Change and continuity in the techniques and technologies of identification over the second Christian millennium

This paper looks at the history of identification in England over the past 1,000 years. It contends that techniques and technologies of identification do not identify a single entity but a number of forms of personality, including the juridical person, the citizen and the deviant. Individuals can be the bearers of more than one of these personalities at the same time, or over the course of their life. These personalities are created by social performances to which people are trained to reactconventionally. As such identity, and its identification, is a social and culturalphenomenon, rather than a ‘thing’. Each of the personalities noted above has beenidentified historically in differing ways -through possessions or techniques in thecase of the juridical person, though the community in the case of the citizen, and on, or through, the body in the case of the deviant. In the contemporary world thesedistinctions are being effaced, as all forms of identification are being reduced to thebody and the database. This levelling of social forms of being has implication forwhat it means to be a person in our society, and for public perceptions of newtechniques and technologies of identification