Is everyone Irish on St Patrick's Day? Divergent expectations and experiences of collective self‐objectification at a multicultural parade

We examine experiences of collective self-objectification (or its failure) among participants in a ‘multicultural’ St Patrick’s Day parade. A two-stage interview study was carried out in which ten parade participants (five each from ethnic majority and minority groups) were interviewed before and after the event. In pre-event interviews, all participants understood the parade as an opportunity to enact social identities, but differed in the category definitions and relations they saw as relevant. Members of the white Irish majority saw the event as being primarily about representing Ireland in a positive, progressive, light, while members of minority groups saw it as an opportunity to have their groups’ identities and belonging in Ireland recognised by others. Post-event interviews revealed that, for the former group, the event succeeded in giving expression to their relevant category definitions. The latter group, on the other hand, cited features of the event such as inauthentic costume design and a segregated structure as reasons for why the event did not provide the group recognition they sought. The accounts revealed a variety of empowering and disempowering experiences corresponding to the extent of enactment. We consider the implications in terms of collective self-objectification, the performative nature of dual identities, as well as the notion of multicultural recognition. A MULTICULTURAL ST PATRICK’S DAY 3 The psychology of crowds has been a topic of interest to scholars working within the social identity tradition in social psychology since the relatively early years of that approach (Reicher, 1984; 1987), and the psychological understanding of crowds has been transformed as a result. Whereas 19 th century accounts centred on mindless ‘contagion’ and the fickleness of crowd members (Le Bon, 1985) and situationist theories of the 1970s stressed deindividuation (Zimbardo, 1970), social identity theorists have sought to highlight the meaningful and normative character of crowd action. Accordingly, much research effort has gone into demonstrating how behaviour that seems irrational to observers is rendered meaningful when we understand the content of the collective identities at stake and the unfolding intergroup relations within which they are formed (Drury & Reicher, 2000; Reicher, 2001; Stott, Adang, Livingstone & Schreiber, 2007). More fundamentally, crowd action is seen as both a product of broader social relations and a source of social change, rather than some kind of suspension of normative conduct or detachment from ordinary sociality, as classic crowd psychology would have it (Reicher, 1996). As such, social identity researchers are drawn to crowd behaviour as a domain in which to elucidate processes underlying social determination and social change more generally. This line of research been further enriched by theoretical developments stressing the performative nature of social identities (Klein, Spears & Reicher, 2007). From this perspective, not only are existing group norms a guide to behaviour, but group members may also seek to consolidate particular understandings of identity content by enacting it. In other words, behaviour can serve to actively shape group norms in a desired way rather than merely following them like a script. Furthermore, such identity enactment may be constrained by the action of others, both within and beyond the group, who wish to advance alternative conceptions of the categories. Thus identity-relevant behaviour can be viewed as part of the process of construction and contestation of the ingroup category. A MULTICULTURAL ST PATRICK’S DAY 4 The notion of collective self-objectification (CSO; Drury et al., 2005; Drury & Reicher, 2005, 2009) speaks to how these enactment processes can play out in a crowd setting. Self-objectification entails the ‘imposition of self or identity’ (Drury & Reicher, 2009, p.717), such that, through collective action, one is able to impose one’s understandings of categories and category relations on events rather than having them imposed by outgroup others. The main concern for Drury and colleagues is how self-objectification can result in an experience of empowerment in the context of protest and social movements. For example, in one study of CSO in the context of an anti-roads campaign, activists were able to temporarily thwart an attempt to destroy a local green, reclaiming it as a communal space. In so doing, they were able to impose their shared understanding of legitimacy on events, an outcome that was experienced as empowering (Drury, Cocking, Beale, Hanson & Rapley, 2005). Drury et al. suggest that such experiences of empowerment arise from collective action that succeeds in changing the world in a way that accords with one’s identity. They argue that the achievement of CSO, underpins the experiences of exhilaration and the subsequent sense of commitment that are often associated with participation in crowd events. While this process has usually been examined in settings of direct confrontations, we can also consider the importance of CSO in crowd events that are not characterised by overt conflict in the same way. Indeed, one may expect to find opportunities for CSO wherever a group can overturn power relations (however temporarily) by changing some feature of the world to reflect its members’ understanding of their identity (Drury & Reicher, 2009). In this paper, we consider the relevance of CSO to events that do not ostensibly involve struggle and conflict, such as national celebrations. It has been suggested that one way in which nations and other large groups can take on a more immediate, material character is through events in which people are brought together in a crowd that in some way represents the entire group or community, such as A MULTICULTURAL ST PATRICK’S DAY 5 festivals and parades, even if not all of the group members are literally present (PMMRG 2007, p298). Research on the Prayag Magh Mela, an annual Hindu gathering in Allahabad, has explored how pilgrims experience the crowds as an embodiment of the ideal Hindu community, allowing them to live fully and authentically as Hindu devotees in a way that would not usually be possible for them, and enhancing their collective identity as Hindus (Cassidy et al., 2007; PMMRG, 2007). This work highlights the role of recognition by others at such events in fostering an embodied sense of connectedness, or what anthropologists have referred to as ‘communitas’ (Turner, 1969). Yet, while such events may afford the possibility of having one’s identity validated by others’ recognition, this cannot always be assumed. Anthropologists in particular point out that collective events are not the expression of a final, consensual, understanding of the group, but serve as important sites for the contestation and negotiation of potentially incompatible understandings of roles, identities and authority (Bryan, 2000). Different participants in a collective event might seek to enact different versions or understandings of the ingroup category, with some having greater means to impose their understanding on the whole event than others, even in the absence of open conflict. These points underlie critiques of the notion of communitas as failing to capture the contested nature of ritual, although the binary opposition of communitas versus contestation has not gone unchallenged (Coleman, 2002). Accordingly, a variety of experiences of success and failure of identity enactment are possible. In the current study, we focus on a national celebratory event in order to examine, first, whether the notion of CSO is relevant beyond settings of crowd conflict and whether it can therefore complement anthropological accounts of collective events by explicating the identity processes involved; and second, the extent to which self-objectification and its failure leads to experiences of empowerment and disempowerment. A MULTICULTURAL ST PATRICK’S DAY 6 Identity enactment, multicultural recognition and dual identities The study of identity enactment within collective events is important for understanding not only crowd behaviour itself, but also social relations more broadly, including issues pertaining to multiculturalism. Theorists of multiculturalism have argued that various forms of oppression have forced devalued groups into a demeaning image of themselves, and that multiculturalism as a ‘politics of recognition’ counteracts this by replacing identities imposed on minority groups with ones imposed collectively by them (Kymlicka, 1995, 2001; Taylor, 1992). This argument is based on the notion that ethnic groups have a need to express authentic cultural identities, a notion that is potentially problematic because it implies an essentialist conception of ‘true’ identities. CSO, however, provides a way to consider multicultural recognition in social psychological terms, without the need to reify ‘culture’ as through there were such things as true versus false versions of pre-existing cultural identities. Multicultural recognition can be conceptualised as an orientation to people’s identities that does not force them to position themselves according to someone else’s definition of who they are (Hopkins & Blackwood, 2011). Social psychologists have often approached the topic of majority-minority relations in relation to multiculturalism by examining the role of subgroup (e.g. ethnic) and superordinate (e.g. national) identities. Superordinate identities, whereby people represent themselves inclusively as belonging to one single group, contribute to more positive intergroup attitudes (Gaetner & Dovidio, 2000). However, it can also reduce awareness of inequality and impede social change. While superordinate identity often appeals to majority groups, minority groups generally prefer a dual identity comprising both subordinate and superordinate levels of categorisation (Dovidio, Gaertner & Saguy, 2009; Hornsey &