ABSTRACT
The term ‘community’ has been promiscuously employed in both common sense and technical language. In an essay published in 1933, the sociologist Louis Wirth noted that the word ‘community’ ‘has been used with an abandon reminiscent of poetic licence’. 1 That the term ‘identity’ is equally multidimensional, suggesting different things according to the questions asked of it, hardly needs to be pointed out. 2 ‘Identity’ can be used to refer to a whole range of social-institutional roles and self-perceptions, many of which can overlap or even contradict one another at different levels of social experience and practice. All members of all societies necessarily belong to more than one such group of mutually recognized ‘identity-sets’, but they do not all belong to the same sets. Thus the identity of an individual as male or female carries with it a reservoir of ways of behaving in both public and private, and according to the specific context in which other persons of one or the other group are encountered. The situation is further modified and complicated when the individuals in question also act out some of their other social and institutional roles, such as ‘parent’, ‘soldier’, priest’, for example. 3 Even social and economic status directly affect patterns of behaviour and the ways in which one’s identity is given expression – a poor man behaves differently before a rich or powerful man than before his peers, and vice versa. 4 The expression of social and cultural (including, of course, moral-ethical) values is modified according to the context, in order that the individual can give expression to his or her understanding of ‘self’, and present the desired version felt to be most appropriate (or necessary, if ulterior motives are present) to the situation. At the same time, social interaction also embodies sets of power relations, so that not all individuals or groups are able to present the identity they would (or think they would) prefer in every situation (for example feelings of inferiority or superiority affect such situations very markedly). Thus different sets of identities, based on appropriate patterns of socially determined and culturally normative behaviour, have different values according to the context in which they function. This is especially important if we are not to oversimplify identities and notions of community. A hierarchy of interests, in which now one aspect, now another, comes to the fore, seems to inform most human social interaction. Observable social praxis is often the result of clashes and contradictions generated by a specific context in which an individual or group of people have to adopt a particular identity for that particular context. It is by analysing situations like this that the historian can try to see how such contradictions evolve, how they present themselves and are ‘understood’, and how they are resolved, an approach that offers some insight into the structure of causal relationships leading to historical change.
