Personhood: individuality and culture

general courses

The course will be held in English and involve written assignments as well as discussion participation as main evaluation components. All students must have a sufficient command of both written and spoken academic English.

Being an individual and a person seems obvious, natural, and a cultural constant. Yet, actual forms of personhood and individuality have varied culturally and historically — and they continue to change. This course explores personhood and human individuality from a broad anthropological perspective as the effect of sophisticated and intensive work of culture: symbols, rituals, hierarchies, legal acts, narratives, science and technology, and shifting categories of identity are all involved in making us the kinds of persons we are with significant consequences for the kinds of societies we live in. We will explore historical and contemporary forms of personhood and ask about its emergent future, considering what the forces that shape them. In that respect, we’ll follow three different perspectives focusing on: the individual (the social aspect), the person (cultural aspect) and the subject (political aspect).

Literature will include - but will not be limited to - selections from the following:

Bateson, G. (2000). The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (2008). Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, Calif. Los Angeles, Calif. London: University of California Press.

Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Biehl, J., Good, B., & Kleinman, A. (Eds.). (2007). Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (1st ed.). University of California Press.

Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Halton, E. (1981). The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge Eng. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dumit, J. (2004). Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Dunn, E. (2005). Standards and person-making in East-Central Europe. In Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 173–193). Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0412/2003026675.html

Dunn, E. C. (2004). Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Fanon, F. (2000). Black Skin, White Masks (Nachdr.; C. L. Markmann, Trans.). London: Pluto Press

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1980). The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Vintage Books.

Foucault, M., Martin, L. H., Gutman, H., & Hutton, P. H. (1988). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Univ of Massachusetts Press.

Freud, S. (1989). The ego and the id (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York: Norton.

Geertz, C. (1973). Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali. In The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press.

Hacking, I. (2002). Making Up People. In Historical Ontology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Helmreich, S. (2014). Homo microbis: The Human Microbiome, Figural, Literal, Political. Thresholds, 42, 52–59. https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00076

Humphrey, C. (2008). Reassembling individual subjects: Events and decisions in troubled times. Anthropological Theory, 8(4), 357–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499608096644

Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (1st ed.). University of California Press.

Jones, R. A. (2016). Personhood and Social Robotics: A Psychological Consideration. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Kharkhordin, O. (1999). The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Vol. 32). Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (Vol. 1st). New York: Norton.

Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Macpherson, C. B. (1962). The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Matza, T. (2012). “Good Individualism”? Psychology, ethics, and neoliberalism in postsocialist Russia. American Ethnologist, 39(4), 804–818. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01396.x

Mauss, M. (1985). A category of the human mind: The notion of person; the notion of self. In M. Carrithers, S. Collins, & S. Lukes (Eds.), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge Cambridgeshire ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Novas, C., & Rose, N. (2000). Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual. Economy and Society, 29(4), 485–513. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140050174750

Rose, N. (1996). Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge, England ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rose, N. S. (1989). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London ; New York: Routledge.

Skultans, V. (2007). The Appropriation of Suffering: Psychiatric Practice in the Post-Soviet Clinic. Theory Culture & Society, 24(3), 27.

Strathern, M. (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. University of California Press.

Sue-Taussig, K., Rapp, R., & Heath, D. (2005). Flexible eugenics: Technologies of the self in the age of genetics. In Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, governmentality, and life politics. Blackwell Publishing.

The Century of the Self | New Philosopher. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2019, from https://www.newphilosopher.com/videos/the-century-of-the-self/

The Two Treatises of Civil Government (Hollis ed.)—Online Library of Liberty. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2019, from https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/locke-the-two-treatises-of-civil-government-hollis-ed

The Works of John Locke, vol. 1 (An Essay concerning Human Understanding Part 1)—Online Library of Liberty. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2019, from https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/locke-the-works-vol-1-an-essay-concerning-human-understanding-part-1

Tischner, J., & Życiński, J. (1994). The Philosophy of Person: Solidarity and Cultural Creativity. CRVP.

Yurchak, A. (2003). Russian Neoliberal: The Entrepreneurial Ethic and the Spirit of “True Careerism.” Russian Review, 62(1), 72–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9434.00264

Zigon, J. (2009). Developing the Moral Person: The Concepts of Human, Godmanhood, and Feelings in Some Russian Articulations of Morality. Anthropology of Consciousness, 20(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3537.2009.01008.x

Discussion participation, final paper, midterm assignment.