Culture and Identity

A person's sense of identity is not something handed down at birth in a fixed form; it is built up, both by the individual and by the group, through relationships with other people. One major source of individual identity is the set of social roles a person plays -- and in a modern society almost everyone juggles several roles at once, each carrying its own particular responsibilities and expectations: the same person may be a child within the family and a parent to their own children, a student in one setting and an employee in another. But simply performing a role is not enough on its own; the role has to be recognised and acknowledged by others for it to count as part of one's identity. This recognition often happens through shared, group-specific language -- students, for instance, develop their own ways of referring to teachers, classmates or class events, and in doing so build a private world of meaning that marks them as insiders. Women have similarly been known to build their own language and their own social space beyond the reach of men -- for example, in the conversation that happens among women gathered at a village pond to bathe, or across rooftop washing lines in a city, spaces where a distinctly female sociability takes shape. …