Posted on 17th Mar 2022 23:37:42 in

2. What is community identity and how is it formed?

Answer.

1. Community identity is based on birth and belonging rather than on some forms of acquired qualifications or accomplishments.
    
2. These kind of identities are called ascriptive i.e. they are determined by birth and individual’s choice is not involved.
    
3. People feel a deep*sense of security and satisfaction in belonging to communities.
    
4. Ascriptive identities such as community identities are difficult to shake off; even if we choose to disown them, others may continue to identify us by those very markers of belonging.
    
5. Expanding and overlapping circles of community ties like family, kinship, ethnicity, language give meaning to our world and gives us a sense of identity.
    
6. Ascriptive identities and community feelings are universal.
   
   Everyone has a motherland, a mother tongue, a family, a faith. And we all are equally committed to our respective identities.
    
7. Our community provides us with our mother-tongue and the cultural values through which we comprehend the world. It, also, anchors our self-identity.
    
8. The process of socialization involves continuous dialogue with our significant surroundings such as parents, kin, family and community. Thus, community is a very important part of our identity.
    
9. Community conflicts are very hard to deal with since each side thinks of the other side as a hated enemy and there is a tendency to exaggerate the virtues of one’s own side as well as the vices of the other side.
    
10. It is very hard for people on either side to sec that they are constructing matching but reversed mirror images of each other.
     
11. At times, both sides are indeed equally wrong or right; at other times, history may judge one side to be the aggressor and the other to be the victim.
     
12. But this can happen long after the heat of the conflict has cooled down.
     
13. Some notion of a mutually agreeable truth is hard to arrive at in situations if identity conflict.