Inviolable Versus Alterable Identities

One of the most frequently mentioned quotes in social representations literature is Serge Moscovici’s claim that the “purpose of all representations is to make something unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar” (1984/2001, 37). This short quote not only highlights the importance of sense-making activities but also implies the active role of social actors in understanding their worlds: the familiar is always familiar to somebody, and there is no familiarity in itself. Consequently, Moscovici concludes, a social representation of an object tells more about a group’s identity than about the nature of this object. Social representations denote what “the group thinks of itself in its relationships with the objects which affect it” (Durkheim 1895/1982, 40; cf. Moscovici and Vignaux 1994/2001, 158). Our membership in social groups constrains the ways in which we come to understand an object, and conversely, by positioning oneself with regard to an object and by the style we communicate about it, we ascertain our belonging to a particular group of people, and simultaneously distance ourselves from others (cf. Duveen and Lloyd 1986). “Just as the water level in communicating vessels changes when the content is altered at only one point, the act of categorizing an object similarly places the individual in his or her rightful place, like a bilateral lever arm whose axis is fixed in the social field common to both” (Wagner and Hayes 2005, 207; cf. Clemence 2001; Harre and van Langenhove 1999).