From Identity' To Belonging' in Social Research Plurality, Social Boundaries, and The Politics of The Self
From Identity' To Belonging' in Social Research Plurality, Social Boundaries, and The Politics of The Self
Special Edition: Contemporary Sri Lankan Society and Politics: Felicitation volume in honour of renowned Sri
Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige
Cite as:
Pfaff-Czarnecka, J. (2020). From ‘identity’ to ‘belonging’ in social research: Plurality, social boundaries, and the
politics of the self. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 16(39), 113. https://doi.org/10.19044/esj.2020.v16n39p113
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Special Edition: Contemporary Sri Lankan Society and Politics: Felicitation volume in honour of renowned Sri
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Introduction
During his appeal hearing at the regional court in Dresden, Germany,
in July 2009, Alex Wiens, a right-wing extremist of Russian-German origin
attacked Marwa El-Sherbini with a knife, stabbing her to death. Marwa El-
Sherbini, a hijab-wearing 33 year-old academic of Egyptian origin – had taken
him to court for abusing her during an encounter on a children’s playground
in Dresden. Before killing her on the court’s premises, Alex Wiens asked
Marwa El-Sherbini what on earth she was doing in Germany. He also
confronted the authorities present in the courtroom, asking why, in the
aftermath of 9/11, Muslims were not deported in their entirety to where they
came from. “I could not understand,”- a direct quotation from his statement
during the subsequent murder trial in November 2009 – “why she came to
Germany, to this potentially unfaithful country that many Muslims hold in
contempt. I (Alex) came to Germany because I have German roots and
therefore this is my original home. I (Alex) could not understand” - and here
comes the sentence that I find particularly striking – “... I could not understand
why and how she could feel at home, here in Germany”.
Three facets of this testimony are in the forefront of this article1. First,
the importance of feeling at home. Currently, discourses of home and
belonging are abound in public communication and they increasingly inspire
academic research. Given its current attraction, it will be the aim of this text
to reflect upon the concept of belonging and to propose analytical tools for
capturing its salience. The empirical backdrop of this inquiry will consist
mostly of Western immigrant contexts, but this reflection is meant to
accommodate other social constellations as well. Second, the heavily and
emotionally charged quest to belong is perennially impeded by others and
systemically restricted. When she was murdered, Marwa El-Sherbini was
ultimately denied making Germany her home. Alex Wiens – as can be inferred
- could not imagine feeling at home in Germany when people like Marwa felt
comfortable there. Belonging is thus an object of continuous negotiations
between individuals and collectivities. This results in tensions and
accommodations as well as an on-going process of setting, transcending, and
blurring social boundaries. In order to understand belonging, it is crucial to
know how it evolves within the protective confines of a specific life-world and
1
Some ideas underlying this article were jointly developed together with Gérard Toffin (see
the jointly written ‘Introduction: Belonging and Multiple Attachments in Contemporary
Himalayan Societies’, Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin (2011)). Nevertheless, this is a novel
approach, going far beyond the scope of the previous text, concentrating on Western
immigrant societies, and considering individual aspects of belonging in particular. The author
should like to thank Peter Geschiere, Lara Jüssen, Raphael Susewind and Richard
Wartenweiler for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this text.
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What is belonging?
What is belonging? To put it briefly: belonging is an emotionally-
charged social location. People belong together when they share values,
relations, and practices (Anthias 2006: 21). Belonging is a central dimension
of life that is easily felt and tacitly experienced and very difficult to capture
through analytical categories. Nevertheless, given the growing scholarly
interest in this notion, it is worth trying to do so. In my view, belonging as an
emotionally charged social location combines (1) perceptions and
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Commonality
‘Commonality’ is a perception of sharing, notably, sharing a common
lot as well as cultural forms (language, religion, and lifestyle), values,
experiences, and memory constructions. It is individually felt and embodied
while collectively negotiated and performed. Commonality is often perceived
through a social boundary-horizon that helps discern between the insiders and
the outsiders. It thus relies on categorisations, mental checkpoints, everyday
life distinctions, and public representations that often buttress the collective
boundary-maintenance (Migdal 2004). This is precisely where commonality
is likely to attain the form of collective identity that requires the other / the
outside for engendering a perception of internal sameness. But we must not
restrict our understanding of ‘commonality’ to ‘collective identity’.
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of this term has instigated a great deal of critique, that was best formulated by
Brubaker and Cooper (2000). In their seminal, ‘Beyond “identity”’, they make
a number of important observations: first, the term ‘identity’ has become so
ubiquitous, combining ‘categories of practice’ with ‘categories of analysis’,
that it carries a huge number of connotations. “Identity,” they argue, “tends to
mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when
understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity)”
(2000: 1). Second, given the substantial range in the meanings used by actors
and by scholars, the central connotations of this term can clash with one
another as is the case with essentialising vis-à-vis constructivist approaches.
Third, ‘collective identity’ transports homogenising notions of commonality
and it endorses methodological ethnicization by delineating clear-cut
collective boundaries of the social.
Most important is Brubaker’s and Cooper’s contention that ‘identity’
does not do justice to the full range of human forms shaped by commonality,
mutuality and affiliations / attachments such as self-understanding or
connectedness. Still, to suggest abanding the term ‘identity’ would be to enter
into a struggle against windmills. It is more fruitful, therefore, to sharpen the
analytical tools when venturing into the preoccupation with ‘belonging’ – a
term that is more and more present in everyday use and that recently has
become the object of a rapidly growing number of academic inquiries. The
term does not have more analytical precision than that of ‘identity’, but
capturing this term will help scholars to uncover the multiple, subtle and
shifting modalities of forging and thinking about the collective dimensions of
social life and the dynamic nature of social boundary-making.
It is important to highlight some major differences between ‘identity’
and ‘belonging’: ‘Identity’ is a categorical concept while ‘belonging’
combines categorisation with social relations. Identity is relational in the sense
that it positions itself vis-à-vis the other. Belonging’s relationality consists in
forging and maintaining social ties and in buttressing commitments and
obligations. Identity caters to dichotomous characterisations of the social
while belonging rather highlights its situatedness and the multiplicity of
parameters forging commonality, mutuality, and attachments. Identity relies
on sharp boundary-drawing, particularism, and is prone to buttressing social
divisiveness. Theorists may argue otherwise, for instance deploying the
concept of identification that, unlike ‘identity’, entails situative and processual
connotations; at the same time, identity politics have time and again revealed
the exclusionary properties entailed in this notion. As has often been the case,
the politics of belonging (see also below) are equally prone to affecting social
exclusion as well as the opposite - widening borders, incorporating former
outsiders, and defining new common grounds. This is precisely one of the
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Mutuality
Shared understandings significantly buttress the sense of mutuality –
the second dimension of belonging. Norms steering mutual expectations and
obligations create common horizons in the here and now, stabilising them as
norms of reciprocity, loyalty, and commitment. Mutuality means
acknowledging the other which often results in compliance to rules ordering
social relations (Simmel 1908, Weber 1921; Tyrell 2008). Families expect
obedience and loyalty as well as pooling of resources. Associations and
organisations expect participation, acceptance of common goals, and a
sufficient contribution of time and resources. Belonging to a nation means
sharing in a given polity’s well-being and enjoying civic rights, while
reciprocating via performing civic duties, in particular, by paying taxes. To
enter a national space and durably remain, migrants need to present themselves
as particularly deserving. Also cliques and friends jealously monitor a mutual
allocation of obligations and debts. These calculations - that can be more overt
or covert - result in ‘regimes of belonging’, that is institutionalised patterns
insisting upon investments of time and resources, loyalty and commitments –
the ‘prices’ people have to pay for belonging together, and when these ‘prices’
are not paid, most collectives can resort to sanctions, such as exclusion or
ostracism.
The unlikely term, ‘regimes of belonging’, combines the cosiness of
the human forms of commonality, the warmth of communitarian existence,
with its putative opposite, i.e. ‘regime’ as something authoritative and
constricting. A ‘regime’ is, according to the political scientist Stephen Krasner
(1982), a „set of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-
making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area
of international relations“. Any self-imposed rules can be equally
overwhelming and oppressive as those imposed by external rule. ‘Own rules’
within communitarian patterns can be even more imposing as consent and
subjugation represent themselves as voluntary – i.e. voluntary
acknowledgment of the authority and wisdom of the (often male) elders. In
transnational immigrant regimes, the valid norms are forged by members of
the national we-groups (Elwert 1997; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2009) that also extend
to immigrants. Most newcomers usually do not fit into the national
frameworks of values and norms and do not share cultural repertoires – at least
in the perception of the autochthonous population. Under these conditions,
forging civic commonality is an onerous process.
Both, social inclusion and social exclusion underlie regimes of
belonging. All bounded collective units, e.g. states, ethnic and religious
organisations, associations and families, make use of devices buttressing
commonality, mutuality, and attachments while simultaneously excluding
outsiders. States, in particular, have a tremendous regulatory force - guarding
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Attachments
Attachments, the third dimension discerned here, follow different
patterns in creating belonging (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2010). Attachments link
people to material and immaterial worlds (Flinders 2002; hooks 2009).
Attachments make people belong to spaces and sites, natural objects,
landscapes, climates, and material possessions. These are forged through such
disparate links as embodiment, resonance of smells and tastes (as with Marcel
Proust’s famous Madeleine) as well as rights and citizenship, and in particular,
property rights. Growing up in a locality can create a strong sense of belonging
– and so does the ownership of land or a house. Whenever people leave an
airplane, they are told: ‘take your belongings with you’ – which brings one
property of material attachments to light. It is difficult to forge attachments,
but they can be created. Religious sites such as cemeteries and places of
worship can be conducive here. Muslim immigrants have for instance created
such places of attachment in many European places, but they usually had to
struggle hard for this. Denying immigrants the right to erect visible religious
structures marking their durable presence in the places of their arrival – as
happened through the Swiss federal vote against the minarets - expressed the
Swiss majority’s reluctance to accept that Muslims could make Switzerland
their new home.
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Creating belonging
To belong in the modern world means to reflexively consider the
meaning of home and a person’s sense of place. Time and again, individual
and collective belonging have been encroached upon, challenged, fought
about, and protected. State rule, market forces, forced displacement,
transnationalisation, pluralisation, acceleration of social change, and the
widening horizon of human aspirations have rendered belonging contested –
from outside and from within. The more it is contested and made explicit, the
less likely it is to just be and tacitly shared. The value, then, can lie in keeping
one’s protected space, often at the high price of self-subjugation under the
governmentality of their own collective as well as at the price of excluding
others. Also, people oftentimes, jealously guard the boundaries of the small
world of their we-collective. The other option of belonging is to render the
boundaries of the social permissible, creating space for negotiations of new
and expanded meanings of mutuality and togetherness.
And yet there is another – highly interesting - property of belonging,
namely, the possibility to forge new ties of collective boundedness. The
concept of belonging provides a tool to inquire how horizons of togetherness
are and can be widened to incorporate newcomers – how to extend collective
we-understanding by including former strangers. In the climate of politically
charged passions about belonging, social exclusion seems to be a norm in
shaping relationships between we-groups and those considered outsiders.
Nevertheless, throughout history all around the world, new constellations of
belonging have been forged and will continue to come into existence in the
future. Bounded and exclusive belonging becomes increasingly problematic,
given the pluralising nature of contemporary societies and given the
differentiated character of any given collective social space that the regimes
of belonging seek to cover up.
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encroached upon, challenged, fought about, and protected. State rules, market
forces, forced displacement, transnationalisation, pluralisation, acceleration of
social change, and the widening horizon of human aspirations have rendered
belonging contested – from outside and from within. The more it is contested
and made explicit, the less people can just ‘be’, share, and join in. Thinking
about one’s belonging explicitely can result in defending the protected space
against all kinds of intrusions.
Belonging, resonating in ‘be-long-in’, displays strong past-oriented,
nostalgic connotations. As an object of political action, it is very much an
element of the present. The concept also has a strong aspirational, future-
oriented element. Kannabiran (2006) distinguishes between belonging and
becoming, suggesting that political struggles thrive upon ideas indicating
where a given collective is heading to and what it is aiming for. So far, this
text has concentrated on personal navigation between different social spaces
of belonging and the entailed politics of the self. But the past decades have
also witnessed pronounced collective mobilisation coalescing into a different
politics of belonging. At least three global trends have instigated these politics.
The first trend has usually been depicted as a third wave of democratisation
and was significantly buttressed by the fall of the Berlin wall and the
inspiration provided by civic action in Eastern European countries. Almost
simultaneously, civil society movements gained momentum in many parts of
the globe. Previously colonized populations “have reversed the colonial flow
from centre to periphery with increasing intensity” (Comaroff and Comaroff
2009: 46-7). Challenging established West-dominated normative orders,
displaying alterity, and forcing the “problem” of difference into the public
(ibid.) realm, collective activism has shifted from deeply subjugated positions
to self-conscious positions reclaiming oppressed spaces of resistance
(Kannabiran 2006). These movements have embarked on a challenging path,
deploying techniques and technologies that are products of globality and
transnationality (means of communication, networking), while organising
against detrimental impacts of neo-liberalism. Large-scale infrastructural
projects as well as the attempts of transnational corporations to secure
intellectual property rights on items such as food grains or medicinal plants
have greatly instigated the local sense of place and a spirit of local resistance
(that I examined in my ‘Challenging Goliath’, see Pfaff-Czarnecka 2007).
The second trend buttressing collective politics of belonging came
about with the global indigenous peoples’ movement (see Pfaff-Czarnecka at
al. 2007). This movement has reached a world-wide scope combining the
politics of identity, entitlement, recognition and rights (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2009: 47). This movement, initially carried out by the US-American
and Canadian First People as well as by a growing number of ethnic activists
in Latin American countries and in the Asian-Pacific region, has importantly
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Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige
Eastern European countries) or simply more rights for local participation and
self-rule (through measures of decentralisation and devolution of power). The
term ‘social inclusion’ is misleading in the very sense that a possibility of
newcomers ‘joining in’ in established orders is implied by it – whereas,
innumerable examples of social struggles reveal that ‘social empowerment’ is
usually accompanied by a thorough transformation of any given society and
its institutional orders.
The second type of politics of belonging, coming to light especially
with indigenous activism, is largely driven by identity politics. Such politics
are usually oriented toward the past, with the activists highlighting the
common origins and genealogies as well as the reasons of having been there
first, and the ensuing rights to particular territories. The politics of identity
tend to highlight particularism, take recourse to strategic essentialism, cater to
homogenising images of the collective self and thrive upon sharp ethnic
boundaries that often discriminate between the collective we-groups and
outsiders. Politics of identity turn into politics of belonging when collective
mobilisation reaches beyond the contested space of identity representations.
The indigenous politics of belonging struggle for political self-rule, reversing
past wrongs such as encroachment on ancestral lands, and in doing so insist
upon decentralising the realm of national political economic realms. In his
most pertinent analysis of the perils of belonging, Peter Geschiere (2009)
demonstrated how such forms of emancipatory action is likely to go hand-in-
hand with a problematic collective particularism, excluding others to such an
extent that they are denied the right to dwell in territories claimed by a
particular ethnic group. Geschiere’s argument is all the more powerful as he
draws a parallel between the particularist ethnic politics of belonging
occurring in local realms of African national spaces and equally exclusivist
we-group self-understandings voiced by claustrophobic voices in numerous
Western immigrant societies. In both cases, the exclusivist politics of
belonging have been buttressed by the infrastructure of identity politics,
discriminating between insiders and outsiders, and erecting tight social
boundaries around the collective units.
Against this backdrop, a third type of politics of belonging appears
particularly crucial. This type of politics has recently been described in the
literature of recent migration flows as well as political reconfigurations
asserting alterity and recognising differences within the terms ‘co-habitation’
and ‘conviviality.’ Judith Butler, who coined the term ‘co-habitation’ stresses
that we can no longer decide ourselves in regards to whom we are living with.
We are therefore compelled to maintain the pluralist character of living
together – which does not follow our own choice – active. Paul Gilroy (2004)
argues in his ‘Postcolonial melancholia’ along similar lines. The ways of
finding common ground in living together, despite differing identities,
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convictions, and forms of life, are multiple and, indeed, possible. The options
for creating civic commonality stand in opposition to exclusivist national we-
group identity politics as they have prevailed in the assimilationist ethos used
against new-comers. Currently, belonging is becoming an object of
politicization. Protecting one’s home, keeping migrants at bay, or engaging in
rivalries regarding who is more deserving to make a place his or her home are
all entailed in the politics of belonging. But the more boundary-constructions,
boundary-restrictions and boundary-protections become part and parcel of
global reflexivity, the more wide-spread the awareness of the possibilities to
transcend and to mould boundaries and to create new possibile spaces for our
living together.
This discussion reveals the complexity of the key notion of belonging:
‘social location’. (This notion is strongly intertwined with, but cannot be
reduced to, geographical location.) Having defined belonging as an
‘emotionally charged social location’, it was the intention of this text to
suggest avenues for understanding belonging as combining different key-
dimensions of social existence and experience that significantly channel
different forms of political action. According to Brubaker and Cooper, in
identitarian theorizing, ‘social location’ is defined as a “position in a
multidimensional space defined by particularist categorical attributes (race,
ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation)” (2000:7). In instrumentalist theorizing,
‘social location’ describes a position in a universally conceived social
structure,for example, a position in the market, an occupational structure, or a
mode of production (ibid. – italics by the authors). The concept of belonging
suggests that ‘social location’ is the combination of both aspects. After all, the
social structures of contemporary societies evolved in a combination of
diverse parameters and resources as well as capabilities (Sen 1999; Alkire
2010). The challenge of grasping the central features of the belonging concept
is even greater given the fact that the contemporary self-reflexivity under the
conditions of peoples’ globalised and transnational experiences renders the
human preoccupation with territorial space and local attachments particularly
pertinent.
Conclusion
This article stressed the necessity to distinguish between the concepts
of collective identity and belonging, while proposing the latter as a well-suited
lens for grasping the dynamics of sociability in the contemporary world. It
proposed avenues for thinking of human forms of togetherness by combining
tacit and overt understandings and performances of commonality with
practices of mutuality, loyalty, and commitments and with different forms of
material and immaterial attachments. Bringing these different elements
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