AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF SELF

THE SELF AS EMBEDDED IN

CULTURE
We are each a product of biological endowments,culture,
and personal history. Culture, ideology, and cultural events
along with transmittedcultural practices influence each of
us. We are each product of collective enterchanges... We
are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness
joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective
tissue soldered together by cultural links.

-Kilroy J. Oldster
 Anthropology considered as one of the most complex areas
of discipline, has explored various meanings of culture, self
and identity in the desire to come up with a better
understanding of the self.

 Anthropology is concerned with how cultural and biological

processes interact to shape human experience.
Anthropology considers human experience interplay of “nature,”
referring to genetic inheritance which sets the individual’s
potensials, and “nature,” reffering to the sociocultural
environment.

 James L. Peacock year 1986 said that the most important

contribution of anthropology is providing insights into the
nature of self based on continous understanding of the basic
elements of culture
 THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND
IDENTITY

British anthropology Edward Tylor defines culture as”...that

complex whole which includes knowlegde, belief, art, morals,
law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by
man as a member of society.”

Culture has acquired a range of different menings that require

reflection and analysis because the signficance of cultures has
enormous implications for everyone’s conception of self (van
Meijl, 2008).
 Two antropologist belief that self and identity may
have different meanings in different cultures

 Martin Sokefeld (1999) a german anthropologist 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.

 Christie Kiefer (Robbins, 2012), 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.
Two ways in which concept of self is viewed in
different societies

 egocentric

 sociocentric

The Self as Embedded in Culture

Clifford Geertz (1973), an American anthropologist, offers a

reformulation of the concept of culture which favors a symbolic
interpretative model of culture. 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 toward life.
Geertz suggests two important ideas:
1) Culture should not be perceived only as complexes of
concrete behavior patterns customs, usages, traditions,
habit clusters as has, by and large, been the case up to
now, but as a set of control mechanism plans, recipes,
rules, instructions for governing behavior.

2) Man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent

upon such extragenetic, outside the skin control
mechanisms, such cultural programs, for ordering his
behaviour.
 THANK YOU !!!

PREPARED BY: RINA MAE N. LORENZANA

Section&year: BSBA A11 (1ST)

PROFESSOR: MS. MARJORIE MALINAO