Beyond_IdentityAuthors_Rogers_Brubaker_and__Frederick

Beyond "Identity" Author(s): Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 1-47 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108478 Accessed: 24-01-2018 20:07 UTC

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Beyond "identity"

ROGERS BRUBAKER and FREDERICK COOPER

University of California, Los Angeles; University of Michigan

"The worst thing one can do with words," wrote George Orwell a half a century ago, "is to surrender to them." If language is to be "an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought," he continued, one must "let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about."' The argument of this article is that the social sciences and humanities have surrendered to the word

"identity"; that this has both intellectual and political costs; and that we can do better. "Identity," we argue, tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity). We take stock of the conceptual and theoretical work "identity" is supposed to do and suggest that this work might be done better by other terms, less ambig- uous, and unencumbered by the reifying connotations of "identity."

We argue that the prevailing constructivist stance on identity - the attempt to "soften" the term, to acquit it of the charge of "essentialism"

by stipulating that identities are constructed, fluid, and multiple - leaves us without a rationale for talking about "identities" at all and ill-equipped to examine the "hard" dynamics and essentialist claims of contemporary identity politics. "Soft" constructivism allows putative "identities" to proliferate. But as they proliferate, the term loses its analytical purchase. If identity is everywhere, it is nowhere. If it is fluid, how can we understand the ways in which self-understandings may harden, congeal, and crystallize? If it is constructed, how can we understand the sometimes coercive force of external identifications? If

it is multiple, how do we understand the terrible singularity that is often striven for - and sometimes realized - by politicians seeking to transform mere categories into unitary and exclusive groups? How can we understand the power and pathos of identity politics?

Theory and Society 29: 1-47, 2000. ? 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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"Identity" is a key term in the vernacular idiom of contemporary politics, and social analysis must take account of this fact. But this does not require us to use "identity" as a category of analysis or to conceptualize "identities" as something that all people have, seek, con- struct, and negotiate. Conceptualizing all affinities and affiliations, all forms of belonging, all experiences of commonality, connectedness, and cohesion, all self-understandings and self-identifications in the idiom of "identity" saddles us with a blunt, flat, undifferentiated vocabulary.

We do not aim here to contribute to the ongoing debate on identity politics.2 We focus instead on identity as an analytical category. This is not a "merely semantic" or terminological issue. The use and abuse of "identity," we suggest, affects not only the language of social anal- ysis but also - inseparably - its substance. Social analysis - including the analysis of identity politics - requires relatively unambiguous ana- lytical categories. Whatever its suggestiveness, whatever its indispens- ability in certain practical contexts, "identity" is too ambiguous, too torn between "hard" and "soft" meanings, essentialist connotations and constructivist qualifiers, to serve well the demands of social analysis.

The "identity" crisis in the social sciences

"Identity" and cognate terms in other languages have a long history as technical terms in Western philosophy, from the ancient Greeks through contemporary analytical philosophy. They have been used to address the perennial philosophical problems of permanence amidst manifest change, and of unity amidst manifest diversity.3 Widespread vernacular and social-analytical use of "identity" and its cognates, however, is of much more recent vintage and more localized prove- nance.

The introduction of "identity" into social analysis and its initial diffu- sion in the social sciences and public discourse occurred in the United States in the 1960s (with some anticipations in the second half of the 1950s).4 The most important and best-known trajectory involved the appropriation and popularization of the work of Erik Erikson (who was responsible, among other things, for coining the term "identity crisis").5 But as Philip Gleason has shown,6 there were other paths of diffusion as well. The notion of identification was pried from its original, specifically psychoanalytic context (where the term had been initially introduced by Freud) and linked to ethnicity on the one hand

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(through Gordon Allport's influential 1954 book The Nature of Preju- dice) and to sociological role theory and reference group theory on the other (through figures such as Nelson Foote and Robert Merton). Symbolic interactionist sociology, concerned from the outset with "the self," came increasingly to speak of "identity," in part through the influence of Anselm Strauss.7 More influential in popularizing the notion of identity, however, were Erving Goffman, working on the periphery of the symbolic interactionist tradition, and Peter Berger, working in social constructionist and phenomenological traditions.8

For a variety of reasons, the term identity proved highly resonant in the 1960s,9 diffusing quickly across disciplinary and national boundaries, establishing itself in the journalistic as well as the academic lexicon, and permeating the language of social and political practice as well as that of social and political analysis. In the American context, the prevalent individualist ethos and idiom gave a particular salience and resonance to "identity" concerns, particularly in the contexts of the 1950s thematization of the "mass society" problem and the 1960s gen- erational rebellions. And from the late 1960s on, with the rise of the Black Power movement, and subsequently other ethnic movements for which it served as a template, concerns with and assertions of individual identity, already linked by Erikson to "communal cul- ture," '0 were readily, if facilely, transposed to the group level. The proliferation of identitarian claim-making was facilitated by the com- parative institutional weakness of leftist politics in the United States and by the concomitant weakness of class-based idioms of social and political analysis. As numerous analysts have observed, class can itself be understood as an identity."1 Our point here is simply that the weak-

ness of class politics in the United States (vis-a-vis Western Europe) left the field particularly wide open for the profusion of identity claims.

Already in the mid-1970s, W. J. M. Mackenzie could characterize iden- tity as a word "driven out of its wits by over-use," and Robert Coles could remark that the notions of identity and identity crisis had become "the purest of cliches."2 But that was only the beginning. In the 1980s, with the rise of race, class, and gender as the "holy trinity" of literary criticism and cultural studies,13 the humanities joined the fray in full force. And "identity talk" - inside and outside academia - continues to proliferate today.14 The "identity" crisis - a crisis of overproduction and consequent devaluation of meaning - shows no sign of abating.15

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Qualitative as well as quantitative indicators signal the centrality - indeed the inescapability - of "identity" as a topos. In recent years, two new interdisciplinary journals devoted to the subject, complete with star-studded editorial boards, have been launched.16 And quite apart from the pervasive concern with "identity" in work on gender, sexuality, race, religion, ethnicity, nationalism, immigration, new social move- ments, culture, and "identity politics," even those whose work has not been concerned primarily with these topics have felt obliged to address the question of identity. A selective listing of major social theorists and social scientists whose main work lies outside the traditional "home-

lands" of identity theorizing yet who have nonetheless written explic- itly on "identity" in recent years includes Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Fernand Braudel, Craig Calhoun, S. N. Eisenstadt, Anthony Giddens, Bernhard Giesen, Jurgen Habermas, David Laitin, Claude Levi-Strauss, Paul Ricoeur, Amartya Sen, Margaret Somers, Charles Taylor, Charles Tilly, and Harrison White.'7

Categories of practice and categories of analysis

Many key terms in the interpretative social sciences and history - "race," "nation," "ethnicity," "citizenship," "democracy," "class," "community," and "tradition," for example - are at once categories of social and political practice and categories of social and political analysis. By "categories of practice," following Bourdieu, we mean something akin to what others have called "native" or "folk" or "lay" categories. These are categories of everyday social experience, devel- oped and deployed by ordinary social actors, as distinguished from the experience-distant categories used by social analysts.18 We prefer the expression "category of practice" to the alternatives, for while the latter imply a relatively sharp distinction between "native" or "folk" or "lay" categories on the one hand and "scientific" categories on the other, such concepts as "race," "ethnicity," or "nation" are marked by close reciprocal connection and mutual influence among their practi- cal and analytical uses.19

"Identity," too, is both a category of practice and a category of analy- sis. As a category of practice, it is used by "lay" actors in some (not all!) everyday settings to make sense of themselves, of their activities, of what they share with, and how they differ from, others. It is also used by political entrepreneurs to persuade people to understand themselves, their interests, and their predicaments in a certain way, to

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persuade certain people that they are (for certain purposes) "identical" with one another and at the same time different from others, and to organize and justify collective action along certain lines.20 In these ways the term "identity" is implicated both in everyday life and in "identity politics" in its various forms.

Everyday "identity talk" and "identity politics" are real and important phenomena. But the contemporary salience of "identity" as a category of practice does not require its use as a category of analysis. Consider an analogy. "Nation" is a widely used category of social and political practice. Appeals and claims made in the name of putative "nations" - for example, claims to self-determination - have been central to politics for a hundred-and-fifty years. But one does not have to use "nation" as an analytical category to understand and analyze such appeals and claims. One does not have to take a category inherent in the practice of nationalism - the realist, reifying conception of nations as real communities - and make this category central to the theory of nationalism.21 Nor does one have to use "race" as a category of analysis - which risks taking for granted that "race" exists - to understand and analyze social and political practices oriented to the presumed exis- tence of putative "races."22 Just as one can analyze "nation-talk" and nationalist politics without positing the existence of "nations," or "race-talk" and "race"-oriented politics without positing the existence of "races," so one can analyze "identity-talk" and identity politics without, as analysts, positing the existence of "identities."

Reification is a social process, not only an intellectual practice. As such, it is central to the politics of "ethnicity," "race," "nation," and other putative "identities." Analysts of this kind of politics should seek to account for this process of reification. We should seek to explain the processes and mechanisms through which what has been called the "political fiction" of the "nation" - or of the "ethnic group," "race," or other putative "identity" - can crystallize, at certain moments, as a powerful, compelling reality.23 But we should avoid unintentionally reproducing or reinforcing such reification by uncritically adopting categories of practice as categories of analysis.

The mere use of a term as a category of practice, to be sure, does not disqualify it as a category of analysis.24 If it did, the vocabulary of social analysis would be a great deal poorer, and more artificial, than it is. What is problematic is not that a particular term is used, but how it is used. The problem, as Loic Wacquant has argued with respect to

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"race," lies in the "uncontrolled conflation of social and sociological... [or] folk and analytic understandings."25 The problem is that "nation," "race," and "identity" are used analytically a good deal of the time more or less as they are used in practice, in an implicitly or explicitly reifying manner, in a manner that implies or asserts that "nations," "races," and "identities" "exist" and that people "have" a "nationality," a "race," an "identity."

It may be objected that this overlooks recent efforts to avoid reifying "identity" by theorizing identities as multiple, fragmented, and fluid.26 "Essentialism" has indeed been vigorously criticized, and constructi- vist gestures now accompany most discussions of "identity."27 Yet we often find an uneasy amalgam of constructivist language and essentialist

argumentation.28 This is not a matter of intellectual sloppiness. Rather, it reflects the dual orientation of many academic identitarians as both analysts and protagonists of identity politics. It reflects the tension between the constructivist language that is required by academic cor- rectness and the foundationalist or essentialist message that is required if appeals to "identity" are to be effective in practice.29 Nor is the solution to be found in a more consistent constructivism: for it is not

clear why what is routinely characterized as multiple, fragmented, and fluid should be conceptualized as "identity" at all.

The uses of "identity"

What do scholars mean when they talk about "identity?"30 What conceptual and explanatory work is the term supposed to do? This depends on the context of its use and the theoretical tradition from which the use in question derives. The term is richly - indeed for an analytical concept, hopelessly - ambiguous. But one can identify a few key uses:

1. Understood as a ground or basis of social or political action, "iden- tity" is often opposed to "interest" in an effort to highlight and conceptualize non-instrumental modes of social and political ac- tion.31 With a slightly different analytical emphasis, it is used to underscore the manner in which action - individual or collective -

may be governed by particularistic self-understandings rather than by putatively universal self-interest.32 This is probably the most general use of the term; it is frequently found in combination with other uses. It involves three related but distinct contrasts in ways of

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conceptualizing and explaining action. The first is between self- understanding and (narrowly understood) self-interest.33 The second is between particularity and (putative) universality. The third is between two ways of construing social location. Many (though not all) strands of identitarian theorizing see social and political action as powerfully shaped by position in social space.34 In this they agree with many (though not all) strands of universalist, instrumentalist theorizing. But "social location" means something quite different in the two cases. For identitarian theorizing, it means position in a multidimensional space defined by particularistic categorical at- tributes (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation). For instrumen- talist theorizing, it means position in a universalistically conceived social structure (for example, position in the market, the occupa- tional structure, or the mode of production).35

2. Understood as a specifically collective phenomenon, "identity" de- notes a fundamental and consequential sameness among members of a group or category. This may be understood objectively (as a sameness "in itself") or subjectively (as an experienced, felt, or perceived sameness). This sameness is expected to manifest itself in solidarity, in shared dispositions or consciousness, or in collective action. This usage is found especially in the literature on social movements;36 on gender;37 and on race, ethnicity, and national- ism.38 In this usage, the line between "identity" as a category of analysis and as a category of practice is often blurred.

3. Understood as a core aspect of (individual or collective) "selfhood" or as a fundamental condition of social being, "identity" is invoked to point to something allegedly deep, basic, abiding, orfoundational. This is distinguished from more superficial, accidental, fleeting, or contingent aspects or attributes of the self, and is understood as something to be valued, cultivated, supported, recognized, and pre- served.39 This usage is characteristic of certain strands of the psy- chological (or psychologizing) literature, especially as influenced by Erikson,40 though it also appears in the literature on race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Here too the practical and analytical uses of "identity" are frequently conflated.

4. Understood as a product of social or political action, "identity" is invoked to highlight the processual, interactive development of the kind of collective self-understanding, solidarity, or "groupness" that can make collective action possible. In this usage, found in certain

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strands of the "new social movement" literature, "identity" is under- stood both as a contingent product of social or political action and as a ground or basis of further action.41

5. Understood as the evanescent product of multiple and competing discourses, "identity" is invoked to highlight the unstable, multiple,

fluctuating, andfragmented nature of the contemporary "self." This usage is found especially in the literature influenced by Foucault, post-structuralism, and post-modernism.42 In somewhat different form, without the post-structuralist trappings, it is also found in certain strands of the literature on ethnicity - notably in "situa- tionalist" or "contextualist" accounts of ethnicity.43

Clearly, the term "identity" is made to do a great deal of work. It is used to highlight non-instrumental modes of action; to focus on self- understanding rather than self-interest; to designate sameness across persons or sameness over time; to capture allegedly core, foundational aspects of selfhood; to deny that such core, foundational aspects exist; to highlight the processual, interactive development of solidarity and collective self-understanding; and to stress the fragmented quality of the contemporary experience of "self," a self unstably patched together

through shards of discourse and contingently "activated" in differing contexts.

These usages are not simply heterogeneous; they point in sharply differing directions. To be sure, there are affinities between certain of them, notably between the second and third, and between the fourth and fifth. And the first usage is general enough to be compatible with all of the others. But there are strong tensions as well. The second and third uses both highlight fundamental sameness - sameness across persons and sameness over time - while the fourth and fifth uses both reject notions of fundamental or abiding sameness.

"Identity," then, bears a multivalent, even contradictory theoretical burden. Do we really need this heavily burdened, deeply ambiguous term? The overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion suggests that we do.44 Even the most sophisticated theorists, while readily acknowl- edging the elusive and problematic nature of "identity," have argued that it remains indispensable. Critical discussion of "identity" has thus sought not to jettison but to save the term by reformulating it so as to make it immune from cetain objections, especially from the dreaded charge of "essentialism." Thus Stuart Hall characterizes identity as "an

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idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain

key questions cannot be thought at all."45 What these key questions are, and why they cannot be addressed without "identity," remain obscure in Hall's sophisticated but opaque discussion.46 Hall's comment echoes an earlier formulation of Claude Levi-Strauss, characterizing identity is "a sort of virtual center (foyer virtuel) to which we must refer

to explain certain things, but without it ever having a real existence."47 Lawrence Grossberg, concerned by the narrowing preoccupation of cultural studies with the "theory and politics of identity," nonetheless repeatedly assures the reader that he does "not mean to reject the concept of identity or its political importance in certain struggles" and that his "project is not to escape the discourse of identity but to relocate it, to rearticulate it."48 Alberto Melucci, a leading exponent of identity-oriented analyses of social movements, acknowledges that "the word identity ... is semantically inseparable from the idea of permanence and is perhaps, for this very reason, ill-suited to the processual analysis for which I am arguing."49 Ill-suited or not, "iden- tity" continues to find a central place in Melucci's writing.

We are not persuaded that "identity" is indispensable. We sketch below some alternative analytical idioms that can do the necessary work without the attendant confusion. Suffice it to say for the moment 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 trace the process through which persons sharing some categorical attribute come to share definitions of their predicament, understandings of their interest, and a readiness to under-

take collective action, it is best to do so in a manner that highlights the contingent and variable relationship between mere categories and bounded, solidary groups. If one wants to examine the meanings and significance people give to constructs such as "race," "ethnicity," and "nationality," one already has to thread through conceptual thickets, and it is not clear what one gains by aggregating them under the flat- tening rubric of identity. And if one wants to convey the late modern sense of a self being constructed and continuously reconstructed out of a variety of competing discourses - and remaining fragile, fluctuating, and fragmented - it is not obvious why the word identity captures the meaning being conveyed.

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"Strong" and "weak" understandings of "identity"

We suggested at the outset that "identity" tends to mean either too much or too little. This point can now be elaborated. Our inventory of the uses of "identity" has revealed not only great heterogeneity but a strong antithesis between positions that highlight fundamental or abiding sameness and stances that expressly reject notions of basic sameness. The former can be called strong or hard conceptions of identity, the latter weak or soft conceptions.

Strong conceptions of "identity" preserve the common-sense meaning of the term - the emphasis on sameness over time or across persons. And they accord well with the way the term is used in most forms of identity politics. But precisely because they adopt for analytical pur- poses a category of everyday experience and political practice, they entail a series of deeply problematic assumptions:

1. Identity is something all people have, or ought to have, or are searching for.

2. Identity is something all groups (at least groups of a certain kind - e.g., ethnic, racial, or national) have, or ought to have.

3. Identity is something people (and groups) can have without being aware of it. In this perspective, identity is something to be discovered,

and something about which one can be mistaken. The strong con- ception of identity thus replicates the Marxian epistemology of class.

4. Strong notions of collective identity imply strong notions of group boundedness and homogeneity. They imply high degrees of group- ness, an "identity" or sameness among group members, a sharp distinctiveness from nonmembers, a clear boundary between inside and outside.50

Given the powerful challenges from many quarters to substantialist understandings of groups and essentialist understandings of identity, one might think we have sketched a "straw man" here. Yet in fact strong conceptions of "identity" continue to inform important strands of the literature on gender, race, ethnicity, and nationalism.51

Weak understandings of "identity," by contrast, break consciously with the everyday meaning of the term. It is such weak or "soft"

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conceptions that have been heavily favored in theoretical discussions of "identity" in recent years, as theorists have become increasingly aware of and uncomfortable with the strong or "hard" implications of everyday meanings of "identity." Yet this new theoretical "common sense" has problems of its own. We sketch three of these.

The first is what we call "cliched constructivism." Weak or soft con-

ceptions of identity are routinely packaged with standard qualifiers indicating that identity is multiple, unstable, in flux, contingent, frag- mented, constructed, negotiated, and so on. These qualifiers have become so familiar - indeed obligatory - in recent years that one reads (and writes) them virtually automatically. They risk becoming mere place-holders, gestures signaling a stance rather than words con- veying a meaning.

Second, it is not clear why weak conceptions of "identity" are concep- tions of identity. The everyday sense of "identity" strongly suggests at least some self-sameness over time, some persistence, something that remains identical, the same, while other things are changing. What is the point in using the term "identity" if this core meaning is expressly repudiated?

Third, and most important, weak conceptions of identity may be too weak to do useful theoretical work. In their concern to cleanse the

term of its theoretically disreputable "hard" connotations, in their insistence that identities are multiple, malleable, fluid, and so on, soft identitarians leave us with a term so infinitely elastic as to be incapable of performing serious analytical work.

We are not claiming that the strong and weak versions sketched here jointly exhaust the possible meanings and uses of "identity." Nor are we claiming that sophisticated constructivist theorists have not done interesting and important work using "soft" understandings of iden- tity. We argue, however, that what is interesting and important in this

work often does not depend on the use of "identity" as an analytical category. Consider three examples.

Margaret Somers, criticizing scholarly discussions of identity for focus- ing on categorical commonality rather than on historically variable relational embeddedness, proposes to "reconfigur[e] the study of iden- tity formation through the concept of narrative," to "incorporate into the core conception of identity the categorically destabilizing dimen-

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sions of time, space, and relationality." Somers makes a compelling case for the importance of narrative to social life and social analysis, and argues persuasively for situating social narratives in historically specific relational settings. She focuses on the ontological dimension of narratives, on the way in which narratives not only represent but, in an

important sense, constitute social actors and the social world in which they act. What remains unclear from her account is why - and in what sense - it is identities that are constituted through narratives and

formed in particular relational settings. Social life is indeed pervasively "storied"; but it is not clear why this "storiedness" should be axiomati- cally linked to identity. People everywhere and always tell stories about themselves and others, and locate themselves within culturally avail-

able repertoires of stories. But in what sense does it follow that such "narrative location endows social actors with identities - however

multiple, ambiguous, ephemeral, or conflicting they may be?" What does this soft, flexible notion of identity add to the argument about narrativity? The major analytical work in Somers's article is done by the concept of narrativity, supplemented by that of relational setting; the work done by the concept of identity is much less clear.52

Introducing a collection on Citizenship, Identity, and Social History, Charles Tilly characterizes identity as a "blurred but indispensable" concept and defines it as "an actor's experience of a category, tie, role, network, group or organization, coupled with a public representation of that experience; the public representation often takes the form of a shared story, a narrative." But what is the relationship between this encompassing, open-ended definition and the work Tilly wants the concept to do? What is gained, analytically, by labeling any experience and public representaion of any tie, role, network, etc. as an identity? When it comes to examples, Tilly rounds up the usual suspects: race, gender, class, job, religious affiliation, national origin. But it is not clear what analytical leverage on these phenomena can be provided by the exceptionally capacious, flexible concept of identity he proposes. Highlighting "identity" in the title of the volume signals an openness to the cultural turn in the social history and historical sociology of citizenship; beyond this, it is not clear what work the concept does. Justly well-known for fashioning sharply focused, "hard-working" con- cepts, Tilly here faces the difficulty that confronts most social scientists writing about identity today: that of devising a concept "soft" and flexible enough to satisfy the requirements of relational, constructivist social theory, yet robust enough to have purchase on the phenomena that cry out for explanation, some of which are quite "hard." 53

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Craig Calhoun uses the Chinese student movement of 1989 as a vehicle for a subtle and illuminating discussion of the concepts of identity, interest, and collective action. Calhoun explains students' readiness to "knowingly risk death" in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3, 1989 in terms of an honor-bound identity or sense of self, forged in the course of the movement itself, to which students became increasingly and, in the end, irrevocably committed. His account of the shifts in the

students' lived sense of self during the weeks of their protest - as they were drawn, in and through the dynamics of their struggle, from an originally "positional," class-based self-understanding as students and intellectuals to a broader, emotionally charged identification with na- tional and even universal ideals - is a compelling one. Here too, how- ever, the crucial analytical work appears to be done by a concept other than identity - in this case, that of honor. Honor, Calhoun observes, is "imperative in a way interests are not." But it is also imperative in a way identity, in the weak sense, is not. Calhoun subsumes honor under the rubric of identity, and presents his argument as a general one about the "constitution and transformation of identity." Yet his fundamental argument in this article, it would seem, is not about identity in general, but about the way in which a compelling sense of honor can, in extra- ordinary circumstances, lead people to undertake extraordinary actions, lest their core sense of self be radically undermined.54

Identity in this exceptionally strong sense - as a sense of self that can imperatively require interest-threatening or even life-threatening action - has little to do with identity in the weak or soft sense. Calhoun himself underscores the incommensurability between "ordinary identity - self-conceptions, the way people reconcile interests in everyday life" and the imperative, honor-driven sense of self that can enable or even require people to be "brave to the point of apparent foolishness."55 Calhoun provides a powerful characterization of the latter; but it is not clear what analytical work is done by the former, more general conception of identity.

In his edited volume on Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Calhoun works with this more general understanding of identity. "Concerns with individual and collective identity," he observes, "are ubiquitous." It is certainly true that "[we] know of no people without names, no languages or cultures in which some manner of distinctions between self and other, we and they are not made." 56 But it is not clear

why this implies the ubiquity of identity, unless we dilute "identity" to the point of designating all practices involving naming and self-other

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distinctions. Calhoun - like Somers and Tilly - goes on to make illuminating arguments on a range of issues concerning claims of commonality and difference in contemporary social movements. Yet while such claims are indeed often framed today in an idiom of "iden- tity," it is not clear that adopting that idiom for analytical purposes is necessary or even helpful.

In other words

What alternative terms might stand in for "identity," doing the theo- retical work "identity" is supposed to do without its confusing, con- tradictory connotations? Given the great range and heterogeneity of the work done by "identity," it would be fruitless to look for a single substitute, for such a term would be as overburdened as "identity" itself. Our strategy has been rather to unbundle the thick tangle of meanings that have accumulated around the term "identity," and to parcel out the work to a number of less congested terms. We sketch three clusters of terms here.

Identification and categorization

As a processual, active term, derived from a verb, "identification" lacks the reifying connotations of "identity."57 It invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying. And it does not presuppose that such identifying (even by powerful agents, such as the state) will necessarily result in the internal sameness, the distinctiveness, the bounded group-

ness that political entrepreneurs may seek to achieve. Identification - of oneself and of others - is intrinsic to social life; "identity" in the strong sense is not.

One may be called upon to identify oneself - to characterize oneself, to locate oneself vis-a-vis known others, to situate oneself in a narrative, to place oneself in a category - in any number of different contexts. In modern settings, which multiply interactions with others not per- sonally known, such occasions for identification are particularly abun- dant. They include innumerable situations of everyday life as well as more formal and official contexts. How one identifies oneself - and

how one is identified by others - may vary greatly from context to context; self- and other-identification are fundamentally situational and contextual.

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One key distinction is between relational and categorical modes of identification. One may identify oneself (or another person) by posi- tion in a relational web (a web of kinship, for example, or of friendship, patron-client ties, or teacher-student relations). On the other hand, one may identify oneself (or another person) by membership in a class of persons sharing some categorical attribute (such as race, ethnicity, language, nationality, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). Craig Calhoun has argued that, while relational modes of identifica- tion remain important in many contexts even today, categorical identi- fication has assumed ever greater importance in modern settings.58

Another basic distinction is between self-identification and the identifi-

cation and categorization of oneself by others.59 Self-identification takes place in dialectical interplay with external identification, and the two need not converge.60 External identification is itself a varied process. In the ordinary ebb and flow of social life, people identify and categorize others, just as they identify and categorize themselves. But there is another key type of external identification that has no counterpart in the domain of self-identification: the formalized, codified, objectified sys- tems of categorization developed by powerful, authoritative institutions.

The modern state has been one of the most important agents of identification and categorization in this latter sense. In culturalist extensions of the Weberian sociology of the state, notably those influenced by Bourdieu and Foucault, the state monopolizes, or seeks to monopolize, not only legitimate physical force but also legitimate symbolic force, as Bourdieu puts it. This includes the power to name, to identify, to categorize, to state what is what and who is who. There is

a burgeoning sociological and historical literature on such subjects. Some scholars have looked at "identification" quite literally: as the attachment of definitive markers to an individual via passport, finger- print, photograph, and signature, and the amassing of such identifying documents in state repositories. When, why, and with what limitations such systems have been developed turns out to be no simple problem.61 Other scholars emphasize the modern state's efforts to inscribe its subjects onto a classificatory grid: to identify and categorize people in relation to gender, religion, property-ownership, ethnicity, literacy, criminality, or sanity. Censuses apportion people across these catego- ries, and institutions - from schools to prisons - sort out individuals in relation to them. To Foucauldians in particular, these individualizing and aggregating modes of identification and classification are at the core of what defines "governmentality" in a modern state.62

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The state is thus a powerful "identifier," not because it can create "identities" in the strong sense - in general, it cannot - but because it has the material and symbolic resources to impose the categories, classificatory schemes, and modes of social counting and accounting with which bureaucrats, judges, teachers, and doctors must work and to which non-state actors must refer.63 But the state is not the only "identifier" that matters. As Charles Tilly has shown, categorization does crucial "organizational work" in all kinds of social settings, in- cluding families, firms, schools, social movements, and bureaucracies of all kinds.64 Even the most powerful state does not monopolize the production and diffusion of identifications and categories; and those that it does produce may be contested. The literature on social move- ments - "old" as well as "new" - is rich in evidence on how movement

leaders challenge official identifications and propose alternative ones.65 It highlights leaders' efforts to get members of putative constituencies to identify themselves in a certain way, to see themselves - for a certain range of purposes - as "identical" with one another, to identify emo- tionally as well as cognitively with one another.66

The social movement literature has valuably emphasized the interactive,

discursively mediated processes through which collective solidarities and self-understandings develop. Our reservations concern the move from discussing the work of identification - the efforts to build a collec- tive self-understanding - to positing "identity" as their necessary result.

By considering authoritative, institutionalized modes of identification together with alternative modes involved in the practices of everyday life and the projects of social movements, one can emphasize the hard work and long struggles over identification as well as the uncertain outcomes of such struggles. However, if the outcome is always presumed to be an "identity" - however provisional, fragmented, multiple, contested, and fluid - one loses the capacity to make key distinctions.

"Identification," we noted above, invites specification of the agents that do the identifying. Yet identification does not require a specifiable "identifier"; it can be pervasive and influential without being accom- plished by discrete, specified persons or institutions. Identification can be carried more or less anonymously by discourses or public narra- tives.67 Although close analysis of such discourses or narratives might well focus on their instantiations in particular discursive or narrative utterances, their force may depend not on any particular instantiation but on their anonymous, unnoticed permeation of our ways of think- ing and talking and making sense of the social world.

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There is one further meaning of "identification," briefly alluded to above, that is largely independent of the cognitive, characterizing, classificatory meanings discussed so far. This is the psychodynamic meaning, derived originally from Freud.68 While the classificatory meanings involve identifying oneself (or someone else) as someone who fits a certain description or belongs to a certain category, the psychodynamic meaning involves identifying oneself emotionally with another person, category, or collectivity. Here again, "identification" calls attention to complex (and often ambivalent) processes, while the term "identity," designating a condition rather than a process, implies too easy a fit between the individual and the social.

Self-understanding and social location

"Identification" and "categorization" are active, processual terms, de- rived from verbs, and calling to mind particular acts of identification and categorization performed by particular identifiers and categorizers. But we need other kinds of terms as well to do the varied work done by "identity." Recall that one key use of "identity" is to conceptualize and explain action in a non-instrumental, non-mechanial manner. In this sense, the term suggests ways in which individual and collective action can be governed by particularistic understandings of self and social location rather than by putatively universal, structurally determined interests. "Self-understanding" is therefore the second term we would propose as an alternative to "identity." It is a dispositional term that designates what might be called "situated subjectivity": one's sense of who one is, of one's social location, and of how (given the first two) one is prepared to act. As a dispositional term, it belongs to the realm of what Pierre Bourdieu has called sens pratique, the practical sense - at once cognitive and emotional - that persons have of themselves and their social world.69

The term "self-understanding," it is important to emphasize, does not imply a distinctively modern or Western understanding of the "self" as a homogeneous, bounded, unitary entity. A sense of who one is can take many forms. The social processes through which persons under- stand and locate themselves may in some instances involve the psycho- analyst's couch and in others participation in spirit-possession cults.70 In some settings, people may understand and experience themselves in terms of a grid of intersecting categories; in others, in terms of a web of

connections of differential proximity and intensity. Hence the impor-

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tance of seeing self-understanding and social locatedness in relation to each other, and of emphasizing that both the bounded self and the bounded group are culturally specific rather than universal forms.

Like the term "identification," "self-understanding" lacks the reifying connotations of "identity." Yet it is not restricted to situations of flux and instability. Self-understandings may be variable across time and across persons, but they may be stable. Semantically, "identity" implies sameness across time or persons; hence the awkwardness of continuing to speak of "identity" while repudiating the implication of sameness. "Self-understanding," by contrast, has no privileged semantic connec- tion with sameness or difference.

Two closely related terms are "self-representation" and "self-identifica- tion." Having discussed "identification" above, we simply observe here that, while the distinction is not sharp, "self-understandings" may be tacit; even when they are formed, as they ordinarily are, in and through

prevailing discourses, they may exist, and inform action, without themselves being discursively articulated. "Self-representation" and "self-identification," on the other hand, suggest at least some degree of

explicit discursive articulation.

"Self-understanding" cannot, of course, do all the work done by "iden- tity." We note here three limitations of the term. First, it is a subjective, auto-referential term. As such, it designates one's own understanding of who one is. It cannot capture others' understandings, even though external categorizations, identifications, and representations may be decisive in determining how one is regarded and treated by others, indeed in shaping one's own understanding of oneself. At the limit, self-understandings may be overridden by overwhelmingly coercive external categorizations.71

Second, "self-understanding" would seem to privilege cognitive aware- ness. As a result, it would seem not to capture - or at least not to highlight - the affective or cathectic processes suggested by some uses of "identity." Yet self-understanding is never purely cognitive; it is always affectively tinged or charged, and the term can certainly accom- modate this affective dimension. However, it is true that the emotional

dynamics are better captured by the term "identification" (in its psycho- dynamic meaning).

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Finally, as a term that emphasizes situated subjectivity, "self-under- standing" does not capture the objectivity claimed by strong under- standings of identity. Strong, objectivist conceptions of identity permit one to distinguish "true" identity (characterized as deep, abiding, and objective) from "mere" self-understanding (superficial, fluctuating, and subjective). If identity is something to be discovered, and some- thing about which one can be mistaken, then one's momentary self- understanding may not correspond to one's abiding, underlying iden- tity. However analytically problematic these notions of depth, constancy, and objectivity may be, they do at least provide a reason for using the language of identity rather than that of self-understanding.

Weak conceptions of identity provide no such reason. It is clear from the constructivist literature why weak understandings of identity are weak; but it is not clear why they are conceptions of identity. In this literature, it is the various soft predicates of identity - constructedness, contingency, instability, multiplicity, fluidity - that are emphasized and elaborated, while what they are predicated of- identity itself - is taken for granted and seldom explicated. When identity itself is elucidated, it is often represented as something - a sense of who one is,72 a self- conception73- that can be captured in a straightforward way by "self- understanding." This term lacks the allure, the buzz, the theoretical pretensions of "identity," but this should count as an asset, not a liability.

Commonality, connectedness, groupness

One particular form of affectively charged self-understanding that is often designated by "identity" - especially in discussions of race, religion, ethnicity, nationalism, gender, sexuality, social movements, and other phenomena conceptualized as involving collective identities - deserves separate mention here. This is the emotionally laden sense of belonging to a distinctive, bounded group, involving both a felt solidarity or oneness with fellow group members and a felt difference from or even antipathy to specified outsiders.

The problem is that "identity" is used to designate both such strongly groupist, exclusive, affectively charged self-understandings and much looser, more open self-understandings, involving some sense of affin- ity or affiliation, commonality or connectedness to particular others, but lacking a sense of overriding oneness vis-a-vis some constitutive

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"other."74 Both the tightly groupist and the more loosely affiliative forms of self-understanding - as well as the transitional forms between

these polar types - are important, but they shape personal experience and condition social and political action in sharply differing ways.

Rather than stirring all self-understandings based on race, religion, ethnicity, and so on into the great conceptual melting pot of "identity," we would do better to use a more differentiated analytical language. Terms such as commonality, connectedness, and groupness could be usefully employed here in place of the all-purpose "identity." This is the third cluster of terms we propose. "Commonality" denotes the sharing of some common attribute, "connectedness" the relational ties that link people. Neither commonality nor connectedness alone engenders "groupness" - the sense of belonging to a distinctive, bounded, solidary group. But commonality and connectedness together may indeed do so. This was the argument Charles Tilly put forward some time ago, building on Harrison White's idea of the "catnet," a set of persons comprising both a category, sharing some common attribute, and a network.75 Tilly's suggestion that groupness is a joint product of the "catness" and "netness" - categorical commonality and relational con- nectedness - is suggestive. But we would propose two emendations.

First, categorical commonality and relational connectedness need to be supplemented by a third element, what Max Weber called a Zusam- mengehorigkeitsgefihl, a feeling of belonging together. Such a feeling may indeed depend in part on the degrees and forms of commonality and connectedness, but it will also depend on other factors such as particular events, their encoding in compelling public narratives, pre- vailing discursive frames, and so on. Second, relational connectedness, or what Tilly calls "netness," while crucial in facilitating the sort of collective action Tilly was interested in, is not always necessary for "groupness." A strongly bounded sense of groupness may rest on cate- gorical commonality and an associated feeling of belonging together with minimal or no relational connectedness. This is typically the case for large-scale collectivities such as "nations": when a diffuse self- understanding as a member of a particular nation crystallizes into a strongly bounded sense of groupness, this is likely to depend not on relational connectedness, but rather on a powerfully imagined and strongly felt commonality.76

The point is not, as some partisans of network theory have suggested, to turn from commonality to connectedness, from categories to net-

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works, from shared attributes to social relations.77 Nor is it to celebrate

fluidity and hybridity over belonging and solidarity. The point in sug- gesting this last set of terms is rather to develop an analytical idiom sensitive to the multiple forms and degrees of commonality and con- nectedness, and to the widely varying ways in which actors (and the cultural idioms, public narratives, and prevailing discourses on which they draw) attribute meaning and significance to them. This will enable us to distinguish instances of strongly binding, vehemently felt groupness

from more loosely structured, weakly constraining forms of affinity and affiliation.

Three cases: "Identity" and its alternatives in context

Having surveyed the work done by "identity," indicated some limita- tions and liabilities of the term, and suggested a range of alternatives, we seek now to illustrate our argument - both the critical claims about "identity" and the constructive suggestions regarding alternative idioms

- through a consideration of three cases. In each case, we suggest, the identitarian focus on bounded groupness limits the sociological - and the political - imagination, while alternative analytical idioms can help open up both.

A case from Africanist anthropology: "The" Nuer

African studies has suffered from its version of identitarian thinking, most extremely in journalistic accounts that see Africans' "tribal iden- tity" as the main cause of violence and of the failure of the nation-state. Academic Africanists have been troubled by this reductive vision of Africa since at least the 1970s and attracted to a version of constructi-

vism, well before such an approach had a name.78 The argument that ethnic groups are not primordial but the products of history - including the reifying of cultural difference through imposed colonial identifica- tions - became a staple of African studies. Even so, scholars tended to emphasize boundary-formation rather than boundary crossing, the constitution of groups rather than the development of networks.79 In this context, it is worth going back to a classic of African ethnology: E. E. Evans-Pritchard's book The Nuer.80

Based on research in Northeast Africa in the 1930s, The Nuer describes

a distinctively relational mode of identification, self-understanding,

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I I I I

*-A *=A =A *=A

0-A 0-A A 0 A *-A -A

&= * M=- -f-A- =AA B

* Female / \ A Male

= Marriage

Figure 1. A segmentary patrilineage; lines represent descent; marriage partners come from another lineage; children of daughters belong to the lineage of the husband and are not shown; children of sons belong to this lineage and are represented here.

and social location, one that construes the social world in terms of the degree and quality of connection among people rather than in terms of categories, groups, or boundaries. Social location is defined in the first instance in terms of lineage, consisting of the descendants of one ancestor reckoned through a socially conventional line: patrilineal, via males in the case of Nuer, via females or more rarely via double descent systems in other parts of Africa. Children belong to the lineage of their fathers, and while relationships with the mother's kin are not ignored, they are not part of the descent system. A segmentary lineage can be diagrammed as in Figure 1.

Everybody in this diagram is related to everybody else, but in different ways and to different degrees. One might be tempted to say that the people marked in circle A constitute a group, with an "identity" of A, as distinct from those in circle B, with an "identity" of B. The trouble with such an interpretation is that the very move that distinguishes A and B also shows their relatedness, as one moves back one generation and finds a common ancestor, who may or may not be living but whose social location links people in A and B. If someone in set A gets into a conflict with someone in set B, such a person may well try to invoke the commonality of "A-ness" to mobilize people against B. But someone genealogically older than these parties can invoke the linking ancestors to cool things off. The act of going deeper in a genealogical chart in the course of social interaction keeps reemphasizing relational visions of social location at the expense of categorical ones.

One could argue that this patrilineage as a whole constitutes an iden- tity, distinct from other lineages. But Evans-Pritchard's point is that

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segmentation represents an entire social order, and that lineages them- selves are related to one another as male and female lineage members are to each other. Then let us consider marriage. Virtually all segmen- tary societies insist on exogamy; and, in evolutionary perspective, the prevalence of exogamy may reflect the advantages of cross-lineage connectedness. So the male-centered lineage diagram presumes another set of relationships, through women who are born into the lineage of their fathers but whose sons and daughters belong to the lineage they married into.

One could then argue that all the lineages that intermarried constitute the "Nuer" as an identity distinct from "Dinka" or any of the other groups in the region. But here recent work in African history offers a more nuanced approach. The genealogical construction of relationality offers possibilities for extension more supple than the twentieth-cen- tury scholar's tendency to look for a neat boundary between inside and outside. Marriage relations could be extended beyond the Nuer (both via reciprocal arrangements and coercively by forcing captive women into marriage). Strangers - encountered via trade, migration, or other forms of movement - could be incorporated as fictive kin or more loosely linked to a patrilineage via blood brotherhood. The people of northeastern Africa migrated extensively, as they tried to find better ecological niches or as lineage segments moved in and out of relations with each other. Traders stretched their kinship relations over space, formed a variety of relationships at the interfaces with agricultural communities, and sometimes developed lingua franca to foster com- munication across large spatial networks.81 In many parts of Africa, one finds certain organizations - religious shrines, initiation societies - that cross linguistic and cultural distinctions, offering what Paul Richards calls a "common 'grammar"' of social experience within regions, for all the cultural variation and political differentiation that they contain.82

The problem with subsuming these forms of relational connectedness under the "social construction of identity" is that linking and separating get called by the same name, making it harder to grasp the processes, causes, and consequences of differing patterns of crystallizing difference and forging connections. Africa was far from a paradise of sociability, but war and peace both involved flexible patterns of affiliation as well as differentiation.

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One should not assume that the principles of a sliding scale of connec- tion are unique to small-scale "tribal" society. We know from the study of larger-scale political organizations - with authoritative rulers and elaborate hierarchies of command - that kinship networks remained an important principle of social life. African kings asserted their authority by developing patrimonial relations with people from different lineages, creating a core of support that cross cut lineage affiliations, but they also used lineage principles to consolidate their own power, cementing marriage alliances and expanding the size of the royal lineage.83 In almost all societies, kinship concepts are symbolic and ideological resources, yet while they shape norms, self-understandings, and percep- tions of affinity, they do not necessarily produce kinship "groups." 84

To a greater extent than the forms of domination that preceded it, colonial rule attempted a one-to-one mapping of people with some putatively common characteristic onto territory. These imposed iden- tifications could be powerful, but their effects depended on the actual relationships and symbolic systems that colonial officials - and in- digenous cultural entrepreneurs as well - had to work with, and on countervailing efforts of others to maintain, develop, and articulate different sorts of affinities and self-understandings. The colonial era did indeed witness complex struggles over identification, but it flattens our understanding of these struggles to see them as producing "identi- ties." People could live with shadings - and continued to do so day-by- day even when political lines were drawn.

Sharon Hutchinson's remarkable reanalysis of Evans-Pritchard's "tribe" takes such an argument into a contemporary, conflict-ridden situation. Her aim is "to call into question the very idea of 'the Nuer' as a unified ethnic identity."85 She points to the fuzziness of the boundaries of people now called Nuer: culture and history do not follow such lines. And she suggests that Evans-Pritchard's segmentary schema gives ex- cessive attention to the dominant male elders of the 1930s, and not

enough to women, men in less powerful lineages, or younger men and women. In this analysis, it not only becomes difficult to see Nuerness as an identity, but imperative to examine with precision how people tried both to extend and to consolidate connections. Bringing the story up to the era of civil war in the southern Sudan in the 1990s, Hutchinson refuses to reduce the conflict to one of cultural or religious difference between the warring parties and insists instead on a deep analysis of political relationships, struggles for economic resources, and spatial connections.

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In much of modern Africa, indeed, some of the most bitter conflicts have taken place within collectivities that are relatively uniform cul- turally and linguistically (Rwanda, Somalia) and between loose eco- nomic and social networks based more on patron-client relations than ethnic affiliation (Angola, Sierra Leone), as well as in situations where cultural distinction has been made into a political weapon (Kwa Zulu in South Africa).86 To explain present or past conflict in terms of how people construct and fight for their "identities" risks providing a pre- fabricated, presentist, teleological explanation that diverts attention from questions such as those addressed by Hutchinson.

East European nationalism

We have argued that the language of identity, with its connotations of boundedness, groupness, and sameness, is conspicuously ill suited to the analysis of segmentary lineage societies - or of present-day con- flicts in Africa. One might accept this point yet argue that identitarian language is well suited to the analysis of other social settings, including our own, where public and private "identity talk" is widely current. But we are not arguing only that the concept of identity does not "travel" well, that it cannot be universally applied to all social settings. We want to make a stronger argument: that "identity" is neither necessary nor helpful as a category of analysis even where it is widely used as a category of practice. To this end, we briefly consider East European nationalism and identity politics in the United States.

Historical and social scientific writing on nationalism in Eastern Europe - to a much greater extent than writing on social movements or ethnicity in North America - has been characterized by relatively strong or hard understandings of group identity. Many commentators have seen the post-communist resurgence of ethnic nationalism in the region as springing from robust and deeply rooted national identities - from identities strong and resilient enough to have survived decades of repression by ruthlessly antinational communist regimes. But this "return-of-the-repressed" view is problematic.87

Consider the former Soviet Union. To see national conflicts as struggles to validate and express identities that had somehow survived the regime's attempts to crush them is unwarranted. Although antinationalist, and of course brutally repressive in all kinds of ways, the Soviet regime was anything but anti-national.88 Far from ruthlessly suppressing nation-

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hood, the regime went to unprecedented lengths in institutionalizing and codifying it. It carved up Soviet territory into more than fifty putatively autonomous national "homelands," each "belonging" to a particular ethnonational group; and it assigned each citizen an ethnic "nationality," which was ascribed at birth on the basis of descent, registered in personal identity documents, recorded in bureaucratic encounters, and used to control access to higher education and employ- ment. In doing so, the regime was not simply recognizing or ratifying a pre-existing state of affairs; it was newly constituting both persons and places as national.89 In this context, strong understandings of national identity as deeply rooted in the pre-communist history of the region, frozen or repressed by a ruthlessly antinational regime, and returning with the collapse of communism are at best anachronistic, at worst simply scholarly rationalizations of nationalist rhetoric.

What about weak, constructivist understandings of identity? Con- structivists might concede the importance of the Soviet system of institutionalized multinationality, and interpret this as the institutional

means through which national identities were constructed. But why should we assume it is "identity" that is constructed in this fashion? To assume that it is risks conflating a system of identification or categoriza-

tion with its presumed result, identity. Categorical group denominations - however authoritative, however pervasively institutionalized - cannot serve as indicators of real "groups" or robust "identities."

Consider for example the case of "Russians" in Ukraine. At the time of the 1989 census, some 11.4 million residents of Ukraine identified their "nationality" as Russian. But the precision suggested by this census datum, even when rounded to the nearest hundred thousand, is entirely spurious. The very categories "Russian" and "Ukrainian," as designators of putatively distinct ethnocultural nationalities, or dis- tinct "identities," are deeply problematic in the Ukrainian context, where rates of intermarriage have been high, and where millions of nominal Ukrainians speak only or primarily Russian. One should be skeptical of the illusion of "identity" or bounded groupness created by the census, with its exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories. One can imagine circumstances in which "groupness" might emerge among nominal Russians in Ukraine, but such groupness cannot be taken as given.90

The formal institutionalization and codification of ethnic and national

categories implies nothing about the depth, resonance, or power of such

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categories in the lived experience of the persons so categorized. A strongly institutionalized ethnonational classificatory system makes certain categories readily and legitimately available for the representa- tion of social reality, the framing of political claims, and the organiza- tion of political action. This is itself a fact of great significance, and the breakup of the Soviet Union cannot be understood without reference to it. But it does not entail that these categories will have a significant role in framing perception, orienting action, or shaping self-under- standing in everyday life - a role that is implied by even constructivist accounts of "identity."

The extent to which official categorizations shape self-understandings, the extent to which the population-categories constituted by states or political entrepreneurs approximate real "groups" - these are open questions that can only be addressed empirically. The language of "identity" is more likely to hinder than to help the posing of such questions, for it blurs what needs to be kept distinct: external catego- rization and self-understanding, objective commonality and subjective groupness.

Consider one final, non-Soviet example. The boundary between Hun- garians and Romanians in Transylvania is certainly sharper than that between Russians and Ukrainians in Ukraine. Here too, however, group boundaries are considerably more porous and ambiguous than is widely assumed. The language of both politics and everyday life, to be sure, is rigorously categorical, dividing the population into mutually exclusive ethnonational categories, and making no allowance for mixed or ambiguous forms. But this categorical code, important though it is as a constituent element of social relations, should not be taken for a faithful description of them. Reinforced by identitarian entrepreneurs on both sides, the categorical code obscures as much as it reveals about self-understandings, masking the fluidity and ambiguity that arise from mixed marriages, from bilingualism, from migration, from Hungarian children attending Romanian-language schools, from intergenerational assimilation (in both directions), and - perhaps most important - from sheer indifference to the claims of ethnocultural nationality.

Even in its constructivist guise, the language of "identity" disposes us to think in terms of bounded groupness. It does so because even con- structivist thinking on identity takes the existence of identity as axio- matic. Identity is always already "there," as something that individuals and groups "have," even if the content of particular identities, and the

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boundaries that mark groups off from one another, are conceptualized as always in flux. Even constructivist language tends therefore to ob- jectify "identity," to treat it as a "thing," albeit a malleable one, that people "have," "forge," and "construct."

This tendency to objectify "identity" deprives us of analytical leverage. It makes it more difficult for us to treat "groupness" and "bounded- ness" as emergent properties of particular structural or conjunctural settings rather than as always already there in some form. The point needs to be emphasized today more than ever, for the unreflectively groupist language that prevails in everyday life, journalism, politics, and much social research as well - the habit of speaking without qualification of "Albanians" and "Serbs," for example, as if they were sharply bounded, internally homogeneous "groups" - not only weakens social analysis but constricts political possibilities in the region.

Identity claims and the enduring dilemmas of "race" in the United States

The language of identity has been particularly powerful in the United States in recent decades. It has been prominent both as an idiom of analysis in the social sciences and humanities and as an idiom in which to articulate experience, mobilize loyalty, and formulate symbolic and material claims in everyday social and political practice.

The pathos and resonance of identity claims in the contemporary United States have many sources, but one of the most profound is that central problem of American history - the importation of enslaved Africans, the persistence of racial oppression, and the range of African- American responses to it. The African-American experience of "race" as both imposed categorization and self-identification has been impor- tant not only in its own terms, but from the late 1960s on as a template for identity claims of all sorts, including those based on gender and sexual orientation as well as those based on "ethnicity" or "race." 91

In response to the cascading identitarian claims of the last three decades, public discourse, political argument, and scholarship in nearly every field of the social sciences and humanities have been transformed. There is much that is valuable in this process. History textbooks and prevailing public narratives tell a much richer and more inclusive story than those of a generation ago. Specious forms of universalism - the Marxist category of "worker" who always appears

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in the guise of a male, the liberal category of "citizen" who turns out to

be white - have been powerfully exposed. "First-generation" identitarian

claims themselves - and scholarly literatures informed by them - have been criticized for their blindness to cross-cutting particularities: Afri- can-American movements for acting as if African-American women did not have gender-specific concerns, feminists for focusing on white, middle-class women.

Constructivist arguments have had a particular influence in Ameri- canist circles, allowing scholars to stress the contemporary importance of imposed identifications and the self-understandings that have evolved in dialectical interplay with them, while emphasizing that such self- and other-identified "groups" are not primordial but historically produced. The treatment of race in the historiography of the United States is an excellent example.92 Even before "social construction" be- came a buzz-word, scholars were showing that far from being a given dimension of America's past, race as a political category originated in the same moment as America's republican and populist impulses. Edmund Morgan argued that in early eighteenth-century Virginia, white indentured servants and black slaves shared a subordination

that was not sharply differentiated; they sometimes acted together. It was when Virginian planter elites started to mobilize against the British that they needed to draw a sharp boundary between the politi- cally included and the excluded, and the fact that black slaves were more numerous and replaceable as laborers and less plausible as political supporters led to a marking of distinction, which poor whites could in turn use to make claims.93 From such an opening, historians have charted several key moments of redefinition of racial boundaries in the United States - and several points at which other sorts of ties showed the possibility of giving rise to other kinds of political affilia- tion. Whiteness and blackness were both historically created and his- torically variable categories. Comparative historians, meanwhile, have shown that the construction of race can take still more varied forms, showing that many people who were "black" under North American classificatory systems would have been something else in other parts of the Americas.94

American history thus reveals the power of imposed identification, but it also reveals the complexity of the self-understandings of people defined by circumstances they did not control. Pre-Civil War collective self-definitions situated black Americans in particular ways in regard to Africa - often seeing an African (or an "Ethiopian") origin as

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placing them close to the heartlands of Christian civilization. Yet early back-to-Africa movements often treated Africa as a cultural tabula

rasa or as a fallen civilization to be redeemed by African-American Christians.95 Asserting oneself as a diasporic "people" did not neces- sarily imply claiming cultural commonality - the two concepts have been in tension with each other ever since. One can write the history of African-American self-understanding as the "rise" over time of a black nationality, or one can explore the interplay of such a sense of collectivity with the efforts of African-American activists to articulate different kinds of political ideologies and to develop connections with other radicals. The most important point is to consider the range of possibilities and the seriousness with which they were debated.

It is not the historical analysis of social construction as such that is problematic, but the presumptions about what it is that is constructed. It is "whiteness" or "race" that is taken as the typical object of con- struction, not other, looser forms of affinity and commonality. Setting out to write about "identifications" as they emerge, crystallize, and fade away in particular social and political circumstances may well inspire a rather different history than setting out to write of an "iden- tity," which links past, present, and future in a single word.

Cosmopolitan interpretations of American history have been criticized for taking the pain out of the distinct ways in which that history has been experienced: above all the pain of enslavement and discrimina- tion, and of struggle against enslavement and discrimination, a history that marks African Americans in ways that white Americans do not share.96 Here is where calls for the understanding of the particularity of experience resonate powerfully, but it is also here that the dangers of flattening those histories into a static and singular "identity" are serious. There may be gains as well as losses in such a flattening, as thoughtful participants in debates over the politics of race have made clear.97 But to subsume further under the generic category of "iden- tity" the historical experiences and allegedly common "cultures" of other "groups" as disparate as women and the elderly, Native Ameri- cans and gay men, poor people and the disabled is not in any obvious way more respectful of the pain of particular histories than are the universalist rhetorics of justice or human rights. And the assignment of individuals to such "identities" leaves many people - who have experienced the uneven trajectories of ancestry and the variety of innovations and adaptations that constitute culture - caught between a hard identity that doesn't quite fit and a soft rhetoric of hybridity,

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multiplicity, and fluidity that offers neither understanding nor solace.98

The question remains whether we can address the complexity of history

- including the changing ways in which external categorizations have both stigmatized and humiliated people and given them an enabling and empowering sense of collective selfhood - in more supple and differentiated language. If the real contribution of constructivist social analysis - that affinities, categories, and subjectivities develop and change over time - is to be taken seriously, and not reduced to a presentist, teleological account of the construction of currently exist- ing "groups," then bounded groupness must be understood as a con- tingent, emergent property, not an axiomatic given.

Representing contemporary American society poses a similar problem - avoiding flat, reductive accounts of the social world as a multichrome mosaic of monochrome identity groups. This conceptually impoverished identitarian sociology, in which the "intersection" of race, class, gender,

sexual orientation, and perhaps one or two other categories generates a set of all-purpose conceptual boxes, has become powerful in American academia in the 1990s - not only in the social sciences, cultural studies, and ethnic studies, but also in literature and political philosophy. In the remainder of this section, we shift our angle of vision and consider

the implications of the use of this identitarian sociology in the latter domain.

"A moral philosophy," wrote Alisdair MacIntyre, "presupposes a sociol- ogy";99 the same holds afortiori of political theory. The problem with much contemporary political theory is that it is built on questionable sociology - indeed precisely on the group-centered representation of the social world just mentioned. We are not taking the side of "uni- versality" against "particularity" here. Rather, we are suggesting that the identitarian language and groupist social ontology that informs much contemporary political theory occludes the problematic nature of "groupness" itself and forecloses other ways of conceptualizing particular affiliations and affinities.

There is a considerable literature now that is critical of the idea of

universal citizenship. Iris Marion Young, one of the most influential of such critics, proposes instead an ideal of group-differentiated citizen- ship, built on group representation and group rights. The notion of an "impartial general perspective," she argues, "is a myth." Different social groups have different needs, cultures, histories, experiences, and perceptions of social relations." Citizenship should not seek to tran-

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scend such differences, but should recognize and acknowledge them as "irreducible." 100

What sort of differences should be ratified with special representation and rights? The differences in question are those associated with "so- cial groups," defined as "comprehensive identities and ways of life," and distinguished from mere aggregates on the one hand - arbitrary clas- sifications of persons according to some attribute - and from volun- tary associations on the other. Special rights and representation would be accorded not to all social groups, but to those who suffer from at least one of five forms of oppression. In contemporary American society, this means "women, blacks, Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speaking Americans, Asian Ameri- cans, gay men, lesbians, working-class people, old people, and men- tally and physically disabled people."101

What constitutes the "groupness" of these "groups?" What makes them groups rather than categories around which self- and other-iden- tifications may but certainly do not necessarily or always crystallize? This is not addressed by Young. She assumes that distinctive histories, experiences, and social location endow these "groups" with different "capacities, needs, culture, and cognitive styles" and with "distinctive understandings of all aspects of the society and unique perspectives on social issues." 102 Social and cultural heterogeneity is construed here as a juxtaposition of internally homogeneous, externally bounded blocs. The "principles of unity" that Young repudiates at the level of the polity as a whole - because they "hide difference" - are reintroduced, and continue to hide difference, at the level of the constituent "groups."

At stake in arguments about group-differentiated or "multicultural" citizenship are important issues that have been long debated outside as well as inside the academy, all having to do in one way or another with the relative weight and merits of universalist and particularist claims.103 Sociological analysis cannot and should not seek to resolve this robust debate, but it can seek to shore up its often shaky socio- logical foundations. It can offer a richer vocabulary for conceptualiz- ing social and cultural heterogeneity and particularity. Moving beyond identitarian language opens up possibilities for specifying other kinds of connectedness, other idioms of identification, other styles of self- understanding, other ways of reckoning social location. To paraphrase what Adam Przeworsky said long ago about class, cultural struggle is a struggle about culture before it is a struggle among cultures.'04 Acti-

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vists of identity politics deploy the language of bounded groupness not because it reflects social reality, but precisely because groupness is ambiguous and contested. Their groupist rhetoric has a performative, constitutive dimension, contributing, when it is successful, to the making of the groups it invokes.105

Here we have a gap between normative arguments and activist idioms that take bounded groupness as axiomatic and historical and socio- logical analyses that emphasize contingency, fluidity, and variability. At one level there is a real-life dilemma: preserving cultural distinctive-

ness depends at least in part on maintaining bounded groupness and hence on policing the "exit option," and accusations of "passing" and of betraying one's roots serve as modes of discipline.106 Critics of such policing, however, would argue that a liberal polity should protect individuals from the oppressiveness of social groups as well as that of the state. At the level of social analysis, though, the dilemma is not a necessary one. We are not faced with a stark choice between a univer- salist, individualist analytical idiom and an identitarian, groupist idiom. Framing the options in this way misses the variety of forms (other than bounded groups) that affinity, commonality, and connectedness can take - hence our emphasis on the need for a more supple vocabulary. We are not arguing for any specific stance on the politics of cultural distinction and individual choice, but rather for a vocabulary of social analysis that helps open up and illuminate the range of options. The politics of group "coalition" that is celebrated by Young and others, for example, certainly has its place, but the groupist sociology that underlies this particular form of coalition politics - with its assump- tion that bounded groups are the basic building blocks of political alliances - constricts the political imagination.107

None of this belies the importance of current debates over "universal- istic" and "particularistic" conceptions of social justice. Our point is that the identitarian focus on bounded groupness does not help in posing these questions; the debate is in some respects based on mis- conceptions on both sides. We need not in fact choose between an American history flattened into the experiences and "cultures" of bounded groups and one equally flattened into a single "national" story. Reducing the heterogeneity of American society and history to a multichrome mosaic of monochrome identity groups hinders rather than helps the work of understanding the past and pursuing social justice in the present.

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Conclusion: Particularity and the politics of "identity"

We have not made an argument about identity politics. Nonetheless, the argument does have political as well as intellectual implications. In some circles, these will be thought to be regressive, to undermine the basis for making particularistic claims. That is neither our intention nor a valid inference from what we have written.

To persuade people that they are one; that they comprise a bounded, distinctive, solidary group; that their internal differences do not matter, at least for the purpose at hand - this is a normal and necessary part of politics, and not only of what is ordinarily characterized as "identity politics." It is not all of politics; and we do indeed have reservations about the way in which the routine recourse to identitarian framing may foreclose other equally important ways of framing political claims. But we do not seek to deprive anyone of "identity" as a political tool, or to undermine the legitimacy of making political appeals in identitarian terms.

Our argument has focused, rather, on the use of "identity" as an ana- lytical concept. Throughout the article, we have asked what work the concept is supposed to do, and how well it does it. We have argued that the concept is deployed to do a great deal of analytical work - much of it legitimate and important. "Identity," however, is ill suited to perform this work, for it is riddled with ambiguity, riven with contradictory meanings, and encumbered by reifying connotations. Qualifying the noun with strings of adjectives - specifying that identity is multiple, fluid, constantly re-negotiated, and so on - does not solve the Orwel- lian problem of entrapment in a word. It yields little more than a suggestive oxymoron - a multiple singularity, a fluid crystallization - but still begs the question of why one should use the same term to designate all this and more. Alternative analytical idioms, we have argued, can do the necessary work without the attendant confusion.

At issue here is not the legitimacy or importance of particularistic claims, but how best to conceptualize them. People everywhere and always have particular ties, self-understandings, stories, trajectories, histories, predicaments. And these inform the sorts of claims they make. To subsume such pervasive particularity under the flat, undif- ferentiated rubric of "identity," however, does nearly as much violence to its unruly and multifarious forms as would an attempt to subsume it under "universalist" categories such as "interest."

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Construing particularity in identitarian terms, moreover, constricts the political as well as the analytical imagination. It points away from a range of possibilities for political action other than those rooted in putatively shared identity - and not only those that are praised or damned as "universalist." Identitarian political advocates, for example, construe political cooperation in terms of the building of coalitions between bounded identity groups. This is one mode of political coopera- tion, but not the only one.

Kathryn Sikkink and Margaret Keck, for example, have drawn atten- tion to the importance of "transnational issue networks," from the antislavery movement of the early nineteenth century to international campaigns about human rights, ecology, and women's rights in recent years. Such networks necessarily cross cultural as well as state boun- daries and link particular places and particularistic claims to wider concerns. To take one instance, the antiapartheid movement brought together South African political organizations that were themselves far from united - some sharing "universalist" ideologies, some calling themselves "Africanist," some asserting a quite local, culturally defined "identity" - with international church groups, labor unions, pan-Afri- can movements for racial solidarity, human rights groups, and so on. Particular groups moved in and out of cooperative arrangements with- in an overall network; conflict among opponents of the apartheid state was sometimes bitter, even deadly. As the actors in the network shifted,

the issues at stake were reframed. At certain moments, for example, issues amenable to international mobilization were highlighted, while others - of great concern to some would-be participants - were margi- nalized.108

Our point is not to celebrate such networks over more exclusively identitarian social movements or group-based claims. Networks are no more intrinsically virtuous than identitarian movements and groups are intrinsically suspect. Politics - in Southern Africa or else- where - is hardly a confrontation of good universalists or good net- works versus bad tribalists. Much havoc has been done by flexible networks built on clientage and focused on pillage and smuggling; such networks have sometimes been linked to "principled" political organizations; and they have often been connected to arms and illegal merchandise brokers in Europe, Asia, and North America. Multi- farious particularities are in play, and one needs to distinguish between situations where they cohere around particular cultural symbols and situations where they are flexible, pragmatic, readily extendable. It

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does not contribute to precision of analysis to use the same words for the extremes of reification and fluidity, and everything in between.

To criticize the use of "identity" in social analysis is not to blind ourselves to particularity. It is rather to conceive of the claims and possibilities that arise from particular affinities and affiliations, from particular commonalities and connections, from particular stories and self-understandings, from particular problems and predicaments in a more differentiated manner. Social analysis has become massively, and durably, sensitized to particularity in recent decades; and the literature on identity has contributed valuably to this enterprise. It is time now to go beyond "identity" - not in the name of an imagined universalism, but in the name of the conceptual clarity required for social analysis and political understanding alike.

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to Zsuzsa Berend, John Bowen, Jane Burbank, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, Mara Loveman, Jitka Maleckovta, Peter Stamatov,

Loic Wacquant, Roger Waldinger, and the Theory and Society Editors for valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. Thanks as well to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where this article was conceived during a lunchtime conversation, and to participants in the Sociology Department Colloquium at UCLA and in the Comparative Study of Social Transformation faculty semi- nar at the University of Michigan, where earlier versions of the article

were presented. And a final word of thanks to our graduate students, who have put up in good spirit - but not necessarily in agreement - with our querying their use of a seemingly indispensable concept.

Notes

1. From "Politics and the English Language," in George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953), 169-170.

2. For a tempered critique of identity politics, see Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), and for a sophisticated defense, Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!. Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997). For a suggestion that the high noon of identity politics may have passed, see Ross Posnock, "Before and After Identity Politics," Raritan 15 (Summer 1995): 95-115; and David A. Hollinger, "Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the United

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States," in Noah Pickus, editor, Immigration and Citizenship in the Twenty-first Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield, 1998).

3. Avrum Stroll, "Identity," Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: MacMillan, 1967), Vol. IV, p. 121-124. For a contemporary philosophical treatment, see Bartholomaeus Boehm, Identitaet und Identifikation: Zur Persistenz physikalischer Gegenstaende (Frankfurth/Main: Peter Lang, 1989). On the history and vicissitudes

of "identity" and cognate terms, see W. J. M. Mackenzie, Political Identity (New York: St. Martin's 1978), 19-27, and John D. Ely, "Community and the Politics of Identity: Toward the Genealogy of a Nation-State Concept," Stanford Humanities Review 5/2 (1997), 76ff.

4. See Philip Gleason, "Identifying Identity: A Semantic History," Journal ofAmerican History 69/4 (March 1983): 910-931. The 1930s Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan: 1930-1935) contains no entry on identity, but it does have one on "identification" - largely focused on fingerprinting and other modes of judicial marking of individuals (Thorstein Sellin, Vol. 7, pp. 573-575). The 1968 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan), contains an article on "identification, political" by William Buchanan (Vol. 7, pp. 57-61), which focuses on a "person's identification with a group" - including class, party, religion - and another on "identity, psychosocial," by Erik Erikson (ibid., 61-65), which focuses on the individual's "role integration in his group."

5. Gleason, "Identifying Identity," 914ff; for the appropriation of Erikson's work in political science, see Mackenzie, Political Identity.

6. Gleason, "Identifying Identity," 915-918. 7. Anselm Strauss, Mirrors and Masks. The Search for an Identity (Glencoe, Ill.: Free

Press, 1959).

8. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Engle- wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963); Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966); Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Moderniza- tion and Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1973); Peter Berger, "Modern Identity: Crisis and Continuity," in The Cultural Drama: Modern Identities and Social Ferment, ed. Wilton S. Dillon (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974).

9. As Philip Gleason has pointed out, the popularization of the term began well before the turbulence of the mid- and late 1960s. Gleason attributes this initial

popularization to the mid-century prestige and cognitive authority of the social sciences, the wartime and postwar vogue of national character studies, and the postwar critique of mass society, which newly problematized the "relationship of the individual to society" ("Identifying Identity," 922ff).

10. Erikson characterized identity as "a process 'located' in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture, a process which establishes ... the identity of those two identities" (Identity. Youth and Crisis [New York: Norton, 1968], 22, italics in the original). Although this is a relatively late formulation, the

link was already established in Erikson's immediately postwar writings. 11. See for example Craig Calhoun, "New Social Movements of the Early Nineteenth

Century," Social Science History 17/3 (1993): 385-427. 12. Mackenzie, Political Identity, 11, reporting a seminar paper of 1974; Coles is

quoted in Gleason, "Identifying Identity," 913. Gleason notes that the problem was remarked even earlier: "by the late 1960s the terminological situation had gotten completely out of hand" (ibid., 915). Erikson himself lamented the "indis-

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criminate" use of "identity" and "identity crisis" in Identity. Youth and Crisis, published in 1968 (p. 16).

13. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Editors' Introduction: Multiplying Identities," in Identities, ed. Appiah and Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1.

14. Between 1990 and 1997 alone, for example, the number of journal articles in the Current Contents database with "identity" or "identities" in the title more than doubled, while the total number of articles increased by about 20 percent. James Fearon found a similar increase in the number of dissertation abstracts containing

"identity," even after controlling for the increase in the total number of disserta- tions abstracted. See "What Is Identity (As We Now Use the Word)?" unpublished manuscript, Dept. of Political Science, Stanford University, p. 1.

15. One might also speak of a narrower "'identity crisis' crisis." Coined and popular- ized by Erikson, and applied to social and political collectivities by Lucian Pye and others, the notion of "identity crisis" took off in the 1960s. (For Erikson's own

retrospective reflections on the origins and vicissitudes of the expression, see the

Prologue to Identity: Youth and Crisis, pp. 16ff.) Crises have become (oxymoroni- cally) chronic; and putative crises of identity have proliferated to the point of destroying whatever meaning the concept may once have had. Already in 1968, Erikson could lament that the expression was being used in a "ritualized" fashion (ibid., p. 16). A recent bibliographical sampling revealed that "identity crises" were

predicated not only of the usual suspects - above all ethnic, racial, national, gender, and sexual identities - but also of such heterogeneous subjects as fifth- century Gaul, the forestry profession, histologists, the French medical corps during the First World War, the internet, the Sonowal Kacharis, technical education in

India, early childhood special education, French hospital nurses, kindergarten teachers, TV, sociology, Japan's consumer groups, the European Space Agency, Japan's MITI, the National Association of Broadcasting, Cathay Pacific Airways, Presbyterians, the CIA, universities, Clorox, Chevrolet, lawyers, the San Francisco

Redevelopment Agency, black theology, eighteenth-century Scottish literature, and, our favorite, dermopterous fossils.

16. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, which appeared in 1994, "explores

the relationship of racial, ethnic and national identities and power hierarchies within national and global arenas ... [It] responds to the paradox of our time: the growth of a global economy and transnational movements of populations produce or perpetuate distinctive cultural practices and differentiated identities" (State- ment of "aims and scope" printed on inside front cover). Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, whose first issue appeared in 1995, is concerned with "the formations of, and transformations in, socially significant identities, their attendant forms of material exclusion and power, as well as the political and cultural possibilities open[ed] up by these identifications" (statement printed on inside front cover).

17. Zygmunt Bauman, "Soil, Blood, and Identity," Sociological Review 40 (1992): 675- 701; Pierre Bourdieu, "L'identite et la representation: Elements pour une reflexion critique sur l'idee de r&gion," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35 (1980): 63-72; Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 Vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988-1990); Craig Calhoun, "Social Theory and the Politics of Identity," in Calhoun, editor, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1994); S. N. Eisenstadt and Bern- hard Giesen, "The Construction of Collective Identity," Archives europeennes de

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sociologie 36, no. 1 (1995): 72-102; Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, in association with Blackwell, Oxford, 1991); Jiirgen Habermas, Staatsbiirgerschaft und rationale Identitdt: Uberlegungen zur europaischen Zukunft (St. Gallen: Erker, 1991); David Laitin, Identity in Formation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Claude Levi-Strauss, editor, L'identite: Seminaire interdisciplinare (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977); Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1992); Amartya Sen, "Goals, Commitment, and Identity,"

Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 2 (Fall 1985): 341-355; Margaret Somers, "The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Ap- proach," Theory and Society 23 (1994): 605-649; Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition: An Essay", (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); 25-74; Charles Tilly, "Citizenship, Identity and Social History," in Tilly, editor, Citizenship, Identity and Social History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Harrison White, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).

18. On experience-near and experience-distant concepts - the terms are derived from Heinz Kohut - see Clifford Geertz, "From the Native's Point of View," in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 57. The basic contrast goes back at least to Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method, which criticized the sociological use of "pre-notions" or lay concepts that have been "created by experience and for

it." Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. S. Solovay and J. Mueller, ed. G. E. G. Catlin, 8th ed. (New York: Free Press, 1964), 14-46.

19. As Loic Wacquant notes of race, the "continual barter between folk and analytical notions, the uncontrolled conflation of social and sociological understandings of 'race"' is "intrinsic to the category. From its inception, the collective fiction labeled 'race'... has always mixed science with common sense and traded on the complicity between them" ("For an Analytic of Racial Domination," Political Power and Social Theory 11 [1997]: 222-223).

20. On "ethnic identity entrepreneurs," see Barbara Lal, "Ethnic Identity Entrepreneurs: Their Role in Transracial and Intercountry Adoptions," Asian Pacific Migration Journal 6 (1997): 385-413.

21. This argument is developed further in Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 1.

22. Mara Loveman, "Is 'race' essential? A comment on Bonilla-Silva," American Sociological Review, November 1999. See also Wacquant, "For an Analytic of Racial Domination"; Rupert Taylor, "Racial Terminology and the Question of 'Race' in South Africa," manuscript, 7; and Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 1: 385ff, for a strikingly modern argument questioning the analytical utility of the notions of "race," "ethnic group," and "nation."

23. On "nation" as a "political fiction," see Louis Pinto, "Une fiction politique: la nation," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 64 (September 1986): 45-50, a Bourdieuian appreciation of the studies of nationalism carried out by the eminent Hungarian historian Jen6 Sziics. On race as a "collective fiction," see Wacquant, "For an Analytic of Racial Domination," 222-223. The key work by Bourdieu in this domain is "L'identite et la representation: 6elments pour une reflexion critique sur l'idee de r6gion," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35

(November 1980), part of which is reprinted in Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic

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Power, trans. Mathew Adamson, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Harvard, 1991).

24. Even Durkheim's uncompromisingly objectivist sociological manifesto shies away from this extreme position; see The Rules of Sociological Method, chapter 2.

25. Wacquant, "For an Analytic of Racial Domination," 222. See also Wacquant's criticism of the concept of "underclass" in "L'underclass urbaine dans l'imaginaire social et scientifique americain," in Serge Paugam, editor, L'exclusion: I'etat des savoirs (Paris: La d6couverte, 1996): 248-262.

26. For a sustained and influential example, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Femi- nism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

27. For a recent review, see Calhoun, "Social Theory and the Politics of Identity," 9-36.

28. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, for example, slides from an impeccably constructivist characterization of "racialized social systems" as "societies ... partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories" to the claim that such placement "produces definite social relations between the races," where "the races" are characterized as real social groups with differing objective interests ("Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation," American Sociological Review 62 (1996), 469-470). In their influential Racial Formation in the United States (second edition, New York: Routledge, 1994), Michael Omi and Howard Winant strive to be more consistently constructivist. But they too fail to remain faithful to their constructivist definition of "race" as an "unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle ... [and as] a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies" (55, emphasis in original). The historical experiences of "white European" immigrants, they argue, were and remain funda- mentally different from those of "racial minority groups" (including Latinos and Asian Americans as well as African Americans and Native Americans); the "ethnicity paradigm" is applicable to the former but not - because of its "neglect of race per se" - to the latter (14-23). This sharp distinction between "ethnic" and "racial" groups neglects the fact - now well established in the historical literature - that the "whiteness" of several European immigrant groups was "achieved" after

an initial period in which they were often categorized in racial or race-like terms as non-white; it also neglects what might be called "de-racialization" processes among some groups they consider fundamentally "racial." On the former, see James R. Barrett and David Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the 'New Immigrant' Working Class," Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (1997): 3-44; on the latter, see Joel Perlman and Roger Waldinger, "Second Gen- eration Decline? Children of Immigrants, Past and Present - a Reconsideration," International Migration Review 31/4 (Winter 1997), 893-922, esp. 903ff.

29. Walter Benn Michaels has argued that ostensibly constructivist notions of cul- tural identity, insofar as they are advanced - as they often are advanced in practice, especially in connection with race, ethnicity, and nationality - as reasons for our holding, or valuing, a set of beliefs or practices, cannot avoid essentialist appeals to who we are. "There are no anti-essentialist accounts of identity ... [T]he essentialism inheres not in the description of the identity but in the attempt to derive the practices from the identity - we do this because we are this. Hence anti- essentialism ... must take the form not of producing more sophisticated accounts of identity (that is, more sophisticated essentialisms) but of ceasing to explain what people do or should do by reference to who they are and/or what culture

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they belong to" ("Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity," in Identities, ed. Appiah and Gates, p. 61n). Note, however, the crucial elision at the end of the quoted passage between "do" and "should do." Essentialism inheres, pace Michaels, less in the "attempt to derive [in an explanatory mode] the practice from the identity" than in the attempt to prescribe the practices on the basis of an ascribed identity: you ought to do this because you are this.

30. For a different approach to this question, see Fearon, "What is Identity (As We Now Use the Word)?"

31. See, for example, Jean L. Cohen, "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Para- digms and Contemporary Social Movements," Social Research 52/4 (Winter 1985): 663-716.

32. Somers, "The Narrative Constitution of Identity." 33. This opposition depends on a narrow conceptualization of the category "interest,"

one restricted to interests understood to be directly derivable from social structure

(see for example ibid., 624). If interest is instead understood to be culturally or discursively constituted, to be dependent on the discursive identification of inter- ests and (more fundamentally) interest-bearing units, to be "constituted and re- constituted in time and over time," like narrative identities in Somer's account, then the opposition loses much of its force.

34. Some strands of identitarian theorizing emphasize the relative autonomy of self- understanding vis-a-vis social location. The tendency is most pronounced in the fourth and the fifth uses sketched below.

35. The contemporary conceptualization of identity as unmoored from social struc- ture is foreign to most premodern social settings, where self- and other-identifica-

tions are generally understood as following directly from social structure. See, for

example, Peter Berger, "On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor," 172-181 in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).

36. Alberto Melucci, "The Process of Collective Identity," in Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

37. Much recent work on gender, to be sure, has criticized as "essentialist" the idea that women share a fundamental sameness. Yet certain strands of recent work

nonetheless predicate such sameness of some "group" defined by the intersection of

gender with other categorical attributes (race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation).

See, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Con- sciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).

38. See, for example, Harold R. Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism, The Questfor Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 195-209.

39. For a sophisticated historical and philosophical account, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

40. For a key statement by Erikson himself, see Identity: Youth and Crisis, 22. 41. See, for example, Calhoun, "The Problem of Identity in Collective Action"; Melucci,

"The Process of Collective Identity"; Roger Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Parisfrom 1848 to the Commune (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

42. See, for example, Stuart Hall, "Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity?'" in Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996).

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43. See, for example, Richard Werbner, "Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas," in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger, editors, Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London: Zed, 1996), 1-26.

44. Two important, although partial, exceptions deserve note. Walter Benn Michaels has formulated a brilliant and provocative critique of the concept of "cultural identity" in "Race into Culture." But that essay focuses less on analytical uses of the notion of "identity" than on the difficulty of specifying what makes "our" culture or "our" past count as "our own" - when the reference is not to one's actual cultural practices or one's actual personal past but to some putative group culture or group past - without implicitly invoking the notion of "race." He concludes that "our sense of culture is characteristically meant to displace race, but ... culture has turned out to be a way of continuing rather than repudiating racial thought. It is only the appeal to race that ... gives notions like losing our culture, preserving it, [or] ... restoring people's culture to them ... their pathos" (61-62). Richard Handler argues that "we should be as suspicious of 'identity' as we have learned to be of 'culture,' 'tradition,' 'nation,' and 'ethnic group"' (27), but

then pulls his critical punches. His central argument - that the salience of "iden- tity" in contemporary Western, especially American society "does not mean that the concept can be applied unthinkingly to other places and times" (27) - is certainly true, but it implies that the concept can be fruitfully applied in contem-

porary Western settings, something that other passages in the same article and his own work on Quebecois nationalism tend to call into question. See "Is 'Identity' a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?" in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); the quota- tions are from p. 27. See also Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

45. Stuart Hall, "Who Needs 'Identity?'" 2. 46. "I use 'identity' to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the

one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to 'interpellate,' speak to us to hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be 'spoken.' Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us" (ibid., 5-6).

47. Claude Levi-Strauss, concluding remarks to Levi-Strauss, ed., L'identite, 332. 48. Lawrence Grossberg, "Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is," in Hall

and du Gay, editors, Questions of Cultural Identity, 87-88. 49. Melucci, "The Process of Collective Identity," 46. 50. Here the blurring between categories of analysis and categories of practice is

particularly striking. As Richard Handler has argued, scholarly conceptions of "nation" and "national identity" have tended to replicate key features of nationalist ideology, notably the axiomatic understanding of boundedness and homogeneity in the putative "nation" (Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec). The same argument could be made about "race" or "ethnicity."

51. See, for example, Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe; Connor, "Beyond Reason: The Nature of the Ethnonational Bond," in Connor, Ethnonationalism.

52. Somers, "The Narrative Constitution of Identity"; the quotations are from 605, 606, 614, and 618, emphasis in original. See also Somers's "Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation," Social Science History 16/4 (Winter 1992): 591-630. For another argument for seeing identity in terms of narrative, see Denis-Constant Martin, "The Choices of Iden-

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tity," Social Identities 1/1 (1995), 5-20; see also idem, "Introduction: Identit&s et politique: Recit, mythe, et ideologie," 13-38 in Denis-Constant Martin, editor, Cartes d'identite: Comment dit-on "nous "en politique? (Paris: Presses de la Fonda- tion Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1994).

53. Charles Tilly, "Citizenship, Identity and Social History," 1-17 in Citizenship, Identity and Social History, ed. Charles Tilly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The quotations are from p. 7.

54. Craig Calhoun, "The Problem of Identity in Collective Action," in Joan Huber, editor, Macro Micro Linkages in Sociology (Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage, 1991). The quotations are from pp. 53, 64-67.

55. Ibid., 53, 68. 56. Calhoun, "Social Theory and the Politics of Identity," 9. 57. On the merits of "identification", see Hall, "Who Needs 'Identity?'" Although

Hall's is a Foucauldian/post-Freudian understanding of "identification," drawing on the "discursive and psychoanalytic repertoire," and quite different from that proposed here, he does usefully warn that identification is "almost as tricky as, though preferable to,'identity' itself; and certainly no guarantee against the con- ceptual difficulties which have beset the latter" (p. 2). See also Andreas Glaeser, "Divided in Unity: The Hermeneutics of Self and Other in the Postunification Berlin Police" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1997), esp. chapter 1.

58. Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 36ff.

59. For an anthropological perspective, usefully extending the Barthian model, see Richard Jenkins, "Rethinking Ethnicity: Identity, Categorization and Power," Ethnic and Racial Studies 17/2 (April 1994): 197-223, and Jenkins, Social Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).

60. Peter Berger, "Modern Identity," 163-164, makes a similar point, though he phrases it in terms of a dialectic - and possible conflict - between subjective and objective identity.

61. Gerard Noiriel, La tyrannie du national (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1991), 155-180; idem, "L'identification des citoyens: Naissance de l'etat civil republicain," Geneses 13 (1993): 3-28; idem, "Surveiller des deplacements ou identifier les personnes? Contribution a l'histoire du passeport en France de la Ier a la III Republique," Geneses 30 (1998): 77-100; Beatrice Fraenkel, La signature. genese d'un signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). A number of scholars, including Jane Caplan, historian at Bryn Mawr College, and John Torpey, sociologist at University of California, Irvine, are currently engaged in projects on passports and other identification documents.

62. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Graham Burchell et al., editors, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104. Similar conceptions have been applied to colonial societies, espe- cially in regard to the way colonizers' schemes for classification and enumeration shape and indeed constitute the social phenomena (such as "tribe" and "caste" in India) being classified. See, in particular, Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

63. On the dilemmas, difficulties, and ironies involved in "administering identity," in authoritatively determining who belongs to what category in the implementation of race-conscious law, see Christopher A. Ford, "Administering Identity: The Determination of 'Race' in Race-Conscious Law," California Law Review 82 (1994): 1231-1285.

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64. Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 65. Melissa Nobles," 'Responding with Good Sense': The Politics of Race and Censuses

in Contemporary Brazil," Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1995. 66. See, for example, Melucci, "The Process of Collective Identity"; Martin, "The

Choices of Identity." 67. Stuart Hall, "Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity?"'; Margaret Somers, "The

Narrative Constitution of Identity."

68. See Hall, "Introduction," 2ff; and Alan Finlayson, "Psychology, psychoanalysis and theories of nationalism," Nations and Nationalism 4/2 (1998): 157ff.

69. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

70. An extensive anthropological literature on African and other societies, for example, describes healing cults, spirit possession cults, witchcraft eradication movements, and other collective phenomena that help to constitute particular forms of self- understanding, particular ways in which individuals situate themselves socially. See studies ranging from classics by Victor Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life (Manchester: Manchester Uni- versity Press, 1957) and I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1971) to more recent work by Paul Stoller, Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Pos- session among the Songhay of Niger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits. Women, Men and The Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

71. For a poignant example, see Slavenka Drakulic's account of being "overcome by nationhood" as a result of the war in the former Yugoslavia, in Balkan Express. Fragments from the Other Side of the War, trans. Maja Soljan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 50-52.

72. See, for example, Peter Berger, "Modern Identity: Crisis and Continuity," 162. 73. See, for example, Craig Calhoun, "The Problem of Identity in Collective Action,"

68, characterizing "ordinary identity."

74. For a good example of the latter, see Mary Waters's analysis of the optional, exceptionally unconstraining ethnic "identities" - or what Herbert Gans has called the "symbolic ethnicity" - of third- and fourth-generation descendants of European Catholic immigrants to the United States in Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

75. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978), 62ff.

76. On the centrality of categorical commonality to modern nationalism, see Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, and Calhoun, Nationalism, chapter 2.

77. See, for example, the discussion of the "anti-categorical imperative" in Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, "Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency," American Journal of Sociology 99/6 (May 1994): 1414.

78. Lonsdale, "When Did the Gusii or Any Other Group Become a Tribe?" Kenya Historical Review 5/1 (1977): 355-368; Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban

Africa: A Study of Migrants in Yoruba Towns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Anthropologists were influenced by the work of Fredrick Barth, editor, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Cultural Differ- ence (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), especially Barth's "Introduction," 9-38. More recent and systematic constructivist accounts include Jean-Loup Amselle

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and Elikia M'Bokolo, editors, Au coeur de 'ethnie: Ethnies, tribalisme et etat en

Afrique (Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 1985); Leroy Vail, editor, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Terence Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition in Africa," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, editors, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1983), 211-262.

79. Identity talk has become popular among Africanists in recent years, and the typical insistence that identity is multiple is rarely followed by explanation of why what is multiplied should be considered identity. For a case in point, see Richard Werbner, "Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas," in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger, editors, Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London: Zed, 1996), 1-26. Afri- canist scholars have been critical of the concepts of race and ethnicity, but often still use "identity" in an unexamined way. See, for example, the special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies 20/3 (1994), coordinated by Saul Dubow, John Sharp, and Edwin N. Wilmsen. "Ethnicity and Identity in Southern Africa." A more reflective approach-deploying a range of terms to indicate different forms of affiliation and examining what "identical" actually means in particular contexts

- may be found in Claude Fay, "'Car nous ne faisons qu'un': identites, equivalen- ces, homologies au Maasina (Mali)," Cahier des Sciences Humaines 31/2 (1995) 427-456. Identitarian positions are severely criticized in Jean-Francois Bayart, L'illusion identitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1996).

80. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940).

81. See the pioneering study of Abner Cohen, "Cultural Strategies in the Organization of Trading Diasporas," in Claude Meillassoux, editor, The Development of Indige- nous Trade and Markets (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).

82. Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone (Oxford: Currey, 1996), 79.

83. John Lonsdale, "States and Social Processes in Africa," African Studies Review 24/2-3 (1981): 139-225.

84. Jane Guyer, "Household and Community," African Studies Review 24/2-3 (1981): 87-137; Jean-Loup Amselle, Logiques metisses. Anthropologie de l'identite, en Afrique et ailleurs (Paris: Payot, 1990).

85. Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas. Coping with Money, War, and the State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 29.

86. Gerard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) and Jean-Pierre Chretien, Le Defi de l'ethnisme: Rwanda et Burundi: 1990-

1996 (Paris: Karthala, 1997). Similarly, Richards's account of conflict in Sierra Leone is notable for his stress on networks over groups, on creolization over differentiation, and on overlapping moral visions over conflicts of "cultures" (Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest).

87. For an elaboration of this argument, see Rogers Brubaker, "Myths and Miscon- ceptions in the Study of Nationalism," in John Hall, editor, The State of the Nation. Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

88. For a fuller version of this argument, see Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, chap- ter 2. For a parallel argument about Yugoslavia, see Veljko Vujacic and Victor Zaslavsky, "The Causes of Disintegration in the USSR and Yugoslavia," Telos 88 (1991): 120-140.

89. Some peripheral Soviet regions, to be sure, had already experienced national

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movements in the last years of the Russian empire (and during the ensuing civil war), but even in those regions, the social basis of such movements was weak, and identification with "the nation" was limited to a relatively small part of the population. Elsewhere, the significance of the regime in constituting national divisions was even more prominent. On Soviet "nation-making" in the 1920s, see Yuri Slezkine, "The U.S.S.R. as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53 (Summer 1994): 414-452; Terry D. Martin, "An Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet State, 1923- 1938," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996.

90. For data on nationality and language, see Gosudarstvennyi Komitet po Statistike, Natsional'nyi Sostav Naseleniia SSSR (Moscow: Finansy i Statistika, 1991): 78-79.

91. Gitlin, Twilight, 134. 92. One of the best introductions to constructivist analysis in American history is Earl

Lewis, "Race," in Stanley Kutler, editors, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York: Scribners, 1996), 129-160. See also Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review 181 (May-June 1990): 95-118.

93. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). More recent works on this formative period include a special issue of William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 54/1 (1997), "Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World," and Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone. The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Northern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

94. The different ways in which race was configured in the Americas was one of subjects in which comparative history came into being, notably in the aftermath of Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Knopf, 1946). An influential short statement is Charles Wagley, "On the Concept of Social Race in the Americas," 531-545 in Contemporary Cultures and Societies in Latin America, ed. D. B. Heath and R. N. Adams (New York: Random House, 1965). A more recent constructivist argument about the historical specificity of the idea of being "white" is exemplified in David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).

95. One of the foundational texts of what is sometimes considered black nationalism,

Martin Delany's account of his voyage to Africa, is notable for its lack of interest

in the cultural practices of the Africans he encountered. What counted for him was that a Christian of African origin would find his destiny in ridding himself of oppression in the United States and bringing Christian civilization to Africa. See Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell, Search for a Place. Black Separatism and Africa 1860, ed. Howard H. Bell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969). For an illuminating recent book on African American-African connections - and the differing ways in which linkages were made while cultural distinctions were emphasized - see James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episco- pal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

96. Eric Lott, "The New Cosmopolitanism: Whose America?" Transition 72 (Winter 1996): 108-135.

97. For one such contribution, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

98. This is the point emphasized by Walter Benn Michaels ("Race into Culture"): the

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assignment of individuals to cultural identities is even more problematic than the definition of those identities.

99. Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 22.

100. Iris Marion Young, "Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship," Ethics 99 (January 1989): 257, 258. See also Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

101. Young, "Polity and Group Difference," 267, 261. 102. Ibid., 267, 268. 103. See especially the lucid and influential books by Will Kymlicka: Liberalism, Com-

munity, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and Multicultural Citizen- ship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).

104. Adam Przeworski, "Proletariat into a Class: The Process of Class Formation from Karl Kautsky's 'The Class Struggle' to Recent Controversies," Politics and Society 7 (1977): 372.

105. Pierre Bourdieu, "L'identite et la representation: Elements pour une riflexion critique sur l'idee de region," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35 (1980): 63-72.

106. David Laitin, "Marginality: A Microperspective," Rationality and Society 7/1 (January 1995): 31-57.

107. In a debate with Young, the philosopher Nancy Fraser has juxtaposed a politics of "recognition" to one of "redistribution," arguing that both are needed, since some

groups are exploited as well as stigmatized or unrecognized. Strikingly, both parties to the debate treat group boundaries as clear-cut, and both therefore conceive of progressive politics as involving intergroup coalitions. Both neglect other forms of political action that do not presuppose commonality or "group- ness." Nancy Fraser, "From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Post-Socialist' Age," New Left Review 212 (1995): 68-93; Iris Marion Young, "'Unruly Categories,' A Critique of Nancy Fraser's Dual Systems Theory," ibid., 222 (1997): 147-160.

108. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). See also the classic study of Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).

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Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

Theory and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1, Feb., 2000

Front Matter
Beyond "Identity" [pp. 1 - 47]
Anti-Politics and the Spirit of Capitalism: Dissidents, Monetarists, and the Czech Transition to Capitalism [pp. 49 - 92]
Understanding Peasant Revolution: From Concept to Theory and Case [pp. 93 - 124]
What Would It Matter If Everything Foucault Said about Prison Were Wrong? "Discipline and Punish" after Twenty Years [pp. 125 - 146]
Back Matter [pp. 147 - 149]

Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach

M A RY B U C H O L T Z U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A , S A N T A B A R B A R A K I R A H A L L U N I V E R S I T Y O F C O L O R A D O

A B S T R A C T The article proposes a framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction, based on the following principles: (1) identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon; (2) identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions; (3) identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems; (4) identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/ delegitimacy; and (5) identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures. The principles are illustrated through examination of a variety of linguistic interactions.

K E Y W O R D S : agency, emergence, identity, ideology, indexicality, interaction, intersubjectivity, positioning, sociocultural linguistics, stance, style

Introduction

In this article, we propose a framework for the analysis of identity as constituted in linguistic interaction. The need for such a framework has become apparent in recent years, as linguistic research on identity has become increasingly central within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and social psychology. But the concomitant development of theoretical approaches to identity remains at best a secondary concern, not a focused goal of the field. We argue for the analytic value of approaching identity as a relational and socio- cultural phenomenon that emerges and circulates in local discourse contexts of

A R T I C L E 585

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CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com

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interaction rather than as a stable structure located primarily in the individual psyche or in fixed social categories. We believe that the approach we propose here, which draws together insights from a variety of fields and theorists, allows for a discussion of identity that permits researchers to articulate theoretical assumptions about identity often left implicit in scholarship, while avoiding the critiques of this concept that have arisen in the social sciences and humanities in the past two decades. Given the scope of such scholarly research, our definition of identity is deliberately broad and open-ended: Identity is the social positioning of self and other.

Before describing our approach, we must first acknowledge our debt to a wide variety of research in several fields that has informed our own view of identity. Such work includes speech accommodation theory (Giles et al., 1991) and social identity theory (Meyerhoff, 1996; Meyerhoff and Niedzielski, 1994; Tajfel and Turner, 1979) in social psychology, theories of language ideology (Irvine and Gal, 2000; Silverstein, 1979) and indexicality (Ochs, 1992; Silverstein, 1976, 1985) in linguistic anthropology, and theories of style (Eckert and Rickford, 2001; Mendoza-Denton, 2002) and models of identity (Le Page and Tabouret- Keller, 1985) in sociolinguistics, among others. In addition, we have drawn on a number of different social theories that are especially relevant to an under- standing of the intersubjective construction of identity within local interactional contexts.

The framework we outline here synthesizes key work on identity from all these traditions to offer a general sociocultural linguistic perspective on identity – that is, one that focuses on both the details of language and the workings of culture and society. By sociocultural linguistics, we mean the broad interdis- ciplinary field concerned with the intersection of language, culture, and society. This term encompasses the disciplinary subfields of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, socially oriented forms of discourse analysis (such as conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis), and linguistically oriented social psychology, among others.1 In incorporating these diverse approaches under a single label, our purpose is neither to deny the differences among them nor to impose new disciplinary boundaries; rather, it is to acknowledge the full range of work that falls under the rubric of language and identity and to offer a shorthand device for referring to these approaches collectively. The interdisciplinary perspective taken here is intended to help scholars recognize the comprehensive toolkit already available to them for analyzing identity as a centrally linguistic phenomenon. As our examples below illustrate, identity does not emerge at a single analytic level – whether vowel quality, turn shape, code choice, or ideo- logical structure – but operates at multiple levels simultaneously. Our own approach privileges the interactional level, because it is in interaction that all these resources gain social meaning. Our goal is to assemble elements of socio- cultural linguistic work on identity into a coherent model that both describes the current state of research and offers new directions for future scholarship.

We propose five principles that we see as fundamental to the study of identity,

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drawing examples from our own research, as well as studies by others. The first and second principles challenge narrowly psychological and static views of identity that have circulated widely in the social sciences. We argue instead, in line with abundant sociocultural linguistic research, that identity is a discursive construct that emerges in interaction. Further, we expand traditional macro- sociological views of identity to include both local ethnographic categories and transitory interactional positions. The third principle inventories the types of linguistic resources whereby interactants indexically position self and other in discourse. The heart of the model is described in the fourth principle, which highlights the relational foundation of identity. To illustrate this principle, we briefly outline our own recently developed framework for analyzing identity as an intersubjective accomplishment. Finally, the fifth principle considers the limits and constraints on individual intentionality in the process of identity construc- tion, while acknowledging the important role that deliberate social action may play in producing identity. Throughout the article, we argue for a view of identity that is intersubjectively rather than individually produced and interactionally emergent rather than assigned in an a priori fashion.

The emergence principle

The first principle that informs our perspective addresses a traditional scholarly view of identity as housed primarily within an individual mind, so that the only possible relationship between identity and language use is for language to reflect an individual’s internal mental state. While individuals’ sense of self is certainly an important element of identity, researchers of individuals’ language use (e.g. Johnstone, 1996) have shown that the only way that such self-conceptions enter the social world is via some form of discourse. Hence, accounts that locate identity inside the mind may discount the social ground on which identity is built, maintained, and altered.

Our own view draws from the sustained engagement with the concept of emergence in linguistic anthropology and interactional linguistics. The idea of emergence was promoted early on in linguistic anthropology by Dell Hymes, whose view of artful linguistic performance as dialogic rather than monologic led him to call for an understanding of ‘structure as sometimes emergent in action’ (Hymes, 1975: 71). Subsequent anthropologists, notably Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, moved the field further away from the analysis of performance as mere reiteration of an underlying textual structure that was traditionally taken to be primary. In both their individual and collaborative work (Bauman, 1977; Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Briggs, 1988), these scholars demonstrated that performance is instead emergent in the course of its unfolding in specific encounters. These ideas also inform Bruce Mannheim and Dennis Tedlock’s (1995) view of culture as emergent through dialogical processes; that is, culture is produced as speakers draw on multiple voices and texts in every utterance (Bakhtin, 1981). Moreover, in functional and interactional linguistics,

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scholars have argued against static structuralist and generativist formulations of grammar, proposing instead that linguistic structure emerges in the course of interaction (e.g. Bybee and Hopper, 2001; Ford et al., 2002; Hopper, 1987).

We extend the insights of this previous linguistic work on emergence to the analysis of identity. As with performance, culture, and grammar itself, we maintain that identity emerges from the specific conditions of linguistic interaction:

1. Identity is best viewed as the emergent product rather than the pre-existing source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore as fundamentally a social and cultural phenomenon.

This is a familiar idea within several very different branches of sociocultural linguistics: the ethnomethodological concept of ‘doing’ various kinds of identity (e.g. Fenstermaker and West, 2002; Garfinkel, 1967; West and Zimmerman, 1987) and the related conversation-analytic notion of identity as an interaction- ally relevant accomplishment (e.g. Antaki and Widdicombe, 1998; Aronsson, 1998; Auer, 1998; Kitzinger, n.d.; Moerman, 1993; Sidnell, 2003); the post- structuralist theory of performativity (Butler, 1990), developed from the work of J.L. Austin (1962), as taken up by researchers of language, gender, and sexuality (e.g. Barrett, 1999; Cameron, 1997; Livia and Hall, 1997); and more generally the semiotic concepts of creative indexicality (Silverstein, 1979) and referee design (Bell, 1984). Despite fundamental differences among these approaches, all of them enable us to view identity not simply as a psychological mechanism of self-classification that is reflected in people’s social behavior but rather as something that is constituted through social action, and especially through language. Of course, the property of emergence does not exclude the possibility that resources for identity work in any given interaction may derive from resources developed in earlier interactions (that is, they may draw on ‘structure’ – such as ideology, the linguistic system, or the relation between the two).

Although nearly all contemporary linguistic research on identity takes this general perspective at its starting point, it is perhaps easiest to recognize identity as emergent in cases where speakers’ language use does not conform with the social category to which they are normatively assigned. Cases of transgender identity and cross-gender performance (Barrett, 1999; Besnier, 2003; Gaudio, 1997; Hall and O’Donovan, 1996; Kulick, 1997; Manalansan, 2003) and ethnic, racial, and national boundary crossing (Bucholtz, 1995, 1999a; Chun, 2001; Cutler, 1999; Hewitt, 1986; Lo, 1999; Piller, 2002; Rampton, 1995; Sweetland, 2002) illustrate in diverse ways that identities as social processes do not precede the semiotic practices that call them into being in specific interactions. Such cases are striking only because they sever the ideologically expected mapping between language and biology or culture; that is, they subvert essentialist preconceptions of linguistic ownership. While the emergent nature of identity is especially stark in cases where a biologically male speaker uses feminine gendered pronouns or a speaker phenotypically classified as nonblack

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uses African American English, identity is discursively produced even in the most mundane and unremarkable situations.

To illustrate the emergent quality of identity, we offer two examples involving very different groups of speakers. The first focuses on the discourse practices of hijras, a transgender category in India whose members, though predominantly born male, identify as neither men nor women. Hijras typically dress and speak like women, but violate gender norms of appropriate Indian femininity in other ways, such as through the use of obscenity (Hall, 1997). One of the resources available to hijras to distance themselves from masculinity is the linguistic gender system of Hindi, where verbal gender marking is often obligatory. In Example (1), taken from an ethnographic interview with Hall, a hijra we call Sulekha discusses her relationship with her family, who forced her out of the house in her early teens because of her effeminate behavior. Here, she reports the speech of her family members as referring to her in the masculine gender (marked with a superscripted m in the transcript), yet when speaking in her own voice, she uses the feminine form to refer to herself (marked with a superscripted f in the transcript):

(1)

K: āpkā parivār kyā soctā hai? K: What does your family think? S: jab ghare nah�ı jātpı f h�u- jātpı f h�u to sab S: When I don’t go home–when I don’t gof

samajhte ha ı̃ ki “mar gayām, (1.0) khatam everybody thinks, “He diedm! ho gayām, (1.5) nātā riśtā He’sm finished! All of our ties [with him] khatam ho gayā.” are finished!”

K: acchā. jab āp chot.pı thı̄ to āp ke bare me K: Oh. But what were they thinking about kyā socte the? you when you were small?

S: kyā soctā log? kuch nah�ı soctā thā log. S: What could people think? People didn’t (0.5) kahtā hai log ki ((lowering voice)) think anything. Or people said ((lowering “are, i kyā ho gayām. hijr. ā ho gayā

m. (0.2) voice)), “Oh, what has he becomem? He mar bh pı nah�ı jātām hai, (0.2) are nikal bh pı becamem a hijra. Why doesn’t he just nah�ı jātām hai, are bāp diem! Oh, why doesn’t he just go mahtārı̄ kā nām khatam ho gayā.” awaym! Oh, the name of his father and

mother is finished!” K: hame ~sā bolte the? K: They always said that? S: h�a. (4.0) beizzatı̄ kā ghar ho gayā. S: Yes. It became a house of dishonor.

“kaise zindagı̄ calegā iskā. mar jātā to [They said,] “How can his life go on? It acchā rahtā.” (2.0) maı̃ sab suntı̄ f thı̄ f would have been better if he had just apnā nikal gayı̄ f. (5.0) jhūt.h kah rahı̄

f diedm!” I usedf to listenf to all of that, h�u? (6.0) maı̃ jhūt.h nah�ı boltı̄

f. (5.0) and then I just ranf away. Am I lyingf? jah�a par bāt gayā to jhūtY h bolkar kyā I don’t lief. When no one cares what I say kar�ugı̄f? (1.0) h�a? (1.0) hamẽ to koı̄ laut. anyway, what would I gain

f by lying? āyegā nah�ı. maı̃ kaise kah d�u ki nah�ı. Right? Nobody will take me back

anyway, so why should I tell you otherwise?

For Sulekha, feminine gender marking does not reflect a straightforwardly assigned feminine identity; indeed, as the reported speech of her relatives makes

Bucholtz and Hall: Identity and interaction 589

clear, her gender identity is contested by her family. Under these circumstances, gender marking becomes a powerful tool used by Sulekha to constitute herself as feminine in opposition to her family’s perception of her gender. Such identity positioning is therefore occasioned by the interactional demands of her narrative. It is important to note that hijras do not use feminine self-reference in an automatic or predetermined way; in other contexts, hijras alternate between feminine and masculine forms in referring to themselves and other hijras in order to construct a variety of rhetorical effects (Hall and O’Donovan, 1996). Though not as dramatic or as recognizable as this example, a similar process of identity construction takes place every time a speaker assigns social gender to another human being. It is the constant iteration of such practices that cumu- latively produce not only each individual’s gender identity, but gender itself as a socially meaningful system (Butler, 1990; West and Zimmerman, 1987).

The second example is taken from the work of Elaine Chun (2001) on Korean American men’s identities. Chun points out that unlike African Americans, most Asian Americans do not have access to a variety of English invested with ethnically specific meaning. She argues that for this reason some of the Asian American men in her study draw on elements of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in order to locate themselves against racial ideologies that privilege whiteness. This phenomenon is illustrated in Example (2):

(2) (Chun, 2001: 60)

2368 Jin: i think white people just don’t keep it real and that’s why 2369 Dave: that is = that’s true man? 2370 Jin: cause that’s why they always back stabbin like my roommate who

wasn’t gonna pay the last month’s // rent 2371 JH: white. 2372 Jin: he kicks us out [of 2373 Eric: [the prototypical whitey. 2374 Jin: ye:::ah ma::n? 2375 JH: no social skills. 2376 Jin: but that’s not true for everyone i don’t think. 2377 EC: uh huh 2378 Jin: cause all those ghetto whiteys in my neighborhood i think they’re cool

The speakers use various elements associated with African American youth language, including idiomatic phrases like keep it real (line 2368) and lexical items like whitey (lines 2373, 2378), as well as a few emblematic grammatical structures such as the zero copula (they always back stabbin, line 2370). None of the participants in this interaction is a fluent speaker of AAVE, and indeed not all participants use AAVE features. But in the context of this discussion – a critique of whiteness – AAVE becomes an effective instrument for rejecting dominant racial ideologies. At the same time, an antiracist Asian American identity emerges in the discourse in alliance with other people of color.

Despite the vast difference in cultural contexts, this example bears a strong resemblance to the hijra example above in that the speakers in both cases

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appropriate linguistic forms generally understood not to ‘belong’ to them. Both the use of feminine grammatical gender forms by hijras, who are usually assigned to the male sex at birth, and the use of African American youth style by Korean Americans actively produce new forms of identity through language by disrupting naturalized associations between specific linguistic forms and specific social categories. Yet even these innovative identities should not be understood as ontologically prior to the discourse that calls them forth. While the macro categories of hijra and Korean American have a certain ideological coherence, their actual manifestation in practice is dependent on the interactional demands of the immediate social context. Such interactions therefore highlight what is equally true of even the most predictable and non-innovative identities: that they are only constituted as socially real through discourse, and especially interaction.

The positionality principle

The second principle challenges another widely circulating view of identity, that it is simply a collection of broad social categories. This perspective is found most often in the quantitative social sciences, which correlate social behavior with macro identity categories such as age, gender, and social class. Within socio- cultural linguistics, the concern with identities as broader social structures is particularly characteristic of early variationist sociolinguistics (e.g. Labov, 1966) and the sociology of language (see Fishman, 1971, among others). The traditional forms of these approaches have been valuable for documenting large- scale sociolinguistic trends; they are often less effective in capturing the more nuanced and flexible kinds of identity relations that arise in local contexts (but see, e.g. Labov, 1963). This analytic gap points to the importance of ethnography. Linguistic ethnographers have repeatedly demonstrated that language users often orient to local identity categories rather than to the analyst’s sociological categories and that the former frequently provide a better empirical account of linguistic practice.

In addition, more recent sociocultural linguistic work has begun to investigate the micro details of identity as it is shaped from moment to moment in interaction. At the most basic level, identity emerges in discourse through the temporary roles and orientations assumed by participants, such as evaluator, joke teller, or engaged listener. Such interactional positions may seem quite different from identity as conventionally understood; however, these temporary roles, no less than larger sociological and ethnographic identity categories, contribute to the formation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in discourse. On the one hand, the interactional positions that social actors briefly occupy and then abandon as they respond to the contingencies of unfolding discourse may accumulate ideological associations with both large-scale and local categories of identity. On the other, these ideological associations, once forged, may shape who does what and how in interaction, though never in a deterministic fashion.

Bucholtz and Hall: Identity and interaction 591

Our own perspective therefore broadens the traditional referential range of identity to encompass not only more widely recognized constructs of social sub- jectivity but also local identity categories and transitory interactional positions:

2. Identities encompass (a) macro-level demographic categories; (b) local, ethnographically specific cultural positions; and (c) temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles.

Examples (3) and (4) illustrate how these different levels of identity emerge in discourse. Both are taken from ethnographic interviews Bucholtz conducted with middle-class European American 17-year-old girls who grew up in the same city and were attending the same California high school. The girls therefore had access to very similar kinds of linguistic resources. Yet they habitually positioned themselves as different kinds of teenagers through their differential use of language. This point could be illustrated through a wide variety of linguistic markers; the one we consider here is the use of innovative quotative forms. Quotative markers introduce represented discourse; some forms may mark nonlinguistic affective expressions as well. The prototypical quotative form is say, but go has also entered widespread use to perform quotative functions. In more recent years, the form be like has been widely adopted by young people in the United States (Blyth et al., 1990; Dailey-O’Cain, 2000). Two of these quotatives are found in Example (3):

(3)

1 Claire: Then you say the magic word, 2 “I have a tutor.” h 3 Mary: Mm. 4 Christine: Everyone goes, 5 “O::::h,” 6 and they’re all jealous and they’re like, 7 “Oh wow, 8 I wish I had a tutor.” hh

In addition to these quotative markers, another form has emerged, especially on the West Coast: be all (Waksler, 2001). Because of its more recent appearance in youth discourse, it is more semiotically marked than be like or the older quotative forms. Whereas in Example (3), Christine uses the well-established quotative markers go and be like, in Example (4), Josie uses only one quotative form, the innovative be all:

(4)

1 Josie: They would not let me join their club by the way. 2 Mary: You tried and they woul[dn’t let you ]? 3 Josie: [Oh I was all, ] 4 “Can I join your club?” 5 <lower volume> {Of course I’d been sitting in the corner

laughing at them for the last twenty minutes.}

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6 And they’re all, 7 “No:,” 8 And I was all, 9 “I don’t like you either.”

Christine and Josie both index their youth through their use of these innovative quotative markers, but their choice of different markers indexes more local dimensions of their identity. Christine is a self-described nerd, who values intelli- gence and nonconformity and, unlike cool students, is not interested in pursuing the latest trends, whether in fashion or language; Josie, by contrast, is one of the most popular girls in the school, and her exclusive use of the innovative quotative marker signals her consummate trendiness.2 These local identities are also relevant to the content of the discourse: Claire and Christine are complaining that they have to pretend to have a tutor in order to avoid explaining their high grades to their less intelligent peers, and Josie is describing her joking attempt to join the high school’s Macintosh Computer Club, which is widely recognized as a bastion of nerdiness.

In the analysis of these girls’ speech, classification along demographic lines of gender, age, race, and class provides part of the picture, but more can be learned by considering other ways in which these girls position themselves and others subjectively and intersubjectively. First, by viewing the girls as members of a single age cohort, we can recognize the importance of age – specifically youth- fulness – as a shared social identity that is expressed through the use of innovative quotative markers. Second, through ethnographically obtained information about these girls’ affiliation with contrasting, locally developed social styles at the high school, we can make sense of their divergent quotative choices. Third, scrutiny of the interactional work the speakers are accomplishing reveals how through represented discourse they make negative evaluations of other types of people (and, implicitly, positively evaluate themselves). For example, in lines 4 and 5, Christine’s utterance Everyone goes O::::h both prosod- ically and lexically marks the quoted speakers’ collective stance of awe and jealousy. But because this utterance is represented discourse, it also signals Christine’s orientation of disdain toward her classmates’ desire for a tutor and their obliviousness to her deception.

Such examples demonstrate that different kinds of positions typically occur simultaneously in a single interaction. From the perspective of the analyst, it is not a matter of choosing one dimension of identity over others, but of consid- ering multiple facets in order to achieve a more complete understanding of how identity works.

The indexicality principle

While the first two principles we have discussed characterize the ontological status of identity, the third principle is concerned with the mechanism whereby identity is constituted. This mechanism, known as indexicality, is fundamental to

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the way in which linguistic forms are used to construct identity positions. In its most basic sense, an index is a linguistic form that depends on the interactional context for its meaning, such as the first-person pronoun I (Silverstein, 1976). More generally, however, the concept of indexicality involves the creation of semiotic links between linguistic forms and social meanings (Ochs, 1992; Silverstein, 1985). In identity formation, indexicality relies heavily on ideological structures, for associations between language and identity are rooted in cultural beliefs and values – that is, ideologies – about the sorts of speakers who (can or should) produce particular sorts of language.

Indexical processes occur at all levels of linguistic structure and use. The third principle outlines some of these different linguistic means whereby identity is discursively produced:

3. Identity relations emerge in interaction through several related indexical processes, including: (a) overt mention of identity categories and labels; (b) impli- catures and presuppositions regarding one’s own or others’ identity position; (c) displayed evaluative and epistemic orientations to ongoing talk, as well as inter- actional footings and participant roles; and (d) the use of linguistic structures and systems that are ideologically associated with specific personas and groups.

The most obvious and direct way that identities can be constituted through talk is the overt introduction of referential identity categories into discourse. Indeed, a focus on social category labels has been a primary method that nonlinguistic researchers have used to approach the question of identity. Researchers in sociocultural linguistics contribute to this line of work a more precise and systematic methodology for understanding labeling and categorization as social action (e.g. McConnell-Ginet, 1989, 2002; Murphy, 1997; Sacks, 1995). The circulation of such categories within ongoing discourse, their explicit or implicit juxtaposition with other categories, and the linguistic elaborations and qualifications they attract (predicates, modifiers, and so on) all provide important information about identity construction. For example, in (1) above, Sulekha quotes her family as condemning her in childhood as a ‘hijra’, a term that carries an extreme derogatory force in non-hijra Indian society: ‘Oh, what has he become? He became a hijra. Why doesn’t he just die! . . . Oh, the name of his father and mother is finished!’ The term acquires this force through its ideological association with impotence (in fact, hijra is often used to mean ‘impotent’ in everyday discourse). This stands as the ultimate insult within normative Indian family structures, for the widespread belief that hijras are impotent positions them outside of reproductive kinship. In short, it is precisely the invocation of the identity label hijra that motivates the quoted speakers’ lamentations. A somewhat different labeling process is seen in Example (2), where the racial label whitey, also generally understood to be derogatory, takes on different valences within the interaction through the use of contrastive modifiers. While Eric negatively characterizes Jin’s roommate as a ‘prototypical whitey’, Jin describes the ‘ghetto whiteys’ in his working-class neighborhood as

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‘cool’. In this interaction, adjectives and predication reorient the social meaning of whitey from a fixed racial reference term to an intersubjectively negotiated identity category.

Less direct means of instantiating identities include such pragmatic processes as implicature and presupposition, both of which require additional inferential work for interpretation. For example, as Anita Liang (1999) has argued, lesbians and gay men who fear reprisal for openly displaying their sexual identity may use implicatures (such as gender-neutral references to lovers) to convey this information to savvy listeners while excluding possibly hostile outgroup members. Indeed, the ability to interpret such implicatures is recognized in gay and lesbian communities with a special term: gaydar. A similarly indirect strategy for positioning self or other in discourse is presupposition. In the college rape tribunal hearings analyzed by Susan Ehrlich (2001), for example, the defense exploits presupposition to situate the alleged rape victims as powerful and in sexual control. Repeated references to the attacked women’s purported options and choices presuppose that they could have prevented their rapes, thus framing them as agents in contrast to the prosecution’s representations of them as passive victims. Here identity is located in the situated social positions of rape survivor versus willing participant.

Recent work on stance – that is, the display of evaluative, affective, and epistemic orientations in discourse – has made explicit the ways in which other dimensions of interaction can be resources for the construction of identity. In his framework for the analysis of stance as both a subjective and an intersubjective phenomenon, John Du Bois (2002) characterizes stance as social action in the following terms: ‘I evaluate something, and thereby position myself, and align [or disalign] with you.’ Similar concepts have emerged in related fields, including assessment (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1992; Pomerantz, 1984) and epistemic authority (Heritage and Raymond, 2005) in conversation analysis, positioning in both discursive social psychology (Davies and Harré, 1990) and language and gender research (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 2003), and evaluation in discourse analysis (Hunston and Thompson, 2000). All these share an analytic focus on the linguistic marking of a speaker’s orientation to ongoing talk. A related but somewhat different approach considers the interactional roles speakers and listeners inhabit in conversation, as laid out in Erving Goffman’s (1974, 1981) groundbreaking work on footing, participant roles, and partici- pation frameworks.

All of these scholars’ insights – and work that builds on them – are productive for the study of identity because they show how even in the most fleeting of interactional moves, speakers position themselves and others as particular kinds of people. Moreover, stances can build up into larger identity categories. In an influential paper, Elinor Ochs (1992) extends the concept of indexicality by arguing that the indexical connection between a given linguistic form and a particular social identity is not direct (see also Ochs, 1993). Rather, linguistic forms that index identity are more basically associated with interactional stances

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such as forcefulness, uncertainty, and so on, which in turn may come to be associated with particular social categories, such as gender. Within interactional linguistics, Mirka Rauniomaa (2003) has developed Du Bois’s (2002) concept of stance accretion to capture the way in which stances accumulate into more durable structures of identity. It is important to emphasize that the process of creating indexical ties of this kind is inherently ideological, creating in bottom- up fashion a set of interactional norms for particular social groups. Conversely, in the process of indexical inversion described by Miyako Inoue (2004), indexical associations can also be imposed from the top down by cultural authorities such as intellectuals or the media. Such an imposed indexical tie may create ideo- logical expectations among speakers and hence affect linguistic practice.

Example (5), taken from a study of family dinnertime narratives by Elinor Ochs and Carolyn Taylor (1995), illustrates how interactional identities emerge in discourse. The following excerpt is from an interaction between a middle-class European American heterosexual couple. The wife (‘Mom’) has been telling her husband (‘Dad’) about her new assistant at work:

(5) (Ochs and Taylor, 1995: 108)

Dad: ((eating dessert)) Well – I certainly think that – you’re a- you know you’re a fair bo?ss – You’ve been working there how long?

Mom: fifteen years in June ((as she scrapes dishes at kitchen sink)) Dad: fifteen years – and you got a guy ((turns to look directly at Mom as he continues))

that’s been workin there a few weeks? And you do (it what) the way he wants. Mom: hh ((laughs))

(0.6) ((Dad smiles slightly?, then turns back to eating his dessert)) Mom: It’s not a matter of my doin it the way he: wa:nt – It does help in that I’m getting

more work? done It’s just that I’m workin too hard? I don’t wanta work so hard

Dad: ((rolls chair around to face Mom halfway)) Well – You’re the bo:ss It’s up to you to set the standards . . .

Ochs and Taylor identify a number of interactional roles in such narratives, including protagonist, primary teller, and primary recipient. They also found that the narratives in their sample tended to involve negative evaluation of the protagonist by the primary recipient, a role pair they term problematizee/ problematizer. In Example (5), Dad assumes the role of problematizer and assigns Mom the role of problematizee at several points. Moreover, the authors discovered that the gendered distribution of interactional roles in this example was a general feature of other interactions they recorded between demographi- cally similar married couples. In this way, gendered identities are built not only locally within couples, but more broadly across (some kinds of) couples. Through the repetition of such processes, the interactional identities produced via stance taking accrue into more enduring identities like gender, as well as forming ideologies of gender-appropriate interactional practice.3

A somewhat related set of insights comes from the concept of style in variationist sociolinguistics. This term traditionally refers to intraspeaker

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variation in language use (Labov, 1972), but more contemporary approaches (Bucholtz, 1999a, 1999b; California Style Collective, 1993; Eckert, 2000; Eckert and Rickford, 2001; Mendoza-Denton, forthcoming; Schilling-Estes, 2004), along with earlier work by Bell (1984) and Coupland (1980), understand style as a repertoire of linguistic forms associated with personas or identities. Whereas scholars concerned with stance concentrate on conversational acts such as evaluative expressions, sociolinguists of style typically look instead to linguistic structures below the discursive level, such as grammar, phonology, and lexis.4 In an indexical process similar to what both Ochs and Rauniomaa describe for stance, these features become tied to styles and hence to identity through habitual practice (Bourdieu, 1977, [1972] 1978). Thus through their repeated choice of one quotative form over another in interactions such as Examples (3) and (4) earlier, teenagers in California display their identity as nerdy or popular. As these examples show, one of the important insights of the style literature is that the social meanings of style often require ethnographic investigation to uncover groups that may seem homogeneous through a wider analytic lens, but become sharply differentiated when ethnographic details are brought into close focus.

In addition to micro-level linguistic structures like stance markers and style features, entire linguistic systems such as languages and dialects may also be indexically tied to identity categories. This phenomenon – long the mainstay of a wide range of sociocultural linguistic scholarship – has been especially well theorized in the literature on language, nationalism, and ideology (e.g. Gal and Irvine, 1995; see also contributions to Kroskrity, 2000; Schieffelin et al., 1998). In addition, work on language choice has also begun to appear in the emerging field of language and globalization. Given the vast scale of such phenomena as nationalism and globalization, much of the research on these issues is not interactional in its approach. However, some current studies, especially on the latter topic (e.g. Besnier, 2004; Hall, 2003; Park, 2004), consider how large- scale social processes such as globalization shape identity in interaction. Example (6) is taken from one such study, carried out by Niko Besnier (2004) in Tonga. The interaction takes place between a Tongan seller and customer at a second- hand market, or fea:

(6) (Besnier, 2004: 29–30)

Seller: Sai ia kia koe, Sōnia. “Looks good on you, Sōnia.”

Customer: Yeah- if it fits = Seller: ((ignoring customer’s contingency)) = Ni::ce. (10.0)

What size is it? (2.0) Customer: Eight. (3.0) Seller: Ohh. (4.0) Too small. (2.0)

‘E hao ‘ia Mālia. (2.0) ‘Ia me’a. (2.0) “It’ll fit Mālia. I mean, what’s-her-name.” It’s might fit you, cuz it looks big!

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Customer: ‘Io? “Yes?”

Seller: Yeah! (2.0) The waist, look! Customer: I know- Seller: I think it’s one of those one that it has to show the bellybutton. Customer: No way! Seller: Aaaha-ha-haa! Customer: .Haa-ha-hah! Seller: That’s the in-thing in New Zealand now. Even my kids say,

“Mummy, see, it has to show the b-!” Huh! I say, “No::::, no::!” Ahahahuh-hh! Cuz that’s the look now!

What is most striking about this exchange is the use of English rather than Tongan for much of the interaction. Besnier demonstrates that this language choice constructs the speakers as modern and cosmopolitan. He notes that the seller also uses a markedly New Zealand pronunciation of certain words by centralizing the vowel [i] as [;], a highly local New Zealand speech style that further displays her cosmopolitan identity. (The knowledgeable epistemic stance the seller takes toward current fashion similarly undergirds this identity project.) In such situations, we vividly see how the vast workings of global processes, and the languages carried with them, settle into the everyday lives of ordinary people around the world.

The range of phenomena discussed in this section attests to the wealth of linguistic resources that contribute to the production of identity positions. Disparate indexical processes of labeling, implicature, stance taking, style marking, and code choice work to construct identities, both micro and macro, as well as those somewhere in between. By considering identity formation at multiple indexical levels rather than focusing on only one, we can assemble a much richer portrait of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as they are constituted in interaction.

The relationality principle

The first three principles we have discussed focus on the emergent, positional, and indexical aspects of identity and its production. Building on these points, the fourth principle emphasizes identity as a relational phenomenon. In calling attention to relationality, we have two aims: first, to underscore the point that identities are never autonomous or independent but always acquire social meaning in relation to other available identity positions and other social actors; and second, to call into question the widespread but oversimplified view of identity relations as revolving around a single axis: sameness and difference. The principle we propose here suggests a much broader range of relations that are forged through identity processes:

4. Identities are intersubjectively constructed through several, often overlapping, complementary relations, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice, and authority/delegitimacy.

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We have described these relations at length elsewhere as what we have termed tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004a, 2004b); we briefly summa- rize those discussions here. The list of identity relations we outline in this and our earlier work is not intended to be exhaustive but rather suggestive of the different dimensions of relationality created through identity construction. In addition, it is important to note that although we separate the concepts for purposes of exposition we do not view them as mutually exclusive; indeed, since these are relational processes two or more typically work in conjunction with one another.5

A D E Q UAT I O N A N D D I S T I N C T I O N

The first two complementary identity relations we describe, similarity and difference, are also the most widely discussed in social-scientific research on identity. To highlight the ways we depart from traditional views of these relations, we use the terms adequation and distinction.

The term adequation emphasizes the fact that in order for groups or individuals to be positioned as alike, they need not – and in any case cannot – be identical, but must merely be understood as sufficiently similar for current inter- actional purposes. Thus, differences irrelevant or damaging to ongoing efforts to adequate two people or groups will be downplayed, and similarities viewed as salient to and supportive of the immediate project of identity work will be foregrounded. The relation of adequation can be seen earlier in Examples (1) and (2). In Example (1), Sulekha’s use of feminine gender marking reflects neither her view of herself as a woman nor her attempt to be so viewed. Instead, it allows her to claim just enough of the semiotic trappings of femininity to produce herself as a hijra in an interaction in which – by her own report – the gendered nature of such an identity is explicitly contested. Likewise, in Example (2), when Jin uses the grammatical and lexical resources of African American youth language, he positions himself not as black but as both nonwhite and as antagonistic to white racism, and hence as sufficiently similar to African Americans to make common cause with them.

A rather different example of adequation comes from unpublished work by Adam Hodges (n.d.), who investigates the Bush administration’s rhetorical strategies to gain the American public’s support for the war the United States eventually waged against Iraq in 2003. In his critical discourse analysis of a speech given by President George W. Bush in Cincinnati in October 2002, Hodges finds that Bush used the relation of adequation to effectively create an asso- ciation in listeners’ minds between President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and the terrorist network Al Qaeda, which claimed responsibility for the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Example (7) is taken from Bush’s speech:

Bucholtz and Hall: Identity and interaction 599

(7) (Hodges ms.)

1 the attacks of September the 11th 2 showed our country that vast oceans 3 no longer protect us from danger 4 before that tragic date 5 we had only hints of al Qaeda’s plans 6 and designs 7 today in Iraq 8 we see a threat whose outlines 9 are far more clearly defined

10 and whose consequences 11 could be far more deadly 12 Saddam Hussein’s actions have put us on notice 13 and there is no refuge 14 from our responsibilities

Hodges notes that the repeated juxtaposition of the names Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in this and other speeches itself establishes a discursive ground for the production of adequation between the two entities. Moreover, the framing of both of them as morally and politically equivalent – for instance, as variously a ‘danger’ (line 3) or a ‘threat’ (line 8) – further adequates Al Qaeda with the Iraqi government as represented in the person of Saddam Hussein; indeed, Bush suggests that the primary difference between these two menacing entities is one of degree, not kind. The crudeness of such rhetorical strategies offers an espe- cially extreme example of adequation by demonstrating how speakers – and here, by extension, entire governments – position not themselves but others as sufficiently similar for a given purpose, such as identifying a target for military attack.

The counterpart of adequation, distinction, focuses on the identity relation of differentiation.6 The overwhelming majority of sociocultural linguistic research on identity has emphasized this relation, both because social differentiation is a highly visible process and because language is an especially potent resource for producing it in a variety of ways. Just as adequation relies on the suppression of social differences that might disrupt a seamless representation of similarity, distinction depends on the suppression of similarities that might undermine the construction of difference.

Because distinction is such a familiar identity relation, we provide only a brief illustration of how it operates. While processes of social differentiation may be found at some level in all of the examples given earlier, we return here to Example (6), the exchange in the Tongan marketplace. This interaction offers a clear instance of adequation with modern English-speaking cosmopolitanism. More- over, by means of some of the same resources, it produces distinction as well. Besnier points out that the seller’s use of centralized New Zealand-like vowels creates a relation of distinction with certain other Tongans: ‘She also distances herself from Tongan-accented English (with some difficulty at the level of syntax)

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and all that it represents in the New Zealand context, including the stigma of being an underclass “Islander,” whose vowels are never centralized’ (2004: 32). In this example, even a linguistically slight similarity to the transnational prestige variety of English is sufficient to align this Tongan seller of second-hand western clothes with modernity and simultaneously to separate her from a local lower-class identity.

AU T H E N T I CAT I O N A N D D E NAT U R A L I Z AT I O N

The second pair of relations, authentication and denaturalization, are the processes by which speakers make claims to realness and artifice, respectively. While both relations have to do with authenticity, the first focuses on the ways in which identities are discursively verified and the second on how assumptions regarding the seamlessness of identity can be disrupted. Like the focus on distinction, a concern with authenticity – that is, what sorts of language and language users count as ‘genuine’ for a given purpose – has pervaded the sociocultural linguistic literature, although analysts have not always separated their own assumptions about authenticity from those of the speakers they study (Bucholtz, 2003). We call attention not to authenticity as an inherent essence, but to authentication as a social process played out in discourse. The interaction we have selected to illustrate this phenomenon is taken from Bauman’s (1992) analysis of Icelandic legends about the kraftaskáld, a poet thought to have magical powers. In his analysis of this narrative genre as polyvocalic and dynamic, Bauman points to the opening and closing of the narrative as sites where the narrator authenti- cates not only his story, but also himself as the teller of it:

(8) (Bauman, 1992: 130–31)

HÖE 1 Voru nokkrir fleiri. . . voru fleiri kraftaskáld talin parna í SkagafirUi? Were any others. . . were others reputed to be kraftaskálds in Skagafjord?

JN 2 Ég man aU nú ekki núna í augnabliki, I don’t remember that now, just now at the moment,

3 en eitt ég nú sagt pér ef. . . ef pú kœrir pig um. but I can tell you now if. . . if you care (to hear it).

4 paU er nú ekki beint úr SkagafirUi, It is, now, not exactly from Skagafjord,

5 og pó, paU er í sambandi viU Gudrúnu, although it is connected with Gudrún,

6 dóttur séra Páls skálda í Vestmannaeyjum. daughter of Reverend Páll the Poet in the Westman Islands.

7 Páll skáldi pótti nú kraftaskáld, Páll the Poet was thought, now, to be a kraftaskáld

[. . .]

25 Nú Gudrún dottir hans sagUi föUur minum pessa sögu. Now Gudrún, his daughter, told my father this story.

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Bauman notes that the detailing of the chain of narration whereby the teller heard the tale also provides evidence for his right to tell it, thus authenticating both the narrative and his interactional identity as its narrator. Bauman describes this process, which he terms traditionalization, as an ‘act of authenti- cation akin to the art or antique dealer’s authentication of an object by tracing its provenience’ (1992: 137). This useful metaphor highlights the temporal dimension of authentication, which often relies on a claimed historical tie to a venerated past.

In denaturalization, by contrast, such claims to the inevitability or inherent rightness of identities is subverted. What is called attention to instead is the ways in which identity is crafted, fragmented, problematic, or false. Such aspects often emerge most clearly in parodic performance and in some displays of hybrid identity (e.g. Bucholtz, 1995; Jaffe, 2000; Woolard, 1998), but they may also appear whenever an identity violates ideological expectations (e.g. Barrett, 1999; Rampton, 1995).

As an example of denaturalization, we turn to work by Benjamin Bailey (2000) on just such an identity: that of Dominican Americans. Bailey points out that in the US racial context, Dominican Americans’ own language-based identities as Hispanic (or ‘Spanish’) are displaced by ideologically motivated per- ceptions of their identity as African American or black based on their phenotype. In Example (9), two Dominican American teenage boys in a Rhode Island high school, Wilson and JB, jokingly conspire against a Southeast Asian American classmate, Pam, to convince her that Wilson is black, not Spanish:

(9) (Bailey, 2000: 571)

(Wilson has just finished explaining to JB, in Spanish, the function of the wireless microphone he is wearing.)

Wilson: ((singing)) Angie Pelham is a weird person (2.5) Wilson: Me estoy miando yo,’mano. [‘I have to piss, man.’] (2.0) JB: ( ) (2.0) Pam: Yo, the first time I saw you, I never thought you were Spanish. (.5) Wilson: [Who?] JB: [(He’s)] Black. Pam: I never- Wilson: Cause I’m Black. JB: ( ) Wilson: Cause I’m Black. Pam: No JB: His father [is Black ], her mother is-, his mother is uh- Wilson: [I’m Black ] Pam: (Can he) speak Spanish? JB: No Wilson: Cause I was- [I was ] Pam: [Yeah!] JB: So why (d- ?)

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Wilson: No, no seriously, I’m Black and I was raised in the Dominican Republic. (.5) Wilson: For real. Pam: Your mother’s Black? Wilson: My mom? No, my father. Pam: Your father’s Black, your [mother’s Spanish? ] Wilson: [My mom’s Spanish] JB: His mom is Black- and she’s Spanish. Wilson: Is mix(ed) JB: His mom was born over here.

(2.0) ((Wilson smiles at Pam and throws a piece of paper at her)) JB: Wilson, don’t t(h)row anything to her. Wilson: Excúsame, se me olvidó, que es la heva tuya [‘Sorry, I forgot that she is your

girlfriend.’] JB: Cállate, todavía no. [‘Be quiet, not yet!’] Pam: English! JB: English, yeah! Wilson: I said I’m sorry. JB: He can’t speak Spanish. Pam: I saw you were talking to him ( ) Wilson: I understand, but I don’t speak everything.

(2.2) ((Wilson smiles broadly at Pam)) JB: I’m teaching him. (5.5) Wilson: ¿Qué tú vas (a) hacer en tu casa hoy, loco? ((slaps JB on the back))

[‘What are you going to do at your house today, man?’]

Bailey’s analysis shows that in this interaction Wilson and JB collaboratively construct an absurd and implausible (to them) representation of Wilson’s ethnic identity as black and non-Spanish-speaking. By the end of the excerpt, Wilson blatantly violates his own immediately previous identity claims by speaking in fluent Spanish, thereby unmasking himself as not ‘really’ black according to the Dominican cultural framework. This jointly produced prank undermines essentialized assumptions that black skin necessarily entails a black identity and thus denaturalizes the dominant racial paradigm in the United States. In both Examples (7) and (8), then, what is at stake, in very different ways, is what counts as a ‘real’ identity. But where the Icelandic narrator puts forth his identity bona fides in order to produce himself as an authentic and legitimate teller of the kraftaskáld tale, Wilson knowingly offers false credentials only to withdraw them later, and thus unsettles the naturalized links between phenotype and ethnic identity.

AU T H O R I Z AT I O N A N D I L L E G I T I M AT I O N

The final pair of intersubjective relations that we describe considers the structural and institutional aspects of identity formation. The first of these, authorization, involves the affirmation or imposition of an identity through structures of institutionalized power and ideology, whether local or translocal. The counterpart of authorization, illegitimation, addresses the ways in which identities are dismissed, censored, or simply ignored by these same structures. To

Bucholtz and Hall: Identity and interaction 603

illustrate authorization, we return to Bush’s speech leading up to the Iraq war (Example 7). Throughout his speech, Bush uses the first-person plural pronoun to conflate the Bush Administration with the United States as a whole. Drawing on the shared national identity that emerged in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Bush invokes ‘our country’ at the beginning of the passage, but then uses the same pronoun to refer to the specialized knowledge available only to members of his Administration (and later revealed to be false). By the end of this excerpt, ‘our responsibilities’ are imposed not only on Bush and his advisors but on the American people as well. This sort of conflation is reinforced by Bush’s ability as President to metonymically position himself as speaking on behalf of the nation. Just as he authoritatively adequates Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, he likewise uses his presidential authority to create an identification of a shared moral stance between himself and the American public. (The effectiveness of such strategies, Hodges notes, can be seen in the strong expressions of public support for Bush’s position after this speech.)

Structures of authority need not be as all-encompassing as in this situation. In our final example, we demonstrate how interactional dynamics may shore up ideological structures even in the absence of a locatable powerful authority. This is the process that Antonio Gramsci (1971) calls hegemony. Example (10) comes from Joseph Park’s (2004) multisited investigation of ideologies of English in Korea. Park shows that these ideologies permeate ordinary interactions in a variety of contexts. Example (10) illustrates one of these ideologies: that it is, in some sense, culturally inappropriate or unKorean to speak English fluently. The example takes place among Korean nationals attending graduate school in the United States. The speakers jointly mock a nonpresent Korean friend, who has left a message on one participant’s answering machine in which he uses an Americanized pronunciation of the word Denver:

(10) (from Park, 2004; slightly simplified transcript)

24 Hyeju: <@[/t3nv8=r/]-ga eodi-ya?@> Denver-SUB where-IE “Where is Denver ([t3nv8=r])?”

25 Junho: /t3nv*=r/-e iss-[<@eo@>]@ Denver-LOC exist-IE “I’m in Denver ([t3nv8=r]).”

26 Hyeju: /[t3n]b8/ ani-gu /t3nv8=r/-ga eodi-ya <@ileohge@> Denver NEG-CONN Denver-SUB where-IE like:this “Where is Denver ([t3nv8=r]), not Denver ([t3nb8])?” Something like that.

27 All: @@@@ 28 Junho: /t3nv*=r/-eseo mweo hae-ss-eulkka @@@

Denver-LOC what do-PST-IR What did he do in Denver ([t3nv*=r])?

29 All: @@@@@@

Here the repeated iterations of the forms [t3nv8r] and [t3nv*r] with exaggerated lengthening of the second syllable, coupled with frequent laughter (marked by

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@), signal the speakers’ sense that such a pronunciation is inappropriate for a Korean speaker. In line 26, Hyeju contrasts this unacceptably American pronun- ciation with the usual Korean realization of the word, [t3nb8]. These speakers draw on a shared national language ideology of Koreanness to illegitimate the inappropriately Americanized identity that, in their view, their friend’s pronunciation projects.

The tactics of intersubjectivity outlined here not only call attention to the intersubjective basis of identity, but also provide a sense of the diverse ways that relationality works through discourse. Relationality operates at many levels. As many sociocultural linguists have argued, including several whose work is cited earlier, even genres traditionally thought of as monologic are fundamentally interactional. Whether one’s interlocutor is a lower-class Tongan woman or the entire world, the earlier examples show that identities emerge only in relation to other identities within the contingent framework of interaction.

The partialness principle

The final principle draws from voluminous literature in cultural anthropology and feminist theory over the past two decades that has challenged the analytic drive to represent forms of social life as internally coherent. This challenge, inspired by the postmodern critique of the totalizing master narratives characteristic of previous generations, surfaces in ethnography in the realization that all repre- sentations of culture are necessarily ‘partial accounts’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). This idea has long been central to feminist analysis – as well as to the early work of female ethnographers who predated the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s – in which there is an ethical commitment to recognizing the situatedness and partialness of any claim to knowledge (see Behar and Gordon, 1995; Visweswaran, 1994). The feminist commitment to explicitly positioning oneself as a researcher rather than effacing one’s presence in the research process, a practice which echoes the politics of location in reflexive ethnography, has exposed the fact that reality itself is intersubjective in nature, constructed through the particulars of self and other in any localized encounter. This idea fits well with postmodern theorizings of identity as fractured and discontinuous, for as anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran has noted, ‘Identities are constituted by context and are themselves asserted as partial accounts’ (1994: 41).

Whereas the critique of ethnography has been most interested in the partial- ness construed by one kind of identity relation – that of researcher and subject – our fifth principle attempts to capture not only this dynamic, but the entire multitude of ways in which identity exceeds the individual self. Because identity is inherently relational, it will always be partial, produced through contextually situated and ideologically informed configurations of self and other. Even seemingly coherent displays of identity, such as those that pose as deliberate and intentional, are reliant on both interactional and ideological constraints for their articulation:

Bucholtz and Hall: Identity and interaction 605

5. Any given construction of identity may be in part deliberate and intentional, in part habitual and hence often less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation and contestation, in part an outcome of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an effect of larger ideological processes and material structures that may become relevant to interaction. It is therefore constantly shifting both as interaction unfolds and across discourse contexts.

Particular kinds of analysis will often bring to the forefront one of these aspects over others. However, the rich possibilities of the broad interdisciplinary research we include under the rubric of sociocultural linguistics are most fully realized when multiple dimensions of identity are considered in a single analysis or when complementary analyses are brought together.

The principle stated above helps to resolve a central and longstanding issue regarding research on identity: the extent to which it is understood as relying on agency. From the perspective of an interactional approach to identity, the role of agency becomes problematic only when it is conceptualized as located within an individual rational subject who consciously authors his identity without structural constraints. (Our gendered pronoun choice here is quite deliberate and corresponds to the fact that male subjectivity was taken as unmarked by many scholars in earlier generations.) Numerous strands of social theory from Marxism to poststructuralism have rightly critiqued this notion of agency, but the litany of dubious qualities associated with the autonomous subject now functions more as caricature than critique of how agency is currently understood. Indeed, current researchers, particularly within sociocultural linguistics, have found ways of theorizing agency that circumvent the dangers identified by critics while exploiting its utility for work on identity. Sociocultural linguists are generally not concerned with calibrating the degree of autonomy or intentionality in any given act; rather, agency is more productively viewed as the accomplishment of social action (cf. Ahearn, 2001). This way of thinking about agency is vital to any discipline that wants to consider the full complexity of social subjects alongside the larger power structures that constrain them. But it is especially important to sociocultural linguistics, for the very use of language is itself an act of agency (Duranti, 2004). Under this definition, identity is one kind of social action that agency can accomplish.

Such a definition of agency does not require that social action be intentional, but it allows for that possibility; habitual actions accomplished below the level of conscious awareness act upon the world no less than those carried out deliberately. Likewise, agency may be the result of individual action, but it may also be distributed among several social actors and hence intersubjective. The phenomenon of what could be called distributed agency, though not as well documented as that of distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), has begun to receive attention in some areas of sociocultural linguistics, often under the label of joint activity or co-construction (e.g. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992; C. Goodwin, 1995; M. Goodwin, 1990; Ochs and Capps, 2001). Finally, agency may be ascribed through the perceptions and representations of others or

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assigned through ideologies and social structures. As we have emphasized throughout this article, it is not a matter of choosing one of these aspects of identity over others, but of considering how some or all of them may potentially work with and against one another in discourse.

The interactional view that we take here has the added benefit of undoing the false dichotomy between structure and agency that has long plagued social theory (see discussion in Ahearn, 2001). On the one hand, it is only through discursive interaction that large-scale social structures come into being; on the other hand, even the most mundane of everyday conversations are impinged upon by ideological and material constructs that produce relations of power. Thus both structure and agency are intertwined as components of micro as well as macro articulations of identity.

Conclusion

Different research traditions within sociocultural linguistics have particular strengths in analyzing the varied dimensions of identity outlined in this article. The method of analysis selected by the researcher makes salient which aspect of identity comes into view, and such ‘partial accounts’ contribute to the broader understanding of identity that we advocate here. Although these lines of research have often remained separate from one another, the combination of their diverse theoretical and methodological strengths – including the microanalysis of conversation, the macroanalysis of ideological processes, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of linguistic structures, and the ethnographic focus on local cultural practices and social groupings – calls attention to the fact that identity in all its complexity can never be contained within a single analysis. For this reason, it is necessary to conceive of sociocultural linguistics broadly and inclusively.

The five principles proposed here – Emergence, Positionality, Indexicality, Relationality, and Partialness – represent the varied ways in which different kinds of scholars currently approach the question of identity. Even researchers whose primary goals lie elsewhere can contribute to this project by providing sophisti- cated conceptualizations of how human dynamics unfold in discourse, along with rigorous analytic tools for discovering how such processes work. While identity has been a widely circulating notion in sociocultural linguistic research for some time, few scholars have explicitly theorized the concept. The present article offers one way of understanding this body of work by anchoring identity in interaction. By positing, in keeping with recent scholarship, that identity is emergent in discourse and does not precede it, we are able to locate identity as an intersubjectively achieved social and cultural phenomenon. This discursive approach further allows us to incorporate within identity not only the broad sociological categories most commonly associated with the concept, but also more local positionings, both ethnographic and interactional. The linguistic resources that indexically produce identity at all these levels are therefore

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necessarily broad and flexible, including labels, implicatures, stances, styles, and entire languages and varieties. Because these tools are put to use in interaction, the process of identity construction does not reside within the individual but in intersubjective relations of sameness and difference, realness and fakeness, power and disempowerment. Finally, by theorizing agency as a broader phenomenon than simply individualistic and deliberate action, we are able to call attention to the myriad ways that identity comes into being, from habitual practice to interactional negotiation to representations and ideologies.

It is no overstatement to assert that the age of identity is upon us, not only in sociocultural linguistics but also in the human and social sciences more generally. Scholars of language use are particularly well equipped to provide an empirically viable account of the complexities of identity as a social, cultural, and – most fundamentally – interactional phenomenon. The recognition of the loose coalition of approaches that we call sociocultural linguistics is a necessary step in advancing this goal, for it is only by understanding our diverse theories and methods as complementary, not competing, that we can meaningfully interpret this crucial dimension of contemporary social life.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

We are grateful to the many audiences and readers who have provided feedback at various stages in the development of this project, and particularly to Dick Bauman, Niko Besnier, Elaine Chun, Barbara Fox, Barbara Johnstone, and Sally McConnell-Ginet for suggestions and encouragement. Special thanks are also due to Sandro Duranti for incisive comments as well as for his original invitation to us to present our joint work at the UCLA symposium Theories and Models of Language, Interaction, and Culture, which spurred us to think more deeply about the interactional grounding of identity. Naturally, we alone are responsible for any remaining weaknesses.

N O T E S

1. The term sociolinguistics sometimes carries this referential range, but for many scholars it has a narrower reference. Sociocultural linguistics has the virtue of being less encumbered with a particular history of use.

2. In other parts of the country, these markers may have very different – indeed, reversed – semiotic valences. Thus, Maryam Bakht-Rofheart (2004) has shown that at one Long Island high school a group that self-identifies as the ‘Intellectual Elite’ and that is identified by others as nerds rejected the use of be like as undesirably trendy and embraced be all as a form that lacked such associations.

3. It is important to note that interactional roles such as problematizer/problematizee (or primary storyteller or recipient) are not merely the building blocks of more persistent forms of identity such as gender; rather, they are situational identities in their own right – that is, they serve to socially position speakers and hearers.

4. Penelope Eckert (2000, 2004), for instance, links the realization of vowel quality to discourse topics and interactional goals (e.g. ‘doing drama’).

5. Indeed, in some situations the same person can enact both dimensions of a contrastive identity pairing, especially in performance contexts (e.g. Pagliai and Farr, 2000).

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6. We take the term distinction from Pierre Bourdieu (1984), whose own conceptualization of it is concerned with the production of social-class difference by members of the bourgeoisie. We broaden its reference to include any process of social differentiation.

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M A RY B U C H O L T Z is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the co-editor of Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self (Routledge, 1995) and of Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse (Oxford University Press, 1999), and author or co-author of numerous articles on identity. Her research focuses in particular on issues of gender, race, age, and power. She is currently at work on a book on language and youth identities. A D D R E S S : Department of Linguistics, 3607 South Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106–3100, USA. [email: [email protected]]

K I R A H A L L is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her publications include the edited collections Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self (with Mary Bucholtz, Routledge, 1995) and Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality (with Anna Livia, Oxford University Press, 1997). As part of her ongoing interest in the areas of identity, sexuality, and gender, she has also published a number of articles on the linguistic and cultural practices of Hindi- speaking hijras in India. A D D R E S S : Department of Linguistics, Campus Box 295, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309–0295, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

Chapter 1

I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings

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O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, All night long crying with a mournful cry, As I lie and listen, and cannot understand The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea, O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I? All night long the water is crying to me. Unresting water, there shall never be rest Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail, And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west; And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me. ARTHUR SYMONS.

[musial notation from "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen"]

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, -- peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards -- ten cents a package -- and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, -- refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination- time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, -- some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the �Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness, -- it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan -- on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand �to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde -- could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people, -- has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves. Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain -- Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came, -- suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences: -- "Shout, O children! Shout, you're free! For God has bought your liberty!" Years have passed away since then, -- ten, twenty, forty; �

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forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem: -- "Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble!" The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people, -- a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp, -- like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku- Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power, -- a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters �of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting- place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-

consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself, -- darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance, -- not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil, -- before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud, -- and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good, -- the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.

So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat

on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past, -- physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands, -- all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong, -- all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete, -- the dreams of a credulous race- childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever, -- the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence, -- else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek, -- the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty, -- all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the �great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.

And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the

striving in the souls of black folk. Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk

Chapter 2

II. Of the Dawn of Freedom

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question �ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth, -- What shall be done with Negroes? Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problems of to-day

It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called the Freedmen's Bureau, -- one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition. The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp- fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt, -- a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler's action was approved, but Fremont's was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. "Hereafter," he commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them." Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers. "They constitute a military resource," wrote �Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; "and being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss." So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives, and Butler's "contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers. This complicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies marched.

Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: "What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?" It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus became in a sense the founder of the Freedmen's Bureau. He was a firm friend of Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandoned lands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially detailed from the ranks to study the conditions. First, he cared for the refugees at Fortress Monroe; and then, after Sherman had captured Hilton Head, Pierce was sent there to found his Port Royal experiment of making free workingmen out of slaves. Before his experiment was barely started, however, the problem of the fugitives had assumed such proportions that it was taken from the hands of the over-burdened Treasury Department and given to the army officials. Already centres of massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well as at Port Royal. Army chaplains found here new and fruitful fields; "superintendents of contrabands" multiplied, and some attempt at systematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving work to the others. Then came the Freedmen's Aid societies, born of the touching appeals from Pierce and from these other centres of distress. There was the American Missionary Association, �sprung from the Amistad, and now full-grown for work; the various church organizations, the National Freedmen's Relief Association, the American Freedmen's Union, the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission, -- in all fifty or more active organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-books, and teachers southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution of the freedmen was often reported as "too appalling for belief," and the situation was daily growing worse rather than better. And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and other ways were camp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The broader economic organization thus clearly demanded sprang up here and there as accident and local conditions determined. Here it was that Pierce's Port Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen pointed out the rough way. In Washington the military governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened confiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome gathered black farm villages. General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and West. The government and benevolent societies furnished the means of cultivation, and the Negro turned again slowly to work. The systems of control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange little governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided

laborers, and its annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk. He �succeeded Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman, after that terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the wretched camp followers. Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's raid through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the characteristic military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war." So read the celebrated "Field-order Number Fifteen." All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and perplex the government and the nation. Directly after the Emancipation Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a Bureau of Emancipation; but it was never reported. The following June a committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in favor of a temporary bureau for the "improvement, protection, and employment of refugee freedmen," on much the same lines as were afterwards followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln from distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the freedmen, under a bureau which should be "charged with the study of plans and execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new state of voluntary industry." Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in �part, by putting the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasury agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to "provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general welfare" of the freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted this as a welcome relief from perplexing "Negro affairs," and Secretary Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations, which were afterward closely followed by General Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in August, 1864, the new regulations were suspended for reasons of "public policy," and the army was again in control.

Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in March the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishing a Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who had charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned lands ought to be under the same department, and reported a substitute for the House bill attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed, but too late for action by the House. The debates wandered over the whole policy of the administration and the general question of slavery, without touching very closely the specific merits of the measure in hand. Then the national election took place; and the administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the country, addressed itself to the matter more seriously. A conference between the two branches of Congress agreed upon a carefully drawn measure which contained the chief provisions of Sumner's bill, but made the proposed organization a department independent of both the War and the Treasury officials. The bill was conservative, giving the new department "general superintendence of all freedmen." Its purpose was to "establish regulations" for them, protect them, lease them lands, adjust their wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their "next friend." There were many limitations attached to the powers thus granted, and the organization was made permanent. Nevertheless, the Senate defeated the bill, and a new conference committee was appointed. This committee reported a new �bill, February 28, which was whirled through just as the session closed, and became the act of 1865 establishing in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands." This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and uncertain in outline. A Bureau was created, "to continue during the present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter," to which was given "the supervision and management of all abandoned lands and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen," under "such rules and regu-lations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and approved by the President." A Commissioner, appointed by the President and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force not exceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint assistant commissioners in the seceded States, and to all these offices military officials might be detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of War could issue rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned property was placed in the hands of the Bureau for eventual lease and sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels. Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a tremendous undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of millions of men, -- and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters. Any man might well have hesitated to assume charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite powers, and limited resources. Probably no one but a soldier would have answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier could be called, for Congress had appropriated no money for salaries and expenses. Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his successor assigned Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as Commissioner of the new Bureau. He

was a Maine man, then only thirty-five years of age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at Gettysburg, and �but the year before had been assigned to the command of the Department of Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in human nature, little aptitude for business and intricate detail, he had had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of the work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that "no approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau." On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the duties of his office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field of work. A curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity, unorganized almsgiving, -- all reeling on under the guise of helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursing and silence of angry men. On May 19 the new government -- for a government it really was -- issued its constitution; commissioners were to be appointed in each of the seceded states, who were to take charge of "all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen," and all relief and rations were to be given by their consent alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with benevolent societies, and declared: "It will be the object of all commissioners to introduce practicable systems of compensated labor," and to establish schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed. They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in making fair contracts for them; and finally, the circular said: "Simple good faith, for which we hope on all hands for those concerned in the passing away of slavery, will especially relieve the assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the freedmen, as well as promote the general welfare." No sooner was the work thus started, and the general �system and local organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work. First, there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters, -- a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay in perfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide field of work. Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child's task; but this task was even harder, for a new central organization had to be fitted on a heterogeneous and confused but already existing system of relief and control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for this work must be sought for in an army still busy with war operations, -- men in the very nature of the case ill fitted for delicate social work, -- or among the questionable camp followers of an

invading host. Thus, after a year's work, vigorously as it was pushed, the problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve than at the beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year's work did, well worth the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England schoolma'am. The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written, -- the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white �and black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand souls, and more. Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and vast possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult to end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau and enlarge its powers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress, far more thorough discussion and attention than its predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer conception of the work of Emancipation. The champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau was still a military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government. The opponents of the measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of possibly hundreds of millions. These two arguments were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that the government must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical re-enslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made permanent the Freedmen's Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by President Johnson as "unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and "extrajudicial," and failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the lost bill was finally passed over the President's second veto, July 16. The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau its final form, -- the form by which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It extended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on nominal �terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance. The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military commander was now made also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen's Bureau became a full-fledged government of men. It made laws,

executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, "scarcely any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau." To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amend-ment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement, -- in such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue, -- that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments. The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busy- �bodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the aver-age was far better than the worst, it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment. Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery, -- not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness, -- but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this slavery under which the black masses, with half- articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each other, -- the North, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty. Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages, -- the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose

fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes; -- and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master's command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife, -- aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the �winds by midnight marauders riding after "damned Nig-gers." These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their children's children live today. Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen's Bureau; and since, with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869, let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in 1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all these activities. Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospi-tals and asylums had been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations were distributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the difficult question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but where local agents differed toto caelo in capacity and character, where the personnel was continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied. The largest element of suc-cess lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmen were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were written, -- fifty thousand in a single State, -- laborers advised, wages guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organiza-tion became a vast labor bureau, -- not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men. The two great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant and the idler, -- the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery under �another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest, -- the Devil and the Deep Sea. In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last absolutely checked. Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of nearly half a million dollars derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained title were sold on easy terms, and public lands were opened for settlement to the very few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the vision of "forty acres and a mule" -- the righteous and reasonable

ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmen -- was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment. And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake -- somewhere. If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift rather than by bounty of the government. The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South. It not only called the school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. Perhaps some inkling of this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the bayonets �allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies smouldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded in these days, and six million dollars were expended for educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty. Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some free capital already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and his pay and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at first complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that the quotas of colored regiments from Northern States were largely filled by recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers. Consequently, payments were accompanied by such frauds that Congress, by joint resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau. In two years six million dollars was thus distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sum exceeded eight million dollars. Even in this system fraud was frequent; but still the work put needed capital in the hands of practical paupers, and some, at least, was well spent. The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau's work lay in the exercise of its judicial functions. The regular Bureau court consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the Negro, and one of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly judicial attitude, this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in time have gained confidence; but the nature of its other activities and the character of its personnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance. On the other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts was impossible. In a distracted land where slavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task. The former

masters of the land were peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and punished over and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The former slaves were intimidated, beaten, �raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely institu-tions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom, -- to make them the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and gave the freedmen a power and independence which they could not yet use. It is all well enough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see that the man who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by "mules and niggers," was really benefited by the passing of slavery. It is not difficult now to say to the young freedman, cheated and cuffed about who has seen his father's head beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient than to heap on the Freedmen's Bureau all the evils of that evil day, and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made. All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone had blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of control there would have been far more than there was. Had that control been from within, the Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all intents and pur-poses. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men and methods would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents and questionable methods, the work accom-plished was not undeserving of commendation. Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to �begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect. Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities, large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searching Congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Its archives and few remaining functions were with blunt discourtesy transferred from Howard's control, in his absence, to the supervision of Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary's recommendation. Finally, in consequence of grave intimations of wrong-doing made by the Secretary and his subordinates, General Howard was court-martialed in 1874. In both of these trials the Commissioner of the Freedmen's

Bureau was officially exonerated from any wilful misdoing, and his work commended. Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to light, -- the methods of transacting the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of defalcation were proved, and other frauds strongly suspected; there were some business transactions which savored of dangerous specula-tion, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the smirch of the Freedmen's Bank. Morally and practically, the Freedmen's Bank was part of the Freedmen's Bureau, although it had no legal connection with it. With the prestige of the government back of it, and a directing board of unusual respectability and national reputation, this banking institution had made a remarkable start in the development of that thrift among black folk which slavery had kept them from knowing. Then in one sad day came the crash, -- all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least of the loss, -- all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of �slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish friends or the dark machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never reveal, for here lies unwritten history. Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessity for any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the Border States and the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky, when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill "to promote strife and conflict between the white and black races . . . by a grant of unconstitutional power." The argument gathered tremendous strength South and North; but its very strength was its weakness. For, argued the plain common-sense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative, -- to make those wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot. Moreover, the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for, argued this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white votes, we certainly can with black votes. So justice and force joined hands. The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white, would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South �to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of

national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt. Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far better policy, -- a permanent Freedmen's Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems. That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and proteges led it far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment. The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only �escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King's Highways sat and sits

a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that

bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

Chapter 3

III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of astonishing commercial devel-opment was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation overtook the freedmen's sons, -- then it was that his leading began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars. His programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights, was not wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830 up to war-time had striven to build industrial schools, and the American Missionary Association had from the first taught various trades; and �Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners. But Mr. Washington first indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path into a veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the methods by which he did this is a fascinating study of human life.

It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves. To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising the white South was Mr. Washington's first task; and this, at the time Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nigh impossible. And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: "In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." This "Atlanta Compromise" is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington's career. The South interpreted it in different ways: the radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived working basis for mutual understanding. So both approved it, and to-day its author is certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with the largest personal following. Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington's work in gaining place and consideration in the North. Others less shrewd and tactful had formerly essayed to sit on these two stools and had fallen between them; but as Mr. Washington knew the heart of the South from birth and training, so by singular insight he intuitively grasped the spirit of the age which was dominating the North. And so thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say to this.

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington's cult has gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded. To-day he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life which, beginning with so little, has done so much. And yet the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career, as well as of his triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier to do ill than well in the world.

The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always been of this broad character. In the South especially has he had to walk warily to avoid the harshest judgments, -- and naturally so, for he is dealing with the one subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section. Twice -- once when at the Chicago celebration of the Spanish-American War he alluded to the color-prejudice that is "eating away the vitals of the South," and once when he dined with President Roosevelt -- has the resulting Southern criticism been violent enough to threaten seriously his popularity. In the North the feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr. Washington's counsels of submission overlooked certain ele-ments of true manhood, and that his educational programme was unnecessarily narrow. Usually, however, such criticism has not found open expression, although, too, the spiritual sons of the Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowl-edge that the schools founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and self-sacrificing spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule. While, then, criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing public opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the solution of a wearisome problem into his hands, and say, "If that is all you and your race ask, take it."

Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has encountered the strongest and most lasting opposition, amounting at times to bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent even though largely silenced in outward expression by the public opinion of the nation. Some of this opposition is, of course, mere envy; the disappointment of displaced demagogues and the spite of narrow minds. But aside from this, there is among educated and thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington's theories have gained. These same men admire his sincerity of purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest endeavor which is doing something worth the doing. They cooperate with Mr. Washington as far as they conscientiously can; and, indeed, it is no ordinary tribute to this man's tact and power that, steering as he must between so many diverse interests and opinions, he so largely retains the respect of all.

But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched, -- criticism of writers by

readers, -- this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. If the best of the American Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss, -- a loss of that peculiarly valuable educa-tion which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and the nicest problem of social growth. History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character! And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of a group within a group? -- that curious double movement where real progress may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this is the social student's inspiration and despair. Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in the choosing of group leaders, founding thus a �peculiar dynasty which in the light of present conditions is worth while studying. When sticks and stones and beasts form the sole environment of a people, their attitude is largely one of determined opposition to and conquest of natural forces. But when to earth and brute is added an environment of men and ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms, -- a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion. The influence of all of these attitudes at various times can be traced in the history of the American Negro, and in the evolution of his successive leaders. Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom still burned in the veins of the slaves, there was in all leadership or attempted leadership but the one motive of revolt and revenge, -- typified in the terrible Maroons, the Danish blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all the Americas in fear of insurrection. The liberalizing tendencies of the latter half of the eighteenth century brought, along with kindlier relations between black and white, thoughts of ultimate adjustment and assimilation. Such aspiration was especially voiced in the earnest songs of Phyllis, in the martyrdom of Attucks, the fighting of Salem and Poor, the intellectual accomplishments of Banneker and Derham, and the political demands of the Cuffes. Stern financial and social stress after the war cooled much of the previous humanitarian ardor. The disappointment and impatience of the Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in two movements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors of the Haytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at insurrection, -- in 1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831 again in Virginia under the terrible Nat Turner. In the Free States, on the other hand, a new and curious attempt at self-development was made. In Philadelphia and New York color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro communicants from white churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious institution among the Negroes known as the African Church, -- an organization still living and controlling in its various branches over a million of men. �

Walker's wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the world was changing after the coming of the cotton-gin. By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission. The free Negroes of the North, inspired by the mulatto immigrants from the West Indies, began to change the

basis of their demands; they recognized the slavery of slaves, but insisted that they themselves were freemen, and sought assimilation and amalgamation with the nation on the same terms with other men. Thus, Forten and Purvis of Philadelphia, Shad of Wilmington, Du Bois of New Haven, Barbadoes of Boston, and others, strove singly and together as men, they said, not as slaves; as "people of color," not as "Negroes." The trend of the times, however, refused them recognition save in individual and exceptional cases, considered them as one with all the despised blacks, and they soon found themselves striving to keep even the rights they formerly had of voting and working and moving as freemen. Schemes of migration and colonization arose among them; but these they refused to entertain, and they eventually turned to the Abolition movement as a final refuge. Here, led by Remond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new period of self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown's raid was the extreme of its logic. After the war and eman-cipation, the great form of Frederick Douglass, the greatest of American Negro leaders, still led the host. Self-assertion, especially in political lines, was the main programme, and behind Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and the Reconstruction politicians, and, less conspicuous but of greater social significance, Alexander Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne. Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of the Negro votes, the changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new lights in the great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the ideals of his early manhood, -- ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms. For a time Price arose as a new leader, destined, it �seemed, not to give up, but to re-state the old ideals in a form less repugnant to the white South. But he passed away in his prime. Then came the new leader. Nearly all the former ones had become leaders by the silent suffrage of their fellows, had sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, save Douglass, little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington arose as essentially the leader not of one race but of two, -- a compromiser between the South, the North, and the Negro. Naturally the Negroes resented, at first bitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered their civil and politi-cal rights, even though this was to be exchanged for larger chances of economic development. The rich and dominating North, however, was not only weary of the race problem, but was investing largely in Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method of peaceful cooperation. Thus, by national opinion, the Negroes began to recognize Mr. Washington's leadership; and the voice of criticism was hushed. Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our

own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to race- prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro's tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing. In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can �survive only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things, -- First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth, -- and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred: 1. The disfranchisement of the Negro. 2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. 3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro. These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for develop-ing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No. And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career: 1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage. 2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run. 3. He advocates common-school and industrial training, and depreciates institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro common-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates. This triple paradox in Mr. Washington's position is the object of criticism by two classes of colored Americans. One class is spiritually descended from Toussaint the Savior, through Gabriel, Vesey, and Turner, and they represent the attitude of revolt and revenge; they hate the white South blindly and distrust the white race generally, and so far as they agree on definite action, think that the Negro's only hope lies in emigration beyond the borders of the United States. And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has more

effectually made this programme seem hopeless than the recent course of the United States toward weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines, -- for where in the world may we go and be safe from lying and brute force?

The other class of Negroes who cannot agree with Mr. Washington has hitherto said little aloud. They deprecate the sight of scattered counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they dislike making their just criticism of a useful and earnest man an excuse for a general discharge of venom from small-minded opponents. Nevertheless, the questions involved are so fundamental and serious that it is difficult to see how men like the Grimkes, Kelly Miller, J. W. E. Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can much longer be silent. Such men feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things:

1. The right to vote. 2. Civic equality. 3. The education of youth according to ability. They acknowledge Mr. Washington's invaluable service in counselling patience and courtesy in such demands; they do not ask that ignorant black men vote when ignorant whites are debarred, or that any reasonable restrictions in the suffrage should not be applied; they know that the low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against it, but they also know, and the nation knows, that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro's degradation; they seek the abatement of this relic of barbarism, and not its systematic encouragement and pampering by all agencies of social power from the Associated Press to the Church of Christ. They advocate, with Mr. Washington, a broad system of Negro common schools supplemented �by thorough industrial training; but they are surprised that a man of Mr. Washington's insight cannot see that no such educational system ever has rested or can rest on any other basis than that of the well-equipped college and university, and they insist that there is a demand for a few such institutions throughout the South to train the best of the Negro youth as teachers, professional men, and leaders.

This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitude of conciliation toward the white South; they accept the "Atlanta Compromise" in its broadest interpretation; they recog-nize, with him, many signs of promise, many men of high purpose and fair judgment, in this section; they know that no easy task has been laid upon a region already tottering under heavy burdens. But, nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticising uncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and urging their fellows to do the same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility. They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a

moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys. In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally the legitimate demands of their people, even at the cost of opposing an honored leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would shirk a heavy responsibility, -- a responsibility to themselves, a responsibility to the struggling masses, a responsibility to the darker races of men whose future depends so largely on this American experiment, but especially a responsibility � to this nation, -- this common Fatherland. It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so. The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful difference of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white. First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly. The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no class is the indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the South toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the South. The South is not "solid"; it is a land in the ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good. Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs, -- needs it for the sake of her own white sons and daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development. Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others -- usually the sons of the masters -- wish to help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class to maintain the Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially in property, life, and limb. Through the pressure �of the money-makers, the Negro is in danger of being reduced to semi-slavery, especially in the country districts; the workingmen, and those of the educated who fear the Negro, have united to disfranchise him, and some have urged his deportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily aroused to lynch and abuse any black man. To praise this intricate whirl of thought and prejudice is nonsense; to in- veigh indiscriminately against "the South" is unjust; but to use the same breath in praising Governor Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing with Mr. Thomas Nelson Page,

and denouncing Senator Ben Tillman, is not only sane, but the imperative duty of thinking black men. It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro's failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro's position; second, industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions, -- it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different develop- ment was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success. In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. �Washington is especially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs. The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North -- her co-partner in guilt -- cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by "policy" alone. If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?

The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate, -- a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr.

Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength

of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds, -- so far as he, the South, or the

Nation, does this, -- we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed

by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Chapter 14

XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs

I walk through the churchyard To lay this body down; I know moon-rise, I know star-rise; I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight; I'll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms, I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day, And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day, When I lay this body down. NEGRO SONG.

[musical notation from "Wrestling Jacob"]

They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days -- Sorrow Songs -- for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with �the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song -- the rhythmic cry of the slave -- stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual

heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people. Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like "Near the lake where drooped the willow," passed into current airs and their source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the "minstrel" stage and their memory died away. Then in war-time came the singular Port Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world's heart that it can never wholly forget them again. There was once a blacksmith's son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in the Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday- �school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode, -- four half- clothed black boys and five girl-women, -- led by a man with a cause and a purpose. They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congrega-tional Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his "Nigger Minstrels." So their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University. Since their day they have been imitated -- sometimes well, by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people. What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering �and unvoiced

longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways. The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development. My grandfather's grand-mother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus: The child sang it to his children and they to their children's children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.

This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the strange chant which heralds "The Coming of John"

"You may bury me in the East, You may bury me in the West, But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning," -- the voice of exile.

Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, and songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have just mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.

The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men know,-"Swing low, sweet chariot," -- whose bars begin the life story of "Alexander Crummell." Then there is the song of many waters, "Roll, Jordan, roll," a mighty chorus with minor cadences. There were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens "The Wings of Atalanta," and the more familiar "Been a-listening." The seventh is the song of the End and the Beginning -- "My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fall"; a strain of this is placed before "The Dawn of Freedom." The song of groping -- "My way's cloudy" -- begins "The Meaning of Progress"; the ninth is the song of this chapter -- "Wrestlin' Jacob, the day is a-breaking," -- a paean of hopeful strife. The last master song is the song of songs -- "Steal away," -- sprung from "The Faith of the Fathers."

There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selection on more scientific principles. There are, too, songs that

seem to be a step removed from the more primitive types: there is the maze-like medley, "Bright sparkles," one phrase of which heads "The Black Belt"; the Easter carol, "Dust, dust and ashes"; the dirge, "My moth-er's took her flight and gone home"; and that burst of melody hovering over "The Passing of the First-Born" -- "I hope my mother will be there in that beautiful world on high."

These represent a third step in the development of the slave song, of which "You may bury me in the East" is the first, �and songs like "March on" (chapter six) and "Steal away" are the second. The first is African music, the second Afro-American, while the third is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land. The result is still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but the elements are both Negro and Caucasian. One might go further and find a fourth step in this development, where the songs of white America have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole phrases of Negro melody, as "Swanee River" and "Old Black Joe." Side by side, too, with the growth has gone the debasements and imitations -- the Negro "minstrel" songs, many of the "gospel" hymns, and some of the contemporary "coon" songs, -- a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies.

In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught. Of nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End. The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to Nature's heart. Life was a "rough and rolling sea" like the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the "Wilderness" was the home of God, and the "lonesome valley" led to the way of life. "Winter'll soon be over," was the picture of life and death to a tropical imagination. The sudden wild thunder- �storms of the South awed and impressed the Negroes, -- at times the rumbling seemed to them "mournful," at times imperious: "My Lord calls me, He calls me by the thunder, The trumpet sounds it in my soul." The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words. One sees the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:

"Dere's no rain to wet you, Dere's no sun to burn you, Oh, push along, believer, I want to go home." The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail:

"O Lord, keep me from sinking down," and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:

"Jesus is dead and God's gone away." Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:

Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences. Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and �the mountains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange blending of love and helplessness sings through the refrain:

"Yonder's my ole mudder, Been waggin' at de hill so long; 'Bout time she cross over, Git home bime-by." Elsewhere comes the cry of the "motherless" and the "Fare-well, farewell, my only child."

Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories -- the frivolous and light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous silence, and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and meaning:

A black woman said of the song, "It can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled sperrit." The same voice sings here that sings in the German folk-song:

"Jetz Geh i' an's brunele, trink' aber net." Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps -- who knows? -- back to his ancient forests again. Later �days transfigured his fatalism, and amid the dust and dirt the toiler sang”

"Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave, But the Lord shall bear my spirit home." The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave. Especially is this true of Bible phrases. "Weep, O captive daughter of Zion," is quaintly turned into "Zion, weep-a-low," and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic dreaming of the slave, till he says:

"There's a little wheel a-turnin' in-a-my heart." As in olden time, the words of these hymns were impro-vised by some leading minstrel of the religious band. The circumstances of the gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of allowable thought, confined the poetry for the most part to single or double lines, and they seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although there are some few examples of sustained efforts, chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Three short series of verses have always attracted me, -- the one that heads this chapter, of one line of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, "Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plain-tively." The second and third are descriptions of the Last Judgment, -- the one a late improvisation, with some traces of outside influence:

"Oh, the stars in the elements are falling, And the moon drips away into blood, And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God, Blessed be the name of the Lord." And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low coast lands:

"Michael, haul the boat ashore, Then you'll hear the horn they blow,

Then you'll hear the trumpet sound, Trumpet sound the world around, Trumpet sound for rich and poor, Trumpet sound the Jubilee, Trumpet sound for you and me." Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope -- a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should AEschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song -- soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation, -- we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood- brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?

Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If somewhere in

this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below -- swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my little children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing: And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his way.

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