Anthropology of the Self: The Individual in Cultural Perspective

By Brian Morris

Western society is individualised; we feel at ease talking about individuals and we study individual behaviour through psychology and psychoanalysis. Yet anthropology teaches us that an individual approach is only one of many ways of looking at ourselves.

In this wide-ranging text Morris explores the origins, doctrines and conceptions of the self in Western, Asian and African societies passing though Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confuscism, Tao and African philosophy and ending with contemporary feminism.

Scholarly and written in a lucid style, free of jargon, this work is written from an anthropological perspective with an interdisciplinary approach. Morris emphasises the varying conceptions of the self found cross-culturally and contrasts these with the conceptions found in the Western intellectual traditions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 1994
• ISBN: 9781783715244

Brian Morris

Brian Morris is the author of several books on anthropology and natural history including Anthropological Studies of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Western Conceptions of the Individual (Berg 1991). He teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

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Preface

To measure the importance of things by one’s own turnip patch is not a good method.

Jean-Henri Fabre, Souvenirs Entomologies

In his classic essay on Tolstoy, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, Isaiah Berlin suggested that there were two kinds of scholars. The first kind, the foxes, know many things, in contrast to the hedgehogs who know ‘one big thing’. The fox category includes such scholars as Aristotle and Goethe, while among the hedgehogs Berlin lists Plato, Hegel and Nietzsche. I am definitely, like Aristotle, a fox. I am also akin to Aristotle in other ways – though I make no claim to his intellectual stature! I had no more success with his Metaphysics than did Ibn Sina a thousand years ago. Among his contemporaries Aristotle was disparagingly described as a jackdaw, as he was such an indefatigable collector of facts. I, too, am an intellectual jackdaw. I pass much of my days enthusiastically gathering fragments of knowledge, in the same way as I forage for mushrooms in the woods. In a curious way I find poetry in facts, in all kinds of facts, from the habits of field mice to Hegel’s ontology. I am, then, essentially a natural historian, in both heart and mind, even though this species of scholar seems to have become extinct in the nineteenth century. My intellectual tendencies and aspirations thus tend to be fundamentally realist and historical. That’s why my favourite authors are all oriented towards history and biology – Goethe, Darwin, Kropotkin, Dubos, Mayr, Jonas and Bookchin.

When famous scholars talk about the emotions or sex or the human subject as simply a cultural or ideological construct, or suggest that there is nothing beyond the text, or that language marks the limits of our world, or that the Gulf War had no reality – I have to admit that I feel both confused and perplexed. Are such theories, I ask myself, just old-fashioned idealism dressed up in modern garb? Or am I simply too dim to grasp what underlies the profundity of these propositions. At times, as I have often said to my friends, I feel like the lad in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale confronted with the emperor. As everyone is casting admiring eyes on Wittgenstein or Baudrillard or Derrida, and applauding their profound insights, I often wonder whether their obscurantist style is just a way of covering up their nakedness?

Such feelings have not been allayed by the reflections of some colleagues on my own earlier writings. I have been accused of being cranky, pompous and sarcastic, and that in my criticisms I tend to misrepresent the work of the scholars whom I discuss. None of this has ever been my intention. Perhaps my criticisms of such scholars as Mary Douglas and Edward Wilson do read rather harshly and I may perhaps have misunderstood them, or failed to capture the full complexity of their work. But my critiques only represent my own critical reflections on their work, and were in no sense meant to be either cantankerous or dismissive. In fact, I have nothing but admiration for these two scholars, and think their work has been truly pioneering. In this study none of my criticisms must therefore be interpreted as ‘attacks’ on my colleagues or intellectual forebears.

This present work represents my intellectual ramblings – Aristotle-like – through some of the anthropological literature on conceptions of the person. It aims to be a critical guide to this literature. The writing of such a study is fraught with difficulties. Firstly, this domain of anthropology is, as Tim Ingold suggested to me, a philosophical and conceptual ‘minefield’, and judging by the anger expressed by one anonymous referee, it is one that evokes strong emotions. Secondly, in attempting to bridge the divide between academic scholarship and a lay readership one seriously risks falling between two stools. On the one hand, as an introductory text, it is open to the charge of being too erudite or advanced for the ordinary reader, and as containing ideas that should have been developed elsewhere in academic journals, solely for the benefit of academic specialists. On the other hand, those who dwell in the narrow halls of academia may bemoan the fact that in its broad coverage and in its inter-disciplinary style it is apt to border on ‘superficiality’. I have no doubt, for example, that some Vedantist scholar who has pored over Sankara’s writings, in Sanskrit, for the past thirty years may think that to describe maya in terms of illusion, as Mircea Eliade and I myself have done, is somewhat simplistic, if not misleading. But given my rambling style, and the attempt to cover Sankara in some three pages, it could hardly be otherwise.

This study, therefore, is intended as a kind of guidebook or companion that an interested student or person may take along when they explore the by-ways of psychological anthropology, in the same way as one takes a field-guide when going on a mushroom foray. I have tried in a sympathetic manner to introduce the reader to interesting ethnographic data and ideas within a particular sub-field of anthropology, focusing on cultural conceptions of the person. I offer some critical reflections on the work of various scholars, although my approach is descriptive and expository rather than critical or analytic, but as I have said, none of these criticisms is meant to be dismissive or derogatory. I have little but disdain for the elitist and competitive ethos that permeates contemporary culture and is actively propagated by the present political establishment.

There is a saying that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Perhaps I am a little foolhardy in this study in attempting to present a comparative account of cultural conceptions of the person that is both critical and introductory, and in trying to act as a guide in presenting for a wider audience ethnographic material and scholarly debates around this important topic. But I hope that my little compendium will prove interesting and illuminating, and that real scholars will forgive me for its shortcomings.

The book, in a sense, is a sequel to my Western Conceptions of the Individual, which explored conceptions of the person in the Western intellectual tradition. It specifically takes a more cross-cultural approach. Inevitably, in spite of its broad coverage, I have had to be selective, and have regrettably been unable to cover such important areas as Latin America, Islamic culture, race and ethnicity, and the interesting debates that have focused around the issue of Western individualism and narcissism, although this latter issue is touched upon both in this and in my earlier study. My focus throughout the text is on cultural representations, and I have not attempted to explain or to fully situate such representations in a socio-historical context. Alan MacFarlane has chided me for the ‘explanatory gap’ in my earlier work. He felt that like Foucault I did not attempt to explain the changing epistemes that I outline. But there is a limit to what one can do in a single text. I have, however, always situated myself, like Evans-Pritchard, in the tradition of the historical sociologists, scholars such as Marx, Dilthey and Weber, who combined interpretative understanding with socio-historical explanations.

I would like, again, to express my thanks to many people who have shown interest in my studies and encouraged me over the years:

Brian Morris

Lewes,

November 1993

1Introduction

The present study is a critical introduction to cultural conceptions of the person. It has therefore a specific focus – on what an earlier generation of anthropologists would have termed cultural ‘world-views’, or on what Roy D’Andrade (1984) has more recently described as ‘cultural meaning systems’. Such meaning systems are quite distinct from – though of course related to – social structure and human praxis. Nothing but confusion reigns if culture is simply conflated with social practice and social relationships; and the tendency of writers like Jurgen Habermas (1972) and Tim Ingold (1986) to separate social interaction and communicative processes from human material and pragmatic relationships with the world, in neo-Kantian fashion, is I think also to be resisted. I am not in this study then concerned with social praxis, but rather with cultural paradigms, and with what, in specific contexts, these paradigms have to tell us about people’s conception of the person as a cultural category. I do not therefore focus on such psychosocial phenomena as the self, personal identity or subjectivity in its wider sense, and so I devote little discussion to such important topics as race, ethnicity, nationality, occupation, class and gender – all of which are constitutive of people’s conception of themselves, as individual subjects.

In the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in cultural conceptions of the person. In a wide variety of academic disciplines – Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralist and post-structuralist theory, cultural anthropology, feminist philosophy, humanistic psychology – theories of the person or of the human subject are now commonplace. ‘Self’ and ‘subjectivity’ have become key concepts in social theory, and some general texts in philosophy take the issue of the ‘self’ as their main organising principle (e.g. Barrett 1986, Solomon 1988). I have elsewhere (1991) explored the varying conceptions of the human subject within the Western intellectual tradition, and the varying responses to the classical episteme of the Enlightenment which, with respect to both the empiricists and the rationalists, tended to conceptualise the person as an ‘individuated’ asocial being. The present study is, in a sense, a sequel to this text and looks at conceptions of the person from a more cross-cultural perspective.

For many anthropologists three scholars have been particularly important in generating an interest in cross-cultural understanding of the person. These are Marcel Mauss, Irving Hallowell and Meyer Fortes; their writings have been seminal. I discuss the work of Fortes in the text, specifically focusing on his ethnographic studies of the Tallensi. But it may be useful here to introduce the work of the other two scholars before attempting to clarify the various meanings that surround the concept of the person.

A nephew of Durkheim, Marcel Mauss was also probably his foremost student. Durkheim decribed him as ‘my alter ego’. After Durkheim’s death, Mauss became a leading figure of French sociology, and had an important influence on both Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss. An important Sanskrit scholar as well as a sociologist, Mauss was by all accounts a man of immense erudition, although he lacked a strong sense of direction and organisation and never completed his dissertation.

Throughout his life Mauss closely followed the methodological and theoretical canons of Durkheim’s sociology, and appears to have studiously avoided any criticisms of his uncle (Evans-Pritchard 1981:190). But he went beyond Durkheim in at least two important ways. In the first place his analyses drew upon a greater diversity of empirical material – both historical and ethnographic. In doing so he developed the structuralist aspects of Durkheim’s sociology (Bottomore and Nisbet 1979:572). Levi-Strauss indeed suggests that his essay on The Gift has a ‘revolutionary character’, inaugurating for the social sciences a ‘new era’ (1987:37–41). Second, Mauss was far more willing than Durkheim to explore psychological issues, and with respect to the present study two essays are of particular interest. The first was an address to the Societe de Psychologie (1924) on the relationship between psychology and sociology; the second, ‘A category of the human mind; the notion of person; the notion of self’ (1938), was one of his last works.

In discussing the relationship between sociology and psychology, Mauss follows Durkheim in arguing that they are distinct sciences which relate to two ‘different terrains’, and he is thus sceptical of William McDougall’s contention that sociology is fundamentally a collective psychology that reduces collective phenomena to individual interactions. But Mauss is equally critical of separating the consciousness of the group from the whole of its material and concrete substratum. A social fact, no matter how abstract, should never be completely detached, he writes, either from its local moorings or from its historical matrix (1979:9). In fact he defines anthropology as the sum total of the sciences (biology, psychology, sociology) that considers the human person ‘as a living, conscious and sociable being’ (5). For Mauss, unlike Comte and Leslie White, there is always scope for psychology. No matter how completely invasive the collective representations may be, it always ‘leaves the individual a sanctuary, his consciousness’, and it is the individual who is always the source of action (1979:10).

In his other essay Mauss discusses the various forms that the notion of the self (moi) has assumed at various times and in various places. The essay follows the style of the French school of sociology, namely in focusing on the social history of one of the categories of the human mind. With Mauss, as with Durkheim, the shades of Aristotle and Kant hover in the background. Whereas his essay on symbolic classification, co-authored with Durkheim, had focused upon the category of class, and his analysis of magic, co-authored with Hubert, on the concept of cause, so the present essay focused on the category of the person (personne) or self (moi). Mauss makes it clear that a concept of self is probably evident in all human communities, and he makes a distinction between the sense of self, the conscious personality, and the concept of self, and it is with the latter, as a social category, that he is specifically concerned. He clearly felt that this notion had evolved, and had passed through a succession of forms during the course of history. The modern conception of the person, and particularly the ‘cult of the self’ was, he felt, of recent origin. He also made it clear that in his opinion all human beings had an awareness of their bodies, and of their individuality, both spiritual and physical.

In earlier human communities, Mauss suggests, people have an essentially sociocentric conception of the person, and this notion is intrinsically linked to clan membership. In ritual contexts and sacred dramas, however, when they take on specific roles (personnage), there emerges the beginning of a detachment of the individual subject from absorption in the social group. Drawing on the limited ethnographic material then available, Mauss discusses the Zuni, Kwakuitl and Winnebago Indians, and the Australian Aboriginal conceptions of the person, stressing the importance that is often given to spiritual reincarnation. In the metaphysical religious systems of China and India (particularly the Samkhya and Vedanta systems) the development of the human person as a complete entity independent of society, but not of god, is further developed. There is an increasing awareness of the notion of the self (moi) with Roman culture, from which the term personne (meaning mask) is taken, and the idea of an independent self was particularly expressed by the Stoics. Slaves, of course, were not conceived of as persons by the Roman aristocracy and thus had no personality. But, Mauss argues, it is only with the coming of Christianity that the true metaphysical foundations of the person as a moral subject became fully established. A transition occurred between the notion of persona, of a ‘man clad in a condition’, to the notion of the person as an autonomous human subject. Of particular importance in this changing conception of the person were the sectarian movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for they ‘posed the question regarding individual liberty, regarding the individual conscience and the right to communicate directly with god’ (1979:88). Finally, a further transformation occurred in the notion of person when, in the philosophical writings of Kant and Fichte, it became a psychological category. Thus Mauss concludes that the conception of the person as an individuated self is not an innate or primordial idea ‘inscribed since Adam in the deepest part of our being’ but is rather a notion that has historically developed (1979:87).

Many have seen this evolutionary approach as somewhat old fashioned, but nevertheless Mauss has stimulated a wealth of discussion on the category of the person (Carrithers et al. 1985). Mauss also had an important influence on Maurice Leenhardt, Meyer Fortes and Louis Dumont. Dumont’s stimulating critique of the individualism inherent in the Western intellectual tradition, and in much anthropology, I have discussed more fully elsewhere (1991:262–74).

Irving Hallowell was, like Malinowski, a perceptive ethnographer, but his theoretical suggestions are very different. A much-neglected scholar, whose work has only in recent years come to be recognised, Hallowell has implicitly, and through his students – Spiro, Bourguignon and Wallace in particular – had a profound and pervasive influence in the making of psychological anthropology. He has been described as ‘a unique scholar with ideas far ahead of his time’ (Bock 1980:81).

For Hallowell an understanding of human nature and culture seemed to necessitate both a relativist and a universalist viewpoint. As he wrote:

Perhaps it is characteristic of man to be always different yet always the same. Perhaps this is what anthropologists have sensed without formulating it, since in moving from one people to another the fieldworker always has assumed that there were both psychological and cultural constants to be expected; identifiable emotions such as sorrow and hate, self-awareness and reflective thought, a scheme of moral values, a world view, tools etc. (1976:228)

On the whole, he suggested, cultural anthropologists had tended to overstress cultural relativism. Experimental psychologists, on the other hand, had gone to the other extreme: ‘They ignored the study of man as a social being and the varieties in his culturally constituted mode of life.’ Human nature cannot be

exclusively identified with what is biologically innate and invariant … Viewed functionally and historically, it appears to be the indeterminate aspect of man’s nature that makes him unique, the inherent potentialities of which, under the necessary motivational conditions, may lead to new and varied forms of social, cultural and psychological adjustment.

And Hallowell concludes that ‘cultural diversities and common denominators of culture are part of the total human picture; both categories of phenomena must be related to the whole nature of man’ (1976:227–8).

In adopting such an approach Hallowell came to suggest two essential themes, which he explored and developed in a number of essays: namely, that generic psychological structures are intrinsically related to the evolution of the human species and human culture; and that the self is structured in terms of a variable behavioural environment. I shall briefly discuss each of these themes in turn.

Although some earlier anthropologists like Mauss, Radin and Lee had discussed the concepts of person and self from an anthropological perspective, it is safe to say that these concepts – central though they are – were generally neglected in ethnographic studies. The person is but a shadowy figure in these earlier accounts. Hallowell, in an important sense, laid the foundations for the study of what has come to be termed ‘indigenous psychologies’ – though of course studies of the person or self by philosophers and psychologists are voluminous, particularly in relation to phenomenology and personality theory.

Hallowell observed that the evolution of the human species had been examined from a number of perspectives – in terms of the taxonomy and phylogeny of the primates; in terms of the development of language or tool-making; in terms of social structure or culture as a specific human mode of adaptation. He suggested that an increased understanding of the complex process of human evolution may be gained in two ways. Firstly, that we should try to get away from the idea that there is a radical discontinuity inherent in the evolutionary process, as if culture, language and humankind suddenly leapt into existence. He therefore postulated the concept of protoculture, a preadaptive stage exemplified by non-hominid primates (Hallowell 1960:359–60, 1976:291–4, Bourguignon 1979:29–39).

Secondly, he suggested a conjunctive approach to human evolution, seeing behaviour as the ‘unifying centre’ of other significant variables. Tool-making would then, for example, be interpreted as an early indication of the reality principle, involving ego functions. A psychological dimension could then be added to our conception of the personality structure of the early hominids. Thus Hallowell came to suggest that for hominid evolution to have advanced beyond the protocultural level, a major ‘psychological transformation’ must also have occurred. The ecological development of our human forebears through the invention and use of technological devices, the normative orientation of human societies, involving regulations and moral precepts (like incest), the cultural transmission of a human system of communication; all these, Hallowell suggests, necessitated the existence of a self-concept, persistent in time. The ego permits adaptation at a new behavioural level. Consequently a capacity for self-awareness and self-identification must be assumed as psychological universals. In phylogenetic terms, he writes, ‘the evolutionary status of Homo sapiens implies common psychological potentialities. These would appear to be necessary for the functioning of notions of eschatology as for the manufacture of tools and other forms of cultural adaptation’ (1976:257). Thus Hallowell postulates both the development of self-awareness and of a ‘concept of self’ as necessary conditions for the functioning of a human society (1955:83).

Various points emerge from this perspective, and are worth noting. Firstly, the self is seen as a constant factor in the human personality structure, and intrinsic to the operation of human society and all situations of social interaction. Self and society, for Hallowell, are aspects of a single whole, and culture and personality cannot be postulated as completely independent variables.

Secondly, Hallowell suggests that neither human society nor human personality can be conceived in functional terms apart from systems of symbolic communication. Thus social existence was a necessary condition of the development of the self (or mind) in the individual. He quotes Dewey who had suggested (1917) that the mind was not ‘an antecedent or ready made thing’: it was a ‘formation not a datum’. Likewise Hallowell argues that the development of the human psychological structure (mind, self, personality) is ‘fundamentally dependent upon socially mediated experience in interaction with other persons’ (1953:355). Like both Goldman (1977) and Singer (1980), Hallowell sees self and society as co-existent, and dialectically inter-dependent.

Finally, although stressing the generic aspect of psychological structures, Hallowell also explored and stressed that the nature of the self was itself a ‘culturally certifiable variable’. As Hallowell emphasised:

The psychological field in which human behaviour takes place is always culturally constituted, in part, and human responses are never reducible to their entirety to stimuli derived from an objective or surrounding world of objects in the physical or geographical sense. (1955:84)

In this Hallowell was echoing the tenet of a modified Whorfian theory and Marx’s criticisms of Feuerbach’s