that individually differentiates one person from others. Other scholars are interested primarily in social identity and the ways in which individuals internalize collective categorial identifications (see Jenkins 2014: 114). And still others who are interested in collective categorial identifications want to understand not only how individuals internalize them but how collectives and non-individual social forms such as nations, schools, neighborhoods, and organizations also have their own collective identities. To understand identity it is thus important to recognize that it can refer to self-identity, to social identity, or to collective identity. Although analysts separate these different forms of identity to demonstrate the multiple layers of the concept, such forms are often intertwined in everyday life. That is, collective and social identities influence personal identity and, likewise, personal and social identifications factor into collective identities.
In arguing against the concept of identity, Brubaker and Cooper (2000) make the point that the term has multiple meanings. Identity, they argue, is a concept distinct from interest. Interests are instrumental and have a clear goal, while actions related to identity have meaning-oriented rather than instrumental goals. Identity, in one reading, designates how action—individual or collective—is governed by particular self-understandings rather than by universal self-interest (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 6). When understood as a collective phenomenon, it indicates an important sameness among members of a social category; when understood as a product of social or political action, it sheds light on the interactive development of the kinds of collective identifications and self-understandings that make identity politics and collective political action possible. For Brubaker and Cooper, the sheer number of uses of the concept of identity makes it analytically fragmented and unusable as a concept. They assert, for example, that, “if one wants to argue that particularistic self-understandings shape social and political action in a non-instrumental manner, one can simply say so … If one wants to examine the meanings and significance people give to constructs such as ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘nationality … it is not clear what one gains by aggregating them under the flattening rubric of identity” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 6). Brubaker and Cooper point to the widely different, and sometimes diverging, uses of identity and assert that this variety makes the concept unusable.
According to the two authors, combining race, ethnicity, nationality, and other social constructions under the single rubric of identity brings little gain. This provocative statement is important—not because it precludes the study of identity, but rather because it requires us to be explicit about the analytic benefits of a unifying rubric such as identity. There is in fact much to be gained by studying such different collective identifications as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and subculture for their analytic similarities and to look at self-identity, collective identity, and the identity of non-individual forms searching for parallel processes of identity construction and identity marking and unmarking. Here, rather than seeing race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, subculture, and other constructs as too dissimilar to be studied together, we can acknowledge their substantive differences while still valuing their formal, general analytic similarities. The ways in which people navigate social constructs to organize their selfdefinitions, to generalize about others, and to participate in the boundary politics of inclusion and exclusion are worth studying not only in their separate, individual substantive areas or in their separate and specific uses (e.g. personal identification, collective mobilization), but for analytic similarities and tensions between them across domains and uses.
In this book I analyze the broad range of categories around which we construct identities. Although identity is diverse in its forms, the latter are often similar in their organization and in their general analytic qualities. I therefore bring together the insights of symbolic interactionist ethnographic studies on particular types of identity with the analytic advantages of a cognitive sociological approach that identifies general patterns through comparisons across specific forms.
Cognitive Sociology Meets Symbolic Interactionism: Social Pattern Analysis of Identity Authenticity, Multidimensionality, and Mobility
To synthesize a wide range of sociological conceptions of identity and to compare identity across the many substantive forms and purposes in which it expresses itself, I follow Eviatar Zerubavel’s (2007) social pattern analysis—a concept-driven cognitive sociology approach to general sociological theorizing. This kind of formal sociological theorizing is characterized by lack of interest in singularity and in isolating unique phenomena and by a concern with cross-case, cross-level, and cross-phenomenal comparisons. Zerubavel (forthcoming) argues that, in contrast to more substantively oriented types of scholarship, such as historical or descriptive ethnographic work, a formal sociological analysis transcends the specific and the concrete in order to focus on general and abstract commonalities. Social pattern analysis is a concept-driven sociology that illuminates sensitizing concepts (see Zerubavel 2007). I combine this general formal theoretical approach, however, with specific, empirically interesting micro-sociological cases of identity enactments and performances studied by symbolic interactionist ethnographers. I draw significantly on ethnographic researchers who study specific identities, roles, and groups, because the concepts they develop in specific settings such as punk authenticity (Force 2009), or black cultural capital (Carter 2003), or protean racial identities (Rockquemore and Brunsma 2002) are analytically applicable to other kinds of settings and generalizable to other kinds of cases. Applying social pattern analysis to punk authenticity and black cultural capital, for instance, allows us to extend insights from these specific types to other kinds of authenticities and cultural capital. Here I apply the general theoretical concerns of social pattern analysis to theoretically focused ethnographies that are analytically portable, speak to larger macro-level issues, and build upon other ethnographies and research studies (see Fine 2003).
The three major, sensitizing concepts labeled in this book “identity authenticity,” “identity multidimensionality,” and “identity mobility,” which I use to frame an understanding of the sociology of identities, are general theoretical concepts that demonstrate analytic commonalities and generic formal similarities across very different kinds of identity. These concepts are important for understanding the power dimensions of identity and the role of identity constructions in producing and reproducing inequalities, marginality, and privilege. In the course of exploring these three properties of identity, other analytic concepts will also be highlighted and discussed in connection to their broader relevance to the sociology of identity. Those analytic concepts have developed in the specific contexts of sociological ethnographies and identity literatures, but they apply across different types of identity.
Bringing together theoretical traditions to analyze the sociology of identity is an ambitious task, particularly given that the term “identity” is used in multiple ways by analysts. Rather than provide a single definition of identity, my goal is to present identity and identification in the pluralistic ways that they are employed by social actors and described by social analysts and to explain the interactional and social boundary work that identity does. This means that the text will move between relatively thin, weak forms of identification and thick, strong forms of identity, between the conscious use of categorial identities as strategic resources and the unconscious expression of them as a tacit presentation that does work (even when what it does goes largely unacknowledged), and between expressions of self-identity and group identity. The concepts of authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility will be explored through a cognitive sociological lens, illustrating how these concepts relate to one another and to the ways in which we interactionally perform identity. Organization around these themes and around the key concepts that cut across theoretical perspectives in identity studies provides an overview designed to spark new insights and fresh ideas for exploring the stakes of identity. An emphasis on how these themes relate among themselves and to social inequalities further frames why identity is an important topic for sociological study.
Why Study Identity in Sociology?
Why should sociologists study identity? Answering this question relates both to why they should concern themselves with something that is already extensively studied in psychology