Identity: Sociological Perspectives

attempts to understand identity as process, as something achieved rather than something innate, as done rather than ‘owned’.

Erving Goffman distinguishes, in his work on stigma (Goffman, 1968), between three forms of identity: personal identity (the unique characteristics of the person, both in themselves

and in terms of their relations with others); social identity (what we might call a ‘categorical’ identity – an identity that persons have by virtue of their membership of social categories); and ego identity or felt identity.

and the more personal, ambivalent, reflective

Mead (1934) proposes a distinction between two dynamic aspects of the self: the ‘me’ who moves through the social world, existing in complex social relations (Mead uses the analogy of play), and the ‘I’ whose exact definition proves difficult, but which represents a post hoc reflection on the actions, perceptions and understandings of the ‘me’.

Instead of seeing identity as something located ‘within’ the person – a property of the person, we might say – I consider it as something produced through social relations.

identity itself is a social and collective process and not, as Western traditions would

and reflexive sense that people have of who they are.

have it, a unique and individual possession.