Anthropology Through a Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory

7. Whose Identity?

Chapter 7 Whose Identity? Identity and Cultural Anthropology In a hybrid world, identity has paradoxically become a pressing popular and scholarly concern. The accelerated circulation of people, goods, and messages has kindled widespread anxieties. Unease over identity feeds ambivalent attitudes toward cosmopolitanism, ethnic mixing, immigration, standardization, international investment, and supranational organization. It motivates, at least in part, innovations in tradition , anti-globalization protests, ethnic renovation projects, revisions of history, and, more menacingly, the xenophobic hatreds that have embroiled much of the planet in intractable wars. At the same time, quickened communication has multiplied identity possibilities. A bigger menu of identity options would seem to offer greater opportunities for self-discovery, self-affirmation, and selffashioning . Proliferating identities also afford foundations for new social movements defending groups-women, gay men, lesbians, ethnics, disabled people, and countless others-whose concerns were formerly ignored or obscured. But the explosion of identity alternatives also has its dangers, for it can be disorienting, alienating, and divisive. The more the world shrinks, the more complicated it becomes to find one's place. However one evaluates these phenomena, their importance is evident. No wonder identity has drawn growing attention from social researchers. The study of identity occupies a key position in contemporary work in cultural anthropology. In response to the historical trends outlined above, ethnographers have begun to scrutinize newly recognized, increasingly salient, and emergent concepts of relatedness, including gender, ethnic, national, and "postmodern" or "transnational" identities . Of course, intellectual disciplines have distinctive concerns as well. The recent ethnographies of identity, intrinsically valuable as they are, engage compelling debates within anthropology. In particular, identity 148 Chapter 7 has become a site of intense theoretical disputes over the nature and locus of meaning. Such disputes show no sign of impending resolution, and the close examination of identity, especially in a fluid moment such as the present one, sharpens them further. Are meanings, above all identities , fixed or dynamic, symbolic or psychological, public or personal? Does the contemporary study of identity invite a reformulation of such questions? The ethnographic inquiries are, in short, inevitably ensnared in and productive of theoretical issues. This chapter explores theoretical disagreements, paradigmatic studies , and new directions in the anthropological analysis of identity. I attend particularly to controversies over the instability and proliferation of identities. I argue that significant future work will require anthropologists to think through the model of the person that underpins all approaches to meaning, all attempts to link public and personal domains, and thus, a fortiori, all accounts of identity. Discourse Versus Culture, Representation Versus Experience Let me first, in very broad strokes, recapitulate the theoretical controversies , turning later to ethnographic matters. For decades cultural anthropology has taken meaning as its primary analytical object, for the most part abandoning earlier projects to inventory traits, things, and behaviors . Cultural anthropologists have, however, differed among themselves as to what meaning is and where to look for it. In the Introduction I distinguished two general viewpoints, the representational (or public) and experiential (or personal) perspectives. Within the representational perspective , I differentiated between symbolic and the newer discursive approaches. Identity has proved to be a point of contention within the representational camp (that is, between symbolic and discursive anthropologists ), and, more generally, between representational and experiential camps. Representational and experiential positions should be thought of as ideal types: many accounts, even when they clearly lean in one direction or the other, cannot resist equivocations. I will initially treat the two perspectives as distinct, but they are not necessarily incompatible, and the most interesting new studies are likely to grapple with their inherent tension . Representational approaches, I have argued, dominate the field of cultural anthropology. Practitioners of symbolic anthropology, the classic representational practice, try to decipher public language, images, rituals, and performances. In its newer discursive variant, representational theory has acquired a temporal dimension, and with it a strongly political and linguistic slant. Nevertheless, the foundational assumption Whose Identity? 149 ofrepresentational anthropology persists in the work of the discursivists: that meaning is at root a public phenomenon, produced through the circulation of symbolic embodiments or conduits amenable to interpretive analysis. Critics question representational anthropology in all its guises for its focus on public tokens of meaning taken to be primordially social phenomena. They mistrust reifications of collective abstractions disconnected from personal experience and biography. The dissenters -psychological anthropologists and a variety of writers who favor phenomenological, humanistic, and existential approaches-often disagree among themselves but...