Review - Us and Them The Science of Identity by David Berreby University Of Chicago Press, 2008 Review by Jodi Forschmiedt, M.Ed. Oct 27th 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 44)
In Us & Them, author David Berreby takes the reader on an exhaustive and thoroughly documented journey through the differences between groups of people, both real and imagined.
Turns out, they are all imagined.
Drawing on history, biology, psychology, and recent events, Berreby demonstrates again and again that we invent categories with which to classify and group one another. When the circumstances change, we just as easily regroup. A classic example: the Cagots were a despised caste in fifteenth century France. The lived apart from others, had separate entrances to churches, married only amongst themselves, had no social or political rights, and were confined to certain occupations. This discriminatory treatment continued until the French Revolution changed the rules. Now, though their descendants may still live in France, no trace of the Cagots remains. The change in French law and culture simply eliminated the category.
In a fascinating chapter titled "Inventing Tradition in Oklahoma, or What I Did on My Summer Vacation," Berreby details a study conducted by Muzafer Sherif in 1954. Two groups of boys, carefully matched in age, race, and background, were sent to separate areas of a summer camp and given time to form tight bonds with their own groups before encountering the others. In a short period of time, each group developed a strong identity, complete with values, traditions, and mores unique to them. The boys also developed an instant antipathy to the other group, even though they were indistinguishably similar. Over the course of the study, the researchers manipulated the boys' circumstances (requiring either competition or cooperation between groups), and thereby altering the subjects' views of us-ness and them-ness.
Berreby calls our facility for categorization "kind sight." Both a blessing and a curse, kind sight enables us to form connections with one another on the basis of our commonalities, yet also allows us to create rifts, sometimes chasms, between people due to objectively trivial distinctions. While it may be beneficial to be counted a member of a particular group, the mere existence of the group, implicitly or explicitly defined, may do damage to those on the outside of it.
Outsider status is particularly damaging when stigma plays a part, and Berreby takes pains to explain the spiraling interrelationship between stigma and the characteristics attributed to the stigmatized. If, for example, members of a stigmatized group receive social punishment for making eye contact with members of the "in" group, they may soon be accurately labeled "shifty-eyed."
Kind sight is an essential part of human nature. Without it we could not form the alliances that we depend upon for survival. But nature doesn't exempt us from responsibility, and Berreby ends his treatise with a call for mindfulness--a conscious and thoughtful approach to using kind sight to help ourselves without harming others.
At over 300 pages of densely packed, scholarly-yet-accessible text, Us & Them takes focused attention. Berreby takes his time and makes his case. If you read Malcolm Gladwell's breezy bestseller, Blink, and wanted a meatier discussion of some of the same points, Us & Them will satisfy.
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