Individual Identity:
"I'm an in-divide-you-all" -- Finnegan's Wake
"The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost." --Norman O. Brown, Love's Body, p. 161 (cf BwO) see also place / identity.
According to Freud, the ego is an agency of the psyche,by means of which the subject aquires a sense of unity and identity, "a coherent organization of mental processes." (XIX,17.) Through consciousness, the ego is the site of differentiation between inside and outside, between "subjective" and "objective."
The construction of reflective identity, treating ‘oneself as another’,provides the ‘narrative component of the comprehension of self’ Identities in this context are conceived as narratives, as stories that people tell themselves and others about who they are, and who they are not, as well as who and how they would like to / should be. The production of identities is always ‘in process’, never complete, contingent and multiplex.(Stuart Hall) A narrative of identity is a necessary condition for the existence of any notion of agency and subjectivity. (Gayatry Spivak)
Group Identity
In Idols of the Tribe, Harold Isaacs explores the workings of group identity. Within homogeneous groups, the primary functions of basic group identity are to provide a sense of belongingness as well as a quality of esteem and self-esteem. Isaacs traces some of the main distinguishing features of identity in the body, name, language, history and origins, religion and nationality.
Many features of group identity are ready-made at birth or acquired in infancy: the baby’s shared physical characteristics, that serve immediately to establish who are the “we” and who count as “them”, in addition to the baby’s birthplace, name, and language, as well as its history and origins, religion, and nationality. The physical characteristics can also be supplemented by circumcision, scarification, tattooing, hair etc.
The names and epithets that members of different groups have for others express feelings of distrust, fear, and hostility, and they are often considered unclean. But the names adopted by groups in changing circumstances can also express how people see themselves.
The element of color and physical characteristics lies at the very center of the cluster that makes up the basic group identity of black Americans. A primary example of the importance of name is the history of designating the descendants of slaves in America. As Harold Isaacs puts it, “If their blackness itself has been at the heart of their crisis of self-definition, the word “black” has been the key two it through a long history. To trace how this word has been used is the trace the passage of black Americans from crippling self-rejection to the beginning of a liberating self-acceptance”. (Idols of the Tribe) For some blacks in the United States, the quest for a more prideful and self-accepting identity has involved not only the matter of changing their group name, but changing individual names as well.
According to Marc Augé, . "We all need places in which we recognise ourselves and in which others can recognise us as easily as we recognise them." (see: Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity).
According to Samuel Huntington, "For people seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential." (The Clash of Civilizations, p. 20) "People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity." For Huntington, "The world is divided between a Western one and a non-Western many." (see Us, We and Them)