Expanding the ‘social’ in ‘social identity’

ABSTRACT

Not enough consideration has been given by some texts in the field of ‘social identity’ to the task of defining society, which is, after all, the notion behind the first half of the field's name. For these particular texts, one very basic definition – ‘society is human interaction’ – is left to stand alone. This paper does not challenge the importance of any of the attempts by these texts (or by any other texts in the field) to describe and analyze the plethora of identities being promoted, invented, or rejected around the world. Rather, it focuses on only the ‘social’ component in ‘social identity’, arguing that the field as a whole would be stronger if all its contributors, or at least the great majority of them, granted this component a more important role. In particular, the paper offers the field three definitional possibilities it might usefully add to the ‘society is human interaction’ definition.

KEYWORDS:

• Social identity
• society
• interaction
• lexicography
• genealogy
• Hobbes

Acknowledgments

I thank Mick Campion, Barbara Evers, Jo Goodie, Ian Hunter, Gavin Kendall, David Silverman, Grahame Thompson, Farida Tilbury, and Stephen Turner for their suggestions on earlier versions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Elias sometimes uses the term ‘habitus’ (not to be confused with Pierre Bourdieu's use of it) to describe the tacit aspect of behaviour formation. In their preface to the 1998 edition of Elias's book The Germans (which carries the subtitle in English ‘Power struggles and the development of habitus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’). Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell define Elias's ‘habitus’ as ‘embodied social learning’ (Dunning & Mennell, 2003, p. ix).

2. The paper uses italics for ‘decorum’ when discussing Thomasius's use of it as a Latin term; otherwise it uses it as an English word without italics.