Identity and Certainty

Michael Curry gave a talk at UCI recently on the idea of Identity and Certainty and how notions of how people are classified have changed over modern times. His talk is archived at the LUCI blog.

Here are the points I though were interesting:

• Identities are relatively new
• In the 18th century life was a local matter in a network of familiarity
• Communities existed in a "place"
• People's lives were rooted in particular places.
• The thinking of place only occurs when place breaks. Like when you move.
• Identity rose with the idea of a nation-state
• Now the individual is treated as the intersection of attributes.