ABSTRACT
The aspirations, uncertainties, satisfactions and disappointments of people’s lives tend to be of a more or less individualizing kind, and so one may expect some sort of concern with personal identity. Identity is a matter of information about people – about oneself, as well as about others. The information may consist of fact or fantasy. The information it offers may be as exact as any, but it is ephemeral, not in itself easily inserted into a lasting record. One must create one’s own contacts, and to put it brutally, identity becomes currency in the exchanges involved. It is fairly obvious that most interpretations of the development of a concern with personal identity point more or less in the same direction, toward a conception of a Great Divide of the kind to which anthropologists are forever coming back, although probably each time a little more wary of the difficulties it entails.
