Epiphanies 2021: What is an identity?
Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
In the Intersectionality thread, @Ruth wrote:
This poked at some thoughts that have been churning around in my mind for a while. What do we really mean by "an identity"? Clearly we mean something that touches the core of a person's being, and the way they interact with the world: I'd say that being Christian was part of my identity, but enjoying eating broccoli wasn't (although it's a thing that I do).
But is it binary - are things either components of an "identity" or not - or is it more of a spectrum, with things that we consider more or less important to our central being?
I'm inclined to the latter thought - that there's a continuum of strength-of-identity, and that there are some things that are very strongly part of our identity, and others that are more on the fringes - they're sort of part of our identity, but not so strongly. And then there are things such as my enjoyment of broccoli that are basically adiaphora, or Ruth's need to wash dishes every day, which is a simply functional result of a desire not to live in a pigsty without clean crockery.
I wash dishes every day and shop every week, but being a dishwasher and a shopper are not for me identities the way being a woman is, or being white, or having Mennonite heritage. A role is not the same thing as an identity.
This poked at some thoughts that have been churning around in my mind for a while. What do we really mean by "an identity"? Clearly we mean something that touches the core of a person's being, and the way they interact with the world: I'd say that being Christian was part of my identity, but enjoying eating broccoli wasn't (although it's a thing that I do).
But is it binary - are things either components of an "identity" or not - or is it more of a spectrum, with things that we consider more or less important to our central being?
I'm inclined to the latter thought - that there's a continuum of strength-of-identity, and that there are some things that are very strongly part of our identity, and others that are more on the fringes - they're sort of part of our identity, but not so strongly. And then there are things such as my enjoyment of broccoli that are basically adiaphora, or Ruth's need to wash dishes every day, which is a simply functional result of a desire not to live in a pigsty without clean crockery.
Comments
My dog is biologically a bitch, but she clearly sees herself as a leader of dogs and humps legs as if she were a stereotypical male.
It’s high time we did away with gender stereotypes, and children don’t need to be told that this or that is male or female.
I'm not sure that's true. I don't believe South Koreans are "innately" more mathematically capable than Britons, any more than I believe that black people have "natural rhythm". There is research that indicates the attitudes of parents to maths has a lot of influence.
I don't think anyone reads Erik Erikson anymore. Nor James Marcia and George Vaillant. Stage models of personal development aren't really very popular because they describe a non-individualized, general human developmental sequence.
I thought quetz was talking about individuals, not about groups.
It is obvious that some individuals have the genetic makeup to have an athletic build, and some don't. I swim very badly. I could do a lot of practice, and get better, but I have entirely the wrong sort of body to be anywhere close to the performance of competitive swimmers.
It seems equally likely (although perhaps less clearly obvious) that some individuals are endowed at birth with the potential to be a great singer, or a great mathematician. They won't achieve that greatness without a lot of work, but they have the raw material necessary. Other individuals may, with a lot of work, achieve basic competence but will not proceed beyond that.
Probably but groups are made up of individuals, and the same logic that suggests individual mathematical aptitude must be innate suggests the same for South Koreans as a group.
No, it doesn't.
Most of the world-class marathon runners are Kenyan, Ethiopian, or Somali. There is, I gather, a sensible claim that a genetic heritage in that part of Africa sometimes comes with some detail of muscle physiology that is advantageous for endurance running.
But the claim that the best distance runners have genetics from that part of Africa is very different from a claim that Ethiopians, as a group, run faster than Europeans. It might or might not be true, but it's a very different claim.
And the claim is not that all difference in performance is caused by genetics - that's obviously false. Those world-class African runners do a lot of training to get that good - you don't just get some kid wandering in off the streets of Mogadishu, and running circles round everyone else.
Not everyone with innate musical gifts will become a concert pianist, or a world-class singer. Again, those things need opportunity, and lots of work. But some of the rest of us could work as hard as we possibly good, and never get to a point where we were worth listening to.
To go back to the OP, identifying what constitutes a social identity often has to do with what people take for granted or the factors that go unquestioned. That takes us back to privilege: that certain people don't need to think about their own whiteness or class or gender because they move and live and interact in a context of people just like them. Those aspects of identity don't feel important. Ditto being neurotypical or able-bodied or being heterosexual in a heteronormative society. Who needs to interrogate the norm?
A couple of years ago, a local family therapist addressed a church group involved in pastoral counselling and informal pastoral support. She talked to us about narrative therapy and the scripts we tell ourselves and others about marriage or falling in love, listed some tropes that came up in counselling. Some of us are attracted to partners of whom our parents will approve. Some of us are drawn to types our parents will loathe. For some of us, the experience of limerence is crucial: unless we fall into an obsessive irrational infatuation, it isn't true love. Others of us are attracted to someone who can make us laugh. Some of us grew up in families with secrets that could never be shared and we want transparent honest communication in our own marriage. Some of us long to recreate the happy uncomplicated family of origin that shaped us. Some of us marry primarily to escape family.
Then she pointed out that, however compelling or dramatic, these are 'thin' scripts because they don't involve the broader socio-cultural framework, economic dependencies and power relations that underlie romantic love and marriage in our societies. Those elements form the less obvious 'thick' narrative of the social forces and dynamics that build or fracture identities and the roles we take on in our daily lives
The family therapist told us she sat down once with an elderly parishioner and asked her what had been the single biggest factor in her marriage of 55 years. The older woman turned to her and said it had been the Second World War. She said, "I married a man and he went off to war. A stranger came back home. Over time I learned to love this stranger but I never again glimpsed the man I had chosen to marry. We couldn't talk about it although I understood why he had changed. The change itself though was permanent. "
I can see two main currents in the way the past creates our sense of identity. One is the familial one (so ably described by Mr Larkin) the other the social setting - class, tribe, nation, race etc. It seems to me an open question how much we differentiate the individual Me from these influences. As @MaryLouise says, you can be subsumed into them to the extent that you cannot detach, and any change to the 'norm' becomes a personal threat.
I don't know that, even after 70 years, I've made all that much progress towards a Self. The best I can do is be aware of the roles I inhabit, and try to understand how other people do the same.
If I'm writing up someone's family history I always, always put a positive spin on it. Great great granny got pregnant after having had sex in return for a bucket of lime, which she needed as she was taking in washing? - A strong woman, determined to provide for her family, with an entrepreneurial streak!
(sorry, utterly irrelevant, but I felt the need)
I'm interested in what you think a "usual sense of identity" might be.
Some historical realities defy a positive spin, I suppose.
In more general terms, I had a number of general assumptions about the lives and motivations of 19th-century settlers from Europe arriving on subsidised sailing ships to begin life in the then-Cape Colony. I followed earlier historical accounts of these settlers as young working-class weavers, farm labourers, dissenters, the unemployed. Then a newer generation of historians went through the detailed shipping lists now available and were struck by the high death tolls and by how many settlers were not from especially deprived backgrounds: they included stonemasons, pastors, shop-keepers, teachers, milliners, governesses. Why were they embarking on this journey to an inhospitable and unknown country?
Extant diaries, correspondence and obituaries revealed a very different story of heroic pathos and a desperate gamble to regain health, with texts often coded and reticent. Many immigrants were severely ill with tuberculosis and desperate for a healthier climate. Tuberculosis had become epidemic in Europe in the late 18th century, was rife in industrialised English cities and by the 1820s wealthier British travellers would come out to convalesce at sanatoriums on the Cape coast or in the dry heat of the Karoo, returning to the UK in summer and leaving for Africa again each winter (they were nicknamed 'swallows'). This option was unaffordable for poorer TB patients and they had to brace themselves to survive in a harsh place where sunshine and fresh air was the only consolation. For a number of settlers, the gamble worked and after long periods of invalidism they went on to farm and do missionary work or moved to Cape Town and established schools. TB invalidism is one of the more fascinating aspects of 19th-century British migrant identity, often not spoken of openly because of social fears of contagion and stigma.
I find this concept bizarre. I'm curious about some of my ancestors - we know about some of them, but not much about others - but I don't think they affect my sense of self in any way. There's a chap some distance up my family tree who was apparently a naval officer of some reasonable distinction. I'd be sort of vaguely interested to know more about his naval career, but I don't see how that affects me. I didn't earn his medals, I don't have anything like the right sort of temperament for military service, and it ultimately wouldn't make a difference whether the chap with the medals was actually my ancestor, or whether he was someone else of the same name.
No it doesn't.
You're basically engaging in a nature/nurture dichotomy error. It's perfectly possible for South Korea to have a good environment for learning maths (nurture) at the same time as certain people within South Korea innately being better at maths than their peers (nature).
Everybody in South Korea benefits from the good environment, whether they have high innate talent in maths as an individual talent or not. In order to find out whether South Korea has a higher rate of innately talented individuals as well, you'd have to correct for whatever advantages all South Koreans, whether innately talented or not, get from having a good system.
Which is (part of) my point. In order to determine whether this innate talent exists to any significant extent within any society you would have to first correct for all the "nurture" influences. I don't think we can say with any certainty that "naturally" mathematically talented individuals exist.
Can we say with certainty that genes exist?
If so, what do they do? Because to be honest I sometimes find when people are arguing against there being innate differences between people, it starts to feel like an argument that human beings are all clones.
If we accept that genes cause physical differences between human beings (along with environmental factors such as the nutrition they receive), then I really don't see why brains should somehow be immune to this.
I'm not aware that we treated them differently enough to account for this.
I wonder too, if given an option other than heavy agricultural labour and childbearing, whether she would have made a life like mine?
I think we inherit more of our ancestors than we think and if our lives are very different it's the circumstances that change.
My daughter is almost a dead ringer for my mother, give or take a biblical lifespan. Stand my daughter next to an old photo of my mother as a teen, and they could be the same person.
They're quite different in personality and aptitudes, though, although we do all share a couple of traits in common.
But I'm still putting this in the "vaguely interesting" drawer. Does it help my daughter's sense of self at all to know that she looks like her grandmother? Neither of us really thinks so. (She didn't see a photo of her grandmother as a girl until recently, so I've seen the lack of change in her self-image based on this new information.)
Do you find that knowing that you resemble your great-grandmother, and wondering whether she would have had a life like yours given your circumstances alters your self-image?
I am going by various discussions of identity I see, and articles and books and such. People have a sense of who they are, in terms of personality, traits, culture, a sense of self, both individual traits and belonging to a group. It's seen as a sign of dysfunction/damage to not have this. I don't know if it's a dysfunctional thing in me.
There are all sorts of discussions about 'This is not who I am,' 'This does not define me,' etc, compared with things people see as part of their identity, who they are. I don't relate to this. Perhaps I have too much focus on detail to be able to have an intrinsic sense of myself.
This is something I have often wondered about. I don't have many photographs of my grandmothers, just a few anecdotes that have come down through generations. Many of the women in my mother's South African line were what I would call marriage-resisters, women who didn't marry for as long as possible, who ran away from the men they married, who insisted on separate bedrooms and preferred the company of women friends to their husbands.
My great-grandmother walked for half a day alone through the veld to the outpost of Graaff-Reinet to order a copy of Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm in 1886, a novel that is all about gender reversal and a young girl (Lyndall) who doesn't find that any of the identities or roles available to her fit, who thinks of herself as not having a ready-made identity or place in Victorian settler society, who calls marriage respectable prostitution. It was a shocking book for its time. I would like to believe that transgressive spirit in Schreiner and my g-grandmother are part of my family legacy. As Virginia Woolf once wrote, "If we are women, we think back through our mothers."
Brains do seem to far more malleable than things like height, though I agree it's possible that there are genetic variations that, given the right stimulus, may lead some of us to feel like we're pushing at an open door when learning maths, but that's a long way from the bald statement of some people being "innately" good at maths.
It does a bit. I've always had a strong sense of an internalised Irishness, visualised in terms of certain landscapes and weather. And though I was born in, and mostly grew up in Belfast, I feel more at home west of the Bann. Visiting Donegal a few years ago I thought these people talk like me - not the accent, but a sort of vigour with language.
Even though I've not lived in the place for 50 years, it still strongly conditions how I see myself.
Interesting. I've always felt a sense of homecoming attached to certain landscapes - and yes, to dreich weather! - when visiting my Scots relatives. But I've always assumed that that was something entirely sourced within my own head. I grew up hundreds of miles away from my nearest family, and have now moved thousands of miles away from them, and I've always rather assumed that those feelings were things I made up based on reading too much sentimental fiction
I wonder if that mightn't be a sign of privilege -- I don't think much about my identity either, but then it's not under attack by anybody.
I don't know. With me, it's possibly because I have never really felt part of any group. And perhaps because my mind doesn't organise things into a coherent whole, but sees many details all individually. And possibly from cPTSD and not starting to think about identity as a teenager and young adult as most people do.
Plenty of my peers, many far more privileged than me, were developing a sense of self and identity when I was a young person at school and university. For GCSE English, we had to do a project about ourselves and my peers got really into it, finding all sorts of ways to define themselves, but the project confused me and so I just wrote an essay about how I like reading, and who my favourite authors were. I now work with teens, many privileged, and they are generally very focused on identity.
I'm minority in a few ways that others embrace as their identity - asexual, agender/non-binary, autistic, disabled. I found it interesting to find words for such things, but they aren't really part of a sense of self.
I do think there's an inherited memory. If I want to experience what the Welsh call hiraeth I think of autumnal mists drifting across Tollymore. But it goes deeper than that, into small, rushy fields and a climate that is both physically and emotionally cool.
The land that begat me.
These windy spaces
Are surely my own.
And those who here toil
In the sweat of their faces
Are flesh of my flesh,
And bone of my bone.
from "Scotland" by Alexander Gray
My Ship avatar is part of my identity - Pictish carvings have resonated with me as far back as I can remember. A carved stone in a lonely spot fuses together landscape and people. Every time I go to church I pass a stone with my avatar carved into it. I'm deeply conscious that people have probably worshipped on the spot on which our present parish church is built for well over a thousand years. I can't really explain it, but I have a strong sense of being an infinitesimally small part of a huge story.
@fineline, this reminds me of something similar I've found over the years, that naming difference isn't necessarily the same thing as claiming it in terms of a meaningful identity. Sometimes I talk about my geo-political location and nationality because it explains to others in the West where I'm posting from to indicate an African or diaspora identity but that is very different from, say, meeting an acquaintance from Malawi in the street and saying I'm hoping to get home to Zimbabwe by the end of the year. How much a name or label says about me depends so much on context and relationship. Often I have a sense of self -- though I wouldn't call it a core identity because identity has always felt multiple to me -- that resists naming or definition, a still evolving and unexplored self.
Thank you. I am not at all sure that I agree with your last sentence. To have an intrinsic sense of myself, do I not need to look closely at the detail. It's that that makes me myself and not the fellow in the house over the street while the general points sketch in only the outline.
I can relate to that - the landscape of the Central Western areas of NSW along the Dividing Range particularly from Mudgee to Oberon is very much deep in me, the real sense of homecoming as you start the climb along the side of the River Lett valley, then down to cross Cox's River and drive on to Hampton. It's much what North East Quine describes experiencing.
Our sexuality will also be an important part of our identity,but one which may be less apparent to others,unless we make it so.
Our identity will also be greatly shaped by our childhood experiences,where we grew up,in what sort of family or community,what religion,if any was practiced and the place in society of our family or community.
The language which we identify with is also a very important building brick in who we come to be as we take our own place in society.
Apart from our ethnicity and sexuality we can shape our lives in many different ways depending on determination as to whether we take what our parents and community have given us or forge a different identity of our own.
Given the amount of migration, invasion, deportation, exile, enslavement and transportation in human history, basing identity on an inalienable right to a particular piece of ground is questionable. And 'God promised it to me' IMO even more so.
I recognise that to be the case, and also that what I'm feeling is akin to the relationship that the First People had to the land. I cannot reconcile the 2 positions, I'm sorry.
In partial answer to Firenze's post, the land here did not belong to the First People, but they to the land. It dictated most aspects of their being to them.
Well, you can't really disagree with my experience, as you don't know it. I'm talking about myself. Plus I wasn't saying close attention to detail prevents a sense of identity. I was specifically saying 'too much,' which is different from 'a lot', and which is personal to me and how my brain works. It's about how/whether detailed thinking interacts with big picture thinking and generalisations, which I'd say are pretty key to identity.
A sense of identity is quite different from how one appears to others. They can overlap, but don't necessarily. Though I observe that consciousness and/or deliberateness in terms of how one appears to others is often a big part of people's sense of identity.
To an extent I'm envious of people who have this connection, being descended from folk who were farm labourers for the most part and left to find work during the industrial revolution, and in recent generations moved across the UK multiple times, emigrated, came back and never really set down roots anywhere. Part of what I hope my wife and I are giving our daughter by bringing her up here is a distinct place and culture that she can have as a foundation, whether she goes out into the world or ultimately stays here.
Language can be changed,religion can be changed,culture can be changed but the effects of language,religion and culture of our early days can never be completely effaced,whether we affirm these as part of our identity or indeed reject them in part or as a whole.
It was the "too much" that I was picking up on, not your experience. "Too much" necessarily connotes excess.