The concept of ‘identity’, according to Taylor (1989), was unthinkable before the sixteenth century: the pre-modern, feudal era in Europe. Today, it is a heavily theorised, academic concept that is a paradigmatic product of its historical conditions, formulated and reformulated in strategic ways by the period or movement under which it arises and the preoccupations of its theorists. Early formulations of identity were the rarefied preserve of philosophers; more recently the topic has made unprecedented strides into the popular realm, permeating everyday talk and practices, from self-help literature to the pseudo-therapy of television chat shows. At the time of writing, in early 2005, an Internet search on ‘identity’ reveals a preoccupation with ‘identity fraud’, ‘identity cards’ and ‘identity theft’, all of which point to a common-sense use of the term as something that people own; a personal possession that can be authenticated or falsified.

In this chapter, we survey both diachronic and synchronic developments in identity theorising. We explore some of these introductory themes, and chart broad paradigmatic shifts in identity accounts from the sixteenth century onwards. We move from early treatments of identity as a self-fashioning, agentive, internal project of the self, through more recent understandings of social and collective identity, to postmodern accounts which treat identity as fluid, fragmentary, contingent and, crucially, constituted in discourse. The latter part of the chapter is devoted to explicating discursive accounts of identity. We propose that discursive approaches may reconcile some of the most entrenched dualisms characterising identity research.