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Class, identity and culture 67

While there are therefore some potential riders that need to be placed
on an overenthusiastic endorsement of Bourdieu’s account, it does provide
new and alternative ways of thinking of class, culture and identity. I will offer
some other potential issues later. However, it is worth considering further one
specific study that Devine and Savage locate in this framework. Anthias (2005)
considers what she terms the ‘intersectionality’ model of social divisions,
where ‘forms of inequality and subordination are distinctive yet interlocking’
(p. 36). While this might be contentious for older forms of class analysis or
what she terms the ‘reductionist’ model, there is, in my mind, not much to
dispute here. This can in many respects, I would argue, be taken as a safe
ground. However, as Anthias suggests, it is important to move this sort of
account from the descriptive to the more theoretical. She does this via a dis-
cussion of the ‘identity’ model. This has been an increasingly common
account and the approach that I have considered so far in this chapter has
made much of the idea of identity as has been set out. Anthias mounts a
critique of what I would see as some forms of this sort of approach. Indeed she
makes two potentionally important criticisms of this idea:
First, the concept has been expanded so much that it has lost its speci-
ficity, so it can embrace everything, for example, when shifting or mul-
tiple notions are used to correct the essentialising of earlier concepts.
Secondly, the concept always takes us back to the theoretical baggage
about communal identity as generic and fundamental in social processes.
Whilst acknowledging that people’s notions of belonging are important
social facts, we cannot presuppose that they are always necessary or
determining elements in collective placement or action.
(Anthias 2005: 39)
While, on the face of it, these are potentially significant points, it is
not clear that they represent a critique of the concept of identity itself, rather
than of particular uses of it and the slippages that are involved. That is to say
this is not a necessary implication of the concept itself. This seems to be the
case when the important way in which she develops her argument is con-
sidered. This involves attention to ideas of belonging. ‘“Where do I belong?” is
a recurrent thought, however, for most of us. Asking this question is usually
prompted by a feeling that there are a range of spaces, places, locales and
identities that we do not and cannot belong to’ (Anthias 2005: 39). Thus in
rejecting a form of identity approach it is possible to retain an emphasis on the
issues that a sociological attention to processes of identity suggest and to
divorce this attention from particular modes of identity politics. Thus, Anthias
proposes that focus should fall on ‘narratives of location’ and positionality: ‘A
narrative is an account that tells a story and a narrative of location, as it is used
here, is an account that tells a story about how we place ourselves in terms
of social categories, such as those of gender, ethnicity and class at a specific
point in time and space’ (p. 42). It is further important to recognize that such
narratives involve ‘a rejection of what one is not rather than a clear and
unambiguous formulation of what one is’ (p. 43). These are points that inform
the idea of elective belonging and, moreover, some of the other arguments of
this book, as: