The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

My main message about the five forms of identity that take us from Chapter Two to Chapter Six is, in effect, that we are living with the legacies of ways of thinking that took their modern shape in the nineteenth century, and that it is high time to subject them to the best thinking of the twenty-first.

The European and American intellectuals who founded modern anthropology in the later nineteenth century tended to think of religion as centrally about the things we believe; and that idea has percolated into the general culture.