Identity as constructed and contextualized

The concept or notion of “identity” remains intensely debated across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As du Gay et al. (2000: 1-2) argued already two decades ago, “the term identity takes on different connotations depending upon the context within which it is deployed ... the term ‘identity’ often provides only simple cover for a plethora of very particular and perhaps non-transferable debates” (cf. Joseph 2004: 9-10; cf. Woodward 2002: 2). Essentially, different approaches to the concept or notion of identity take different views on the possibilities and limits of human agency, that is, the ability of individuals to actively participate in forming their own identities across different social and cultural settings and contexts (Woodward 2002: 2-4).

In Western social and cultural contexts, people tend to understand and talk about “identity” as an individual’s way of making sense of and comprehending him/herself as a unique, distinct being who has a set of “inner mental states” (Shorter 1993: 5). Or as Weedon (2004: 8) puts it: “In [Western] commonsense discourse, people tend to assume that they are ‘knowing subjects’, that is sovereign individuals, whose lives are governed by free will, reason, knowledge, experience and, to a lesser extent, emotion.” An “identity” is therefore commonly viewed as stemming from a set of individual characteristics, or a “personality,” through which an individual defines him/herself in relation to others and by which, conversely, others define him/her (e.g. du Gay et al. 2000: 2; Weedon 2004: 8-9; Shorter 1993: 4). Identities are thus always formed in and through

Digital media and religion in an international context 15 social relations and various types of either direct or indirect and more or less clearly articulated types of association, nonassociation, and/or disassociation with particular “others.” Individuals therefore form their identities not only on the basis of their own individual notions or perceptions about “who” or “what” they “are” but also in equal measure in relation to their respective perceptions of “who” or “what” they are not (Weedon 2004: 19). Identities are never static or uniform, nor particularly stable and enduring. For example, throughout the course of our daily lives, we find ourselves in various types of situations that encourage us to take on and perform particular types of identities rather than others (e.g. the identity of parent, manager, or parishioner).

On a broader level, identities are also fundamentally intersectional and deeply intertwined with numerous aspects and positionalities of social and cultural life including (but not limited to) ethnicity, gender, social class, nationality, political persuasion, religious affiliation, etc. Like identities in general, these types of collective identities - whether they are consciously adopted, ascribed, or imposed - rely on “active processes of identification” on the one hand and “conscious counter-identification against institutionally and socially assigned identities and the meanings and values that they are seen to represent” on the other (Weedon 2004: 7). Our ongoing participation in the various types of discourses and practices through which these categories and collective identities are constructed and reproduced results in the formation, adoption, and performance of multiple, although always intersecting, identities.

Western understandings of identity also tend to be built around a sense of continuity. As “unique personalities” people understand themselves as having a history and a future. For this reason, much previous scholarship on identity and identity construction has focused on the ways and degrees to which identities are constructed and reproduced through narrative, i.e. through the various types of stories that people continually tell about themselves (Woodward 2002: 24-25; Burr 2003: 143). The notion of the narrative construction of identity or the “self” constitutes a widely explored topic in contemporary social and cultural theory (e.g. Taylor 1989; Giddens 1991; Lash 1995; Bauman 2001; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). This interest has largely been motivated by broader concerns about the social and cultural effects of a gradual but intensifying transition from traditional to post-traditional society in the postWorld War II era. As a principal consequence of this general transition, modern post-traditional societies have become increasingly individualistic and come to encompass a plurality of moral frameworks and outlooks on life. No longer as strongly bound by tradition, convention, class, and related categories, identity and identity construction in post-traditional society has become an increasingly fluid, reflexive, and continuous endeavor as people have become ever freer to choose and determine their own identities (e.g. Adams 2007: 7). For example, in his influential andwidely debated account, Giddens (1991) framed identity in late-modernity in terms of a “reflexive project of the self,” arguing that modern individuals have become continuously engaged in reflexively constructing and revising their own sense of themselves.

In spite of the fluid, reflexive, and individualized character of contemporary identities, identity construction still remains a fundamentally relational phenomenon. While we have become ever freer to construct our own identities and sense of ourselves, we still remain “dependent for our identity upon the willingness of others to support us in our version of events” (Burr 2003: 145). Individual understandings of selfhood and the individuation of selves therefore remain crucially dependent on relationships and individuals’ embeddedness within broader communities of meaning (e.g. Benhabib 1992: 127-29). It is crucial to recognize, therefore, that the stories people use to make sense of themselves and their place in the world remain strongly determined by the broader social and cultural contexts that they occupy and find themselves varyingly embedded and positioned within. As such, peoples’ personal narratives are always “deeply colored and structured by the codes of expectable and understandable biographies and identities” of different cultures (Benhabib 1992: 214) and “interwoven with the way stories are socially and culturally situated” (Schiffrin 1996: 168). Moreover, as Schiffrin (1996: 168) observes, stories of the self are situated both globally (i.e. in relation to cultural knowledge and broader cultural expectations) and locally (i.e. in relation to the particular “here and now” in which people are situated).

A social and cultural context-sensitive understanding of identity and identity construction also needs to remain attentive to the ways in which the stories people tell about themselves may be more or less conditioned by broader dominant social and cultural discourses as embedded in dominant ideology and perpetuated by central social institutions such as political, legal, and educational establishments (Gergen 2009: 51). It is important to recognize, therefore, how dominant discourse may function to set the parameters for, or even to severely limit, the range of “possible life stories” and discursive resources that become available to particular social groups and segments and the individuals who belong to them (Gergen 2009: 68). In some cases, dominant discourse can serve to force certain people and groups into what du Preez (1980) has termed “identity traps,” leaving them with few other choices than to construct their own life-stories and sense of selves using the often unfavorable and perhaps even chastising discourses and constructed realities of others (Benhabib 1992: 198). These observations have important implications for how we are to understand and approach collective forms of identity across various social, cultural, and religious contexts. Considering the focus of this volume, this concerns in particular how we choose to approach and understand the (often ambiguous) notion of “religious identity” and how it relates to other forms of collective identity markers such as ethnicity, gender, and social status or class.