Identities

Introduction: Identity and Geography

The idea of identity tends to take us towards closure. To identify something/someone, or to be so identified, means to delineate and define, to pin down what/who this thing is. It is a word that pulls us towards the assumption that we are able to know what a thing or a person really is; that there is somewhere in the murky eddies of selfhood or the collective being of a group, a truth to what we are that can be named. On the basis of such reified identities, wars are fought, territories claimed and murder carried out – think of the role of nationalism in the Second World War, the role of religious fundamentalism in terrorist acts, or the patriotic sensibilities that justify US imperialism. It is thus unsurprising that the question of identity has been much examined over the last century. Although it is a word that continues to be used as if identities were fixed and self- evident, scholarly thinking and debate is broad-ranging. One way of looking at identity is that it is how we become meaningful as human beings: you have an identity as a student, for instance, and such an identity has certain cultural meanings which shift depending on context. The study of identity is the study of who we are – as individuals, and as part of families, networks of friends and colleagues, the nation state, a religious group and a global society.

Identity is a particularly important question in Western philosophy, wherein much consideration has been given to enquiring about the nature of the self, often lending priority to the sense of a ‘true self’ (be true to yourself) associated with an identity that we (individual humans) can indeed possess, know and represent. In an essentialist tradition, concerned to locate the seemingly true or underlying ‘essence’ of a thing, identity can be thought of as something fundamental and unchanging. This might be biological: you are born male or female, and in different ways it shapes who you are and how you live your life. It might be to do with race or ethnicity: you were born with white or black [Page 628]skin, born an Australian, or Greek, or Indonesian – this determines your first language and can shape the way you are treated by the people around you and the cultural norms with which you grow up.

There is also an anti-essentialist tradition in which identity is conceptualised very differently. Here all forms of identity are changeable and seen to relate to transient and always changing cultural and societal norms. For contemporary cultural theorists and human geographers, identity tends to be understood more on these terms – as something that changes with time, something we construct, something that is closely connected with operations of power in the contemporary world, whether at the level of global politics or that of the politics of everyday life. Here, scholarship is more likely to think about identity in the plural and imagine how human beings inhabit multiple identities in the course of daily life. The term ‘subject position’ is important here and refers to a discursively constructed ‘position’ that individuals take on, and can (to a degree) move from. For example, an academic may see themselves taking up pre-existing subject positions that they move between as they move from the university (where they are ‘professor’) to home (where one is positioned as wife, partner, flatmate) to the field (where one is positioned as researcher, adopted daughter, consultant) to the pub (where one is positioned as a friend, compatriot, tourist).

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