A lecture about culture and identity

1. AXL3400F
Week 5:Challenge of
Culture
Ayanda Manqoyi

2. Culture and Identity

3. Recap
 Last week we looked at
Bourdieu’s “Habitus”:
 as embodied symbolic capital = embodied knowledge.
 Habits (unconscious) which inform and are informed by the
fields/environments we exist in and which ultimately serve as
strategic systems of navigating these overlapping fields in order to
achieve dominance/ power / status.
 the institutions/ fields and practices which contribute to the
production, legitimation and contestation of culture, and by
extension, habitus.
 School as a Microcosm of Real Life
 Nyamnjoh andYamada’s theories on colonial education.
 Theories on how to de-colonise education

4. ThisWeek
This week we discuss:
“the nature of identity as an anthropological concept”
and
“the relationship between culture and identity, and the strategic ways
in which culturally informed identities are mobilised to claim or deny
access to power, privilege and resources by individuals and
collectivities.”
Texts
 Anderson, Benedict, 1983, ‘Imagined Communities’
 Jenkins, Richard, 1996, ‘Social Identity’
 Thornton, Robert, 1988, ‘Culture: A contemporary definition’
 Biko, Steve. 2004 (1978). ‘Chapter 6:We Blacks’

5. Imagined
Communities

6. How DoYou
Identify
Yourself?
Nation
 African?
 South African?
 If not, where are you from?
Why do you identify as ….. ?
Linguistic/Language
 English?
 Afrikaans?
 isiXhosa
 IsiZulu?
 Any other languages?
 Is your language a defining
part of your identity?Why?

7. How DoYou
Identify
Yourself?
Spiritual belief
 Christian?
 Muslim?
 Jewish?
 Other?
Ethnicity
 Zulu?
 Chinese?
 English?
 Portuguese?

8. Socialization
 What is your level of education?
 What music do you listen to?
 What gender do you identify as?
 What race do you identify as?
So each of us has a particular identity which is made up of our
subscription to and acceptance in/ or non-acceptance in particular
communities
This week we are talking about identity, how we identify ourselves,
how we identify others, how this interplays with our understanding
of culture.

9. Selfhood and
social identity
 Jenkins defines the “self” as being both social & cultural but
definitely individual (Habitus – individual)
 Also defines the self as a “process” and not a “thing”
But what does this mean?
We are constantly adjusting and assessing our sense of self in
relation to our surroundings and others, in relation to our
acceptance in or exclusion from our surroundings and others, and
our own acceptance or rejection of surroundings and others.

10. Selfhood and
social identity
Thus, there is a delicate interplay between self (Agency) & social
(External Agency) which is both simultaneous and perpetual.
“Agency is central to selfhood”
And
“Mind and selfhood, then are cultural and social, they operate within
the Individual”
But as Jenkins points out:
1) Selfhood is realised vis a vis others – external are necessary foils
(oppositions) to self knowledge
2) Selfhood is an ongoing internal/external dialectic of acceptance,
rejection or not)
3) Self identity draws on a wide palette of accessories in the
environment – family, spouse, work, relationships (social capital)

11. Identityand
Belonging

12. Forming
community
Thus according to Jenkins, the interplay of similarity and difference
to the EXTERNAL is the logic by which all identification, both
individual and collective, is formed.
We define ourselves based on the claims we can make to belonging
OR NOT to communities (family/friends/ethnicity/nation/belief)
etc.
And we define others by the claims they make , and our perceived
validity of those claims.
This is the basis of acceptance, but also denial/discrimination.
How are these communities formed?
Communities are formed when a group of people come together
over a shared set of values, memories, stories, resources, institutes,
schools,

13. Nation and
identity
But Anderson proposes that communities are “imagined”
Using the concept of NATION as an example:
 He suggests that ‘nation’ is a political/social community
 That largely we never encounter all the members of the
communities we claim belonging to
 Our claims are built on an ‘imagined’ knowing of connection and
kinship
 It is only mobilized in relation to other “communities” – nations
are limited in that there are boundaries on the border of which
other nations exist.
 Nations are sovereign in that they have freedom to self-regulate
 Nations are imagined as community even if internally there is
exploitation and inequality

14. Thornton-
Imagined
borders
• Nations and national borders are a largely modern concept, and evershifting.
• A product of accurate time, longitude, latitude, war and conquest.
Consider countries that:
❖No longer exist
❖Have been absorbed into others
❖Are newly formed
• Anderson andThornton both point out that within these communities are
tensions and ruptures – they claim homogeneity where there is none -
because communities are not homogenous
• Additionally, the very nature of claims to a particular community essentialises
and stereotypes it - creating something static
 Thorton uses the examples of British/Boer and Zulu as classifications.
• The conflation of ideas of identity, culture, nation, society, community creates
boundaries -Yet these boundaries are arbitrary and not objective.

15. How is Identity
Mobilized?

16. How is
Identity
Mobilized?
 We activate/mobilize notions of identity to conform or resist
whether consciously or unconsciously.
 But, as Anderson, Jenkins and evenThornton allude to,
identification/ categorization, in as much as it is aimed at defining,
also essentialises.
 In the process of defining something transient, we also
essentialise and “stereotype” it.

17. Diaspora
 Living in host communities has encouraged ways that collective
identities can be/or are strategically essentialised.
 Originally, diaspora was used to refer specifically to scattered
Jewish communities outside of Israel.
 But it now also refers to populations of people outside of their
original “homeland”.
How do diaspora’s operate?
 Often a collective of people adopt and essentialise aspects of their
perceived identities and traditions in resistance to their locales, to
maintain a sense of “individuality” of “difference” to not lose their
identity.
 Often diasporas end up creating entirely new traditions that they
claim as traditional, but which when viewed by the “homeland”
are completely un-relatable.

18. African
collective
Both Biko and Nyamnjoh talk about the collectives ofAfrica.
If we refer back to last week, we recognize that Nyamnjoh calls for the
mobilization of the collective identity of Africans, African
intellectualism,African academia, African knowledge as a means to
resist or contest colonial education.
Biko does similar – he calls on the collective identity of blackness,
specifically African blackness to produce, reconsider, reinvest in black
consciousness as resistance and contestation to the undeniable damage
done to the “collective” black psyche, humanity, spirituality and sense
of self done by apartheid.
In both cases we see the mobilization of a collective identity, but also an
essentialising of identity in order to strategically gain purchase, include,
exclude, motivate, contest, inspire.
To move from pre-colonial – colonial – p0st-colonial – Decolonial.

19. NextWeek -
Culture,
Cultural
Rights and
Human
Rights
 we critically examine how culture is used in global
discourses of human rights.We think critically through
ideas of universality in order to explore anthropological
understandings of the right to be different.