Promos suggest you can choose your identity. Join a tour to Kurdistan and you can become an adventurer. Buy a Don Bradman cricket bat and you can become a cricketer.
Buy an Aussie flag, sing loudly about boundless plains, and you can become a dinky di Aussie. Write a few colourful Malawis, Russians, Andorrans and Afghanis into your novel, and you can become a best seller. Choose, buy and compete. The only questions are about rights and price.
Identity, however, is more subtle. It is formed by the significant relationships — to the human race, to body, to place of birth and of living, to language, to the significant adults of childhood, to possessions, to education and work, to hobbies, religions and political parties and to all the people met through these relationships.
These relationships and the people met through them form the layers of our identity. In each layer we are linked to other people who differ from us. The members of our netball team, for example, may differ from us in religion, political adherence, nation of birth, wealth and so on. But through them we are connected to people who share these layers of their identity.
Some of these layers are given, not chosen. We are human beings; we are born with distinctive bodies and temperaments; we grow up in a place and language, with parents or significant adults, and with early education that we did not choose.
Others layers, formed around religion, political persuasion, educational level, cultural interests, social position and nationality, for example, we can choose and change. But in changing them we do not lose previous layers of our identity. They continue to shape us.
What we can choose and change, though, is how we identify ourselves, indicating which layer of our identity that we believe central and that we allow to control the people we meet, the books we read and what will matter to us. It orders the layers of our identity.
When we identify ourselves as a Buddhist, a socialist, a doctor, an entrepreneur, we shall form relationships and develop interests that over time layer our identity in distinctive ways.
"Cultural appropriation is not best thought of as a market. It is about exploring and building relationships. The test of legitimacy will be whether the appropriation expresses and encourages respect."
But the ways in which we identify ourselves can also be shallow or passing. Adolescents might try on successively being a