Identity

A friend sent me the link to a video today that reminded me of Amin Maalouf’s In The Name of Identity.

Maalouf keeps reiterating that we are not born but rather made - and that we make and remake ourselves - in relation to the world in which we live and the choices that it presents to us. It is a point that bears repeating, he says, because a failure to recognize the fluidity, multiplicity and malleability of identity is not only misguided but also dangerous. The danger is twofold. First, a failure to recognize the complexity, the multi-dimensionality of the Other makes their dehumanization easier. Second, imposing on the Other a rigid, singular (and usually inferior) identity will provoke them, in anger and defiance, to pick up arms to ‘assert their identity.’ This, he says, is how ordinary men are “transformed into butchers.”

Amin Maalouf’s In The Name Of Identity, subtitled Violence And The Need To Belong has been by translated from French into English by Barbara Bray and published by Penguin Books.

  

After seeing the video, I looked up Moira Kelly (no, not the actress). To read more about her, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moira_Kelly_(humanitarian)