Martin Pj Edwardes an Anthropological Perspective
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The Origins of Self explores the role that selfhood plays in defining human society, and each human individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialisation and language, and the types of self we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Edwardes argues that other awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only non-model, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self. Developed in relation to a range of subject areas – linguistics, anthropology, genomics and cognition, as well as socio-cultural theory – The Origins of Self is of particular interest to MARTIN P. J. EDWARDES students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies. Martin P. J. Edwardes is a visiting lecturer at King’s College London. He is currently teaching modules on Language Origins and Language Construction. Martin was Web Editor for the THE British Association for Applied Linguistics, 2004–2007 and 2010–2016, and has edited a weekly newsletter, The EAORC Bulletin, for the evolutionary anthropology community since 2003. His first monograph, The Origins of Grammar: An Anthropological Perspective, was published in 2010. ORIGINS OF AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL m PERSPECTIVE Cover design: SELF www.ironicitalics.com Cover image: © Jeremy Vessey/ Unsplash The Origins of Self The Origins of Self An Anthropological Perspective Martin P.J. Edwardes First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Martin P.J. Edwardes, 2019 Images © Martin P.J. Edwardes, 2019 The author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Edwardes, Martin P.J. 2019. The Origins of Self: An Anthropological Perspective. London: UCL Press. DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787356306 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 632- 0 (Hbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 631- 3 (Pbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 630- 6 (PDF) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 633- 7 (epub) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 634- 4 (mobi) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 635- 1 (html) DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787356306 For Philip, my strongest critic still, my fiercest defender always. And for Matthew, without whom I would be in a very different place today. Contents List of figures and tables x Acknowledgements xi Prologue: Down the Rabbit-hole xii 1. What Is a Self? 1 The priest’s turn 3 The philosopher’s turn 5 The psychologist’s turn 12 The neurologist’s turn 15 The anthropologist’s turn 22 Is there an answer? 27 2. Where Did Self Come From? 29 The sense of not- self 30 The sense of almost- self 32 Senses of other and sense of self 34 Awareness 36 Sharing information 39 Do animals have awareness of self? 42 Non- humans using human language 45 What is special about human self- awareness? 48 Does having an awareness of selfness mean there is a self to be aware of? 49 3. The Modelled Self 52 How to make models of others 53 How to make models of relationships between others 56 vii Sharing models of others 58 Making models of my self 63 Me, myself and I 64 Awareness of selfness: for humans only? 66 Language, culture and the self 68 The disadvantages of a modelled self: deficient self and self- deception 73 4. How Do We Become Selves? 76 The developing child: traditional approaches 79 The developing child: modern approaches 83 The developing child: deception 87 Timescales for self in childhood 89 How to make a human adult (start with other human adults) 92 5. Where Did Social Calculus Come From? 95 Social networks, genes and brains 97 Machiavellianism 103 The tragedy of the commons 107 Altruism 109 Altruistic punishment and free- riders 112 From altruistic punishment to social model- sharing 115 So where did social calculus come from? 119 6. The Language of Self 120 Pronominalisation and selfhood 124 Where names come from 126 The origin of they 128 The origin of you and me 132 The origin of possession and the possessive 135 The origin of recursion and reflexivity 138 Self out of language, language out of self? 142 viii CONTENTS 7. Metaphors of Self 145 THE MODEL IS THE ACTUAL 147 THE GROUP IS AN ENTITY 149 SELF IS OTHER 151 I AM ME 154 ONE AMONG EQUALS 156 Mapping metaphor to rhetoric and deception 160 8. What Is a Self? There and Back Again 163 The Actual self: unknowable 165 The Social self: the self others believe me to be 166 The self- model: the self I believe me to be 167 The Episodic self: the self as modelled in individual past events 170 The Narrative self: the remembered self, the self with history 172 The Cultural self: the self I should be 174 The Projected self: the self I want others to believe me to be 177 … And there’s more: some other selves 181 Why self defines us 187 9. Epilogue: Snarks or Boojums? 190 The route to self- modelling 192 Yes, but … who am I? 195 Glossary 197 Bibliography 209 Index 225 CONTENTS ix List of figures and tables Fig 1.1 Types of knowledge, ways of learning, ways of responding 2 Fig 2.1 The development of selfhood 41 Fig 6.1 Suggested cognitive structure for the self’s model of the social calculus relationships 130 Fig 8.1 Types of self 164 Fig 9.1 The route to self- modelling 194 Table 6.1 List of my social calculus relationships between A and others 129 x Acknowledgements I would like to thank all the people who have helped to make this book possible: my students and colleagues, who have inspired me in ways they were probably unaware of; and my friends, who have tolerated my habit of thinking out loud and hijacking conversations, and who have helped me through my weirder moments. I thank the following readers of early drafts of this book: Guy Cook, Tore Janson, Adriano Reis E. Lameira, Philip Rescorla, Jim Toller and two anonymous publisher’s reviewers. Your comments have improved clarity, readability and structure, and have added scholarship that I missed or was unaware of. Philip, in particular, provided me with an informed layperson’s view, and he has mitigated – no, toned down – my habit of reaching for little- known specialist terms when simpler words are avail- able. I must also thank Sören Stauffer-Kruse for his help with the subtle- ties of German. Finally, I would like to thank those great minds that created this cognitive playground of selfhood research. Many of you have been mentioned or discussed in this book (but not all, and not enough). Without your thought and imagination I would have had no base on which to build my own ideas – and no book to write. xi Prologue: Down the Rabbit-hole So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat- pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat- pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.