Original scientific paper
THE CALL OF IDENTITY AS A DISPUTABLE SCIENTIFIC ISSUE
Rade Kalanj
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The paper deals with the concept of identity as one of the issues that have become topical within the framework of postmodern culture and general globalization development. This concept is actually an "old" common-sense, philosophical, cultural anthropological and theoretical political issue, yet it is nowadays for the most part connected with the concept of culture and the analysis of individual or collective self in the era of instrumental homogenisation. Because of this, the author makes an attempt to identify and to present predominant theoretical orientations dealing with identity, instisting especially on the differentiation between traditional essentialist and antiessentalist conceptions. Pointing at the one-sidedness of this conceptions, the author pleads for the relationist identity concept, which does not start from the so-called immanent, either biologist or culturalist, fixed definitions, but insists upon socio-cultural situations, circumstances and instrumental reasons that actually influence this or that kind of identification. As a consequence, identity is under no circumstances an abstract or metaphysical essence, but the product of a social construction of acteurs, groups and institutions - a construction which depends on the given social situation, on the power relations and on the strategies that individual or group acteurs use to affirm their individual or collective selves. This paper, in accordance with the most relevant analytical views, is based on the thesis on plurality and socially variable determination of identity construction. At the same time, it refers to the reasons of latency of their logic, which is actually the greatest challenge to scientific thinking.
Keywords
antiessentialism; essentialism; group; identification; identity; communitarism; identity construction; culture; cultural identity; difference; relationism; self
Hrčak ID:
50965
URI
Publication date:
16.6.2003.
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