The Situational Essence of Identity Expression: Interlocutor Effects in Ukraine

• In Event: Identity Change and Fluidity in Wartime: Evidence from Ukraine

Abstract

One of the oldest debates in the study of ethnic politics and nationalism concerns the degree to which ethnic identity is fixed or malleable at the individual level. True, few scholars today would argue for a “primordialist” perspective in any literal sense (Chandra 2001; Hale 2004). We know, in Van Evera’s (2001, 20) words, that “our ethnic identities are not stamped on our genes so they must be constructed.” But many concur with Van Evera’s other point, that ethnic identity, once constructed, tends to behave as if it is a primordial trait. In this theoretical tradition, the same bonds that hold people fast to their ethnic identities over time also make these identities inherently expressive: At the core of individuals’ senses of self and as key sources of their self-esteem, people’s ethnic identities are brought by individuals to every social situation they encounter, bringing positive utility when they are recognized and affirmed but quickly activating emotions like rage or resentment that guide behavior when they are not (Connor 1993; Horowitz 1985; Kaufmann 1996; Kaufman 2001; Taylor 1994; Varshney 2003). The tools we use to study identity in survey research generally reflect this perspective: When census forms or pollsters ask people to state their ethnicity, it is assumed that their answers in fact express something fundamental to one’s sense of self. An alternative perspective, however, calls this into question, seeing ethnic identity as fundamentally situational and relational in nature, being a flexible cognitive mechanism that reduces uncertainty by simplifying people’s relationships to a hopelessly complicated social world and that thereby helps people navigate it (Brubaker 2004; Hale 2004). Grounded in another set of landmark works on ethnic and national identity, this perspective finds that people’s identity is inherently multidimensional and that individuals can present themselves—and even think of themselves—in different ways in different situations, often but not necessarily strategically (Brass 1997; Chandra 2012; Laitin 1977; 1986; Posner 2005; Royce 1982). Accordingly, the ethnic identities individuals express can be expected to shift from situation to situation depending on the utility of relevant, available categories for navigating it. Our study finds support for the second perspective by randomly assigning interlocutors with different implicitly discernible ethnic identity traits across a large nationally representative sample of residents of Ukraine in the context of a telephone survey in April 2020, an exercise that we successfully replicated in September-October of the same year. In social situations where individuals are likely to discern implicit cues to an interlocutor’s identity, we show, variation in the implicit cues produces large statistically significant changes in the identities respondents claim to have. We also find that this pattern of situational fluidity in identity expression does not vary much across macroregions of Ukraine, including where ethnic identities are widely believed (including by key proponents of as-if-primordialist theories) to be most strongly “baked in” through processes of historical socialization.

Authors

• Henry E. Hale, George Washington University

• Volodymyr Kulyk, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

• Olga Onuch, University of Manchester

• Gwendolyn Sasse, Humboldt University Berlin