Region and place: regional identity in question

Identity, a term that was not yet included in Williams’ important Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (1976), has become a major watchword since the 1980s. Traditional territorialized battles over democracy, political status/citizenship and wealth have been complicated by the struggle over ’race’, ethnicity, multiculturalism, gender, sexuality, recognition and a new symbolic economy characterized by the production/marketing of images (Isin & Wood 1999, du Gay et al. 2000, Lash & Featherstone 2002). The identity discourse has emerged concomitantly with such arguments that the world, particularly the Western world, is moving towards a ‘forced’ individualization: people’s lives are increasingly being left as their own responsibility, so that people shape their lives and environments through personal identities rather than through categorizations such as nationality, class, occupation or home region (Beck & Beck 2001). Contrary to previous arguments, however, people’s awareness of being part of the global space of flows seems to have generated a search for new points of orientation, efforts to strengthen old boundaries and to create new ones, often based on identities of resistance (Castells 1997, Meyer and Geschiere 1999, Kellner 2002). It is argued that collective action cannot occur without a distinction between ‘us’ and the ‘other’ (Della Porta & Diani 1999) but identity movements do not always base their activities on difference as it may be strategically beneficial to stress similarities (Bernstein 1997). This report will review one specific part of the complicated identity discourse, the question of regional identity. Along with the tendencies depicted above, this old idea has gained new importance not only in geography but also such fields as cultural/economic history, literature, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology and musicology. I will first reflect the premises that geographers and others have associated with this mushrooming but rarely analytically discussed category, then map the conceptual gaps, and, finally, suggest some possible avenues for further research.