What Is Cultural Identity?

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

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,

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