IDENTITY AND MULTICULTURALISM: FROM DISINTEGRATION TO INTEGRATION OF THE COMMUNITY

The aim of this article is to trace the evolution of traditional notions of identity and multiculturalism within a broad frame of the European culture organized around the national state. The author claims that traditional communities undergo disintegration and quasi-communities evolve as a consequence of this process. Following the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and his categories of mobile identities in the postmodern world, the author suggests that neotribes can be seen as one of possible ways of how to organize the modern socio-cultural world, as a counterbalance to a traditional juxtaposition: society vs. community.