Identity, Geography and

Identities help us know who we are and who we are not. Collective or social identities serve to order social and political relations between different groups, while personal or individual identities, sometimes called psychic identities, are crucial in the formation of subjects and allow for identification of individuals with groups. Geographers are interested in identities because they are spatial phenomena in that people identify with particular places, landscapes, and territorial entities. These can be, for example, local, regional, or national identities. With the emergence of the modern nation-state system and modernity, national identity was for a long time considered a more important identity than other identifications. Nations, as Benedict Anderson suggested, are groups of people who invent themselves as “imagined communities” on the basis of a common history, culture, or heritage, thereby defining who is a member of a national group and who is not. These definitions of membership create boundaries between “us” and “them.” In the context of nation-states, such social group boundaries are thought to be reflected in the actual borders of states, but social boundaries also delineate ethnic or racial groups that do not necessarily lay claim to territory.

Recent globalization has shown that privileging the nation-state as the site of primary identification is problematic. Globalization and transnationalism have also served to highlight an important aspect of identities that had long been neglected: that the idea of homogeneous (national) identity needs to be critically examined and corrected toward an understanding of identity as not organic or static but as emerging in specific historical, social, and political contexts.

Identities are neither neatly nested in hierarchical spatial entities nor are they singular, nor are identity and geography easily mapped onto one another as early work in geography and the social sciences assumed. This entry considers identities in their multiplicity and in their relationship to geography, emphasizing the fluid and situational character of both identities and space. Creating group unity on which identity is based does not erase within-group differences or power imbalances. Gender, religious, class, or generational identifications, and different interests exist simultaneously within groups, and multiple identifications frequently conflict as individuals try to negotiate their identities in different social settings and places. This approach to identity as multiple identifications forms a break from widespread, earlier notions of identity as stable and occupied Western philosophy in much of the 20th century. Earlier ideas common in Western philosophy of an assumed coherent subject have been supplanted by notions that the human subject is constituted out of multiple identifications and of difference that do not necessarily amount to a coherent and consistent whole. Scholars now largely agree that identities are constituted through social relations with others. There are, however, different explanations with regard to how subject formation takes place, with the most prominent approaches deriving from the constitution of the subject in and through discourse, psychoanalytic approaches to the subject, and conceptualizations developing from combinations of these approaches that aim to resolve some of the problems inherent in each.