charmaz 2014:342). Social constructionists more readily accept that their interpretations are themselves social constructions, and as a result, they tend not to make assertions regarding their own neutrality or the generic applicability of their findings.

What does all this mean for the study of identity and authenticity? Critical realism looks upon these notions as “actual” or “durable” phenomena (Moya 2000; Porpora 2015) and tends to examine the effects of identification on subsequent behaviors and self-feelings, including experiences of (in)authenticity. Social constructionism, instead of assuming their existence, focuses on the processes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction to the social construction of identity and authenticity
• Section 1 Authenticating identities in interpersonal contexts
• Section 2 Beyond interpersonal authentication
• Index