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434 Janet Spreckels and Helga Kotthoff

In this age of globalization we must bear in mind that the construction
of identity is no longer bound to locality (Giddens 1990). The essence of glo-
balization is the intensification of world-wide social relations, at the expense
of formerly local activities and relations. Along with economic and cultural
globalization, the globalization of social relationships has far reaching con-
sequences for individuals’ life goals and identity formation. “The advent of
modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations be-
tween ‘absent’ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-
to-face interaction.” (Giddens 1990: 18). Appadurai (1995) posits that mo-
dern configurations of space, time and culture overlap with ‘imagined worlds’
and ‘imagined communities’. Each of these landscapes is assembled by social
actors on the basis of the cultural images and possibilities for identity that
are presented to them. Tourists, migrants and refugees produce new ‘ethno-
scapes’ that, in turn, overlap with the ‘technoscapes’ of transnational enter-
prizes and the ‘mediascapes’ of globalized sources of information, images and
symbols.
Identity and otherness are still driving forces between social conjunctions
and disjunctions, and in a globalized world ever more social knowledge is
required to understand their manifestations. Not only for this reason will the
field of study called ‘communicating identity’ remain interdisciplinary, drawing
together sociology, linguistics, psychology, political science and anthropology,
as this article has attempted to show.

Notes

1. This first part is based on Janet Spreckels’s discussion of identity concepts in her book
Britneys, Fritten Gangschta und wir: Identitätskonstitution in einer Mädchengruppe.
Eine ethnographisch-gesprächsanalytische Untersuchung (2006).

References

Allport, Gordon W.
1979 The Nature of Prejudice. Reading MA et al.: Addison-Wesley.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.)
2003 Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia:
Benjamins.
Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.)
1998 Identities in Talk. London: Sage.
Appadurai, Arjun
1995 The Production of Locality. In: Richard Fardon (ed.), Counterworks: Ma-
naging the Diversity of Knowledge, 204–225. London: Routledge.