ABSTRACT
People frequently encounter the descriptive study of identity in the study of religion—a linkage indebted for some to the influential work of the Jamaican culture studies theorist, Stuart Hall. However, theorizing on how those things commonly referred to as identities are possible—and thereby historicizing the situations in which something called an identity is produced and claimed, and, in many cases, eventually so authorized as to be seen and represented as an essential trait or quality—is often neglected in favor of describing the features or limits of something called an identity. The turn toward identity studies has, in recent decades, impacted virtually all fields in the human sciences, often with a focus on how group members already understand and represent themselves—both their commonalities with those seen as their peers and their collective differences from those seen by them as outsiders.
