Endo-identity

Calling it a magical word is precise rather than dismissive. Magical words in this framework are words whose usage is unrelated to their meaning in universal reality, used to create an endogroup or endoreality, and an endo-identity is one of them. What it accomplishes is enabling exclusive membership, marking a group as exceptional and creating or highlighting difference, and Marsh's example is state citizenship. The United States began with no clear endo-identity either before or after independence, which is her demonstration that identities are assembled rather than discovered. The formation follows a pattern. The endo-identity first casts as wide a circle as possible in order to gather as much exceptional credit and victimhood under its umbrella as it can, and anyone refusing it at that stage is vilified for considering themselves exceptional or for lacking solidarity. A special identity for the inner group is created later, often significantly later. Every endo-identity generates its inverse automatically. If the endo-identity is the wealthy, the negative image is the poor, if it is the healthy the negative image is the ill and disabled, if it is the devout the negative image is the sinners. That pairing is not a side effect but the reason the word works, since an identity that excluded nobody would set nobody off as exceptional.

Constructivist accounts of identity are standard across the social sciences. Benedict Anderson's imagined communities, Eric Hobsbawm on invented tradition and Fredrik Barth's argument that ethnic groups are defined by their boundaries rather than their contents all make versions of the same point, and social identity research demonstrates in-group formation experimentally on arbitrary criteria. Marsh's version is distinguished by treating the identity as an instrument with a specified function rather than as an emergent social fact, and by the claim that the negative image is generated automatically. On her account you cannot have the identity without the scapegoat, which is a stronger position than Barth's and one that makes inclusive identity a contradiction rather than an aspiration.