出版社：Estonian Literary Museum and Estonian Folklore Institute
摘要：Identity is a concept that concentrates cultural researchers’ thinking and discussions around a search for an explanation to human behaviour and ideas behind it. Identity appears to us as a contradictory idea that can be perceived in diachronic and synchronic perspectives simultaneously as fixed and vague, a core of one’s self-understanding and an endless play of meanings, existential and stereotypical. Identity is related to a certain substantial sense of constancy but is seen in the course of an analytical effort as a fluid complex of discourses. In a general methodological perspective, approaches to identity have changed considerably. Over a long period of time, different peoples’ identity was seen as simple and collective. The Other appeared to European intellectuals as transparent (savages were treated as incapable of concealing their personality from observers) and unified (without differences between people – observing one individual was enough to enable conclusions concerning a whole group).
