Oct 27, 2014
'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, construct, and negotiate. Conceptualizing all affinities and affiliations, all forms of belonging, all experiences of commonality, connectedness, and cohesion, all self-understandings and self-identification in the idiom of 'identity' saddles us with a blunt, flat, undifferentiated vocabulary.
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, "Beyond 'Identity'" Theory and Society
