Clans, Traits and What Makes Us Us
It would be no exaggeration to say that the postcold War era has brought identity politics to the fore of global politics. Numerous collective identities provide sources of conflict and confrontation in both domestic and international arenas, as they bind people together to engage in exclusionary collective action. But are those binding identities real?
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, explores five forms of identity — religion, nation, race, class and culture — to reveal their false figment. His theory builds on three conceptual features that collective identities share — a set of labels and the rules for ascribing them to people, norms that shape the behavior and feelings of the bearers of those labels, and their treatment by others. Appiah posits that humans aren’t just prone to “essentialism” — the view that certain categories have an underlying reality or a true nature that one cannot observe directly, but that gives an object its identity — we also have clannish tendencies, and we each have a habitus, or a set of dispositions, to respond to the world in particular ways, shaped by our identities.
Revealing the pitfalls of habitus and tribalism premised on essentialism in each social identity, the author warns us of the way flase identities set us against one another and suggests a comprehensive human identity binding us all should replace them.
Appiah posits that humans aren’t just prone to ‘essentialism,’ we also have clannish tendencies.