Sociology of knowledge heuristic possibilities in analysis of identities: from typology to topology

Abstract

In this paper the analysis of identity as a knowledge-construct, i.e. as a result of the process and synthetic (macro and micro) of building by structures and agent of social knowledge is carried out. With the use of synthetic methodology theorists (P. Bourdieu, A. Giddens, N. Luhmann, P. Shtompka), researchers issues of identity (R. Brubaker, D. Schnapper, B. Anderson, S. Hall) and a number of other theories, the author argues that identities at all diversity of its manifestations and bases are having homologous internal structure, the foundation of which are similar knowledge mechanisms. It is emphasized that knowledge in the constitution of identity can be heterogeneous, irreducible to each other, associated with different types and ways of rationality that does not give grounds to hierarchize continuum of identities. The author concludes that a unifying identities’ discourse, often dominant in modern sociology, is irrelevant to its subject matter, because both of the monifying trend of analysis of identity grounds (which is not the same as the analysis of the identification mechanisms), and ambitions to hierarchies in continuum of identities.