The Lies That Bind

Among the most significant elements of your bodily hexis, Bourdieu thought, were habits of using your mouth; people acquire a distinctive accent, a recognizable way of speaking, that reflects dimensions of their social identity

He saw the habitus as grounded in the distinctive way in which a person used his or her body, what he called the “bodily hexis,” “a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking

But among the most significant things people do with identities is use them as the basis of hierarchies of status and respect and of structures of power.

People who give reasons like these—“Because I’m a this, I should do that”—are not just accepting the fact that the label applies to them; they are giving what a philosopher would call “normative significance” to their membership in that group. They’re saying that the identity matters for practical life: for their emotions and their deeds. And one of the commonest ways in which it matters is that they feel some sort of solidarity with other members of the group. Their common identity gives them reason, they think, to care about and help one another. It creates what you could call norms of identification: rules about how you should behave, given your identity

One further reason that’s true is the third feature all identities share: not only does your identity give you reasons to do things, it can

My main message about the five forms of identity that take us from Chapter Two to Chapter Six is, in effect, that we are living with the legacies of ways of thinking that took their modern shape in the nineteenth century, and that it is high time to subject them to the best thinking of the twenty-first. The European and American intellectuals who founded modern anthropology in the later nineteenth century tended to think of religion as centrally about the things we believe; and that idea has percolated into the general culture. But I’m going to argue that at the heart of religious life across space and time are matters other than creed. And, once you see that creeds are not so central, you’ll also have to accept that scriptures—as sources of belief—matter less than many people think

For much of my adult life, three features have mattered most when I meet someone for the first time: I am a man, I am not white, and I speak what used to be called the Queen’s English. These are matters of gender, race, class, and nation

I’ve set myself the task in this book of discussing some of the ideas that have shaped the modern rise of identity and trying to see some of the mistakes we regularly make about identities more clearly