Jenkins Identity Matters
Who we are, or who we are seen to be, can matter. Identification is not always just a matter
of the encounters and thresholds of individual lives. Identification seems to matter.
But… does identity matter?
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. There
are doubts about whether identity, in itself, actually causes behavior. In order to begin
thinking about this issue, it must be decided what is meant by ‘identity’. As a very basic
starting point, identity is the human capacity, rooted in language, to know ‘who’s who’. It
involves a multi-dimensional classification or mapping of the human world and our places in
it, as individuals and as members of collectivities. Identification is a process, not a ‘thing’.
The matter is made more complex by the fact that knowing who’s who isn’t merely a matter
of neutral classification. Classification is rarely neutral. At the very least, classification implies
evaluation, and often much more. In addition, because identification makes no sense outside
relationships, there are hierarchies or scales of preference, ambivalence, hostility,
competition, partnership etc. From this perspective, identification and motives for behavior
might seem to be connected. However, our classificatory models of self and others are
multidimensional, 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 (I hate all As; you are an A; but you are my friend).
A further issue is the emotional charge that may, or may not, attach to identification. There
are two things to say about this:
● Even allowing for social psychological studies of identity, 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
identification in some circumstances but not in others.
● Where identity does appear to be an emotional matter this does not seem to be
inevitable, or natural. Identification has to be made to matter.
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
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.
● Tajfel’s social psychology
Argued that group membership is sufficient in itself to generate identification with that
group and to channel behavior towards in-group favoritism and discrimination against
out-group members. He was taking issue with social psychological accounts of
identity that emphasized ‘realistic competition’ and conflicts of interest as the basis
for cooperation and group formation.
Identification and interests are not easily distinguished. Classification (identification),
however, is unlikely to be disinterested. Identification is, at the very least, consequential and
reciprocally entailed in the specification and pursuit of individual and collective interests. 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 contemporary political, and other, rhetoric seems
to set a supreme price on identity doesn’t mean that we should. As critical social scientists
we are obliged not to. 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.
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 to
mobilize people. It is in this context that the question has recently been posed: are groups
‘real’?
‘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 everyone does, however. As one of the most
consistent critical voices in this respect, Roger Brubaker insists that ethnic groups are not
real. What is real is a shared sense of group membership. Ethnicity, for Brubaker, is
cognitive, a point of view of individuals, a way of seeing the world. But it is not how the
substance of the human world is really organized. 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. 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. 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 evolving 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.
The definition of groups that Brubacker presents as wrong is not universally accepted.
Another, more minimal definition, which commands considerable support, 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.
What, then, of groups? Brubaker’s argument is underpinned by the proposition that the
collective-stuff-of-human-life is not a substantial 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 can be said to exhibit these
attributes, not the groups themselves. So there is a sensible issue to be addressed with
respect to the ontological status of groups and other collectivities.
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?
, ● We all live in an everyday world of observable, very real groups. Small informal
groups like family, but also formal groups like organizations. These small local
groups are embedded within, and help produce larger groups.
● Size doesn’t seem to be a barrier to the social reality of groups. Large collectivities
may be very abstract to their members, but may nonetheless have observable, local,
immediate representation or presence.
A further important issue that needs to be considered, is that people categorize others all the
time and as a matter of course. categorization is as much a part of our subject matter as
self-identification. This is the external aspect of the process of identification. Categorization
makes a powerful contribution to the everyday reality of groups. Attributions of group
membership feature routinely in how we categorize others.
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.
What is to be done about identity?
The author’s argument so far is that identification matters because it is the basic cognitive
mechanism that humans use to sort out themselves and their fellows, individually and
collectively. On the other hand, identification doesn’t determine behavior, and patterns of
identification don’t allow us to predict who will do what.
● People work with various ‘maps’ or hierarchies of identification, these hierarchies of
identification are never clear cut, unambiguous or in consistent agreement with each
other.
● The relationship between interests and identification is too complex for individual
behavior to be predictable in these terms.
What should social science do about ‘identification’ and ‘identification’? 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. Malesevic also offers the argument that identity as an
analytical concept is confused and confusing, means too many things and encompasses too
many different processes to be of any social analytical value. The author agrees with some
of these points, but states that discarding the notion of ‘identity’ for social analytical purposes
is no solution. It cannot really be done. Even if we would stop talking about ‘identity’, we
would still need a way of talking about the fundamental human processes that he has
discussed in this chapter.
Jenkins Similarity and Difference
Defining Identity
The general, non sociological meanings of identity are worth considering. The notion of
identity involves two criteria of comparison between persons or things: similarity and
difference. The verb ‘to identify’ is a necessary accompaniment of identity. It adds two further
items: to classify and to associate oneself with. For sociological purposes identification can
be defined as follows:
● ‘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 together, similarity and difference are the dynamic principles of identification,
and are at the heart of the human world.
Discourses of Difference
The approach to identity and identification that the author explores in this book is at odds
with an influential body of contemporary social theory that distinguishes between ‘identity’
and ‘difference’ as different kinds of phenomena and emphasizes the pre-eminence of
difference.
There is some agreement in the context of the author’s argument. Anti-essentialism (to insist
that identity is not fixed) is the right place to begin in order to understand how identification
works. A healthy distrust of political universalism also imbues the work of many authors of
difference. The author, however, does disagree with two core propositions that are broadly
shared by difference theorists:
● Knowing who’s who is primarily a matter of establishing and marking differences
between people. From this perspective, knowing who you are is a matter of
distinguishing and distancing yourself from other people. The recognition of ‘us’
hinges mainly on not being ‘them’.
● Difference and identity have become more marked and more significant over the last
few decades.
Similarity and Difference
In the first place, emphasizing difference misses the utter interdependence of similarity and
difference. It doesn’t make sense to separate similarity and difference, or to accord one
greater significance. We cannot have one without the other. To say who you are is to say
who or what you are not, but it is also to say with whom you have things in common. A
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.
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. Knowing who’s who is undeniably a matter
of similarity and solidarity, of belonging and community, of ‘us’ and ‘we’. In this respect the
focus on difference arguably flies in the face of the observable realities of the human world.
These terms, however, are deeply political and should be approached with apposite caution.
We should also recognize that invocations of similarity are intimately entangled with the
conjuring up of difference. One of the things that people have in common is precisely the
recognition of other groups or categories from whom they differ.
