New Forms Of Identity Research Articles

Money, Mayhem and the Beast: Narratives of the World's End from New Ireland (PAPUA NEW GUINEA)

This article discusses the relationship between money, the nation, and new imaginings of apocalypticism in Papua New Guinea. Robert Foster has argued that money played an important role in the Australian administration's efforts to promote a sense of nation at the end of the colonial period. I explore the effects of the new imaginings beyond the nation that are occurring as Christian apocalypticism becomes a dominant framework for interpreting the world. New meanings and values are being attached to money, resulting in the destabilization of the strong link between money and nation that was observed by Foster. I argue that, within this new world‐view, money is losing its symbolic potency, that new forms of identity are emerging, and that people's attachment to the nation is being weakened.

Developing European Citizenship or Discarding it? Multicultural Citizenship Theory in the light of the Carpenter Judgment of the European Court of Justice

Developing European Citizenship or Discarding It? Multicultural Citizenship Theory in Light of the Carpenter Judgment of the European Court of Justice Elspeth Guild (bio) The current discussion on citizenship of the European Union in political science focuses heavily on multiculturalism and identity politics as the essential analytical tools to understanding the developments, particularly since the Amsterdam Treaty. In the context of the European Union when identity rights become the field of negotiation, the framework for the definition of those rights is the economic capacity of the individual, in contrast to national constitutional regimes. In this article I want to examine this bifurcation taking the recent judgment of the European Court of Justice in Carpenter1 as the starting place. The central point is the degree to which the inability of citizenship rights to embrace identity at the national level becomes the field of struggle at the European level between the state and the individual. The power of mediator then exceeds the national level, even where the national identity settlement was the result of a high degree of consensus in the national political scene. But the venue in which the struggle takes place, notwithstanding its fundamental nature as one of identity, is not citizenship or human rights but economic activity. In political science there has recently been renewed interest in analysing citizenship of the European Union through the lens of multicultural citizenship.2 The analytical tools of cultural citizenship and identity creation in the European Union are deployed to examine the extent to which borders remain central in the EU framework of citizenship and identity but often with a normative plea for new identity formation. "The nightmarish dream of a common identity [of EU citizenship] ought to be replaced with reliance on citizenship, human and cultural rights and constitutional principles." (Delgado-Moreira 2000: 153). Others take a colder view of the EU in light of the apparently intractable problems of feeble democratic accountability and legitimacy and suggest that citizenship as a core sovereignty question properly remain at the national level (d'Oliveira in O'Keeffe & Twomey: 1999: 410). Following a different path but still founded in identity politics are claims of a supra national identity or a postmodern identity which replace or supersede the national one (Soysal: 1994). The mechanisms for development of new forms of identity or citizenship practices then depend on the institutions and actors acting on the concept (Weiner:1998). This is not to dismiss the importance of recent work challenging the perspective that in this field the European construction is "eroding historically constructed national collective identities" using constructivist tools which permits a deeper understanding of the inconsistencies at the heart of the concepts (Checkel: 2001). What is surprising in all this work is either the silence or the rejection of the link of economic activity to the development of identity rights in the Union. In law, however, the insertion of citizenship rights from the Union level into the national level is founded on economic criteria and justifications. The recent judgment in Carpenter is paradigmatic of this development and enlightening about the lack of legal legitimacy being given to the multicultural approach to Union citizenship. Mr. Carpenter, from the account in the ECJ's judgment, appears to have been quite an ordinary Englishman, living in the UK. He was a self-employed businessman selling advertising space in medical and scientific journals. Mr. Carpenter had responsibility for his young children by a previous marriage. Mr. Carpenter married Mrs. Carpenter, a Philippine national who was irregularly in the UK having overstayed her permitted visit. Here the first step of the identity trail begins unwinding. The UK authorities refused, as is consistent with national law, to allow Mrs. Carpenter to remain in the UK with her husband. Part of UK identity rights and duties is either not to marry a foreign national irregularly in the UK or if this is irresistible, not to seek to have the spouse live with the national in the UK. Where a UK national marries another UK national or a national of another EU Member State no obstacles to cohabitation are placed in their way. However, if the UK national deviates from these legally privileged choices...

New forms of identity in contemporary Europe1

The article's main theme is national identity and its questionable role in establishing identity of a European political community. It is argued that political integration within the European Union requires a normative and conceptual re‐examination of the concept of national identity. ‘Europeanisation’ in the context of this article suggests the integration of national groups within and between the states of the Union is a project rooted in the political future. Consequently, national identity, inspired historically, may have reached a stage whereby its utility has expired.

The Evolution of Rock and Roll: Its Religious and Ecological Themes

The evolution of messages in rock and roll, diversity and disparity included, offers unique insights into an emerging ecocentric paradigm. The contagious affirmation of the gift of life that began with Rock’s primal beat became a revolt against and a questioning of authority’s values and, ultimately, has led to a quest for new forms of identity and spirituality. This essay examines the evolution through three particular lenses — the cultic forms of old-time rock and roll, the countercultural messages of folk and classic Rock, and the ecofeminism of contemporary singer-songwriters — as a means of elucidating the evolution of rock and roll’s religious and ecological themes.

Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion: Property, Nation and Religion

Abstract Adopting a comparative approach, the article discusses patterns of inclusion and exclusion such as property, nation and religion from a historical viewpoint. According to Luhmann the concept of inclusion and exclusion is about taking into account persons in social systems; according to Foucault it is related to deviance and abnormality. The transition from stratified to functionally differentiated societies is analysed, emphasising the transformation of ›Inklusionsindividualität‹ to ›Exklusionsindwidualität‹. Property and nation are both treated as transient semantics: for a short time after its emergence, private property guarantees inclusion and brings about new forms of identity and exclusion. Without the nation state the autonomy of subsystems would not be tolerable. The idea of a nation temporarily compensates for exclusion rates resulting from this new form of differentiation. While religion grants access to anyone and everyone even in stratified societies, thus anticipating the new pattern of inclusion, it also turns into a reservoir for unplanned, non-functionary exclusion in modern society.

Adolescence Lost/Childhood Regained: on Early Intervention and the Emergence of the Techno-Subject

This article is a materialist philosophical and historical analysis of the current policy focus on early intervention programmes for print literacy. It documents the direct impact of economic and cultural globalization and new technologies on the material conditions for adolescence and youth. We argue that educational systems and government policies are struggling with the consequences of these changes: new forms of identity, technological competence and practice, and new life pathways for children and adolescents. The case is made that the current enthusiasm for early intervention programs is a ‘rhetorical displacement’ that attempts to solve the problems of unruly adolescence and the emergence of the ‘techno-subject’ through an ‘inoculation’ model dedicated to the restoration and preservation of print-based early childhood.

Breaking away from grounded identity? Women academics on the Web.

The World Wide Web has provided a new way for academics to find out about others' work and to present versions of their identity. In previous discussions we analyzed how people present themselves in this new medium, in terms of Goffman's ideas of the presentation of self, and commented on gender differences and how issues of credibility and authority are handled by women academics in their homepages. This paper reports discussions with women academics about how they have responded to this opportunity, both in how they present themselves in their own pages, and how they deal with the problems involved in presenting an individual identity within an institutional Web page framework. In presenting themselves in personal homepages, many women academics feel a need to establish their credentials and entitlement to an academic identity. However, the vulnerability of themselves as women remains part of their persona as academics. For example, they were ambivalent about the use of a self-photo on their homepages (most wanted to avoid it, but found it friendly and validating on other women's pages). The discussion considers how far new technology provides opportunities for new forms of identity, or how far the identity presented on the Web is still grounded in people's physical and institutional existence. Women academics feel that the Web has given them new freedom and reduces some traditional gender and status differences (as has been found with other aspects of electronic communication), but they are still wary of it being "yet another way of carrying on the same old gender plot."

El habitus de la feminidad y la narrativa de escritoras mexicanas contemporáneas

La sociedad se moderniza pero el habitus se reproduce. Se transforma el ámbito de lo público, de la producción social, de la política y de la cultura; sin embargo las concepciones de lo que significa ser mujer se han producido legitimando el espacio de lo doméstico como el lugar donde la mujer cumple sus tareas reproductivas. En la escritura de narradoras contemporáneas, como Angeles Mastreta y Silvia Molina, se encuentra la propuesta de nueve formas identitarias que transgreden el habitus tradicional de la feminidad, construyendo uno nuevocon características de autonomía y de reapropiación del cuerpo femenino y la sexualidad.

Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age.

In 1882 Oscar Wilde toured America as the Apostle of Aestheticism, his wit and brilliance and deliberate outrageousness creating controversy among audiences across the continent. The America visited by Wilde was a nation still badly shaken by the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this atmosphere Wilde's message of regeneration through art and beauty seemed to many Americans to open new horizons of social possibility. In this book, a cultural history of the aesthetic movement in the United States, Mary W. Blanchard provides an account of a neglected dimension of American history. Blanchard shows that the aestheticism was a wide-ranging popular movement, implemented by an array of tastemakers, resisted by the moral guardians of Victorianism. She constructs the lives of the female visionaries who used the decorative arts to assault the conventions of middle-class milieu and to advance in the social and business worlds of the Gilded Age. She also shows how the movement allowed new forms of identity for men - in particular feminized or homosexual roles that were profoundly at odds with Victorian notions of manliness. Drawing on evidence from material culture, popular media, and history and literature, Blanchard reveals aestheticism as an oppositional movement in the American Gilded Age.

Race And Language: Ties Of 'Blood And Speech', Fictive Identity And Empire In The Writings Of Henry Maine And Edward Freeman

This essay examines the views of two nineteenth-century intellectuals, the lawyer Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822-88), and the historian Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-92). Both were writing at the height of Empire, in the age of the 'comparative spirit' and of the new sciences of comparative philology and comparative ethnology. Neither was a professional linguist nor a race theorist, but both responded to the rise of these new sciences by noting their great impact on European politics. New forms of identity had arisen based on a shared language or a reconstructed linguistic affinity. Maine and Freeman shared the recognition that these new identities were not strictly grounded in accepted scientific fact, and that race could not simply be equated with language. Both Maine and Freeman were concerned with the nature of the British Empire, and Freeman in particular saw a potential conflict between the new language-based identities of Europe and the future of the British Empire. For Freeman saw the ties of Empire as a threat to Britain and to its relationship with the United States within a 'Greater Britain' made up of politically independent but ideologically and linguistically kindred states. It is argued that a key to the understanding of twentieth-century identity politics can be found in the partial dislocation - perceived clearly by Freeman and Maine - of these new identities both from historical reality and from the categories of philological and ethnological science. These identities draw on the prestige of these new sciences, but they are fictive identities constructed as myth and requiring acts of social will and leadership ('the hero') to sustain them.

Hydrographies

Drawing on the work of the theoretical biologist Humberto Maturana, I offer in this essay a way of conceptualizing the forms of identity that survive the various death pronouncements of our postidentitarian moment. I associate the work of imagining those strange new forms of identity with what Frederic Jameson calls “cognitive mapping,” arguing that these “afteridentities” can emerge from a “hydrographic” charting of the fluid cultural territories of the modern and the postmodern. In conclusion, I indicate how this approach may be of use in contemporary attempts to “map” the diasporic territories of the Black Atlantic.

Movements rising in the west

Questions as to what, if anything, is new about contemporary Western transnational social movements (TSMs) have puzzled theorists for more than a decade. These questions are of more than academic interest because the more we know about these movements the better we can participate in them and aid them in achieving their objectives. My purpose here is to critically review three principal arguments regarding the novelty of TSMs: first, that they act in new arenas of conflict; second, that they display new forms of identity and consciousness; and third, that they employ new types of organization and action. Alberto Melucci and other students of contemporary Western transnational social movements argue that TSMs operate in what might be termed new arenas of conflict. Whereas nineteenth‐century movements were embroiled in struggles over the production and distribution of material goods and resources, some sectors of contemporary social movements challenge the administrative logic of complex social and politica...

Gilding the Smokestacks: The New Symbolic Representations of Deindustrialised Regions

Central to attempts to restructure the economic and industrial base of deindustrialised regions is the redefinition of image and the creation of new forms of identity. It is argued that this cultural focus is often absent from analyses of industrial change and the regeneration of localities. With a focus on two deindustrialised areas in Australia which have faced significant job loss in recent years, the local promotional texts are analysed to investigate how important the production of a revitalised image has been to the regeneration of these areas. The author looks at what elements in the texts drew on specifically local or national myths and culture and what elements drew on more universal symbolic discourses and realities, in particular dominant Western notions of masculinity. The concern was to see if the form of representation of the dominant discourses varied spatially or in the process of change.

Gilding the smokestacks: The new symbolic representations of deindustrialised regions

Central to attempts to restructure the economic and industrial base of deindustrialised regions is the redefinition of image and the creation of new forms of identity. It is argued that this cultural focus is often absent from analyses of industrial change and the regeneration of localities. With a focus on two deindustrialised areas in Australia which have faced significant job loss in recent years, the local promotional texts are analysed to investigate how important the production of a revitalised image has been to the regeneration of these areas. The author looks at what elements in the texts drew on specifically local or national myths and culture and what elements drew on more universal symbolic discourses and realities, in particular dominant Western notions of masculinity. The concern was to see if the form of representation of the dominant discourses varied spatially or in the process of change.