“ Who are you?” and “Who are they?”

1. Identities are answers to the questions: “Who are you?” and “Who are they?”

2. Identities are answers to the questions “Who are you?” and “Who are they?” • Identities are relational, contextual • Identities form through social interaction • Their content and meaning – the boundaries of identities – change over time

3. Identities consist of: • a boundary separating me from you or us from them • a set of relations within the boundary • a set of relations across the boundary • a set of stories about the boundary and relations Tilly, 1999

4. Identities form through pairing - comparing, contrasting, & relating - social categories • a social category consists of a set of sites that share a boundary distinguishing all of them and relating all of them to at least one set of sites visibly excluded by the boundary • identities separate us from them, imply distinct relations among us, among them, and between us and them Tilly, 1999

5. Ch. 42: Being Middle-Eastern American: Identity Negotiation in the Context of the War on Terror Amir Marvasti

6. Stigma & management of spoiled identity • objective: to show how Middle Eastern Americans manage the stigma of their “spoiled identities,” especially in the aftermath of September 11th • analytical method: combines symbolic interactionism (SI) and structuralism • SI attends to how meanings and identities are constructed through everyday social interaction • Structuralism focuses on how micro-level interactions are conditioned by social structure - social context and history

7. Goffman on stigma • “When a stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his possessing an attribute that makes him different from others…He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is stigma.” • Stigma is variable social construct and not a fixed characteristic of a person

8. Identity disputes are occasions for eliciting and producing “accounts” • accounts: encounters in which a person is called to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior—whether his/her own or that of others, and whether the cause of the statement arises from the actor himself or someone else • accounts are conditioned by structural factors, social-historical context, e.g., • political turmoil • war

9. Media images shape social context • Middle Eastern Americans are suffering “ill-fame” (Goffman, 1963) perpetuated by the mass media • their “public image . . . seems to be constituted from a small selection of facts which . . . are inflated into dramatic news-worthy appearance, and then used as a full picture [of their identity],” e.g., • racist stereotypes and fear of terrorism perpetuated by the media • the stigma of being Middle Eastern American is not external to interactions but is constructed or rejected via interaction, accounts, & self-presentational strategies

10. Five forms of accounting strategies • humorous accounting • educational accounting • defiant accounting • cowering • passing

11. Humorous Accounting • uses humor as a diversion technique • substance of account is incidental and is deliberately trivialized • account-giver acknowledges demands of encounter while undermining legitimacy and urgency of request for an account

12. Educational Accounting • takes deliberate pedagogical form where account-giver assumes role of educator, informing & instructing account-taker • combats stigma by correcting stereotypes • unlike humorous accounting, educational accounting centers on the informational substance of the account

13. Defiant Accounting • like humorous accounting, account-giver exerts agency by challenging other’s right to the request • unlike humorous accounting, stigmatized make explicit demands for counter-explanations • interaction explicitly focused on the fairness of the exchange

14. Cowering • in “defensive cowering” the stigmatized go along with stereotypical demands of setting in order to avoid greater harm • artful practice and agency take backseat to external conditions • stigmatized is virtually powerless in the face of rigid demands of the setting • more about “saving body,” or one’s physical safety, than “saving face”

15. Passing • goal is information control and concealment of stigmatizing attributes • accomplished by manipulating one’s appearance, e.g., using disindentifiers

16. As described by A. Marvasti, in post-9/11 NYC, US flags were deployed as disidentifiers among people suspected of disloyalty, to passas loyal Americans (“Being Middle Eastern American: Identity Negotiation in the Context of the War on Terror,” 2005)