Identity

Identity can be thought of as the cover term for the names humans impute and avow in the course of interacting with others and orienting themselves to their various social worlds. A central principle of interaction between humans, or humans and the other objects that constitute their world, is that interaction is minimally contingent on the identification of the objects involved. In other words, before we can act toward or interact with some object, it must be situated in time and place. To do so is to give the object a name in the sense of classifying it as a member of a particular category (e.g., a soldier, a woman, a man, a chef, a student, and so on). Such naming entails the imputation and/or avowal of identities.

Not all identities are the same, however, as there are at least three types of identity that are featured in the relevant literature on identity in the social sciences: social identity, personal identity, and collective identity. The three types are often interconnected and overlap in the fashion of a Venn diagram. From a sociological standpoint, social identity is the foundational or anchoring concept in that it is grounded in and derives from social roles, such as police officer, physician, or mother, or broad social categories, such as gender, racial, ethnic, and national categories. This structural grounding is captured in the parallel concepts of “role identities” and “categorical identities.”

Interactionally, social identities can be both imputed or avowed. They are imputed when ego assigns to alter an identity based on alter's presumed category membership (She is a feminist!) or the role alter is thought to be playing (She is a teacher!) or the role ego would like alter to be playing, which is referred to as altercasting (You are my friend, aren’t you?). In each of these cases, a social identity is ascribed to others, and interaction is likely to proceed in terms of this identity.

Social identities can also be avowed or claimed, as when ego announces, “I am a Serb” or “I am a wine connoisseur” or “I am a professor.” It is because of such category-based avowals that some social psychologists define social identity in terms of self-definitions or identifications associated with social category memberships, or as one's self-concept derived from one's knowledge of membership in a social group, as well as the emotional significance that this membership produces.

But such self-definitions are perhaps more appropriately conceptualized as personal identities, which also include aspects of one's biography and life experiences that congeal into relatively distinctive personal attributes that function as pegs upon which social identities can be hung (Goffman 1963). The importance of distinguishing between social and personal identities rests not only on the fact that the latter are self-designations rather than other-attributions, but is also suggested by the observation that individuals sometimes reject other-imputed social identities, especially when they imply social roles or categories that are demeaning and contradictory with an idealized self-concept (Snow and Anderson 1987). Such observations suggest that personal identities may sometimes be grounded in social identities that derive from role incumbency or category-based memberships but without necessarily being determined by those social identities.

...