History of Culture: IDENTITY MODULE

A ritual is an organized activity, performed individually or collectively (in a group), governed by a set of norms or rules, under the direct or indirect supervision of an authority figure/body.

Ritual: What is a Ritual?

Ritual: What is a group?

A group is identified by a number of people who are held/hold themselves together by a common symbol, community, rituals.

Ritual

To represent an individual and collective (shared) Identity, because society is made up of difference - different people, contexts, backgrounds, beliefs, religions, sexuality, gender, class, etc. To (Re)Define identity: Once a definition is created for what a group might be, it automatically marginalizes certain members who identify with the group.

Why are Rituals Necessary?

Identity

• Legal provisions• Text and Literature• Publicity • Rituals and Traditions• Stereotyping• Can you name more ways?

Identity as a codified category, always defined by its categorical opposite.

What is the Process of Codification?

WHAT IS GENDER?

"To be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman', to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project." (Butler, 1988)

Source

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• Childhood• Parents, family• Friends• Schooling, teachers,

authority figures

• Neighborhood• Media• Religion

Norms• Norm is an “implicit (or hidden) standard of normalization”

• Norm is not a rule; Norm is not a law

• Norms AUTHORIZE and LEGITIMIZE

• Norms evolve continuously: standards of normal also change.

Who’s added, Who’s taken out?

• Are Norms necessary?

• Norms determine what is human and subhuman.

And sometimes the very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status, producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. page 2

Sexuality does not follow from gender in the sense that what gender you “are” determines what kind of sexuality you will “have.”

David Wojnarowitz

• Agency is an individual’s CAPABILITY or POWER to affect a desired change.

• Agency is NOT the same as Rights, Freedoms, Privileges, Advantages, Abilities.

• Agency is specific to time, place, socio-economic context.

Agency

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities

• Single common ancestor?

• Common historical experience?

• Common culture? • Ethnic identity?• Geographical identity?• Religion?• Attachment to

territory?• Language?

Religious Nationalism

- the relationship of nationalism to particular religious belief, dogma, or affiliation.

- often a response to modernity and in particular, secular nationalism.- sometimes portrayed as more authentic or “traditional” rendering

of identity.

Religious Nationalism

Nationalism is an ideology of expanded solidified identity

Collective identity that is built on the basis of history will distort that history, glorify it; underline the silverlinings in that history where you are concerned, and to darken parts of the history where the others are concerned.

Performing Protest:The Rise of the Civic Sphere in Pakistan

Back to Basics

Culture

Context

Positionality

Ethnocentricity

Why is it problematic when the state derives political legitimacy

from religion?