The notion of social identity has been the centre of scholarly attention in various fields. Stemming from social psychology, the concept straddles many fields which include sociology, politics, gender studies, anthropology and linguistics, to name just a few. Given the many fields that explore it, there are several ways of understanding the notion of social identity. However, a universal way and perhaps the beginning point in understanding how humans deal with other humans is by categorizing them (Blackledge & Creese 2010; Hall 2011; Johnstone 2008;Tajfel 1974; ) and it is from these categorizations that identities are said to emerge. These categories may include, sex, nationality, ethnicity, social class and so forth. On the basis of these, people may partly decide on how to relate to others, for example, people may deal with “men” differently from “women”, “foreigners” differently from “fellow citizens”. According to Johnstone (2008), people tend to act as if identities are natural and predictable, as if gender “man” and “woman” are a result of biological sex (male vs female), as if nationality were a result of place of birth, as if ethnicity could be judged on the premise of skin colour or genealogy.
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Furthermore, Johnstone (2008) argues that there are no categorization schemes which are really natural. This because social identities are multiple and keep on shifting (Hall 2011; Romaine 2010; Pennycook 2010) as people range on a spectrum of cultural gender; for example, some opt for gender identifications that do not correlate with their biological sex and sex orientations do not fit well with the biological sexes, and a South African may not necessarily be anyone born in South Africa (Johnstone 2008). Moreover, ethnic categorization and racial ones do not correlate directly to identity. Thus the assumption that people possess easily, stable, predictable social identities does not make sense for people with mixed backgrounds or social identities. Besides the manner in which identities shifts over time and from context to context especially in the modern times characterized by globalization and integration of people from different backgrounds (Blackledge & Creese 2010; Pennycook 2010; Romaine 2010; Johnstone 2008;;;). According to Johnstone (2008:151),“it is important…not to let predefined categories such as nationality, sex, and so on dictate how they divide up people or texts, or what questions to ask…it is important to try to let analytical categories emerge in the analysis”. This, however, does not mean that social class is not important but rather that it may be relevant in one context but not in another (cf. Hall 2011). For that reason conversational analysts such as Antaki and Widdicombe (1998) argue that social categorizations should emerge in interactions and thus none of the participants or people who study interactions needs to have any knowledge of what social categorizations conventionally mean about people(cf. Banda 2009).
In most cases people may socialize themselves to the ways they are categorized by others and to the ways others categorize themselves and are categorized. In addition, people create, claim and express these perceptions (orientations) through discourse (Johnstone 2008; Hall 2011). Therefore, discourse analysts have found the idea of performance relevant in trying to explain how social categories are connected to discourse. In this vein, daily interactions are said to require “performances” (Johnstone 2008) of selves which are strategically positioned to meet the interactional demands at hand. It is from this understanding that the term identity has been used to explain these performances (Gumperz 1982; Bucholtz & Hall 2004). Therefore, identity in this regard refers to “outcome of processes by which people index their similarity to and difference from others, sometimes self-consciously and strategically and sometimes as a matter of habit”
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(Johnstone 2008:151). In this way, identities are actively negotiated in discursive acts (Hall 2011; Pennycook 2010; Blackledge & Creese 2010).
Johnstone (2008) contends that there has been much research on social identities relating to race, gender, ethnicity and nationality as if identities only arise from these aspects of social life. Conversely, identities emerge from other sources, for example, identities can be associated with discourse participant roles like “author” or “over hearer”, temporary situational roles like teacher or categorization schemes that emerge from certain local contexts, like social cliques in some schools (Hall 2011).
According to Johnstone (2008), discursive performances are said to play various roles and have numerous effects. Such performances may be consciously and carefully planned and executed. She cites an example in which women in the Southern US use what they may refer to as “turning on the Southern charm” as a sexually charged way of manipulating a man and the use of linguistic performances of regional identity such as adoption or showing off of local sounding ways of talking which may express resistance to cultural homogenization as people become more mobile and interconnected. Thus Johnstone (2008:153) concludes by stating that to:
[t]hink of identity as performance is to adopt a humanistic, rhetorical perspective on a set of issues which linguists have taken a social scientific and deterministic perspective…that this highlights the ways in which people decide who to be and how to act and the extent to which they are responsible for the consequences of such decisions.
The current study takes this view which sees identity as a phenomenon actively performed and negotiated for through discursive acts. This perspective enables the researcher to unravel different ways in which social identities in late modern Lusaka are discursively enacted in various social aspects of the city such as popular music, conversations, online discourses, radio talk and advertisements. It also enables the researcher undertstand the roles these identities are
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serving. Besides, the study finds this conceptualization of social identity significant as it seeks to understand how social identities are realized through participant social roles or structure (cf. Banda 2009). This kind of understanding can only be achieved when identity is viewed as a performed act.
It follows that if identity is to be viewed as a performed act, understandably it should be multiple and dynamic (Dyer 2007; De Fina 2007; De Fina, Schiffrin & Bamberg 2006) as it keeps shifting from one context to another. On this basis, individual agency is placed at the centre of understanding social identity (Johnstone 2008). This perspective to language and identity further challenges the traditional “linguistic applied” perception in which social identity is seen as a set of essential characteristics unique to individuals, independent of language, and unchanging across contexts, and in which language users can display their identities but cannot affect them in anyway. Identity from this (traditional) perspective is singular and fixed (Hall 2011).
However, as pointed out above, given the different fields that explore the notion of social identity and language, various ways of understanding the notion have been advanced and these have largely been influenced by the perspectives that each field emphasizes. It follows that understanding the diverse meanings of social identity advanced by different scholars requires an understanding of the theoretical basis upon which the notion has been established. Therefore, the diverse meanings of social identity as explored by different scholars would only be understood in light of the different fields and the theoretical emphasis advanced therein, although it should be stated that there are more agreements than are differences in defining the notion. The section that follows, presents a brief historical account on studies on social identity and language.
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3.2. Social identity and language: a brief historical account