1 00:00:05,810 --> 00:00:13,100 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Good evening to everyone. Uh, and welcome to this year's I h Hornsey lecture. 2 00:00:13,820 --> 00:00:23,270 It's a pleasure to introduce, uh, a lecture, uh, named after Charlie Hosie because, you know, pretty much for everyone, 3 00:00:23,270 --> 00:00:31,680 students, faculty and actually one of the key figures in the history of sociology at Oxford and also in the UK. 4 00:00:31,820 --> 00:00:37,130 Okay. So he joined Oxford fellow not to college in 1962. 5 00:00:37,160 --> 00:00:44,930 He later became chair of Social and Administrative Studies and remained part of the Oxford community for more than 50 years. 6 00:00:45,710 --> 00:00:57,250 His work on inequality, social mobility, educational access, um higher education helped define the field at Oxford and beyond. 7 00:00:58,700 --> 00:01:09,350 This evening's speaker, professor, is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory and Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. 8 00:01:10,400 --> 00:01:14,540 He joined LSC in 2010. That's right. 9 00:01:14,810 --> 00:01:20,780 Roughly, yeah. Um, Boston, director of the centre for the Study of Human Rights until 2017. 10 00:01:21,350 --> 00:01:24,589 Before that he taught at Goldsmiths, Essex. 11 00:01:24,590 --> 00:01:36,020 Um, Southampton. His most recent book, The Revolutionary Road to Me Politics on the Western Left, was published by poverty in 2025. 12 00:01:36,380 --> 00:01:40,340 Available good bookstores near you? Um. 13 00:01:40,340 --> 00:01:46,880 He's currently completing a book on the politics and ideology of a new Western far right. 14 00:01:47,660 --> 00:01:52,550 Tonight, he's going to address the theme of the limits of identitarian ism. 15 00:01:53,360 --> 00:01:56,749 I think this is a theme that would have engaged Jeremy Balls. 16 00:01:56,750 --> 00:02:02,840 It's interesting. He was part of a generation that, to paraphrase Raymond Aron, 17 00:02:02,870 --> 00:02:11,030 implicitly regarded British sociology as an attempt to make intellectual sense of the political problems of Labour Party. 18 00:02:12,170 --> 00:02:17,840 And the substrate of that endeavour was, for many, at least, of that generation, 19 00:02:17,840 --> 00:02:24,740 to come to terms with a certain sort of identitarian issue of a rather personal nature. 20 00:02:26,140 --> 00:02:32,320 But then it was the significance of having themselves roots in the working class. 21 00:02:32,710 --> 00:02:41,740 So in one way or another, issues to do with identity have always been lurking in the background of a sociological endeavour. 22 00:02:42,340 --> 00:02:47,640 So please join me in welcoming Professor Park to talk about the limits of identity. 23 00:02:49,990 --> 00:02:56,580 Thank you. Hello, everyone. 24 00:02:56,580 --> 00:03:00,780 And, uh, and thank you. Thank you for coming here on a Friday. 25 00:03:00,780 --> 00:03:08,010 Lovely Friday afternoon, uh, to listen to me. And I'd also like to thank the organisers and the Department of Sociology for inviting me. 26 00:03:08,910 --> 00:03:12,270 And I want to talk to you about identity, 27 00:03:12,450 --> 00:03:23,370 but in a particular way that situates contemporary conflicts about identity within a broader idea of identity terrorism and the historical 28 00:03:23,370 --> 00:03:33,450 architecture that's relevant to identity terrorism and its emergence through the convergence of a range of social and historical forces. 29 00:03:34,050 --> 00:03:37,140 So today's identity politics, I'm sure you're all familiar with it. 30 00:03:37,770 --> 00:03:42,540 And the so-called culture wars are just one manifestation of this broader idea. 31 00:03:44,420 --> 00:03:49,820 Now, what do I mean by a ban to terrorism? I'd like you to consider these ordinary moments. 32 00:03:49,830 --> 00:03:53,460 So politicians says people like us are being ignored. 33 00:03:54,210 --> 00:04:02,130 Or a rich owner of a social media platform declares that Western civilisation is in peril and Europe is dying, 34 00:04:02,820 --> 00:04:07,350 or a public health service announces better representation of a particular minority group. 35 00:04:08,420 --> 00:04:11,870 Or a genocide or conflict, depending on your point of view. 36 00:04:12,140 --> 00:04:17,240 In the Middle East translates into a conflict between religious groups in the UK. 37 00:04:17,960 --> 00:04:24,950 Or a social media storm rages not because of disagreement about ideas, but about the person who's speaking. 38 00:04:25,990 --> 00:04:29,740 And these are familiar scenes. They seem normal. 39 00:04:30,680 --> 00:04:34,580 And perhaps inevitable. And in many ways they are. 40 00:04:35,780 --> 00:04:39,110 And they also contain markedly different political orientations. 41 00:04:39,950 --> 00:04:49,430 But I want to suggest to you that they are all expressions of something broader, pervasive, that we really pause to examine in its fullness and reach. 42 00:04:49,970 --> 00:04:56,930 And here I don't mean left and liberal identity politics, which I will focus on later in this talk, 43 00:04:57,440 --> 00:05:02,270 perhaps in quite a provocative way, but a much larger field of identitarian ism. 44 00:05:02,870 --> 00:05:06,979 And I want to work with the idea of identity terrorism not as a heavy theoretical concept, 45 00:05:06,980 --> 00:05:13,640 but as a perspective and a point of orientation through which we might hopefully see things differently. 46 00:05:14,180 --> 00:05:21,920 And I want to push this idea and see where we get to in a talk that is academic but inevitably crosses some political boundaries. 47 00:05:22,610 --> 00:05:27,140 And over the next hour, and I'll try and limit it to less than an hour if I can. 48 00:05:27,710 --> 00:05:32,690 But I'd like to try and persuade you that contemporary identitarian thinking within and outside 49 00:05:32,690 --> 00:05:40,700 academic life needs to be interrogated far more deeply and far more robustly than it is. 50 00:05:41,210 --> 00:05:47,900 And by this I don't mean simply criticising identity politics, but questioning a general mode of thought that is ubiquitous, 51 00:05:47,900 --> 00:05:54,920 embedded and naturalised across social institutions and practices and across much academic life. 52 00:05:56,280 --> 00:06:05,910 And we can see identitarian ism as a general instinctive, so as to be natural mode of social and political reasoning, 53 00:06:06,360 --> 00:06:12,360 in which ascribed or assumed identities based on race, sex, gender, sexuality, 54 00:06:13,230 --> 00:06:17,880 or others based on nation, ethnicity, religion, culture or civilisation. 55 00:06:18,480 --> 00:06:27,300 I'm not just socially salient, but are seen routinely as foundations for judgement, action, politics, policy or law. 56 00:06:28,410 --> 00:06:30,420 It's a mode of thought by which social, 57 00:06:30,420 --> 00:06:36,990 political and cultural life is automatically instinctively apprehended through ideas of group and personal identity, 58 00:06:37,680 --> 00:06:46,260 and these become the main way in which we understand social life and political life, make moral judgements, organise political politics. 59 00:06:47,680 --> 00:06:53,170 And identitarian ism is not simply the acknowledgement that group identities might matter sometimes, 60 00:06:53,680 --> 00:07:00,820 but instead elevates an aspect of social life into its governing principle, and it often has explanatory primacy. 61 00:07:01,240 --> 00:07:05,770 So we explain actions in terms of the identities involved of a person or a group. 62 00:07:06,070 --> 00:07:15,610 Or we judge claims in terms of the identities, or we see complex conflicts involving states, for example, as conflicts between identity based groups. 63 00:07:16,510 --> 00:07:22,899 And similarly, identity can be treated as the foundational unit for social reality and of social relations, 64 00:07:22,900 --> 00:07:26,770 which are recast as relationships between identity based groups. 65 00:07:28,100 --> 00:07:35,240 And identities are typically seen as internally coherent properties of people and groups and their relations, 66 00:07:35,720 --> 00:07:43,130 and they're treated as stable and enduring substances or quasi substances that seem to end here within people, 67 00:07:43,520 --> 00:07:51,020 such that they're effectively natural, constitutive, and also claim to be socially constructed or socially created. 68 00:07:52,400 --> 00:08:00,290 So historical contingent social classifications are substantially used as if the groups they uh, to which they refer, 69 00:08:00,650 --> 00:08:08,180 harbour some definitive substance that makes them conclusively a group that behaves like a group and is different from other groups, 70 00:08:08,960 --> 00:08:13,040 and through many historical processes, historical categories, and so forth. 71 00:08:13,310 --> 00:08:16,760 These categories harden into moral persons. 72 00:08:17,650 --> 00:08:22,840 So another way of saying identitarian ism is as this is as social and institutional 73 00:08:22,840 --> 00:08:28,530 practices that turn historical classifications into morally saturated personhood. 74 00:08:30,490 --> 00:08:35,530 Similarly, identity is also often the medium through which the social world is made legible. 75 00:08:35,770 --> 00:08:39,160 So who can speak? Who can know? 76 00:08:39,520 --> 00:08:43,390 Who counts as injured or oppressed? Who is represented and by whom? 77 00:08:44,140 --> 00:08:48,100 Which political claims are made visible? Which ones are made to recede? 78 00:08:49,000 --> 00:08:54,879 So identitarian ism converts messy social processes into a very simple social field, 79 00:08:54,880 --> 00:09:02,350 dominated by groups who are not bearers of a common humanity, but a particular, seemingly durable attributes. 80 00:09:03,690 --> 00:09:08,880 And in identitarian thinking, identities are morally endowed and drenched with normative meaning, 81 00:09:09,960 --> 00:09:17,010 so moral charge and often a moral excellence accrue to those who make identity claims. 82 00:09:17,730 --> 00:09:22,620 Moral judgement moves away from the evaluation of ideas, actions, and intentions, 83 00:09:23,250 --> 00:09:28,080 and instead to the assessment of the good or bad nature or character of people in groups. 84 00:09:28,890 --> 00:09:32,460 And the focus is typically on whether a person is good or bad. 85 00:09:32,850 --> 00:09:39,899 The bad character of a person or a group, rather than the right or wrong of their actions and moral authority, 86 00:09:39,900 --> 00:09:45,600 is conferred because of who individuals or groups say they are, rather than what they've done, 87 00:09:46,410 --> 00:09:50,760 the reasons for what they've done, and the intentions behind their actions. 88 00:09:51,900 --> 00:09:57,360 And indeed, identity, can often work as a credential for moral, political, or epistemic authority. 89 00:09:59,360 --> 00:10:05,690 Now, these themes represent a shift in political legitimacy and justification and in the structure of political disagreement. 90 00:10:06,410 --> 00:10:11,330 So interactions and conflicts are metabolised into contestations between identity claims. 91 00:10:11,330 --> 00:10:18,290 Political conflict is organised around the recognition, contestation or defence of particular identities, 92 00:10:18,980 --> 00:10:22,130 and they also represent a shift in how knowledge and truth are assessed, 93 00:10:22,730 --> 00:10:33,590 especially when epistemic authority is tied to subjective personal experience, which by its nature is often unfalsifiable or incontestable. 94 00:10:35,030 --> 00:10:38,320 Now you might be thinking, well, hang on a minute. 95 00:10:38,330 --> 00:10:46,190 People have ethnicities. They have sexualities, their national belonging, their religion are meaningful to them. 96 00:10:46,700 --> 00:10:50,120 So of course, we think in identity terms. How silly to think otherwise. 97 00:10:51,450 --> 00:10:55,710 Maybe they didn't use the word identity, but ancient Greeks, Nubians, 98 00:10:55,920 --> 00:11:01,530 medieval estates, industrial classes, emerging nations were all forms of identity. 99 00:11:01,560 --> 00:11:04,110 So what's the big. What's the big issue here? 100 00:11:06,120 --> 00:11:14,399 Or you might say people are rewarded, excluded, even killed as a result of categories of race, sex, nation, ethnicity and religion. 101 00:11:14,400 --> 00:11:19,500 And that's reality. Identities often arise from shared experiences of injustice. 102 00:11:20,440 --> 00:11:23,590 They are meaningful for groups and consequential for them. 103 00:11:24,190 --> 00:11:32,710 And some identity labels may have been described by others, including by oppressors, but have been reclaimed now and are used to resist oppression. 104 00:11:33,490 --> 00:11:38,290 So identities matter and unnecessary for recognition and resistance. 105 00:11:39,960 --> 00:11:43,680 Now, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with some of these objections, 106 00:11:44,310 --> 00:11:52,710 but contemporary identitarian ism is distinctive as a social logic because it is psychologically intimate and institutionally driven. 107 00:11:53,470 --> 00:12:00,629 We're encouraged to become uniquely ourselves, while at the same time we are sorted into many demographic, 108 00:12:00,630 --> 00:12:04,590 legal, therapeutic, political and other categories. 109 00:12:05,660 --> 00:12:08,870 In this way, identity terrorism represents a synthesis. 110 00:12:09,880 --> 00:12:20,760 Of the modern self. An inward selfhood, with many institutional fields that classify people and organise politics around that classification. 111 00:12:21,720 --> 00:12:25,890 And today we see the convergence of several social factors. 112 00:12:27,200 --> 00:12:30,920 Unprecedented individualisation. Mass classification. 113 00:12:31,430 --> 00:12:34,460 New techniques for collective organisation and representation. 114 00:12:35,090 --> 00:12:38,930 And the growth of vast institutional fields for identity making. 115 00:12:39,800 --> 00:12:45,470 At an identity making. Identity promotion. And these lie well beyond the state. 116 00:12:46,860 --> 00:12:55,319 And in some forms, entity making. We also see the convergence of a kind of hyper individualism with, uh, strangely, 117 00:12:55,320 --> 00:13:05,490 a type of communitarian virtue ethics that generates morally exemplary, morally, morally unassailable, uh, identities. 118 00:13:07,520 --> 00:13:11,210 Now these changes are coinciding with a period, 119 00:13:11,870 --> 00:13:18,800 or during a period where the raw political energy of the populist right meets with the institutionalised, 120 00:13:19,220 --> 00:13:20,150 technocratic, 121 00:13:20,540 --> 00:13:30,290 corporate and perhaps ossified processes that have taken the place of political vitalism within liberalism and among much of the corporate left. 122 00:13:31,830 --> 00:13:39,870 However, identity terrorism is not the feature of any single political or ideological camp, though that important asymmetries to register. 123 00:13:41,660 --> 00:13:51,320 On the political left, it's often manifests as identity politics based on race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and associated categories. 124 00:13:51,860 --> 00:13:54,920 And you can think of much contemporary transgender rights activism. 125 00:13:55,130 --> 00:14:03,590 Many aspects of, uh, academic coloniality and some dominant strands of anti-racism in the aftermath of 126 00:14:03,590 --> 00:14:09,740 the killing of George Floyd in 2020 as examples of this left wing identity politics. 127 00:14:11,280 --> 00:14:18,840 But I would put to you that identitarian ism has been historically associated with the political right, particularly in its ethno nationalist form. 128 00:14:19,830 --> 00:14:28,139 And right wing and far right forms of identity politics, I think, are the most powerful today and represented by authoritarian, 129 00:14:28,140 --> 00:14:35,670 populist and far right states, political parties and movements across much of North America and Europe and elsewhere. 130 00:14:37,580 --> 00:14:45,590 And, uh, certainly amongst the far right, identity politics manifests as ethno nationalism, white nationalism, 131 00:14:45,590 --> 00:14:51,710 Christian nationalism, many racial narratives of civilisation and civilizational catastrophe, 132 00:14:52,550 --> 00:15:00,200 and the prominence of the idea of the replacement of white populations by others for which forced re migration, 133 00:15:00,200 --> 00:15:06,710 which is essentially a form of racial and ethnic cleansing, is considered a legitimate, uh, political response. 134 00:15:08,320 --> 00:15:16,060 Now. Right wing and left wing forms of identitarian thinking represent two different sets of ethical commitments or political trajectories, 135 00:15:16,540 --> 00:15:23,050 and indeed manifest power in the world. So my claim is emphatically not about their moral equivalence. 136 00:15:23,710 --> 00:15:25,280 Left and right wing identitarian. 137 00:15:25,420 --> 00:15:32,950 I do not usually share political aims or ethical orientations, nor do they have a similar kind of of moral reasoning. 138 00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:42,880 Leftwing identity politics often emerges, or claims to emerge from histories of discrimination and injury and violence, 139 00:15:43,420 --> 00:15:48,130 and it's often focussed on minority recognition, safety and representation. 140 00:15:49,340 --> 00:15:58,280 But it can sometimes or often do this in a way that can enforce serious restrictions on language and people and institutions, 141 00:15:58,490 --> 00:16:02,660 on freedom of speech, on freedom of assembly and the legitimate rights of others. 142 00:16:03,850 --> 00:16:13,270 Conversely, identity politics from the authoritarian right often comes with fantasies of superiority and domination and racial restoration. 143 00:16:14,530 --> 00:16:18,340 Much Western authority and right politics is obsessed with national purity, 144 00:16:18,700 --> 00:16:24,790 with civilizational degeneration and decline and the terror of being replaced or extinguished. 145 00:16:26,460 --> 00:16:30,330 So the so-called culture wars, which are really very old now. 146 00:16:31,460 --> 00:16:38,870 On the outcome of this opposition between differing instantiations of identitarian logic on the left and right. 147 00:16:40,540 --> 00:16:43,720 And I don't position myself in between these two left and right camps. 148 00:16:43,750 --> 00:16:49,510 In large part, my concerns about the prospects for the Western Democratic left as a viable political 149 00:16:49,660 --> 00:16:54,910 force that can appeal beyond the common Identitarian Alliance between urban, 150 00:16:54,910 --> 00:17:01,840 middle class, university educated professional groups and urban ethnic minorities and some sections of the urban working class. 151 00:17:02,470 --> 00:17:09,430 And this alignment leaves substantial portions of the country to the appeal of authoritarian populists and the far right. 152 00:17:11,160 --> 00:17:16,140 But though identitarian tendencies on the political left and the right are vigorously opposed to each other, 153 00:17:16,710 --> 00:17:22,320 they can share an epistemic space in which societies are apprehended primarily through bounded 154 00:17:22,320 --> 00:17:27,510 group identities that are morally charged and determine the legitimate ground for politics. 155 00:17:27,810 --> 00:17:34,500 And both can share languages of victimisation, discrimination, prior entitlement, and both can share the view. 156 00:17:35,460 --> 00:17:40,680 Which is, um, I suppose this is a facet of polarisation that civic, civil, 157 00:17:40,680 --> 00:17:47,460 democratic engagement with each other cannot be the means of finding a mode of coexistence. 158 00:17:48,930 --> 00:17:53,549 Now I want to move to situating these ideas in identitarian ism historically, 159 00:17:53,550 --> 00:17:58,860 and point to some key historical dimensions that can shape identitarian conflicts today. 160 00:17:59,460 --> 00:18:04,080 And it's impossible to capture every dimension of identity historically. 161 00:18:04,380 --> 00:18:11,280 Nor do I want to give the impression of historical continuity, where the often unconnected trends and books. 162 00:18:12,460 --> 00:18:17,110 But the broad map here is of the rise of inward focussed selfhood, 163 00:18:17,380 --> 00:18:27,520 the proliferation of a range of modern templates for personhood and the establishment of powerful infrastructures of population classification, 164 00:18:27,520 --> 00:18:34,930 ordering and ranking. And then the institutionalised identities we see in more recent periods, especially on the left. 165 00:18:36,830 --> 00:18:42,440 Contemporary identitarian ism can be seen as a late modern successor to older, large scale abstractions, 166 00:18:42,440 --> 00:18:50,630 such as the individual rights of liberalism or socialist policies of class, or the salvation or damnation offered by religion. 167 00:18:51,760 --> 00:18:57,250 Now. Premodern societies, of course, had groups based on religion, kinship, village rank, and so on. 168 00:18:57,940 --> 00:19:04,120 But historians tell us that these were not articulated to something that was personal, inner to one's self, 169 00:19:04,300 --> 00:19:14,890 that also made that person simultaneously socially legible, politically consequential, and requiring official and formal institutional recognition. 170 00:19:15,820 --> 00:19:22,300 So one sense of self relied less on who am I and more on what is my rank or my job. 171 00:19:23,320 --> 00:19:28,780 And it's not that prior to the 19th and early 20th centuries, personal identity didn't exist as an idea. 172 00:19:29,170 --> 00:19:33,790 It certainly did in many non-Western as well as Western philosophies. 173 00:19:34,570 --> 00:19:39,370 But with René Descartes in the 17th century and philosophers, art philosophers, after him, 174 00:19:40,330 --> 00:19:47,380 we see a particular methodical excavation of the interior self, the interiority of ourselves. 175 00:19:48,040 --> 00:19:55,180 And a critical example of the rise of modern inwardness that writers like Charles Taylor have tied to questions of authenticity, 176 00:19:55,420 --> 00:20:01,999 freedom, and moral being. The modern person is a person who dives into themself because they have an 177 00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:06,740 inner depth that is there to be discovered and which reflects some true self. 178 00:20:08,990 --> 00:20:15,170 I also want you to consider how alive the idea of self-identity that emerges from Descartes's work remains today, 179 00:20:15,830 --> 00:20:21,830 especially among those who would otherwise reject the work of dead, white and. 180 00:20:23,320 --> 00:20:29,730 So I am self proven. And don't need empirical evidence from outside me for that proof. 181 00:20:30,510 --> 00:20:34,680 I turn inwards and create a self grounding identity that is true to me. 182 00:20:35,280 --> 00:20:45,690 A stable inner self that is certain, authentic, coherent, unified and dependent only on my thoughts. 183 00:20:46,560 --> 00:20:51,150 My truth about myself can be accessed by only looking inside myself. 184 00:20:51,180 --> 00:20:58,530 I don't need to be supported by empirical evidence from outside me and from foundation as a thinking entity. 185 00:20:58,830 --> 00:21:05,310 I then go on to discover truths about myself and the world outside me and this inner contained self, 186 00:21:05,820 --> 00:21:09,600 which in Descartes's case, of course, involves the famous separation of mind from body. 187 00:21:10,260 --> 00:21:15,059 This is an example of the modern individual as something like a closed container Homo. 188 00:21:15,060 --> 00:21:18,510 Clausius, as the sociologist Norbert Elias called it. 189 00:21:20,450 --> 00:21:25,639 Another important idea is that of the person. And this emerges from Loks work. 190 00:21:25,640 --> 00:21:34,430 But I want to use it in a different way. And this is the idea of personhood, the legal, moral, political, social person, 191 00:21:35,000 --> 00:21:39,799 an entity that is not the human as a living body, but the socially created person, 192 00:21:39,800 --> 00:21:48,650 like the bare body of the human being covered in the clothing of, for example, legal personhood such as the citizen or the bearer of human rights. 193 00:21:49,640 --> 00:21:56,210 And there are many, many templates of these socially persistent persons that emerge in modernity. 194 00:21:56,480 --> 00:22:03,950 And they include the individual moral person, Kant's legislator who makes moral judgements about right or wrong actions, 195 00:22:04,160 --> 00:22:08,300 or the consumer who might make rational choices about what they buy. 196 00:22:09,050 --> 00:22:14,570 And then many collectively defined personhood is characterised by nation and ethnicity and religion and many others. 197 00:22:14,570 --> 00:22:21,680 The bourgeois family man, the industrial worker free to sell their labour, the suffragette woman fighting for political rights and so on. 198 00:22:23,210 --> 00:22:33,530 And alongside these ideas of the contained in a self and socially legible personhood, there are important transformations that occur in taxonomy, 199 00:22:34,250 --> 00:22:41,660 especially from the 19th century, and these provide the scaffolding for various later identity projects in the 20th century. 200 00:22:43,030 --> 00:22:52,480 Now. Today we are often living with, within and against these taxonomies and classifications from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 201 00:22:53,560 --> 00:22:58,600 And because much of the historical material may be familiar, I'll focus on themes that are relevant for today. 202 00:22:59,530 --> 00:23:05,350 So firstly, nationalism and specifically 18th century and 19th century ethno nationalism 203 00:23:05,590 --> 00:23:10,090 as a protean form and a major template for later forms of identity terrorism. 204 00:23:10,570 --> 00:23:14,229 And this is a period where nations came into being with their nation states, 205 00:23:14,230 --> 00:23:19,930 and the people emerged as the elites asked a singular question who are we? 206 00:23:20,710 --> 00:23:26,830 And the people often responded through popular movements and in other ways that generated material for national identity. 207 00:23:27,760 --> 00:23:33,880 And the collective national self here is morally charged, self-determining and travelling along a distant path. 208 00:23:34,870 --> 00:23:39,609 And ethno nationalism was typically based on adherence to the traditions and values of the 209 00:23:39,610 --> 00:23:45,820 chosen inheritors of the land who and relied on the virtues of more excellent people. 210 00:23:46,000 --> 00:23:53,049 The fictive kinship between near and distant strangers, based on imputed ancestry and ethno nationalism, 211 00:23:53,050 --> 00:23:56,080 of course, has the potential for chauvinism and xenophobia. 212 00:23:57,270 --> 00:24:00,840 In this sense, nationalism offers a model for modern identity itself, 213 00:24:01,380 --> 00:24:08,940 and there's a reason why contemporary identity movements are so focussed on self-determination and autonomy, 214 00:24:08,940 --> 00:24:18,360 and declarations of collective identity, personal sovereignty, even ideas of manifest destiny in the belief that we can change the world. 215 00:24:19,370 --> 00:24:22,790 And of course, it explains why there's so many flags around. 216 00:24:24,050 --> 00:24:29,240 And crudely, crudely speaking, identity seems like macro nationalism without the nation state. 217 00:24:30,810 --> 00:24:36,770 Another critical historical strand was the rise of the idea of race, 218 00:24:36,780 --> 00:24:41,610 the development of modern racial thought, and related claims about inherited differences. 219 00:24:42,240 --> 00:24:52,350 These resulting in racial classifications and hierarchy as globally relevant systems that are used to uh group rank uh and subjugate enslaved, 220 00:24:52,350 --> 00:24:54,540 colonised, and other groups and classes. 221 00:24:55,410 --> 00:25:01,560 And during the 19th and early 20th century, race ideology was institutionalised by colonial powers through law, 222 00:25:01,710 --> 00:25:05,610 the colonial state and its management and administration, 223 00:25:05,610 --> 00:25:16,169 as well as science and other processes as significant but not talked about as much today was the cataloguing of religious, 224 00:25:16,170 --> 00:25:23,190 ethnic, caste and other groups, for example in Asia and in on the African continent, 225 00:25:23,190 --> 00:25:33,420 including mapping groups to geographical territories and describing in copious detail practices of customary law, ritual, social organisation. 226 00:25:35,440 --> 00:25:38,880 Race, caste and other cultural classifications are of course relevant today. 227 00:25:38,890 --> 00:25:44,170 They have vital power today and they provide both the material for identity and its rejection. 228 00:25:44,170 --> 00:25:52,480 We live in and against them and they allow for new processes of race, fication for racist as well as some anti-racist projects. 229 00:25:53,200 --> 00:26:02,890 And they of course, often, uh, cause social theory to be trapped in a circuit of reification and rejection of essentialism that we'll consider later. 230 00:26:04,400 --> 00:26:12,950 Adjacent to this is another development that becomes especially important in the early 20th century and indeed today. 231 00:26:13,880 --> 00:26:18,080 And this is the ordering of civilisations and related to that cultures. 232 00:26:19,850 --> 00:26:23,210 Civilizational discourse is powerful and mesmerising. 233 00:26:23,960 --> 00:26:28,700 It gathers vast, discontinuous histories into a singular, majestic form. 234 00:26:29,060 --> 00:26:33,799 Some monuments, texts, philosophies, technologies, manners, law, 235 00:26:33,800 --> 00:26:40,220 aesthetics are absorbed by this entity that appears coherent once we call it a civilisation, 236 00:26:41,150 --> 00:26:44,270 and in this way disruptions, borrowings from other cultures, 237 00:26:44,270 --> 00:26:48,230 dependency and mixing, internal violence and heterogeneity, 238 00:26:48,890 --> 00:26:58,580 and the textures of deep historical time are polished into an authoritative story that explains past grandeur and typically future decline. 239 00:26:59,620 --> 00:27:06,100 And Oswald Spangler, of course, in the 1920s gave civilisational discourse its most powerful decline to form. 240 00:27:07,260 --> 00:27:15,720 Cultures flourish, but then they harden into technical, urban, rational civilisation, after which they die. 241 00:27:16,650 --> 00:27:21,860 So civilisation a civilisation. It's always a terminal form. 242 00:27:23,000 --> 00:27:26,980 And civilisational discourse is therefore often animated by loss. 243 00:27:26,990 --> 00:27:31,520 Whether the loss is a result of people becoming too weak or decadent, 244 00:27:32,300 --> 00:27:37,940 or the losses feared because of the invaders that are amassing just outside the borders of civilisation. 245 00:27:39,590 --> 00:27:46,550 And this is what makes Western civilisation such a politically charged concept today, amongst the populist and true to the far right. 246 00:27:47,090 --> 00:27:53,329 It is often presented within a narrative of siege in which Greece, Rome, Christendom, the Renaissance, 247 00:27:53,330 --> 00:27:59,750 the enlightenment, and then the post-war settlements are fused into a threatened inheritance, 248 00:28:00,140 --> 00:28:03,770 while the savagery of colonialism, slavery, the two world wars, 249 00:28:03,770 --> 00:28:11,960 the Judeo side occurring at the peak of civilisation are either ignored or excuses minor deviations from this grand story. 250 00:28:12,910 --> 00:28:17,770 And historically, the idea of civilisation emerged from, uh, strange places, 251 00:28:17,770 --> 00:28:24,550 legal commercial activities and then debates about morality and manners, especially in Scottish Enlightenment and French Enlightenment, 252 00:28:25,270 --> 00:28:31,840 where civilisation became linked to the presence of unmoveable property systems of law and social refinement, 253 00:28:32,620 --> 00:28:38,050 and stayed theory divided societies into stages of savage, barbarian and civilised. 254 00:28:39,040 --> 00:28:43,390 Although early stage thinkers did not necessarily see this in racial terms, 255 00:28:43,810 --> 00:28:49,540 the concept of civilisation neutralised hierarchy and it made European understandings of property, law, 256 00:28:49,540 --> 00:28:59,409 commerce and culture the end point for civilizational development and civilizational thinking also supplied the taxonomy, 257 00:28:59,410 --> 00:29:04,870 through which native populations in the Americas and other groups could be placed outside civilisation. 258 00:29:05,500 --> 00:29:09,370 This is an idea that is both used today and inverted. 259 00:29:12,570 --> 00:29:17,700 From other directions, including Aryan and Teutonic racial theories as well as eugenics. 260 00:29:17,700 --> 00:29:21,720 In the early 20th century, civilisation was fused with race, 261 00:29:22,320 --> 00:29:26,700 and during the 1920s numerous projects appeared in the United States and Europe 262 00:29:27,000 --> 00:29:31,440 that proposed essentially white supremacist theories of global civilisation. 263 00:29:32,250 --> 00:29:40,650 In them, white civilisation was the apex of human achievement, and, crucially, it was a fragile rarity. 264 00:29:42,110 --> 00:29:46,610 Threatened by immigration. Racial mixing. Low European birth rates. 265 00:29:47,090 --> 00:29:54,970 Internal degeneration. And the profound fear here was the white race would become extinct. 266 00:29:56,320 --> 00:29:59,710 And liberal charity. Philanthropic empathy. 267 00:30:00,940 --> 00:30:09,099 What is sometimes today called suicidal empathy and socialism were often seen as the internal weaknesses of European nations, 268 00:30:09,100 --> 00:30:18,320 causing something called race suicide. This latter being an especially striking theme in the US in the early decades of the 20th century. 269 00:30:18,920 --> 00:30:23,270 And some of these ideas resonate very powerfully today within a newly energised 270 00:30:23,270 --> 00:30:29,540 discourse about Western civilisation and the catastrophic threats that it faces. 271 00:30:32,290 --> 00:30:40,380 Now if these areas around race, ethnicity and civilisation provide some elements for the scaffolding for identitarian thinking, 272 00:30:40,390 --> 00:30:43,660 today I want to turn to some entirely different areas. 273 00:30:45,050 --> 00:30:48,770 Because alongside the hierarchical ordering of peoples and civilisations, 274 00:30:49,280 --> 00:30:55,760 the taxonomic ordering of bodies by sex and sexuality is also critical to this story. 275 00:30:56,540 --> 00:31:04,190 And this is again familiar territory. But I want to point to some issues about how these areas emerged today in identity thinking. 276 00:31:05,540 --> 00:31:13,669 And as we know, documenting sex difference was a major intellectual effort during the enlightenment and differently by the romantic movements, 277 00:31:13,670 --> 00:31:18,819 the Romantics. Now across the social sciences, arts and humanities. 278 00:31:18,820 --> 00:31:22,930 Today, it's frequently argued that biological sex is a social invention. 279 00:31:23,980 --> 00:31:27,550 And these arguments often draw on the work of historians. 280 00:31:27,820 --> 00:31:33,850 Queer theorists. That understandings of sex bodies change for social and political reasons, 281 00:31:34,330 --> 00:31:39,250 and did not arise from new scientific discoveries about sex differences during enlightenment. 282 00:31:40,060 --> 00:31:47,260 So it's argued that there was a transition from a one sex model in which female bodies, uh, you can laugh at this. 283 00:31:47,260 --> 00:31:52,180 This is how it was seen. Female bodies were seen as lesser and colder versions of male bodies. 284 00:31:52,750 --> 00:31:57,280 So movement from that to a two sex model grounded in absolute biological difference 285 00:31:57,730 --> 00:32:02,020 that justified gender hierarchies for political rather than scientific reasons. 286 00:32:03,410 --> 00:32:07,030 And this kind of argument can lead to many. 287 00:32:07,040 --> 00:32:10,970 I don't know what you call them confusions or absurdities to today. 288 00:32:12,000 --> 00:32:16,410 That often result from a failure to distinguish reality from its description. 289 00:32:17,900 --> 00:32:22,600 We can accept the argument that gender hierarchies are quite major social and political meanings. 290 00:32:22,610 --> 00:32:32,270 As a result of these vast efforts in the 18th and 19th centuries to delineate real and imagined differences between men and women. 291 00:32:32,960 --> 00:32:37,100 But this is not the same as also accepting that biological sex differences are fiction. 292 00:32:38,270 --> 00:32:42,860 So one aspect of the critique of patriarchal ideas of gender difference is that it 293 00:32:42,860 --> 00:32:48,320 generates an altogether different set of arguments about biological sex difference. 294 00:32:49,010 --> 00:32:55,550 And I think this can lead to the promotion of, uh, non artificial intelligence hallucinations. 295 00:32:57,510 --> 00:33:07,270 In much identitarian academic work. Related to this is another popular idea through which it's claimed that binary binary biological 296 00:33:07,270 --> 00:33:12,880 sex difference was imposed by Western colonists upon populations who who previously, 297 00:33:13,150 --> 00:33:17,470 uh, presumably had, uh, very fluid sex, gender lives. 298 00:33:17,650 --> 00:33:23,170 And in some academic work, pre-colonial people, uh, essentially might be something like queer theorists. 299 00:33:24,790 --> 00:33:29,830 Uh, and this is an example of a very familiar Western romantic projective identification. 300 00:33:32,130 --> 00:33:39,270 There is copious ancient and medieval literature, some related to physiology and medicine, 301 00:33:39,270 --> 00:33:46,590 from Arabic and Indian and other sources that contains extensive descriptions of biological sex difference, 302 00:33:46,950 --> 00:33:56,070 and it often extends from these descriptions of biological sex to normative patriarchal ideas about gender roles and gender hierarchy. 303 00:33:56,940 --> 00:34:04,889 And some literature shows awareness of differences of sexual development and the difficulties of classifying these with some Indian texts, 304 00:34:04,890 --> 00:34:11,280 for example, proposing a third category for groups that today would be referred to as intersex people. 305 00:34:12,330 --> 00:34:15,540 And several of these texts also discuss same sex sexuality. 306 00:34:16,530 --> 00:34:24,690 Now, to be sure, Western colonists in some countries did forcefully prevent the expression of certain kinds of gender and sexual expression. 307 00:34:25,110 --> 00:34:28,439 But this is a different historical argument from one that says that they imposed 308 00:34:28,440 --> 00:34:34,080 a novel patriarchal binary sex difference which hadn't previously existed. 309 00:34:36,430 --> 00:34:46,540 Now with regard to taxonomies of sexuality. In 1886, Richard von Craftygaming, a German psychiatrist, published Psychopathic Asexuals, 310 00:34:46,760 --> 00:34:51,889 a work that established the academic discipline of sexology and which detailed Western 311 00:34:51,890 --> 00:34:56,450 sexuality and sexual practices based on his and other people's clinical reports. 312 00:34:57,050 --> 00:35:01,040 And this is part of the contents page from the 1894 English edition, 313 00:35:01,970 --> 00:35:09,830 and it illustrates the need to describe and list many sexual desires and practices within the Magisterium of psychiatry. 314 00:35:10,970 --> 00:35:14,780 And here name sexual practices are linked to particular persons. 315 00:35:14,840 --> 00:35:21,170 For example, the homosexual and the sadist and the masochist and fetishists of various kinds. 316 00:35:21,560 --> 00:35:26,420 And uh. Further, he also described two desires among natal men. 317 00:35:27,560 --> 00:35:33,410 One was about women's clothing, which he referred to as the fetishism, and that would be considered offensive today. 318 00:35:34,250 --> 00:35:38,120 And that was the intense belief among some natal men that they were women, 319 00:35:39,050 --> 00:35:44,300 and they perceived a transformation in which they wanted to have bodies like women's bodies. 320 00:35:44,300 --> 00:35:48,350 And he had a particular term, what he called a scientific term for that. 321 00:35:49,130 --> 00:35:53,450 And he saw both of these as distinct from homosexuality and male effeminacy. 322 00:35:54,350 --> 00:36:00,110 And he also referred to androgyny and gallantry, some examples of which today might be called intersex. 323 00:36:00,740 --> 00:36:06,980 And there are several recognisable persons here today persons that could be recognisable today gay men, 324 00:36:07,250 --> 00:36:11,990 lesbians, transgender people and people with differences of sexual development. 325 00:36:12,920 --> 00:36:22,310 And in 1869, Hungarian writer Carl Cut Benny first used the word heterosexuality at the same time as he, uh, coined another term, homosexuality, 326 00:36:22,940 --> 00:36:30,320 and these classifications exist alongside the types of persons that, for example, Foucault identified, including, uh, what he, uh, 327 00:36:30,500 --> 00:36:36,620 the historical woman and the so-called hermaphrodite and sexology became a major academic 328 00:36:36,620 --> 00:36:41,780 enterprise and various other major works catalogued in copious detail human sexual behaviour, 329 00:36:42,200 --> 00:36:47,690 the work peaking in the US in the mid 20th century and continuing in different forms to today. 330 00:36:49,400 --> 00:36:52,520 Now. This is a fast journey through older taxonomies, 331 00:36:53,000 --> 00:37:00,470 and it needs to make its way into social developments from the 20th century and in particular, the rise of the identity concept. 332 00:37:02,090 --> 00:37:07,940 And firstly, during periods of mass immigration in the United States to the United States. 333 00:37:07,940 --> 00:37:10,280 Late 19th century early 20th century, 334 00:37:10,520 --> 00:37:17,210 there were fraught debates about minorities and national loyalty that occurred and intensified during the First World War. 335 00:37:18,080 --> 00:37:22,660 And this included debates about terms like Irish American, Italian American, with, uh, 336 00:37:22,700 --> 00:37:27,650 Theodore Roosevelt famously saying that there was no room in the US for hyphenated Americanism. 337 00:37:28,660 --> 00:37:35,600 And he also incidentally popularised the term race suicide. Of about which there were great fears because of immigration. 338 00:37:37,440 --> 00:37:38,489 By the Second World War, 339 00:37:38,490 --> 00:37:47,520 the United States also faced a problem of how to make a nation of desperate migrants become a unified nation that was ready for war. 340 00:37:48,750 --> 00:37:55,020 But one change by then was the greater recognition of minority groups such as, uh, national groups, 341 00:37:55,470 --> 00:38:01,230 and included black Americans, and, uh, led to the internment of Japanese Americans. 342 00:38:02,190 --> 00:38:08,310 And the acceptance of hyphenated labels accelerated after the civil rights movement in the 1950s. 343 00:38:08,340 --> 00:38:14,280 So terms such as Mexican-American Asian American became prominent in the 1960s and join terms like, 344 00:38:14,280 --> 00:38:17,280 uh, Afro American, which had been used for quite a long time. 345 00:38:18,360 --> 00:38:27,899 And it was also in this period that the identity concept, uh, emerged and spread in the United States, being virtually unknown before the 1940s. 346 00:38:27,900 --> 00:38:29,520 Or at least that's what historians argue. 347 00:38:30,670 --> 00:38:39,370 So following from earlier Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of a psychological identity took particular shape in the United States. 348 00:38:39,880 --> 00:38:46,480 And this was a pivotal moment, uh, one of two linked by historians to the influence of Erik Erickson's work in the mid 349 00:38:46,480 --> 00:38:51,129 20th century and the dissemination of the concept of identity across psychology, 350 00:38:51,130 --> 00:38:59,590 sociology and other social sciences, and in parallel, through the work of John Money, Robert Stoller and others in the 1950s and 60s, 351 00:39:00,040 --> 00:39:11,230 the idea of an internal innate gender identity that was distinct from gender role and biological sex became highly significant and in a different way. 352 00:39:11,380 --> 00:39:16,780 An earlier distinction between sex and gender became foundational for feminism in the 1970s. 353 00:39:18,010 --> 00:39:24,700 And significantly, the identity concept was first widely deployed among academics in the 1940s and 354 00:39:24,700 --> 00:39:29,650 50s to discuss Black American identity as well as ethnic identity in the US. 355 00:39:30,430 --> 00:39:35,080 So the idea of a racial and ethnic identity takes shape as a concept. 356 00:39:35,440 --> 00:39:43,540 Before, the word identity was used in civil rights and later movements as a concept to describe the self and the group, 357 00:39:44,650 --> 00:39:50,950 and indeed in the writings of the civil rights movement, you'd be hard put to find the word identity used in relationship to selfhood. 358 00:39:51,760 --> 00:40:01,900 The transformation occurs across the black, gay and women's movements in a very few years, from around 1966 67 to 1973. 359 00:40:03,540 --> 00:40:12,180 So if the dominant civil rights language in the 1950s and early 60s is about rights, equality, anti-discrimination, police violence and citizenship, 360 00:40:12,900 --> 00:40:22,440 by the mid 60s it has evolved into freedom, power and self-determination, turning into pride, consciousness, autonomy and self naming. 361 00:40:22,560 --> 00:40:32,640 But at the end of the decade, and by 1967 68, the concept of identity is explicitly used across the black, gay and women's movements. 362 00:40:33,090 --> 00:40:39,240 And this is a change from a demand to recognise my rights, to a demand to recognise me. 363 00:40:40,200 --> 00:40:47,290 Though, of course, the former demands don't disappear. And the African American socialist feminist Combahee River collective. 364 00:40:47,890 --> 00:40:55,810 Its statement of 1977, as well as the work of black nationalist groups before them, together with statements from gay, 365 00:40:55,810 --> 00:41:02,080 lesbian and women's groups in the 1970s, often identified as and criticised as similar to identity politics today. 366 00:41:02,800 --> 00:41:10,000 But this is really strong radical humanist tradition or position, and this first form of identity politics, 367 00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:16,660 which isn't just focussed on one group, it's inevitably about universal issues, the world outside identity. 368 00:41:16,930 --> 00:41:20,740 Other social and class movements and critiques of economic exploitation. 369 00:41:22,840 --> 00:41:28,569 Now in the transition from the social movements of the 60s and 70s to today's liberal and left identity politics, 370 00:41:28,570 --> 00:41:31,930 we have to account for several social transformations. 371 00:41:33,880 --> 00:41:40,080 From a foucauldian perspective. Modern power does not repress identities. 372 00:41:40,590 --> 00:41:44,969 It makes them. It counts them, it funds them, it represents them. 373 00:41:44,970 --> 00:41:52,980 And it often makes us mistake them for freedom. And within these identity making processes, the post-war Western State, 374 00:41:52,980 --> 00:42:02,130 the main entity concerned with the classification and organisation and governance of populations, becomes joined by other institutional fields. 375 00:42:02,430 --> 00:42:07,770 That's a key difference, and a key institutional field is represented by NGOs. 376 00:42:08,940 --> 00:42:16,520 So, uh, consider the growth of the LGBT NGO sector in the United States, uh, from from the late 80s. 377 00:42:16,530 --> 00:42:19,260 So you really this is a really 90s kind of phenomena. 378 00:42:20,480 --> 00:42:26,480 And I hope you can see from the figure on the left that the rise in funding of LGBT NGOs in the US is quite substantial. 379 00:42:27,210 --> 00:42:30,620 Uh, nearly half $1 billion in revenue in 2018. 380 00:42:31,790 --> 00:42:38,720 For perspective, look at the estimates of the Christian right, NGOs and their income in 2003. 381 00:42:39,260 --> 00:42:45,170 This represents a parallel institutional field that is fuelled Christian nationalist identitarian ism in the US. 382 00:42:46,010 --> 00:42:52,880 And in 2003. This was some 40 times higher than for LGBT uh groups. 383 00:42:53,420 --> 00:43:00,740 And that would be a serious underestimate because of the difficulty in finding, uh, the amount of money going into the Christian right. 384 00:43:01,670 --> 00:43:06,770 But within the field of liberalism and leftwing identity, processes of identity, 385 00:43:06,770 --> 00:43:15,620 consecration are related to large institutions and institutional fields, including the state, international bodies, liberal corporations, 386 00:43:15,620 --> 00:43:22,370 the academy, liberal political parties and NGOs that constitute the apparatus for identity making, 387 00:43:22,370 --> 00:43:28,700 especially for minority groups in the West and within liberal corporate fields including the public sector. 388 00:43:29,150 --> 00:43:33,500 Identity politics becomes institutionalised as a mode of governance, 389 00:43:33,500 --> 00:43:38,510 through which social and political questions are transformed into technical managerial ones. 390 00:43:39,460 --> 00:43:45,160 In this way, identitarian ism becomes embedded as a as technocratic practice. 391 00:43:46,270 --> 00:43:49,540 Now, I've argued elsewhere, and I do have to mention my book at least once. 392 00:43:50,530 --> 00:43:52,450 Uh, that in liberal environments, uh, 393 00:43:52,450 --> 00:44:00,520 advocacy NGOs have been critical in disseminating and embedding identitarian policies across liberal corporate sectors, 394 00:44:00,850 --> 00:44:03,940 public and private, through training, partnerships and lobby work. 395 00:44:04,690 --> 00:44:07,059 And this is also linked to economic transformations, 396 00:44:07,060 --> 00:44:15,580 including changes in the labour process for middle class work as the latter becomes, uh, routine, monotonous and alienating. 397 00:44:15,610 --> 00:44:22,510 Liberal corporations respond not by addressing inequality, but by reorganising the experience of the worker. 398 00:44:24,000 --> 00:44:29,340 Now, groups can also come into being because the state activates a group related idea in, for example, 399 00:44:29,340 --> 00:44:38,970 the census or social policy and groups often facilitated by NGOs and public sector initiatives may transform around that idea. 400 00:44:39,540 --> 00:44:42,360 Uh oh. So I group around that idea and may transform it. 401 00:44:42,570 --> 00:44:48,880 And the state then responds to that transformation changes the label, which may have impacts on the group and so on. 402 00:44:48,900 --> 00:44:52,760 What Ian Hacking calls the looping effect of humankinds. 403 00:44:53,460 --> 00:44:57,060 And one consequence is what hacking calls dynamic nominalism. 404 00:44:57,870 --> 00:45:04,919 So the label Asian American in the United States has undergone many changes over the decades as a group such as Native Hawaiians, 405 00:45:04,920 --> 00:45:09,840 and institutions such as the agencies responsible for the census have fitted, 406 00:45:09,840 --> 00:45:14,940 changed or challenged the labels, and the changes in the labels are reflected in a different way. 407 00:45:16,080 --> 00:45:22,140 Here. This is changes in what was gay and lesbian and what it's become today. 408 00:45:22,740 --> 00:45:30,270 And the last contribution was from a Canadian politician very recently, and I very much doubt it will survive hacking snooping affect. 409 00:45:31,320 --> 00:45:38,430 But I put it there because it illustrates the paradoxically colonising nature of Western gender identity terrorism, 410 00:45:38,820 --> 00:45:43,110 in which the murders of indigenous women can only be articulated within the queer 411 00:45:43,110 --> 00:45:47,520 and trans decolonial register with which they have no relationship whatsoever. 412 00:45:49,620 --> 00:45:55,740 And the two s there refers to two spirit and a different looping effect attends to that term. 413 00:45:56,760 --> 00:46:03,090 It's widely used today as an authentically indigenous term to describe, uh, sexually diverse, 414 00:46:03,330 --> 00:46:10,110 non-gender conforming people allegedly accepted in Native American culture, especially before European colonisation. 415 00:46:11,360 --> 00:46:14,510 But the term was invented in the English language in the 1990s. 416 00:46:15,880 --> 00:46:24,040 It has no clear conventional meaning for many Native American groups, and it arose through the nexus of several institutional fields, 417 00:46:24,580 --> 00:46:33,970 including a series of conferences between anthropologists and Native American gay men and lesbians, and at one such event in the 1990s, 418 00:46:34,120 --> 00:46:41,170 the third annual Native American Gay and Lesbian Gathering in Winnipeg in Canada, the name of the event was changed to Two-spirit, 419 00:46:42,220 --> 00:46:47,620 and the term became used by Native American gay men and lesbians as a way of trying to connect with 420 00:46:47,620 --> 00:46:53,800 each other and try to connect with tribes and bands that were often very hostile to homosexuality. 421 00:46:54,840 --> 00:47:01,050 Most significantly. And this, I think, is the main reason for the dissemination of initial dissemination of this term. 422 00:47:01,530 --> 00:47:08,430 The phrase was used to develop HIV Aids outreach services among Native American men who have sex with men. 423 00:47:11,180 --> 00:47:16,520 Institutional fields can also be highly significant in what counts for indigeneity itself. 424 00:47:17,330 --> 00:47:24,469 So you be you may be familiar with the codification of indigenous people by the International Labour Organisation from the 1950s, 425 00:47:24,470 --> 00:47:34,070 but especially during the 1980s. And then the United Nations, uh, which expanded the term and situated within a global human rights framework. 426 00:47:35,150 --> 00:47:39,980 But deeper issues are also relevant to the idea of indigenous identity. 427 00:47:41,040 --> 00:47:44,100 So the social anthropologist Tanya Marie Lee. 428 00:47:45,150 --> 00:47:55,650 Her study of NGO environmental activism in Indonesia shows that the population that fitted the indigenous slot depended on the agendas of NGOs. 429 00:47:56,400 --> 00:48:02,640 So urban activists who are critical of the Indonesian government's form of modern development looks for remote, 430 00:48:02,970 --> 00:48:11,280 culturally bound, distinct indigenous groups living in the same area, which Lee says are very hard to find and in Indonesia. 431 00:48:12,700 --> 00:48:16,710 But when they do exist. Something quite remarkable is revealed. 432 00:48:18,090 --> 00:48:27,000 Dutch colonisers who wanted land and resources, had to create tribal structures and had to create traditional leaders with whom they could negotiate. 433 00:48:27,600 --> 00:48:34,980 So the Dutch invented the idea of a customary law community that was required for colonial governance. 434 00:48:35,250 --> 00:48:40,980 But where the Dutch had no economic interests, they didn't bother engaging with the populations that existed there, 435 00:48:41,640 --> 00:48:46,130 and their identities and the social practices related to them were. 436 00:48:46,830 --> 00:48:50,490 And the cultural authority for them remained very flexible and diffuse. 437 00:48:52,150 --> 00:48:57,940 They didn't form the bounded indigenous groups that NGOs today want to foreground. 438 00:48:58,690 --> 00:49:07,750 And so in this strange paradox, colonisation can be reflected in the work of contemporary decolonial NGOs who are making decisions 439 00:49:08,200 --> 00:49:14,050 on what types of and indigeneity can be consecrated or not within their institutional field. 440 00:49:17,930 --> 00:49:21,900 How are we doing for time? Are we? I could go on for hours. 441 00:49:23,420 --> 00:49:31,280 Yeah. Okay, so, um, I think paternalism can also diminish our way of understanding, uh, social life in ways that have ethical consequences. 442 00:49:31,940 --> 00:49:42,350 So today, the social conditions in which Native American populations live are tragic on virtually all indicators of poverty adopting infant mortality, 443 00:49:42,920 --> 00:49:46,440 uh, violence, access to housing and water. 444 00:49:46,460 --> 00:49:51,530 Health care. Welfare, education. And you can see this as a severe humanitarian crisis. 445 00:49:52,490 --> 00:49:57,590 Yet this is rarely discussed by writers that tend to be more focussed on issues of culture and knowledge, 446 00:49:58,850 --> 00:50:03,860 including ecological ideas that will help alleviate global, uh, ecological catastrophe. 447 00:50:03,860 --> 00:50:11,000 If only we'd listen to the sacred coal in this case, claims about cultural identity mystify. 448 00:50:11,930 --> 00:50:19,460 The real cultures, the lived cultures, the actual social lives of large numbers of rural indigenous people in North America. 449 00:50:21,810 --> 00:50:26,250 Now, sociology is inevitably concerned with the study of power and hierarchy. 450 00:50:26,880 --> 00:50:30,960 And it works best when it mystifies. Sorry. Demystifies. 451 00:50:31,890 --> 00:50:35,610 Uh, it also often works today very well when it's mystifying things. 452 00:50:35,770 --> 00:50:38,160 Um, and that has a lot of purchase as well. 453 00:50:38,940 --> 00:50:46,850 But when it demystifies and reveals underlying social mechanisms and processes and, uh, so I just want to make a few points about that. 454 00:50:46,860 --> 00:50:56,520 Uh, in this concluding, uh, part, identitarian academic work can often be less about the analysis of identity and more about its affirmation. 455 00:50:57,780 --> 00:51:07,620 And in turn, this can mystify the role of institutions as well as other relations of class, economy and power and status that may be relevant. 456 00:51:08,310 --> 00:51:12,120 And what outcome is the reduction of social complexity to identity categories, 457 00:51:12,360 --> 00:51:17,940 the marginalisation of political economy or institutional analysis or state theory, 458 00:51:18,540 --> 00:51:27,690 and the displacement of alternative accounts of social life, including more universal forms of affiliation and similarity between people. 459 00:51:29,040 --> 00:51:34,350 Identity based approaches can also similarly evade class and elite dynamics within identities, 460 00:51:34,770 --> 00:51:39,120 or the status and interest that identity claims can mask. 461 00:51:40,540 --> 00:51:49,060 So the sociological logics of academic identity work are not necessarily equivalent to supporting oppressed or exploited groups. 462 00:51:49,810 --> 00:51:52,000 They may, in practice, have nothing to do with this. 463 00:51:53,850 --> 00:52:01,079 So maybe a case can be made that ideas from decolonial theory have indirectly informed initiatives 464 00:52:01,080 --> 00:52:07,409 like Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission or other UN or NGO activities already taking place. 465 00:52:07,410 --> 00:52:11,970 It's aligned, aligned with them. But over the last two decades, maybe more. 466 00:52:12,360 --> 00:52:15,420 And I'm speaking about second generation decolonial theory here. 467 00:52:16,620 --> 00:52:25,230 It hasn't changed relations of land and labour and capital and violence and policing and borders or militarism or war. 468 00:52:26,570 --> 00:52:31,640 It's a change of reading lists. And this has sometimes been for the better. 469 00:52:31,940 --> 00:52:40,040 And it can be genuinely liberating. But what must queer or decolonial theory claims it's different from its sociological function. 470 00:52:41,330 --> 00:52:44,210 In part, which is to critique institutions of knowledge production, 471 00:52:44,630 --> 00:52:51,890 in part to increase the representation of more global academic work and its consequences for academic disciplines, which can only be a good thing. 472 00:52:52,700 --> 00:52:57,860 It is also to increase the representation and resources for diaspora and queer academics, 473 00:52:58,370 --> 00:53:02,030 and it can also be to delimit academic work to identitarian logics. 474 00:53:04,120 --> 00:53:04,959 A further, 475 00:53:04,960 --> 00:53:13,930 hardly discussed aspect of second generation decolonial theory is the extent of its amenability to ethno nationalist and even racist thinking, 476 00:53:14,590 --> 00:53:20,650 such that its ideas and its theorists are used regularly in far right intellectual projects. 477 00:53:22,410 --> 00:53:28,900 Diaspora. Academics. Include elites who can manifest elite and status competition. 478 00:53:29,290 --> 00:53:35,710 So the sociology of academic decolonisation might reflect the status and interests of elite and middle class academic groups. 479 00:53:36,490 --> 00:53:44,980 So, in one sense, decolonial discourse in academia can mystify elite status through identity claims about marginalisation. 480 00:53:45,790 --> 00:53:55,089 Now, of course, diaspora academics have as much right to elite status in places like this as elite Marxists do, or elite conservatives. 481 00:53:55,090 --> 00:53:57,910 But the broader point is about how status competition is concealed. 482 00:53:59,350 --> 00:54:05,560 And in terms of theory, there are large problems with identitarian academic work, which are not always easy to resolve. 483 00:54:06,460 --> 00:54:12,760 So identities are treated in many overlapping ways in academic work as social facts, explanatory concepts. 484 00:54:13,000 --> 00:54:20,110 Vehicles for advocacy, tools for self-affirmation, authorisations of the moral good, 485 00:54:20,650 --> 00:54:25,510 intrinsic substances, and historically created, socially created products. 486 00:54:26,530 --> 00:54:32,080 If identity often shifts back and forth between being an analytical category to being a self advocating, 487 00:54:32,290 --> 00:54:38,170 self-affirming group ness, then our use of it can have important ethical consequences. 488 00:54:39,600 --> 00:54:44,490 It can be difficult to use analytical categories about identity without advocating 489 00:54:44,670 --> 00:54:50,010 for an identity or maintaining boundaries between inside and outside perspectives. 490 00:54:50,880 --> 00:54:55,650 For example, I was involved in research in a research project looking at the reasons for serious 491 00:54:55,650 --> 00:55:00,570 violence that broke out in Leicester in 2022 between some groups of young men. 492 00:55:02,840 --> 00:55:08,940 Who are these groups? Because as soon as I say the violence was between Hindu and Muslim groups, 493 00:55:09,270 --> 00:55:14,040 the events are immediately ordered and they intelligible in our minds in a particular way. 494 00:55:15,150 --> 00:55:22,110 But to even use the terms Hindu and Muslim is to advance the logic of communal separation that caused the violence in the first place, 495 00:55:22,590 --> 00:55:29,250 and partly to accept the communal framing that's informed Hindu, nationalist and political Islamist narratives about the violence. 496 00:55:31,300 --> 00:55:38,770 Conceptual areas also pose other difficulties. Identities at the core of the individual, but it is also at the core of the collective, 497 00:55:39,700 --> 00:55:45,010 and this property of identity enables a movement from inner truth to social category, 498 00:55:45,280 --> 00:55:50,110 from personal experience to group affiliation, from psychology to sociology. 499 00:55:50,800 --> 00:55:54,430 The concept wraps around two ontologically different entities, 500 00:55:55,180 --> 00:56:00,580 so we can slide without friction from talking about group things to talking about personal things. 501 00:56:01,360 --> 00:56:09,459 And much contemporary theory also slides from talking about real institutions to talking about structures that are linguistic, 502 00:56:09,460 --> 00:56:16,470 but inclusively something else as well. So what, for example, does it mean to call whiteness a structure? 503 00:56:18,170 --> 00:56:26,719 Similarly, as the political scientist Adolf Reed has said, reducing the social formation to a few axes of oppression tells us virtually nothing about 504 00:56:26,720 --> 00:56:32,060 the phenomenology of oppression that might be experienced by those whom those axes represent. 505 00:56:33,410 --> 00:56:38,299 And analysis also typically oscillates between incompatible positions stable substance, 506 00:56:38,300 --> 00:56:43,790 contingent creation, wholeness, fragmentation, homogeneity, or division. 507 00:56:45,400 --> 00:56:51,190 Identities must be deep enough to matter, but not so deep that accusations of essentialism start flying about. 508 00:56:52,260 --> 00:56:55,620 Yet identities are regularly treated as deep and substantive, 509 00:56:55,860 --> 00:57:02,489 certainly durable enough to support large claims about vast spans of historical and geographical space, 510 00:57:02,490 --> 00:57:09,930 such as coloniality or trans historical structures of power such as the heterosexual matrix or all Western knowledge and truth, 511 00:57:09,930 --> 00:57:13,530 as in much decolonial theory. And these tensions are not incidental. 512 00:57:13,530 --> 00:57:19,709 They're constitutive of much academic identitarian thought, including queer, decolonial and critical race theory, 513 00:57:19,710 --> 00:57:25,410 all of which deny the essentialism of identities while affirming identities of the most absolutist kinds. 514 00:57:26,220 --> 00:57:32,310 In this sense, left identitarian ism is what happens when supposed anti essentialism becomes 515 00:57:32,310 --> 00:57:37,080 institutionalised and the theoretical problems aren't here just about essentialism, 516 00:57:37,380 --> 00:57:45,360 but about reification. Now, not everything that matters is identity shaped, and not everything identity shaped matters, 517 00:57:46,140 --> 00:57:49,500 and a robust critical orientation to identity needs to be maintained. 518 00:57:49,710 --> 00:57:54,540 How does it come into being? Which institutions and groups and powers are creating it? 519 00:57:54,720 --> 00:58:00,960 Who benefits from it? Who loses? What interest does it serve and what does it conceal? 520 00:58:02,060 --> 00:58:10,350 And the broader challenges are formidable. So for sociology, I don't think we can return to what is often referred to as colour-blind liberalism, 521 00:58:10,800 --> 00:58:13,410 or ignore identity in favour of class and economy, 522 00:58:13,830 --> 00:58:19,530 or propose a return to universalism without incorporating the darker histories of universalist projects. 523 00:58:20,310 --> 00:58:27,090 The difficult tightrope is that it shouldn't be the job of intellectual work to critically, uncritically affirm identities, 524 00:58:27,600 --> 00:58:32,580 but the human rights of identity groups who have come under genuine attack have to be defended. 525 00:58:33,920 --> 00:58:34,820 Thank you for listening to me.