Cultural Identity as an Anticipatory Identity
Cultural Identity as an Anticipatory Identity

Summary/Abstract: Identity is a conscious referring of oneself to a structured identification field, which includes basic attributes, values, beliefs, attitudes of a given community. When individuals or communities try to acquire a new, desired social identity and eventually abandon the old one, there often appears, to some degree, the so-called anticipatory identification. Identity conceived of in this way permits characterizing culture identity as anticipatory and, in this sense, incomplete; but its basic core, the dominant part, is already at hand and forms a new center around which cultural identity is structured. Cultural identity may be said to exist only insofar as a central zone is present, which attracts to itself the other elements of national identity, repeating in turn the elements of the identification field of ethnic identity. In this way the incompleteness actually determines the inner dynamics of the transition to culture identity.

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