Social Facilitation, Psychology of Cultural Dimensions

Identity and Identification, Social Psychology of
Nick Hopkins, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015
Representations of Identity
Social identifications are not the product of a lone individual's imagination. What it means to be a Bulgarian, a Muslim, an academic, or whatever, is a social product. For example, it might be tempting to assume that religious identities are defined by their associated texts (e.g., the Bible, Qur'an). However, such texts are always read and interpreted in specific social and economic contexts with the corollary that the meanings of such identifications are contingent upon the social milieu. Yet, even within the same context, the reading of text is contested (Hopkins and Kahani-Hopkins, 2009) with consequences for group members' understandings of how they should behave. Thus debates about the nature of a Muslim social identification have implications for how British Muslims should relate to non-Muslims in Britain and to non-British Muslims across the globe. Indeed, it is possible to see such identity constructions as organized to promote different forms of behavior. Thus in some constructions of identity, positive engagement with the non-Muslim social order is defined as identity-appropriate, yet in others it is defined as inappropriate, and as identity-threatening.
Such debate could be assumed to reveal a lack of a common social identification. However, unless there is investment in a common identification, debate and contestation have little logic: it is because of a common identification that debate exists, has value and is worth entering into as those with different views on how the community should develop advance different definitions of collective identity. Such debates do not always result in a consensus and the potential for schism is ever-present: yet even schism and its dynamics cannot be understood without reference to the concept of a common identification (Sani and Reicher, 1998). It is also important to note the scope to such debate. Assumptions about the immutability of identity suggest contestation to be limited to topics at the margins of group identity. Yet, debates over the meaning of an identity typically include reference to cultural figures, histories, and traditions that are familiar to all. The reason is simple: invoking such figures and histories in terms that warrant the forms of behavior that one wishes to promote is a powerful means to recruit other group members to one's cause. Indeed, the wider corollary of such insights is that group members' talk about what a social identification means (e.g., the values shared by those adopting a particular social identification) should not necessarily be understood as descriptions of a contemporary social reality. Rather, they can be conceptualized as constructions that are organized to mobilize the behavior that would bring a particular way of living and social order into being. That is, people's talk of identity can be understood as having a performative and constitutive dimension, and as organized to encourage the forms of action that would realize a particular vision of how the social world should be (Reicher and Hopkins, 2001).
Such identity definitions may involve the characterization of in-group identity. However, they may also involve characterization of others' social identifications and how they impact upon one's own group. For example, in India, Hindu nationalists have defined India as essentially Hindu and depicted Muslims as an alien and threatening other (e.g., labeling Muslims as ‘Babur ki sanfan’ or the children of Babur, the sixteenth-century Muslim leader who conquered lands in present day northern India). Moreover, postcolonial analysts have explored how such contemporary characterizations of Muslim and Hindu identities are only possible because British orientalist ‘scholars’ (often colonial administrators motivated by a concern to maintain colonial power through a strategy of ‘divide and rule’) created histories that implied Hindus and Muslims in India are monolithic communities with continuous but separate histories. Such colonial histories provide powerful ideological resources for the contemporary promotion of particular social categorizations and the organization of collective behavior in terms of communal categories.