Identity in Stasis

John was a member of the Luo tribe, according to his passport he was Kenian, though with a permanent residence in the United States, where he practiced as a Harvard trained general practitioner and he had lived the last ten years of his life in Boston. He was one of the proudest members of the Luo, and the tribe was at least as proud of him. When I met him, Obama was president for two years, while John was elaborating on his theory of self identity and advocating the importance of the tribe. He had not asked me about my tribe, he knew of course, there was no such entity in western society. I wasn't sure if he had immediately guessed my Dutch origin, but I was pretty sure that he was not aware of the tensions between the westerners, the southerners, the easterners and the Frisians, in the Netherlands. I of course am a member of the Heracleitian tribe of thought, and I do not believe in the concept of identity, or it would be in my persona as an anarchist deliberately trying to disturb all my pre-existing attachments and ideas like a Nietzschean lion. The main argument I tried to make against John's was based on Marxist principles however, where identity is the superstructure of my class origin, which is determined mostly by technology and ownership of capital, but this is a very typical belief for someone of the middle classes, and a very white and western notion, which he refuted of course.