Concepts of Individual, Self, and Person in Description and Analysis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2458855 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Grace Gredys Harris, Grace Harris (0000-0002-9311-3527, University of Rochester, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1989 |
| Volume | 91 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 599-612 |
| Publication date | 1989-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Anthropologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1525/aa.1989.91.3.02a00040 |
| OpenAlex | W2097789402 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 104 |
| References cited | 31 |
This article asserts the need to distinguish among "individual," "self," and "person" as biologistic, psychologistic, and sociologistic modes of conceptualizing human beings. The concepts differentiate individual as member of the human kind, self as locus of experience, and person as agent-in-society. The author follows out various descriptive and analytical implications. Ethnographic examples are used to illustrate and clarify points relevant to single-case studies and comparativist work. Within a particular local scheme, concepts of individual, self, and person are interrelated, sometimes hierarchically so. The article briefly takes up issues following from the double nature of these concepts as "native" categories and outsiders' analytical constructs. It is held that adopting as analytically central any one mode of conceptualizing human beings has consequences for the analyst's view of culture and/or social structure
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The archaeology of death
Mothers of Solitude
Self and Illness
The resonance of fieldwork. Ethnographers, informants and the creation of anthropological knowledge
The "Skipper Effect"
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Pathways to life course changes
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Seeking Personhood
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Nourishing Gods
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More Things in Heaven and Earth
The Mandala Model of Self
Care as work
Personhood, Positioning, and Cultural Pragmatics
Becoming Free” through Fortune-telling
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Interpretative trajectories toward understanding personhoods in prehistory
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Actualités de la personne en Mélanésie
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Is There a Circum-Mediterranean Person? Looking for Stereotypes
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Individualism, Holism, and the Market Mentality
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Identity and Healing in Three Navajo Religious Traditions
Personhood and Illness among the Kulina
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Surviving Time
Signs of Their Times
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Equality without equivalence
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A Fluid Ambiguity
Diabetes in People, Cats, and Dogs
Discourse,daño, and healing in north coastal Peru
Guns and rain
Ancestor worship in contemporary Japan.
Text, play, and story
Rituals of manhood
Social being
Kinship and the Social Order.
Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self
Human Nature and the Social Order
Indigenous psychologies
Sexual meanings, the cultural construction of gender and sexuality
The Category of the person
How To Do Things With Words
Psychosocial Theories of the Self
Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View
Spirits of Protest
Morality and the Concept of the Person Among the Gahuku‐gama
The Self in Self Decoration
Culture and self
Divinity and Experience
The Divine Hierarchy
Tikopia Ritual and Belief
Culture in History, Essays in Honor of Paul Radin
Asylums
Sociologie et anthropologie
Casting Out Anger
Concepts of Individual, Self, and Person in Description and Analysis
The Tchambuli View of Persons
| Unique citing works | 104 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,81 |
| Citation span | 1989 - 2026 (38) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 104 |