Self Consciousness

An Alternative Anthropology of Identity

Anthony Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134889310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Traditionally the self and the individual have been treated as micro-versions of larger social entities by the social sciences in general, and by anthropology in particular. In Self Consciousness, Cohen examines this treatment of the self, arguing that this practice has resulted in the misunderstanding of social aggregates precisely because the individual has been ignored as a constituent element. By acknowledging the individual's self awareness as author of their own social conduct and of the social forms in which they participate, this informs social and cultural processes rather than the individual being passively modelled by them.

Chapter 1
The neglected self

Anthropological traditions

Most Indians do not reveal themselves because it does not occur to them that they have unique selves to reveal.

(Gearing 1970:146)

The self has no private space…but no need for privacy.

(Greenhouse 1986:98)

Positions

Fred Gearing’s sympathetic study depicts the Fox Indians of Iowa as defined by the statuses they occupy in their classificatory kinship system. They regard their behaviour as inhering in the structural niches in which they are placed, so that any other Fox who happened to be similarly located would behave in the same way. Carol Greenhouse imputes a comparable self consciousness—or lack of it—to the devout Southern Baptists she studied in Hopewell, Atlanta, believers who define themselves by their family roles, and who oppose individualism to Christianity (see Chapter 6).

This selflessness seems so at odds with the ways in which most of us might be assumed to think of ourselves that we have to work hard to understand what Gearing and Greenhouse may mean and to envisage the people they thereby describe. Anthropologists have laboured to elicit notions equivalent to our ‘self’ and ‘selfhood’ which are held by the people among whom they have lived and who they have studied. The difficulties of imagining and interpreting these notions are compounded by those of translation, which makes discourse about the self tricky among the speakers of different European languages, let alone those of more esoteric tongues. All sorts of metaphors and circumlocutions have been called in aid, such as ‘indigenous psychologies’ and ‘inner’ (as opposed to ‘outer’) consciousness, all of which attempt to evoke a distinction between the private and public aspects of a person.

The public-private dimension is a clumsy construction. Writers such as Lienhardt (1985) and Hsu (1985) have shown (for, respectively, Dinka and Chinese) that selfhood is a composite, the constituents of which vary in public and private modes. Thus, the self is not ‘replaced’ by something else as its bearer moves from privacy into public social space; rather, it adopts or discards elements which are not pertinent in more private contexts (for example, in intimate interaction or in solitary contemplation). The self is not a monolith; it is plastic, variable and complex. But that is to say that its description should acknowledge its complexity, a requirement in which anthropologists have not distinguished themselves. We shall consider some reasons for their failings.

Historically, another feature of this concern in anthropology has been the attempt to distinguish among such categories as ‘individual’, ‘person’ and ‘self. These distinctions are arbitrary, and are often difficult to sustain. They will be discussed at length. The motivation to make them clearly stemmed from theoretical influences at the turn of the century which demarcated the social and the psychological; and which elaborated the lineaments of social structure both to provide an analytic scheme and to demonstrate the primacy of society in the formation and determination of behaviour. For example, Durkheim was interested only in those aspects of the individual which could be socialised; he consigned the rest to psychology or physiology. And if these potentially social elements were not adequately socialised, this spoke, in his view, of the pathology of either the individual or society. In a normally functioning society, a person could not reasonably decide to behave in a way which defied social convention. In this theoretical perspective, selfhood was socially determined. The dominance of this perspective in British social anthropology is evident in that until quite recently ‘the self and ‘selfhood’ were simply not recognised as anthropological problems, other than in a methodological sense, despite the publication in 1938 of Mauss’s classic essay on the self, a work only given appropriate recognition nearly fifty years later (see Carrithers et al. 1985).

There was a tradition in American anthropology of concern with the self, due in large part to the influence of the social psychologist G.H. Mead, a scholar whose work has remained almost entirely absent from the undergraduate syllabuses of British social anthropology. But in North American anthropology, concern with the self settled on a rather obscure subfield of the discipline as a whole, ‘psychological anthropology’—again, a specialism which has never been recognised in Britain—associated with writers such as A.I.Hallowell and Dorothy Lee. It did not attract mainstream attention until very much later, when, with the ‘interpretive turn’ (Rabinow and Sullivan 1979), anthropologists everywhere began to be interested in processes of symbolisation, rather than just in the decoding of cultural symbols.

Selfhood finally moved to centre stage in the late 1970s and 1980s with the linked developments in ‘reflexivity’ and the critical scrutiny of anthropological and ethnographic writing, a movement which is often trivialised by its description as ‘post-modernism’. It was a trend of thought pertinent to selfhood because it interjected explicitly into the ethnographic scenario the figure hitherto proscribed by the canons of disciplinary practice, the anthropologist’s self, appropriately caricatured by Crapanzano (1992) as a ‘trickster’ and by Hastrup (1992a) as a ‘magician’; and, in so doing, triggered a critical examination of the distinction made by ethnographic style and convention between the self (the anthropologist) and the other (the anthropologised).

The convergence of these themes, selfhood and the posture of the anthropologist, was not adventitious. As scholars began to focus on self-awareness and cognate phenomena such as thought, emotion and cognition, the characteristic anthropological problem inevitably arose to pose unanswerable questions: How do you know what the other person is thinking? How do you know that the other person is thinking? How can you discriminate between the other person’s consciousness and your construction of his or her consciousness? The answer to the first and second questions, ‘I cannot know for certain’, leads inexorably to the answer to the third: ‘I cannot’. What we can do, what anthropologists customarily have done, as recent work has shown us, is to use literary devices of one kind or another to convey in our authored texts the impression of such a discrimination. But it is one which we as authors have engineered.

The enormity of this admission should not be underestimated, for it calls into question the methodological pretensions of modern anthropology. It amounts to the admission that the inevitable starting point for my interpretation of another’s selfhood is my own self. For at least the three decades since the philosopher Peter Winch pointed to this inevitability in his The Idea of a Social Science (1958), anthropologists have sought ever more sophisticated means of minimising, if not escaping, its limitations, and they have become very sophisticated indeed. The rigour of anthropological scholarship in validating its rendering of other cultures’ systems of knowledge, belief, thought and communication has arguably been unmatched by the other humane sciences. But it was all predicated on the prescription to maintain the axiomatic difference between the anthropological self and the anthropologised other.

The argument of this book denies the authority of that axiom. It is plainly unacceptable to assume that anthropologist and anthropologised are alike; indeed, it could be perverse, for it might risk rendering anthropology redundant. But, equally, the assumption that they are not alike is unacceptable for it seems to lead inexorably to the construction of their difference. It is also perverse, for it denies the pertinence of the most potent investigative and interpretive weapons in the anthropologist’s armoury: his or her own experience and consciousness.

Objectives

This argument cannot be made simply or briefly, but depends on extended demonstration. That is one of the purposes of this book. It is implicated in, but subsidiary to, its principal objective which is to show why we must address the question of the self since not to do so is to risk misunderstanding, and therefore misrepresenting, the people who we claim to know and who we represent to others.

It is always difficult to know quite when a book originated. I began to write the final version of this volume during the summer of 1992, but had been consciously and deliberately working on it during at least the previous six years. During this period as working papers and articles appeared, some of my friends and colleagues grew increasingly exasperated with the apparent futility of my argument which called for anthropologists to do what we all know cannot be done: to elicit and describe the thoughts and sentiments of individuals which we otherwise gloss over in the generalisations we derive from collective social categories. Some were more than sceptical about my suggestion that we should use in a rigorous and controlled fashion the only means which is available to us: our experience of our own selves. Still others insisted that this objective was simply not the proper business of anthropology. I hope to show in this book that, notwithstanding these entirely respectable objections, anthropologists inevitably engage with the self, their own and other people’s, and that it is in the nature of their enquiry that they must do so. Because they are unaware of doing it, or are squeamish about it, it is often fudged. But, by drawing extensively on the work of anthropologists and on a wide spectrum of cultural experience and ethnographic expertise, I will try to demonstrate that social anthropology has incorporated self consciousness implicitly into its discourse, and should now come out of the closet in order to deal more faithfully and fully with the self.

There is nothing new in the argument that methodologically anthropologists cannot avoid the intrusion of their own selves. It has been rehearsed openly and repeatedly throughout the history of modern social anthropology, sociology and the philosophy of science. Further, the engagement with critical literary theory and with various ‘post-modern’ currents has extended this self-scrutiny from the investigative to the writing processes in ethnographic work. More recently, the argument has been further developed by systematic attempts to explore how what had previously been regarded as a methodological burden and inhibition might be transformed instead into a resource, even a virtue (see e.g. Okely and Callaway 1992).

This aspiration is the premise for the present study. The proposition is that anthropologists’ self-consciousness may stimulate their sensitivity to the self consciousness of those they study. I am not advocating an egocentric anthropology, or anything so facile as the notion that ‘we are all the same under the skin’, and that we might therefore be justified in treating ourselves as models for others. But I do insist that if there is no justification for treating people axiomatically as being alike, then equally the assumption of their difference is also questionable. Modern social anthropology was built on the putative cultural distance between anthropologist and anthropologised, on the largely unexamined assumption of the differences between the self (observer) and the other (observed). Throughout the 1980s, anthropologists showed how this presumption had been made self-validating in anthropological analysis and writing. I shall argue later that one of its unfortunate consequences has been to deny to cultural ‘others’ the self consciousness which we so value in ourselves.

If my contention is correct, then our neglect of others’ selves must be objectionable for all kinds of reasons and certainly raises serious ethical questions. But the implication on which I wish to focus is that it has probably rendered our accounts of other societies inaccurate in important respects, since they must be revealed as generalisations from the only partially perceived, at worst misperceived, elements of those societies—individuals to whom we have denied self consciousness.

Addressing self consciousness and selfhood thus brings us up critically and inevitably against two bulwarks of ethnographic practice: generalisation and cultural relativism. Indeed, acknowledging that other people have selves also means recognising that generalising them into such analytic collectivities as tribes, castes and ethnic groups may be a very crude means of categorisation, the inadequacies of which we have all experienced in similar categorisations of ourselves. Sensitive ethnography demands nothing less than attention to other people’s selves, an inquiry which inevitably entails to some extent the use of our own consciousness as a paradigm.

However, I repeat that my concern is not with the self for its own sake, but is to consider critically and constructively the assumptions we conventionally make about the relationship of individual to society. Western social science proceeds from the top downwards, from society to the individual, deriving individuals from the social structures to which they belong: class, nationality, state, ethnic group, tribe, kinship group, gender, religion, caste, generation, and so on. We have concentrated on these collective structures and categories and by and large have taken the individual for granted. We have thereby created fictions. My argument is that we should now set out to qualify these, if not from the bottom upwards, then by recognising that the relationship of individual and society is far more complex and infinitely more variable than can be encompassed by a simple, uni-dimensional deductive model.

This book is written with reference to, and from the perspective of, social anthropology, partly because it is my own discipline and because I am therefore criticising my own practice. However, readers may note that at various points in the text I identify the subject more generally with social science. This is not careless writing or absent-mindedness. While anthropological experience reveals the practices which I identify in the argument, they are also present in other social science disciplines which may have been even less sensitive to them. I have also long taken the view that, both because of its theoretical focus on culture, and, notwithstanding my critical stance, its general methodological rigour, social anthropology should be regarded as fundamental to social scholarship. My argument is therefore addressed in a non-sectarian spirit to all those academic disciplines whose practitioners regard themselves as engaged in the humane sciences in the hope that it may contribute to the discourse among them.¹

Why Should Anthropologists be Concerned with the Self?

Concern with the self has not been universally welcomed among anthropologists; indeed, it has provoked some trenchant comment and invective. There are those who dismiss it as mere ‘self-indulgence’ (inter alia Friedman 1987; Sangren 1988), a deliberate pun; those who argue that it is a Western-, Euro- or Anglocentric preoccupation; and those who maintain more substantially, if atavistically, that it detracts from our proper attention to social relations, or that it poses such intractable methodological difficulties that it is really a blind alley. The first comment is too trivial to require an answer, the second a contention which is at odds with the ethnographic record, as the case studies which follow will show. The present book attempts to address the three latter points.

There is no essential opposition between the consideration of the self and the description and analysis of social relations, indeed, quite the contrary. In the past, our concern with groups and categories, that is, with the social bases of social relations, has largely ignored the dimensions of the self and self consciousness, and may therefore be regarded as having dealt with bogus entities. In treating individuals either explicitly or by default as merely socially or culturally driven, ignoring the authorial or ‘self-driven’ aspects of behaviour, is to render them at best partially, and, perhaps more often, as fictitious ciphers of the anthropologist’s theoretical invention. It was an approach with a pedigree at least as long as the sociological concept of role, a term which focuses wholly on what a person does socially to the exclusion of who the person is. To treat social relationships as encounters among roles seems odd, and ethnographers rarely present their descriptions in this modest way. They are much more inclined to pretend that they are dealing with people’, but, as I have suggested, this seems an unjustifiable pretence.

Let us take a step backwards. If we regard social groups as a collection of complex selves (complex, because any individual must be regarded as a cluster of selves or as a multi-dimensional self) we are clearly acknowledging that they are more complicated and require more subtle and sensitive description and explanation than if we treat them simply as a combination of roles. Indeed, the aggregation of these complex entities into groups may itself be seen as more problematic than would otherwise be the case. Collective behaviour is then revealed as something of a triumph, rather than as being merely mechanical. I suspect that this is a description which gibes more closely with our personal experience as members of families, committees, clubs, platoons or whatever.

If these problematic aggregations are then magnified to the level of society, we can put into a quite different focus the question of how society is possible. Far from being sociologically gratuitous, the question is a real one. The conventional answers of European social theory, most of which point to determinism of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 The neglected self: anthropological traditions
• 2 The creative self
• 3 Initiating the self into society
• 4 Social transformations of the self
• 5 The primacy of the self?
• 6 The thinking self
• 7 Individualism, individuality, selfhood
• Notes
• References
• Index