The study of identity in the context of culture: the methodology of latent changes

Abstract

Despite the fact that the current changes in identity are committed literally before our eyes, not all the obvious processes are significant for the researcher, while not all the significant processes are obvious. The methodology of latent changes tends to trace the underwater currents hidden from the eyes of the observer and the movements of culture, which in future development are likely to become the preconditions for the already clearly observed changes. Along with standard research methods, such as observation, testing and interviews, an indirect role in the study of identity is played by the comprehension of the experience of related sciences (primarily sociology, ethnography, anthropology), as well as analysis of epistemological twists, philosophical searches, new movements art. Observed in the evolution of modern knowledge, the transdisciplinary turn leads to the expansion of the cognitive field of psychological science. In this context, the ethnographic method, which has spread from the study of traditional cultures to the phenomenology of modern society, becomes a general scientific tool for analysis in the field of social and humanitarian knowledge. Throughout the twentieth century a change in the focusing force of the culture category was evident for a retrospective view. As a result of the epistemological turn, the transition from the consideration of culture as a factor of social life along with science, religion, philosophy to the understanding of culture, on the one hand, as a complex system and the universal context of human existence, and on the other – its heterogeneity and the need for differentiation of subsystems. The method of thinking through antinomies today allows us to comprehend these multidirectional flows as part of a single process in which culture becomes global and reinforces the position of a comprehensive abstraction in scientific discourse, while culture becomes local and breaks down into a multitude of subcultures and different currents. This complex and transitive reality is surveyed in a single thinking space by various modes of visibility – methodological optics and focusing the view of the observer.