Throughout the last decades, scholars have pointed out the veritable discursive explosion around the concept of identity: the critique of the selfsustaining subject at the center of post-Cartesian Western metaphysics has been comprehensively advanced in philosophy; the question of subjectivity and its unconscious processes of formation has been developed within the discourse of a psychoanalytically influenced feminism and cultural criticism; and the endlessly performative self has been advanced in celebratory variants of postmodernism. Within the anti-essentialist critique of ethnic, racial, and national conceptions of cultural identity and the “politics of location,” some adventurous theoretical conceptions have been sketched in their most grounded forms. What, then, is the need for a further debate about “identity”?

The discussions during the last decades around the concept of identity have been channeled mainly into two major positions, primordialist and non-primordialist. The first position assumes that there is an essential content to any identity that is defined by common origin or common structure of experience. In the words of the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf (Amīn Ma‘lūf), it “presupposes that ‘deep down inside’ everyone there is just one affiliation that really matters, a kind of ‘fundamental truth’ about each individual, an ‘essence’ determined once and for all at birth, never to change thereafter.” Although discredited among cultural theorists and sociologists, this view, for obvious reasons, is popular among politicians, particularly with regard to ethnic identity. The second major position, which encompasses non-primordialist views regarding identity, including the instrumentalist and the constructivist views, argues that identities are constructed through the interplay between cultural reproduction, everyday reinforcements, and institutional arrangements.