THE SELF AND THE PERSON IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTHROPOLOGY
 The study of people past and present.
 Focuses on understanding human condition in its cultural aspect. Concerned
with understanding how human evolved and how they differ from one another.

DEFINITION OF SELF IN MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY

 Unit but unitary
 Prof. Katherine Ewing described self as encompassing “physical organism,
possessing psychological functioning and social attributes.”

2 ASPECTS OF THE SELF (Joseph LeDoux)

1. Implicit – self that you are consciously aware of.
2. Explicit –self that is not immediately available to the consciousness.

 “The self is not static, it is added to and subtracted from genetic maturation, learning,
forgetting, stress, ageing, and disease.”
 Self-representation (Culturally shaped “self”)
 Ewing (1989) asserted that “self is illusory.” People construct a series of self
-representation that are based on selected on selected cultural concepts of person and
selected ‘chains’ of personal memories.

THE SELF EMBEDDED TO CULTURE

 The ways of how the self is developed are bound to cultural differences.\
 The principles of how the mind works cannot be conceived of as universal, but
that is as varied as the culture and traditions that people practice all over the
world (Cultural Anthropologists).
 The self is culturally shaped and infinitely variable.

DISTINGUISHED TWO WAYS OF HOW THE SELF IS CONSTRUCTED (CULTURAL

PSYCHOLOGIST)
1. Independent Construct (Individualistic Culture)
 Internal Attributes – values and skills
2. Interdependent Construct (Collectivist Culture)
 The essential connection between individual to other people.

Catherine Raeff (2010) believed that culture can influence how you view: relationship,
personality traits, achievement, and expressing emotions.
 WHAT ARE SELF AND PERSON IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY?
“Person” or personhood is a bundle of roles, norms of behavior, expectations,
responsibilities, obligations that situate a human being in social life. This bundle of roles,
rules, responsibilities, obligations, etc, are “defined” by specific cultural criteria and
principles that are primarily related to gender, sexuality, age, class, birth order, and
other kinship identities, as well as other identifications such as class and division of
labor. Thus a person is the way a human fulfills, enacts, negotiates, or struggles with
the diverse ways in which they are also a person defined by social, legal, moral,
economic, and political institutions.

“Self” is a dynamic process by which a human experiences and identifies their

specificity as a human in tension with being a person. The self is an identification that
negotiates the tension/opposition between being a person and being unique human.
This uniqueness is formulated differently in different cultures— it could be in terms of
“self” as consciousness, as soul, as mind (opposed to body), as a unity of soul-spirit-
body, as a unity between oneself and another, as synonymous with personhood, as
opposite of the ways they are a person; and, so on….

So person and self are not stable things. But rather questions that pose problems
to investigate. How does/do this individual of this social group construct their lives in
terms of being a person and a self?