0. Humankind; humanity. This refers here to the largest possible grouping of people who might be the subject of historical inquiry. This describes the most egalitarian and democratic group of those who might be the subject of history or the consumers of it. This has the very general qualities of the word "population".
This "zero" category also is a good place to think about the single individual, the smallest possible morsel within any population, the smallest possible human "group". Individual as "group"? Consider the ideas of a very suggestive but often overlooked German social theorist in the era before World War One, Georg Simmel. In 1908, he published an essay called "Die Kreuzung sozialer Kreise". The literal meaning of that title is "the intersection of social circles". It has been translated into English under the title "The Web of Group Affiliations". Simmel's point was that every individual exists within a complex and intersected collection of social circles. The individual is not just one thing but is an accumulation of many different, inter-webbed and, over time, changing social affiliations. The word Kreuzung even implies something like cross-breeding. Each intersected circle contributes some of its diverse qualities to the process of "breeding" individual identity and influencing behavior. Even the separate individual is historically an amalgam of many overlapping or intersecting circles of identity. Groups express a complex identity, and so do individuals.
What follows here are twelve varieties of identity circles that might intersect and variously define any historical person or group.
1. Time, chronologically defined groups =
--a. absolute [dates according to a standard calendar or clock]
--b. relative [e.g., first, last, original, medieval, atavistic, backward;
contemporary]
2. Place, location, geographically
defined groups
--a. geophysical or "ecological" [jungle, plains, urban, rural]
--b. territorial, border-bound [Asian, Parisian, Canadian]
--c. relative E.g., near, far, "them & us"
(Japanese concepts of "soto" & "uchi")
3. Gender
4. Age [the young, the old, children,
elders]
5. Language [i.e., "mother
tongue"]
6. Ethnicity or nationality (in a
sense other than simply "citizenship" in a nation-state)
7. Religion or confessional association (NB! relationship of consciousness
and institutions)
8. Class
--a. economic [landowning elites, owners or managers of capital,
or those who rent out their own labor]
--b. social [aristocracy, commoners, untouchables]
9. Institutional assignment [soldier, prisoner, taxpayer,
family (cf. voluntary below)]
10. Education [most particularly literateand illiterate]
11. Voluntary behavioral association
[Masons, businessmen, voters, household; the nuclear family in some
societies and at different levels = Husbands and wives might associate
voluntarily, but parents and children do not as a rule]
12. Shared perspective,
self-consciousness and other forms of abstract categorization of individuals or
groups [conservative, decadent, environmentalist]. This is usually a very
intangible or theoretical category. It is occasionally a very artificial
category. The concepts "bourgeois" or "Westerner" might fit here. "Race" fits
here rather than in category (6) above. Sometimes "shared perspective" is
fostered and protected by institutional assignment (#9 above), e.g., religious
views within a church, mosque, synagogue, etc. or "nationality" when it means membership in a
nation-state. The possession of a passport or drivers license defines a form of
ID by institutional assignment (9 above), but the larger concept of "national
identity" or "national character" exists almost exclusively as a matter of
intellectual presumption. See Benedict R.O. Anderson,
Imagined communities:
Reflections on the
origin and spread of nationalism
The Historical Fluidity of Individual and Group Identity
To illustrate the taxonomic view of groups or individuals, consider the following = Several people together might be "Russians", but some of them entrepreneurs, some members of the Communist Party, some with advanced degrees, some illiterate, some rich, some poor, some Orthodox Christians, some atheists, some of Tatar origins, some Finnish, some speaking Ukrainian at home, some Yiddish, some old, some young, some female, some male, some from Moscow, some from remote villages, some veterans of the Great Patriotic War, some dissidents against militarism, etc.
Now we have to factor in the insights of Simmel [ID]. Any one person, certainly any defined group of people, will combine the categories of identity in many different patterns, and these patterns are subject to historical change. Yes, the young grow old, if they are lucky, but the other categories also evolve over time in the life of individuals and groups
The blending of these several categories no doubt gives rise to a rich variety of PERCEIVED INTERESTS in any larger population. Thus any big historical moment will reflect a rich variety of motivations and will discover them in patterns of factional harmony and discord within and among the groups suggested here.
Remember these words of caution about "taxonomies".
