This book explores how identities emerge, persist and change and which power resources are tapped in the course of this process -- topics that are of great importance in academic and popular debates today. The thrust of this collection of papers from experts in various fields is two-sided, cutting against both the post-modern view of identity as merely a shifting assemblage of images and categories marketed through the media and the view of identity as something fixed and rooted in primordial authenticity. The contributors illustrate the dynamics of identification as performance and narrative, as power and meaning, and as an interplay between self and other, difference and similarity.