Collective identity facts for kids

Collective identity is like a shared feeling of belonging to a group. It's when people in a group feel connected and think of themselves as part of something bigger.

Collective Identity in Sociology

In 1989, a thinker named Alberto Melucci wrote a book called Nomads of the Present. In it, he shared his ideas about collective identity, based on how social movements worked in the 1980s. He built on the ideas of other thinkers like Touraine and Pizzorno.

Melucci explained that collective identity is a shared idea that many people (or groups) create together. It helps them decide how to act and what they can achieve. He thought that people recognize they have similar goals and then choose to act together. He saw collective identity as a process that develops over time, with three main parts:

• Thinking Together: This is when a group decides on its goals, how to reach them, and what challenges they might face.
• Working Together: This means that people in the group start to connect and build relationships with each other.
• Feeling Together: This is about the emotional bond and understanding that forms between individuals in the group.

Melucci believed that collective identity is a helpful tool for understanding social movements. It helps explain how groups work internally, like their leaders or how they communicate. It also shows how groups interact with others, like friends or rivals. This idea helps us understand modern group actions better, especially as social science research grows. It also helps us see groups as organized teams, not just simple ideas or values. This can change how we understand and talk about disagreements between groups.

Collective Identity in Social Psychology

Social psychologists have been interested in identity for a long time. George Mead, an early thinker, explored how a person's identity and society are connected. He believed that society shapes who we are, and then we, in turn, interact with others and help shape society. It's like a cycle where each influences the other.

More recently, Polletta and Jasper described collective identity as a person's thoughts, feelings, and moral connections to a larger community, group, or way of life. A group's collective identity is often shown through its culture and traditions. This identity can come from inside the group or from outside, but it only truly forms when the group members accept it. They stressed that collective identity is about the group itself, and it's different from ideas like personal goals or individual identity.

It's important not to confuse collective identity with social identity theory or self-categorization theory. Collective identity focuses on the identity of the group as a whole. The other theories look at how an individual connects with a group.

Some researchers also believe that collective identity is something we create and show, rather than just something we are. For example, Sue Widdicombe showed that people use their words and actions to become part of a group, accept being seen as part of a group, or even resist it. She explained that collective identities are both a goal and a way to achieve other goals. Collective identity is also very important when we talk about conflicts. People often see themselves as part of a specific group to understand their experiences and their role in difficult situations. Seeing another group as very different or bad can sometimes be used to justify actions against them.

Collective Identity in Political Science

The idea of class consciousness from Marxist thinking can be seen as an early form of political collective identity. This idea suggested that a group's identity was linked to its values and interests, and it included a sense of solidarity (sticking together). Durkheim also shared this idea of solidarity, believing that collective identity helps create bonds between people through shared morals and goals.

Max Weber, in his book "Economy and Society" (published after he died in 1922), disagreed with Marx's focus only on how things are made. Weber suggested that class, social status, and political parties are the three main sources of collective identity. Sometimes, collective identity can lead to actions that go against human rights, like those listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. This can be a sign of a serious problem within a group or political system.

Alexander Wendt is known for his ideas about how countries interact. He believes that collective identity plays a big role because a country's identity helps decide its place in the world. His approach looks at group and individual identity both within a country and between countries. This way of using collective identity to explain the international system is called constructivism. Constructivism focuses on how our discussions and ideas create these identities. These identities not only define a country as a group but also help form alliances between countries. When countries are grouped together, either by their own choice or by others, new alliances or blocs can form based on the collective identity given to them. Even if these groupings aren't always perfectly accurate, the act of grouping them together affects how the rest of the world sees and treats them. This, in turn, can make the countries identify with each other because of their shared position globally.

Richard Ned Lebow has also studied collective identity in international relations. He argues that countries see themselves and others as part of larger power groups, like rising or falling powers. Their feeling of belonging to certain power groups, or wanting to be in others, affects how they interact with other countries, no matter what their actual power status is.

Evolutionary Purpose of Collective Identity

Joseph Jordania has suggested that in human history, collective identity was super important for the survival of early humans. Individual early humans were too weak and slow to survive dangerous predators on their own. So, in very dangerous moments, like when predators attacked or during fights, humans would enter a special state where they didn't feel much fear or pain. They wouldn't question what other group members were doing and were ready to risk their lives for the group's survival, especially for children.

Sometimes, people don't remember these very stressful moments, which is called psychogenic amnesia. Jordania believes that humans' ability to follow a rhythm in large groups, to sing together, to dance for many hours and feel excited, and the tradition of body painting, were all parts of the first universal rituals. These activities helped to make everyone in the group feel connected by releasing special chemicals in their brains. This helped them reach a state of collective identity, also known as transcendence. In this state, the group's need to survive could become more important than an individual's instinct to save themselves.

See also

In Spanish: Identidad colectiva para niños

• Collective consciousness
• National identity