Individuality and community: The limits of social constructivism.

The self is not entirely socially constituted or distributed, despite claims from cognitive science, anthropology, and cultural psychology. While older scholarship contrasted a Western individual self with non-Western sociocentric conceptions, newer views treat subjectivity as a fluid, relational construct shaped by power structures. The author argues these accounts remain too crude, failing to distinguish different dimensions of selfhood. This leads to a radical social constructivism that cannot adequately account for first-person experience or the diversity of actual communal life.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Is selfhood socially constituted and distributed? Although the view has recently been defended by some cognitive scientists, it has long been popular within anthropology and cultural psychology. Whereas older texts by Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Hazel Rose Markus, and Shinobu Kitayama often contrast a Western conception of a discrete, bounded, and individual self with a non-Western sociocentric conception, it has more recently become common to argue that subjectivity is a fluid intersectional construction fundamentally relational and conditioned by discursive power structures. I assess the plausibility of these claims and argue that many of these discussions of self and subjectivity remain too crude. By failing to distinguish different dimension of selfhood, many authors unwittingly advocate a form of radical social constructivism that is not only incapable of doing justice to first-person experience but which also fails to capture the heterogeneity of real communal life.