`T he worst thing one can do with words,'' wrote George Orwell a half a century ago,``is to surrender to them.'' If language is to be``an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought,'' he continued, one must``let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.'' 1 The argument of this article is that the social sciences and humanities have surrendered to the word`i dentity''; that this has both intellectual and political costs; and that we can do better.``Identity,'' we argue, tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity). We take stock of the conceptual and theoretical work``identity'' is supposed to do and suggest that this work might be done better by other terms, less ambiguous, and unencumbered by the reifying connotations of``identity.''

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The papers in this volume were first presented to a Wenner-Gren Foundation conference held in Mijas, Spain, in November 1988. A roughly equal number of historians and anthropologists with different regional expertise were invited to rethink what frameworks and themes the anthropology of colonialism should entail.' Our goal was to bring metropole and colony into a single analytic field, overcoming the tendency of the one to go out of focus as the other comes in. We hoped to maintain a global perspective while probing the more intimate reaches of colonial power relations at the same time. Anthropologists have been most concerned with the consequences of conquest for the colonized and its impact on indigenous social and economic organization. Despite anthropology's successful efforts to move away from the isolated community studies of earlier generations, we still tend to treat colonialism as an abstract process, and focus more on the agency of those subject to colonial rule than on the agency of those who carried it out. For their part, historians of Africa and Asia have, since the 19605, tried to distance themselves from the assumptions of an earlier tradition of imperial history, seeking to establish the integrity and dynamics of non-Western societies and the complexity of their reactions to European political and economic dominance. Neither discipline has explored deeply how the rulers of empire reexamined their own hegemony in the face of the divisions within their own camp and the challenges from the people they were trying to rule. In refocusing the attention of the conference on the tensions among colonizers and between them and the colonized, we began from the premise that even these categories were not fixed but problematic, contested, and changing. Colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent. Against the power which they projected across the globe and against their claim to racial, cultural, or technological dominance, closer investigation reveals competing agendas for using power, competing strategies for maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the venture. It i s not clear that the idea of ruling an empire captivated European publics for more than brief periods, or that a coherent set of agendas and strategies for rule was convincing to a broad metropolitan population, any more than the terms in which regimes articulated their power inspired awe or conviction among a broad range of the colonized. Although the agents of colonization-officials, missionaries, and entrepreneurs-possessed seemingly immense culture-defining capacity, more and more evidence is emerging of the anxiety of colonizers lest tensions among themselves over class, gender, and competing visions of the kind of colonialism they wished to build fracture the facade. Scholars are uncovering conflicting conceptions of morality and progress, which shaped formal debates as well as subterranean discourses among high and low-level officials, technical specialists, planters, farmers, merchants, missionaries, and subord...