Thanks for this. I agree completely that self-perceived identity and the identity assigned to you by others are different and don’t necessarily match up. I just didn’t have much to say about self-perceived identity, since it’s by definition only accessible to a single person. Except, you also raise the issue of group vs. individual identity, and in that case there is certainly room for asking how a group is perceived by its own members. That will hopefully be the subject of a future essay, so watch this space…

You’re right that archaeologists studying identity can only attempt to reconstruct how a person was or may have been perceived; how they actually perceived of themselves we can never know. Thanks for your kind words!