Crisis of Identities

Abstract

Modern identities are less bound to subjective personal sense of sameness or even continuity, perceived in self-constructive terms. They rely on short term leased friendships, incidental peers, looser binding patronage, and symbolic bondages. As quality of self-conscious living, this can be gloriously obvious in the South Eastern European (post Dayton) nexus. Collective identities on this side drift among disintegrating communalities. Unique unification of what is irreversibly given – body type and temperament, giftedness and vulnerability, acquired ideals etc. (Erickson, 1970) is even less related to open choices provided in available roles, occupational possibilities, values offered, mentors met, friendships made, or even first sexual encounters. The sense of living in permanent crisis, according the notorious imperatives of Balkan survival, recalls on predetermined fate, as driving force of timeless change. This fosters fatalisms and makes cultures vulnerable to Eastern mysticisms.