Iara Cury
Week#6, Elizabeth Ewart
23/02/2011
Identity, Self, and Personhood
Dichotomy is one of anthropology’s dearest nemeses. As much as the discipline strives for a
holistic understanding of human sociality, it forever struggles against dualism in its
analytical work. Nowhere is this more evident than in the subject of personhood. Besieged
by accusations of Western ethnocentrism, centuries of philosophical inquiry, the diversity
of ethnographic evidence, and insights from cognitive science and experimental
psychology, the study of the person relies on a variety of dichotomies to make sense of this
vast material. The first of the dichotomies is one which to the Western mind cannot be
avoided—the individual versus society. But this very last statement presents another
important dichotomy—that between Western and non-Western conceptions of the person,
further projected into the dichotomy between individualistic and relational concepts of
personhood. Other potentially useful dichotomies appear rooted in such discussions: those
between the material and immaterial aspects of the person and between unified versus
partitioned concepts of being. In short, the exploration of ideas about the individual, person
and self navigate so many dimensions that it has been unfeasible to discard these simplified
conceptual frameworks; they exist precisely to shape comparative and, as some hope,
universal understandings of the individual uniqueness of human experience.
Before delving into the discussion about the subtleties of cultural perspectives on the
person, however, it will be useful to clarify the terms individual, person and self. According
to J.S. La Fontaine, “[i]f the self is an individual’s awareness of a unique identity, the
‘person’ is society’s confirmation of that identity as of social significance.” (1985, p.124).
Here La Fontaine roughly outlines the way in which the three words, taken to be synonyms
in vernacular language, carry different meanings—the individual as a distinguishable
organism, the self as single, bounded consciousness, and the person as the social role
accorded to the individual by his or her sociocultural context. Yet throughout this essay,
more important than semantic attention will be the underlying tension between articulated
and unarticulated ideas about the individual, self, and person. A. Taylor states that we can
only hope to learn about the thoughts and experiences of people belonging to other
cultures by “spelling out and explicating the large part of culture that ‘goes without saying’,
that escapes indigenous conceptualization because it is embedded in, and acquired
through, practice rather than discourse” (1996, p.211). As will be discussed below,
investigating “the person” entails much more than linguistic analysis. Whether or not
members of other cultures can express ideas about individual experience in light of
collective and relational imaginaries does not tell anthropologists enough about the
constitution of personhood. More in-depth methodologies and theories have to be
deployed.
After Mauss’ seminal article on the different conceptions of the person made explicit the
recognition that individualism1 was unique to the Western world, anthropologists began to
pose questions about personhood in a broader framework. How does a society
conceptualize the person? How does a society conceptualize the self? Do all societies
recognize the self? Among the various ethnographic works that sampled the social
mechanisms of societies lacking an ideology of individualism, M. Strathern’s book, The
Gender of the Gift, is cited as one of the more powerful ones. Proposing that “Melanesian
persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a generalized
sociality within” (1988, p.13), Strathern articulated and theorized the opposite of
individualistic personhood—relational personhood. Quite a revolutionary concept
applicable to many other cultures around the world, relational personhood took on a life of
its own. But the result was the strengthening of the anthropological dichotomy between
Western and non-Western forms of personhood, between individual and relational
persons, to the point where personhood because a reified polarity of opposites instead of a
spectrum of ideas.
In the analysis of his ethnography of personhood in Melanesia, E. LiPuma tackles this very
problem, the view that Western and Melanesian ideas of personhood were “fully
incommensurable” (1998, p.56). For him, “persons emerge precisely from that tension
between dividual and individual aspects/relations. And the terms and conditions of this
tension…will vary historically” (p.57). In addition to returning Melanesian ideas to the
spectrum of personhood, he also notes how the process of modernization depends on a
functional understanding of individualism; Melanesians have had to deploy localized
notions of what personhood entails to effectively manage different situations (p.72).
Overall, LiPuma notes that to compare non-Western notions of personhood to Western
ideology, an essentialization of diverse ideas clearly divergent from Western reality, is a
recipe for misguided theorizing (p.75). Striking down the façade of incommensurability,
LiPuma circumvents traditional academic dichotomies to pose a challenge: grounding the
study of personhood on comprehensive ethnographic evidence rather than on ideologies,
be they Western or non-Western.
On the same track, additional decades of ethnographic work and analysis have led
anthropologists to doubt the wisdom of Mauss’ partitioning of social and individual
experiences of personhood. The question arises: in societies where the conceptualization of
the self is not as strong or missing, does the self still play a part in the constitution and
functioning of society? A suggestive answer comes from L. Belaunde’s ethnographic work,
descriptive of the attention placed on the feeling and public demonstration of anger by the
Airo-Pai of Amazonia, whose notion of personhood would not qualify as individualistic. The
first interesting point she raises is that “as elsewhere in Amazonia, upbringing is the
cornerstone of personhood and kinship” (2000, p.211). Here the proper transmission of
cultural values and social training is held to be invaluable for the constitution of effective
1
Individualism: “notions of the ultimate value and dignity of the human individual, his or her moral and
intellectual autonomy, his or her rationality and self-knowledge, spirituality, right to privacy, self-sovereignty
and self-development, an d his or her voluntary contracting into a society, market and polity” (Lukes 1990,
quoted in Rapport, 2007, p.209).
personhood. Furthermore, the statement that “although a person’s anger is caused by
others, he or she is responsible for controlling it once it is felt” (p.211) highlights the
socially recognized difference between acceptable social behavior and individual conduct.
In fact, Belaunde brings to the fore the importance of agency in the imaginary and practice
of personhood by writing that the Airo-Pai “stress the moral responsibility of both the one
who causes anger in others and the one who becomes angered by others” (p.218).
A researcher of another Amazonian group, the Jivaroan Achuar, A. Taylor presents
ethnographic evidence to the effect that the experience of self and personhood is both an
intensely psychological and thoroughly relational affair. According to her, “one’s inner
landscape is shaped by the understanding one has of others’ perceptions of oneself”. Yet in
a culture where violence and shifting alliances is “endemic”, the “pervasive uncertainty as
to the real nature of others’ feelings for oneself cannot fail to have consequences
for…selfhood” (1996, p.207). In this example Taylor touches upon the individual’s
experience of his or her social position, where the self’s search for security and stability
clashes with the fluidity of social personhood. Both Amazonian examples draw attention to
the danger of essentializing notions of personhood in non-Western cultures, especially in
terms of negating the close relationship between personal consciousness and the
performance of sociality. As F. Poole deftly asserts, “to suppose that representations…of
individuality can exist only in conjunction with a highly elaborated, metaphysically
complex, ideologically prominent, and institutionally embedded concept of the individual
would be unduly restrictive” (2005, p.844).
The more we discuss the variety of ideas about personhood the more it seems that
anthropology is only beginning to analytically reorganize concepts and processes emerging
from recent (and not so recent) contributions from cognitive science and psychology. One
particular challenge is to integrate understandings of childhood formation of the self and
socialization with later developments of social personhood based on age, maturity,
parenthood and achievement. The Durkheimian tradition’s emphasis of the latter cannot
discard the course and consequence of the psychological basis—the self—of the person.
In his article entitled, “Becoming Persons: Consciousness and Sociality in Human
Evolution”, T. Ingold reinterprets relational personhood from a cognitive perspective. For
him, “the pattern of a person’s social relationships becomes incorporated into the very
structure of his or her perceptual system” (2006, p.189). In other words, exercising
cognitive abilities simultaneously exercises social relationships and cultural knowledge;
since consciousness and social relations cannot be separated in experience, they should not
be dichotomized in theory. As Ingold’s article demonstrates, contemporary “Western”
studies of the mind, self, and socialization have insisted on probing what that Mauss
eschewed in his time—the connection between individual and society, and the question of
which one is primarily constitutive of the other.
Discussions of personhood frequently amble into the domain of social responsibility and
moral order, as for example in the debate about when personhood begins; these ideas must
be taken into account as much as cognitive perspectives. In addition, while the popular
Western idea of individual autonomy must be scrupulously examined, anthropologists do
well to avoid what Rapport and Overing term “overdetermining” or “overweening” social
theories (2007, p.225). Ultimately, it seems (from my interpretation) that anthropological
inquiry in many fields is converging on an intricate and indivisible problem—human
agency and its relation to social structure. Postulating analytical dualisms have helped
anthropologists to explore complex and unbounded problems, but the accumulation of
ethnographic evidence, paired with various scientific (not to imply accurate or cohesive)
findings, demands the juxtaposition, and optimistically, integration of certain dichotomous
strands. Whatever may be said for the dangers of dichotomy, however, it is debatable
whether theoretical developments will ever be able to bridge the existential gulf between
the “I” and the “Other”. Rapport and Overing’s sober affirmation that “no process of
socialization or enculturation” can overcome “the separateness of the individual body and
brain” (p.224) sounds like a challenge for the daring anthropologist, but it might be the
simple truth.
Bibliography
Belaunde, L.E. 2000. ‘The convivial self and the fear of anger amongst the Airo-Pai of
Amazonian Peru’ in Overing & Passes (eds.) The Anthropology of Love and Anger.
London: Routledge
Ingold, T. 1991 ‘Becoming persons: consciousness and sociality in human evolution’
Cultural Dynamics vol. 4(3): 355-78 [reprinted in Moore & T. Sanders (eds)
Anthropology in Theory Oxford: Blackwell]
LaFontaine, J.S., 1985. “Person and individual: some reflections” in The Category of the
Person, Carrithers, M., Collins, S., Lukes, S., (eds). Cambridge: CUP.
LiPuma, E. 1998. ‘Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia’ in Lambek, M. &
Strathern, A. Bodies and persons Cambridge: CUP
Poole, F.J.P. 2002. “Socialization, enculturation and the development of personal identity” in
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Rapport, N. and J. Overing. 2007. “Invididuality” and “Individualism” in Social and Cultural
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Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkley: University of California Press.
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