The feeling, thinking and acting Self is a principal category of social thought. It is the basic unit of sociological conceptions of society, as well as of theories of democracy and the market economy. According to our general philosophical intuitions, the subjective and subjectified Self is where social structure and individual agency intersect, which makes it difficult to think society without the subject. At the same time, however, recent scholarship has firmly established the notion that the subject belongs to a specific historical configuration. According to this view, subjectivity, as the center of the reflective and self-identical Self, is a condition of Western modernity.
In this seminar, we will focus on what social anthropology can contribute to conceptualizing subjectivity and the subject. We will place particular emphasis on the cultural and historic contingencies of notions and practices regarding the Self. We will read ethnographic literature from around the world that explores alternative ways of conceiving of humans as sentient and acting beings, challenges certainties regarding individual consciousness as the core of the human condition, considers non-Western ways of thinking sociality beyond the monadic subject, and thematizes the subject as the locus of power and resistance in the (post-)colonial world.
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