Society and Social Identity

Identity and its equivalents in languages other than English may currently be among the most used nouns in the world. They can be encountered in all kinds of contexts, referring to all kinds of phenomena. Gender, family, nationality, ethnicity, race, politics, place of residence, religion, age, sexuality, occupation, employment, consumption patterns, musical tastes, sporting allegiances, and leisure activities apparently all have something to do with the expression identity and are, for some people, foci for identification. That this could easily have been a longer list suggests genuine contemporary significance. But what does it actually mean, this word identity?

Before addressing that question, however, a few remarks about society and the social are necessary. To turn to society first, although it is a word in everyday use, what it might be is often frustratingly unclear. Are small, face-to-face groups societies, or do only the biggest and most abstract collectivities qualify? From a different perspective, does society refer to a generic dimension of the human repertoirewhich might as easily be call sociality, perhapsand to the fact that we are not solitary creatures and need our fellows to become competent human beings at all?

To narrow the focus somewhat, does the fact that the conventional sociological model of a society is based on the modern nation-statean organized unitary group, characterized by definite boundaries and definite, if not exclusive, criteria of membership, with a hierarchical division of labor and some capacity for collective mobilizationimply that there were no premodern societies? No. And does this nation-state model actually fit all societies, as they are discussed today, anyway? Probably not: Just think about a building society (what is known as a savings-and-loan in the United States), a society for the protection of animals, industrial society, or high society, and the point is made. The word is imprecise.

Society is also a notion that is sometimes invoked in implicit or explicit contrast to culture, the one being patterns of human behavior, the other the meanings of that behavior. Looked at closely, however, society and culture depend on each otherone without the other is unthinkableand, in [Page 767]many of the ways in which they are used, particularly to talk about collectivities, they seem to have more in common with each other than not. Once again, certainty about what one is actually talking about when using these words seems to be elusive.

Accepting these reservations, perhaps the best thing to do is to use society and societies as, at most, general words referring to the varieties of human collectivity, and the generic sociality on which they depend. They are certainly not words that encourage greater precision in their definition or use. This may be one of those cases in which strategic imprecision, which does not foreclose on the complex variety and routine fuzziness of the everyday human world, is necessary to achieve the greatest possible clarity.

This brings us to the social and to social identity, in particular. The adjective social is arguably redundant here, although it is probably now a fact of contemporary life. Human beings learn all that they know and most of what they can do directly from, or indirectly during dealings with, other humans (and this does not refer just to socialization in childhood and youth, nor does it ignore individual creativity and innovation). Identities are no different, and are definitively social: Their production and reproduction depends on interaction with other humans, with some of whom they will be in some senses shared.

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