A Narrative Theory of History and Identity

Abstract

The concept of social identity, as described by social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979) and its subsequent elaboration, self-categorization theory (Turner et al. 1987), provides a nucleus from which psychologists can understand the relationship between individuals and the social worlds they inhabit. Identity from this perspective is not something belonging to the individual, as a set of fixed traits, but rather something that emerges out of an interaction between the person and the situation. The interplay between a person’s self-concept and the situation, containing the social forces emanating from other people and institutions that direct him how to think, feel, and behave is at the heart of the process of identification (Reicher and Hopkins 2001; Oakes, Haslam, and Turner 1994; Turner et al. 1987). A person has a fluid repertoire of self-categorizations that enable self-positioning as “one” with different in-groups and responses to being positioned as “other” by other people (Dresler-Hawke and Liu 2006). Self-categorization activates socially shared cultural knowledge that allows the individual to conform to situation-appropriate group norms for behavior. The same person may sometimes act as a mother, as a social worker, or a nationalist. A person’s subjective sense of social identification provides a navigation system for dealing with the different demands of these different in-groups and enables differentiation from various out-groups. This fluidity in social identification allows a person to sometimes activate maternal norms for caring, to other times conform to nationalistic beliefs about defending the motherland, and still to other times react against prejudice, and so on.