Gabriele Melendugno

What are the Identities?

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The identities are a social construction: they depends solely on the social environments in which we grow and we live.

We could say that since we are not yet born, we absorbe the feelings, the lifestyle of our mother, but generally we would say that the process of building out our identity starts when we are children.

As human beings, we have two different social needs: to feel ourselves part of a group, and to be recognized as individuals, so we could refer to a individual identity and a collective identity. These are our most important needs: if we are not recognized by the others, we feel we don't exist, and all our other needs cannot be satisfied before being recognized as a person.

The humans seems to be the only animals that can suicide themselves: our identity is a social process and it can happen that humans that in some period of their life don't feel any belonging they decide to get away from the world also physically. Durkheim was the first that wrote one of the first and even most important sociological research on this subject: the rate of suicide is a “social fact”, directly related to the social environment, to the feeling of “anomia”, that means the feeling to be not recognized by the others. He observed that this rate became higher in the periods of social changes, and this could be explained with the dynamic of change of the expectations: it can happen that we feel to be inadequate to the new environment and to be not a part of it, and, in the worst cases, to “resign” from the life.

The concept of our identity is not a theoric speculation but a fact of survival, as we see in the suicides. Even we don't want refer to the worst cases, in general, our feelings of wellbeing depend on the concept of identity: as much we feel to belong to a group that recognize ourselves like a part of that group and like a special individual, we got energy and power to work and to live.

There are many approaches to the concept of identities, I'd cluster them into three categories: the psychological approach, the sociological approach, and the genealogic-historical approach.

In the first category we can put the approaches that connect our identity to our brain; the most simple approach is that our identity is connected to our physical brain, but what happen if we put the brain of a person into the head of another person? Who will be the first and the second? Our identity is based simply on the neuronas chains or better on our unique way to experience the world? Another theory that comes from the researches of Hume, says that our identity is a sort of chain of states of identity, in which the new one comes from the previous: the metaphora is that the identity is a flame by which we can light a candle, and this flame passes from a candle to another one.

All the psychological approaches show the limit that they don't consider the social environment that forges the identities, this is why I prefer the sociological approaches: our identity is based on the feedback that we receive from the others during our never ending process of interaction.

We could focus on the concepts of “Me”; of “I” and of “Myself”: the first one is what the others remind us about ourselves, the second one is the complex of values on which are based our opinions and practises, the last one is the complex of our reflective process.

The third approach focuses on the genealogy of the concept of “identity”: it's a concept we refer to by our “western” way of analysis. One of the most interesting thinkers that I like to mention is Michel Foucault. His studies remind us as the process of identity is carried out and how many, and which factors work to build up our social identities. We cannot mention here his very interesting studies, but we can say that the society in which every individual lives, tries to build a person that is functional to that society. In our western mass society, the hidden efforts are directed to build ourselves as good machines, with many and the higher technical skills, but with the less “political skills”: the capacity to think, to imagine, to decide, to worry about our life and to act for our wellbeing instead of delegating all that concerns our existence to the society in which we live in.

The society acts with all the controling power that it can use: the “Experts”, the Medicine, the Psychiatry, the Religion, the Literature, the Entertainment, and in general all what concerns our personal believings. Also Erich Fromm and the other thinkers of the “School of Frankfurt” focused on the social dynamics of the western mass society that affect directly our way of thinking and to act, focusing on how the market-economy and mass-media society rules structure our emotions, and consenquentially our actions.

Can our identity change?

Yes. The “myself” can focus on the mirrors that we have and can choose what fit better ourselves. This is a very hard process: it means to strongly improve our knolewdge about ourselves and our environment with a critical approach, deconstructing the concept we are used to refer, trying to experience as many different point of view as we can. It means also to improve our reflective thinking, trying to observe us “from outside” ourselves, meaning using other points of view different from ours. It means focusing on the sources of the powers and energy that we get to do something or to act in someway better than others.

Foucault says that our effort can be to became aware of this whole process in which the “power” fullfill ourselves, how it controls our physical behaviour through the sanctions that we get in our family, in our school, in our working place, and generally in everyplace we interact with the others.

If we want refer to a Mediterranean perspective, it seems to me that the matter of the identity is more complex in the secularized cultures, like the European, despite the MENA regions: in the South East Mediterranean, the identities are more arcaic, in the meaning that the religion has a most important role to build individuals that can feel themselves “bricks” of the “Islam”. The secularization process occurred in Europe, with a more in-depth individualization, carried rising opportunities of belonging to new groups: more jobs due to the improving complexity of society that carries higher division of work and also in (sub)cultural groups; all the new rising opportunities of belonging to a growing groups/communities brings the decrease of the individual need to be recognized just as a member of the primary community. We still need the feeling of our “primary community”, meaning our family, our best friends, but this is more dynamic, changing.

So, the identity can change, but I prefer to say that the identity can became more complex creating the opportunities to have more opportunities to be identified, more group to belong.

From a Human Rights point of view, the main debate is about “Universalims” against “Relativism”: can we refer to the human beings as a unique community, deciding what are the common rights for everyone, or we should point that the world is made by many cultures each one with their values?

The Universalism strive for the first point of view and from this point of view born the World Declaration of Human Rights: the critique says that this declaration start from a Western set of values instead of taking in count all the cultures of the world that it want to protect. On the other side, the Relativism says that each culture has his own values and we cannot decide what are the world values. This second point of view can be dangerous because it can allow exploitation of one culture by another one, or can legitimate dictatures, tortures and so on.

The debate is open. I think that the first effort is to wide our knolewdge and to open the debate to all the cultures. In general I think that as human we have common needs worldwide, but we have to be very clear about these needs, because this concept can be used to colonize other cultures.

We should be clear that universal human needs are those connected to survival needs and the feeling of belonging; the “market economy” even if someone says it's spreaded worldwide, it's just a unique, particular way in which a local economy (=”how people manage and redistribute their resources”) has been structured.

To study “cultures” also the language has to be focused: each language structures and categorizes the vision of life, so we should take in count all these things. We realize how much important can become the literatures, the arts, the rituals, the day-by-day life practises to get a most in-depth knolewdge of the world, using the theorical concepts only with a clear reference at the culture of the belonging.

Gabriele melendugno, 26th july 2006