Microsoft Word - PhD Thesis Final.pdf - University of Limpopo ...

sufficient. Significant in the process whereby people acquire the identities
with which they are labelled, is the capacity of authoritatively applied
identities effectively to constitute or impinge upon individual experience 75 .
This is a question of whose definition of the situation counts (put differently:
power). Identification by others has outcomes; it is often the capacity to
generate those observations which matters. Labelling may also, of course,
evoke resistance (which, no less than internalisation, is an ‘identity effect’
produced by labelling). For instance, social actors with power like the state,
may use labelling as a form of imposing identities, and this may result in
resistance of such labels like in when most people in South Africa rejected
labels such as “kaffirs”, “natives” and “non-Whites”.
Social, cultural and political aspects on identity
75 R. Jenkins, Social Identity, pp. 22 - 23.
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