ANTHROPOLOGICAL

PERSPECTIVES
OF THE
SELF
 ANTHROPOLOGY
•From the Greek words Anthropos (human) and
Logos (study and science).

• The study of human societies and cultures involves the exploration of their
development and how cultural and biological processes interact to shape
human experience.
SUBDISCIPLINES OF ANTHROPOLOGY
ARCHEOLOGY: the study of past human societies via the
analysis of the remains of the materials of everyday life.

PHYSICAL/BIOLOGICAL: The study of human evolution

and primates, both living and extinct, as well as modern
human biology.
SUBDISCIPLINES OF ANTHROPOLOGY
CULTURAL: the study of all the aspects of society and
culture.

LINGUISTIC: the study of human languages, their

various aspects, and their social and cultural contexts
throughout history.
ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SELF
• Anthropology studies how selfhood
shapes human society and each
individual within that society. It
investigates the genetic and cultural
roots of self, how self contributes to
socialization and language, and the
different types of self that we develop
as we grow and mature into adulthood.
THE SELF EMBEDDED IN CULTURE
CULTURE
• The set of patterns of human activity within a
society or social group.
• How we act, think, and behave based on the shared
values of our society. It is how we understand
symbols, from language to hand gestures.
• It is everywhere, and we continually develop and
define our culture on a daily basis.
 THE SELF EMBEDDED IN CULTURE
BASIC TYPES OF CULTURE
• Material culture - refers to the physical objects, resources, and
spaces that people use. These include homes, schools, churches,
temples, offices, factories and buildings, tools, means of
production, goods and products, stores, and so forth.
• Non‐material culture - refers to the nonphysical ideas that people
have about their culture, including beliefs, values, rules, norms,
morals, language, organizations, and institutions.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE SELF
According to French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss
(1950), the person was considered primarily a cultural conception,
or a ‘category’ of a particular community and is composed of
two faces:

Moi
• a person’s sense of who he is.
• refers to the concept of the self.
Personne
• composed of the social concepts of what it means to be
MARCEL MAUSS who he is.
• refers to the concept of person.
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE SELF
Harry Triandis (2019), a psychology professor at the University of Illinois,
furthered the discourse about the self being culturally shaped. He
introduced and distinguished three aspects of the self:

Private Self
• cognitions that involve traits, states, or behaviors of the person; it is
an assessment of the self by the self.
HARRY TRIANDIS
Public Self
• cognitions concerning the generalized other’s view of the self.
Collective Self
• cognitions concerning a view of the self that is found in some
collective (e.g., family, co-workers, tribe, scientific society).
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE SELF
INDIVIDUALISM
• A social pattern consisting of loosely linked individuals who
view themselves as independent of collectives and who are
primarily motivated by their own preferences, needs, and
rights (Triandis, 1995).

COLLECTIVISM HARRY TRIANDIS

• A social pattern consisting of closely linked individuals who

view themselves as parts of one or more collectives and who
are primarily motivated by the norms of, and duties imposed
by, those collectives (Triandis, 1995).
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE SELF
• Triandis also made a distinction between
idiocentrism and allocentrism. He believed that
individualism and collectivism were ways of
characterizing the dominant perspectives of
societies, whereas idiocentrism and allocentrism
were ways of characterizing the individual. HARRY TRIANDIS

• Countercultural Individuals - People who find

themselves mismatched with respect to their
society's perspective.
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE SELF
•In a widely cited study, Geert Hofstede (1980) examined individualism and
collectivism across 39 countries.

• The United States, Australia, England, Canada, the Netherlands, and New
Zealand ranked as the top 6 countries in individualism. In fact 15 of the
most individualistic countries are what we would consider Western
Countries.
Geert Hofstede
•The highest-ranking individualistic Asian country was India at 21.

•Of the countries that scored in the collectivistic direction, only 3 were
European countries (Turkey, Greece, and Portugal), with all other countries