Social Self and Identity

Abstract

In this chapter, it is argued that the idea of a social self is at the origin of much of the everyday understanding of the actions of the social, including that of identity within groups. We begin with the idea of social action and argue for the essential sociality of every individual. How is it, that individuals invoke concepts like ‘We’ to describe certain kinds of processes and experiences? Is the use of ‘We’ similar to the use of ‘I’ when describing experiences? Is the idea of the social to be discovered in the ways by which the we-consciousness arises and is sustained? In this sense, the ‘individual’ itself is a social construction. Experiences are unified through the notion of the individual self. Similarly, we can see how the idea of a social self is formed in talk about collective experiences and the formation of we-consciousness. We conclude this chapter with a discussion on the social self of caste.