Identity Of Magical Creatures In Harry Potter

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Identity of Magical Creatures in Harry Potter J.K. Rowling’s wildly successful Harry Potter series has been translated into over 42 languages and The Deathly Hallows alone sold 11 million copies in 24 hours. The sheer amount of children and adults reading the series has exposed many to Harry’s magical world and the characters and creatures in it. Rowling has created a world with obvious good versus evil themes and groups that have been thoroughly explored but the formation and actions of the creatures into identity groups are also significant and important. The obvious yet central division in the Harry Potter series of magical and non-magical creatures is a primary divide between identity groups yet it is the further framing between magical creatures that define ethnicity and result in the impervious social rank in the books. As we know, Harry Potter realizes his is a wizard on his eleventh birthday in the Sorcerer’s Stone. Up until that point he has lived and gone to school with Muggles and while he despises the Dursley’s and has no friends, he certainly identifies with his family and classmates even though he is usually on the edge of the group. According to Volkan, “a child has only traits of ethnicity or nationality until he goes through adolescence; these traits may be strongly felt in childhood, but they do not comprise a full blown view of the other group as a common enemy in the social and political sense” (86). Harry, in fact, later identifies the same group that he longed to be a part of as the ‘enemy’ but he also had no strong ties to the group and therefore was very willing to shed these traits in order to fit into a new group. Harry is placed in a family as he enters Hogwarts and in this peer group he identifies with a different sense of ethnicity that has a firmer and larger effect on his interaction with his environment (Volkan, 86). It is

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