John Borge Sayson 24/03/2021

S2MA BSMAR-E
The Self and Culture
Remaining the same person and turning chameleon by adapting to one’s context
seems paradoxical. However, the French Anthropologist Marcel Mauss has an
explanation for this phenomenon. According to Mauss, every self has two faces:
personne and moi. Moi refers to a person’s sense of who he is, his body, and his basic
identity, his biological givenness. Moi is a person’s basic identity. Personne, on the
other hand, is composed of the social concepts of what it means to be who he is.
Personne has much to do with what it means to live in a particular institution, a
particular family, a particular religion, a particular nationality, and how to behave
given expectations and influences from others.This dynamics and capacity for
different personne can be illustrated better cross-culturally. An overseas Filipino
worker (OFW) adjusting to life in another country is a very good case study. In the
Philippines, many people unabashedly violate jaywalking rules. A common Filipino
treats road, even national ones, as basically his and so he just merely crosses
whenever and wherever. When the same Filipino visits another country with strict
traffic rules, say Singapore, you will notice how suddenly law-abiding the said
Filipino becomes. A lot of Filipinos has anecdotally confirmed this observation.