Excerpt from the book:
Identity – what is it? It’s the answer on the question «Who am I?» that a person asks them selves. Usually people give surface answers like: I’m a student; I’m young or I’m old; I’m the fan of rock – music or I’m a sportsman etc. At first look we see examples of an identity that are built on social role: a professional, an educational, age – related , subcultural. A human – being as a social person (a mask) is a crossing of who they think they are and who society thinks they are (a status, a role in society).
Deeper thinking about «Who am I?» question will lead us to more wide scale and fundamental iden tities: confessional (religious), gender based (a male or a female that also includes sexual identity), ethnic (a Russian, a German, a Greek, a Tuvinian, etc), civilian/national and racial. These are more general and complicated collective identities. The other part is ontology identity, where the answer on the question «Who am I?» Will be: «The human being, one of the homo sapiens «. From the point of view of biological taxonomy (all the people that ever lived, have died or live right now, will live and will die) specific identity.
Identity is the base for cooperation, creating a commune, social groups, for identifying self – belonging and orientation in society with help of wide set of social markers, signs, functions and relationships. Human is a summary of different identities, some of them are given to person (birthplace, ethnicity, gender and language), other identities may be changed by social mobility (horizontal and vertical: the place of living, a profession, a family, an education, a confession, a ci vil, a hobby, an age etc.). Identities are built in ah hierarchy.
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