Identities: Time, Difference and Boundaries

"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.

"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. Contents: I: PERSPECTIVES AND CONCEPTS: Identity: Desire, Name and Difference, Heidrun Friese; Identity and Selfhood as a Problématique, Peter Wagner; Personal and Collective Identity: A Conceptual Analysis, Jürgen Straub; Identities of the West: Reason, Myths, Limits of Tolerance, Barbara Henry; II: REPRESENTATION AND TRANSLATION: The Praxis of Cognition and Representation of Difference, Martin Fuchs; Constructions of Cultural Identity and Problems of Translation, Shingo Shimada; III: WOMEN AND ALTERITY: The Performance of Hysteria, Elisabeth Bronfen; The &rsquoJewess Pallas Athena&rsquo: Horizons of Selfconception in the 19th and 20th Centuries; IV: BOUNDARIES AND ETHNICITY: Collective Identity as a Dual Discursive Construction: Dominant v. Demotic Discourses of Culture and the Negotiation of Historical Memory, Gerd Baumann; Historical Culture in (Post-) Colonial Context: The Genesis of National Identification Figures in Francophone Western Africa, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink; Identity as Progress - The Longevity of Nationalism, Christian Geulen; Culture and History in Comparative Fundamentalism, Emanuel Sivan. Heidrun Friese has published widely on social theory and time, the anthropology of the sciences, and social imagination. She is currently at the Department ofSocial and Political Sciences of the European University Institute, Florence.