Being German, Paraguayan and Germanino: Exploring the Relation Between Social and Personal Identity

ABSTRACT

Despite people’s claims, their national, ethnic and other identities are not ubiquitously relevant, they are rather situationally evoked and performed. Such is the case with the German, Paraguayan and Germanino identity in the municipality of Nueva Germania, in Paraguay. Recognising such contextual epistemic permissibility allows us to form a de-essentialised understanding of groups and individuals. One of the challenges that emerge from this approach, is to understand how a person can perform different identities, which differently define who they are, while remaining certain of being a continuous and persistent person. The objective of this article is to provide a theoretical grounding for theories of social identity in theories of personal identity. It allows us to analytically accommodate the situational and multiscalar character of identities, while recognising their existential importance for personal identity (for the Self).

KEYWORDS:

• Theory of identity
• situational identities
• personal identity (the Self)
• epistemic multiplicity
• anti-essentialism

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank all of those who have commented on earlier versions of this article and helped to improve it – Carmen Delgado Luchner, Luis Escobedo D‘Anglés, Marina Girona Raventós, Jan Lorenz and Duygu Tekgül. Special thanks to Christian Williams who besides providing excellent feedback, served as the main discussant in a seminar in which this paper was presented at the University of the Free State. Furthermore, I also wish to thank colleagues who invited me to give guest lectures based on early versions of this paper at the Viadrina European University and the Adam Mickiewicz University. I am grateful to Jonathan Tracey who provided excellent proofreading. I thank the editor, Renee Galliher, and both anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Last but not least, I want to thank all the wonderful Germaninos who collaborated with me on this project and whose stories form the basis for my academic thinking – in this paper Carlos Benitez, Waltraud Haudenschild, Arnold Garcia, Gerda Kück and Albert Kück are mentioned. Special thanks to Marta Villalba Agüero who organised a seminar at the Municipality of Nueva Germania in June 2018, where these ideas were presented and discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For those interested in the historical and ethnographic context of Nueva Germania, its foundation, ideological roots in nineteenth century racism and nationalism, roots in the history of the Paraguayan War, death of Förster and departure of Nietzsche, the town’s further development and current modernisation, and other related subjects which lie out of the scope of this article, I refer the reader to Kraus (1999) and Kurzwelly (2017).

2. It is important to note that I use “nationalism” in a very broad understanding of the term. Nationalism, as an analytical category cannot be reduced to political movements only, since these movements ground their logic and legitimacy in other, often more quotidian nationalist thinking, behaviour and identities (see: Billig, 1995). The problem of categorising Germanness or Paraguayanness in Nueva Germania as ethnicity, nationality or race, is discussed below.

3. The term “race” does not seem to have the same negative connotations in Nueva Germania as in Europe. The term “clase” is used as “kind” or “type”, and in this use is not associated with “class” in the Marxian sense. I will abstain from using these emic categories.

4. For an introduction to materialist approaches see: Martin and Barresi (2002, pp. 1–14). The assumption of material unity and continuity as the basis for a singular self has been put into question by the famous metaphor of the Ship of Theseus. Does a ship, in which over time each constitutive element is being replaced, remain the same ship? At which point of change in material substance does the person or the object become someone or something else? By the logic of Leibniz’s law (In Forrest, 2010), the identity of indiscernibles, once any change occurs bodies and objects cannot be assumed to be the same.

5. A somewhat similar approach to personal identity, from a different philosophical tradition and terminology, can be found in Heidegger’s writing. Mitchell in his book Heidegger’s Philosophy and Theories of the Self points out that the question “What am I?” assumes the basic Cartesian separation between the self and the world, the subject-object dichotomy, in which the I is assumed as being present-at-hand (2001, p. 167). For Heidegger, contrariwise, the self should not be defined ontologically as an objectively present entity of substance (Heidegger, 2010, pp. 305–306), it should be rather denoted through activity and process, through ways, or modes, of Being – an always situated being, a Dasein. Within such an approach, being German and being Germanino could be understood as differed modes of being that contextually situate the Dasein in different ways.

6. See also Appiah (2006).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of St Andrews [PhD Fellowship].