Varieties of Place Identity
In the 21st century, it is increasingly less likely that a person's identity to place will be singular and fixed. Identities may with multiple places, dynamic, and often reconstructed. For instance, people may have more than one national identity. Dual national identity is apparent in World Cup football, for example, where some players have a choice of playing for the team of the country in which they were born or the team where their parents or grandparents were born. Or identity may have official status and be reinforced by state processes, such as a decennial census. The vagaries of ethnic classification can give rise to constructed pan-ethnicities (Hawkins 2007), where the place of origin is generalized to a broad region that actually encompasses enormous ethnic diversity (e.g., the African American, Hispanic, Native American and Asian-Pacific Islander designations made by the US Census Bureau). We will focus here on two important concepts: transnational and supranational identities.
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Date last modified: October 8, 2009.
NSF Project (AAG,Texas State, Northern Colorado)