Identity: A Very Short Introduction

Florian Coulmas

ISBN 10: 0198828543 / ISBN 13: 9780198828549

Verlag: Oxford University Press Feb 2019, 2019

Beschreibung

Neuware -'Identity' as a concept has many faces, and its very versatility in different contexts can make it hard to define. Florian Coulmas discusses the many meanings of this slippery concept, considering why individual and collective identities are important to us, and discussing the problems asserting individual identities can create. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 9780198828549

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Identity: A Very Short Introduction

Verlag: Oxford University Press Feb 2019

Erscheinungsdatum: 2019

Einband: Taschenbuch

Zustand: Neu

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe:

Identity has become one of the most widely used terms today, appearing in many different contexts. Anything and everything has an identity, and identity crises have become almost equally pervasive. Yet 'identity' is extremely versatile, meaning different things to different people and in different scientific disciplines. To many its meaning seems self-evident, since its various uses share common features, so often the term is used without a definition of what, exactly, is meant by it. This provokes the core question: What exactly is identity?

In this Very Short Introduction Florian Coulmas provides a survey of the many faces of the concept of identity, and discusses its significance and varied meanings in the fields of philosophy, sociology, and psychology, as well as politics and law. Tracing our concern with identity to its deep roots in Europe's intellectual history, individualism, and the felt need to draw borderlines, Coulmas identifies the most important features used to mark off individual and collective identities, and demonstrates why they are deemed important. He concludes with a glimpse at the many ways in which literature has engaged with problems of identity throughout history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor:

Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. Prior to this, he has held research and teaching positions at Georgetown University, the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics, and Chuo University. He has published numerous books, including An Introduction to Multilingualism (OUP, 2017) and Writing and Society: A Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2013). For the past three decades he has served as Associate Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Languages, during which time he has observed the steadily increasing use of the concept of identity in both general and scholarly publications.