The Utility of Identity 

Article by Dr Jamie Wood. Edited by Liam Geoghegan. 

Looking back over my time at university, I’ve always been interested in identity and its role in history. When I was an undergraduate I enjoyed looking at the formation of national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and interactions between Muslims, Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. I was especially taken with Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’: the idea that a sense of national communal belonging is in many senses something which is ‘in our heads’ and the result of the peculiar technological and political changes of the modern age. Later on I got interested in how authors in the early middle ages wrote about and ‘constructed’ the identities of the people they wrote about. These days I’m working on a project at the University of Manchester on the role of conflict in the formation of religious identity in late antiquity. So, you’d think I’d have a pretty good idea about identity and what it is. 

Unfortunately not. I am the first to admit that ‘identity’ is a pretty slippery concept. Individuals have identities, but so too do communities. Individuals can have several features to their identities: political, religious, ethnic, family, economic, gender, age, profession, class, etc. Indeed, these different features often overlap and sometimes conflict. Consider the following ways in which it was possible to ‘be’ a Roman in antiquity: 

• A civic Roman: a ‘Roman’ from the city of Rome or an inhabitant of the city; 

• A legal Roman: a ‘Roman’ citizen, which is essentially a claim to a a legal status; this all got complicated after AD 212 when citizenship was extended to all free inhabitants of the empire; in the early middle ages ‘Romans’ were sometimes differentiated legally from the ‘barbarians’ who had taken control of the western provinces (Franks and Goths, for instance); 

• A political Roman: a ‘Roman’ in the sense of someone who lived within the bounds of the empire and accepted the authority of the emperor; 

• A regional Roman: a ‘Gallo-Roman’, a ‘Hispano-Roman’, ‘Romano-British’, Roman inhabitants of Gaul, Spain, Britain; 

• From the late fourth century AD there were eastern Romans (Byzantines) or western Romans, that is an inhabitant of the eastern or western parts of the empire; 

• A ‘Roman’ adherent to the Papacy, or what would now be known as a ‘Roman Catholic’; 

• A subject of the Holy Roman Empire from 800 when the Pope crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne as emperor in Rome. 

All of this is complicated by the fact that a number of these categories, such as ‘Hispano-Roman’ and ‘Byzantine’, are interpretive and analytical categories imposed by later scholars as a way of understanding the world of antiquity. For example, the inhabitants of what we call the ‘Byzantine Empire’ would not have thought of themselves as ‘Byzantines’, but as ‘Romans’ under the rule of the true ‘Roman Emperor’, not the eastern, Byzantine emperor. Likewise, it is highly unlikely that there was any great sense of ‘Hispano Roman’ identity before the fall of the western empire over the course of the fifth century. That is, the Roman inhabitants of Spain only began to think of themselves as Hispano Roman once their connections to the empire as a whole, and perhaps their security, were threatened. We must also take into account the relationship between the identity of individual ‘Romans’ and the collective, communal identity of the ‘city of Rome’ or the ‘Roman Empire’. This leads onto another important point. Social scientists have long acknowledged, and historians are catching up, that identity varies according to the context in which one finds oneself. Identity is therefore: 

• situational – dependent upon the immediate and broader situation; 

• relational – dependent upon relationships with others; 

• performative – it is (or can be) something that you create for yourself and act out in relation to others and the wider social context. It is therefore very difficult to talk about identity as a static category. Identity can vary according to historical context and personal agency plays a big role in determining how identity is perceived and enacted. Indeed, in some cases in antiquity it was possible to choose to change identity. Conversion to or from a particular religious affiliation is one such example. The performative aspect of identity is emphasised when we consider that Christian martyrs demonstrated their opposition to pagan religion by refusal to participate in the public rituals of sacrifice. Likewise, entry into the Christian community increasingly came to be marked by the performance of certain rituals, for example baptism. 

In the context of the ancient world (and probably the modern world too) this is complicated by the authors of our sources, who often have very specific ideas about what ‘identity’ should be, about what it means to be a Roman, a Christian, or a Visigoth. We must always bear in mind, therefore, that the sources may be actively constructing the identities (and the communities) about which they are writing and which we are trying to analyse. It seems, therefore, that the one thing that we do know about ‘identity’ is that its instability as an objective category is only matched by its attractiveness as a an analytical term. Personally, I still think that ‘identity’ is a useful concept for understanding the people of the past and how ideas of the personal and communal belonging interacted. It is because identity sits at the interface between the individual and society that it is an interesting unit of analysis. Finally, it is because identities, like the national communities I studied as an undergraduate, are in many ways imagined that we need to do our best to understand their formation and their later impact.

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