Cultural identity

If cultural identity means that a person achieves the fullest humanity within an accepted context of traditional symbols, judgments, values, behaviour and relationships with specific others who self-consciously think of themselves as a community, then it must be seen as a great contemporary challenge to many Western philosophical assertions about the person, society, meaning and truth.

This sense of cultural identity, as well as more extreme forms, can amount to classic determinism: individuals are subsumed under the relations with meaning and people surrounding them. Advocates of the centrality of cultural identity often make an argument rooted in an ‘authenticity’ which purports that, to fully encounter oneself, each of us must grasp and fully accept one’s psychological and social location within a specific group of people who interpret life in terms of the particular civilization that contains them.