Questions of identity: Personhood and collectivity in transnational migration to the United States”, Critique of Anthropology

Over the last 15 years, the discourse of ’identity ’ has spread rapidly within the US academy. Indeed, by uniting discussions of many different kinds of inequality, especially those organized along lines of nationality, ethnicity, race, sexuality and gender, and by offering powerful tools for linking the processes through which people are made collective to the ways in which they develop as distinctive individuals, it has become the primary medium for understanding and engaging the relationship between the political and the cultural, the subjective and the social. Many scholars have made identity their principal object of study and many more have come to use the term quite casually in the process of analysis. At the same time, faculty and students alike have taken up the discourse to articulate a forceful sense of self and vital visions of political practice. ’ 1 Within this discourse, there has, of course, been considerable diver-gence and debate. Essentialists have vied with constructionists and, while some within the latter camp have focused on the macro-level struggles through which identities are forged and made to seem compelling, others have looked more closely at the micro-level processes through which individual identities are developed and collective ties asserted and ascribed. Perhaps most notably, those who argue for the merits of single, fixed identities have increasingly been challenged by those who stress the value of maintaining multiple identities and moving fluidly between them. Yet, however much the participants in these debates may disagree, they remain united by the view that questions of identity are fundamental to the cultural politics that link personal experience to collective forms and actions. There is, of course, a great deal to be said in favor of this view. Issues of identity clearly matter to a lot of people. Work on these issues ha