ABSTRACT
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, philosophers, 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.
