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The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity
Author(s) -
Friedman Jonathan
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1992.94.4.02a00040
Subject(s) - citation , identity (music) , politics , sociology , history , library science , law , computer science , political science , philosophy , aesthetics
deterioration of the conditions that empowered a dominant modernist identity. The latter entails the liberation of formerly encompassed or superseded identities. I shall be arguing that the dehegemonization of the Western-dominated world is simultaneously its dehomogenization. In this article I present two kinds of argument. The first concerns the general relations between identity and the politics of historical construction. The second concerns the current situation of contested representations of other peoples' realities. The overriding argument is that cultural realities are always produced in specific sociohistorical contexts and that it is necessary to account for the processes that generate those contexts in order to account for the nature of both the practice of identity and the production of historical schemes. This includes the identifications "invented" by anthropologists as well as those of the subjects that we engage "out there." I argue, further, that the processes that generate the contexts in which identity is practiced constitute a global arena of potential identity formation. This arena is informed by the interaction between locally specific practices of selfhood and the dynamics of global positioning.