Key concept: identity practice questions.

Bourgois described young men selling crack in East Harlem in the late 1980s who had taken and then abandoned low-paid office jobs downtown, because the deference those jobs demanded clashed with the standing they held on their own street. In his account, street identity is best understood as

• an inherited set of neighbourhood values passed on unchanged from one generation to the next
• a personal preference formed independently of what the wider labour market offered these men
• a claim to respect made under conditions of structural exclusion
• evidence that the men lacked the schooling that office employment required of applicants

Answer: a claim to respect made under conditions of structural exclusion

Bourgois treats identity as something produced in the encounter between people and the structures that exclude them, not as a trait the neighbourhood transmits. Reading the case as a skills deficit reverses his argument, which is that respect on the street was the resource that low-wage work destroyed.

Boellstorff carried out participant observation inside the virtual world Second Life between 2004 and 2007, taking part in its economy, festivals and disputes through an avatar. Which claim about identity does his fieldwork most directly support?

• Identities can be built and sustained where participants share no physical location
• Online personas are disguises that conceal a person's one real offline identity
• Identity becomes socially real only where people meet face to face over time
• Virtual settings cannot be studied by the methods developed for village fieldwork

Answer: Identities can be built and sustained where participants share no physical location

Boellstorff studied Second Life in its own terms rather than tracing residents offline, precisely to show that a field site need not be a place on a map. The common error is to treat the avatar as a mask over a 'real' self, which assumes the very fixity that the concept of identity questions.

Abu-Lughod recorded ghinnawa poems among Awlad 'Ali Bedouin in Egypt's Western Desert in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In these short poems women and young men voiced longing, grief and dependency that the public code of modesty and autonomy did not permit them to state openly. The material supports the argument that

• the modesty code had already collapsed among Awlad 'Ali by the period of her fieldwork
• poetry gives an ethnographer direct and unmediated access to what informants really feel
• one of the two registers must be insincere, since a person cannot hold both positions at once
• identity is enacted differently across settings rather than held as one fixed self

Answer: identity is enacted differently across settings rather than held as one fixed self

Abu-Lughod's point is that the poetic register and the public register are both genuine, each appropriate to its setting, so a person's identity is plural and situational. Treating one register as the truth behind the other reimposes the single unified self that her material undoes.

Writing in 1969, Barth argued that anthropologists had been asking the wrong question about ethnic groups, because groups persisted even as the customs, dress and language of their members changed. On his account an ethnic group is identified by

• the boundary its members maintain against others
• the bundle of shared cultural traits that its members hold in common with each other
• the descent its members can demonstrate through documented genealogical connection
• the territory that its members have occupied for longer than any neighbouring group

Answer: the boundary its members maintain against others

Barth shifted attention from cultural content to boundary maintenance: what matters is the ascription of membership and the rules for crossing, not a checklist of traits. Defining ethnicity by descent or by traits treats it as a natural fact rather than a social relation.

Mahmood attended women's mosque lessons in Cairo in the mid-1990s, where participants worked deliberately at prayer, dress and the management of feeling in order to become modest and pious, and described this as difficult work they had chosen. Her argument about agency is that

• the women's agency lay in those moments when they quietly departed from what their teachers prescribed
• agency need not take the form of resistance, since cultivating a norm can itself be an exercise of it
• the concept does not apply here, because the women had accepted the authority of religious teachers
• the women were exercising agency only in so far as they remained unaware of the tradition shaping their conduct

Answer: agency need not take the form of resistance, since cultivating a norm can itself be an exercise of it

Mahmood's target is the assumption that agency shows itself only in subversion, which makes any woman who works at conformity invisible as an actor. Her cases are of deliberate, effortful self-formation towards a norm — an exercise of capacity, not its absence.

Gomberg-Muñoz worked with a group of undocumented Mexican men employed as busboys in a Chicago restaurant. They cultivated a reputation for working faster and complaining less than anyone else on the staff, and spoke of that reputation with pride. Her account reads this as

• evidence that the men had fully internalised their employer's view of them and no longer noticed the conditions
• a straightforward description of a work ethic the men had brought with them from rural Mexico
• a claim to dignity made in the one register available to workers who cannot make legal claims
• proof that undocumented workers are in fact more productive than documented workers doing the same job

Answer: a claim to dignity made in the one register available to workers who cannot make legal claims

The reputation is a resource: it secures shifts, protects against denunciation and supplies a source of self-respect where the labour law that others invoke is out of reach. Reading it as internalisation or as an imported trait both miss that it is produced by the men's legal position in Chicago.