Hard Identity and Soft Identity

Abstract

Often collective identities are classified depending on their contents and rarely depending on their forms. Differentiation between soft identity and hard identity is applied to diverse collective identities: religious, political, national, tribal ones, etc. This classification is made following the principal dimensions of collective identities: type of classification (univocal and exclusive or relative and contextual), the absence or presence of conflictsof loyalty, selective or totalitarian, objective or subjective conception, among others. The different characteristics analysed contribute to outlining an increasingly frequent type of identity: the authoritarian identity.

Keywords

• cultural identity
• ethnicity
• community
• tradition
• interculturality