Anthropological uses of ‘identity’ are ambiguous. In one sense, the term refers to properties of uniqueness and individuality, the essential differences making a *person distinct from all others, as in ‘self-identity’. In another sense, it refers to qualities of sameness, in that persons may associate themselves, or be associated by others, with groups or categories on the basis of some salient common feature, e.g. ‘ethnic identity’. The term may also be applied to groups, categories, segments and institutions of all kinds, as well as to individual persons; thus families, communities, classes and nations are frequently said to have identities.
The term ‘identity’ was brought into general use by the *psychoanalytic theorist Erik H. Erikson (1959). Personal identity, for Erikson, was located deep in the unconscious as a durable and persistent sense of sameness of the self; whatever happens, however traumatic the experience or dramatic the passage from one phase of life to another, the non-pathological individual does not normally consider himself or herself to have become someone else. Individuals conceive of the self in terms of the *cognitive models or paradigm types of personality or moral character available in their historical time and within spatial range of their experience. While the term ‘identity’ is frequently employed by anthropologists to refer to selfhood in a loosely Eriksonian way, the concept is usually treated more sociologically, emphasizing the individual’s social and *cultural surroundings, and the mechanisms of *socialization and cultural acquisition. The anthropological concern with selfhood considerably antedates the recent adoption of the term ‘identity’, in the United States exemplified by the works of †Margaret Mead, †Ruth Benedict and the *culture and personality school, from the late 1930s.
Anthropologists have also found inspiration in the works of pioneering social theorists such as †Georg Simmel, †Émile Durkheim, †George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schutz, and others.
In its sense of sameness, ‘identity’ refers to commonalities associated with groups or categories. The starting point is classificatory: the social and cultural world is held to be composed of segments, membership in terms of which individuals must define themselves, or be defined by others. While sharing some features of the well-established concept of ‘status and role’, the usage is less prescriptive and mechanical, giving greater attention to individuals’ conscious self-typifications. The groups and categories are accorded significant cognitive content ‘of a type’. These include evaluative or emotional characteristics from which the individual derives self-esteem, or a sense of knowing or belonging. These features are highly variable in intensity and salience, as are any associated normative expectations which may furnish individuals with guides to their social behaviour. Individuals’ identities are, then, emergent properties of their categorical memberships.
