Thanks to a fruitful convergence among many disciplines, contemporary sciences now offer us a comprehensive history of humanity capable of outlining the timing and methods of major migrations. Human cultures are autonomous yet interdependent. Absolute cultural purity has never existed. On the contrary, cultures evolve and continually emerge within a network of communications, interactions, and hybridizations, in a dynamic tension of openings and closures.
In this context, we uncover the new relevance of a term that is now present in all political, social, historical, and anthropological debates—identity. This term is the battleground for two highly divergent, if not opposing, conceptions. "Identity" can be a means to reduce the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, the dynamic to the static, the flexible to the rigid, when understood as a slogan that imposes separating the superfluous from the essential, purifying and cleansing, as seen in the most brutal conflicts—national, ethnic, or religious.
However, "identity" can also be an invitation to discover what civilizations have truly been nourished by. We would then find that pure identities do not exist and that all nations are the result of complex alchemies among histories, narratives, ideas, and traditions originating from different spaces and times.
In this framework, every individual appears of inestimable value: each person is a site of intertwining and meeting between different identities and narratives, an irreplaceable laboratory for the reproduction and expansion of the human experience as a whole.
