Identity and Repertoires: From Sources to Resources

• In Event: 022 - Student Forum Paper Session. Identity, Meaning Making, and Movement

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to make more explicit a facet often under-specified in the sociological study of culture and identity—how culturally-specific sources such as values, meanings, material objects, and narratives are mobilized in identity practices, and become resources for identity that are consciously deployed to support the attainment, performance, and maintenance of an identity. Resources for identity will be considered those material and symbolic facets of everyday life without which one could not attain nor maintain a given identity. I will use two main concepts in explicating this thesis: 1) Repertoires of Identity: a tool-kit of routinized identity performances that may be deployed to further various goals, both instrumental and value-laden; 2) Repertoires of Identification: a tool-kit of cultural and material resources deployed in the situated construction of identity and in identity projects. In the process, I hope to show the inter-connectedness of symbolic and material resources, and how these resources support identity as both a capacity and a practical accomplishment.

Author

• Scott Beck, New School for Social Research