Anthropological

Perspectives on
the “Self”
Leonardo D. Buyan Jr. |
GECC 108: Understanding the Self
Anthropology

Culture is the learned

Anthropology is the study
behavior of people,
of the origin
including their languages,
and development of
belief systems, social
human societies
structures, institutions,
and cultures.
and material goods.
Anthropology
• Anthropologists study
the characteristics of past and
present human communities
through a variety of techniques.
In doing so, they investigate and
describe how different peoples of
our world lived throughout
history.
Anthropology in the 18th and 19th centuries:
“a tool for emancipation”

• Anthropology is a relative newcomer to the debate on selfhood as it

primarily emerged as a subject from the imperial ambitions of
European states during the 18th and 19th centuries, and was initially
an effort to identify the weaknesses and failings of other cultures so
that they could be exploited and subjugated.
Anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries:
“What does it mean to be human?”

• It was only in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that

anthropology threw off its intimate links with the national and
religious organizations it had been serving, and began to ask the big
question that has informed its research ever since: “What does it
mean to be human?”
KARL MARX
Karl Marx: Individuals as puppets of society
due to an emerging capitalistic structure

• Karl Marx (1844) recognized that the problem was socio-political

since humans had adopted a stratified social system at some point in
the past, in which individuals became specialized not only in their
productive roles but also in their social roles.

• In capitalism, some individuals became rules and owners

(bourgeoisie), while the rest became the proletariat, workers without
the freedom to choose in any useful way.
Marx: Alienation of workers from their work
• The workers were alienated from their work – they had no control
over what they did – and alienated from their own selves, from their
innate potential as individuals.

• Through communism, the illusion of selfish but powerless individual

selfhood, fostered by capitalism, would be replaced by a communally
aware selfhood in which the individual is fulfilled by their work for the
collective.
 20th century was marked by a
series of revolutions intended to
introduce worker control over
production and consumption
(Russia 1917, Germany 1918,
China 1946, Vietnam 1954, Cuba
1958 and Venezuela 1999).
EMILE DURKHEIM
Emile Durkheim: Alienation of the individual
due to enhanced sense of personal identity
• Emile Durkheim (1895), like Marx, saw modern society as a form of
alienation of the individual; but for Durkheim the alienation was caused by
an enhanced sense of personal identity.

• Traditional societies have collective awareness and weak self-identity, while

modern Western societies have individual awareness and strong self-
identity; traditional societies enforce conformity by dealing with deviant
behavior, while modern Western societies deal with the deviant individual;
and, while conformity in traditional societies means adoption of a standard
role, modern Western conformity is a matter of finding a specialist role in a
complex and highly differentiated society.
CLAUDE
LEVI-
STRAUSS
Claude Levi-Strauss: Abandoning our
individuality to reach personal fulfillment

• Claude Levi-Strauss thought that the individual was almost entirely

the product of their social environment, and selfhood was therefore
imposed on the individual by the local culture.

• Like Durkheim, he saw the collectively defined self as the natural state
in traditional societies, while modern humans were in a state of
enhanced individuality. However, unlike Durkheim (and more like
Marx), he believed the traditional state was preferable to the modern.
Levi-Strauss: To celebrate individual
creativity is a form of destruction
• Modern individuality leads to the celebration of individual creativity, which
cannot actually exist. Everything created is continuous with what has gone
before; which means that attempting to consciously add newness usually
adds imperfection – it is not creation, it is destruction.

• His work on mythology was concerned with the essentially impersonal nature of
story-telling: mythology is not about a story being told, it is about a story being
heard, and it is under- stood through the culture in which it is heard. It is not
important that the story is told well, it is important that it is heard as the same
story by everyone every time. The shaman’s or bard’s or skald’s role is to convey
the message behind the story, and it should therefore be possible to trace the
same message through the stories told in any area of continuous culture.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Joseph Campbell: Individuals and
individuality are building blocks of society
• Joseph Campbell (1949) looks at the myths as hero-myths, descriptions of
the growth and emancipation of the individual protagonist in the story –
who is usually male, and usually forced to undertake a series of ego-
enhancing tasks.

• Like Levi-Strauss, Campbell saw all myth as carrying one single message,
which he called the monomyth. This myth has four functions: (1) to explain
nature; (2) to reconcile the conscious experience of life to the subliminal
experience; (3) to establish the constraints that society must place on the
individual to ensure group survival, and (4) to provide a template by which
individuals should live to ensure personal survival.
DORINNE KONDO
Dorinne Kondo: It is through subjective knowledge that
individuals identify cultural differences

• Dorinne Kondo’s (1986) experience while conducting fieldwork in Japan

made her realize that her own selfhood had intruded onto her research in
an unexpected and disturbing way: in her effort to understand the
“Japaneseness” of her subjects, she had increasingly identified with, and
adopted, the attitudes and views of her subjects.

• Kondo was simultaneously two selves, and it was only the maintenance of
both selves that allowed her ethnographic work to proceed. Her Japanese
self was neither subsumed into, nor properly differentiated from, the local
culture; instead, it was in a constant negotiation with her American self
and the context in which it found itself.
Thomas
Csordas
Thomas Csordas: Any anthropological study of
the self needs to recognize the physical body

• Thomas Csordas (1990) argues the existence of a body is the cause of the
existence of the self, and the existence of groups of bodies is the cause of
culture – both the physical culture evident in many non-humans and the
symbolic culture evident in humans.

• The human self is both a subjective thing experienced in a physical culture

and an objective thing experienced in a symbolic culture; but the subjective
and objective selves are not different things, they are different sides of the
same thing. Only by acknowledging the embodiment of the self can we
hope to reconcile our subjective and objective experiences.
Deacon et al.: ”Self” as an inevitable
outcome of motivated matter
• Deacon et al. (2011) argues that human selfhood has both subjectivity (we
are aware of our selfness) and interiority (we can think about our selves);
while we share subjectivity with other animals, interiority is an extra level
of selfhood – which may, or may not, be exclusive to Homo sapiens, but is
certainly not common in nature.

• Subjectivity and interiority are, in turn, products of the cognitive

complexity permitted by our brains, they are not by-products of an
inexplicable human nature. If we are to understand selfhood as a social or
cultural phenomenon, we must first understand it as a cognitive
phenomenon.