Collective Identities

Abstract

Collective identity is an abstract category which encompasses narrowly definable concepts such as group identity, cultural identity, or regional identity, and historically specific types of community formation and sociation such as clans, tribes, peoples, nations, or ethnic minorities, including socio-structural concepts such as social status and class as well as political parties and movements. A definition of the term collective identities includes every process of community formation and sociation that leads to clearly definable social entities, although communicative processes of self- and other-identification and corresponding attitudes appear to be of constitutive importance. The transformation of collective identities is considered in view of the ‘three waves of democratization’, and the socio-structural processes of ‘political exclusion’, ‘socio-cultural closures’, and ‘meritocratic-functional differentiation’. Currently massive migration processes are also connected with questions and symptoms of a crisis of collective identities. At the same time, issues of multiple identities gain more importance.