This article uses ethnographic and historical data on certain pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in Jammu and Kashmir to illustrate the simultaneous or consecutive use of a variety of cultural features in the construction, maintenance and manipulation of identity. It describes and analyses the context specific uses of religion, language and so on to include as much as to exclude in various economic and political settings. The data exemplify the floating nature of identity, which enables adaptation, assimilation and accommodation to a range of historical contexts within broader regional systems of power.