'SELFING': Contact, Magic and the Constituion of Personhood
'SELFING': Contact, Magic and the Constituion of Personhood
This study will explore processes of ‘Selfing' and ‘Othering' in contexts of ‘contact' between social actors. Actors here are defined as agents or entities with capacity to exert ‘effects' or changes in the world, which can as much be spirits and gods, persons and collectives, as national governments, material cultures and other bodies. Through a comparative case study approach, this project will focus on the different kinds of ‘ontological work' through which the forms and boundaries of persons (where ‘person' is subject to ethnographic examination) are cultivated, maintained, transformed, or subverted. Anthropological studies dealing with issues of transnationalism, globalisation and migration, for instance, have demonstrated that social contact often generates situations in which social ‘entities' seen in variable dimensions - in terms of gender, individuals, groups, classes, nations, etc. - can cohabitate in a same locale while pertaining separated social lives, cultures and identities (Pina-Cabral 2002). In such contexts, Selves and Others seem to constitute each other as what Paul Ottino (1986) called ‘intimate strangers' whose interrelation seems crucial for the maintenance of identity. While processes of Selfing and Othering have been abundantly described in the academic literature (Barth 1970, Fabian 2006) few anthropologists have attempted to explain what precisely makes such processes so successful in human society, if we define ‘success' as the ability to co-exist somehow, in this sense, in a multicultural or multiethnic setting. However, by ‘contact', we refer not merely to intercultural, racial, or ethnic interfaces; we wish to extend its meaning from the realm of the sociological to that of the cosmological, in which physicality and embodiment are nevertheless implied. Spirit possession is one powerful example of such forms of contact; forms of initiative travel to and through spaces ascribed with mythical qualities (e.g. the ‘West' for Young middle class Russians) or the symbolic anthropophagy of Western strangers as part of hospitality practices in Madagascar are other pertinent examples.
Project 'SELFING': Contact, Magic and the Constituion of Personhood - PTDC/CS-ANT/114825/2009 - Financed by FCT - Principal Contractor: Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA)
Magic,
Social contac,
Self-Other relations,
Social phenomenology
This study will explore processes of ‘Selfing' and ‘Othering' in contexts of ‘contact' between social actors. Actors here are defined as agents or entities with capacity to exert ‘effects' or changes in the world, which can as much be spirits and gods, persons and collectives, as national governments, material cultures and other bodies. Through a comparative case study approach, this project will focus on the different kinds of ‘ontological work' through which the forms and boundaries of persons (where ‘person' is subject to ethnographic examination) are cultivated, maintained, transformed, or subverted. Anthropological studies dealing with issues of transnationalism, globalisation and migration, for instance, have demonstrated that social contact often generates situations in which social ‘entities' seen in variable dimensions - in terms of gender, individuals, groups, classes, nations, etc. - can cohabitate in a same locale while pertaining separated social lives, cultures and identities (Pina-Cabral 2002). In such contexts, Selves and Others seem to constitute each other as what Paul Ottino (1986) called ‘intimate strangers' whose interrelation seems crucial for the maintenance of identity. While processes of Selfing and Othering have been abundantly described in the academic literature (Barth 1970, Fabian 2006) few anthropologists have attempted to explain what precisely makes such processes so successful in human society, if we define ‘success' as the ability to co-exist somehow, in this sense, in a multicultural or multiethnic setting. However, by ‘contact', we refer not merely to intercultural, racial, or ethnic interfaces; we wish to extend its meaning from the realm of the sociological to that of the cosmological, in which physicality and embodiment are nevertheless implied. Spirit possession is one powerful example of such forms of contact; forms of initiative travel to and through spaces ascribed with mythical qualities (e.g. the ‘West' for Young middle class Russians) or the symbolic anthropophagy of Western strangers as part of hospitality practices in Madagascar are other pertinent examples.
Project 'SELFING': Contact, Magic and the Constituion of Personhood - PTDC/CS-ANT/114825/2009 - Financed by FCT - Principal Contractor: Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA)