Social Identities

July 17, 2007

One of the questions I persistently run up against is the nature of identity. I don't mean our sense of self.. the way I am an individual named Martyn. What interests me is how I have multiple identity commitments. I recognize too that there are many people in our world who have complex and even contradictory identities. There are gay Southern Baptists. There are people of mixed racial/ethnic backgrounds. These identity commitments seem obvious enough.. and I never have trouble convincing students of the existence of levels of identity. But how to define these identities has been more problematic.

Kwame Anthony Appiah's work The Ethics of Identity ends up spending most of its space debating the place of these identities within our polity. I get bored by policy discussions.. if you haven't already figured that out. But following Ian Hacker, Appiah settles on four qualities that define a social identity:

1. Availability of terms in public discourse (66). The formation of identities demands labels that separate people into distinct categories. Those labels are important.. and they do something in a society. They create consciousness of difference.. and therefore identity.

2. Internalization of labels as parts of the individual identities of some people known by those labels (68). I take this to mean that some people have to actively identify themselves according to common labels.. or else we do not have an "identity".. but just a social fiction.

3. Identity has a narrative component (68). Identities.. whether that of a Mormon or a Jew.. bring with them a certain model for life. These models are often embedded in books and films, but other times they are just an unspoken mental picture of an ideal life.

4. The existence of patterns of behavior with respect to people of a given identity (68). This follows naturally from the other qualities. If a person identifies himself/herself with a certain label, then others who fall into that label will be perceived as part of an in-group.. and treated differently as result.

If identities are defined by these qualities, then it is clear that there is nothing settled about social identities. They are as changeable as vocabularies. When reading older texts it should thus be possible to read not just to locate material facts, but also to read for cognitive facts: what were the identity commitments of this person. The labels a person uses to describe himself or herself.. along with the labels applied to other people.. are crucial clues as to the possible identity commitments of that period. I like to think of this as an archeology of perception.. and it is a practice that works quite well with travel narratives in particular.

Ancient identity commitments will often be unexpected.. and often simpler.. than we expect. One of the chief errors that I notice in students who read ancient texts is the willingness to impose current identity categories on the past world. A habit that leads unfailingly to confusion.