1.2.    Cultural and/or ethnic identity: a controversial question

There is a close relationship between culture and identity, because if on the one hand there is no person without culture, on the other, there is no culture with person. Personal identity, then, coincides somehow with cultural identity. Through a process of inculturation and socialization, identity takes the form a culture assumes in its subjects, in groups or in the different identities that compose it. It follows that each person in her acting, operates according to a cultural identity that she acquires, defines, modifies and redefines through a process that lasts all through her existence. ¹¹

The problem of cultural identity is taking on ever wider dimensions, not only in complex societies, but also in the so-called “simple” ones. Today cultural identity is going through a profound crisis, as the effect both of the homologation process of mass media with the growing detachment from tradition (written and oral historical memory), and of the process of uprooting due to territorial emigration and mobility in search of work or a homeland or flight from political or economic situations and  impossible living conditions (migration of peoples). Think also of the problems deriving from technological openness to urban models and managerial organizational forms,  increasingly more in the market and consumer logic of the western world

To get out of the impasse of the crisis, it is necessary to promote formation processes that help re-define and re-elaborate one’s cultural system from within, including basic traits of the cultural identity, freeing it from what can hinder its development. The process of re-elaboration and re-definition will have to be done within one’s cultural context and cultural models, to the point of re-appropriating these and re-interpreting them. Only in this way will we be able to develop a selective capacity that will allow facing all other models that come and impose themselves from the outside. Crucial in this process is precisely the engrafting of models that come from the outside with one’s own models, inside the culture and which one cannot do without, without losing one’s identity.

In this process of inculturation and acculturation different solutions are possible, as for example: the fixing or hardening of identity, denied identity and the acritical assimilation of external cultural models, oscillation between sometimes conflicting models, synthesis and integration. ¹²

Very often we fall into unfortunate forms of hybridism or syncretism, fruit of superimposition or assimilation of different models, which just leads to confusion of identity, with all the ambivalence and conflicts that this entails.

A separate reflection must be reserved to the concept of ethnic identity, often associated with the idea of forms of “primitive” or “pre-modern” living, or understood as a natural fact that is common to individuals of the same origin, language and religion, inhabitants of the same territory and having certain traditions that characterize them. Most of the time it is based on a mistaken concept of an ethnic group or of ethnicity which easily leads to revenge, conflicts between different and opposing groups. ¹³

Ethnic identity is described as a component of social identity which comes from belonging to an ethnic group. Going back to the concept of social identity of Tajfel (1982), ethnic identity can be defined as that part of the self-image that is born of the awareness of being member of a particular ethnic group, joined to the value and emotional significance attributed to that belonging. Ethnic identity or ethnicity, since it derives from the feeling of belonging to an ethnic groups are “collective definitions of the self and/or of the other which almost always have their roots in relationships of strength between groups gathered around specific interests”. ¹⁴

The experience of belonging to a group (ethno-territorial) or to a social category (young/adult, man/woman, student/laborer, etc.) allows, in the sense that it can facilitate or hinder, the process of elaboration of one’s self-image, to the point of reaching definition of self and/or the collective other. ¹⁵  Think of the negative or positive reflex this can have on self-respect or on the ability to face relationships with diversity. In fact, ethnic identity is acquired through a process of confrontation/comparison that activates evaluations and leads toward defining, both the position of one’s group within the social context, and the significance that belonging to this group assumes within a more general self-concept.

It is necessary to remember however, that while persons cannot choose the ethnic group into which they are born, they can always change the meaning they attribute to their belonging and the role that it plays in the definition of their own identity. In fact, if on the developmental level identity is built on the basis of an identification process, also the ethnic identity is formed starting off from the ethnic identification which is the result of a slow subjective process regardless of the objective belongings of the person. We can verify, in fact, that at different levels, each person belonging to an ethnic minority, could highlight, hide, camouflage, or even refuse their ethnicity, perhaps assuming other social and/or religious identities. ¹⁶