I didn't want to become one of those grad students who takes forever to find out what he wants to study, so I entered the Masters program at PITT with an idea what I wanted to do as a dissertation: national identity in the Ivory Coast. It sounds like a straightforward enough concept, but I encountered an article while I was taking a history course which looked at several case studies of the construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identities over a variety of geographical locations and historical periods that made me radically re-think the entire concept of identity.
It's a concept that makes intuitive sense to most people, I would imagine. It means who you are, right? The layperson could also probably understand quite readily that there seem to be many different levels at which our "identity" can be determined or constrained. A black person may feel more of a racial component to identity than a white person, for example. My religious identity takes primacy over my national identity in certain contexts, helping me connect with identities beyond my country's borders, yet permitting me to maintain a passionate patriotism in other contexts.
One of the problems with the term identity, however, is that even though it seems an obvious term intuitively, when you really think about it with theoretical rigor it means both too much and too little at the same time.
On one hand, the term identity seems to underestimate the power of the self to change or to consider solidarities beyond its "natural" affiliations--the very term "natural" implying the "too much" that identity can mean. For example what does it really mean for an American theorist to talk about the Mande identity of the peoples of northern Côte d'Ivoire? Isn't that somehow imputing that they have some sort of immutable, essential character inscribed into their very DNA? Doesn't that suggest that their ethnic component is somehow stronger or more difficult to transcend (if escape from it is even possible) than the national component to their identity? If so, what justifies that assumption? And does a Mande author describing Mande ethnic identity mean the same thing as the French anthropologist?
And on the other side, maybe the term identity doesn't go far enough. Maybe we're all composed of more than one identity, parts of which just get foregrounded in reaction to conditions in our environment or context. There is a trend in literary theory that has good reason to deconstruct the whole idea of identity as some essential part of a person's nature, and make it out to be more of a cultural phenomenon. There's a sense in which we can all choose for ourselves the identity we are going to have, but there's also a sense in which the society, geographical location, language, economic privilege (or lack thereof), ethnicity, race, sex we're born into makes certain choices more or less inevitable for us. Some go so far as to claim that all identities are constructed as a negotiation between individuals and their environments. But then we could ask, well are those really identities, then? Are they rather just projections, or even illusions or delusions of identity? Are they just performances, or acts, and therefore not truly representative of the core self of the individual? In the constructivist lexicon, the term identity seems to say too little, be too ambiguous to be really meaningful or useful as a rigorous theoretical term.
These are the problems that Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper bring up in their powerful article "Beyond 'Identity'"[1]. But more than simply critiquing a widely used term (and thereby taking entire movements of very smart people to task for slipshod thinking and use of ambiguous terminology while pretending to be rigorous), they propose some terms that I think brilliantly reinvigorate the quest for rigor all theoreticians should strive for. These terms break the problem of identity down into 3 categories, each of which unpacks a different element of the term identity:
- Self-identification and Categorization: how others categorize you can be different from how you claim belonging to a group, so both terms are necessary , but both invite the theorist to specify who's doing the choosing/grouping. This term has the advantage of removing the tendency to make "identity" out to be some sort of reified essentialism (an immutable essence made into a thing--rather than simply an idea) which has no agent.
- Self-understanding and social location: the first term here might SOUND like self-identification, but it suggests something a little more subjective, and maybe subconscious. It gets at the idea that we can have a stable "identity" which nevertheless changes over time, and informs our decisions whether or not we overtly signal belonging to a group larger than ourselves. It may completely ignore groups beyond our person altogether, but at least lets the theorist still discuss how we understand our relations of distance or proximity with other people. Social location may be another's understanding of where we fit in society, but doesn't impose certain "identities" upon us just because that's where we fit (which the term "identity" tends to imply doing)
- Connectedness, Commonality, Groupness: if you use the term "identity" to talk about "black consciousness" for example, you often mean BOTH the sense of connectedness people of the same skin color have, AND the subjective self-understanding an individual might FEEL as belonging to such a group. This makes the term "identity" ambiguous, but easily disambiguated by separating connectedness and self-understanding. Three separate terms are required for this, though, since each designates a separate operation of group "identity"--categories of groups may be connected even though there is nothing common between them, groups of people with something in common may not be connected, and neither connection nor commonality necessarily forms the basis for a group's sense that a "group" has been formed, whereas sometimes groupness is perceived without connection or commonality.
I have been assuming a lay audience for this blog, and have therefore been using the term identity over the course of several posts. I'm going to stop that. This post constitutes your education: you are no longer the uninitiated, and can now see the benefits of discarding the term altogether. Just as I will no longer use it for my dissertation, I will scrupulously avoid it in future blog posts, and hopefully thereby bring even more clarity to the blog.
[1] Brubaker, Rogers, and Cooper Frederick. "Beyond 'Identity'", Theory and Society, 29: 1-47, 2000.
Comments