A society is a system of human individuals in some structured relationships with each other, relationships that are informed and shaped by beliefs and values and meanings. More than that, a society is a set of “kinds of persons to be”: individuals occupy culturally defined roles and positions, and they act within a universe of concepts and categories that make their actions meaningful and appropriate. Gilbert Herdt has referred to this universe of categories and meanings as a ccuullttuurraall oonnttoollooggyy.
Ontology is the study of being, of what kinds of things exist. Herdt defines cultural ontology as “local theories of being and metaphysics of the world; of having a certain kind of body and being in a certain kind of social world, which creates a certain cultural reality; and of being and knowledge combined in the practice of living”
(1994: 61). Culture posits many different kinds of beings, a great number of which pertain to what we would call “religion.” However, a culture also contains an ontology of human beings – what kinds of humans are there, what makes them different kinds of humans, and how does the society treat and value them? As Herdt adds,
For a collective ontology to emerge and be transmitted across time, there must be a social condition, eventually a stable social role, that can be inhabited – marking off a clear social status position, rights and duties, with indications for the transmission of corporeal and incorporeal property and status.
(Herdt 1994: 60) Humans, even within a single society, are born diverse, but culture provides a com- bination of increased diversification through enculturation and of categorization of innate and acquired differences. We might say that humans learn how to be individuals in the presence of cultureand that culture assigns meaning and value to different kinds of individuals. The study of the individual in a cultural context raises fundamental questions about “human nature”: to what extent is human behavior given by nature or shaped by culture? This is a debate that rages to this day. Two particularly impor- tant and interrelated aspects of the argument are the questions of personality and gender. Here, as in all other areas that it surveys, anthropology finds that the answers – or at least the facts – are more complicated but at the same time more interesting than mere dualities.
whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background” (1976: 225). Particularly in American culture, people are encouraged to cultivate and develop the self, to become very “self-aware” and to improve the self, through physical exercise (equating the self with the body in some way) or more often through “psychological growth” or “self-actualization.” Americans even talk about their “self-image” and “self-esteem” and how it can be askew from the
“reality” of the self; that is, people can imagine or see themselves to be worse than they really are or occasionally better than they really are. But if one’s self-concept can be so elusive and problematic, then self is not quite as simple or self-evident as it may seem.
Two points have surfaced from the cross-cultural analysis of the self. First, self is not as solid and certain as we like to think; it may not even be a universal human concept. Second, self may not be as exclusively human as we like to think. That is, not all humans may have the modern Western sense of self, and not only humans may have some sense of self. To take the first point, a fair amount of research has gone into the question of whether all societies conceive of and experience the self as Westerners do – as a bounded, enduring, private personal essence. There is at least some reason to conclude that they do not. Buddhism teaches explicitly, for instance, that there is no self. Anattaor selflessness (not in the sense of unselfishness but literally of having no self) is a central and formal concept in high Buddhism: there is no “you” that endures from moment to moment, let alone for a lifetime or an eternity. Instead, in each moment the person is remade, the previous moment lighting the candle that is the “self” for this moment. So, while there is some continuity for the individual, it is much less than and very different from the Western view.
In other cultures, the enduring and bounded self has been called into question.
Nancy Munn’s Walbiri Iconography(1973) examines the Warlpiri sense of self. She claims to find evidence that they did not have a persistent, concrete self of the familiar Western kind. By looking at their mythology and especially their symbolism, as in their sand-drawings that accompany story-telling, she concludes that they did not have a permanent unchanging sense of self but rather one that was ever transmutable – from human to animal or plant and back, or from human to “spirit” and back. In fact, a “person” could be two things at once rather than “just” himself or herself – human and animal simultaneously, for instance. And for them, the individual was never fully differentiated from the tribe or society; the individual was not really “an individual” but part of a social mass that never completely extricated itself from the society or looked at itself in isolation.
Other anthropologists have described self-concepts in other societies – Dorothy Lee among the Wintu (1959), A. Irving Hallowell among the Ojibwa (1967), and Catherine Lutz among the Ifaluk (1998), to name but a few. Lee makes some intriguing claims: based on Wintu linguistic practices, she suggests that the Wintu did not share the Western sense of “an established separate self.” Rather, “a Wintu self is identical with the parts of his body and is not related to them as ‘other’ so long as they are physically part of him” (135). Nor was the self-concept nearly so crucial for the Wintu: “with the Wintu the universe is not centered in the self” (138). Likewise,
Lee, Dorothy. 1959.
Freedom and Culture.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Lutz, Catherine A. 1998.
Unnatural Emotions:
Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Lutz’ study of Ifaluk indicated that for these Pacific islanders “the person is first and foremost a social creature and only secondarily, and in a limited way, an autonomous individual” or distinct self; the Ifaluk “are oriented toward each other rather than toward an inner world of individually constituted goals and thoughts” (1998: 81).
Therefore, they think of themselves as “more public, social, and relational, and necessarily more dyadic than we do” (82).
Western society may overestimate the solidity of its own selves, as is shown by the ease with which that self is manipulated and even re-formed in such circum- stances as brain-washing and conversion. The well-known “Stockholm Syndrome”
is a phenomenon in which kidnap victims or captives come – sometimes fairly quickly – to identify and empathize with their captors; by a few simple devices, a person’s sense of self can be eroded and replaced with another, more pliant one.
Interrogators are all too familiar with the requirements for this pliability, and domestic abusers often count on it tacitly. The taken-for-granted sense of self appears to need constant reinforcement. Disrupt this process (with sleep deprivation, disturbances of natural rhythms, detachment from friends and family and everything familiar, and disinformation from “re-programmers”), and the self quickly collapses and can be reshaped by the right techniques.
Finally, the self may not be uniquely human. Just as anthropologists find “a little culture” in closely related species, so we find “a little self” in these same beings. The question is whether a non-human animal can have an experience of “me-ness” – an awareness of what is and is not its particular individuality. Chimpanzees seem to possess it, at least to a degree. In 1970 the psychologist Gordon Gallup conducted experiments to determine if a chimp knows who s/he is. He placed chimps in front of a mirror, and eventually they discovered that the image in the glass was
PLATE 5.1 Enculturation:
Warlpiri elder men showing boys sacred knowledge and skills
“themselves.” They related their motions to the motions in the mirror, and they even began to examine themselves for the first time, looking at parts of themselves that they had never seen before, like their ears and the inside of their mouths. Going a step further, once the animals had become familiar with themselves, Gallup made subtle changes in their appearance, such as putting a spot of paint on their foreheads.
Back in front of the mirror, they quickly realized that “they” were different and explored the spot, including touching it and sniffing their fingers to figure out what was going on. Chimps that had never seen a mirror before did not react to the spot at all – they had not yet acquired a “sense of self.” Other experiments have suggested that chimps may also have a sense of “intersubjectivity” – that is, an awareness that other beings have minds and even what may be in those minds. Chimps that are shown the secret hiding place of a key to locked-up food, and are then shown humans who behave as if they do not know where the key is, will guide the humans to the key with facial and hand gestures, indicating that they know that they know that the humans do not know and that the humans need to know it.