Toward Multi-Perspective Analysis of Social Identity

Abstract

The paper presents of the multi-perspective concept of a social identity which is based on the theories which constitute the roots of the contemporary sociological reception of an identity as well as some recent anthropological theories of it. There are distinguished three such theoretical contexts: identity as an objective aspect of personality; the structure of social identities of an individual; and the process of maintaining and changing the group boundaries and individual identities. Those contexts differ widely and establish different research directions. But such conceptual network lets understand the identity problems better and provides to formulation new research problems which appear on the border of those theoretical contexts.