Born into a web of collective identities

We are all born into a web of collective identities. From our earliest moments we are assigned a gender and a race. Depending on our circumstances, we may be born into a nationality, a religion or a philosophy that we will hold all our lives, or we may adopt new ones later and come to feel them as part of the "truth" about ourselves. We will eventually have a sexual orientation — we may not agree with each other about whether we chose it or were born into it.

These are the collective identities that are probably most important to us in understanding who we are — although the drive to adopt a collective identity seems stronger than any one category. In a famous classroom experiment in the United States, when third grade children were informed that people with blue eyes were "bad" and "stupid", it took them only a matter of hours, or in some cases minutes, to become convinced that eye colour was in fact a powerful collective identity and to divide themselves into the "oppressed" and "oppressors". Some identities — gender most of all — are based on definable physical markers. Others, like religion or nation, may adopt visible markers but remain almost entirely imaginative constructs.

Even those who reject many of the traditional forms of collective identity tend to adopt alternate forms (for instance, a collective identification with radical pacifism). And it is not only difficult to live without awareness of one's gender or race, it may be — particularly if you belong to the dominant group — downright irresponsible. (One of the tasks of women's movement, for instance, is to make men aware that they are gendered, not just a generalized representation of all humanity).

So far, collective identity is no more than a tool to help us make some sense of who we are. But, of course, collective identities become much more than that. They become invested with some of our most powerful emotions. They become so much a part of what we understand to be the "truth" about ourselves that they shape everything we do. And they affect the way that others treat us so powerfully that they can determine much of the course of our lives.

Collective identities can have many positive meanings. They can tie us in a relationship of loyalty to a large number of people for whom we have no personal reason to feel solidarity, and this can be — though it is not necessarily — a step towards, rather than away from, feeling solidarity with the whole great random mass of beings. Collective identification by oppressed groups can provide the strength to struggle against repression, to build a culture, to create poems and songs and celebrations and languages, to repair psychological wounds inflicted by the dominant culture. But collective identities can also become exclusive, dangerous, militaristic — and some forms of collective identity seem to do so with worrying ease.

We are very aware, at the moment, of problematic case of identification. It is clear that passionate and exclusive national identification has played a major — perhaps the major — role in most of the violent conflicts going on today. National identification is among the most emotional and volatile of collective identities; perhaps because of its almost entirely imaginary nature, it is felt to be fragile, threatened, in need of being defended by force, even by the extermination of other national identities. Still, its pull on the human imagination is hard to deny. We can imagine ourselves as a people in ways that enrich us. We can also — and all too often do — imagine ourselves as a people in ways that depend on the degradation or elimination of other peoples.

What we do not yet seem to understand is the mechanisms which cause national identification to become exclusive and violent. To understand these, and to begin to work against them, we may need to enter more deeply into the imagining of the nation than pacifists have traditionally done.

The frighteningly passionate nature of some collective identities can, of course, be undermined in part by the recognition that identity is multiple, that we are none of us defined by one collective. This is the dynamic that has operated, sometimes with success, in the women's peace movement in many countries, where women have argued that their identity as women transcends their identity as national, political or religious enemies. The success of this has been more qualified than we would like, perhaps, to admit — it seems that identity as women can be quite easy to incorporate into an exclusive national, ethnic or religious imagining, especially by emphasizing women's role as potential mothers of new members of the nation, ethnic group or faith. There is also the danger that a collective gender identification, even within the peace movement, can be used to reinforce old gender roles — women as caretakers, healers. But there has been some success — there was and continues to be a vibrant women's peace movement in former-Yugoslavia that draws in women from all the republics, and this collective gender identification has enabled some strong reconciliation initiatives at the community level, and allowed some women to emerge into a strong and active visibility they might not have attempted before.

People can also come to realize that what may seem like one clear identification actually contains multiple and contradictory identities within it — that to identify as, say, a member of the Mohawk nation in North America can mean identification with the pacifist tradition of Handsome Lake and the Iroquois Confederacy, or with the militarist tradition of the Warrior Society, both of which are almost equally long-established strains in Mohawk history. (Indeed, many with Mohawk ancestry have to decide whether to identify primarily as "native", "Métis" — mixed-race — or "white", racial descent being as confused and fundamentally imaginary here as it is anywhere else; and there are at least a few cases where Canadians of entirely European descent have been welcomed as members of the "Mohawk nation").

Probably it is part of the job of the peace movement to promote the creative potential of confusion and muddy boundaries. Perhaps another part of our job is simply to create social conditions that will make people feel more secure, less in need of seizing on and reifying a collective identity to give them an apparent firm ground to stand on. Certainly it is part of our job to promote a multiple and flexible understanding of the concept of "identity". (I would argue that our failure to do that has stemmed in part from our fear of entering into the collective imagining, our fear that if we try to look at it with sympathy we will, ourselves, be drawn back into exclusive and violent behaviours.) We need to explore, in much more depth, the means by which we can accomplish these tasks.

Maggie Helwig is a poet, writer and peace activist, living in Toronto, Canada. Along with Biljana Kasic of the Croatian anti-war group ARK, she is convenor of the "Identity and Conflict" theme group at the WRI Triennial in Porec, Croatia, 19-24 September 1998.