From studying regional discourse elsewhere, I recognize Jacquelyn's essay as a fascinating hybrid of two genres that are usually kept separate: regional analysis and regional rhetoric. In other words, it is at once an insightful meditation on local identity and a compelling illustration of how those identities can be mobilized. As if to prove her point that regional identity is "half-chosen, half-imposed," Jacquelyn shows us just where the power of choice lies: in the way she arranges the raw data of the regional past to make them meaningful.

Being a historian, Jacquelyn draws our attention mainly to the temporal axis of this arranging. Her emphasis is on the way we narrate and remember a place—which of its many stories we single out to tell and what morals we elect to draw from those stories. But similar choices are made in a spatial dimension as well. Regions are not just narrated; they are also framed (at a particular scale) and positioned (in relationship to a wider world). In particular, regional discourse always locates the region vis-à-vis the nation. What makes "Landscapes of the Heart" unusual in this sense is not that it yokes Southern identity to a larger debate over American identity but that it does so in such an overt and inclusive way.

I think it is this inclusiveness that makes Jacquelyn's essay so moving. "Landscapes of the Heart" implicates its readers in the regional complexities it analyzes in a way that is simultaneously personal and political. In a few lyrical paragraphs, Jacquelyn manages to do something that is rare in academic prose: create a moral relationship between her subject, herself, and her audience. And not just her Southern audience either. Insisting that the "vexed and painful, yet precious, pasts" of the South lay a claim on all Americans, she draws even outsiders like me into the conversation, transforming the struggle over Southern identity into a struggle over American identity as a whole.

What makes this doubly provocative is the daunting challenge it implicitly sets up for writing and teaching—one that is arguably more difficult to pull off in my corner of the academic world. "Landscapes of the Heart" offers a powerful model of scholarship as encounter, an encounter that pulls both the researcher and reader (or teacher and student) into a dynamic, passionate encounter with the past. The premise of that encounter, in Jacquelyn's case, is identification. For a Southerner who teaches Southern history in a Southern university, that may be a good strategy. But what about those of us who work on far-flung people and places? Can we area-studies scholars align ourselves with our subjects and students in a way that sets up comparably rich resonances between the personal, the professional, and the political?

There may be no easy answers to that question. In my experience, scholarship-as-encounter in the Japanese history classroom is both hard to invoke and tricky to manage. Asian landscapes are inaccessible to most of my students as "landscapes of the heart"; often, they barely exist as landscapes of the mind. And generating a sense of relationship to a largely unknown place requires crossing many different distances at once.

To my knowledge, there are three strategies for collapsing those distances. One is to frame our work in global terms, emphasizing comparisons and encounters between the West and the Rest. To the extent that we can link our selves, our subjects, and our students on a common world-historical map, we too may be able to invoke a shared past. There is nothing new in this; many if not all area-studies scholars find both comparative and connective approaches indispensable tools of the trade. Yet neither goes all the way; neither fully implicates "us" in the stories we tell.

For that, we may need to experiment more with the confessional mode of Jacquelyn's scholarship, the art of weaving (auto)biography into our work. On the one hand, that means reconstructing for our readers and students the paths through which we found our way to a lifetime of learning about a distant place. On the other hand, it may also mean mapping the terrain of our profession: its genealogies, its debates, its generational twists and turns. Professional identities, after all, are like regional identities in being "half-chosen, half-imposed"; and we can foreground the choices as well as the impositions. Putting these choices into the picture may allow us, too, to spark personal encounters in our work and in our classrooms.

Interweaving the history of our professions with the history of our areas has a final advantage as well: it opens the door to showing how scholarly debates in area studies are implicitly debates over America's place in the world. While the Japanese past may well seem remote to many of my students, the issues that have animated the study of that past on American campuses are much more familiar. Jacquelyn's essay inspires me to try to keep those issues constantly in view and to insist that talk about the global—like talk about the local—is always also talk about American identity.

Kären Wigen is an associate professor in the Department of History at Duke University. Her current research concerns the history of regionalism in the Japanese Alps. Her recent publications include The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920; "Geographic Perspectives in Early Modern Japanese History: Retrospect and Prospect," Journal of Asian Studies; and "Politics and Piety in Japanese Native-Place Studies: The Rhetoric of Solidarity in Shinano," in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique.

What did my grandmother mean? She never said, but I gather she and others like her meant "who" not so much in terms of personal identity as social identity—family, perhaps implicitly class or community position, perhaps race, too. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin's struggle doubtless was framed by some such identity in terms of natal background. Her identity was, by objective standards, secure, yet it was also subjectively fragile and "contested," if for no other reason than that white Southern identity is always suspect.

This leads to the question of how identities develop. The current emphasis on constructivism (the claim that identities are culturally constructed) underestimates the deep power of shared identities, just as essentialism (the claim that identities emerge from almost primordial collective histories) leads to an overly rigid or reductive sense of how individuals actually construct their own sense of self. Identity is, as Jacquelyn notes about her own, "half-chosen, half-imposed."

This phrase deserves unpacking, especially since it was the crux of many discussions during the Sawyer Seminar. Jacquelyn states a constructivist position in stressing her "conviction that 'the South' is not a fixed geographic place but a construct, an idea, a metanarrative in which Northerners and Southerners have colluded." Of course, this is true, and it is the necessary, but not sufficient, corrective to a sense of one's identity as primordial or fully rather than half-imposed. Fashionably punny phrases such as "there's no place like Heimat" deflate claims for dangerously primordial identities of place in ideologies such as Nazism, and Jacquelyn's commentary helps deflate similar claims for Southerners. But does it go too far?

A comparative perspective can help. Take, for example, William Faulkner and the South. An anthropologist is struck by the ghosts of classic tribal themes in the works of Faulkner, who writes about the incest taboo in The Sound and the Fury and about totemism in As I Lay Dying. I refer to the deep mutual attraction of brother and sister, Caddy and Quentin, in the first of these novels and the images of people in the second: "My mother is a fish...."

The ghosts are not exactly living, to be sure, yet the power of incest taboos and totemism shows that the ancient "primordial" ghosts of our identities may still be with us. What is explicit and institutionally prescribed in tribal societies—prescriptions and proscriptions regarding marriage and incest, categorical equations between humans and animals—is an implicit, whispered underculture in Faulkner's South, more psychological tendency than institutional structure.

But wait! What about the contemporary ghosts? Comparatively speaking, the Southern family resembles the standard Euro-American, nuclear family, but it also celebrates themes of clan and blood, which are part myth and part truth. Who you are becomes, therefore, a vexed question, perhaps gaining power through its complex social history. But psychoanalysis and, especially, modern psychology miss the point (and, worse, often misguide) by failing to capture the institutional or social aspects of identities, while anthropology errs by making all identities into the mechanical outcome of culture. Perhaps history, as Jacquelyn suggests, will hit the right balance between individual psychology and the shaping power of culture.

But only if she avoids the limited and too narrow fashions of constructivism (which lack a comparative perspective). The problem for Lumpkin as for anyone who tries to transcend the deep social and cultural framework of the South—almost clan, almost community, almost ethnicity—is to escape the primordial ghosts.

The challenge for Jacquelyn Hall and for us is that we cannot exorcise these ghosts by pretending they are mere "constructs." If we are to affirm a vision of the South as a place for "national redemption" or multicultural memories and visions, we must discover a foundation that is at once firmer than a "construct" and more flexible than an ur-sein.

This leads to the twin themes in Jacquelyn's commentary: memory and globalism. As an anthropologist who directs an international studies center, I deploy the term "grounded globalism" or "GlobGro," whose fertilizer-like imagery connotes the organic bond between global and grounded identity. The South is poised, I suggest, to leapfrog over its tortured oppositional identity, vis-à-vis the nation, and assume an identity as part of a wider world, with which it has not had a history (memory) of antipathy like it has had with the North and the nation.

The notion of identity is essential for the mission of the humanities in this runaway world. The humanities give people identities by sustaining human memory, history, values, culture, and a sense of place—all of which have been sensitively explored by Jacquelyn and other members of the Sawyer Seminar at a National Humanities Center that is surrounded by the globalizing forces of the Research Triangle Park.

James Peacock is Kenan Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the university's Center for International Studies. His fieldwork in Southeast Asia and the United States includes studies of proletarian culture in Surabaja, Indonesia, of Muslim reformation in Southeast Asia, and of primitive Baptists. His present research is on religion in Appalachia and the South and Southeast Asia in relation to history and memory. Among numerous works, he is the author of The Anthropological Lens and "American Cultural Values: Disorders and Challenges," in Diagnosing America: Anthropology and Public Engagement, edited by Shepard Foreman.

Who, if anyone, has the right to tell someone else what that person’s “identity” is? What principles determine identity? A remarkable feature of the identity debates in the United States is how little systematic attention has been given to these questions, even while plenty of people are quick to ascribe to others the essence of their identities.

Identity, whatever else it may be, is now a zone of contestation within which claims and counterclaims concerning an individual’s social character and obligations press against each other. Whether identity is understood as monolithic or multiple, enduring or contingent, it is also understood to be performative: one’s identity carries implications for the distribution of one’s affections and resources and energies, and for the claims one can make on the affections and resources and energies of others. Hence, the choosing or ascribing of an identity entails the distribution of solidarity. No wonder identity is often felt to be too important to be left to individual choice. Even many who favor “reproductive choice” are uncomfortable with “identity choice.”

By convention, we as a society decide identity largely on the basis of two related considerations: (1) the physical evidence of skin color and morphological traits and (2) the historical evidence that these physical features determine so much of any individual’s social destiny that they must be central to identity. So comfortable are we ascribing identities on these bases that when we encounter persistent self-identification in conflict with the marks of physical descent, we take it as false or wrong. One can’t pretend to have a differently shaped and hued body than one has! And isn’t it immoral to diminish solidarity with those with whom one shares a social destiny, even if that destiny is in large part the product of prejudicial treatment at the hands of empowered racists?

We resist generally the substitution of civic-nationalist identities (“I’m an American”) and religious identities (“I’m a Christian”) for descent-community identities, apparently because such substitutions seem to be evasions of primal truths and thus serve to invite further victimization of peoples whose ultimate interests are served by solidarity with their community of descent. We seem the most willing to accept multiple identities when there is a clear hierarchy placing identity by descent-community first (ahead of identities by religion, civic nationality, sexual orientation, professional calling, etc.); and we seem the most willing to accept individual choice when it validates social expectations created by the physical marks of descent.

Persons comfortable with these conventions should be urged to defend them. If individuals are to be assigned identities against their will, exactly how can this practice be justified, and in what specific contexts? If individual will is not a sufficiently authoritative basis for identity, to whom does the authority to ascribe identity belong and why, and on the basis of what considerations do the ascribers assign the right identities to individuals? Are physical characteristics to be allowed to continue forever their traditional ordinance over culture?

David Hollinger is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center. His books include Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995).