Abstract

Everyday identity change is common after conflict, as people attempt to move away from oppositional group relations and closed group boundaries. This article asks how it scales up and out to impact these group relations and boundaries, and what stops this? Theoretically, the article focusses on complex oppositional configurations of groupness, where relationality and feedback mechanisms (rather than more easily measured variables) are crucial to change and continuity, and in which moral authority is a key node of reproduction. It uses the normatively weighted concept of transformation to augment existing research on boundary and identity change, while elaborating it to recognise the role of everyday agency in furthering change and moral inertia in impeding it. Substantively, the article compares the processes of everyday transformation of groupness in three cases that are very similar in historical depth, social embeddedness, symbolic opposition and everyday change, but very different in time-scale and with contrasting outcomes: successful transformation of reformation religious groupness; partial transformation of national groupness; and failed transformation of complexly-configured ethnic groupness in Northern Ireland. This allows tracing of the patterns and mechanisms at work. To anticipate, the article argues that everyday identity change can erode the moral authority of groupness. Its impact is generational and dependent on institutional linkages. The article highlights the importance of moral mechanisms as drivers of and obstacles to change; and it suggests ways that the obstacles could be overcome by radical policy interventions.

中文翻译：

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身份改变重要吗？冲突后群体转型中的日常能动性、道德权威和代际级联

摘要

冲突后，日常身份改变很常见，因为人们试图摆脱对立的群体关系和封闭的群体边界。本文询问它如何扩展和扩展以影响这些群体关系和边界，以及什么阻止了这种情况？从理论上讲，本文重点关注群体性的复杂对立结构，其中关系和反馈机制（而不是更容易测量的变量）对于变化和连续性至关重要，而道德权威是再生产的关键节点。它使用规范加权的转型概念来增强现有的关于边界和身份变化的研究，同时对其进行详细阐述，以认识到日常机构在促进变革中的作用和道德惯性在阻碍变革中的作用。从本质上讲，本文比较了三个案例中群体性日常转变的过程，这三个案例在历史深度、社会嵌入性、象征性对立和日常变化方面非常相似，但在时间尺度上却截然不同，结果也截然不同： ;民族群体性的部分转变；北爱尔兰复杂的族群转型失败。这允许追踪工作中的模式和机制。不出所料，文章认为，日常身份的改变可能会削弱群体的道德权威。其影响是世代相传的，并且取决于机构联系。文章强调了道德机制作为变革的驱动力和障碍的重要性；它还提出了可以通过激进的政策干预来克服障碍的方法。