240523 SE MM3 Anthropologies of the self and subjectivity (2024S)

Intersectionality is part of a family of social constructivist theories that take selfhood to be socially constituted and distributed. Whereas older anthropological texts often contrasted a Western conception of a discrete, bounded and individual self with a non Western sociocentric conception, the more recent anthropological literature argues that subjectivity is a fluid intersectional construct, fundamentally relational and conditioned by discursive power structures. But is our individuality really reducible to the particular intersection and amalgamation of culturally determined social roles we inhabit? Radical constructivism regarding the self begs a number of questions about how subjectivities are constituted, since it neglects the possibility that there might be something about the self that is not socially constructed, indeed that there has to be a pre-social dimension to subjectivity for socially constituted and distributed selves to be possible at all. Arguably experiential subjectivity is not an obstacle but a requirement for any genuine intersubjectivity.

Accordingly, this course will focus on four issues highlighted by the intersectional approach. The first is the tendency to attribute an underlying essence to social groups and assign individual membership in those groups based on easily distinguishable surface features, such as physical traits, habits, manner of speech. ‘Psychological essentialism’ has been investigated in various domains including gender, religion, sexual orientation, political groups, race, ethnicity, language. What matters most in terms of outcomes is not that cognitive biases are pervasive or inevitable, but whether one’s identification with an essentialist social category is voluntary or imposed, and whether different essentialist social identifications are exclusive or complementary. These questions assume that the experiential self, and the body, isn’t identical with its social roles.

The second issue concerns emotions like shame, pride, fear, anger, gratitude, expressed and displayed in response to the actions, or the underlying essences, of others. Having and displaying such feelings towards others holds them responsible for their actions or for membership in an essentialist category. There are at least six aspects an account of emotions must consider: subjective feeling, physiology, facial expressions, display rules, appraisals, and representations. Only the latter three are culture specific, the first three are universal and common to all humans, suggesting that the emotional construction of social identities requires an experiential self.

The third issue concerns speech and gesture used as a conventional means to bring about conventional results, such as promises, insults, marriage, witchcraft, or gender. In many social contexts, gender identities are increasingly perceived, by the people themselves, as being constructed through a set of acts said to be in compliance with dominant societal norms. Similarly, what counts as an insult is highly variable from one society to another, but the human capacity to use speech to harm others, or to be affected by it, is universal. Performativity presupposes an experiential self that is capable of speech and gesture, and is vulnerable to the effects of discursive power structures.

The fourth issue concerns the role of the body and materiality in constituting individual experiential selves. Embodiment as an anthropological paradigm views cultural objects as perceptually constituted and enacted through habits, and accessible to direct observational understanding. When we hear a human host speaking in trance we directly see the spirit; when we see certain tools being used in a particular type of landscape, we directly understand the underlying motive, without needing an explanation. Moreover, this ability to detect the abstract in the concrete may explain why psychological essentialism is pervasive.