Identity has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.
Heidrun Friese has published widely on social theory and time, the anthropology of the sciences, and social imagination. She is currently at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the European University Institute, Florence.
PART I: PERSPECTIVES AND CONCEPTS
Chapter 1. Identity: Desire, Name and Difference
Heidrun Friese
Chapter 2. Identity and Selfhood as a Problematique
Peter Wagner
Chapter 3. Personal and Collective Identity: A Conceptual Analysis
Jurgen Straub
Chapter 4. Identities of the West: Reason, Myths, Limits of Tolerance
Barbara Henry
PART II: REPRESENTATION AND TRANSLATION
Chapter 5. The Praxis of Cognition and Representation of Difference
Martin Fuchs
Chapter 6. Constructions of Cultural Identity and Problems of Translation
Shingo Shimada
PART III: WOMEN AND ALTERITY
Chapter 7. The Performance of Hysteria
Elisabeth Bronfen
Chapter 8. The 'Jewess Pallas Athena': Horizons of Selfconception in the 19th and 20th Centuries
PART IV: BOUNDARIES AND ETHNICITY
Chapter 9. Collective Identity as a Dual Discursive Construction: Dominant v. Demotic Discourses of Culture and the Negotiation of Historical Memory
Gerd Baumann
Chapter 10. Historical Culture in (Post-) Colonial Context: The Genesis of National Identification Figures in Francophone Western Africa
Hans-Jurgen Lusebrink
Chapter 11. Identity as Progress - The Longevity of Nationalism
Christian Geulen
Chapter 12. Culture and History in Comparative Fundamentalism
Emanuel Sivan
Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index