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What Is Cultural Identity?

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It is a word that has been used a lot in our societies, springing out almost everywhere: from political rhetoric and social discourses. The notion of Cultural Identity is often the central issue in which many debates evolve, a hybrid product reflecting human societies. We believe in its existence, we need it, to define ourselves against the otherness. The concept has been (ab) used to give foundation to particular rights, claims or grievances, to make legit privileges, violence and coercion.
Identity has been one of the main topics in which anthropological studies have been focused during the 1990s. It will be underlined that the malleability of identity, as the ability to define ourselves in a large spectrum of ways, leads us to a form of …show more content…

Some philosophers and cultural studies researchers have queried the assumption that identity is a fixed `item ' that we possess. Identity, it is argued, is not best considered as an entity but as an emotionally charged (mostly unbeknown) description of ourselves. Instead of being a timeless essence, what it is qualified as a person is said to be plastic and changeable being specific to particular social and cultural conjunctures.
Notably, subjectivity and identity mark the composition of persons in culture and language. Identity is a process of becoming constituted by points of similarity and difference.
There is no essence to be discovered, rather, cultural identity is continually being created within the vectors of distinction and resemblance. Cultural identity is not an essence but a continually shifting description of ourselves.
The political nature of identity is a “production” built on the the possibility of multiple, shifting and fragmented identities which can be articulated together in a variety of ways (Hall, 1990, …show more content…

But Duncan Ivison observes: “I take it that one of the great projects of twenty-first-century political thought is to develop new models of transnational and global political order that can provide not only effective security and welfare provision for citizens, but that can also become the object of people’s reasoned loyalty; to construct, in other words, new forms of transnational democracy.” At one level, this is of course an enormously ambitious vision, and I am by no means arguing that freedom of international movement must wait until transnational democratic institutions are established. As I hope we have seen, there are good moral reasons to move toward greater freedom of international movement, and few good reasons to resist it. What we should notice is actually how little is involved in changing the nature of borders. The fact is that the vast majority of political boundaries in the world do not entail a right of exclusion.
We tend to think of boundaries around political communities in terms of national borders, but most political boundaries are not like that at all. We are surrounded by an enormous range and number of open but democratic political bodies with boundaries that

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A person’s identity is an amalgamation of characteristics that set them apart from others. Everyone is truly unique because no two people possess the same exact beliefs and qualities as another person. Though a person may have grown up in a specific culture, outside factors can contribute to the forming of an individual’s identity which causes a person to diverge from what they knew themselves to be growing up. Andrew Solomon, author of “Son”, puts forth the idea of vertical and horizontal identities. Vertical identity comes from the passing down of expectations and culture from family while horizontal identity comes from outside forces.

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This novel reveals that culture and language has a lot to do with forming one's identity. The type of culture and language a person has been surrounded with affects their sense of identity,

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Identity matters because it differentiates one person from another. Without an identity, a human would not be a human, because it is crucial to life. Each person has a distinct identity, which they are known for. But, as people grow, they notice and pick up on others’ habits, and make those habits their own. Those habits thus form a person’s identity.

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In academic article “Who Am I” by Beverly Daniel Tatum; she talks about the complexity of identity, which defined as a person. She describes the multiple identities of different kinds of people and their significance in the community. She illustrate the how person past, historical event, family background, experiences, and thought of person has impact on the personal identification. The concept of past, present, and future, those characterize the person identity. She explains how gander of person is the part of identity, which build identity.

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Later, the cultural critic Stuart Hall has opined about the changing nature of identity. He says that there is no fixed identity that can be attributed to an individual for his life period; it evolves through several changes in each phase of life. So it can be understood that formation of identity involves several steps: construction, reconstruction and deconstruction. The politics behind this formation may depend on the nature of identity that an individual tries to hold. Indeed, the cultural critic Kobena Mercer reminds us: “One thing at least is clear - identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something

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Human dilemmas no doubt are as old as human nature because human beings are eternally entrapped in situations wherein subjective feelings and objective conditions mismatch. The predicament of man in the impersonal and formal universe evidences continuous struggle for search of meaning, which again has lost its absolutist character in postmodernist times on account of its fluidity. As such, the whole point of constructing identity in an essentialist manner seems untenable today. The liberal humanist seeking for a truer/nobler self, or identity in the conventional sense which has always remained definable and determinable, scarcely holds any ground. The proposed thesis has an explicit diasporic slant to work out how identities of various characters

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In the article ‘The Complexity of Identity - Who am I?’ , the author Beverly Tatum argues that the definition of identity for a person is laid down by the societal norms and not by one’s own conscious understanding of her or his existence. And these societal norms are the ones that are acceptable to the dominant group of the society. Any aspect of one’s identity that sets her or him apart from others is targeted by the dominants. Tatum has used the terms ‘dominants’ and ‘subordinates’.

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Identity speaks of who we are as individuals but it also comes from two different groups: social and cultural. These groups are connected to power, values and ideology. Social identities are related to how we interact with people and how we present ourselves. Meanwhile cultural identities relate to society in whole such as religion, values, etc. In this paper I will talk about the dominant and subordinate identities.

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Weeks (2007) explains, “Identities are troubling because they embody so many paradoxes: about what we have in common and what separates us; about our sense of self and our recognition of others; about conflicting belongings in a changing history and a complex modern world; and about

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Introduction The concept of identity has been a notion of significant interest not just to sociologists and psychologists, but also to individuals found in a social context of perpetually trying to define themselves. Often times, identities are given to individuals based on their social status within a certain community, after the assessment of predominant characteristics that said individual has. However, within the context of an ethnicity, the concept identity is most probably applied to all members of the ethnical group, and not just one individual. When there is one identity designated for the entire group, often times the factor of “individuality” loses its significance, especially when referring to the relationship between the ethnic

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One’s identity crucially depends on being able to communicate with others, be it family members, acquaintances and so on, it is stated that our relationships help to fulfill us and contribute to our identity but do not define them. These exchanges with others are necessary in order to transfer over an accurate interpretation of who we are. It is known that societies come to give their own interpretations to describe groups of individuals which fall out of the realm of what they consider to be “like them” and with it provide a damaging image, in order to prevent a damaging or inaccurate interpretation of who we are then it is not only necessary to be able to communicate what substance lies within our identity, but to be acknowledge that originality and uniqueness within all

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We share the same cultural identity as we consume those cultural artifacts of narratives, memories, stories and fantasies to incorporate their cultural representations in similar or different ways into our everyday rituals and practices of daily life. Besides, the social and cultural construction of identity is highly influenced by media communication in the modern age. Technologies have empowered the media to communicate their meaning to a variety of people; (Hall, 1997) Social and cultural identity are linked to issues of power, value systems, and ideology. The media uses representations, such as images, words, and characters or personae, to convey specific ideas and values related to culture and identity in a society.

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Cultural identity plays a very vital role in cross cultural communication, people from a particular culture communicate with partners and employees from many different cultures and in this situation every individual strives to keep their cultural and individual identity. According to Gardiner and Kosmitzki, identity is defined as “a person 's self-definition as a separate and distinct individual, including behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes” (Gardiner & Kosmitzki, 2008, p. 154). Also, Ting-Toomey defines identity as a "reflective self-conception or self-image that we each derive from our family, gender, cultural, ethnic, and individual socialization process"( Ting-Toomey, 2005). Both definitions bring out the generalisation of cultural identity

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Hall narrates that young immigrants of today are always fragmented, puzzled, decentered and unbenefited ( 355). Immigrants after changing their identities remain puzzled and lost. They have lost their self in the process of shifting identities. 3.3 The first position Hall in Cultural identity and Diaspora gives two ways to understand identity.

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