Identity Game

1 IDENTITY MATTERS

Many of us, much of the time, are able to take identity for granted. We seem to know who we are, we have a good enough working sense of who the others in our lives are, and they appear to relate to us in the same way. Sooner or later, however, a time arrives when identity becomes an issue . . .

Someone calls your name and you turn round. His face is familiar, but that’s all. There are no clues. He seems to know who you are, however: he knows your name at least. You ask each other how it’s going, and agree that meeting up for a drink sometime would be good. ‘I’ll call you’, he says. He’s got my number? ‘Say hello to Alan’, he says and then you each go your separate ways. With luck it’ll come back to you.

It’s a cold Friday night, rainy and windy. You’re dressed for dancing, not the weather. Finally, shivering, you reach the head of the queue outside the club. The bouncer – or, as he prefers to be known, the doorman – raises his arm and admits your fl at mate. He takes one look at you and demands proof of your age. All you have is money. But you don’t have enough. You walk home alone.

You hand your passport to the immigration offi cer behind her glass screen. She looks at your nationality, at where you were born. Your name. She checks your visa. She looks at the photograph, she looks at you. She asks you the purpose of your visit. She stamps the passport and wishes you a pleasant stay. Already she is looking over your shoul- der at the person behind you.

2 identity matters

Finally you get through to the order line of a clothing catalogue. You want to buy a new jacket. The young woman who answers is called Angela, although her voice suggests an origin in the Indian sub- continent. She asks for your name, address, credit card number and expiry date, your customer reference number if you have one, estab- lishing your status as someone to whom, in the absence of a face-to- face encounter, goods can be dispatched in confi dence. And also, of course, putting you on the mailing list if you’re not already there.

Others may speculate about our identity without us noticing it, or it becoming a particular issue.

On a train, the stranger in the opposite seat smiles and excuses her- self: she has noticed you reading last week’s newspaper from a small town several hundred miles to the east. You explain that your mother posts it to you, so that you can keep up with the news from home. She recognised the newspaper because she is married to a man from your home town. You, it turns out, were at school with her sister-in-law, and can remember, vaguely, her husband. He was something of a bully, if memory serves, but you don’t tell your fellow passenger that. Before leaving the train she gives you her telephone number. On balance, you aren’t going to use it.

In situations such as the above identity is, or has to be, established or verifi ed but the stakes are not high, one way or the other, and life goes on much as before. Identifi cation is not always so mundane or trivial, however.

One of the central themes of this book is that identifi cation, whether of ourselves or of others, is a process; something that we do. As a con- sequence, we may get it wrong, particularly when we consciously try to infl uence how other people see us, and it may matter:

You’re getting ready for a blind date with a woman who you have ‘met’ on the lonely hearts page of a national newspaper. It’s the fi rst time you’ve dipped your toe in the pond since a messy break up seven months ago. You are very nervous. You’ve showered twice, the second time to scrub off some of the overdose of eau de toilette and aftershave. But what to wear? Not too smart or she might think you’re a bit full on. Too casual and she’ll think that, well, that you’re too cas- ual. It takes hours, or so it seems. Clothes are scattered everywhere, but eventually you get it about right. You think so, anyway. That grey

identity matters 3

cotton-linen mix jacket you picked up in a sale last year, the black Dockers that you bought last week, a plain white button-down Oxford shirt. Should do the trick. It’s a nice night, no risk of rain. Off you go. The wine bar where you’ve arranged to meet is about ten minutes away, and just before you get there you stop and have a look in a shop window. Fine. Then you look down and you can’t believe it. How did you do that ? Nerves? Absent-mindedness? You’ve put on your favourite trainers. Trainers , for goodness sake. Scruffy, old, favourite trainers. Smelly trainers. Too late to go back and change. You take a deep breath. What will she think? Just got to hope that she really does have a GSOH.

There are, however, many situations in which we only have a limited ability to infl uence how others identify us.

The morning of your sixty-fi fth birthday, in addition to birthday cards and presents, brings the prospect of imminent retirement: a pension instead of a salary, a concessionary public transport pass, and special rates every Tuesday at the hairdresser’s. Beyond that, free medical prescriptions and invitations to the Senior Citizens Club at something called the ‘Day Centre’ are intimations of dependence and disability. Death. It may be the same face you see in the bathroom mirror but you will no longer be quite the person that you were yesterday. Nor can you ever be again.

It is the annual company dinner. You have always gone alone, and always left alone, early. This year, however, you have someone to bring. What will your colleagues, the MD especially, think of her? There is a promotion coming up in February, and you know what they’re like about that kind of thing. You take a deep breath, push open the glass door, and walk into the bar of the hotel restaurant that has been booked for the evening. Your boss, smarmy Mark, comes across, hand out, glass of red – certainly not his fi rst – in his hand: ‘Susie, lovely to see you.’ He turns slightly, there is a question in his eyes . . . Big deep breath: ‘Mark, this is my partner, Alison.’

You hand your passport to the immigration offi cer behind her glass screen. She looks at your nationality, at where you were born. Your name. She checks your visa. She looks at the photograph, she looks at you. She types something into her computer terminal. She asks you the purpose of your visit. During the conversation she checks again the

4 identity matters

screen beside her and presses a button under her desk, to alert airport security. Abruptly you fi nd yourself being removed from the queue of incoming passengers by two male offi cers and led away to an interview room. Already she is dealing with the person who had been in line behind you.

A rainy afternoon in Belfast in 1973 and you leave work early to dis- cover that the buses are off. Finding a public phone box that works you try for a taxi. Your usual number has nothing available: a bomb scare’s tying up the traffi c. Do you walk home? No, it’s too far and it wouldn’t be safe. You fi nd what’s left of the phone book and start dialling other taxi companies. Eventually you get one. Ten minutes later it comes and you settle in for the ride home. It doesn’t take you long to realise that instead of heading up Divis Street to the Falls Road you’re driving over the bridge into Protestant East Belfast. The next afternoon, when you come round in hospital, a distant voice that you don’t recognise is telling you that you’re going to be alright. You were lucky to get off with a shot through the kneecap, some burns and a bad beating.

So, who we are, or who we are seen to be, can matter enormously. Nor is identifi cation just a matter of the encounters and thresholds of individual lives. Although identifi cation always involves individuals, something else – collectivity and history – may also be at stake.

Mass public occasions such as the Sydney Mardi Gras, or Gay Pride in London, are public affi rmations that being gay or being lesbian are shared, as well as individual, identifi cations. For participants these occasions may, or may not, affi rm their individual sexual identities, and it may also be an occasion to have a good time, but they are also shared rituals, celebrations of collective identifi cation and political mobilisation.

Imagine a contested border region. It might be anywhere in the world. There is a range of ways to settle the issue: violence, a referendum, international arbitration. Whatever the means adopted, or imposed, the outcome will have consequences for people on both sides, depending on who they are. While some will accept it, some may not. Populations may move, towns and regions may be ‘cleansed’, genealogies may be rewritten. The boundaries of collective identity may be redrawn.

identity matters 5

Finally, here are two cases that are not drawn from my own experience or general knowledge. They illustrate the interplay of individual and collec- tive identity, the consequences of identifi cation, and the magnitude of the historical themes that everyday situations may evoke.

In 1935 a fair-skinned Australian of part-indigenous descent was ejected from a hotel for being an Aboriginal. He returned to his home on the mission station to fi nd himself refused entry because he was not an Aboriginal. He tried to remove his children but was told he could not because they were Aboriginal. He walked to the next town where he was arrested for being an Aboriginal vagrant and placed on the local reserve. During the Second World War he tried to enlist but was told he could not because he was Aboriginal. He went interstate and joined up as a non-Aboriginal. After the war he could not acquire a passport without permission because he was Aboriginal. He received exemption from the Aborigines Protection Act – and was told that he could no longer visit his relations on the reserve because he was not an Aboriginal. He was denied permission to enter the Returned Servicemen’s Club because he was. 1

When Youssra’s three-and-a-half-year-old son started nursery school, he really wanted his mum to come on a school trip. So she signed up to help out on a cinema visit. She buttoned the children’s coats outside their classroom and accompanied them to the front hall. But there, she was stopped by the headteacher, who told her, in front of the baffl ed children: ‘You don’t have the right to accompany the class because you’re wearing a headscarf.’ She was told to remove her hijab, or basic Muslim head covering, because it was an affront to the secular French Republic. ‘I fought back’, she says. ‘I brought up all the arguments about equality and freedom for all. But I was forced home, humiliated. The last thing I saw was my distressed son in tears. He didn’t under- stand why I’d been made to leave.’ 2

Each situation above illustrates how identifi cation affects real human experience: it is the most mundane of things and it can be the most extraordinary. Whichever way we look at it, identifi cation seems to matter , in everyday life and in sociology.

BUT . . . DOES IDENTITY MATTER?

It isn’t enough for me simply to insist that identity matters. Some con- tributors to the literature have expressed serious doubts about whether

6 identity matters

identity and identifi cation matter as much as social science appears to think they do. Their scepticism has some justifi cation, and is a useful reminder that we should not take identity for granted.

First, and most fundamentally, there are doubts about whether iden- tity, in itself, actually infl uences or causes behaviour. Martin, for example, has insisted that despite the high profi le of ‘identity’ in accounts of recent confl icts, such as in the Balkans, it ‘fails to provide an explanation . . . [for] why actors are making certain utterances or why certain events are hap- pening’ (1995: 5). This was a response to claims that explicitly connected identity to actions, assertions that under the circumstances the people concerned could not have done otherwise (and were, hence, blameless). Subsequently Malešević (2006) also put forward arguments broadly simi- lar to Martin’s.

In order to begin thinking about this issue, we must decide what we mean by ‘identity’. As a very basic starting point, identity is the human capacity – rooted in language – to know ‘who’s who’ (and hence ‘what’s what’). This involves knowing who we are, knowing who others are, them knowing who we are, us knowing who they think we are and so on. This is a multi-dimensional classifi cation or mapping of the human world and our places in it, as individuals and as members of collectivities (cf. Ashton et al . 2004). Ethnomethodologists, developing the work of Harvey Sacks, call this ‘membership categorisation’ (Eglin and Hester 2003; Housley and Fitzgerald 2002, 2009; Leudar et al . 2004; Stokoe 2003). It is a process – identifi cation – not a ‘thing’; it is not something that one can have , or not, it is something that one does .

So, following Martin and Malešević, it cannot be said too often that identifi cation doesn’t determine what humans do, although this claim is often made by politicians and others. Knowing ‘the map’ – or even just approximately where we are – does not necessarily tell us where we should go next (although a better or worse route to our destination might be suggested). However, without such a map we would not know where we are or what we, and others, are doing.

The matter is made more complex by the fact – which is also some- thing that the literature on ‘membership categorisation’ referred to in the previous paragraph teaches us – that classifi cation is rarely neu- tral (something that I discuss further in Chapter 9). At the very least, classifi cation implies evaluation, and often much more. Humans are generally not disinterested classifi ers. This is spectacularly so when it comes to classifying our fellow humans (and them us). Cognitively, classifi cation is organised hierarchically: A and B may be different from each other at one level, but both are members of the meta-category C.

identity matters 7

Classifi cation is also hierarchical interactionally and socially: one may be identifi ed as a C in one context, but as an A in another. In addition, because identifi cation makes no sense outside of relationships, whether between individuals or groups, there are hierarchies or scales of prefer- ence, of ambivalence, of hostility, of competition, of partnership and co-operation, and so on.

From this perspective, identifi cation and motives for behaviour might seem to be connected: to identify someone could be enough to decide how to treat her. This is one of the claims made by social psychology’s ‘social identity theory’, discussed further in Chapter 9. However, our classifi catory models of self and others are multi-dimensional, unlikely to be internally consistent and may not easily map on to each other. Hierarchies of collective identifi cation may confl ict with hierarchies of individual identifi cation, which means that the following can make com- plete interactional sense: I hate all As; you are an A; but you are my friend. Taken together, these points suggest that categorical imperatives are unlikely to be a suffi cient guide on their own, and that the ability to discriminate between others in subtle and fi ne-grained ways is an every- day necessity.

A further issue, to which I will not give extensive attention here because it is discussed in Chapter 14, is the emotional charge that may, or may not, attach to identifi cation. There are perhaps two things to say about this, the fi rst of which is that, even allowing for social psychologi- cal studies of identity (see Chapter 9), we do not have a clear picture of the relation between emotion and identity. Perhaps the most that we are enti- tled to say at the moment is that emotion appears to be bound up with identifi cation – typically through attachment – in some circumstances but not in others (Ashton et al . 2004: 90-92). The second point, which can perhaps be made with greater confi dence, is that where identity does appear to be an emotional matter – and hence capable of infl uencing actions – this does not seem to be inevitable, or natural. Identifi cation has to be made to matter, through the power of symbols and ritual experi- ences, for example. Flags and other symbols of collective identifi cation may, probably as a result of early socialisation and not necessarily obvi- ously, call forth the ‘inarticulate speech of the heart’ in powerful and consequential ways (Jenkins 2007, 2012a: 115-51).

So, while identifi cation may be connected to motivation and behaviour, the connection is neither straightforward nor predictable. Which suggests that when Rogers Brubaker, for example, insists that ethnicity is a cogni- tive matter, of classifi cation and categorisation (Brubaker 2004: 64-87; Brubaker et al . 2004), the key point is not that he is wrong – because he

8 identity matters

isn’t – but that other factors must also be taken into account. To repeat, classifi cation is rarely disinterested.

This raises the question of the role of interests: is it the pursuit of interests, material or otherwise, which matters, or is it identity? This debate has a considerable history, and the alternative positions appear in useful contrast if we compare two infl uential perspectives on iden- tity: Barth’s social anthropology (1969) and Tajfel’s social psychology (1981a). Despite points at which their understandings of identifi cation resemble each other – not least in their emphases on process – they dif- fer sharply in this important respect. Barth argued that identifi cation and collectivity are generated as emergent by-products of the transac- tions and negotiations of individuals pursuing their interests. He was dissenting from a taken for granted, structural-functionalist orthodoxy in social anthropology that explained what people did by reference to their identity, in particular their membership of corporate groups or ‘cultures’, such as lineages, clans and tribes. Tajfel, by contrast, argued that group membership – even if it was only arbitrary assignation to a group under laboratory conditions – is suffi cient in itself to generate identifi cation with that group and to channel behaviour towards in-group favourit- ism and discrimination against out-group members. He was taking issue with social psychological accounts of identity (e.g. Sherif 1967) that emphasised ‘realistic competition’ and confl icts of interest as the basis for co-operation and group formation.

In fact, identifi cation and interests are not easily distinguished. How I identify myself has a bearing on how I defi ne my interests. How I defi ne my interests may encourage me to identify myself in particular ways. How other people identify me has a bearing on how they defi ne my interests, and, indeed, their own interests. My pursuit of particular interests might cause me to be identifi ed in this way or that by others. How I identify others may have a bearing on which interests I pursue. And so on. Even the apparently single-minded, calculative pursuit of material self-interest does not exist in isolation from organisational and other identifi cations – jobs, positions and reputations – and shared understandings of value and optimal behaviour that are informed by more abstract identity categories such as ‘rich’, ‘clever’ or ‘successful’.

This is not to deny that people may sometimes pursue interests that appear to confl ict with how they are publicly identifi ed, individually or collectively. It does, however, return us to the proposition that classifi ca- tion (identifi cation) is unlikely to be disinterested. Identifi cation is, at the very least, consequential and reciprocally entailed in the specifi cation and pursuit of individual and collective interests:

identity matters 9

in practice, interest and identity claims are closely intertwined. What I want is in some sense shaped by my sense of who I am. On the other hand, in clarifying my interests I may sometimes begin to redefi ne my sense of self. But there remains for me a fundamental distinction between my objectives that do not threaten my identity and those that do.

(Goldstein and Rayner 1994: 367-368)

Can this really mean that a threat to my identity is more serious than a threat to my interests? Given that it is not easy to distinguish one from the other, the answer has to be: only if I think or feel it is. There is no evidence that everyone does think or feel that.

In fact, identity ‘in itself’, independent of other considerations such as interests, may not be a plausible proposition. Just because much con- temporary political, and other, rhetoric seems to set a supreme price on identity (Malešević 2006) doesn’t mean that we should. As critical social scientists we, in fact, are obliged not to. Even where individual or collec- tive ‘identity politics’ appear to be intense, the extent to which collective or individual interests are subordinated to the categorical imperatives of ‘identity’ should be a matter for empirical discovery, rather than a priori theoretical presumption (although there are epistemological issues here, since identifying the interests of an individual or a group is not a straightforward matter).

As the fi nal thread in this debate, scepticism about whether identity matters has inspired scepticism about the nature of social groups. This refl ects the fact that group identities are often treated as the most power- ful forms of identifi cation, in terms of their capacities – whether rooted in socialisation, peer pressure, perceived shared interests or Tajfel’s social identity effects – to mobilise people. It is in this context that doubts about whether groups are real can sensibly be raised. Given that ‘the group’ is among the most fundamental of social scientifi c concepts, this is not a minor matter.

‘The group’ is such a basic notion, in fact, that most social scientists take it completely for granted, as part of the conceptual furniture. Not everyone does, however. As one of the most consistent critical voices in this respect, Rogers Brubaker (2002; 2004: 7-27) insists that ethnic groups, as he believes they are generally conceptualised within social science – as clearly bounded, internally fairly homogenous and distin- guished from other groups of the same kind – are not real. What is real is a shared sense of ‘groupness’, of group membership. By this argument, the participants in ethnic confl icts are individuals and organisations, rather than ethnic groups. Ethnicity, for Brubaker, is cognitive, a point

10 identity matters

of view of individuals, a way of seeing the world (Brubaker 2004: 64-87; Brubaker et al . 2004). But it is not how the substance of the human world is really organised.

Brubaker goes on to argue, using similar logic, that identity in general is not a ‘thing’ that people can be said to have, or that they can be; thus it is not real, either (Brubaker 2004: 28-63; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). In this sense identity does not, and cannot, make people do anything; it is, rather, people who make and do identity, for their own reasons and purposes. So, instead of ‘identity’, we should only talk about ongoing and open-ended processes of ‘identifi cation’.

Brubaker’s arguments have much to commend them. It’s true, for example, that the only reality that we should attribute to a group derives from people thinking that it exists and that they belong to it (an issue that I discuss further in Chapter 9). It’s also true that identity is a matter of processes of identifi cation that do not determine, in any sense, what individuals do. Individual behaviour is a complex and constantly evolv- ing combination of planning, improvisation and habit, infl uenced by emotional responses, health and well-being, access to resources, knowl- edge and world-view, the impact of the behaviour of others, and other factors, too. Group membership and identity are likely to have some part to play, but they cannot be said to determine anything.

In the above respects, Brubaker is in considerable agreement with the arguments that have been put forward in earlier editions of this book. But he is right only up to a point. 3 The defi nition of groups that he pre- sents as wrong-headed, social science conventional wisdom – as clearly demarcated and bounded, relatively homogenous collectivities that are distinct from other groups – is not universally accepted. Another, more minimal defi nition, which commands considerable support across a broad social science spectrum, simply says that a group is a human collectivity the members of which recognise its existence and their membership of it: there are no implications of homogeneity or defi nite boundaries. From this point of view, Brubaker’s distinction between non-existent groups and real ‘groupness’ doesn’t make sense, in that groups are constituted in and by their ‘groupness’.

In a search for unambiguous ‘ really real’ analytical categories, Bru- baker is attempting to impose theoretical order on a human world in which indeterminacy, ambiguity and paradox are part of the normal pat- tern of everyday life (Jenkins 2012a: 17-19, 292-297). Although as social scientists we must aim for the greatest possible clarity, our concepts must also be grounded in the observable realities of the human world. If we try to impose concepts that are too straight-edged on this messy reality we

identity matters 11

risk divorcing ourselves from it, substituting the ‘reality of the model’ for a ‘model of reality’ (Bourdieu 1990: 39).

What, then, of groups? Brubaker’s argument is underpinned by the well-worn proposition that the collective-stuff-of-human-life is not a substantial reality and does not have the same ontological status as individuals. Human individuals are actual entities; groups are not. They cannot behave or act, and they do not have a defi nite, bounded mate- rial existence in time and space. Only the individuals who constitute supposed groups – their members – can be said to exhibit these attrib- utes, not the groups themselves. Although Calhoun’s characterisation of Brubaker, as offering a social theoretical version of Margaret Thatcher’s observation that there is ‘no such thing as society’, is uncharitable (Cal- houn 2003a: 536), it is not hard to understand its inspiration. One of the reasons why it can be described as uncharitable is because the ‘Thatcher position’ is not as foolish as it is often taken to be; it has real foundations in everyday experience. Groups and other collectivities are more elusive than embodied individuals (Jenkins 2002a: 73-76). They are diffi cult to grasp. They are not merely arithmetical aggregates: what constitutes and defi nes them is more than merely the fact of their members, even if those members could all be gathered in one place. What’s more, although indi- viduals can’t be in two or more places at once, in some senses a collectiv- ity can (and is quite likely to be).

Organisations – which can be formal or informal, extending in size and complexity from a regular pub quiz team to a multi-national corpo- ration or a nation-state – are perhaps the most substantial kind of group. But even organisations are somewhat fuzzy and unclear. In addition to their members – and who counts as a member is not always obvious – organisations are constituted in implicit behavioural norms and customs, in explicit rules and procedures, in criteria for recruitment, in divisions of labour, in hierarchies of control and authority, and in shared objectives. None of these things are necessarily obvious at any given moment, let alone all at the same time. To complicate the matter further, organisa- tions may persist despite membership turnover. People come and go, but the organisation can continue. There is more to an organisation than its membership, and the same is true for any group or collectivity.

So there is a sensible issue to be addressed with respect to the onto- logical status, the reality , of groups and other collectivities. There is a question to be asked, and its answer isn’t self-evident. Brubaker’s response is that groups are imaginary, and since we don’t treat imagi- nary entities as analytical categories, we should not accord this status to groups. It is only the sense of ‘groupness’ that is real. Real, but illusory:

12 identity matters

an important part of his argument is that beliefs in the reality of eth- nic groups, and actions informed by these beliefs, create pressing con- temporary problems. In a world of ethno-political entrepreneurs and organisations, ‘groupness’ constrains the landscape of options, and offers foci of identifi cation to which uncompromising loyalty can legitimately be demanded, which transcend and disguise the sordid pursuit of base interests. There is more than a suggestion of ‘false knowledge’ about his argument at this point.

And once again, Brubaker is right in part . . . but defi nitely wrong in the end. Groups may be imagined, but this does not mean that they are imaginary. They are experientially real in everyday life. In this respect, the empirical questions we should ask are: Why do people believe in groups? Why do they believe that they themselves belong to them? And why do they believe that others belong to them? The fi rst reason that they do so is that we live in an everyday world of observable, very real – even if modest – groups. Small informal groups exist, and are an aspect of local reality for each of us. Whether they are families, peer groups or friendship circles, our own experience tells us that groups are real. Formal organisations – also groups, let’s remember – are real, too. So whether informal or formal, whether more or less organised, groups look and feel real enough. They are actually anything but elusive. We all belong to some groups.

These small local groups are embedded within, and help to produce and reproduce, larger groups. To stay with Brubaker’s primary interest, ethnicity, families, peer groups and friendship circles are regularly identi- fi ed along ethnic lines and help to constitute larger ethnic groups. Small- scale formal organisations may also be deeply implicated in the everyday construction of ethnic collectivity: sports clubs, religious congregations, schools, voluntary organisations, businesses and political party branches may all be signifi cant in this respect. So, in local everyday experience, there is a three-dimensional experiential materiality to supra-local ethnic groups. They can be grasped and ‘seen’ without having to make any effort of the imagination. They are, in other words, ‘real’. Small wonder that people should believe in their existence.

There are also other reasons why people might sensibly believe in the existence of ethnic, or other, groups. Size, for example, doesn’t seem to be a barrier to the social reality of groups. There is no reason why all the members of any particular group should be capable of assembling in one place, for example, or should know every other member of the group. This is manifestly true for large organisations and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t hold for groups of any kind. Large collectivities may be very

identity matters 13

abstract indeed to their members, but may nonetheless have observable local, immediate representation or presence. The absence of formal co- ordination or collective decision-making across a large ethnic population – the fact that there is no central committee, and the group may be inter- nally divided in various respects – does not necessarily undermine its status as a group, either. Even small groups can be unco-ordinated, lead- erless, fractious or amorphous: families are often good examples of this (and are no less ‘real’ because of it).

Returning to my earlier argument, the minimal reality of a group is that its members know that it exists and that they belong to it (although what counts as belonging may take many forms). Returning to Brubaker, it is only the defi nition of groups that he uses – as defi nitely bounded, internally more or less homogenous and clearly differentiated from other groups of the same basic kind – that allows him to reject their reality. Judged against the observable realities of the human world, the concept of ‘the group’ that Brubaker uses as his yardstick is, indeed, a mirage. That does not, however, mean that groups do not exist.

A further important issue also needs to be considered, albeit briefl y: people categorise others, all the time and as a matter of course. Categori- sation is as much a part of our subject matter as self-identifi cation. This is the external aspect of the process of identifi cation, which I will discuss at length in subsequent chapters. The point in this context is that cat- egorisation makes a powerful contribution to the everyday reality – the realisation, if you will – of groups. Attributions of group membership are fundamental to our categorisation of others (Eglin and Hester 2003; Housley and Fitzgerald 2002, 2009; Leudar et al . 2004; Stokoe 2003), and the categorisation of out-groups is intrinsic to in-group identifi ca- tion. Who we think we are is intimately related to who we think others are, and vice versa. Categorisation also makes an important contribu- tion to the distribution of resources and penalties, and is central to both confl ict and confl ict avoidance strategies: part of the experience of being a group member is categorisation by others and its attendant conse- quences. It is very real.

To invoke the fi rst principle of social constructionism, groups are real if people think they are: they then behave in ways that assume that groups are real and, in so doing, construct that reality. They realise it. That groups are social constructions doesn’t mean that they are illusions. Ordinary everyday life is full of real encounters with small groups and manifestations of larger groups. It is the distinction that Brubaker draws between groups and ‘groupness’ that is an illusion, and it does not help us to understand the local realities of the human world.

14 identity matters

WHAT IS TO BE DONE ABOUT IDENTITY?

My argument so far is that, if for no other reason, identifi cation matters because it is the basic cognitive mechanism that humans use to sort out themselves and their fellows, individually and collectively. This is a ‘base- line’ sorting that is fundamental to the organisation of the human world: it is how we know who’s who and what’s what . We couldn’t do whatever we do, as humans, without also being able to do this.

On the other hand, identifi cation doesn’t determine behaviour, and patterns of identifi cation don’t allow us to predict who will do what. This is so for a number of reasons: people work with various ‘maps’ or hierarchies of identifi cation, these hierarchies of identifi cation are never clear-cut, unambiguous or in consistent agreement with each other, and the relationship between interests and identifi cation is too complex for individual behaviour to be predictable in these terms.

Given these conclusions, what should social science do about ‘identity’ and ‘identifi cation’? Let’s turn to Brubaker once again (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; reprinted in Brubaker 2004: 28-63):

[Identity] . . . is too ambiguous, too torn between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ mean- ings, essentialist connotations and constructivist qualifi ers, to be of any further use to sociology.

(Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 2)

the term ‘identity’ is made to do a great deal of work. It is used to high- light non-instrumental modes of action; to focus on self-understanding rather than self-interest; to designate sameness across persons or sameness over time; to capture allegedly core, foundational aspects of selfhood; to deny that such core, foundational aspects exist; to highlight the processual, interactive development of solidarity and collective self-understanding; and to stress the fragmented qual- ity of the contemporary experience of ‘self ’, a self unstably patched together through shards of discourse and contingently ‘activated’ in differing contexts.

(Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 8)

People everywhere and always have had particular ties, self-under- standings, stories, trajectories, histories, predicaments. And these inform the sorts of claims they make. To subsume such pervasive par- ticularity under the fl at, undifferentiated rubric of ‘identity’, however, does nearly as much violence to its unruly and multifarious forms as

identity matters 15

would an attempt to subsume it under ‘universalist’ categories such as ‘interest’.

(Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 34)

On the one hand, Brubaker and Cooper argue that the term ‘identity’ is overused to the point of becoming almost meaningless. On the other, they insist that one blanket term cannot adequately deal with the human word’s rich variety of identifi cation processes. Either conclusion suggests that we should abandon the term.

Brubaker isn’t the only person to have pronounced a death sentence on ‘identity’. Siniša Malešević (2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2011) offers a sus- tained and impressive argument that, as an analytical concept, identity – by which he generally means ethnic or national identity – is confused and con- fusing, means too many things and encompasses too many different pro- cesses, to be of any social analytical value. Identity has, he suggests, become reifi ed in social science as a phenomenon, the existence and importance of which can be taken for granted. Nor is Malešević more kindly disposed to everyday, commonsense uses of ‘identity’: he argues that it is an ideologi- cal notion – basically ‘false knowledge’ – of recent historical origin, which power elites manipulate politically to their own advantage. It is certainly not, in his eyes, a generic or universal aspect of the human repertoire.

I agree with some of Brubaker’s and Malešević’s arguments. I certainly sympathise with their impatience with a good deal of writing about iden- tity. However, discarding the notion of ‘identity’ for social analytical pur- poses is no solution (cf. Ashton et al . 2004: 82). It cannot really be done, if only because the genie is already out of the bottle. ‘Identity’ is not only an item in sociology’s established conceptual toolbox, it also features in a host of public discourses, from politics to marketing to self-help. If we want to talk to the world outside academia, denying ourselves one of its words of power is not a good communications policy.

What’s more, even were we to stop talking about ‘identity’, we would still need a way of talking about the fundamental human processes that I have been discussing in this chapter. We would still require abstract, shorthand terms that allow us to think about ‘knowing who’s who’, and the fact that people are, in their own eyes and the eyes of others, identifi ed as ‘this, that or the other’. While replacing ‘identity’ with ‘identifi ca- tion’ is an alternative that has its attractions, in that it refers explicitly to a process, it isn’t much of an improvement, because it is stylistically somewhat cumbersome.

We need to fi nd a compromise between a complete rejection of ‘iden- tity’, in the style of Brubaker and Malešević, and an uncritical acceptance

16 identity matters

of its ontological status and axiomatic signifi cance. Such a compromise calls for more care about what we say, and more modesty in how we say it. Since both ‘identity’ and ‘identifi cation’ are nouns, and therefore poten- tially vulnerable to reifi cation, what matters most is how we write and talk about them, not an artifi cial and mutually exclusive choice between them. Throughout this book I shall, unapologetically, use both terms.

So, how should we write and talk about ‘identity’ and ‘identifi cation’? Well, fi rst we need to recognise the limitations of both terms, when it comes to explaining or predicting what people do (as opposed to how they do it). We also need to recognise that if we use ‘identity’ to talk about everything, we are likely to end up talking about very little of any moment. We need to remember that we are talking about processes, and to beware of casual reifi cation. We need to unpack these processes of identifi cation, rather than treating them as a ‘black box’. We need to recognise that identifi cation is often most consequential as the categorisa- tion of others, rather than as self-identifi cation. Last and absolutely not least, we need to adopt a critical stance towards public discourses about ‘identity’, rather than simply taking them at face value. This book, I hope, takes all of these cautionary suggestions to heart. Not least, because identity – and understanding identity – really does matter.