Grimson - Culture and identity
Grimson, A. (2010). Culture and identity: two different notions. Social Identities, 16(1): 61–77.
The objective of this article is to add to an already well-defined concept of culture by incorporating decisive contributions from theories about the nation. Its author claims that a precise conceptual distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ is an essential precondition for analysing social processes in general, especially when it comes to those related to the notion. Namely, although there are numerous contributions to the study of interethnic relationships, ethnic borders and ethnicity, culture, and nation are not only highly complex theoretical notions with a long history; they both deal with heterogeneous and conflictive entities. The author asserts that culture and identity relate to analytically different aspects of social processes and that no relationship between the two can be presupposed or generalised to fit all cases. It is therefore essential to analyse cultural and identity aspects of complex phenomena separately.
Alejandro Grimson “Culture and identity: two different notions”