I've been exploring this idea of "collective identity" and "the sense of belonging" lately, as a preparation for my next Spanish lesson. This is a topic that my tutor and I agreed on to talk about in our next lesson. I like having a theme-based conversation/discussion, even if I sometimes feel like I'm not good enough. For me, setting up a theme-based discussion holds a lot of benefits in language learning; being able to enhance my vocabulary in one area at a time, familialise myself with a certain group of words commonly used to talk about the related topics, and above all, the fact that we can actually have a very interesting and deep conversation around it. You can never guess what kind of context or sub-topic pops up during an hour-long lesson. It is also a great way to know different cultures, actually. Trying to better-equip yourself for the lesson by consuming related materials like articles, blog posts, and YouTube videos, adding new phrases and vocabulary to your arsenals, and deepening your thoughts on one specific theme for a week, naturally cultivates a way to see something from a different angle. You start throwing yourself a list of questions which drags you out of the moulded train of thought. You eventually realise what you thought would be an easy topic to talk about has morphed into something very different and very thought-provoking without no obvious answers.

But I digress. When I first started thinking about collective Identity and the sense of belonging, I was thinking more of a "stereotype" or "characteristics of the country and people living there." However, as soon as I started researching, I realised this theme was deeper than that. What I was originally thinking of seems to sit better in the definition of "national identity." National identity can be a part of collective identity. Collective identity, however, can be both broader (or sporadic, even) and narrower than that and refer to a group of people who experience the same event or the progress of time together for a certain duration. The key here, in my opinion, is the experience. After reading a couple of articles and watching a few videos about it, I defined the term "collective identity" myself as "the identity which is cultivated among a group of people who share the same experience, including both good and bad, even pain or struggles, so that when two people who share the same collective identity meet they don't have to explain a lot when it comes to their experience at least in the limited range of shared context." Some examples include: religion, generation, school (or even a school class), activity group (e.g. sport group or hobby group), support group, the same website's visitors, race, nationality, etc.

My intuition tells me that the narrower the group is, the more concrete their collective identity becomes. They tend to share not only the experiences and time, but also the purposes or objectives. However, when the group becomes bigger, the things start to becoming a bit tricky. Let's assume we have such a thing called the collective identity as the Japanese. I can sort of imagine what characteristics people outside of the circle think of when they hear the word "the Japanese" identity. I can also sort of imagine what characteristics we have in common, in a very broad stroke. But this time, some questions arise, such as "are people who were born in Japan but spent the majority of their lives in other countries included in the collective identity as the Japanese?" or "are non-Japanese people who've been living here for such a long time that they've already got the permanent residency included?" What I think is key to answer these questions is yet another question: do I have the same experience as theirs?

In other words, do I have the same experience as the person who was born in Japan but spent the majority of his or her life in other countries, and can they and I share this feeling of "yeah, I know what you're talking about"? No. Do I have the same experience and can explain my own without really explaining from scratch to non-Japanese people who've been living here for a long time with the permanent residency? No. I can't have the same collective identity as theirs because I simply haven't experienced the things they have experienced. I wish I had, but as the reality, I don't. There would be no sense of belonging here, without experiencing what they're experiencing.

This is what I think of collective identity, at least for now. My thoughts might change over time. It could be after my next Spanish lesson with my tutor at the earliest. Here is a list of questions I found online or came up myself. I'll try to think some of them through to deepen my thoughts. I'd love to hear many other thoughts and opinions about this theme, too, if you wouldn't mind sharing yours :)