Chapter 3
Given or constructed? Identity in
cultural anthropology
‘I became a black man when I arrived in England’
If ‘Who am I?’ is a tricky question, ‘Who are we?’ is hardly less troublesome,
being grounded as it is in today’s identity obsession. Humanity is one, but at the
same time divided into multiple groups. Scattered around the globe, humans
exhibit many variations in terms of race, language, religion, descent and kinship,
residential patterns, use of tools, dress, diet, and so on. These features constitute
‘ethnicity’, marking what seem to be clear distinctions; yet their usefulness for a
coherent classification is limited. They are contingent, and hence subject to
perpetual change, and they are vague, allowing for partial and shifting
attachment. What is more, how we see ourselves often does not match how
others see us.
Writer Inua Ellams made the point succinctly. In autumn 2017, his Barber Shop
Chronicles was staged in London to considerable acclaim. The play tackles the
‘African male’, or rather the peculiarly homogeneous idea of the African male in
the UK. In a newspaper interview, Ellams remarked, ‘I became a black man
when I arrived in England’. He is a black man, but during his childhood in
Nigeria, his blackness was never an issue. It had no important role in the
formation of his identity; in England, it became a central part of it.
Ethnographic imagination
Cultural anthropology, a natural child of Western colonialism, has for decades