Identity Configuration of the Russian Youth

The Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Kazan National Research Technological University










                IDENTITY CONFIGURATION OF THE RUSSIAN YOUTH




            Monograph












Kazan
KNRTU Press

2019

         UDC 316.346.3
         BBK 60.55



Published by the decision of the Editorial Review Board of the Kazan National Research Technological University

Reviewers:
F. Nezhmetdinova, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Associate Professor
A. Shakirova, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor

         Authors: R. Zinurova, A. Tuzikov, E. Gayazova, S. Alekseyev
         Identity Configuration of the Russian Youth : monograph / R. Zinurova [et al.]; The Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Kazan National Research Technological University. - Kazan : KNRTU Press, 2019. - 224 p.

         ISBN 978-5-7882-2400-8

       The phenomenon of personal social identity has been studied by researchers representing various research areas for a long time, which has helped accumulate an essential fund of knowledge on these topics. At the same time, cultural and historical changes that had resulted in scientific paradigm shifts underlay the necessity of considering the problematic area of the social identity of individuals within changing contexts, such as cultural, historical or scientific environments. Following the researchers, our authoring team has prepared the present monograph on the problems in characterizing the youth identity configurations at the current stage of Russia’s and global development.
       The monograph is intended for researchers, teaching staff, and the students of all levels studying social sciences.
       This book is done within the project supported by RFFR grant № 18-01100981 «Social mapping of ethnic, confessional and migration risks in contemporary city agglomeration».
                                                  UDC 316.346.3
                                                  BBK 60.55

ISBN 978-5-7882-2400-8     © Zinurova R., Tuzikov A., Gayazova E.,
Alekseyev S., 2019
                           © Kazan National Research Technological
University, 2019

INTRODUCTION


                It is by coming close to your reference ideal, by being 'tndy yourself', that you most fully obey the collective imperative and most closely coincide with a particular 'imposed' model.
                              Fiendish trick or the dialectic of mass culture?
Jean Baudrillard¹

         The phenomenon of personal social identity has been studied by researchers representing various research areas for a long time, which has helped accumulate an essential fund of knowledge on these topics. At the same time, cultural and historical changes that had resulted in scientific paradigm shifts underlay the necessity of considering the problematic area of the social identity of individuals within changing contexts, such as cultural and historical, social and psychological, social and economical, social and political, and social and cultural environments, as well as its multifactor nature and its actualization versions as affected by contextual dynamics.
         The interdisciplinary nature of the research is defined by the phenomenon of modern identity itself and by its contextual actualizations. The discourse of multiple identifications and the ‘adaptability’ of their designing becomes an increasingly greater influence. Our authoring team has prepared the present monograph on the problems in characterizing the multiple youth identity configurations at the current stage of Russia’s and global development.
         The multiplicity of identifications may come into focus in a simultaneous combination of national (civil) and ethnic (ethno-cultural) identities, such as those of Italian Americans. With the development of technology, communication networks, and virtual space, new roles, values, and landmarks arise, which results in appearing new identities. Consumer and cyber identity coming from the proliferation of Internet-based network technologies becomes more important. The problem of multiply formatted identities is conceptualized as both a conflict and a ‘package of identities’. In our interpretation, identifications represent a phenomenon, that is, something that appears within the context of social interaction and has a configuration fan. This understanding provided the basis for choosing the

¹ The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, [by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1998). 208 P.(P. 95)

3

empirical research methods, including questionnaire methods, such as questionnaires and focus groups, and non-questionnaire methods, such as content or discourse analyses. This allowed us to identify the specific versions of identity configurations in matrix form, with respect to the coordinates of political, social, consumer and cyber identities.
        In general, the configurations considered appear as the most important social categories that reflect the core aspects of the social development of a society or a person. The content of the person’s identification within one or another social group is dynamic and may change contextually. Certain conditions may contribute to actualizing some components of social identity as compared to the other ones.
        The monograph you are holding in your hands is the result of our authoring team’s theoretical and empirical research that has allowed us to specify the possible configurations of the young people of modern times.

4

Chapter 1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE «IDENTITY CONFIGURATION» CONCEPT IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

       During the past decade, many Russian and foreign researchers have increasingly addressed the problem of the complex composition and the multi-level nature of the identity structure, as well as its functional and destructive nature amid multiple quasi-identities, the predominance of pseudo-values, and meta-instability in all areas. Can the “Self-Identity” be formed uninfluenced by the specific, local socio-historical and sociocultural environment? Is the collective identifification so important for a person at the Positivist stage of his or her mental development, as it is at the Metaphysical or Theological stages? What actualizes the opposition of ingroups and outgroups and the “us-vs.-them” dichotomy as an opposition of dominance and marginality? What is the behavior criterion for the modern infantilized society in the age of culture virtualization?
       There is no mainstream definition of identity in the world science. The possibility of using a unified interdisciplinary definition thereof within the academic community is not very high, since every researcher, whether a sociologist, psychologist, economist, political scientist, anthropologist, or philosopher, offers his or her own interpretation. Identification, originally from Medieval Latin identifico - ‘I identify’, later from Latin identificus -‘identical’ or ‘the same’, means acknowledging the identity, identifying the objects, recognition, or recognizing the matches¹. The problem of searching for a well-established explanation of identification is worsened by the chronic crisis of the ideology of postmodern society and by permanent referencing to new ideological determinants and identification cues at the personal, social, civil, and ethnic levels in the context of antagonism between the dominating principles of universalism and globalism, on the one hand, and those of multiculturalism, paticularism, and estrangement, on the other hand. This inconsistency limits the possibility of social solidarity. The postmodern society straddles the declared cultural relativism, as well as the drive for national and cultural distinctness and unique self-awareness based on cultural and historical tradition, the national system of values, and the actual cultural pluralism, assimilation of the cultural substrates of

¹ Prokhorov A.M. (1998) Bolshoy entsiklopedichesky slovar [Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary]. In: Prokhorov, A.M. (editor-in-chief). 2nd edition, revised and amended. Moscow: Scientific Publisher “Great Russian Encyclopedia”. P. 434. (In Russian).

5

various civilizations, peoples, and epochs, confounding the cultural development levels, and the dominance of cultural filters and ethnocentric judgements. These are the properties felt here: Consistency and unity characterize personal identity, while the sense of belonging is integral to social identity. When attempting to unify different identity configurations, it seems apparent that it plays out simultaneously and in parallel in both the exclusion, i.e. something what distinguishes a human, such as individuality, authenticity, and the person’s intention to stand out from the crowd, and the inclusion, i.e. something that allows a person to identify him or herself with others, such as similarity, sameness, and the intention to be a part of a social group. E. Erikson, the founder of the theory of identity, also interpreted it as the internal sensation of and, at the same time, the objectively observed property of self-relation linked to the confidence in the integrity of the world view shared with others.
        The basis of identification as an art was laid by A. Bertillon (1879), a French lawyer, inventor, medicolegist, forensic specialist, and the originator of ‘bertillonage’, who became famous for having introduced the classical system of police sideview-frontview photographs (‘mugshots’) and the ‘anthropometric method’ for describing characteristics identifying criminals by 14 indicators ensuring the most accurate recognition of a person. When the first system of identifying a person by external features was developed and the anthropological identity paradigm started to be formed in science in the 19th century, then it became possible to differentiate social, psychological, and neurophysiological approaches to identity in the 20th century.
        The term of ‘identity’ has especially deeply seated in neuro humanities and social studies. Approaches to understanding the identity within humanities and social studies are differentiated into philosophic and anthropologic ones, while the latter ones include, in their turn, psychological, sociological, and cultural interpretations. Where, in anthropological approaches, the identityis represented as a property of personal becoming and developing, then, in philosophical thought, it is considered as an ontological form, a basis for human existence, or a neurophysiological process. The conception of neurophysiological identity was developed within the framework of reductive materialism and physicalism in the philosophy of mind in the middle of the 20th century and included the type-identity theory (Place U., Feigl H., and Smart J.; 1950) and the token-identity theory assuming not the typical identification marks, but the associative flow of subjective experience.

6

        The socio-humanistic understanding of identity starts with the psychoanalytical structural-dynamic analysis of forming the gender identity and detecting the defense mechanisms to protect the identity stability (Freud S.;   1894), the archetypes of collective unconscious as the
psychospiritual heritage of humanity, the base of the hidden codes of memories common to all humanity, that cannot be reproduced within individual experience (Jung C.;    1936), and the theory of psychosocial
development stages (Erikson E.; 1967). Later, the psychosocial knowledge in this area was increased by cognitive psychologists within the social identity theory (Tajfel, H.; 1986), theory of social categorization (Turner J.; 1987), the theory of systematizing internal identities and self-schemas (Markus H.; 1977), and the theory of self-discrepancy into actual, ideal, and ought (Higgins E.T.; 1989).
        In contrast to the psychoanalytic approach, behaviorists, such as M. Sherif or D. Campbell, who conducted manipulating group experiments provoking competitive, conflict, or collaborative social relations, proposed to pay more attention to intergroup behavior and clarified about the sociogroup component of identity, dominating the personal component thereof. M. Sherif made a breakthough of his time: He discovered that the process of personal identification can be managed, basically, using intergroup conflicts, real-life situations, and external factors. D. Campbell developed that idea in his situative theory of ‘guarding the group borders’, in which he had empirically proved the intensification of identifying processes due to the threat of a ‘stranger’ penetrating the self-identification group. Note that it was exactly the Skinner's classical Stimulus-Response scheme used as the basis for the experiments performed by situational behaviorists. Here we can observe the similarity to J. Marcia’s identity status model, in which the identity may be in the states of search, crisis, moratorium, achievement, foreclosure, or diffusion. Many contemporary researchers characterize this transition from the psychoanalytic understanding of identity to the social-behavioristic one as the transfer of ‘identity’ from the field of quasi-reality into the real-life environment, i.e. into the natural surroundings. Not until much later, J. Habermas would propose a vertical-horizontal structure of identity, which, however, would not close the issue regarding whether social or personal identity dominates.
        Simultaneously, the theory of identity is developing within the activity approach, where it is understood as the generating quality of activities - the basis for forming meanings, thinking, and the subjective perception of the objective reality (Russian researchers A.N. Leontiev and

7

S.L. Rubinstein). The interpretation of identity as the sameness of behavior profiles along with the perception of others, the self-conceptions, and distorted image-structures of figures influenced by the background saturation and the completeness of forms, is represented in the Austrian-German humanistic area of psychoanalysis - Gestalt psychology (Ch. von Ehrenfels (1890), M. Wertheimer (1912), W. Kohler (1947), and K. Koffka (1935)). In the field theory of behavior that considers both the intrinsic motives of actions and the valence of external objects (K. Lewin), the identity is produced by the possibility of realizing the locomotion between ‘regions’. K. Lewin portrays a human as a closed shape, the peripheries of which separate the object from its life space and, at the same time, subtilize the part’s feeling of belonging to the whole.
        Finally, having processed the metatheoretic experience of learning identity from the beginning of the 19th till the 20th century, the identity becomes ‘sociologized’, i.e. it opens out within the conceptual space of sociology in the context of social behaviorism, and acts as the core category for social constructivists, such as P. Berger and T. Luckmann (1995), and of symbolic interactionists, such as G. Mead (1934) and Ch.H. Cooley. They supposed the process of personal identification to be only possible if ‘others’ are present, through interacting with them, internalizing ‘important others’, and forming a ‘generalized other’. Following Ch. H. Cooley and his ‘Looking Glass Self’, the identity as a component of the self-conception was represented in the works of E. Goffman, Sh. Stryker, and R. Fogelson. R. Fogelson’s concept of opposite identities is known through the identity classification he proposed: A ‘real’ identity, which an individual thinks closely approximates an accurate representation of the self; an ideal identity, an image of itself that one wishes to realize; a feared identity, which one values negatively and wishes to avoid; and a claimed identity that is presented to others for confirmation, challenge, or negotiation in an effort to move the ‘real’ identity closer to the ideal and further from the feared identity. E.Goffman recognizes forming and activating the identity within the process of social interaction, too, and interprets it as a complex of symbolic differences from others. Sh. Stryker, as a representative of structural symbolic interactionism, proposes the concept of interiorizing the social positions of a person, where the key category is self-understanding while interacting with others and the awareness of one’s role in social processes. The sociological analysis of religious identity evolution and configurations is given in the works of A.N. Krylov, a Russian and Berlin social philosopher.

8

        Pre-classically, the notion of ‘identity’ started to be used late in the 19th century, due to the outstanding psychologist W. James. The basis for the identity theory was laid by S. Freud, although the psychologist did not actually define the term and never presented it in his research works outside the context of the theory of developing the sexual individuality; he just mentioned it at one of his public talks, speaking about his own ethnical identity. Later, E. Erikson would note that there were Freud’s works where he discovered the term of ‘internal identity’, not yet formulated, but frequently indirectly denoted and used by the famous psychoanalyst as the basis of the meaning of life. A hint at a distinguished position of identity in personal development and at the necessity to maintain its stability is traced in Freud’s paper titled The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894), where he described self-relation as a mechanism of psychological defense in unbalanced conditions and critical real-life situations. In his research work titled Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, S. Freud speaks of identity as an expression of an emotional tie; while his work titled Ego-Ideal describes how one’s self-relation to one’s parents or surrogate parents in combination with infantile self-idealization and narcissism forms a substructural instance of Super-Ego. The classical idea of identity and the first occurrence of the term ‘identity’ in academic circles in the 20th century are related to the name of E. Erikson, an American psychologist, psychoanalyst, a disciple of P. Federn, S. Freud, and A. Freud. In his psychosocial concept of identity represented in his research works titled Childhood and Society (1950) and Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968), the scientist postulated the continuity, integrity, dynamism, and dimension of self at each development phase within the lifecycle. These are Erikson’s works that allowed terminological categories, such as ‘identity crisis’, ‘ideal identity’, ‘ego identity’, and ‘identity disorder’, to be included into the framework of categories in the academic community of modern times. In the postmodern interpretation, identity is transformed, the borders of selfconsciousness become blurred, and multiple terms denoting artificial identification, i.e. the ‘parody of identity’ as its destruction, are introduced (M. Foucault). In the context of instable positive identity and popular discussions on identity disorders, the term of ‘identity capital’ is introduced, which indicates the high estimate of its social importance.
        E. Erikson’s theory proceeds on the basic conceptual ideas of Freud’s theory, particularly, on the stages of personal psychophysiological, sexual, and cognitive development, i.e. 1. Oral stage, 2. Anal stage, 3. Phallic stage, 4. Latent stage, and 5. Genital stage. Erikson perfected the

9

concept of stages by having developed a graphical scheme of eight successfully occurring lifecycle stages, which allows tracking the basic purpose-orientation-values, as well as the identity evolution and crises of the given age period. E. Erikson created his world-famous eight-phase epigenetic model of psychosocial personal development, according to which, at each stage of his or her development, a person experiences certain events, such as critical situations and unbalanced conditions opening new values and capabilities that are the basis for transiting to another stage and a necessary condition of further evolution. According to E. Erikson, social identity evolves over time from self-identification through self-statusing, i.e. equipping the self with social sense and evaluating the set of one’s internal images from the perspective of the social environment. In his works, E. Erikson uses, along with the personal-social identity dichotomy, the formulation of ego identity or self-identity as the key property of personality, which some researchers prefer to interpret as the genuineness of the existence, congruence, authenticity, rectitude - sincerity -commitment to the first principles, originality, etc.
         Erikson’s identity correlates with the concepts of ‘self’ (from German das Selbst - ‘self’, ‘one's own personality’; C. G. Jung, M. Klein, H. Kohut, W. Reich, and R. Assagioli), ‘postulated identity’ and ‘individualization’ as liberation from the predetermined social role in the individualized society theory (Z. Bauman), ‘compensation for individual weakness and striving for superiority’(A. Adler), ‘self-actualization’ and ‘self-realization’ (K. Goldstein), ‘sense of Self’ (S. Huntington), the ‘true self and false self of British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, ‘personal spirit’ in the theory of archetypal defences of Jung’s analyst D. Kalsched, ‘individuation’ of C. Jung, etc. Starting from the 19th century, a large number of authors tried to represent the structure of identity. However, the systematization of all existing approaches allows distilling the following groups:
         1)          Approaches representing a horizontal - multiple structure (co-existence of subpersonalities perceived by the mind as isolated ones, correlating with a certain internal image from a set of the personality-imaginal variables, each of which determines human behavior, lifestyle, motives, needs, etc.);
         2)          Appoaches representing a vertical - multilevel structure (Self as a set of structural units in their integrity, such as the classical representation of the interacting personal/social and internal/external subidentities, as well as three-/four-/five-level models).

10