Importance Of Making Sense Of Identity

Reading Response- Chapter 2: Making Sense of Identity As Oscar Wilde said, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” That is how I mostly interpret Professor Sen’s claim about making sense of identity. In the book, he generally discusses how an individual belongs to a plural of groups, and how one has to choose which one is more important, to make sense of one’s identity. He specifies how it is approached by using reductionism, which is identity disregard and singular affiliation. With the variety of groups we encounter and affiliate with, it all comes down to choosing how we make sense of our own identity. With the identity disregard approach, an individual ignores influences of other identities on their values or

I can see the possibility as an application in a form of loyalty, however, I believe it will be swayed from an identity one way or another. Many of our backgrounds and experiences have many influences to our perspectives which then affects how we take in identity. The exercise of finding how relevant our identities are and then weighing the importance of the identities is important idea in making sense of identity. One way to determine the importance of an identity is the social context. In applying this in the same situation of the dinner with the in-laws, the importance of having good etiquette would not be able to compare to having Filipino as my nationality. In that context, the in-laws favors the culture identity than the eating habit identity, but does that mean I will prioritize my culture over eating? Only in that situation or for the rest of my life? I noticed that identities are always prioritized in different ways, depending on the situation. Does that define who we are? Or is the consistency of prioritized identity makes us who we