Modern Identities

Modern identities have become a feature of societies around the world and have in turn been influenced by global factors. The construction of collective identities and boundaries—a construction that has been going on in all human societies throughout human history—constitutes, like the exercise and regulation of power, the production and distribution of economic resources and the structuring of economic relations with all of which it is continually interwoven, a basic component of human societies, the central core of which is the cultural, “symbolic,” and social construction of boundaries of collectivities, of inclusion and exclusion, and of trust and solidarity among the members of such collectivities.

The central focus of the constitution of collective identities is the combination of the (1) definition of the distinctiveness of any collectivity, with the specification of criteria for membership in it, (2) of inclusions and exclusions, and (3) of the attributes of similarity of the members of these collectivities. Or, in D. M. Schneider's terms, it is the combination of “identity” and membership in different collectivities, that is, the definition of the attributes of similarity of members of a collectivity with the specification of the range of “codes” available to those participating in such collectivities—delineating in this way the relations to various “others”—that constitutes the central focus of the construction of collective identities.

The definition of the “other” or “others”—and the relations to such others—poses the problem of crossing the boundaries of how a stranger can become a member and of how a member can become an outsider or a stranger. Religious conversion and excommunication represent obvious illustrations of the crossing of the boundaries.

Such constitution of collective identities and of their boundaries is regulated by distinct codes—to follow E. Shils, the primordial, civility, and sacred ones—and the concrete formation thereof crystallizes in different ways in different historical settings. The distinctive characteristics of collective identities that crystallized in the modern world were closely connected with the basic characteristics of the cultural and political programs of modernity, the core of which was that the premises and legitimation of the [Page 1174]social, ontological, and political order were no longer taken for granted, and the concomitant development of a very intensive reflexivity around the basic ontological premises as well as around the bases of social and political order of authority of society and the questioning thereof—a reflexivity and questioning which was shared even by the most radical critics of this program, who in principle denied the legitimacy of such questioning, all of which entailed, to follow James D. Faubian's exposition of Max Weber: