1.         IDENTITY AND CULTURE: DYNAMICS OF INTERACTION

The multiplication of exchanges, the globalization of markets and communications have put the focus on the question of individual and collective identities, relationships between men and women of different cultures, ability to live together in mutual respect of each one’s freedom, and especially the question of ways to manage violence and conflict resolution---relationships of power among individuals, groups and institutions.  But, in the first place, traditional concepts of identity have been questioned, to the point that the question of identity, both individual and collective, has now become one of the most urgent and complex questions to solve. ⁶

In this context, identity and its formation seem to have become much more problematic.

Personal identity, in fact, is built and designed “within a culture” that forms the basis and the privileged place to give specificity and “color” to each person. Identity is not “given right from the beginning” as a gift received at birth, but represents the laborious and complex result of a personal history, built within the weaving of interpersonal relationships and the many interactions with environment, starting off from the elaboration of cultural models and different life experiences.

Identity, according to recent studies of psychology, sociology and cultural anthropology, is no longer considered an entity or a structure, like “what remains” beyond the flow of events and circumstances, attitudes and experiences, but as a built, researched, ‘invented’ reality. It has a quality of “construction” which implies a work of differentiation, that is of separation and assimilation, which however is carried out on the basis of a continual flow and change. ⁷

So that an identity can manifest itself, the person must perceive himself as a unified whole and learn to recognize his separate diversity as individual (process of individuation), in a continuous being made and  being un-made, “separated from” and “recognized in”, in the self-recognition, that is, same to himself and different from others, beyond all the transformations that upset that sameness and that diversity. ⁸

Can we then ask ourselves: What are the processes for acquisition and construction of a personal and cultural identity?  And what are the formation routes that promote the re-appropriation of the personal identity and the re-knowing of self (self-recognition) in “differences” (of gender, language, culture,…) against the risk of homologation and anonymity?