ABSTRACT
Current work on identity emphasizes the emergent, performative aspect of identity work: that identity is ‘brought about’ interactively, rather than ‘brought along’ (cf. Zimmerman 1998) as a preexisting repertoire of traits or attributes. From a linguistic perspective, the former suggests the examination of interaction as the means by which identity is performed, while the latter suggests that text can be searched and interrogated for traces of preexisting identities. So how do we explain or account for those more or less stable aspects of identity that are brought along in interaction, attempting as it were to historicize the nature of identity work, while continuing to treat it as interactively contingent? One can perhaps envisage a repeated sequence of interactional acts of identity, over time creating the layering or sedimentation of habitus.
