elanya

morbane asked me to talk about an academic interest I haven't talked about before.

I thought about talking about conservations stuff, but probably no one really wants to hear about how I spent a few hours of my day on Friday reading about glue >.>

Instead I think I will talk about my interest in identity, and conceptions of that that means. I don't think it is something I have talked about here before, and certainly not something I have talked about in a while.

I am really interested in how people understand themselves, and to what extent they have a concept of self. Like, I feel like the cultures to which I belong, and this is especially true of online culture, people are sort of obsessed with identity, and knowing and classifying ourselves. We can have different identities that are contextual, and are very self-aware in that regard. I don't think that this is a construction of self or of personhood that is universal, or even one that necessarily has a lot of historical depth. I haven't actually studied this in depth, mind, but I would really like to.

I think that relationships are important to construction of identity, and some of those relationships are personally forged and some of them are socially constructed, and there is a lot of nuance. You can be born into something, which establishes a relationship of some sorts, but the shape of that, and its meaning, doesn't necessarily follow a prescribed path, even if it commonly does. Those relationships might not be something people are always conscious of, and certainly not self-aware of and self-critical of the way people can be today.

My studies of piracy and maritime communities are set up in this framework - can we see how element were important to the construction of a community? Do the things that people have and use mark inclusion in a particular community? The things they eat? Is that demarcation conscious? What can we see about their relationships to the land, and how are those relationships important to their constructions of themselves and individuals, or as a group? When we look for these signs of identity in historic (pr pre-historic) populations, are we reading something that actually existed or are we creating categories based on out own perceptions, and how do we tell the difference? How those differenced matter, and in what context, is really interesting to me, as it can tie in to conceptions and constructions of group history, which tie back to modern identities, which can be very political.

Benedict Anderson talks about Imagined Communities in regard to nationhood (people can belong to a community that can never interact directly, but they imagine what that relationship means along common lines that can still link them together... very short short version), but to some degree I think all communities are imagined. Living in the same place as other people doesn't necessarily make you 'one of them' if you don't meet all the criteria that other people understand (or imagine) that mark inclusion. And the lines are nebulous. There is both an internal and external construction to identity as well, the personal and the external, and they can be very contextual and fluid.

I have a lot of questions about this sort of stuff, and some thoughts about answers, but it is something I would really like to have a chance to think about and research in more depth. There is a lot of material out there that could be pulled togther into more coherent . Other people have studied these things as well - One of the things I would like to try and do this year is get myself to read more academic stuff as opposed to just more fiction, since I seem to be doing okay at making myself read at all lately!