DEBATING SELF, IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN ANTHROPOLOGY by Martin Sokefeld: A Summary

 

DEBATING SELF, IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN ANTHROPOLOGY

MARTIN SOKEFELD

 

                                The article is about the relationship between “identity” and “self”-with the help of exemplified concepts that tends to be approached separately the aspect of Anthropology. Here the writer wants to suggest how the self might be envisaged by anthropology as a universal which like culture is a definitional aspect of humanness. Such a conceptualization of the self has to avoid both the Scylla of voluntarism and the Charybdis of cultural determinism.

In the concept of self as “Western’ self, characterised as autonomous and egocentric. It was here generally taken to make understand the readers. The concept of non-western self and western self plays individual importance and meanings in anthropological perspective. The understanding of non-western selves point of view exclusively to elements shared with others and not to individual features and western views are absolutely differs from it. Along with this anthropological discourse diverse attention  from actual individuals and selves. Here in this article, to make people understand better this view , Sokefeld had exemplified a different case from Northern Pakistan which is a social setting characterised by the plurality of contradictory identities. It is argued that how a particular individual acts  in the situation one is having between the role of identities, requires a  concept of ‘self’ as it emerges from the actions of individuals that is capable to manage the shared identities respectively. 

According to the writer’s view the concept of the self has to be developed from heighted attention to the human capacity and necessity for action . An inevitable premise is that all humans are able and required to act, which means that there is no culture acting for them or uncontradictably prescribing which mode of behaviour must be chosen in any situation. This becomes utterly clear in situation of plural identities, where individuals are obviously not found to a cultural consensus but exposed to a plurality of conflicting perspectives and interests and must, like Ali Hassan in his uneasy wedding visit, make their way through a maze of different identities. Attention to selves accordingly demands “ethnographies of the particular” that examine what people actually do in the specific circumstances of their daily lives.

 Besides any culture-specific attributes, this self is endowed with reflexivity and agency. This concept of self is a necessary supplement to the concept of culture in anthropology and it should be regarded as a human universal.