Individualism should not be confused with individuality, difficult though it has been to separate their definition and implication in anthropologists’ work. To attempt this as a starting-point here, individualism pertains to a particular historicocultural conceptualization of the *person or self, and might include: notions of the ultimate value and dignity of the human individual, his or her moral and intellectual autonomy, *rationality and self-knowledge, spirituality, voluntary contracting into a *society, market and polity, the right to privacy and self-development (cf. Lukes 1990). Individuality, by contrast, refers to the universal nature of human existence whereby it is individuals who possess †agency. Moreover, since individuals engage with others by virtue of discrete sense-making apparatuses (nervous systems and brains)—discrete centres of consciousness in discrete bodies—their agency necessarily accords with distinct perspectives on the world. Not only is an individual’s being-in-the-world universally mediated by very particular interpretive prisms which distance the individual from the world, but while intrinsically ‘of the world’, the individual also inexorably comes to know the world as ‘other’.
Finally, this individuality of consciousness and agency is extant whatever the currency of individualism as a cultural norm.
In much anthropological writing on individualism, however, a conflation is apparent. The study of the conceptualization of the person in a particular socio-cultural milieu spills over into a positing of the nature of the individual actor. The society or culture to which the individual belongs is looked to for the ultimate origination of action and its interpretation, the source of agency. Hence, individuality comes to be depicted as as much prone to the niceties of socio-cultural fashion as individualism.
The root of the confusion lies in the nineteenth-century tradition of social thought from which twentieth-century anthropology derives. In attempting social-scientifically to come to terms with what were felt to be grand societal changes (the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution), to discover causatives and predict evolutions in mimicry of the sciences of natural organisms, *sociology began predicating grand historical patterns and forces. Explanatory narratives were fashioned which turned on the origins and development of such collective organisms as society (generally in Europe) and *culture (generally in North America).
While *Boas and American anthropology owed debts to the writings of †Herbert Spencer and *L.H.Morgan (and later, †Weber), perhaps the key nineteenth-century influence on the twentieth-century development of anthropological explanation—the key exponent of a collectivist narrative which subsumed individual agency within grand societal workings—was †Emile Durkheim. It was from him that *Radcliffe-Brown and *Malinowski, †Lowie and †Kroeber adopted much of their theoretical programme and problematic, and it is from Durkheim’s French followers, especially †Marcel Mauss and †Louis Dumont, that a theorizing which conflates individualism with individuality has been propagated and elaborated. Let me outline this thinking.
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