The Identity Theories

Casey French

9/29/13

The Identity Theories

In class, we discussed the two theoretical approaches to global identity: identity theory and social identity theory. The identity theory is a straightforward approach to gathering information about a certain culture, primarily based on ascribed traits. It does incorporate other areas that are achieved traits, but this theory is based on characteristics of the individual. It aims to survey a multitude of participants with a list of questions. As mentioned in class, the survey handout is an example of this theory because it is a list of characteristics that one identifies themselves with such as race, class, gender, occupation, and religion. That is the primary focus. It assesses the attributes of an individual in a culture by only looking at the surface of one's identity. This is a simplistic approach to gathering useful information in a quick and timely matter. The other theory is more complicated and allows for more variance. Social identity basically classifies people into what they perceive to be their sense of belonging in a group. It is the localized groupings that give people a sense of social identity. This includes social class, religion, and family, but it can even incorporate one's interests that set them apart from other groups. It could be as transparent as identifying yourself with a specific soccer team or associating yourself with a specific political party. That is a pretty generalized statement, but the point I'm trying to illustrate is that social identity is a subcategory of global identity that people claim membership to and links commonalities in their values or norms. It's one's self-concept and shared values that more specifically distinguish themselves from their global identity.

I found this video that illustrates my point. Sami Awad explains how important it is to have a global identity, stating that life would be boring without different identities. Awad analyzes the structure of global identity, explaining how people are associating themselves with smaller, localized groups before they identify themselves as their nationality. He shows that there could be multiple identities before someone finally reaches that national level. Instead of identifying one's self as their nationality, people have to prioritize the identity that holds the most importance to them. He gave examples of "sublevels" of global identity such as ethnic identity, religious identity, cultural identity, etc.

"It is not an issue of balancing one [identity] over another, but creating this transformation between these two aspects are building and creating something new."

I agree with his interpretations on social identity. It is not always about nationality. It is about the small communities that we interact with every day that makes us different. We are all similar by being human in a sense, but our cultural differences makes us unique and it should be respected and interpreted with an open-mind.