title: Identification or the pluralisation of the person.
abstract: Man's life cannot be condensed into a single function, one ideology or a single sex. This is what one may see in our contemporary reality which becomes more and more heterogeneous in so many areas such as sex, speech, and work. The role of the double, the guardian angel, the anthropological twin, is at present held by a sort of psychological and social duplicity which plays with the various assignments attributed to identity. If one considers the shadow as a metaphor of the double, of plurality, one is led on one hand to a more complex order and on the other hand, to a communal conception of life. Since everything has its place in social reality, everyone can live there. The essential lesson of openness, induced through the notion of 'person', is not to deny what may seem strange or foreign, not to satisfy oneself with tolerance, but to appreciate the solid organicity it serves to impulse at its just value.
authors.affiliation: Sorbonne, Université René Descartes-Paris V.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Maffesoli
mesh_terms: D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D005783:Gender Identity; D006716:Homosexuality / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012725:Sexual Behavior; D012925:Social Conformity; D012931:Social Environment; D012933:Social Identification; D013240:Stereotyping