UTS

• Anthropology is a relatively newcomer to the debate on selfhood.
• Men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.
• Anthropology is the study of the past and present of human societies and cultures.
• Through anthropology, we understand the human condition both biologically and culturally.
• Selfhood is the quality that gives a person or thing an individual identity and makes them different from others.
• Anthropology emerged as a subject from the imperial ambitions of European states during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was initially an effort to identify the weaknesses and failings of other cultures so that they could be exploited and subjugated.
• In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, anthropology threw off its intimate links with the national and religious organisations it had been serving, and began to ask the big question that has informed its research ever since: ‘What does it mean to be human?’
• Being human encompasses a complex interplay of biological, cognitive, emotional, and social elements.
• Humans often express creativity, empathy, and a sense of morality, contributing to a rich and diverse human experience.
• Anthropology expresses a unique view on the issue of selfhood: the anthropological approach both starts and finishes with the group.
• The self needs to be seen as a socially defined phenomenon, created by both the impression of the group upon the individual and the expression of the individual upon the group.
• Language has something to do with culture and is a salient part of culture, ultimately affecting our crafting of the self.
• Culture is the "accumulated totality" of symbolic patterns that appear in different societies.
• Heikegami studied non-Western societies all over the world and proposed the “Total Social Phenomenon”, which tackles that every sector in a community or society should cooperate to have a well-balanced living.
• Culture reveals the link between what man is capable of and how he actually behaves, which in turn helps define human nature.
• Humans have a unique relationship with other members of their species, both communicatively and socially.
• Clifford Geertz, an American cultural anthropologist, defined culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.
• Personne is the mask that we wear depending on the situation, while Moi is our real face.
• Basic premises of Clifford Geertz's work, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man," include the following:
• Culture is a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.
• It is more effective to analyze human nature by noting the differences between cultures that arise over time and space than to try to form vague notions of universals.
• Our capacity for group living and group institutions exceeds that of every other animal on the planet.
• Anthropology therefore has an important voice in the discussion of selfhood.
• French anthropologist Marcel Mauss has an explanation for the paradox of remaining the same person and turning chameleon by adapting to one’s context.
• According to Mauss, every self has two faces: personne and moi.
• Moi refers to a person's sense of who he is, his body, and his basic identity, his biological givenness.
• Personne, on the other hand, is composed of the social concepts of what it means to be who he is.