Identity Crises

A mordant dismissal of the notion of 'identity crisis', found in 'Beyond 'Identity'' by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper in 29 Theory and Society (2000) 1-47 -

putative crises of identity have proliferated to the point of destroying whatever meaning the concept may once have had. … A recent bibliographical sampling revealed that “identity crises” were predicated not only of the usual suspects - above all ethnic, racial, national, gender, and sexual identities - but also of such heterogeneous subjects as 10th-century Gaul, the forestry profession, histologists, the French medical corps during the First World War, the internet, the Sonowal Kacharis, technical education in India, early childhood special education, French hospital nurses, kindergarten teachers, TV, sociology, Japan's consumer groups, the European Space Agency, Japan's MITI, the National Association of Broadcasting, Cathay Pacific Airways, Presbyterians, the CIA, universities, Clorox, Chevrolet, lawyers, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, black theology, eighteenth-century Scottish literature, and, our favorite, dermopterous fossils.