AN100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Umbundu, Japanese Language, Arnold Van Gennep
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The (cid:448)ie(cid:449) that people ha(cid:448)e of thei(cid:396) o(cid:449)(cid:374) a(cid:374)d othe(cid:396)s(cid:859) positio(cid:374)s i(cid:374) so(cid:272)iet(cid:455). These learned personal and social affiliations may include gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality, and ethnicity. Who we are and how we stand in relation to others. Each person would need to have an infinite variety of behaviours with which to interact with people of an infinite number of types. We avoid this situation by categorizing people, placing them in groups so that not everyone in our social universe is unique. We group them into categories based on criteria such as gender, ethnicity (irish, italian, chinese), personal characteristics, and so on. In reality, our social identities are constructed in large part by others, who, by their behaviour toward us, confirm that we occupy the spot on the social land- scape we claim to occupy. Put another way, nobody is anybody except in relation to somebody.
