Adam Kuper

He spoke today at a debate in school. Provoked all sorts of emotional responses with people even calling him a "fascist anthropologist", among other undeserving names. Thoughtful intelligent gentleman who looks like Harisson Ford. I shoke his hand. My latest hero. lol. :)

excerpts from another forum..

"This question of identity is an interesting one in relation to this; it's a new kind of question. People out in the world there are looking for their identities. I don't know if any of you have this problem, you wake up in the night, 'Who am I?' It's a sort of adolescent problem that many people have evidently carried on into adult life. It hasn't bothered me for a long time but people have this problem, 'Who am I?' - and the answer is, the answer we're supposed to find, is that I find my identity when I find what group I belong to. And there can only be one group. So I discover I am gay. Or I discover that I am Muslim. I make this discovery, and then I search out my group, and I adopt the ways of thinking, the prejudices, the views, the manner of speaking and so on of this group, and then I have found my identity, I've found my place in the world and from then on I can be happy and fulfilled as a human being.

The reality, as Bonnie said of course, is that we all contain multitudes. We are all sorts of different people all the time, we're in different contexts, we have different notions, we contradict ourselves, we play with one idea rather than another. What we don't want is for someone to look at us and say 'I know who you are, I can tell who you are by your accent, by your colour or by your hairstyle, I know who you are and so I know a whole range of things about you, I can put you in your box.' That, of course, is very dangerous and a degenerate way of dealing with other human beings. So I am a liberal, I take the liberal point of view that what matters is allowing the greatest possible freedom for individual choice and individual self-expression, and also the freedom to change, so I am very much against all collective attributions of identity, and I'm against all sorts of movements that demand from an individual solidarity with a group with which they have some kind of imaginery identity."

(taken from www.kenanmalik.com)