The introduction by John Kirkpatrick and Geoffrey M. Victor Barnouw's textbook, in its fourth edition as of 1985, still adheres to the older nomenclature for its title. For the "continuities" between the two orientations, see also the study by Philip K. Pology," the introduction to a collection of essays on the subject. Thomas Williams lists over a hundred and twenty references that permit the interested reader to trace the historical trajectory from culture and personality to psychological anthropology in his "The Development of Psychological Anthro. Hsu is particularly hostile to "personality" as the reference term for this type of study, which may account for the title of his co-edited text, Culture and Self. 7, below), is more nearly a matter of the thirties. Although culture-and-personality studies may be dated from as early as 1910, their influence, through Benedict, Mead, Sapir, and others (cf. For a tough, ideologically inflected account of the early culture and personality movement, see Harris 1968. Almost by definition, a strictly conceived psychological anthropology tends to privilege the individual perception of self, projecting a Western bourgeois bias. Nevertheless, it does seem to be true that psychological anthropology, for better or worse, is currently on an upswing and that its focus of study is whatever name we choose to give to the unitary male's or female's own sense of himself or herself as a unit entity. I would not be quite so certain as Marsella, DeVos, and Hsu, writing at the meridian of Reaganism, that "The Self has returned!" nor so unequivocally cheered if that were indeed the case. As we shall see, not selfhood, hallmark of "individualist" society so much as personhood, hallmark of the "holist" society (Dumont passim) is what is found among most of the world's people. If not another "problem," another consideration is that while some sense of self may be universal, it is not the case that that sense of self, whatever it may be, receives cultural validation. Considerations of this sort have animated work in the ethnography of the self, from its rudimentary and initially "anti-psychological" be. What, after all, does it mean for the Hopi to be "reflective," for the Yaqui to be "conscious," for the Chippewa to be a "subject," for the Ojibwa to "have" experiences? Humans are or do all of these things, and we are or do them in the same ways-differently. The problem is that every term in Rorty's (or in any other) description is culture-specific, inflected in its meaning by the particular cultural codes according to which we differentially "have," as historically and geographically situated men and women, our similar "experiences" as human beings. Whether or not Paul Heelas is correct in his generalization (and I think he probably is not) that "the autonomous self is universal" (48), it is very likely the case that some sense of self-perhaps Amélie Rorty's "reflective, conscious subject of experience, a subject that is not identical with any set of its experiences, memories or traits, but is that which has all of them" (11)-is indeed toīe found universally, and so, to be sure, among Native American people. But to say that the Western understanding of the self, in its various historical representations, is neither prioritized nor valorized in Native American autobiography is not at all to say that subjectivity is, therefore, absent or unimportant in these texts. This is not to indicate an error or omission to the contrary, inasmuch as the centrality of the self to Western autobiography has no close parallel in Native American autobiography, any immediate orientation toward the self would inevitably have seemed ethnocentric, at the least premature. Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic SelfĪlthough studies of Native American autobiography have become more numerous of late, no one of these has yet taken as its central focus the matter that has perhaps more than anything else occupied students of Western autobiography, that is, the nature of the "self" presented in these texts.
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