Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Time and social networks
48 Árendás Zsuzsanna culture- making processes, and seizes culture in its state of constant change. Stuart Hall (1997) distinguishes three types of identity concept: (a) the subject of Enlightenment, (b) the sociological subject, and (c) the subject of post-modernity. The subject of Enlightenment has a stable centre; it is a consistent individuum. It has an inside core existing from the moment of birth; it develops together with the individual while in essence it stays unchanged. The sociological subject is embedded in the complexity of the modern world, it does not have a stable inside core, but it is formulated throughout relationships, and connections with the outside world. In sociology, symbolic interactionists (first of all G. H. Mead and C. H. Cooley) worked out the interactive model of the individual and the environment. They “waved in" the individual into the society. According to the experiences of the end of this century, the subject falls into pieces; we cannot speak about a central core, but the subject is made up of more, sometimes conflicting, identities. At the same time, the process of identification is becoming endless, often even problematic. The post-modern subject does not have a fixed, (in time) continuous identity. Identity becomes a “mobile holiday”: it is formulated and changed according to the representations and calls of our surrounding cultural systems (Hall 1987). Some scientific approaches try to seize ethnic identity on the level of individual strategies. They see it in terms of individual interests, in the development of personal power and strategies. It is obvious that such an interpretation of the phenomena would be too one-sided without considering the surrounding social mechanisms. Perhaps it is a more acceptable statement that there are norms, values, practices which become collective representations. Ethnicity is not a static social entity, it is more a process in time. Its exact appearance is a station on the way of adaptation to the new environment; the final station of adaptation is total assimilation.
