A Reflection on Identities, Culture Models and Power

Third International Cross-Cultural Communication Conference (“Cultural Identity and Diversity as Assets to Global Understanding”), 2019

There is a painting by the Renaissance master Pieter Bruegel (who became known as “The Old Man”) whose original name is “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”, which Homi Bhabha (Rato, 2015) observes that should make us think. In the picture a small detail shows us Icarus, son of Daedalus, fallen from the sky to drown solitarily in the sea, after he tried to fly too high and burned the wings for having been near the sun, and no one noticing his drama. The picture is supposed to be from the dreadful perspective of Daedalus, watching impotently from above the misfortune of his own son. This leads to a question by Bhabha: “After all, who is the moral witness of human suffering, today?” According to the scholar, this is one of the questions that Culture can make the world. A self-reflexive question, as the role of witness is one of the places of Culture. Another question is to think if Culture is not the peripheral and secondary detail that makes us reconsider the whole system, just like the legs of Icarus, when we finally look at them, at Pieter Bruegel’s picture. The concept of “Culture” has several meanings, continuing to be problematized and reformulated constantly, making the word complex and impossible to be fixed in an unique way. The same happens with ‘identity’, that is a concept that must be declined in the plural. In the current paradigm crisis, the identity plan integrates a broader process of change that has shaken the frames of reference that previously seemed to give individuals some stability. Stuart Hall notes that identity theories have shattered, and identities are in the process of disintegration as a result of cultural homogenization and ‘postmodern-global’ logic stemming from the globalization process. Thus, to talk about the existence of an eventual centrality of culture, it is necessary to leave behind the idea of absolute truth (Hall, 1997). Identity and difference are thus faces of the same coin (Martins, 2007), and memory must be preserved in a balanced way, in order to avoid amnesia and indifference from becoming dangerous ingredients of any barbarism, and so that resentment does not occupy the place of humanity. As Claude Dubar (2011) points out, the crisis is not only due to the passage from one economic cycle to another, but it has to do with the new ways of living together in the world, which highlight preconceived ideas about another, about himself and about the world itself. It is the acceptance of the ‘other’ which, moreover, there is, to determine the beginning of an ethical dimension, as stated Umberto Eco (1998). Or it shall be understood by an ‘other’ ubiquitous, in the design of Dominique Wolton (2003), who is no longer abstract or distant, but does not mean that it is more familiar or understandable. It is therefore an ‘other’ that will be understood as a sociological reality, integrating all elements resulting from cultural diversity, but also those that establish links, at the societies scale. With this communication, we propose a reflection on the relationship between identity and culture, observing how cultural identities are located in a globalized world.

Culture & Psychology, 2012

The European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2019

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

2005

The search for identity is itself problematic. It is a pervasive theme in our society. Social scientists, cultural studies scholars, dramatists and the like, use the term identity in a variety of ways to explain an assortment of phenomena. Some familiar words like identity crisis, finding oneself, self-esteem, self-actualization, are used in the search for identity. At various levels, identity and culture are either pole apart, closely knit, can stand for one another or are interrelated. Whichever way however, we form our identity by carefully and deliberately selecting values, beliefs, and concepts that better define our sense of self. This is why identity cannot invariably be wholly separated from the culture(s) which build, structure and sustain it.

2014

This paper aims to present an important phenomenon of our world, namely the contradictory relationship between globalization and cultural identity. In this work identity is understood as a cultural practice therefore it cannot be analyzed without taking into account global communication and diversity. The multidimensional transformation of our society in the XXI century is marked by increased interconnectivity and affirmation of singular identities. These identities come in constant tension with the context in which the existing political forms that are in crisis and the restructuring processes through new projects are struggling to set up a new society. Globalization versus cultural identity it’s not a zero-sum game even though the two might be perceived as opposite processes this paper argue that it globalization cultural identity can go hand in hand with globalization.

2024

The history of the hybridity concept and the literature about hybridity show the continuous transformation of its meaning(s). It ranges from biological racist connotations in 19th-century colonialism to a powerful subversive tool for analysing asymmetric colonial encounters in 20th-century postcolonial studies. In the 20th century, hybridity and adjacent notions, such as transculturation, denoted this asymmetry. Bringing them into dialogue again in the 21st century, these and other related concepts may guide analyses of planetary cultural, economic, and political entanglements that avoid the false objectivism that the notion of ‘globalisation’ implies. As a result, the book critically reconsiders cultural hybridity as a concept for a world globally interconnected without losing the local articulations. So, this book argues that hybridity should be reframed with a view to the connections and entanglements it enables and complicates. As the world has become increasingly interconnected in the last few decades, this book investigates connectivity, relationships, and entanglements through new meanings and adjacent concepts, methods, and social expressions of hybridity. Methodologically, it examines hybridity within the framework of an increasingly interconnected global world, while analysing identities that intersect in cultural, socio-political, religious, and virtual spaces. The purpose of these multifaceted critical explorations is to reframe the potential and limits of hybridity in shedding light on the intersections between cultures on a global scale. ISBN 978-3-98940-042-9, 288 S., 36 Abb., kt., € 38,50 (2004) ISBN 978-3-98940-046-7, 288 S., 36 Abb., € 34,50 (E-Book/pdf, 2024) (GCSC - Giessen Contributions to the Study of Culture, Bd. 18) https://www.wvttrier.de/.../cultural-identities-in-a...

Anthropology and Humanism, 2006

The Illusion of Cultural Identity is a sophisticated and provocative text with the potential to make meaningful contributions to the sociological examinations of culture, politics, globalization and postcolonialism, specifically, and to sociological theory and historical sociology, more generally. In this text, Jean-François Bayart offers a complex account of the social world, attending primarily to the relationships between "cultural representations and political practices, popular modes of political action, and the political imaginaire" in a global context (ix). Describing his aims as both modest and Nietzschean, the author advances in the preface that intellectual inquiry ought to help us "free ourselves from ourselves" by leading us astray from what we (think we) know. Throughout, Bayart develops a caustic critique of "culturalism" and specifically, of the belief in the existence of "primordial identities…imperturbably travers(ing) the centuries" (85) with incandescent cultural "cores." His over-arching concern is with the commonplace reduction of political action to an expression of an underlying and/or immanently unfolding cultural identity. The alternative to culturalism that is creatively developed and identified under the rubric of the "imaginaire" brings the historically contingent, negotiated, differentiated, recycled, and invented nature of social formations into the foreground of an understanding of the intersections of cultural and political life.

In N. Chaudhary, S. Anandalakshmy, & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Cultural Realities of Being: Abstract Ideas within Everyday Lives. Oxford: Routledge. Cultural Realities of Being offers a dialogue between academic activity and everyday lives by providing an interface between several perspectives on human conduct. Very often, academic pursuits are arcane and obscure for ordinary people, this book will attempt to disentangle these dialogues, lifting everyday discourse and providing a forum for advancing discussion and dialogue.