What is Identity

"Identity"

 is a key term in the vernacular idiom of contemporary politics, and social analysis must take account of this fact. But this does not require us to use "identity" as a category of analysis or to conceptualize "identities" as something that all people have, seek, con -struct, and negotiate. Conceptualizing all affinities and affiliations, all forms of belonging, all experiences of commonality, connectedness, and cohesion, all self-understandings and self-identifications in the idiom of "identity" saddles us with a blunt, flat, undifferentiated vocabulary. "identity" is made to do a great deal of work. It is used to highlight non-instrumental modes of action; to focus on self -understanding rather than self-interest; to designate sameness across persons or sameness over time; to capture allegedly core, foundational aspects of selfhood; to deny that such core, foundational aspects exist ;to highlight the processual, interactive development of solidarity and collective self-understanding; and to stress the fragmented quality of the contemporary experience of "self," a self unstably patched together through shards of discourse and contingently "activated" in differing contexts .These usages are not simply heterogeneous; they point in sharply differing directions. To be sure, there are affinities between certain of them, notably between the second and third, and between the fourth and fifth. And the first usage is general enough to be compatible with all of the others. But there are strong tensions as well. The second and third uses both highlight fundamental sameness - sameness across persons and sameness over time - while the fourth and fifth uses both reject notions of fundamental or abiding sameness. (Brubaker,2,8) 

The set of identity 

categories in which membership is determined by descent - based attributes is large. Ethnic identity categories are a subset of this larger set , defined by the following restrictions: (a) They are impersonal—that is, they are an “imagined community” in which members are not part of an immediate family or kin group; (b) they constitute a section of a country’s population rather than the whole; (c) if one sibling is eligible for membership in a category at any given place, then all other siblings would also be eligible in that place; and (d) the quali -fying attributes for membership are restricted to one’s own genetically transmitted features or to the 5 language, religion, place of origin, tribe, region, caste, clan ,nationality, or race of one’s parents and ancestors. (Chandra , 400).

Identity

is an ambiguous and slippery term. It has been used—and perhaps overused—in many different contexts and for many different purposes, particularly in recent years. As we shall see, there are some diverse assumptions about what identity is, and about its relevance to our understanding of young people’s engagements with digital media .The fundamental paradox of identity is inherent in the term itself. From the Latin root idem, meaning “the same,” the term nevertheless implies both similarity and difference .On the one hand, identity is something unique to each of us that we assume is more or less consistent (and hence the same) over time. For instance, as I write, there is an intense debate in the U.K. about the government’s proposed introduction of identity cards and their potential for addressing the problem of “identity theft.” In these formulations, our identity is something we uniquely possess: it is what distinguishes us from other people. Yet on the other hand, identity also implies a relationship with a broader collective or social group of some kind. When we talk about national identity, cultural identity, or gender identity, for example, we imply that our identity is partly a matter of what we share with other people .Here, identity is about identification with others whom we assume are similar to us (if not exactly the same), at least in some significant ( Buckingham,1).

Works Cited