Maurice Bloch has an interesting article on the human self which he dubs “the blob” for rhetorical purposes: The Blob, Anthropology of This Century (Issue 1, May 2011). His purpose is sketch out a framework in which the universalist tendencies of psychologists and the culturally specific and relativist tendencies of anthropologists can commingle and even be transcended in a mutually beneficial way.
Rather than attempt a summary, much less a discussion, I’m just going to offer a few paragraphs to indicate the flavor of the discussion. Thus, the opening paragraph:
The history of the social sciences and especially that of modern anthropology has been dominated by a recurrent controversy about what kind of phenomena people are. On the one hand there are those who assume that human beings are a straightforward matter: they are beings driven by easily understood desires directed towards an empirically obvious world. The prototypical examples of such theoreticians are Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, or more recently the proponents of rational choice theory. The positions of these thinkers have been, again and again, criticised by those who have stressed that there can be no place in theory for actors who are simply imagined as “generic human beings” since people are always the specific product of their particular and unique location in the social, the historical and the cultural process. Among the writers who have made this kind of point are such as Emile Durkheim, Louis Dumont, and more recently Michel Foucault and the post-modernists.
After this that and the other Bloch proposes a multi-level model with a core component (no reflexive awareness) common to all animals (I believe), a minimal component (a sense of continuity in time) common to birds and mammals (more or less), and a narrative component which seems unique to humans. The narrative component comes in two flavors, which Bloch differentiates according to a distinction proposed by philosopher Galen Strawson, who
argues that there are some people who are into creating conscious autobiographical narratives about themselves. These he refers to as “diachronics”. And there are others, like himself, who are just not interested in doing this. It is not their rhetorical style. He calls these latter people, somewhat unfortunately, “episodics”. Strawson intends the distinction to apply to all cultures at all times but the people he uses as examples are all Europeans or North Americans. As will be made clear below, although I am sure he is right that everywhere and at all times there are individuals of both type, that does not mean that the distinction is not of use also in contrasting different cultural settings.
Bloch suggests that most of the conflict between the universalists and relativists is over the differences between Strawson’s episodics and diachronics. The diachronics engage in “meta-representation” of the self that the episodics do not.
Moving on:
In those societies where, for historical/cultural reasons, it is acceptable, even encouraged, to talk about internal states of mind, individual motivations and autobiography, there are many diachronics and these will often take centre stage. It should be noted however that, as they do this, they are not exposing their selves, their individuality, their personhood, their agency, to the harsh light of day. They are doing something quite different; they are telling stories about themselves to others, which should not be mistaken for the complex business of being oneself among others. What they are doing when they are being diachronics, and this is the implicit point of Quinn’s criticism of post modernists, is interpreting those few aspects of their blob [that is, the human subject in Bloch’s terminology] that are easily available to their consciousness, and then re-representing them as best they can, in other words publically meta-representing them. This clearly reveals the error of the direct “representational” reading that anthropologists have made of such meta-representational activity, which has led them to consider discourse about the self and others to be what it is a representation of.
In societies where, in most contexts, such meta-representational talk about one’s internal states and motivations is thought inappropriate or even immoral, discourse will obviously not normally be psychologically oriented but will be much more about the rules of behaviour that should be followed in groups, roles, rights and duties and exchange systems. This is my experience among the more remote Malagasy groups I have studied. Such emphasis does not mean that we have found an alternative self, different from the self of the west where the rhetorical emphasis is on individuality and interiority. It is simply that when anthropologists are in societies where the glorifying of diachronics does not take place, they concentrate on the discourse about relations and morality – which, in any case, is found in all societies. Quite misleadingly, they make this into a compatible, if alternative, blob, a kind of substitute concept of the person, or the individual, or the self or the agent, while in fact it is nothing of the sort. There is thus no basis for a contrast between two types of blob.
And so:
All levels interact. Thus the narrative self is continuous with the primate-wide requirements of the minimal self and the minimal self is continuous with the living-kind-wide requirements of the core self. Similarly the narrative self is continuous with the minimal self which will itself be affected by the core self. We are psychologically and physically one.
But there is also another aspect to the continuum of the blob. As we move to the higher levels, we also move from the internal and private level of such experiences as the awareness of ownership of one’s body and its location, towards the public, and therefore inevitably social, expressions of the narrative self.
This gradual move from the private to the public and, above all, its internal continuity are particularly important if we are to understand how the cultural/historical affects the blob. We might be tempted to assume that the private is untouched by the cultural while the public, caught up in social discourse, is entirely cultural. This would be misleading because it would forget the continuity of the blob through its various levels. The blob is a process. It is not a matter of a binary contrast but one of more or less. In other words, like icebergs, the blob is 90% submerged but the exposed part has no real independent existence from the submerged part and vice versa.
Bloch’s discussion is worth serious thought.
I’ve taken a somewhat different approach to these issues in The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (1993) and in First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction (2000).
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