Anthropology Of Personhood Research Paper

On neither the meaning nor the implication of the above conceptual terms, however, can significant disciplinary consensus be found; a number of writers have addressed definitional issues directly (Harris 1989), but large disagreements remain. The dissension is perhaps understandable when one considers that what is fundamentally at issue is the nature of individual consciousness, and its manifestation— emergence, development, and construal—in different times and places. What is the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in this context: between consciousness as a biological given and as sociocultural construct; between consciousness as privately experienced and as publicly validated; between consciousness as uniquely embodied and as collectively elicited and shared?

The position taken in this research paper is that an anthropological study of personhood must be careful to distinguish between what may be termed ‘individualism’ and ‘individuality’: roughly, between the conventional conceptualization of individual actors in particular settings on the one hand and their personal experience on the other. Much of the conceptual difficulty which the discipline has experienced arises from a conflating of these two, a confusion which goes back to Durkheim.

1. Social Structure And System

1.1 The Durkheimian Individual

Durkheim conceived of human beings as homo duplex; on one side there was the biological and personal (comprising the individual body with its material senses and appetites) and on the other the social and moral (the conceptual and conscientious). The individual thus led a double existence: one rooted in the physical organism and one (morally, intellectually, spiritually superior) in a social organism of collectively and uniformly held ideas and practices. Between the two there was ongoing antagonism and tension, but through inculcation into a public language and culture, humankind was capable of rising above mean (animal) ‘individuality’ and becoming part of a collective conscience in which the (sacred) traditions of a society were enshrined. If individuals were indeed conscious of themselves as individuals, then this was equally a product of their socialization in a collective conscience; ‘individualism’ was a social product like all moralities and all religions.

From Durkheim’s (structuralist) descendants a collectivist narrative was elaborated which conceptually subsumed the individual actor within sociocultural contexts. Mauss (1985) took it upon himself to detail how experience was constituted by cultural categories, and thus how society exerted its force on the physiological individual. He outlined a purported evolution in individual consciousnesses which could be tied to the particular forms of social structuration. First, comes the tribal stage of personnage, where individuals are conceived of as ephemeral bearers of a fixed stock of names, roles, and souls in clan possession; having no existence independently of the clan, individuals possess no inner conscience. Next comes the Classical stage of persona where individuals are conceived of as independent and autonomous citizens of a state; they are responsible, legal persons but still they possess no inner life or identity beyond the civic. With the rise of Christianity comes the stage of personne; conceived of as indivisible and rational, possessing a conscience, indeed, a unique sacred soul, the individual now serves as the foundation of all political, economic, and legal institutions. Finally comes the peculiar Western stage of moi: the individual as a ‘self,’ with self-interestedness and self-knowledge, as validated by modern institutions of psychological science.

Beginning with the assumption that sociocultural holism represents the paradigmatic form of human consciousness and experience, Dumont (1986) set out to plot more precisely the origination and progression of the singular Western idea of the autonomous individual as bearer of supreme moral value by comparing it with the Oriental ‘archetype.’ The Christian personne, he suggests, is reminiscent of the Hindu figure of the ‘world-renouncer,’ someone who seeks ultimate truth by forgoing the world in favour of his own individual spiritual progress. In the world-renouncer one finds a Western-like individualist for whom society has lost its absolute reality, and who, despite the constraining interdependence Indian society ubiquitously imposes on its members, has become self-conscious and self-sufficient. The evolution of the Western individual and the ‘substitution’ of self for society as absolute value marks the triumph of a (Christian) religious ideology in which worldly renunciation becomes the collective norm. Christ’s teaching that man possesses a soul which absolutely transcends the world of social institutions and powers (which is absolutely individual in relation to God and meets others’ only in God) engenders a community of ‘outworldly’ individuals who meet on earth but have their hearts in heaven. Nonetheless, Dumont concludes, the evolution need not end there; in the wake of such movements as multiculturalism, nationalism, fascism, and Islamic fundamentalism, the cultural future of individualism is, to say the least, unpredictable.

Characterizing the above, ‘Durkheimian,’ line of thought, in short, is the idea that the individual actor of Western society is the result of a recent and exceptional historico-cultural development. The concept of the ‘individual’ and its moral and social significance is absent elsewhere, with no a priori differentiation being made between individual and role, between self and society. Learned in this paradigm, moreover, it is not surprising that in much anthropological reportage on the person one finds a denial of individualism and little discussion of individuality. Inasmuch as ‘the individual’ exists, it is as a particular manifestation of ‘the person’; it is not individuals who are seen to be diverse so much as the working parts of the complex social systems of which they are components and conduits. Individuals, in short, become collective constructs within the contexts of specific cultural ideologies and social practices, their psyches emanations of certain pregiven and prestructured life-worlds of socialization.

For instance, Strathern (1988) describes Melanesian personhood not in terms of individuals—distinct actors with discrete emotions, awareness and agency—but ‘dividuals’: beings constituted by properties, goods, and substances as these are ongoingly exchanged with others. The Gahuku-Gama, Read (1955) elaborates, are conscious of themselves only as members of common categories of relations; rather than, say, ‘friendships’ between unique individuals there are only relationships between socially defined positions. Similarly, Myers (1986) records Australian Aboriginal ‘emotions’ not as pertaining to deeppsychological experiences of the individual but as cultural evaluations of people and circumstance which persons must make in order to live in fluxional social settings. Geertz (1973, pp. 360), finally, relativizes Western conceptions of the autonomous individual by emphasizing the collective role-playing fundamental to the Balinese habitus of the person. Culture, Geertz suggests, translates into symbolic ‘control mechanisms’ by which the breadth and indeterminateness of actors’ potential social lives are programmatically reduced to the specificity and narrowness of their actual ones.

In sum, a Durkheim-inspired anthropology of personhood has eventuated in comparative enquiries into the diversity of sociocultural conceptions of the human individual, how these conceptions connect with other sociocultural ‘institutions’ (family, law, exchange), and how these different ways of conceptualizing determine differences in experience. ‘Personhood,’ on this view, amounts to ‘those culturally constituted and socially conferred attributes, capacities and signs that mark a moral career and its jural entitlements in a particular society’ (Poole 1998, p. 842). ‘Selfhood’ refers to a human being as a locus of experience, as this experience is culturally allocated and defined—usually as relational, socially embedded, and sociocentric. ‘Individual’ compasses an actor’s uniqueness to the extent that this latter is realized in certain collectively structured life-worlds.

1.2 The Non-Durkheimian Individual

There have been exceptions to the Durkheimian line, nevertheless: ethnographies and analyses which deny the priority (ontological, developmental, historical) of the societal in its causing and conditioning of individual experience. Tracing the ‘origins of English individualism,’ Macfarlane (1978) sets out specifically to refute those theorists who would see individualism as a recent socio-cultural development—whether epiphenomenal upon religious or Renaissance or Enlightenment or capitalistic or industrialistic thinking. For:

the majority of ordinary people in England from at least the thirteenth century were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically ‘rational,’ market-oriented and acquisitive, ego-centred in kinship and social life (1978, p. 163).

In New Guinea, meanwhile, Burridge (1979) describes how most people are ‘individuals’ and ‘persons’ in different respects and at different times, where ‘persons’ may be understood as those who realise given sociocultural categories, prescribed by traditional morality and the social order, while ‘individuals’ are those who use their perception and intuition to create anew. If persons are products of current sociocultural conditions, then individuals exist in spite of them. Each ‘spatially bounded organism’ is able to switch between these two modalities, Burridge concludes, such individuality representing an existential imperative which pre-exists culture. This also accords with Wikan’s (1990) reappraisal of the Balinese, where the institution of cultural norms of personal composure, grace and placidity do not obviate the individual emotional effort and will be recognized as necessary to effect and sustain their appearance.

An emphasis on individual actors, their personal experience and agency, similarly found expression in early anthropological theorists of consciousness (such as Gregory Bateson and Anthony Wallace), in the transactionalism with which Fredrik Barth (and also F. G. Bailey and Robert Paine) developed Leachian insights into instinctually ‘interested’ individuals, in the work of network analysts (such as John Barnes and Ulf Hannerz), and in the burgeoning of studies within interpretive anthropology more generally which focus on the constructions of experience made by particular individuals in interaction. These accord more with Weberian sentiments that collectivities must be approached solely as the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since it is they who remain the upper limit and the sole carrier of meaningful conduct.

Notwithstanding, structuralist and poststructuralist discourses still denigrate an anthropological sensitivity of this kind as ‘methodological individualism’: as an erroneous couching of explanation in terms of individuals’ characteristics, their behaviors, and interests, such that the ‘foundational’ conditions of sociocultural reality are obscured. The center ground of anthropology, it may be true to say, remains the preserve of ‘methodological collectivism,’ positing social phenomena as determined by factors which bypass individual rationality, and hence envisaging cultural development quite independently of individual consciousness. There is a continuing insistence, in other words, that the distinction between the individual and the societal is specific to the West and must be collapsed in favor of the latter—or at least of ‘social relations’—for anthropology persuasively to encounter cultural others.

On the other hand, there is a growing insistence that it is a peculiar ethnocentrism for anthropologists to fail to allow in the ‘others’ we study the personal complexity which we recognize in ourselves: as both individuals and persons, role-players and rebels, conventional and creative. The anthropology which has sought most deliberately to keep this truth in view may be termed ‘existential’ or ‘phenomenological,’ after the philosophical traditions associated with such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Sartre (Rapport 1997). It sets out with very different tenets and intentions from the ‘sociological’ orientation towards social structures and systems predominant above, privileging instead individual existence and experience.

2. Existence And Experience

To become human is to become individual, Geertz (1973, p. 52) has admitted, adding that we become individual in an environment of sociocultural forms and patterns in whose terms we give form, order, direction, and point to our lives. The important question which this raises is the precise relationship between sociocultural forms and the individual lives lived by them. Becoming human and individual in an environment of common sociocultural forms need not eventuate in becoming ‘the same’ as others, or even necessarily comparable, nor becoming after a deterministic or directly influenced fashion. For in this becoming, energy, agency, intention, and interpretation can be seen to remain properties of self-conscious subjects; indeed, it is individual agents who are responsible for the creation, animation, deployment, and development of systems of forms in their usage of them.

An intrinsic dichotomy between individual and world is often eschewed as a peculiarity of ‘Western’ sociocultural milieux, as we have heard, and hence as methodologically and analytically inapplicable. This is hardly defensible. Human beings may be socioculturally situated, but they are also, always, interpretively autonomous—responsible for a ‘personalization’ of the world—and inexorably and inevitably (by) themselves. It is not good enough simply to say that only Western culture valorizes the concept of the individual—as ‘individualism’—and therefore only in Western society do individuals act distinctively—with ‘individuality.’ For, while the former might be said to describe a particular sociocultural form of behavior (the pursuit of self-distinguishment), the latter concerns a condition which is an human universal: by virtue of a unique consciousness, each of us perforce engages with the world as other and is possessed of distinct perspectives upon it.

Individualism, more precisely, pertains to a specific historico-cultural conceptualization of the person which includes such notions as: the ultimate value and dignity of human individuals, their moral and intellectual autonomy, their rationality and self-knowledge, spirituality, right to privacy, self-sovereignty, and self-development, and their voluntary contracting into a society, market, and polity. Individuality, by contrast, refers to that unique awareness, and awareness of awareness, which is the mark of human embodiment. It is the universal nature of existence that human beings engage with others by virtue of discrete sense-making apparatuses (nervous systems and brains); they possess discrete centers of perceptual activity in discrete bodies. Furthermore, the human body (and in particular the brain) gives rise to knowledge of the world, to a perspective upon the world, which is inherently individual: human beings come to know themselves within the world by way of cognitions and perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and imaginings, which are unique to them (Edelman 1992). Not only is there an individuality intrinsic to human consciousness but also to human agency. For, it is in terms of his perceptions that an individual comes to act, each individual becoming a discrete centre of motivation and intention. Not only is the individual’s being-in-the-world universally mediated by very particular interpretative prisms which distance him from it, then, but while intrinsically ‘of the world,’ the individual inexorably comes to know the world, and act towards it, as ‘other.’ Individuals experience and interpret (and experience themselves interpreting) and therefore they are.

An individuality of consciousness and agency is current whatever the provenance of individualism as a cultural norm. Individuality is the human a priori, the physical–psychical basis on which all human knowledge of the world, all creativity within it and all activity upon it, rests (including the creation and representation of sociocultural milieux). Individuality remains consequential, that is, whether or not individual consciousness is an item of collective dis- course, whether or not individual reflection is publicly eschewed, and whether or not individual distinctive- ness is disparaged through the institutionalization of a fund of common behaviours (concerning, for instance, notions of the person). The experience of self is essentially distinct from sociocultural representations of self (cf. Spiro 1993).

Finally, an existential anthropology of personhood can hope to ‘decolonize’ (Cohen 1994) the individual human subject both from over determining cultural conditions and overweening social institutions (discourse, language-game, collective representation, social relationship, habitus, praxis), and from their holistic and hegemonically minded social-scientific commentators. It can take into account both the individual agency which brings sociocultural milieux to life and also the common sociocultural forms and practices by which individuals coordinate their activities and world-views within these milieux. Retaining respect for individual cognitive processes it apprehends the ambiguous interface between convention and individuality, and portrays sociocultural milieux as comprising, constituted by, individual difference: human individuals making a diversity of meaningful worlds by way of a commonality of cultural forms. In this way, an existential appreciation is promised of the ‘individuals’ behind the ‘persons,’ and of that consciousness of ‘self’ by which the disjunction is mediated.

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