Interest in the study of national identity as a collective phenomenon is a growing concern among the social and political sciences. This book addresses the scholarly interest in examining the origins of ideologies and social practices that give historical meaning, cohesion and uniqueness to modern national communities. It focuses on the various routes taken towards the construction of cultural authenticity as an inspirational purpose of nation-building and reveals the diversity of the themes, practices and symbols used to encourage self-identification and communality. Among the techniques explored are the dramatization of suffering and tragedy, the exaltation of heroes and deeds, the evocation of landscape, nature and the arts and the delimitation of collective values to be pursued during reconstruction in post-war periods.

This volume presents a cultural history of Alex Haley's Roots as a case study in 'operational acts of identification.' It examines the strategy and tactics Haley employed in developing a family origin story into an acclaimed national history. Where cultural studies scholars have critiqued notions of sacrosanct 'rootedness,' this book shows the fruit of critically identifying those claims. It reframes the concept of 'roots' as a theoretical vocabulary and grammar for the anthropology of scriptures - a way of parsing the cultural texts that seem to read us back. Identifying Roots invites scholars of religion to reimagine their place in the humans sciences. Theorizing from a tradition of African American interventions in the history of religion, Richard Newton registers the social dramas and dynamic rhetoric that render the cultural logic of scriptures powerful. Creatively marshaling intellectual history, ethnographic autobiography, Close Reading and discourse analysis, Newton enumerates the consequences for signifying people and cultural texts as intrinsically significant. More than an investigation into Alex Haley's legacy, Identifying Roots unearths the politics of beginnings and belongings.

Despite over 50 years of literacy training by the Mexican government, the National Census records an illiteracy rate of over 70 percent in most Indian communities. This book attempts to discover why so many Indians are illiterate today despite an indigenous literary tradition that dates back to the pre-Conquest period. The author sees language as the main factor explaining the high illiteracy rate in the Indian regions. Although alphabets have been created for most of Mexico's indigenous languages, there is no longer a literate tradition in the languages themselves, and writing is intrinsically associated with the official and dominant language, Spanish. Indians continue to reproduce their group identity through the maintenance of linguistic and cultural boundaries. How these boundaries have been built over time and how they continue to be maintained throughout the 20th century form the substance of this book.

This volume is presented in four sections based on recent research in the field: the sources of identity, the tie between identity and the social structure, the non-cognitive outcomes - such as emotional - of identity processes, and the idea that individuals have multiple identities. This timely work will be of interest to social psychologists in sociology and psychology, behavioral scientists, and political scientists.

Spanning the eight decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, The Roots of African-American Identity focuses on the lives of African Americans in the nominally free northern and western states. This book explores how a group of marginalized people crafted a uniquely New World ethnic identity that informed popular African American historical consciousness. Elizabeth Rauh Bethel examines the way in which that consciousness fueled collective efforts to claim and live a promised but undelivered democratic freedom, helping readers to understand how African Americans reformulated and perceived their collective past. Bethel also reveals how this vision of freedom and historical consciousness shaped African American participation in the Reconstruction, formed the spiritual and ideological foundation for the modern Pan-African movement, and provided the historical legacy for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Comprehensive and engaging, The Roots of African-American Identity is an absorbing account of an often overlooked part of American history.

Self and identity have been important yet volatile notions in psychology since its formative years as a scientific discipline. Recently, psychologists and other social scientists have begun to develop and refine the conceptual and empirical tools for studying the complex nature of self. This volume presents a critical analysis of fundamental issues in the scientific study of self and identity. These chapters go much farther than merely taking stock of recent scientific progress. World-class social scientists from psychology, sociology and anthropology present new and contrasting perspectives on these fundamental issues. Topics include the personal versus social nature of self and identity, multiplicity of selves versus unity of identity, and the societal, cultural, and historical formation and expression of selves. These creative contributions provide new insights into the major issues involved in understanding self and identity. As the first volume in the Rutgers Series on Self and Social Identity, the book sets the stage for a productive second century of scientific analysis and heightened understanding of self and identity. Scholars and advanced students in the social sciences will find this highly informative and provocative reading. Dr. Richard D. Ashmore is a professor and Dr. Lee Jussim is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, whites sought renewed status in the romance of Old World travails and New World fortunes. Ellis Island replaced Plymouth Rock as the touchstone of American nationalism. The entire culture embraced the myth of the indomitable white ethnics—who they were and where they had come from—in literature, film, theater, art, music, and scholarship. The language and symbols of hardworking, self-reliant, and ultimately triumphant European immigrants have exerted tremendous force on political movements and public policy debates from affirmative action to contemporary immigration. In order to understand how white primacy in American life survived the withering heat of the Civil Rights movement and multiculturalism, Matthew Frye Jacobson argues for a full exploration of the meaning of the white ethnic revival and the uneasy relationship between inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered in our conceptions of national belonging.

How popular media cultivates genealogy but buries its cultural context

This volume reflects the renewal of interest in `Self' and `Identity' among social scientists. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach to explore different perspectives across the lifespan, from the neonate to the elderly adult.

This collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to offer perspectives on national identity formation in various European contexts between 1600 and 1815. Contributors challenge the dichotomy between modernists and traditionalists in nationalism studies through an emphasis on continuity rather than ruptures in the shaping of European nations in the period, while also offering an overview of current debates in the field and case studies on a number of topics, including literature, historiography, and cartography.