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Working Group on Identity

After all that has been said about identity over the last two decades, is it still possible to add something new and useful to the subject? Or, as Brubaker and Cooper suggest, is it time to go beyond identity? Our working group takes these questions as a challenge and as a starting point.

We do not have any definite answers at this point; we want to discuss the relevance of the concept of identity for some of the key issues in our Special Research Project. As all of our individual research projects focus on moments of human encounter and interaction in which images and ideas of the world are communicated and negotiated, they address the question of how representations of 'self' and 'other' are formed. In other words, they explore the formation and negotiation of identities.

There is a connection between representations and social order, on the one hand, and these representations and identity, on the other. Representations of social order are influenced by the identities that social groups or individuals profess, construct, or are ascribed by others. These representations of social order, however, also influence the identities of the people involved. Or, put differently, representations of social order are a constituent part of individual and group identities. As most of the individual research projects of the working group members examine changing representations, we are confronted with the question how these correspond with changing identities.

Our working group seeks to explore facets of the term identity and show its analytical potential for our research on the representations of social order. We aim to create an effective link between the issue of identity and our individual research projects. The participants in our working group have a variety of academic backgrounds and regional interests. We intend to bring together our anthropological, historical and regional studies approaches, not only to explore how the concept of identity can contribute to our individual research projects, but also to shed light on the links between our projects. We therefore plan to read and discuss further theoretical texts on identity as well as more specific texts that address issues of identity formation and negotiation in our individual case studies. The idea is to proceed gradually from general texts and questions to more specific ones, and to link our empirical and actor-centred work with the theoretical concepts we have encountered in our discussions.

One of our major interests is the question to what extent we can identify strategic uses of identity in our individual projects. This is closely linked with the issue of (un)conscious action in the process of constructing identities: When and how do people consciously engage in defining or rediscovering the 'self' and the 'other'? What is the role played by crises in this context: Are they the result of the clash of different representations of identity or do they result from the process of negotiations and/or conflicts between different concepts of identity? Discussions of these points promise to be controversial, and thus all the more stimulating.

We are also interested in the impact of our respective research on the societies we study, on the one hand, and contemporary academic and political debates, on the other. Constructionist perspectives nicely indicate the manner in which particular identities have been constituted, thereby providing evidence in favour of social process over primordialism. Rigid and primordialist conceptualisations take root and prosper, nevertheless, sometimes with destructive or even violent consequences. Therefore, we should consider how our work may be deployed beyond academic circles.