There are 3 prompts. Each one should be a successful academic essay, from introduction to conclusion. Use the article to provide at least one quote from relevant text. Please give the outlines of each one before the essay. In the beginning of the quarter

20180311002450still_hanging_in_the__hood__rappers_who_stay_say_their_strength_is_from_the_streets___the_new_york_times 20180311002456conflicting_paradigms_on_gender_and_sexuality_in_rap_music___a_systematic_review 20180311002454rap_and_race__it_s_got_a_nice_beat__but_what_about_the_message 20180311010758the_sudden_rise_of_lil_yachty___the_new_york_times 20180311002459authenticity_within_hip_hop__kembrew_mcleod__1_ 20180311002458geography_of_american_rap__rap_diffusion_and_rap_centers 20180311040822social_identity__richard_jenkins
 

There are 3 prompts. Each one should be a successful academic essay, from introduction to conclusion. Use the article to provide at least one quote from relevant text. Please give the outlines of each one before the essay.

1. In the beginning of the quarter we learned about the historical roots of hip-hop/rap. Based on what we learned, what connections can you make between the historical roots and what is portrayed in the genre today? Provide examples and be prepared to use course texts to support your claims.
2. McLeod argues that hip-hop/rap is a culture threatened by assimilation. Think of another culture that is threatened by assimilation. Compare and contrast similarities and differences between hip-hop/rap and the culture of your choice. Your claims must be supported by evidence.
3. McLeod states, “Keepin it real and various other claims of authenticity do not appear to have a fixed or rigid meaning throughout the hip-hop community.” To help him better understand the range of meanings, McLeod developed semantic dimensions. Does this framework assist in the understanding of authenticity within the genre? If so, provide examples from our course materials to backup your claim. If not, what framework do you propose for authenticity within the genre? Provide examples that support your framework.

 

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September 24, 1995

Still Hanging in the ‘Hood; Rappers Who Stay Say
Their Strength Is From the Streets
By CHARISSE JONES

The young men blend together on the Staten Island street corner, a blur of baggy T-shirts and blue
jeans. They smoke and laugh like any neighborhood crew. But under one baseball cap, you’ll find a rap
star.

“I could leave, move out of the neighborhood, but the neighborhood is still in me,” said Jason Hunter,
the rapper, better known as Inspektah Deck of the platinum-selling rap group Wu-Tang Clan. “I stay
in my neighborhood because the people there, they keep me in touch with where I’m from. Park Hill is
like my bloodstream.”

For many rap artists, the decision whether to stay or leave is difficult. Stardom may mean a mansion
far from the humble surroundings where many of their lives began, or a more secure environment for
their families. But performers struggling to keep their creative edge, and credibility with their
audiences, are pulled by the communities where their talent took root. So many have chosen to stay.

But remaining in the old neighborhood can bring a new set of problems: the jealousy of former friends
and the feeling of not quite belonging anymore. Many rap performers have chosen an uneasy
compromise, moving to more comfortable neighborhoods that give them easy access to their old turf.

Some rappers, like Snoop Doggy Dogg, have been criticized for rapping about poverty and urban
violence, yet living like millionaires in suburbs miles away. “It has a lot to do with the credibility,” said
Havelock Nelson, a columnist for Billboard magazine who often writes about rap. “Even if you don’t
live in the neighborhood, you’ve always got to go back to make sure you’re keeping it real.”

But many rappers argue that they have as much right as anyone to prosper and live where they choose.
The rapper Ice-T lives in the Hollywood Hills, while Speech of Arrested Development lives in the
upscale suburbs of Atlanta.

Those who have stayed in their old neighborhoods say their reasons have nothing to do with the
expectations and pressures of others.

They stay because they hear their muse on the stoops of Flatbush, Brooklyn, and in the streets of
Hollis, Queens. They buy homes near childhood haunts because their parents never moved, and
neither did their schoolyard friends. They stay because when they are home, they don’t have to
posture and pose.

“Where is there to go where I would feel natural,” said Edward Archer, 23, a rapper known as Special
Ed, who was raised in Flatbushand now lives only blocks away in Canarsie. “This is what I know. This

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is what I was raised around. I don’t feel the need to go somewhere else, feel uncomfortable and have to
start all over again.”

Mr. Archer, 23, has rapped on the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn” and appeared on “The Cosby
Show.” But he chose to open his recording studio in Brooklyn. And he bought an apartment five
minutes from the house where he was raised.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Church Avenue pulsated with the thump of dance hall reggae. But
when Mr. Archer was a teen-ager, hip-hop was the siren call. He answered, rapping on the steps, in
the hallways, in the park. At 16, he had his first hit record, called “I Got It Made.”

When he tells his memories to a stranger, rhymes mingle with recollections of stickball and cheese
doodles, sweet girls and passers-by, floating by his parents’ house as they exited the No. 2 train.

People often ask why he has stayed.. Occasionally, he even asks himself, “late at night, when I’m
driving and I’m just looking at the environment.”

Then he remembers. “There might be better scenery” somewhere else, he said. “But it doesn’t
outweigh staying, because my foundation and my people are here.”

Still, Mr. Archer admitted, he is not the fellow he used to be. Age and musical success have opened his
eyes. Yet, as much as he has changed, the neighborhood has stayed the same, and sometimes he is
reminded of the chasm.

“I’m not really concerned with the hangout policy of the ‘hood,” he said. “And that’s a problem a lot of
kids have. They feel they owe something to the corner. You owe something to yourself.”

But many people feel that stars who come from poor and working-class communities do owe
something to the neighborhoods that spawned them.

Joseph Simmons, 30, stayed near his old Queens neighborhood, and he says it was not to be a role
model. But he knows he is one, not only to younger rappers, but also to the children of Hollis, the
working-class neighborhood where he grew up, and his group, Run-D.M.C., was born.

Mr. Simmons, 30, recently moved with his wife and four children to Jamaica Estates, an upper-
middle-class community less than a mile from Hollis. “I can drive down the street, pass a little boy and
he says, ‘There goes Run, and he’s from Hollis, and he’s still here.’ They can feel they can achieve the
same goals. It doesn’t seem out of reach.”

Mr. Simmons, an ordained minister, is on Hollis Avenue most days, driving his Mercedes-Benz to the
hardware store, taking his children to school, joining friends for a game of basketball.

The neighborhood was, and is, his inspiration. “What you saw in Run-D.M.C. was what Hollis brought
out,” said Mr. Simmons, whose group became the first internationally known rap superstars. “The
hats, the sneakers: the image was hard. That’s what Hollis made.”

Some may question the merits of teen-agers looking up to rap idols, trying to attain something as
elusive as stardom. But, the rapper Craig Mack said, “I’d rather hear somebody say they want to be a
rapper than a drug dealer.”

Last year, Mr. Mack, 25, had one of the biggest hits of the year, “Flava in Ya Ear.” But a hit record does
not necessarily mean instant wealth. For now, he lives with his wife and 1-year-old son in a

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comfortable, modest town house a few miles from his childhood home in Brentwood, L.I.

There are some rappers who want to move farther. “I used to feel like staying in the ‘hood was keeping
it real,” said the Notorious B.I.G., perhaps the biggest rap star of the moment. “But now it’s not the
thing to do. There’s a lot of jealousy and envy. So it’s time to go.”

Raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, B.I.G. (also known as Chris Wallace) used to sell crack near his
doorstep and served time on Rikers Island and in North Carolina. He used the fear and paranoia he
felt as a street hustler to fuel the lyrics that turned his debut album platinum.

Recently, he bought his mother a home and moved with his wife, the singer Faith, into a Fort Greene
duplex, near where he grew up. But he dreams of moving much farther, to “a place with a guard, a
gate.”

“To me, if you stay in the same spot as you were in when you were doing nothing and now you’re doing
something, that’s not progression,” said Mr. Wallace, 22. “Being real is taking care of your family, your
mother, your children, doing things with your money. When you think about getting wealthy, you
think of mansions. Ain’t no mansions in Brooklyn. You don’t want to deal with the subways and the
gunshots. You want to be comfortable and safe.”

Heather Gardner, the rapper Heather B., feels a cocoon of warmth in her hometown, Jersey City,
where she still lives.

“I never really know what I miss about it till I’m gone,” said Ms. Gardner, 24. “When you’re in other
places, you always have to ask where the mall is, where’s this, where’s that. There’s a certain security
about being home. You just know where you’re going. Always.”

Ms. Gardner, who currently has a top 25 rap single, moved downtown when she couldn’t find an
apartment in her old neighborhood. But she opened a nail and hair salon five minutes from where she
grew up. Several days a week she takes the short drive to that worn section.

She bumps into her cousin as she walks down the street. Her name is still splashed in ink on a
generator next to Crown Fried Chicken, where she wrote it during her days at Lincoln High.

She lived in Manhattan once, as part of the inaugural cast of the MTV program “The Real World,” but
Ms. Gardner held on to her apartment on the other side of the Holland Tunnel. “I was like, I don’t
belong around here,” she said. “I was like, I’m going right back to where I came from. Orange juice
don’t cost $4 around my way.”

But living in the old neighborhood sometimes means dealing with its pain.

The Wu-Tang Clan, whose members grew up in Park Hill and most of whom still live there, were
friends of Ernest Sayon, a 22-year-old man who suffocated in police custody last year. His death
sparked protests in the community, and members of the group say that they miss Mr. Sayon still.

“Everything from now on we’re dedicating to Ernest,” said Method Man, 24, one of the group’s
members.

The group has been the host on its own MTV special, and traveled to Japan. Its debut album, “Enter
the Wu-Tang,” went platinum.

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Yet they are bound to Park Hill, a Staten Island neighborhood where the red brick housing project
towers over weather-beaten storefronts, and a mural names the neighborhood’s young dead. The
group’s nine members no longer live in the projects, but most still call the community home. They
opened a business, the Wu Wear store, nearby.

“The only way I would really leave this right here is if I feel there’s no hope of me getting through with
what I’m saying through my rhymes,” said Mr. Hunter, who says the group’s hard-core lyrics bear a
warning to the young. “If I wasn’t here, they’d say, ‘You just saying that.’ But I’m taking the step to live
it.”

Photos: Method Man of Wu Tang Clan talking with children at the rap group’s clothing store, Wu
Wear, in Staten Island. The group’s members grew up in the Park Hill housing projects, and most still
call that neighborhood home. (pg. 43); The rapper Special Ed at Flatbush and Church Avenues, in his
old Brooklyn neighborhood.; The rap artist Heather B. in her old neighborhood in Jersey City, where
she still lives. (pg. 46) (Photographs by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times) Chart: “Rappers Who
Stay Say Their Strength Is From the Streets” From “Sucker M.C.’s” By Joseph Simmons of Run-D.M.C.
(co-writer) AGE: 30 OLD NEIGHBORHOOD: Hollis, Queens I’m D.M.C. in the place to be, I go to St.
John’s University, And since kindergarten I acquired the knowledge, And after 12th grade I went
straight to college, I’m light-skinned,, I live in Queens, And I love eating chicken and collard greens, I
dress to kill I love to style, I’m the M.C. you know who’s versatile. From “Respect” By the Notorious
B.I.G. (Chris Wallace) AGE: 22 OLD NEIGHBORHOOD: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Hearing the
coach scream Ain’t my lifetime dream I mean I wanna blowup Stack my doe up So school I didn’t
show up. . . My moms said that I should grow up And check myself Before I wreck myself Disrespect
myself Put the drugs on the shelf naww I couldn’t see it Scar face king of N.Y. I wanna be it. From “The
Bush” By Special Ed (Edward Archer) AGE: 22 OLD NEIGHBORHOOD: Flatbush, Brooklyn If you
come to the Bush, Keep a low pro cause you might catch a knot or a shot, or a blow to the face in this
place if you base you’ll be broken coming off the train you gotta pay another token.

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REVIEW

Conflicting Paradigms on Gender and Sexuality in Rap
Music: A Systematic Review

Denise Herd

Published online: 21 November 2014

� Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Rap music has major social and cultural significance for American and
global youth audiences and, along with other media, is believed to play a central

role in shaping adolescents’ beliefs, attitudes and intentions related to sexuality.

However few studies concerned with health issues have explored the content of

lyrics regarding sex and gender, with most research in this area focused on the

effects of media portrayals on sexual behavior and problems. Much of the schol-

arship analyzing sexuality and gender issues in the media comes from disciplines

outside of health and the behavioral sciences, such as cultural studies. This paper

compares literature related to sexuality and gender in rap music from a variety of

perspectives such as feminism, cultural studies, and sociology as well as from health

and behavioral research in order to deepen understanding of the lyrical content that

may influence sexual attitudes and behavior. The review illustrates that conflicting

paradigms, for example of sexual agency or misogyny, emerge in this literature and

that few studies are both conceptually rich and empirically strong. Future research

should address this challenge as well as explore changes over time in how sexual

and gender relationships have been depicted in this musical genre.

Keywords Rap music � Sexuality � Gender relationships � Feminism � Masculinity

Introduction

This review focuses on the presentation of gender relationships and sexuality in rap

music lyrics. This is a compelling research issue because of the major cultural

significance of rap music for American and global youth audiences (Mizell 2003)

D. Herd (&)
School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94707, USA

e-mail: tiara@berkeley.edu

123

Sexuality & Culture (2015) 19:577–589

DOI 10.1007/s12119-014-9259-9

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12119-014-9259-9&domain=pdf

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12119-014-9259-9&domain=pdf

and the critical role the media is believed to play in shaping adolescents’ beliefs,

attitudes and intentions related to sexuality (Aubrey and Frisby 2011; Martino et al.

2006; Primack et al. 2008; Peterson et al. 2007 Brown 2002; Brown et al. 2006).

Despite widely held perceptions that popular music influences sexual behavior,

little health related research has analyzed the content of lyrics regarding sex and

gender—most research in this area is concerned with the effects of media content on

norms and behavior related to sexual behavior and problems. Literature focused on

understanding how sexuality and gender relationships are portrayed in the media

often come from disciplines outside of health and the behavioral sciences, such as

cultural studies and the humanities. Few studies have incorporated these diverse

perspectives that could provide insight into the social and cultural role of media

portrayals of sexuality and gender portrayals as well as their impact on behavior and

social problems.

In addition, there is a wide methodological gulf in how these issues are analyzed

in different disciplines. Research from a cultural studies perspective is usually based

on in depth qualitative analysis of a limited number of selected texts or cases; while

public health and empirical work is often quantitative and based on a large number

of cases, but with little interpretive depth. As a result, there are substantial gaps in

the field regarding the social meaning of sexuality and gender in a genre known for

heterogeneous and complex depictions of gender and sexual issues.

The purpose of this review is to explore and compare literature related to

sexuality and gender in rap music from a multidisciplinary perspective which

crosses conceptual as well as methodological boundaries. This is an important task

with the goal of enriching perspectives on the content of images of sexuality and

gender in rap music to better inform how rap music constructs sexual and gender

related phenomenon as a baseline for more nuanced understanding of the

implications of media portrayals and sexual health.

The following analysis of the scholarly and research literature on sexuality and

gender relationships in rap music is based on exhaustive searches of the literature

from a variety of data bases that focus on research in social science, cultural studies

and the health fields. The key perspectives are derived from work within studies of

feminism and masculinity; folklore and media studies; sociological studies; and

public health.

Feminist Perspectives on Sexuality in Rap Music

An important thread of feminist theory argues that images of black women and

sexuality represent modern day resurrections of historically constructed derogatory

images. Evelyn Brooks Higginbothan (1993) and Patricia Hill Collins (2000) show

how European thought and the American political economy of slavery, race, and

labor relations helped control black female sexuality and fertility through creating

stereotypes of black women that deny black female equality and denigrate healthy

sexuality or femininity in black women. From this perspective, images of black

women have been shaped by the following principles: black women are unfeminine;

their sexuality is abhorrent (either hypersexual, asexual; or anti male and sexually

578 D. Herd

123

punitive) their economic and social outlook is similarly deviant (they are predators

or lazy and dependent on public assistance and men). The resulting ‘‘controlling

images’’ of black women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients

and ‘‘hot mamas’’ are used to justify black women’s oppression and to normalize

racism, sexism, poverty and other forms of social inequality. Countering and

challenging these controlling images has long been a central focus of black feminist

thought.

These viewpoints have emerged in some social science analyses of sexual images

in rap music. Stephens and Phillips (2003) used this framework and argued that the

basic stereotypes applied to black women historically—e.g. the ‘‘Jezebel, Mammy,

Matriarch, and Welfare Mother’’—form the basis of the modern more sexually

explicit and demeaning portrayals of black women as ‘‘Freaks, Gold Diggers, Divas,

Dikes, and Baby Mamas’’ in rap music today. In fact they argue that despite the

availability of a diversity of images for black women, the substance of media

portrayals has changed little over the past century. Furthermore, these authors state

that Hip Hop is a male oriented cultural space in which controlling images of black

women are mediated through a patriarchal framework that ‘‘includes sexism and

both the physical and emotional abuse of women’’, p 37.

In contrast other theorists, primarily those focusing on female rappers (Roberts

1991; Troka 2002; Goodall 1994; Pough 2007; Rose 1990; Shelton 1997; Skeggs

1993; Phillips et al. 2005) have identified counter narratives in this music which do

several things: promote women’s right to assert their own desires for sexual

fulfillment and pleasure apart from meeting the needs of men or being controlled by

them (Roberts 1991; Goodall 1994; Rose 1990; Skeggs 1993); resist patterns of

sexual objectification (Rose 1990; Skeggs 1993): promote women’s independence

and economic prowess (Troka 2002; Oware 2007) provide critiques of male

dominance (Troka 2002), and sexual and domestic violence (Troka 2002; Oware

2007). Tricia Rose’s (1994) earlier work asserts that rap music is heterogeneous and

fluid rather than monolithic with respect to female images of sexuality and gender

relationships, and that men and women rappers have rapport and are in dialogue

together. One of her central arguments centers on the sexual empowerment of

women to not only hold the ultimate power to control male sexuality, but to also

enjoy sexual expression, play, and innuendo without the need for sanctioning

through romance and dating. In fact, Rose’s explanation of misogyny in men’s rap

lyrics focuses on men’s fears and anxieties regarding women’s ability to control

heterosexual sex. In addition, she described a broader range of empowering

activities through which female rappers expressed feminist agendas—e.g. support-

ing and protecting women; responding to the needs and perspectives of working and

lower class urban women; redefining stereotypes of derogatory female images to use

them as images of female agency and empowerment.

Other important strains of feminist theory in this tradition emphasize the role of

women rappers in defying broader structural forces such as sexism and racism that

oppress black women and men. For example Shelton (1997) agues that women

rappers subvert traditional roles and the focus on the nuclear family through

presenting unmarried women enjoying motherhood—images which undermine

images of the welfare mother and combat the Norplant era ideology. Skeggs (1993)

Gender and Sexuality in Rap Music 579

123

asserts that women rappers ‘‘defiantly speak to the system of institutionalized and

hegemonic masculinity that places all women as objects through the representa-

tional processing of masculine fear and fantasy’’ p. 301. In her view women rappers

display assertive sexuality to liberate themselves from moralizing and victimizing

discourses promoted within the society as a whole. In fact Skeggs’ states that while

all music objectifies women, rap music is the only genre that responds to or protests

those views. Making similar points, Phillips (2005) identifies three strands that

define women’s oppositional voices in rap music—‘‘talking back to men in defense

of women and demanding respect for women; women’s empowerment, self-help

and solidarity; and defense of black men against the larger society’’ p. 261. Song

lyrics expressing these points include dialoguing (dissin) songs between black

women and men (e.g. Roxanne songs); songs critiquing domestic violence; and the

‘‘ride or die songs’’ showing black women’s loyalty to their men opposed to the

society or criminal justice

system.

In sum, feminist analyses of black women’s roles and portrayals in rap music and

rap music videos are polarized with respect to critiques of hegemonic controlling

images identified in the Hill-Collins framework, in contrast to the frames of

resistance and empowerment emphasized by hip hop scholars and feminist writers

such as Rose (1994) in her earlier work. Emerson (2002) and Oware (2007) both

attempt to reconcile these conflicting viewpoints through empirical analyses of rap

music videos and music lyrics. Emersons’s qualitative analysis of 38 music videos

concludes that they reflect features of both perspectives—e.g. the ideological

controlling image of the hypersexual ‘‘jezebel’’ as well images of agency,

independence, strength, and autonomy. Emerson also points out that the videos

often feature reversals of the traditional focus on female bodies from the male gaze.

Instead he notes that the videos have in common ‘‘the construction of the male body,

and particularly the black male body, as the object of Black female pleasure’’,

p. 131. In addition he states that the videos show mutual sexual fulfillment with

women’s sexual pleasure predominating. Oware’s (2007) analysis of 44 popular

songs by women rappers showed that their songs differed from men’s in more

frequent references to empowering lyrics about women. However he emphasizes

that some of these lyrics undermine empowering messages by strong sexual themes

that ‘‘self-objectify and self-exploit, seemingly employing a male gaze’’, p. 790.

Images of Masculinity in Rap Music

For the most part, scholars agree that images of manhood in rap music are

hypersexual, misogynistic, and violent. However, these writers offer different

explanations to account for these portrayals. They include the importance of

historical controlling images (Hill-Collins); sociology of black life in the ghetto

with a major sub-theme of strained relationships between African American men

and women; media constructions of black male sexuality and the impact of

corporate influences on rap music.

A few scholars locate the origins of misogynistic rap music in larger structural

forces such as capitalism and patriarchy which are mediated through racism, elitism

580 D. Herd

123

and sexism (Adams and Fuller 2006) or as part of the general valorization of

masculinity and cultural resistance to feminism (Weitzer and Kubrin 2009). For

example, Bell hooks (2006) states that the ‘‘sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of

thinking and behaving that are glorified in gangsta rap are a reflection of the

prevailing values in our society, values created and sustained by white-supremacist

capitalist patriarchy’’ (p. 135). In her view, hedonistic consumerism that richly

rewards young black men for lyrics promoting violence and misogyny is one avenue

through which these values are propagated. Hooks argues that this process mirrors

the essence of mainstream culture, which in her words ‘‘would not lead us to place

gangsta rap on the margins of what this nation is about but at the center. Rather than

seeing it as a subversion or disruption of the norm, we would need to see it as the

embodiment of the norm’’ (p. 137). From her perspective, members of white

mainstream culture are not concerned about misogyny and sexual violence

unleashed on black women and children, but only become uncomfortable when

young white consumers use it to rebel against bourgeois values.

Important themes in this literature trace the images of black male hypersexuality

and violence in rap music to the social construction of black sexuality during

slavery and post reconstruction segregation as part of the apparatus of institution-

alized racism (West 2001). Hill-Collins (2004) pivotal works describes the creation

of the stereotype of the ‘‘black buck’’ that embodied images of black men as ‘‘tamed

beasts’’—wild, violent, unintelligent and hypersexual beings used to justify

domination and labor exploitation under chattel slavery in the mid nineteenth

century (pages 56–57). After reconstruction, the image of the black man as a hyper

sexual rapist possessed by the insatiable desire for white women emerged in era of

wide spread lynching. These images helped fuel the campaigns for disfranchisement

and provided ideological support for extreme anti-black terrorism (Herd 1985).

Media and Folklore Images

Studies of contemporary media show how images of black masculinity are

constrained to conform to derogatory stereotypes emphasizing similar traits.

Turner’s work (2011) argued that in the analysis of TV shows, ‘‘we see the

perpetuation of the hypermasculine black buck and the objectified and overly

sexualized one-dimensional Black female who is reduced to ‘‘decorative eye candy’’

p. 187 (Emerson 2002, p. 123). From a similar perspective, Orbe’s (1998) analysis

of black male characters on MTV concludes that they are designed to show that

black men are inherently angry, potentially violent and sexually aggressive which in

his words ‘‘work toward the reification of a syntagmatic code: Black men are to be

feared’’, p. 42.

Another strain of research on images of masculinity in rap music describes the

role of culture and folklore. Kelley’s (1996) work emphasizes that as an art form rap

music incorporates mythical and folktale elements—with braggadocio ‘‘tall tales’’

figuring prominently. Kelly argues that some of the exaggerated sexual exploits and

put downs of women are less a reflection of real life and social relations than of

verbal dueling and one upmanship characterizing black performance and cultural

styles which pre-date rap music and in fact reach back into the early cultural

Gender and Sexuality in Rap Music 581

123

traditions of African Americans. ‘‘Playing the dozens’’ is a good representation of

this genre.

Other writers trace recent stereotypes of 1970s black exploitation characters such

as Dolomite, the Mack and Superfly as well as athletes like Muhammed Ali or

Charles Barkley to images of the badman that originated in the fables of Stagolee

and Shine (Ogbar 2007; Perry 2004). These authors argue that the ‘‘badman’’ is

partly created by racism and classism, and is feared by whites and middleclass black

society for not conforming to established rules, norms, or laws of society. Perry

(2004) states that the badman ‘‘is a rebel to society, living on the margins of a black

community that at once regards him as a hero and a threat’’, p. 128) In his view,

drug dealers, hustlers, pimps, and players exercise badman behavior by emphasizing

sexual and physical prowess, and embracing misogyny and homophobia as part of

their character.

Corporate Influences

A number of scholars have directly or indirectly alluded to the influence of

corporate influences on black male images in rap music (Kitwana 2004; Lena 2006;

Weitzer and Kubrin 2009; Englis et al. 1993). They suggest that stereotypical

images of black males as angry, violent, and dangerous have been created and

manipulated to increase sales of songs and music videos. Weitzer and Kubrin (2009)

state that ‘‘Producers not only encourage artists to become ‘‘hardcore’’ but also

reject or marginalize artists who go against the grain’’, p. 6. Lena’s research

substantiates the impact of corporate ownership on music lyric content. Her findings

showed that when independent labels owned most of the charted singles, lyrics

focused on the local environment and hostility to corporate music production and

values. In contrast, dominant labels featured lyrics with a focus on ‘‘street’’

credibility and commercial success in the hustler as hero. She notes that Billboard

Magazine editors said that corporations invested in puerile rap ‘‘because [it] was

sleazier as a lure, easier as an enterprise, and more speedily remunerative at the end

of the day’’ (Anonymous 1996: 4).

Some researchers have also described the commercialization of rap music and

artists through campaigns using them to market alcoholic beverages, athletic shoes,

and athletic clothing (Blair 1993; Herd 2005). Herd’s study (2005) shows that the

integration of corporate structures between the music and alcohol industries was

accompanied by a major increase in alcohol depictions in rap music. With respect to

images of gender relationships and masculinity, some scholars have described the

increasing connections between hip hop and pornography (Kitwana 2002; Stephens

and Phillips, 2003; Neal 2006) that might encourage more explicit sexual depictions

in music videos. For example, Miller-Young (2007) argues that the masculinist,

hypersexualized and antiestablishment qualities of rap music videos have made

them extremely attractive to the pornography industry for developing a new genre of

hard core celebrity rap videos. As examples of the merge of hip hop with

pornography she mentions the release of Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle and notes that

Tupac Shakur’s soft-core video ‘‘How Do You Want it’’ featured legendary porn

starts Heather Hunger, Angel Kelley, Jeanine Pepper and Nina Hartley (p. 271).

582 D. Herd

123

Other writers propose a more nuanced view in which representations are

mutually shaped by the industry and artists that use stereotypes to self-promote and

create their own branding. For example, Balaji (2009) argues that while the media

has a strong ideological influence on how black male identity is constructed (e.g.

capitalizing on the ‘‘thug appeal’’ of black men in rap music boosts sales and

income in the music industry and justifies repressive social policies in black

communities), he also states that artists engage in a self-commodification process to

create their own unique brands and social following. He cites artist 50 cents

willingness to capitalize on existing stereotypes of black masculinity with his own

self-conception as an example of this process. Miller-Young’s (2007) work makes a

similar point with reference to the integration of images of black masculinity in rap

music and pornography. In her view hip hop pornography serves ideological and

pragmatic arenas of resistance for performers. She raises the possibility that hip hop

artists use the form to resist black bourgeois values and respectability as well as a

way to expand entrepreneurial opportunities.

Sociological Research

In contrast to the above perspectives, some scholars argue that images of black

masculinity in rap music are derived from actual norms and behavioral patterns

typifying social life in black communities. Armstrong’s (2001) work is a graphic

example of these views. He asserts that rap music promotes and reflects a ‘‘rape

culture’’ that ‘‘is a complex of beliefs supporting a continuum of threatened violence

against women that ranges from sexual remarks to rape itself’’ (p. 105). Armstrong

argues that gangsta rap is a real cultural statement about rappers and their lives and

refutes other structurally oriented explanations, e.g. that corporate structures have

influenced the rise of misogyny in rap music. Weitzer and Kubrin’s (2009) more

nuanced work takes a broader view of influences on misogyny in rap music which

encompasses larger social forces, norms about gender relations, the music industry

and local neighborhood conditions. However citing Bourgois (1995, 276, 275) these

authors focus on the prevalence of misogyny in rap music as a reflection of the

‘‘street code’’ of young males in disadvantaged communities which strip men of

traditional sources of dignity and promote values emphasizing a high level of male

promiscuity, the ‘‘celebration of the gigolo image’’, the value of ‘‘being an

economic parasite’’ on one’s girlfriends, and justifications for violence against

women, p. 9. Weitzer and Kubrin argued that these elements of the street code

parallel five misogynistic themes that they identified in their content analysis of rap

music lyrics: (a) derogatory naming and shaming of women, (b) sexual objecti-

fication of women, (c) distrust of women, (d) legitimation of violence against

women, and (e) celebration of prostitution and pimping.

Taking a slightly different approach, Collins (2005), stated that the growth of a

prison culture in the 1980s has influenced ideas about masculinity and gender

relationships in African American communities. In her view the incarceration of

large numbers of black men has lead to a cultural focus that valorizes thug life and

increases misogyny and homophobia in black youth. Kitwana (2002) argues that the

Gender and Sexuality in Rap Music 583

123

misogynist descriptions of black women in music dominated by black men reflects

real tensions in gender relationships within African American communities.

Rose’s (2008) later work echoes similar themes—she asserts that within rap

music ‘‘Sexism is visible, vulgar, aggressive and popular’’ (p. 114), fueled by a

complex of factors including sexism in black communities that influences rappers’

attitudes and lyrics as well as the patriarchal values permeating the wider society.

Health/Behavioral Research

The content of sexual imagery in rap music has received very little attention in

health-related literature. For example, we were able to identify only two studies

focused on this topic in the public health literature. Primack et al. (2008) explored

the prevalence of ‘‘degrading and non-degrading’’ sexual images in different music

genres. Degrading sex was defined as sex with three different attributes: insatiable

sexual appetite—usually on the part of males, objectification—usually of females

and ‘‘sexual value placed solely on physical characteristics’’, p. 594. Findings of the

study showed that references to degrading sex were almost twice as common as

references to non-degrading sex and that these references were more prominent in

rap music than in other genres such as Country or Rhythm and Blues/Hip Hop.

Songs with degrading sex were also more likely to mention alcohol and drug use,

violence, and weapons compared to songs mentioning non-degrading sex. From a

similar perspective, Aubrey and Frisby (2011) showed that sexual objectification

was more prominent in R&B/hip hop and pop videos than in country music videos.

In contrast, there is a considerable body of health-related literature examining the

impact of music lyrics and music videos on adolescent sexual norms, attitudes and

behavior. First, some of this research asserts that negative portrayals of sexual and

gender relationships—e.g. objectification, degradation, or stereotypes—promotes

unhealthy sexual attitudes or behavior among youth. Aubrey et al. (2011) found that

watching music videos with highly objectified women artists predicted oppositional

sexual beliefs, acceptance of interpersonal violence and trends towards tolerance of

sexual harassment among male college students. Martino et al. 2006 and Primack

et al. 2008 both reported that youth listening to ‘‘degrading’’ sexual content were

more likely to start engaging in sexual intercourse or participate in higher levels of

sexual activity while youth exposed to non degrading sexual lyrics of music did not

show significant changes in their sexual behavior. Peterson et al. (2007) found that

adolescents who perceived more sexual stereotypes in rap music were more likely to

have more than one sexual partner, to engage in binge drinking, test positive for

marijuana and have a negative body image.

Second, some researchers (Pardun et al. 2005) have argued that amount rather

than type of exposure to sexual content is the more critical determinant of

adolescent sexual behavior and related intentions. For example, L’Engle et al.

(2006) found that youth with higher levels of exposure to sexual content in the

media are more like to have intentions to have sexual intercourse and to engage in

sex than other youth. In addition, Wingood’s (2003) study showed that greater

exposure to rap music vides was associated with having more sexual partners as

584 D. Herd

123

well as having an STD and social problems such as school violence, being arrested

and using alcohol and drugs. Brown’s (2006) research found that white adolescents

aged 14–16 with the most media exposure were more than twice as likely to have

had sex than those with the least exposure. However after controlling for parent

attitudes and peer norms, this relationship did not hold for black youth. Kistler and

Lee’s (2009) study reported that watching MTV sexually oriented videos

significantly increased scores of approving premarital sex in adolescents. Lou

et al. (2012) also showed that use of the mass media and media messages influenced

sexually related knowledge and behaviors in unmarried Asian and young adult

respondents.

However, some literature has focused on explaining how media influence sexual

behavior beyond exposure effects. The media practice model (Brown 2002) assumes

that adolescents are not passive recipients of media messages, but that they have

agency and choice in selecting and interacting with media based on their own sense

of identity. The model assumes that the impact of the media on youth is shaped by

their personal attributes. As an example of this perspective, Brown et al. (2005)

reported that earlier maturing girls were more interested than girls maturing later in

viewing or listening to sexual media content. Earlier maturing girls were also more

likely to interpret media messages as approving of teens being sexually active.

L’Engle et al. (2006) also showed that teens interpretation as well as exposure to sex

in the media influenced their sexual behavior. Those teens that viewed the media as

being supportive of teen sexual behavior had a higher level of intentions to have

sexual intercourse and more sexual activity. In addition Ter Bogt et al. (2010)

argued that preferences, rather than exposure were associated with permissive

sexual attitudes and gender stereotypes. For both girls and boys, preferences for hip

hop and hard-house music were associated positively with gender stereotypes and

preference for classical music was negatively associated with gender stereotypes.

Taking these perspectives even further, Arnett (1995) argues that adolescents ability

to control media choices allows them to engage in a form of self-socialization based

on their own individual preferences and personalities in a way that is not possible

with broader socializing agents such as family, school, community and the legal

system.

Cognitively oriented theories such as Priming Theory and Social Cognitive

Theory emphasize the effect of media on sexuality through perception and learning

by shaping belief systems. In Priming Theory, Ter Bogt et al. (2010) theorizes that

stimuli in songs and music activate cognitive schemas and reinforce and strengthen

them through repetition. From this perspective, stereotypical depictions of gender

roles can promote/activate the development of conforming stereotypical belief

systems.

Finally, some research has applied sexual script theory—normative frameworks

for making sense of sexual behavior—to music influences on sexual behavior.

Stephens and Phillips (2003) state that African American pre adolescents belief

systems mirror the sexual scripts circulating in African American culture including

the Diva, Gold Digger, Freak, Dyke, Gangster Bitch, Sister Savior, Earth Mother,

and Baby Mama.

Gender and Sexuality in Rap Music 585

123

Discussion and Conclusions

This review of portrayals of sexuality and gender relationships in rap music

identified a fairly wide range of approaches rooted in feminist theory, cultural

studies, sociology and behavioral science, some of which are at odds with each

other. For example, some strains of feminist theory have argued that portrayals of

women and gender relationships reflect the historical oppression associated with

slavery and domination, while others have focused on narratives of women’s

empowerment within the music. Analyses of the role of masculinity in rap music

have generally emphasized misogyny and violence often attributed to actual social

patterns within urban communities. On the other hand some critical studies have

examined the social and cultural construction of sexuality and gender in the music

and pointed to the influence of structural factors such as patriarchy and corporate

practices in shaping how gender relationships and sexual content are portrayed in

the music. Behavioral science researchers generally have had little to say about the

sexual and gender related content of rap music, but nonetheless conclude the content

is important because it influences sexual attitudes, behavior and intention.

The different conceptual approaches that have been applied to images of

sexuality and gender relationships in rap music are interesting and thought

provoking—however, for the most part they have not been informed by strong

empirical work. Rap music itself is richly varied and provides ample material to

illustrate a variety of specific conceptual frameworks. Existing research has mined

some of these images and linked them to important theoretical contexts but has not

provided substantial analysis of how gender and sexual relationships are depicted

within the genre as a whole.

On the other hand, empirical work on this topic is extremely limited and

generally lacks theoretical richness. The virtual absence of content studies in health

research and the simplistic dichotomous frames used to describe sexual portrayals

(e.g. as ‘‘degrading or non-degrading’’) illustrate this problem.

In addition, none of the literature discussed analyzes changes in portrayals of

sexuality and gender relationships over time in rap music. The genre is now

approximately 35 years old and has undergone a number of changes in corporate

ownership, audiences, and sub genre types. These kinds of changes would be

expected to influence lyrical content related to portrayals of gender relationships and

sexuality. For example, research on other social issues illustrates that images of

alcohol, illegal drugs, and violence have increased substantially over time in rap

music lyrics in response to corporate pressures and other societal factors (Herd

2005, 2008, 2009).

Given the importance of music as a social influence on the development of sexual

attitudes and gender norms among youth, it is important to understand more about

the content of the music. Existing studies indicate that the content is important, but

lack precision in identifying what aspects of gender and sexuality portrayals are

influential. Part of the problem may be that analyses of the content of lyrics in health

research are very limited in terms of understanding the varied landscape of sexual

portrayals and gender images in the music and their social meanings.

586 D. Herd

123

As such, one of the critical questions for future research is to understand more

about the variety of gender and sexual relationships depicted in rap music. For

example the music includes lyrics about courtship and love; sexual gratification;

sexual violence; and sexual and economic exploitation among others. Some

researchers have hinted at this variety by dichotomizing sexual depictions as

‘‘degrading versus non-degrading’’. However, more analysis is needed to provide

insight into the nuances and contexts of different kinds of sexual relationships

portrayed as well as their prevalence in the music. This kind of analysis could

provide a basis for exploring how particular theoretical frameworks map onto

portrayals of gender relationships and sexuality in rap music.

Another compelling question is to understand whether these images have varied

significantly over time. As an illustration of this possibility, Rose’s (1990, 1994)

earlier work emphasized women’s sexual power and skill in confronting men’s

attempts to control and subordinate women in rap music; however her later work

(Rose 2008) points to the blatant and aggressive sexism characterizing popular

music in the genre. A related issue to explore is whether there have been shifts in the

social context of sexual behavior in rap music. For example, have their been

changes in the association with sexuality and social behavior such as romance,

glamorous lifestyles, drug and alcohol use, crime and violence over time? Future

research should focus on addressing these questions by providing in depth empirical

work informed by relevant theories.

Acknowledgments Funding for this research was provided by a University of California Faculty
Research Grant.

Conflict of interest The author declares that the author has no conflict of interest.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13511610.1993.9968358

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF03159848

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11199-010-9815-1

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11199-010-9766-6

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1097184X08327696

• Conflicting Paradigms on Gender and Sexuality in Rap Music: A Systematic Review

Abstract
Introduction
Feminist Perspectives on Sexuality in Rap Music
Images of Masculinity in Rap Music
Media and Folklore Images
Corporate Influences
Sociological Research
Health/Behavioral Research
Discussion and Conclusions
Acknowledgments
References

Rap and Race: It’s Got a Nice Beat, but What about the Message?
Author(s): Rachel E. Sullivan
Source: Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 33, No. 5 (May, 2003), pp. 605-622
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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Journal of Black Studies

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RAP AND RACE

It’s Got a Nice Beat, But What

About the Message?

RACHEL E. SULLIVAN
University of Connecticut

This article examines adolescents’ attitudes toward rap music, specifically

racial differences in Black and White adolescents’ perceptions of rap. Rap

critics have long touted the allegedly deleterious effects of rap, but few

researchers have asked fans themselves how rap has affected them. This

study uses a survey of 51 adolescents in a Midwestern city to examine racial

differences in preferences for and interpretations of rap music. Survey

results indicate that racial differences in the popularity of rap music are lim-

ited. However, further questions reveal that African American youth are

more committed to rap music and are more likely to see rap music as life

affirming. Although both groups appear to have favorable opinions of rap,

their commitment to it and its significance in their lives varies by race.

Keywords: hip-hop; rap music; race; Black/African American studies;

White youth; music/media effects; Black youth

RACE AND RAP’S ROOTS

Rap music emerged in the mid-1970s in New York City. Since

that period, it has grown from a New York phenomenon to a main-

stay of popular music in the United States and around the world

(McGregor, 1998). Most of the research on rap music explores its

history and development as a social movement (Rose, 1991, 1994)

and analyzes the content of lyrics (Henderson, 1996; Martinez,

1993, 1997; Pinn, 1999). Although these studies have contributed

to our understanding of hip-hop, they are more focused on music

artists and less on rap fans.’ Thus, this article marks a departure

JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES, Vol. 33 No. 5, May 2003 605-622

DOI: 10.1 177/0021934703251108

? 2003 Sage Publications

605

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606 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

from much of the research because it focuses mostly on rap’s listen-

ers and their interpretations of rap, specifically racial differences in

adolescents’ opinions of rap.

In its early years, rap’s fans were primarily Black and Latino;

however, the 1980s saw the popularity of rap music expand dramat-

ically. Artists such as Run DMC, LL Cool J, Salt N’ Pepa, and the
Beastie Boys all gained popularity not only with urban African

Americans and Latinos but also with White adolescents outside the

inner city (Rose, 1994). By the late 1980s, rap was no longer

viewed as a fad but as a distinctive musical form. In spite of the

increasing numbers of White rap fans, many people still viewed rap

consumers as African American.2

How these fans interpret and reinterpret rap music and how

important rap music is in their lives have not been thoroughly

explored. Furthermore, studies on the potential differences that

racial/ethnic groups may have are often limited in much of the liter-

ature. Given the racialized political themes in rap (Martinez, 1997),

it is possible that rap’s White fans may see rap in a different light.

They may also try to avoid listening to rap that involves a more

explicit critique of racism.

During the 1980s, genres of rap became more noticeable, and

many rappers turned to more overtly political themes.3 They

addressed gang violence, police brutality, and other politically

charged issues, such as poverty and racism (Martinez, 1997). The

more politically oriented rap became very popular in the late 1980s

and early 1990s (Rose, 1991), a period that some refer to as the
golden era of rap (Powell, 2000). The group Public Enemy was at

the forefront of this movement with songs like “Fight the Power,”
“By the Time I Get to Arizona,” and “911 is a Joke” (Drayton,

Shocklee, & Sadler, 1990; Ridenhour, Shocklee, & Sadler, 1991;

Shocklee, Sadler, & Ridenhour, 1989), all of which addressed the
effects of White racism in the United States (Rose, 1991, 1994).

Even “gansta rappers” injected political views into their music; for

example, Ice Cube’s (1991) “How to Survive in South Central” crit-
icizes the Los Angeles Police Department’s treatment of African
Americans.4

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Sullivan / RAP AND RACE 607

Although more overtly political rap lost popularity in the mid-

1990s, some critical discourse is still embedded in the lyrics of

many recent rap songs. Nevertheless, rap’s more critical voices

have been marginalized in recent years. Some say that corporate

control and marketing have deadened hip-hop’s political edge

(Powell, 2000). Rather than offering a critique of the postindustrial

United States, which was more evident in early rap (Rose, 1994),
rap’s critical voice has faded into the background. Even though this

may not be directly connected to rap’s widening and “Whitening”

audience, it is probably not coincidental.

From the start, the public viewed hip-hop culture and rap music

through a racist lens. Rappers and rap fans were often portrayed as

menacing Black adolescents, and rap music was vilified as violent

and misogynistic (Feagin, Vera, & Batur, 2001; Rose, 1994). As

Rose (1994) noted, rap music has both overt and covert political

dimensions: “Rap’s poetic voice is deeply political in content and
spirit, but its hidden struggle-that of access to public space and

community resources and the interpretation of Black expression-

constitutes rap’s hidden politics” (p. 145). She also pointed out the

“struggle between rappers’ counter-dominant speech and the exer-

cise of institutional and discursive power against them.” Rose

(1994) highlighted the role of institutional racism leveled against

rappers, who were given poor record contracts and forced into

recording divisions that had smaller budgets. Moreover, these same

acts found it nearly impossible to put together concert tours

because insurance companies refused to insure their concerts.

These companies argued that rap acts were a great risk because of

their allegedly violent fans (Rose, 1994). Thus, the struggle for rap

artists and fans to gain respect has taken place in the context of per-
vasive, institutionalized White racism.

Of particular interest are the criticisms leveled by White politi-

cians, almost all of whom viewed rap as producing potential vic-

timizers. Vice President Dan Quayle attacked rapper Tupac Shakur

for promoting violence. President George H. W. Bush also voiced

his antirap (anti-Black) sentiments when he criticized Ice-T and

Body Count’s song “Cop Killer” (Rose, 1994). (Ironically, neither

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608 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

politician had heard these albums; in fact, Dan Quayle did not even

pronounce Tupac’s name correctly, and Bush failed to realize that

Body Count was in fact a heavy metal group.) President Bill

Clinton also leveled similar charges at rapper Sista Souljah, argu-

ing that she advocated killing Whites (Feagin et al., 2001). Other

well-known political figures, such as Bob Dole and Supreme Court

nominee Robert Bork, have also added their own critiques of rap

music (Ogbar, 1999). All these criticisms of rappers were made by

politicians in a highly racialized (racist) context. Even though

many of their criticisms may have relayed legitimate concerns

about violence, their discussions also appealed to fears that these

rappers would somehow incite violence among Black youth; more-

over, they appealed to Whites’ fears of Black youth.

Rap music has long been the target of criticism from the popular

media, White politicians, and even some older African Americans.

Often, antirap sentiments are thinly veiled anti-Black comments.
Moreover, these antirap comments are often framed differently

from those attacking White musicians, as Binder’s (1993) analysis

of media accounts indicates. Her study indicated that White heavy

metal fans were viewed as potential victims of the music, whereas

predominantly Black rap fans were viewed by media outlets as

potential victimizers.

A small number of African American leaders have also criti-

cized rap on similar grounds. C. Deloris Tucker and Reverend Cal-

vin Butts have both argued that rap music promotes violence and

misogyny and have publicly criticized rap music on these grounds

(Ogbar, 1999; Rose, 1994). White media outlets, possibly in search

of African Americans to make criticisms, have quickly picked up
Black leaders’ criticisms.

In the new millennium, critics from within the hip-hop commu-

nity have argued that many contemporary artists have abandoned

antiracism messages and focused instead on money and sexual
exploits (Powell, 2000). They go on to say that corporate control
and the desire to reach a “wider and Whiter” audience has led rap

away from overtly antiracist sentiments. Although hip-hop artists
have always been diverse and self-critical (Ogbar, 1999), criticism

from within hip-hop seems to have increased in recent years.

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Sullivan / RAP AND RACE 609

Although many leaders have argued about the effects of rap on

its fans, studies exploring effects of rap are few. This is partly

because the small body of research on hip-hop focuses more on art-

ists, lyrical content, and the history of hip-hop. Moreover, any

social differences (gender, age, race, social class, etc.) in fans that

could be correlated with influence are generally overlooked.

RACE AND RAP’S AUDIENCE

Debates regarding the effects of rap music are missing one very

critical voice-that of fans. While politicians and other community

leaders argue over “how corrupting” rap can be and researchers

look at the themes and history of the music, few people speak

directly to rap fans asking them what they feel about rap and how

important it is in their lives.

In spite of the criticism, the popularity of rap continues to grow.

Billboard’s top 100 albums of April 11, 1998, included 13 rap

albums, whereas Billboard’s top 100 albums of January 20, 2001,

included 21 rap acts.5 Given the tremendous increase in rap’s popu-

larity, it is evident that rap’s White audience has grown dramati-

cally. In the early 1990s, Public Enemy’s Chuck D estimated that

60% of his audience was White (Rose, 1994). However, it is very

difficult to make any precise estimates of the racial makeup of the

rap audience because no specific information has been collected.

Even though many people have made claims about rap music

and its effect on its listeners, research on music effects generally

focuses on young Whites and their attitudes about rock and roll,

punk, or heavy metal (Arnett, 1992, 1993, 1995; Fox, 1987; Gold,

1987; Rosenbaum & Prinsky, 1991; Roe, 1995; Snow, 1987; Stack,

Gundlach, & Reeves, 1994). Jonathon Epstein’s (1994) collection

of essays, Adolescents and Their Music: If It’s Too Loud, You’re

Too Old, does include 1 essay on rap music, but this is surrounded

by 13 other essays all dealing with rock and heavy metal.

Many of the studies analyzing rap have been more qualitative

and theoretical, focusing on the role of rap music in popular culture

(Fenster, 1995; Martinez, 1997) and its use as a form of resistance

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610 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

(Berry, 1994; Martinez, 1993; Pinn, 1996; Rose, 1991). However,

these studies did not examine multiracial samples and did not ask

specific questions focusing on the attitudes of rap’s audience.

One study by Epstein, Pratto, and Skipper (1990) analyzed the

relationship between behavior problems and preference for rap and

heavy metal music. This study indicates that preference for heavy

metal and rap was highly correlated with race: 96% of those who

preferred heavy metal were White, and 98% of those who preferred

rap were Black. In addition, they found that preference for both

forms of music was not associated with behavior problems.

Three studies have focused on young people’s opinions of rap.

One study written by Berry (1994) concluded that rap helps low

income African American youth develop empowering beliefs that

help them connect with their culture and develop positive identities.

However, the weakness of this study is that it does not give a

detailed analysis of students’ responses or the questions students

were asked, so it is difficult to gain a thorough understanding of the

students’ attitudes. Moreover, the sample only included low-

income African Americans in an Upward Bound program.

The second study from American Demographics magazine

reported on a survey conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited

(Spiegler, 1996). This study revealed that 58% of those younger

than 18 years and 59% of those 18 to 20 years liked or strongly liked

rap. This study also found that several fashions associated with hip-

hop were considered “in” by 12- to 19-year-olds. Seventy-eight

percent of adolescents said that baggy clothes were in, 76% said pro

sports apparel was in, and 69% said hooded sweatshirts were in.

The author argued that rap has expanded the market for White
designers such as Tommy Hilfiger and DKNY; moreover, style of

dress has become a way for Whites to connect with Blacks without

actually having any face-to-face contact. Although this indicates

that there are racial differences, those differences were not the

focus of the survey.

Finally, the most detailed study of rap’s effect on adolescents

was conducted by Kuwahara (1992). This study found that 13.3%

of Black college students listened to rap all the time, and 29.7% lis-
tened to rap often. Kuwahara also found that Black men had a stron-

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Sullivan / RAP AND RACE 611

ger preference for rap than Black women. The analysis of White

college students revealed that 51.6% of White men and 68.9% of

White women seldom or never listened to rap. When the two groups

were compared, White students demonstrated less knowledge of

rap acts regardless of their preference for rap music. However,

Whites and Blacks did not differ much in their reasons for listening

to rap. Both groups preferred the beat most and the message sec-

ond. Drawing on qualitative responses from Black students,

Kuwahara argued that rap music and the styles of dance associated

with it serve as forms of resistance to the dominant culture. How-

ever, findings from this study may be dated. Rap’s popularity has

increased significantly since 1992, and the White audience for rap

has increased (The Source, 1998).

Because of the rapid change in rap’s popularity, it is necessary to

reevaluate youth’s attitudes toward rap. More literature on rap is

also needed because the current writings are few and many theoreti-

cal claims have not been substantiated through empirical work.

METHOD AND HYPOTHESES

To explore the relationship between racial identity and prefer-

ence for rap music, I conducted surveys in a small Midwestern city.

I approached teenagers on a Saturday afternoon in a local mall and

asked them to fill out a brief survey about the music they listened to.

In creating this survey, I developed four major hypotheses related to

racial differences in adolescents’ reactions to and interpretations of

rap music.

First, I predicted that Black adolescents would have stronger

preferences for rap music than White adolescents. Given the high

percentage of African American rappers and rap’s history of articu-

lating concerns of Black youth, I expected that young African

Americans would like rap music more than Whites. Moreover, at

least two prior studies found this (Epstein et al., 1990; Kuwahara,

1992).

For the second hypothesis, I expected that Black respondents

would be more likely to agree with the statements, “Rap is a truthful

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612 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

reflection of society,” “I find myself wearing clothes similar to rap-

pers,” and “I find myself using words or phrases similar to rappers.”

If Kuwahara’s 1992 study is still accurate and Black students like

rap music more than their White counterparts, then I expect that

Black adolescents will incorporate rap music and rap acts into their

everyday life to a greater extent than White adolescents.

Next, I hypothesized that Black adolescents would listen to a

wider variety of rap acts. In spite of rap’s increasing popularity with

Whites, I expected that Black adolescents will still be more knowl-

edgeable about rap acts (Kuwahara, 1992).

Finally, I expected that Whites (who are rap fans) would be most

likely to say that rap has affected their opinions about racism. If rap

does act as an interracial socializer, then it may very well be that

White fans learn about the effects of racism and discrimination

through rap music. White adolescents may also be more affected

because African American adolescents are more likely to have

many more sources, such as parents, religious leaders, or peers,

through whom they learn about racism. On the other hand, White

adolescents are probably less likely to hear about racism through

peers and family members; therefore, they may be most affected by

rap. Although the study was generally guided by hypotheses, I also

put an open-ended question at the end of the survey, asking rap fans

why they listened to rap, which was designed to give the respon-

dents an opportunity to express their feelings outside of the narrow

categories that I previously provided.

FINDINGS

The response rate was very high: Only 3 adolescents refused to

participate in the study. There were a total of 51 respondents-21
Blacks, 17 Whites, 7 Latinos, and 6 who marked other categories.

Nineteen of the respondents were girls and 32 were boys, and the
mean age of respondents was 16 years old. The questionnaire
included 13 questions. Participants were asked their age, gender,

and race as basic demographic questions. Then they were asked
how much they liked rap on a scale ranging from 10 (It’s myfavor-

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Sullivan / RAP AND RACE 613

ite music) to 1 (I don’t like it at all). Participants were also asked

how many hours they listened to rap and which three rap artists they

listen to most. The next 4 questions asked how rap had influenced

them, and the final, open-ended question asked those who listened

to rap why they listened.

Rap music appeared to be very popular within the sample. Over-

all, students rated rap 7.98 on the 10-point scale. The mean rating

was 8.57 for Blacks, 7.18 for Whites, and 8.29 for Latinos.6 How-

ever, the difference between racial groups was not statistically sig-

nificant.7 What was most surprising was that 22 of the respondents

gave rap a 10, saying that it was their favorite music. Within this

group, racial differences were more evident: 13 of these respon-

dents were Black, 3 were Latino, 4 were White, and 2 marked mul-

tiple racial categories or no category.8 This does provide some evi-

dence that rap is more popular with African Americans; however,

the difference did not appear to be significant in this sample.

Overall, respondents registered slight agreement with the state-

ment, “Rap is a truthful reflection of society.” Moreover, there were

not strong racial differences. African Americans had a mean of 3.3,

and Whites had a mean 3.1 (on a 5-point scale where 5 represented

strongly agree). So the hypothesis that Blacks would be more likely

to agree with this statement was not confirmed. However, another

finding did come out of this particular question. Those who were

rap fans were much more likely to agree that rap is a truthful reflec-

tion of society.9

The hypotheses that African Americans were more likely to

agree with the statements, “I find myself wearing clothes similar to

rappers”” and “I find myself using words or phrases similar to rap-

pers” were supported. Black adolescents were much more likely to

report wearing clothes similar to rappers, and they were somewhat

more likely to say that they used words similar to rappers. Only 1

White respondent agreed that he wore clothes similar to rappers;

however, 8 Whites reported that they used words or phrases similar

to rappers.

White fans were more likely to say that rap had affected their

opinion about racism than Black fans. However, what was even

more interesting was that the overall agreement for Whites, regard-

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614 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

less of whether they were fans, was higher than that of African

Americans. Even though there were racial differences in agreement

with this statement, overall the respondents moderately disagreed;

they did not believe rap has had much of an effect on their opinions

about racism.

The two open-ended questions in the survey provided the most

interesting answers. They were used to address the third hypothesis

that Black adolescents would be more knowledgeable about rap. I

asked the respondents to name their three favorite rap acts, and pro-

vided them with three blanks. African Americans did name a wider

variety of rap acts; they named a total of 27 different acts, and only 3

answers were left blank. In contrast, White adolescents named only

15 different acts, and left 14 blanks. Racial differences in whom

adolescents named as their favorite rap acts were small. 1

Although I formulated no hypotheses about racial differences in

reasons for listening to rap music, some differences were evident.

Whites, particularly young women, were much more likely to say

that they listened to rap because it had a “nice beat.” Black adoles-

cents gave more diverse responses, and the most common response

was variations of “I like it.” However, a significant number of Afri-

can American adolescents gave responses that indicated that rap

was an affirmation of their experiences. The following five

responses were indicative of these responses:

Teach me things or tell me things about life. (Black male, 17)

Because it hits home, when I listen to it it’s something I can relate to.
(Black male, 18)

Because it tells the truth about how us Black people live being raised
in the ghetto. (Black female, 15)

Because I like the way it sounds and some rapper just tell the truth
and the way things really are. (Black female, 17)

Mostly because of the way they talk and state about people’s real

life. (Black female, 13)

Only one White respondent had a similar response:

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Sullivan / RAP AND RACE 615

Because some of the things the rappers rap about is the same type of
shit that happens in everyday life to sombody [sic] from the hood.
(White male, 18)

Even the response by this 18-year-old White male is written in

third person, indicating some distance between this young man and

“sombody [sic] from the hood.”

These statements indicate that there are some racial differences

in why African Americans and Whites listen to rap and how knowl-

edgeable they are about rap. Unfortunately, the methodology lim-

ited the ability to probe on many of these questions, which could

have provided more detailed answers and revealed more specific

racial differences.

Overall, this survey indicates that the racial gap in adolescents’

desirability ratings for rap is closing. Nevertheless, racial differ-

ences in adolescents’ perceptions of rap still exist. However, this

survey is primarily exploratory. It does not include a random sam-

ple and does not allow us to further explore how Whites and Blacks

are affected by and committed to rap.”

RAP’S RACIAL IMPLICATIONS

The most striking finding from this study is that the racial gap in

preference for rap music is closing. Unlike the previous research

(Epstein et al., 1990), this study shows that preference for rap was

not significantly different for Blacks and Whites; however, this

may be misleading. Black adolescents named more rap artists and

were more likely to say that they wore clothes like rappers and used

words or phrases similar to rappers. Moreover, African Americans

were more likely to say that they listened to rap because it was

truthful and taught them about life. Although White adolescents

say they like rap, many of the White respondents in this survey had

difficulty naming three rap artists, which indicated that they did not
have a high level of commitment to the music. Rap may only be a
fad and a phase, as indicated by this statement given when a respon-

dent was asked why he listened to rap:

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616 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

I used to but now I don’t anymore. (White male, 16)

The responses to the open-ended questions on the survey sup-

port the idea that African Americans have higher commitment to

rap. The wider variety of rap acts Black adolescents listed provides

evidence that they have a broader knowledge of rap. Some of the

White respondents’ answers to the question, “Why do you listen to

rap?” indicated that Whites were listening to rap because it has a

“good beat,” so the message of the music was not as important as

the sound. This leads me to believe that although Black and White

adolescents are saying that they like rap, they may be getting two

different messages from the same music. Many young African

Americans appear to be looking at rap for its messages about life

and its aesthetically pleasing sound, yet Whites seem to be listening

almost exclusively because of the aesthetically pleasing sound. In

many ways, these findings support Berry’s (1994) and Martinez’s

(1997) arguments that rap is a form of resistance. Although young

African American rap fans are not arguing that rap leads them into

social protest, they seem to be indicating that it offers a counter-

dominant message that they use as an affirmation of their

experiences.

Not only are rap music and hip-hop culture a potential form of

resistance, they may also have broad-reaching implications for

identity development and maintenance. Although many may see

music as a passing phase, it is often a source of information about

one’s group (or other groups), and it can also be a (re)affirmation of

one’s identity. This could be particularly true for young African

Americans, who are less likely to have their experiences reflected
in the dominant culture.

Therefore, future research needs to examine not just how much

adolescents report they like to rap but their knowledge and commit-
ment to the music. Furthermore, the extent to which Black and

White adolescents are getting different messages from the same rap
songs must be clarified.

Because so many young Whites listen to rap, future research

should also focus on rap as an interracial socializer. Whites in this
study (who were fans) indicated that rap had affected their opinions

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Sullivan / RAP AND RACE 617

about racism. The survey did not measure how rap had affected

their opinions of racism or how it has affected their opinions of

African Americans more generally. However, rap as an interracial

socializer may be detrimental for many reasons. First, many Whites

who listen to rap may be motivated by curiosity. Rap may allow

White adolescents to satisfy their curiosities without ever having

face-to-face contact or interpersonal relationships with any African

Americans, so rap can be a way for Whites to vicariously learn

about African Americans. They may be able to satisfy curiosities

about African Americans and even mimic what they may see as

African American life without having an understanding or appreci-

ation of African American experiences. Second, rap music does not

reflect the diversity of African Americans. Rap often operates from

the perspectives of young, urban, Black men. White adolescents

may get a picture of African American life that is not inclusive of

those who are older, from rural areas, or female (or other important

social characteristics). The third reason this could be detrimental is

because it may perpetuate prejudices, particularly the view that
African Americans are materialistic and hedonistic, which could

inadvertently promote stereotypes more than it dismantles them.

Although rappers themselves are not fully accountable for how

their music is interpreted, many fans may not be accessing alterna-

tive sources of information about African Americans. In addition,

many rap songs are fictional and do not even represent the artists’

true beliefs or those beliefs of African Americans in general. Rap,

like any other cultural product, is also subjected to corporate con-

trol, which could potentially limit antiracist messages because

those messages may not be as economically profitable.

I am not making the case that rap sends only negative messages

to White adolescents. Many artists do have images that are less ste-

reotypical (Ogbar, 1999); however, those voices are often less com-

mercially successful. Rap would probably be best when combined
with other forms of interracial socialization, particularly in a soci-

ety that has been built on racism, sexism, and capitalism. Daily

interactions or interactions that are not from media could be

beneficial.

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618 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

One of the more interesting findings in this study is the overall

agreement with the statement that rap is a truthful reflection of soci-

ety.12 Future research has many questions to answer in this respect.

If adolescents agree that rap is a truthful reflection of society, do

they value rappers’ opinions about political and social issues?

Moreover, it is important to understand what aspects of rap adoles-

cents think are truthful. Do young people believe what rappers say

about topics such as gender, sexuality, racism, police brutality,

wealth, and poverty? This may be very difficult to ascertain, given

the ambivalence and the great diversity found within rap. This also

has practical applications for political organizers who want to

mobilize the hip-hop generation.

Rap music research has a very promising future. There is little

work in this field, so virtually any aspect of rap music is open to

research. Moreover, rap music and hip-hop culture are the products

of the first generation to be raised in the postindustrial era (Rose,

1994). Research on racial formations and their effects on the post-

baby-boomer generations need to be pursued further given the

unique technological and social changes experienced by the hip-

hop generation.13

Although this article focuses primarily on racial differences,

future studies can focus on several other areas. Factors such as gen-

der, class, age, and urbanicity affect the production and consump-

tion of rap and preferences for rap. The area of racial differences

also needs to be explored further. Many of the responses to this sur-

vey need elaboration. Precisely why and how there are racial differ-

ences in consumption of rap can be identified through in-depth

interviews. In addition, rap’s effects on Latinos also need to be ana-

lyzed. Latino rappers, such as Mellow Man Ace, Kid Frost, Fat Joe,

Cuban Link, and Cypress Hill (who have Black and Hispanic mem-

bers), have made strong contributions to hip-hop, and much
research, including this, does not explore Latino opinions. The role

of rap as a form of interracial socialization should also be analyzed

because such a large number of White adolescents are listening to
rap, even those who are not fans cannot help being exposed to at

least some rap. Adolescents’ interpretations of rap songs must also

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Sullivan / RAP AND RACE 619

be examined so researchers can better understand what they are lis-

tening to and why they think it is important or unimportant. Finally,

more research must be done because rap is constantly changing.

Even though rap music is a relatively new phenomenon, it con-

tinues to expand. The current market for rap and hip-hop products

is a lucrative business. What started out in the Bronx has spread

nationwide. Although rap music is reaching a multiracial audience,

this research indicates that Black and White adolescents are influ-

enced by rap in different ways. These differences need to be further

examined and interpreted.

NOTES

1. It is important here to explain the difference between the term rap and hip-hop. In the

movie Rhyme and Reason (Block, Spirer, & Sollinger, 1997), rapper KRS-One defines hip-

hop as the cultural phenomenon that appeared in the mid- to late 1970s. Hip-hop culture is

primarily organized around the experiences of urban, minority youth, and the primary

expressions of hip-hop culture include rapping, break dancing, and graffiti art (Rose, 1994).

Some also include DJing as the fourth pillar of hip-hop. So, rap music is a form of expression

used by people within the hip-hop community or culture.

2. It is interesting to note that the Puerto Rican members of the early hip-hop culture

were ignored and forgotten by the popular media and many later rap fans.

3. It is very difficult to make clear distinctions between the genres of rap. Some divide

rap into East Coast and West Coast. East Coast rap generally comes from New York, and

West Coast rap comes from Los Angeles and its surrounding cities. Dividing rap by coast has

some merit because most rappers come from these cities, but it fails to address differences in

rap beyond geographic subcultures. Moreover, the division also ignores the recent ascen-

dance of rappers from the South. Others have used the terms old school and new school-old

school rap would be anything before the late 1 980s, and new school anything after that point.

Rap has also been classified as gansta rap, political rap, dance rap, fast rap (The Source,

1998), and gospel rap. We would also argue that materialistic rap and bravado rap should also

be added to the list of rap genres.

4. Ice Cube and other rappers have long been critical of the Los Angeles Police Depart-

ment, which seems quite appropriate given the recent revelations about police brutality and

misconduct in that department.

5. Artists such as Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac, Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, and others

have produced multiplatinum records.

6. Because there were only 7 Latinos in the study, it is difficult to make any accurate
generalizations.

7. All tests of statistical significance were conducted using chi-square. Results are sig-
nificant if they have a p value of .05 or less.

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620 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

8. Only 2 of the Black respondents giving rap a 10 were Black young women. In fact,

only 3 of the 22 were females.

9. Those who rated rap 6 or higher were considered to be fans.

10. Black adolescents chose Master P as their favorite rap act followed by Tupac, Puff

Daddy, Notorious B.I.G., and Ice Cube. The most popular rap artists, according to White

adolescents, were Master P followed by Mase, Tupac, Puff Daddy, and Bone Thugs In

Harmony.

11. Commitment in this study is operationalized as: the ability to name rap artists, wear-

ing clothes similar to rappers, using words or phrases similar to rappers, belief that rap is a

truthful reflection of society, and listening to rap because it is truthful or teaches about life.

12. This question was included in the survey because it is one main argument used tojus-

tify explicit and violent lyrics in rap.

13. I intentionally avoid using the term Generation X; we find this term to be racially

loaded. I argue that this term has been used almost exclusively to refer to young, middle-

class, White men and their experiences. Personally, I prefer the hip-hop generation.

Although many may think this is also racially loaded, hip-hop has always been a multiracial

movement, which makes the term more inclusive.

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622 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 2003

Rachel E. Sullivan is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Connecticut.

Her research focuses primarily on the intersections of race and family. She is also

pursuing research on the construction of race in mass media and popular culture.

She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines family approval of

Black/White interracial relationships.

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All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 33, No. 5 (May, 2003), pp. 545-705
Front Matter
Dreaming Ancestors in Eastern Carolina [pp. 545-561]
Images of African Traditional Religions and Christianity in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “The Piano Lesson” [pp. 562-575]
Black versus Black: The Relationships among African, African American, and African Caribbean Persons [pp. 576-604]
Rap and Race: It’s Got a Nice Beat, but What about the Message? [pp. 605-622]
The Afrocentric Paradigm in Health-Related Physical Activity [pp. 623-636]
Intimate Risk: Sexual Risk Behavior among African American College Women [pp. 637-653]
African American Female Adult Learners: Motivations, Challenges, and Coping Strategies [pp. 654-674]
Narrating Acts of Resistance: Explorations of Untold Heroic and Horrific Battle Stories Surrounding Robert Franklin Williams’s Residence in Lake County, Michigan [pp. 675-703]
Book Review
Review: untitled [pp. 704-705]
Back Matter

2018/3/5 The Sudden Rise of Lil Yachty – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/fashion/mens-style/lil-yachty-rap-atlanta.html?_r=0 1/5

https://nyti.ms/2hs3AzV

The Sudden Rise of Lil Yachty
The stylish 19-year-old rapper has made his way from obscurity
in Atlanta to working with LeBron James and Kanye West.

By JOE COSCARELLI DEC. 9, 2016

After 18 years of trying to get noticed, the rapper and teenage eccentric Lil Yachty
has been forced recently to practice blending in. It’s mostly the hair.

On a recent Saturday, following a dayslong spate of promotional appearances
and photo shoots, the 19-year-old internet supernova, who found fame online and
beyond this year with a series of catchy mixtapes and goofy viral moments, hoped
to do a little shopping in the heart of Brooklyn.

But before he could peacefully enter Kith, the streetwear store that
specializes in sneakers and sugary cereal, Lil Yachty needed to hide his trademark
accessory: his grenadine-red skinny braids adorned with clear plastic beads. As
his chauffeured S.U.V. approached the buzzing shop, the Atlanta rapper grabbed
a knit cap from the head of a friend, who assented without a word, seemingly
familiar with the routine.

It worked. Locks tucked atop his head, Lil Yachty, whose face is usually
obscured by the clacking tentacles, proved unrecognizable even to those who may
have binged on his whimsical music videos or Instagram account. Like a
millennial Clark Kent, he went unbothered in the maw of his target demographic,
drawing stares only as he stacked five pairs of shoes and two art books
(“Pharrell,” “KAWS”) by the register.

As with the mini-shopping spree, there was still some thrill in needing to go
undercover. “At the beginning of this year, I used to walk through the local mall
and say, ‘One day, I’m not going to be able to walk through this mall,’” Lil Yachty

https://www.nytimes.com/

https://nyti.ms/2hs3AzV

https://www.nytimes.com/by/joe-coscarelli

https://www.lilyachty.com/

https://kithnyc.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/dining/kith-treats-cereal-bar.html

https://www.instagram.com/lilyachty/?hl=en

2018/3/5 The Sudden Rise of Lil Yachty – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/fashion/mens-style/lil-yachty-rap-atlanta.html?_r=0 2/5

said later in the privacy of a Caribbean restaurant, his hair since released. “No
way I could walk through the mall now. Unless I’m hiding.”

Last winter, the teenager born Miles McCollum, who had recently dropped out of
college and had been arrested in a Florida mall for credit card fraud, was hoping
to shake his anonymity. Rapping was a relatively new pastime (it still is), though
striving for fame came naturally to a diligent student of social networks.

“I always knew I was going to be something,” he said. “I didn’t know what.”

Now, at the end of a career-making 2016, Lil Yachty seems more certain. “I’m
not a rapper, I’m an artist,” he said. “And I’m more than an artist. I’m a brand.”

The stats back him up. In addition to releasing the popular “Lil Boat” and
“Summer Songs 2” mixtapes, filled with his taffylike digital wails and cartoon
melodies, and reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 with his sweet-and-sour
guest verse on D.R.A.M.’s “Broccoli,” Lil Yachty has modeled Kanye West’s Yeezy
line at Madison Square Garden, starred in a Sprite commercial with LeBron
James and teamed up with Nautica on a capsule collection for Urban Outfitters.
An official debut album with Capitol Records is planned for early 2017.

Yet even among the bevy of singular voices in the new Atlanta hip-hop scene,
where male rappers can wear dresses and carry designer bags, moan about their
feelings and dance with their hips, Lil Yachty is demonstrably odd, flaunting his
indifference to rap traditionalism and aiming to remain somewhat wholesome:
more schoolyard than trap house.

“Rappers don’t have endorsements because of their images,” he said.
“Endorsement money is huge. And I care about my character.” He added: “I don’t
rap about drinking or smoking, ever, because I don’t do it. I don’t rap about
anything I don’t do.”

Instead, Lil Yachty preaches an all-purpose positivity fueled by timeless
adolescent ambitions: chasing girls, looking cool and hanging out with friends.
(Lil Yachty’s crew is known as the Sailing Team: “If you’re a fan of me, then you
know my friends, because I push them just as hard.”) His most menacing raps
can feel playful, his sexuality disarmingly juvenile and his boasts betray his age:
“Parents mad at my ass ’cause their kids sing my song in class,” he taunts while

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liBL9eHXnac&feature=youtu.be

2018/3/5 The Sudden Rise of Lil Yachty – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/fashion/mens-style/lil-yachty-rap-atlanta.html?_r=0 3/5

proclaiming himself the King of the Teens. “We are the youth!” goes another
battle cry.

As with his breakout viral hits “1 Night” and “Minnesota,” Lil Yachty’s music
relies less on technical rapping than on simple melodies that invoke warped
nursery rhymes, with bright, bubbly production and an affecting falsetto
smoothed with Auto-Tune. Along with Kanye West and Kid Cudi, both of whom
count as elder statesmen to someone born in 1997, his most direct influences
include the cult-favorite, outre internet rappers Lil B and Soulja Boy, along with
pop acts like Coldplay, Daft Punk and Fall Out Boy.

While modeling for Nautica last month to his own personal playlist, Lil
Yachty mimed air guitar to “Paradise City” by Guns N’ Roses and boogied to Elton
John’s “Bennie and the Jets” when he wasn’t belting Chris Martin ballads.
Between looks, he dined on his preferred menu of Domino’s pepperoni pizza,
candy and cookies, head buried in his two Louis Vuitton-cased iPhones. (One had
a hand-scrawled message: “LETS BE RICH FOREVER.”)

At the same time, Lil Yachty’s stated indifference toward the catalogs of
Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. has made him a punching bag for rap purists, the
poster child for a style-over-substance new school dismissively dubbed “mumble
rap.” He’s leaned into that mantle, so online schadenfreude bubbles up every time
Lil Yachty, say, bombs a freestyle over ’90s beats or fails miserably at dunking a
basketball.

“I ask myself all the time, ‘How do I always go viral?’” Lil Yachty said with a
grin. “I’m the face of the youth, the new sound. Nobody likes my truth.” Except
the youth, that is. “They relate to me because I’m so like them,” he said, “but on a
global scale.”

Music, it turns out, was something of an afterthought, despite his deep roots
in Southern rap. Though he was raised mostly by his mother in the Atlanta
suburb Austell, his father, Shannon McCollum, lived in the city and worked as a
photographer with local acts such as Outkast, Goodie Mob and Lil Jon. But
hanging around stars as a child bolstered Lil Yachty’s sense of style and business
acumen more than his sense of hip-hop history.

“I would let him help direct photo shoots, and I would always show him my
invoices so he could see what I made,” Mr. McCollum, 46, said. “I used to

4
ARTICLES REMAINING

http://www.mtv.com/news/2891484/lil-yachty-freestyle-not-a-rapper/

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/11/rapper-lil-yachty-dunk-fail

2018/3/5 The Sudden Rise of Lil Yachty – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/fashion/mens-style/lil-yachty-rap-atlanta.html?_r=0 4/5

photograph Miles every week. By 3 or 4, he was so comfortable in front of a
camera.”

An obsession with fashion followed. “Once, when he was about 7, we were
picking up his friend, and Miles had on a pink polo shirt,” his father recalled.
“The little boy got in the back seat and started laughing uncontrollably at Miles,
calling him a girl. Miles just said, ‘You don’t know nothing about this, man.’”

In high school, influenced by the bright colors favored by Pharrell Williams
and Tyler, the Creator, Lil Yachty would spend the money he earned working at
McDonald’s or as an assistant to his father at thrift stores. “Ninety-nine cents, 50
cents, I just knew how to put it together,” he said. His mother even taught him to
sew.

His confidence and originality helped to win over his eventual manager,
Coach K, an Atlanta stalwart who has worked with Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane and
Migos. “It was like your first meeting with Marilyn Manson,” Coach K said of
encountering Lil Yachty. “You’ve got this freakish look, but he’s not scared of who
he is. He’s wearing it with pride. Instantly I said, ‘This is it.’”

Lil Yachty had already determined that packaging a mystique was his strong
suit. After graduating from high school, he traveled repeatedly to New York and
Los Angeles — his father’s day job at Delta gave him access to free flights — where
he slept on couches and worked to ingratiate himself with rap-adjacent
tastemakers like Ian Connor and Luka Sabbat.

“I was simply trying to get people who had an audience to hang out with me,
so that I could get that audience,” Lil Yachty said. “I was making music, but I
wasn’t really pushing it yet. I knew exactly how it worked.” He corrected himself.
“I know exactly how it works.”

Still, even he has been surprised by the speed of his ascent.

“It just feels like a dream,” he said, recalling that in January, he couldn’t
make it past the door of Kanye’s studio. “I sat in the hallway for hours while ASAP
Rocky was in there. They wouldn’t let me in. By August, I was working with him.”
Nautica, too, came calling only after a year of Lil Yachty’s attempting to get the
maritime brand’s attention via social media.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/fashion/mens-style/luka-sabbat-fashion-influencer.html

2018/3/5 The Sudden Rise of Lil Yachty – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/fashion/mens-style/lil-yachty-rap-atlanta.html?_r=0 5/5

It was backstage among the V.I.P.s at Jay Z’s Made in America festival in
September that Lil Yachty’s new reality started to sink in. “Obama’s daughters
knew who I was,” he said. “They were huge fans. Jay Z said my name to me before
I introduced myself.”

And yet, persona aside, a teenager can only be a teenager.

At an Urban Outfitters meet-and-greet in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, among
decidedly less dazzling guests, the rapper hid once again behind his hair and
phone as overeager young fans offered him anything they could find to
autograph: $5 bills, laptops, water bottles, purses, coats and, yes, eventually
breasts. Not yet immune to such attention at close range, Lil Yachty could only
giggle to himself, shaking his head as he mouthed the words to his own music.

Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and
Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.

A version of this article appears in print on December 9, 2016, on Page D11 of the New York edition
with the headline: ‘King of the Teens’.

© 2018 The New York Times Company

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134

Journal of Communication, Autumn 1999

Authenticity Within Hip-Hop and Other
Cultures Threatened with Assimilation

By Kembrew McLeod

This essay examines claims of authenticity within hip-hop, African American cul-
ture. In the mid- to late 1990s, authenticity claims have been pervasive within hip-
hop music communities, which had previously existed on the margins of main-
stream U.S. culture. By mapping the range of meanings associated with authentic-
ity as they are invoked discursively, we can gain a better understanding of how a
culture in danger of assimilation seeks to preserve its identity. The use of the con-
ceptual apparatus of semantic dimensions highlights how that culture’s most cen-
tral and powerful symbols are organized and given meaning vis-à-vis authenticity
within a discursive system.

In this article, I examine claims of authenticity and the contexts under which these
claims are made within a form of African American culture: hip-hop. Hip-hop
music—popularly known as rap music—grounds, reflects, and is at the center of
an African American, youth-oriented culture that originated in the Bronx, New
York, during the mid-1970s (Neal, 1999). Rose (1994) described hip-hop music as
“a form of rhymed storytelling accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically
based music” (p. 2). By using a method of understanding authenticity claims as
structured, meaningful discourse, I seek to demonstrate how the concept of au-
thenticity lies at the nexus of key cultural symbols in hip-hop.

These reoccurring invocations of authenticity are not isolated to hip-hop cul-
ture. They also take place in other cultures that, like hip-hop, are threatened with
assimilation by a larger, mainstream culture. By mapping the range of meanings
associated with authenticity as the meanings are invoked discursively, we can
gain a better understanding of how a culture in danger of assimilation actively

Kembrew McLeod (MA, University of Virginia, 1995) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Commu-
nication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His research interests include critical cultural
studies, popular music, and the political economy of communication, with an emphasis on intellectual
property law’s effect on cultural production. The author thanks Donal Carbaugh for his assistance in
helping to work through some ideas and approaches in this essay, and Lisa Rudnick for her sharp
mind and eagerness to discuss issues that grounded this essay. An earlier version was presented at the
May 1999 annual conference of the International Communication Association.

Copyright © 1999 International Communication Association

135

Authenticity Within Hip-Hop

attempts to preserve its identity. Further, using the conceptual apparatus of se-
mantic dimensions used by Seitel (1974), Katriel and Philipsen (1981), and Carbaugh
(1989, 1996), I highlight how that culture’s most central and powerful symbols are
organized and given meaning vis-à-vis authenticity within a discursive system.
Whereas I employ semantic dimensions to understand the significance of authen-
ticity discourse in hip-hop culture, Seitel (1974) employed semantic dimensions to
understand the use of metaphors in Haya culture. Seitel stated, “Studying meta-
phors can uncover basic underlying principles that people use to conceive of and
evaluate their own speech interactions” (p. 66). Although the specific symbols
referenced in authenticity discourse cannot be generalized beyond hip-hop cul-
ture, the interpretive framework I use can be applied to other cultures in danger
of assimilation in order to understand how authenticity is at the intersection of
powerful cultural symbols, and how those symbols are invoked to maintain pure
identity.

Although Lull (1985, 1987), Garofalo (1997), Thornton (1996), Duncombe (1997),
and others examined the assimilation and commodification of subcultural expres-
sion, they did not engage in a systematic examination of how a politics of authen-
ticity functions to maintain a culture’s identity. In his study of authenticity dis-
course in country music, Peterson (1997) paraphrased the observations of Maurice
Halbwachs by stating that “authenticity is not inherent in the object or event that
is designated authentic but is a socially agreed-upon construct” (p. 5). This “so-
cially agreed-upon construct” is a sign, a discursive formation with multiple mean-
ings. It is at the center of not just hip-hop, but many cultures and subcultures
threatened with assimilation, such as insurgent forms of rock music, “rave” com-
munities, underground gay discos, jazz scenes, country music, zine-making com-
munities, and African-American culture, generally (Duncombe, 1997; Ennis, 1992;
Frith, 1981; Garofalo, 1997; hooks, 1992; Lubiano, 1996; Lull, 1987; Neal, 1999;
Peterson, 1997; Thornton, 1996). For instance, Lull (1987) argued that authenticity
was valued in punk rock communities because of the “commodification of the
punk ethic” (p. 227). I will return to a broader discussion of the ways in which
authenticity is signified in cultures threatened with assimilation in the final section.

A Brief History of Hip-Hop Music’s Commercial Ascendancy

As a culture that is distinct from the larger African-American culture from which it
emerged, hip-hop contains the key elements of Carbaugh’s (1988) definition of a
culture; there are “patterns of symbolic action and meaning” that are deeply felt,
commonly intelligible, and widely accessible to members of the hip-hop commu-
nity (p. 38). Hip-hop culture, broadly speaking, incorporates four prominent ele-
ments: breaking (i.e., break dancing); tagging or bombing (i.e., marking the walls
of buildings and subways with graffiti); DJ-ing (i.e., collaging the best fragments
of records by using two turntables); and MC-ing (i.e., rapping; Hager, 1984). In the
late 1990s, hip-hop music is extremely popular. Despite the fact that hip-hop
musical, clothing, and linguistic styles vary from one locale to another, one con-

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cept that is commonly invoked is authenticity. In fact, authenticity has been in-
voked by hip-hop fans and artists throughout the 1990s, spoken in terms of being
“true,” “real,” or “keepin’ it real.”

After a decade of existing on the margins of mainstream popular culture, hip-
hop music began to sell more than before. In 1988, the annual record sales of hip-
hop music reached $100 million. This accounted for 2% of the music industry’s
sales. The next year, Billboard added rap charts to its magazine, and music video
outlet MTV debuted Yo! MTV Raps, which quickly became the network’s highest
rated show (Samuels, 1995; Silverman, 1989). By 1992, rap generated $400 million
annually, roughly 5% of the music industry’s annual income (Vaughn, 1992). These
estimates climbed to $700 million in annual revenues for rap in 1993 (Rose, 1994).
Within only a few years, hip-hop music was transformed from a being an aspect
of a small subculture identified with young, city-dwelling African Americans to a
genre that had been absorbed into mainstream U.S. popular culture. Everything
from soft-drink commercials to “White” pop music appropriated hip-hop music’s
musical and visual style.

By 1999, exactly 20 years after the first hip-hop record was released, hip-hop
music and the culture from which it emerged were firmly entrenched within main-
stream U.S. culture. In the course of one month in 1999, Time magazine devoted
its cover story to hip-hop, Fugees member Lauryn Hill took home the first Album-
of-the-Year Grammy awarded to a hip-hop artist, and MTV (which, a dozen years
before, had been reluctant to air hip-hop music videos) devoted 7 days of its
programming to the music during its much-hyped “Hip-Hop Week” (Farley, 1999).
In 1998, hip-hop music sales continued to outpace music industry gains in general
(a 31% increase over the previous year, compared to the music industry’s 9%
increase), and hip-hop outsold the previous top-selling format, country music
(Farley, 1999).

During hip-hop music’s dramatic ascendancy in the 1990s, hip-hop artists and
fans found themselves in a contradictory situation that other subcultural groups
confronted with widespread acceptance previously faced: being “inside” a main-
stream culture they had, in part, defined themselves as being against. By selling
millions of albums to White teens and appearing on MTV, hip-hop artists (and
their fans) have had to struggle to maintain a “pure” identity. They preserved this
identity by invoking the concept of authenticity in attempting to draw clearly
demarcated boundaries around their culture.

With this in mind, I aim to answer the following questions in my analysis of
hip-hop. First, what do authenticity claims mean to people within the hip-hop
community, and how does the invocation of authenticity function? Second, does
the invocation of authenticity make appeals to solidarity across racial, gender,
class, or cultural identity formations? Third, what are the contexts in which au-
thenticity is invoked? Fourth, how and why are authenticity claims—specifically,
the term, “keepin’ it real”—contested by some members of the hip-hop commu-
nity? Finally, how do the community members that use these terms resolve the
apparent contradiction between being both outside mainstream U.S. culture and
very much inside it as well?

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Method

As a listener of hip-hop music for many years, a reader of hip-hop magazines,
and, later, a music journalist who primarily writes about hip-hop, I noticed that
claims of authenticity had become a significant part of the vernacular of hip-hop
artists and fans. After hearing “keepin’ it real” (or some variation of that phrase)
hundreds or thousands of times in the past decade, I began to question why it was
used so often.

Because authenticity exists as a discursive construction, a linguistic-oriented
method was an appropriate way to analyze how it is used in communities threat-
ened with assimilation. Starting from the concept of authenticity, I employed the
conceptual apparatus of semantic dimensions used by Seitel (1974), Katriel and
Philipsen (1981), and Carbaugh (1989, 1996). This allowed me to deduce meaning
from the data I collected. I drew heavily from the method of analysis and phrasing
used by the above-mentioned authors.

Seitel (1974) defined a semantic dimension as “a two-valued set that is used to
conceive of and evaluate aspects of language use” (p. 51). He stated that it is
described and analyzed through indigenous literal statements. Unlike quantitative
research, this qualitative study did not bring an a priori coding scheme to the
analysis of data. Rather, like Seitel (1974), Katriel and Philipsen (1981), and Carbaugh
(1989, 1996), I derived an indigenous coding scheme from the data. The unit of
analysis was not the hip-hop community, broadly, but was any discursive context
in which the following two symbols co-occurred: “authenticity” and “hip-hop.”
Therefore, my data for this study were potentially any place where a discourse of
authenticity and hip-hop co-occurred. However, to be systematic, I limited what I
examined to discourse primarily intended to be received within the hip-hop com-
munity. This included, for the purpose of this study, hip-hop magazines (a 6-
month period), Internet discussion groups that focus on hip-hop (a 3-month pe-
riod), hip-hop song lyrics (a 6-year period), and press releases sent to hip-hop
music critics (a 6-month period). Significantly, my corpus of authenticity discourse
in hip-hop included more than 800 authenticity claims.

The above-mentioned data were analyzed in the following way. First, I set the
criteria for what constituted a symbol of authenticity discourse as being any ap-
pearance of the terms “true,” “real” (and any derivation of that word, such as
“realness”), and “authentic” (or any derivation of that word, such as “authentic-
ity”). The semantic dimensions of authenticity discourse were inductively derived
from the data by questioning what the listener needed to know in order to process
the term “keepin’ it real,” or other such invocations of authenticity. This was done
by looking at key cultural symbols of authenticity. For instance, when Meen Green
stated, “I try to keep it real for the street,” he was associating authenticity with “the
street,” or the urban neighborhoods from which he and many hip-hop artists
came (Meen Green, personal communication, November 13, 1997). This consti-
tuted a type of distinctive features analysis that Seitel (1974), Katriel and Philipsen
(1981), and Carbaugh (1989) employed. After carefully scrutinizing themes that
were most prominent in my data, and noting the number of times these themes
appeared, I formulated six tentative dimensions (although I was careful to recog-

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nize that frequency does not necessarily constitute saliency). I returned to my data
several times to check the validity and to obtain speakers’ terminology for those
dimensions.

Next, to confirm the validity of the semantic dimensions I selected, I conducted
23 individual, tape-recorded, phone interviews with a wide range of hip-hop
artists, from multimillion selling artists to underground, cult artists (MC Eiht, Meen
Green, DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill, DJ Spooky, Frankie Cutlass, Cee-lo and Big Gipp
of Goodie Mob, Killah Priest, Cappadonna and Method Man of Wu-Tang Clan,
Rass Kass, Hell Razah of Sunz of Man, Voodoo, Wyclef and Pras of the Fugees, MC
Lyte, Kool Keith, Lou Nutt and Flaggs of Land of Da Lost, Guru and DJ Premier of
Gang Starr, and Mixmaster Mike and Q-bert of the Beastie Boys and Invisibl Skratch
Piklz). I asked five open-ended questions that were followed up with more spe-
cific queries that probed the answers given to those questions: What does the
phrase “keepin’ it real” mean to you? Who, in hip-hop, isn’t keepin’ it real? What
makes someone real in hip-hop? What makes someone fake in hip-hop? How do
you feel about the way the phrase “keepin’ it real” is used in hip-hop?

The following list specifies the volume of collected data where symbols of
authenticity and hip-hop co-occurred at least once: 45 hip-hop magazine articles,
totaling 93 pages (from Rap Pages, Rap Sheet, and The Source1); 11 letters to the
editor printed in two hip-hop magazines; 187 individual postings to Internet dis-
cussion groups that focus on hip-hop (heretofore called “hip-hop newsgroups”),
which ranged from 20 words to 500 (averaging around 100 words); 23 interviews
that, when transcribed, totaled 47 pages of single-spaced text; 2 interviews with
hip-hop fans that, transcribed, totaled 5 typed, single-spaced pages of text; an
interview with Dave Paul, president of a hip-hop record company, which totals 3
typed, single-spaced pages; 2 interviews with 2 hip-hop record company execu-
tives, totaling 5 pages collectively; 1 interview with Haze, a hip-hop clothing
designer and graffiti artist, totaling 2 single-spaced pages; 241 hip-hop songs; and
33 hip-hop record company press releases that announced the release of 33 differ-
ent hip-hop albums.

Authenticity Claims Within Hip-Hop Discourse

Invocations of authenticity are performed often, resonate deeply, and are widely
shared by members of the hip-hop community. By understanding the discourse
that centers around authenticity within distinct, but interrelated, semantic dimen-
sions, we can see how the key symbols of a culture threatened with assimilation
are drawn upon and organized to maintain that culture’s identity. Authenticity is
invoked around a range of topics that include hip-hop music, racial identification,
the music industry, social location, individualism, and gender and sexual roles.
Profanity and slang are used in discourse often to emphasize the claims about
authenticity that the speaker or writer is trying to support.

1 The Source claims in its masthead that it is “Dedicated to True Hip-Hop.”

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When I interviewed DJ Muggs, a member of the multiplatinum group Cypress
Hill, he dismissed the use of the phrase “keepin’ it real” in what to me seemed an
irritated manner, claiming it was a trendy, “flavor of the month” term. Neverthe-
less, Muggs acknowledged that the term was widely used within hip-hop, sighing,
“Trust me, I did about 200 interviews last year and in every one was that question,
‘What’s keepin’ it real to you?’” (DJ Muggs, personal communication, October 31,
1997).2 In a similar illustration of the ubiquity of the term, hip-hop journalist
Angela N. (1997) stated in a hip-hop newsgroup posting, “You haven’t lived until
you’ve edited a 2-hour interview and heard ‘keepin it real’ after every other sen-
tence, tried to cut most of them out of the finished product, then have your boss
ask you ‘could you do *something* about all of these ‘keeping it real’s?” The fact
that claims of authenticity are such a pervasive part of hip-hop discourse is an
explicit indication that something is going on. That something can be rendered
intelligible by examining the data I collected using the conceptual apparatus of
semantic dimensions.

Keepin’ it real and various other claims of authenticity do not appear to have a
fixed or rigid meaning throughout the hip-hop community. Keepin’ it real is a
floating signifier in that its meaning changes depending on the context in which it
is invoked. I demonstrate here how the identities of hip-hop community members
are constituted vis-à-vis authenticity, in both a conscious and unconscious man-
ner. The conceptual framework of semantic dimensions allows me to interpret the
range of meanings that are associated with claims of authenticity, meanings that
are deeply bound up with this culture’s key symbols of identity.

Table 1 outlines six major semantic dimensions of meaning inductively derived
from the data that may be active when hip-hop community members (i.e., hip-
hop fans, artists, and critics) invoke authenticity. Although each dimension of
meaning deploys different and distinct cultural terms, these semantic dimensions
are deeply interrelated and can provide a way of comprehending authenticity

2 It is significant that Muggs had such a negative reaction when I asked him about “keepin’ it real.” The
contestations over claims of authenticity among hip-hop community members such as Muggs are
something I will return to later in this essay because these struggles over authenticity reveal what is at
stake within hip-hop culture.

Table 1. Support Claims of Authenticity

Semantic Dimensions Real Fake

Social-psychological staying true to yourself following mass trends
Racial Black White
Political-economic the underground commercial
Gender-sexual hard soft
Social locational the street the suburbs
Cultural the old school the mainstream

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claims as rich, meaningful discourse that draws upon important cultural symbols.
The six semantic dimensions are labeled social-psychological, racial, political-
economic, gender-sexual, social-locational, and cultural. Within each dimension, I
have identified two exemplars of oppositionally defined symbols drawn from the
speakers’ language.

Social-Psychological Dimension (Staying True to Yourself vs. Following Mass Trends)
The discourse placed within the social-psychological dimension highlights the
valorization of individualism and the demonization of conformity in the discourse
of hip-hop community members. For many, keepin’ it real refers to—employing a
phrase that is often used—staying true to yourself. Moreover, by “representing
who you are in actuality to the best of your ability,” as hip-hop newsgroup user
Christina Hsu (1997) stated, one is not conforming to the media-generated repre-
sentations of youth-culture movements. In another example of staying true to
yourself, Spice 1 told hip-hop magazine, The Source, “Basically, I’mma try to make
my art the same thing as my life. In the past, my life was going where my art was
going because I try to keep it as real as I can” (Burke, 1997, p. 71). Essentially, he
was stating that he wants his music to be an accurate representation of his own
life world. That, according to many people within the hip-hop community, is a
fundamental component of portraying oneself as authentic.

Wu-Tang Clan member and multiplatinum solo artist, Method Man (personal
communication, January 30, 1998), told me, “Basically, I make music that repre-
sents me. Who I am. I’m not gonna calculate my music to entertain the masses. I
gotta keep it real for me.” MC Eiht is a self-identified “underground” hip-hop artist,
although, like Method Man, he records for a major record label, and his recordings
have gone platinum. Eiht (personal communication, November 20, 1997) told me,
“Basically, my format doesn’t change. If I sell 2–3 million records on this record
it’s because of me. It’s not because of an image change or because of the record
company.” Individualism is a key component of the discourse that surrounds
claims of authenticity that, within the social-psychological dimension, is played
against the negative symbols of “the masses” or “mass trends” and aligned with
“staying true to yourself ” and “representing who you are.”

I believe that one reason DJ Muggs had such a seemingly negative reaction
when I brought up the term keepin’ it real was because his group, Cypress Hill,
had been criticized for selling a large number of records to White suburban kids.
When I asked him if he associated this type of criticism with the term keepin’ it
real, DJ Muggs (personal communication, October 31, 1997) said, “Yeah. Keepin’
it real. I hate that fuckin’, um, yeah. I just try to be who I am. People be too worried
about how many records I sold and that I was on fuckin’ MTV [emphasis added].”

Racial Dimension (Black vs. White)
To its core community members, hip-hop remains strongly tied to Black cultural
expression. For instance, one person stated in a hip-hop newsgroup, “White boys
shouldn’t rap because rap is black!” (Black36865, 1997). Robert Mashlin (1997)
wrote to the White readers of a hip-hop newsgroup, “F@#$ all this sh@# that’s
happenin’ to hip-hop. It’s cuz all these crab-ass peckerwood execs and all these

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other mainstream, bullsh#@ views are gettin into hip-hop—man, F@#$ that! This
music wasn’t made fo ya’ll—stay da F@$# away from it—listen to house of pain,
snow and vanilla” (Mashlin, 1997). House of Pain, Snow, and Vanilla Ice were
three successful White artists during the early 1990s who appropriated hip-hop
musical styles, and the three were used as symbols of identity to represent an
inauthentic whiteness.

It should be noted that explicit anti-White sentiments are rarely made in hip-
hop. Instead, pro-Black statements are more typical. For instance, the lyrics of
Common’s (1994) song, “In My Own World,” include: “I love Black thighs, you
sisters better realize/The real hair and real eyes get real guys.” Here, authenticity
is clearly identified with having Black traits (i.e., “real hair and real eyes”), and the
“real guys” Common talks about are implicitly Black like him. Ice Cube has occa-
sionally said that, when he speaks, he is not talking to White America. During an
interview, Ice Cube explained this statement by saying that he has no problem
with White people, but his messages are directed toward a Black audience (hooks,
1994). By disassociating oneself from “blackness,” a hip-hop artist opens himself
or herself to charges of selling out.

Political-Economic Dimension (Underground vs. Commercial)
There are many different methods of selling out. One significant way falls within
the political-economic dimension, which addresses the topic of commercial suc-
cess versus underground or street credibility. One significant kind of sell-out is
going “commercial,” that is, the distancing of an artist’s music and persona from
an independently owned network of distribution (the underground) and reposi-
tioning oneself within a music business culture dominated by the big five multina-
tional corporations that control the U.S. music industry. There are other distinc-
tions, such as the radio and MTV (which represent the commercial) versus 12-inch
singles and hip-hop clubs (which represent the underground). The latter, 12-inch
singles and hip-hop clubs, are media that can be used to disseminate hip-hop
music locally by avoiding mainstream mass media channels such as the radio and
MTV. In an interview with the Hieroglyphics in Urb, group member Casual said a
previous group he was in was “never about making hits.” Casual continued, “We
were about making real underground hip-hop” (Tai, 1997, p. 58). Another hip-
hop newsgroup writer drew an overt link between authenticity and independence
when he stated, “Newsgroups aren’t corporate owned, thus, it’s ‘keepin’ it real’”
(Carlton, 1997).

Popular award shows are another mainstream genre that is despised by hip-
hop community members. For instance, Tupac (1994) raps in his song, “I Don’t
Give a Fuck,” “The Grammy’s and the American Music shows pimp us like hoes/
They got dough but they hate us though/You better keep your mind on the real
shit/And fuck trying to get with these crooked ass hypocrites.”

Being “true” is another common word used in authenticity claims. The follow-
ing excerpt from the letters to the editor section of the hip-hop magazine, The
Source, is an example of this. In one letter, Cronic Jhonez (1997) is angry that The
Source did a cover story on the commercially successful hip-hop artist Puff Daddy.
Chronic Jhonez (1997) wrote, “I can’t believe [Puff Daddy] said he loved Hammer.

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. . . What true hip-hop fan had any love for Hammer? I guess he should love
Hammer, he paved Puffy’s way for exploiting hip-hop” (p. 18). My corpus of
authenticity discourse is loaded with broadsides against mainstream or commer-
cialized artists whose music is played on television or the radio—those who make
“hits.” Real, underground hip-hop is defined in opposition to these symbols of
identity that represent inauthenticity.

Gender-Sexual Dimension (Hard vs. Soft)
Selling out is also associated with being soft, as opposed to hard. Within the
context of hip-hop, these oppositional terms are very clearly gender-specific, with
soft representing feminine attributes and hard representing masculine attributes.
This type of discourse, which falls within the gender-sexual dimension, directly
comments on either one’s gender or sexual orientation. An artist who has been
repeatedly criticized for selling out is LL Cool J because he has made many love
songs that attracted a large female audience, he sells millions of records, and he
has incorporated pop styles into his hip-hop music. In the opinion of a hip-hop
newsgroup writer, LL Cool J’s “soft ass song sucks big time. How ’bout keeping it
real?!?” (Driss, 1997). In Canibus’s (1997) song, “2nd Round Knockout,” he disre-
spected LL Cool J by claiming, “99% of your fans wear high heels.” The group 40
Thevz (1997) began their song, “Mad Doggin” by saying, “I got my real niggaz in
the house/Some real motherfuckin’ men.”

Within hip-hop, being a real man doesn’t merely entail having the proper sex
organ; it means acting in a masculine manner. Many hip-hop community members
have observed that, for various reasons, hip-hop is a male-dominated arena, and
it can be overtly homophobic, as a couple writers for The Source openly acknowl-
edged (Byers, 1997; Hardy, 1997). To claim one is a real man, one is defining
himself not just in terms of gender, but also sexuality, that is, not being a “pussy”
or a “faggot.” For instance, Tupac (1994) raps in “Heartz of Men,” “Now me and
Quik gonna show you niggas what it’s like on this side/The real side/Now, on this
ride there’s gonna be some real motherfuckers/and there’s gonna be some pus-
sies.” In Tupac’s lyrics, the Canibus song, and the hip-hop newsgroup writer Driss
(1997), there is a clear demarcation between masculinity and femininity, as well as
between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Tupac explicitly contrasts being real
against those who are “pussies,” that is, those whom he labels as feminine.

Social-Locational Dimension (the Street vs. the Suburbs)
Social location refers to the community with which a hip-hop artist and fan iden-
tifies himself or herself. Often artists and fans play with the symbols associated
with White-dominated U.S. suburbia. They contrast them with a very specific and
idealized community that is located in African American-dominated inner cities, a
social location that is often referred to within hip-hop as “the street.” For many,
keepin’ it real means not disassociating oneself from the community from which
one came—the street. Moreover, it means emphasizing one’s ties to the commu-
nity (which partially explains why so many hip-hop artists mention the name of
their neighborhood in their songs). A hip-hop newsgroup posting stated that hip-
hop artist Master P is “keepin’ it real and not forgetting where he’s coming from”

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(BTP300, 1997). Rass Kass (personal communication, December 11, 1997) told
me, “For me, the most important thing is the street. That’s what I make my shit for
and to do anything else would be fake.” The Wu-Tang Clan, another newsgroup
member asserted, “keep it real just like in da streets” (QueenB2986, 1997). The
Black Moon (1993) song, “Shit Iz Real,” contains multiple invocations of authentic-
ity. In this song, the MCs (i.e., rappers) rail against those “who fake real,” that is,
feign authenticity when they do not have the right to make that claim. The group
claims that “Bucktown,” where they come from, “is real.”

If hip-hop artists are perceived as distancing themselves from their roots, they
are considered a sell-out. Consequently, many successful artists are defensive
when the sell-out charge is leveled against them. The charge is tightly wrapped up
in claims of authenticity. This partially explains why DJ Muggs became so agitated
when I brought up the phrase keepin’ it real. In the song, “H.I.P.H.O.P.,” KRS-ONE
(1997) raps, “Dead, two in the head before some A&R can tell me/I must give up
the street so that the record company can sell me.” Here, KRS-ONE is saying,
essentially, that he wouldn’t be caught dead allowing a record label employee
telling him to disassociate himself from the urban, largely African American com-
munities that KRS-ONE identifies with so that a company can sell his music.

In the song,, “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” Tupac (1996) answered charges that his
change in social location diluted his authenticity. “So many questions, and they
ask me if I’m still down/I moved up out of the ghetto, so I ain’t real now?” (Tupac,
1996). In these lyrics, there is a direct link that Tupac drew between moving away
from his community and being real (though, in his case, he denied it is true).

Hip-hop artists are often considered sellouts when they distance themselves
from their community and sell records primarily to suburban kids, or “teenie
boppers [sic],” as one hip-hop newsgroup writer called them (Wright, 1997). “I
don’t make music for the teeny-boppers [sic]/the coppers, and proper bourge[oisie],”
Del the Funky Homosapien (1997) raps in “Help Me Out.” In this song, Del aligns
himself against the inauthentic, bourgeois teenyboppers who purchase hip-hop
music in the suburbs and, in the next verse, he positions himself within the au-
thentic underground. In the discourse that falls within the semantic dimension of
social location, claims of authenticity are often negatively defined against the
symbols of identity that represent suburbia. Further, authenticity is positively de-
fined by affiliating oneself with the street.

Cultural Dimension (the Old School vs. the Mainstream)
The cultural dimension encompasses the discourse that addresses hip-hop’s status
as a culture that has deep and resonating traditions, rather than as a commodity.
Often this discourse revolves around discussions of what is pure and polluted
culture or, respectively, authentic and inauthentic culture. Busta Rhymes (1996)
stated in The Coming that hip-hop is “a way to live/It’s a culture.” The discourse of
hip-hop fans, critics, and artists contains multiple references to the early days of
hip-hop culture—what is commonly referred to as “the old school” or, occasion-
ally, “back in the day.” Back in the day is a somewhat romantic reference to a time
before hip-hop music became popular. The old school refers to a more close-knit
community of break dancers, DJs, MCs, and graffiti artists who helped nurture and

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develop hip-hop as a culture, and who were not necessarily concerned with
making money.

Mixmaster Mike, of the Beastie Boys and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, told me that
people do not have the right to make claims about what is real hip-hop “unless
they were brought up into hip-hop like way back in the day. If they know their
history between watching Wild Style and all that then they’ll know what real hip-
hop is. . . . If they just base it upon hip-hop today, what’s being played on the
radio, then they won’t know what real hip-hop is” (Mixmaster Mike, personal
communication, November 10, 1997). Invisibl Skratch Piklz member Q-bert made
a similar reference to “back in the day,” when he blamed the decline of the
“experimentalism” that was associated with the old school on commercialism dur-
ing an interview with me (Q-Bert, personal communication, November 14, 1997).
Guru, of the hip-hop group Gang Starr, similarly told me that “you’ve got to
understand hip-hop’s past and understand it as a cultural tradition rather than treat
it as merely a product. And you have a lot of that happening nowadays, treating
hip-hop as a product” (Guru, personal communication, December 1, 1997). On a
hip-hop newsgroup post, someone voiced a similar concern: “Young people nowa-
days think that the REAL hip-hop is what they hear in the radios or what they see
on MTV. What they don’t know is that it is a culture” (DJ Brian G, 1997). Another
newsgroup writer asked, “Who in rap is sticking closest to the roots of hip-hop???”
(DJ AMF, 1997). In a discussion about the old school, a newsgroup writer stated
that “we just want to keep it real, like it was in the dopest hip-hop movies of back
in the day . . . i.e., Wild Style ” (NeonEPee, 1997).

For one to be able to make a claim of authenticity, one has to know the culture
from which hip-hop comes. Thus, by identifying the old school and back in the
day as a period when a pure hip-hop culture existed, hip-hop community mem-
bers invoke an authentic past that stabilizes the present.

Contesting the notion of authenticity within hip-hop culture. Invocations of
authenticity are not used by all members of the hip-hop community. Further, the
use of keepin’ it real and other such authenticity claims are openly contested by
some. By looking at who contests or resists the use of authenticity claims, we can
get a better understanding of what is at stake in hip-hop culture. DJ Muggs hates
the phrase, keepin’ it real, at least partially because his multiplatinum group,
Cypress Hill, has been criticized for selling out by becoming popular with a largely
White suburban audience. Another person accused of selling out is Will Smith,
known earlier in his career as “The Fresh Prince.” Smith began as a popular
rapper. He then became a well-known actor-comedian with his own television
show who, by 1997, had become a bonafide movie star (Rodriguez, 1997). He has
been lambasted by hip-hop community members because of his success among
White audiences, and is, according to one letter writer in The Source, a “fake MC”
(Zinc-NE, 1997, p. 18).

In 1997, Smith released Big Willie Style, his first album since becoming a movie
star. It was obvious Smith was conscious of the criticisms that have been leveled
against him, because Big Willie Style contained satirical skits that involved a fic-
tional reporter named Keith B. Real (from the fictional magazine, Keepin’ It Real)
who follows Smith around, asking him accusatory questions and calling him a

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Authenticity Within Hip-Hop

“big-time bourge[oisie] Hollywood sell out.” In Big Willie Style, Keith B. Real is
made to sound like a fool because he asks silly questions that are parodies of
types of authenticity claims made within the hip-hop community. In other words,
the skits on Smith’s album are used to undermine the value of making authenticity
claims within hip-hop.

Similarly, a self-identified Black, middle-class, hip-hop newsgroup writer pointed
out that many artists are dismissed by people in the hip-hop community because
“they’re not ‘street’ enough” (Maverick, 1997). This writer continued, “Why is
everyone always defining what elements of culture, particularly Black Culture,
are? It seems that we all subconsciously subscribe to the ‘keep it real’ mentality—
some things are Black enough, and others don’t seem to measure up to some
definition of Blackness” (Maverick, 1997). Those who question or resist the use of
authenticity claims tend to be located in opposition to what is deemed authentic
by the most vocal hip-hop community members. They are characterized as main-
stream, commercial, White suburbs.

Six Semantic Dimensions Summarized
These six dimensions of meaning revolve around different, and relatively specific,
cultural terms. However, they are also deeply intertwined. When the identity talk
is organized within the six semantic dimensions inductively derived from the
discourse studied, it can provide a way of understanding claims of authenticity as
drawing upon this culture’s most important symbols in ways that attempt to pre-
serve its identity.

Using the native terms I selected to represent the contrastive symbols I identi-
fied, a more explicit definition of authenticity in hip-hop can be formed. Being
authentic, or keepin’ it real, means staying true to yourself (by identifying oneself
as both hard and Black), representing the underground and the street, and re-
membering hip-hop’s cultural legacy, which is the old school. To be inauthentic,
or fake, means being soft, following mass trends by listening to commercial rap
music, and identifying oneself with White, mainstream culture that is geographi-
cally located in the suburbs. During a discussion with me about “real” hip-hop,
MC Eiht used many of the native terms used within the semantic dimensions I
identified.

Real, underground hip-hop is staying true to what you have always done and
not trying to go mainstream or Top-40 or Top-20 on the radio just to sell
records or get your face on MTV or be on the Lollapalooza tour. I think being
underground is just making records that the people on the street appeal to.
Not to win an award on the American Music Awards or a Grammy or a Bill-
board Music Award. It’s just a fact that you make the music that people on the
street want to listen to. (Eiht, personal communication, November 20, 1997,
emphasis added)

Now I will return to my questions surrounding the nature of authenticity claims
I asked earlier in this article. Authenticity may be invoked (in everyday talk, song

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Journal of Communication, Autumn 1999

lyrics, and during my interviews) consciously and strategically, or it may be incor-
porated in a seemingly random fashion. Regardless, this does not reduce keepin’
it real to “just a saying.” Even when authenticity is invoked without context, it
works as a continuous reminder that hip-hop culture is threatened with assimila-
tion. Just as varying styles of personal address are not always consciously used in
conversations to solidify group identity formations, they function to do the same
thing nonetheless (Carbaugh, 1996). By invoking authenticity, one implicitly or
explicitly makes appeals that highlight the importance of particular conceptions of
individualism, race, economic activity, gender and sexuality, politics of place, and
cultural heritage. These are key symbols in hip-hop cultural discourse. As I dis-
cussed in the method section, these semantic dimensions emerged by looking at
what key cultural symbols authenticity claims are played off.

Drawing from my discussions of Will Smith and DJ Muggs, invocations of au-
thenticity are often contested by those whose identities are primarily constituted
of elements that authenticity is defined against: suburban Blacks, White fans or
artists, feminine women, artists who sold millions of records, and the like. The last
question I asked—how do they resolve the contradiction of being both outside
the mainstream U.S. and very much inside it?—provides an entry point into the
last section, in which I more broadly discuss hip-hop as one of many cultures and
subcultures threatened with assimilation.

Hip-Hop Culture and Other Cultures Threatened With Assimilation

The multiple invocations of authenticity made by hip-hop community members
are a direct and conscious reaction to the threat of the assimilation and the colo-
nization of this self-identified, resistive subculture. Authenticity claims are a way
of establishing in-group/out-group distinctions. Therefore, by invoking authentic-
ity, one is affirming that, even though hip-hop music was the top-selling music
format in 1998, hip-hop culture’s core remains pure and relatively untouched by
mainstream U.S. culture. Hip-hop can balance large sales and mainstream success
with a carefully constructed authentic self. By organizing the expressions used in
hip-hop authenticity discourse into semantic dimensions, identity talk can be un-
derstood as structured, meaningful, and a way of comprehending central ele-
ments of hip-hop culture from a native’s point of view. When hip-hop community
members disparage inauthentic symbols of identity and valorize authentic sym-
bols of identity, they implicate themselves in a larger cultural logic shared by other
cultures and subcultures threatened with assimilation.

In a study of another self-consciously rebellious subculture that centers around
zine-making, Duncombe (1997) observed that authenticity was invoked by com-
munity members to distinguish themselves from the mainstream culture that threat-
ened to absorb them. Duncombe (1997) stated, “the authentic self that zinesters
labor to assemble is often reliant upon the inauthentic culture from which they are
trying to flee” (p. 42). That inauthentic culture included suburban life, conformity,
and corporate capitalism. The British “rave” subcultures that Thornton (1996) studied
used authenticity in a similar way. Thornton stated, “The social logic of subcul-

147

Authenticity Within Hip-Hop

tural capital reveals itself most clearly by what it dislikes and by what it emphati-
cally isn’t” (p. 105). A vast majority of rave community members, Thornton claimed,
used the notion of authenticity to distinguish themselves against what they con-
sider the “mainstream.” Thornton demonstrated that participants in rave scenes
defined themselves against an inauthentic, feminized, and classed-down main-
stream. These are concepts that were used to police the scene’s boundaries.

Country, like hip-hop, was transformed from a relatively unprofitable genre
that arose from a subculture that was largely dismissed and derided by the main-
stream to become a hugely profitable industry. In both cases, this change brought
antagonism between those who had previously been inside and the outsiders
who came into the musical genre once it became popular and profitable.

As is the case in this study of hip-hop, authenticity is invoked within country
music as a referent to a past that is constructed to fit the needs of the present
community. Constructions of authenticity center around, among other things, an
acknowledgment of a rich cultural heritage, a close connection to its audience,
and a genuine expression of one’s inner feelings. Peterson (1997) argued that the
construction of “authenticity is not random, but is renegotiated in a continual
political struggle in which the goal of each contending interest is to naturalize a
particular construction of authenticity” (p. 220). Authenticity claims and their con-
testations are a part of a highly charged dialogic conversation that struggles to
renegotiate what it means to be a participant in a culture threatened with assimi-
lation.

Quite a lot has been written on the commodification of rock music. Lull (1985)
stated that the commodification of punk and new wave music caused its subcul-
tural status to be “subtly removed” (p. 370). Lull (1987) found, in the punk com-
munity he studied, that authenticity was valued in the face of punk’s
commodification. Garofalo (1997) discussed how the counterculture became
commodified through the major record labels’ appropriation of 1960s antiestab-
lishment rock. Ennis (1992) similarly wrote about corporate control and rock and
roll more generally. Frith (1981) identified three components of an “ideology of
rock,” all of which implicitly centered around the concept of authenticity: First, a
musician’s career should evolve organically, not in a prefabricated way; second,
rock is an expression of a subcultural identity; third, there must be a real connec-
tion between the musician and audience. The ideology of rock emerged during a
time when rock was contradictorily both big business and at the epicenter of
1960s rebellion. This ideology further distinguished rock from, and legitimized it
against, other forms of popular music.

In a study that focuses on hip-hop, the most obvious place to look for another
culture threatened with assimilation is African American culture, more generally.
Because hip-hop culture is firmly rooted in African American culture, it comes as
no surprise that hip-hop’s emphasis on authenticity is similarly emphasized by
certain members of the African American community. hooks (1992) emphasized
the fact that some of the separatism that occurred in African American communi-
ties was not necessarily a “knee-jerk essentialism” (p. 270), and the search for an
authentic yet essentialized Black culture was a “concrete response to the fear of
erasure” (p. 272). Similarly, Lubiano (1996) stated, “Against the constant distor-

148

Journal of Communication, Autumn 1999

tions of Euro-American ethnocentric dismissal and burial of the African American
presence, we respond with an insistence on ‘setting the record straight,’ ‘telling
the truth,’ ‘saying it like it is’” (p. 183). Because these distortions have not ceased,
Lubiano (1996) argued, there continues to be a preoccupation among African-
Americans with how the dominant culture constructs African American-identified
cultural forms.

Conclusion

When faced with the very real threat of erasure via misrepresentation by outsiders
like Vanilla Ice, major label executives, and out-of-touch advertising agencies,
hip-hop community members attempt to protect their culture by distinguishing
authentic and inauthentic expression. The sense that hip-hop culture faces the
threat of being erased and transformed into something that is undesirable has led
to an increasing number of authenticity claims throughout the 1990s, the period
directly connected with hip-hop’s commercial ascendancy. Semantic dimensions
are used to demonstrate how authenticity claims and their meaningfully struc-
tured place within a play of discourse can highlight a culture’s key symbols as
they are employed to maintain a “pure” identity.

In the final section, I identified similar key cultural symbols that were discussed
by Duncombe (1997), Thornton (1996), Peterson (1997), and Frith (1981). These
symbols include identifying oneself against suburbia and corporate culture, and a
connection to a community and rich cultural heritage. The specific semantic di-
mensions developed in this paper cannot be generalized beyond hip-hop. How-
ever, the method used to derive this information can be used to study other
cultures and subcultures threatened with erasure, assimilation, or both, to under-
stand how these cultures similarly employ authenticity to maintain their identity.

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Geography of American rap: rap diffusion and rap centers

Kenneth French

Published online: 14 October 2015

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract The goal of this paper was to contribute to

the interdisciplinary research that linked place and

music by conducting a brief geography of rap. Rap

music grew from the isolated Bronx in the 1970s and

became a mainstay in popular culture today. Hip hop

music was noted for its strong sense of place, as rap

credibility (what ‘hood do you represented), identities

(e.g. Flo Rida), and local slang (e.g. sippin’ sizzurp in

Houston) were often geographically-based. This

research described the various spatial meanings of

rap, mapped the diffusion of hip hop music, and

identified rap centers. Cartographic analysis was based

on the hometowns of 1124 rappers and the release dates

of their debut albums from 1979 to 2015. The diffusion

of rap followed the hierarchical diffusion pattern by

leapfrogging from one major urban area to another.

Keywords Rap � Cultural geography � Music
geography � Sense of place � Diffusion

Introduction

Rap music in America grew from isolated urban

neighborhoods in the 1970s to become a mainstay in

the landscape of popular music today. Behind the

catchy beats, lyrics offered glimpses into a world

where poverty, police brutality, gang-related violence,

and other urban social ills were commonplace. Rising

from these ignored urban environments were prideful

voices calling for social change to ‘fight the powers

that be,’ as Public Enemy put it. Prominent in rap

music was a strong attachment to place, as rap

credibility, identities, and local slang usages were

often geographically linked. Given the popularity of

this musical form, it was somewhat surprising that

geographical research on rap music in America has

received scant attention (Graves 2009; Carney 2003).

Most gaps in the geographic research of rap were filled

by scholars across various disciplines (Forman 2000,

2002; Mitchell 2001; Hess 2009; Westhoff 2011).

More analysis could be done on the importance of

place in rap music, mapping the spread of rap in

America, and to describe local styles in major hip hop

centers. The goal of this paper was to contribute to the

existing interdisciplinary research on rap by providing

a geography of hip hop music to date.

Music studies

A few music geographers (Kruse 2005; Hudson 2006;

Johansson and Bell 2009) have added to music studies

with research that successfully linked music and place.

The subfield of music geography has generally

overlooked rap music, thus restricting the field by

focusing on other music genres, such as country and

K. French (&)
Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-

Parkside, Kenosha, WI 53141, USA

e-mail: frenchk@uwp.edu

123

GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272

DOI 10.1007/s10708-015-9681-z

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10708-015-9681-z&domain=pdf

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10708-015-9681-z&domain=pdf

folk (Gill 1995). Leyshon et al. (1995: 19) warned that

the ‘‘problem with the standard historical geography

of rap… [is t]he assumption that to place rap is to
explain it risks denying the mobility, mutability, and

global mediation of musical forms.’’ Geographical

research on rap followed a traditional approach by

identifying cities that have prominent rappers and rap

groups (Carney 2003). Graves (2009) described a

historical geography of rap by distinguishing folk

culture aspects of hip hop from popular culture

features of rap music. Placing rap music has been

mainly filled by non-geographers due in part to the

‘Spatial Turn’ in the humanities. Scholars from

anthropology, communication studies, cultural stud-

ies, and musicology studied the importance of geog-

raphy in music (Leonard and Strachan 2010; Bennett

2000). In terms of rap research, Murray Forman’s

book The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place

in Rap and Hip-Hop (2002) was the seminal piece

noting the importance of space and place in the genre.

Tony Mitchell’s edited volume of Global Noise (2001)

offered various examples of rap outside of the United

States. These works notwithstanding, there were many

research opportunities to explore the diffusion of hip

hop music within America.

According to the Encyclopedia of Human Geogra-

phy (Warf 2006: 107–109), there were two types of

diffusion: contagious diffusion and hierarchical diffu-

sion. The former described the transmission of a

phenomenon from one person to another, while the

latter described the spread of a phenomenon from one

city to another in a leapfrog manner. Contagious

diffusion depended on people directly sharing ideas

with each other or by migrating from one locale to

another. Hierarchical diffusion relied on the use of

technology to spread a feature from the hearth to more

distant places. Anthropologists Peterson and Di Mag-

gio (1975) noted the diffusion of country music

popularity across America was linked to the spread of

country radio stations and not solely on the migration

of Southerners away from the South. Likewise,

geographers have studied the origin and distribution

of rock and roll music by noting cities where

musicians were born (Ford 1994; Butler 1994). These

studies described the spatial patterns of music in

America without mapping the location of artists over

time. Music studies could be enhanced by mapping the

diffusion of artists based on their hometowns and the

dates their first albums were released. Understanding

the origins of rap and its various meanings can provide

context to the diffusion of rap.

Origin of rap

Rap music originated on the streets of American inner

cities; however, the roots of rap were deeper than this

urban surface. Rap has ties to West African griots, or

folk poets, who had an oral tradition described in

written records in the 11th Century (Hale 1998). These

praise-singers were known for communicating stories

and historical accounts through the use of song. Due to

the forced migration of Africans to the Americas,

many African traditions developed into African

American traditions. Aspects of ‘playing the dozens’

or ‘yo’ mama’ jokes were prevalent in rap battling. In

this verbal game of trading insults, a crowd judges who

wins or loses based on the humor and causticity of the

barbs (Jemie 2003). Feuding and trading insults

between rappers and rap centers were prevalent in

the history of rap music.

In addition to African continental heritages,

African American political and art movements have

shaped the formation of rap music (Rabaka 2012). For

example, another precursor to rap music was spoken

word poetry—popularized by the Black Arts Move-

ment of the 1960s (Sablo Sutton 2004). Performance

poetry, including its modern manifestation of slam

poetry, related to the delivery of rap lyrics in that the

recitation style was as important as the poem itself.

Rhythmically, rap had ties to the blues, jazz, neo-soul,

and R&B traditions. The background beats and sounds

of rap, or its musical samples and breaks, were

predominately from these African American musical

genres. Rap music celebrated the use and/or re-

working of preexisting musical elements to create

the foundation of a rap song (Williams 2013).

The birthplace of rap in New York City was tied to

another African-based tradition. The act of toasting, or

the improvised speaking over beats, was a Jamaican

musical tradition that found its way to the multicul-

tural borough of the Bronx. DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican-

American, brought toasting and a large sound system

to block parties in the ‘Boogie Down’ Bronx (Chang

2005). Early hip hop consisted of party music—using

turntables to extend danceable sections of songs—as

illustrated when DJ Kool Herc performed at his

sister’s party in the recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick

260 GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272

123

Avenue apartments (Fig. 1) in August, 1973 (Kosa-

novich 2014: 53–54). According to Tricia Rose

(1994), hip hop culture, which encompassed fashion,

break dancing, graffiti art, and rapping, ‘‘attempts to

negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally

truncated opportunity, and oppression within the

cultural imperatives of African American and Car-

ibbean history, identity, and community’’ (Rose 1994:

21). The origin of rap was born from fusing African,

Caribbean, and African American traditions to express

modern inner city experiences.

Meanings of rap

While the historical-cultural roots of rap influence the

morphology and outer characteristics of the art form,

the meanings of early rap music were tied to a

description of inner city life in America, as both an

expression of joy and as an articulation of oppression.

The first hit that put rap on the popular culture scene

was Rapper’s Delight (1979) by The Sugarhill Gang.

The song described a party atmosphere filled with

hyper-masculinity and self-boasting, themes still

prevalent today. In the song, Master Gee rapped,

‘Well, my name is known all over the world/By all the

foxy ladies and the pretty girls/I’m going down in

history/As the baddest rapper there could ever be.’

A more powerful use of rap was ‘conscious rap,’

where rappers often provided commentaries about

social injustices (Watkins 2005: 21). In The Message

(1982) by Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five,

Melle Mel rapped about a poor urban economy with

double digit inflation and unemployment, junkies

beating people for money, and a deficient educational

system. The frustration felt in the song built up to the

chorus: ‘It’s like a jungle sometimes/It makes me

wonder how I keep from going under.’ Recently,

Chicago rapper Common demonstrated social aware-

ness in the Oscar-winning song Glory (2014), by

linking the past protests in Selma, Alabama to those in

Ferguson, Missouri after the Michael Brown shooting.

Commenting on social issues and calling for change,

Melle Mel and Common were what Cheney (2005)

would call ‘‘raptivists.’’

These examples illustrated the significance of rap,

which provided a voice for the marginalized—a strong

factor in the global appeal and acceptance of this

musical form. Groups that do not have political or

economic power can express their local situations to

the wider community, country, and world through the

medium of popular culture. As rapper Nas said, ‘All I

Need is One Mic, One Beat, One Stage’ (One Mic,

2001) to express the urban context he inhabited. For

global youth, as Tony Mitchell noted, ‘‘rap music and

hip-hop culture have in many cases become a vehicle

for various forms of youth protest’’ (Mitchell 2001:

10). In this youthful dissent there were prideful

descriptions of growing up at the margins of society.

The positive messages and meanings found in rap

music tell part of the story. Rap music has been

justifiably condemned for misogynistic lyrics and

music videos, homophobia, promoting drug use, and

the glorification of violence (Rebollo-Gil and Moras

2012; Gourdine and Lemmons 2011; Hobson and

Bartlow 2008; Herd 2009). Controversy surrounded

misogynistic rap lyrics and videos, where women were

degraded in rhymes and sexually exploited on screen

(Adams and Fuller 2006). The hyper-masculine ten-

dency of rap often led some rappers to express

homophobia in lyrics by ‘demasculinizing’ another

rapper (Rose 2008: 236–242). Rap music was criti-

cized further for its glorification of violence and the

admiration of criminal activities, which propagated

negative stereotypes about American inner cities. In a

random sample of 632 rap songs from platinum selling

albums (selling over 1 million units), Kubrin (2005)

found that close to 65 % of the rap songs from 1992 to

2000 referenced violence.

A reason for the popularity of violence in rap was

tied to the marketing to middle-class, suburban

Fig. 1 1520 Sedgwick Avenue apartments in the Bronx [photo
by author]

GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272 261

123

audiences whom fanaticize about the ghetto life.

Commercialization of hip hop transformed rap away

from African American experiences (Blair 1993) and

rap lyrical content shifted away from grassroots

themes when major record labels bought out indepen-

dent rap labels (Myer and Kleck 2007). Lena (2006),

in analyzing rap lyrics from 1979 to 1995, noted that

major labels featured rappers with lyrics emphasizing

street credibility (often tied to drugs and violence) and

a ‘‘hustler’’ protagonist. In the documentary Hip Hop:

Beyond Beats & Rhymes (2006), young rappers felt

pressure to express violent and hyper-masculine lyrics

to get signed to a record deal. Rappers included violent

themes in rap music, often with the backing of major

record labels, to authenticate their real or imagined

urban struggle. This sense of place marker was one of

many aspects of geography within the hip hop

community.

Geography in rap

There were strong connections between rap music,

identity, and senses of place. City of origin was an

important spatial identity marker in hip hop songs,

music videos, and fashion (e.g. clothes that supported

local sports teams, music video locales, etc.). Wiz

Khalifa was proud of his city in Black and Yellow

(2010) by rapping about the common colors of the

professional sports teams in Pittsburgh. Bay Area

rapper Tupac mentioned various cities in California

Love (1995) and Jay Z’s Empire State of Mind (2009)

was an ode to places within New York City. Further,

place names became popular references in hip hop and

occur at multiple geographic scales. Rappers had pride

in their regions (East Coast, West Coast, ‘Dirty South,’

and Midwest) and were identified in song. These rap

regions were self-evident among American rappers:

for example, at the beginning of Hip Hop is Dead

(2006), Nas called to ‘NYC, Dirty South, West Coast,

Midwest, let’s go!’

At the city level, Snoop Dogg represented the LBC

(Long Beach City) and Kanye West rapped about Chi-

Town or The Chi (Chicago). Nelly put St. Louis on the

rap map with Country Grammar (2000), where he

embodied place with: ‘Sing it Loud (What?)/I’m from

the Lou’ and I’m Proud.’ In fact, Nelly’s debut album

cover depicted the rapper in front of the Gateway

Arch. Atlanta rapper Ludacris sang about area codes—

another popular geographically-based marker in hip

hop culture. Rapper Drake referenced ‘6’ in several

rap songs as a spatial marker for Toronto—the digit is

the common number in the city’s 416 and 647 area

codes. In comparison, several Toronto’s suburban

neighborhoods use the 905 area code. At the street

level, Warren G referenced the intersection of ‘21 and

Lewis’ in Los Angeles. The importance of geography

in rap can also be seen in the actual names of famous

rappers, as the T in T-Pain stands for Tallahassee, the

D in D-12 represents Detroit, and it’s obvious what

state Flo Rida called home. Legitimacy as a rapper was

based on what ‘hood you represented, either at the

neighborhood, city, or regional geographic scales.

To use Murray Forman’s words, rap put ‘‘a

pronounced emphasis on place and locality,’’ (Forman

2002: 28) and credibility as a rapper was based on

geography and identity; in other words, ‘who you are’

was answered by ‘where you are from.’ Street cred

was built up geographical since growing up in an inner

city neighborhood and surviving the harsh social

environment authenticated a rapper. Where you are

from was something that a few rappers have to

overcome to be accepted in the hip hop. Mickey Hess

(2009) notes how the Wu-Tang Clan has justified their

street cred in Staten Island—New York City’s least

credible rap borough because of its perception of being

a white community—by rapping about living in the

island’s two housing projects (Stapleton and Park

Hill). Place was critical in providing the legitimacy of

Eminem, who grew up in inner city Detroit (Warren,

MI), while de-legitimizing Vanilla Ice, who did not

grow up in the inner city in Miami. Place, instead of

race, could also be the reason that many in the rap

community do not give white Seattle rapper Mackle-

more more credit. Geography can be used as a

powerful authenticating tool that may have hampered

hip hop’s growth across America. Were rappers

outside of New York City or Los Angeles, irrespective

of their lyrical talents, seen as lacking urban credibil-

ity? If you were not from a poor inner city, could you

claim to be an authority on street life?

Rap feuds based on a sense of place and territori-

ality were common, a fact observed in the infamous

East Coast vs. West Coast rivalry during the mid-

1990s that sadly culminated in the murders of

Notorious BIG (East Coast) and Tupac (West Coast).

The rivalry was encouraged by record labels and

producers, as Diddy’s Bad Boy Records supported

262 GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272

123

Notorious BIG and Suge Knight’s Death Row Records

backed Tupac. Commercialization of hip hop, as

record labels focused on record sales, fostered a

climate of rap feuds since controversy sells. Eithne

Quinn noted that rap rivalries were ‘‘fueled by

geography—the geographies of community, of repre-

sentation, of markets’’ (Quinn 2005: 182). Here the

meaning of rap was territorial: by promoting their

region or place, rappers consequently (directly or

indirectly) constructed all other places as inferior.

Thus, as rap diffused, rap artists from emerging hip

hop centers made it a point to place themselves by

distinguishing their neighborhood from other areas

and rappers.

Data and methodology

The difficulty in mapping the diffusion of rap music in

America was the lack of a current data source on the

hometowns of rap artists. This study attempted to

overcome this limitation by developing a rap database

in a three-step process. First, a list of 1124 rappers was

collected from Wikipedia. As an open-source website,

Wikipedia has been noted for errors and can be

rightfully questioned as a primary source. Thus,

Wikipedia was only used as a starting point to identify

the names of American rappers. The second step

included the confirmation and cross-referencing of

rappers and their hometowns from verified internet

sources: All Music, Rolling Stone, and MTV. The

third step involved noting the year an artist’s debut

album was released by using online album databases

(Discogs and All Music). Using data about albums,

and not mixtapes or EPs (Extended Plays), focused

this research away from the underground rap scene.

The limitations of the created database included a

potential undercount of rappers in America, was

depended upon the biographic accuracy from music

websites, and the exclusion of underground rappers.

This data collection methodology did not claim to

have developed the definitive database of every rapper

in American history.

The diffusion of rap in America can be shown by

mapping the hometown of rap artists based on the year

of their debut album. Debut albums indicated the

potential commercial success of a new rap artist.

Hometowns were used instead of birthplaces since

rappers could move before releasing their debut

album. For example, Tupac Shakur was born in New

York City, lived in Baltimore, and then moved to

Marin City, California when he was a teenager. For

this dataset, his hometown was listed as Marin City (in

the Bay Area) since that was where he became a

successful rapper. Rapper hometowns, with debut

album dates, were then geocoded in a Geographic

Information System (GIS). A query of rap artists by

debut album date in the GIS allowed for the mapping

of rap diffusion by any time periods (e.g. 1980s,

1990s, and 2000s). Rap centers were identified by

mapping all 1124 rappers by their debut album date

from 1979 to 2015. The top ten top cities with the

highest number of rappers were selected and further

understood in terms of their local styles. Also, the

history of each rap center concentrated on the impact

of geography: intra-urban differences and place-based

references in lyrics.

Rap diffusion

In mapping new rap artists based on their debut album

release date (Fig. 2), patterns of growth within and

between urban areas became apparent. In the 1980s,

New York City was the main center of rap by having

64 of the 108 (59.3 %) new rap artists calling the city

home. New York City-area rap pioneers, with pre-

1984 debut album release dates, included The Sugar-

hill Gang, Kurtis, Blow, The Cold Crush Brothers,

Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, and Afrika

Bambaataa. It was not until Philadelphia rapper

Schooly D (1985), became the first non-New York

City metro area rapper to release an album. Los

Angeles was a distant second with 14 rappers having a

debut album in the decade—Ice T and Easy-E released

their debut albums in 1987 and 1988 respectively. In

1987, Oakland rappers MC Hammer and Too Short

were the first Bay Area rappers to release albums. The

only Southern cities that produced popular rappers in

the 1980s were from Miami (2 Live Crew), Dallas

(The D.O.C.), and Houston (Geto Boys).

All of early rap centers continued to develop new

rappers into the 1990s and rap spread to new

metropolitan areas. There were 440 new rappers that

had debut albums in the 1990s.

New York City

continued to be the dominant city in developing

rappers and was home to 142 of the 440 (32.3 %) new

rap artists. The next major rap city was Los Angeles,

GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272 263

123

with 77 new rappers with debut rap albums in the

1990s. Popularity of hip hop music ignited diffusion to

smaller urban centers in New Orleans (26 new

rappers), Houston (24 new rappers), Oakland (20

new rappers), and Atlanta (18 new rappers) in this

1990s. Some of the earliest New Orleans rappers with

debut albums included Master P (1991) and Mystikal

(1994). The debut albums of Arrested Development

(1992), Kris Kross (1992), OutKast (1994), and Lil Jon

(1997) helped place Atlanta on the hip hop scene.

There were only a few rappers with albums from the

Midwest in the 1990s. Detroit had eight new rap

Fig. 2 Diffusion of rap
music by decade based on

the hometowns of new rap

artists. Rap artist

hometowns and year of their

debut albums were collected

from the following websites:

www.allmusic.com, www.

discogs.com, www.mtv.

com, www.rollingstone.

com, and www.wikipedia.

org

264 GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272

123

http://www.allmusic.com

http://www.discogs.com

http://www.discogs.com

http://www.mtv.com

http://www.mtv.com

http://www.rollingstone.com

http://www.rollingstone.com

http://www.

wikipedia.org

http://

www.wikipedia.org

artists, including Eminem’s debut album in 1996, and

Chicago developed five new rap artists such as

Common and Twista (both had debut albums in 1992).

Post-millennium growth of rap was seen in South-

ern cities, as Atlanta had emerged as a rival to New

York City in generating new talent. New York City

still produced the highest number of new rappers, with

72 of the 390 (18.5 %) new rap artists being from New

York City. However, the percentages of new rappers

from New York City had declined from 59.3 % in the

1980s to 32.3 % in the 1990s to 18.5 % in the 2000s.

In the 2000s, Atlanta had 45 new rap artists emerge,

while 39 new rap musicians were from Los Angeles.

Other cities like Philadelphia, Memphis, and Dallas

continued to grow in rap talent over time. Midwestern

rap nodes in St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, and

Detroit continued to gain recognition in the 2000s—as

Chicago rapper Kanye West then noted: ‘You Know

What the Midwest Is? Young and Restless’ (Jesus

Walks, 2004). Interestingly, there were fewer new rap

artists originating from Californian cities, New

Orleans, and Houston in the 2000s. The development

of new rappers in the 2000s spread away from the

largest metropolitan areas near the coast.

The diffusion of rap music progressed from one

major urban center to another in America in a leapfrog

pattern. The spread of rap from New York City to the

other large urban areas benefited from rap music’s rise

in popular culture. Rap music transitioned from being

a fad in the early 1980s to a mainstream musical genre

in the late 1980s with the help of radio stations and

cable television. Television shows Yo! MTV Raps

(started in 1988) and Rap City (started in 1989) were

instrumental in the diffusion of rap music across

middle-class America. Rap music spread with people

traveling away from New York City (contagious

diffusion pattern), however the hierarchical diffusion

pattern described the diffusion of rap more closely. In

the 1980s, rap dispersed from New York City to

distant urban centers of Los Angeles, Houston, and

Oakland in a leapfrog manner. The last rap centers to

develop were cities in the Midwest, which were closer

to New York City than those on the West Coast. If rap

music spread according to contagious diffusion, rap

would reach Chicago and St. Louis before it would

reach Los Angeles and Oakland. Similar to the process

of diffusion in country music identified by Peterson

and Di Maggio (1975), the diffusion of rap music was

disseminated via multimedia platforms and not from a

large migration of people. Future diffusion research of

the 2010s may provide an indication of the growth of

hip hop in America as new cities may develop into rap

centers.

Rap centers

Spatial patterns were apparent when mapping 1124

rap artists by hometown from 1979 to 2015 (Fig. 3).

Three major rap centers emerged: New York City, Los

Angeles, and Atlanta—these metro areas combined to

be home to 50.2 % (or 564 out of 1124) of all rappers

in America (Table 1). The gap to the next tier of cities

was sizable (New Orleans, Houston, Oakland,

Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Miami), as no

other city produced more than 50 rappers with albums.

However, if the Bay Area of California (Oakland, San

Francisco, and Vallejo) was considered as one entity,

then there were 63 rappers from this conurbation. The

relatively lower total number of rappers from the

Midwestern cities of Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis

was due to the fact that rap diffused into these cities at

a later time. A brief historical geography of the top ten

rap centers was created by identifying selected

rappers, indicating their intra-urban differences, and

referencing place-based rap themes. Many rap styles

that started in one city were often adopted by rappers

from another city over time. Rap music has a long

tradition of copying, from using sampled beats and

imitating rap styles. Also, due to the complexity of

styles and histories in hip hop music, this study only

analyzed a very limited sample of rap artists from each

center.

New York City

New York City was the hearth of hip hop culture and

was home to 314 rap artists to date. Territoriality in

New York hip hop was evident as rappers represent

various sub-city geographies of boroughs. Rap rival-

ries between New York City boroughs started in the

1980s. In representing the birthplace of rap, Bronx

rapper KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions puts

down Queens’ rappers MC Shan and Marley Marl,

with The Bridge is Over (1987): ‘Manhattan keeps on

makin’ it/Brooklyn keeps on takin’ it/Bronx keeps

creatin’ it/And Queens keeps on fakin’ it.’ New York

City rappers were displayed geographical awareness

GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272 265

123

about which neighborhoods other rappers represented.

New York rap music can be geographically divided

amongst the boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn,

Queens, and Manhattan (mainly Harlem).

The South Bronx was the origin of rap music as the

early rap pioneers included DJ Kool Herc, Busy Bee

Starski, and The Cold Crush Brothers. The hearth of

rap music was a part of the Hip Hop cultural

movement—the term Hip Hop was coined by Bronx-

native DJ Afrika Bambaataa (Pabon 2006: 19). A

common occurrence in the 1970s South Bronx was the

block party, using stolen municipal power, which was

used to lessen gang tensions within the neighborhood

(Lamotte 2014). Bronx pride as the birthplace of rap

can be seen in street signs in its urban landscape as

rappers KRS-One, DJ Red Alert, Grandmaster Flash

and The Furious Five, Afrika Bombaataa, and Grand-

master Caz were a few of the hip hop legends inducted

to the boroughs’ Walk of Fame. Bronx rap in the 1990s

included Latino artists such as Fat Joe (founder of

Terror Squad record label) and Big Pun,

Brooklyn rappers in the 1980s included artists such

as Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, Chubb Rock, and MC

Lyte. Perry (1994: 191) analyzed female rapper MC

Lyte’s video for Stop, Look, Listen (1989) and noted

that she challenged male space by rapping on the street

which countered the negative association of women on

the street corner as being prostitutes. Many famous

Brooklyn rappers had their debut albums released in

the 1990s: Notorious BIG (1994), and Jay Z (1996),

Mos Def (1998), and Talib Kweli (1998). Notorious

BIG drew upon his upbringing in Brooklyn and

constructed some of the most creative clever rhymes.

To the envy of other rappers, he took on a persona that

promoted the fact he sold crack in Brooklyn (he was

arrested at the age of 17) and rapped about the gangster

lifestyle (Collins 2006). After Notorious BIG’s death

in 1997, there was a territorial rap battle in New York

Fig. 3 Total number of
rappers with albums by

hometown, 1979–2015. Rap

artist hometowns and year of

their debut albums were

collected from the following

websites: www.allmusic.

com, www.discogs.com,

www.mtv.com, www.

rollingstone.com, and www.

wikipedia.org

Table 1 Top 15 cities with the highest number of rappers,
1979–2015

Rank City Number of rap artists

1 New York City 314

2 Los Angeles 162

3 Atlanta 88

4 New Orleans 48

5 Houston 43

6 Oakland 41

7 Philadelphia 38

8 Chicago 31

9 Detroit 30

10 Miami 25

11 Memphis 17

12 Boston 13

13 San Francisco 12

14 St. Louis 11

15 Vallejo, CA 10

Rap artist hometowns and year of their debut albums were

collected from the following websites: www.allmusic.com,

www.discogs.com, www.mtv.com, www.rollingstone.com, and

www.wikipedia.org

266 GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272

123

http://www.allmusic.com

http://www.allmusic.com

http://www.discogs.com

http://www.mtv.com

http://www.rollingstone.com

http://www.rollingstone.com

http://www.wikipedia.org

http://www.wikipedia.org

http://www.allmusic.com

http://www.discogs.com

http://www.mtv.com

http://www.rollingstone.com

http://www.wikipedia.org

City between Brooklyn rapper Jay Z and Queens

rapper Nas. The rivalry was a battle over the ‘King of

New York’ rap title and involved various songs and

freestyles that insulted the opposing rapper. The feud

was a commercial success for both rappers as people

purchased records to hear how each rapper disre-

spected the other. This territorially-based controversy

dissipated as Nas and Jay Z overcame their dispute,

especially when the former was signed by the latter to

a Def Jam record deal. Nas was one of several rappers

in the 1990s that continued the rap tradition from

Queens. Rap artists and groups such as Run DMC

(1984), Salt-n-Pepa (1986), and Young MC (1989)

had debut albums before 1990. Rap reached wider

audiences when Run DMC rapped over a sample from

Aerosmith’s rock song Walk this Way (1986). Newer

Queens rap artists from the 2000s included G-Unit

(tied with rapper 50 Cent) and Nicki Minaj. Part of 50

Cent’s street credibility was the fact that he was shot

nine times in 2000 on 161st Street in Jamaica, Queens

(Birchmeier 2015).

Many rappers from the borough of Manhattan

hailed from its Harlem neighborhood—a neighbor-

hood near to the South Bronx. Early Harlem rap

innovators included Kurtis Blow and beatboxer Doug

E. Fresh. In the song Rappin’ Blow, Part 2 (1980),

Kurtis Blow stated: ‘I’m Kurtis Blow on the micro-

phone/A place called Harlem was my home.’ Another

famous rap group from Manhattan in the 1980s was

the rap group The Beastie Boys—members were from

affluent families. Stratton (2008) argued that The

Beastie Boys’ Jewishness was central to their success

and they brought rap to a mainstream, white American

audience. One of their songs was No Sleep till

Brooklyn (1987)—a party anthem heard across Amer-

ica. The song geographically referenced Brooklyn, a

major center for hip hop, and not their home borough

of Manhattan. Was geography used to authenticate

their rap credibility to wider rap audiences?

Los Angeles

In its formative days, 1980s Los Angeles rap was

known for the development of Gangsta Rap. The main

neighborhoods to develop rappers were Compton,

South Central, and Long Beach City. The local social

tensions within Compton added to the rap themes

introduced by the rap group NWA. Their place-

referenced album Straight Outta Compton (1988), and

commercially successful film of the same name

(2015), violently described an urban environment

filled with police brutality and gang hostilities. This

subgenre of rap, Quinn explained, ‘‘continually elab-

orated highly appealing and marketable expressions of

authentic place-bound identity… [and] at the same
time, intimated the wider context of insecurities about

place and the displacing features of post-Fordist

capitalism that precisely drove such expressions’’

(Quinn 2005: 67). Key members of NWA, such as

Easy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre, were influential in the

West Coast rap scene. Critically-acclaimed rapper

Kendrick Lamar continued Compton’s rap tradition,

as Los Angeles locales and streets were prominently

featured in his album good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012).

His King Kunta (2015) lyrics, and subsequent music

video locales, indicated Kendrick Lamar’s sense of

place: ‘Stuck a flag in my city, everybody’s screamin’

‘Compton’/I should probably run for Mayor when I’m

done, to be honest.’ Geographical markers used in Los

Angeles were similar in importance to those rappers

from the various sub-city areas of New York City.

The Los Angeles rap scene was tied to its G-Funk or

Gangsta Funk beginnings. Dr. Dre influenced this style

and advanced the careers of several Long Beach City

rappers such as Warren G, Nate Dogg, and Snoop

Dogg. He produced Snoop Dogg’s first album Dog-

gystyle (1993). A common theme in Snoop Dogg’s

music over the years was the recreational use of

marijuana. A similar theme can be found in the songs

from Latino rap group Cypress Hill—named after a

local hangout on Cyprus Avenue in the South Gate

neighborhood of LA (Cypress Hill 2015).

Another inner city neighborhood of Los Angeles

famous for rap was South Central—rappers Ice Cube

and the rap group The Pharcyde call this area home.

Former NWA member and creative rap lyricist Ice

Cube’s street credibility was questioned on two fronts:

family status and geography. Ice Cube had been

criticized for coming from a two-parent family (sadly

seen as a negative for some in the hip hop community)

and was bussed out of his South Central neighborhood

to Taft High School in the San Fernando Valley

(Hilson-Woldu 2008: 14–26). These factors were used

by some to question his Gangsta background, espe-

cially noting that he did not know many Crip gang

members from his neighborhood. Nonetheless, Ice

Cube lived in South Central and knew about the social

climate of Los Angeles.

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123

Atlanta

A major criticism of the marketing of ‘Dirty South’

rap in Atlanta was that it obscured the real social and

economic problems in the South (Grem 2006). Many

of the rap styles in Atlanta rap do not focus on the

social ills within Southern inner cities. The rap styles

Atlanta included up-tempo beats, Snap Rap, Trap,

and Crunk. Atlanta’s rap group OutKast had a strong

sense of place in their music and they titled their

debut album: Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik

(1994). The group was known for their rapid rhymes

and up-tempo drum and bass beats—for example,

listen to Bombs over Baghdad (2000). The heavy

drum and bass sounds were musical traditions that

came to Atlanta from Jamaica via Miami. A devel-

opment heard in Atlanta-based music and dance in

the 2000s was called Snap Rap. In this subgenre,

finger snaps instead of drum beats served as percus-

sion, and rap songs and associated dances in Lean

Wit It, Rock Wit It (2006) by Dem Franchize Boys

and Crank That (2007) by Soulja Boy Tell’em

demonstrated the movement. Popular dances, such as

The Dougie, The Bernie, Nae Nae, and Whip Dance,

were influential in bridging the gap between hip hop

and mainstream cultures. Atlanta teenager Silentó,

with his commercially successful song Watch Me

(2015), referenced several Southern-based hip hop

dances mentioned above. Southern Trap, a mixture of

electronic dance music and rap, spread in the DJ

world and led to the Harlem Shake internet memes

and viral videos in 2012.

Starting in Memphis and then becoming popular in

Atlanta, Crunk rap was a feel-good subgenre of rap

linking music in strip clubs and the Southern under-

ground rap industry (Westwood 2005). Strippers

wanted feel-good songs to get the audience excited

and local DJs provided these hip hop beats. Even

though the etymology of Crunk was unknown, the

combination of ‘crazy’ and ‘drunk’ were commonly

used to describe this rap style about partying. The

distinctiveness of Crunk was the expression of emo-

tions in a yell: as the self-proclaimed King of Crunk,

Atlanta rapper Lil Jon screamed ‘yeah!,’ ‘what?!,’ and

‘okay!’ in numerous songs. In Southern rap parlance,

‘turn up’ or ‘turnt up’ refered to partying while getting

drunk and/or high. In the lyrically simple song Turn

Down for What (2013), Lil Jon wonders why anyone

would want to stop partying. The Crunk rap subgenre

was the antithesis of blues music, where musicians

often used groans to express their feelings of sorrow.

Secondary centers

Emerging secondary centers offered new subgenres on

rap music by mixing local musical traditions and

referencing local slang. The fourth largest hip hop

center was New Orleans, centering around two major

labels: No Limit Records and Cash Money

Records.

New Orleans rappers Master P (founder of No Limit),

Birdman (co-founder of Cash Money), Mystikal, and

Juvenile found commercial success by 1995. Lil

Wayne was a popular rapper, and due to a recent

dispute, a former member of Cash Money Records. He

embodied place identity by having ‘Orleans’ and the

New Orleans Saints Fleur-de-lis logo tattooed on his

face. Lil Wayne (aka Weezy) grew up in the Holly-

grove neighborhood of New Orleans and raps in

Hollyweezy (2015) that he was ‘Too Hollygrove to go

Hollywood.’ Hip hop culture continued to diversify, as

the New Orleans gay culture was known for partying

to Bounce music, a dance-orientated rap subgenre

(Miller 2012).

The fifth largest rap center was Houston—where

pre-1990s artists included the Geto Boys and Scarface.

Houston was noted for the rap subgenre of ‘chopped

and screwed,’ where up-tempo beats were abandoned

for slow background grooves. DJ Screw (hence the

style name) popularized this method by taking current

rap hits and re-mixing them by slowing the music

tempo down. Slim Thug, Paul Wall, and Mike Jones

represented H-Town by rapping over these chopped

and screwed beats—for example, in their song Still

Tippin’ (2005). Adding to the lexicon of Houston rap

was the local drug usage that was referenced as

‘sippin’ sizzurp,’ The reference was to Purple Drank

or Lean, a mixture of prescription-strength cough

syrup (consisting of promethazine and codeine) and

soft drinks. Hart et al. (2014) surveyed 2349 under-

graduates and linked Purple Drank drug use to fans of

hip hop music. This popular Southern drug has been

linked to the deaths of DJ Screw and Port Arthur,

Texas rapper Pimp C, among others.

The sixth largest rap center to develop artists was

Oakland, California—extending to the entire Bay

Area included rappers from San Francisco and

Vallejo. The sexually explicit lyrics of Too Short put

Oakland on the map in the late 1980s. Another early

268 GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272

123

rap pioneer from Oakland is MC Hammer, whom

found commercial success in 1990 with his song U

Can’t Touch This. Also in 1990, Digital Underground

became popular with the song The Humpty Dance.

Tupac, who started as a dancer for Digital Under-

ground, became an iconic rapper from the Bay Area.

His music touched on rap themes of partying, the

‘Thug Life,’ family togetherness, and political acti-

vism (Stanford 2011). Some of the themes of rap in the

Bay Area revolved around the development of the

Hyphy Movement (similar to Crunk in the South) in

The Bay Area. The style, which was distinguishable

by its unique local slang, was short for hyperactive,

which referred to getting drunk or using drugs to ‘get

stupid’ and ‘go dumb’ (Jones 2006). Rap songs

mentioned ‘ghost riding the whip,’ the local phe-

nomenon of drivers walking and/or dancing outside of

their slow moving vehicles. For rappers engaged in the

Hyphy movement, such as E-40, the music provided

an expression of their local culture to a wider

audience. E-40 popularized the slang ‘-izzle’ suffix

in the West Coast rap lexicon, with ‘fo’ shizzle’

meaning ‘for sure’ as one example. This rap dialect

became more popular when West Coast rapper Snoop

Dogg adopted it and used this vernacular in his lyrics.

Another early East Coast center for rap music was

Philadelphia—with artists like Schooly D and DJ

Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince debuting albums in the

1980s. The latter represented West Philadelphia and

were known for their popular hit Parents Just Don’t

Understand (1988). The Fresh Prince, aka Will Smith,

parlayed his musical success into acting success, as his

TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air led to various

blockbuster movie roles. Influential Philadelphia hip

hop band The Roots produced several albums in the

1990s and were known for being the house band for

several rappers’ live performances. Ruff Ryder rapper

Eve places her hometown of ‘Philthadelphia’ on

several of her early raps. In 2013, rappers Cassidy

and Meek Mill continued the tradition of doing the

dozens by releasing songs insulting each other.

The eighth and ninth ranked centers of rap were

found in the Midwest, Chicago and Detroit respec-

tively. Chicago’s own Kanye West—equally known

for his creative beats, big ego, and controversial public

outbursts—worked with musicians from various

musical genres. Kanye West collaborated with Adam

Levine of Maroon 5, former Beatle Paul McCartney,

and French electronica group Daft Punk. Kanye

West’s song and video Homecoming (2009), featuring

Coldplay’s Chris Martin, was an ode to Chicago. The

song personified Chicago and ended with: ‘Jump in the

crowd, spark your lighters, wave ‘em around/If you

don’t know by now, I’m talking ‘bout Chi-town!’

Kanye West did not shy away from his middle-class

upbringing, as the educationally-themes titles of his

first three albums noted: The College Dropout (2004),

Late Registration (2005), and Graduation (2007). Had

geography as an authenticating tool in hip hop become

less important over the years? The diversity of

Chicago rap was seen with Lupe Fiasco, a creative

lyricist who became prominent with his ode to

skateboarding in Kick, Push (2006) and for being the

official musician of the U.S. Soccer Federation.

Detroit rapper Eminem, a member of D-12, became

famous for his criticisms of popular culture icons and

for his alter-ego Slim Shady. Eminem’s rap credibil-

ity, which is difficult for a white rapper to achieve,

came by his ascension through Detroit’s underground

rap battle scene (fictionalized in the movie 8 Mile, a

road that historically separated African Americans and

whites). The film described a poor rapper from a trailer

park who participated in rap battles, where rappers

created rhymes that insulted their rap competitor

(similar to playing the dozens). Other Detroit rappers

include D-12 artists, Slum Village, Royce Da 50900, and
Big Sean. Royce Da 50900 raps about being the King of
Detroit in Rock City (2002) and proclaimes: ‘If you

hate me/You hate the D,’ proving that it was difficult

to separate the identity of a rapper from the geographic

area they represent.

The tenth most populated rap center was Miami,

where controversial rap group 2 Live Crew was known

for their sexually explicit lyrics and legal battles over

censorship. ‘Parental Advisory’ labels were used on 2

Live Crew’s albums of As Nasty As They Wanna Be

(1989) and Banned in the USA (1990). Miami

remained Florida’s major hip hop center, with geog-

raphy being an important identity marker for many

prominent artists. The Carol City rapper Rick Ross

named himself after a drug lord—his lyrical themes

mention drug trafficking and expensive automobiles.

His place-based debut album was titled Port of Miami

(2006). Cuban-American rapper Pitbull’s debut album

was titled M.I.A.M.I. (2004)—using the city’s name to

stand for ‘Money Is A Major Issue.’ Florida rapper

T-Pain was the poster child of the Auto-Tune move-

ment in Hip Hop, where a voice processor was used to

GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272 269

123

correct for off-key sounds. Songs such as I’m Sprung

(2005) and Up Down (Do This All Day) (2013)

exemplified this sing-song genre of rap music that

became popular for many rappers outside of Florida.

In a regional dispute, New York City rappers Nas and

Jay Z, in Hip Hop is Dead (2006) and D.O.A. (Death of

Auto-Tune) (2009) respectively, had criticized the

Auto-Tune movement in rap.

Summary

Rap music started in the Bronx borough of New York

City and diffused to several large inner cities over time.

The diffusion of rap music followed the hierarchical

diffusion pattern of leapfrogging from one large metro

area to another. In the 1980s, rap was mainly produced

in New York City and then diffused to Los Angeles,

Oakland, and Miami. In the 1990s, rap continued to

diffuse and grow in Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, and

Memphis. In the 2000s, Midwestern cities of Detroit,

Chicago, and St. Louis developed more rap artists. This

research showed after mapping 1124 rap artists that

there were three major hip hop centers: New York City,

Los Angeles, and Atlanta. Secondary rap centers were

found in the East Coast (Philadelphia), West Coast (The

Bay Area), South (New Orleans, Houston, and Miami),

and Midwest (Chicago and Detroit). Rappers from these

centers developed local rap styles and used local slang to

portray their locality. Rap music has a powerful

connection to place as rappers legitimized their hip

hop authenticity by constantly indicating where they

grew up in rap songs. Rap artists even incorporated

geography into their identity when creating their rap

names and rap groups. Hip hop music within large urban

areas can be studied for their geographic meanings and

intra-urban rivalries. Future research can build upon this

paper and add to the multidisciplinary approaches that

study the geography of rap music.

Discography

2 Live Crew. 1989. As Nasty As They Wanna Be.

Luke/

Atlantic Records.

2 Live Crew. 1990. Banned in the USA Luke/

Atlantic Records.

2 Pac featuring Dr. Dre. 1995. California Love.

Death Row/Interscope.

Beastie Boys. 1987. No Sleep till Brooklyn. Def

Jam/Columbia Records.

Boogie Down Productions. 1987. The Bridge is

Over. B-Boy Records.

Common and John Legend. 2014. Glory. Columbia

Records.

Dem Franchize Boys. 2006. Lean Wit It, Rock Wit

It. Virgin Records.

Digital Underground. 1990. The Humpty Dance.

Tommy Boy.

DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince. 1988. Parents

Just Don’t Understand. Jive.

DJ Snake and Lil Jon. 2013. Turn Down for What.

Columbia.

Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five. 1982. The

Message. Sugar

Hill.

Jay Z. 2009. D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune). Roc

Nation/

Atlantic.

Jay Z. 2009. Empire State of Mind. Roc Nation/

Atlantic.

Kanye West. 2004. Jesus Walks. Roc-A-Fella Records.

Kanye West. 2009. Homecoming. Roc-A-Fella

Records.

Kendrick Lamar. 2012. Good kid, m.A.A.d city. Top

Dawg/

Aftermath/Interscope.

Kendrick Lamar. 2015. King Kunta. Top Dawg/

Aftermath/Interscope.

Lil Wayne. 2015. Hollyweezy. Young Money.

Lupe Fiasco. 2006. Kick, Push. Atlantic.

MC Hammer. 1990. U Can’t Touch This. Capitol.

Mike Jones, with Slim Thug and Paul Wall. 2005.

Still Tippin’. Warner Bros Records.

N.W.A. 1988. Straight Outta Compton. Ruthless.

Nas. 2001. One Mic. Columbia.

Nas. 2006. Hip Hop is Dead. Def Jam/Columbia.

Nelly. 2000. Country Grammar. Universal Records.

OutKast. 2000. B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad).

LaFace.

Pitbull. 2004. M.I.A.M.I. (Money Is A Major Issue).

TVT.

Rick Ross. 2006. Port of Miami. Slip-n-Slide/Def

Jam/Poe Boy.

Royce Da 50900. 2002. Rock City. Columbia.
Run DMC. 1986. Walk this Way. Profile.

Silentó. 2015. Watch Me. Capitol.

Soulja Boy Tell’em. 2007. Crank That. Interscope.

T-Pain. 2005. I’m Sprung. Konvict/Jive/Zomba.

T-Pain. 2013. Up Down (Do This All Day). Nappy

Boy/Konvict Muzik/RCA Records.

270 GeoJournal (2017) 82:259–272

123

The Sugarhill Gang. 1979. Rapper’s Delight. Sugar

Hill.

Wiz Khalifa. 2010. Black and Yellow. Rostrum/

Atlantic.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest None.

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Geography of American rap: rap diffusion and rap centers
Abstract
Introduction
Music studies
Origin of rap
Meanings of rap
Geography in rap
Data and methodology
Rap diffusion
Rap centers
New York City
Los Angeles
Atlanta
Secondary centers
Summary
Discography
References

SOCIAL IDENTITY
The third edition of Social Identity builds on the international success of
previous editions, offering an easy access critical introduction to social
science theories of identity, for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates.
All of the previous chapters have been updated and extra material has
been added where relevant, for example on globalisation. Two new chapters
have also been added; one addresses the debate about whether identity
matters, discussing, for example, Brubaker; the second reviews the
postmodern approach to identity.
The text is informed by relevant topical examples throughout and,
as with earlier editions, the emphasis is on sociology, anthropology and
social psychology; on the interplay between relationships of similarity
and difference; on interaction; on the categorisation of others as well as
self-identification; and on power, institutions and organisations.
Richard Jenkins is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield,
UK. Trained as an anthropologist, he has done research in Ireland,
Britain and Denmark. Among his other books are Foundations of Sociology
(2002), Pierre Bourdieu (second edition 2002) and Rethinking Ethnicity
(second edition 2008).

KEY IDEAS
SERIES EDITOR: PETER HAMILTON, THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, MILTON KEYNES
Designed to compliment the successful Key Sociologists, this series covers
the main concepts, issues, debates, and controversies in sociology and
the social sciences. The series aims to provide authoritative essays on
central topics of social science, such as community, power, work,
sexuality, inequality, benefits and ideology, class, family, etc. Books adopt
a strong ‘individual’ line, as critical essays rather than literature surveys,
offering lively and original treatments of their subject matter. The books
will be useful to students and teachers of sociology, political science,
economics, psychology, philosophy, and geography.
Citizenship
KEITH FAULKS
Class
STEPHEN EDGELL
Community
GERARD DELANTY
Consumption
ROBERT BOCOCK
Globalization – second edition
MALCOLM WATERS
Lifestyle
DAVID CHANEY
Mass Media
PIERRE SORLIN
Moral Panics
KENNETH THOMPSON
Old Age
JOHN VINCENT
Postmodernity
BARRY SMART
Racism – second edition
ROBERT MILES AND
MALCOLM BROWN
Risk
DEBORAH LUPTON
Sexuality – second edition
JEFFREY WEEKS
Social Capital – second edition
JOHN FIELD
Transgression
CHRIS JENKS
The Virtual
ROB SHIELDS
Culture – second edition
CHRIS JENKS
Human Rights
ANTHONY WOODIWISS
Childhood – second edition
CHRIS JENKS
Cosmopolitanism
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Social Identity – third edition
RICHARD JENKINS

SOCIAL IDENTITY
THIRD EDITION
Richard Jenkins

First edition published
by Routledge in 1996
2nd edition, 2004
3rd edition published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1996, 2004, 2008 Richard Jenkins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Jenkins, Richard.
Social identity / Richard Jenkins. — 3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Group identity. I. Title.
HM753.J46 2008
305.01—dc22
2007046151
ISBN10: 0–415–44848–4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–44849–2 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–92741–9 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–44848–2 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–44849–9 (pbk)
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“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
ISBN 0-203-92741-9 Master e-book ISBN

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the main; . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I
am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,
but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
Karl Marx

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
1 Identity matters 1
2 Similarity and difference 16
3 A sign of the times? 28
4 Understanding identification 37
5 Selfhood and mind 49
6 Embodied selves 60
7 Entering the human world 74
8 Self-image and public image 90
9 Groups and categories 102
10 Beyond boundaries 118
11 Symbolising belonging 132
12 Predictability 148

13 Institutionalising identification 156
14 Organising identification 169
15 Categorisation and consequences 184
16 Identity and modernity revisited 200
NOTES 207
BIBLIOGRAPHY 213
INDEX 238
viii contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first edition of this book (1996) was a long time in the making. Its
intellectual thread began with my PhD, about the transition to adult-
hood in Belfast, continued through subsequent research into racism in the
West Midlands’ labour market, moved on to work in South Wales about
the transition to adulthood in different contexts, made a useful detour to
sniff around informal economic activity, and eventually turned into an
interest in national identity in Denmark. Although the consistency of
that thread was not necessarily obvious to others, I don’t think I ever lost
hold of it, no matter how gloomy or intimidating the maze.
As a result it is more difficult than usual – and it’s never easy –
adequately to acknowledge my debts. In one way or another all those with
whom I have worked, whether as direct collaborators or interested
colleagues, have influenced my thinking about the ideas that I present
and explore in this book. My students have been particularly important.
Of my teachers and mentors, two in particular were important. The
late Milan Stuchlik started the ball rolling in the Department of Social
Anthropology at Queen’s, Belfast, and I have been trying to catch up with
it ever since. Subsequently John Rex egged me on from the sidelines.
Other acknowledgements are due, too. Without Chris Rojek’s initial
encouragement the book would never have been written. Since 1992 the
intellectual support and inspiration supplied during regular visits to
the anthropology departments at the Universities of Aarhus and
Copenhagen, Denmark, have been vital. Over the years, the Department
of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wales Swansea and the
Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield offered
teaching contexts in which my disregard for the boundary between
anthropology and sociology could survive and prosper. Sheffield has
also, from time to time, given me the space necessary to think and write,
for which I am most grateful.

At Swansea, John Parker deserves a broader acknowledgement than
his mentions in the footnotes. Conversations with Jess Madge were helpful
in orienting me to the post-Piagetian model of infant socialisation. Pia
Christensen’s contribution to my thinking about embodiment was
important. All or part of drafts of the first edition of the book were read
and commented on by Stephanie Adams, Steve Ford, Janne Bleeg Jensen,
Melanie Jones, Sharon Macdonald and two anonymous referees. With
respect to the second edition, I owe a particular debt in this respect to
Miles Hewstone and Allison James. In the case of the third edition,
three anonymous publisher’s referees wrote unusually full and helpful
comments, which have been important in steering the revisions that I have
made. Readers who have contacted me over the years, about this or that
aspect of the book, should also be mentioned.
All of these people deserve my gratitude, and have it. However, the
usual disclaimer applies: while I cannot take all the credit for the book’s
virtues, its failings are completely my own. Finally, and as usual, Jenny
Owen deserves to be acknowledged in too many different ways to list.
Richard Jenkins
Sheffield, October 2007
x acknowledgements

1
IDENTITY MATTERS
Many of us, much of the time, are able to take identity for granted. We
seem to know who we are, we have a good enough working sense of who
the others in our lives are, and they appear to relate to us in the same way.
There are occasions, however, when identity becomes an issue . . .
You telephone the order line of a clothing catalogue to buy a new jacket.
The young man who answers asks for your name, address, credit card
number and expiry date, your customer reference number if you have
one, establishing your status as someone to whom, in the absence of
a face-to-face encounter, goods can be dispatched in confidence.
And also, of course, putting you on the mailing list if you’re not already
there.
On a train, the stranger in the opposite seat smiles and excuses herself:
she has noticed you reading last week’s newspaper from a small town
several hundred miles to the east. You explain that your mother posts
it to you, so that you can keep up with the news from home. She recog-
nised the newspaper because her husband is from your home town. You,
it turns out, were at school with her sister-in-law. Before leaving the
train she gives you her telephone number.
It is a cold Friday night, rainy and windy. You are dressed for dancing,
not the weather. Finally you reach the head of the queue outside the
club. The bouncer – or, as he prefers to be known, the doorman – raises
his arm and admits your flat mate. He takes one look at you and demands

proof of your age. All you have is money. But you don’t have enough.
You walk home alone.
You hand your passport to the immigration officer behind her glass
screen. She looks at your nationality, at where you were born. Your name.
She checks your visa. These declare your legitimacy as a traveller, your
desirability as an entrant. She looks at the photograph; she looks at
you. She asks you the purpose of your visit. She stamps the passport
and wishes you a pleasant stay. Already she is looking over your shoulder
at the person behind you.
In situations such as these, once identity is established or verified, life
goes on much as before. But identification is not always so mundane or
trivial.
You come home from work and sit down at your computer. The screen
saver is on. Strange: who’s been eating your porridge? Clicking the
mouse reveals that the machine is not only switched on, but is online.
Facebook appears. Someone called ‘sexonlegs911’ is apparently still
logged on. On your pc. There are no recognisable photos, and the details
– female, twenty-three, into a whole set of stuff that’s only identified
by acronyms – don’t match anyone who lives in the house. There is
a message from someone called ‘rawflesh21’. Do you read it? Do you
answer it?
The morning of your sixty-fifth birthday, in addition to birthday cards
and presents, brings retirement: a pension instead of a salary, a con-
cessionary public transport pass, and special rates every Tuesday at
the hairdresser’s. Beyond that, free medical prescriptions and invitations
to the Senior Citizens’ Club at something called the ‘Day Centre’ are
intimations of dependence and disability. Death. It may be the same
face you see in the bathroom mirror but you will no longer be quite the
person that you were yesterday. Nor can you ever be again.
It is the annual company dinner. You have always gone alone, and
always left alone, early. This year, however, you have someone to bring.
What will your colleagues, the MD especially, think of her? There is a
promotion coming up in February, and you know what they’re like about
that kind of thing. You take a deep breath, push open the glass door,
and walk into the bar of the hotel dining room restaurant that has
2 identity matters

been booked for the evening. Your boss, smarmy Mark, comes across,
hand out, glass of red in his hand: ‘Susie, lovely to see you.’ He turns
slightly, there is a question in his eyes . . . Big deep breath: ‘Mark, this
is my partner, Alison.’
You hand your passport to the immigration officer behind her glass
screen. She looks at your nationality, at where you were born. Your name.
She checks your visa. She looks at the photograph; she looks at you.
She types something into her computer terminal. She asks you the
purpose of your visit. During the conversation she checks again the
screen beside her and presses a button under her desk, to alert airport
security. Abruptly you find yourself being removed from the queue
of incoming passengers by two male officers and led away to an inter-
view room. Already she is dealing with the person who was in line
behind you.
A rainy afternoon in Belfast in 1973 and you leave work early to discover
that the buses are off. Finding a public phone box that works you try for
a taxi. Your usual number has nothing available: a bomb scare’s tying
up the traffic. Do you walk home? No, it’s too far and it wouldn’t be
safe. You find what’s left of the phone book and start dialling other
taxi companies. Eventually you get one. Ten minutes later it comes and
you settle in for the ride home. It doesn’t take you long to realise that
instead of heading up Divis Street to the Falls Road you’re driving over
the bridge into Protestant East Belfast. The next afternoon, when
you come round in hospital, a voice that you don’t recognise is telling you
that you were lucky to get off with a shot through the kneecap, some
burns and a bad beating.
So, who we are, or who we are seen to be, can matter enormously. Nor is
identification just a matter of the encounters and thresholds of individual
lives. Although identification always involves individuals, something else
– collectivity and history – may also be at stake.
Mass public occasions such as the Sydney Mardi Gras, or Gay Pride in
London, are public affirmations that being gay or being lesbian are
collective, as well as individual, identifications. For participants these
occasions may – or, indeed, may not – affirm their individual sexual
identities, but, before they are anything else, they are shared rituals,
celebrations of collective identification and political mobilisation.
identity matters 3

Imagine a contested border region. It might be anywhere in the world.
There is a range of ways to settle the issue: violence, a referendum,
international arbitration. Whatever the means adopted, or imposed, the
outcome will have consequences for people on both sides, depending on
who they are. While some will accept it, some may not. Populations may
move, towns and regions may be ‘cleansed’, genealogies may be
rewritten. The boundaries of collectivity may be redrawn.
Finally, here are two cases that are not drawn from my own experience
or general knowledge. They illustrate the interplay of individual and
collective identity, the consequences of identification, and the magnitude
of the historical themes that everyday situations may evoke.
In 1935 a fair-skinned Australian of part-indigenous descent was
ejected from a hotel for being an Aboriginal. He returned to his home on
the mission station to find himself refused entry because he was not
an Aboriginal. He tried to remove his children but was told he could
not because they were Aboriginal. He walked to the next town, where he
was arrested for being an Aboriginal vagrant and placed on the local
reserve. During the Second World War he tried to enlist but was told
he could not because he was Aboriginal. He went interstate and joined
up as a non-Aboriginal. After the war he could not acquire a passport
without permission because he was Aboriginal. He received exemption
from the Aborigines Protection Act – and was told that he could no
longer visit his relations on the reserve because he was not an Aboriginal.
He was denied permission to enter the Returned Servicemen’s Club
because he was.1
In October 2007, in north-eastern Italy, a dispute erupted over the
wearing of the burqa, which covers the body from head to foot, apart
from a small mesh at eye level. The Prefect of Treviso in north-east Italy
announced that he would now permit it, despite national anti-terrorism
legislation, dating from the 1970s, outlawing clothing that prevents
the wearer from being identified. He said that women who wore the
burqa for religious reasons were free to do so, but would have to reveal
their features if required to do so for purposes of identification. In Treviso,
moreover, the burqa was the target of a specific ban. Three years
earlier, the city’s Mayor, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern
League, had introduced a bylaw banning the garment, as ‘a mask that
can be permitted at carnival time, but not throughout the year’. The
Egyptian-born Deputy Editor of Corriere della Sera attacked the Prefect’s
initiative for ‘leading us straight to the suicide of our civilisation’; were
4 identity matters

it endorsed at national level, he argued, Islamic women ‘could soon
be going to school, taking jobs and going around freely, completely
veiled’. The Prefect’s boss, Giuliano Amato, Interior Minister in Italy’s
centre-left government, and the Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, had each
previously spoken out against the burqa. Mr Amato said that it ‘offended
the dignity of women’.2
Each situation above illustrates how identification affects real human
experience: it is the most mundane of things and it can be the most extra-
ordinary. Whichever way we look at it, identification seems to matter, in
everyday life and in sociology.
BUT . . . DOES IDENTITY MATTER?
It isn’t enough for me simply to insist that identity matters. Some recent
contributors to the literature have expressed serious doubts about whether
identity and identification matter as much as social science appears to think
they do. Their scepticism has some justification, and is a useful reminder
that we should not take identity for granted.
First, and most fundamentally, there are doubts about whether identity,
in itself, actually causes behaviour. Martin, for example, has insisted that
‘identity’, despite its high profile in accounts of recent conflicts, such as in
the Balkans, ‘fails to provide an explanation . . . [for] why actors are making
certain utterances or why certain events are happening’ (1995: 5). This
was a response to claims that explicitly connected identity to actions,
assertions that under the circumstances the people concerned could not
have done otherwise (and were, hence, blameless). Recently Malešević
(2006) has also put forward arguments broadly similar to Martin’s.
In order to begin thinking about this issue, we must decide what we
mean by ‘identity’. As a very basic starting point, identity is the human
capacity – rooted in language – to know ‘who’s who’ (and hence ‘what’s
what’). This involves knowing who we are, knowing who others are, them
knowing who we are, us knowing who they think we are, and so on: a
multi-dimensional classification or mapping of the human world and our
places in it, as individuals and as members of collectivities (cf. Ashton
et al. 2004). It is a process – identification – not a ‘thing’. It is not something
that one can have, or not; it is something that one does. Following Martin
and Malešević, it cannot be said too often that identification doesn’t
determine what humans do. Knowing ‘the map’ – or even just approximately
where we are – does not necessarily tell us where we should go next
(although a better or worse route to our destination might be suggested).
identity matters 5

The matter is made more complex, however, by the fact that knowing
who’s who isn’t merely a matter of neutral classification. Or, rather,
classification is rarely neutral (something that I discuss further in Chapter
9). At the very least, classification implies evaluation, and often much more.
Humans are generally not disinterested classifiers. This is spectacularly so
when it comes to classifying our fellow humans (and them us). Cognitively,
classification is organised hierarchically: A and B may be different from
each other at one level, but both are members of the meta-category C.
Classification is also hierarchical interactionally and socially: one may be
identified as a C in one context, but as an A in another. In addition, because
identification makes no sense outside relationships, whether between
individuals or groups, there are hierarchies or scales of preference, of
ambivalence, of hostility, of competition, of partnership and co-operation,
and so on.
From this perspective, identification and motives for behaviour might
seem to be connected: to identify someone could be enough to decide how
to treat her. However, our classificatory models of self and others are multi-
dimensional, unlikely to be internally consistent, and may not easily map
on to each other. Hierarchies of collective identification may conflict
with hierarchies of individual identification, which means that the follow-
ing can make complete interactional sense: I hate all As; you are an A; but
you are my friend. Taken together, these points suggest that categorical
imperatives are unlikely to be a sufficient guide on their own, and that the
ability to discriminate between others in subtle and fine-grained ways is
an everyday necessity.
A further issue, to which I will not give extensive attention here because
it is discussed in Chapter 14, is the emotional charge that may, or may not,
attach to identification. There are perhaps two things to say about this,
the first of which is that, even allowing for social psychological studies
of identity (see Chapter 9), we do not have a clear picture of the relation
between emotion and identity. Perhaps the most that we are entitled to
say at the moment is that emotion appears to be bound up with identi-
fication – typically through attachment – in some circumstances but not
in others (Ashton et al. 2004: 90–92). The second point, which can perhaps
be made with greater confidence, is that where identity does appear to
be an emotional matter – and hence capable of influencing actions – this
does not seem to be inevitable, or natural. Identification has to be made
to matter, through the power of symbols and ritual experiences, for
example.
So, while identification may be connected to motivation and behaviour,
the connection is not straightforward or predictable; which suggests that
6 identity matters

when Rogers Brubaker, for example, insists that ethnicity is a cognitive
matter, of classification and categorisation (Brubaker 2004: 64–87;
Brubaker et al. 2004), the key point is not that he is wrong – because he
isn’t – but that other factors must also be taken into account. To repeat,
classification is rarely disinterested.
This raises the question of the role of interests: is it the pursuit of
interests, material or otherwise, which matters, or is it identity? This debate
has a considerable history, and the alternative positions appear in useful
contrast if we compare two influential perspectives on identity: Barth’s
social anthropology (1969) and Tajfel’s social psychology (1981a). Despite
points at which their understandings of identification resemble each other
– not least in their emphases on process – they differ sharply in this
important respect. Barth argued that identification and collectivity are
generated as emergent by-products of the transactions and negotiations
of individuals pursuing their interests. He was dissenting from a taken
for granted, structural-functionalist orthodoxy in social anthropology that
explained what people did by reference to their identity, in particular
their membership of corporate groups or ‘cultures’, such as lineages, clans
and tribes. Tajfel, by contrast, argued that group membership – even if
it was only arbitrary assignation to a group under laboratory conditions –
is sufficient in itself to generate identification with that group and to channel
behaviour towards in-group favouritism and discrimination against
out-group members. He was taking issue with social psychological accounts
of identity (e.g. Sherif 1967) that emphasised ‘realistic competition’ and
conflicts of interest as the basis for co-operation and group formation.
In fact, identification and interests are not easily distinguished. How
I identify myself has a bearing on how I define my interests. How I define
my interests may encourage me to identify myself in particular ways. How
other people identify me has a bearing on how they define my interests,
and, indeed, their own interests. My pursuit of particular interests might
cause me to be identified in this way or that by others. How I identify others
may have a bearing on which interests I pursue. And so on. Even the
apparently single-minded, calculative pursuit of material self-interest
does not exist in isolation from organisational and other identifications
– jobs, positions and reputations – and shared understandings of value and
optimal behaviour that are informed by more abstract identity categories
such as ‘rich’, ‘clever’ or ‘successful’.
This is not to deny that people may sometimes pursue interests that
appear to conflict with how they are publicly identified, individually or
collectively. It does, however, return us to the proposition that classifica-
tion (identification) is unlikely to be disinterested. Identification is, at the
identity matters 7

very least, consequential and reciprocally entailed in the specification and
pursuit of individual and collective interests:
in practice, interest and identity claims are closely intertwined. What
I want is in some sense shaped by my sense of who I am. On the other
hand, in clarifying my interests I may sometimes begin to redefine my
sense of self. But there remains for me a fundamental distinction between
my objectives that do not threaten my identity and those that do.
(Goldstein and Rayner 1994: 367–368)
Can this really mean that a threat to my identity is more serious than
a threat to my interests? Given that it is not easy to distinguish one from
the other, the answer has to be: only if I think or feel it is. There is no
evidence that everyone does think or feel that.
In fact, identity ‘in itself’, independent of other considerations such
as interests, may not be a plausible proposition. Just because much con-
temporary political, and other, rhetoric seems to set a supreme price on
identity (Males�ević 2006) doesn’t mean that we should. As critical social
scientists we, in fact, are obliged not to. Even where individual or collective
‘identity politics’ appears to be intense, the extent to which collective or
individual interests are subordinated to the categorical imperatives of
‘identity’ should be a matter for empirical discovery, rather than a priori
theoretical presumption (although there are epistemological issues here,
since identifying the interests of an individual or a group is not a
straightforward matter).
As the final thread in this debate, scepticism about whether identity
matters has inspired scepticism about the nature of social groups. This
reflects the fact that group identities are often treated as the most powerful
forms of identification, in terms of their capacities – whether rooted in
socialisation, peer pressure, perceived shared interests or Tajfel’s social
identity effects – to mobilise people. It is in this context that the question
has recently been posed: are groups ‘real’? Given that ‘the group’ is among
the most fundamental of social scientific concepts, this is not a minor
matter.
‘The group’ is such a basic notion, in fact, that most social scientists take
it completely for granted, as part of the conceptual furniture. Not every-
one does, however. As one of the most consistent critical voices in this
respect, Roger Brubaker (2002; 2004: 7–27) insists that ethnic groups,
as he believes they are generally conceptualised within social science – as
clearly bounded, internally fairly homogenous and distinguished from
other groups of the same kind – are not real. What is real is a shared sense
8 identity matters

of ‘groupness’, of group membership. By this argument, the participants
in ethnic conflicts are individuals and organisations, rather than ethnic
groups. Ethnicity, for Brubaker, is cognitive, a point of view of individuals,
a way of seeing the world (Brubaker 2004: 64–87; Brubaker et al. 2004).
But it is not how the substance of the human world is really organised.
Brubaker goes on to argue, using similar logic, that identity in general
is not a ‘thing’ that people can be said to have, or that they can be; thus it
is not real, either (Brubaker 2004: 28–63; Brubaker and Cooper 2000).
In this sense identity does not, and cannot, make people do anything; it
is, rather, people who make and do identity, for their own reasons and
purposes. So, instead of ‘identity’, we should only talk about ongoing
and open-ended processes of ‘identification’.
Brubaker’s arguments have much to commend them. It’s true, for
example, that the only reality that we should attribute to a group derives
from people thinking that it exists and that they belong to it (an issue
that I discuss further in Chapter 9). It’s also true that identity is a matter
of processes of identification that do not determine, in any sense, what
individuals do. Individual behaviour is a complex and constantly evolv-
ing combination of planning, improvisation and habit, influenced by
emotional responses, health and well-being, access to resources, knowledge
and world-view, the impact of the behaviour of others, and other factors,
too. Group membership and identity are likely to have some part to play,
but they cannot be said to determine anything.
In the above respects, Brubaker is right, and in considerable agreement
with the arguments that have been put forward in earlier editions of this
book. He is, however, right only up to a point.3 The definition of groups
that he presents as wrong-headed, social science conventional wisdom – as
clearly demarcated and bounded, relatively homogenous collectivities that
are distinct from other groups – is not universally accepted. Another, more
minimal definition, which commands considerable support across a broad
social science spectrum, simply says that a group is a human collectivity
the members of which recognise its existence and their membership
of it: there are no implications of homogeneity or definite boundaries. From
this point of view, Brubaker’s distinction between non-existent groups
and real ‘groupness’ doesn’t make sense, in that groups are constituted
in and by their ‘groupness’.
In a search for unambiguous ‘really real’ analytical categories, Brubaker
pushes a broadly sensible argument to its logical extremity and winds up
somewhere less sensible. He is attempting to impose theoretical order on
a human world in which indeterminacy, ambiguity and paradox are part
of the normal pattern of everyday life. Although as social scientists we must
identity matters 9

aim for the greatest possible clarity, our concepts must also be grounded
in the observable realities of the human world. If we try to impose concepts
that are too straight-edged on this messy reality we risk divorcing ourselves
from it, substituting the ‘reality of the model’ for a ‘model of reality’
(Bourdieu 1990: 39).
What, then, of groups? Brubaker’s argument is underpinned by the
well-worn proposition that the collective-stuff-of-human-life is not a sub-
stantial reality and does not have the same ontological status as individuals.
Human individuals are actual entities; groups are not. They cannot
behave or act, and they do not have a definite, bounded material existence
in time and space. Only the individuals who constitute supposed groups –
their members – can be said to exhibit these attributes, not the groups
themselves. Although Calhoun’s characterisation of Brubaker, as offering
a social theoretical version of Margaret Thatcher’s observation that there is
‘no such thing as society’, is uncharitable (Calhoun 2003a: 536), it is not
hard to understand its inspiration.
It is uncharitable because the ‘Thatcher position’ is not as foolish as it is
often taken to be; it has real foundations in everyday experience. Groups
and other collectivities are more elusive than embodied individuals ( Jenkins
2002a: 73–76). They are difficult to grasp. They are not merely arithmetical
aggregates: what constitutes and defines them is more than merely the fact
of their members, even if those members could all be gathered in one place.
What’s more, although individuals can’t be in two or more places at once,
in some senses a collectivity can (and is quite likely to be).
Organisations – which can be formal or informal, extending in size and
complexity from a regular pub quiz team to a multi-national corporation
or a nation-state – are perhaps the most substantial kind of group. But even
organisations are somewhat fuzzy and unclear. In addition to their members
– and who counts as a member is not always obvious – organisations are
constituted in implicit behavioural norms and customs, in explicit rules
and procedures, in criteria for recruitment, in divisions of labour, in
hierarchies of control and authority, and in shared objectives. None of these
things are necessarily obvious at any given moment, let alone all at the
same time. To complicate the matter further, organisations may persist
despite membership turnover. People come and go, but the organisation
can continue. There is more to an organisation than its membership, and
the same is true for any group or collectivity.
So there is a sensible issue to be addressed with respect to the ontological
status, the reality, of groups and other collectivities. There is a question to
be asked, and its answer isn’t self-evident. Brubaker’s response is that
groups are imaginary, and since we don’t treat imaginary entities as
10 identity matters

analytical categories we should not accord this status to groups. It is only
the sense of ‘groupness’ that is real. Real, but illusory: an important part
of his argument is that beliefs in the reality of ethnic groups, and actions
informed by these beliefs, create pressing contemporary problems. In a
world of ethno-political entrepreneurs and organisations, ‘groupness’
constrains the landscape of options, and offers foci of identification to which
uncompromising loyalty can legitimately be demanded, which transcend
and disguise the sordid pursuit of base interests. There is more than a
suggestion of ‘false knowledge’ about his argument at this point.
Once again, Brubaker is right in part . . . but definitely wrong in the
end. Groups may be imagined, but this does not mean that they are
imaginary. They are experientially real in everyday life. In this respect, the
empirical questions we should ask are: Why do people believe in groups?
Why do they believe that they themselves belong to them? And why do
they believe that others belong to them? The first reason that they do so is
that we all live in an everyday world of observable, very real – even if modest
– groups. Small informal groups exist, and are an aspect of local reality
for each of us. Whether they are families, peer groups or friendship circles,
our own experience tells us that groups are real. Formal organisations
– also groups, let’s remember – are real, too. So, whether informal or formal,
whether more or less organised, groups look and feel real enough. They are
actually anything but elusive. We all belong to some groups.
These small local groups are embedded within, and help to produce
and reproduce, larger groups. To stay with Brubaker’s primary interest,
ethnicity, families, peer groups and friendship circles are regularly
identified along ethnic lines and help to constitute larger ethnic groups.
Small-scale formal organisations may also be deeply implicated in the
everyday construction of ethnic collectivity: sports clubs, religious con-
gregations, schools, voluntary organisations, businesses and political party
branches may all be significant in this respect. So, in local everyday
experience, there is a three-dimensional experiential materiality to supra-
local ethnic groups. They can be grasped and ‘seen’ without having to make
any effort of the imagination. They are, in other words, ‘real’. Small wonder
that people should believe in their existence.
There are also other reasons why people might sensibly believe in the
existence of ethnic, or other, groups. Size, for example, doesn’t seem to
be a barrier to the social reality of groups. There is no reason why all the
members of any particular group should be capable of assembling in
one place, for example, or should know every other member of the group.
This is manifestly true for large organisations and there’s no reason why
it shouldn’t hold for groups of any kind. Large collectivities may be very
identity matters 11

abstract indeed to their members, but may nonetheless have observable
local, immediate representation or presence. The absence of formal
co-ordination or collective decision-making across a large ethnic population
– the fact that there is no central committee and that the group may be
internally divided in various respects – does not necessarily undermine
its status as a group, either. Even small groups can be uncoordinated,
leaderless, fractious or amorphous: families are often good examples of this
(and are no less ‘real’ because of it).
Returning to my earlier argument, the minimal reality of a group is
that its members know that it exists and that they belong to it (although
what counts as belonging may take many forms). Returning to Brubaker,
it is only the definition of groups that he uses – as definitely bounded,
internally more or less homogenous and clearly differentiated from other
groups of the same basic kind – that allows him to reject their reality.
Judged against the observable realities of the human world, the concept
of ‘the group’ that Brubaker uses as his yardstick is, indeed, a mirage. That
does not, however, mean that groups do not exist.
A further important issue also needs to be considered, albeit briefly:
people categorise others, all the time and as a matter of course.
Categorisation is as much a part of our subject matter as self-identification.
This is the external aspect of the process of identification, which I will
discuss at length in subsequent chapters. The point in this context is
that categorisation makes a powerful contribution to the everyday reality
– the realisation, if you will – of groups. Attributions of group member-
ship feature routinely in how we categorise others, and the categorisation
of out-groups is intrinsic to in-group identification. Who we think we
are is intimately related to who we think others are, and vice versa.
Categorisation also makes an important contribution to the distribution
of resources and penalties, and is central to both conflict and conflict
avoidance strategies: part of the experience of being a group member is
categorisation by others and its attendant consequences. It is very real.
To invoke the first principle of social constructionism, groups are real if
people think they are: they then behave in ways that assume that groups
are real and, in so doing, construct that reality. They realise it. That
groups are social constructions doesn’t mean that they are illusions.
Ordinary everyday life is full of real encounters with small groups and
manifestations of larger groups. It is the distinction that Brubaker draws
between groups and ‘groupness’ that is an illusion, and it does not help us
to understand the local realities of the human world.
12 identity matters

WHAT IS TO BE DONE ABOUT IDENTITY?
My argument so far is that, if for no other reason, identification matters
because it is the basic cognitive mechanism that humans use to sort out
themselves and their fellows, individually and collectively. This is a ‘base-
line’ sorting that is fundamental to the organisation of the human world:
it is how we know who’s who and what’s what. We couldn’t do whatever
we do, as humans, without also being able to do this.
On the other hand, identification doesn’t determine behaviour, and
patterns of identification don’t allow us to predict who will do what.
This is so for a number of reasons: people work with various ‘maps’ or hier-
archies of identification, these hierarchies of identification are never clear
cut, unambiguous or in consistent agreement with each other, and the
relationship between interests and identification is too complex for
individual behaviour to be predictable in these terms.
Given these conclusions, what should social science do about ‘identity’
and ‘identification’? Let’s turn to Brubaker once again (Brubaker and
Cooper 2000; reprinted in Brubaker 2004: 28–63):
[Identity] . . . is too ambiguous, too torn between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’
meanings, essentialist connotations and constructivist qualifiers, to
be of any further use to sociology.
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 2)
the term ‘identity’ is made to do a great deal of work. It is used to highlight
non-instrumental modes of action; to designate sameness across persons
or sameness over time; to capture allegedly core, foundational aspects
of selfhood; to deny that such core, foundational aspects exist; to high-
light the processual, interactive development of solidarity and collective
self-understanding; and to stress the fragmented quality of the contempo-
rary experience of ‘self ’, a self unstably patched together through shards
of discourse and contingently ‘activated’ in differing contexts.
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 8)
People everywhere and always have had particular ties, self-
understandings, stories, trajectories, histories, predicaments. And these
inform the sorts of claims they make. To subsume such pervasive
particularity under the flat, undifferentiated rubric of ‘identity’, however,
does nearly as much violence to its unruly and multifarious forms as
would an attempt to subsume it under ‘universalist’ categories such
as ‘interest’.
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 34)
identity matters 13

On the one hand, Brubaker and Cooper argue that the term ‘identity’ is
overused to the point of becoming almost meaningless. On the other, they
insist that one blanket term cannot adequately deal with the human world’s
rich variety of identification processes. Either conclusion suggests that we
should abandon the term.
Brubaker isn’t the only person to have pronounced a death sentence on
‘identity’. Sinis�a Males�ević (2002, 2003, 2004, 2006) offers a sustained
argument that, as an analytical concept, identity – by which he generally
means ethnic identity – is confused and confusing, means too many things
and encompasses too many different processes to be of any social analytical
value. Identity has, he suggests, become reified in social science as a
phenomenon the existence and importance of which can be taken for
granted. Nor is Males�ević more kindly disposed to everyday commonsense
uses of ‘identity’: he argues that it is an ideological notion – basically ‘false
knowledge’ – of recent historical origin, which power elites manipulate
politically to their own advantage. It is certainly not, in his eyes, a generic
or universal aspect of the human repertoire.
I agree with some of Brubaker’s and Cooper’s, and Malešević’s, diagnoses.
I certainly sympathise with their impatience with a good deal of recent
writing about identity. However, discarding the notion of ‘identity’ for
social analytical purposes is no solution (cf. Ashton et al. 2004: 82). It
cannot really be done, if only because the genie is already out of the
bottle. ‘Identity’ is not only an item in sociology’s established conceptual
toolbox; it also features in a host of public discourses, from politics to
marketing to self-help. If we want to talk to the world outside academia,
denying ourselves one of its words of power is not a good communications
policy.
What’s more, even were we to stop talking about ‘identity’, we would
still need a way of talking about the fundamental human processes that
I have been discussing in this chapter. We would still require abstract,
shorthand terms that allow us to think about ‘knowing who’s who’ and the
fact that people are, in their own eyes and the eyes of others, identified as
this, that or the other. While replacing ‘identity’ with ‘identification’ is an
alternative that has its attractions, in that it refers explicitly to process, it
isn’t much of an improvement, because it is stylistically so cumbersome.
We need to find a compromise between a complete rejection of ‘identity’,
in the style of Brubaker and Males�ević , and an uncritical acceptance of its
ontological status and axiomatic significance. Such a compromise calls for
more care about what we say, and more modesty in how we say it. Since both
‘identity’ and ‘identification’ are nouns, and therefore potentially vulnerable
to reification, what matters most is how we write and talk about them, not
14 identity matters

an artificial and mutually exclusive choice between them. Throughout this
book I shall, unapologetically, use both terms.
So, how should we write and talk about ‘identity’ and ‘identification’?
Well, first we need to recognise the limitations of both terms when it comes
to explaining or predicting what people do (as opposed to how they do
it). We also need to recognise that if we use ‘identity’ to talk about
everything, we are likely to end up talking about very little of any signifi-
cance. We need to remember that we are talking about processes, and to
beware of casual reification. We need to unpack these processes of iden-
tification, rather than treating them as a ‘black box’. We need to recognise
that identification is often most consequential as the categorisation of
others, rather than as self-identification. Last and absolutely not least, we
need to adopt a critical stance towards public discourses about ‘identity’,
rather than simply taking them at face value. This book, I hope, takes all
of these cautionary suggestions to heart. Not least, because identity – and
understanding identity – really does matter.
identity matters 15

2
SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE
There are many questions to ask about identity and identification. How
do we know who we are, and how do others identify us? How does our
sense of ourselves as unique individuals square with the realisation that,
always and everywhere, we share aspects of our identity with many others?
How can we reconcile our routine sense of ourselves as consistently ‘who
we are’ with the knowledge that we can be different things to different
people and in different circumstances? To what extent is it possible to
become someone, or something, other than what we now are? And is it
possible to ‘just be myself’?
This book offers a sociological framework1 within which to think about
these questions. Identification is a particularly seductive sociological topic
because of the way in which it focuses the sociological imagination on
the mundane dramas, dreams and perplexities of everyday human life. It
brings together C. Wright Mills’ ‘public issues’ and ‘private troubles’ and
makes sense of each in terms of the other. To put this in another context,
‘identity’, as a meta-concept that, unusually, makes as much sense indi-
vidually as collectively, is strategically significant for social theoretical
debates about ‘structuration’ and the relationship between the individual
and the collective (Parker 2000; Stones 2005)
DEFINING IDENTITY
In principle, the notion of identity applies to the entire universe of creatures,
things and substances, as well as to humans. Its general, non sociological,
meanings are worth considering. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a Latin
root – identitas, from idem, ‘the same’ – and two basic meanings:

• the sameness of objects, as in A1 is identical to A2 but not to B1;
• the consistency or continuity over time that is the basis for establishing
and grasping the definiteness and distinctiveness of something.
From either angle, the notion of identity involves two criteria of comparison
between persons or things: similarity and difference.
Exploring further, the verb ‘to identify’ is a necessary accompaniment
of identity. There is something active about identity that cannot be ignored:
it isn’t ‘just there’, it’s not a ‘thing’, it must always be established. This adds
two further items to our starter pack:
• to classify things or persons;
• to associate oneself with, or attach oneself to, something or someone
else (such as a friend, a sports team or an ideology).
Each of these locates identity in practice: they are both things that people
do. The latter also implies a degree of reflexivity.
Which brings us back to social identity. While this third edition retains
the book’s original title – marketing considerations carry some weight,
after all – I prefer, wherever possible, simply to talk about ‘identity’ or
‘identification’. This is for two reasons. First, if my argument is correct,
all human identities are, by definition, social identities. Identifying our-
selves, or others, is a matter of meaning, and meaning always involves
interaction: agreement and disagreement, convention and innovation,
communication and negotiation. To add the ‘social’ in this context is
somewhat redundant (cf. Ashton et al. 2004: 81). Second, I have argued
elsewhere that to distinguish analytically between the ‘social’ and the
‘cultural’ misrepresents the observable realities of the human world (Jenkins
2002a: 39–62). Sticking with plain ‘identity’ prevents me from being
seen to do so.
Much writing about identity treats it as something that simply is.
Careless reification of this kind pays insufficient attention to how identi-
fication works or is done, to process and reflexivity, to the social construction
of identity in interaction and institutionally. Identity can only be under-
stood as a process of ‘being’ or ‘becoming’. One’s identity – one’s identities,
indeed, for who we are is always multi-dimensional, singular and plural
– is never a final or settled matter. Not even death freezes the picture:
identity or reputation may be reassessed after death; some identities –
sainthood or martyrdom, for example – can only be achieved beyond the
grave; and graves and memorials – testaments of identity, in some respects
– are not unchanging points in a static landscape (Hallam and Hockey
similarity and difference 17

2001; Sudnow 1967). Bearing this in mind, for sociological purposes
identification can be defined minimally thus:
• ‘Identity’ denotes the ways in which individuals and collectivities are
distinguished in their relations with other individuals and collectivities.
• ‘Identification’ is the systematic establishment and signification,
between individuals, between collectivities, and between individuals
and collectivities, of relationships of similarity and difference.
• Taken – as they can only be – together, similarity and difference are the
dynamic principles of identification, and are at the heart of the human
world.
Like most of the ideas in this book, the notion that similarity and differ-
ence play off each other is not new. In 1844 Karl Marx wrote the following,
in a letter to Feuerbach:
The unity of man with man, which is based on real differences between
men . . . what is this but the concept of society!
(Marx, quoted in Wheen 1999: 55)
More than seventy years later, in a similar vein, Simmel argued that
the practical significance of men for one another . . . is determined by
both similarities and differences among them. Similarity as fact or
tendency is no less important than difference. In the most varied forms,
both are the great principles of all internal and external development.
In fact the cultural history of mankind can be conceived as the history of
the struggles and conciliatory attempts between the two.
(Simmel 1950: 30)
Thus, identification is a game of ‘playing the vis-à-vis’ (Boon 1982: 26).
Identity is our understanding of who we are and who other people are, and,
reciprocally, other people’s understanding of themselves and of others
(which includes us). It is a very practical matter, synthesising relationships
of similarity and difference. The outcome of agreement and disagreement,
and at least in principle always negotiable, identification is not fixed.
DISCOURSES OF DIFFERENCE
The approach to identity and identification that I explore in this book is
at odds with an influential body of contemporary social theory that
distinguishes between ‘identity’ and ‘difference’, as different kinds of
18 similarity and difference

phenomena, and emphasises the pre-eminence of difference. Identity is, at
best, confined to a supporting role, in relationships based either on
similarity alone or on identification with someone or something.
This ‘difference paradigm’ has roots in a varied range of debates over the
last three decades. One such debate was about theoretical alternatives to
structuralism: inspiration was sought in Derrida’s notion of différance and
psychoanalytic models which understood identification as dissociation from
ego’s earliest significant other(s). Elsewhere, a celebratory emphasis on
difference was part of postmodernism’s abandonment of modernist grand
narratives and universalism. The reconstruction of theory and strategy
on the political broad left, following the collapse of European state socialism
and the rightward reorientation of politics in the Western social democ-
racies, was also significant. New political alliances were expressed in ideas
such as ‘identity politics’, for which ‘difference’ provided an organising
theme. In this context, the campaigns of a range of interest groups and
movements – women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, disabled people,
for example – have asserted the positivity of diversity and difference, and
the ethical and political value of pluralism.
Notable theorists of difference include Seyla Benhabib (1996), Judith
Butler (1990), Paul Gilroy (2006), Stuart Hall (1996), Luce Irigaray (1993),
Steven Seidman (1997) and Charles Taylor (1994). If nothing else, this
brief roll call suggests that theoretical discourses focusing on difference
are, as one might perhaps expect, characterised by intellectual and political
heterogeneity (for useful surveys, see du Gay et al. 2000; Taylor and Spencer
2004; Woodward 1997a). Even so, there is some agreement, and, in the
context of my argument, it is important to emphasise that key elements of
this broad understanding of identification are right.
Anti-essentialism is perhaps the most obvious of these. To insist that
identity is not fixed, immutable or primordial, that it is utterly socio-
cultural in its origins, and that it is somewhat negotiable and flexible, is
the right place to begin if we are to understand how identification works.
However, this perspective is not new – it is certainly not post-modern – nor
is it as radical as it is often presented. It has been particularly influential
in social anthropology, post-Barth (1969), but it has an even longer history
in interactionist sociology, stretching back through Goffman, to Hughes,
Simmel and Weber. At best, this wheel has been reinvented.
A healthy distrust of political universalism – of inclusive, apparently
equal, citizenship – also imbues the work of many of these authors.
Gutmann, introducing Taylor’s seminal essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’,
describes universalism as ‘totalitarian’ (1994: 7), while Irigaray puts it thus:
‘supposedly universal values . . . turn out to entail one part of humanity
similarity and difference 19

having a hold on the other’ (1993: 16, her emphasis). These are important and
defensible views: difficult questions need to be asked about the potential
tyranny of compulsory inclusion. The recent convergence in Western
Europe of social integration policies with the ‘war on terror’ is only one
case in point. Arguments that diversity is valuable – necessary even – do
not conflict with the understanding of identification set out in this book.
Having acknowledged common ground, I must now disagree with two
core propositions that are broadly shared by difference theorists. The first
insists that knowing who’s who is primarily – if not wholly – a matter of
establishing and marking differences between people. Hall summarises this
point of view with particular clarity:
[identities] are more the product of the marking of difference and
exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally-constituted
unity . . . Above all, and directly contrary to the form in which they are
constantly invoked, identities are constructed through, not outside,
difference . . . identities can function as points of identification
and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude.
(Hall 1996: 4–5)
From this perspective, knowing who I am is a matter of distinguishing
and distancing myself from you and you, and from that person over there.
The recognition of ‘us’ hinges mainly upon our not being ‘them’. In
Benhabib’s words, ‘Since every search for identity includes differentiating
oneself from what one is not, identity politics is always and necessarily a
politics of the creation of difference’ (1996: 3). Note the use of words such
as ‘only’, ‘always’ and ‘necessarily’. Note too that identification with and
differentiation from are seen as dissimilar processes: ‘differentiation from’
permits ‘identification with’ to happen, and is thus logically prior and
apparently more significant. Difference almost appears to have become the
defining principle of collectivity, the fulcrum around which the human
world revolves.
The second proposition shared by the difference theorists about which
one should, at least, be very sceptical is their argument that difference and
identity have become more marked and more significant over the last few
decades: ‘cultural diversity is, indeed, the fate of the modern world’ (Hall
1992: 8). We are, apparently, living in a new globalised epoch of diversity
and identity politics. Since I will discuss this further in Chapter 3, I will
merely register my disagreement here and move on, to focus on two reasons
for rejecting the notion that knowing who’s who is primarily a matter of
difference.
20 similarity and difference

SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE
In the first place, and leaving aside the established meanings of the word
‘identity’ discussed earlier in this chapter – for definitions can always be
contested – emphasising difference misses the utter interdependence,
whether in abstract logic or messy everyday practice, of similarity and
difference. Neither makes sense without the other, and identification
requires both. And, indeed, some of the writers against whom I am argu-
ing appear to recognise, to some extent, the necessary interplay of similarity
and difference:
identity is always particular, as much about difference as about shared
belonging . . . identity can help us to comprehend the formation of
the fateful pronoun ‘we’ and to reckon with the patterns of inclusion
and exclusion that it cannot help but to create. This may be one of
the most troubling aspects of all: the fact that the formation of every ‘we’
must leave out or exclude a ‘they’, that identities depend on the marking
of difference.
(Gilroy 1997: 301–302)
Gilroy appears to acknowledge the role of similarity, or ‘shared belonging’.
Having done so, he nonetheless privileges difference: it remains, for him,
the active principle upon which knowing who’s who depends.
Against this, the point is that, logically and in everyday interaction, it
doesn’t make sense to separate similarity and difference in this way, or to
accord one greater significance. We cannot have one without the other:
to identify something as an A is to assert that it has certain properties in
common with all other As, and that it differs from Bs, Cs and so on. To say
who I am is to say who or what I am not, but it is also to say with whom
I have things in common. For example, one’s personal name is one of the
definitive markers of individual difference. But, to name oneself is generally
also to establish one’s public gender. To those with the appropriate
contextual knowledge it also positions one in terms of family or kin-group
membership. Further local knowledge may enable one’s ethnicity or
religion, or both, to be established. Thus, while a personal name signifies
individual distinctiveness, it also positions its bearer in terms of collective
similarities (and, of course, differences).
And there is a more serious problem. If it were possible to assert one’s
distinctive difference from others without simultaneously indicating those
with whom one might have stuff in common, all one could actually do is
communicate who or what one is not. Unless one could exhaustively deny
the entire array of possible persons, or kinds of person, that one might be
similarity and difference 21

– bar one, of course – it would not be sufficient to communicate who or what
one is. Even if one could perform such an implausible feat, it is not clear
how one would then give substance to what or who one might claim to
be. Difference on its own is simply not enough to establish who’s who. It
doesn’t work.
The conventional solution to this problem is to use the concept of
‘identity’ to denote relationships of similarity, and to say that ‘identity’
and ‘difference’, although utterly distinct, should be thought about
together, a view that can be traced back at least as far as Locke in the late
seventeenth century (see Anthias 1998; Benhabib 1996; Taylor 1998;
Woodward 1997b). This might be fair enough, although it arguably
underestimates the degree to which similarity and difference, in order to
make any sense at all, must each imply the other. It also flies in the face
of what some of the difference theorists actually say. Hall, for example, is
emphatic that he is not concerned with ‘identity in its traditional meaning
(that is, an all-inclusive sameness . . . without internal differentiation)’
(1996: 4). His model of identification and attachment – derived from a
cultural reading of psychoanalysis – depends upon the exclusion of others
and the establishment of difference as the foundation of personal meaning
and self-regard. Similarity is not even in the frame.
A more significant difficulty with this position is that separating
identification and differentiation from each other seems, in practice, to
end up privileging the notion of ‘identification with’. In this mode, identity
becomes coterminous with uniformity and conformity, if not outright
conformism. Butler, for example, seems only able to understand identity
as attachment and subjective conformism. In pursuit of the liberating
power of difference, her argument for the subversion and transcendence
of identity – or, rather, of what she sees as the illusion, or trap, of identity
– is grounded in ‘the presumption that identities are self-identical,
persisting through time as the same, unified and internally coherent’ (Butler
1990: 16). The similarity to Hall’s view, quoted above, is striking. It is only
Butler’s understandings of identity and difference as utterly distinct
from each other, and of identity as identification with, that allows her
the luxury of even imagining the transcendence of identity. The emphasis
upon ‘identification with’ ignores two linked realities: that identification
is also a matter of classifying oneself and others, and that classification
depends upon the interplay of similarity and difference. Against the utopian
possibilities evoked by Butler, it is vital to recognise that absolute differ-
entiation from others – no less than absolute absorption in others – is likely
to be a very rare bird indeed (not to mention flightless and in constant
danger of extinction).
22 similarity and difference

To summarise the argument so far, knowing who’s who involves
processes of classification and signification that necessarily invoke criteria
of similarity and difference. Attending to difference on its own, or even
simply emphasising difference, cannot provide us with a proper account
of how it is that we know who’s who, or what’s what, in the human world.
To say this does not, of course, imply any ‘objectively real’ sense of similarity
or difference. It is constructions or attributions of similarity and difference,
made by people engaging in the identification of self and others, with which
I am concerned.
The above criticisms converge in a recognition that foregrounding
difference underestimates the reality and significance of human collectivity.
Whatever else might be involved in knowing who’s who, it is undeniably
a matter of similarity and solidarity, of belonging and community, of
‘us’ and ‘we’. In this, as in other respects, the focus on difference arguably
flies in the face of the observable realities of the human world.
‘Us’, ‘we’, ‘community’, ‘solidarity’ are, however, words that should carry
a health warning. They are deeply political – communitarianism and
nationalism are good examples of their ideological potential – and we
should at least approach them with apposite caution. Charles Taylor’s or
Judith Butler’s discussions of the dangers inherent in ‘identity as same-
ness’, and their arguments for, respectively, the foundational necessity to
democracy of the recognition of difference, or the progressively subversive
character of difference, are worth remembering. So, too, is Samuel Johnson’s
famous eighteenth-century characterisation of patriotism as the last refuge
of the scoundrel. We should also remember that these notions are imagined.
In Anthony Cohen’s words (1985), they are ‘symbolic constructs’. They
are, however, capable of being extremely powerful imaginings, in terms
of which people act. They are anything but imaginary, in that they are
enormously consequential. Solidarity, once it is successfully conjured up,
is a powerful force.
We should also recognise that invocations of similarity are intimately
entangled with the conjuring up of difference. One of the things that people
have in common in any group is precisely the recognition of other groups
or categories from whom they differ. It cannot be otherwise: Hughes
understood this in the late 1940s, and Barth developed the idea further
(Barth 1969; Hughes 1994: 91–96). But to acknowledge this is a far cry
from calling up difference alone – or even mainly – as the primary arbiter
of who’s who. The human world simply doesn’t work like that.
similarity and difference 23

THEORISING IDENTITY
My other basic objection to the difference paradigm is that concentrating
on difference makes it difficult to deal with the core questions of social
theory, or even, perhaps, to engage in social theory at all. In this context,
I take the consistent, and connected, core concerns of social theory to
be: ‘How should we understand social change?’ and ‘How are we to under-
stand the relationship between the individual and the collective?’ ( Jenkins
2002a: 15–20).
Focusing only, or even mainly, on difference is unhelpful if one wants
to understand social change, in that it doesn’t accord with observable
realities. Put simply, collective mobilisation in the pursuit of shared
objectives is a characteristic theme of history and social change. It may not
be the only important process at work, but it is to be found wherever one
looks, and, unavoidably, collective politics involves collective imaginings
of similarity as well as of difference (witness the remarks of Marx and
Simmel, quoted earlier). To make the point from a different direction,
the consequences and processes of the change from agrarian to industrial
lifestyles and production – as Durkheim outlined in 1893, in The Division
of Labour in Society (1984) – can, at least in part, be understood by look-
ing at the interplay and significance of relationships of similarity and
difference.
Moving on to the relationship between individuality and collectivity,
the problem is even more fundamental. I am not sure that it is possible
to have any comprehension of the collective dimensions of social life – other
than a merely additive, arithmetical model – if we emphasise difference.
If knowing who’s who is essentially, or even largely, a matter of fission
and exclusion, then where does the ‘more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts’ that
is an enduring mystery of everyday human life come from? In this context,
it is noteworthy that most theorists of difference – with the exception
of Butler – routinely use collective notions such as ‘culture’ or ‘society’ that
are in considerable tension with their fetishisation of difference. Perhaps
they simply have no choice.
There is also a more general point to be made. Theory of all kinds
depends upon three linked processes: abstraction, generalisation and com-
parison. Social theory is no exception. A model of the human world that
prioritises difference offers, at best, only very limited scope for general-
isation and comparison. At least one difference theorist has acknowledged
this:
One of the dangers of focusing on difference may be a retreat into
empiricism. For the very assertion of the existence of differences involves
24 similarity and difference

taking at face value the appearance of living in a diverse and fragmented
universe. There is a failure to interrogate what may lie behind or beneath
these surface appearances, to find connections and commonalities.
(Anthias 1998: 509, her emphasis)
Apropos empiricism, Anthias is right, although she may understate the
case. The problem that she identifies may – and only apparently para-
doxically – explain why discussions of difference are so rarely based in
systematic empirical research; why there is a dependence, at best, on loose
qualitative description; and why the essay is the dominant form. Perhaps
this is the only way to disguise, and keep at bay, the ever-present threats
of empiricism and a-theoria.
Finally, there is something other to think about than social theory, and
something more important. One source of the difference paradigm was
the post-1989 realignment and reorientation of left-wing politics; it is
easy to sympathise with it as a political move that was appropriate to
the times. One of the ethical impulses that stand behind the emphasis
on difference is a plea, not just for tolerance of difference, but for its
enthusiastic embrace:
If ever-growing social complexity, cultural diversity and a proliferation
of identities are indeed a mark of the postmodern world, then all the
appeals to our common interest as humans will be as naught unless
we can at the same time learn to live with difference.
(Weeks 1990: 92)
Leaving aside the supposed historical novelty or post-modernity of differ-
ence, we have returned to Taylor’s ‘politics of recognition’ (1994), a call to
arms, whether liberal or radical, on behalf of pluralism. A call that is
difficult to ignore. These are values that need to be defended, nurtured and
supported, no less today than fifty or a hundred years ago.
They are not, however, enough. There are pressing public issues that
are simply not addressed by proclaiming the positivities of difference, or
arguing for tolerance and pluralism. They concern collective belonging,
collective disadvantage and, not least, the relationship between the freedom
to be different, on the one hand, and equality and collective responsibility,
on the other. Thinking about these issues – none of which is either new
or simple – requires a model of identification that places similarity and
difference at its heart, on an equal footing with each other. Even if it is not,
to echo Bauman (1999: 190), time to ‘recall universalism from exile’
– certainly not an unreconstructed universalism, anyway – it is, perhaps,
similarity and difference 25

time for a return to a politics which recognises responses to collective ills
other than the purely privatised and individualised.
WHO’S WHO (AND WHAT’S WHAT)
I have argued here, and in Chapter 1, that the human world is unimaginable
without some means of knowing who others are and some sense of who
we are. Since, unlike other primates, we don’t rely on smell or gestures
– although these aren’t insignificant in face-to-face identification – one of
the first things that we do on meeting a stranger is attempt to identify
them, to locate them on our ‘mindscapes’ (Zerubavel 1997). The cues that
we rely upon include embodiment, clothing, language, answers to ques-
tions, incidental or accidental disclosures of information, and information
from third parties. Our efforts are not always successful, either: ‘mistaken
identity’ is a common enough experience to be a staple of folktales and
literature. Equally familiar is the theme of ‘lost’ or ‘confused’ identity:
people who can’t prove who they are, who appear not to know ‘who they
are’, who are one thing one moment and something else the next, who
are in the throes of ‘identity crises’.
Situations such as these provide occasional cause to reflect upon identity.
We try to work out who strangers are even when we are merely observing
them. We work at presenting ourselves, so that others will work out who
we are along the lines that we wish them to. We speculate about whether
so-and-so is doing that because of ‘her identity’. And we talk. We talk about
whether people are born gay or become gay because of their upbringing.
About what it means to be ‘grown up’. About the differences between the
English and the Scots (or the Welsh, or the Irish). About the family who
have just moved in round the corner: we shake our heads, after all you can’t
expect anything else, they’re from the wrong part of town. About ‘Arabs’,
‘Muslims’, ‘rag heads’ and ‘terrorists’. We talk about identity all the time
(although we may not always use the word itself).
Change, or its prospect, is particularly likely to provoke concerns about
identity. The transformation of everyday life in the affluent West during
the 1950s and 1960s, for example, occurred amid argument and conflict
about gender, sexuality, generation, race, class, imperialism and patriotism;
all of which speak very directly to our topic here. More recently in the
United Kingdom, monetary union in Europe – and, indeed, every other
aspect of the European Union, from decision-making in the Council of
Ministers to the regulations governing sausage manufacture – conjures up
the ghosts of centuries of strife with our continental neighbours and is
interpreted as another attempt to undermine British national identity.
26 similarity and difference

Public concern about identity may wax and wane, but the perpetual
bottom line is that we can’t live routine lives as humans without
identification, without knowing – and sometimes puzzling about – who we
are and who others are. This is true no matter where we are, or what our
way of life or language. Without repertoires of identification we would
not be able to relate to each other meaningfully or consistently. We would
lack that vital sense of who’s who and what’s what. Without identity there
could simply be no human world, as we know it. This is the most basic sense
in which identity matters. Accordingly, my focus in the rest of this book
is primarily on the mundane matter of how identification works, and the
production and reproduction of identities during interaction. Before
getting down to this in detail, however, there is one final issue to address,
the relationship between modernity and identity. This is the subject of
the next chapter.
similarity and difference 27

3
A SIGN OF THE TIMES?
Identity has been one of the unifying themes of social science for the
last twenty years, and shows no signs of going away. Everybody has something
to say about identity: anthropologists, geographers, historians, philo-
sophers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists. From debates
about the modernity of self-identity, through feminist deconstructions
of gendered social conventions, to urgent attempts to understand the
apparent resurgence of nationalism and ethnic politics, the field is crowded.
Identity, it seems, is bound up with everything from political asylum to
credit card fraud, shopping to sex. And the talk is about change, too: about
new identities, the return of old ones and the transformation of existing
ones. About shape-shifting, on the one hand, and the deep foundations
of selfhood, on the other.
IMAGE AND POLITICS
One obvious reason for social scientists’ fascination with identity is that
we have no monopoly on the notion. The advertising industry, for example,
has long understood how to sell people more, and more expensive, stuff
by selling them an identity: a ‘new look’, a ‘make-over’, a ‘new me’. The
diversity of identification has become part of the self-conscious stock in
trade of advertising and marketing, in the identification of niche markets
and categories of consumer and the careful negotiation of the myriad
possibilities for consumer alienation and offence (Costa and Bamossy 1995).
On the other hand, the appropriation of brand names and mass products
for assertive and very specific identity projects is increasingly well

documented (e.g. Lamont and Molnár 2001), as is the more general
significance of consumption patterns for identification (Bourdieu 1984;
Lamont and Fournier 1992). While anthropology suggests that iden-
tification, consumption and display have always been connected, what may
be new – although I’m not wholly convinced – is our disenchanted
awareness of what we’re doing and self-conscious collusion with the sirens
of the global market (even after we’ve read No Logo).
Moreover, the market in identities doesn’t just involve buying new
clothes or a new car. Some people seek their ‘new me’ in different market-
places, in psychotherapy or spirituality. For others, the pilgrim’s way leads
to the beaches of Goa or the bright lights of the big city. For many of us,
however, the pursuit of new or alternative identities never gets beyond
our daydreams. The routine stability and constancy of ordinary lives, and
the uneven distribution of the resources that are necessary to play the make-
over game with any seriousness, are often lost to sight amid all of the talk
about identity.
In international politics, to take another example, identity seems to have
become a symbolic public good the defence of which asserts a legitimacy
that is beyond criticism or opposition. Reified into a sacred and holy
apotheosis, identity is something to which everyone has a right. It allows
the pursuit of narrowly sectional interests to pass – covered by at least a fig
leaf of sincerity – as a defence of the ineffable (Malešević 2006). It is a
difficult card to trump (although, as ever, another kind of common sense
– based in Realpolitik and the pursuit of business interests – still shapes
foreign policies).
Issues of identity are also deeply rooted in national politics. In an
increasingly globalised world, politicians far from the extreme right seem
to feel perfectly comfortable wrapped in the patriotic certainties of the flag.
On the left – such as it is at the beginning of the twenty-first century –
‘identity politics’ still attempts to appeal to disadvantaged constituencies
that are based on shared experiences other than class-based exploitation.
Gender is important in this respect and it has become an established basis
for politics in its own right. For decades women all over the world have been
questioning and confronting their conventional identities and striving to
establish more equal and self-determined ways of being women.
Indigenous peoples, too, have begun to identify themselves as political
actors, distancing themselves from the metropolis, establishing new
relations of difference and similarity within which to challenge unchecked
tourism and the expropriation of environmental resources. Their national
governments, in turn, are discovering that although the well-shod tourist’s
fascination with the downtrodden of the earth may be as shallow as their
a sign of the times? 29

lifestyle holiday – the contemporary equivalent of the nineteenth-century
European grand tour, perhaps – it is precisely that which encourages them
to spend their hard currency.
Elsewhere, in the former state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, the
politics of local identity continue to mushroom in the rubble of bureau-
cratic centralism. Meanwhile, Russia is reasserting itself and Russians are
calling themselves a ‘people’ again. And no discussion of identity written
after 11 September 2001 would be complete without an acknowledge-
ment of the re-emergence of religion as a major index of who’s who and
what’s what. Within and between nation-states, and from the shadows
and holes of the few remaining indeterminate borderlands, faith and sect
have returned to centre-stage, to teach us that modernity may turn out to
be not quite what we had expected. Identity, it seems, is the touchstone
of the times.
MODERNITY AND IDENTITY
Some recent social science about identity resembles too closely what the
politicians and advertising executives say. The urgency of the issues at stake
may mean, for example, that what identity is – or, indeed, that it is and
that it matters – is often taken for granted in analysing the local specifics
of messy situations. Less excusable, perhaps, is the celebration of collective
or individual self-identification, or the presumption that what we buy is
necessarily an expression of who we are. More critical distance between social
scientists and their subject matter may be needed.
Arguments that concerns about difference and identity are historically
recent phenomena – and perhaps even diagnostic or definitive of post- or
late modernity – are largely the specialist prerogative of social theorists,
however. Here is a moderate version of this thesis:
At earlier historical moments, identity was not so much an issue; when
societies were more stable, identity was to a great extent assigned, rather
than selected or adopted. In current times, however, the concept of
identity carries the full weight of the need for a sense of who one is,
together with an often overwhelming pace of change in surrounding
social contexts – changes in the groups and networks in which people
and their identities are embedded and in the societal structures and
practices in which those networks are themselves embedded.
(Howard 2000: 367–368)
This has already been discussed briefly in Chapter 2, and the arguments
are not convincing. It’s true that how we talk about who’s who and what’s
30 a sign of the times?

what is historically and culturally specific, so the present epoch will have
its own terms and themes. It is probably also true that the volume of discourse
about identity has reached new magnitudes, if only because global noise
and chatter about everything have increased with the population and the
widening availability of communication technologies.
Allowing for the concerns of the age and a rise in the noise level,
reflections upon identity have a long history. An established sociological
and psychological literature about identity goes back to the turn of the
century and before: James, Cooley, Mead, Simmel come to mind imme-
diately. In the present (post-)modern hubbub this body of work has been
somewhat neglected, but it remains fundamental to social theory and the
sociology of identity. Going back further, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, for example, published in 1690, includes a chapter on
‘Identity and Diversity’. About a hundred years earlier, when, in As You Like
It, Shakespeare wrote ‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women
merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in
his time plays many parts’, among other things he anticipated Goffman.
Six hundred years before Locke and Shakespeare, similar themes and
issues were important to Indian philosophers (Harré 2000: 64–66). We
sacrifice historical perspective if we neglect the variety of intellectual
traditions that have reflected on identity: there is nothing intrinsically new
about these issues (Williams 2000: 13–30).
This is not to deny the reality of contemporary concerns about identity
and identity-related issues, or their definitive modernity. These concerns
reflect the uncertainty produced by dramatic changes: reorientations of
work, gender and family, class and status mobility, migration, medical and
technological innovation, the redrawing of political borders, the intrusive
reality of global media. Our cognitive maps do not always fit the landscape
of others around us. We encounter people whose identities and natures are
not clear to us. We may no longer even be sure about ourselves. The future
may no longer appear as predictable as it seems to have been for earlier
generations. Who’s who, and what’s what, may not always be obvious.
But change – the confrontation of languages, traditions and ways of
life; the transformation of divisions of labour; demographic flux; catastrophe
and calamity; progress and social improvement – is not in any sense recent
or modern. It is arguably the norm in human experience. It isn’t anachro-
nistic, for example, to recognise ‘crises of identity’ in early modern
witch-hunting or in the medieval persecution of heretics, Jews, lepers and
homosexuals, or to interpret these in the context of contemporary change
and upheaval (Moore 1987). Or to see in the almost perpetual motion of
a city such as Wroclaw, in today’s Poland – also known, between the
a sign of the times? 31

eleventh century and the twentieth, as Wrotizla, Vretslav, Presslaw and
Breslau, ruled by Poles, Czechs, Germans, Bohemians, Austrians, Prussians
and then Germans again – struggles about identification: about who’s
who and what’s what in that particular corner of central Europe (Davies and
Moorhouse 2002).
Globalisation is a shorthand term for a complex package of com-
prehensive changes that, in many ways, defined the twentieth century
(although some of these processes began centuries earlier). Whatever we
think about globalisation’s history, it has had an impact on the nature
and salience of identification in the modern world. In particular, global-
isation means that people are aware of living in a global rather than a local
context: ‘all the world’s a stage’ has become ‘the stage is all the world’. And
this is true almost everywhere we look. Some of the Maasai of Tanzania,
for example, inspired by external non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
and the campaigns of circumpolar and Amazonian peoples, now participate
in the international ‘Indigenous Peoples’ movement, exploiting the
symbolic capital that attaches to that global identification in their dealings
with the state (Igoe 2006). On a different tack, what it means to be
‘authentically’ Irish has become, at least in part, defined in complex –
sometimes ironic, sometimes not – relations with a global audience, and
with a global marketplace in which ‘authentic Irishness’ is bought and sold
(Mays 2005).
Globalisation is also widely believed to have made human life more
diverse. This is an important part of the argument, discussed in Chapter
2, that difference has become the dominant (post-)modern theme when
it comes to knowing who’s who. Some of this is obvious and hard to deny:
due to vastly increased volumes and speeds of movement and communi-
cation, and capitalism’s abhorrence of a market vacuum, more experiences
and elective identities are on offer today than ever before. On the pavement
of any modern city we are confronted with diversity as a matter of routine
everyday expectation. There are, however, three good reasons why acknow-
ledging globalised diversity does not necessarily get us very far.
In the first place, to do so tells us nothing about the meanings of diversity
then compared with the meanings of diversity now. There is every reason
to think that in the past, as now, diversity had a range of consequences for
people’s everyday experience, depending upon historical, local and personal
contingencies. Diversity in itself – if we can sensibly talk about diversity
in itself – may not actually be particularly significant, so whether or not there
is ‘more’ or ‘less’ of it is unlikely to tell us much about what it means.
Second, the literature about globalisation suggests that, alongside
diversity, globalisation brings in its train greater homogeneity, particularly
32 a sign of the times?

in organisational settings. Ritzer’s McDonaldization of Society (2004) is an
influential version of this thesis and despite some telling critiques of his
argument (Smart 1999) it would be perverse not to recognise that it has
captured something important about modernity. But – much like diversity,
in fact – homogeneity may not be particularly important in itself, either.
If nothing else, it is likely to be mediated by other factors and processes.
For example, Hannerz (1992) and others have argued that the economic,
political and cultural impacts of being homogenised or globalised may
inspire local responses that, in various ways and for a range of reasons,
(re)invent diversity in the guise of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’, reassert existing
identifications or customise the global into local forms. To use a word that
Robertson (1995) kidnapped from the discourses of international
management, this is ‘glocalization’. Much like similarity and difference, the
global and the local keep each other close company.
Finally, although globalisation has made it more likely that more people
will, in the routine of their everyday lives, encounter Others and Other
ways of doing things, an alternative narrative of globalisation is at least as
significant. ‘Glocalisation’ and ‘globalisation’ are not options that have been
available to everyone. The history of the expansion of globally powerful
nation-states has been a chronicle of ethnocide and genocide. Hunters,
fisherfolk and subsistence agriculturalists have not simply had to adapt,
they have in many cases been exterminated. The last of the Beothuk people
of Newfoundland died in 1829, the last indigenous Tasmanian in 1876
and the twentieth century saw further extinctions. Less dramatically, in
Europe and elsewhere the nation-state project – the worldwide standard-
isation of which has been a significant dimension of globalisation – has
usually involved the suppression of local and regional ways of life (e.g.
E. Weber 1976). The world is arguably less diverse in important respects
than it was several hundred years ago.
So, if diversity is not new, what of the fragmentation and contradiction
that apparently (e.g. Woodward 1997b: 15–23) characterises post-
modernity, and post-modern identities? If by this we mean that people are
identified in a multiplicity of ways, and that these do not always fit well
together, producing personal troubles and public issues to which they
and others have to respond, then once again the argument about their
historical novelty seems, at best, unproven. The great and ancient literatures
of the world, religious and secular, seem to suggest that such things are
nothing new. To draw upon my Methodist upbringing, the Bible is full of
examples of issues and troubles of this kind. The story of Joseph is one such;
the parable of the Good Samaritan – with its telling response to a telling
question about identity, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ (Esler 2000) – is another.
a sign of the times? 33

Change also reveals itself in the intimate details of individual lives,
and the privacies of the person occupy a particular and important place in
contemporary social science discourses about identity. ‘Reflexive self-
identity’ is among the phenomena hailed as peculiarly and diagnostically
modern by some social theorists, most notably Giddens. Modernity and
Self-Identity (1991) expands upon his earlier critique of the concept of
post-modernity (Giddens 1990), to take in the intimacies of selfhood
and their apparent transformations at the end of the twentieth century.
Giddens is concerned to understand the politicisation of the personal, the
private and the intimate. He argues that self-identity is a distinctively
modern project within which individuals can reflexively construct a
personal narrative for themselves which allows them to understand them-
selves as in control of their lives and futures. Apparently, ‘life politics’ has
emerged in the capitalist democracies to fill the vacuum left by the decline
of the politics of class, and therapy and counselling are now among the
characteristic – perhaps even the most distinctive – discourses of modernity
(Giddens 1991: 33). To appropriate an expression with its origins in the
women’s movement of the 1960s, ‘the personal is the political’ provides
the sub-text for Giddens’ argument about our contemporary concern with
identity.
This argument, predicated as it is upon definitions of rationality,
reflexivity and self-identity that tie them to the modern era post-Weber and
post-Freud (thus effectively foreclosing on any debate before it begins), is
at least an overstatement, revealing more about the conceits of Western
modernity, and its intellectual elite, than anything else. Where, for
example, does it leave the many millions of people, in Europe and the
United States, never mind anywhere else, who, for whatever reasons, do
not spend much, or even any, time agonising over ‘life narratives’ and
‘personal growth’? Who have other things – not better, please note, just
other – to fret about? Are they outside the loop of the ‘late modern age’,
stranded in a historical cul-de-sac?
It is also an argument that privileges a secular understanding of both
identity and modernity. It is not straining interpretive licence to see in
religions of personal redemption thoughtful, reflexive responses to
‘ontological insecurity’ (Giddens 1991: 53). Salvation is as much a project
of the self – although that word begs as many questions as it answers – as
‘personal growth’ or ‘psychological integration’. Ideologies of spiritual
salvation seek to understand and identify the essentials and the meaning
of individual conscious existence no less than ideologies of personal
development. Both offer a raft to cling to in the storms of life; in both, the
relationship between self-deception and self-knowledge is intimate. Saint
34 a sign of the times?

Augustine’s Confessions, for example, written about 1600 years ago, is a
testament to the possibilities for re-forging the self – personal growth –
offered as an example to others. Stepping back nearly another thousand
years, one can understand Buddhism as a project for the reformation of the
self (Carrithers 1985).
Finally, there is another reason why we should be deeply suspicious of
claims for the historical novelty of either diversity or reflexive self-identity.
They bear a close family resemblance to other claims about the novelty
– and superior wisdom or sophistication – of the here and now. Among the
other aspects of the human world that are apparently distinctively modern
are childhood and privacy. The smug anthropologist in me wants at this
point to insist that arguments such as these may reflect poorly on the
ethnocentricity and comparative ethnographic – and historical – ignorance
of their authors. However, I suspect that what they really tell us about are
the conceits of modernity, and the propensity – even among those who
identify with post-modernism – to see the past as no more than a lengthy
prologue to the present. Historicism is a pervasive temptation.
PUTTING IDENTITY INTO PERSPECTIVE
Allowing for the reservations that I have just expressed, our concerns about
identity at the beginning of the twenty-first century are, of course, to a
considerable extent specific to their moment, as are their contexts and the
media in and through which they are expressed. There is something
distinctive about where we are now, as there is something distinctive about
every time and place. It would, for example, be foolish to suggest that the
women’s movement has not been a major historical development, and
modern to boot.
There is nothing to be gained, however, from labelling notions such
as difference, identity or reflexivity as definitively modern: are we really to
believe, for example, that people did not know who they were, or think
about it, before the twentieth century? Some of these claims are simply too
ponderous to carry their own weight. There is, for example, the well-known
argument that the individual ‘subject’, having first appeared as a defini-
tive and unique product of the European Enlightenment, has disappeared
under conditions of post-modernity (Jameson 1991). At best, this rests
upon a notion of subjectivity and agency that is too narrow – too trivial,
indeed – for sociological use. At worst, it takes the presumptions of
modernity too much at their own, self-serving face value. With respect to
both of its major claims – at the dawn and the supposed dusk of modernity
– it can and should be challenged empirically.
a sign of the times? 35

Empirical critique aside, there are other grounds for concern about the
social theoretical implications of these discourses about (post-)modern
identity. The disquiets of Brubaker and Cooper and Malešević have
been discussed in Chapter 2: by their lights ‘identity’ has become too
overburdened with meanings to mean anything at all. Bendle has also
suggested (2002) that the ways in which identity is understood by Giddens
and others1 – as a fundamental essence of individual selfhood, vital to
personal well-being, on the one hand; as evanescent, utterly constructed and
situationally contingent, on the other – combine to produce incoherence
and theoretical incapacity. Although these critiques may go a little too far
– and risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater – they are necessary
and important anti-theses to a self-sustaining body of theory whose authors
have forgotten the fundamental importance of systematic inquiry into
the observable realities of the human world, increasingly (mis)taken the
proper subject of social theory to be social theorists and, one suspects,
(mis)understood their own existential crises to be universal problems of
the age.
It is nothing new to be self-conscious about identity: about what it means
to be human, what it means to be a particular kind of human, what it means
to be an individual and a person, whether people are who and what they
appear to be, and so on. It is nothing new to be uncertain about these
matters from time to time, or to think that they are important. To suggest
otherwise risks assigning most of human experience to a historical
anteroom, waiting for modernity to turn the lights on, and reinvents ethno-
centrism and historicism under the reassuring sign of post-modernism’s
break with both. What we need instead is a generic framework for under-
standing how identification works that will accommodate its roots in
human nature as well as its construction and contingency, allowing us to
get on with the sociological business of approaching all human experience
on its own terms in order better to understand it. The rest of this book
offers just such a framework.
36 a sign of the times?

4
UNDERSTANDING
IDENTIFICATION
One of the assumptions that much social science has in common with the
‘everyday thinking’ of ‘common sense’ or ‘common knowledge’ is a radical
distinction between the individual and the collective.1 This means that
collective identity and individual identity are typically understood as different
kinds of phenomena, and the relationships between unique individuality
and shared collectivity tend to be unexamined or treated as axiomatic.
Much otherwise sophisticated sociological argument, for example, offers
a ‘black box’ where there should be an attempt to understand identifica-
tion processes. Even social psychology – such as ‘social identity theory’
(Brewer and Hewstone 2004; Capozza and Brown 2000; Hogg and Abrams
1988; Robinson 1996) or ‘discourse theory’ (Antaki and Widdicombe
1998; Potter 1996; Potter and Wetherell 1987) – which does look at process
and typically focuses on individuals, treats ‘personal’ identification and
‘social’ identification as different psychological conditions or constructs,
and understands groups in a coarse-grained and reified fashion. Something
important is still taken for granted, something important still missed (and
a recent psychological contribution that begins to look at this absence is
Ashton et al. 2004).
In this book I adopt another approach. This perspective, which is not
dramatically new, argues that:
• with respect to identification, the individually unique and the
collectively shared can be understood as similar in important respects;
• the individual and the collective are routinely entangled with each other;

• individual and collective identifications only come into being within
interaction;
• the processes by which each is produced and reproduced are analogous;
• the theorisation of identification must therefore accommodate the
individual and the collective in equal measure.
The most significant contrast between individual and collective identi-
fication in this model may be that the former emphasises difference and the
latter similarity. This is only a matter of their respective emphases, however:
each emerges out of the interplay of similarity and difference.
The clear-cut differentiation of the individual and the collective is often
underpinned by a further ontological assumption: that one or the other is
the more substantial or ‘real’. Common sense and psychology – even at its
most ‘social’ – both tend to privilege the individual. Sociologists (and social
anthropologists) tend to the reverse. While some may espouse method-
ological individualism – the view that the only acceptable data are
statements about individuals and aggregates of individuals – sociologists
are, with a few exceptions such as ethnomethodology and rational actor
theory at its most extreme, unlikely to embrace the radical theoretical
individualism of psychology (or economics).
This is not to say, however, that sociology is definitively collectivist
while common-sense knowledge is individualistic. Neither proposition is,
in any straightforward sense, true. In the first place it depends on how one
defines sociology. C. Wright Mills offers a view that still commands
considerable support:
The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the
larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and
the external career of a variety of individuals . . . to grasp history and
biography and the relations between the two within society . . . Perhaps
the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination
works is between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues
of social structure’.
(Mills 1959: 5, 6, 8)
There is nothing collectivist about this: the individual is, in fact, placed at
the heart of the enterprise (although not more so than the collective). What
Mills calls ‘society’ – and I call the ‘human world’ (Jenkins 2002a: 3–5) –
is the field upon which the individual and the collective meet and meld.
This view is an important foundation for the understanding of identity
offered in this book.
38 understanding identification

Characterising common sense, or common knowledge, as individualistic
raises different issues. Primarily, we must ask whose common sense or know-
ledge? Staying close to home, within ‘Western common sense’ or ‘Western
European common sense’ there is enormous diversity: even within national
borders – the United Kingdom or France, for example – the differences in
everyday thinking are as remarkable as the similarities. Individualism,
for example, is a broader and more heterodox church than is suggested by
the dominant Western political ontology of liberalism. How, for example,
should we characterise the distinctively Scandinavian attachment to
corporatist social democracy and individualist egalitarianism? What about
the core platform of Christianity, with its combination of communion
and congregation with the pursuit of individual salvation? On the other
side of the balance sheet, let’s not forget that socialism is originally a
distinctly European ideology. Looking further afield than Europe, it is clear
that there is considerable variation, across time and space, in how people
understand what we think of as ‘the collective’ and ‘the individual’: in this
respect, there may be an almost infinite plurality of ‘non-Western’ common
senses.
We may move closer to the intersubjective2 realities of everyday life –
and, indeed, everyday thinking – if we view the individualist viewpoint
as a pragmatic interpretive framework which permits actors to construct
a first line of sense and defence in a human world which, whatever else, is
peopled by embodied individuals, of which we are each one, and with whom
we each have to deal. We are all to some extent – and of necessity
– pragmatic individualists in our dealings with others. As suggested by the
quotation from Mills above, pragmatic individualism is a prerequisite for
the exercise of the sociological imagination rather than a barrier to it. It is
also the only possible foundation for understanding identity.
The pragmatic individualism of this book is grounded in an under-
standing of the human world that I have developed elsewhere ( Jenkins
2002a: 68–76; 2008: 55–69). Leaning heavily on Erving Goffman and,
to some extent, Anthony Giddens, I suggest that the world as constructed
and experienced by humans can be best understood as three distinct
‘orders’:
• the individual order is the human world as made up of embodied
individuals and what-goes-on-in-their-heads;
• the interaction order is the human world as constituted in relationships
between individuals, in what-goes-on-between-people;
• the institutional order is the human world of pattern and organisation, of
established-ways-of-doing-things.
understanding identification 39

This is a way of looking at a complex but unified phenomenon, the human
world, and viewing the same observable realities – humans and their works
– from different points of view, paying attention to different stuff:
embodied individuals, interaction and institutions, respectively. The three
orders are simultaneous and occupy the same space, intersubjectively and
physically. As may become apparent below, it is almost impossible to talk
about one without at least implying the others. The notion of the ‘order’
both emphasises that the human world is ordered, if not always orderly,
and reminds us that this is a classificatory scheme, intended to further our
understanding of the human world and nothing more.
The proper sociological place for the concept of ‘identity’ is at the heart
of our thinking about the relationships between concrete individual
behaviour and the necessary abstraction of collectivity. As I have already
suggested, this isn’t a radical proposition and the model of identification
that stems from it is, in most important respects, not new. The ideas of
George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman and Fredrik Barth have been
particularly influential in shaping it: the line of intellectual kinship
connecting them is the genealogy of this book. The work of many other
authors has been significant – particularly Karl Marx, Georg Simmel,
Gilbert Ryle, Howard Becker, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, Henri
Tajfel, Anthony Cohen, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens and Ian
Hacking – but Mead, Goffman and Barth remain my real inspirations.
THE INDIVIDUAL ORDER
If identification is a necessary prerequisite for human life as we understand
it, the reverse is also true. Individual identity – embodied in selfhood – is
not a meaningful proposition in isolation from the human world of other
people. Individuals are unique and variable, but selfhood is thoroughly
socially constructed: in the processes of primary and subsequent social-
isation, and in the ongoing interaction during which individuals define
and redefine themselves and others, throughout their lives. This view
derives from American pragmatism, via the seminal contributions of Cooley
(1962, 1964) and Mead (1934). From their work, an understanding
emerges of selfhood as an ongoing and, in practice, simultaneous synthesis
of (internal) self-definition and the (external) definitions of oneself offered
by others. This offers a template for the basic model, which informs my
whole argument, of the internal–external dialectic of identification as the process
whereby all identities – individual and collective – are constituted.
Mead distinguished the ‘I’ (the ongoing moment of unique individ-
uality) from the ‘me’ (the internalised attitudes of significant others).
40 understanding identification

Although this formulation requires considerable modification – and gets
it in Chapter 6 – the general idea does not: while I argue for a unitary model
of selfhood, that unity is a dialectical synthesis of internal and external
definitions. Mead further insisted that self-consciousness, indeed cognition
itself, can only be achieved by taking on or assuming the position of the
other, in his terms a collective ‘generalised other’. This is another idea that
cannot be swallowed whole. However, and drawing also upon Ryle’s
philosophy, the view that ‘mind’ is processual, interactional – rather than
radically and individually autonomous – and reciprocally implicated in
identification is central to the model which I outline here. In everyday
terms, Mead suggests that we can’t see ourselves at all without also seeing
ourselves as other people see us. For him the collective reality of ‘society’ is
no more than an extension of this basic theorem of identification.
Mead is equally clear that mind and selfhood are attributes of embodied
individuals. The embodiment of identity is another thread in my argument.
That human beings have bodies is among the most obvious things about
us, as are the extensive communicative and non-utilitarian uses to which
we put them. The human body is simultaneously a referent of individual
continuity, an index of collective similarity and differentiation, and a canvas
upon which identification can play. Identification in isolation from
embodiment is unimaginable.
Individual identity formation has its roots in our earliest processes of
socialisation. Recent post-Piagetian understandings of learning in infancy
and childhood and the ‘new’ sociology and anthropology of childhood
allow the development of cognition and the development of identification
to be located side by side in primary socialisation. This further suggests
that identities which are established this early in life – selfhood, human-
ness, gender and, under some circumstances, kinship and ethnicity – are
primary identities, more robust and resilient to change in later life than
other identities. Although change and mutability are fundamental to
identification, some identities are more changeable and mutable than
others. The primary identifications of selfhood, human-ness and gender, in
addition to their deep rooting in infancy and early childhood, are
definitively embodied (as local understandings of kinship and ethnicity
may be too). Where locally registered embodiment is a criterion of any
identity, be it individual or collective, fluidity may be the exception rather
than the rule.
understanding identification 41

THE INTERACTION ORDER
To return to the internal–external dialectic, what people think about us is
no less significant than what we think about ourselves. It is not enough
simply to assert an identity; that assertion must also be validated, or
not, by those with whom we have dealings. Identity is never unilateral. Hence
the importance of what Goffman (1969) famously described as ‘the
presentation of self’ during interaction. Although people have (some)
control over the signals about themselves that they send to others, we are
all at a disadvantage in that we cannot ensure either their ‘correct’ reception
or interpretation, or know with certainty how they are received or
interpreted. Hence the importance, too, of what Goffman calls ‘impression
management strategies’ in the construction of identity. These dramatise the
interface between self-image and public image. Impression management draws
to our attention the performative aspects of identity and the fact that
identification is a routine aspect of everyday life.
An important assumption made by Goffman (and, indeed, by Barth,
about whom more below) is that individuals consciously pursue goals
and interests. They seek to ‘be’ – and to be ‘seen to be’ – ‘something’ or
‘somebody’, to successfully assume particular identities. This raises two
important questions. First, does a self-conscious decision-making model
encourage a better understanding of human behaviour? Second, is this
kind of choice-making with respect to identity peculiar to modern, indus-
trialised societies? My answers, which underpin the entire argument, are a
qualified ‘yes’ to the first question and an emphatic ‘no’ to the second.
Bourdieu (1977, 1990), another anthropologist heavily influenced by
Goffman, offers a helpful perspective on these questions when he emphasises
the improvisational quality of interaction. Improvisation is facilitated and
encouraged by ‘habitus’, the domain of habit, which, in the presentation
of self, operates neither consciously nor unconsciously, neither deliberately
nor automatically. Although the notion of habitus may in some respects
be problematic (Jenkins 2002b: 74–84), it resonates loudly with my
perspective on identity: habitus is simultaneously collective and individual,
and definitively embodied.
Not only do we identify ourselves in the internal–external dialectic
between self-image and public image, but we identify others and are
identified by them in turn. One unfairly neglected account of this dialectic
is offered by the labelling perspective in the sociology of deviance (e.g.
Becker 1963; Matza 1969). It describes the interaction between (internal)
self-definition and definition by others (externally) as a process of internal-
isation. Internalisation may occur if an individual is authoritatively labelled
42 understanding identification

within an appropriate institutional setting. This model of internalisation
isn’t, however, sufficient. The capacity of authoritatively applied iden-
tification to constitute or influence individual experience affects whether
or not individuals internalise the label(s) concerned. This is a matter of
whose definition of the situation counts (put crudely, power). Identification
by others has consequences. It is the capacity to generate those consequences
and make them stick which matters. Labelling may also, of course, evoke
resistance (which, no less than internalisation, is an ‘identity effect’
produced by labelling). Although the labelling perspective emerged from
the study of deviance and control, the model works in other contexts
– education and the labour market, for example – and for positive as well
as negative labels.
THE INSTITUTIONAL ORDER
Moving on to more collective identities, Karl Marx distinguished between
a ‘class in itself’ and ‘a class for itself’. The first is unified only in the eye of
the beholder, in that its members are believed to have something significant
in common (in this case their relationship to the means of production). In
the second, those individuals realise that they share a similar situation and
define themselves accordingly as members of a collectivity. Appropriating
the methodological distinction between groups and categories, a distinction
can be made between a collectivity which identifies and defines itself
(a group for itself) and a collectivity which is identified and defined by
others (a category in itself).
To avoid reifying the ‘reality’ of collectivities, it makes further sense to
insist on the centrality of process: group identification and categorisation.
Revisiting the internal–external dialectic further makes the point: group
identification and categorisation can feed back upon each other, and are
very likely to do so. Problematising the group–category distinction also
underlines again the centrality of power, and therefore politics, in identity
maintenance and change. Asserting, defending, imposing and resisting
collective identification are all definitively political. In general, one of my
core arguments is that the external or categorical dimensions of identity
are not only indispensible but have been insufficiently recognised in social
science accounts of identity.
Tajfel’s social psychological work in the 1970s, as developed into ‘social
identity theory’ and ‘self categorisation theory’ (Brewer and Hewstone
2004; Capozza and Brown 2000; Hogg and Abrams 1988; Robinson
1996), suggests that group identification and categorisation are generic
processes – and real for individuals – in the human world, with collective
understanding identification 43

identifications emerging in the context of ‘external’ inter-group relations.
This is also a reminder that distinctions between the individual, inter-
actional and institutional orders are only heuristic: here we are, under
the rubric of ‘the institutional order’, folding the argument back into
individualist social psychology.
A model of collective identification that is broadly similar in many
respects can be traced in the slightly earlier anthropological theories of
Barth (1969, 1981). Owing an explicit debt to Goffman, Barth offers a
model of ethnic and other identities as somewhat fluid, situationally
contingent, and the perpetual subject and object of negotiation. One of his
key propositions is that it isn’t enough to send a message about identity:
that message must be accepted by significant others before an identity can
be said to be ‘taken on’. As a consequence, identifications are to be found
and negotiated at their boundaries, in the encounter between internal and
external. Staying with Barth, but drawing also upon Anthony Cohen’s
discussion of the symbolic construction of community (1985), group
identification is characteristically constructed across the group boundary,
in interaction with others. Boundaries are permeable, persisting despite
the flow of personnel across them, and identity is constructed in transactions
at and across the boundary. During these transactions a balance is struck
between (internal) group identification and (external) categorisation
by others. Barth’s distinction (1969) between ‘boundary’ and ‘content’ –
the ‘cultural stuff’ which is supposed to characterise an ethnic group,
for example – allows a wider distinction to be drawn between nominal
identity and virtual identity: between the name and the experience of an identity.
It is possible for individuals to share the same nominal identity, and
for that to mean very different things to them in practice, to have different
consequences for their lives, for them to ‘do’ or ‘be’ it differently.
Nominal–virtual may be related to the group–category distinction but
isn’t coterminous with it (not least because it can be applied to individual
identification as well). It also reaffirms the importance of the consequences
of identification, as in the discussion of labelling above.
The nominal–virtual distinction is important. The name can stay the
same – X – while what it means in everyday life to be an X can change
dramatically. Similarly, the experience may stay relatively stable while the
name changes. Both can change. Either group identification or categori-
sation, or both at the same time, can contribute to the array of possibilities.
Power and politics are unavoidable, again. To return to Marx, the trans-
formation of a category into a group is a political process of mobilisation,
which may be influenced from within and/or without. It is a change of
virtual identity that may also become a nominal change. Nominally, the
44 understanding identification

categorisation of people, by state agencies for example, may be subject to
change and it may be resisted. It may also be part of a virtual change in their
conditions of existence and quality of life. While the nominal and the
virtual are analytically distinct, in the real human world they are everywhere
chronically implicated in each other.
Institutions are among the more important contexts within which
identification becomes consequential. Institutions are established patterns
of practice, recognised as such by actors, which have force as ‘the way things
are done’. Institutionalised identities are distinctive due to their particu-
lar combination of the individual and the collective. Particularly relevant
are those institutions which the sociological literature recognises as
organisations. Organisations are organised and task-oriented collectivities:
they are groups. They are also constituted as networks of differentiated
membership positions which bestow specific individual identities upon
their incumbents.
In addition, identity is bound up with classification. In order for persons
to be classified, however, a classificatory lexicon must exist: positions and
categories, for example. Since organisations – whether formal or informal
– are made up, among other things, of positions, and procedures for
recruiting individuals to them, they are important vehicles of classification.
The constitution and distribution of positions are the outcome of political
relationships and struggles, within and without organisations. Institutional
recruitment procedures, in allocating persons to those positions, authori-
tatively allocate particular kinds of identities to individuals, drawing
upon wider typifications of identity to do so. This is one of the ways in
which nominal and virtual identification are implicated in each other:
the allocation of positions (names) is also the allocation of resources and
penalties (consequences). Consistency in recruitment practices between
organisations – in the labour market, for example – contributes to the
formation, maintenance and change of consistent collectivities, classes of
persons characterised by similar life-chances and experiences.
Thus individual and collective identities are systematically produced,
reproduced and implicated in each other. Following Foucault, Hacking
(1990) argues that the classification of individuals is at the heart of modern,
bureaucratically rational strategies of government and control (which is
not a backdoor admission of the distinctive modernity of discourses of
identity, or reflexive identity itself). Identities exist and are acquired,
claimed and allocated within power relations. Identification is something
over which struggles take place and with which strategems are advanced
– it is means and end in politics – and at stake is the classification of
populations as well the classification of individuals.
understanding identification 45

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE
So far, two basic threads run through my argument. First, identity is a
practical accomplishment, a process. Second, individual and collective
identities can be understood using one model, of the dialectical interplay
of processes of internal and external definition. To return to the model
of the three ‘orders’, there is more at stake here, however, than a better
understanding of identification. Perhaps the most persistent issue in social
theory is the ‘structure–action’ problem, most recently incarnated as the
debate about ‘structuration’ (Parker 2000; Stones 2005). From Marx to
Weber to Parsons to Berger and Luckmann to Giddens to Bourdieu, broadly
similar questions have been asked:
• How to bring together analytically the active lives and consciousnesses
of individuals, the abstract impersonality of the institutional order,
and the ebb and flow of historical time?; and
• How to bring public issues and personal troubles into the same frame?
As one of the rare concepts that make as much sense individually as
collectively (cf. Ashton et al. 2004), identity is a strategic concept in
broaching these questions:
• Although identities are necessarily attributes of embodied individuals,
they are equally necessarily collectively constituted, sometimes at a high
level of abstraction. In identification, the collective and the individual
occupy the same space.
• If identity is conceptualised in terms of process, as identification at work
and at play in the interaction order, the distinction between structure
and action may be avoided.
• If those processes are conceptualised as a perpetual dialectic of two
analytically (but only analytically) distinct moments – the internal and
the external – then the opposition between the objective and the subjective
may also be sidestepped.
• Since identity is bound up with shared repertoires of intentionality (such
as morality) and interactional networks of constraint and possibility, it
is an important concept in our understanding of action and its outcomes,
both intended and unintended.
• The institutional order is, at least in part, a network of identities
(positions) and of routinised practices for allocating positions (identities)
to individuals.
• There is a direct relationship between the distribution of resources and
penalties and identification: identity both is a criterion for distribution
46 understanding identification

and is constituted in terms of patterns of distribution (means and
end again).
• In the internal and external moments of identification a necessary
connection is made between domination and resistance and identification.
• The classification of populations as a practice of state and other agencies
is powerfully constitutive both of institutions and of the interactional
experience of individuals.
This list is not offered as an exhaustive catalogue. It has the virtue, however,
of moving the debate from the stratosphere of grand theory to the more
oxygenated altitudes of what Merton (1957: 5–10) called ‘theories of the
middle range’. The basic question becomes: how can we relate individuals
and collectivities to each other so that neither is privileged, neither is reified
or caricatured and, above all, we are enabled to understand better the real
human world?
THE INTERNAL AND THE EXTERNAL
At which point more needs to be said about the external–internal
distinction. As with Mead’s choice of ‘I’ and ‘me’ – one of the contexts in
which the distinction first appeared, and first appeared to be problematic
– this usage is unfortunate in some senses. There is a danger of reifying
or objectifying a distinction that, in the interests of explanation and
illustration, commits necessary violence to the complexities and subtleties
of being. It should be understood metaphorically, and does not imply
necessary sequence: first one, then the other. The expression ‘moments of
identification’ is intended to suggest that in principle and in practice
the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ may be simultaneous (and simultaneity is
very difficult to write about, since sequence is one of the things that
makes language make sense). In this dialectic the focus is firmly upon the
synthesis.
Nor is it my intention to suggest a difference of kind. Your external
definition of me is an inexorable part of my internal definition of myself –
even if I only reject or resist it – and vice versa. Both processes are routine
everyday practices, and neither is more significant than the other. At most,
I am indicating different modes of mutual identification that proceed,
not side by side, but in the same interactional space. While it may, for
example, be possible and analytically necessary to distinguish different
kinds of collectivities – groups and categories – in terms of the relative
significance to each of internal or external moments of identification, this
is only a matter of emphasis.
understanding identification 47

That identity is, so to speak, both interior and exterior is one reason why
it’s significant for the integration of the individual and the collective within
social theory. So, too, is the centrality of time and space to identification, as
is already apparent with respect to sequence and simultaneity (see also
Jenkins 2001). The three dimensions of space, and their material coales-
cence into a ‘sense of place’, are implied by the interior–exterior metaphor.
Identification is always from a point of view. For individuals this point
of view is, in the first instance, the body. Individual identification is always
embodied, albeit sometimes imaginatively, as in fiction or myth, or Internet
chat rooms. Collective identities are usually located within territories or
regions, and these too can be imagined, as in diasporic myths of return
or charts of organisational structure. In that bodies always occupy space, the
individual and the collective are to some extent superimposed.
Philosophers have long understood that time is bound up with space in
one’s experience of self and others (Campbell 1994): space makes no sense
outside time. Apart from the inexorable passage of time during interaction,
a sense of time is inherent within identification because of the continuity
which, even if only logically, is entailed in a claim to, or an attribution
of, identity. Continuity posits a meaningful past and a possible future,
and, particularly with respect to identification, is part of the sense of order
and predictability upon which the human world depends. We are back to
knowing who’s who and what’s what. The past is a particularly important
resource upon which to draw in interpreting the here-and-now and
forecasting the future. Individually, ‘the past’ is memory; collectively, it is
history (although individuals do have histories and it isn’t absurd to talk
about collective memory, even if it might be a potential reification).
Neither, however, is necessarily ‘real’: both are human constructs and
both are massively implicated in identification.3 That they are imagined
does not, however, mean they are imaginary.
The argument summarised in this chapter relies heavily on the work of
others and is not dramatically innovative. It combines perspectives –
particularly from social anthropology, social psychology and sociology
– which, as will occasionally become clear, sometimes frustrate me in
their apparent mutual ignorance of each other. The goal is a synthesis that
is greater than the sum of its parts, a theoretical space within which ‘self’
and ‘society’ can be understood as different abstractions from the same
phenomenon, human behaviour and experience. I shall begin with the ‘self ’.
48 understanding identification

5
SELFHOOD AND MIND
What do we mean when we talk about ‘the self’? The Oxford English
Dictionary charts the word’s known pedigree back more than a thousand
years to Germanic roots. Four basic meanings emerge from several pages of
usages and examples:
• the first indicates uniformity, as in the ‘self-same’, for example;
• the second, and most common, refers to the individuality or essence of
a person or thing – herself, yourself, myself, itself, self-interest –
simultaneously evoking consistency or ‘internal’ similarity over time
and difference from external others;
• the third takes in introspection or reflexivity, as in ‘self-doubt’, ‘self-
confidence’ and ‘self-consciousness’; and
• finally there is a sense of independence and autonomous agency, as in
‘self-improvement’, ‘self-propulsion’ and ‘she did it herself’.
Thus the meanings of the word ‘self’ parallel the general meanings of
‘identity’ discussed in Chapter 2: there are the core features of similarity,
difference, reflexivity and process. This is no coincidence. It leads me to propose
a definition of the self as an individual’s reflexive sense of her or his own
particular identity, constituted vis-à-vis others in terms of similarity
and difference, without which she or he wouldn’t know who they are and
hence wouldn’t be able to act.

SELFHOOD ( . . . AND PERSONHOOD)
The literature about the self1 is so vast, and so varied, that I cannot pretend
to survey it comprehensively. A theme running through much of it is the
distinction between the self and the person. A longstanding conventional
understanding of these notions distinguishes the private, internal self from
the public, external person (e.g. Harré 1983; Mauss 1985). The self is the
individual’s private experience of herself or himself; the person is what
appears publicly in and to the outside world.
Some distinction between the internal and the external is unavoidable.
Not everything going on in our heads and hearts is obvious to others,
nor is there always harmony between how we see ourselves and how others
see us (or how we imagine they do). Since this is fundamental to the view
of identity I am offering, we need some way of talking about it. However,
an absolute distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ obscures that view.
Against the well-established conventional distinction between ‘self’ and
‘person’, I want to insist that selfhood and personhood are completely
and utterly implicated in each other.
Finding a metaphor for this simultaneity is difficult: ‘different sides of
the same coin’ might catch it; describing them as eddies in the same stream
is better. Selfhood/personhood are aspects of individual identification,
and in each the internal and the external cohabit in an ongoing process
of identification. The notion of the internal–external dialectic of identi-
fication attempts to communicate this. The internal and external aspects
of this process can be regarded as simultaneous moments, implying
temporality, process and materiality, but not necessarily sequence. One
should not necessarily be seen as following the other (which isn’t to say it
can never happen). The word ‘moment’ is another metaphor, derived from
applied mathematics: moment expresses the forces around a central point as
com-bined functions of mass and distance. The central point is, if you like,
the identity at issue, the synthesis of the external and internal. Mass and
distance suggest the interactional factors that determine the strength of
the identification process, whether internal or external.
It’s also important to recognise that we often don’t differentiate self
and person in everyday speech. If I speak personally to you, for example, my
claim to authenticity relies upon my implied selfhood. In general terms, in
fact, the difference between selfhood and personality is not clear, a confusion
which exists as much in psychology as in common sense. This might, as
Mauss suggested (1985: 20), reflect a historical convergence of meanings
in this respect in European culture: the public persona has increasingly
been defined in terms of the psychological characteristics of the self.
50 selfhood and mind

However, an equally plausible reason why selfhood and personhood are
difficult to distinguish might be that the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ are,
for each of us, inextricably entangled.
European intellectual traditions recognise two polar models of humanity,
the ‘autonomous’ and the ‘plastic’ (Hollis 1977), each with its implicit
model of the self. The autonomous self evokes reflexivity and independence.
The emphasis is on the internal. Although this may be how we would prefer
to see ourselves in the mirror, it is also an image of anxiety and uncertainty,
of an existential world in which individual moral judgements derive from
personal preference or feeling, rather than from external authority or the
responsibilities of position. Resembling the fragmentation which Marx
called alienation, and even more closely Durkheim’s anomie, this has been
characterised by Alasdair MacIntyre (1985: 31ff) as the ‘emotive self’.
At the other end of the spectrum, the plastic self is an epiphenomenon
of collectivity, determined rather than determining. Here the emphasis is
on the external. Structural-functionalism and structuralism, each drawing
on Durkheim, are conventionally regarded as sociological exemplars of
this theme (although Parsons or Lévi-Strauss read in their own words reveal
more moderation in this respect than textbook summaries often suggest).
This model of the self reaches its logical end in Althusser’s argument – of
which there are loud echoes in Foucault – that the ‘autonomous subject’ is
an ideological notion which fools individuals into misunderstanding their
own domination as self-willed. Therefore they ‘freely’ accept it: ‘There are
no subjects except by and for their subjection’ (Althusser 1971: 182).
Images of autonomy and plasticity each contain more than a grain of
truth. Each, just as obviously, is inadequate. There are as many good reasons
for rejecting a model of selfhood defined in terms of individual interiority,
autonomy and reflexivity, as for refusing to accept a view of the self as
externally determined. The first suggests an essential self that is, at least in
part, untouched by upbringing, knowing its own mind but little else.
The second denies the reality of a ‘creative’ or ‘authorial’ self (Cohen 1994:
21–54), able to make up its own mind and to act. To borrow Dennis
Wrong’s famous expression (1961), where one is undersocialised, the other
is oversocialised. Both are manifestly out of kilter with the observable
realities of the human world and our own experience of ourselves.
With respect to these themes, and before discussing them further, it
should be pointed out that my account of selfhood – in this book’s first
edition – has been criticised for denying the interior subjectivity upon
which individual authenticity depends. Craib, making a stark distinction
between consistent personal ‘identity’ and contingent ‘social identity’,
suggests that I ignore ‘half the picture, that half which goes on “inside” the
selfhood and mind 51

bearer of identity or identities, and the process of internal negotiation which
this involves’ (Craib 1998: 4). Vogler goes further:
he [i.e. Jenkins] emphasises the external social dimension to a much
greater extent than the individual dimension and omits the unconscious
and emotional dimensions of identity entirely.
(Vogler 2000: 21–22)
I plead guilty to neglecting the unconscious. As I’ve argued elsewhere
(Jenkins 2002a: 78), the problem with ‘the unconscious’ is that it cannot
be shown to exist. Although conscious rationality isn’t the sum total of the
human ‘mind’ – we dream, we forget and remember stuff, our decision-
making can be intuitive and elusive, we improvise as we go along, our
emotions are powerful, control of what we are doing isn’t always possible,
and so on – the existence of a mental territory called ‘the unconscious’ is
epistemologically and ontologically problematic. It cannot simply be
assumed. As a rhetorical device of psychotherapy ‘the unconscious’ may
have its uses, but it isn’t a usable sociological concept rooted in the
observable realities of the human world.
Moving on to emotion, it may not have had an index entry in the first
edition, but it wasn’t omitted either. It’s there, among other places, in the
discussions of the affective power of primary identification (see Chapters
6 and 7) and ritual and symbolisation (Chapter 14). With respect to the
interiority of individual selfhood, the entire point of the model of the
internal–external dialectic of identification underpinning my under-
standing of identification is to avoid privileging either side of that
relationship. I leave it to the reader to decide whether I manage that
balancing act in what follows.
MINDS AND OTHER MINDS
That neither autonomy nor plasticity is a convincing image of the exercise
of rationality by thinking actors who share knowledge, meaning and
morality with others suggests that, in order to come to terms with the
self, we need to understand mind – consciousness and thinking – as well. Given
that the mind is more and less than the brain, what is it? A sociological
approach to this question suggests an answer that doesn’t collapse into
physiology, psychoanalysis or metaphysics, thus: the mind is the sum of
our organised processes of consciousness, communication and decision-
making. A model of this combination of perception, information handling
and intentionality – which, apropos Craib and Vogler, all involve emotion
52 selfhood and mind

– is a prerequisite if we are to understand human agency, including
identification.
For many people, mind and self are axiomatically synonymous. This
appears to be reasonable: a self without a mind is unimaginable, and vice
versa. However, such an equivalence of self and mind is deeply problematic.
Does a damaged mind mean a damaged self? Do differing grades of intel-
lectual competence have implications for selfhood? These are awkward
questions to ask, let alone answer. They are at the heart of debates about
the treatment of impaired foetuses or neonates, or the legal and personal
status of people with learning difficulties. The issues they raise are ambigu-
ous, delicate and profound. For the moment, suffice it to say that although
mind and selfhood are difficult to contemplate in isolation from each other,
they’re not the same phenomenon.
Another pertinent difficulty is familiar to philosophers as the ‘other
minds’ problem (Wisdom 1952): how can we know what is going on in
someone else’s mind, since we cannot observe or hear it? Hence, how can
we understand someone else’s selfhood? This is a mundane question,
of a type which confronts us in everyday life, but it’s also fundamental to
social science epistemology. According to one answer, the only mental
processes to which we can ever have access are our own. Reflecting upon
these, all we can do is to assume that those of other humans are similar in
their workings if not in their content. This view often entails a second
presumption that there is something special upon which to reflect, which
differs from – and is causally prior to – overt behaviour. Anthony Cohen
– much as Craib and Vogler – adopts both positions, arguing for ‘the
primacy of the self’. Whether it be soul, spirit or mind, in this view every
individual has, or is, a cloistered essence of selfhood: ‘Selfhood rests on
the essential privacy of meaning; in what else might it consist?’ (Cohen
1994: 142).
Before attempting to answer Cohen’s question, his argument, like
those of Craib and Vogler, raises epistemological issues. For example, he
describes his scepticism about the ‘reasonable’ assumption that uniformity
of behaviour within a group indicates uniformity of thought, as ‘purely
intuitive’ (1994: 89). The issue is not whether he’s wrong: I’m in fact sure
that he’s right. Nor is it that he seems to have missed Wallace’s convincing
logical argument that ‘cognitive non-sharing’ is, in fact, a ‘functional
prerequisite’ of collective organisation (1970: 24–38). No, the problem
is that in presupposing the existence of a private self that has causal ‘primacy’
as a core of individual being, Cohen is led into metaphysical assertion rather
than defensible argument. His position, which closely resembles Craib’s,
is inscrutable, and thus can be neither wrong nor right. The same is true,
selfhood and mind 53

arguably to an even greater degree, of Vogler’s assumption that ‘the
unconscious’ exists.
Why are there epistemological difficulties with respect to the self and,
by extension, the mind? Well, first, the ‘other minds’ problem is real. We
cannot ‘read’ other people’s minds. But this doesn’t demand that we accept
an interior–exterior model which identifies a domain of selfhood that is
accessible only privately and uniquely to each individual, about which
others can only intuit, at best. If that was true, everyday life would be
very difficult indeed. How would we come to know other people at all, let
alone get to know them well? Life is full of surprises, but it would be
impossibly unpredictable if we couldn’t know something – enough to
be going on with – about the minds of others. And much sociological
research would be in vain. So, perhaps the wisest thing to do where possible
is to avoid, as incapable of resolution, ontological arguments about the
nature of selfhood. Instead, making a simplifying assumption that there
is a self – as defined at the beginning of this chapter2 – I will ask, ‘What
can we know about it?’
NETWORKS AND INTERACTIONS
Gilbert Ryle, in his robust critique of the Cartesian dualism of the mental
and the physical, argues that an individual’s understanding of herself is no
different in kind from her understanding of others:
The sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the
sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods
of finding them out are much the same. A residual difference in the
supplies of the requisite data makes some differences in degree between
what I can know about myself and what I can know about you, but these
differences are not all in favour of self knowledge.
(Ryle 1963: 149)
The data Ryle has in mind are visible behaviour, talk (whether silent
to oneself, vocal to oneself or vocal to others) and other communicative
practices – such as writing – and their products. ‘Unstudied talk’, which
is ‘spontaneous, frank, and unprepared’ (ibid.: 173), is particularly impor-
tant. Our methods for deciding what we are about and what others are
about, Ryle describes as observation and retrospection.
For Ryle, introspection is implausible, requiring a capacity to do
something and to think about doing it – thus to do two things –
simultaneously. He uses this very particular definition of introspection to
54 selfhood and mind

argue that actors possess no privileged way of knowing themselves,
compared to their ways of knowing others. But he overstates the case about
doing two things at once. The point is literally true. Just as no two physical
‘things’ can occupy the same space at the same time, no two words
– whether uttered or thought – can issue from the same speaker simul-
taneously. But I can, for example, engage in a conversation while, during
the same performative flow of time, reflecting on the conversation and the
behaviour of all the parties to it (including myself). Although this is,
strictly, retrospection, it can be understood as a species of introspection: my
reflections will always be at least a micro-second behind the action, but
interactionally they are contemporaneous with, and part of, their object. By
this argument, retrospection isn’t possible until the business of interaction
is actually finished. If this is correct, introspection doesn’t require privileged
access: it is observing oneself rather than observing others.
Reflexivity, therefore, involves observation and retrospection, and is
similar whether I am considering myself or others. Potentially I have
different data available in each case. I may have more information about
myself, including recollections of my talk with myself, and biographical
data only I know. On the other hand, I cannot observe myself in quite
the way that I can observe others. Ryle is correct: self-knowledge is not
necessarily more accurate than our knowledge of others, and self-awareness
does not entail ‘privileged access’ to the mind. Accepting this, we can begin
to account for the common realisation that our understanding of ourselves
is at least as imperfect as our understanding of others (something which
Cohen, for example, doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge).
A further possibility that Ryle doesn’t consider is projection. To know
what we are doing and who we are, we must have some idea of what we are
going to or might do. Intentionality is thus an important aspect of mind
(and therefore selfhood). But more than intentions are involved: planning
involves drawing on direct and indirect experience, on theoretical reasoning
and on the hunches of implicit practical logic, in the attempt to make the
future more predictable. However, projection is concerned with more than
reducing uncertainty. It is a human characteristic to look beyond the here
and now, to locate oneself as the link between a past and a future (Clark
1992; Jenkins 2001). Thus it makes sense to include projection with
retrospection and observation in the repertoire of reflexivity.
For Ryle, minds are not occult or secret: ‘Overt intelligent performances
are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings’ (ibid.: 57).
If the mind is conceived of as mental processes, then these are to be found ‘out
there’ as much as ‘in here’. This doesn’t uncouple individual minds from
embodied individuals: that would be absurd (and, anyway, individual
selfhood and mind 55

persons are also ‘out there’). But it does suggest that minds work as much
between bodies as within them. Ryle’s is a model of ‘mind’ – as well as ‘the
mind’ – which offers the prospect of a theoretical framework bringing
together individuals and the collective human world without either being
seen to determine the other.3
While this view doesn’t sit easily with the presumptions of common
sense, other writers agree with its basics. Bateson’s ‘ecology of mind’ (1972)
pictures the relationship between individual organism and environment
as a cybernetic network within which information flows backwards
and forwards: ‘mind obviously does not stop with the skin’ (Bateson 1991:
165). Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ (1977: 72–95; 1990: 52–65) is also
suggestive, and in the same way. Habitus is a corpus of dispositions,
embodied in the individual, generative of practices in ongoing and impro-
visatory interactions in, and encounters with, ‘social fields’ of one kind
or another. The key point is that individual habitus only ‘works’ in the
context of a social field, which itself is a kind of collective habitus: the
one seems to flow into and out of the other; which is not too dissimilar
to Wittgenstein’s argument (1974) that for humans the ‘outside world’,
rather than existing in the eye of the beholder or in objective reality, is a
contingent product of our negotiated language-games.
Drawing upon Wittgenstein, Harré and Gillett’s notion of the
‘discursive mind’ is perhaps more straightforward. Rooted in what Harré
(1979) calls the ethogenic revision of social psychology, with its emphasis
on meaning and agency – and drawing, too, upon recent critiques of
behaviourism’s model of mental process as a ‘black box’, unavailable for
inspection – Harré and Gillett understand ‘mental life as a dynamic
activity, engaged in by people, who are located in a range of interacting
discourses and at certain positions in those discourses’ (1994: 180). Mental
processes are thus always interactional. Even more thoroughgoing is the
mutualist perspective, rooted in the ideas of James, Dewey and Vygotsky,
that argues that to talk about ‘interrelations’ is insufficient (Still and
Good 1991).4 Through the use of metaphors such as ‘steeped and dyed in’
– drawn from William James – and dialectical models of process, mutual-
ism emphasises the utter perceptual and cognitive interdependence of
human beings.
MIND, SELF AND G. H. MEAD
William James and John Dewey belong to the heterogeneous, largely
American, pragmatist philosophical tradition. Pragmatism emphasises
the purposive dimension of human behaviour, and derives meaning and
56 selfhood and mind

criteria of judgement from behaviour’s practical outcomes: ‘the proof
of the pudding is in the eating’. Sociologically, the key pragmatists are
Cooley and Mead, and the direct sociological descendent of their argu-
ments about mind and self is symbolic interactionism. Charles Horton
Cooley uses the metaphor of an orchestra to emphasise that mind, the
‘social mind’, is an organic whole, though not necessarily one that is either
‘made up’ or in agreement. It is a system of which individuals are active
parts:
everything that I say or think is influenced by what others have said
or thought, and, in one way or another, sends out an influence of its
own in turn.
(Cooley 1962: 4)
Writing in 1909, Cooley doesn’t mention Durkheim. It would have
been perfectly appropriate of him to do so. Each in their fashion flirts
with metaphysical notions of the ‘group mind’ (Parsons 1968: 64), and
each tends towards a consensual view of the human world. However, the
difference between Cooley’s ‘social mind’ and Durkheim’s conscience collective,
systematically discussed in 1893 in De la division du travail social, is
each’s starting point. Durkheim begins with the collective, Cooley with
the individual. For Cooley, ‘society really has no existence except in the
individual’s mind’ (Mead 1934: 224fn).
Although critical of Cooley, George Herbert Mead acknowledges
his influence.5 Describing his own position as ‘social behaviorism’, Mead
begins with two related assumptions: that ‘no sharp line can be drawn
between individual psychology and social psychology’ (1934: 1) and that
interaction produces consciousness, not the other way around:
the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to
the whole; and the part is explained in terms of the whole, not the whole
in terms of the part or parts . . . from the outside to the inside instead
of from the inside to the outside, so to speak.
(Mead 1934: 7, 8)
Mead argues that our perception of an environment of objects – the
consciousness which creates meaning – depends upon being able to see
ourselves as objects (a proposition which resonates psychoanalytically
with Winnicott’s theory of object-relations [1965] and Lacan’s notion of
the ‘mirror stage’ in human development [1977: 1–7]). The perceptual
basis of cognition is an internal–external dialectic between mind and
selfhood and mind 57

environment. Interactionally, consciousness emerges within the pre-
linguistic ‘conversation of gestures’ with others, and in the basic other-
oriented behaviour of taking up attitudes (which doesn’t here mean ‘values’
or ‘views’) towards others.
However, the development of language, the symbolisation of that
conversation of gestures, is the crucial step. Speech, says Mead,
can react upon the speaking individual as it reacts upon the other . . . the
individual can hear what he says and in hearing what he says is tending
to respond as the other person responds.
(Mead 1934: 69, 70)
Thus an individual can adopt the attitude of the other as well as adopting
an attitude toward the other. The point made earlier, that I cannot observe
myself as I can another, indicates the limitations of gesture and attitude
without language. Mead argues that with language one can hear oneself in
the same ‘objective’ way that one can hear another, and the situation is
transformed: ‘Out of language emerges the field of mind’ (ibid.: 133). In
language, reflexivity, which is for Mead the principle uniting ‘mind, self
and society’, comes into its own:
It is by means of reflexiveness – the turning-back of the experience upon
himself – that the whole social process is thus brought into the
experience of the individuals involved in it; it is by such means, which
enable the individual to take the attitude of the other toward himself,
that the individual is able consciously to adjust himself to that process,
and to modify the resultant of that process in any given social act in
terms of his adjustment to it. Reflexiveness, then, is the essential
condition, within the social process, for the development of mind.
(Mead 1934: 134)
Reflexive interaction doesn’t just introduce the wider human world into
the individual’s interior world. Without language there is no distinctively
human interior world. Without the stimulus of interaction with others
there would be nothing to talk about or think. (The) mind is thus
simultaneously ‘internal’ and ‘external’.
Collins argues persuasively (1989: 15) that, although Mead’s great
contribution is to demonstrate the possibility of a sociology of mind, his
theory is underdeveloped; that he overemphasises the impact of the
collective on the individual, and like Durkheim (or, indeed, Cooley) ‘slides
into the assumption that society is unified’. Be that as it may, it is less easy
58 selfhood and mind

to agree with Collins that Mead reduces consciousness to mere behaviour
or reflex. In fact, Mead’s insistence that mind emerges out of co-operative
interaction is more reminiscent of Marx than Durkheim: ‘language, like
consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with
other men’ (Marx and Engels 1974: 51).6 Mead offers us the prospect of
placing the thinking of individuals at the centre of the human world
without lapsing into either precious subjectivity or mechanical objectivity.
Mental processes become neither wholly interior nor wholly exterior.
Cognition and consciousness may seem to be some distance from identity.
An interactional view of (the) mind is, however, vital for an understanding
of identification. The self is unimaginable without mental processes, and
vice versa. Identity without selfhood is similarly implausible. Both mind
and selfhood must be understood as embodied within the routine inter-
action of the human world, neither strictly individual nor strictly collective.
To make safe the foundations of the account of identity offered here, mind
and selfhood must be understandable within the internal–external dialectic
model. The arguments of Ryle and Mead have provided perspectives that
allow us to do that. Some of their further implications will be explored in
the next chapter.
selfhood and mind 59

6
EMBODIED SELVES
Ian Burkitt calls ‘the idea that there is a basic division between society
and the individual . . . a nonsense’ (1991: 189). If he’s right – and on
balance, depending on what he means by ‘division’, I think he is – why is
it such plausible and popular nonsense, as attractive to social theorists
as to more mundane folk-in-the-street? Are the concepts and issues involved
in thinking about individuality and collectivity so obscure, and so
difficult, that gross simplification is the only way to deal with them them?
Perhaps. Leaving ‘collectivity’ to one side for discussion elsewhere, Chapter
5 has left unresolved some important matters to do with individuality and
selfhood.
THE PROBLEM OF ‘I’
Gilbert Ryle describes ‘I’ as an ‘index word’, that locates what is being
referred to with respect to the speaker. Like ‘here’ or ‘now’, it is always
uttered from a point of view, and those points of view are always changing:
spatially, over time, from individual to individual. There cannot be an ‘I’;
only my ‘I’, your ‘I’, her ‘I’, etc.
In everyday life, according to Ryle, people find this ‘I’ – selfhood –
perplexing and ‘systematically elusive’ (1963: 178). Yesterday’s self seems
to be substantial and easy enough to account for and explain, but the self
of the ongoing moment is fugitive, harder to pin down. This is his argument
about introspection again: he argues (ibid.: 186) that the one item of my
behaviour about which any commentary of mine must necessarily be silent

is itself. Self-reflexivity, for Ryle, is always retrospective: the ‘I’ that does
something has to wait until later before it can be considered. ‘I’ cannot look
at itself: ‘I’ can look at ‘her’ or ‘you’, but not at ‘I’.
Ryle may be logically correct, but interactionally he is wrong. Whatever
people do they do within or over periods of time – even if very short periods
– not in successive nano-seconds. I can approach myself, look at myself and
comment on myself in the present, which is a relatively stable time zone
of the here and now ( Jenkins 2001). I can, for example, tell someone over
the phone that ‘I’m sitting in the garden enjoying the sun’. I can stop in
the middle of a very busy day and take stock of what I’m doing. I can say
that ‘I’m pissed off’, and explain why. And so on: the present-tense first-
person singular, ‘I am’, makes very straightforward sense.
Giddens, too, argues that ‘I’ – in his case when compared to ‘me’ – is
especially problematic (1984: 43), and he is no more convincing. It is not
clear why ‘I’ should be more elusive than other index words: you, here,
there, now, then, etc. For all of the perplexity which Giddens and Ryle
accuse it of producing, ‘I’ is a much-spoken word that is relatively unprob-
lematic in use: when I use it I know who I am referring to and so do you
(as do I when you use it, and so on). It is testament to the ordinariness of
‘I’ that individual difficulty with the word’s use may be taken to indicate
cognitive or emotional disorder (Erikson 1968: 217).
So, what is the problem here? In rejecting the dualism of mind and body,
Ryle argues that Mind and Matter are different, non-comparable kinds
of things. While this allowed him to restructure the philosophy of mind,
it prevented him from recognising the embodiment of mind and selfhood.
He simply ruled the body out of court. Since the point of view of index
words is always that of a speaker existing in time and space, and hence
embodied, we may begin to appreciate why ‘I’ seemed so elusive to Ryle.
This centrality to selfhood of an embodied point of view (Burkitt 1994) is
probably the major reason for the plausibility of the categorical distinction
between the individual and the collective. As already discussed briefly
in Chapter 1, embodied individuals exist in common sense and experience
in a way that collectivities do not (Jenkins 2002a: 63–84). Hence the
‘pragmatic individualism’ discussed in Chapter 4: embodied individuals
are the space-time co-ordinates of minds and selves and are thoroughly and
reciprocally implicated in, and constitutive of, human relationships
and the human world.
Cooley, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, talks about
the ‘empirical self’ (1964: 168): actual people who acknowledge their
presence and their actions in the world. For Cooley, that empirical self
always implies the presence of others. It is always an interactional self, similar
embodied selves 61

to and different from others. Part of this is summed up in his image of the
‘looking-glass self’:
A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the
imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of
his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as
pride or mortification . . . The thing that moves us to pride or shame is
. . . the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.
(Cooley 1964: 184)
To Cooley, this dimension of selfhood is fundamental to collective life: to
the adjustment of self to others, the internalisation of collective norms, and
the production of an ordered and orderly human world. It is particularly
important, he suggested, in the early socialisation of children.
THE ‘I’ AND THE ‘ME’
Cooley draws heavily on William James, and in turn he provides part of
the inspiration for Mead’s more systematic model of selfhood. However,
Mead’s interest in actual, embodied people – for him ‘society’ is objectively
something more than an idea in the consciousness of individuals – leads
him to criticise Cooley’s models of selfhood and mind (Joas 1985: 111–
112). Mead wants to establish a cognitive foundation for selfhood in the
‘internalized conversation of gestures . . . the origin and foundations of
the self, like those of thinking, are social’ (Mead 1934: 173). For Mead the
self is more than ‘the bare organization of social attitudes’; he characterises
it as a relationship between ‘I’ and ‘me’ (concepts also derived from William
James). Mead appears to be talking about ‘selves’ or a ‘plural self ’ rather than
‘the self ’:
The ‘I’ reacts to the self which arises through the taking of the attitudes
of others. Through taking those attitudes we have introduced the ‘me’
and we react to it as an ‘I’ . . . The ‘I’ is the response of the organism
to others: the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one
himself assumes.
(Mead 1934: 174, 175)
The ‘I’ is the acting self: the ‘ego’ that moves ‘into the future’, the
individual’s often unpredictable answer to others, the custodian of initiative
(ibid.: 177). The ‘me’ is the other side of the argument: it is what ‘I’ react
against, the voice in part of others, the foil which gives form and substance
62 embodied selves

to the ‘I’ (ibid.: 209). It might catch the spirit of the ‘me’ to call it the ‘what
me?’ Although it represents external control, Mead’s ‘me’ is not a Freudian
censor: the ‘I’ is capable of winning the argument. The ‘me’ exercises a
moral, not a mechanical, imperative over the ‘I’. Mead’s self is not deter-
mined by the internalised voice of others to the same extent as Cooley’s
looking-glass self. Reflexivity, which is of the essence for Mead, involves a
conversation with oneself (Blumer 1986: 62–64; Burkitt 1991: 38).
Mead and Ryle have something in common.1 Mead’s ‘I’ cannot be
apprehended in the here and now, either: ‘I cannot turn round quick enough
to catch myself’ (1934: 174). As soon as someone remembers her ‘I’ of a
minute ago, it has become a ‘me’, something with which ‘I’ can only enter
into dialogue. The ‘I’ is not directly available in experience. Here Mead
is trying to reconcile the cumulative, organised, learned resources of com-
mon sense and common knowledge, which we draw upon in the ongoing
production of our lives, with the evanescent immediacy of being in the
world, which is perpetually in the present tense: ‘the “me” is the individual
as an object of consciousness, while the “I” is the individual as having
consciousness’ ( Joas 1985: 83). Mead doesn’t mean, however, to imply a
‘split personality’:
The ‘I’ both calls out the ‘me’ and responds to it. Taken together they
constitute a personality as it appears in social experience. The self is
essentially a social process going on with these two distinguishable
phases. If it did not have these two phases there would not be conscious
responsibility, and there would be nothing novel in experience.
(Mead 1934: 178)
Even so, the two are not on an equal footing: ideally, the ‘me’ is more in
charge than the ‘I’. It is the source of an integrated personality.
At this point, Mead hypothesises the existence of a ‘generalized other’,
representing the organised community to which an individual belongs
and against which she is poised and defined. Simply taking the attitude(s)
of specific individual others – a looking-glass self – might produce a series
of ‘me’s, rendering the self inherently unstable over time (the ‘me’ would
thus be similar to the ‘I’). A degree of personal consistency in the self can,
therefore, only be assured by taking on consistent attitudes. Hence the
‘me’ also adopts the internalised voice of a generalized other. This differs
from Durkheim’s conscience collective or Cooley’s ‘social mind’ in that it is the
product of ongoing encounters between individuals within group rela-
tionships. Every person will, in principle, have their own generalised other;
but every group member will, also in principle, have much in common
embodied selves 63

with every other. Without the generalised other, the Meadian self is
incomplete:
only in so far as he takes the attitudes of the organized social group to
which he belongs toward the organized, co-operative social activity or set
of such activities in which that group as such is engaged, does he develop
a complete self . . . only by taking the attitude of the generalized other
toward himself, in one or another of these ways, can he think at all; for
only thus can thinking – or the internalized conversation of gestures
which constitutes thinking – occur.
(Mead 1934: 155, 156)
Here we return to the origins of cognition in interaction. The generalised
other is acquired early in childhood; it is the parent of mind and self (and
its ‘voice’ is often literally a parent’s). Although Mead doesn’t say that
‘society’ is ‘all in the mind’, he insists that without the generalised other
‘organized human society’ (ibid.: 155) is impossible. Unless collectivity is
also in the minds of its members – as well as ‘out there’ in actual people and
their behaviour – there can be no universe of discourse, no meaningful
human relationships, no human world. Since for Mead ‘mind’ is as much
‘out there’ as it is anywhere, it adds up to the same thing, from whichever
direction you look at it.
In Mead’s social theory, ‘mind, self and society’ are not different kinds
of thing. ‘Society’ is relationships between individuals, and individual
humans cannot exist outside those relationships. Without relationships
human mind and selfhood would not exist. For Mead, selfhood is intrin-
sically interactional, emerging out of the reciprocal relationship between
the individual dialogue in the mind between ‘I’ and ‘me’, on the one hand,
and the individual’s dialogue with others during interaction, on the other.
‘Society’ is a conversation between people; the mind is the internalisation
of that conversation; the self lies within and between the two.
THE UNITY OF SELFHOOD
Giddens’ remark that ‘the “I” appears in Mead’s writings as the given core
of agency, and its origins hence always remain obscure’ (1984: 43) is
representative of a standard criticism of Mead, to which there are several,
related answers. To start with, questions about origins are of doubtful
value: it isn’t clear how one could ever answer fully a question of this kind.
Rooting the self in cognition, Mead simply argues that human physiology
entails the capacity for/of mind (1934: 226n). Given that capacity, mind
64 embodied selves

and selfhood emerge from the conversation of gestures, from interaction.
The ‘I’ is thus part of the response of our species-specific capacity for
intelligence – ‘the physiological mechanism of the human individual’s
central nervous system’ (ibid.: 255) – to the stimuli provided by other
humans. It is also, by this token, an aspect of ‘human nature’: Mead nowhere
suggested that mind and self are only constructs (Honneth and Joas 1988:
59–70). Finally, to meet Giddens’ comment head on, the ‘I’ isn’t the ‘core
of agency’: the dynamo of agency in Mead’s model is the relationship between
‘I’ and ‘me’.
Giddens’ comments do, however, suggest that the the terms ‘I’ and ‘me’
– implying as they do a plural or multiplex self – are not straightforward.
Despite these problems, to which I return below, Mead’s account of selfhood
offers a basis for a general sociological theory of identification. In particular,
it encourages us to understand intimate processes of mind and selfhood
as an internal–external dialectic. Despite its discussion of ‘society’, how-
ever, it isn’t the basis for an adequate theory of the human world in all of
its collectivity. This point can be made in two ways. First, in a manner
which recalls Cooley, Mead sees ‘society’ as essentially consensual and
relatively simple: power and domination aren’t recognised. In particular,
the ‘generalized other’ makes little allowance for institutionalised conflicts
or differences in common knowledge (Burkitt 1991: 52). ‘Being able to
see the other person’s view’ held out to Mead the prospect of a defensible
collective rationality (or rational collectivity). Conflict, in this view, is
largely the product of poor communication.2
Which leads on to the second point. Meadian selfhood, rooted in
cognition, is cerebral and pragmatic. Mead dismisses Freudian psycho-
analysis, for example, because of its focus on ‘sexual life and self-assertion
in its violent form’ that is outside ‘the normal situation’ (1934: 211).
Compared to Durkheim, for example, Collins argues that ‘Mead has a flat,
unidimensional world. Utilitarian actions of individuals are primary;
social interaction enters merely as means to these ends’ (1989: 14). Collins
further suggests that Mead overlooks the human drive to sociability.
We relate to each other because it is in our natures to do so, we cannot do
otherwise: ‘sociality’ is an adaptive feature of homo sapiens sapiens (Carrithers
1992). This criticism isn’t wholly fair. As we have already seen, it’s clear
that Mead understands the intersubjectivity on which his theory depends
to be part of the basic human repertoire: human nature. But it’s also true
that there is little room for emotion, frivolity, passion, doubt or conflict in
Mead’s world.
Mentioning emotion suggests a need to explore further the genesis in
interaction of intimate psychology and personality (Burkitt 1991; Craib
embodied selves 65

1998; Giddens 1984: 41–109; Harré 1986), which is beyond the reach of
this book. There is, however, one related matter requiring attention: the
apparent resemblance between Mead’s ‘I’ and ‘me’, and Freud’s ‘ego’ and
‘superego’ (Freud 1984: 351–401).3 In particular, the superego, as the
internalised parent(s) and the internalised voice of external control, looks
very like the ‘me’ and the ‘generalized other’. And even when Transactional
Analysis reconstituted psychoanalytic selfhood as a trio of ego states
– parent, adult and child – the internalised parental voice remained (Berne
1968: 23–32). Freud, Mead and Berne, in their different ways, agree that
selfhood is interactionally constructed within what I have called an
internal–external dialectic of identification. They all attempt to integrate
the internal regulation of autonomy and the external constraint of plasticity.
However, they also share a serious shortcoming – touched upon during
the discussion of ‘the unconscious’ in Chapter 5 – in their characterisation
of selfhood as a system of different ‘bits’: in Freud modelled as zones or
territories (which have frontiers), in Mead and Berne as entities (who have
identities and hold conversations).
This is problematic because most of the time we don’t seem to experience
ourselves as an assembly of different bits, and particularly not as a plurality
of entities. Perhaps the most important source of our consistency – in
the eyes of ourselves and others – is, as Burkitt argues (1994), the embodi-
ment of selfhood. Although over time and across situations we recognise
conflicts and different possibilities within ourselves, these don’t constitute
a committee or a cast of characters. Consider, for example, the notion of the
internal conversation (which is something very like Craib’s internal
negotiation, discussed in Chapter 5). Is it really a conversation? Probably
not. I recognise the experience of ‘talking to myself’ and I don’t confuse
it with a conversation with somebody else. Giddens is right to say (1984:
7–8) that talking about the self as if it’s peopled by ‘mini-actors’ is
unhelpful and unnecessary: talking about ‘moral conscience’ is, for example,
a straightforward substitute for ‘super-ego’ (or the ‘me’ and the ‘generalized
other’).
Dividing the self up into ‘bits’ loses sight of the fact that most humans
most of the time live their lives as more or less unitary selves. Not every-
one, however: when unity appears to be threatened or fragmented, serious
personal disorder may be diagnosed by medical, religious or other
specialists. If we are to acknowledge a continuum of differentiation between
those who experience such states and ‘most people most of the time’
who do not,4 we need a model of the self as routinely more or less unitary.
A similar point can be simply made: although we can talk about someone
‘being in two minds’, there is no equivalent sensible remark about ‘being
66 embodied selves

in two selves’. To have two selves transgresses one of the roots of selfhood,
a degree of individual consistency over time.
Perhaps the most fundamental objection to ‘bits models’ is that they are
actually much too simple. To acknowledge the many facets of selfhood would
require the proliferation of bits into potentially infinitely complex, and
infinitely unmanageable and implausible, models: the committee of three
would become a very unruly assembly indeed. By contrast, adopting a
unitary model allows us to recognise selfhood as simultaneously cognitive
and emotional, a rich amalgam of knowledge and feelings, both individual
and collective, and thoroughly interconnected and interdependent (it
probably wouldn’t ‘work’ otherwise). Inter alia this mixture includes:
• an embodied awareness of being in the spatial world;
• emotions;
• sensual memory (tactile, visual, olfactory, etc.);
• creativity and imagination;
• tacit embodied competences;
• retrievable information.
Some is this is easily reviewed and recalled, some not; some is in contra-
diction, some in agreement; some is imperative, some merely ‘take it or
leave it’; some is painful, some joyous; some is a matter of life or death,
some just in-flight entertainment; some is frankly mysterious; and some
completely fantastic or imaginary. Individual selfhood encompasses all
this and more. It symbolises the distinctive cognitive and emotional
complexities of real people – ourselves to ourselves, no less than others – so
as to imbue those complexities with the minimal sense of consistency that
we expect and require in everyday interaction.
Retrospection offers access to things that we have done or said, that
others have done or said, and so on. Some of what is going on we observe
as it happens. Other material is not retrospective: knowledge about how
things are or how they might be. Other stuff is simply difficult to get
at. And there are many other possibilities. More complicated than a
structure of a few bits, this model is also more plausible. It allows for dis-
agreement and dissensus. It allows for variability: some people may, for
example, have a rich vein of material deriving from their parents, others
may not. For some who do, the parental stuff may be very controlling, for
others not. Etcetera.
A final problem with ‘bits models’ is their tendency to reduce process
to structure. Mead, Freud and Berne might each argue that selfhood is
dynamic, but when they draw maps of the self or people it with characters
embodied selves 67

– even if only metaphorically – misplaced concreteness is added to the
problems described above. This makes it even more difficult to place self-
hood in interactional context. Although Mead, for example, consistently
writes about selfhood as constructed within an intersubjective external
world, his manner of talking about it makes that image difficult to hold.
Despite Mead’s protestations to the contrary, the human world for the
Meadian self often appears to be internalised, condensed into a ‘generalized
other’, part of the structure of the self rather than actually ‘out there’.
EMBODIED SELVES
So, then, what about the apparently elusive ‘I’? If Ryle and Mead can’t
turn round in time to catch their ‘I’, it is because they are it. The self is a
unifying point of view, and that point of view is always here. Thus, so am
‘I’: always here. When I reflect on myself I am not reflecting on someone
– a ‘me’ – ‘over there’. If I say, for example, ‘That’s just me, that is’, I
am either reflecting on myself here, which is also now, or reflecting on
myself then (which could have been here, or in a range of theres). I am a
complex character, capable of realising myself in different ways in different
contexts, but I am me (and vice versa), and I am here, the centre of my
own compass.
Where ‘here’ is requires further consideration, however. It is embodied,
certainly. Selves without bodies don’t make much sense in human terms.
Ghosts or spirits, if we recognise them as human, once had bodies; even
the disembodied world of cyberspace depends, in the not-so-final resort,
on bodies in front of computer screens (Hakken 1999: 69–92). We reach
out with our selves, and others reach out to us. The self participates in an
environment of others; to recall Bateson, like mind selfhood does not stop
at the skin. But it always begins – literally or figuratively – from or at the
body. There is nowhere else to begin.
‘Here’ is not, however, limited to the spot which my body currently
occupies. When, for example, a large number of people arrange to gather
in a big room, it makes sense to ask, ‘Is everybody here?’ Thus there are
various ‘heres’, depending on context. ‘Here’ from the point of view of an
assembled group, and its individual members, is not the same as ‘here’ from
the point of view of an individual performing solo. ‘Here’ can be a spot
or a territory, as indeed can ‘there’ (a similar point to my earlier argument
about the ‘present’: the here-and-now is a zone rather than an instant).
As with all index words, point of view is crucial. Each individual is the
embodied centre of a universe of self-and-others, the locus of perpetual
internal–external comings and goings, transactional inputs and outputs,
68 embodied selves

some of which are incorporated into the sense of selfhood and some of which
are not.
Selfhood is constitutive of our sense of who and where we are, which also
implies some sense of what we are doing. But the reciprocal entailment
of mind and selfhood is more than logical. ‘The mind’ and ‘the self’ are
different ways of referring to the same phenomenon, the embodied and
developing point of view of the human individual, living with other human
individuals (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1999). While we distinguish cogni-
tion (mind) from emotion (selfhood), we also recognise their co-existence
and relationships – it isn’t easy to capture the simultaneity I am aiming
for here – in the embodied point of view: it makes sense when we speak of
our ‘feelings’ clouding our ‘reason’. ‘The mind’ and ‘the self’ may not be the
same thing, but they are ways of talking about the same thing.
Common knowledge and shared symbols – ‘culture’ – constitute mind
and selfhood. Exploring this point illuminates the difference between the
two: mind is more universalistic or collective than selfhood. Selves are
interactional, but they are by definition individual. Mind is something
else. It makes as much sense to talk of individual minds as of individual
selves, but the ability to talk about ‘mind’, without the definite article, is
telling. ‘Mind’ is not just ‘cultural’: in some senses it is ‘culture’. We can be
‘of one mind’, but it makes no sense to say that ‘we are of one self’.5 This
suggests that (the) mind and the self are not ‘things’ or ‘objects’, other than
grammatically: they are processes. The mind and the self are perpetually in
motion, even if it sometimes appears to be slow motion. They are perpetually
in a state of ‘becoming’, even if what becomes is similar to what has been.
INDIVIDUALITY
To insist that minds and selves, whatever else they might be, are attributes
of individuals is not to accept the ‘primacy of the self’ (Cohen 1994;
Craib 1998; Vogler 2000). Selves and minds are not definitively private
essences of individuals, ultimately causally prior to their behaviour. In what
people do and say we witness minds and selves at work. Minds and selves
are thus knowable. Not perfectly knowable, but nothing is. How we ‘know’
ourselves is basically the same as how we ‘know’ others, depending upon
observation, retrospection and projection.
Selfhood does have its own particular status, however, in that it can be
thought of as a primary (or basic) identification. This is not an allusion to
the psychoanalytic concept of the infant’s primary identification with an
other. It draws, rather, upon the useful basic distinction between primary
and secondary socialisation (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 149–157).
embodied selves 69

Selfhood is arguably the earliest identification that humans develop, and the
most robust (as well as the most vulnerable during its earliest formation).
It can perhaps be understood as offering a template for all subsequent
identities, a stem stock onto which they are grafted. During the initial
emergence of self-recognition, the infant becomes aware of her presence
as against others: her difference from and similarity to them; that she is one
of them, but they are not her. The sense of self may be coloured with secure
self-regard that reflects the regard of others. It may not. Her name enters
into her identity. So do the names of other people and things, and her
relationship to them. Subsequently, primary self-identification becomes
elaborated in many ways: ‘Mummy says I am a good girl’, ‘I hate Aunty
Meg’, ‘I am bottom/top of the class’, etc.
Selfhood is not the only identity which may be conceptualised as
primary, in the sense of developed during primary socialisation and
subsequently exhibiting great solidity. Gender is also best understood as
a primary identity, organising the earliest experience and integrated into
the individual sense of selfhood. Depending on local context, ethnicity may
be, too (Jenkins 2008: 48–50). Mentioning gender and ethnicity in this
context emphasises that primary identifications are neither fixed nor
timeless. Identification is something that individuals do, it is a process. As
decades of interactionist sociology have documented in detail, even the
reproduction of the status quo requires perpetual work of one sort or
another. What’s more, primary identifications are only resistant to change,
they’re not set in concrete. Change is routine in the human world, occurring
for all kinds of reasons, and selfhood, gender and ethnicity are in and of
that world.
To characterise selfhood as a primary identity – perhaps even as the
primary identity – doesn’t imply that it is simply or only individual. Paying
attention to others is at the heart of selfhood from the earliest moments.
It is a species-specific trait:
babies are born predisposed to learn about sounds and sights that are
characteristic features of people. They are particularly attentive to shapes
and patterns that are like faces and to sounds that fall in the frequency
range of the female human voice. As babies they learn especially fast
about stimuli that change in a way that is contingent upon their own
behaviour.
(Dunn 1988: 1)
The embodied point of view – mind and selfhood – emerges into, and
within, an intersubjective human world of others and objects and the effects
70 embodied selves

which the individual has upon them. Agency is central to selfhood and it
is central to infancy.
Mind and selfhood, then, operate/exist within and between individuals.
To focus on selfhood and self-identification, this is so in at least three senses.
First, individual human selfhood is initially realised vis-à-vis others: they
are the necessary foils against which we come to know ourselves. The human
developmental process is an interactive process and cannot be otherwise.
This process continues, second, throughout our lives, as our individual
identities (and minds) adapt and change. Self-identification involves the
ongoing to-and-fro of the internal–external dialectic. The individual
presents herself to others in a particular way. That presentation is accepted
(or not), becoming part of her identity in the eyes of others (or not). The
responses of others to her presentation feed back to her. Reflexively, they
become incorporated into her self-identity (or not). Which may modify the
way she presents herself to others. And so on. As presented here, it appears
simple, sequential and linear. It is in fact multiplex, simultaneous and
often tortuous.
Third, the presentation and elaboration of self-identification draw upon
a wide palette of accessories in the human world. These are often other
people: family, sexual partners, children, friends, colleagues, etc. Who
I have relationships with, and the nature of those relationships – who I
identify with – contributes to who I am, and says something to others
about me. What’s more, other people can either validate who or what I
claim to be, refute it or attempt to float an alternative: power and authority
are critical in determining whose definition counts. Nor are people the
only resources that I can draw upon in self-identification. Clothes, religious
practices, house, neighbourhood, music, car, occupation, pets: things of
all kinds can be put to use. The world, in this respect, seems to be our
oyster.
The self is, therefore, altogether individual and intrinsically inter-
actional. It arises and is maintained within the internal–external dialectic
of identification. It draws upon the environment of people and things for
its content. Even though it is the most individualised of identities – we
might call it customised – selfhood is absolutely interactional. It depends
for its ongoing security upon the validation of others, in its initial
emergence and in the dialectic of continuing identification.
A unitary image of selfhood – rather than a model of the self as a collation
of bits – doesn’t imply a simple self. Quite the reverse: selfhood is complex
and multi-faceted, as is the lifelong process of self-identification, involving
a range of others in a range of situations, and drawing upon a range
of resources. Nor is a unitary self in complete charge of itself. In the first
embodied selves 71

instance, the foundational experiences of early life are largely – although
not completely – outside the infant’s control. And they are extraordinarily
consequential for later life. During that later life, during the ongoing
dialectic of identification, the responses of others are, at best, only
predictable or manipulable to a degree. Nor is how we receive them and
incorporate them into our self-identification likely to be within our full
control. Everything that we know about individual psychology suggests
that the early formation of selfhood – warm or cold, secure or insecure, rich
in experience or poverty-stricken, well fed or hungry – is enormously
influential in equipping us with the resources required to respond to the
categorisations of us offered or imposed by others.
Other constraints are grounded in embodiment. That selfhood is
routinely entangled with identities that are definitively embodied, such as
gender/sex, ethnicity/‘race’ or disability/impairment, makes the matter
more complicated than my attempt to deal with it via punctuation can
communicate. Nor are the accessories of identification equally available
to each individual. The world is not really everyone’s oyster. Various factors
systematically influence access to the resources that are required to play
this game: in any given context, some identities systematically enhance
or diminish an individual’s opportunities in this respect. The materiality
of identification in this respect, and its stratified deprivation or affluence,
cannot be underestimated.
In Chapter 4 I called my point of view ‘pragmatic individualism’. As a
sociological perspective this permits an engagement with the ‘empirical
selves’ of real people acting in the world, who know what they are doing
and who they are (although it doesn’t follow that they know everything
about what they are doing or who they are). As actual people they embody
mind and selfhood as points of view located in space and time. As actual
people they talk about themselves and others as ‘persons’. But ‘selves’ and
‘persons’ don’t fit together with any consistency. As I argued in Chapter 5,
the two are not systematically distinguished in common sense: there is
a loose equivalency, with the presumption that each or either word has a
taken for granted and understood referent. Even where they are defined
and differentiated – philosophically, for example – there is sufficient variety
and lack of agreement, and so much conceptualisation by decree, that, when
taken together with problems of translation between cultures and epochs,
‘the risk of sheer incoherence is alarming’ (Hollis 1985: 220).
So, as far as possible, I intend to avoid differentiating the self from
the person. Instead I start from unitary selfhood, as the embodied point of
view of the individual. It is the individual’s reflexive sense of her own
particular identity, constituted vis-à-vis others in terms of similarity and
72 embodied selves

difference, without which she would not know who she was and hence
would not be able to act. That particular identity, in this model, is always
a to-ing and fro-ing of how she sees herself and how others see her.
These represent opposite ends of a continuum, one her self-image, the other
her public image. Each is constructed in terms of the other and in terms
of her perceived similarity or difference to others. The difference is who
is doing the perceiving, who is doing the constructing. This is the
internal–external dialectic of individual identification.
And there are other issues about the choice of words. I have outlined
two complementary understandings of the self: as the embodied point of
view of each human individual in her or his context, and as a way of talking
about the complex consistency – or the consistent complexity – of
those human individuals. Each of these suggests that we should talk about
selfhood rather than about the self. This usage minimises the pull towards
reification implicit in ‘the self’ and emphasises the processual character
of selfhood. We are talking not about a ‘thing’, but about an aspect of the
human condition.
The definite article must be retained in some circumstances, however.
It makes sense, for example, to talk about the self or selves of a specific
individual or individuals: their embodied point(s) of view. Nothing else will
do if we are to remember that selfhood is an attribute of actual individuals,
‘empirical selves’ in Cooley’s words. And indeed all identities must, at some
point, refer to individuals if they are to have substance. Embodiment is not
optional: just as all individual identities are interactional, so all identities
attach or refer to individuals.
While some identities position individuals alongside other similarly
identified individuals within collectivities, some identities differentiate
individuals, as individuals, from each other. This distinction is crude and
only analytical. Individuals differ from each other in their characteristic
portfolios of collective identities, and the similarities of members of
a collectivity typically presuppose their difference from the members
of other collectivities. The interplay of similarity and difference is the
logic of all identification, whether ‘individual’ or ‘collective’. Allowing for
these reservations, however, it remains useful to distinguish individuality
from collectivity. The chapters immediately following focus upon identities
which are, to differing degrees and in different ways, individual.
embodied selves 73

7
ENTERING THE HUMAN
WORLD
Any newborn human is the product of interactions that take place before
birth. At least two people have to have had something to do with each
other. There are family histories and a pre-existing context of emotion
and relationships. There may be metaphysical and ethical debate about
the status and identity of embryo and foetus. During pregnancy new
identifications and relationships are constructed, tried out and worked into,
particularly parenthood and particularly, perhaps, motherhood (Bailey
1999; Baker 1979; Smith 1991, 1994).
Nonetheless, birth, as the moment at which the embodied individual
enters the human world, is a convenient point at which to begin here. Issues
of identification attend every birth. Is the baby a boy or a girl? Who
does he or she resemble? What is he or she to be called? There may be
questions about paternity. There may be ritual initiation into the com-
munity concerned (baptism, circumcision or a variety of other practices).
Modern civil society requires the bureaucratic registration of name,
place and time of birth, and antecedents, which may in turn establish the
individual’s claim to citizenship. In each of these cases, individual
identification also locates the child within collectivities.
HUMAN-NESS
Some early questions of identification are, however, pointedly individual.
The risks and uncertainties of pregnancy and birth, and the precariousness

of life throughout most of human history, suggest that these must have
been addressed by all people at all times. Perhaps the most pertinent is
whether the baby is ‘alright’. Depending on their severity and nature,
perceived impairments can quickly raise doubts about the humanity of the
child. Questions of individual human-ness are enormously consequential:
although few, if any, mutual obligations are established on the grounds of
fellow humanity, an attribution of ‘non-human-ness’ or ‘sub-human-ness’
has dramatic implications.
How human-ness is understood is locally and historically variable.
Acceptable human-ness is attributed to individuals on the basis of explicit
or implicit collectively defined criteria (Hirst and Wooley 1982). As a
categorical problem, philosophers perceive it better than they can resolve
it (Cockburn 1991). Modern medicine has rendered the issue more rather
than less perplexing as fragile lives are increasingly maintained or pro-
longed. The question ‘Should the baby live?’ is a big question, and no less
so when it is implicit and unvoiced (Kuhse and Singer 1985; Lee and
Morgan 1989; Singer 1994). On the other hand, modernity in the shape
of National Socialist Germany’s ‘euthanasia’ programme has also produced
the most extensive and systematic attempt yet to kill those who fall short
of acceptable human-ness (Burleigh 1994; Burleigh and Wippermann
1991: 136–167). Even then, however, when it might appear that the iden-
tification of the ‘ab-human’ was thoroughly routinised and collectivised,
each decision required authoritative individual categorisation (in which it
differed from the mass murder of the Jews and other peoples).
The question of whether a child should live does not always hinge on
the individual attribution of flawed human-ness. It may be a response to
environmental conditions: abandonment, infanticide or abortion in times
of famine or other stress are well documented in the ethnographic and
historical records (Williamson 1978). But even these practices are typically
related to understandings of human-ness. Infanticide may be permitted at
need if full human status – whether in terms of spirit, name or whatever
– is understood as something children acquire, rather than possessing
at birth.
There are also definitively collective identifications – ‘race’, for example
– which may compromise human-ness in the eyes of others. At birth and
in early infancy, however, the question of human-ness is posed individually.
If selfhood is the primary identity of internal definition, human-ness
is the primary identity of external definition. It is necessarily the work
of others, with reference to perceived and interpreted bodily character-
istics, to categorise individual neonates as acceptably human or to decide
the nature of their human-ness. More accurately, in the absence of evidence
entering the human world 75

to the contrary, adequate individual human-ness is likely to be assumed
at birth by significant adult others. Human-ness is largely taken for
granted, and, once granted, human-ness is for most of us largely irrelevant
thereafter. However, precisely because human-ness is axiomatic and vague
it is at risk in the face of life’s hardships. Subsequent factors such as
perceived intellectual competence or acquired physical impairment may
undermine it.
Human-ness and selfhood, as primary identities, are typically entailed
in each other: there seems to be a close connection between perceptions of
one and perceptions of the other. Anthropologist Robert F. Murphy,
for example, in a moving account of his own progressive immobilisation
by a spinal tumour, describes profound disability as, in the eyes of others,
‘a form of liminality’ (a state of being betwixt and between), in which
‘humanity is in doubt’ (1990: 131):
Alienation from others is thus a deprivation of social being, for it is
within our bonds that the self is forged and maintained. This loss of
self, however, is inherent in the social isolation of paralytics, who have
furthermore become separated from their bodies by neural damage
and from their former identities. Their plight is that they have become
divided from others and riven within themselves.
(Murphy 1990: 227)
This relocation – not merely onto the margins of the human world but onto
the margins of the human, a withdrawal of mutual recognition neither
sought nor embraced by the individual concerned – is difficult to resist, even
for adults equipped with resilient resources of selfhood. In this particular
internal–external dialectic, others hold most of the cards. Human-ness is
largely in the eye of the beholder. Murphy tells us of his vulnerability
when other people neglected, or refused to continue to recognise, his full
human-ness and individual selfhood. Others’ definitions of the situation
became so dominant as to carry the day. Thus as alienation from others
feeds back upon self-perception and reflexivity, individuals become
alienated from themselves and their sense of selfhood. Public image may
become self-image. Our own sense of humanity, of who and what we are,
is a hostage to the categorising judgements of others.
INFANTS, CHILDREN AND OTHERS
Birth inaugurates the process of individual initiation into the human world
and the assumption of identities within it. While this process necessarily
76 entering the human world

takes place from an embodied individual point of view, the human world
is always a world of others, and during infancy the balance is in favour of
the identificatory work done by those others. If Shotter’s account (1974) can
be accepted, an infant is not a being independent of its mother (or,
presumably, other consistent carers). Shotter draws on Spitz to characterise
the relationship between infant and carer as ‘psychological symbiosis’.
While this image acknowledges the infant’s agency and predisposition
to learn, it recognises the indispensable role of the other(s) in the infant’s
development of mind, selfhood and identity. For Shotter, ‘making’ a
competent human infant is an intended project of the other(s).
This suggests that, to begin with, the symbiosis is neither symmetrical
nor equal. Kaye, for example, reviewing the evidence in support of the
notion of the ‘mother–infant system’, argues that, because the mother is in
the first instance the locus of agency in the interaction, there is no system
as such. Persons are not born, says Kaye, they are the creations of their
parents:
the temporal structure that eventually becomes a true social system
will at first only have been created by the parent, making use of built
in regularities in infant behavior rather than actual cooperation or
communication. Another way of stating this is that evolution has
produced infants who can fool their parents into treating them as more
intelligent than they really are . . . it is precisely because parents play
out this fiction that it eventually comes to be true: that the infant
does become a person and an intelligent partner in intersubjective
communication.
(Kaye 1982: 53)
Kaye’s interpretation relies on a strict notion of agency: because the
infant is at first doing what seems to come naturally, her behaviour doesn’t
count. Two comments about this are necessary. First, it may be a naïve
observation, and obvious, but agency is integral to human nature – an
evolutionary endowment – and much of it, whether in adulthood or
childhood, is neither deliberate nor reflexive. Second, the evidence Kaye
was surveying – evidence that has since grown (e.g. Mehler 1994) – can be
interpreted otherwise:
The mind of the infant is neither simple nor incoherent. They do not
develop intentional integrity by the linking up of sensory-motor reflexes
through conditioning, as the behaviourists said they did. They seem,
rather, to be seeking to refine their reactions to particular events and
entering the human world 77

formulate specialised skills within a coherent general ability to perceive
and understand both physical objects and persons. They are born
with several complementary forms of knowing, and they use these
to develop experience of the particular world they are in, assisted by
communicating.
(Trevarthen 1987: 363)
The difference between these versions of early human development isn’t
total. They agree that human infants are utterly dependent, that they have
the necessary instincts or reflexes – such as suckling – to ensure survival,
that they are not blank slates and that the contribution of others to their
very early development is determinate. Much recent developmental
psychology seems to see no paradox in a vision of active infants-in-their-
own-right who require the work of others to realise their potential (see
Lindesmith et al. 1999: 217–282). That vision is, in fact, pretty much
the image of human nature that informs the account of identification
offered here.
So, what is the place of identification in the processes by which the
infant is ‘routinely completed as a cognitive and social being’ (Harré 1981:
98)? First, the infant recognises self and significant others (in the begin-
ning, perhaps, significant other). Turn-taking is arguably the most basic
– or even, recalling Mead’s ‘conversation of gestures’, the only basic –
interaction process (Goffman 1983: 7). To call it the atom of the human
world may be no exaggeration. It provides the framework for attachment
and mutuality of recognition. It is also the context within which language
is acquired: recognising names, being able to ascribe them correctly, acquir-
ing appropriate discursive forms. The capacity to make others respond
bestows upon them significance, creating signifier and signified. Objects
as well as persons fall into the identification process: their materiality
and their uses, the practical possibilities that they afford (Gibson 1979;
Winnicott 1965). Learning who she is, and her place in the world of
others and objects, is an integral part of the infant’s acquisition of language,
and vice versa.
Identification is a two-way process between infant and caretaker, but
in its early stages the exchange is dominated by incoming signals. Some of
the earliest contributions to identification may, what’s more, come from
interactions that don’t involve the infant, taking place away from her.
Gendering, for example, often begins, unknown to the infant, from day
one (or even before, now that the foetus can be sexed). In Britain, for
example, naming aside, accessories such as clothing, toys and nursery colour
scheme may be brought into play, creating a gendered world that the infant
78 entering the human world

encounters and takes for granted, and that structures the responses to her
of others.
Gender is only the most obvious aspect of infant identity that is partly
constructed during interactions between others. Being ‘a grandchild’ is
another example, perhaps less momentous. Grandparents may open savings
accounts for their grandchildren, attempt to influence this or that aspect
of their upbringing or revisit inheritance plans. They may vie with
each other for position in the politics of the family. And in the process
‘grandchildhood’ is constructed as much during interactions between others
– largely in the circle of parents and grandparents – as between grand-
parents and infant grandchildren (and in that process, of course,
‘parenthood’ and ‘grandparenthood’ also come into being).
Infants very rapidly become babies, however, and just as rapidly child-
ren. Incrementally, they enter into relationships with others that are
increasingly autonomous of other relationships. They identify themselves
as they identify others, and as they are themselves reciprocally identified.
Dunn (1988) argues that self-efficacy develops in the child early in life,
hand in glove with a concern about and with others. From at least as
early as eighteen months, children exhibit an understanding of the world
of self and others as a moral world in which actions have consequences;
from about three years old they begin to show signs of interest in and
understanding of minds, of their own mental states and those of others
(see also Cicchetti and Beghley 1990; Kagan and Lamb 1987).
There is a distinctively human pattern in this process, although
specialists may dispute its detailed chronology, and local variation modifies
it. Poole’s overview of far-flung ethnographic and other evidence (1994:
847–852) suggests the following general sequence for the routine
‘emergence of identity in childhood’:
• An individualised attachment to mothers and caretakers becomes
apparent by seven to nine months.
• From twelve months onwards naming and categorisation emerge and are
directed to an understanding of the human world.
• By the age of two basic conversational capacity is established.
• Thereafter the child’s capacity to represent and act out everyday
individual others and their practices in the abstract – ‘in pretend’ –
grows in complexity.
• By early childhood (two to four years), the child’s narratives and
understandings of self and others indicate ‘the appearance of a more
elaborated map of persons in an experientially expanding sense of
community’, entailing ‘Self-identification of and with other persons
entering the human world 79

through observation, differentiation, imitation and affiliation’ (Poole
1994: 850).
• During the same period, gender becomes an important dimension of
selfhood.
• By middle childhood, from five or six years, the child begins to assume
a degree of interactional and moral responsibility for her actions, begins
to understand the statuses she occupies, with their related roles,
begins to acquire a public ‘face’ to control how she is perceived by others,
and (ideally!) begins to do as she would be done by.
• As the child moves through middle childhood, towards adolescence,
the peer group, often segregated by gender, begins to replace the family
as the primary context within which identification occurs and develops.
It is necessary to question the late timing in this scheme of the child’s
attachment to mother or other carers, and the universality of phases such
as ‘early childhood’, ‘middle childhood’ and ‘adolescence’. However, viewed
as a broad-brush impression rather than a technical drawing, Poole’s
account offers a useful ideal-typical model of some very general processes
that draws comparatively upon a wider range of sources than most.1
The ‘new’ sociology and anthropology of childhood that coalesced during
the 1990s (Corsaro 1997; James 1993; James and James 2004; James
et al. 1998; Jenks 1996) also has much to teach us about identification
processes during childhood. Species-specific developmental patterns such
as those summarised by Poole notwithstanding, the founding propositions
of this revisionist approach are:
• that children and childhood are experienced and understood differently
in different places and times; and
• that children should be understood, and approached by researchers, as
active contributors to and makers of the human worlds of which they
are members.
This is a matter of ‘personifying children’ (James 1993: 31), of treating
them as conscious, human persons possessing agency. Children are actors
in their own right, not merely appendages of the adults in their lives, and
there is no universal, objective category of ‘childhood’:
Although clearly childhood can be seen as a permanent feature of
any social structure, the particular social and cultural parameters
which define and regulate . . . ‘childhood’ . . . are all temporally – that is
generationally – situated. Any account of the unfolding of childhood in
80 entering the human world

children’s lives must therefore acknowledge the effects of such historical
structuring.
(James et al. 1998: 64)
although children may share in a common biology and follow a
broadly similar developmental path, their social experiences and their
relative competences as social actors must always be seen as con-
textualized, rather than determined, by the process of physiological
and psychological change . . . Global paradigms, it is suggested, may
over-standardize models of childhood as a particular segment of the
life course by according priority to age and thus induce a determined
and determining conformity which might underplay the impact of local
social and environmental contexts on the everyday lives and experiences
of children.
(Christensen and James 2000: 176)
‘Childhood’ is thus a matter of time, both historically and in the everyday
lives of children: it is a matter of collective definition (by others) and
individual becoming (on the part of children).
The implications of this approach for our understanding of identifica-
tion are obvious. Accepting that there is an early imbalance in favour of
‘external’ moments in the internal–external dialectic of identification, and
that young humans rarely have the cognitive, experiential or other resources
available to older humans, there is no reason to imagine the post-infancy
world of childhood as strikingly different to, or isolated from, the human
world(s) experienced by adults. They are in large part the same world(s).
Children actively construct their own identities – and, indeed, the identities
of others – and identification works for children much as it does for adults.
The everyday processes involved, rooted in the internal–external dialectic,
are no different.
The new sociology and anthropology of childhood, in insisting that
childhood is socially constructed, relative and relational, also reminds us
that childhood is not a ‘stand-alone’ identification or state of being. Much
as similarity and difference cannot make sense independently of each other,
childhood and adulthood depend on each other for their meaning. Nor
can either be understood outside a more complex set of identifications
and identificatory processes that make local collective sense out of, and
order, the organically embodied changes of individual human ageing:
the life course is among the most powerful institutionalised domains of
identification (Hockey and James 2003) and among the most consequential
in the lives of individuals.
entering the human world 81

GENDERED IDENTIFICATION
One of the developmental processes on which Poole focuses is the assump-
tion of ‘social personhood’ (1994: 851). He defines personhood in contrast
to selfhood, and much as discussed in Chapter 5: as a public moral career
with connotations of responsible agency and jural entitlements (ibid.:
842), which he sees as developing in middle childhood. Unfortunately,
his version of the self–person distinction confuses institutional iden-
tification (jural entitlements) with individual cognitive and emotional
development (responsible agency), and conflates an analytical category of
‘the person’ with local categorisations of agency and status. One reading
of his account, for example, might suggest an equivalence between adult-
hood – as locally defined – and personhood, while another might question
whether, within many local understandings of gender differentiation,
women can be considered persons at all.
Poole’s scheme is, however, a useful peg on which to hang the exploration
of a number of general themes. For example, if, as already suggested, self-
hood and human-ness are the primary identities par excellence, then gender
is something similar. Gender differentiations, rooted in biological
differences (Jenkins 2002a: 119–129), are ubiquitous in the human world.
Their specifics and content are locally variable, but that there is differ-
entiation is not. Human infants are defined in terms of gender from their
earliest appearance, the environment of infancy is structured in terms
of gender, and children come early to an embodied identification of
themselves as gendered (Damon and Hart 1988: 30–31).
It may be objected here that gender is a collective rather than an
individual identity. It isn’t that simple, however. While the biology of
sex differentiation has considerable generality, and some collective
consequences for humans (generic male domination, for example), and
gender, as the local coding of sex differences, is enormously significant
in everyday life, no general principal of attachment, obligation or even
mutual recognition is collectively established between actors on the basis
of sex or gender. In any local context there may be, but it isn’t universal (very
far from it, indeed).
To introduce a distinction of which more will be made in subsequent
chapters, gender is a categorical collective identification before it is a
principle of group formation. In this it differs from kinship or ethnicity,
which are in the first place – and by definition – principles of group
identification. Furthermore, the gender of every individual must be
established at birth, it isn’t predictable from the local co-ordinates of birth,
unlike kinship or ethnicity. One is not born into a gender in the same way,
82 entering the human world

for example, that one is born into a family, a lineage, a community or an
ethnie.
At which point it’s necessary to qualify the argument further: despite
the individuality of gender, all human communities and all local views
of the world are massively organised in gender terms. This is a collective
matter. Gender is one of the most consistent identificatory themes in human
history, and one of the most pervasive classificatory principles – arguably
the most pervasive – with massive consequences for the life-chances and
experiences of whole categories of people.
Gender is thus simultaneously individual and collective in equal
degree, and in this it may be distinctive. Although all human identities,
individual or collective, are definitively interactional, where the individual
emphasises difference the collective is weighted towards similarity. Gender
identities are fairly evenly balanced in this respect. Gender is a binary
classificatory scheme, and the demographic distribution of the root male–
female differentiation is approximately equal. Thus each main gender
is the classificatory intersection of one basic relation of difference and one
basic relation of similarity.
The internal–external dialectic of identification is also relevant. Gender
as a category, no matter what else it may be, is always massively externally
defined. This is so with respect to initial individual identification and
subsequent practices of identification. In the institutional constitution
of the human world and its rewards and penalties, an individual’s gender
becomes interactionally real in large part because of her membership
of a collective category. On the other hand, gender – rooted as it is in
sex differences – is at the centre of the embodied point of view of selfhood
and the internal moment of the dialectic of individual identification.
Collectively, the sharing of similar life-experiences, which may be powerfully
embodied, also allows gender to be a principle of group formation: this is
the internal moment of collective identification. The twentieth-century
women’s movement can, for example, be understood as an attempt to
transform individual identification based on categorical differentiation into
collective group identification asserting shared similarity.
How do selfhood, human-ness and gender relate to each other? A sense
of gender is typically powerfully incorporated into the embodied individual
point of view of selfhood. Collective gender differentiation, on the other
hand, may relate to local conceptions of human-ness, via gendered notions
about ‘human nature’ or embodied models of the ‘natural’ or the ‘normal’.
For example, behaviour that is locally gender-inappropriate may be
identified by others as ‘un-natural’, and the individual may perceive herself
to be ‘un-natural’ too, or must struggle not to do so.
entering the human world 83

PRIMARY IDENTIFICATIONS
The model of an internal–external dialectic of identification fits with both
Poole’s account of child development and the recent renovation and
expansion of the sociology and anthropology of childhood. During early-
life experience, however, the external moment of that dialectic is necessarily
the more significant. Very young humans are dependent: there is much
that they must discover about the world and their place in it. All other
things being equal, they are hard-wired to be voracious learners, and they
must learn who’s who and what’s what. But if they do not learn this from
others, they will never know. Children soon begin to exercise autonomy
in this respect as in so many others, but it comes after, and only on the back
of, a somewhat different early experience.
This suggests that identities that are established during infancy and
childhood may be less flexible than identities that are acquired sub-
sequently. There are a number of reasons for making this suggestion. On
the face of things, identification is neither remorselessly permanent nor
frivolously malleable. The most adamantine identity has some leeway in it,
if only as a sense of possibility. Identities are flexible because the dialectic
of identification is, in principle, never wholly closed. Given the uncertainty
and unpredictability of life this is useful, even vital. Arising within and
out of bilateral processes of mutual recognition which are often rooted in
specific situations, identities are generally contingent, ‘for the time being’,
and somewhat tolerant of inconsistency or contradiction.
But the more unilateral the internal–external traffic, the less negotiable
the resultant identity is likely to be, the smaller the room for manoeuvre.
Identifications entered into in early life are experienced as more authori-
tative than those acquired subsequently: at most, infants and very small
children can only muster weak responses of internal (self-)definition to
modify or reject them. Assumed during the most foundational learning
period, they become part of the individual’s axiomatic cognitive furni-
ture: ‘the way things are’. Pace Mead, this is all the more so given that
children are learning to talk during this period, and language, and talk
in particular, is central to identification (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998;
Gumperz 1982; Potter 1996; Potter and Wetherell 1987). Very young
humans lack the competence to counter successfully their identification
by others. They have limited capacities to question or resist, even if they
are disposed to. And they may not be: during and before the process of
language acquisition the powerful human learning predisposition leaves
the individual open to forceful and consequential definition by others.
Further, inasmuch as gendered identity (for example) is incorporated into
84 entering the human world

individual selfhood, a powerful set of mutual reinforcements, with change
posing a threat to the security of selfhood, are likely to be set in place.
The security of selfhood has, of course, sources other than authoritative
inculcation during early childhood. As Giddens has argued (1984: 50ff;
1990: 92–100), individual ontological security – the common sense that
all that is solid, including oneself, does not melt into air – relies upon routine
and habit. This is arguably more so for children than for adults. Certainly
infants and children are well known to resent the disruption of their
routines: insisting upon routine may be among their earliest interventions
in the human world. Further, the world of early childhood is often largely,
if not totally, sheltered within an immediate domestic group. Routine is
easily established, carers well known and the world relatively simple. Under
such circumstances, primary identities are acquired in ordered settings
which the child experiences, and to some extent creates, as homogeneous
and consistent. Minimal disruption may encourage the experience of
primary identification as universal, globally independent of context and
situation, providing the individual with a subsequent taken for granted
‘thread of life’, to borrow a phrase from Wollheim (1984).
This is, of course an ideal-typical – even idealised – representation of
early childhood.2 None of it is inevitable: insecurity and inconsistency are
to be expected. Not all parents and carers are or can be committed to their
infants to the same degree. Interaction with baby, the all-important turn-
taking, is perhaps as often neglected as not. The emotional climate of family
life and kin networks is variable. Childrearing practices vary enormously.
For parents and carers, the demands of the adult world routinely conflict
with the demands of childrearing. More dramatically, children are rarely
insulated from the tempests of the outside world: when life is turned upside
down, they are turned upside down too.
Secure consistency and relative calm in the formative years may,
therefore, be as much the exception as the rule. But this doesn’t mean that
the human world is peopled by individuals with fragmentary or insecure
senses of selfhood and identity. Rather, I am suggesting that although most
people, most of the time, experience life from the embodied point of
view of relatively unitary and consistent selfhood, they are no strangers
to uncertainty and insecurity either. Usually we know who and where we
are, but not always. And if on occasions our security is threatened (or worse),
it need not mean our internal moment of identification is fragile or
wavering.
The human world can be unpredictable, challenging and unsupportive,
and our bodies are vulnerable. Even so, the primary identifications of
selfhood and gender are much more robust than most other identities.
entering the human world 85

Human-ness – a taken for granted assumption, ascribed by default – is
different, but it can still be described as primary in that ascriptions of
compromised human-ness are unforgivingly robust. What’s more, although
human-ness and gender may be distinct from selfhood, they are acquired
so early, are so consequential and are so definitively embodied that they
should be regarded as reciprocally entailed in selfhood.
Can any other identifications be called primary? One obvious candidate
is kinship. The kin group is one source of enduring individual primary
identification. No matter when or where, one of the most important
elements in individual identification, by self and others, is kinship (Harris
1990; Holy 1996; Keesing 1975; Parker and Stone 2003). Kin-group
membership epitomises the collectivity of identity, locating individuals
within a field that is independent of and beyond individually embodied
points of view. Naming, the identification of individuals in terms of
collective antecedents and contemporary affiliations, is central to kinship
and is given substance by the rights and duties of kin-group membership.
Kinship identity establishes relations of similarity with fellow kin in terms
of descent; it differentiates the individual from non-kin and, in classificatory
terms, other members of the descent group. Kinship may also establish
equivalence – similarity – with non-kin: principles of exogamy and alliance
relationships between groups identify potential marriage partners, ritual or
exchange partners, political allies and so on.
Looking at the internal–external dialectic, her individual name is among
the earliest things a child learns. For most of us our name, for better or
worse, is as it has ever been: there and part of us, we can’t remember a time
pre-name. Try imagining yourself by another name . . . it’s not impossible
(and people do change their names, or become called by other names)
but it isn’t easy. From learning her name follows a child’s ability to name
her parents, other significant kin, where she lives, etc. Thus kin-group
membership – name and place – is likely to be significantly entailed in
selfhood. The emotional charge on kin-relations is also significant. That
kinship may be represented in terms of embodied family resemblance
further encourages the incorporation of descent into self-identification.
On the other hand, however, resemblance is in the eye of the beholder.
And, certainly in childhood, our name isn’t usually an identity which
we bestow on ourselves. More generally, we should remember the old adage:
unlike friends, one can’t choose one’s family.
Nor is kinship universally salient: in some local settings kinship is
all, in others it has limited significance. It may be less significant within
the immediate kin group (where it may be taken for granted) than in rela-
tionships outside it. Kin identification doesn’t travel well, either. For
86 entering the human world

example, outside the family itself my family membership only matters in
the face-to-face local context from which it draws its relevance. Elsewhere,
my family name ceases to be a multi-stranded identification with others,
becoming instead a uni-dimensional means of differentiating me from
others.
The other possibly primary identification is ethnicity. There is some
debate about whether ethnicity is primordial, essential and unchanging,
or situational, as manipulable as circumstances require or allow (Jenkins
2008: 46–50). The notion of primary identification opens up some middle
ground for this debate. As a collective identity that may have a massive
presence in the experience of individuals, ethnicity – including, for the
moment, ‘race’ – is often an important and early dimension of self-
identification. Individuals often learn frameworks for classifying themselves
and others by ethnicity and ‘race’ during childhood, certainly by about ten
years old.3 The ideologies of collective descent that frequently underpin
ethnicity imagine it as distinctively embodied. And embodiment, even
if stereotypical, is always individual and part of the point of view of self-
hood. Although ‘race’ is likely to be more visible than ethnic differentiation
based on behavioural cues, either may be established relatively early, albeit
probably not as early as gender. Ethnicity may involve emotion and affect
(Epstein 1978; Memmi 1990), suggesting that it can become significantly
entailed in selfhood. Ethnicity, when it matters to people, really matters.
The circumstances under which it matters are relevant, however. Ethnicity
depends on similarity and difference rubbing up against each other
collectively: ‘us’ and ‘them’. Ethnic identification weaves together the fate
of the individual with collective fate in a distinctive fashion, and it can
be enormously consequential.
On the other hand, the research of Barth (1969) and others suggests that
ethnicity can be very negotiable. Individuals may, under appropriate
circumstances, change their ethnicity, and sometimes they do. Even the
embodied categorisations of ‘race’ have their flexibilities: ‘passing’ is not
unheard of and, more important, the definitions and significances of ‘race’
are historically and locally variable. Nor does ethnicity as an organising
principle of interaction and relationships, or a presence in early experience,
have the same salience everywhere. All of which suggests that ethnicity is
not primordial. It may however – depending on the situation – be a primary
identification (which need not deny it some situational flexibility).
Thus whether kinship or ethnicity is a primary identification is always
a local question. Unlike human-ness, selfhood and gender, they are not
universal primary identities. Kinship or ethnicity may be salient early in
the individual experience of identification, they may be enormously
entering the human world 87

consequential, they may be entailed in selfhood. That both involve
embodied criteria of identification – family resemblance, physical stereo-
types, ‘race’ – is likely to reinforce this. But neither kinship nor ethnicity
is necessarily a primary individual identification. Depending on local
circumstance and individual history they may be more negotiable and
flexible than human-ness or gender.
THE ‘OUTSIDE’ WORLD
A gradual shift in the dynamics of the childhood dialectic of identification,
towards increasingly bilateral relationships of mutuality and reciprocation,
occurs sooner rather than later. Selfhood becomes more secure and
consistent. Children become increasingly knowledgeable and competent
actors. These changes are systematically entangled, and on each count the
child develops greater resources with which to assert her internal moment
of identification. She has a burgeoning, more confident and fuller sense
of who she is. Infants soon become children, children eventually become
adults.
There is more to it, however, than individual development or progress
through local age-based identity categories. Although this will vary from
place to place, she isn’t very old before she starts to move in ever-widening
networks. Increasingly she has to relate to other children, with whom
interaction is more equitable and more of a contest. Families may have
their politics, but the peer group is definitively political. Relationships
with others become more negotiable and more negotiated (James 1993).
And much less predictable. Other children need to know who she is. She
needs to know who they are and what to expect of them. Who’s who and
what’s what. Skills of self-presentation are acquired, and she learns to
identify others on the basis of a range of cues. Reputation, public image
in the eyes of peers, becomes important. If indeed it ever was, the regard
of others is no longer unconditional. Hierarchy must be negotiated and
status begins to matter. Friendship begins to be an affective domain of its
own, distinct from kinship. Projective play – ‘let’s pretend’ – provides
opportunities for role-playing and the rehearsal of identities. And
increasingly children cultivate the capacity to mobilise ‘face’ and ‘front’. A
sense of private selfhood begins to be important.
Before long the peer-group competes with the domestic group for the
child’s attention. She also has more adults to deal with, and proportionately
fewer of them are familiar. Increasingly she is a member of formal insti-
tutional settings. Negotiating a path through and round these ever more
complex environments, she is increasingly required to be self-resourcing
88 entering the human world

and resourceful and is expected to function autonomously to some extent.
This entails the gradual assumption of more and more responsibility for
her actions. One thing for which she may increasingly have to accept
responsibility is her impact, acting in the part of the other, on the
identification(s) of those with whom she interacts.
Most strikingly, every child has to learn to live with her public image.
This may differ from her self-image, is not always within her control,
and may vary from context to context. The internal–external dialectic of
identification, the problematic relationship between how we see ourselves
and how others see us, is now a central concern and theme of her life.
Whether wholly consciously or not, identifications are increasingly entered
into as projects, or resisted when they are imposed and unwelcome.
The face-to-face world of children very quickly comes to resemble the
adult world in its strategies, its games, its stratification and its rules. It is,
indeed, a model for the world of adulthood. This is the everyday world that
Erving Goffman called the ‘interaction order’. Goffman’s work is one of
the places where the next pieces of the jigsaw of identity will be found.
entering the human world 89

8
SELF-IMAGE AND PUBLIC
IMAGE
Erving Goffman’s work is approachable and subtle, combining sociology,
social anthropology and social psychology in a manner that challenges petty
disciplinarity. He is also among the most mundanely useful of writers.
How many other social scientists can illuminate the full spectrum of our
face-to-face encounters, from an evening in relaxed good company to
the most formal of life-cycle rituals? He has no rivals in the sociological
interpretation of everyday life. Even so, there are four established criticisms
of his work:
• that, even if not merely descriptive, it isn’t a systematic body of theory;
• that it doesn’t integrate the everyday world within ‘social structure’;
• that his analyses are too specific to the modern (American) human world
to be generalisable; and
• that his actors are hollow shells, that he offers no account of the
formation of selfhood and only a cynical account of motivation.
Responses to the first three are not vital here. For those who are interested,
Burns (1992), Collins (1988) and Giddens (1984: 68–73) offer discussions
of the issues that are sympathetic to Goffman’s project. The fourth criticism
is, however, relevant.

SELFHOOD AND MOTIVATION
Hollis is representive of this strand of critique, arguing that ‘Goffman owes
us a theory of self as subject . . . to sustain an active base for its social
transactions . . . Notoriously the debt goes unpaid’ (1977: 88). He goes on
to say, somewhat contradictorily perhaps, that Goffman’s actors are pure
individualists, bent only on the public pursuit of purely private ends and
interests (ibid.: 102–103). MacIntyre is one of Goffman’s harshest critics in
this respect:
Goffman . . . has liquidated the self into its role-playing, arguing that
the self is no more than ‘a peg’ on which the clothes of the role are hung
. . . For Goffman, for whom the social world is all, the self is therefore
nothing at all, it occupies no social space.
(MacIntyre 1985: 32)
This, too, seems contradictory: if MacIntyre is correct, if Goffman’s self is
merely its role-playing, then that self, such as it is, can only be ‘social’.
What does Goffman himself say? There are two interdependent themes
running through his work, the better known of which concerns the routines
and rituals of everyday interaction. It can be summarised under four head-
ings. First, there is the embodiment and spatiality of interaction. The
individual has, and is, a physical presence in the world. The embodied actor
is always, for Goffman, spatially situated: vis-à-vis others, and regionally,
in terms of the local staging of interaction. The two main interaction
regions are front-stage and backstage, public and private (Goffman 1969:
109–140). The body, particularly the upper body and most particularly
the face, is the interactional presence of selfhood. Goffman’s unit of analysis
is the embodied individual, and the embodied self has its territories,
preserves of space that can be respected or violated (1971: 51–87). So
while Goffman’s self is embodied, its boundaries extend into interactional
space.
Second, he uses two metaphors to understand everyday routines or
rituals: interaction as a performance or drama (1969) – hence front-stage and
backstage – or as a game (1961, 1970). In each, interaction is co-operative,
organised, ordered, rule-governed. However, it occurs in a world of
negotiation and transaction. This is a world that is created and enabled
by interactional routines, a universe in which implicit and explicit rules are
resources rather than determinants of behaviour.
The variability and multiplexity of life and experience are summed up,
third, in Goffman’s concept of framing (1975). From the individual point
self-image and public image 91

of view, and in the institutional constitution of the human world, specific
settings are ‘frames’ – each with characteristic meanings and rules – within
which interaction is organised. Individuals experience life as a series of
different sets or stages, organised formally or informally. While each
individual may have different understandings of these settings, and of
what’s happening within them, the shared frame creates enough consistency
and mutuality for interaction to proceed. Frames are bounded in space and
time and in this sense substantial. Frame analysis is thus a compromise
between the relativism of social constructionism, in which the ‘definition
of the situation’ is all (but all there is), and a commonsensical epistemology
that recognises the existence of a ‘real’ world out there.
All of these merge, fourth, in Goffman’s notion of the interaction order
(1983): the face-to-face domain of dealings between embodied individuals.
Remote dealings, over the ‘phone or by letter, are not excluded – and it is
about time we thought about the implications of mobile phones, e-mail
and the Internet for the twenty-first-century interaction order (Katz 2006;
Katz and Aakhus 2004) – but the emphasis is on the physicality of co-
presence. It is an orderly domain of activity, in which the individual and
the collective become realised in each other. Although, in Goffman’s
own words, this is the terrain of ‘microanalysis’, the notion of the interaction
order may be regarded as his contribution to bridging the ‘individual–
collective’ gap. The interaction order and ‘social structure’ are implicated
in each other in a relationship of ‘loose coupling’ (1983: 11): each is entailed
in the other, but neither determines the other.
One major problem with this framework is its vision of the human
world as rule-governed, scripted or ritualised. Goffman himself glossed
these possibilities as ‘enabling conventions’ (1983: 5), which is helpful,
but the image of explicit and directed organisation lingers. A further
problem is the implication that individual means–ends rational calculation
is the wellspring of behaviour. Of course, much interaction is observant
of rules or conventions, and means–end rationality is often important.
But, contra rules or calculation, much of what people do is necessarily either
habitual or improvisational. There is no scriptwriter – although there
are repertoires – and rules can never be sufficiently flexible or comprehensive
to deal adequately with the variability and unpredictability of life.
The importance of habit and habitualisation in human life is well-known
(e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1967: 70–85). In fact, habit provides the
space within which rational decision-making operates: if we had to make
a decision about everything, we’d never be able to make a decision about
anything. Goffman’s emphasis upon ritual, routines and frames indicates
his awareness of this. Apropos rules, however, Goffman overstates the
92 self-image and public image

case. Bourdieu is on the right lines (1977, 1990), in theorising practical
dispositions as embodied habit – habitus – and emphasising the improvisa-
tory, non-rule-governed nature of much of what we do. In many situations
neither habit nor rules nor calculation offer a way ahead; so, necessarily,
we improvise. Improvisation can, however, be reflexive, resembling rational
calculation, or spontaneously unreflexive, in which case it looks more like
habit. Improvisation may also pay attention to rules and conventions in
the ad hocery of the moment. Habit, rule-observance, calculation and
improvisation, as ways of doing things, are, at best, only analytically
distinct. Things are a lot less tidy in everyday interaction.
THE PRESENTATION OF SELF AND IMPRESSION
MANAGEMENT
The other important theme in Goffman’s work is identity. Individuals
negotiate their identities within the interaction order. Mobilising inter-
actional competences within situational (‘framed’) routines, individuals
present an image of themselves – of self – for acceptance by others. In my
terms, this is the internal moment of the dialectic of identification with
respect to public image. The external moment is the reception by others
of that presentation: they can accept it or not. Individual identification
emerges within the ongoing relationship between self-image and public
image.
Goffman’s work suggests that, interactionally speaking, the internal–
external dialect of individual identification involves a number of elements.
There are the arts of impression management: the interactional competences
which ‘send’ particular identities to others and attempt to influence their
reception. These include dramatic style and ability, idealisation (by which
Goffman means individual identification with collectively defined roles),
expressive control, misrepresentation and mystification. Many of these
derive from early socialisation, and are routinised in embodied non-verbal
communication in addition to language.
Interactional regions are resources for revealing and concealing particular
identities. Backstage one can, to some extent, be free of the anxieties of
presentation; it is the domain of self-image rather than public image. Hence
the idea that I can ‘be myself’ in private. I can rehearse the presentation
of an identity in a backstage area before trying to carry it off in public. As
a teenager, for example, I learned to play guitar in my bedroom, but I also
practised something more awkward, ‘being a guitarist’. Front-stage, work
is required by performer and audience, to collude in the mutualities
of identification. Under some circumstances audience tact is required if the
self-image and public image 93

performance is to ‘come off’ and the public image established in the setting
in question.
Burns (1992: 270ff) discerns two understandings of self-presentation
in Goffman. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1969) selfhood lies
in expressive performance: hence the metaphor of the human world as
a stage, and the criticisms of Hollis and MacIntyre. In Frame Analysis
(1975), however, selfhood – as the thread of consistency from frame to frame
– has become the source of the performance, sufficiently autonomous
of context to be able, at need, to achieve distance from it. These visions
of selfhood are complementary, not contradictory. Nor, arguably, is the
second absent from The Presentation of Self: it is implicit in the discussion
of discrepant roles (Goffman 1969: 123–146), and crystal clear in Goffman’s
distinction between the performed self-as-character, ‘some kind of
image, usually creditable, which the individual on stage and in character
effectively induces others to hold in regard to him’ (ibid.: 223), and
the performer, ‘a harried fabricator of impressions involved in the all-too-
human task of staging a performance’ (ibid.: 222). The individual
as character is a public construct; the individual as performer is partly
a psycho-biological creature and partly a product of the ‘contingencies of
staging performances’ (ibid.: 224).
Apropos character in another sense, Hollis and MacIntyre are simply
wrong, in that Goffman’s individual is a moral creature, inhabiting a moral
universe. Giddens correctly stresses (1984: 70) the emphasis in Goffman
on inter-personal trust: on tact, collusion, interactional damage limita-
tion and repair. Goffman’s actors want to appear creditable to others;
they want (or need) to make a good impression. Thus most people most of
the time extend to others the minimal interactional support which they
require themselves if their own identity performances are to succeed (or,
at least, not fail). ‘Do as you would be done by’ seems to be the basic axiom.
Thus the dialectic – a word which Goffman himself uses (1969: 220) – of
identification has a moral dimension, rooted in reciprocity:
when an individual projects a definition of the situation and thereby
makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he
automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them to
value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right
to expect. He also implicitly forgoes all claims to be things he does not
appear to be and hence forgoes the treatment that would be appropriate
for such individuals.
(Goffman 1969: 11–12)
94 self-image and public image

If this were all Goffman had to say, his would be a mildly utopian model
of a world in which actors do their best to get on with each other in a
relatively equitable fashion. Fortunately, he also knows that things do not
always go smoothly.
LABELLING
In particular, Goffman recognises that identity can be ‘spoiled’; that
identification, particularly within institutions, can be heavily biased in
favour of its external moment; and that identification is often a matter
of imposition and resistance, claim and counter-claim, rather than a
consensual process of mutuality and negotiation. Leaving institutional
identification until later chapters, what does he mean by ‘spoiled identity’?
The key text, Stigma (1968a) is arguably the least satisfactory of
Goffman’s books. Under the rubric of spoiled or stigmatised identity he
includes a range of things – from having a colostomy, to being a criminal,
to being a member of an ethnic minority – which don’t have much in
common, even at second or third glance. The book is concerned with how
individuals manage discrepancies between their ‘virtual social identity’ –
their appearance to others in interaction (often on the basis of superficial
cues) – and the ‘actual social identity’ which closer inspection would reveal
them to possess. Individuals with a discreditable actual identity want to be
‘virtually normal’: stigma is the gap between the virtual and the actual, and
the shame that attaches – or would attach – to its discovery by others.
Stigmatisation is, moreover, a continuum of degree. We are all disreputable
in some respects, and the information management skills required to
control who knows about them, and to what degree, are routine items in
our interactional repertoires.
In Stigma, Goffman also distinguishes between ‘social identity’ and
‘personal identity’. Personal identity combines relatively consistent
embodied uniqueness and a specifically individual set of facts, organised as
a history or a biography. This is not reflexive selfhood: ‘Social and personal
identity are part, first of all, of other persons’ concerns and definitions
regarding the individual whose identity is in question’ (1968a: 129). These
distinctions – social and personal, virtual and actual – are less rather than
more helpful. Apropos the social and the personal, all human identities
are, as I have already argued in Chapter 2, ‘social’ identities. What’s more,
Goffman’s notion of personal identity relies heavily on the self–person
distinction which I have been avoiding. Finally, the virtual–actual
distinction is problematic in that the use of ‘actual’ implies that one is more
‘real’ than the other.
self-image and public image 95

However, Stigma offers much that is useful. It emphasises the demands
that others make of us on the basis of our public image. As a consequence,
trajectories that are anything but those we would choose can be thrust upon
us. Others don’t just perceive our identity, they actively constitute it. And
they do so not only in terms of naming or categorising, but in terms of
how they respond to or treat us. In the dialectic of individual identification
the external moment can be enormously consequential.
In Stigma, Goffman drew upon the labelling perspective in the sociology
of deviance.1 Intellectually, this is an offspring of Mead, on the one hand,
and Chicago sociologists such as W. I. Thomas and Everett Hughes, on
the other. Beginning with the early work of Tannenbaum (1938), the
labelling perspective was shaped into a coherent model by Becker (1963),
Lemert (1972), Matza (1969) and others. Against the conventional view
that social control was a reaction to deviance, the labelling school argued
that social control necessarily produced deviance. This labelling theorem
comes in three versions:
• rule-breaking is routine and endemic and only becomes deviance when
it is authoritatively labelled as such;
• actors become deviants because they are so labelled; and
• rates of deviance are the product of the activities of social control
agencies.
The classificatory logics of these arguments are unimpeachable. Compare,
for example, Becker’s view, that ‘social groups create deviance by making
the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance’ (1963: 9), with Douglas’s
proposition, that ‘Dirt is the by-product of the systematic ordering and
classification of matter’ (1966: 48). Disorder is the product of ordering;
definition generates anomaly; and similarity begets difference.
The labelling perspective has its vigorous critics (Gove 1980; Taylor
et al.: 1973: 139–171). Inter alia, they argue that it isn’t a systematic theory;
that it is so relativist that nothing is really deviant; that it neglects power
and structure; that it is an over-simple model of process; and that it sees
actors as uni-dimensional at best and utterly determined at worst. Much
of this resonates with the standard critique of Goffman, and invites similar
responses; and, as also with Goffman, the labelling model has its staunch
defenders (Plummer 1979).
96 self-image and public image

BEING AND BECOMING
Although much of it isn’t relevant here, some aspects of the labelling
perspective are significant for a wider understanding of identification.
Lemert, for example, distinguishes between primary and secondary deviance
(1972: 62–92). Primary deviance is the basic act of deviance, with its origins
in any number of physiological, psychological or interactional factors.
Generally it is not dramatised as deviant, being normalised away or
negotiated around. Excuses are made, mitigating circumstances discovered,
the act redefined as not ‘really’ deviant, or whatever. We all do deviant
things sometimes (or could otherwise be considered deviant) but hardly
any of us is ‘a deviant’. This is an individual identification that definitively
requires the identificatory work of others. Depending on circumstance
and the nature of the deviance, primary deviance may be recognised and
defined as deviance, and the individual labelled deviant. Deviance is very
much in the eye of the beholder. Secondary deviance is the internalised
identity of ‘deviant’ produced by the act of labelling, and the subsequent
deviance that identity generates.
The labelling perspective emphasises secondary deviance, the process
whereby people are identified as deviant and come to identify themselves
as deviant. In terms of my model, the external moment of identification
is turned round on, and incorporated into, the internal. The individual’s
subsequent behaviour and biography become organised – by herself and by
others – with reference to an identification which is now internal as well as
external. Becker (1963: 25–39) refers to this as the deviant career, during
which the initial external identification of ‘deviant’ becomes an internal
identification. This internalisation occurs in the context of authoritative
social control processes in which identification as deviant generates
real consequences; in which the identity of deviant is sufficiently powerful
to nudge or propel a rule-breaker towards ‘becoming a deviant’. It is a
question of whose definition of the situation, and of the individual, counts.
The affinities with Goffman, and with my argument that identity must be
understood processually, are clear: we should always be concerned with
processes of identification, trajectories of being and becoming.
The labelling model is, of course, neither sufficient in itself to understand
identification nor without shortcomings. In particular, it needs to recognise
more clearly the capacity of individuals to resist external identification.
More attention to the decision-making of individuals who are identified as
deviant is also required. Insufficient attention is paid to why primary
deviance occurs, not least in terms of motivation. Furthermore, much
deviance is definitely not the secondary deviance of labelled individuals:
self-image and public image 97

unlabelled ‘primary’ deviants often know that they are being deviant, and
precisely how deviant they are being. White-collar crime is illustrative of
this. With respect to ‘lifestyle’ deviance – and the jazz musicians about
whom Becker wrote are actually a good example – individuals may actively
seek out an identity in part because it is deviant. Classifications of devi-
ance are public knowledge, they are altogether collective, and they can
be drawn on and manipulated in different ways with respect to identity.2
An individual does not have to be labelled a deviant to know that some of
the things that she does count as deviance.
Allowing for these undoubted failings, the labelling perspective
underscores the processual character of identity, and allows us to con-
textualise the internal–external dialectic of individual identification within
the everyday realities of the interaction and institutional orders:
• it insists on the role of external identification in individual identification;
• it offers a way of thinking about how external definition becomes internal
definition;
• it extends the dialectical model beyond primary socialisation;
• it offers a further view of the way in which collective identifications –
of deviance in this case – can become incorporated into self-conscious
individual identification;
• it emphasises the capacity of particular agents, occupying particular
positions – the police, social workers, psychologists, judges and juries, and
so on – authoritatively to identify others in consequential ways, moving
us beyond the interaction order, into the institutional order.
The usefulness of the labelling perspective isn’t limited to the analysis
of deviance, either. Education is just one area in which labelling models
have proven insightful (Cicourel and Kitsuse 1963; Mehan et al. 1986;
Mercer 1973). The perspective is particularly suited to examining
formalised practices of identification, but labelling operates with as much
force in informal interpersonal settings.
In fact, the labelling perspective provides the basis for a general model
of the external moment of individual identification. There is every reason
to suppose that positive, valorised identities may be internalised in the
same or similar ways, as negative, stigmatising identities: they too are labels
and they too have their consequences. Perhaps the best-known piece
of research to make this point is Rosenthal and Jacobsen’s experiment
(1968) in which the academic performance of individual children was found
to correlate with the expectations of their progress that the researchers
had foisted upon teachers via a spurious testing procedure. Those pupils
98 self-image and public image

who were identified as about to experience a learning ‘spurt’ subsequently
achieved more academically than their peers, presumably as a consequence
of the extra attention, stimulation and encouragement offered – whether
consciously or unconsciously – by their teachers.
NOMINAL AND VIRTUAL IDENTIFICATION
The ‘expectancy’ version of the labelling model exemplified by Rosenthal
and Jacobsen’s research brings me to the distinction between the ‘nominal’
and the ‘virtual’. The nominal, in this context, is the label with which the
individual is identified. The labelling perspective insists that a label
alone is not sufficient for an identity to ‘take’: just because I call you a
deviant, or a gifted child, doesn’t mean that you will think of yourself as
a deviant or clever, or that other people will. Nor is it enough for you to
think of yourself as a deviant or clever. What is required is a cumulative
labelling process over time, in which the label has consequences for the
individual. This will be even more effective if that process is endowed with
institutional legitimacy and authority. That the consequences lie in the
responses of others to the labelled individual as well as in her responses
to the identification means that labelling individuals with the same
identification doesn’t mean that they will be similarly affected by it.
In each of their lives, for myriad reasons, the consequences of being
so identified – generated in the internal–external dialectic between the
behaviour of others and their own actions – may differ widely. Being
labelled is neither uni-directional or determinate.
It is in the consequences of identification that the virtual can be
discerned. Putting aside Goffman’s unfortunate distinction between the
virtual and the actual, and the use of virtuality to refer to cyberspace,
the ‘virtual’ in its Oxford English Dictionary definition is something that
exists for practical purposes rather than in name or by definition. Thus
virtual identification is what a nominal identification means experientially
and practically over time, to its bearer. Distinguishing the nominal and
the virtual is important for several reasons:
• Identification is never just a matter of name or label: the meaning of
an identity lies also in the difference that it makes in individual lives.
• A label and its consequences may not always be in agreement. Only if
they are is there likely to be substantial internalisation.
• The consequences or meaning of any specific nominal identification
can vary from context to context and over time. The nominal may be
associated with a plurality of virtualities.
self-image and public image 99

• Individual identities and differences are to some considerable extent
constructed out of collective identities. We need, therefore, a means of
distinguishing the unique particularities of the individual from the
generalities of the collective. Distinguishing the virtual from the
nominal allows us to do that: some part of the virtual is always
individually idiosyncratic.
Two examples may illustrate these points. First, there is a situation where
the virtual and the nominal are in disagreement. Nominally, people with
learning difficulties over the age of eighteen in the United Kingdom are
regarded by those who make policy about and for them, and provide them
with services, as adults. However, the wider legal framework defining
the adult status of people with learning difficulties is less clear: the matter
is, at best, ambiguous (Jenkins 1990). On the other hand, the routine
everyday responses to people with learning difficulties of many significant
others – family, friends, care workers or the anonymous public – serve to
compromise their adulthood (even though due lip-service may be paid
to the notion). Subject to an almost constant supervision that is generally
inappropriate to their competences (Davies and Jenkins 1995), they are
nominally adult but virtually something else, the precise status of which
is unclear. Although people with learning difficulties may be called adults,
they are consistently treated otherwise. As a result it is, therefore, difficult
for them to become adults, in their own eyes or in the eyes of others.
Apropos the individual and the collective, second, being a gay male
is an important identity that, in any individual case, becomes publicly
nominal once it is ‘out’ and visible. But although there are relatively
consistent collective templates or stereotypes of male homosexuality,
what it means virtually depends on individual circumstances. It is one
thing to be a gay television producer, another to be a gay doctor and
quite another to be a gay clergyman. Being gay in London, with a
flourishing and supportive gay scene, is likely to be quite different to being
gay in, say, a rural village in Norfolk. The same nominal identity produces
very different virtual identifications and very different experiences. Nor
is it only context and the responses of others which constitute the
virtualities of identification: individuals construct the consequences of their
own identification as and how they can, in engagement with a human world
bursting with others. There are many ways to be gay, in Norfolk as in
London.
Neither the nominal nor the virtual is the more ‘real’: both are real in
the lives of individuals; both have their own substance. Nor are they separate
in everyday life. The nominal and the virtual are aspects of the same process.
100 self-image and public image

In fact, wherever possible we should speak about nominal and virtual
identification, rather than nominal and virtual identities. On the one hand,
there is the labelling or naming of individuals, by themselves and by others.
On the other, the individual’s actions and the responses of others are
consequential experience. All identification combines the nominal and
the virtual. It is in the interaction between them that identity careers,
drawing together the individual and the collective, emerge as meaningful
elements in biography.
self-image and public image 101

9
GROUPS AND CATEGORIES
Individual identification emphasises uniquely embodied differentiation.
During primary and subsequent socialisation, in everyday interaction and
in institutionalised labelling practices, individuals identify themselves
and are identified by others, in terms that distinguish them from other
individuals. Individual identification is, however, necessarily about simi-
larity too. Selfhood, for example, is a way of talking about the similarity
or consistency over time of particular embodied humans. And, as Simmel
understood (1955), public individuality in the interaction order is, at least
in part, an expression of each person’s idiosyncratic combination of
collective identifications.
Collective identification, on the other hand, evokes powerful imagery of
people who are in some respect(s) apparently similar to each other. People
must have something intersubjectively significant in common – no matter
how vague, apparently unimportant or apparently illusory – before we can
talk about their membership of a collectivity. However, this similarity
cannot be recognised without simultaneously evoking differentiation.
Logically, inclusion entails exclusion, if only by default. To define the
criteria for membership of any set of objects is, at the same time, also to
create a boundary, everything beyond which does not belong.
It is no different in the human world: one of the things that we have in
common is our difference from others. In the face of their difference our
similarity often comes into focus. Defining ‘us’ involves defining a range of
‘thems’ also. When we say something about others we are often saying
something about ourselves. In the human world, similarity and difference
are always functions of a point of view: our similarity is their difference and

vice versa. Similarity and difference reflect each other across a shared
boundary. At the boundary, we discover what we are in what we are not,
and vice versa.
Even when the matter is expressed as superficially as this, it is possible
to see an internal–external dialectic of identification at work collectively,
and to begin to understand how the same basic processual model of the
construction of identity may be applicable to individuals and to collec-
tivities. This is not to say individuals and collectivities are the same. They
clearly are not (Jenkins 2002a: 81–84). It is, rather, to suggest that there
may be much to learn from exploring the processual similarities and
differences between individual and collective identification.
UNDERSTANDING COLLECTIVITY
Collectivity and collective identifications are vital building blocks in
the conceptual frameworks of sociology and social anthropology (social
psychology, as we shall see later in this chapter, is somewhat different).
Without some way of talking about them, we can’t think sociologically
about anything. Even the intimacies of selfhood incorporate identifications
such as gender, ethnicity and kinship which, whatever else they are, are
also definitively collective. However, although the ‘individual’ is an easy
enough notion to grasp – in the sense that the human world is peopled by
real bodies that are also persons – a ‘collectivity’ is more abstract and elusive.
So what might ‘collectivity’ mean?
Similarity among and between a plurality of persons – according to
whatever criteria – is the clearest image of the collective that I have offered
so far. In sociology and social anthropology it is generally taken for granted
that a collectivity is a plurality of individuals who either see themselves
as similar or have in common similar behaviour and circumstances. The two
facets of collectivity are often conceptualised together: collective self-
identification derives from similar behaviour and circumstances, or vice
versa. This understanding of collectivities dominated sociology during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and still informs much
contemporary social theory. It underpins most, if not all, attempts to apply
models of causality to the human world, allowing regularities in behaviour
to be translated into the principles which are believed to produce that
behaviour.
It also exposes a major fault-line within social theory: between an
approach which prioritises people’s own understandings of their inter-
personal relationships and another which looks for and classifies behavioural
patterns from a perspective which is outside the context in question.
groups and categories 103

Somewhat crudely, this is the difference between the Verstehen of Weber and
Simmel, and the positivism of Durkheim, between ‘the cultural’ and ‘the
social’ (Nadel 1951: 75–87), and between ‘subjectivism’ and ‘objectivism’
(Bourdieu 1977, 1990).
This might suggest that there are two different types of collectivity,
and hence two different modes of collective identification. In the first, the
members of a collectivity can identify themselves as such: they know
who (and what) they are. In the second, members may be ignorant of their
membership or even of the collectivity’s existence. The first exists inasmuch
as it is recognised by its members; the second is constituted in its recog-
nition by observers. Nadel is, however, correct to emphasise (1951: 80)
that these are not two different kinds of collectivity. They are, rather,
different ways of looking at interaction, at ‘individuals in co-activity’. He is
equally right to insist that neither is more ‘real’ or concrete than the
other: both are abstractions from data about ‘co-activity’. These different
kinds of abstraction provide the basis for the fundamental conceptual
distinction between groups and categories:
category. A class whose nature and composition is decided by the
person who defines the category; for example, persons earning wages
in a certain range may be counted as a category for income tax pur-
poses. A category is therefore to be contrasted with a group, defined by
the nature of the relations between the members.
(Mann 1983: 34)1
This is a methodological distinction – expressed in social psychology, for
example, in the contrast between sociological categories and psychological
reference groups (Turner and Bourhis 1996: 28) – which constitutes the
human world as a manageable object for empirical inquiry and theoretical
analysis. Whether a collectivity is seen as a group or a category is a con-
sequence of how it is defined. However, since in each case the definition is
that of the observer, the difference is less clear than it appears. By this token
a group is simply defined sociologically according to a more specific
criterion – mutual recognition on the part of its members – than a category,
which may, in principle at least, be defined arbitrarily, according to any
criteria.
At this point Bourdieu’s strictures against substituting ‘the reality of the
model’ for ‘the model of reality’ (1977: 29) are worth considering. He warns
– as indeed does Nadel – against the reification of interaction, against
the linked fallacies of misplaced concreteness and misplaced precision.
We should beware, for example, of investing collectivities with the kind
104 groups and categories

of substance or agency with which embodiment allows us to endow
individuals (something that was discussed in the context of Brubaker’s
recent critique of the concept of the ‘group’ in Chapter 1). It is not that
collectivities lack reality or the capacity to do things – if that were so they
would be of little sociological interest – but they differ in these respects
from individuals. Similarly, the boundedness of a collectivity is different
in kind from the bodily integrity of an individual. Where a collectivity
begins and ends is not mappable using the sociometric equivalent of a
dressmaker’s tape. Nadel and Bourdieu also remind us that our necessarily
systematised and carefully drafted view of the human world is, after all,
just that, a view. It is a necessarily abstract and simplified view, which we
should not mistake for reality; and, what is more, it is a view that is always
from a point of view.
However, groups and categories are not just sociological abstractions.
Social scientists have no monopoly over processes of definition and
abstraction, of identification. Sociologists engage in the identification of
collectivities, but so does everyone else, in a range of everyday discourses
and practices of identification. The sociological definition of ‘group’, above,
explicitly recognises this. Group identity is the product of collective internal
definition. In our relationships with significant others we draw upon iden-
tifications of similarity and difference, and, in the process, generate group
identities. At the same time, our self-conscious group memberships signify
others and create relationships with them.
Thus categorisation, no less than group identification, is a generic
interactional process, in this case of collective external definition. I have, for
example, already suggested that the identification of others – their definition
according to criteria of our adoption (which they may neither accept nor
recognise) – is often part of the process of identifying ourselves. More
generally, categorisation is a routine and necessary contribution to how
we make sense of, and impute predictability to, a complex human world of
which our knowledge is always limited, and in which our knowledge
of other humans is often particularly limited. Our ability to identify
unfamiliar individuals as members of known categories allows us at least
the illusion that we may know what to expect of them. This is the specialist
concern of a branch of ethnomethodology that is concerned with the study
of ‘membership categorisation’ (Eglin and Hester 2003; Housley and
Fitzgerald 2002; Leudar et al. 2004; Stokoe 2003).So, although in the
strictest of senses groups and categories exist only in the eye of the socio-
logical beholder, the conceptual distinction between them mirrors generic
interactional processes, external and internal moments of collective iden-
tification: group identification on the one hand, categorisation on the other.
groups and categories 105

This means that groups and categories are something more than products
of the sociological imagination. But what?
THE POWERS OF CATEGORISATION
It is an article of sociological faith for all but the most obdurate positivists
that if people think that something is real it is, if nothing else, real in terms
of the action that it produces and in its consequences. Therefore it is
‘socially’ and intersubjectively real. Deriving from W. I. Thomas at Chicago
in the early decades of this century, this injunction recommends that
sociologists not bother themselves too much with ontology and get on
instead with the pragmatic business of trying to understand the inter-
subjective realities in terms of which people act. How people define
the situation(s) in which they find themselves is thus among the most
important of sociological data.
From this point of view, a group is intersubjectively ‘real’. Group
members, in recognising themselves as such, effectively constitute that to
which they believe they belong. In the first instance processes of internal
collective definition bring a group into existence, in being identified by
its members and in the relationships between them. However, a group that
was recognised only by its members – a secret group – would have a very
limited presence in the human world. What’s more, its discovery (and
categorisation) by others would be perpetually immanent. Furthermore,
even if secrecy were maintained, such a group would necessarily be shaped
to some extent by the categorising gaze of others: one of its identifying
features in the eyes of its members would be precisely its freedom from
external recognition. Thus categorisation by others is part of the reality
of any and every group.
A category, however, is less straightforward, since its members need
not be aware of their collective identification. Here we must focus on
consequences. Can the extreme case – a category that is unrecognised by
those who are identified by others as belonging to it, and which has no
impact upon their lives – be said to have any reality? Such cases are not
common; a category is not generally a secret to its members. But there is
no reason why it could not be. Among the obvious possible examples are
the classificatory schema of the social sciences.2 These are often distant
from the people to whom they refer, and their uses apparently arcane and
remote.
It seems unlikely, for example, that anthropological debates concerning
the Nilotic peoples of the southern Sudan – about whether ‘the Nuer’ are
a definite collectivity in their own right, whether ‘the Nuer’ and ‘the Dinka’
106 groups and categories

are separate collectivities, whether one is the other, or which one is which
(Burton 1981; Hutchinson 1995; Newcomer 1972; Southall 1976) – have
been audible to Dinka or Nuer themselves or have had any consequences
for their lives. A similar point could be made about sociological debates
concerning the categorisation of populations in terms of social class (Erikson
and Goldthorpe 1993; Goldthorpe and Hope 1974; Marshall et al. 1988;
Savage 2000; Stewart et al. 1980; Wright 1985, 1989). It doesn’t seem
likely that technicians, for example, spend much time pondering whether
they are members of the ‘service class’, the ‘non-manual working class’ or
some other analytical category.
However, these examples oblige us to return to an issue originally
raised in Chapter 1 and ask whether categorisation can ever be disinter-
ested. In the first place, neither example is wholly divorced from the people
who are the objects of the classificatory exercise: ‘Nuer’ and ‘Dinka’ are
locally recognised identities in Sudan, are part of the present political
landscape (embroiled in the conflict between the Khartoum regime and
the south) and earlier had resonance for colonial government (who also
tried to ‘pacify’ them). Similarly, people in industrialised societies routinely
identify themselves according to class, and those identifications have
implications for everything from voting to courtship, housing and
schooling choices – or their absence – and policing patterns. The precise
ways in which these categories are defined and refined may not be part
of the local common knowledge of the people to whom they are applied,
but the categories themselves are locally grounded. They are not secrets to
their members.
The role of categorisation in the production of disciplinary power is also
worth considering. Foucault (1970, 1980), Hacking (1990) and Rose
(1989) argue that the categorising, or classificatory, procedures of the social
sciences are part of the bureaucratic practices of government of the modern
state, and thus not wholly disinterested. Scientific notions of ‘objectivity’
and ‘truth’ derive their epistemological power in part from their ground-
ing in procedures of categorisation. In turn, assumptions of objectivity
and truth underpin the bureaucratic rationality that is the framework of the
modern state. The categorisation of individuals and populations that is
the stock in trade of the social sciences is one way in which humans are
constituted as objects of government and subjects of the state, via censuses
and the like. The reference to taxation in the definition of ‘category’ quoted
earlier was apposite. More pointedly, ‘objective’ knowledge about the
human world provides one basis – whether that is its rationale or not – for
the policing of families and the private sphere which characterises the
modern state (Donzelot 1980; Meyer 1983).
groups and categories 107

So, even the most apparently aloof categorisation is only apparently so.
Whether directly, via the commissioning, direction and use of social science
research by the state or other agencies, or indirectly, via the contribution
of theory and research to the fecundity and potency of the categorical
point of view of government (Foucault’s ‘governmentality’), categorising
people is always potentially an intervention in their lives, and often more.3
Although they may not be aware of their categorisation, that they have
been categorised is always at least immanently consequential for a category’s
members.
It’s more common that people know that they have been lumped
together in the eyes of others, but aren’t aware, or fully aware, of the content
and implications of that categorisation. A category may be recognised by
its membership without its implications for their lives being clear or
obvious to them. We have probably all had the experience of realising
that we are being categorised in a particular fashion – in a new workplace,
perhaps, or on moving into a new neighbourhood – without knowing
what this means in terms of the responses or expectations of others.
Imbalances of this kind may be thoroughly institutionalised. Policies such
as ‘normalisation’ and ‘empowerment’ may encourage individuals with
learning difficulties, for example, despite their awareness of the general
categories ‘retarded’, ‘stupid’, or whatever, to deny that these apply to them
(Davies and Jenkins 1996). This consequence may be unintended, but the
extent to which those categorisations shape their lives and exacerbate
the routine cruelties of the world are nonetheless concealed. Both nominal
and virtual are obscured.
This highlights another characteristic of categorisation. Group member-
ship is a relationship between members: even if they do not know each
other personally, they can recognise each other as members. Membership
of a category is not a relationship between members: it doesn’t even
necessitate a relationship between categoriser and categorised. Any inter-
personal relationships between members of a category only involve them
as individuals. Once relationships between members of a category involve
mutual recognition of their categorisation, the first steps towards group
identification have been taken.
Categorisers are the other side of the coin. Categorisation may be more
significant for categoriser(s) than for categorised. Our categories don’t have
to be consequentially ‘real’ to the people to whom they refer in order to
have consequences for us. Although categorising others is one aspect
of identifying ourselves, this need not involve explicit notions of difference
vis-à-vis ourselves and those others. Nor need we have any expectations of
them. The examples of the Nuer–Dinka, or social class, can help again to
108 groups and categories

make the point. The most important themes of these categorisations are not
‘Nuer–Dinka are different from us anthropologists’, or ‘the working class
are different from us sociologists’ (although these sub-themes may be
present). As aspects of their disciplinary world-views, categorisations such
as these do other kinds of identificatory work for anthropologists and
sociologists: recently, for example, Brubaker and Cooper (2000; Brubaker
2004: 28–63) used the Nuer case to establish and highlight their own
differences from other social theorists of identity. Disagreements over
categories may produce boundaries internally, between different ‘sides’ of
the argument: in the case of class, for example, competing classificatory
schema are associated with intra-disciplinary groupings and sociological
feuds of some longevity and bitterness.
Another example may further illustrate what I mean. Style is an arbiter
of youth identities in Western industrialised societies. One of the ways
in which styles are delineated is through the categorisation of music and
musicians. In my youth, for example, questions such as whether white
musicians could play the blues, or whether Tamla-Motown counted as soul,
had an urgency which seems disproportionate only in retrospect: the
answers were a significant part of style and ‘who’s who and what’s what’.
Thus the categorisation of others is a resource upon which to draw in the
construction of our own identities.
That categorisation has consequences, even if only trivial or immanent
ones, returns the discussion to the distinction between the nominal and
the virtual. Collective identification also has nominal and virtual dimen-
sions. The nominal is how the group or category is defined in discourse,
the virtual how its members behave or are treated. As with individual
identification these are conceptually distinct. In practice they are chronically
implicated in each other, but there is no necessary agreement between
them.
SIMULTANEITY AND PROCESS
I argued in Chapter 4 that although the dialectic of internal–external
definition might imply sequence – one, then the other – simultaneity is
what I am trying to communicate. Collective internal definition is group
identification; collective external definition is categorisation. Each is an
inter-related moment in the collective dialectic of identification, suggesting
that neither comes first and neither exists without the other. But is this
actually the case?
Group identification probably cannot exist in a vacuum. Short of
imagining an utterly isolated – and implausible – band, small enough to
groups and categories 109

lack significant internal sub-groupings, it seems sensible to suggest that
groups necessarily exist in relation to other groups: to categorise and to
be categorised in turn. Group identification therefore proceeds hand in
glove with categorisation. Although it makes figurative sense to talk
about groups being constituted ‘in the first instance’ by internal definition
– after all, without their members relating to each other, and defining
themselves as members, there would be nothing to belong to – this should
not be misconstrued literally and chronologically, to mean first group
identification, then categorisation.
There may, however, be situations in which group identification is
generated by prior categorisation. But although categorisation necessarily
conjures up a possible group identity, it doesn’t inevitably create an actual
one. Marx understood this when he talked about the difference between
a ‘class in itself’ and a ‘class for itself’.4 He argued that the working class is
constituted in itself by virtue of the similar situation of workers, their
common alienation from the means of production within capitalism.
By virtue of their shared situation, workers have similar interests (i.e. things
that are in their interest). Marx argued that these interests cannot be
realised until workers unite into a class for itself and realise for themselves
what their interests are. This, for Marx, signifies the emergence of the
working class as a collective historical agent. The process of group
identification encourages and is encouraged by class struggle. Subsequent
refinements of this model, particularly by Lenin in What Is to Be Done?,
emphasised that class struggle would not ‘just happen’ as a consequence
of the conflict of interests between classes; it has to be inspired or produced.
Hence Lenin’s notion of the ‘vanguard party’, and hence the need for
politics.
Whether or not we agree with this, it illustrates my argument. Given
appropriate circumstances, groups may come to identify themselves as such
because of their initial categorisation by others. The point is that there
was no class ‘in itself’ until its common interests were perceived and
identified. The categorical constitution of the working class as a class in itself
with a situation and interests in common – by socialists and other activists,
on the one hand, and, as a ‘dangerous class’, by capitalists and the state, on
the other – was a necessary although not a sufficient condition for the birth
of the class for itself and, hence, for working-class politics (if not necessarily
revolution). Before the working class could act as a class, working people
had to recognise that it was – or they were – a class. In this recognition the
working class was constituted as a politically effective group.
Distinguishing the necessary from the sufficient suggests that for a
category to be defined it must be definable. There has to be something that
110 groups and categories

its members share. In principle this can be completely arbitrary. One could,
for example, decide that all married persons with in-growing toenails
were a category. But would this ever amount to more than an abstract,
logical category? To become a category it would at the very least have
to be recognised by appreciable numbers of others. In order for that to
happen the condition of being married and suffering with in-growing
toenails would have to possess some significance to those others. They would
have to have an interest in the matter; there would have to be a point to it.
In the case of the working class, capitalist wage-labour produced the
common interest and the point, without which there would have been
nothing ‘in itself’ to recognise. Although categorisation may in principle
be arbitrary, it is actually unlikely ever to be so.
People collectively identify themselves and others, and they conduct
their everyday lives in terms of those identities, which therefore have
practical consequences. They are intersubjectively real. This is as true for
categories as for groups. Or, to come closer to the spirit of this discussion,
it is as true for categorisation as for group identification, since neither
groups nor categories are anything other than emphases within ongoing
processes of identification.
Two further points flow from adopting this position. First, collective
identities must always be understood as generated simultaneously by group
identification and categorisation. How we understand any particular
collective identity is an empirical matter, for discovery. In one case group
identification may be the dominant theme, in another categorisation;
but, as argued above, both will always be present as moments in the
dialectic of collective identification, even if only as potentialities. Second,
identificatory processes are practices, done by actually existing individuals.
There is thus nothing idealist about this argument. Collectivities and
collective identities do not just exist ‘in the mind’ or ‘on paper’.
The distinction between groups and categories is an analogue of the
general processes of group identification and categorisation. Collective
identities are no less processual than individual identities, and group
identification and categorisation have practical consequences. Rather than
reify groups and categories – as ‘things’ – we should think instead about
identities as constituted in the dialectic of collective identification, in the
interplay of group identification and categorisation. In any particular case
it is empirically a question of the balance between these processes. Group
identification always implies categorisation. The reverse is not always
the case. Categorisation, however, at least creates group identification as an
immanent possibility.
groups and categories 111

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE . . . AGAIN
Groups and categories are fundamental to the social psychology of identity
inspired by the work of Henri Tajfel (1970, 1978, 1981a, 1982; Tajfel
and Turner 1979). Sometimes these are distinguished from each other
in the way that I have distinguished them here: groups are defined by,
and meaningful to, their members, while categories are externally defined
without any necessary recognition by their members (e.g. Turner and
Bourhis 1996: 27–30). More consistently in this approach, however, the
distinction between groups and categories is weak and only implicit: a
group is an actually existing concrete point of reference for its members,
while a category is a collectively defined classification of identity, part
of local common knowledge.
Looking for an alternative to the individualism that he saw as prevalent
in social psychology and inspired by his earlier research on social percep-
tion, Tajfel was concerned to understand prejudice and conflict as
something other than inevitable ‘facts of life’ and to reconcile cohesion
and differentiation within one model of human group relationships. The
resultant ‘social identity theory’, and its immediate development ‘self-
categorisation theory’ (Turner 1984; Turner et al. 1987), can be summarised
thus:5
• ‘Personal identity’, which differentiates the unique self from all other
selves, is different from ‘social identity’, which is the internalisation
of, often stereotypical, collective identifications. Social identity is
sometimes the more salient influence on individual behaviour.
• Group membership is meaningful to individuals, conferring social
identity and permitting self-evaluation. It is a shared representation
of who one is and the appropriate behaviour attached to who one is.
• Group membership in itself, regardless of its context or meaning, is sufficient
to encourage members to, for example, discriminate against out-group
members. Group members also exaggerate the similarities within the
in-group, and the differences between the in-group and out-group.
• Society is structured categorically, and organised by inequalities of
power and resources. It is in the translation of social categories into
meaningful reference groups that ‘social structure’ influences or produces
individual behaviour. Social identity theory focuses on how categories
become groups, with the emphasis on inter-group processes.
• Social categorisation generates social identity, which produces social
comparisons, which produce positive (or negative) self-evaluation.
Universal species-specific processes mediate between social categories
and individual behaviour: cognitive simplification, comparison and
112 groups and categories

evaluation, and the search for positive self-esteem. These processes bring
groups into being.
• The cognitive simplification that is required to manage the information
overload produced by a complex world generates stereotypes of
collectivities and their members.
• Comparison and evaluation between groups is generically bound
up with the establishment and maintenance of in-group distinctiveness,
in an interplay of internal similarity and external difference.
• Groups distinguish themselves from, and discriminate against, other
groups in order to promote their own positive social evaluation and
collective self-esteem.
• Individuals and groups with unsatisfactory social identity seek to restore
or acquire positive identification via mobility, assimilation, creativity
or competition.
• Moving from inter-group to intra-group matters, self-categorisation
theory focuses on the universal psychological processes that produce
group cohesion. Accentuating the in–out distinction, self-categorisation
as a group member – the internalisation of stereotypes – generates a
sense of similarity with other group members, and attractiveness or
esteem.
• Individuals, in using stereotypical categories to define themselves thus,
bring into being human collective life.
• Individuals will self-categorise themselves differently according to the
contexts in which they find themselves and the contingencies with
which they are faced.
This is merely a thumbnail sketch of a complex and still growing body of
research and literature that has become an established social psychological
paradigm in its own right (Brewer and Hewstone 2004; Brown and Capozza
2006; Capozza and Brown 2000; Hogg and Abrams 2003; Robinson
1996; Worchtel et al. 1998). Nor does it do justice to the twists and turns
along the way. Tajfel, for example, in his last word on stereotyping (1981b),
went beyond cognitive simplification as an explanation, adding the defence
or preservation of values, the creation or maintenance of group ideologies,
and positive in-group differentiation (see Chapter 12 for a further discussion
of stereotyping).
As might be expected, three decades of development have generated
considerable debate about ‘social identity theory’, within the approach
itself and with external critics. One of the most pertinent issues concerns
the empirical underpinnings of Tajfel’s – and Turner’s – foundational
propositions. These data derived from explicit, controlled laboratory
groups and categories 113

experiments, most characteristically the ‘minimal group’ approach. This
method involves typically small, artificial coalitions of subjects, doing tasks
in the outcome of which they have no material or other interest. Among
the most significant findings here is that, placed in otherwise meaningless
groups by an experimenter, research subjects tend to discriminate against
members of the experimental out-group, even though they stand to gain
or lose nothing by doing so (Tajfel 1970; Tajfel et al. 1971).
Questions have been asked by both supporters and critics about whether
‘social identity theory’ can be generalised beyond its experimental context
(e.g. Maass et al. 2000; Skevington and Baker 1989). To stick with the
example above it may, for example, be at least partly because a minimal
group is a simplified, no lose–no gain situation that experimental subjects
discriminate against the out-group in this way. Within the checks and
balances of the everyday human world, in which actions have real con-
sequences, choices are likely to be more complex (or may not be available
at all). More specifically, there are questions about whether the evidence
supports generalisations about themes such as inter-group evaluation and
bias (Crisp and Hewstone 1999; Hewstone et al. 2002), inter-group nega-
tive discrimination (Migdal et al. 1998; Turner and Reynolds 2004), the
cognitive simplification effects of stereotyping (Oakes 1996: 98–100) and
the maximisation of self-esteem (Abrams and Hogg 2004; Rubin
and Hewstone 1998; Wetherell 1996: 277–280).
It is obviously important to be clear, and cautious, about what we
can learn from laboratory experiments (which is not the same thing as
rejecting them). To a sociologist or social anthropologist, reservations about
the minimal-group approach seem to be uncontroversial: ambitious
generalisations about large-scale collective processes deriving from the
investigation of micro-micro-level situations – whether experimental or
not – require considerable modesty in their formulation, even when
they are not completely unsafe. This issue has, however, been hard fought
and has yet to be accepted by most social psychologists, working as they
do in a field in which the experiment is still the gold-standard research
design.
From my point of view, there are other criticisms of psychology’s ‘social
identity theory’, not least its problematic basic differentiation between
personal and social identity (as discussed in previous chapters). The equally
fundamental problem of how to differentiate in this approach between
its own concepts of social categorisation in general and social identification
in particular shouldn’t be underestimated either (McGarty 1999:
190–196). What’s more, despite Tajfel’s original ambitions, ‘social identity
theory’ remains an individualist perspective: groups are, at best, taken for
114 groups and categories

granted as simplified and reified features of the human landscape, actual
interaction is largely ignored, and identification appears to take place solely
‘inside people’s heads’. With respect to interaction, the particular lack of
attention to the emergence of identification during talk and other discourse
is noteworthy (Antaki and Widdecombe 1998; Billig 1996: 346–351), as
is the frequent dependence on assumptions about weakly conceptualised
motivational factors such as ‘esteem’, ‘attraction’ and ‘liking’.6
These criticisms aside, some recent writing within this paradigm
resonates loudly with the arguments advanced in this book. Deschamps
and Devos (1998) have, for example, explored the relationship between
similarity and difference and ‘personal’ and ‘social’ identity, while Deaux
(2000) has looked at the range of motivations for social identification
and the varying intensity of group identification. Abrams’ account (1996)
of how, depending on situational factors and goal-orientations, self-
identification and self-attention may vary in their salience and interact
to produce self-regulation of varying intensity, suggests fruitful lines of
inquiry into the hows and whys of identification’s variability. Finally,
Ashton et al.’s review (2004) of the range of ways in which individuals
do collective identification points to fruitful possibilities for work across
disciplinary boundaries.
Specific research findings aside, important general themes running
through this approach support the model of identification that I am
exploring and advocating here:
• In the general spirit of earlier theorists such as Mead ‘social identity
theory’ offers a vision of identification as rooted in basic and generic
human processes, part of our species-specific nature.
• The minimal group experiments suggest that group identification is
one of those generic processes and is in itself a powerful influence on
human behaviour.
• These experiments further suggest that categorisation, in my definition
– i.e. external identification, the process of placing people, in this case
arbitrarily, into collectivities – is also an important generic process,
which can contribute to group identification.
• The approach understands collective identification as not just an internal
group matter, but as coming into being in the context of inter-group
relations: thus groups identify themselves against, and in their
relationships with, other groups.
• ‘Social identity theory’ also recognises that collective identifications
are real for individuals – that they mean something in real experience –
and seeks to understand how that reality works.
groups and categories 115

• ‘Self-categorisation theory’ acknowledges the situational variability of
identification.
• There is a general appreciation of the necessary interplay within
identification of similarity and difference.
• Although not well thought through, the significance for identification
of the distinction between groups and categories is acknowledged.
• Finally, the emphasis – certainly in Tajfel’s own writings – on power and
inequality, while it may be underdeveloped, is an important reminder
of the realities of the human world.
With benefit of considerable hindsight, one of the striking things
about this school of thought is its apparent isolation from scholarship
outside social psychology that, some time before Tajfel’s seminal state-
ments, outlined a vision of how identification works which, in some of
its fundamentals at least, resembles ‘social identity theory’. As I shall
discuss in Chapter 10, during the 1960s Fredrik Barth, standing on the
shoulders of earlier anthropologists and sociologists (not least Goffman),
began to put together some very similar propositions. The resultant shift
in the understanding of ethnicity and other collective identifications
– the establishment of what I have elsewhere called ‘the basic anthro-
pological model’ (Jenkins 2008) – seems to have been unnoticed by Tajfel
and his associates, despite its conceptual harmony with much of what they
were saying.
I doubt that this was mainly due to ‘academic trade barriers’ on the
part of social psychologists eager to establish a distinctive niche for them-
selves within their discipline (Condor 1996: 309–310). Probably more
to the point are personal factors, the nature of the discipline in question,
and the power of normal science. Reading his own words and what his
ex-students say about him – even when, like Billig (1996), they now
seem to be at odds with much of his intellectual legacy – Tajfel’s influence
as a teacher and that of the force and direction of his intellectual
leadership shine through. He seems to have been trying to establish a dis-
tinctive school of thought. The context for that project was an academic
disciplinary field, psychology, in which natural science, rooted in the
laboratory, held sway (even today, ‘humanist’ approaches remain a
peripheral minority interest, often located outside mainstream psychology
departments). Tajfel himself was committed to the natural science model:
it isn’t obvious that anthropology, for example, or the work of Goffman
would have interested him. Finally, once established, the social identity
and social categorisation theorists pursued their work within a taken for
granted normal science paradigm. Most of them don’t seem to have seen
116 groups and categories

any need to look elsewhere for ideas: the work they had in hand was enough,
and the networks self-sustaining.
Nor, to be fair, should this mini intellectual history single out for
comment only the social psychologists. After all, what goes on within
groups, and how their members identify themselves, is also a function of
what goes on between groups. And there is no evidence that the anthro-
pologists showed any interest in, or were aware of, what Tajfel and his
followers were doing (almost certainly for reasons similar to those that I
have just sketched in). With little communication between the two camps,
their relationship, if it can be called that, seems to have been characterised
by distance and mutual ignorance rather than stoutly defended boundaries.
‘Trade barriers’ weren’t necessary. Which was a shame: each might have
benefited from talking to the other. That they didn’t, however, is no more
than might have been expected: they simply got on with doing their own
stuff. It’s a tribute to the force of disciplinary identifications and boundaries
that, by and large, it’s what they’re still doing today.
groups and categories 117

10
BEYOND BOUNDARIES
Identification is the production and reproduction during interaction of
the intermingling, and inseparable, themes of human similarity and
difference. Collective identification, which places the emphasis on similarity
– and it is only a matter of emphasis – is the focus of Chapter 11. The
collective identification of differences, as a process and with respect to its
consequences, is the distinctive intellectual territory of Norwegian anthro-
pologist Fredrik Barth, and the focus of the present chapter.
Barth hasn’t had the recognition he deserves. Compared to stars such
as Bourdieu or Geertz, his work remains little known outside anthropology.
This may be a consequence of being based in Oslo, rather than in Princeton
or Paris; it may be a consequence of intellectual fad and fashion. Whatever
the reasons, however, Barth’s body of work is one of the richest and most
imaginative in anthropology, and in social science more widely, and a
foundational contribution to the interactionist approach to identification
that I develop in this book. His consistent project, over a long career,
has been:
to explore the extent to which patterns of social form can be explained if
we assume that they are the cumulative result of a number of separate
choices and decisions made by people acting vis-à-vis one another . . .
patterns are generated through processes of interaction and in their form
reflect the constraints and incentives under which people act.
(Barth 1966: 2)
Barth wants to understand how collective forms exist, and what collectivity
is, given that the human world is, before it is anything else, a world of

individuals. That he understands collectivities as generated in and out of
interaction between individuals doesn’t mean that he understands ‘society’
as simply the sum of individuals and their relationships:
Indeed, ‘society’ cannot defensibly be represented by any schema which
depicts it as a whole made up of parts . . . The complexities of social
organization can neither be bounded in delimited wholes nor ordered
in the unitary part–whole hierarchies which the schematism of our
terminology invites us to construct.
(Barth 1992: 19)
In this 1992 paper he cautions against identifying any ‘particular area of
the world’ in which we are interested as a ‘society’ (to which I’d want to add
that we shouldn’t talk about a ‘culture’ either). The world is not as neat and
tidy as that. It is a further consistent theme in his work that, in addition
to the relatively stable patterns and forms of the human world, we should
recognise, in the open-endedness of everyday life, the routine imminence
of change and transformation. Each, in a sense, gives rise to the other.
ETHNICITY
In 1969 Barth edited Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, a symposium on ethnic
identification that was sub-titled ‘the social organisation of culture
difference’. This indicated that ethnicity and ‘cultural’ difference are
connected, and suggested that the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural’ are not separate
domains. Although this framework addressed ethnic identification, it is
also applicable to other collective identification.
Although Barth’s model of ethnic identification broke new ground
for social anthropology, it wasn’t an immaculate conception ( Jenkins 2008:
10–14). Its important elements all had their antecedents. Individual
behaviour and decision-making – organisation rather than structure – had
long been themes in the work of anthropologists such as Malinowski,
Firth and Nadel. Barth’s key insight that ethnic identities are flexible – if
not totally fluid – over time can be found, albeit less systematically
expressed, in Leach’s earlier study of Burma (1954), and the situational
variability of ethnic identity had already been explored by, for example,
Moerman (1965). Barth’s theorising also owes much to Goffman and,
through him, to Chicago sociologists such as Everett Hughes.1
However, Barth superseded existing conceptualisations in depth and
detail, theorising ethnic identification within a wider set of arguments
about interaction and collective forms. This line of thought began with his
beyond boundaries 119

study of politics in Swat, north-western Pakistan (1959), which focused on
how political groupings develop and change as the result of inter-personal
strategising and transactions. His understanding that collective forms
are not fixed, but are brought into being by, or emerge out of, interaction,
was taken further in Models of Social Organisation (1966). That work’s insight
that the foundation of collective pattern was laid in the processes of indi-
vidual lives became the primary theme in Barth’s thinking. It continued
in his exploration of ethnic identification.
Barth’s ‘Introduction’ to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) begins by
observing that the persistence of differences between ethnic groups, indeed
the groups themselves, had been taken for granted. The existence of ethnic
groups (or tribes) was just ‘the way things were’ and anthropology had
not problematised how such groups maintained their distinctiveness or
reproduced themselves. Although Barth made the pragmatic assumption
that it was sensible to continue to talk about groups, he was moving away
from a structural-functionalism that over-solidified them, as Durkheimian
‘social facts’. ‘Societies’ were not to be seen as things. That people in inter-
action produce groups was his basic theorem, and anthropologists needed
to look at how the membership of ethnic groups is recruited, rather than
simply assuming an obvious process of birth-and-death reproduction.
He went on to insist that groups ‘exist’ even though whatever separates
them is osmotic rather than watertight: ‘boundaries persist despite a flow
of personnel across them’ (ibid.: 9). Barth declared his interest in,
social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete
social categories are maintained despite changing participation and
membership in the course of individual life histories.
(Barth 1969: 10)
Bearing in mind that his use of the word ‘category’ is not tightly defined
like mine – something else he shares with the social psychologists discussed
in Chapter 9 – Barth is arguing here that ethnic collectivities are inde-
pendent of the individuals whose membership constitutes them. Members
come and go, if only (but not only) as a consequence of human mortality.
An ethnic group can also survive the fact that individuals in the course
of their lives may change their ethnic identities. In Haaland’s analysis,
for example (1969), individual members of sedentary Fur communities
in the western Sudan may adopt a nomadic lifestyle, eventually becoming
members of Baggara communities. But a difference between Fur and
Baggara, as collective identifications, remains clear even though it may
be blurred in individual biographies.
120 beyond boundaries

Barth’s model of how ethnic identification works is constructed out of
three basic elements:
• Ethnic identities are folk classifications: ascriptions and self-ascriptions,
held and understood by the participants in any given situation. They
thus contribute to the organisation of interaction. In W. I. Thomas’s
sense they are ‘socially real’; in terms of the ‘social identity theory’
discussed in Chapter 9, they are ‘psychologically real’.
• Barth is interested in the processes that generate collective forms, rather
than in their abstract structure. He is primarily concerned with what
people do; his is a materialist (and pragmatist) concern with the
behaviour of embodied individuals.
• As a consequence, third, rather than looking at the ‘content’ of ethnicity
– cataloguing the history or ‘cultural’ characteristics of ethnic groups
– the focus of investigation shifts outwards to processes of ethnic
boundary maintenance and group recruitment. This involves looking at inter-
ethnic (i.e. inter-group) relations. By these tokens, shared common
sense, common knowledge and behaviour are better understood as
products of processes of boundary maintenance, rather than as defining
characteristics of group organisation.
The model can be summarised by saying that the interactional construction
of (external) difference generates (internal) similarity, rather than vice versa.
It follows that
we can assume no simple one-to-one relationship between ethnic
units and cultural similarities and differences. The features that are taken
into account are not the sum of ‘objective’ differences, but only those
which the actors themselves regard as significant . . . some cultural
features are used by the actors as signals and emblems of differences,
others are ignored, and in some relationships radical differences are
played down and denied.
(Barth 1969: 14)
This characteristic of ethnic identities allows individuals in principle to move
in and out of them. It also means that ethnic identities are not immutable.
They are capable of change over time, a process in which the nominal and
virtual aspects of identification may come into play. To be German in 2007,
for example, involves emphasising or de-emphasising different things
than being German would have done before reunification; and both would
be very different to nominally equivalent identifications in 1938, or 1916,
or 1871. There is also likely to be considerable variability between contexts.
beyond boundaries 121

What it means to be English – what is required to maintain the iden-
tification, and the kinds of responses from others which it generates – is one
thing when an English person interacts with, say, a Nigerian person in
England; it is likely to be another thing altogether in Nigeria.
Thus difference is organised, in the first instance, by individuals in
interaction. But not all interactions are equally significant in this respect.
The continuity of ethnic collectivities – a better expression for the moment
than groups or categories – is particularly dependent upon boundary
maintenance. This is managed during interaction across the boundary, with
Others (for whom we are, in turn, their Other). Referring at this point
(Barth 1969: 16) to Goffman’s ‘presentation of self’, Barth argues that all
inter-ethnic relations require recognised rules to organise them. Although
‘rules’ may be too strong a word, implying a degree of conscious formula-
tion that is implausible, these interactional conventions or habits do not
just delineate difference. They define the limits of the interaction, and
permit either side to participate with only the barest agreement about
acceptable behaviour in common.
Barth doesn’t, however, neglect relationships within the boundary,
between co-members. He emphasises the importance to ethnic identity
of shared value orientations, the ‘standards of morality and excellence’
with which behaviour is evaluated. His emphasis upon being recognised,
as well as recognising oneself, is congruent with Mead and the symbolic
interactionist tradition, as well as Goffman. Internal and external meet;
inasmuch as claiming an ethnic identity
implies being a certain kind of person, having that basic identity, it also
implies a claim to be judged, and to judge oneself, by those standards
that are relevant to that identity.
(Barth 1969: 14)
In belonging to a collectivity, an individual accepts the right of co-members
to judge, and seeks to be to be accepted and judged by Others only in
particular ways.
For Barth, ethnic identities are processual or practical: ‘for acting . . .
rather than contemplation’ (1969: 29). All identification is, what’s more,
part of a larger universe of experience, which is, in turn, part of ‘the material
world of causes and effects’ (Barth 1981: 3). Collectivities exist within
the realities of ecological constraint and possibility, which frame their
relations with Others and relations among their members. Inter-group
competition for resources within specific ecologies is important in the
generation of boundaries. Further, in the embodied face-to-face world of
122 beyond boundaries

everyday life – and making a distinction which is homologous to that
between the nominal and the virtual – he argues (1969: 28) that although
ethnic ascription does not require access to assets (conceived in the widest
possible way), the satisfactory performance of an ethnic identity does. It
is not enough to claim an ethnic identity; one must be able satisfactorily
to perform it, to actualise it. That may require resources.
What counts as a successful performance, however, varies from situation
to situation, place to place, and time to time. Nor is success guaranteed.
Nominal ‘ethnic labels’ and the virtualities of experience feed back on each
other:
under varying circumstances, certain constellations of categorization
and value orientation have a self-fulfilling character, . . . others will tend
to be falsified by experience, while others are incapable of consummation
in interaction.
(Barth 1969: 30)
Drawing once again upon Goffman,2 Barth means by ‘self-fulfilling’ that
participants will typically do their best, using ‘selective perception, tact,
and sanctions’, to maintain identifications conventionally appropriate to
the situation. If for no other reason, they do this because it is generally
easier than coming up with alternative identifications or definitions of
the situation. Thus although change and flux in ethnicity are possible –
and common – the persistence and stability of the everyday common sense
of ethnic identification is likely to be routine. This is a tribute to the
‘organizing and canalizing effects of ethnic distinctions’ (ibid.: 24). Identity
revision only takes place when it is either manifestly incorrect (‘untrue in
any objective sense’) or proves to be consistently unrewarding. What counts
as unrewarding is, of course, moot in terms of the pragmatics of the
situation. What counts as ‘objective’ is more problematic: I will return
to this below.
It is implicit that identity change occurs only when interaction must
be maintained, when disengagement isn’t a practical option. It is also
implicit, given Barth’s insistence that interaction across the boundary is
the sine qua non of ethnic identity, that its persistence or revision is a
dialectical process of collective identification, with internal and external
moments. Ethnicity is always a two-way street, involving ‘them’ as well
as ‘us’. The fact that not all identificatory performances ‘work’ draws
our attention to the role of significant others in validating identity: internal
identification and external identification are mutually entangled. Although
in Barth’s own work, and its appropriation within anthropology, the
beyond boundaries 123

emphasis has fallen upon group identification (‘us’) rather than categorisa-
tion (‘them’), this emphasis is not inevitable (Jenkins 1994, 2008).
TRANSACTIONS, POLITICS AND POWER
Although he seems never to have aspired to leadership of a school of
thought, such as psychology’s ‘social identity theory’ discussed in Chapter
9, Barth’s understanding of ethnic identification as transactional and
situationally flexible is now almost conventional anthropological wisdom
(e.g. Eriksen 2002). I have argued elsewhere that it has, indeed, become
the ‘basic anthropological model’ (Jenkins 2008). However, this did not
happen immediately: the same themes in Barth’s general social theory were
fiercely criticised during the 1970s (Asad 1972; Evens 1977; Kapferer
1976; Paine 1974), and these criticisms can be applied to his arguments
about ethnicity. In particular, he was taken to task for individualism,
means–ends voluntarism and neglecting power.
Barth has responded at length to these criticisms (1981: 76–104), so
I shall be brief here. That he emphasised individuals, and their decision-
making in the pursuit of their interests, was at that time unusual – although
not novel – within anthropology. That it is more routine today reflects
a gradual recognition of the need to acknowledge agency, practice and
subjectivity. But Barth focuses on more than individuals anyway. His
critics have largely overlooked his central interest in the processual
generation of collective forms (such as identities) as the unintended
consequence of interaction. He has described this aspect of his work as the
most significant (1981: 76), and it is the theoretical path he has continued
to tread (e.g. 1987, 1992). If a body of work of great substantive range
and theoretical variety can be characterised in one keyword, ‘generative’
would undoubtedly do.
Since 1969 Barth has addressed issues that further mitigate the charge
of individualism. Discussing pluralism in complex societies (1984, 1989),
he talks about ‘universes of discourse’ or ‘streams of tradition’. These are
less clear cut than ‘cultures’; individuals participate in them differentially,
typically in several at the same time, and with varying intensity or depth.
Writing about Bali, Barth describes it thus:
People participate in multiple, more or less discrepant, universes of
discourse; they construct different partial and simultaneous worlds in
which they move; their cultural construction of reality springs not from
one source and is not of one piece.
(Barth 1989: 130)
124 beyond boundaries

While the imagery suggests movement and activity, these universes or
streams are to a considerable extent historically stable.
In part these ideas are a response to the persistence with which anthro-
pologists and sociologists – despite his arguments of 1969 – continue to
reify ethnic groups as possessing coherence and definite boundaries:
We must abandon the physicalist comforts of seeking to anchor plural
cultural components universally in some construct of population
segments.
(Barth 1984: 80)
Ethnic identification is, let us remember, processual, generated during,
and an expression, of interactional give and take. For Barth, this implies that
‘dichotomized cultural differences . . . are vastly overstated in ethnic
discourse’; ‘the more pernicious myths of deep cultural cleavages . . . sustain
a social organization of difference’ but are not ‘descriptions of the actual
distribution of cultural stuff’ (1994: 30).
Criticism of Barth’s neglect of power is, of course, related to the
accusation of individualism. And it has some force. Much of the relevance
of Barth’s argument with respect to power is at best implicit in his work.
That doesn’t, however, mean it is absent. A consistent theme running
through Barth’s work since the 1950s has been the fundamentally political
nature of interaction. Competition and manoeuvre are ubiquitous, as
are constraints of ecology and resources. Emphasising choice and decision-
making does not mean that they only take place in a situation of equality
between persons. Quite the reverse (and the echo of Marx is surely no
accident):
choice is not synonymous with freedom, and men and women rarely
make choices under circumstances chosen by themselves. What is
more, the unfortunate circumstance of a gross disadvantage of power
does not mean that strategy is unavailing – indeed it may be all the
more essential to the actor and all the more pervasive in shaping his
behaviour.
(Barth 1981: 89)
In emphasising the importance of assets for successful performance,
and exploring the circumstances under which ethnic identifications are
not validated, Barth is implicitly indicating the importance of power, in this
case the power to define the situation successfully. Stressing that the
dialectics of group identification and categorisation (to use my terms) are
rooted in inter-personal transactions does not mean that each is equally
beyond boundaries 125

important in specific situations. One is likely to dominate; which is a
question likely to be decided by power differentials.
Barth’s argument is, however, vulnerable to other criticisms. In
suggesting that shared common knowledge, common sense and patterns
of behaviour (similarity) come into being as a result of processes of iden-
tification (differentiation) at the boundary, rather than vice versa, he misses
the dialectical simultaneity of identification. Neither similarity nor
difference ‘comes first’. Subsequently, and somewhat contradictorily,
however, in highlighting the role of values in orienting decision-making,
he takes for granted a substantial degree of shared common sense and
knowledge. This is part of his emphasis upon ‘feedback’, most evident in
1966’s Models of Social Organisation, upon how values change as a result
of interactional experience. As Barth himself admits, he may have ‘over-
estimated the potential power and adequacy’ of the concept of ‘value’ (1981:
91). If nothing else, an emphasis upon values falls foul of the difficulty of
attempting to know what is going on in other minds (Geertz 1983: 55–70;
Holy and Stuchlik 1983). Nor, as is discussed in Chapter 8 with respect
to Goffman, are notions of choice and decision-making unproblematic.
Exactly the same cautions apply in Barth’s case.
Perhaps the most significant problem with Barth’s work, however,
attaches to the notion of ‘boundary’. As we have seen, Barth himself has
always recognised the danger, in subdividing the human world into distinct
‘segments’, of reifying collectivity. It’s clear that he understands identity
boundaries as somewhat indefinite, as ongoing emergent products of
interaction, particularly between people holding different identities. It
is in these ongoing transactions that what is or is not relevant as markers
of the identities in question – and what ‘being A’ or ‘being B’ means in
terms of consequences – comes into being. However, with its topological
or territorial overtones, ‘boundary’ is a metaphor the use of which demands
vigilance; witness the ease with which one talks about the boundary. It
may be precisely Barth’s emphasis on boundaries which has allowed many
other anthropologists to draw on his work while persisting in the reifying
view of the ethnic group as corporate and perduring which he intended
to demolish (Brubaker 2004: 48–52; Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 21–25;
Cohen 1978: 386–387; Jenkins 2008).
Recently, Barth has looked again at this issue (2000). Acknowledging
that talking about boundaries may help us to think about collectivity, he
insists that we must bear in mind two cautions:
• that to make a distinction between things is not necessarily to establish
a definite boundary between them; and
126 beyond boundaries

• that ‘boundary’ is our analytical notion, which doesn’t necessarily travel
well: it isn’t clear that all local traditions of human thought and being
understand collectivity in a definitely bounded fashion.
For Barth, whether collective boundaries ‘exist’ – in the sense of being
locally meaningful – is always a matter of discovery, a matter of respect for
the observable realities of any local human world (for all that they may
be Other-wise and difficult to comprehend or translate). The presence or
importance of boundaries shouldn’t be assumed.
Even where it can be said to exist, it’s far from clear ‘where’ or ‘what’ the
boundary of any particular identity ‘is’. This is not surprising, since ‘it’ is
not, really, anywhere or anything. Boundaries are to be found in interaction
between people who identify themselves collectively in different ways; this
interaction can in principle occur anywhere or in any context (Lamont
and Molnár 2002). Identification is not a simple matter of the ‘cultural
stuff’ which is associated with any specific identity, and which may appear
to constitute the solid criteria of membership. Identity is a matter of
boundary processes (Wallman 1986) rather than boundaries: it is a matter
of identification. As interactional episodes, processes of identification are
temporary checkpoints rather than concrete walls (and even the latter
are permanent only in their makers’ conceit: witness Maginot and Berlin).
Boundary processes may be routinised or institutionalised in particular
settings and occasions – something that I will discuss subsequently with
respect to the institutionalisation of identity – but that is a different matter.
Lastly, Barth’s notion that revision of an identity occurs if it is ‘objec-
tively’ incorrect requires more attention. As a moderate caution it is very
sensible: the capacity of humans to define the reality of the human world
in the face of ‘the material world of causes and effects’ is finite. But there
is more to it than Barth’s mention of the environment. Harking back
to discussions in earlier chapters, the embodiment of identification is a
case in point, for example. Gender is the obvious case. As the lives of trans-
sexuals and transvestites attest, it is to some extent manipulable, but the
definitive embodiment of female and male means that the scope for and ease
of revision and change are limited. The same is true for other identifications
that are defined in embodied terms, such as ‘race’ or age.
Embodiment aside, there is a more general point that is not to be denied.
Even though the human world is ‘socially constructed’, it has its observable
realities which demand our respect if we are to understand that world
(Jenkins 2002a). A group of people without Norwegian passports, with no
discoverable historical connections to Norway, and speaking no Norwegian,
cannot, for example, simply arrive at the Norwegian border and have any
beyond boundaries 127

expectation of mounting a plausible claim to Norwegian identity or
nationality. Even categorisation – the thoroughly external moment of iden-
tification – can never, as I argued in Chapter 9, be wholly arbitrary. There
needs to be something to work with.
Thus actors’ definitions of the situation cannot be unilaterally para-
mount. To begin with, not everything is thinkable in any given context;
not everything that is thinkable is situationally practical; and not
everything that occurs in practice is thinkable (or, at least, thought). And
the matter of whose definition of the situation counts is always significant,
returning us to the importance of power, authority and resources. In
recognising this, Barth – like Goffman – is espousing a middle-of-the-road
materialist realism that resonates with the core themes of pragmatism.
This is only one of the senses in which Barth stands in a line of thought
that, via Goffman and the Chicago sociologists of the 1940s, reaches back
to Mead and beyond. However, whereas Mead begins with the whole
(the collective human world) and goes to the part (the individual), Barth
works from individuals to the collective. Each makes his biggest error
in conceptualising the matter in terms of a vector from one to the other.
And in each case, the error is largely one of expression: they actually both
imply models of the relationship between the collective and the individual
as a perpetual and more or less simultaneous dialectic or feedback.
BEYOND ETHNICITY
Barth’s is among the most developed, and the most convincingly
empirically supported,3 explorations of the interaction between internal
and external collective identification, between group identification and
categorisation, and between the individual and the collective. In this respect
there are two stand-out themes, intimately related to each other, in his
work:
• He is concerned to understand how difference is organised during,
and arises out of, interaction. Rather than taking identity differences and
boundaries for granted and then looking at how they affect interaction,
Barth’s approach is the reverse. He wants to know – and he really wants
to know, rather than paying the idea lip-service – how identification,
difference and boundaries are socially constructed.
• In exploring what he has called (Barth 1994) the ‘median’ level of human
collective life – analogous perhaps to Goffman’s ‘interaction order’ (or
Merton’s ‘middle range’) – he offers a bridge between individuals, their
practices and identifications, and collective forms and identifications.
128 beyond boundaries

Accepting these rather general propositions, it’s now time to justify in more
detail my earlier remark that Barth’s arguments apply to identifications
other than ethnicity.
Oblique confirmation of this proposition comes from a paper by Yehudi
Cohen that appeared at the same time as Barth’s ethnicity symposium
(1969). In a discussion which appears to owe nothing to reading Barth,
drawing heavily instead on the literature about networks, Cohen develops
a model of ‘boundary systems’ that is remarkably similar to Barth’s – intra-
and inter-group relationships are seen as mutually dependent across
a boundary – and applies it to collective identifications such as kinship
and town membership (ibid.). To anticipate the discussion in Chapter 11,
further indirect support for the argument can be drawn from the studies
inspired by Anthony Cohen’s model of communal belonging – rooted as it
is in Barth’s ideas – which deal with identities other than the ethnic.
In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, however, Barth himself said little about
this issue. In a tantalising aside, he suggested, for example, that, like ‘sex
and rank’,
ethnic identity implies a series of constraints on the kinds of roles an
individual is allowed to play, and the partners he may choose for different
transactions . . . ethnic identity is superordinate to most other statuses,
and defines the permissible constellation of statuses, or social
personalities, which an individual with that identity may assume.
(Barth 1969: 17)
But that was all. Fifteen years later, however, in a study of everyday life in
Sohar, Oman (1983, 1984), Barth painted a picture of the organisation
of difference using a wider palette, albeit with a fine brush:
the diversity of identities that entails membership in distinctive culture-
carrying groups in Sohar was not one that I had expected. I arrived in
the field with the expectation that ethnicity would provide the primary
ordering identities . . . The dismantling of this picture . . . [was] my
response to empirical findings in Sohar.
(Barth 1983: 81fn.)
To understand the pluralism of the town of Sohar, it proved necessary
to develop a model of diversity (Barth 1983: 81–93; 1984) which could
encompass the following ‘universes of discourse’ or ‘streams of tradition’:
• ethnicity (Arab, Baluchi, Persian, Zidgali, Indian Banyan), each with its
own language, with Arabic as the lingua franca;
beyond boundaries 129

• gender, including institutionalised transsexualism (Wikan 1977), in
Barth’s view the deepest and most ubiquitous distinction of all;
• history and descent (10 per cent of the population are the stigmatised
descendants of former slaves);
• religion (Sunni Islam, Shiah Islam, Ibhazi Islam, Hindu);
• occupation and class; and
• settlement and lifestyle (the distinction between townspeople and recently
settled Bedouin).
To this list, although Barth might not conceptualise them as aspects of
pluralism, one could append further universes of discourse such as kinship
or age.
The domains of identity that Barth explored in Sohar are bounded, but
only very weakly: there is coming and going across them, and little in the
way of mutual reinforcement between them. The overlaps are complex.
There is a varied range of processes of group identification and categorisa-
tion. Some people, some collectivities, are in a stronger position to construct
their identities and resist the imposition of identification by others; some
are in a weaker position.
Soharis in their daily lives, and in the pursuit of their varied interests,
spin the different strands into distinctive threads of biography and
individual identity. In their transactions and interactions they weave a
carpet of complex plurality. In doing so, the mundane preoccupations
of their daily lives emerge out of and are channelled by the histories to
which they further contribute, and the local is brought to bear upon and is
framed by wider networks and ‘external’ events and processes. The town
is a ‘kaleidoscope of persons’ (Barth 1983: 165).
This summary of the ethnographic riches of Barth’s study, and that of
his collaborator, Wikan, makes a prima facie case for arguing that his model
applies to a universe of identification wider than ethnicity. It also supports
Barth’s latter-day observation, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that the
original ethnicity symposium
contains, perhaps, one of the first anthropological applications of a
more postmodern view of culture. Though we lacked the opaque
terminology of present day postmodernism, we certainly argued for
what would now be recognised as a constructionist view. Likewise in our
view of history: we broke loose from the idea of history as simply the
objective source and cause of ethnicity, and saw it as a synchronic
rhetoric – a struggle to appropriate the past, as one might say today.
(Barth 1994: 12–13)
130 beyond boundaries

His recent discussion of boundaries, in which he mentions ethnic groups,
corporate groups, households and formal institutions, is further evidence
that he sees his approach as widely applicable (Barth 2000).
So Barth offers us a general model of collective identification, within
which all of the domains of identification (my term) or universes of discourse
(his) encompassed by the Sohar study are understandable. The same general
model was quite clearly present, even if implicit, in 1969 in Ethnic Groups
and Boundaries:
• Identity is processual – i.e. it is identification – part of the ongoing
organisation of interaction and everyday life. It is not to be understood
as part of a superstructure of ‘culture’.
• The analytical emphasis falls on the social construction of identities
in interaction at and across the boundaries that they share with other
identities, and upon processes of recruitment.
• Collective identification and its boundaries are, thus, generated in trans-
action and interaction and are, at least potentially, flexible, situational
and negotiable. Barth begins with embodied individuals in interaction
and works up to collective forms.
• Identification is a matter of ascription: by individuals of themselves, and
of individuals by others. Collectively, the same holds good: group
members identify themselves and are categorised by members of other
groups.
• Finally, it is an important implication of Barth’s emphasis upon
transaction that collective identification is inherently political.
This is a model of the collective dialectic of identification, of the entangle-
ment and interplay of group identification and categorisation, and of
how that occurs in interaction between individuals. It has the widest
possible application. However, in emphasising the social organisation
of difference, Barth arguably underplays the question of similarity. It is
to this that I now turn.
beyond boundaries 131

11
SYMBOLISING BELONGING
Although the previous chapter focused on the role of difference in collective
identification, it still makes sense to say that the emphasis in collective
identification falls upon similarity. Group identification, by definition,
presupposes that members will see themselves as minimally similar.
Categorisation is predicated upon the proposition that those who are
categorised have a criterion of identification in common. Collectivity
means having something in common, whether ‘real’ or imagined, trivial
or important, strong or weak. Without some commonality there can be no
collectivity.
These issues have a long history in social theory, particularly the theme
that the less stuff people have in common with each other, the more
problematic collective cohesion becomes. Marx’s writings on alienation,
and his subsequent discussions of class conflict and mobilisation, are
actually all about this. When Ferdinand Tönnies, writing in 1887, posited
a historical transition from Gemeinschaft (‘community’) to Gesellschaft
(‘association’) he, too, was concerned with what people had in common
and how it was changing. Durkheim’s distinction in The Division of Labour
in Society (1984), first published in 1893, between the mechanical soli-
darity of traditional rural life, in which similarity bound people together
– an image reminiscent of Marx’s description, in The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte, of the French peasantry as ‘potatoes in a sack’ – and the
differentiated complementarity, or organic solidarity, of the newly
industrialised world, evokes the same theme. So does his notion of the
conscience collective.
Ever since Durkheim, the classic territory within which these themes
have been explored has been ‘the community’. Thinking about community

probably has its deepest roots in the Romantic intellectual tradition in
European social thought, in response to the uncertainties and conflicts of
rapid modernisation and industrialisation. ‘Community’ called up an
imagined past in which horizons were local, the meaning of life was
relatively consensual, co-operation prevailed, and everyone knew everyone
else and ‘knew their place’. However, in a post-1945 world characterised
by affluence, mobility and consumerism, on the one hand, and conflict, the
shadow of genocide, and a gradual retreat from socialism, on the other,
‘community’, and the approach to empirical research known as the
‘community study’, became increasingly contentious (Bell and Newby
1971; Stein 1960). Agreed definitions of the basic notion became ever
more elusive and, facing competition from theoretical newcomers such
as ‘culture’, ‘community’ slowly withdrew to the margins of the syllabus
(where it would eventually be joined by ‘class’). Post-modernism’s cele-
bration of difference, flux and decentred polyvalence looked like the final
nail in the concept’s coffin.
However, ‘community’ does not belong to intellectuals. It is a power-
ful everyday notion in terms of which people organise their lives and
understand the places and settlements in which they live and the quality
of their relationships. It expresses a fundamental set of human needs (Doyal
and Gough 1991; Ignatieff 1984). Along with the idioms of kinship,
friendship, ethnicity and faith, ‘community’ is one way of talking about
the everyday reality that the human world is, collectively, more than the
sum of its individual parts (Jenkins 2002a: 63–84). As such, ‘community’,
and its analogues in languages other than English, is among the most
important sources of collective identification. Whatever we do with it, it
isn’t to be ignored.
It probably isn’t too surprising, therefore, that the idea of ‘community’
has experienced a recent revival within the social sciences (Crow and Allen
1994; Delanty 2003). Whether in Bauman’s cautious rediscovery of the
post-postmodern virtues of collectivity (2001), in communitarianism
and the critical responses to it (Etzioni 1993; Sennett 1998), in the notion
of ‘social capital’ (Farr 2004; Portes 1998; Putnam 2000), in lively anthro-
pological debates (Amit 2002; Amit and Rapport 2002), in discussions
of ‘communities of practice’ (Barton and Tusting 2005; Wenger 1998)
or in empirical studies of aspects of ‘community’ (Bellah et al. 1991, 1996;
Blokland 2003; Keller 2003), the idea shows signs of returning to a centre-
stage position that would have seemed unlikely twenty years ago.
symbolising belonging 133

SYMBOLISING COMMUNITY
Despite this renaissance, in order to understand better community and
collectivity I am going to turn to a framework that is, in fact, more than
twenty years old itself. Not only is it a previous generation of intellectual
software, but, to make matters worse, it has since been repudiated by its
author, Anthony Cohen. Drawing on his argument (1994) that selfhood,
identification and consciousness are rooted in an irreducible and interior
essence of stable, private meanings, Cohen has now taken to task his own
work, The Symbolic Construction of Community (1985), criticising it, and
himself, for
the attribution to identity of the characteristics of relativity and an
ephemeral nature; and concomitantly, the denial to identity (communal
or individual) of constancy.
(Cohen 2002: 166)
It isn’t the notion of community itself that bothers Cohen. Rather, he is
resisting the notion that communal boundaries are by definition negotiable
and shifting, merely a matter of who stands where, and deploring the
neglect of relatively autonomous communal self-identification that he sees
as resulting from the emphasis on transactions at the boundary. Both
of these elements of his original argument derive, interestingly enough,
from Barth.1 Collective identification, he seems to be saying, has to be
something more solid, something more authentic.
I make no apologies, however, for insisting that Cohen’s original model
of the ‘symbolic construction’ of communal and other collective identities
remains useful (1982, 1985, 1986). More than useful, in fact: it’s indis-
pensable, exploring how people construct a sense of themselves and their
fellows as ‘belonging’ in a particular locality or setting of relationships and
interaction, and with – if not to – each other. This is what Cohen meant by
‘community’ in the 1980s and it seems to be pretty much what he still means
(2002: 168–169). Although, the argument was developed during his work
in peripheral communities within large-scale polities, his framework offers
a set of general, and generalisable, propositions about communal life:
• community membership depends upon the symbolic construction and
signification of a mask of similarity which all can wear, an umbrella
of solidarity under which all can shelter;
• the similarity of communal membership is thus imagined;
• inasmuch as it is a potent symbolic presence in people’s lives, however,
it is not imaginary.
134 symbolising belonging

Like most worthwhile social theory, Cohen’s was a creative synthesis.
Drawing on the Durkheimian tradition of British social anthropology
– emphasising the role of symbolism in creating solidarity – Cohen’s
understanding of the significance of communal boundaries, as has already
been pointed out, owed much to Barth. With respect to the politics of
symbolism, he acknowledged the influence of the Manchester School
of social anthropologists, particularly Max Gluckman (1956), Victor Turner
(1967) and Abner Cohen (1974), while his emphasis upon meaning derived
from Geertz (1973, 1983) and, ultimately, Weber.
Cohen’s starting point was that ‘community’ encompasses notions of
similarity and difference, ‘us’ and ‘them’ again. This focuses attention
on the boundary, which is where the sense of belonging becomes most
apparent:
The sense of difference . . . lies at the heart of people’s awareness
of their culture and, indeed, makes it appropriate for ethnographers to
designate as ‘cultures’ such arenas of distinctiveness . . . people become
aware of their culture when they stand at its boundaries.
(Cohen 1982: 2, 3)
Recognition of a ‘sense of us’ and community stems from the awareness
that things are done differently there, and the sense of threat that poses for
how things are done here. The debt to Barth is obvious: in particular, note
that collective forms – such as ‘cultures’ – are produced by the local sense
of difference at the boundary.
However, ‘community’ in this model is not material or practical in the
way that identity is generated interactionally for Barth. But neither is it
‘structural’. It is definitively ‘cultural’, and as such – anticipating Cohen’s
later arguments about selfhood and identity – mental or cognitive:
culture – the community as experienced by its members – does not
consist in social structure or in ‘the doing’ of social behaviour. It inheres,
rather, in ‘the thinking’ about it. It is in this sense that we can speak of
the community as a symbolic, rather than a structural, construct.
(Cohen 1985: 98)
Emphasising the symbolic construction of ‘community’, Cohen advanced
three arguments:
• Symbols generate a sense of shared belonging. A sports team, for example, can
excite the allegiance of, thus uniting, all or most of a community’s
symbolising belonging 135

members, coming, in time, to symbolise the community to its members
and to outsiders. Shared rituals – whether weddings and funerals, or
rituals of community such as the annual fête or the works outing – can
also act for the community as symbols of community.
• ‘Community’2 is itself a symbolic construct upon which people draw, rhetorically
and strategically. Claims to act in the best interests of the ‘community’
or to represent the ‘community’ are powerful. We’re all supposed to
be in favour of ‘community’: it’s a feel-good word carrying a powerful
symbolic load, hence its political uses, as in ‘community care’, for
example (Bulmer 1987). ‘Community’ is ideological: it not only says
how things are, it says how they should be. It’s also ‘essentially enshrined
in the concept of boundary’ (Cohen 1985: 14): it symbolises exclusion
as well as inclusion. Hence its rhetorical potency in ethnically divided
situations such as Northern Ireland.
• Community membership means sharing with other community members a similar
‘sense of things’, participation in a common symbolic domain. This does not
entail either a local consensus of values or conformity in behaviour:
‘community’, for example, means different things to different com-
munity members. So do symbols of community. The rugby club in a
south Wales valley, for example, will be experienced and understood
differently by an ex-player, by a teacher who has only recently come
to live locally, and by the wife of an unemployed man who spends too
much money in the club bar. But each of them may see themselves
as supporters of the team, particularly if it’s doing well in the Cup, and
to each the club may represent ‘the community’. What matters is not
that people see or understand things the same, or that they see and
understand things differently from other communities, but that their
shared symbols allow them to believe that they do.
Whether we are talking about ‘symbols of community’ or ‘community
as a symbol’, the power of the notions and images thus mobilised depends
on the capacity of symbols to encompass and condense a range of, not
necessarily harmonious or congruent, meanings. By definition, symbols
are abstract to a degree, imprecise to a degree, always multi-faceted
and frequently implicit or taken for granted in their definition. As a con-
sequence, people can to some degree bestow their own meanings on and
in symbols; they can say and do the ‘same’ things without saying or doing
the same things at all. This returns us to the distinction between the
nominal and the virtual. The nominal – the name or description of an iden-
tification – is always symbolic. In addition to language, it may be further
symbolised in heraldry, dress, ritual or other material and practical forms.
136 symbolising belonging

Which is precisely why the nominal can be associated with a wide range of
virtualities without change or abandonment.
So the sense of homogeneity or uniformity that is apparent within local
communities is just that: apparent and every inch a collective – and symbolic
– construct:
the members of a community may all assent to the collective wisdom
that they are different from other communities in a variety of stereo-
typical respects. But this is not to say that they see each other, or
themselves, manifesting these differences similarly.
(Cohen 1986: 11)
Using an expression that recalled Barth (1981: 12, 79–81), Cohen argued
that the ties or bindings of ‘community’ aggregate rather than integrate:
what is actually held in common is not very substantial, being form
rather than content. Content differs widely among members.
(Cohen 1985: 20)
Differences of opinion and more – of world-view, cosmology and other
fundamentals – among and between members of the same community are
normal, even inevitable. They are masked by a semblance of agreement
and convergence generated by shared communal symbols, and participation
in a common symbolic discourse of community membership that constructs
and emphasises the boundary between members and non-members. Thus
members can present a consistent face to the outside world. One might also
say – although Cohen didn’t put it like this – that the symbolic construction
of community allows people who have to get on with each other to do so
without having to explore their differences in damaging detail.
Here Cohen, once again anticipating his later arguments about
self-identification, introduced a distinction between the public and the
private:
The boundary thus symbolises the community to its members in
two quite different ways: it is the sense they have of its perception by
people on the other side – the public face, or ‘typical’ mode; and it
is their own sense of the community as refracted through all the
complexities of their lives and experience – the private face, and
‘idiosyncratic’ mode. It is in the latter mode that we find people thinking
about and symbolising their community.
(Cohen 1986: 13)
symbolising belonging 137

This is almost a communal ‘I’ and ‘me’. The symbolisation of community
is, once again, to be found in ‘thinking’ rather than in ‘doing’.
Cohen rounded his argument out with the suggestion that symbolic
boundaries – of hearts and minds – become more important as boundaries
of place and locality become less important, with political centralisa-
tion, lifestyle standardisation and national integration. The more pressure
there is on communities to change as part of this process, the more
vigorously boundaries will be symbolised. Difference will be constructed
and emphasised and we-ness asserted in opposition to them. A symbolically
contrived sense of local similarity may be the only available defence. In
some cases the hardening of an apparently ‘traditional’ identity may actually
serve as a smokescreen, behind which substantial change can take place
with less conflict and dislocation.
Various criticisms can be made of Anthony Cohen’s original framework.
For example, his contrast between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ is problematic
(Jenkins 1981), as is his distinction between ‘social structure’ and ‘culture’.
In particular, the epistemological difficulties of his emphasis upon what
people think cannot be underestimated. Discussing the private ‘thinking
of community’ (Cohen 1986: 9) he anticipated his recent insistence on the
essential privacy of meaning and individual identification (1994), discussed
in Chapter 5. As suggested there, any analysis developed on these terms is
opaque, relying on assertion rather than evidence.
Fortunately, in his original work on collective identity, Cohen’s emphasis
upon individual private thoughts was almost irrelevant. Advancing his
argument by means of apt ethnographic case study and illustration, he
presented, over and over again, accounts of people doing things: saying this
or that, participating in rituals, mounting political protests, fishing
together, or whatever. It’s in and out of what people do that a shared sense
of things and a shared symbolic universe emerge. And it’s in talking
together about ‘community’ – which is, after all, a public doing – that its
symbolic value is produced and reproduced.
There are other problems, too. Focusing on the anthropologised margins,
Cohen overemphasised the homogenising, flattening effect on communities
of their integration into nation-states and wider polities. Even more
important, he exaggerated the uniformity, and the monolithic tendencies,
of large-scale political units. Doing what many anthropologists do –
treating ‘beyond the community’ as the modern equivalent of ‘here be
dragons’ on a mediaeval map – he didn’t attend to the complexity, divi-
sions and tensions of state and nation and their constituent institutions.
Which is ironic. Almost every thread in his analysis of the ‘symbolic
construction of community’ could have been woven into a model of the
138 symbolising belonging

‘symbolic construction of the nation’ (and indeed, in many respects, it
already had: see, for example, Anderson 2006). The ‘community’ of locality
and settlement is no less imagined than the ‘community’ of the nation, and
no less symbolically constructed.
A related difficulty is that he didn’t explore situations in which collective
communal solidarity is not symbolically reasserted in the face of external
pressure. He replaced structural-functionalism’s image of consensus with
a model of imagined consensus or homogeneity that is no more likely to fit
all situations. How, one wonders, would Cohen accommodate the fractured
towns and villages of Sicily and Calabria,3 or inner-city neighbourhoods
in the United States,4 within his framework? The ethnographic evidence
suggests that while the conventional understanding of ‘community’ doesn’t
fit the bill, situations such as these can’t be explained away as anomic
disorder either. Cohen’s model can, however, be expanded to include them,
at least in principle. There is ample evidence of collective identification
– within families, networks, churches, gangs or informal associations, for
example – that could quite easily be grist to his analytical mill. But the
mask of community has slipped: that particular umbrella is in tatters. That
Cohen neglected to take on the local fragmentation of communal iden-
tification – its symbolic deconstruction, if you like – was an opportunity
missed to widen the scope of his theoretical framework.
Allowing for these criticisms, however, his original framework brings
much to the sociology of identification. In the first place, he recognised
that his analysis wasn’t confined to localities of physical co-residence (Cohen
1985: 97–118). Although the emphasis on community as a mental
construct created problems, it permitted the application of his model to a
wide variety of collectivities: communities of interest, geographically
extensive ethnic communities, occupational communities, religious com-
munities, transnational communities, cyber-communities, and so on
(see, for example, Howell 2002). These are all collectivities to which one
can ‘belong’. Cohen’s arguments are relevant beyond the village or
the neighbourhood. In his edited volume about ‘Identity and Diversity in
British Cultures’ (1986), for example, households, kinship, adolescence
and a farm are among the communities of identification discussed by the
contributors.
Second, his original framework complements Barth’s, offering a more
developed model of the relationship between boundaries of identification
and their ‘contents’ – the common sense, common knowledge and patterns
of behaviour shared by the people inside the boundary – while still
emphasising the possibility of flexibility and variability. Bearing in mind
his emphasis upon cognition and concomitant de-emphasis of interaction,
symbolising belonging 139

Cohen’s original understanding of boundaries was more ‘definite’ than
Barth’s (thus already implying, perhaps, his subsequent self-critique).
But in taking seriously the ‘cultural stuff’ within the boundary, and empha-
sising symbolisation rather than values, Cohen offered an advance on
Barth (which further suggests that his critique of his own neglect of stable
collective self-identification is probably a little harsh).
Collective identities are not ‘internally’ homogeneous or consensual.
They can and do change; they can and do vary from context to context;
they can and do vary from person to person; and yet they can and do
persist. Cohen’s self-critique overlooks the fact that it is precisely the
‘constancy’ of collective identification that his original framework helps
us to understand. Without emphasising the symbolic dimensions of
identification – in addition to the transactional and interactional – the
enduring more-than-the-sum-of-parts of collectivity cannot, in fact, be
fully understood.
SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE REVISITED
Symbolisations of community are umbrellas under which diversity can
flourish, masks behind which a considerable degree of heterogeneity is
possible. In my terms, the mask or umbrella is a nominal identification.
This is always symbolised: in language, but also potentially in other forms,
whether visual, musical or whatever. The practice and experience of
community membership, vis-à-vis other members and outsiders, is the
virtual dimension of communal identification. It may, in large degree, be
individually idiosyncratic. Both nominal and virtual have internal and
external moments of identification; both are a dialectic of group iden-
tification and categorisation. Each feeds back upon the other (to return to
Barth). The distinction between the nominal and the virtual allows an
emphasis upon process and the practices of embodied individuals to be
integrated into Cohen’s original scheme.
Cohen was saying, most convincingly, that the similarity emphasised
by collective identities is a construction, an ongoing historical contrivance,
reminiscent perhaps of Bourdieu’s ‘cultural arbitrary’. It stems from the
minimal sharing of a symbolic repertoire. But, of course, and Cohen
would not, I think, disagree, in that the individuals concerned believe in
it – in the sense of organising their lives with reference to it – it is not only
‘socially real’, it is consequential. And sometimes very powerfully con-
sequential. A flag may only be a symbol of national unity, but there are
too many historical examples of individuals perishing in its defence to take
it anything but seriously. There is no such thing as just a symbol. Nor can
140 symbolising belonging

a community ever be imaginary (even though it can never be anything
other than imagined).
And Cohen was saying more: if communal identification is a collective
contrivance, it is contrived within a comparative framework of similarity
and difference. It evokes our difference from them as well as our simi-
larity to each other. But that’s not all. Throughout Cohen’s argument, and
in his choice of examples, he emphasised that the ‘belonging’ of ‘com-
munity’ is symbolically constructed by people in response to, even as
a defence against, their categorisation by outsiders, whether they be the
folk from the next village, tourists upon whose cash locals might depend,
the representatives of an oil company, environmental protesters, or
the officers and impersonal agencies of the state. Against these foils
difference is asserted and similarity symbolically constructed; it is in their
face that communal identification is necessary. It is here in Cohen’s original
framework that we see the internal–external dialectic of collective
identification at work.
To recall a point made elsewhere, words such as ‘response’ or ‘defence’
should not be misconstrued to imply necessary sequence. They do not
mean that communal identification, the shared sense of belonging together,
is absent until, one morning, along comes the outside world to conjure
them up. There will always have been an ‘outside world’, even if only the
next village. However, the outside world’s salience, its power and size,
and its perceived distance and difference from ‘us’, may all change. In the
process, as part of an ongoing dialectic of collective identification,
community may be more explicitly stressed and practices of communal
symbolisation and differentiation increasingly called into play in the
solidary affirmation of similarity and the defence of perceived collective
interests. To reiterate another earlier point, collective identificatory
strategies stressing symbolisations other than the strictly communal –
family, friendship or whatever – may be alternatives to a communal
response.
The similarities here with social psychology’s ‘self-categorisation theory’
(Turner 1984; Turner et al. 1987) are sufficiently striking to deserve brief
comment. That approach argues that in response to ‘external’ situational
contingencies individuals select, from the available possibilities, and
not necessarily self-consciously, collective identifications with which to
identify themselves (and to identify themselves with). In the process,
they contribute to the production and reproduction of the collectivities
with which they are identifying, evoking and constructing intra-group
similarities and inter-group differences. This theory, with something in
common with both Barth and Cohen, could be described as another version
symbolising belonging 141

of the internal–external dialectic of identification, albeit a very individualist
one.
BOUNDARIES, RELATIONSHIPS AND EMBODIMENT
The internal–external dialectic allows us to think about boundaries
of identification – A/not A – without reifying them. One metaphor for
boundaries might be the hyphen between the internal and the external
(a hyphen, after all, meaning nothing without whatever it connects).
In another image, the boundary can be seen as the dialectical synthesis
of internal thesis and external antithesis: the identity is in important senses
the boundary. These ways of thinking about the matter converge, in that
each involves at least two simultaneous points of view. The internal
definition of A is external from the point of view of B, and vice versa.
Similarly, A and B can be thesis, antithesis or synthesis, depending on
one’s starting point (of view). Boundaries are definitively relational,
simultaneously connecting and separating one side and another.
This definitively relational nature of boundaries of identification is
closely connected to the symbolisation of identity. In the first place, symbols
only ‘make sense’ in relation to other symbols. Meaning is a product
of system and relation; nothing means anything on its own. Similarity, for
example, cannot be established without also delineating difference. The
second place, however, is more interesting. This is
the line of argument of the French sociologists of L’Année sociologique
. . . that the social relations of men provide the prototype for the logical
relations between things.
(Douglas 1973: 11)
That line of argument stretches from Durkheim and Mauss, via Lévi-
Strauss, to Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas herself and Pierre Bourdieu. In
the present context, it points to a reciprocal mutuality of signification
between symbolisation and identification. This means that identification
is not just a sub-set of the general symbolic domain that we routinely, and
carelessly, reify as ‘culture’. As the symbolic constitution of relationships
of similarity and difference between collectivities and embodied
individuals, identification provides the basic template – via analogy,
metaphor, homology, etc. – for the wider constitution of the world as
meaningful. Identification thus emerges as fundamental to cognition,
a view which resonates with the arguments of Marx and Mead, that
interaction between humans is the a priori of consciousness, rather than
vice versa.
142 symbolising belonging

If interactional relations provide the model for symbolic relations – i.e.
for meaning – then it is important to remember that those are relations
between individuals, and that those individuals are embodied. This is
recognised by, among others, Douglas (1973), Bourdieu (1977: 87–95;
1990: 66–79) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999). The collective point of view
imagines a world with humanity at its centre; the individual point of
view centres on the body. With respect to identity, this is perhaps most
significant in that the (individual) human body provides a basic metaphor
for symbolising and imagining collective identities. It’s not only social
scientists who ‘see’ the human world using organic analogies. In English,
for example, we talk about ‘the head of the family’, ‘the head of state’, ‘the
heart of the community’ or ‘the backbone of the organisation’. We say that
a particular group ‘has guts’. Communities can be ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. One
could doubtless find many other examples. Even collective identification,
it seems, draws symbolically on embodiment as a model or evocation of
its consistency and integrity.
The symbolisation of identification offers a further perspective on
the processes during which the embodied individual and the abstract
collective converge. Individual and collective identifications are inherently
symbolised, particularly in the symbolic interaction of language (remember
the discussion of Mead in Chapter 5). Language allows individuals to
participate in the collective domain; according to Mead, it permits reflexive
selfhood, in the capacity to take on the role of the Other. In summarising
what might otherwise be vast amounts of information about people,
condensing it into manageable forms, the symbolisation of identifica-
tion also allows us, sociologically and in everyday life, to think about
and to model – in other words to imagine – collectivities and the relations
between them. Symbolisation permits the necessary abstraction of
individuals and collectivities, and of the relationships between them, which
is the constitutional basis of the notion of ‘society’.
Among the most important aspects of the symbolisation of identity
in this respect is that it allows individual diversity and collective similarity
to co-exist within the human world. There is no need to wonder about
why people who ‘are’ the same don’t all ‘do’ the same. For practical purposes
and in certain contexts, we simply imagine them as more or less the
same. And that imagining is ‘socially real’. The symbolisation of iden-
tification works, what is more, in a similar fashion whether individually
or collectively. One way of talking about selfhood, for example, is as a
symbolisation of the complexities of individuals, a means of glossing them
with enough consistency to allow others to decide how to act towards them.
The identification of individuals with respect to their membership of
symbolising belonging 143

collectivities contributes in the same way to the expectations that others
have of them. The point is not that this consistency is ‘objectively real’, but
that it provides a plausible basis for a minimum of predictability during
interaction and in the course of relationships between people.
The unity of selfhood is in one sense an umbrella or mask, under or
behind which the diversity and contradictions of the individually embodied
point of view over time and across situations can co-exist, backstage,
without having to be perpetually in the front-stage public limelight (to
the likely confusion of self and others). The parallel with the ‘symbolic
construction of community’ is clear: selfhood is no less imagined than any
other identity. Identification, whether individual or collective, is always
symbolically constructed.
THE INESCAPABLE ABSTRACTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Looking at symbolisation draws our attention to the necessary abstraction
of identification. Sociologically speaking, images of identity – selfhood,
community or whatever – look very like what Max Weber called ideal
types (1949: 90–106). An ideal type is an abstract model of any particular
collective pattern or form, with two basic characteristics:
• An ideal type is a synthesis of/from a myriad of ‘more or less present
and occasionally absent’ collective phenomena. Not everything that
is a specified feature of an ideal type is necessarily present in any actual
case.
• Phenomena are included as elements of an ideal type on the basis of
the ‘accentuating’ point or points of view – in the sociological case,
theoretical positions and interests – from which it is constructed.5
Among the examples of social scientific ideal types that Weber offered
are the ‘city-economy’, ‘capitalistic culture’, ‘feudalism’, ‘the state’ and
‘Christianity’. The construction of ideal types by social scientists is a
heuristic procedure that permits comparison and hypothesis formulation
in the face of the extreme diversity and density of everyday life.
Weber recognised that many ideal types are not only analytical models,
but are also meaningful folk models (which harks back to the discussion
of groups and categories in Chapter 9). Sociologists are not the only
people who need to compare things, or frame working hypotheses. Nor
do they have any monopoly on the complexity of collective life. Alfred
Schutz (1967: 176–250) expanded upon Weber’s conception of the ideal
type to make this point more thoroughly. Schutz argued that all of our
144 symbolising belonging

knowledge of the world – whether commonsensical or sociological – is in
the form of ideal typifications. Given the inherently symbolic nature of
language this is perhaps no more than we might expect.
Schutz distinguishes our direct face-to-face knowledge of our fellows in
the everyday human world, from our indirect experience of contemporaries,
who we have never met and may never meet.6 Our ideal typical models of
our contemporaries are likely to be more abstract than the typifications
– based in direct experience – which we draw upon to understand and
render more predictable people who we ‘know’. There is a continuum,
from more concrete to more abstract, which Schutz expresses from an
ego’s point of view, as a move from We to Thou to They. From the direct
vividness of my face-to-face interaction with known others, the human
world becomes ever more ‘remote and anonymous’ as I look out into the
world of my contemporaries. Eventually the boundary of that world is
reached in artefacts which ‘bear witness’ to their meaning for some
unknown Others, but don’t identify those Others to me. Beyond that
boundary my contemporaries are inaccessible. What Schutz is saying
here is relevant to our understanding of similarity and difference:
All our knowledge of our fellow men is in the last analysis based on
personal experience. Ideal-typical knowledge of our contemporaries,
on the other hand, is not concerned with the other person in his given
concrete immediacy but in what he is, in the characteristics he has in
common with others.
(Schutz 1967: 193)
This resembles closely my proposition that individual identification
emphasises difference, while collective identification emphasises similarity.
The ‘concrete immediacy’ of our fellows differentiates one from another as
complex individuals; our contemporaries have ‘in common’ their collective
similarity as members of this or that particular category.
Schutz’s distinction between fellows and contemporaries illuminates
the nuances of the relationship between similarity and difference, as it is
worked out differently with respect to individuals and collectivities.
For example, despite Schutz’s stress on what they have in common, it is clear
that contemporaries are definitely individuals, even though they may be
shadowy and anonymous. I know that the Mexican navy, for example,
is made up of real sailors; I don’t recognise any of their faces, however.
Even in the case of contemporaries with faces, in the absence of knowledge
based in direct personal experience one relies on more superficial, less
individualised knowledge about them, among which their participation in
symbolising belonging 145

collective identifications, such as gender, ethnicity, residence, class or
occupation, will be prominent. Allowing for that, however, that one of my
fellows is, say, Mrs Oswald’s daughter, baby Helena’s mother, and the
owner of a red Mazda coupé, who dropped a bag full of groceries out-
side my door yesterday (which I helped her to pick up at the same time
as having a chat about the new couple who have just bought the house two
doors away), will probably be more relevant to me than her collective
identifications as female, Afro-Caribbean, middle class and a lawyer.
But this example itself demands further elaboration. I cannot, for
example, forget that Mrs Oswald’s daughter is female. Otherwise she would
be Mrs Oswald’s son, and could not possibly be Helena’s mother. And
the relevance of gender depends upon point of view, whether I am male
or female, regardless of closeness of relationship and directness of know-
ledge (and not actually regardless: the nature of intimacy and its likelihood
between individuals are both influenced by gender). Gender, the embodied
intersection of one relationship of similarity and one of difference, is
simultaneously and definitively a matter of individual fellowship and
collective contemporaneity.
Nor can ethnicity – ‘race’ in this case – be disregarded. My ethnic point
of view matters, depending on context. When I first encountered the
woman who I now know to be Helena’s mother, that she was Afro-
Caribbean may have been the first and most significant thing that I noticed
about her. And is Mrs Oswald Afro-Caribbean? And what might it tell
me if she were not? Similarly, the fact that her daughter owns the red Mazda
tells me something about her class, which in itself may call up know-
ledge about her profession. And that she is a lawyer is a significant aspect
of her individual identity as one of my fellows: you never know when
you might need a bit of informal legal advice. Etcetera. No less important,
there is also the place of collective identifications in her self-image, which
none of the above even begins to touch on.
Our knowledge of our fellows – their individual identity in our eyes –
can never, whether in the last analysis or not, be completely ‘based on
personal experience’ as Schutz claims. I do not, for example, have to
experience Mrs Oswald’s daughter practising law to know, for all practical
purposes and until otherwise proven wrong, not only that she is a lawyer,
but also (approximately) what being a lawyer entails. That is a matter of
the things she has in common with other members of the professional
collectivity – lawyers – that she claims as her own. What we know about
individuals as fellows in our everyday lives, and the plausible expectations
we have of them, are as much a matter of their collective identifications as
our direct experience of them.
146 symbolising belonging

Nor are our contemporaries only known to us in terms of their collective
similarities to specified others. The President of the United States – as I
write it is still George W. Bush – is not one of my fellows. Even so, I would
recognise him if I bumped into him in the High Street. In his case, however
– unlike his predecessor’s, Bill Clinton – I could neither name nor recog-
nise his wife. The media ensures that I know a great deal about Bill and
Hillary – from their marriage, to their politics, to their business dealings
– although I cannot personally vouch for the accuracy of my knowledge.
More to the point, do I know any less about Clinton or Bush than I know
about the neighbour with whom I pass the time of day every day, discussing
only the garden and the weather, and is what I know any less accurate, less
verifiable or less concrete?
One resolution of these questions might suggest that all of our fellows
are, in some aspects of their lives and in some circumstances, also our
contemporaries. That this is so may, when it becomes apparent, be a potent
source of distress in close relationships: ‘To think I thought I knew her’
is too common a theme to require elaboration. We simply can’t have
full direct experience of even our closest intimates. Each of our fellows
is identified individually by us via their idiosyncratic combination of
collective identifications and the synthetic, rolling account provided
by our direct experience of them. And on the other hand we know about
our contemporaries in vastly different degrees of detail and individuality.
The more people have to do with each other in everyday life, the more
likely they will be to identify each other as fellow individuals, rather
than primarily by reference to their collective identifications. Others,
looking into the everyday human world from a distance or ‘outside’, will,
however, be more likely to identify them first as members of a collectivity,
as contemporaries. Whether someone is my fellow or my contemporary
is always a function of my point of view. At the boundary, in encounters
between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ – which is, once again, always relative,
a matter of point of view – when insiders come to see themselves, in the
internal–external dialectic of collective identification, as belonging,
there is a constant interplay of similarity and difference. As symbolic
constructions, each is imagined. In their consequences, however, neither is
imaginary.
symbolising belonging 147

12
PREDICTABILITY
Collectivity may not require consensus, but a degree of consistency is
important in the human world. The symbolisation of communal identity
generates an imagined similarity, which, as Anthony Cohen argues, permits
difference and heterogeneity to prosper. But if diversity were all, human
life would be complex and unpredictable to the point of being unimag-
inable. Because communal identity, for example, is a cognitive and
emotional reality to individuals – and it, therefore, influences their
behaviour – it is ‘socially real’ in W. I. Thomas’s sense. People may or
may not think the same, but there must be some reciprocal and consistent
similarity, even if not uniformity, in what co-members do. Identification
is a practical matter – something that people do – and it involves similarity
as well as difference.
Which brings me back to Barth, for whom consistent patterns of
behaviour generate identity boundaries and collective forms more generally.
Goffman alludes to this when he talks about ‘routines’ and ‘presentation’,
and Schutz seems to imply it in his definition of a ‘personal ideal type’
– a model or typification of a particular kind of person and of what it is
plausible to expect of them – as ‘by definition one who acts in such and such
a way’ (1967: 190, original emphasis). Should their behaviour not conform
to the ideal type, then eventually the individual will be re-identified
with reference to another ideal type.

CONFORMITY AND CONFORMISM
One way to look at collective consistency is in terms of conformity and
conformism. Conventional social psychological wisdom (Aronson and
Aronson 2007: 13–57), which resonates with Mead and Goffman, suggests
that two motivations inspire conforming behaviour: the desire to be correct
and the desire to remain in the good graces of others. The first has its
greatest impact on backstage private decision-making, the second on front-
stage public behaviour. Each is rooted in primary socialisation and each
is an emotional allotrope of the desire to belong. External factors that
impinge upon conforming orientations vary according to local common
sense and knowledge, situational contingencies and individual point
of view. Non-conforming behaviour, deviance if you like, may come most
easily to those whose group membership is secure in the mainstream.
Insecure membership may thus encourage conforming behaviour, although
one would expect to find a point of marginality beyond which this is
no longer true. This puts a new spin upon Cohen’s argument about the
symbolic power of boundaries to license or accommodate within them a
degree of dissensus and heterogeneity.
Aronson and Aronson recognise that conforming behaviour may
have sources other than these conscious goal-orientations. Compliance, for
example, is produced by compulsion. While it may only be weak con-
formity, which won’t survive relaxation of the coercion, it is significant.
Identification depends upon affective powers of attraction, in intimate dyadic
relationships and in more collective or public contexts: here the result is
conformism. Identification, of course, is related to the desire to stay in the
good graces of others. Internalisation, finally, results in this model from
learning and rationalisation. Here, conformism results from doing whatever
is thought – within local canons of rationality – to be the most sensible
response to the demands of the situation; it is also routinely reflected in the
thoughtlessness of habitual routines.
This social psychological scheme is not wholly straightforward, however.
Attempting to distinguish ‘internalisation’ from the ‘desire to be correct’,
for example, looks like hair-splitting: locally specific canons of ‘correctness’
are central to both, and in both there is a presumed motivation to be
‘right’ or, at least, to avoid being ‘wrong’. Similarly, the perceived rational
thing to do may be to stay in the good graces of others. Compulsion apart,
therefore, the distinction between goal-oriented and non-goal-oriented
conforming behaviour – or, which is a little different, between conformity
and conformism – looks analytical, at best.
Max Weber’s discussion of the nature of domination (1978: 53–54,
212–301) is pertinent here. From Weber’s point of view, conformity and
predictability 149

conformism are, in different ways, both product and expression of domi-
nation. In his model the exercise of power – the capacity to dominate others
through coercion of one kind or another – is the pursuit of compliance and
conformity. The alternative to power, however, is more interesting and
more routine: authority is legitimate domination, the conformism of those
who accept its demand or expectation as justified (Smith 1960: 15–33).
Identification and internalisation fall within Weber’s categorisation of
legitimate domination: the first as the basis of charismatic authority,
the second of either legal or traditional authority. There are many modes
of legitimate domination, and many sources of conformism. All of them
are intimately bound up with ideology and the symbolisation of collective
identification (cf. Bourdieu 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Gledhill
2000). If for no other reason, this is because to identify oneself, or one’s
group, in a particular way is to treat as axiomatic, and hence legitimate, the
arbitrariness of one’s way of life and relationships.
The social construction of conformity and conformism is also, partly,
an attempt to render interaction predictable. This, it must be emphasised,
does not imply ‘objectively’ accurate predictability: it is, rather, predict-
ability for practical purposes and, even more important perhaps, the
comforting sense of predictability. It is what affords individuals some
expectations of the behaviour of others (and Others), on the basis of which
they can proceed with their everyday lives without having to consider
consciously everything in advance, and without excessive uncertainty.
Conformity of a kind may also, however, emerge out of uncertainty. When
one is unsure of local rules or customs, the behaviour of others may be the
single most important source of information about the right thing(s) to do.
Hence conformity. This is of major significance for childhood learning,
but it remains important throughout adult life (think, for example, about
driving in a foreign country), and offers another understanding of why
behavioural conformity may be at a premium at the boundary.
Looking at these matters anthropologically, Mary Douglas (1966) argues
that notions of ritual pollution and supernatural danger reinforce other
pressures towards conformity. Both tend to be associated with the bound-
aries of identity: examples might be marriage rules forbidding certain
alliances, or ghost stories associated with the territorial spaces between
groups. Her particular emphasis is upon symbolic classifications and their
boundaries: between different membership roles within groups, between
appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, between dirt and cleanliness,
etc. Without classificatory systems, everyday life is unthinkable. Every
human group has such a system or systems, some competence or parti-
cipation in which is a criterion of practical group membership. Inter alia,
150 predictability

classification systems focus our attention on boundaries: of the group,
of acceptable behaviour, of purity, of humanity, of whatever. Issues of
classification are always issues of identification.
Ritual pollution and supernatural danger combine in the ‘incest taboo’.
Conventional anthropological wisdom suggests that a ban on incest, in one
local form or another, is the universal regulation for humans – the ultimate
boundary – and that incest is the ultimate transgression. From Frazer
to Lévi-Strauss, and since, debates about incest have a long history within
anthropology. Fortes brings out their relevance for this discussion.1 He
argues that the notion of incest, the identification of particularly close
categories of kin between whom sex is prohibited, provides a basic
‘us–them’ template for the wider human world, creates a need to form
relationships between us and them, and offers the basic model for the rules
of everyday life in general. It is thus the foundation of the human world:
without rules there can be neither society nor culture . . . it was the
emergence of the capacity to make, enforce, and, by corollary, to break
rules that made human society possible.
(Fortes 1983: 6)
The argument is plausible (although one major qualification would be
that organisation requires more than rules). Fortes posits an intimate
relationship between identification and our capacity to live collectively
integrated human lives. While one can overplay the notion that human
experience is orderly, human relationships are certainly ordered. In this
sense, the original sin of incest is to generate disorder, a confusion
of identities. Incest places individuals in two incompatible places at the
same time: how can one’s mother also be one’s sister, for example? Fortes
further suggests that rules do not create identities. The message of incest
prohibitions is that, if anything, it’s rules that emerge from the classifica-
tion and categorisation of individuals. By these lights, identification
– knowing who’s who, what’s what, and what that involves – is an
irreducible aspect of being human and living together.
MAKING SENSE
Stereotyping and attribution are important dimensions of classification
and identification. A further social psychological conventional wisdom
suggests that stereotyping, the labelling and classification of collectivi-
ties in a partial and incomplete fashion, simplifies otherwise excessive
predictability 151

information flows in and about complex situations (Aronson and Aronson
2007: 142–147; Operario and Fiske 2004; Tajfel 1981b). By this argu-
ment, stereotyping is but an extreme example of the general classificatory
process of ideal typification (in psychology’s terms, categorisation). In
its encouragement of everyday predictability – which, let me repeat, isn’t
‘objectively’ accurate predictability – stereotyping underpins habitua-
tion and facilitates institutionalisation (Berger and Luckmann 1967:
74–75). I will return to this in Chapter 13. At this point, the important
thing to grasp is the mundane nature of stereotyping. Although the word
has in many quarters come to attract wholly negative connotations,
stereotyping is a routine, everyday cognitive process upon which we all to
some extent depend.
However, important as they are, stereotyping is about much more than
the interactional and cognitive demands placed upon individuals by the
demands of information management in a complex human world. Tajfel,
for example (1981b), argues that stereotyping is also a collective process,
involving the creation and maintenance of group values and ideologies,
and the positive valorisation of the in-group. In other words, collective
boundary maintenance and symbolisation, pace Barth and Cohen, are also
important (McDonald 1993). In a thoroughgoing revision of theorising
about stereotypes, which is also an exhaustive historical account, Pickering
(2001) emphasises their political role in the ‘social exorcism of the Other’,
their extreme dramatisation of differentiation and boundaries.
All of which reminds us that stereotypes, almost before they are anything
else, are powerful symbols:
symbolic discourse . . . only retains from experience a minimum of
fragments to establish a maximum of hypotheses, without caring to
put them to the test.
(Sperber 1975: 4)
Stereotypes of the inhabitants of either side of an identity boundary
demarcate its contours with a particular, albeit illusory, clarity. Stereotypes
are at best partial and always – like all ideal typifications – constructed
from a point of view. They are not, however, necessarily hostile: a stereotype
can flatter (a similar point to that which was made in Chapter 8 about
labelling). Apropos Schutz, and my general argument about collective
identities, it is in the nature of stereotypes to emphasise a small number of
putative similarities between the stereotyped rather than their infinite array
of particularities and differences. Stereotypes are extremely condensed
symbols of collective identification.
152 predictability

Attribution, the attempt to understand others, particularly the moti-
vations of others, by inference from the limited information provided by
their verbal and non-verbal behaviour, is also at work within stereotyping.
Attribution is another attempt to understand the human world and render
it more predictable: rather than cognitive overload and complexity, this
is the other side of the coin, the fact that often humans don’t have suffi-
cient information to make sense of what’s going on (Eiser 1990: 99–122).
All people, all of the time, need to explain and anticipate the behaviour
of others. To do so, we often need to go beyond the available information.
Ambiguity and uncertainty in such situations lead, Aronson and Aronson
suggest, to the use of stereotypical attributions (2007: 315–318). It
may, therefore, be no coincidence that, according to Douglas, anomaly and
ambiguity are likely to attract a symbolic charge (1966: 41–53). Ambiguity
or anomaly, uncertainty about which way to jump or what to do, are
characteristic of boundaries and borders, hence the need to map them
with imaginary precision or to dramatise them ritually (and it is, of
course, precisely the ambiguity of boundaries which underlies Barth’s
understanding of them – and of identities – as fluid and permeable).
Before leaving this topic it is vital to remember, or insist, that stereo-
typing is but one aspect of cognition and identification. It’s probably
not even the most important. Returning to one of my central themes –
the relationship between similarity and difference – humans attend to
particularity and differentiation no less avidly than they do to stereotypical
homogeneity (Billig 1985; 1987: 118–155). In order to live successfully
in a complex human world we need to be equally concerned with each:
that’s the whole point of the model of identification presented in this
book. If cognition were only a matter of simplification and stereotyping
– regardless for the moment of why stereotyping happens – then we would
have only the most rudimentary sense of who’s who and what’s what, and
the human world would in all respects be a very different place indeed.
PRODUCING PREDICTABILITY
To recapitulate another core theme, although individual and collective
identification are matters of symbolic classification and boundary main-
tenance, they are matters of classification in interaction and practice. Group
membership, for example, demands, as a practical accomplishment, some
behavioural conformity: some consistent similarity in what individual
members do. Every member has to be able, to some extent, to ‘bring it off ’.
As we have seen, however, this doesn’t entail consensus. The symbolisation
of group boundaries and identifications (the ‘umbrella’), the distinction
predictability 153

between private judgements and public behaviour, and the variety of types
of domination all suggest that normative consensus is not necessary for the
existence of a shared identity.
Nor do marginality, deviance or non-conforming behaviour necessarily
imply normative dissent. At the margins of the group, where the frame-
works of predictability are less firm and intrusive, there is likely to be
ambiguity about membership criteria and appropriate behaviour. Group
boundaries may thus be generated by uncertainty, emerging as an order-
ing response to the relative unpredictability of encounters. Strong pressures
encouraging conforming behaviour – with penalties attaching to deviance
– may oppress most those whose membership or identity is insecure.
Powerful signals about conformity and deviance, dramatising group
membership and boundaries, are easily expressed as stereotypes of insiders
and outsiders. This is the exorcism and dramatisation of the Other,
to recall Pickering’s argument (2001). For individuals on the collective
margins, the price of admission may be some subordination of their
own ambiguity, submission to the minor tyranny of the everyday predict-
ability demanded by others. The less securely one belongs, or the more
one wants or needs to, the higher that price is likely to be. And in this, once
again, it is possible to see an internal–external dialectic of identification
at work.
Symbolisation is central to more than individual and collective dialectics
of identification, however. For Abner Cohen symbolisation underlies
the whole process of institutionalisation . . . Social relations are
developed and maintained through symbolic forms and action.
(Cohen 1974: 5)
Institutionalisation is one of the most consequential ways in which
individuals participate in, or take on, collective identifications. It also
contributes massively to the production and reproduction of environments
of relatively predictable collective behaviour.
To follow the thread of the argument back as far as Mead, I have been
considering predictability as an emergent and symbolically constructed
property of everyday life. People identify themselves in particular ways
at least in part in order that others may know what to expect of them.
This involves a minimum of appropriate behaviour: a performance. In
identifying myself within any setting where there is even a minimum of
intersubjective understanding, I also render the behaviour of others easier
to predict (or, at least, to imagine). In identifying myself, I can imagine
their position or orientation vis-à-vis myself. In presenting myself, I may
154 predictability

make an active contribution to their behaviour towards me. Similarly,
identifying others in particular ways permits me to imagine that I know
what to expect of them. I will, more often than not, orient my behaviour
towards them in terms of their presentations of identity. And so on.
Throughout, one can see the interactions of internal and external moments
of identification, the emergence of individual and collective senses of who’s
who and what’s what.
Nor, again, must predictability be ‘objectively’ well founded or accurate,
or identification actually predictive of behaviour. It may be, but that isn’t
the point. Our ideal typifications of ourselves and others allow us to proceed
in our everyday lives without fretting perpetually about what other people
are going to do: we are afforded an intersubjective sense of the predict-
ability of the human world. On the basis of who we think they are, who
we imagine them to be, we accept them at behavioural face value until
there is reason not to do so. Most people most of the time ‘know’ who they
are, ‘know’ who others are and ‘know’ what to expect. This is fundamental
to understanding identification.
To talk about institutions and institutionalisation, as I have begun to
do in this chapter, necessitates going beyond the discussion so far.
Institutions are organised, and organising, with respect to identification
and behaviour. No less imagined than any other human phenomenon,
institutions are enormously consequential in everyday life. In the next
chapter I discuss institutions and institutional identification, and explore
further arguments about the importance of identity as a conceptual bridge
linking the individual and collective within a unified understanding of
the human world.
predictability 155

13
INSTITUTIONALISING
IDENTIFICATION
Having understood that collectivities are more than the sum of their
embodied parts, Durkheim, following Comte and Spencer, made an error
in adopting an organic analogy in order to understand and communicate
this: collectivity – ‘society’ – modelled as a corporeal entity, a ‘living
thing’ with firm boundaries, complex functional internal relationships,
and higher and lower systems. In this, he was adopting an essentially
commonsensical symbolisation of collective identity. Margaret Thatcher,
approaching the same issue, made what is arguably a worse mistake,
however, in declaring that there is no such thing as ‘society’, other than
‘you and me and our next-door-neighbour and everyone we know in our
town’ (Raban 1989: 29–30).
A worse mistake, but an easy one to make. Although their existential
status is not straightforward, individuals are at least embodied and
obvious. Collectivities, from the smallest network to the largest nation or
global corporation, are altogether more nebulous; in their definitively
collective aspects they may be difficult to ‘see’, whether in common sense
or sociologically. An army on the march or a stadium full of partisan sports
fans have an embodied physicality that presents itself with material
immediacy. But even their tangible presence – and many collectivities
don’t have that kind of presence – is a small part of what constitutes
each as a collectivity. There must be something else if an aggregation of
individuals is to be anything other than arithmetical (Jenkins 2002a:
63–84). The fact of a lot of breathing human bodies occupying a territory
is not enough to constitute a collectivity.

Collectivities and collective identifications are to be found, in the first
instance, in the practices of the embodied individuals that generate or
constitute them. Two different kinds of identificatory process have been
outlined: group identification and categorisation, corresponding, respec-
tively, to the internal and external moments of the process of collective
identification. These processes take place most definitively at the boundary
of identity, which, at the risk of repeating myself once too often, doesn’t
mean a territorial boundary. Nor is it like the physical boundary of an
organism. A social boundary is a cumulative construction that is produced
when people who are identified as, say, Laputans interact with others who
are identified differently in any context or setting in which being Laputan
matters. In the process the relevant criteria of membership of Laputa –
Laputan identity – are rehearsed, presented and developed, as are the
consequences of being Laputan. These are political processes: negotiation,
transaction, mobilisation, imposition and resistance.
During these interactions, an image of similarity that is the defining
characteristic of collective identities is symbolically constructed. But in
the shade of that image a range of diversity and heterogeneity exists
with respect to what people do: collective identity emphasises similarity,
but not at the expense of difference. Similarity and difference being irre-
trievably entangled in each other, where the emphasis falls depends on the
point of view. Difference is no less socially constructed than similarity:
both are ‘culturally arbitrary’, to use Bourdieu’s expression, but neither, to
remember W. I. Thomas, is less ‘real’ than the other.
REALISING INSTITUTIONS
Individual and collective identifications coincide in complex ways. A useful
starting point if we are to grasp these is the notion of institutions, understood
in an open, minimalist definition:
• An institution is a pattern of behaviour in any particular setting that has
become established over time as ‘the way things are done’.
• An institution has intersubjective relevance and meaning in the
situation concerned: people know about it and recognise it, if only in the
normative specification of ‘how things are done’.
Institutions are thus an integral part of the human world, with reference
to which, and in terms of which, individuals make decisions and orient
their behaviour.
institutionalising identification 157

The study of institutions is a staple of the sociological diet, and their
constitution as appropriate objects for our attention is a matter of funda-
mental methodological importance. Institutions can be understood as ideal
types, in both commonsensical and sociological discourse. Abstractions
from the complex ebb and flow of interaction, they allow us to think
about, to imagine, the patterns and regularities of everyday life. Once again,
however, they are anything but imaginary: they are consequential and
constraining. Institutions – much like identities, in fact – are as much
emergent products of what people do, as they are constitutive of what people
do. They don’t ‘exist’ in any sense ‘above the action’. Institutions are
perhaps best understood as our collective ideal typifications of continuing
processes of institutionalisation.
One of the most lucid accounts of those processes, rooted in the phenom-
enological ideas of Schutz (Schutz and Luckmann 1973), comes from
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their classic The Social Construction
of Reality (1967: 70ff.). They identify habit – and, whatever else we are,
human beings are certainly creatures of habit – as the cognitive foundation
of institutionalisation. The habitualisation or routinisation of behaviour
brings with it two important practical advantages:
• Choices are narrowed to the point where many courses of action or ways
of doing things do not have to be chosen (or, indeed, rejected) at all.
• Since we don’t have to think and decide about every little aspect of our
daily lives, space for ‘deliberation and innovation’ is opened up: there is
no need for every situation to be perpetually encountered and defined
anew.
More than simply rendering the human world predictable, habitualisation
almost obviates the need for predictability in many situations: it creates
a substantial, and secure, environment of ‘the way things are’, which may
not be easy to reflect upon consciously, much less change (Bourdieu 1977,
1990).
Habitualisation may be a necessary condition for institutionalisation,
but it isn’t in itself enough. A degree of intersubjectivity – shared meaning
– is required. When a number of people begin to share the same habitual-
ised pattern of activity, to possess some sense that they are doing it, and
to communicate to each other in the same terms about what they are doing,
that is the beginning of institutionalisation. If it persists for any length
of time, a pattern of activity acquires a history. People encounter it as ‘the
way things are done’. It has become institutionalised as a taken for granted
feature of the human world.
158 institutionalising identification

As part of this process, sanctions are likely to become associated with
deviation from institutionalised routine: ‘the ways things are done’ may
quickly become ‘the way things should be done’ (if, indeed, there is
much difference in the first place). Institutions, perhaps before anything
else, involve control. Lest this be misunderstood, however, Berger and
Luckmann are clear that the very existence of the institution, as an axiomatic
part of the human world – ‘the way things are’ – is the primary form of
control. Doing things otherwise is simply difficult to imagine. Additional
processes of control are necessary only if institutionalisation is less than
complete or effective.
The human world that we encounter as axiomatic during early social-
isation is a world of institutionalised practices. As the products of history,
we encounter them as ‘objective’, as not to be questioned, and we seem
to move in and out of their shadows. It is, of course, we who actually cast
those shadows:
Knowledge about society is thus a realization in the double sense of
the word, in the sense of apprehending the objectivated social reality, and
in the sense of ongoingly producing this reality.
(Berger and Luckmann 1967: 84)
This is how institutions ‘hang together’. They are ‘real’ – W. I. Thomas
again – because we think they are and behave as if they are. The logic which
institutions appear to possess derives not (only) from their own organisa-
tion, but is imposed by the reflexive consciousness of actors. We ‘know’ that
they are logical and integrated and therefore de facto they are. Language
– discourse – is the pre-eminent source of this order, in the form of ritualised
speech, rules and laws, written records, narratives, etc.
Institutions order everyday life, provide predictability and permit
actors to exercise lower levels of attention than might otherwise be
demanded by the complexities of the human world. They provide templates
for how things should be done. But they do require legitimation in order
to be presented successfully to each new generation: ‘The same story, so
to speak, must be told to all the children’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967:
79). The more intersubjective meanings are shared in any collectivity, the
greater scope there is for the thoroughgoing and interpenetrating insti-
tutionalisation of everyday life. This we may call ‘axiomatic legitimation’
(Jenkins 1983: 7).
Where a range of constituencies each construct the world from differing
points of view – which is likely, no matter how ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ the
setting in question – then the institutional order will be more fragmented
institutionalising identification 159

or limited in scope. Legitimation is more problematic in the presence of
alternatives. Berger and Luckmann (1967: 110–46), while drawing in the
first instance on Weber, broaden the notion of legitimation to encompass
more than the overtly political. They insist that the legitimation of the
institutional order is a matter of knowledge rather than, or as well as,
values. Legitimation emerges from the production and reproduction of
‘symbolic universes’: cosmologies, implicit and explicit specifications
of the nature of the world and the place of people and their creations within
it. In my terms, symbolic universes may be thought of as collective points
of view or common knowledge:1
bodies of theoretical tradition that integrate different provinces of
meaning and encompass the institutional order in a symbolic totality
. . . symbolic processes are processes of signification that refer to
realities other than those of everyday experience.
(Berger and Luckmann 1967: 113)
One of the key words in the above is ‘processes’. At the heart of these
processes is language, the primary constituent and framework of symbolic
universes.
While wishing to avoid the reification which bedevils discussions of
this kind, a symbolic universe is, if you like, the story which a collectivity
tells about itself, the world and its place in the world. A symbolic universe
– and Anthony Cohen later said something very similar – is, for Berger
and Luckmann, the unifying umbrella under which the discrepant diversity
of everyday life can come together. Nor is this only a collective matter:
By the very nature of socialization, subjective identity is a precarious
entity. It is dependent upon the individual’s relations with significant
others, who may change or disappear . . . symbolic universes . . . are
sheltering canopies over the institutional order as well as over individual
biography.
(Berger and Luckmann 1967: 118, 120)
For Berger and Luckmann, then, symbolic universes are the sources of
collective and individual consistency, continuity and constancy: ‘psychology
always presupposes cosmology’ (1967: 196). Returning to the concerns
of this discussion, one paraphrase of this might suggest that psychology is
to cosmology as individual is to collective identification.
Unfortunately, after all these kind words, it has to be said that Berger
and Luckmann’s conception of the ‘symbolic universe’ is perhaps a little
160 institutionalising identification

grandiose. It is certainly much too integrative. A back-door functionalism,
consensus in the final instance, lurks in the ‘totality’ of it all. As earlier
chapters have argued, consensus – whether normative or cognitive – is
neither necessary nor likely. We might, perhaps, do better to imagine the
human world as a complex of greater and lesser symbolic universes
– ‘provinces of meaning’ in the quotation above? – which interlock and
conflict with each other in a variety of ways and with uncertain outcomes.
Modest examples of symbolic universes in this sense might be godparent-
hood, the medical profession, a neighbourhood community, a government
bureaucracy or a voluntary organisation. Each of these rests on a minimal
intersubjective definition of the situation, sufficient at least to actually
conjure up the institution as a reality in the human world. Each also
integrates within it a certain amount of institutional diversity in terms
of detail and practice.
MATERIALISING INSTITUTIONS
The centrality to Berger and Luckmann’s model of cognition – symbol-
isation and knowledge – is no less problematic. When it first appeared,
The Social Construction of Reality was a welcome corrective to structural-
functionalism’s emphasis upon normative integration and values. However,
as I have just suggested, the model of ultimate cognitive integration with
which Berger and Luckmann replaced it shared many of the same problems.
Even more serious – and there is a similar problem in Anthony Cohen’s
work – is their neglect of what Barth called ‘the material world of causes
and effects’, and the contribution that it makes to the way that the human
world ‘hangs together’. This is most significant, in the present context,
with respect to the location and sedimentation of institutions in embodied
individuals, artefacts and territorial space.2
This of course varies, depending upon which institutions we are talking
about. Marriage is an institution, for example. It exists, it hangs together
and it persists, as a fairly abstract institution, because people believe in it
as a symbolic universe within wider symbolic universes. But it also hangs
together in a very material sense: in the sexual, domestic and economic
practices of cohabitation, in common property, in the physical presence in
the everyday world of married couples, in specific places which one has to
attend and specific rituals – whether secular or religious – which one has
to perform there in order to be married, in the ring and the ring finger,
etc. Without the full symbolic consecration of marriage it is possible to
be married after a fashion by doing it: living together, behaving as a married
couple, even wearing rings. And symbolic consecration alone may not be
institutionalising identification 161

sufficient: without sharing a bed and a roof, without doing ‘being a married
couple’, is it a ‘proper’ marriage? Each scenario is recognised in English
law and everyday discourse: one is cohabitation, the other constitutes
grounds for divorce, or refusal of admission by an Immigration Officer.
How often, for example, have we heard people say things such as ‘The
marriage was really over years ago’? Nor do the everyday practices
of marriage and its symbolic specification have to harmonise in order for
the institution to make sense. That, for many people, they appear not to
at the moment doesn’t mean that marriage, as an institution rooted in
appropriate symbolic universes, is necessarily weakening.
A more straightforward example is a university. A university is an insti-
tution in two senses: as an example of ‘the university’ – a type of institution
of higher learning – and as this particular university (of Poppleton, for
example). Symbolically it is conjured up within and by a rich universe of
statutes, traditions, ideals of scholarship, rituals of consecration, funding
mechanisms, recruitment processes and so on. This constitution has
developed historically within the broader institutional field of education,
although these days it also has something of the air of a business enter-
prise (and does this undermine it as a university?). More mundanely,
however, it also exists as a body of people and as a collection of buildings,
a campus and playing fields. Getting off the train at Poppleton, for example,
it is possible sensibly to ask for, and expect to receive, directions to ‘the
University’.
Thus one can see and encounter physically both marriage and a university.
Metaphorically, where marriage is a shifting archipelago of particular
and historically ephemeral marriages, a university is a substantial land-
mass (which is not to ignore its eventual historical impermanence).
The point is not that Berger and Luckmann are wrong to emphasise the
symbolisation of institutions. Quite the reverse: everything about the
materiality of marriage and a university which I have described above is,
in fact, definitively symbolised and cannot be otherwise.
The point is, rather, that symbolisation is always embodied in very
material practices, in their products and in three-dimensional space (which
also involves time, since space doesn’t make sense outside a temporal
framework, and vice versa). In their desire to move beyond the materialist–
idealist impasse this, perhaps, was something that Berger and Luckmann
neglected. Collective life hangs together as much in the visibly embodied
doing as in the thinking (and the two are, indeed, not easily disentangled).
Berger and Luckmann’s notion of ‘society as objective reality’, meaning
symbolically objectified reality, does not take the embodiment of collec-
tivity – in people and in things – seriously enough. Institutionalised
162 institutionalising identification

collective forms may be imagined, but they are not imaginary: the practices
of people, and their products, constitute them as tangible in space and time.
There are other criticisms of Berger and Luckmann. The cognitive and
the normative, for example, are not as distinct as they sometimes seem
to imply: the way things are done and the way things should be done often
amount to much the same thing. The power of ideology resides precisely
in its combination of the two. Nor is the distinction between habitua-
tion and institutionalisation always clear. There is a continuum from the
individual to the collective in this respect: collective habit is a form
of institutionalisation, and habit is often the individual expression of
institutionalised patterns (hence Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus).
Berger and Luckmann’s underplaying of power and compulsion is more
telling. Their emphasis upon legitimation is an important recognition
of particular aspects of domination, and of the stratification which is an
inherent characteristic of knowledge and symbolic universes. Nor do
they wholly ignore power: ‘He who has the bigger stick has the better
chance of imposing his definitions of reality’ (1967: 127) is only one
example. But power could be more prominent in their model than it is.
This is particularly important for our understanding of internal–external
dialectics of identification. External identification does not have to
be legitimated or accepted by those who are its subject and object – they
don’t necessarily even have to know about or recognise it – in order for it
to be consequentially real for them.
INSTITUTIONS AND IDENTITIES
Such criticism notwithstanding, Berger and Luckmann’s account of
institutionalisation is plausible and straightforward, allowing us to think
about flexible, fluid and loosely specified institutions, as well as those that
are constituted more formally. It also helps us to understand the nature
of collectivities and collective identification. While not every institution
involves identification or membership – ‘going for a walk’ might be a
mundane example, or ‘having a bath’ – all collective identities are, by
definition, institutionalised: as ‘ways of being’ they are ‘the way things
are done’.3 Thus ethnic identifications, for example, are institutionalised,
as are locally specific gender norms and conventions, or the most loosely knit
friendship group or temporary interest-based coalition.
To reverse the thrust of the argument, it’s no less important that
institutions, such as events (i.e. an annual village fête), estates (i.e. marriage)
and corporate groups (i.e. universities), are sources and sites of identification.
Even when they are not in themselves collective identities, they are
institutionalising identification 163

productive – in Barth’s terms, generative – of identifications. The village
fête has an organising committee and a structure of tasks and offices that
are occupied by individuals, whose incumbency differentiates them from
each other and from those who merely attend the fête and may have wider
resonance within the politics of the village. Being married differs from
being single, being divorced or being widowed (all of which are, however,
identifications that are necessarily rooted in the institution of marri-
age). Being a university lecturer is an identification constituted in and
by the institution of the university, from which, at least in part, derive the
frameworks of similarity and difference which situate it – and any particular
university lecturer – with respect to, say, a university porter, on the one
hand, or a lecturer in a college of further education, on the other.
As ‘the way things are done’, collectivities and collective identifications
are, almost by definition, institutionalised. And institutions are sources
and sites of identification for individuals. But what, for example, is the
relationship between institutional identities and the individuals who
occupy them? Ralph Linton addressed this issue when he defined status and
role (1936: 113–131). A status is an institutionalised identification viewed
in the abstract, as ‘a collection of rights and duties’ (ibid.: 113). For example,
‘husband’ and ‘Professor of Sports Marketing at the University of Poppleton’
are both statuses: the actual individuals who may be identified with the
status are irrelevant. Every status has a practical element, in the role
attached to and specified by it: this is what the occupant of the status does
when acting in that status.
Linton’s notion of role, with its implied theatrical analogy, anticipates
some aspects of Goffman’s dramaturgical model (see Chapter 8). Indeed,
the status–role dyad – for they are inseparable concepts, each entailed in
the other – was fundamental to the development of social theory. However,
it is problematic in at least three key respects. First, as Merton pointed
out (1957: 369), ‘a particular status involves, not a single associated
role, but an array of associated roles’. Merton preferred to refer to the
‘role-set’ attached to a status: ‘that complement of role-relationships which
persons have by virtue of occupying a particular social status’. Taking
Merton’s point further, any institutionalised identification – any ‘status’ –
can be done in a variety of ways, depending upon the individual occupant(s),
contextual constraints and possibilities, and the demands of significant
others.
The second problem is that the practical concomitants of any insti-
tutionalised identification are unlikely to be as clear and unambiguous
as both Linton and Merton appear to think. No doubt some of the practical
requirements or expectations of any status are obvious and definite: fidelity
164 institutionalising identification

is part of the role of ‘husband’ in Western Christian societies, for example.
But much will be situationally sensitive and, as recognised by Goffman
and Bourdieu, improvisatory within the interactional ebb and flow of the
human world; another way of saying which is to remember that insti-
tutional identifications, like all human phenomena, are simultaneously
in the individual, interaction and institutional orders. The role-expectations
of a ‘status’ may also be contradictory or incongruent: fidelity figures promi-
nently in Christian marriage vows, but locally it may also be regarded
as perfectly appropriate for a ‘good’ husband discreetly to take a mistress.
But in that same local context, failure to take a mistress does not amount
to failure as a husband.
The final problem with Linton’s definition may in part account for
the ‘difficulties and weaknesses of general role theory’ (Jackson 1972: 5).
Put simply, if a ‘status’ is a collection of rights and duties, why do we need
a further concept of ‘role’ in order to define its performative aspects, unless
they are somehow different from the rights and duties concerned? Rights
and duties are, after all, practical matters: rights are what you can expect
of others, duties what they can expect of you. Since Linton and many
subsequent sociologists have understood role as the operationalisation
of the rights and duties of status, the former entailed in the latter, the
concept of role looks redundant (Coulson 1972). What’s more, ‘status–role’
looks suspiciously like a version of the problematic distinction between
thinking and doing, and its associated allotropes of structure/action and
culture/society.
From the point of view of the beginning of the twenty-first century,
‘status’ and ‘role’ might, therefore, appear to be antediluvian concepts;
they are certainly no longer much used. But they don’t deserve to be simply
forgotten. For example, in suggesting that rights and duties are definitive
of institutionalised identity, they shed further light on the internal–external
dialectic of identification. Rights may be what I expect of others as an
aspect of my institutional identity, but they have no effect – in fact they
don’t exist – if those others don’t recognise them. I cannot simply assert this
or that ‘right’: it has to be specified in a legitimate collective discourse
about rights and the entailment of rights in particular identifications.
This is, in fact, the point about institutionalisation. A similar point in
reverse can be made about my duties: the call of duty may be collectively
issued, but it has to be recognised – and that duty done – by me as an
individual.
Thus status, as a collection of rights and duties, alerts us to the
complexity of the dialectic of identification. Nor is it the only useful lesson
to be drawn from Linton:
institutionalising identification 165

A status, in the abstract, is a position in a particular pattern. It is thus quite
correct to speak of each individual as having many statuses . . . However,
unless the term is qualified in some way, the status of any individual
means the sum total of all the statuses that he occupies.
(Linton 1936: 113)
Although this is a little too simple, using the same word for both the
abstractly institutional and the concretely individual encourages an appreciation
of the interpenetration of the individual and the collective. Individual
identification is revealed as, to a considerable extent, a customised collage
of collective identifications.
The problems with ‘status–role’ seem to centre largely on the role side
of the equation. The distinction between the nominal and the virtual may
offer a more promising way forward, in that it allows us to think about the
fact that abstractly collective institutionalised identifications (statuses)
are occupied by embodied individuals yet are also independent of them.
The nominal in this case is the ideal typification of the institutionalised
identity – its name or title, the notional rights and duties which attach
to it, etc. – while the virtual is how that identification is worked out, given
local vagaries of context and allowing for individual variation, by any
particular incumbent. This permits comparison of the range of differ-
entiation in everyday life between individual incumbents of the same
institutionalised identity, such as ‘husband’ or lecturer at the University
of Poppleton. At the same time we can compare local differences in typi-
fication and practice with respect to institutionalised identities: we might
look, for example, at lecturers at the Universities of Poppleton and Old
Sarum to see what they have in common and how they differ. Rather
than persisting with the concepts of status and role, we might therefore talk
about institutionalised identities in their nominal and virtual aspects. This has
the further advantage of reducing the scope for confusion between the
Weberian notion of ‘status’ – that dimension of stratification which relates
to ‘social honour’ or ‘social standing’, judged according to a range of ascribed
or achieved criteria (Turner 1988) – and ‘status’ as abstract institutionalised
identification.
ORGANISATIONS AND IDENTITIES
So far I have been talking about institutions in very general terms. But
what about different kinds of institutions? Clearly there is, for example,
a difference between ‘marriage’ and an event such as the village fête. Both
are institutionalised, and both are sources of identifications, but I don’t
166 institutionalising identification

have to be a sociologist to appreciate that they are not really the ‘same kind
of thing’. A first move towards clarity is to distinguish institutions from
organisations.
Institutions have already been defined. Organisations require a slightly
more complex definition, as particular kinds of institutions in which:
• there are always members;
• members combine in the pursuit of explicit objectives, which serve to
identify the organisation;
• there are criteria for identifying, and processes for recruiting, members;
• there is a division of labour in the specification of the specialised tasks
and functions performed by individual members; and
• there is a recognised pattern of decision-making and task allocation.
By this definition, the category of organisations stretches to include many
real life possibilities: from a rhythm ’n’ blues band, to a New Guinean
men’s house, to an Ashanti matrilineage, to a bowling club, to the CIA, to
Microsoft, to the United Nations. Thus, marriage is not an organisation –
although any particular marriage may be – while the village fête organising
committee is.
The sociological study of organisations is well established. Building
on Weber’s initial observations about bureaucracy, there is a huge litera-
ture, on formal organisations in particular,4 that doesn’t need to be reviewed
here. But looking at organisations does help us understand the interplay
between individual and collective identifications. Organisations are
composed of members, actual individuals. My organisational memberships
are an aspect of my individual identity, although each is not equally rele-
vant. Being a member of the University of Sheffield has greater salience
than being a member of the National Trust. Once again, however, this
depends on point of view and context: to its staff my membership of the
Trust is likely to be my only significant identification.
Organisations are also networks of specialised nominal identifications:
positions, offices and functions, organised as ‘jobs’. This is where the
organisation as a division of labour comes into its own. Although occupied
at any point of time by individuals, these positions are identified with
or part of the organisation: at least in principle, their existence is inde-
pendent of their occupancy by specific individuals. Organisations create,
in fact, the possibility of specific, concrete identities that are not, at any
particular point in time, embodied (whether individually or collectively).
That a post or an office is vacant does not necessarily mean that it ceases
to exist.
institutionalising identification 167

The organisation of identification is an important part of what social
scientists talk about, often with a glibness that does them little credit, as
‘social structure’. If ‘social structure’ is to be found anywhere other than
in the aggregate abstraction of statistics, if it is to have anything approach-
ing an intersubjective reality in the human world, it is in institutions
and organisations, and the pattern of relationships between organisations
and their members. In the organisation of identification, the interaction
order and the institutional order are routinely and mutually implicated
in each other.
I suggested in Chapter 2 that a theoretical appreciation of identification is
vital if we are to steer the debate about structure and agency – the collective
and the individual – out of its present doldrums. In any local setting in
the human world, organised processes of identification are central to the
allocation of rewards and penalties, resources and costs, honour and shame.
Organisations and identifications are at the heart of the production
and reproduction of hierarchy and stratification. Furthermore, since the
degree to which identity is organised is likely to be a function of complexity
– scale and institutional heterogeneity – there is also something more to
be said in this respect about modernity and identity. These issues are
explored further in the closing chapters.
168 institutionalising identification

14
ORGANISING
IDENTIFICATION
In English, the word ‘organisation’ can refer to the act of organising, to
the state of being organised or to an organised system. Each meaning
emphasises activity: process and practices. Organisations are bounded
networks of people – distinguished as members from non-members –
following co-ordinated procedures: doing things together in inter-related
and institutionalised ways. These procedures are specified explicitly
or tacitly, formal or informally, in bodies of organisational common know-
ledge: organisationally specific symbolic universes, which may be subject
to revision or confirmation and are transmitted to members through
processes of organisational socialisation. Organisations are also networks
of identifications – individually and collectively – which influence strongly
who does what within those procedures, and how. These identifications
– positions, offices, functions, jobs – are specified informally and formally
by and in organisational common knowledge, as are the procedures
for allocating or recruiting individuals to them.
Understood in this way, everything from families to nation-states
(and beyond) can be described as organisations. That might suggest that
the term is too vague and general to have analytical value. I don’t think
so, however. First, as discussed in Chapter 13, not all institutions are
organisations. Second, not all collectivities are organisations. Categories,
for example – collectivities that cannot speak, that do not in fact know
their own names – are not organisations. Nor are spontaneous collectivities
(crowds, audiences, mobs, refugees in flight and so on). Nor are loosely knit

networks of individuals pursuing the same or congruent goals but lacking
organised divisions of labour or authority structures (Boissevain 1968;
Mayer 1966; Wellman 1999). The word ‘organisation’ covers most
collectivities, but not all.
In terms of identities, organisations are constituted simultaneously in a
distinction between members and non-members, on the one hand, and in
an internal network of differentiation among members, on the other. An
organisation without internal differentiation doesn’t make much sense:
organisation is the harnessing and orchestration, under a symbolic umbrella,
of difference. Thus between the members of any organisation there is a
relationship of similarity and a range of relationships of difference. In this
respect, one of the most fundamental characteristics of organisations is that
they produce and reproduce individual and collective identities (Gubrium
and Holstein 2001; Webb 2006). Whatever else organisations do, they do
identification.
If organisations were only concerned with their own internal affairs they
would be of limited sociological interest. However, organisational members
rarely live their lives all day and every day wholly within the organisation:
the ‘total institution’ (Goffman 1968b) is the exception rather than the
rule. Nor are most people members of only one organisation. Furthermore,
an organisation’s raison d’être is the co-ordination of the activities of a
plurality of individuals – not all of whom will necessarily be members – in
collective pursuit of some specified purpose. This defining purpose is the
organisational charter; it is what calls it into existence, another, and hugely
important, part of the common knowledge of the organisationally specific
symbolic universe. An organisation’s purposes are rarely, however, purely
or even mainly internal: they are typically oriented towards and located in
the wider, external human world. Organisations are open to and part of
their environments. So much so that their boundaries may be permeable and
osmotic; it isn’t always easy to see where they are drawn.
Another defining feature of organisations requires emphasis: without
relations of authority (or, indeed, power), the successful co-ordination of
activities would be impossible. Some subordination to others is the
reciprocal precondition of individual autonomy, in the same way that
similarity is the precondition of difference and rules create deviance.
Organisations – small or large – are institutionalised networks of
hierarchical relationships, of sub- and superordination, of power and
authority. Organisational collectivity is, in fact, the source of the legitimacy
without which authority carries no weight.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will concentrate on two aspects of
organisations:1
170 organising identification

• the ways in which individuals become identified as organisational
members (and as particular organisational members); and
• the ways in which organisations influence the identification of non-
members.
Surveying the historical, local and institutional variety of either, let alone
both, would be a task more appropriate to an encyclopaedia. Instead, in
order to illustrate the range of possibilities, I shall discuss a limited selection
of procedural types or cases with respect to each of the above, as examples
of general organisational processes. I will also discuss the consequential
nature of organisational identification with respect to the lives of individuals
and the production and reproduction of patterns of differentiation:
hierarchy, stratification, inclusion and exclusion, etc. In this chapter I focus
on organisations and their members; in the next, on their impact on non-
members.
RECRUITMENT
Without personnel renewal and replacement, the lifespan of any
organisation could be no longer than that of its most long-lived individual
member. Since a characteristic of organisations is that they can persist
despite routine attrition of personnel, procedures for recruiting replacement
members are vital. There are two basic trajectories of recruitment to
organisational membership.
In the first, the qualifying criteria of recruitment are ‘givens’ such as
parentage, age and position in the life-course, gender, etc. Identifications
of this kind are intersubjectively constructed – typically in terms of
embodiment and folk notions of biology – as basic, natural or primordial.
They are also typically collective: they identify the individual as a member
of a group or category. They are understood as aspects of the individual for
which she has little or no responsibility, and over which she has little or
no control. Although in any specific situation the possibilities may exist
of a renunciation of membership by a candidate, a refusal to recognise
a candidate, or her subsequent expulsion, organisational membership of
this kind is generally taken for granted, even if not inevitable. If my sister
wants to join the Women’s Institute, for example, her age and gender render
her unproblematically eligible.
In the second trajectory, criteria of membership may be many and
varied, but membership is not entailed in pre-existent characteristics. It
is also much more a matter concerning the individual as an individual.
Membership is, therefore, always to some degree uncertain and must
organising identification 171

typically be sought and endorsed: it is a matter of negotiation at the organ-
isational boundary, and more or less competitive. However, in neither case
is the presence or absence of self-determination and choice a defining
feature. Both trajectories can involve involuntary or imposed organisational
membership.
These two routes into organisational membership may be characterised
thus: in the first an individual is a member or a prospective member by
virtue of who she is, in the second by virtue of what she is (or what she does).
Often seen, erroneously, as a contrast between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’
modes of identity, this has much in common with the distinction between
ascribed and achieved statuses drawn by Linton (1936) in his original
formulation of status and role.2 Ascribed identification is constructed on
the basis of the contingencies of birth. Achieved – or, to adopt Merton’s
subsequent, more accurate terminology, acquired (1957: 382) – identi-
fications are assumed during the subsequent life-course, and are generally,
although not necessarily, the outcome of a degree of self-direction. This
general distinction between the ascribed and the acquired isn’t specific
to organisational identifications; it can in principle be applied to all
identities.
The key distinction informing my model of identification, between
the internal and external moments of the dialectic of identification, is
heuristic, presented as an opposition for explanatory purposes. Much the
same is true of ascription and achievement/acquisition. In everyday life
the difference between them is likely to be at most a matter of emphasis.
Organisational membership, no less than any other identity, is thus a
particular combination of the acquired and the ascribed. The ins and
outs of biography conspire to ensure that who I am and what I am are not
easily disentangled.
This can be taken a little further. Primary identities such as gender,
rooted in very early experience, are massively implicated in the embodied
point of view of selfhood. Following Linton and Merton, they are ascribed
identities and potentially criteria of organisational membership. But they
are also – qua selfhood – important influences on the self-direction that is
so influential in the achievement of identities. However, the purposeful
acquisition of achieved organisational identification depends upon more
than unilateral self-determination. Most significantly, it involves negotia-
tion and transaction with others – organisational gatekeepers of one
kind or another – who are in a position to recruit individuals to the organ-
isation or to exclude them, and to decide to which organisational positions
individuals will be recruited. In making their choices, gatekeepers will
frequently have recourse to (ascriptive) criteria such as gender or age.
172 organising identification

Where acquired organisational identities are imposed on non-members –
such as selection for conscription or imprisonment – ascriptive criteria are
likely to be particularly influential. Imposition can have many consequences,
including:
• no apparent reaction;
• internalisation;
• reluctant acceptance as legitimate;
• resentful endurance; and
• overt resistance.
However, as long as categorisation is recognised – seen, heard, understood
– by those upon whom it is visited, or produces real consequences in their
lives, it is never a question of imposition only. Whatever it might be, there
is always a response: there is always the dialectic between internal and
external identification.
Indeed, all the above scenarios can be understood with reference to an
internal–external dialectic of identification, albeit with different emphases
in each case. In each there is a relationship of mutual signification between
the ascribed and the achieved or acquired. Even so, a loose analytical
distinction between ascribed and acquired identities continues to make
sense, particularly, perhaps, with respect to organisational identification.
They differ – as Nadel, for example, seems to have appreciated (1957:
36–41) – in the manner in which individuals enter into them, or take
them on.
With respect to organisations, this difference is largely, although not
only, procedural. Recruitment to organisational identities where the
emphasis falls upon ascription is a matter of affirmation. Although member-
ship is immanent, it must be publicly confirmed, registered, solemnised,
consecrated or whatever. Recruitment to organisational identities that
are achieved or acquired is, however, a matter of rationalisation (cf. Collinson
et al. 1990: 110ff.). Membership must be justified; reasons have to be
offered. Affirmation and rationalisation reflect different sources or kinds
of legitimate authority. In Weber’s terms (1978: 212–241), affirmation
is rooted in traditional understandings of legitimacy, and rationalisation
– unsurprisingly – in rational-legal legitimacy.
AFFIRMATION
Affirmation takes many forms. The Christian ritual of confirmation or First
Communion, in which the young person is received into full membership
organising identification 173

of the Church, is one example. The Jewish bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah
rituals also come to mind (Mars 1990). And there are options other than
the strictly religious: many societies around the world could be drawn upon
to provide examples of life-course rituals in which young people are
initiated into organised age-sets of one kind or another (Bernardi 1985;
La Fontaine 1985). Coming of age ceremonies often touch upon more than
the membership of specific organisations: ‘These rites of initiation trans-
form individuals by investing them with socialness’ (Cohen 1994: 57). It
may be nothing less than full membership of the collectivity in question
that is at issue (see Richards [1956] for one of the classic anthropological
accounts). Although the ritual dimensions of coming of age have atro-
phied in the industrialised societies of modernity, they can still be found,
for example, in the notion of the ‘key to the door’, or in the informal
humiliations that often attend the ‘last night of freedom’ of brides- and
grooms-to-be.
More obviously organisational memberships can also depend primarily
on the ascription of ‘who you are’. In Northern Ireland, for example,
membership of the Orange Lodge depends upon as many as three ascrip-
tive criteria: being Protestant, being male and, apropos which Lodge
one joins, family (Bryan 2000: 105–111; Harris 1972: 163, 192–194). And
if we recognise that the family is an informal organisation – or even, in the
bureaucratised modern state, a formal organisation – then the rite of baptism,
for example, is inter alia a public affirmation of the full organisational
membership of a new infant.
Common to all of the above is a transition from immanent member-
ship to actual membership – literally, confirmation – and an element of
ritualised initiation. These are important aspects of ‘rites of passage’, a
general category of ritual first identified by van Gennep (1965) nearly
a century ago. Building on his ideas, there is now a relatively settled
consensus that humans experience life as a series of transitions from
one identity to another, that these transitions are ritualised to a greater
or lesser extent, and that the transitions have an approximately tripartite
form (Leach 1976: 77–79; Morris 1987: 246–263). That form is not a
structural universal, it simply makes sense logically and situationally: first
separation from the present state or identity; then transition or liminality
(a state of limbo which may draw upon a symbolic repertoire relating to
death); then finally incorporation into, or aggregation with, the new state or
identity (which may use birth as a metaphor). In ritual, these phases may
be represented spatially; they always have a temporal sequence, one after
the other. A processual structure of this broad kind appears in all explicit
and organisationally marked identity transitions.
174 organising identification

Rites of passage and the internal–external dialectic of identification
have a bearing on each other. The enhancement of experience which ritual
offers, cognitively and particularly emotionally, plays an important role in
the internalisation of identification. To say this is, in most significant
respects, to agree with Durkheim about the power of ritualised communion.
Ritual can invest the symbols of organisational membership – flags,
uniforms, logos, songs – with an affective weight that transcends occasion
or ceremony. It is likely to be of particular moment in generating individual
internal identification with the external collectivity: making the recruit
feel that she belongs and is part of the greater organisational whole. It
may also distance her from previous identities. Even the formal pattern of
separation, transition and incorporation is amenable to interpretation in this
light: separation weakens existing internal self-identification(s); during
transition the new identity is introduced ‘from outside’ and dramatised;
incorporation affirms and strengthens the new identification. In other
words, ritual can invest identification, particularly collective identification,
with an emotional significance that makes it really matter to individuals
(Grimes 2000).
Victor Turner (1974: 119ff.), inspired by the theologian Martin Buber,
understood that although the ‘we’ of collective identification is enor-
mously powerful, it is always fragile and contingent, always vulnerable
to subversion. In my terms, it is imagined but not imaginary. Among other
things, this reflects a contradiction between the egalitarian inclusivity
of ‘us’ and the internal hierarchical differentiation of an organisational
division of labour. Similarity and difference play against rather than with
each other in organisations; hence the organisational importance of rituals
of identification. While these are generally significant as occasions for acting
out and practically participating in the symbolisation of identity, they are
particularly momentous in combining an affirmation and reaffirmation of
what Turner calls communitas – undifferentiated ‘we-ness’, if you like – with
a recognition and legitimation of internal organisational structure.
Ritualised affirmation of ascriptive identity isn’t only a matter of
individual membership or affective affirmation, however; nor is it confined
to initiation or recruitment. Ritual also plays an important part in the
creation and communication of organisational common knowledge, in
the interests of co-ordination:
A public ritual is not just about the transmission of meaning from a
central source to each member of an audience; it is also about letting
audience members know what other audience members know.
(Chwe 2001: 4)
organising identification 175

In addition to rites of passage, there are many other ritual occasions
that organise, orchestrate and reaffirm collective identifications. Public
pageantry offers many obvious examples of rituals of communal affirmation.
From the theatrical set-pieces of modern state ceremonial (Handelman
1998: 191–233; Johnston 1991; Lane 1981) to the more modest cere-
monies of ‘traditional’ states (Cannadine and Price 1987; Gluckman 1963:
110–136), from the parades of the ‘marching season’ in Northern Ireland
(Bell 1990; Bryan 2000; Jarman 1997) to the official and unofficial uses
of national flags (Eriksen and Jenkins 2007), the theme is similar: the
public reaffirmation and consecration of ascriptive collective identification.
Similar themes can be discerned in more secular rituals (Moore and
Meyerhoff 1977) such as carnivals (Cohen 1980) and beauty contests (Wilk
1993). Organised collective identities which claim to be more than merely
‘socially constructed’ are also likely – for both internal and external con-
sumption – to use ritualised public ceremonial to affirm and symbolise
their a-historical essence. Examples of this include the characteristic and
inevitable carnivals of national identity, and festivals such as the gay
and lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney, Australia.
As well as being an analytical category, class is an ascriptive identity
of sorts. Class is equated in common sense with ‘background’, referring to
family of origin, and often with ‘breeding’ too. A sophisticated version
of this is the argument – with which the Eugenics movement, for example,
identified itself – that class differences reflect differential genetic endow-
ments; a view that probably persists more widely than we know. A mirror
image of this, glorifying the essential nobility of working people, can
be seen in Soviet socialist realist public art. Ceremonial or ritualised
(re)affirmations of class identities are easy to exemplify: on the one hand,
the, sadly, declining spectacles of May Day marches of international
workers’ solidarity and British Miners’ Galas; on the other, Oxbridge
May Balls and the numerous set-pieces of upper-class ‘Society’. It is no
accident that the middle class(es) – often in upwardly mobile flight from
their ‘background’, and generally thanks to achievement – appear less keen
to affirm publicly the supposed essence of their identity.
So, with respect to ascriptive identifications such as family, age,
ethnicity, gender and even class, ritual (re)affirmation is of considerable
significance. It may actually be fundamental: identity – as a definitively
interactional construct – can never be essential or primordial, so it has to
be made to seem so. We have to be made to feel ‘we’. And collectivities, as
discussed in earlier chapters, are not embodied in quite the way that
individuals are. In addition, the potential tension between ascriptive
inclusion (similarity) and hierarchy (difference) should be born in mind.
176 organising identification

These difficulties are all addressed when the power of symbol and ritual is
brought to bear. Organised collective identity is endowed, via collective
ritual and ‘communitas’, with personal authenticity and experiential
profundity. It is also given shape in common knowledge. Inasmuch as
public ritual is performative, it is a powerful and visible embodiment of the
abstraction of collective identity (cf. Connerton 1989: 41–71). Rituals
gather together enough members for embodied collectivity to be ‘socially
real’. The individual – whether participating as an individual or as ‘one
of the crowd’ – is included in the organised collectivity in the most potent
fashion. Individual diversity finds a place within symbolised unity. The
imagined ceases to be imaginary.
Ascription is, however, as much a principle of exclusion as inclusion; it
encourages expulsion as well as recruitment. The refusal to admit women,
Jews and black people – and these are only the most obvious cases – to
membership of exclusive clubs is one such situation. More consequential
are the less thoroughgoing but nonetheless significant discriminations
that operate in the labour and education markets of a country such as
Britain. At its most comprehensive, ascriptive exclusion can plumb the
depths reached by regimes of slavery, by the Republic of South Africa
during apartheid or by the racialised state created in Nazi Germany.
RATIONALISATION
The argument is now approaching situations in which important elements
of rationalisation figure. The point that ascription and achievement/
acquisition are not easy to disentangle in everyday life can be made in many
ways. Ascriptive exclusion may, for example, define the arena within
which the principle of competition comes into play in recruitment. A club
may not admit women, Jews or black people, but that doesn’t mean that
any white male can join. The choice of which white males is a matter for
rationalisation, even if only at the level of procedural correctness. Ascriptive
inclusion – the organisational boundary – may delineate the space within
which internal position and office are competitively achieved. And there
are subtler possibilities. An employer who would rather not hire black
employees is not committed to hiring whites regardless of their capacity to
do the job in question. But nor, in the absence of a white person fitting the
bill, is she totally constrained from hiring a black worker. Rationalisation
permits both options.
These examples illustrate the interaction of selection criteria of
‘acceptability’ and ‘suitability’ (Jenkins 1983: 100–128; 1986: 46–79). In
competitive organisational recruitment, ascriptive criteria – ‘who you are’
organising identification 177

– are most likely to influence the identification of acceptability, which
can be broadly defined as whether or not an individual will ‘fit in’ to the
networks and relationships of the organisation, or be the right ‘kind of
person’ in general. Suitability, however, emphasises achieved or acquired
characteristics relating to ‘what you are’. This is typically a matter of
competence. It can also be, however, in voluntary organisations for example,
a question of interests or attitudes. Suitability is more an issue when
a particular organisational position, rather than just membership (or a
broad category of membership), is at stake. Notions of suitability are
definitively involved in employment recruitment, for example, but are less
likely to influence recruitment to club membership. Where both criteria
are influential, permutations are possible: individuals may be suitable
but unacceptable, or vice versa.
The distinction between suitability and acceptability is rarely clear
cut. Being identified as the most suitable person for an organisational
position doesn’t guarantee your recruitment to it. ‘Whether your face fits’
may contribute to colleaguely relations and, hence, to fulfilling the organ-
isational charter. So is it a kind of competence? Suitability can’t always
be easily specified; there may be a number of equally suitable candidates;
the threshold of suitability may be low. In situations such as these, questions
of acceptability – now concerning the individual and the idiosyncratic,
rather than the categorical – may once again become influential. And both
suitability and acceptability offer a basis for competitive recruitment.
There is no straightforward equivalence between the ascribed and the
acceptable, or the acquired and the suitable. It is possible to argue that
gender, for example, is sometimes a legitimate criterion of suitability. And
acceptability can depend on factors such as marital or domestic situation,
or attitudes to abortion or nuclear disarmament (or whatever), which are
unlikely to be a matter of ascription. And so on.
There may be no straightforward equivalences, but there is a modern
discourse that emphasises opportunity, achievement and access, particularly
with respect to economic activity and benefits. Or there are, rather, two
related modern discourses: of meritocracy and of equality. The two do
not always make happy partners – the idea of meritocracy, for example,
owes a frequently unacknowledged debt to notions of ‘liberty’ which isn’t
readily compatible with equality – but they come together in the Western
democracies in the political project of equality of opportunity. This is
relevant here because of its emphasis upon access for all to fair competitive
organisational recruitment. From the point of view of the promotion
of equality of opportunity, ascriptive criteria or criteria of acceptability
require special justification.
178 organising identification

And here we can begin to appreciate the sociological importance of the
organisation of identification, in the production and reproduction of large-
scale patterns of differentiation and stratification. Ascriptive identities are
not only collective; they are intersubjectively widely recognised. Significant
numbers of people agree on the nominal boundaries of male and female,
black and white, etc. The understandings of ‘us’ and ‘them’ across those
boundaries – the virtual identifications – are less consensual; it depends on
point of view. But the basic outlines, the scaffolding around which virtual
identification – played out in the history of consequences – is constructed,
will typically be relatively clear.
In this sense, ascription may be widely understood as the ‘inevitable’
result of ‘natural differences’; it isn’t, however, innocent of self-interest or
competition for collective advantage. It informs widespread processes of
categorisation: the defining of others in the external moment of the dialectic
of identification. Among those processes is recruitment into organisa-
tions. Organisational membership in any context is therefore likely to reflect
local ascriptive categories of identification. We know that this is often the
case. At least two, analytically distinct, organisational processes produce
this situation.
In the first, people organise themselves in terms of ascription: this
organisation is for ‘us’, with ‘us’ understood in a particular way. The organ-
isational charter defines membership: Poppleton Working Men’s Club,
the Eastend Punjabi Youth Association, Old Sarum University Women’s
Society, Boyne Square Protestant Defenders Flute Band, and so on.
Organisation along these ascriptive lines is a potent political and economic
resource. Among its advantages are an ideology of natural or primordial
community and loyalty, the symbolisation and valorisation of identity,
comradeship and mutual support, pooled resources, the organisation
of collective action, and the creation of opportunities – jobs or whatever –
for members.
In the second, the organisational charter does not define membership in
ascriptive terms. It may in fact evince a commitment to competitive,
achievement-based membership. However, those who are in a position to
recruit or reject prospective members may draw upon ascriptive criteria in
their decision-making. For example, a manager may refuse to employ men
as production workers in a factory assembling electrical components,
because he ‘knows’ that women are more dextrous and don’t want to work
full time, and that men can’t tolerate the boredom. As a result of this
managerial categorisation, the factory employs only women in the majority
of jobs. If there is consistency in the common knowledge of managers in
general – some participation in a shared symbolic universe – then their
organising identification 179

recruitment decisions will draw upon similar typifications and stereotypes,
and will contribute to the production of a wider pattern in which women
are disproportionately represented in part-time, semi-skilled assembly
work.
Reflecting consistencies in their recruitment, careers and the constraints
within which they work, managers are likely to have identification, experi-
ence and knowledge in common: class background, ‘race’, gender, politics,
orientation towards business, organisational and professional socialisation,
etc. That they should behave similarly in similar circumstances is not
remarkable. And the process may be even more avowedly exclusionary than
the example given: despite decades of legal and policy interventions, racism,
ethnic chauvinism and sexism, for example, are still potent forces shaping
patterns of recruitment. Organisations – and although I have focused
on employing organisations, discrimination operates in many other areas
– may be nominally open to all but virtually closed to many categories of
the population, excluded on the basis of ascription.
People join – or attempt to join – organisations for many reasons: to
validate an existing self-identification, to change it or for other reasons
more idiosyncratic. This applies in employment and across the spectrum
of politics, education and leisure activities. They may also join simply in
order to make a living or otherwise gain access to resources: identification
may, in the first instance, have nothing to do with anything. To return to
the discussion of interests in Chapter 1, distinctions between ‘identity’
and other aspects of the person – whatever that means – and that person’s
life are often difficult to maintain. Does someone become an animal rights
activist because she is opposed to cruelty to animals, because she likes
the image of herself as a guerrilla of sorts, because ‘that’ll really make my
mother mad’, because she loathes patronising-men-in-white-coats or
because she fancies ‘that bloke with the dreads’? It is not easy to know. But
it all contributes to identification.
People also form organisations as vehicles for their identity projects. This
has already been suggested in the case of ascription; it is no less true
for acquired identities. The organisational charter may refer to facilitating
and improving the wider public understanding of train-spotting, or
sado-masochism, or whatever, but that cannot be divorced from the train-
spotters or sado-masochists who are the members, and their cause(s). And
many of the advantages that accrue in the case of organisations based on
ascription – support, symbolisation, pooled resources, co-ordinated action
– apply equally to organisations oriented around acquired identities.
Whether emphasising ascription or acquisition, membership in different
organisations has different consequences for individual identification.
180 organising identification

Scarcity is an obvious factor. Joining the Mickey Mouse Club, where the
only qualification for membership is a small fee sent through the mail, is
clearly less significant than finally, the day after your ninth birthday, having
made yourself a pain in the neck for the last few months, being initiated
as only the fifth member of your big brother’s gang. And exclusivity isn’t
just a matter of competitive scarcity: the membership criteria matter, too
(hence the power of ascription). In ascriptive theory, at least, you can only
be in or out. The boundary between ‘in’ and ‘out’, dramatised as it often is
by ritual, may also be the threshold between the sacred and the profane.
On one side purity, on the other danger (Douglas 1966). Certainly other
factors contribute to the strength of particular organisational identifications
– the effectiveness of initiation (and, indeed, its affectiveness), external
pressures on the group, the penalties attached to leaving, and so on – but
the importance of exclusivity shouldn’t be underestimated.
Whatever the context, in competitive recruitment a degree of rationali-
sation is called for. This can be a matter of reasons, or a matter of procedure,
or both. The question of reasons has already been discussed: is someone
acceptable? Are they suitable? These are reasons. Procedures may not be
easily separable from reasons, however. Sometimes procedural correctness
provides sufficient legitimation for the outcome. That the proper procedure
has been followed is reason enough.
A good example here is the ordeal, a category of ritual which figures in
a variety of organisational initiations: from the theatrical pretension of
the Masonic rite, to the violence of a motorcycle gang, to the psycho-
sexual emotional trials of some New Guinean peoples, to the torment often
visited on new recruits to the military. In the ordeal, survival rationalises
recruitment. As ritual, it dramatises and authenticates the achievement
of membership, both for the recruit and for her new colleagues. In this
sense it contributes to both internal and external identification. The other
major context in which the ordeal figures historically – determination
of guilt or innocence in the face of accusation3 – also has serious implications
for membership. An unfavourable outcome to a judgemental ordeal may
result in expulsion from membership; recruitment may depend – and here
we are back to initiation – upon satisfactory reputation or character.
More characteristic of modern organisational recruitment, however,
is the interview and its associated screening procedures (which may also be
experienced as an ordeal). Interviewing is rooted in the informally insti-
tutionalised or ritualised human world of Goffman’s interaction order:
one or more people talk to another person – this is a definitively oral
interactional form – in order to find out sufficient about her to decide about
her recruitment (or, indeed, whatever fate is in question). However, the
organising identification 181

organised interview has arguably become the generic form of bureaucratic
interactional encounter. Its only rival is the committee (and the two are, of
course, combined in the board or panel).
The bureaucratic interview has a number of characteristic features (see
Jenkins 1986: 128–129 for more extended discussion):
• There are always two sides, interviewer(s) and interviewee(s).
• There is a situational hierarchy. One side – the interviewer – is typically
in charge of the procedure and of the determination of outcomes. This
hierarchy derives from the interviewer’s organisational position
(particularly her control over resources) and, although not always, from
her possession of the legitimate competences to carry off interviewing
authoritatively.
• The business of the interview is the allocation of resources or penalties
to the interviewee. The legitimacy of that allocation is grounded in
adherence to more or less formally constituted procedures and in the
reasons which inform the decision-making.
• However, the interview is not necessarily about decision-making on
the spot. It may, for example, be about the ex post facto justification
or rationalisation of decision-making that has already taken place
(Silverman and Jones 1976); alternatively, it may send recommendations
on elsewhere.
• Finally, interviews are generally private. The protection of privacy is
extended as much – indeed more – to interviewer(s) as to interviewee:
decisions can be made without the scrutiny of an audience.
The ordeal, by contrast, is typically a public or semi-public event which
requires an audience for its legitimacy.
The ordeal and the interview are not the only forms of rationalisation:
recruitment by election, by nomination or by lottery can be important too,
drawing on legitimatory rhetorics of democracy, authority and chance.
And rationalisation does not preclude affirmation. Once an individual’s
recruitment to an organisation has been rationalised, nothing prevents
that decision being subsequently ceremonially affirmed. There is every
reason for doing so, if the arguments about the affective power of ritual, and
its role in organisational common knowledge, are correct. Rationalised
membership needs authenticity too.
Existing members can also have their membership reaffirmed and re-
authenticated, and ideally their identification with the organisation
revitalised. A good example is the ‘team-building’ that figures in staff
development programmes in many employing organisations in industrial
182 organising identification

societies. One common model is the ‘residential’: staff are taken away from
work and home to spend a few days ‘out of time’, engaging together in
a range of activities – from outdoor pursuits, to intensive group work,
to equally intense socialising – after which they return home, ideally
somewhat transformed (otherwise what’s the point?). Separation, limbo
and (re)incorporation: the rite of passage analogy is irresistible.
These are some, but only some, of the ways in which organisations affect
the identities of their members. Organisations are, first and foremost,
groups. As we proceed through life, our organisational memberships make
a significant contribution to the diversity of the expanding portfolios
that are our individual identities: who we are. The internal–external
dialectic of identification can be seen at work not only between members,
but also between members and non-members. Organisations are con-
stituted in the tension between solidary similarity, vis-à-vis outsiders,
and the internal hierarchical differentiation of members from each other.
Although the internal moment of group identification is a consistent and
necessary thread of organisational identification, on balance categorisation
– of outsiders by insiders, of members by other members – is the dominant
theme of recruitment and initiation.
organising identification 183

15
CATEGORISATION AND
CONSEQUENCES
As argued in Chapter 14, every organisation is a group, with members
who recognise it and their own membership of it. Organisations are also
always networks of reciprocal identification: self-definition as a member
depends upon recognition by other members. Specifically, membership
must at least be registered by those who are authorised to do so (i.e. by ‘the
organisation’). Hierarchies of authority and control govern the reciprocity
of identification within organisations, and group membership is always
in part a matter of categorisation. Thus it is even, in extremis, possible to
have organisational ‘members’ who are authoritatively registered as such,
but are not themselves aware of their ‘membership’, or may not even
exist.
Organisational membership can be a penalty or a resource or benefit.
When the committee of an exclusive Country Club interviews a would-
be member, none of the participants doubt that something scarce and
attractive is at stake. A job selection interview is also allocating an organ-
isational membership that is usually seen positively, as a resource. However,
an interview assessing someone for a place in a psychiatric institution
or residential care home is deciding something more ambiguous.
ORGANISATIONS AND OUTSIDERS
The examples immediately above prompt the question: when are the
two sides to the transaction actual or potential co-members of the same

organisation? The successful applicant and the Country Club committee are
co-members. On the face of things, so are recruiters and recruits in an
employing organisation. But that may not be straightforward. If one is a
manager and the other an hourly paid worker, whose terms and conditions
of membership – among which is security of membership – are dramatically
different, in what sense are they co-members? Point of view is important
here, as is the interplay of similarity and difference within organisations.
Whether or not a psychiatric patient is a ‘member’ of the institution will
depend upon institutional policy and style. And also upon point of
view. Membership may be demanded of the patient by a therapeutic regime
emphasising inclusion and participation; she, however, may refuse to
connive in it, which in its turn may have consequences. Nominally she may
be a member, but virtually? Virtually she is an inmate. Therapeutic rhetoric
aside, she cannot enjoy membership of the same kind as her psychiatrist’s.
To make a point which resonates with the arguments of Foucault and
many others, although modern organisations produce engine parts, meals,
telecommunication services, government information or whatever, they
also contribute to the production of people, identified in particular ways.
And just as other organisational product ranges are diverse, organisational
membership is by definition heterogeneous and stratified. There is no such
thing as an undifferentiated category of ‘member’.
For some organisations ‘people-production’ is their core business.
Schools, colleges and other organisations of formal education are perhaps
the most obvious examples, but they aren’t the only ones. The criminal
courts, for example, impose penal membership and stigmatising iden-
tification. Instead of branding a felon on the forehead, modern criminal
justice interrupts her official biography – her ‘record’ – with a prison
sentence. This cancels or suspends most of her existing organisational
memberships, locking her into a new one – convicted prisoner and inmate
– which overrides practically all others. Branding iron and prison record
are both effective stigmata. Both change her identity.
To take another example, institutional psychiatry, in addition to its
provision of therapeutic benefits and care, is in the business of contain-
ment and, arguably, punishment.1 Both involve the authoritative medical
identification of individuals as patients of a particular type, and their
location in appropriate niches within organisational hierarchies. ‘Psychiatric
patient’ (‘person with a serious mental health problem’, or whatever)
is another identification, its origins organisational, which overshadows
most other aspects of individual identity. In Becker’s terminology (1963:
32–33) – borrowed from Everett Hughes – it is a ‘master status’, to which
most other identities are subordinate.
categorisation and consequences 185

Identity of any kind is consequential (otherwise it wouldn’t be identity).
Organisational identification is consequential in particular ways. Member-
ship may offer access to resources and it may have costs; it may be a benefit
or a penalty. For example, organisations are generally something more
than a symbolically constructed collective umbrella. Even if only in a
modest way, they are often corporate groups, in which property and
resources are vested and through which those resources are distributed.
Furthermore, as hierarchical networks of authority and power, organisations
entail the direction of the behaviour of members and at least minimal indi-
vidual submission to collective routines (if not actual rule). Organisational
membership closes some options as it opens others.
Members aside, organisations deal with a wide range of people –
customers, competitors, victims, clients and so on – on whose identifications
they often have an impact. Take, for example, the inevitable, if perhaps
unintended, consequences of organisational recruitment. An individual
who applies unsuccessfully for organisational membership is affected by
the experience. Recruitment is, after all, a labelling process: the rejected
applicant’s self-identification may change. She may find herself stigmatised
and excluded from access to other organisations. Materially, the resources
that she invested in the bid for membership may be lost. On the other hand,
if successful, her recruitment may have consequences for the members
of her network, and for her position within it (if she joins the police, for
example, or if her working hours are altered). Joining one organisation
may mean having to resign from another. And so on. A change of identity
is a stick poked into a pond: ripples spread in all directions. Organisational
recruitment – or rejection – touches the lives and identities of more people
than those immediately involved.
Typically, organisations have a substantial and visible presence in the
human world: in buildings, artefacts and public symbols, in the organi-
sation of time (timetables, the working day, the prison sentence, visiting
time, opening hours, etc.), and in the wearing of uniforms or other visible
identifications by members. Interactionally, an individual’s organisational
identification may be framed at least as much by that organisation’s
public image as by her presentation of self. This doesn’t necessarily mean
that, in the case of a railway employee, for example, passengers ‘see’ the
organisational identity rather than the individual. But they certainly do
see that, and to them it may be the most important thing about her in
that situation.
The public presence of organisations is an important dimension of their
impact on non-members. From the dawning of our experience of the human
world – during the processes of primary identification – our environment
186 categorisation and consequences

is organised and signified by organisations of which we are not members.
Space is defined in terms of its ownership or control by organisations. The
skyline itself may be outlined by their buildings and monuments: think of
the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House or the space left by the Twin
Towers, the castles and cathedrals of mediaeval Europe, or the great earth-
and stoneworks of prehistory. Most organisations are visibly symbolised
more modestly: a flag flies over the general’s tent, the post office has a sign
outside it, the removal company van is covered in the firm’s name and
logo, the local football club’s fans wear its colours on match day, and so on.
Individuals in public may be identified with this or that organisation
(which, as in the case of the football fans, needn’t mean they’re members
in any formal sense). The human world is a highly visible world of
organisations.
RESOURCES AND PENALTIES
It’s not just a matter of visibility, however. For all sorts of reasons we all
deal with organisations and their representatives. Many organisations
are in the business of allocating resources or penalties to non-members,
either as the theme of their organisational charter or as a by-product of
their main activities. In this way they organise the human world. The
organised allocation of resources and penalties prompts questions. How do
organisations classify collectivities in the abstract, and identify embodied
individuals, in order to determine allocation? What are the consequences
for the identification of those people of that organised allocation (or denial)?
What is the relationship between identification and the categorisation
inherent in organisational allocation procedures?
In small-scale societies, without extensive markets or a state, the
allocation of resources and penalties has, historically, been a matter for
organisations of modest scale, with members typically recruited according
to kinship or locality: family, lineage, village, etc. Here the criteria that
inform allocation are implicit in the principles of organisation and pre-
dominantly bound up with group membership (which does not obviate
the need for decision-making, or the competitive allocation of scarce
resources: Plattner 1989; Sahlins 1974).
It is different in the large-scale urbanised and industrialised societies
of the modern world. I shall concentrate on them for the purposes of
illustration. Modernity, perhaps before anything else, differs from other
eras in the extent to which everyday life is framed within and by complex
organisations, and by the number and heterogeneity of those organisations.
The existence in most modern states of a welfare system – even in countries,
categorisation and consequences 187

such as the United States, which are not usually identified as welfare states
– means that all everyday life is entangled in organisations.
Organised and organisational allocation is a pervasive aspect of
administrative systems. Administrative allocation (Batley 1981) takes place
in many contexts; some have been touched upon in the discussion of
labelling in Chapter 7, and in Chapter 14 with respect to organisational
recruitment. A large literature discusses the topic in a range of organ-
isational and cultural settings (Collmann and Handelman 1981; Hasenfeld
et al. 1987). Administrative allocation procedures have some features
in common. They are typically found in the organisations of the state and
its licensees, although they also occur in market settings (particularly the
most bureaucratised and regulated of markets, the labour market). They
characterise agencies or enterprises (Weber 1978: 956), the main public
spheres within and through which the large-scale allocation of resources and
penalties occurs in modern, institutionally diverse societies.
Agencies and enterprises are bureaucracies, and the legitimacy of
bureaucratic action is to a considerable extent grounded in procedural
correctness. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that allocatory pro-
cedures are wholly, or even thoroughly, formalised. Formality and
informality – much like control and deviance – are inescapably entailed
in each other (Harding and Jenkins 1989: 133–138). The interview is at
the heart of these procedures. As a ritualised encounter, between those-
who-decide and those-about-whom-decisions-are-made, it requires the
interviewee to engage in a presentation of self and the interviewer to
categorise; each is involved in different identificatory work. The interview
is an oral form, an organised encounter that blends the formal and
the informal. Literate procedures, such as the written examination (Ong
1982: 55–56) or the diagnostic test (S. Cohen 1985: 183–196; Hanson
1993), are increasingly influential in some arenas of administrative
allocation and do not depend upon the immediacy of interaction and
situation. These are characteristically modern procedures; testing, in
particular, exemplifies what Giddens describes as the increasing impor-
tance in the modern world of ‘expert systems’ (1990: 27–29). The test offers
a vision of decision-making uncontaminated by its immediate context,
‘objectivity’ guaranteed by scientific method. With the IQ test as a basic
model, a multitude of standardised tests – promoted by an expansionist
academic discipline, psychology, and exploited in their professionalising
strategies by personnel and training specialists – are now used to assess
intelligence, motor skills, personality, aptitudes, etc. Formal testing adds
apparent rigour and legitimate authority to bureaucratic classificatory
processes. The relationship between testing and interviewing varies – either
188 categorisation and consequences

can rationalise decision-making – but testing, with its focus upon
suitability rather than acceptability, is rarely determinate in itself.
Allocation is concerned, in large part, with rationing. Although scarcity
is frequently exaggerated or constructed, if only to maximise organisational
control over resources and increase their value, resources are always in
finite supply. Penalties too, if they are to have meaning, must not be
devalued by overuse. How to rationalise rationing is thus an important
matter. Legitimate procedure is important, but so are reasons; these reasons
are categorising judgements about whether or not recipients qualify. The
politics framing administrative allocation means that these judgements
often derive from or reflect ideology and policy agendas.
Categorisation operates in two apparently contradictory, but actually
complementary, modes: discretion and stereotyping. For a range of reasons,
discretion is central to policy formulation and implementation in modern
states (Hill 1997: 127–225; 2000: 85–108). Far from being a departure
from bureaucratic niceties, without discretion bureaucratic organisations
don’t function well. Discretion permits a flexibility of response and
decision-making that is appropriate to conditions of scarcity – whether real
or imagined – and to the complexity of individual differentiation and
situational variety. The interview has become so central to bureaucratic
work because it creates the formally constituted space within which
discretion can operate legitimately. Organisations are structured by rules,
but rules only become meaningful in their operation and interpretation,
and in the elaboration of exceptions.
The necessary simplification that facilitates judgement also encourages
recourse to identificatory stereotypes. And discretionary exceptions aren’t
easily allowed without stereotypes from which to depart. Just as classi-
fication involves stereotyping – as argued in Chapter 11 – stereotyping
is inherent in institutionalisation. In addition to its contributions to
group identification (Pickering 2001; Tajfel 1981b), stereotyping is a
routine feature of human attempts to enhance predictability – or at least
a sense of predictability – in everyday situations of complexity and/or
uncertainty. The maximisation of predictability is one respect in which
bureaucratic organisations can claim what Weber called ‘technical superi-
ority’ (1978: 973), so we should not be surprised to discover ‘a close
relationship between popular stereotypes and bureaucratic classification’
(Herzfeld 1993: 71).
In everyday terms, what does all this mean? Some examples may
help. Recruitment into employment was discussed in Chapter 14, and here
the resource being allocated or denied is also an identification. As a
competitive process, discrimination – defined neutrally as the evaluation
categorisation and consequences 189

of a number of options and selection from among them – is inherent in
employment recruitment. Apropos scarcity, however, the more vacancies
there are, the more competition will favour the job seeker and the less
discriminatory recruiters can be, the less discretion they can exercise (and,
of course, vice versa). The recruitment process may be administrative,
but market conditions are crucial, not least in determining the intensity
of competition.
Stereotypes that are systematically related to situationally specific criteria
of suitability and acceptability come into widespread play in employment
selection (Jenkins 1983: 100–128; 1986: 46–79). The generality of the
distinction between suitability and acceptability is suggested by the range
of analogous concepts in the literature – ‘functional’ and ‘extrafunctional’
criteria (Offe 1976: 47–99), or ‘quantitative efficiency’ and ‘qualitative
efficiency’ (Gordon 1976: 22–26), for example – and its subsequent use
by other researchers (Collinson et al. 1990; Curran 1985). It is particularly
significant because acceptability invokes perceived identity as an indicator
of employability.
Examinations and diagnostic tests are most likely to feature in employ-
ment recruitment in the context of decisions about suitability. Even when
‘personality’ is tested, this is typically with respect to effectiveness in
a particular post, rather than organisational ‘fitting in’ or general reliability.
Acceptability is arguably less predictable than suitability, if only because it
is difficult to define and highly context-specific. So we might expect recourse
to stereotypes (and discretion) to be more common when acceptability is in
question. Not only does this seem to be true, but some stereotypes are general
enough to produce patterned outcomes across a range of unconnected
recruitment occasions. There is ample evidence of the cumulative influence
in employment recruitment of common stereotypes relating to ‘race’,
ethnicity, gender, disability, class and so on.
Take family responsibilities as an example. With respect to men, and
particularly in secure, routine jobs, a stereotypical model of the ideal
employee as ‘a-married-man-with-two-kids-a-house-and-a-car’ has been
documented in British research (Blackburn and Mann 1979: 105; Jenkins
1986: 67–68; Nichols and Beynon 1977: 97, 199). It is strongly related to
age-based notions of maturity. These are ‘steadier’ workers, recruiters
believe, because the burden of their domestic responsibilities disciplines and
habituates them to be so. If, as a consequence, men in this category stand
a disproportionate chance of recruitment to secure manual jobs, then their
perceived ‘stability’ will, at least in part, be a product of the stability of those
jobs. In the process, a particular kind of worker is (re)produced: one who
can afford a mortgage, a car, etc., who values a degree of predictable minor
190 categorisation and consequences

prosperity, who recognises the rewards attached to behaving in particular
ways, who is tied in to consumerism.
Organisational recruitment decisions, and the criteria which inform
them, are one of the processes whereby particular class identities – in this
case, relatively affluent, ‘respectable’, politically conservative and working-
class – are constituted as distinct ‘types’. In this case, the process is also
predicated upon, and reproductive of, a set of gendered identifications. For
a woman, employers may perceive the same domestic responsibilities as
a disincentive to recruitment, because it is believed that they will weaken
her commitment to a stable work pattern (Collinson et al. 1990: 192–213;
Curran 1985: 26–29). The example further illustrates the power of routine
and axiomatic ethnocentrism in the specification of the ‘normal’ family.
Administrative allocation is significant in other contexts and with
respect to other resources: housing, for example. In the owner-occupier
market and private-rented sector, decisions are conditioned by a variety of
factors, particularly the contingencies of supply and demand at any
particular moment. Looking at local relationships between identification
and wealth, a great deal of the spatial materiality of identification – resi-
dential segregation – is generated in bilateral market transactions between
private individuals, mediated by financial and brokerage organisations.
In public housing,2 however, demand – particularly for ‘desirable’ housing
– typically exceeds supply, and scarcity is the norm. In the public-housing
sector – certainly in Britain, given its recent contraction – the scope for
tenant choice is limited.
The organisation of public housing is more bureaucratised than
other housing sectors. This scarce public resource is allocated through
assessment, involving the categorising by officials of individuals and
families. Assessment is conditioned by implicit or explicit stereotypes of
eligibility and need, on the one hand, and of particular categories of people
– ‘blacks’, ‘single parents’, ‘problem families’, ‘roughs’, the ‘homeless’ or
whatever – on the other. This may be reflected in local policy formulation
(Gill 1977). More typically it operates in the immediacy and privacy of
specific allocatory decisions (Flett 1979; Karn 1983), involving classi-
ficatory work such as the assessment and grading of housekeeping standards:
here we have discretion and stereotyping combined, once again. Desirable
housing is a resource, undesirable housing a penalty, and they may be
allocated as such. Access to public housing may be denied altogether.
These tendencies may be encouraged by the politics of clientage to which
local government is vulnerable. The end product is a spatial arrangement
of public housing which identifies individuals as of greater or lesser worth
according to where they live, and places them where they live on the basis
categorisation and consequences 191

of the identification of their worth. This is another way in which iden-
tification becomes mapped on to public space. It also illustrates the
virtualities of identification. People are allocated a house in a ‘good’ area
because they are judged to be worthy of it; because of where they live
they are judged to be ‘respectable’. And so on, and vice versa.
Administrative allocation is wide-ranging and pervasive. Discretion and
stereotyping in allocatory decision-making can be seen at work in benefit
allocation in social security offices in the United Kingdom (Dalley and
Berthoud 1992; Howe 1990: 106–135). They have also been documented
in ‘street-level bureaucracy’, social work encounters of one kind or another
in the United States (Lipsky 1980; Prottas 1979). Prottas calls this is
a business of ‘people processing’; Spencer calls it ‘organizational processing’
(2001). The ‘gatekeeping encounters’ of the interview room are concerned
with ‘social selection’ as well as with allocation (Erickson 1976). In fact,
selection and allocation are one process, of authoritative classification: in
contexts such as the administration of immigration rules this is particularly
clear. Much policing work exhibits the same combinations of discretion
and stereotyping, and can be understood as administrative allocation, in this
case largely of penalties (Cicourel 1968; Turk 1969).
Reference to policing is a useful reminder that I am talking about
labelling processes here. Although the labelling model originated in the
study of deviance, as argued in Chapter 7 it can be applied to identification
in general. Administrative allocation is a process of labelling, imbued with
organisational and administrative authority, in which positive and negative
stereotypes of particular categories are applied to individuals, systematically
influencing the distribution to them of resources and penalties.
IDENTITY AND MORALITY
Identificatory stereotypes are, therefore, consequential, affecting people’s
life-chances across a range of situations. But which stereotypes, and is
there consistency in their mobilisation? Some are obvious: gender, sexual
orientation, ethnicity, ‘race’, all of the usual suspects. Among the more
interesting are stereotypes of the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’. These
are typically concerned with attributes of lifestyle – cleanliness, thrift,
sobriety, honesty – many of which are understood to be visibly embodied,
encoded in appearance and demeanour. Allied to categorical distinctions
such as ‘rough/respectable’ and ‘reputable/disreputable’ (Ball 1970; Matza
1967), these are particularly applied to working-class people. With their
origins in nineteenth-century ideals of self-help and improvement, these
ideas and categories are implicated in the ideologies of free-market
192 categorisation and consequences

capitalism, and still constitute an influential thread in the formulation and
implementation of social policy in industrialised societies (Handler and
Hasenfeld 1991; Katz 1989).
Stereotypes of the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ are significant in
a number of respects. The research cited in previous paragraphs (see also
Hutson and Liddiard 1994; Jenkins 1983) suggests that in a variety of
allotropes they inform policy and administrative allocation in Europe,
North America and elsewhere. They are also conspicuous in everyday
common sense. This is a cumulative and consistent classificatory process
that is anything but trivial. Categorical boundaries are drawn that gloss
morality and identity on to each other in a forthright manner.
It is this moral register, resonating as it does with underlying notions
about fairness and justice, that makes these stereotypes so appropriate
to allocatory decision-making. From its own point of view, the process
appears, not as denial, but as a means of ensuring that the deserving are not
deprived of scarce resources by the undeserving. What is more, stereotypical
classifications such as these are sufficiently blunt to permit widespread
application, yet sufficiently discriminating to allow their discretionary
interpretation (and, as I have argued, the two things are not unconnected).
They are general collective categories that can be applied to individuals.
They are flexible, and adapt well to changing circumstances. They
can be mapped on to other stereotypes – such as gender or ‘race’ – to produce
cumulative and potent classifications of ineligibility and exclusion (Karn
1983: 170–173). They also resonate with homologous themes such as
the discourse of moral responsibility informing the modern medical model
of the patient (the ‘sick role’, as in Parsons 1951: 428–454).
However, stereotypical classification doesn’t only affect the disad-
vantaged, and it isn’t always disadvantageous. Nor do written examinations
or other formally ‘objective’ assessment procedures guarantee immunity
from the influence of stereotyping or discretion. Allocatory decision-
making is enormously consequential in education (Cicourel and Kitsuse
1963), and here too we find stereotyping and discretion. Bourdieu (1988:
194–208) analyses the relationship of generally mutual reinforcement
between the formal marks given to students’ written work and the
stereotypical professorial judgements of that work, as ‘clumsy’, ‘vigorous’,
‘brash’, ‘cultivated’ or whatever, and how this maps on to the cultural capital
of the student, as indicated by class background. Bourdieu argues that
‘social’ inputs (class) are converted into educational outputs (marks,
scholarships, university places) through the mediation of those stereotypical
categories of judgement. Stereotypes also come into play in the careful
descriptive qualification of formal results – the discretion – which the
categorisation and consequences 193

writing of references demands. Even if students have similar formal
achievements, their work – and their worth – may be evaluated differently
(another example of the difference between the nominal and the virtual).
Stereotypes enable classification to be euphemised as academic classification.
This is analogous to the way in which the various distinctions between the
‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ combine with procedurally correct
allocations of resources to represent collective classification as the just
satisfaction of legitimate individual ‘need’.
Stereotypical categories of allocatory judgement do not arise wholly, or
even mainly, within organisations. If they did they wouldn’t be such
common currency. Organisations aren’t self-contained. The classifications
that are evident in organisational categorisation are also mobilised and
developed outside organisations. Indeed they feed into allocatory processes
from the wider environment (which, of course, consists, in part, of other
organisations). Officials, managers, teachers, whomsoever: they have
histories, upbringings and backgrounds, they go home at the end of the
day, they read newspapers, and they talk to their friends. They live lives that
are more than organisational. The mass communication media – television,
cinema, the press, advertising – and the political institutions and arenas
of the state are significant frames of everyday life in the modern human
world. The media and politics are not innocent with respect to each other:
each feeds the other in the promotion and agitation of public discourses
and campaigns focusing upon particular issues and particular categories of
the population.
Some of these campaigns are familiar to us as ‘moral panics’, following
Stanley Cohen’s seminal account (1972) of the political demonisation of
working-class youth culture – ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ – in England in the
1960s (see also Critcher 2003; Goode and Ben-Yahuda 1994; Thompson
1998). However, the word ‘panic’ underplays the routine nature of many
of these processes and overestimates their drama. Becker’s notion of the
‘moral crusade’ (1963) is more downbeat, and has the virtue of emphasising
organisation and direction. However we describe them, these campaigns
are not new phenomena: the recurrent identification of working-class
youth as a threat, for example, has a considerable history (Pearson 1983).
Their volume, variety and pervasiveness have increased – and this is
doubtless something other than a mere increase in magnitude – but there
is a remarkable degree of historical continuity. These collective public
discourses affect what individuals do – in administrative allocation, for
example – and, in turn, they reflect individual behaviour. Hutson and
Liddiard’s account (1994) of the relationship between the construction
of ‘youth homelessness’ as an issue and the bureaucratic processing of the
194 categorisation and consequences

young homeless illustrates this interplay between ‘public issues’ and
‘personal troubles’.
Other identity categories that have been the subject and object of
public agitation in this way include black youth (Hall et al. 1978; Solomos
1988: 121–145), welfare recipients (Golding and Middleton 1982), homo-
sexuals and HIV-positive people in general (Cook and Colby 1992;
Fordham 2001; Watney 1988), young people organising and attending
‘raves’ (Critcher 2003: 48–63), immigrants (Pijpers 2006) and ‘terrorists’
(Rothe and Muzzatti 2004). Some public moral campaigns – dealing
with child abuse and paedophilia (Jenkins 1992) or satanism (Richardson
et al. 1991), for example – in addition to identifying deviant categories,
whether real or imaginary, dramatise and normalise institutions and
identities such as the family and Christianity. To re-emphasise that these
campaigns are not distinctively modern, a parallel can be drawn with
medieval and early-modern anti-Semitic public discourses, for example
(Dundes 1991; Hsia 1988). Other, more routine collective public discourses
– for example the signification of conventional gender roles – dramatise
and promote ‘normal’, positively valorised identities. These are generally
not crusades or panics, but, rather, ubiquitous themes in advertising,
cinema, literature and so on (Goffman 1979; McRobbie 1991).
IDENTITY AND NORMALITY
The identification and construction of the ‘normal’ has many facets.
Returning to administrative allocation, the role of testing is important in
this respect. Inspired in part by Foucault, Ian Hacking (1990) argues
convincingly that the notion of ‘normality’ is in large part a modern artefact
of the exponential growth of mathematics as a cultural discourse and
a way of understanding the world. The development of statistics trans-
formed the imprecise everyday probability of chance and experience into
a hard image of predictability, legitimated by science and suited to the
needs of bureaucracy. This facilitated the imperialism of increasingly
sophisticated and unforgivingly firm models of statistical ‘normality’. Hand
in glove with this went the elaboration of categories in general:
many of the facts presented by the bureaucracies did not even exist
ahead of time. Categories had to be invented into which people could
conveniently fall in order to be counted.
(Hacking 1990: 3)
The census of population – although it has antecedents in the empires
of antiquity – is a distinctive product of the modern state’s statistical
categorisation and consequences 195

governmentality that has had massive identificatory consequences (Kertzer
and Arel 2002). From colonial Africa and India to the contemporary US,
census and other population classifications have interacted in complex
ways with local collective identifications: reinforcing some, downgrading
some and inventing yet others, inspiring responses ranging from cynical
manipulation to resistance (Anderson and Fienburg 1999; Cohn 1988:
224–254; Lentz and Nugent 2000; Sundar 2000).
Censuses aside, the apparently aloof distance of statistical abstraction
doesn’t mean that mundane human life is unaffected. Hacking argues that
the science of statistics has created a powerful general framework for everyday
individual experience:
The normal stands indifferently for what is typical, the unenthusiastic
objective average, but it also stands for what has been, good health,
and for what shall be, our chosen destiny. That is why the benign and
sterile-sounding word ‘normal’ has become one of the most powerful
ideological tools of the twentieth century.
(Hacking 1990: 169)
One invented modern category – which definitively invokes ‘normality’
– is ‘mental retardation’ (in the US) or ‘learning difficulties’ (in the UK).
Where once some individuals were seen as ‘idiots’, ‘half-witted’ or what-
ever, a distinct population category has been created out of the diffuse
individual diversity of intellectual (in)competences (Jenkins 1998). While
its legitimacy is based in authoritative testing and psycho-medical
diagnosis, such coherence as this category possesses derives largely from
the treatment and services its members receive, rather than their ‘intrinsic’
collective characteristics (Trent 1994). Research in the USA by Mehan
et al. (1986) and Mercer (1973) suggests that testing may be pre-eminently
influential in the construction of individual institutional careers and
identities as ‘mentally retarded’. The symbolic power of the statistical
model of normality is such that internal individual differentiation is
submerged in a dominant categorisation of similarity, constituted in
relationship of difference vis-à-vis the rest of the population (whose
‘normality’ this classification simultaneously confirms). In the process, the
imagined has become anything but imaginary, and powerfully conse-
quential in the lives of individuals.
Hanson (1993), also drawing on Foucault, offers a further perspective on
testing. His concepts of authenticity tests and qualifying tests are broadly
homologous with ‘acceptability’ and ‘suitability’. Authenticity is concerned
with commitment, attitude, faith or whatever; qualification is largely a
196 categorisation and consequences

matter of competence or ability. Whereas the assessment of authenticity,
through procedures such as the ordeal, is documented throughout history,
Hanson, documenting the centrality of testing to much administrative
allocation in the contemporary United States, argues that the quantitative
assessment of qualification is distinctively modern.
Hacking and Hanson agree on the degree to which the categorising
effects of normality-assessment procedures frame the identification of
individuals and population categories. In the general contours of their
argument and in their debt to Foucault, they are not alone. Rose (1989)
argues, for example, that the twentieth century has seen the increasingly
authoritative (and authoritarian) social construction, by practitioners of
expert systems such as psychology, of a normalised model of responsible,
autonomous and ‘healthy’ selfhood. More generally, Cohen talks about
the ‘classified society’ (1985), Polsky the ‘therapeutic state’ (1991) and de
Swaan the ‘management of normality’ (1990).
In the historical background, imperialistic normalisation has roots
other than the statistical. The increasing centralisation of the nation-state,
beginning in Europe in the late eighteenth century, was manifest in the
codification of law, state education, language policies, public health reforms
and public welfare (de Swaan 1988). The standardisation, centralisation
and imposition of national identity (Calhoun 1997) went hand in hand
with programmes of cultural homogenisation. It’s not a coincidence that
one of the chosen vehicles of French cultural integration and the
modernisation of the state was called the Ecole Normale (E. Weber 1976:
303–338).
Finally, also with respect to historical background, it would be inappro-
priate to move on without pausing to remember the apotheosis – and the
nadir – of both the state categorisation of individuals and populations, and
the twentieth century’s elaboration of normality. The genocide of Nazi
Germany against Jews and gypsies, and its assault upon those of its own
citizens who were identified as ‘unfit’ in one sense or another, was rooted
in scientific models of the ‘normal’ and in diagnostic procedures; it
was, certainly in the first instance, in the hands of authoritative experts
(Burleigh and Wippermann 1991; Müller-Hill 1988). The process was
also thoroughly bureaucratised. It is chilling to recognise the continuity
between allocation procedures that determined whether or not individuals
should live and our own mundane procedures of employment recruitment
or educational assessment. As Bauman argues (1989), the Holocaust was
a definitively modern phenomenon – with lessons for today – rather than
an atavistic throwback to barbarism.
categorisation and consequences 197

IDENTITY AND CONSEQUENCES
Generally, organisations influence the identities of non-members through
categorisation during the allocation of resources and penalties. A broad
definition of resources, as something more than the commonsensically
material or economic, is implied here. While I have focused on admin-
istrative allocation – the exercise of legitimate bureaucratic authority
– resources and penalties can be allocated by other means. Typically
involving force, they are no less consequential for identification. However
achieved, the capacity of organisations to identify people – authoritatively
or powerfully, as individuals or collectively – and to make those
identifications ‘stick’ through the allocation of resources and penalties
should not be underestimated.
Identification and allocation are, in fact, mutually entailed in each other.
Identity is consequential in terms of allocation: how you are identified
may influence what, and how much, you get. Allocation is part of the
process that generates identification: being deprived of or given access to
particular resources is likely to colour the individual sense of what it means
to be an X or a Y. A shared experience of being treated in particular ways
may even generate a sense of collectivity where none existed before.
The significance of this lies in distinctions drawn in earlier chapters
between the virtual and the nominal, and between groups and categories.
Identification is consequential in everyday life. It is in those consequences
that what an identification means – whether individually or collectively
– is generated. Consequences vary from place to place, and epoch to
epoch, but in those consequences the virtualities of identification emerge.
What it was to be Jewish in Germany in the late 1930s was utterly different,
for example, from what it is to be Jewish in Israel in 2007. Nominally the
same, virtually different. Same name, different identity?
The reciprocation between identification and its consequences is in
large part established during the allocation of resources and penalties.
Organisationally, this may be allocation to members (internal) or to
non-members (external). It is, however, generally – perhaps necessarily
– organised and co-ordinated. It is in the consistency over time and across
organisations of (stereo)typifications of identification and patterns of
allocation that ‘structure’ – an organised pattern of relationships between
relatively stable collective identifications and the conditions of individual
lives – can be discerned in the human world.
Theoretical points about structure aside, the consequential nature
of identification must be central to our understanding of it. Alongside
internalisation – which in itself isn’t enough – the weight of consequences
198 categorisation and consequences

is the main experience of identification. Coming back to groups and
categories, this means that a collectivity or an individual can be categorised,
and that categorisation produce major consequences for them, without
their being fully aware of it (or aware at all). People with learning
difficulties, who as individuals may be unaware of their categorisation
(Davies and Jenkins 1996), are a case in point. Although there are particular
groups of people with learning difficulties – clubs, residential units, and
so on – in the largest sense they are a category, not a group. That category
is a reality for the ‘rest of society’, however, and its consequences are real
for people with learning difficulties and their families.
Another possibility is that group members may know that they are
nominally categorised by the Ys as Xs – indeed X may be what they call
themselves – without understanding the consequences, the virtualities,
of that categorisation. This is common in times of change. Many German
Jews, for example, took a long time to realise the implications for them
of National Socialist racial policies: that a census classification had
become massively and fatally consequential. This example further illus-
trates how consequences can eventually feed into self-identification,
through internalisation. The post-1945 history of Israel – and of Jewish
people the world over – has been a painful working-through of the
internalisation of the Holocaust, a reworking and historicisation
of individual and collective experience in the construction of new Jewish
identities (Hartman 1994; Kaplan 1994). That this process has also had
consequences for how another group, the Palestinians, identify themselves
and are identified by others is further support for the arguments of this
chapter. Identification is never unilateral, never isolated and never without
its consequences.
Organisational processes of identification take many forms, from the
mundane to the terrible. How, and how much, they shape our lives – who
we are, and our experiences of being who we are – is arguably specific
to, and characteristic of, the modern world. In the closing chapter I will
briefly return to some of the questions about modernity and identity that
were raised in Chapter 3.
categorisation and consequences 199

16
IDENTITY AND MODERNITY
REVISITED
In the opening chapters of this book, I argued that identity and
identification are ubiquitous, generic aspects of human life that we need to
understand in order to do sociology. They are also strategic concepts for the
sociological project of understanding better the relationship between
individuality and collectivity. I went on to propose that:
• the human world as we know it would be an impossible creation without
a sophisticated and extensive ability to know and communicate who’s
who and what’s what;
• identification and identity are thus nothing new; and
• individual and collective concerns about identity and identification
aren’t definitively modern either: the increased volume of discourse
about these aspects of what it is to be human are at least in part a
reflection of increased global chatter in general.
Throughout the rest of the book, there is a further consistent thread of
argumentation to the effect that:
• identification is an interaction between relationships of similarity
and of difference;
• individual and collective identity are as much an interactional product
of ‘external’ identification by others as of ‘internal’ self-identification;
and

• identity is produced and reproduced both in discourse – narrative,
rhetoric and representation – and in the practical, often very material,
consequences of identification.
Putting all of the above together, whichever way we look at it identification
matters, to people in their everyday lives and to sociology and the other
social sciences.
The matter can’t quite be left there, however. In particular the
modernity, or otherwise, of identity requires some further discussion. In
Chapter 3, while arguing that ‘doing identification’ was a generic human
characteristic, I also insisted that modern times meant modern concerns
about identity and modern processes of identification. This proposition
needs to have a little more flesh put on its bones.
THE RATIONALITIES OF MODERNITY
Despite my consistent argument for a balanced understanding of
identification as an internal–external dialectic, Chapter 15 emphasised the
external moment of that dialectic. To revisit the distinction between
interests and identity, that argument owed something to Foucault and
much to Weber’s vision of the ‘iron cage’1 of modern life, in which the
capitalist ‘care for material goods’ and the demands of rational conduct
and bureaucratic organisation diminish the human spirit to a point beyond
despair (M. Weber 1976: 181). Whereas in Chapter 3, criticising Giddens,
I argued that reflexive self-identification, far from being distinctively
modern, is a generic aspect of being human, in Chapter 15 I suggested
that, if anything, it is the power of categorisation – the subjugation of the
internal moment of identification by the external – that characterises
the modern human world. It is this suggestion that I intend to explore
further in closing.
This isn’t the place to discuss comprehensively Weber’s contribution
to our understanding of rationality and modernity (see Brubaker 1984;
Ray and Reed 1994; Schroeder 1992: 112–140; Whimster and Lash 1987).
However, if we do find ourselves in an iron cage – and I don’t for one moment
believe that we do – it’s clear that Weber intended us to understand that,
in large part, we have manufactured the cage and imprisoned ourselves
within it. The impositions of modern bureaucracy are both external and
internal. To say this, however, begs two fundamental questions:
• How constraining and imposing is bureaucracy (and, by extension,
modern government)?; and
• How rational is it?
identity and modernity revisited 201

There are a number of complementary grounds for scepticism about the
existence, let alone the penal efficiency, of the bureaucratic cage.
The first can be found in the impressive body of social science research
on formal organisations, from Gouldner (1954) onwards. Weber massively
underestimated the capacity of individuals to subvert the formal ratio-
nalities – objectives and procedures – of bureaucracies. This applies as much
to those who work in bureaucracies as to those who otherwise deal with
them. The sources of this resistance include the ‘rational’ pursuit of other,
non-organisational interests and objectives, the boredom and distress
engendered by over-routinisation, and the self-expressive refusal to accept
organisational categorisation (which can be put in other words as the
expression of selfhood). Generations of managers have wrestled with these
problems, and generations of management consultants and trainers have
made a living offering solutions to them. None of them has been more
than partially successful.
The second point is related. Formality and informality cannot be
separated other than conceptually. Each is a presence and an absence in the
other: each needs the other to make sense (Harding and Jenkins 1989:
133–138). Formal procedures of necessity bring the informal with them,
for a number of reasons, of which the recurrent need to by-pass bureau-
cratic formality simply in order to get things done and the fact that not
everything can be legislated for are only the most obvious. Weber defined
the ‘formal rationality of economic action’, which was for him at the heart
of bureaucracy, as:
the degree to which the provision for needs . . . is capable of being
expressed in numerical, calculable terms, and is so expressed.
(Weber 1978: 85)
This is the realm of allocation and diagnostic testing, discussed in
Chapter 15. However, not everything is amenable to quantification. Not
everything is susceptible to formal rationalisation. Nor are efficiency
and formal rationality necessarily the same thing (Ritzer 2004).
A further related point concerns organisational size and complexity:
these are significant in the construction (or not) of the iron cage. Size is
a function of number of employees, number of transactions, volume of
business, and spatial extension. Complexity relates to spatial pattern-
ing, relations with the external environment and specialisation of the
division of labour. Size and complexity are inter-related. As size and/or
complexity increase, the more irresistible one might imagine the impetus
towards formal rationalisation. Paradoxically, however, the bigger and more
202 identity and modernity revisited

complex the organisation, the more nooks and crannies are created in which
its members can evade monitoring, the greater the potential and oppor-
tunity for the disruption of formal rationality, and the more difficult it
becomes to rationalise and communicate procedures. Large, complex
systems have their own special problems of coherence and consistency that
are countervailing tendencies with respect to rationalisation.
Formal rationalisation is demanding of actors in terms of cognitive and
interactional competences. Fortunately, however, incompetence of both
kinds is widespread and there are limits to the remedies and corrections
that can be applied by training and education. Further, we must not forget
one of the very few sociological laws of relatively universal application:
Sod’s Law, under and in a variety of different names and formulations,
predicts that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. I would, personally,
want to add a codicil to the effect that everything can go wrong. The com-
bination of everyday incompetence with Sod’s Law is a powerful obstacle
to successful rationalisation.
Comfort can also be taken from the fact that even within the most
efficiently rationalised bureaucracy many things other than organisational
procedures and objectives influence what people do. The ‘irrational’
dimensions of everyday life – for example symbolism, myth, notions of
fate or luck, sexuality, religious or other ideologies, ethnic attachments,
emotional ups and downs, and so on – are ubiquitous and significant, within
organisations no less than in other walks of everyday life. Furthermore,
as organisations with boundaries, memberships and recruitment processes,
bureaucracies are themselves constitutive of all the devices and enchant-
ments – rituals, symbols, ésprit de corps, history and so on – which, as we
saw in Chapter 11, are implicated in collective identification. Upon close
examination, rationalised bureaucracies are, in important respects, strik-
ingly similar to the ‘pre-modern’ human worlds which anthropologists
have in the past claimed as their special domains of expertise. Although
the use of a term such as ‘pre-modern’ is problematic – it is potentially, if
not downright, misleading – it serves to emphasise that formal bureaucratic
organisations are no less under the sway of enchantments than other,
less ‘rationalised’ areas of everyday life.
None of these arguments should distract us from acknowledging
the harsh organisational facts of life, or the realities of inequality and
stratification in the modern world. The inefficiencies of organisational
procedure can be as much a burden as a liberation. Not everyone is equally
well placed to resist the compulsion and degradation that many organ-
isational hierarchies routinely inflict on their members, particularly those
at the bottom of the heap. The capacity to exercise self-determination
identity and modernity revisited 203

– whether individually or collectively – is systematically related to wealth,
in terms of both material and other resources, and market position.
The power of formal rationality should thus no more be underestimated
than the power of enchantment. Be that as it may, however, the com-
plexities of modern human life don’t run smoothly, mechanically or
predictably. Any organisational ‘system’ – and the larger it is, the more this
will be true – is so creaky, so partial, and contingent upon so much else,
that there is always room for some manoeuvre, space for some self-
determination and some holes to slip through.
Good, but what has all this to do with identification? In the first place,
it emphasises the ‘built-in’ constraints on the capacity of organisations
– and governments – to impose their categorisations on their members or
others. In the second, it suggests that humans, from their point of view
of embodied reflexive selfhood and possessing the capacity to choose among
alternatives, are likely to be persistently resistant to categorisation. If
there is such a thing as ‘human nature’ (Jenkins 2002a: 115–119), this is
one area in which to look for it. This is something fundamentally impor-
tant, of which Weber, for example, wasn’t sufficiently aware. Individuals
and groups will assert their own sense of who and what they are. They
may not always be successful, but that’s not the point. Nor does the fact
that resistance often appears to be a response to categorisation undermine the
point: if the notion of ‘the internal–external dialectic’ is an approximation
of how identification works, how could matters be otherwise?
It isn’t just organisational categorisation that matters, either. Human
beings are wont to resist categorisation in all sorts of ways, and whatever
its source. Everyday life is the site of the most mundane and possibly the
most important resistance. In terms of name and treatment, and in however
modest a manner, human individuals assert themselves. Even the expression
– asserting themselves – is telling. They may only do so ‘in their heads’,
mindful of threat and constraint, waiting for a better day (even though that
day may never come), but that is still something. This is not to present
a naïvely idealised and utopian vision of the human spirit: it can be broken,
and the body with it. But the point is not only that it has to be broken, in
extremis, for complete domination, but that the costs of doing so generally
frustrate the point of the exercise.
Collectively, spontaneous resistance can manifest itself in many different
ways. Riot and protest, withdrawal of labour, uprising on the plantation,
sullen minimal co-operation, the interactional refusal to recognise the
oppressor: the possibilities are many and obvious. Organised resistance is
also a multi-headed creature: neighbourhood groups and political move-
ments and parties; persistent and delicate lobbying and non-violent mass
204 identity and modernity revisited

civil disobedience; anonymous leaflets, newspapers and satellite television
broadcasts; assassination, guerrilla tactics and full-scale armed mobilisation.
And means and ends may be thoroughly implicated in each other.
Resistance, whether spontaneous or not, can be a potent affirmation of
group identification; organising is necessarily so.
We can, however, only resist categorisation if we know that we are being
categorised. One development that may be definitive of the early twenty-
first century is the massive expansion and extension of individual and
population surveillance and monitoring that has been made possible
by new information technologies and science (e.g. Norris et al. 2004; Norris
and Wilson 2006). Politically legitimated by collective crises of security
inspired by new forms of political violence, this ‘new surveillance’ may
also serve other more routine and long-term state projects. We are being
recorded, categorised and archived by organisations in the public and
private sectors, in ways of which we may only be dimly, if at all, aware,
and with which we are increasingly required to collude in the pursuit of our
routine everyday lives.
With resonant echoes of Foucault’s image of the Panopticon (1979:
195–228), these new technologies of ‘social sorting’ (Lyon 2003) have
consequences for private troubles and public issues, for individual fates and
collective fortunes, and add an extra layer of meaning to the notion of the
‘examined life’. Although they have longstanding non-digital ancestries
(Caplan and Torpey 2002; Cole 2001; Kertzer and Arel 2002; Torpey
2000), the technologies concerned – from traffic cameras, to DNA profiling,
to ultra high-speed, high-capacity computerised databanks, to retina
biometrics – have all been developed relatively recently.
In every respect, these technologies offer eloquent testimony to the
escalating, and possibly epoch defining, centrality of categorisation to
modern organisational practices of governance and ruling. In the possi-
bilities that they offer for behavioural profiling, social network modelling
and information sharing between organisations, they may also be creating
something that is qualitatively different from previous bureaucratic
surveillance and record keeping. Because they are made and run by humans
– and, therefore, as vulnerable to ‘whatever can go wrong will go wrong’
as anything else – we should, of course, not overestimate their efficiency.
Nor, however, should we simply take for granted that they are more of the
same old stuff. The jury is still out.
To return to the distinction between interests and identification one last
time, struggles over the allocation of resources and resistance to cate-
gorisation are, by virtue of the fact that identification is consequential, one
identity and modernity revisited 205

and the same thing. Weber ended The Protestant Ethic by enjoining us to
avoid either one-sided materialism or equally one-sided idealism in our
attempts to understand collective life and individual behaviour. That
remains good advice today: human beings – blessed with sociable natures
and dignified by a spirited embodiment – demand nothing less. Whether
or not there is an explicit call to arms in these terms, something that can
be called self-assertion – or ‘human spirit’ – is at the core of resistance
to domination. It may ebb to the point of invisibility, but it remains
a consistent thread in human life. It is as intrinsic, and as necessary, to that
life as the socialising tyranny of routine, everyday categorisation. The
internal and the external moments of identification loop in and out of each
other in the unfolding of individual and collective identities. And although
those identities are imagined, they are not imaginary.
206 identity and modernity revisited

NOTES
1 IDENTITY MATTERS
1 This quotation, from a conference paper by the historian Peter Read,
can be found in Gardiner-Garden (2000). I am deeply indebted to an
anonymous publisher’s referee for bring it to my attention.
2 This is a précis of a news item in the Guardian, 10 October 2007, written
by John Hooper.
3 See Jenkins 2006; Ruane and Todd 2004; and the 2003 debate between
Brubaker and Calhoun in the journal Ethnicities (Brubaker 2003; 2003a,
2003b).
2 SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE
1 On ‘generic sociology’ as the intellectual home of social anthropology and
social psychology, as well as sociology, see Jenkins (2002a: 22–27).
3 A SIGN OF THE TIMES?
1 See, in particular, Castells (2003). An author who takes a somewhat
different point of view, arguing that the overload or saturation that modern
life imposes on us has, if anything, made the self more insular and less
rather than more accessible, is Gergen (2000).
4 UNDERSTANDING IDENTIFICATION
1 On ‘everyday thinking’, see Billig et al. (1988); on the relationship between
sociology and ‘common sense’, see Jenkins (2002a: 27–38); on ‘common
knowledge’, see Chwe (2001).
2 ‘Intersubjectivity’ is the subject of a specialised and complex literature in
philosophy and social theory (e.g. Crossley 1996; Schutz 1967: 97–138;
Williams 2000: 80–100). In this book I use the term as shorthand to remind

us that, the philosophical problem of ‘other minds’ notwithstanding (see
the discussion in Chapter 4), meanings and understandings are to some
extent shared, and can to some extent be communicated, between people
in the everyday human world. This doesn’t imply agreement or consensus
or perfect cognitive equivalence, but without some sharing there wouldn’t
even be minimal mutual intelligibility.
3 See Connerton 1989; Fentress and Wickham 1992; Hobsbawm and Ranger
1983; and Samuel and Thompson 1990.
5 SELFHOOD AND MIND
1 The following are all worth a look: Breakwell 1992; Burkitt 1991; Carrithers
et al. 1985; Carruthers 1986; Erikson 1968; Finkelstein 1991; Freeman 1993;
Gergen 2000; Heelas and Lock 1981; Morris 1991, 1994; Rorty 1976;
Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984; and a thematic issue of History of the
Human Sciences (vol. 7, no. 2, May 1994) dedicated to ‘Identity, Self and
Subject’.
2 This may put the ontological questions into quarantine, but it doesn’t
deport them from my argument. However, I had to start somewhere and
this seemed to be the most modest position to adopt.
3 Such a framework would be a more general version of the model of
identification which I develop here.
4 For social anthropology from a mutualist viewpoint, see Carrithers (1992).
5 Joas (1985) is an intellectual biography of Mead that discusses his
relationship to Cooley and other pragmatist thinkers.
6 On the affinities between Marx and Mead, see Goff (1980).
6 EMBODIED SELVES
1 Although I suspect that Ryle would have dismissed Mead’s model as an
example of the absurd notion of the person as ‘some sort of committee’
(Ryle 1963: 181).
2 An idea that runs from Dewey all the way to Habermas (Thompson 1982).
3 This point is very obvious and not original (e.g. Parsons 1963: 34).
4 I’m not ignoring the ubiquity of ‘mental health problems’ here. The
acute/serious personality disorders to which I refer are, however, relatively
uncommon, and are on a continuum, towards the other end of which are
‘most people, most of the time’.
5 I am grateful to John Parker, my former colleague at Swansea, for the
insights and some of the phrasing of this paragraph.
208 notes

7 ENTERING THE HUMAN WORLD
1 The bibliography in Poole’s article is indispensable for anyone interested
in the matters that are being discussed here.
2 One – regrettably unrealistic – assumption that I make here is the routine
availability of adequate nutrition for the infant.
3 See Goodman 1964; Heskin 1980: 132–134; Milner 1983; Phinney and
Rotherham 1987; Troyna and Hatcher 1992; van Ausdale and Feagin 2001.
8 SELF-IMAGE AND PUBLIC IMAGE
1 Also known as the ‘social reaction’ perspective.
2 And Becker’s concept of the ‘secret deviant’ (1963: 20) is, even within the
labelling perspective’s own terms, a contradiction.
9 GROUPS AND CATEGORIES
1 The author of this encyclopaedia entry is Michael Banton.
2 I could at this point have mentioned, for example, the classificatory
schemes of medicine. These, however, are, by definition, intervention-
oriented, and generally consequential for those on the receiving end.
3 Both examples cited are historically associated with administration and
government. African ‘tribal’ identities were at least in part the product of
colonial government (e.g. Igoe 2006; Lentz and Nugent 2000), while social
class has been a conceptual tool of government in industrial societies since
the nineteenth century. Both are important in population monitoring and
censuses.
4 Although this is how Marx’s idea is generally referred to, I haven’t been
able to find, in the major texts by Marx (or Engels) that I have to hand, this
exact form of words. The closest is a passage in The Poverty of Philosophy
(1847) discussing the English working class:
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of
the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this
mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already
a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which
we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass becomes united
and constitutes itself as a class for itself
(Marx 1975: 159–160)
5 Useful summaries can be found in Abrams and Hogg 2004; Hewstone
et al. 2002; Hogg and Abrams 1988: 1–30; 2003; Skevington and Baker
1989; and Turner 1996. For an important alternative view, see Billig (1996).
notes 209

6 Although it is probably unfair to single out anyone from the field in respect
of this criticism, see Hogg (1996) for an example of what I mean.
10 BEYOND BOUNDARIES
1 Barth studied at Chicago during the late 1940s. His theoretical works,
particularly Models of Social Organisation (1966) and Ethnic Groups and
Boundaries (1969), acknowledge Goffman’s influence. Hughes taught
Goffman at Chicago; his essay ‘The Study of Ethnic Relations’, published
in 1948 (Hughes 1994: 91–96), strikingly anticipates many of Barth’s
later arguments.
2 Although it could as easily be a reference to Merton (1957: 421), who calls
W. I. Thomas’s dictum about the relationship between social beliefs
and social reality the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.
3 Because of space constraints I have underplayed Barth’s stature as
a working ethnographer: he has undertaken field research in Norway,
Kurdistan, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, New Guinea, Oman, Bali and Bhutan.
Although he is among the most acutely theoretical of anthropologists,
Barth’s ideas have always been hammered out on the anvil of empirical
research, which is what he takes to be the core task of social science:
What we . . . need is not a deductive theory of what these [social]
systems will be but exploratory procedures to discover what they are:
what degree of order and form they show in each particular situation
in question. This needs to be discovered and described, not defined
and assumed.
(Barth 1992: 25)
11 SYMBOLISING BELONGING
1 No less interesting, Cohen seems to have moderated his ‘excessive’
opposition to the notion of negotiable boundaries; see, for example, Cohen
(2000: 150–154).
2 And its analogues in other languages.
3 See Arlacchi 1983, 1986; Blok 1974; Gambetta 1993; Sabetti 1984; Schneider
and Schneider 1976.
4 See Anderson 1978, 1993; Hannerz 1969; Liebow 1967; MacLeod 1987;
Rainwater 1973.
5 In his discussion of ideal types, Weber was attempting to explain the
role in the analytical process of the point of view (including the value
orientations) of the historian or the sociologist. He wasn’t trying to
banish values and points of view, in the futile pursuit of ‘objectivity’; he
was, rather, trying to make them more visible.
210 notes

6 Although there is no space to deal with it here, Schutz also discusses our
knowledge of our predecessors and our successors.
12 PREDICTABILITY
1 My use of Fortes here doesn’t mean that I accept his arguments in the
paper cited about altruism, or the centrality to the emergence of humans
as ‘cultured’ beings of the development of the institution of fatherhood.
Nor, however, should one reject these arguments out of hand.
13 INSTITUTIONALISING IDENTIFICATION
1 I have avoided the word ‘culture’ where possible throughout this book,
because of the multiplicity of contested meanings attached to the word,
because of its capacity for reifying everyday lived experience, and in a desire
to avoid the culture/society dichotomy, which makes little sense and
smuggles in further dichotomies – such as thinking/doing or mind/body
– which are at least as problematic (see Jenkins 2002a: 51–54).
2 There is an analogous problem in Berger and Luckmann’s work with respect
to their neglect of embodiment as the site of the point of view of selfhood.
3 This is another expression that I owe to John Parker, formerly of the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Swansea
(see also note 5, Chapter 6).
4 Most of the literature addressing organisations from a broadly sociological
point of view has only limited relevance here. Among the interesting
exceptions are Blau and Scott (1963), Alvesson (1993), Herzfeld (1993) and
Silverman (1970).
14 ORGANISING IDENTIFICATION
1 A third important contribution that organisations make to identification,
which space constraints exclude from consideration here, is the process
whereby positions and functions are produced (designed) as ‘offices’
– abstract positions in the network – before they are occupied by actual
incumbents.
2 Much the same distinction is intended by Nadel, in contrasting the
‘contingent’ and the ‘achieved’, and ‘recruitment roles’ and ‘achievement
roles’ (1957: 36). One could widen the net to suggest that anthropo-
logically familiar distinctions between ‘incorporation’ and ‘alliance’ (Leach
1961: 21), or ‘incorporation’ and ‘transaction’ (Barth 1966: 4, 23–24), are
addressing the same theme.
3 The ordeal has a long history (Bartlett 1986) as an arbiter of guilt and
innocence, producing an identity transformation from ‘suspect’ to either
notes 211

‘innocent’ or ‘guilty’. Systematic torture may, at least in part, be interpreted
as a relatively modern grafting onto procedural judgement of the organ-
isational need for reasons that is manifest in the quest for confession (Peters
1985).
15 CATEGORISATION AND CONSEQUENCES
1 None of what I say here is a denial of the authenticity of ‘mental health
problems’ (see note 4, Chapter 6).
2 For simplicity’s sake I am ignoring here the publicly funded voluntary
sector, and housing associations in particular.
16 IDENTITY AND MODERNITY
1 In deference to Weber’s original language, see Chalcraft’s discussion of
the appropriateness of Parsons’ translation (1994: 29–32).
212 notes

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Abrams, D. 37, 43, 113, 114, 115, 209
acceptability, recruitment criteria of
177–8, 189–91
achieved identity 172–83
acquired identity 172–83
administrative allocation 188–92
adulthood 80–1
age, as a criterion of identification
1–2, 76–81, 84–9
alienation 51, 132
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Alvesson, M. 211
Amit, V. 133
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Barth, F. 7, 19, 23, 40, 42, 44, 87, 116,
118–31, 134, 137, 140, 141, 148, 152,
153, 161, 164, 210, 211
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Barton, D. 133
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Batley, R. 188
Bauman, Z. 25, 133, 197
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209
Beghley, M. 79
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Bell, D. 176
Bellah, R. N. 133
Bendle, M. F. 36
Benhabib, S. 19, 20, 22
Ben-Yahuda, N. 194
Berger, P. L. 40, 46, 69, 92, 152,
158–63, 211
Bernardi, B. 174
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Berthoud, R. 192
Beynon, H. 190
Billig, M. 115, 116, 153, 207, 209
Blackburn, R. M. 190
Blau, P.M. 211
Blok, A. 210
Blokland, T. 133
Blumer, H. 63
Boissevain, J. 170
Boon, J. A. 18
boundaries, of collective
identification 3–4, 10–12,
118–31, 132–47, 150–5, 157,
169–71
INDEX

Bourdieu, P. 10, 40, 42, 46, 56, 93,
104, 118, 140, 142, 143, 150, 157,
158,
165, 193
Bourhis, R. Y. 104, 112
Breakwell, G. 208
Brewer, M. B. 37, 43, 113
British identity 26
Brown, R. 37, 43, 113
Brubaker, R. 6, 8–14, 36, 105, 109,
126, 201, 207
Bryan, D. 174, 176
Bulmer, M. 136
bureaucracy 107, 169–83, 184–99,
201–6
Burkitt, I. 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 208
Burleigh, M. 75, 197
Burns, T. 90, 94
Burton, J. W. 107
Butler, J. 19, 22, 23
Calhoun, C. 10, 197, 207
Campbell, J. 48
Cannadine, D. 176
Caplan, J. 205
Capozza, D. 37, 43, 113
Carrithers, M. 35, 65, 208
Carruthers, P. 208
Castells, M. 207
categorisation 12, 42–5, 47–8, 82–3,
102–118, 123–4, 125, 140–2,
184–99, 204–6; as fundamental to
identification 12, 43–5, 77–9, 82–3,
102–18
category, defined 43, 105–6, 120
census of population 195–6
Chalcraft, D. 212
childhood, development of
identification in 41, 76–81,
84–9; ‘new’ sociology of 41, 80,
81
choice 42, 51–2, 92, 118–20, 125, 158–9
Christensen, P. x, 80
Chwe, M. S-Y. 175, 207
Cicchetti, D. 79
Cicourel, A. V. 98, 192, 193
Clark, G. 55
class 31, 43, 107, 109, 110–1, 130, 133,
176, 190–2, 209 (see also
stratification)
classification 45, 47, 142–4, 150–1,
184–99
Cockburn, D. 75
Cohen, Abner 135, 154, 176
Cohen, Anthony P. 23, 40, 44, 51,
53–4, 69, 129, 134–41, 148, 149,
152, 160,
161, 174, 210
Cohen, R. 126
Cohen, S. 188, 194, 197
Cohen, Y. 129
Cohn, B. 196
Colby, D. C. 195
Cole, S. A. 205
collective identification, its
relationship to individual
identification 5–12, 16–18, 34–5,
37–48, 60–2, 69–73, 82–3, 84–8,
99–101, 102–17, 118–31, 132–47,
156–61, 163–8, 171–83, 187–92,
200
Collins, R. 58–9, 65, 90
Collinson, D. L. 173, 190, 191
Collmann, J. 188
common sense, relationship to
sociology 38–9, 69, 207
community 23, 44, 132–47, 148
‘community care’ 136
Comte, A. 156
Condor, S. 116
conformity 149–51
Connerton, P.
consequences, their centrality to
identification 43, 44–5, 95–101,
140–1, 184–99, 179–206
consumption 28–30
Cook, T. E. 195
Cooley, C. H. 31, 40, 57–58, 61–2, 63,
65, 73
Cooper, F. 9, 13, 14, 36, 109, 126
Corsaro, W. A. 80
Costa, J. 28
Coulson, M. 165
Craib, I. 51–2, 53, 65, 66, 69
Crisp, R. J. 114
Critcher, C. 194, 195
Crossley, N. 207
Crow, G. 133
culture 17, 20, 24, 25, 44, 69, 119–33,
134–44, 211
index 239

Curran, M. M. 190, 191
‘cyber identity’ 2, 68
Dalley, G. 192
Damon, W. 82
Davies, C. A. 100, 108, 199
Davies, N. 32
death 2, 17
Deaux, K. 115
decision-making 42, 51–2, 92. 118–20,
125, 158–9
Delanty, G. 133
Derrida, J. 19
Deschamps, J.-C. 115
de Swaan, A. 197
deviance 42–3, 95–9, 149–51, 185,
192–5
Devos, T. 115
Dewey, J. 56, 208
diagnostic testing 188–9, 190. 195–7
difference 16–27, 30–6, 38, 49, 69–73,
82–3, 102–3, 118–31, 132, 135,
137–8, 140–2, 152–3, 157, 170
Dinka (Sudanese ethnic group)
106–7, 108
disability 72, 74–6, 100, 108, 190
discourse theory 37, 115
diversity 25, 32–3
domination, modes of 149–50
Donzelot, J. 107
Douglas, M. 96, 142, 143, 150, 153,
181, 195–7, 199
Doyal, L. 133
du Gay, P. 19
Dundes, A. 195
Dunn, J. 70
Durkheim, E. 24, 51, 57, 58, 59, 63, 65,
104, 132, 135, 142, 156, 175
duties 164–6
Eglin, P. 105
Eiser, J. R. 153
embodiment 26, 39–40, 41, 42, 46,
48, 60–73, 74–6, 78–9, 82–8,
91–5, 127, 131, 142–4, 156–7,
161–3, 171–3, 176–83
emotion 6, 51–2, 65–7, 69, 85, 86, 87,
173–7, 203
Engels, F. 59
English identity 26, 122
epistemology 52–9, 92, 138
Epstein, A. L. 87
equal opportunity 178
ethnicity 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 11–12, 14,
19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 28, 44, 70, 75,
87–8, 116, 118–31, 133, 146; as a
primary identification 70, 75, 87–8
Erickson, F. 192
Eriksen, T. H. 124, 176
Erikson, E. H. 61, 208
Erikson, R. 107
Esler, P. F. 33
Etzioni, A. 133
European Union 26
Evens, T. M. S. 124
experience, as central to identification
11, 42–3, 44–5, 97–101, 106–9,
161–3, 172–7, 181–3, 184–99
Farr, J. 133
Feagin, J. R. 209
feminism 19, 28, 29, 34, 35, 83
Fentress, J. 208
Fienburg, S. E. 196
Finkelstein, J. 208
Firth, R. 119
Fiske, S. T. 152
Fitzgerald, R. 105
Flett, H. 191
Fordham, G. 195
formality 161–8, 169–83, 187–97,
201–5
Fortes, M. 151, 211
Foucault, M. 45, 107, 108, 142, 195,
196, 205
Fournier, M. 29
Frazer, J. G. 151
Freeman, M. 208
Freud, S. 34, 63, 65, 66, 67
Fur (Sudanese ethnic group) 120
Gambetta, D. 210
Gardiner-Garden, J. 207
gay identity 2, 3, 19, 26, 31, 100, 195
Geertz, C. 118, 126, 135
gender 19, 21, 28, 29, 31, 41, 70, 72,
78–9, 82–3, 84–6, 87, 127, 130,
171, 172, 190–1, 192, 193, 195; as a
primary identification 41, 70,
82–3, 172
240 index

‘generalised other’ 41, 63–4
German identity 121
Gibson, J. J. 78
Giddens, A. 34, 39, 41, 46, 61, 64, 65,
66, 85, 90, 94, 188, 201
Gill, O. 191
Gillett, G. 56
Gilroy, P. 19, 21
Gledhill, J. 150
globalisation 20, 28–30, 32–3
Gluckman, M. 135, 176
Goff, T. W. 208
Goffman, E. 19, 31, 39, 40, 42, 44, 78,
89, 90–7, 99, 116, 119, 122, 123,
126, 128, 149, 164, 165, 170, 181,
195, 210
Golding, P. 195
Goldstein, J. 8
Goldthorpe, J. H. 107
Good, J. M. M. 56
Goode, R. 194
Goodman, M. E. 209
Gordon, D. M. 190
Gough, I. 133
Gouldner, A. W. 1202
Gove, W. R. 96
Grimes, R. L. 175
groups 8–12, 23, 43–5, 102–17, 118–31,
132–47, 169–83; defined 8, 9, 43,
104; as fundamental to
identification 43–5, 82–3, 102–17
Gubrium, J. F. 170
Gumperz, J. J. 84
Gutmann, A. 19
Haaland, G. 120
Habermas, J. 208
habit 42, 92–3, 122, 158–61
habitus 42, 56, 93
Hacking, I. 40, 45, 107, 195, 196, 197
Hakken, D. 68
Hall, S. 19, 20, 22, 195
Hallam, E. 17
Handelman, D. 176, 188
Handler, J. F. 193
Hannerz, U. 33, 210
Hanson, F. A. 188, 196–7
Harding, P. 188, 202
Harré, R. 31, 50, 56, 66, 78
Harris, C. C. 86
Harris, R. 174
Hart, D. 82
Hartman, G. 199
Hasenfeld, Y. 188, 191
Hatcher, R. 209
Heelas, P. 208
Herzfeld, M. 189, 211
Heskin, K. 209
Hester, S. 105
Hewstone, M. x, 37, 43, 113, 114, 209
Hill, M. 189
Hirst, P. 75
Hobsbawm, E. 208
Hockey, J. 17, 81
Hogg, M. A. 37, 43, 113, 114, 209, 210
Hollis, M. 51, 72, 91, 94
Holocaust, the 197, 199
Holstein, J. A. 170
Holy, L. 86, 126
homosexual identity 2, 3, 19, 26, 31,
100, 195
Honneth, A. 65
Hope, K. 107
housing market 191–2
Housley, W. 105
Howard, J. A. 30
Howe, L. E. A. 192
Howell, S. 139
Hsia, R.P. 195
Hughes, E. 19, 23, 96, 119, 185, 210
human nature 36, 64–5, 70, 76–82,
206
human-ness, as a primary
identification 41, 74–6, 85–6, 87
Hutchinson, S. 107
Hutson, S. 193, 194
‘I’ and ‘me’, relationship between
40–1, 62–8,
ideal types 144–7, 148, 158
identity, basic definition of 5, 16–8; as
prerequisite of the human world
26–7, 62, 151; as basis for
predictable interaction 148–55; as
key to the structuration debate 16,
46–7
ideology 14, 23, 136
Ignatieff, M. 133
Igoe, J. 32, 209
impression management 42, 93–5
index 241

improvisation, during social
interaction 42, 92–3
incest taboo 151
individual identification 37–41, 60–73,
74–81, 82, 90–101, 102, 112–7;
relationship to collective
identification, 5–12, 46–7, 60–2,
69–73, 82–3, 86–8, 99–101,
102–17, 118, 131, 132–47, 156–61,
163–8, 169–83, 187–92
individualism 24–6, 37–40, 124–6
infanticide 75
informality 188–9, 201–5
institutionalisation 39, 43–5, 148–51,
153–5, 156–68; of identification
43–5, 156–68
institutions, defined 43–5, 157
interaction order 39, 42–3, 89, 92
interests, pursuit of 7–8, 124, 205–6
internal-external dialectic of
identification 40–8, 50–2, 56–9,
60–4, 71, 73, 76, 78, 81, 83, 84, 86,
93–5, 98, 103, 111, 115, 121, 123,
125–8, 131, 140–4, 153–5, 163–6,
172–3, 198–9, 200, 201–5
intersubjectivity 39, 70–1, 106, 158,
159, 207–8
interviews, in organisational
recruitment 181–2, 189–90
Irigary, L. 19–20
Islamic identity 4–5
Italy 4–5
Jackson, J. A. 165
Jacobsen, L. 98
James, Adrian L. 80
James, Allison x, 80, 81, 88
James, W. 31, 56, 62
Jameson, F. 35
Jarman, N. 176
Jenkins, P. 195
Jenkins, R. 10, 17, 24, 38, 39, 42, 48,
52, 55, 61, 70, 82, 87, 100, 103,
108, 116, 119, 124, 126, 127, 133,
138, 156, 158, 176, 177, 182, 188,
190, 193, 196, 199, 202, 203, 207,
211
Jenks, C. 80
Jewish identity 174, 198–9
Joas, H. 62, 63, 65, 208
Johnson, M. 69, 143
Johnston, W. M. 176
Jones, J. 182
Kagan, J. 79
Kapferer, B. 124
Kaplan, H. 199
Karn, V. 191, 193
Katz, J. E. 92
Katz, M. B. 193
Kaye, K. 77
Keesing, R. M. 86
Keller, S. 133
Kertzer, D. I. 196, 205
kinship 41, 86–8, 187
Kitsuse, J. 98, 193
Kuhse, H. 75
labelling processes 42–3, 95–9, 186,
192
labour market 45, 177–83
Lacan, J. 57
La Fontaine, J. 174
Lakoff, G. 69, 143
Lamb, S. 59
Lamont, M. 29, 127
Lane, C. 176
language 58–9, 61, 84, 115, 130, 143,
145, 197
Lash, S. 201
Leach, E. 119, 174, 211
‘learning difficulties’ 53, 100, 108,
196, 199
Lee, R. 75
Lemert, E. M. 96, 97
Lenin, V. I. 110
Lentz, C. 196, 209
lesbian identity 2–3 (see also gay
identity)
Leudar, I. 105
Lévi-Strauss, C. 51, 142, 151
Liddiard, M. 193, 194
Liebow, E. 210
life course 81 (see also adulthood, age
as a principle of identification, and
childhood)
Lindesmith, A. R. 78
Linton, R. 164–6, 172
Lipsky, M. 192
Lock, A. 208
242 index

Locke, J. 31
Luckmann, T. 40, 46, 69, 92, 152,
158–63, 211
Lyon, D. 205
Maass, M. 114
MacIntyre, A. 51, 91, 94
MacLeod, J. 210
Male?eviç, S. 5, 8, 14, 29, 36
Malinowski, B. 119
Mann, M. 104, 190
marriage, as an institution 161–2, 163,
164–5
Mars, L. 174
Marshall, G. 107
Martin, D.-C. 5
Marx, K. v, 18, 40, 43, 44, 46, 51, 59,
110, 125, 132, 142, 208, 209
materiality of identification 161–3,
184–99
Matza, D. 42, 96, 192
Mauss, M. 50, 142
Mayer, A. C. 170
Mays, M. 32
McDonald, M. 152
McGarty, C. 114
McRobbie, A. 195
Mead, G. H. 31, 40–41, 47–59, 62–8,
84, 96, 115, 122, 128, 142, 143, 149,
154, 208
Mehan, H. 98, 196
Mehler, J. 77
membership categorisation 105
Memmi, A. 87
‘mental illness’ 66, 185, 212
‘mental retardation’ (see ‘learning
difficulties’)
Mercer, J. R. 98, 196
Merton, R. K. 47, 164, 172, 210
Meyer, P. 107
Middleton, S. 195
Migdal, M. J. 114
Mills, C. W. 16, 38, 39
Milner, D. 209
mind 40–1, 49–59, 61, 64
minimal group experiments 7, 113–4,
115
modernity and identification 20,
26–7, 28–36, 45, 107–8, 194–97,
200–6
Moerman, M. 119
Molnár, V. 29, 127
Moore, R. I. 31
Moore, S. F. 176
Moorhouse, R. 32
moral panics 194–5
Morgan, D. 75
Morris, B. 174, 208
motherhood 74
‘mother-infant system’ 76–80
Müller-Hill, B. 197
Murphy, R. F. 76
mutualism (philosophical school) 56,
208
Muzzatti, L. 195
Meyerhoff, B. G. 176
Nadel, S. F. 104, 105, 119, 173, 211
national identity 2, 3, 4, 26, 29, 33,
138, 176, 197, 198
Newby, H. 133
Newcomer, P. J. 107
Nichols, T. 190
nominal identification 44, 99–101,
123, 136–7, 140, 166, 198–9
non-verbal communication 26, 93, 153
‘normality’ 195–7
Norris, C. 205
Northern Ireland 3, 174, 176
Nuer (Sudanese ethnic group) 106–7,
108
Nugent, P. 196, 209
Oakes, P. 114
Offe, C. 190
Ong, W.J. 188
ontological security 34, 85
Operario, D. 152
ordeal, as a ritual of identification 181,
211–2
organisations, defined 45, 166–7; and
identification 8, 10, 45, 166–8,
169–83, 201–5
‘other minds’, as an epistemological
problem 52–4, 126, 138
Paine, R. 124
Parker, J. x, 16, 46, 208, 211
Parker, R. 86
Parsons, T. 46, 51, 57, 193, 208, 212
index 243

Passeron, J.-C. 150
Pearson, G. 194
personality disorder 66
‘personhood’, distinguished from
‘selfhood’ 50–2, 72–3, 82, 95
Peters, E. 212
Phinney, J. S. 209
Piaget: post-Piagetian models of child
development 41, 76–81
Pickering, M. 152, 154, 189
Pijpers, R. 195
Plattner, S. 187
Plummer, K. 96
Polsky, A. J. 197
Poole, F. J. P. 79–80, 82, 209
Portes, A. 133
postmodernism 19, 35, 130
‘postmodernity’ and identity 25, 30–5,
36
Potter, J. 37, 84
power 43–5, 65, 95–99, 124–8,
148–51, 163, 170, 184–99,
201–6
pragmatic individualism 37–40,
72
pragmatism (philosophical school)
40, 56, 121
predictability, as a basis for
interaction 148–55
Price, S. 176
primary identities, rooted in early
socialisation 41, 69–72, 75–6, 82,
84–8
Prottas, J. M. 192
psychiatry 184–5
psychoanalysis 19, 22, 52, 57,
64–8
public image 42, 73, 89, 90–101
Putnam, R. D. 133
Raban, J. 156
‘race’ 4, 72, 75, 88, 127, 146, 192, 193,
195
Rainwater, L. 210
Ranger, T. 208
Rapport, N. 133
rationality, and modernity 201–5
Ray, L. J. 201
Rayner, J. 8
Read, P. 207
recruitment into identities 45, 171–83,
184–5, 189–90; into employment
177–8, 189–90
Reed, M. 201
reflexivity 54–9, 60–4, 159
religion 34–5, 39, 130, 173–7,
203
Rex, J. ix
Reynolds, K. J. 114
Richards, A. I. 174
Richardson, J. T. 195
rights 164–5
rites of passage 174–5, 181
rituals of identification 3, 74, 90, 92,
135–6, 161, 173–83, 203
Ritzer, G. 33, 202
Robertson, R. 33
Robinson, W. P. 37, 43, 113
role 164–5
Rorty, R. 208
Rose, N. 107
Rosenthal, R. 98
Rothe, D. 195
Rotherham, M. J. 209
Ruane, J. 207
Rubin, M. 114
rules, relationship to identification
92, 127, 151
Ryle, G. 40, 41, 54–6, 59, 60–1, 63,
68, 208
Sabetti, F. 210
Sahlins, M. 187
Samuel, R. 208
Savage, M. 107
Scandinavia 39
Schneider, J. 210
Schneider, P. 210
Schroeder, R. 201
Schutz, A. 144–6, 148, 152, 158, 207,
211
Scott, W.R. 211
Seidman, S. 19
self-categorisation theory 112–7,
141–2
selfhood 40–1, 42, 49–73, 83–6,
88–9, 90–91, 143–4; defined 49;
distinguished from personhood
50–2, 72–3, 82, 95, 114;
ontological status of 53–4, 69–70;
244 index

as a primary identification 83–7;
normalisation of 196–7
self image 42, 73, 89, 90–101
Sennett, R. 133
Shakespeare, W. 31
Sherif, M. 7
Shoemaker, S. 208
Shotter, J. 77
Sicily 139, 210
‘sick role’ 193
Silverman, D. 182, 211
similarity 17–18, 21–3, 24, 25–6, 38,
49, 72–3, 83, 102–3, 112, 115, 116,
118, 126, 131, 132–47, 148, 152, 157,
170, 176–7, 196–7
Simmel, G. 18, 19, 31, 40, 102, 104
Singer, P. 75
Skevington, S. 114, 209
Smart, B. 33
Smith, J. 74
Smith, M. G. 150
social change 24, 26–7, 28–36, 201–6
social identity, basic definition of 5,
16–18; as prerequisite of the
human world 26–7, 62, 151; as
basis for predictable interaction
148–55; as key to structuration
debate 16, 46–7
social psychological models of
identification 7, 37, 40, 43–4,
112–7, 141–2, 149, 151–2, 189
social security, and stereotypes 192,
195
socialisation 40, 64, 69–71, 72,
74–89, 159–60
sociology, distinguished from
common sense 37–4
Sohar, Oman 129–30
Solomos, J. 195
Southall, A. 107
space and identification 47–8, 55,
68–9, 72, 91–2, 93, 139, 161–3, 174
Spencer, H. 156
Spencer, J. W. 192
Spencer, S. 19
Sperber, D. 152
status 164–5
Stein, M. R. 133
stereotypes 113, 151–3, 189–90
Stewart, A. 107
stigmatisation 95–9
Still, A. 56
Stokoe, E. H. 105
Stone, L. 86
Stones, R. 16. 46
stratification 179, 184–99 (see also
class)
structuration debate in social theory
16, 46–7, 92, 168, 198
Stuchlik, M. ix, 126
Sudnow, D. 18
suitability, recruitment criteria of
177–8, 189–91
Sundar, N. 196
Swinburne, R. 208
symbolism 44, 58, 69, 132–47,
148–55, 157, 159–63, 175–7, 203
Tajfel, H. 7, 8, 40, 43, 112–7, 152,
189
Tannenbaum, F. 96
Taylor, C. 19, 23, 25
Taylor, D. 22
Taylor, G. 19
Taylor, I. 96
‘team building’ as a ritual of
identification 182–3
Thatcher, M. 10, 156
Thomas, W. I. 96, 106, 121, 148, 157,
159, 210
Thompson, J. B. 208
Thompson, K. 194
Thompson, P. 208
time and identification 48, 55, 60–1,
67, 68–9, 72, 79–81, 92, 109–11,
124–5, 141, 138, 174
Todd, J. 207
Tönnies, F. 132
Torpey, J. 205
Transactional Analysis 66–7
Trent, J. W. 196
Trevarthen, C. 78
Troyna, B. 209
Turk, A. 192
Turner, B. S. 166
Turner, J. C. 104, 112, 113, 114, 141,
209
Turner, V. 135, 175
turn-taking 78, 85
Tusting, K. 133
index 245

‘unconscious’, the 52–4
United States’ inner-cities 139, 210
university, as an institution 162,
163–4, 166
van Ausdale, D. 209
van Gennep, A. 174
virtual identification 44, 99–101, 123,
136–7, 140, 166, 198–9
Vogler, C. 52, 53–4, 69
Vygotsky, L. S. 56
Wallace, A. F. C. 53
Wallman, S. 127
Watney, S. 195
Webb, J. 170
Weber, E. 33, 135, 197
Weber, M. 19, 34, 46, 104, 144, 149,
150, 173, 188, 189, 201, 202, 203,
206, 210, 212
Weeks, J. 25
welfare recipients and stereotypes
192, 195
Wellman, B. 170
Wenger, E. 133
Wetherell, M. 37, 84, 114
Wheen, F. 18
Whimster, S. 201
Wickham, C. 208
Widdicombe, S. 37, 84, 115
Wikan, U. 130
Wilk, R. 176
Williams, R. 31, 207
Williamson, L. 75
Wilson, D. 205
Winnicott, D. W. 57, 78
Wippermann, W. 75, 197
Wisdom, J. 53
Wittgenstein, L. 56
Wollheim, R. 85
women’s movement 19, 28, 29, 34,
35, 83
Woodward, K. 19, 22, 33
Wooley, P. 75
Worchtel, S. 113
Wright, E. O. 107
Wrocklaw, Poland 31–2
Wrong, D. 51
youth life-styles 109, 194, 195
Zerubavel, E. 26
246 index

BOOK COVER
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1 IDENTITY MATTERS
2 SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE
3 A SIGN OF THE TIMES?
4 UNDERSTANDING IDENTIFICATION
5 SELFHOOD AND MIND
6 EMBODIED SELVES
7 ENTERING THE HUMAN WORLD
8 SELF-IMAGE AND PUBLIC IMAGE
9 GROUPS AND CATEGORIES
10 BEYOND BOUNDARIES
11 SYMBOLISING BELONGING
12 PREDICTABILITY
13 INSTITUTIONALISING IDENTIFICATION
14 ORGANISING IDENTIFICATION
15 CATEGORISATION AND CONSEQUENCES
16 IDENTITY AND MODERNITY REVISITED
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX