Summary of Beyond Identity - Brubaker and Cooper

Identity is a very complicated subject. Part of the reason why it is so complicated is because it can mean so many things. It can be understood both in its strong sense - as something fixed, crystallised, hardened, congealed, or in its weak sense, as something malleable, in flux, unstable, contradictory. In Beyond Identity, Brubaker and Cooper problematises the discursive treatment of identity, arguing, amongst other things, that the prevailing constructivist stance on identity - “the attempt to soften the term, to acquit it of the charge of essentialism” is ill suited for socio-analytic purposes. In addition, they argue that conceptualising “all affinities, affiliations, all forms of belonging, all experiences of commonality, connectedness, and cohesion, all self-understanding and self-identification in the idiom of ‘identity’ saddles us with a blunt, flat, undifferentiated vocabulary”. For this very reason, B&C proposes to break “identity” apart, for both practical and epistemic reasons. 

They first take us through a literature review of the rise of discourse on “identity” in academia. Charting its historical roots, BnC points to the 1960s as the point at which academics (mainly in the US) started paying attention to ‘identity’ for social analysis. Erik Erikson, for instance,started the ball rolling by coining the term “identity crisis”. Slowly it diffused from the realms of psychoanalysis to ethnicity, sociological role theory and reference group theory. It is in America that the “prevalent individualist ethos and idiom” gave a particular salience and resonance to “identity” concerns. The “mass society problem” of the 60s, the generational rebellion, the Black Power movement and other ethnic movements all contributed to the focus on identity. BnC also claims that the “institutional weakness of leftist politics” and the “concomitant weakness of class based idioms of social and political analysis” further facilitated the turn, although it is unclear what he means by former. How is leftist politics - presumably variants of social democracy - weak institutionally? Moving on, with the rise of “race, class and gender” (the “holy trinity” of literary criticism and cultural studies, according to BnC), identity talk blossomed. 

Perhaps the most useful and insightful part of BnC’s writing is this portion as follows. Many key terms in the social sciences - race, nation, ethnicity - are at once “categories of practice” as well as “categories of analysis”. Categories of practice refers to “native”, “lay” or “folk” categories. It is the categories used in everyday speech, by the laymen. Categories of analysis refers to specialised usage by sociologists. BnC claims that they “prefer” the former to the latter, for the latter relies a sharp distinction between “lay” and “scientific” understanding while the former reflects the “close reciprocal connection between practical and analytic use. 

Identity too relies on both categories. There is “everyday identity talk” and “identity politics”, which is argued by BnC to be real and important phenomena. They further argue that despite its importance as categories of practice, it does not necessarily follow that it needs to be used as categories of sociological analysis. Providing the example of nations and nationalism, they argue that one “does not have to take a category inherent in the *practice* of nationalism and make this category central to the *theory* of nationalism. Just like how one can engage in “nation-talk” without positing the existence of “nations” (theoretically) and like how one can talk about “race” without positing the existence of “race”, so too can we talk about “identity” without arguing that it exists conceptually, or theoretically. This is a brilliant point - but it raises certain paradoxes. If speech and communication is a series of word games, how can we talk about something and expect other people to know that in fact theoretically, we contend that this thing does not actually exist? How do other parties then differentiate between the things we actually mean to exist and those that we don’t? So in principle we can separate identity talk from hard notions of identity but in practice this seems impossible. 

As if foreseeing the difficulties, BnC then talks about reification. Reification occurs at moments where the “political fiction” of categories like nation, race, gender, “crystallise as a powerful, compelling reality”. By “uncritically adopting” categories of practice as categories of analysis, we are in fact reinforcing such reifications. He argues that analysts of these categories should try to *account* for the process of reification. However, the question remains: how does one get around the process of reification every single time a category is mentioned? Isn’t naming something, in this case, the ultimate reification process? This is when symbols become real. 

Moving on, BnC dissects the different uses of identity. 

The first way identity is used emphasises its distinction from “interest”. By doing so it highlights the “non-instrumental” modes of social and political action. In simpler terms, interests are instrumental: it is a way to achieve a certain end. Social actions explained by identity is posited to be the end in itself. I do this because it is part of who I am. Actions under identity are governed by “particularistic self-understanding” instead of “putatively universal self-interest”. 

Second, identity connotes a “collective” phenomenon, a “fundamental and consequential sameness” between members of a group. 

Third, identity can be understood as a “core aspect of selfhood”, either on an individual level on in a group level. This selfhood is deep, basic, abiding and foundational. 

Fourth, identity can be understood as a *processual, interactive* development of a kind of self-understanding or “groups”. It is typically found in “new social movement” literature where identity is understood as a *contingent* product of social action. 

Lastly, the post-modern take on identity finds it “unstable, multiple, fluctuating and fragmented”. It is a product of multiple and competing discourses. 

To make things clearer, BnC highlights the affinities between the second and third, and between the fourth and fifth. He also mentions that the first usage is compatible with all the others. While number 2 and 3 highlights fundamental sameness, 4 and 5 rejects this notion. 

To BnC, identity is simply too semantically rich to be analytically useful. He proposes that we split it up into the following categories: identification and categorisation; self-understanding and social location; commonality, connectedness and groupness. Before that, he has to justify what we gain by splitting identity up into these categories and what we lose. To do so, we return to current notions of identity. 

BnC distinguishes between strong and weak notions of identity. While the former generally refers to everyday usage of identity with an emphasis on sameness, the latter focuses on the instability and flux, or what BnC calls “cliched constructivism”, where identity is “routinely packaged with standard qualifiers” such as “unstable, in flux, contingent, fragmented, etc”. He then pushes the argument that weak conceptions of identity ought not be conceptions of *identity*, and that they are too weak to do theoretical work. He cites several theorists who engage with weak notions of identity for theoretical work and contends that “identity” is not the best concept for their theories. 

Moving back to BnC’s divided categories; let’s focus on the first element, identification and categorisation. The primary reason provided by BnC for the adoption of this category is that identification lacks the reifying connotations of identity. This seems to be a very functional category. BnC also draws our attention to relational and categorical modes of identification. One can, for instance, identify oneself “by position in a relational web (kinship, friendship, teacher-student relations) or one may identify oneself by membership in a class of persons sharing some categorical attributes (race, ethnicity, etc). He mentions how the modern state is one of the most important agents of identification and classification. This is linked to Foucault’s notion of governmentality. 

Of course, simply accounting for categorisation of social agents is not enough: BnC also needs to account for the internal dimension of identity. Thus, the second category - self-understanding and social location. Self-understanding refers to one’s sense of who one is, one’s social location. Like identification, self-understanding lacks the reifying connotations of identity; in other words, it is less “essentialist”; it is much more susceptible to change. However, self-understanding is only one tiny part of “identity”, and BnC takes pains to let us know what it cannot do. First, since it’s a self-referential term, it cannot capture other people’s understanding. For instance, identity can sometimes said to be imposed from outside, where self-understanding can at most be influenced by the outside, but will always stem from within. 

Second, self-understanding’s privileging of cognitive awareness does not capture the affective or cathectic processes of identity. However, BnC insists that self-understanding is not always *truly* cognitive; it is affected in large part by feelings as well. Finally, self-understanding does not claim to objectivity. Strong notions of identity allows one to distinguish “true” identity from “mere” self-understanding. Identity is assumed to be something deep and discovered, whereas self-understanding is just momentary and might not correspond with one’s abiding, underlying identity. BnC claims, quite naturally, that such an understanding of identity is problematic. 

The third and final category BnC claims is “commonality, connectedness and groupness”. This category deals with the notion of “collective identities”, a sense of belonging to a distinctive, bounded group. Commonality denotes the sharing of some common attributes. Connectedness the relational ties that link people. BnC claims that neither of these two engender groupness - the sense of belonging to a distinct, bounded, solidary group. The benefits of thinking of connectedness in this manner is to develop an “analytical idiom sensitive to the multiple forms and degrees of commonality and connectness, and to the widely varying ways in which actors attribute meaning and significance to them.” Thus commonality is seen as the weakest bonds, groupness the strongest. 

In the final part, BnC takes us through three case studies where his new conception of identity is applied. The first is Nuer; I will be skipping this. The second case study deals with East European nationalism. In this, BnC attempts to argue that “identity” is neither necessary nor helpful as a category of analysis even though, in this case, it *is* widely used as a category of practice. He begins by highlighting how literature on nationalism in Eastern europe is premised on notions of group identity. Many attribute the resurgence of ethnic nationalism in the region as springing from robust and deeply rooted national identity, something that has survived decades of repression by communist regimes. BnC argues against this view, contending that many of these countries was not “anti-nationalist” per se, but rather take great pains to institutionalise and codify nationhood. The Soviet Union, for instance, carved up Soviet territory into more than 50 putatively autonomous national “homelands” each belonging to a particular ethnonational group. In this way, nationalities are constantly ratified and reinforced. BnC implies that we cannot assume the presence of strong, buried, repressed identities since these “identities” are constantly being ascribed.

To illustrate this BnC brings up the case of “Russians” in Ukraine. He says that while 11.4m of the residents in Ukraine identify themselves as Russians, the categories of “Russians” and “Ukrainian” as “putatively distinct ethnocultural nationalities” or distinct “identities” is deeply problematic as rates of intermarriage have been high. The problem with “identity” here is that it creates the “illusion” of bounded groupness. That official categorisations will shape self-understanding is a fact - but using “identity” to figure out this question will only lead us to confusion. 

Using a very similar example of Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania, BnC argues further that even “constructivist” notions of identity disposes us to think in terms of bounded groupness, for it connotes that identity is always “there” (even though it’s weak, fragmented, in flux) as something individuals and groups “have”. He emphasises how the tendency to objectify “identity” deprives us of analytical leverage, making it more difficult to treat “groupness” and “boundedness” as “emergent properties of particular structural or conjunctural settings”. 

The final example BnC gives is that of race in the US, where the pathos and resonance of identity claims is particularly strong. He notes how constructivist arguments have particular influence in the US, where the self and other-identitied groups are not primordial but historically produced. BnC astutely points certain contradictions in this approach. Directing our attention to African americans, he contends that “asserting oneself as a diasporic people did not necessarily imply claiming cultural commonality”. He laments that it is “whiteness” or “race” that is taken as the object of construction, not looser forms of “affinity and commonality”. He argues that to write about “identifications” might be more fruitful. He raises the same problem early on that many are caught between a “hard identity that does not fit into a soft rhetoric of hybridity and fluidity”. If “real contributions of constructivist social analysis” is to be taken seriously, it should not, argues BnC, take “bounded groupess” as an axiomatic given.