2. Self & Person: What am I

This week we explore the concept of "individual".  It seeems 'natural' to me that I am individual. But social scientists treat the individual as a recent cultural invention; a mythical creation. To help you understand this, the objective of this section is to 'denaturalize' the idea that you are an individual.

The Individual

In this section, we are going to develop reflexivity further by challenging Western notions of self.

What is the self?  When you say “I”, (e.g. “I drove to uni this morning”) what are you referring to? If medicine of the future enabled you to survive being sliced in half, which, if any, half would you say is “me”? What is the relation of the “I” and the body? Where does your “I” reside. These are all questions about the self. The idea of the self is sometimes called "selfhood".

The predominant form of self in the West is the individual. As Dalsgaard notes. "For the last two centuries, individualism has been the dominant mode in the understanding of social identities and personhood in the West" (8).

The point is not that the notion of individual differs in other cultures. Rather, some cultures do not conceive of the self as individual at all.

Now we will compare ideas of self among the Pitjantjatjara, Nupe, and Contemporary West with those of the Berawan, whom we read about in Section 1. What can anthropologists tell us about the meaning of the word “I”?

Munn: "referring to him as I"

Munn describes conceptions of self among the Pitjantjatjara of Central Australia as follows:

In addition to homeland ties and claims, an individual has close associations with his (or her) birthplace and its ancestors. He may sometimes identify himself with the ancestor of his birthplace as well as his homeland (if these two differ) by referring to him as "I". Birthplace ties are also expressed in the beliefs concerning birth-marks (called djuguridja, 'of or pertaining to the ancestors'). Pointing to various body markings such as moles, warts or skin discolorations, Pitjantjatjara would say that they were marks left by the ancestors at their birthplace. for example, one woman explained that a marking upon a particular ancestral rock at her birthplace was also on her body. The rock was the transformed body of the ancestor lying down and the marking was originaily his hair. Similarly, another man claimed that a small skin marking on his body was the scar on a carpet-snake ancestor speared in a fight at his birthplace. The result of this fight was the emergence of specific topographical features (and no doubt the scar was recorded in them although my informant did not state this specifically).

How could it make sense for a Pitjantjatjara man to think of his birthplace ancestor as well as his homeland as "I"? 

How could it make sense of the geography of the country to be his body?

 If the Pitjantjatjara are right, how can we go about studying body and mind?

Anthropologists now doubt whether the term "Individual" is appropriate to describe Pitjantjatjara selfhood.

Pitjantjatjara footy field

Peacock: "Collectivism has a larger place"

Peacock thinks that when we talk about 'individuals', it doesn't make much sense.

Anthropology, with its perspective spanning the millions of years between human prehistory and the present, acknowledges the pervasiveness of collectivism. From the time of human origins to the first states in the Near East and Asia some 10,000 years ago, humans lived in small bands. Even after the first states were organized, most of life was lived collectively, with government, community, and kinship having priority over the individual. The concept of the individual as we know it really care to exist only a few hundred years ago, as a product of the Reformation, Renaissance, and industrial revolution, and even then it was confined to Western Europe and its colonies. Collectivism has a larger place in human history than individualism. 

 

Reflecting logically rather than historically, one arrives at a similar conclusion. Thought occurs through language, and language is a property of groups; thus thought itself - in the highly symbolic forms developed by humans - is a property of the group. 

Finally, the notion of individualism is itself a product of the group.  

 

The philosophy of individualism is, after all, a product of Western society. What we term "individual" is a cultural construct

Perhpas, Peacock is going too far with this. I think that we can find traces of individualism in non-Western societies. But, I have to concede, some of the traits of the 'individual' are a peculiarly Western product.

Required reading: Individual Self & Facebook

The required reading this week is Dalsgaard's Facework on Facebook. In describing how we present our 'self' on social media, Dalsgaard interrogates the idea of "individual". You can find a summary of the article in the blog "Dalsgaard--Facework on Facebook".

Dalsgaard observes that we use Facebook and other social media to promote our individual social identity through "exhibiting" our material consumption (meals we eat, holidays we take etc.) and immaterial consumption (bands we 'like'; books we read). That seems obvious enough. However, Dalsgaard also argues that Melanesian ways of viewing the self as a dividual (that is constituted out of relationships with others) are useful in understanding the way we use social media. We exhibit our dividual self by showing who our 'friend' is. Having 'friends' also translates to political power in the 'big man' system of PNG. Similarly, in the 2008 US presidential election,  politicians used FB friends to garner support.

You can also see Dalsgaard's article put to use in a blog entitled "Online Self/Selves: Netizens & (In)dividuals" in a course on Digital Anthropology.

Simpson Desert

Personhood

"Personhood" refers to what it is to be person. What is the idea of person in my culture? For me, dog biscuits aren't usually considered a person. Nor, generally are curtains. It gets a bit tricky when we talk about

•  Simba, the family dog, 
• 'Excalibur' our Dad's Gibson guitar
• "Suzie" our uncle's Subaru WRX. 

They have names, they might be 'part of the family', they may even have little funerals at the end of their 'lives'.

What counts as a person in other cultures. Stanner's famous essay "The Dreaming" contains an account of Aboriginal personhood. He argues that an Indigenous (Aboriginal) Australian person is very different to a European person:

The distinctiveness we [Europeans] give to "mind," spirit," and "body," and our contrast of "body" versus" are not there [in Aboriginal cultures], and the whole notion of "the person" is enlarged. To a blackfellow, a man's name, spirit, and shadow are "him" in a sense to which many of us seem passing strange. One should not ask a blackfellow: "What is your name?" To do so embarrasses and shames him. The name is like an intimate part of the body...In the same way, to threaten a man's shadow is to threaten him. Nor may one treat lightly the physical place from which his spirit came. By extension, his totem, which is also associated with that place, and with his spirit, should not be lightly treated... 

The separable elements that I have mentioned are all present in the metaphysical heart of the idea of "person".

I find Stanner's work is really useful in challenging my own idea of what it is to be aperson, so you might want to read up on him.

Conclusions

Comparing the above readings provides very different notions of self and person. When i, as an anthropologist, come across such different ideas in various cultures it causes me to question my taken-for-granted ideas about who i am. For example, i have always assumed that i am "I" a free, autonomous being acting of my own accord, that is, an individual. But clearly, this idea of the self has only emerged from a specific liberal tradition in the West. In Section 3, we will critically reflect on the two other crucial concepts used for understanding the self in the West: body and mind.

References

     Dalsgaard 2008, "Facework on Facebook," Anthropology Today, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 8-12.
     Munn, ND 1970, 'The Transformations of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth', in RD Berndt (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborigines, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies & University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, WA, pp. 141-163.

      Peacock, JL 2001, 'Substance'. The Anthropological Lens: Harsh Light, Soft Focus, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.