Fabricating Identities pairs early career scholars with members of Culture on the Edge, to explore how social actors identify themselves through their practices and associations. The book is arranged in a series of articles and commentaries that all press the model of seeing what we usually call identity as the result of a series of identifications-actions and circumstances that enable us to understand ourselves as related to others in specific ways. Changing relations result in changing senses of identity. With an introduction and substantive theoretical afterword, the book's brief main chapters make it an ideal conversation-starter in classes or primer for those wishing to rethink how we normally talk about identity.
Russell T. McCutcheon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. His major publications include Manufacturing Religion (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Guide to the Study of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2000), Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2001) and The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (Routledge, 2003). His most recent book, co-authored with William Arnal, is The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of 'Religion' (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Russell T McCutcheon