Identity is a challenging subject for the social sciences. It is both familiar and puzzling. Rather like the problem of consciousness in the study of the mind, identity is familiar because we all have one. In our day-to-day lives, identity is taken for granted. Stepping outside of ourselves to examine it seems awkward and unnatural, as if to see identity this way makes it inauthentic-if we ask ourselves who we are, it is almost an admission that we don’t have a “real self.” This intimacy makes it difficult to get a critical distance and, as a result, there is no consensus in the social sciences about what identity is or how it should be studied. As Deschamps and Devos put it, “Few concepts are as polysemic as identity” (1998:1), spanning scholarly and creative work from antiquity to the present.