Professor Bruce Berman: Culture, Politics, identity: how we know who we think we are

The production of culture is an open-ended and highly political process that demarcates the experience of daily life and its continuity and change within social institutions from the family to the state. The construction of modern ethnic identities and their politicization revealed the crucial role of the 19th and 20th century development of the intellectual ‘disciplines’ and institutions of the humanities and social sciences in the imagining and dissemination through mass media and popular culture of the often conflicting identities of ethnicity, race, class and gender. These have created contending claims to interpretive authority and a cultural politics that both unites and divides us.