Marshall Sahlins in his essay “The Western Illusion of Human Nature”
describes that most of what we believe to be human nature or l’especs, c’est moi- I
am the species, is due to “inclinations of (bourgeois) adult males” (p.44). Our
notion of human nature Sahlin argues is based on the “exclusion of women,
children, and old folks and to the comparative neglect of the one universal
principle of human sociality, kinship…” (p.44). What Sahlin is arguing is that
Western civilizations have adopted the illusion that human nature must organize
itself in forms of government based on things such as equality, social class,
power, and self-interest.
Sahlin indirectly states that primitive human nature organizes itself
according to kinship community and that there is no self-interest or sense of
individuality precisely. “Beyond the current controversies over human nature and
its supposed cultural complements, the Western tradition has long harbored an
alternative conception of order and being, of the kind anthropologists have often
studied: kinship community.” (p.43-44). Sahlin is stating that Western traditions
have long ago moved past this ideal and have created their own system or notion
of human nature based of self-interest. To reinforce his thesis, Sahlin defines
kinship as “ a mutual relationship of being. Kinsmen are members of one
another. Their mutuality may be a sameness of being, as among brothers or
descendents of a common ancestor, or it may entail belonging to one another in a
reciprocal and complementary relationship…the relationship to the other is
intricate to one’s own existence…” (p.46).
Sahlin proves his point that primitive societies organize themselves
around the notion of kinship in giving examples of anthropological research on
people from distinct parts of the world. “Ethnographic reports speak of “the
transpersonal self” (Native Americans), of the self as a “locus of shared social
relations or shared biographies” (Caroline Islands), of persons as “the plural and
composite site of the relationships that produced them” (New Guinea)…the
individual person is the locus of multiple other selves with whom he or she is
joined in mutual relations of being…” (p.48). In his essay, Sahlin quotes Marilyn
Strathern in her research with primitive societies of New Guinea when he writes “
unlike the classic bourgeois individualism, the body is not the private possession
of the individual…a body is the responsibility of the micro-community that feeds
and cares for it…” (p.49-50).
Probably Sahlins most effective lines are his conclusion in which he states
“For the greater part of humanity, self-interest as we know it is unnatural in the
normative sense: it is considered madness, witchcraft, or some such grounds for
ostracism, execution or at least therapy. Rather than expressing a pre-social
human nature, such avarice is generally taken for a loss of humanity. It puts in
abeyance the mutual relationships of being that define human existence. Yet if
the self, the body, experience, pleasure, pain, agency and intentionality, even
death itself, are transpersonal relationships in so man societies, and in all
likelihood through so many eons of human history, it follows that the native
Western concept of man’s self-regarding animal nature is an illusion of worldanthropological proportions.” (p.51).
In Christopher Pinney’s essay “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and
Photography” he argues that “when photography is operated in conjunction with
anthropology the necessity of stressing re-production and repressing production
involves the effacement of any marks of the presence of the photographer’s
culture. At this point the recurrent anthropological quest for Otherness coincides
exactly with the trick that photography enacts in pursuit of its “reality
effect”…just as the anthropologist is often concerned with the polluting effect of
his presence on those he studies…so the anthropological photographer strives to
preserve the purity of the cultural other that he represents.” (p.76).
In support to Sahlins argument, photography can be used to show the essence or
purity of human nature in support to anthropological research that shows that
the idea of self-interest is an illusion of Western society. Primitive societies
establish order and being based on kinship and thus disregard the term “himself”
or “herself” and embraces the concept of “ourselves”.