Sociological and Anthropological Perspectives on the Self

Sociological Perspective

Mead and Cooley

• The sociological perspective is based on the assumption that human behavior is influenced by group life.
• A person's view of themselves is formed through interactions with other people, groups, or social institutions.
• Sociologists like Mead and Cooley believe the self is a product of social interaction, not biological predispositions.
• The sense of self emerges as an individual participates in society.

Charles Horton Cooley: The Looking-Glass Self

• Cooley introduced the concept of the "looking-glass self," where people around a person act as a mirror for self-perception.
• Self-identity is achieved through:
  • Conceiving an idea of how one presents oneself to others.
  • Analyzing how others perceive them.
  • Creating a self-image.
• Subjective perceptions can lead to misinterpretations, potentially causing a negative self-image if one believes others judge them unfavorably.

George Herbert Mead: Theory of the Social Self

• Mead's theory supports the idea that a sense of self develops through social interaction, not biological predispositions.
• The self has two divisions:
  • "I": The subjective, active element representing spontaneous and unique traits.
  • "Me": The objective element representing internalized attitudes and demands of others, and awareness of those demands.
• Full development of the self is attained when the "I" and the "me" are united.
• The self is not present at birth; it develops through social experience using language, gestures, and objects to communicate meaningfully.
• Role-taking: Inferring people's intentions, understanding the world from their point of view, creating one's own role, and anticipating responses.
• The self continuously changes with social experience.
• Individuals remain creative beings, able to react to the world, regardless of how much it shapes them.

Mead's Three-Stage Process of Self-Development:

1. Preparatory Stage (0-3 years old):

   • Children imitate people around them, especially family.
   • They copy behaviors without understanding intentions.
   • They have no sense of self and are merely preparing for role-taking.

2. Play Stage (3-5 years old):

   • Children view themselves in relation to others and learn to communicate through language and symbols.
   • Role-taking is exhibited, but not seen as an expectation.
   • The self emerges as children pretend to take roles of specific people or significant others.
   • The self is developing.

3. Game Stage (Early school years):

   • Children understand their own and others' social positions.
   • They consider generalized others: attitudes, viewpoints, demands, and expectations of society, including cultural norms and values.
   • They have a more sophisticated view of people and can respond to numerous members of the social environment.
   • The self is now present.

Gerry Lanuza: Society and the Individual

• Lanuza discusses the relationship between society and the individual in his article, "The Constitution of the Self".
• In modern societies, self-identity attainment and stability are freely chosen, no longer restricted by customs and traditions.
• This freedom allows infinite possibilities for self-cultivation, but also leads to problems like alienation and dehumanization, hindering human potential.
• Discovering the "authentic core" of the self is necessary for self-realization.
• Postmodern individuals welcome all possibilities for self-improvement, unlike the solid and stable self-identity constructed in modern society after the dissolution of traditional values.
• Self-identity continuously changes due to social contexts, new information technologies, and globalization in postmodern societies.

Jean Baudrillard: Postmodernity and Consumption

• Baudrillard exposes the negative consequences of postmodernity on individuals.
• Consumption structures postmodern society.
• Individuals achieve self-identity through prestige symbols they consume.
• They seek a position in society based on the quality of prestige symbols they can afford.
• Advertising and mass media influence individuals to consume goods for the feeling of goodness and power, not utility.
• The postmodern person becomes an insatiable consumer, never satisfied.
• Example: Buying an expensive phone for prestige, desiring a newer model when it appears.
• The self may be in a never-ending search for prestige in postmodern society.

Anthropological Perspective

James Peacock

• Practices among different societies reveal ways how societies conceptualize what the self is and how it relates to culture.
• Anthropology is a complex discipline exploring meanings of culture, self, and identity.
• Some anthropologists believe that there is no simple definition.
• Anthropology studies how cultural and biological processes interact to shape human experience.
• Contemporary anthropologists believe culture and the self are complementary concepts.
• Anthropology uses a holistic and integrated approach in examining human nature.
• Anthropology examines the interconnection and interdependence of biological and cultural aspects of the human experience at all times and for all people.
• Anthropology considers human experience as an interplay of "nature" (genetic inheritance) and "nurture" (sociocultural environment).
• Biological and cultural factors influence self-awareness within society.
• Ethnographic investigations show that cultural variations affect one's mental state, language, and behavior.
• Anthropology provides insights into the nature of the self based on an understanding of the basic elements of culture.
• British anthropologist Edward Tylor defines culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
• Culture guides behavior and is expressed in behavior, reflecting shared understandings.
• Culture provides patterns of "ways of life."

Concept of Self and Identity

Martin Sökefeld

• German anthropologist Martin Sökefeld (1999) believes that the concept of self is a necessary supplement to the concept of culture in anthropology and should be regarded as a human universal.
• Culture and self, thus, become complementary concepts that have to be understood in relation to one another.
• Identity is used in the context of "ethnic identity," pointing out the sameness of the self with others, that is, to a consciousness of sharing certain characteristics such as language and culture within a group.
• Identity is understood as a disposition of basic personality features acquired mostly during childhood and, once integrated, more or less fixed.
• This identity makes a human being a person and an acting individual.
• Peacock believes that an individual is neither a robot nor an entirely independent self-willed little god, but a cultural individual existing in freedom. It also embodies that cultural mold in which he or she is cast in his or her particular society and historical epoch.

Egocentric vs. Sociocentric Views of Self

• Egocentric: The self is seen as an autonomous and distinct individual.
  • Each person is defined as a replica of all humanity but is capable of acting independently from others that sets an individual's potentials.
• Sociocentric: The self is contingent on a situation or social setting.
  • This is a view of the self that is context-dependent, which emphasizes that there is no intrinsic self that can possess enduring qualities.

Christie Kiefer

• For anthropologist Christie Kiefer, the Japanese possess a sociocentric view of the self, in which the membership of a person in a particular social group defines the boundaries of the self.
• The interdependence between the person and the group is more valued than independence.
• Social interaction should be characterized by restraint.

Francis Hsu

• Chinese American anthropologist Francis Hsu attributes a sociocentric view of the self to the Chinese.
• He explains that the Chinese prioritize kin ties and cooperation.
• For them, the very essence of interpersonal relations is mutual dependence.
• Hence, they do not value self-reliance but place importance on compliance and subordination of one's will to the authority figures in a family.
• In contrast with the Japanese and the Chinese, the Americans are egocentric.
• They believe that they should be assertive and independent.

Social Identity

• From the similarities and differences in characteristics among individuals, people construct their social identities.
• The identity toolbox refers to the features of a person's identity that he or she chooses to emphasize in constructing a social self.
• Some characteristics, such as kinship, gender, and age, are almost universally used to differentiate people.
• Other characteristics, such as ethnicity, personal appearance, and socioeconomic status, are not always used in every society.
• Family membership can be the most significant feature to determine a person's social identity. Another important identity determinant that is often viewed as essential for the maintenance of group identity is language.
• In other societies, religious affiliation is an important marker of group identity (Robbins, 2012). In Mindanao, being a Christian or a Muslim is possibly the most important defining feature of one's social identity.

Personal Naming

• Personal naming is a universal practice with numerous cross-cultural variations, establishes a child's birthright and social identity. A name is an important device to individualize a person and legitimize him or her as a member of a social group, such as a family.
• Personal names in all societies are intimate markers of a person, which differentiates him or her from others. A person's name may symbolically represent his or her cultural self. Hence, many cultures mark the naming of a child with a special ceremony.
• For example, Aymara Indians do not consider an infant as a true human until a name is given to him or her. When the child is around two years old and ready to speak the Aymara language, a special ritual is performed to give it a name. This marks the Aymara child's social transition from a state of nature to culture, which also consequently makes him or her fully accepted into the Aymara community.
• Different from the Aymara Indians, Icelanders name their infants soon after birth. The baby receives the paternal given name as its last name. The boy's name is added with a suffix sen and the girls name with dottir. Whereas patronyms (surnames based on fathers' names) are common in Iceland, matronymic traditions prevail in an Indonesian island of Sumatra, where an ethnic group known as Minangkabau lives, In Minangkabau culture, children inherit their mother's family name.
• Another unique naming is practiced in Arctic Canada, where children are named after their deceased relatives and other people with admirable qualities, which they believe will be helpful for their character formation. Similarly, in the Philippines, it is a common practice for Catholic parents to name their children after saints. Perhaps they think that by bearing a sacred name, their child will be blessed and protected throughout life.

Rites of Passage

• One's identity is not inborn. It is something people continuously develop in life.
• For instance, rites of passage usually involve ritual activities to prepare individuals for new roles from one stage of life to another, such as birth, puberty, marriage, having children, and death.
• Arnold van Gennep believes that changes in one's status and identity are marked by a three-phased rite of passage: separation, liminality, and incorporation.
  • SEPARATION PHASE - people detach from their former identity to another. For example, in a wedding, the bride walking down the aisle to be "given away" by the parents to the groom implies the separation from one's family to become a part of a new one.
  • LIMINALITY PHASE - a person transitions from one identity to another. For example, the wedding ceremony itself is the process of transition of the bride and groom from singlehood to married life.
  • INCORPORATION PHASE - the change in one's status is officially incorporated. For example, the wedding reception and parties that celebrate the wedding serve as the markers that officially recognize the bride and groom's change towards being husband and wife.
• Rites of passage help a person adjust from one social dimension of his or her life to another stage of life or identity.

Identity Struggles

• However, sometimes, individuals disagree on their respective identities.
• Anthony Wallace and Raymond Fogelson coined the term "identity struggles" to characterize interaction in which there is a discrepancy between the identity a person claims to possess and the identity attributed to that person by others.
• Moreover, individuals may also be confused in defining their personal identity when there is a clash between self-identification and inherited collective identification emerging from the cultural changes and conflicting norms and values in the postmodern society.

Identity Crisis

• When the universal values and moral principles of an individual or group become relatively determined by politics and ideology, among other external factors, an identity crisis may occur.
• Golubovic (2011) suggests that to attain self-identification, individuals have to overcome many obstacles, such as traditionally established habits and externally imposed self-images.
• Meanwhile, the works of cognitive anthropologists suggest that to maintain a relatively stable and coherent self, members of the multicultural society have no choice but to internalize divergent cultural models and should reject or suppress identifications that may conflict with other self-presentations.

Illusion of Wholeness

• Katherine Ewing's "Illusion of Wholeness" exhibits how individual selves throughout the world continuously reconstitute themselves into new selves in response to internal and external stimuli. Therefore, the cohesiveness and continuity of self are only illusory.
• For the reason that the postmodern man has lost his right and stopped striving to become an autonomous and active part of the process of self-determination and a particular identification with one's community, the most important philosophical task of the postmodern man today is to "work on yourself, just like in the Socratic message "know thyself".

Clifford Geertz: Culture as a System of Inherited Conceptions

• offers a reformulation of the concept of culture that favors a symbolic interpretative model of it.
• He defines culture as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.
• Furthermore, he proposes that it is necessary that humans give meanings to their experiences so that order in the world can be established.
• He agrees with Max Weber that $man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, in which those webs are perceived to be symbolic of culture$
• This semiotic approach to culture is helpful in getting inside a conceptual world where human beings live.
• Thus, the concept of culture has its impact on the concept of man. In his attempt to illustrate an accurate image of man
• Geertz suggests two important ideas
  • culture should not be perceived only as complexes of concrete behavior patterns-customs, usages, traditions, and habit clusters as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms -plans, recipes, rules, and instructions-for the governing behavior
  • man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such as cultural programs, for ordering his behavior.
• Therefore, man is defined by his genetic potentials shaped into actual accomplishments that are made possible by culture.
• Geertz also emphasizes that human nature is interdependent with culture: "Without men, no culture, certainly; but equally, and more significantly, without culture, no men"

Robbins: Human Beings as Cultural Animals

• considers human beings as cultural animals, as they create the meanings of objects, persons, behaviors, emotions, and events and behave in accordance with meanings they assume to be true.
• Every aspect of their lives is filled with meaning, and if they share the meanings they impose on their experiences, they are operating within the same culture.
• Cultural differences exist when groups of people assign different meanings to different life events and things. Hence, the self is embedded in the culture.