Language Policy and Identity in Mauritania. El Hacen Moulaye Ahmed
from roughly the Renaissance on. In contemporary sociology, the same basic experience finds theoretical expression in the acting ego, which finds itself confronted with people outside as others (Elias, 1994, p. 473). Even though Elias posited that “at most one can . . . juxtapose the two conceptions unconnectedly, that of the individual as homo clausus, as ego, as individual beyond society, and that of society as a system outside and beyond individuals” (Elias, 1994, pp. 472–473), and dedicated much space of his book to explaining this juxtaposition as reflected in the excerpts cited earlier, he called for the need to go beyond this “dead end of sociology and political sciences” (Elias, 1994, p. 473). Elias’ call for the need to go beyond such juxtaposition is a reflection of his views of its limitation. For him, the juxtaposition suppresses an alternative view which understands identity in terms of their relation to a web of other identities. In other words, he calls for an understanding of identity that is formed between rather than within the individuals. Such view is what conceptualized the individual as a being. He suggested a view of identity that bridges the individual with the society, the inner core with the outside world. Elias’s position is a social constructionist critique to individualism and essentialism which are introduced next (Elias, 1994, pp. 481–482).
Essentialism is another mode of thinking which sees identity, even though in terms of essence, differently from individualism. While individualism attributed uniqueness and authenticity to the individual, essentialism attributed them to a group of people. Essentialism, then, is seen as the “reiterated and totalizing use of ethnonyms: entire groups are hypostatized as cohesive entities” (Conversi, 2003, p. 271). The essentialist approach is reinforced by Romanticist arguments, “to be yourself; to be true to your nature” (Calhoun, 1994, p. 15). In this sense, essentialists structure the “common sense” of identity. They situate identity, or some part of it, in the sphere of some aspects of the person’s nature rather than in the social relations. That is, identity is understood as an essence. “[A]n essence refers to something fundamental and integral to the person, which is not alterable (it is not possible to ‘be’ contrary to one’s essence) and is held to persist throughout time and despite other social changes” (Lawler, 2014, pp. 17–18). The essence, as mentioned earlier, stems primarily from some aspects that are related to the individual: The body (biological essentialism) or the mind (psychological essentialism) or as existing in a ‘soul’ (religious essentialism). “Whatever the form, an essence of identity is understood as being ‘internal’ and as divided from the ‘external’ world of others” (Lawler, 2014, p. 18).
To lay out some of the essentialists’ thought very clearly, an example is worth mentioning. They posit gender as the sole aspect which determines the social meaning of the individual experience. They tend to describe one woman in terms of the others. They blur all possible distinctions such as social class, literacy, motherhood, and so forth, between women; as a result, they generalize that a woman is the same as other woman in every corner of the world. According to Lawler, essentialists consider a slave woman living in antebellum America can experience her “womanness” in the same way a middle-class housewife living in Victorian England might do. Moreover, they argue that two women living in close proximity to each other (such as a Zulu maid and her Afrikaner madam) can be so similarly “situated in relation to the category of gender that their experiences, and the social meanings inscribed in those experiences, can be usefully described in the same terms” (Moya, 2000, p. 3). The representations of identity are criticized by many scholars. For example, according to Moya, “the social meanings attached to each woman’s gender might be so different as to render the project of describing one woman in terms of the other meaningless” (2000, p. 3).
In fact, essentialists’ tendency to perceive identity primarily in light of social categories, such as gender, class, age and ethnicity, should be appreciative, for on daily basis, people from all walks of life claim membership based on such categories. However, as critics said, the problem with essentialists is that their essentialization does not take into account the variation of the contexts of the attributes. No speech can be made about one context as the essentialists seemed to do. On the contrary, every attribute operates within different contexts and thus gives the individual different meanings of himself or herself.
There are variants of essentialism. Bucholtz (2003) anchored her theory of “authentication of identity” to a distinction she drew between essentialism and strategic essentialism. In so doing, she pointed out that essentialism actually serves a positive end in the way that it enables researchers to “identify a previously undescribed group and offer a preliminary description” (p. 400). She further added that, essentialism, for group members, “promotes a shared identity, often in opposition to other, equally essentialized social groups,” whereas the latter “may be a deliberate move to enable scholarly activity, to forge a political alliance through the creation of common identity, or to otherwise provide a temporarily stable ground for further social action” (Bucholtz, 2003, p. 401). Bucholtz’s typology seems to lessen the critique which is directed to essentialism’s representation of identity.
In addition to individualism and essentialism, symbolic interactionism has its own picture of identity formation. “The symbolic interactionist perspective, associated with the Chicago school of sociology, seems to provide the link between psychologists’ lone individual and sociologists’ social processes. In its approach, identity is the process through which individuals become members of the society” (Mehdi, 2012, p. 34). Mead and Cooley are perhaps the main theorists of symbolic interactionism beside James, Strauss, and others. As such, let us consider the main theorists views about identity. To start with, Cooley asserted that “self and society are twin-born” (1962, p. 5). It seems that symbolic interactionism is moving us away from the static categorization of individualism and essentialism. Indeed, Cooley reveals that the individual and the society are interlocked. That is, the individual is “always cause as well as effect of the institutions” (Cooley, 1962, p. 314).
In order to explain how identity is constructed, Cooley coined the phrase “looking- glass self.” The reflective process, which this phrase suggests, is explained in Cooley’s words as follows:
As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be, so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it. A self-idea [self-image] of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance; and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification. . . . The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind. . . . We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgment of the other mind. (1964, p. 184)
Cooley’s metaphor of “looking-glass self” reinforces that self is formed and maintained through ongoing interaction with and evaluation of (imagined ones) the others. As such, Cooley sees identity formation as a life-long process; accordingly, personality and self-concept are not stable or fixed.
Drawing on Cooley’s “looking-glass self,” Mead (1934) developed his own theory of the self. For Mead, the self is socially constructed. He wrote “the self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity” (p. 135). Such quotation demonstrates that Mead opted for interaction between the self and society in identity construction. The sense of sameness and difference that underlies “identities” arises as we participate in what Mead (1934) called the “conversation of gestures” (p. 43). Therefore, we can only comprehend ideas and concepts through our engagement with the symbolic, the gesture, the word, the representation. Mead introduced the notion of “I” and “me” to illustrate his views about identity more explicitly. The “I”/“me” are Mead’s two dynamic aspects of the self.
The “I” is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the “me” is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself