Abstract
Few concepts have generated such diverse lines of scholarship as identity. It seems that identity now has become a core social science idea, as with Bourdieu’s ‘cultural capital’. Almost every research interest can fit itself under the broad umbrella of identity. Its capacious reach can be deemed to make it meaningless because it results in the concept being ambiguous and even contradictory, giving rise to disciplinary divisions, and this consequently segregated and fragmentary field presently awaits integration.
The editors of The SAGE Handbook of Identities spent almost four years exploring contemporary research by approaching identities from different disciplinary perspectives and around distinct philosophical underpinnings, in order to present a comprehensive overview of the field. Its interdisciplinary characteristics, its timely, encompassing character, and its detailed scrutiny of research all fully justify its description as a ‘handbook’.
The book consists of four parts: Frameworks, Formations, Social Categories, and Sites and Contexts. Part 1 includes reviews of major theoretical approaches to identity. Part 2 discusses how biology, racialization, culture and technology, relationality, religion, media, and schooling contribute to the formation of personhood. Part 3 focuses on the social categories that are usually employed by people to distinguish between groups, including ethnicity, gender, class, culture, morality, sexuality, indigeneity, disability, and their intersections. Part 4 examines the dynamics of identity in social sites, such as in social movements, in nation-building, in group conflicts, in the family, and in work.
The editors are well aware of the elusiveness of identity. Instead of giving an authoritative definition, this book provides a spectrum of understandings of identity in Part 1. In Chapter 1, Stephen Frosh sets out the array of psychoanalytic thinking on identities. The concept of identity bridges the exterior world and the interior mind, bringing intersubjectivity into sight, and therefore moves from ego to interpersonal ethics. The social identity approach demonstrates social psychology’s efforts to bring the person into social context. Here, identity is not only a personal project, but also is associated with group membership, with ‘social identity’ defined as ‘the processes that surround the way in which people define themselves as members of a social group’ (p. 45). Anthropology’s interest in identity has resulted from transformation of its understanding of culture. As the characteristics of ‘heterogeneity and multivocality’ (p. 63) of culture are widely recognized, identity now signifies an agreed understanding of a person ‘preceded by an awareness of cultural difference’ (p. 63). In Chapter 4, the authors discuss discursive accounts of identity, and present a united formation of identity as ‘a product of the social, and by extension, of discourse’ (p. 83). For feminists, however, identity is performative, a political tool in claiming rights and fighting for recognition. This vision of identity, along with post-colonial perspectives and subaltern studies, has resulted from political movements, which in turn gave rise to calls for emancipation, with identity seen as fluid and negotiable.
These different understandings of identity have given rise to a massive amount of research within different disciplinary areas as well as in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary works. For example, Chapter 11 on rationality, Chapter 14 on identity-making in schools and classrooms, and Chapter 15 on ethnicity, draw largely on psychological approaches, presuming identity as a private project, while Chapter 23 explains conflicts in Northern Ireland from a social identity perspective.
One criticism of this book is that, despite the editors’ claim that ‘the content of the Handbook ranges across the globe’ (pp. 4–5), the globe seemingly consists of only particular parts of the world. The West and the North are basically simplified as the UK and USA, and the East and the South as decolonized India, South Africa and the Caribbean. While this selection may well present areas of an intensified identity politics, an important line of study of the mobilization of identity in social movements more widely is ignored.
This, however, does not compromise the book’s value in pointing out the future of identity as both a useful analytical term and a rallying point for social movements. Disagreeing with claims about the end of identity, Mohanty affirms her faith in its prospects, and suggests that its future lies in ‘social justice and the politics of identity’ (p. 538). What should be borne in mind is that, regardless of social justice or the politics of identity, identities are associated with rights claims in social movements; and agency is indispensible to an action-oriented understanding of identities. Therefore, a greater focus on social actors and their multiple identity memberships should help revitalize and refocus identity studies. Overall, its breaking of disciplinary isolation, enhancing of mutual understanding, and laying out of a transdisciplinary platform makes this Handbook a milestone in identity studies.