Concepts of Individual Self and Person in Description and Analysis

Concepts of Individual, Self, and Person in Description and Analysis Author(s): Grace Gredys Harris Reviewed work(s): Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 91, No. 3 (Sep., 1989), pp. 599-612 Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/680868 . Accessed: 31/10/2012 18:31 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Wiley-Blackwell and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Anthropologist. http://www.jstor.org GRACE GREDYS HARRIS University of Rochester Concepts of Individual, Self, and Person in Description and Analysis This article asserts the need to distinguish among "individual," "self," and "person" as biologistic, psychologistic, and sociologistic modes ofconceptualizing human beings. The concepts differentiate individual as member of the human kind, self as locus of experience, and person as agent-in-society. The author follows out various descriptive and analytical implications. Ethno- graphic examples are used to illustrate and clarify points relevant to single-case studies and com- parativist work. Within a particular local scheme, concepts of individual, self, and person are interrelated, sometimes hierarchically so. The article briefly takes up issues following from the double nature of these concepts as "native" categories and outsiders' analytical constructs. It is held that adopting as analytically central any one mode of conceptualizing human beings has consequences for the analyst's view of culture and/or social structure. IN STUDYING CONCEPTS OF "PERSON" AND "SELF," ANTHROPOLOGISTS take up a set of subjects that only marginally engaged the discipline's attention in the past.' At the same time, philosophical writings dealing with epistemological, ontological, moral, and bioethical concerns explore issues of human identity, intention, agency, and causation. Moral philosophers, ethicists, and philosophers of action are like traditional epistemol- ogists in focusing on the transcendental subjects of belief, thought, knowledge, and con- duct. They commonly use "person" to mean the experiencing, behaving self. (See for example the essays by Nagel 1979.) Questions about person and self are central to other fields also. Political theory, legal doctrine, psychology, and theology deal with human beings as doers, perceivers, believers, and knowers. As usual, anthropology differs from the other disciplines in seeking to know what concepts are or have been used in societies and cultures of other places and times as well as our own and to find ways of comparing and accounting for the variations. All else aside, a common feature runs through anthropological and other work: con- cepts of person, self, and, also, individual are often conflated. The consequences are se- rious, for the issues are theoretically important and not merely terminological. In an- thropology, one result is that various ethnographies do not lend themselves easily to com- parison. Potential cross-disciplinary work is also hampered. Certainly in anthropology we need to distinguish among conceptualizations of human beings as (1) living entities among many such entities in the universe, (2) human beings who are centers of being or experience, or (3) human beings who are members of society. That is, we need to distin- guish, for any local system, among biologistic, psychologistic, and sociologistic con- cepts-concepts that may parallel without being coextensive with Western biological, psychological, and sociological formulations. Besides improving understanding within anthropology, such clarity can help us to see when anthropologists, philosophers, and others are really dealing with similar questions and when they are not. Theoretical dis- cussion can also advance. GRACE GREDYS HARRIS is Professor, Department ofAnthropology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. 599 600 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [91, 1989 This article presents what I see as fundamental distinctions among the concepts of individual, self, and person, taking the view that local varieties of these concepts are in use everywhere. Discussion of some analytic issues completes the paper. Individual A concept of the individual is one focusing on a human being considered as a single member of the human kind. Not all individuals acquire the standing of full persons as agents-in-society (see below). In distinguishing between being an individual and being a person in given societies it is important to determine whether the entity is considered to be a "normal" member of the kind. It seems to hold everywhere that people look to an ideal of "normal" human characteristics. These are seen as making possible the performance of meaning-laden conduct, that is, conduct construable or interpretable as action, according to a system of principles.2 "Normal" infants are generally seen as having those characteristics only po- tentially, while some "non-normal" older humans are seen as never acquiring them, being defective to an extreme degree. Universally, the single most important species char- acteristic acquired by "normal" individuals is considered to be use of language as asso- ciated with capacity for human culture. That that is so everywhere makes anthropological sense, for anthropologists have long recognized that language makes possible a number of major features of ordinary human life. Language enables humans to survey, indeed to create past, present, and future within which to situate their own and others' conduct, to evaluate conduct retrospectively, and, prospectively, to plan. In Western psychological terms, the critical related faculty is the second-order monitoring that we label "self-awareness" (Harr6 1979:282). This reflexive awareness, embedded in and shaped by linguistic usages, enables humans to respond to their own conduct as well as to that of others. In brief, the use of language makes it pos- sible for an individual to develop a self living in a world of beings recognized as having or being selves, some of whom are persons. The second major feature of human life dependent on language lies in the nature of social interaction as discourse. In the world of social discourse, language mediates all the institutions and activities in and through which humans respond to each other. Marriage is not "mating"; giving a lecture is different (or so one hopes) from "vocalizing"; a tragic death is not merely the cessation of vital functions in a body. In the public world of mu- tual construal, people use and manipulate the structure and generative capacities of their own language and culture to create, re-create, and alter their institutions. Third, language is constitutive of many elements of action by way of speech acts such as stating, greeting, commanding, promising, and judging. Individuals unable to use lan- guage cannot draw on this resource and so must remain little more than members of the kind. Fourth, through language a sense of time is linked to that continuity of identity without which accountability for conduct cannot exist. If neither I nor others could consider me to be the same entity today as yesterday, neither I nor others could hold me accountable for what I did yesterday. My performance today would neither bear upon a future nor have any significance in relation to a past. Plans and promises would be impossible. There would be no ongoing social discourse in which individuals could participate, and so humans could be conceptualized neither as selves nor as persons. Yet it is the distinct but related capacities for selfhood and personhood toward which concepts of the human individual look: Charles Taylor, touching on the social and cultural embeddedness of people seen as selves, notes that any significance-free account of humans must be inad- equate. To humans, the situations they are in always have significance for them, and between different cultures significances vary (Taylor 1985:107). Among those of Western anthropological persuasion, the capacities we reckon as char- acteristic of normal individuals of the species are associated with bodily characteristics Harris] INDIVIDUAL, SELF, AND PERSON 601 considered fundamental to human psychological potentialities. The biologically oriented, psychologized language of much of our own discourse explicates the analytic relevance of the concept of the individual for Western anthropologists. At the same time, it bears directly on universal concerns. However, when we look at ethnographic accounts we find that universally recognized language-related capacities are fitted into different overall views of humanness. First, the boundaries of the kind are not everywhere drawn in the same manner but may, for example, be set by ethnic divisions or by a local model of spatio-moral relations.3 Second, individual humans are not everywhere seen as confined to the usual bodily shape and capacities. European werewolves, Ojibwa cannibal mon- sters, and shape-shifting magicians in parts of Africa provide examples. Third, doctrines concerning bodily composition and structure, fetal development, later growth, matura- tion, and reproductive capacities can assert differences among categories of human in- dividuals of a magnitude unfamiliar to Euro-American culture. Thus in Papua, New Guinea, elaborate systems of thought present the sexes as differing varieties of humanity, each having its own natural connections with the non-human world (Poole 1981:121- 122). Fourth, the mutual permeability of individual human bodies varies greatly. Hence Marriott, while conflating individual and person, examines the way in which the primi- tive elements of the Hindu world flow in and out of a human being so as to make the latter an almost constantly changing configuration (Marriott 1976:109-142). Finally, the in- tegrity of the kind as an autonomously reproducing line of organisms must be challenged by some kinds of incarnate deities. These few among many possible illustrations support the view that, far from being a matter for general agreement, the individual as human unit is the subject of divergent doctrines cross-culturally. Everywhere there is a human kind embracing the home society or at least its socially dominant members. Everywhere there are individuals labeled as belonging to that kind. But the scope of the kind differs and so do its asserted biophysical processes. We can expect the conceptualization of capacities for and constraints on be- havior to connect these various ideas in complex ways with the other principal modes of conceptualizing human beings, to which I now turn. Self To work with a concept of self is to conceptualize the human being as a locus of expe- rience, including experience of that human's own someoneness. In the psychologized view of the West, reflexive awareness of the individual is seen as yielding a duality of self. In one aspect, the self is subject, author of behaviors known to their author as the latter's own and so distinguished from the behaviors of any other someone. In its other aspect, the self is an object some aspects of which are brought within its own purview by the normal human capacity for noticing one's noticing. The latter is the activity that makes human beings (and perhaps some other animals) self-aware. The self as existential "I," though intermittent, is fundamental to a sense of self-iden- tity. The categorical "me," the self as object, is cognized and recognized as distinct from all other objects in the world, with a set of beliefs about itself. It may experience itself as a unique unity, achieving a sense of personal identity. Since the major works of Cooley and Mead, the self as a product of social experience has engaged the attention of social psychology (see Cooley 1912 and Mead 1934). Yet the precise nature of self is disputed as various psychologies pursue their own theories of the self's development, dynamics, and pathologies.4 Geertz, in discussing his observations on Balinese ethnosocial psychology with its rad- ical de-emphasis on individuation, eschews claims of knowing how Balinese really expe- rience themselves "in themselves." His concern is with a culture, that is, with a public symbolic order (Geertz 1973:360-364). That must be the rule in sociocultural anthro- pology, for while public, shared concepts must help to shape private experience, it re- mains doubtful whether anthropologists have means for gaining access to that experience 602 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [91, 1989 as experience. Certainly we have the means to discover what materials and processes are used to construct the self in a given society, and that is a different enterprise from discov- ering the public concept of the self. Hence, claims that we can know what it is like to be a self in a different society arouse skepticism. As with individual, we have to ask what, if any, comparable doctrines of self are employed in local schemes. There can, of course, be other ways of conceiving of the self without systematized ideas paralleling the self of modern Western psychologies. Godfrey Lienhardt argues that Dinka religion represents the self as passively experiencing the impositions of external agents, especially mystical ones. Suffering is "imaged," objectified, and projected in something in the world outside the self (Lienhardt 1961:149-154). Maurice Leenhardt claims that a vegetational concept of the human body prevented members of a New Ca- ledonian society from incorporating "their" bodies in their ideas about selves until they became Christians (Leenhardt 1979:164). A few other general points can be made. One concerns the continuity of the self and of identity. Sleep and dreaming, hallucination, and the effects of alcohol and other drugs raise questions in many societies. Yet some questions that an anthropologist might raise appear to be meaningless in other parts of the world, or else the answers are taken for granted. For example, teachings about spirit possession would appear to involve ideas of possible breaks in the availability of the self as object, but just what is involved may be of no local concern. Other matters call for more ethnographic investigation into ideas about the genesis of self, the selfs unity or non-unity in the face of multiple social iden- tities, and the self s relation to bodily birth, development, aging, and death; views of hu- man selfhood in relation to moral claims; and concepts about the selves, if any, of non- human entities. All cultures appear to teach that any normal human past early childhood has some measure of capacity for privileged knowledge of that human's own experiences, including the experience of continuity. Without some version of the assumption that the human world is populated by more-or-less persisting selves, mutual accountability would be im- possible. In other words, no concept of the person could exist in the absence of a culturally shared concept of the self. As to knowledge of other selves, cross-cultural variation is striking. Thus the Taita of southern Kenya ventured only cautious guesses based on observation of behavior (Harris 1978:51). Middle-class Americans readily practice attempts to read other selves, a prac- tice that supports and is supported by psychologistic social science. Person Dealing with a concept of person entails conceptualizing the human or other being as an agent, the author of action purposively directed toward a goal. By "human person" I mean a human being publicly considered an agent. In this sense, to be a person means to have a certain standing (not "status") in a social order, as agent-in-society. Conse- quently, it is not sufficient to a discussion of personhood to talk about people as centers of experience, selves. To be a person means to be a "somebody" who authors conduct construed as action. It is noteworthy that in many ethnographically recorded ideas about the person, not all persons are living humans or, indeed, human at all, nor are all human beings persons. Some deceased humans may be conceptually endowed with attributes ofpersonhood (see Smith 1974:140-145). So may non-human animals as well as various other entities rang- ing from deities to diseases. The last is especially instructive: a disease viewed as entirely mechanistic is a non-personal process operating causally, but smallpox treated as a god- dess can also be a person or person-like being, an agent (Babb 1975:129-131). As Hal- lowell has discussed through papers effectively distinguishing persons from selves, the members of some societies live in a world full of non-human entities conceptualized as persons, as authors of actions affecting human life (Hallowell 1963, 1976 [1960]). Such a Harris] INDIVIDUAL, SELF, AND PERSON 603 world contrasts with that of modern science, where mechanism-cause excludes the notion of personal agents from non-social contexts and, in extreme views, from social life as well. Whatever the particular case, it is probably true that the model for all notions of non- human persons or person-like beings is the living human person (see Fortes 1987:261). I would add, however, that in Western societies we see how ideas about mechanistic causes operating in the non-human world can invade and reshape concepts of the human person (see Sperry 1983:107-108). If there are in some societies ideas of an impersonal force or power, they can be expected to impinge on concepts of person. If human persons can gain access to external power, that is an aspect of humanity's place in the cosmos to be con- sidered in delineating the agentive capacities of human and non-human persons (but see Firth 1967[1940] on mana). To focus on human persons as agents-in-society directs attention to systems of social relationships whose participants, performing actions and responding to each other's ac- tions, live in a moral order. In this analytic frame we can make contact with concepts of the person used in other societies and notice their connections with social structures. Lo- cal concepts of the person as agent-in-society plainly are not co-extensive with local con- cepts of normal human individuals and their capacities for behavior. Many but not all of the doings of persons, when approached from within their society, reveal themselves as actions. In an ongoing sociomoral order movements and vocalizings are constantly sub- jected to a public process of construal. There is a process of analyzing, interpreting, and labeling of conduct so as to generate a stream of public discourse about agency and non- agency. Construal is carried out according to culture-specific criteria of logic, factuality, standards of evidence, values, and labels, that is, to rules in a very broad sense. In this context, issues of conformity to, transgression of, and manipulation of rules are of less interest than the fact that members of the society construe stretches of conduct as consti- tuting specific actions or non-actions. That is why anthropologists must take note of local rules (1) differentiating between sorts of actions, such as "borrowing" versus "theft," or "marrying" versus "taking a con