«IDENTITY» AND/OR «IDENTIFICATION»: THE CHOISE OF CATEGORY FOR POLITICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

The article discusses the heated debates of the last decades about the practisability of using «identity» as a category of social and political analysis. The main arguments of the parties are presented and analyzed. The main problems here are: the ambiguity and controversy of the terms «identity» and «identity crisis»; heterogeneity of their use, both in everyday language practice and in the scientific sphere; too close connection between the practical (obviously essentialist) and analytic use of these terms, that devalues their analytic significance. The article «Beyond «Identity»» (2000), written by the well-known American researchers of nationalism and ethnicity R. Brubaker and F. Cooper, is considered in detail. The article presents a definitely critical view on «identity». There are given the main arguments of the authors in favor of the complete replacement of «identity», as category of scientific analysis, by more adequate, in their view, groups of terms. Such, for example, as: «identification» and «categorization»; «Self-understanding» and «social location»; «commonality» «connectedness » and «groupness». An alternative approach to «identity» is considered — the attempts, undertaken by P. Ricoeur, Z. Bauman and many others, to reformulate or, in other words, to deconstruct the concept, thereby saving it from the essentialist roots and claims. Particular attention is paid to the icon work that represents exactly this approach, namely, the article of the British culturologist S. Hall «Who needs «identity»?» (1996). Speculating within the framework of this approach, which allows  an understanding of «identity» in a new, shifted or decentered form, we made a conclusion, that the term «identification», as a dynamic and constructed process, and the concept of «identity», as the position of identification at a particular moment in time, are preferable.