Religious Identities and Religious Institutions 211
fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal” (p. 76). Faced with the fluidity of bound-
aries that brings ever-changing arrays of people together, we use theatrical displays of
clothing and body art to found and reconfirm communities and recognize ourselves in
them.
His is an attempt to find a new way of understanding the order that still exists in the
midst of the seeming chaos, a chaos that appears to leave each of us to invent a new self
for each new situation and each group to an arbitrarily defined fight for recognition.
While not everyone is so sure that emerging “tribes” are potentially benign, Maffesoli
is not alone in pointing to fluidity of boundariesandto the strength of sociality and
custom. Neither selves nor groups are utterly reconstituted with each new encounter.
Some continuity clearly prevails at the same time that a complex society continually
challenges that continuity.
The tension between order and chaos, between continuity and revision, is reflected
in differing emphases in thinking about identity.^9 Some focus on fluidity and agency,
on the ways in which each new encounter leaves the world or the identity slightly (or
radically) changed. Others, following especially in the footsteps of Bourdieu (e.g. 1987),
focus on the ways in which every interaction is structured by and reinforces patterns of
difference, hierarchy, and domination, especially through categories of class, race, and
gender (Lamont and Fournier 1992).
But either such view of identity seems to me inadequate. I am unwilling to discard
the possibility that persons seek some sense of congruence within the complexity of
their lives. Nor do I believe that structured categories exist untouched by the actions
and resistance of the actors who inhabit them. What seems essential is to move beyond
the notion that any single category of experience – even race, class, or gender – defines
identity or action. Identity is not an essential, core, category, nor is it well-conceived in
binary either/or terms.^10 To be feminine does not preclude being also masculine, nor
does being “American” preclude being also “Irish” or “Hispanic.” What we need is a
way to talk about who we are and how we behave without reducing ourselves either
to a single determining structural essence or to complete chaotic indeterminacy. While
the realities of the late modern situation make analysis (and life itself) immensely com-
plex, any adequate account of identity needs an account of the ongoing coherence
that is constructed by human consciousness and the solidarity that is created by so-
cial gatherings, however temporary. In Giddens’s words, “The reflexive project of the
self...consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical
narratives” (Giddens 1991: 5). Both the coherence and the revision are central to the
process. This task is made challenging by the pluralization of our life contexts and the
diversity of authorities and power present in any society, but neither the life project
nor the analytical task can be set aside in the face of complexity.
IDENTITY AS A PROBLEM OF AGENCY AND STRUCTURE
At its root, differences over fluidity and constraint in the formation of identity grow out
of different understandings of agency and structure. To what extent and in what ways
(^9) Cerulo (1997) calls these two camps the “constructionists” and the “postmodernists.”
(^10) Minow (1997) is especially helpful in examining the political difficulties of insisting on this
middle ground between essentialism and constructionism.