The Process of Identity Creation

I would like to address this week’s readings by presenting several aspects of looking at the way identity is shaped during this process of opposition that Thomas touches on.

I think I’ll sequeway into this with an example, in one of my classes on Islam, we’re always talking about the way that Islamic identity was shaped and changed by encounters with modernity and the processes of colonization. One member of the class didn’t like using colonization as the primary lens through which we look at Islam, because it creates a false “before and after” duality of Islam. This implies it is a static thing that was changed by white people rather than a tradition evolving in its own right with reference to changes that were happening internal to the tradition.

On the one hand I agree with him, but I also agree that communities are created in reaction to externalities. The topic of the elaboration of identity, as either a positive or a negative thing is very interesting. For one thing, it is a common phenomenon, Calvinsim developed its own identity in reaction to Anabaptists and Catholics. In the same way, other cultures were forced to define themselves in reaction to the incursion of Western Christian anthropologists in the 19th century. While this can be good because it encourages the production of a stable identity which will safeguard the tradition from disparagement or assimilation, it can also have a negative effect. The culture defending itself is nonetheless participating in the proliferation of Western terms and discourses. The term “religion” as a singular object is not one that comes naturally to all cultures, Hinduism and Buddhism for example. It is one that they must use and fit their practices into, in order to be understood by the West. In this way it could be seen as negative: having cultures define themselves in terms that are alien to that culture.

Yet, to problematizes my own schema, could that also be seen as an act of subversion? Taking a latin word, which was once the sole province of Christianity, and applying it oneself, thereby in effect, forcing the West to accept one’s tradition as equal and on par with its own Western-Christocentric worldview?

I do like the author’s take on the construction of identity as a diacritical, oppositional process wherein both groups participate in the construction of identity. I feel that the general view of this is that the group under threat is the one who is constructing its identity in reaction to the incursion of the dominant group, but here Thomas contends: “a variety of dominant and dominated groups reify the attributes of both others and themselves in a self-fashioning process” ( 215). That is to say, it is not simply the dominated group who identify a few traits within their group and then crystallize them into a neat manifesto that can then be presented to the dominant group as a justification, but rather, each group reducing the other to set of crystallized attributes that can be used to understand both themselves and the other.

The process of dual identity construction also problematizes the simple hierarchy of dominant/dominated, for the dominated can use or invert a label applied to them by the dominant group, thereby forging themselves a new, valorized identity. Overall, Thomas’s article was very interesting, and caused me to rethink a lot of ideas I hold about identity construction.