Notion Of Collective Identity Research Articles

Literary Associations and Language Activism: Reading the Past and Present Motivations of Asam Sahitya Sabha

In the early decades of the twentieth century in colonial Assam, the standardisation of language, the expansion of regional literature and literary circles, and the challenges arising for linguistic communities led to the formation of Asam Sahitya Sabha (ASS) that intended to work for the advancement of Assamese language in the interest of the public. Implicit in its model of association was the notion of collective identity that gradually set the pace for assertions. The ASS’s motivations cannot be discussed in isolation. The historical junctures of colonial India must be taken into account that had set the stage for revolutionising the literary spaces. This article has two key aims, first to discuss the events of ASS’s activism during the colonial and post-independence periods and observe the relevant transitions. Second, to look at the mobilisation agendas pursued by the ASS in contemporary times and whether there are alternative inspirations. To place the key issues of the present, the insights from ASS members, who were interviewed, are included. Overall, this article looks at the associational form of the language assertion in Assam, years earlier and the roles adopted with the changing times.

Was Brexit a Form of Secession?

AbstractAs a form of legal separation taking place within a quasi‐federal framework, Brexit displayed important conceptual similarities with secession, in that it was predicated upon notions of collective identity and aspirations of renewed self‐government. This article examines the interrelationship between Brexit, secession as a legal concept, and secessionism as a political phenomenon. It advances two main arguments: at a first stage, it highlights that while Brexit ideologically aligns with secessionism, it could not have met any sustained international law definition of secession itself. However, the constitutional constraint to the European Union's formal status as an association of states (Staatenverbund) as opposed to a federation (Staatsverband) has rendered its withdrawal provision (Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU)) unduly impervious to the important practical parallels between the Brexit process and decisional, that is, negotiated, forms of secession. The article goes on to argue that an active recognition of aspects of decisional secession within the EU constitutional framework could have allowed for a more complex and dialogical resolution of Brexit than the conditions set up by the unilateral withdrawal clause allowed.

Defining Collective Identities in Technopolitical Interaction Networks.

We are currently witnessing the emergence of new forms of collective identities and a redefinition of the old ones through networked digital interactions, and these can be explicitly measured and analyzed. We distinguish between three major trends on the development of the concept of identity in the social realm: (1) an essentialist sense (based on conditions and properties shared by members of a group), (2) a representational or ideational sense (based on the application of categories by oneself or others), and (3) a relational and interactional sense (based on interaction processes between actors and their environments). The interactional approach aligns with current empirical and methodological progress in social network analysis. Moreover, it has been argued that, within the network society, the notion of collective identity (Melucci, 1995) in the political field must be rethought as technologically mediated and interactive. We suggest that collective identities should be understood as recurrent, cohesive, and coordinated communicative interaction networks. We here propose that such identities can be depicted by: (a) mapping and filtering a relevant interaction network, (b) delimiting a set of communities, (c) determining the strongly connected component(s) of such communities (the core identity) in a directed graph, and (d) defining the identity audiences and sources within the community. This technical graph–theoretical characterization is explained and justified in detail through a toy model and applied to three empirical case studies to characterize political identities in party politics (communicative interaction in Twitter during the Spanish elections in 2018), contentious politics in confrontation (in Twitter during the Catalan strike for independence 2019), and the multitudinous identity of Spanish Indignados/15 social movement (in Facebook fan pages 2011). We discuss how the proposed definition is useful to delimit and characterize the internal structure of collective identities in technopolitical interaction networks, and we suggest how the proposed methods can be improved and complemented with other approaches. We finally draw the theoretical implications of understanding collective identities as emerging from interaction networks in a progressive platformization of social interactions in a digital world.

Democracia participativa, protestas sociales y autoritarismo en el socialismo del siglo XXI: el movimiento estudiantil venezolano

Siguiendo el enfoque de la estructura de oportunidades políticas y la noción de identidad colectiva, uno de los objetivos de este trabajo es analizar las movilizaciones y ciclos de protesta en los que participó el movimiento estudiantil venezolano, el actor con mayor credibilidad, durante el periodo 2007-2019. El propósito es conocer el impacto del cierre del sistema político a la participación, la polarización y el creciente autoritarismo y represión en su éxito o fracaso.

The Flâneur/Flâneuse and the Multiple “I”s of the “Local” in Xi Xi’s I City

Since its publication in the mid-1970s, Xi Xi’s novel I City (Wo cheng) has become a classic of Hong Kong literature and the focus of considerable scholarly attention. Since 1997, this attention has shifted away from aesthetic concerns, such as language and structure, toward a discussion of the local. This article continues that discussion, proposing interpretations of the local that go beyond notions of collective identity. The “I” in I City is often understood as a collective “we,” and the optimistic tone and vision of the novel as reflections of the social conditions and political reforms experienced under the British Hong Kong government of the 1970s. Here, in contrast, I suggest that I City deconstructs the imaginary of a linear, continuous historical narrative, and presents the local as fluid and constantly in flux. This is evident in the figure of the flâneur/flâneuse, whose behaviour implies both their detachment from the capitalist city in which they live and their rejection of the ideology of the family and nation-state. I argue that the flâneur/flâneuse participates in the creation of the local through their everyday practice, rather than by submitting themselves to a collective identity.This essay is an abridged version of a longer article forthcoming from Thoughts and Words (Si yu yan). My thanks to the anonymous reviewers of that publication, for their careful feedback and recommendations.

The ambivalent Apostle of 1953: a liminal reading of the centenary of José Martí

This article has common Cuban motifs at its core: the prevalent obsession with the notion of collective identity, the ideological and psychological importance of national anniversaries, and the omnipresence of the archetypal patriot José Martí. It approaches all from a particular theoretical perspective, however, and thus presents a new reading of the so-called ideario martiano and of the Cuban “national narrative” at a critical moment of the island’s historical trajectory: 1953, the centenary of Martí’s birth. Taking its lead from cultural anthropology (and particularly from the work of Victor Turner), this article presents the half-century since independence in 1902 as a post-colonial “rite of passage” punctuated by a series of turning points, or “limens,” within which the sense of national identity was exposed to sustained scrutiny by public intellectuals and activists. The article provides evidence of such intense collective introspection in 1953 when commemorations of Martí’s centenary stimulated a re-examination of the Republic in the light of his luminous example. Importantly, this turning point is also exposed as a battleground on which antagonistic interpretations of martiano heroism, Republican history, and national identity faced each other in exegetical strife.

Ethnographic reflections on ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in two post-earthquake Italian cities

This article explores the politicisation of cultural heritage during the aftermath of the 1980 earthquake in Naples and the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila. It begins by critically addressing the positions of Tomaso Montanari and Salvatore Settis, two prominent heritage intellectuals at the forefront of national campaigns to restore the damaged historic centre of L’Aquila. Both have been instrumental in shaping an ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in Italy that underscores the civic virtues of the nation’s cultural patrimony while simultaneously railing against its marketisation. Reflecting upon observations in L’Aquila, where locals involved in protests at government inaction have been scolded by fellow inhabitants for their lack of obeisance to cultural heritage, and drawing on longstanding ethnographic research in Naples, where heritage campaigns against redevelopment in the historic centre in the 1980s were later incorporated into an ambitious regeneration agenda, the article argues that this oppositional heritage discourse is not only premised upon idealist notions of collective identity but also, as a result of its attempts to legislate the boundaries of heritage citizenship and its disavowal of philologically incorrect relationships with historic centres, it ultimately provides tacit support to the very same neoliberal urban processes against which it claims to take a stand.

GENNEP, A. V. Os ritos de passagem. 2. ed., Trad. Mariano Ferreira. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2011.

This book review is related to “The rites of passage” from the authorship of Arnold Van Gennep. The author was the first to point out the existence of constitutive aspects of the turning point in the change of social status of the individual. The importance to analyze ceremonies, rites, spectacles, which are concerned to fundamental events in some social group pertaining process, is discussed. Using a socioanthropological reflection, this classic book demonstrates that the notion of collective identity is linked to how others recognize the individual. This text stimulates to think in sociocultural aspects which permeates Physical Education academic field.

NOMOS, IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS: CIRO POGGIALI'S DIARIO AOI 1936–1937 AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE ITALIAN COLONIAL WORLD

The article begins by looking at the body of written and visual material that was produced on the colonial world in the interwar years. It considers various reading strategies that can be applied to this body of work and how it can be addressed through post-colonial criticism. The article argues that the work of the sociologist Peter Berger offers a series of insights into the way in which this material represents the social world, and the notions of collective identity and alterity that are central to that world. In the light of Berger's thinking on the socially constructed nomos, the essay examines some of the definitions of the relation between metropolitan and subject communities that recur in writings on the reality of colonialism. The essay explores the relationship of an individual author to the nomos of his or her time by looking in detail at one text: the journalist Ciro Poggiali's diary of the time he spent in Ethiopia in the immediate aftermath of the Italian conquest of the country. It examines how Poggiali's diary can be interpreted as a complex account of how the coerciveness of the social world is experienced by individual consciousness and how its definitions of racial and cultural belonging can be appropriated or challenged. The essay concludes by arguing that the analysis of strategies for defining identity and otherness within the Italian colonial context can be taken further by working within a comparative framework.

“The Sisterhood is Watching”: Challenging Identity and Agency in Citizenship

“The Garneau Sisterhood is watching”, warns an impromptu poster in the Garneau community, following a police warning for women to take safety precautions subsequent to announcements of a serial rapist in the area. In this context, tensions exist between the individual, the state and the collective. In this interpretivist study, we invoke the lens of feminist theory to examine the relationship between identity and agency in a collective conceptualization of the citizen. Through content analysis of a sampling of public media, we present the case of the Garneau Sisterhood to consider the relationship between collective identity and agency in challenging the constraints of individualist notions of citizenship. Finally, we argue that feminist citizenship education is needed to engage the notion of collective identity and agency as a source of empowerment for students, and other citizens, to raise issues of importance in the public sphere.

Nation, narration, unification? The politics of history teaching after the Rwandan genocide

The paper investigates the strategy of the Rwandan government in pursuing its stated objective of national unity and reconciliation after the 1994 genocide. In order to unmake the divisions of the past it promotes a notion of collective identity, which is no longer based on ethnic but on civic identity of all as citizens. The strategy is centred on an interpretation of Rwanda's history according to which ethnicity did not exist prior to the arrival of the colonialists. But does narrating the nation as founded on ethnic harmony lead to unity in Rwanda? I argue that due to the top–down nature of the government's history discourse, its censorship of alternative accounts as well as the deep scars of the genocide division and resentment persists. At present, ethnic belonging is still very important for most Rwandans restricting their willingness to consider different interpretations of the past. The paper draws on the teaching of history as an example of illustrating means by which the Rwandan government narrates its past. It analyses the debates about and practises of history teaching in schools as well as in education camps called ingandos through which released genocide prisoners, but also a considerably large portion of the society in general, have to pass. By way of conclusion it argues that the Rwandan government introduces narrative closure on alternative interpretations of the past which stands in the way of reconciliation and a genuinely grown national unity in the future.

The Moods of Homeric Greek. By Jo Willmott

BOOK REVIEWS 67 nity. More seriously, consideration of Boiotian identity often takes place within a context devoid of Boiotika (tellingly, there is no map of Boiotia); L. summarily discusses inter-communal rivalry in Late Archaic –Early Classical Boiotia as indicating the absence of a regional political federation (pp. 182–4), but this was simultaneously the background for the continuing progression of Boiotian ethnogenesis. My deeper concern is that notions of collective identity, ethnicity, and the like are fetishized here. The utility of the Boiotian ethnicity on display in L.’s work is abstract, and it is clear neither how it mattered on a day-to-day level, nor, for example, how a “populous geographic collective mobilized around the chance at acquiring new territory” (pp. 151–2, L.’s description of the Boiotians at the time of their invasion of Athens in 507/6) was distinct from a formal military and political league.1 The prose style and overall bulkiness of the argument, finally, too often reveal its origins as a doctoral dissertation. These criticisms do not detract from the overall value and usefulness of L.’s work, which represents a significant contribution both to scholarship on ethnicity in Greek antiquity and Boiotian studies in general. D. GRANINGER American School of Classical Studies at Athens University of Tennessee, Knoxville * * * The Moods of Homeric Greek. By JO WILLMOTT. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 264. Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978–0–521–87988–0. Latin has a sequence of tenses, Greek has a sequence of moods: so goes the standard line. And Classical Attic is relatively wellbehaved in using subjunctives after non-past main verbs, optatives after past-tense ones—with the proviso that an author could always choose in the latter instance to use the “vivid” subjunctive, whatever that is supposed to mean. This distribution, together with the use of main-clause subjunctives in exhortations and prohibitions (over which the speaker has some control) and that of optatives in wishes (over which the speaker has little control), led scholars to posit that the two moods act in parallel, and that they exist, together with the indicative, on an irrealis continuum: with the indicative, the speaker 1 On this point, mention should be made of the recent, very preliminary publication of a fragmentary Archaic columnar monument from Thebes inscribed with a dedication (which came to light too late for L. to take note of) likely recording a “Theban ” perspective on the crucial events of 507/6 (SEG 54.518; BullÉp. 2006, no. 203). In Athenian perspective, these northern invaders were simply [ἔθνεα Βοιοτν] (IG 13 501, supplemented by Hdt. 5.77). 68 BOOK REVIEWS asserts the reality of the event, with the subjunctive that assertion becomes an expression of will, with the optative one of mere wish. There were also morphological grounds for this schema: the subjunctive has primary endings, the optative secondary endings, calling to mind the English pairing of will : would, can : could, and may : might, in which the past tense of the modal verb is more irrealis than the present . Nor is this irrealis continuum the only major theoretical categorization of relevance to the Greek moods. Perpendicular to it runs a division of moods and modal verbs into deontic and epistemic modality . As the names suggest, the former covers the use of the moods to indicate obligation, necessity and will (prohibitive and jussive subjunctives , the optative of wish), while the latter encompasses modal uses in which the focus is more on the speaker’s uncertain knowledge of the truth of the statement (potential optatives, and, in Homer, the subjunctive used as a future). Again, objective morphosyntactic facts seem to corroborate this division: as Chantraine pointed out, deontic modals generally lack the modal particle ἄν / κε and are negated with μή, whereas the epistemic modals have the modal particle and are negated with οὐ. As a whole, the description appears to hold fairly well for Attic. But what about Homeric Greek? The central argument of W.’s book is that it does not. Instead, W. offers a problematized account of the Homeric moods, in which these neat structuralist divisions are called into question and replaced with a more...

Globalisation and Values

This paper discusses a central element in globalisation debate little addressed by economists, namely the interactions at global, national and community levels between globalisation and societally based values. Social values refer to wider notions of collective identity; religious values, attitudes towards materialism, moral beliefs, and a sense of collective awareness and are a broader and more encompassing concept than social capital discussed in recent economics and sociology literature. Social capital relates to trust, honesty and the social fabric of accepted norms central to the successful implementation of individual optimising decisions and denotes a communal asset reflecting strength of joint collective commitment whose amount can be increased or improved upon through investment of time and resources. Social values are much discussed in sociological literature going back to Comte, Durkheim, Parsons, and others. The issues taken up here are how different social values might interact and change as societies and their economies integrate (globalise). Processes of value competition, displacement and joint assimilation occur naturally to economists, but seem little studied by sociologists who seemingly place less stress on analytical comparative statics. Scenarios for how values can interact under globalisation are discussed in the text.

Modular Modern: Shifting Forms of Collective Identity among the Akha of Northern Thailand

In this article, I demonstrate that notions of collective identity among the Akha of Northern Thailand have shifted in recent history from a comprehensive, holistic form to a compartmentalized form. I contrast forms of collective (Akha) identity during the period of my initial fieldwork (1982-1985) with forms emerging post-1985 through 1998, a time period characterized by increasing nation-state and capitalist penetration. This recent shift is placed within a broader, long-term historical context of the shifting politics of identity in upland/lowland relations. A comprehensive, holistic form of collective identity was historically developed by the Akha as a protective and organizational complex under conditions of dispersion, orality, local autonomy and unequal power relations with outside, lowland (especially Tai) groups. Thus recent critiques of holistic, bounded approaches to culture need to take into account the fact that such forms may be produced by native actors, both as concepts and as lived realities. This form, which was defined as permeating multiple dimensions of everyday life, is being replaced by a form in which it is acceptable to compartmentalize Akha identity as an "ethnic" component that is relegated to special occasions and social domains. These two different forms of identity have different implications for the way the Akha construct and relate to others (non-Akha). Such a change raises comparative questions concerning the creative formation of and limits on modern forms of collective identity. Both new tensions and new accommodative potential between ethnic groups arise under these new conditions.

Diaspora and nation: displacement and the politics of Kashmiri identity in Britain

The idea of the nation-state continues to dominate the way in which political collective identities are conceptualised in South Asia. One of the challenges the nation-state faces is the situation in which large sections of its population are located outside state boundaries. This paper reflects on the way in which the displacement of peoples can lead to the displacement of a conventional understanding of the nation-state as combining the idea of one government, one land and one people. It explores the impact of displacement, both empirically and conceptually, on the notions of collective identity, illustrating the argument by reference to the Kashmiri narratives of identity being articulated in Britain.

Community boundary, secularized religion and imagined past in Bangladesh: Archaeology and historiography of unequal encounter

The past, as constructed by the modern power of colonialism and nationalism, has essentialized the ideals of nation-state through the process of homogenizing the polysemous identities of non-Western societies and religions. The power of this imagined past is particularly manifested in the institutionalization of the disciplines of archaeology and history, and has acted to fix communitarian boundaries within the conditions and structures of inequality. The analysis of the part played by archaeological narratives in this process of fixation within the domain of nation-state has not even been initiated in the context of Bangladesh. This paper examines the conditions and processes in and by which the secularized notion of religion and representations of the past have been persuaded and coerced to invoke the 'pure' ideals of nation while simultaneously subordinating other notions of collective identity.

Does ASEAN measure up? Post-Cold War diplomacy and the idea of regional community

This article analyses ASEAN's security discourse and behaviour in the post-Cold War era with the goal of assessing whether ASEAN has become a diplomatic community that acts on the basis of a collective identity. The notion of community is subjected to critical analysis by measuring ASEAN's diplomacy against three criteria that are used to operationalize the concept of ‘regional collective identity’: shared meaning structures, mutual identifications and norm compliance with the ‘ASEAN way’. The article assesses ASEAN behaviour for fourteen diplomatic events in the post-Cold War period against those indicators. Do the findings support the notion of collective identity and, by extension, the idea of a regional community? The article argues that the data gained from ASEAN's post-Cold War diplomacy provide only conditional support for the idea of an ASEAN community. Exploring the foundations of ASEAN diplomacy, it suggests that ASEAN qualifies as a rule-based community but not an identity-based community. Finally, the article relates those findings to recent events in the region and outlines some implications of this study for the future trajectory of ASEAN's diplomacy. This study seeks to make a contribution to the theoretical debate about international relations in Southeast Asia as well as providing useful insights into ASEAN relations with external powers, particularly China and the United States.

Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique

INTRODUCTION by CARLA KAPLAN This roundtable was conceived-or risked-in the belief that, in spite of the many efforts to tell the history of feminism, our dialogue as feminists is still unfolding and that, hence, important questions remain unsolved. Paramount among them to us (for a variety of reasons) was the question of feminist politics: not politics as opposed to theory, not politics in the largest, vaguest, sense of ideology-but politics as collective action, resistance, agitation, and change, with all its necessary, attendant questions of identity, agency, and collectivity. No one shares the same narrative of feminism. Indeed, this roundtable is partly an attempt to provoke our different narratives and to tease out why we are so invested in our own, so agitated by those of others. My own narrative takes us to a moment, this moment, in which a successful deconstruction of feminism's own categories-a deconstruction resulting simultaneously from political and theoretical challenges to putative universals-troubles the traditional grounding of political action and resistance. Notions of collective identity, shared interests, solidarity, alliance, self-identification are all up for grabs in ways that we have become adept at anticipating and rehearsing but which, as yet, remain unsolved. The title of this roundtable, drawn from Susan Lurie's book, Unsettled Subjects: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique (Duke University Press, 1999), conveys our hope that the insights of poststructuralism fuel not only critiques of feminism but feminist critiques as well and that we are-already-restoring the force of politics to the project of critique.