Definition of national identity - What it is, Meaning and Concept

Identity is a word of Latin origin ( identitas ) that makes it possible to refer to the set of own features of a subject or of a community These characteristics differentiate an individual or a group from others.Identity is also linked to the awareness that a person has about himself.

National identity, meanwhile, is a social, cultural and spatial condition ; these are features that have a relationship with a political environment since, generally, nations are associated with a State (although not always so).

nationality It is a concept close to national identity.People who are born in Brazil, for example, are Brazilian nationals and have legal documents that prove that condition.These individuals, therefore, have a Brazilian identity.

However, the most symbolic aspect of the notion may vary in each case.A person born in Brazil (has Brazilian nationality) and at five years of age goes abroad, may lose or neglect, with the passage of time, his national identity.If said subject, after spending his first five years of life in Brazil, lives the next forty years in Australia, never returning to his homeland, he is likely to maintain his nationality from the legal point of view , but not your social or cultural identity.

In other cases, national identity can exist without being certified by a legal document .Gypsies can speak of national identity even though their nation does not have its own territory or a State that protect them as a social collective.A man, therefore, can have Spanish nationality or any other country and gypsy identity.

Returning to the pure concept of identity, it is important to highlight that one of its fundamental nuances is the vision that a person has about their own characteristics, as they believe that others perceive it when they see it, when they listen to her, when they deal with her.It is precisely this very personal aspect, so private, that unquestionably affects the rigidity of national identity; It is not even necessary to have lived in a country to feel part of it, although this is not very frequent.

Although cultural exchange has taken place for hundreds of years, as can be seen by investigating the life of writers and composers, technological advances in the field of communications increasingly facilitate the approach to other lands without The need to move from our own Internet allows us to learn in a way that only a few years ago only science fiction could describe, and this has repercussions on a wealth that weakens more and more the chains that separate one nation from another.

For those born in the era of television, words of foreign origin such as "stop" or "play" were never strange; In the same way, they have been able to incorporate «email», «Internet» and «streaming», among many other terms, to adapt to the increasing possibilities offered by technology.Something similar happens with musical genres: a couple of Japanese dancing tango in a Kyoto theater is as common as a Spanish performing a rap written by it, in its own language.

How much national identity remains in these last two examples? If you take into account the number of hours needed to train in a discipline such as dancing or singing, in the case of a person who dedicates his life to study a style created thousands of kilometers from his home , at another time, with an absolutely different sociocultural context and in another language, these people probably do not have much time available for nenbutsu dance or cante jondo .It is therefore, if necessary, or positive, national identity.