What scholars are committed to in principle is not always what they are likely to uphold in practice. Adam T. Smith examines – and deplores – the striking discrepancy between the centrality of the constructivist idiom in a variety of disciplines and the tendency of archaeologists to continue to treat archaeological subjects (be they ethnic groups, classes, nations, races, cultures or any other kind of identity group) as given entities and stable units of analysis. Smith's concern is not merely about the consistency of the discipline's theoretical underpinnings. In fact, his greatest worry turns out to be political: an archaeology that reconstitutes, rather than deconstructs, the essential subject may be wrongly used as a foundation for contemporary political action (such as nationalism). Thus he invites archaeologists to revise the relationship between scholarly analysis and political practice. Smith not only suggests taking into full account the malleability of identity groups in relation to changing sociopolitical contexts, but he also incites scholars to bend their minds to the sociopolitical circumstances within which seemingly stable categories of identity are produced. Archaeologists should be careful not to ‘essentialize’ identities, he concludes, but instead shift their attention to exposing the strategic practices deployed by those who do ‘essentialize’ identities.