Identifying Identity: A Semantic History

Today we could hardly do without the word identity in talking about immigration and ethnicity. Those who write on these matters use it casually; they assume the reader will know what they mean. And readers seem to feel that they do-at least there has been no clamor for clarification of the term. But if pinned down, most of us would find it difficult to explain just what we do mean by identity. Its very obviousness seems to defy elucidation: identity is what a thing is! How is one supposed to go beyond that in explaining it? But adding a modifier complicates matters, for how are we to understand identity in such expressions as ethnic Jewish or American identity? This is a question to which the existing writings on ethnicity do not provide a satisfactory answer. There are helpful discussions, to be sure, but none seems altogether adequate, at least not from the historian's viewpoint. The historically minded inquirer who gains familiarity with the literature, however, soon makes an arresting discovery-identity is a new term, as well as being an elusive and ubiquitous one. It came into use as a popular socialscience term only in the 1950s. The contrast between its handling in two standard reference works dramatizes its novelty. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, published in 1968, carries a substantial article on Identity, Psychosocial, and another on Identification, Political. The original Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, published in the early 1930s, carries no entry at all for identity, and the entry headed Identification deals with fingerprinting and other techniques of criminal investigation. '