Identities in Global Societies

There has been much discussion in the social scientific literature on how and in what ways processes of globalization have transformed senses of identity in the world today. Identity may be defined as how the individual human being comprehends his or her self, as conditioned by the world of others. Each human being plays various different social roles—we may be, to take an individual example, at different times parent, spouse, citizen, employee, or customer, among many other roles. Our personal senses of identity consist of how we combine these different social roles into an ongoing personal narrative of who we are. This narrative may construct an illusion of consistency, as many scholars have noted—our identities are far less coherent than we generally suppose—but nonetheless, this is how we live, in telling the ongoing stories of ourselves to ourselves and to the people around us.

A question arising from the previously mentioned definition is this: To what extent does globalization transform the very nature of identity? How much do personal senses of identity change over different historical eras, and how much do they remain the same? The physiological basis of the human brain, by most accounts, has remained the same for many thousands of years, shaping the nature of human experience and thus, presumably, of identity formation (a contrarian view is offered in the work of Julian Jaynes). Language, the primary means through which identity is comprehended, has similarly retained its most basic, physiologically based structures for millennia. Human social life affixes some fundamental markers of identity—for example, mother and child, and woman and man—that, despite degrees of cultural difference in different societies, are almost universal over time and space. In this basic sense, identities in today's globalized era are not, at the most fundamental level, different from identities in past eras.

In other ways, however, identities have clearly shifted. One simple way to get at aspects of identity is to answer the question “Who are you?” with whatever responses one might come up with taking the form, “I am a. …” Typically, a person may answer, for example, “I am a woman / I am French / I am a doctor / I am a mother / I am a Christian / I am a blogger / I am a football [soccer] fan,” or any number of other designations. Some of these designations—“I am a mother” or “I am a woman”—largely transcend history. Others are historical but over a long-range period: “I am a Christian” could have been uttered a thousand years ago as much as today. Still others are distinctly new in history: “I am French” would certainly not have been uttered a thousand years ago; national identity is for the most part new in history, as many scholars have argued, a product of the 18th and 19th centuries; “I am a football fan” would not have been uttered 200 years ago, and “I am a blogger” would not have been uttered even 20 years ago. While most of us would not answer the question “Who are you?” by claiming, “I am a global citizen,” many of the answers offered above are clearly shaped by globalization: One's profession and one's favorite sports team are likely to be internationally shaped, and one's blog is probably [Page 854]read by at least some people from across the globe, as one may be well aware.

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