The Meaning Of Identity Of The Individual

The meaning of identity of the individual

We need to start the identity to understand where you want to reach, we will rely on two antagonistic positions of philosophy. The first comes from logical philosophy clarifies the character of all those that remains unique and identical to itself, although it has different appearances or can be perceived in a different way. From this perspective, identity prevails over time, another theory has affirmed that it is precisely the possibility of variation and modification that characterizes the true being. From a psychological perspective: identity can be defined as an individual attribute that responds to three needs of the person:

• The subject’s need to be perceived as a totality.
• This totality has a continuity, this refers to being oneself over time.
• The requirement that this unit for the social context, which is called itself.

The identity is built from the confrontation of the ideal of the individual self and the social ideal, the process of construction that gives rise to it is related to the values, principles, culture of the environment and undoubtedly a social construction. It is also what the subject maintains, that questioning makes that precarious construction staggered and for that reason, that foreign becomes an enemy, a opponent, a rival or an undesirable. Identity is not only the result of a personal definition, but includes, either by acceptance or rejection, a burden that the different institutions through which the individual travels throughout his life, deposits on him.

In this struggle that the subject has to pass to conserve its construction that identifies it, the other arises, the foreign that questions this construction through the similarities or differences for this reason becomes an enemy, rival or undesirable.The subject is considered, as an individual as a measure of the human, due to these situations there are conflicts to accept the different. As the other’s gaze was already pointed out, locates the subject in a place that he can accept or reject, but he cannot avoid it. The confrontation between the subjects and the others an example of this are the genocides that characterized the history of humanity and particularly those that occurred in the twentieth century, were always linked, among other things, with the need to eliminate those others(Races, religions, cultures, etc.) that with their single presence, they questioned the superiority of a majority.

To understand Freud’s approach better when it refers to the "narcissism of small differences", he points out that neighboring communities in all its aspects are harassing and embodying ". Explain this hostility, in the fact that this aggressive position towards the neighbor, facilitates the cohesion of community members. The conclusion offered by this thinker was the following: every hard identity needs another to demonstrate its difference and in this way it can justify its intended superiority,

The "foreign"

The foreign, the different one, is a phenomenon that occurred since the most remote times, was initially considered as an enemy potential and outside its clan or tribe. With the establishment of more complex cultures, consideration on the foreigner generates two opposite attitudes that fight each other for rejection and hospitality. The first arises spontaneously before the other, which with its single presence puts at risk or creates a feeling of discomfort, as already pointed out, identity values. The second attitude establishes that they try to deny these hostile impulses generated by the stranger and, in some cases, for example Christianity, incite charity and love of neighbor. However, this charity and recognition from the foreigner, always implied the requirement to be incorporated into the flock through the acceptance of religion.

The foreigner in the contemporary world

The current world is characterized, among other things, by multidiversity, cultural, phenomenon that is not so evident in our country, but it is in any of the big European cities. This situation has generated multiple conflicts, which occur as a consequence of these populations, which emigrated from their countries of origin, usually run by hunger and misery and are rejected by the local population for various reasons: one of them is for the competitionlabor that generate at this time of work shortage and so important or more than the first, the rejection originated by the cultural particularities that imply: ways of expressing themselves, modalities of clothing, food, religion and different behaviors of refugees, cling tothe elements of their culture that make their identity, without accepting the "culturally correct" forms of the country that hosts them. One of the examples of this occurred one or two years ago, that the government of France, related to respect for individual differences and human rights, wanted to establish the prohibition that Islamic women, who studied there, attended class with class withThe typical clothing of their culture and religion. The fact was even repudiated by the French people and did not put into practice, but the circumstance that it has been, even if thought by an official. The rejection of the European population for the Islamic community, worries European social scientists very much. The problem they visualize, refers, fundamentally, to their Islamic identity, strongly dominated by the religious, a particularity that predominates incompatibility occurs from the foundations of an identity of a religious nature and the principles based on equality and freedomFrom the western world, which can be defined as "democratic identity", these two such dissimilar identity modalities constitute, according to these scientists, the main obstacle to solving the problem. This shows that we cannot relate to the other without treating something that represents our own identity and not respecting the culture or way of being of the other.

Some clarifications

The ethical, philosophical and political debates of recent years, revolve around the issue of otherness and some of the responses to the problem of the problem of can be characterized as “devices that facilitate the acceptance and appropriation of the strangethat strangeness dissolves, which hinders the identification attempts with the other.

Said, in a functional and therefore ethical relationship, it must constitute an absolute otherness, an element that cannot be provided, or unveiled, or in common. Exceptionality, does not confer any identity privilege, simply generates another logic of relationships by guaranteeing something like a "secret" in the identity of the other. A secret is what remains hidden and for that reason he summons or interrogates in another way. The secret is not only something unknown, but something that marks an exception. This exception does not cause tolerance that puts distance but the surprise that is pure proximity.

CHAPTER II: CULTURAL OUTE IN ANTHROPOLOGY

To continue defining the anthropological work in two ways. One has to do with its object, in which anthropology is defined as the study of cultural otherness, cultural alteity or cultural diversity. The second of this refers to its "technique" or "method" and argues that the particularity of anthropology would reside in their way of working, in the way in which they are collected, analyzed and exhibited by their data: the participant observation. We maintain that you cannot explain what anthropology does today without referring to the history of its constitution as part of the scientific field. This accumulation does not imply a sum or an idea from greater to minor, but has to think as a "conflicting" accumulation of its different parts. Consequently, to understand what an anthropologist does, it is necessary to take into account, in the first place, the historical and social context in which anthropology was developed, its relationship with the scientific field in general and the relations between the parties that constitute it:object, theory, method and techniques. Second, neither the object of anthropology nor their technique have been the same over time nor even in the same space. We maintain that, like all science, anthropology is a "construction". It is commonly accepted that anthropology was constituted as science from building explanations about "cultural otherness", but we add that not only built its explanations but also built an image, a model of otherness (of the other cultural). In such a way that this "other cultural", which was constituted as an object of anthropological study, did not respond to a real "empirical fact". On the contrary, it was an object built scientifically by the different theories that dominated in each of the historical moments. Thus, the evolutionary theory appears considered as the first scientific theory was not limited to explaining cultural otherness but also "built" its object from the "cultural difference", the "other" as different from the "we". Subsequent theories, on the other hand, built an object characterized by particularity and talked about "cultural diversity". The "other cultural" was thought as diverse, as different. Finally, when the idea of the domination of one culture on another was evidenced, the anthropological object was built around the notion of inequality: the other cultural was the product of that inequality.

Late nineteenth century:

At the end of this century anthropology was formalized as science. It was a time when the knowledge of the world, of the existence of different ways of life, became more evident for the changes that occurred in Europe and the expansion of the West. On the one hand, the Industrial Revolution as a product of important technological changes generated new differences: class, national, ethnic and "problems" that over time were called "social". The fundamental issue of social sciences was to explain those changes that occurred in the European world. But, along with these changes, the West systematically expanded throughout the world, over other peoples, over other cultures, on other ways of life other than European mode. While the intercultural encounter was not new and always aroused an attitude of astonishment at the differentRules of the scientific world: the difference was constituted in the object of scientific explanation. The new meeting of Europeans with other different cultures gave the first scientific theory about the difference was the evolutionism that answered this question through the concept of evolution. The theory of evolution was constituted as such based on the application of the comparative method and on the basis of a precise conception of its object: man. This object was conceived with a particularity: the duality of it;Man was both body and spirit. As a body, it belonged to the world of nature, as "spirit" belonged to another world, that of culture. Following this duality, anthropology became two branches: physical anthropology and cultural anthropology. But, however, the differences between men were thought of by these evolutionists, basically, as cultural "differences". When studying man in these different manifestations in which this division was presented, product of a historical process, it was carried out based on the distinctions of societies or cultures in time and space, having as a parameter the location of the West.

Chapter III: World Wars

This historical moment was characterized by "a closure of national borders" and the consolidation of European presence in their colonies. In European and North American anthropology, two important facts are produced: the crisis of evolutionism as a unique paradigm and the separation of science in national schools;thus appears the English structuralism and functionalism.Alternative theories were elaborated, many times without contact between them, but they all had criticism of evolutionism in common. They criticized, in the first place, the techniques used by evolutionists, postulating that the data with which anthropology should be handled should be obtained first hand, that is, it is the anthropologist, particularly the ethnologist, the one who has to look for in the otherscultures the data with which theories are built. In this way, the participating observation is introduced, invents as a privileged technique of anthropology, which implies the transfer of the researcher to other societies. The idea was to study a culture in a very extensive, very specific way, could realize the differences and similarities. The second criticism was regarding the comparative method, mainly because it was applied having as a reference the comparison the values of Western society. But this criticism of the method was also the result of applying the technique of participating observation since when observing a culture as totality, as a set of united parts, in which each part is related to the whole, the evolutionary operation ofabstract a part to compare it with another from another culture. Because to the extent that different cultures were studied in a very detailed way, less elements in common were. Thus, the comparative method was replaced by relativism whose extreme postulate implied the impossibility of comparing, since each culture is a different and understandable configuration only in its own terms. In other words, these national schools had in common having developed "relativistic" theories. Relativist theories try to show that all cultures are different from each other but equivalent, therefore, they are diverse. The relativistic approach led anthropology to work on differences to end up accounting for cultural diversity.

Somehow, what both schools will have in common is the tendency to specialize in "primitive villages". A fundamental separation for theory, between social anthropology and cultural anthropology is already appearing at that time. The first will be interested in the way men organize, while the second will do so in the way they live and think about their lives and the world. Thus, each school will raise their relationship with different sciences. North American cultural anthropology will have close relationships with psychology and history, while British social anthropology will be immediately related to sociology.

Now a brief summary of the war: World War I, also known as Great War, was a war developed mainly in Europe, which began on July 28, 1914 and ended on November 11, 1918, when Germany requested the armistice. After six months of negotiations at the Paz Conference in Paris, on June 28, 1919, the countries at War signed the Versallies Treaty. More than nine million combatants lost their lives, an extraordinarily high figure, given the technological and industrial sophistication of the belligerents, with their consequent tactical stagnation. It is considered the fifth deadliest conflict in the history of humanity. Such was the seizure that caused war, which raided the way to great political changes.

World War II was a global military conflict that developed between 1939 and 1945. Most of the world’s nations were involved in it. It was the largest war in history, with more than one hundred million mobilized military and a state of "total war" in which the great contestants allocated their all their economic, military and scientific capacity at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between resourcescivil and military. Marked by acts of enormous historical impact that included the massive death of civilians, the holocaust and the use, for the first and only time, of nuclear weapons in a military conflict, World War II was the deadliest conflict in the history of humanity, with a final result of between 50 and 70 million victims.

After the Second War:

From the ‘50 decade two types of transformations occur simultaneously. The transformation of primitive societies. On the other, and in parallel, anthropologists are also modified. Regarding "primitive" societies, the transformations that occurred were of different types:

• Physical disappearance, a quantitative and accelerated decrease of its members, via war, disease, genocide.
• a qualitative transformation, mainly towards Western forms of life and the consequent cultural disappearance product of the pressure of the West. This process refers to the action and consequences that causes any policy of change or forced transformation, assimilation and change of mentalities or native values, it was called ethnocide or cultural genocide.

These "forced" changes were considered as a product of an action process from the western world: colonization, which although it was already entering its final stage, was now recognized as such by dominant anthropology. Thus some societies disappeared completely as independent entities through their absorption in major units (colonization), others disappeared totally physically and others were transformed into new nations ("wars of liberation"). The changes that these peoples suffered were the ones that led them to transform from "primitive peoples" in complex societies. And here it is necessary to clarify an issue: these transformations do not