The Vicissitudes of Identity*

Two or three months ago I mentioned I was to give the opening address to this conference2 and was asked what I was going to say. I found myself replying: “Just, three words: Cain murdered Abel”. The message was: “there's not enough room in this world for both of us”. That was the story when the world was a much smaller place and it's the same story today.

It is a story that has always interested me. As a boy I wondered whether Cain and Abel must have married their sisters, as Adam and Eve were the only other people on earth, or was it the serpent that begat Cain? The obvious point about this story is that the two brothers made their offerings to the Lord: Cain, “the tiller of the soil”, offered his “fruit of the ground” and Abel, as the keeper of sheep, offered his “firstlings and the fat thereof”. The Lord made his preference plain. It is the first recorded example of envy and jealousy: Cain's envy of what Abel had and he lacked; and jealousy of his relationship with the Lord. And who's to blame the Lord when he's faced with the choice between some straggly sheaves of corn as against sizzling barbecued lamb “and the fat thereof”? Perhaps the Lord was also communicating that grazing sheep and goats might give better added value than trying to grow corn on the stony ground outside Eden.3

However, the theme from this story I want to take up today is that of identity. Cain's experience was of having two significant identities suddenly taken away or denigrated: that of an elder brother and as an agriculturalist. First, seniority didn't count: and secondly, the tiller of the soil was devalued: the future belonged to the pastoralist. Sometimes we have identities that we value taken away like this and sometimes we have imposed on us identities that we're not comfortable with. Thus the primary task of this conference asks me to mobilize a national identity and its structure asks me to represent an institution. What