individuality and community essay

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Individuality and Community, Essay Example

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The respective concepts of individuality and community are often viewed in terms of a certain antagonism: in the case of community, identities are defined by social relationships. The individual, in other words, does not exist as a proper autonomous entity, but instead finds their identity determined by their relationships to other in the community through various institutions such as family, the Church, neighborhoods, etc. Individuality, in contrast, entails that there is some aspect of the human being that cannot be reduced to the social level: rather, individuality asserts that the singular individual is the fundamental unit of social life, and that all other manifestations of social relationships are in fact products of the individual.

These two concepts of individuality and the community do not always have to be in antagonism: for example, we can say that they shape each other. When we say that someone is an independent, autonomous and strong-willed person, this does not mean that they exist without any connections to a social community. Individuality for example can flourish in certain communities, in terms of creativity; individuals can also group together and form collectives. Nevertheless, in art there seems to be a tendency to emphasize the tension between individual and community: this is arguably because art is a radically individualistic and autonomous gesture, the pure act of creation, and thus the antagonistic side of the individual and the community often appears in this context.

Consider for example, Emily Dickinson’s poem “Much Madness is Divinest Sense.” Dickson is arguably one of the archetypical examples of the artist as individual, and in this poem she exemplifies this trope: the poem is essentially an argument in favor of madness, which is clearly an argument against social norms and thus the logic of the collective. Dickinson makes this clear in the following lines: “Assent – and you are sane – / Demur – you’re straightaway dangerous – / And handled with a Chain.” (187) Dickinson is using the theme of madness as a way to explore individual and community relations: the phenomenon of madness is a clear example of how community can subjugate the individual. In so far as the individual differs from the dominant social norms, he or she will be deemed to be “mad”, which for Dickinson, is just a name for not following social norms, i.e., to be “mad” is to assert one’s radical individuality. Dickinson’s ode to madness in this poem is thus an ode to individuality against the “herd mentality” of the collective and the communal.

Don Marquis continues this typical artistic approach to the dialectic of the individual and the community when he writes in “Lesson of the Moth” the following: “I was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires/why do you fellows pull this stunt I asked him.” (196) Marquis’ question anticipates that the reason for this is “convention”; the answer of the moth, however, is to live intensely and individually. This, however, is still a manifestation of the individual and community antagonism, and one that sides with the individual: namely, the individual decision to live intensely is granted a philosophical authority over conventionality to the norm. Essentially, this antagonism in a work such as Marquis’ is irreconcilable: to conform to social normativities, which is what the community here means, is to sacrifice one’s individuality. In a certain profound sense, in the artistic visions of Marquis as well as Dickinson the two cannot co-exist.

Certainly, as mentioned, this appears to be a typical account of individual and community from the artist because the artistic work seems to be a creation of intense individual creation and autonomy. This, however, is not true of all art, only these examples. Great collective art was the theme of much of the early art of the Soviet Union, including great poets such as Mayakovsky. Also artistic collectives exist to disseminate a communal approach to creativity. In other words, the individual and community relationship may be one of antagonism, to the extent that community suppresses individuality; at the same time, it is important to note that over-emphasis on the individual can lead to egoism and selfishness. It is the balance between the two that, if not crucial to art, seems to be crucial to a free and just society.

Works Cited

Dickinson, Emily, “Much Madness is Divinest Sense”, In: Editor Name (ed.) Book Title in Italics . City Where Published: Publishing House, Date. p. 187.

Marquis; Don, “Lesson of the Moth”, In: Editor Name (ed.) Book Title in Italics . City Where Published: Publishing House, Date. p. 196.

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How to Write the Community Essay – Guide with Examples (2023-24)

September 6, 2023

Students applying to college this year will inevitably confront the community essay. In fact, most students will end up responding to several community essay prompts for different schools. For this reason, you should know more than simply how to approach the community essay as a genre. Rather, you will want to learn how to decipher the nuances of each particular prompt, in order to adapt your response appropriately. In this article, we’ll show you how to do just that, through several community essay examples. These examples will also demonstrate how to avoid cliché and make the community essay authentically and convincingly your own.

Emphasis on Community

Do keep in mind that inherent in the word “community” is the idea of multiple people. The personal statement already provides you with a chance to tell the college admissions committee about yourself as an individual. The community essay, however, suggests that you depict yourself among others. You can use this opportunity to your advantage by showing off interpersonal skills, for example. Or, perhaps you wish to relate a moment that forged important relationships. This in turn will indicate what kind of connections you’ll make in the classroom with college peers and professors.

Apart from comprising numerous people, a community can appear in many shapes and sizes. It could be as small as a volleyball team, or as large as a diaspora. It could fill a town soup kitchen, or spread across five boroughs. In fact, due to the internet, certain communities today don’t even require a physical place to congregate. Communities can form around a shared identity, shared place, shared hobby, shared ideology, or shared call to action. They can even arise due to a shared yet unforeseen circumstance.

What is the Community Essay All About?             

In a nutshell, the community essay should exhibit three things:

• An aspect of yourself, 2. in the context of a community you belonged to, and 3. how this experience may shape your contribution to the community you’ll join in college.

It may look like a fairly simple equation: 1 + 2 = 3. However, each college will word their community essay prompt differently, so it’s important to look out for additional variables. One college may use the community essay as a way to glimpse your core values. Another may use the essay to understand how you would add to diversity on campus. Some may let you decide in which direction to take it—and there are many ways to go!

To get a better idea of how the prompts differ, let’s take a look at some real community essay prompts from the current admission cycle.

Sample 2023-2024 Community Essay Prompts

1) brown university.

“Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community. (200-250 words)”

A close reading of this prompt shows that Brown puts particular emphasis on place. They do this by using the words “home,” “College Hill,” and “where they came from.” Thus, Brown invites writers to think about community through the prism of place. They also emphasize the idea of personal growth or change, through the words “inspired or challenged you.” Therefore, Brown wishes to see how the place you grew up in has affected you. And, they want to know how you in turn will affect their college community.

“NYU was founded on the belief that a student’s identity should not dictate the ability for them to access higher education. That sense of opportunity for all students, of all backgrounds, remains a part of who we are today and a critical part of what makes us a world-class university. Our community embraces diversity, in all its forms, as a cornerstone of the NYU experience.

We would like to better understand how your experiences would help us to shape and grow our diverse community. Please respond in 250 words or less.”

Here, NYU places an emphasis on students’ “identity,” “backgrounds,” and “diversity,” rather than any physical place. (For some students, place may be tied up in those ideas.) Furthermore, while NYU doesn’t ask specifically how identity has changed the essay writer, they do ask about your “experience.” Take this to mean that you can still recount a specific moment, or several moments, that work to portray your particular background. You should also try to link your story with NYU’s values of inclusivity and opportunity.

3) University of Washington

“Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the UW. (300 words max) Tip: Keep in mind that the UW strives to create a community of students richly diverse in cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints.”

UW ’s community essay prompt may look the most approachable, for they help define the idea of community. You’ll notice that most of their examples (“families,” “cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood”…) place an emphasis on people. This may clue you in on their desire to see the relationships you’ve made. At the same time, UW uses the words “individual” and “richly diverse.” They, like NYU, wish to see how you fit in and stand out, in order to boost campus diversity.

Writing Your First Community Essay

Begin by picking which community essay you’ll write first. (For practical reasons, you’ll probably want to go with whichever one is due earliest.) Spend time doing a close reading of the prompt, as we’ve done above. Underline key words. Try to interpret exactly what the prompt is asking through these keywords.

Next, brainstorm. I recommend doing this on a blank piece of paper with a pencil. Across the top, make a row of headings. These might be the communities you’re a part of, or the components that make up your identity. Then, jot down descriptive words underneath in each column—whatever comes to you. These words may invoke people and experiences you had with them, feelings, moments of growth, lessons learned, values developed, etc. Now, narrow in on the idea that offers the richest material and that corresponds fully with the prompt.

Lastly, write! You’ll definitely want to describe real moments, in vivid detail. This will keep your essay original, and help you avoid cliché. However, you’ll need to summarize the experience and answer the prompt succinctly, so don’t stray too far into storytelling mode.

How To Adapt Your Community Essay

Once your first essay is complete, you’ll need to adapt it to the other colleges involving community essays on your list. Again, you’ll want to turn to the prompt for a close reading, and recognize what makes this prompt different from the last. For example, let’s say you’ve written your essay for UW about belonging to your swim team, and how the sports dynamics shaped you. Adapting that essay to Brown’s prompt could involve more of a focus on place. You may ask yourself, how was my swim team in Alaska different than the swim teams we competed against in other states?

Once you’ve adapted the content, you’ll also want to adapt the wording to mimic the prompt. For example, let’s say your UW essay states, “Thinking back to my years in the pool…” As you adapt this essay to Brown’s prompt, you may notice that Brown uses the word “reflection.” Therefore, you might change this sentence to “Reflecting back on my years in the pool…” While this change is minute, it cleverly signals to the reader that you’ve paid attention to the prompt, and are giving that school your full attention.

What to Avoid When Writing the Community Essay  

• Avoid cliché. Some students worry that their idea is cliché, or worse, that their background or identity is cliché. However, what makes an essay cliché is not the content, but the way the content is conveyed. This is where your voice and your descriptions become essential.
• Avoid giving too many examples. Stick to one community, and one or two anecdotes arising from that community that allow you to answer the prompt fully.
• Don’t exaggerate or twist facts. Sometimes students feel they must make themselves sound more “diverse” than they feel they are. Luckily, diversity is not a feeling. Likewise, diversity does not simply refer to one’s heritage. If the prompt is asking about your identity or background, you can show the originality of your experiences through your actions and your thinking.

Community Essay Examples and Analysis

Brown university community essay example.

I used to hate the NYC subway. I’ve taken it since I was six, going up and down Manhattan, to and from school. By high school, it was a daily nightmare. Spending so much time underground, underneath fluorescent lighting, squashed inside a rickety, rocking train car among strangers, some of whom wanted to talk about conspiracy theories, others who had bedbugs or B.O., or who manspread across two seats, or bickered—it wore me out. The challenge of going anywhere seemed absurd. I dreaded the claustrophobia and disgruntlement.

Yet the subway also inspired my understanding of community. I will never forget the morning I saw a man, several seats away, slide out of his seat and hit the floor. The thump shocked everyone to attention. What we noticed: he appeared drunk, possibly homeless. I was digesting this when a second man got up and, through a sort of awkward embrace, heaved the first man back into his seat. The rest of us had stuck to subway social codes: don’t step out of line. Yet this second man’s silent actions spoke loudly. They said, “I care.”

That day I realized I belong to a group of strangers. What holds us together is our transience, our vulnerabilities, and a willingness to assist. This community is not perfect but one in motion, a perpetual work-in-progress. Now I make it my aim to hold others up. I plan to contribute to the Brown community by helping fellow students and strangers in moments of precariousness.    

Brown University Community Essay Example Analysis

Here the student finds an original way to write about where they come from. The subway is not their home, yet it remains integral to ideas of belonging. The student shows how a community can be built between strangers, in their responsibility toward each other. The student succeeds at incorporating key words from the prompt (“challenge,” “inspired” “Brown community,” “contribute”) into their community essay.

UW Community Essay Example

I grew up in Hawaii, a world bound by water and rich in diversity. In school we learned that this sacred land was invaded, first by Captain Cook, then by missionaries, whalers, traders, plantation owners, and the U.S. government. My parents became part of this problematic takeover when they moved here in the 90s. The first community we knew was our church congregation. At the beginning of mass, we shook hands with our neighbors. We held hands again when we sang the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t realize our church wasn’t “normal” until our diocese was informed that we had to stop dancing hula and singing Hawaiian hymns. The order came from the Pope himself.

Eventually, I lost faith in God and organized institutions. I thought the banning of hula—an ancient and pure form of expression—seemed medieval, ignorant, and unfair, given that the Hawaiian religion had already been stamped out. I felt a lack of community and a distrust for any place in which I might find one. As a postcolonial inhabitant, I could never belong to the Hawaiian culture, no matter how much I valued it. Then, I was shocked to learn that Queen Ka’ahumanu herself had eliminated the Kapu system, a strict code of conduct in which women were inferior to men. Next went the Hawaiian religion. Queen Ka’ahumanu burned all the temples before turning to Christianity, hoping this religion would offer better opportunities for her people.

Community Essay (Continued)

I’m not sure what to make of this history. Should I view Queen Ka’ahumanu as a feminist hero, or another failure in her islands’ tragedy? Nothing is black and white about her story, but she did what she thought was beneficial to her people, regardless of tradition. From her story, I’ve learned to accept complexity. I can disagree with institutionalized religion while still believing in my neighbors. I am a product of this place and their presence. At UW, I plan to add to campus diversity through my experience, knowing that diversity comes with contradictions and complications, all of which should be approached with an open and informed mind.

UW Community Essay Example Analysis

This student also manages to weave in words from the prompt (“family,” “community,” “world,” “product of it,” “add to the diversity,” etc.). Moreover, the student picks one of the examples of community mentioned in the prompt, (namely, a religious group,) and deepens their answer by addressing the complexity inherent in the community they’ve been involved in. While the student displays an inner turmoil about their identity and participation, they find a way to show how they’d contribute to an open-minded campus through their values and intellectual rigor.

What’s Next

For more on supplemental essays and essay writing guides, check out the following articles:

• How to Write the Why This Major Essay + Example
• How to Write the Overcoming Challenges Essay + Example
• How to Start a College Essay – 12 Techniques and Tips
• College Essay

Kaylen Baker

With a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College, an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and a Master’s in Translation from Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Kaylen has been working with students on their writing for over five years. Previously, Kaylen taught a fiction course for high school students as part of Columbia Artists/Teachers, and served as an English Language Assistant for the French National Department of Education. Kaylen is an experienced writer/translator whose work has been featured in Los Angeles Review, Hybrid, San Francisco Bay Guardian, France Today, and Honolulu Weekly, among others.

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Individuality vs. Community: Confronting the Liberal-Communitarian Debates

• First Online: 01 September 2017

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• Anton Luis Sevilla 4  

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This chapter develops the critique of moral individualism on the sociopolitical level, examining the ethical relationship between individual citizens and communities. The chapter begins by exploring Watsuji Tetsurô’s approach to the functions of and dynamics between individuality and community, paying close attention to how these ideas shift and turn over the prewar, wartime, and postwar volumes of Ethics . Sevilla argues that Watsuji has no less than four different models of the relationship of the individual and the community. But despite this inconsistency, he argues that Watsuji can contribute to the liberalism vs. communitarianism debates (John Rawls vs. Michael Sandel, etc.), not only as a communitarian, but as an attempt to overcome that dichotomy altogether.

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Brivio, Chiara. 2009. The Human Being: When Philosophy Meets History: Miki Kiyoshi, Watsuji Tetsurô and their Quest for a New Ningen . Zutphen, Netherlands: Wöhrmann Print Service.

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Sevilla, A.L. (2017). Individuality vs. Community: Confronting the Liberal-Communitarian Debates. In: Watsuji Tetsurô’s Global Ethics of Emptiness . Global Political Thinkers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58353-2_3

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — On The Waterfront — Individuality vs Community: Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront

Individuality Vs Community: Terry Malloy in on The Waterfront

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105 Individualism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best individualism topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy individualism essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on individualism, ❓ questions about individualism.

• Individualism in Romantic Literature He discusses societal disapproval as well as foolish consistency as the main obstacles to self reliance and trust in one’s self.
• Collectivist and Individualist Parents The grandparent’s role in a collectivist family would be similar to that of parents, and they would be expected to help with the upbringing, and children would need to bey them.
• Cultural Differences: Individualism vs. Collectivism The understanding of the relevant cultures helps in knowing where the people around us originate. The religion types are unique to the areas where they are found and exemplify the culture of people who participate […]
• From Collectivism to Individualism in Marriage A marriage that is established on a collectivist ideal tends to be focused more on the interests of the in-group more than self interests.
• Collective to Individualism Employment Relationship HR There is an increasing rate in the shift from collectivism to individualism in major parts of the world and it is highly experienced at the workplaces particularly in the management of employment relationships.
• Culture and Individualism: The Conflict Analysis The described stance is supported by a range of philosophical and cultural perspectives, including the notions of multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and the theory of rational choice, to name just a few. Therefore, active cross-cultural communication […]
• Economics of Individualism and Collectivism In particular, its advertisements are designed a way that seems to appeal to the best practices of both individualism and collectivism in the United States.
• Coach-Player Relationship: Power Distance and Individualism-Collectivism Yet, in a low-power distance culture, power inequality is concerned immoral, and therefore the society strives to certify that everyone is equal and receives equal treatment.
• Global Issues, Common Good, and Individualism In such a case, the cohesion and commitment of each individual to shared goals and interests seem to solve the mentioned problems.
• The Causal Relationship of the Culture of Individualism The dynamism of social structure is perfectly observable through the study of the role of the individual in the overall system of relations.
• Youths’ Career Choices in Individualist and Collectivist Societies To study the influence of the different types of societies on young adults’ career aspirations, it is important to establish the distinct features of individualistic and collectivistic approaches to the issue.
• Individualism and Collaborative Culture It leads to the derivative nature of society, which does not have an independent existence outside the totality of individual actions and is a consequence of interactions between people.
• Individualism as an Ideal of Civil War in America Most of the Americans believe that James town is the birth place of the distinctive, secular and unique ideals of America that led to America’s freedom and prosperity.
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• Steve Jobs and His Romantic Individualism It is possible to note that the two articles in question focus on the way people’s views and values affect the development of society.
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individuality

Definition of individuality

• individualism
• personality
• self-identity

Examples of individuality in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'individuality.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1600, in the meaning defined at sense 3

Dictionary Entries Near individuality

individualist

individualize

Cite this Entry

“Individuality.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/individuality. Accessed 4 Sep. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of individuality, more from merriam-webster on individuality.

Nglish: Translation of individuality for Spanish Speakers

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Moscow: It’s Raining Men

July 1999. It was midnight in Moscow, eight years after the collapse of European Communism and the Soviet Union. That Party was gone. But in a lavish new nightclub, our rather proper if not outright staid American Cinema Foundation was hosting what turned out to be a successful but memorably nearly out-of-control party of our own. There was something foreboding about those long-ago summer midnights at the Moscow Film Festival. It was a strange, early transition era of “frontier land” capitalism, when anything still seemed possible, even, God forbid, peace and good relations between Russia and America.

But something went badly wrong in the transition. After close to a decade of the heralded blessings of free enterprise, while the festival’s globetrotting sophisticates were dancing the night away, the glum-but-decent nearby streets, of rundown stores and communal apartments, now glittered with bright lights, strip clubs, brothels, and extravagant new restaurants, run by a newly empowered criminal class. The Yeltsin years. It was like the dystopian alternative future gone so wrong of Back to the Future Part II , but it was real. Russia’s new billionaires partied with their foreign friends while Russians felt humiliated. Was this America’s fault? Why are so many Russians bitterly convinced to this day that it was, at least in great part?

For me, the trail of the answers began way back. I’d started listening to shortwave radio when I was a kid, and soon became familiar with many foreign stations, including the distant, static-y sounds of Moskva Gavrit (Moscow Speaks), and its English-speaking sibling, Radio Moscow. I finally had a look at Moscow, and its national showpiece of a film festival, on my first trip overseas in 1985. It was all a complicated mix: Communist bureaucracy; a stubborn pre-Left national culture of remarkable durability; and the restless new young aspiration of the MTV and Walkman age that tacitly hinted at a less Marxist future, which they glimpsed in Mikhail Gorbachev, who’d taken over in March.

Millions of young people readied themselves for that future. I was surprised by how many of them I’d see in the subways of Moscow, intently making notations in Russiki yazik self-help books that taught computer programming. They didn’t own a home computer but expected to someday, and whenever they finally got it, they wanted to be ready. It was hard not to be impressed with their determination.

In the Eighties, you could go into any Moscow cafeteria– Stolovaya –and get a pretty good basic lunch. Chicken soup, bread, a steamed vegetable, and a glass of tea for about 35 cents. The subway was immaculate and cost seven cents. This is part of what makes writing about the Iron Curtain days tricky for pre-Trump conservatives: the Soviets might lie about anything, but they weren’t lying about everything. The late period USSR was a land of tradeoffs: Freedom for equality. Opportunity for predictability. A crowded trolleybus today, maybe a family car in ten years.

By 1985, the Stalin era was far back in the rearview mirror, but there was still a level of government surveillance of the Moscow Film Festival that few of the foreign guests expected or understood. If anything, they were foolishly flattered by all the attention.

Then, after the tumultuous changes of the Gorbachev years, it suddenly ended. By New Year’s Day, 1992, the Soviet Union was no more. Boris Yeltsin was Russia’s president.

Some of the benefits of the end of Soviet rule were clear. There was less fear of a 2 am knock at the door. Some of the negative parts would have been hard to avoid in any case. Wall Street’s “shock treatment” prescription of the Nineties, adopted by Clinton’s team, was probably if reluctantly needed in some form, but the high dose of austerity administered at once almost killed the patient.

Losing the Cold War? The bewildered Russians, stung by ridicule, thought they deserved the lasting thanks of the world for negotiating an end to that Cold War, before doing everyone the favor of dissolving the USSR altogether.

Many Hollywood conservatives protested Clinton’s air war against Serbia in 1999. Serbia is Russia’s little brother: Yugoslav=southern Slav. That war really stuck in Russia’s craw. Even the multimillionaire guys walked a picket line with the rest of us when Madeleine Albright spoke at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The news coverage of the demonstration never aired. I’m not proud to say that we had no impact—zip, zero, nada. To the broadcast media, Hollywood being antiwar was only adorable some of the time.

Russia was screwed in the Nineties, yes. But they weren’t simply victims; it was complicated. The transition away from Communism was never going to be easy. We were never going to nudge Boris Yeltsin into being James Madison, but we could and should have handled Russia a lot better than we did. It’s a moot point now.

By the end of the Nineties, stricter attention paid to appearances ensured that Moscow’s major monuments and boulevards gleamed with nationalist, not Communist, pride. A backlash was building.

Back to the party, the one in the Luxor nightclub. The disco ball was spinning. The festival’s international crowd mingled with the local mob, and I use the term “mob” advisedly. They gyrated to Prince’s 1981 ode to that once futuristic year of nine teen- nine ty- nin e. I sweated under the lights, too, although all I was doing was making on-camera conversation about the festival . This was the most lavish club in a city that was now full of them. Oligarchs had their own reserved booths. The liquor flowed at $500 a bottle. The walls elaborately imitated Egyptian motifs but with lots of female nudity.

When you came down to it, I was there, in part, to show that America cared about their history, that Hollywood applauded their struggle to overcome the Communist years. Did we really? I wondered, as French movie stars mingled with Moscow’s new rulers of the midnight streets. Personally, I missed the low-key Russianness of the old stolovaya. But who was I kidding? To them I was a cardboard cutout, the American with a nice suit and a microphone. I was mixed up in all that entails whether I liked it, admitted it, or not.

*There was a pause in the music and a lighting change. Fog machines started filling the dance floor for a production number. As scantily dressed female dancers took formation, the music teased the opening of a gay dance classic, “It’s Raining Men”. The lewd MTV video played on a screen in the background. While the dance troupe of women moved forward through the fog in arrow formation, like they were in A Chorus Line , a line of interested men formed, moving hungrily towards them. “The temperature is rising! (Rising! Rising!) Barometer’s getting lo-o-w-w-w!” The two lines clashed in a dance floor collision of curses, smiles, slaps and rushed exchanges of telephone numbers.

Someone’s boyfriend had jealous objections, and a chair flew across the elegant nightclub. In moments, a brawl broke out. They didn’t stop the show, which BTW I was ostensibly hosting. The club just cranked up the music and called out an insta-ready platoon of beefy, heavily armed bouncers, who ran through the shrieking metal detectors and waded into the fight. There was a roiling, boiling fistfight but no one fired a gun. The loudspeakers drowned out the shouts: “It’s raining men! Yeah! Say Hallelujah!”

By the time the last wise guy was tossed out into the street, it was 3:30 in the morning. I headed back to the hotel in a taxi. Seal’s “Kissed by a Rose” was on the radio. In Russia’s northern latitudes, the summer sun was already above the horizon.

Something else was rising above that horizon: an unquenchable wave of Russian resentment. Movies like Prisoner of the Mountains, Brother , and Voroshilov Regiment were like our downbeat cynical 70s films about Vietnam, amoral youth, and vigilante justice. No, they didn’t want the USSR back. But they wanted the country they thought they knew back. Many Americans today would, if not agree with those Russian sentiments of a quarter century ago, at least at some level understand them much better now than we did then.

You know what else was rising above that new horizon? The reign of Vladimir Putin. Given that history, given the circumstances, are you surprised? I wasn’t.

There are 36 comments.

A really long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

EPSON MFP image

Gary McVey : Many Hollywood conservatives protested Clinton’s air war against Serbia in 1999. Serbia is Russia’s little brother: Yugoslav=southern Slav. That war really stuck in Russia’s craw.

Imagine if Russia had taken little brother off into a corner and whispered to him urgently that raping and butchering one’s neighbors is just not done.

Imagine it ever occurring to a Russian that raping and butchering one’s neighbors is just not done.

Percival  (View Comment ) : Gary McVey : Many Hollywood conservatives protested Clinton’s air war against Serbia in 1999. Serbia is Russia’s little brother: Yugoslav=southern Slav. That war really stuck in Russia’s craw.

Imagine if Russia had taken little brother off into a corner and whispered to him urgently that raping and butchering one’s neighbors is just not done.

Imagine it ever occurring to a Russian that raping and butchering one’s neighbors is just not done.

It’s an impulse that’s by no means confined to Russians, of course. The case of Serbia isn’t so easy.

Since, oh, the twelfth century, Russians have lamented that they don’t get help from the West in fighting off barbarian invaders. That’s in those times between when they were being invaded by other Christians. Bosnian Serbs had a legitimate complaint in the Eighties that Yugoslav federal policy favored Muslim resettlement in their nominally sovereign state/province. This was true, but it reflected another fact: it was easy to be blind to these distinctions because 40 years of iron-fisted Communist erasing of religious and cultural identities in Yugoslavia did have a brutal but undeniable effect. It also meant those separate identities springing back to redoubled life as the end of Communism neared. When in 1988 Slobodan Milosevic told Bosnian Serbs, “No one has the right to beat you”, he wasn’t wrong in 1988. That doesn’t justify his turning into Huey Long and then for the final years into a small-time Mussolini. It’s history’s eternal irony, the victim that turns bully. 

An excellent piece, @garymcvey , and I recommend it strongly for promotion to the Main Feed. I especially appreciate your references to the Clinton Administration’s vanity project (the various NATO air campaign targeting Serbia).

Reflecting on those years from 1989 to 1999, I can now recognize that it was during that decade that the bitter kudzu of decay now afflicting the contemporary US military was first planted and then lovingly cultivated. 

Gary McVey : *There was a pause in the music and a lighting change. Fog machines started filling the dance floor for a production number. As scantily dressed female dancers took formation, the music teased the opening of a gay dance classic, “It’s Raining Men”. The lewd MTV video played on a screen in the background. While the dance troupe of women moved forward through the fog in arrow formation, like they were in A Chorus Line , a line of interested men formed, moving hungrily towards them. “The temperature is rising! (Rising! Rising!) Barometer’s getting lo-o-w-w-w!” The two lines clashed in a dance floor collision of curses, smiles, slaps and rushed exchanges of telephone numbers.  

The optimism of men knows no bounds when confronted by scantily dressed women.

Good one, Gary.

Gary McVey Wall Street’s “shock treatment” prescription of the Nineties, adopted by Clinton’s team, was probably if reluctantly needed in  some  form, but the high dose of austerity administered at once almost killed the patient.

Given we now know that the Clintons were, at least later, in bed with the Russians, was this only a bad policy decision? Or work more or less as designed? Seeing as the end result was Putin, it seems they ended up with what they wanted. The other option is Putin’s largess was showered on accidental allies.

Thank you for the thoughtful essay.  Did we even have leaders of the stature required to have helped in constructive ways, who understood the Russian temperament and history?  Was it even possible to help the Russians constructively given their temperament and history?   If a people won’t accept any responsibility but constantly look to others to solve their problems, then I’m not sure what can be done. 

Great post!

Part of the problem of Russians “recovering” Russia is that it may never have existed.  When the czars ruled, 90+% were worse off than medieval serfs in Western Europe.  Lenin had plenty of resentments to work with. The wealth and national prestige under Catherine or Peter took place in the absence of a recognizable middle class.  The concentration of wealth in the nobility was probably unprecedented.

Modern Russians wanted the material goodies of the more advanced world but lacked the identity, values, and self-image of a free prosperous people that goes along with a market-based society.  The West is all about optimism.  Russians have a hard time with that.

Andrei Amalrik in Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984  made the point almost fifty years ago that glad-handing Western politicians did not fathom the depth of Russian mistrust and lack of faith in betterment.  When an American drives home in a new car, he wrote, his neighbor looks out the window and says to himself, the system better let me get one of those.  The Russian neighbor wants the state to come and take it away because its owner is getting too big for his breeches.

Old Bathos  (View Comment ) : Andrei Amalrik in Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984  made the point almost fifty years ago that glad-handing Western politicians did not fathom the depth of Russian mistrust and lack of faith in betterment.  When an American drives home in a new car, he wrote, his neighbor looks out the window and says to himself, the system better let me get one of those. 

Alas, that seems to have changed, at least for a sizeable number of Americans. Adam Carolla has expressed it a bit differently. He says that years ago a father and son would be walking down the street and the town’s rich guy would drive by in his Rolls. The father would tell the son that if he works hard, that can be him one day. Now, the father is more likely to tell the son that the fat cat unfairly got the Rolls and something needs to be done to knock him down.

Percival  (View Comment) :

I’m trying to imagine what it takes to level such a grotesque indictment of the moral character of each and every citizen of a nation/member of a culture (in this case, about 140 million of them). I’m failing.

Good golly. Even TDS is not this bad.

GPentelie  (View Comment ) : Percival (View Comment) :

Each and every citizen? Nah. Too many of them flee and are valuable citizens elsewhere for that to be true. Their leaders? Again no, but they arrive at leaders prepared to do anything to amass and maintain power with disturbing regularity. Terrorism is certainly in the toolbox. In fact, it seems to always be the first to hand.

Percival  (View Comment ) : GPentelie (View Comment ) : Percival (View Comment) :

Sometimes you throw a party, and it turns into a fistfight…

It’s more than 50 years since the trial of Lt. Calley, but people still recognize the words “My Lai”.  Fifty years after the special military operation is over, people in southern and eastern Europe will remember Bucha. By then, what will Luhansk and Donetsk think about being shelled from both sides? It depends on who is perceived to have won the pile of rubble. 

Great post Gary!

It must have been fascinating to travel there during those interesting times.

Clavius  (View Comment ) : Great post Gary! It must have been fascinating to travel there during those interesting times.

Thanks, Clavius, right back at ya. I never got to see India; I walked a beat in Communist and Communist-adjacent countries, so that generally meant eastern and central Europe, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. 

Gossamer Cat  (View Comment ) : Thank you for the thoughtful essay. Did we even have leaders of the stature required to have helped in constructive ways, who understood the Russian temperament and history? Was it even possible to help the Russians constructively given their temperament and history? If a people won’t accept any responsibility but constantly look to others to solve their problems, then I’m not sure what can be done.

Good comment. No, I don’t think we had leaders of that stature in either party at that time, and alas, later. 

There are analogies with race relations in this country. Just suppose there was a group of people small enough to be a minority but large enough to cohere, to resist change. Suppose they have genuine, undoubted grievances about how history has treated them, which has hardened into a diamond-hard shell of resentment, distrust, and a persecution complex. They’ve gone from self-blame to believing that nothing is ever really their fault. 

It’s a human trait, but not a helpful one. 

Gary McVey  (View Comment ) : Gossamer Cat (View Comment ) : Thank you for the thoughtful essay. Did we even have leaders of the stature required to have helped in constructive ways, who understood the Russian temperament and history? Was it even possible to help the Russians constructively given their temperament and history? If a people won’t accept any responsibility but constantly look to others to solve their problems, then I’m not sure what can be done.

Good comment. No, I don’t think we had leaders of that stature in either party at that time, and alas, later.

There are analogies with race relations in this country. Just suppose there was a group of people small enough to be a minority but large enough to cohere, to resist change. Suppose they have genuine, undoubted grievances about how history has treated them, which has hardened into a diamond-hard shell of resentment, distrust, and a persecution complex. They’ve gone from self-blame to believing that nothing is ever really their fault.

It’s a human trait, but not a helpful one.

I don’t think it was our responsibility to craft a solution for them. They weren’t a colony, they weren’t 1945 Germany or Japan, and they have their own culture and traditions. Beyond the usual give and take of international agreements, incentives and the like, the usual tool set, we weren’t going to have much affect. I think Iraq and Afghanistan vividly showed the limits of American wisdom in nation-shaping, but still there are some pushing endless wars.

Gary McVey  (View Comment ) : Sometimes you throw a party, and it turns into a fistfight…

I have a different analogy to offer:

You threw a pool party, then someone plopped a rancid turd into the pool and got well deserved flak for it.

Gary McVey : For me, the trail of the answers began way back. I’d started listening to shortwave radio when I was a kid, and soon became familiar with many foreign stations, including the distant, static-y sounds of Moskva Gavrit (Moscow Speaks), and its English-speaking sibling, Radio Moscow.

Even before my move to America I was a dedicated listener to the BBC World Service which used to be available only on SW (now it’s broadcast domestically on FM and possibly LW when Radio 4 shuts down at night). I’ve owned at various times a Sony ICF-2002, a Sony ICF-2010 with a powered antenna, and a Yaesu FRG 7. Before the advent of the internet, the BBC World Service was invaluable in keeping in touch with UK news, but I did a lot of listening to Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, and Radio Tirana also (around 2015 I met a bunch of Albanians in a Starbucks and they were amazed I could hum the Radio Tirana interval signal).

I’ve got a small, battery-powered, no-name SW receiver in a bedroom drawer in case of emergencies, but I’ve not turned it on in years. Perhaps on Nov. 6 when civil society disintegrates and the power goes out, I’ll have to resurrect it.

An addition to the soundtrack, which has an interesting backstory of its own:

GPentelie  (View Comment ) :

I’ll use smaller words and shorter sentences.

Berlin. Three months later: November 1999, the night before the 10th anniversary of the opening of the border between the BRD and the DDR…also known as “the fall of the Wall”.

This is one of the best  posts on Ricochet that I’ve ever read . Great stuff!!!🙂

aardo vozz  (View Comment ) : This is one of the best posts on Ricochet that I’ve ever read . Great stuff!!!🙂

Totally agree. 

Bravo and thank you, Mr. Mcvey.

Your colorful descriptions and your wise observations about your place in that setting made for an intriguing read.

I <ditto> the piece being one of the best posts offered on this forum.

By the late 1990’s, oil man, and mafiosa-styled American business man, Richard Cheney, was rumored to be part of the group that brought about newly minted Moscow billionaires. Meanwhile normal every day people abandoned their children to state run orphanages, as there was no food in their homes  available to feed those kids.

Often those abandoned kids still starved, as caregivers who were hired to take care of them dipped into the meager allotments of food available.

I never was able to substantiate those rumors about Cheney.

In 1993, I had a health care client who had spent much of the prior year over in Russia distributing aid to people who had once been normal, rather middle class citizens of the Soviet Union. Once back here in the states, even as he recovered from a quad bypass, he continued organizing a donation drive requesting monies from SF Bay area people. He never relaxed as he felt that every single moment someone else – possibly someone whom he had met –  might be dying back over in Russia. (This man was an affluent American business man, not some comrade mourning the death of the communism-based Soviet Union.)

Currently one of the few non-scrubbed accounts of how much American economic titans had to do with the economic realities  that the average Russian citizen was being hammered by   is this one:

https://worldaffairs.blog/2017/03/01/why-the-us-russia-relationship-went-sour-after-the-1990s/

My comment: in this article, the blame is placed squarely on the big greedy shoulders of The World Bank and the IMF.

From the article itself:

“Under the guidance of U.S., thousands of Russian factories were simply shut down. Even Russia’s oil/gas production fell by half, compared to the USSR period. Russia’s PPP GDP fell by 40%  during Yeltsin years and the economic crisis was worse than America’s Great Depression of the 1930s”.

The article is worth reading for anyone interested in the analysis and background of what went on.

There may well be some similarities between what is happening here and now in our country, and what went on there in that time period. Time will tell, I guess.

When I started writing this post, I tried to keep in mind, “Don’t concede too much to the social conservatives. Just what is obviously correct about how things went. If they gloat, they gloat.” As A. Whitney Brown used to say, let’s look at the Big Picture. 

Did the West introduce vice to Russia? Of course not; that borders on a straw man argument. Human nature is everywhere. Even in strict Soviet days, there was furtive behavior that was hidden or ignored. Compared to major European cities, prostitution was minimal in the USSR. Though I have to note, with a cynic’s amused eye, that police restrictions mysteriously loosened during massive events with lots of international visitors. It was known at the Moscow film festival that official delegates from what might be call the developing world eagerly looked forward to sampling the delights of the east, in rooms that no doubt had more cameras and microphones than Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center. I am inclined to look at this as more of an intelligence operation than as a puzzling sudden lapse in official morality. 

After 1991, prostitution flourished. Teenage girls were quoted as aspiring for the job. This was not sustainable for any society. 

Before we get too pious about the traditionalists of the Soviet Union, note that abortion rates in the USSR were very high, much higher than America’s even at their peak. In this century they’ve come down radically. It’s hard to categorize modern Russian sexual morality as being prim or conservative. The hookup culture is not all that different than ours or Britain’s. 

CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill  (View Comment ) : Your colorful descriptions and your wise observations about your place in that setting made for an intriguing read. I <ditto> the piece being one of the best posts offered on this forum. By the late 1990’s, oil man, and mafiosa-styled American business man, Richard Cheney, was rumored to be part of the group that brought about newly minted Moscow billionaires. Meanwhile normal every day people abandoned their children to state run orphanages, as there was no food in their homes available to feed those kids. Often those abandoned kids still starved, as caregivers who were hired to take care of them dipped into the meager allotments of food available. I never was able to substantiate those rumors about Cheney. In 1993, I had a health care client who had spent much of the prior year over in Russia distributing aid to people who had once been normal, rather middle class citizens of the Soviet Union. Once back here in the states, even as he recovered from a quad bypass, he continued organizing a donation drive requesting monies from SF Bay area people. He never relaxed as he felt that every single moment someone else – possibly someone whom he had met – might be dying back over in Russia. (This man was an affluent American business man, not some comrade mourning the death of the communism-based Soviet Union.) Currently one of the few non-scrubbed accounts of how much American economic titans had to do with the economic realities that the average Russian citizen was being hammered by is this one: https://worldaffairs.blog/2017/03/01/why-the-us-russia-relationship-went-sour-after-the-1990s/ My comment: in this article, the blame is placed squarely on the big greedy shoulders of The World Bank and the IMF. From the article itself: “Under the guidance of U.S., thousands of Russian factories were simply shut down. Even Russia’s oil/gas production fell by half, compared to the USSR period. Russia’s PPP GDP fell by 40% during Yeltsin years and the economic crisis was worse than America’s Great Depression of the 1930s”. The article is worth reading for anyone interested in the analysis and background of what went on. There may well be some similarities between what is happening here and now in our country, and what went on there in that time period. Time will tell, I guess.

You know the traditional line restaurants or bars use when they’re comping someone who’ll bring lots of lucrative business into the place: “Put your wallet away, esteemed sir. Your money’s no good here”, they’ll say with a smile. That’s what they told me in Moscow. But the sad thing, sometimes the creepy thing, was the opposite was true. “My” money–the American dollar–was the only thing that was good there. Nineties Russians referred to the ruble in the most scatological terms. The moment a cab driver knew you were American, he wanted to be paid in dollars. It was the official currency of the Moscow underworld. A new Mercedes? A kilo of cocaine? Your own private harem, rented for the weekend? Anything. Provided you had dollars. 

This did not do our image much good. 

CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill  (View Comment ) : The article is worth reading for anyone interested in the analysis and background of what went on.

The article was written by Chris Kanthan, an anti-Western Putin-lover who claims elsewhere on World Affairs to have had articles published on the famously pro-Kremlin and antisemitic website Russia Insider . He is clearly not someone whose opinions on the subject of Russia and its history should be trusted.

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Individuality and community: The limits of social constructivism

1 Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Denmark

2 Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, Oxford UK

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.

INTRODUCTION

Within the cognitive sciences, the increasing popularity of “4E” approaches to cognition, that is, approaches that highlight the embodied , embedded , extended , and enactive character of cognition, has gone hand in hand with a steady criticism of the traditional idea that cognition primarily takes place inside individual brains (Newen, de Bruin, and Gallagher 2018 ). Whereas proponents of 4E cognition initially emphasized the link between the mind, the body, and the inanimate physical environment, a more recent development has been to also look at the role of the social environment. As the argument goes, some forms of cognition are also socially distributed: They involve other individuals and even groups and social institutions. But what about selfhood? Might selfhood also be socially distributed and constituted? Although the cognitive sciences have only recently explored this question (e.g., see Prinz 2012 ), the idea has been commonplace within disciplines such as anthropology and cultural psychology for a long time. In the following contribution, I intend to look closely at how notions such as self and subjectivity have been discussed within these disciplines. My aim is not to provide an exhaustive overview but rather to first demonstrate the prevalence of a radical form of social constructivism and then to pinpoint its limitations.

TURNING TO ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

In a famous article from 1938, “Une catégorie de l'esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de ‘moi,'” sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss criticized what he called the “cult of the ‘self’” and its aberrations (Mauss 1985 , p. 3). Even if many would find it natural to ascribe the autonomous and individual self a central role in action, morality, and rationality—even if many might find such a notion of self both fundamental and primordial, Mauss argued that we are dealing with a rather peculiar and recent Western invention. In his view, the notion has a complicated historical origin, one deeply influenced by changing social structures and by specific religious (Christian), legal, and philosophical ideas (pp. 3, 22).

Since then, influential authors have picked up on this idea and pointed to the existence of a more relational, collectivist, or “groupist” non‐Western conception of self, one according to which the self is seen as “an integral part of the collective” and as nothing “without the collective” (Markus and Kitayama 1994 , p. 570).

In an often‐quoted passage in “‘From the native's point of view’: on the nature of anthropological understanding,” anthropologist Geertz ( 1974 , p. 31) writes:

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.

This view is echoed by anthropologist Richard Shweder and psychologist Edmund Bourne, who have contrasted a Western egocentric conception, which views the self as a discrete and self‐reliant entity, which prioritizes and valorizes the autonomous individual and which considers society as something that merely serves the interests of the freestanding individual, with a sociocentric and organic conception of the relation between an individual and society that they take to be prevalent in non‐Western cultures. On this latter account, the self is not distinguished from or separated from the social context. Rather, selfhood is by and large a question of the culturally determined social role one occupies. According to the non‐Western, sociocentric conception, we are defined by our interpersonal relationships and are all part of an interdependent system (Shweder and Bourne 1982 , pp. 105, 111, 127, 132).

In a much‐cited paper, to mention just one further example, social and cultural psychologists Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama argue that people in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the relation between self and others and that these construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , p. 224). They contrast what they call an independent from an interdependent conception of the self. Whereas the former, which they also call the Western conception, conceives of the self as an independent, self‐contained, autonomous entity that primarily feels and acts because of its own unique internal attributes (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , p. 224; Markus and Kitayama 1994 , p. 569), the interdependent conception takes others and the social context to be focal in individual experience (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , 225). On this conception, the self depends upon the social context and changes according to the social situation, or as they also put it, given that relations with others in specific social contexts on this account are taken to be constitutive of the self, “others are included within the boundaries of the self” (p. 245).

CONCEPTIONS OR MANIFESTATIONS OF SELFHOOD

When addressing the question of self, some anthropologists and cultural psychologists have claimed that the non‐Western self is both less individuated and less differentiated than the Western self, that the non‐Western self is a sociocentric or socially distributed self, a self extended to include significant others (also see Marsella 1985 ). As radical as such claims might sound, it is, however, not always clear how one ought to interpret them. Is the focus on the conception, experience, or nature of selfhood? Do the authors intend to criticize the Western conception for failing to grasp the true interdependent nature of self or are they rather propounding a form of ontological relativism: Cross‐cultural conceptual differences reflect or mirror or constitute cross‐cultural ontological differences?

At first sight, the ambition of Markus and Kitayama, for instance, seems to be to show that the notion of a discrete and autonomous self is not only not as cross‐culturally widespread as often assumed but ultimately also fundamentally out of sync with social and psychological reality. As they write,

Even within highly individualist Western culture, most people are still much less self‐reliant, self‐contained, or self‐sufficient than the prevailing cultural ideology suggests that they should be. Perhaps Western models of the self are quite at odds with actual individual social behavior and should be reformulated to reflect the substantial interdependence that characterizes even Western individualists. (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , p. 247; also see Markus and Kitayama 1994 , p. 575)

On the face of it, Markus and Kitayama seem to recognize that cultural ideology is one thing and social and psychological reality another. When looking closer at their texts, however, it becomes increasingly unclear which view they actually defend. On the same page as the quote above, they also endorse the view that cultural differences in styles of behavior and display of emotional expression reflect differences in “the phenomenology accompanying the behavior” (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , p. 247). In an article published a few years later, they argue that you will not only come to believe that you are a discrete and bounded self, but also come to experience yourself as one, if you live in a society with institutions, social practices, and other cultural elements that promote the independent construal of self (Markus and Kitayama 1994 , p. 573). At the same time, Markus and Kitayama also claim that the anti‐collectivist ideology of the unique and self‐contained self, which has increasingly gained a foothold within the social sciences (see Abrams and Hogg 2001 , p. 428), does not account for actual social behavior (Markus and Kitayama 1994 , p. 575) and ultimately fails to grasp “many of the social and interdependent aspects of the self” (p. 569). At one point, Markus and Kitayama refer to Neisser's distinction between the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private, and conceptual self and seem to defend the view that while there are certain features of our embodied experience that are both universal and cross‐cultural, and which provide all humans with some private sense of self, there are other aspects of the self that are culture‐specific (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , p. 225). But a page later, they revert position again and endorse the strong claim that there are cultures where the individual is no longer “the primary unit of consciousness” (p. 226). But what precisely is that supposed to mean? What do they mean when they, as already mentioned, claim that “others are included within the boundaries of the self” (p. 45), on the interdependent, non‐Western, construal?

Consider the case of shame. Shame is arguably both a self‐conscious and a social emotion (Zahavi 2012 ); it is, to use a term coined by developmental psychologist Vasudevi Reddy, a self‐other‐conscious emotion (Reddy 2008 ) since it makes us aware of our relational being. It concerns the self‐in‐relation‐to‐others. The existence of vicarious shame might serve as a particular clear illustration of this. Consider the following example. You were born in the country in which you now reside, but both of your parents are immigrants. You are attending a university class and feel shame when your teacher expounds on how immigrants systematically exploit the generosity of the welfare system. Why would you feel ashamed in a situation like this? The key lies in the relationship between yourself and the ones who are subjected to the denigrating criticism. As a self‐conscious emotion, shame targets your own identity. For you to react with shame in a situation like the one described arguably pre‐supposes that processes of group identification are in place and that you consider your relationship to your parents (partially) constitutive of your own identity, constitutive of who you are (also see Salice and Montes Sánchez 2016 ). Such group identifications are obviously not restricted to family members alone, which is also why, when traveling abroad, some might feel ashamed when witnessing the misbehavior of compatriots. We are not only individuals, possessors of singular identities, but also group members, shareholders in collective identities. Granted this analysis is correct, one might then argue that a “loss of face” is simultaneously a personal and a collective process (Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007 , p. 53).

However, one cannot, based on a study of shame, infer that experience “is always simultaneously social and subjective, collective and individual” (Kleinman and Fitz‐Henry 2007 , p. 53). To put it differently, whereas the case of shame might serve as a good example of an experience where “others are included within the boundaries of the self,” there are other experiences where it is much harder to see such a claim being justified. Consider, for instance, ordinary perceptual experiences such as the perception of the blue sky or the experience of a stomachache. To what extent does it hold true for such experiences that the individual is no longer the primary unit of consciousness and that others are their organizing principle? I do not want to deny that one might come up with examples featuring visual experience and bodily pain where these experiences are not only shaped by culture but also interpersonally structured. But the claim that this holds true for all perceptual and bodily experiences is a very strong claim and one that simply is not borne out by the evidence provided by Markus and Kitayama. The same holds true for the claim that the individual in non‐Western cultures is no longer the primary unit of consciousness if this is supposed to imply that non‐Western “individuals” cannot distinguish their own perceptual experiences from those of others or that they feel the pain of others in the same way as they feel their own.

The very reference to a Western and a non‐Western conception is also problematic. Not surprisingly, several anthropologists have subsequently objected to this binary dichotomization and argued that the claim that there are only two conceptions is a stupendous simplification (Hollan 1992 , p. 283; Spiro 1993 , p. 108; Cohen 1994 , pp. 14–15). 1 Not only does it overlook the diversity and variety of non‐Western cultures, but it also presents an astonishingly crude account of how the self has been conceived in Western history and culture as if thinkers like Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, James, Heidegger, and Mead all had the same view of self. That sociocentric accounts of self can also be found in Western theorizing is easy to demonstrate. Take first the case of philosopher and social theorist George Herbert Mead, who in Mind, Self, and Society argued that we are selves not by individual right but in virtue of our relations to one another (Mead 1962 , p. 182). Given its social constitution, the self “implies the preexistence of the group” (p. 64). Ultimately, Mead is explicit in his defense of the claim that selfhood is socially distributed. As he writes, “No hard‐and‐fast line can be drawn between our own selves and the selves of others, since our own selves exist and enter as such into our experience only in so far as the selves of others exist and enter as such into our experience also” (p. 164).

Consider next, the communitarian criticism of liberalism. For communitarians, such as philosophers Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre, liberalism is premised on a commitment to an asocial individualism that fundamentally misunderstands the relation between the individual and the community (see Mulhall and Swift 1996 ). We are not social atoms that only subsequently form social relationships with others because we deem that to be to our individual advantage and conducive to the realization of our own pre‐social goals. Rather, my goals and preferences, what has significance and meaning to me, are largely shaped by the community of which I am part. But even more important, my very identity is not something ready‐made, something fixed by nature that simply awaits discovery. Rather, it is by forging an identity that I become a self. It is by living a life under certain normative guidelines that I develop my own viewpoint on matters, and thereby acquire a distinct individuality. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes, “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose” (Taylor 1989 , p. 27). It is consequently not simply my preferences and values that are influenced by my community. No, it is my very self‐identity. To think that one can get to the core of human selfhood by abstracting away from the social context is a fundamental mistake. Rather than being an antecedently individuated self, rather than being merely contingently embedded in a community, my identity as an individual has a communal origin. I cannot be a self on my own, but only with others, as a participant in a process of social experience and exchange (Taylor 1985, p. 35).

LEVELS OF SELFHOOD

Given a normatively rich conception of the self like the one just presented, that is, an account that defines selfhood in terms of normative commitments and values, it is easy to see the legitimacy of a sociocentric and socially distributed account of selfhood. But is this normative conception sufficient, or might the self be so multifaceted that a comprehensive understanding of its complexity necessitates conceptual differentiation and clarification and ultimately an integration of various levels of analysis?

There continues to be much controversy about the nature, structure, and reality of the self. But one idea being increasingly accepted in both philosophy and empirical science is that the self is neither simple nor univocal but better viewed as multifaceted. While William James already differentiated the material, social, and spiritual self (James 1890 , p. 292), and psychologist Ulrich Neisser distinguished the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private, and conceptual self (Neisser 1993 ), neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Stan Klein have more recently argued that evidence from neuropsychology and neuropathology points to the multidimensional nature of self (Damasio 1999 , pp. 16–17, 127; Klein 2010 ). In a target article published in Journal of Consciousness Studies in 1999, philosopher Galen Strawson summarized the ongoing controversy about the notion of self by listing over 20 concepts, including autobiographical self, narrative self, core self, dialogical self, embodied self, normative self, and neural self (Strawson 1999 , p. 484). As should be clear from these few references, the discussion is both complex and somewhat confusing. While various authors operate with slightly different distinctions and a variety of labels, there is, however, growing consensus that it makes sense to distinguish, at the very least, a more primitive experientially grounded self from a more normatively enriched and extended self (Fuchs 2017 ; Gallagher 2000 ; Strawson 2009 ; Zahavi 1999 , 2005 , 2014 ).

Some dimensions of self are clearly social and first established in and through development, interaction, and enculturation. Consider again the claim that my normative orientation is an essential part of who I am. Who I am is a question of what matters to me and what I care about. This is why knowing I am, say, pro‐choice rather than pro‐life and pro‐gun tells you something about who I am. If I change my interests, political views, religion, or other commitments, I change as well. To the extent that there are aspects of our self‐identity constituted by the values and norms we endorse, these aspects can also be lost, for instance, in severe dementia.

But there are also other, arguably more fundamental dimensions present from early on, which are linked to our embodiment and experiential life. Consider, for instance, that we encounter the world from an embodied perspective. The objects I perceive are perceived as being to the right or left of me or as within reach or further away from me . Likewise, our experiential life is not merely distinguished by its qualitative features but also by its subjective character . There is not simply something it is like—qualitatively speaking—to taste buttermilk, to feel a headache, or to enjoy ice skating because when we do so, the experiences are not simply given as free‐floating anonymous events. When feeling a headache, I am not faced with a two‐step process in which I first detect an unpleasant experience, and then wonder whose experience it might be. Rather, the experiences are necessarily like something for a subject. They involve a viewpoint; they come with perspectival ownership . Rather than to simply speak of the what‐it‐is‐likeness of experience, it is more accurate to speak of the what‐it‐is‐like‐ for‐m e‐ness of experience (Zahavi 2014 , 2020 ; Zahavi and Kriegel 2016 ). Consequently, a minimal form of selfhood is a built‐in feature of experiential life. One can see this proposal, which has a clear phenomenological heritage, as occupying a middle position between two opposing views. According to the first view, the self is viewed as an enduring substance (say a physical brain or an immaterial soul) that is distinct from and independent of our ongoing experiential life. According to the second view, there is nothing to consciousness besides a variety of ever‐changing experiences; there are experiences and perceptions but no experiencer or perceiver. On the present Husserlian proposal, the experiential self is not a separately existing entity, it does not exist independently of, in separation from or in opposition to the stream of consciousness, nor is it a social construct that evolves through time. Rather, the self is defined in experiential terms as the first‐personal mode of experiencing. It is identified with the subject(ivity) of experience, which is something no experience can lack (Zahavi 1999 , 2014 ).

It is important to recognize the difference between the thicker normative and the thinner experiential notion of selfhood, but we are not faced with competing accounts we have to choose between. Rather, both notions target different aspects or levels of selfhood. One classical thinker to favor such a multidimensional account is Husserl. In his work, the two dimensions just outlined are often discussed under the headings of pure ego and personal ego . 2 For Husserl, the pure ego is not something “mysterious or mystical” but simply another name for the subject of experience (Husserl 1989 , p. 103). One reason Husserl thinks a phenomenological description and analysis of consciousness must include such a reference to a pure ego is because of what he takes to be the radical first‐personal character of experience. Experiences do not occur anonymously; rather, they possess an intrinsic individuation. As he writes in Ideas II , “What is uniquely and originally individual is consciousness, taken concretely with its Ego” (p. 315), and “This subject has absolute individuation as the Ego of the current cogitation, which is itself absolute individual in itself” (p. 103). To claim that experiences are ownerless, to claim they are nobody's experiences, would for Husserl not only fail to do justice to this radical individuation, but it would also make it impossible to account for social experiences, which by conceptual necessity presuppose a distinction between self and other (Husserl 1973c , p. 335).

The pure ego has an important role to play in Husserl's account of consciousness, but as he also points out, even though our experiential life is inherently individuated, it is a formal kind of individuation (Husserl 1973a , p. 23). This can be brought out by the following consideration: I can come to have the same kind of experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and preferences as somebody else without becoming the other, just as somebody else can come to have the same type of experiences and beliefs as I have without becoming me. Given that this is the case, it cannot be the specific content of experience that constitutes my being as a subject and distinguishes me from others. Rather, my most basic self‐identity is the formal identity of my pure ego. But as a human person, I am more than simply a pure ego. I also have character traits, abilities, dispositions, interests, habits, and convictions, and since this is all something that the pure ego lacks, the latter should not, as Husserl writes, “be confused with the Ego as the real person, with the real subject of the real human being” (Husserl 1989 , p. 110).

How do we then, according to Husserl, become personal egos? Our identity as persons, our personal character and individuality, is constituted through development as a result of our personal genesis and history. Husserl in particular emphasizes the importance of our convictions, commitments, and decisions. By being committed and devoted to a certain set of central values and by leading a life in the light of specific norms, I come to have a view and voice of my own, and I come to be a true individual in the robust sense of the term. This process does not occur in isolation, however, but is very much a matter of a continuing socialization. As Husserl puts it, every child is “raised into the form of a tradition” (Husserl 1973c , p. 144). By being socialized, we inherit and appropriate a tradition passed down over generations, a tradition that comes to normatively regulate, orient, and organize our experiences and actions by serving as a guide for how one ought to act and behave. Our constitution as persons is consequently also a matter of partaking in an open “generative nexus, a concatenation and intersection of generations” (p. 178). In many cases, the convictions I come to hold are convictions I appropriate from other community members through processes of communication. What they take to be valid acquires validity for me as well. Sometimes, I can reconstruct the rational reasons behind the others’ convictions and actively make them my own; in other cases, I am simply yielding passively to the influences and suggestions of others without even realizing it (Husserl 1977 , p. 163):

The development of a person is determined by the influence of others, by the influence of their thoughts, their feelings (as suggested to me), their commandments. This influence determines personal development, whether or not the person himself subsequently realizes it, remembers it, or is capable of determining the degree of the influence and its character. (Husserl 1989 , p. 281)

In arguing for this view, Husserl explicitly emphasizes that my being as a person is not simply my own achievement, but the result of what he calls my “communicative intertwinement” with others (Husserl 1973b , p. 603; see also Zahavi 2019 ).

I do not expect everybody to be convinced by all details of Husserl's analysis. But what is important for present purposes is his differentiation between the thicker normative and the thinner experiential notion of selfhood and his insistence on their compatibility. One might dispute the differentiation or deny the existence of one or both dimensions. But any of these moves requires careful argument. What is not acceptable is to take findings that clearly pertain to the more normative dimension of self and then without further justification use that as evidence regarding the nature and structure of the self‐tout court. But that is precisely what has occasionally happened in the anthropological and cultural psychological debate.

Consider again Geertz, who has argued that the right way to grasp and understand “other people's subjectivities,” that is, the fundamental structures of their experiential lives, is by studying their modes of expression and the symbolic forms—words, images, institutions—in terms of which they represent themselves to themselves and to one another (Geertz 1974 , pp. 30, 44). As he also puts it: Such symbolic forms “generate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display” (Geertz 1973 , p. 451). After having then suggested that the pre‐occupation with the self as distinct center or subject of experience is a peculiar Western invention, Geertz mentions the case of a young Javanese man, whose beloved wife died suddenly, and who afterwards did his utmost to flatten “the hills and valleys of his emotion” and to appear as calm as possible. Geertz takes this case to demonstrate the parochiality of the Western conception of selfhood (Geertz 1974 , p. 34). But why assume that culture‐specific rules about how to display emotions in public should affect the idea that the self is a center of awareness?

We find a similar conflation in the work of Markus and Kitayama, who explicitly define the self as “the ‘me’ at the center of experience” (Markus and Kitayama 2010 , p. 421), and who then argue that being such a center of awareness requires input from sociocultural practices and that the relevant question is not whether the self is culturally constituted, but rather how and when this happens (2010, pp. 421, 423). 3 On their account, internalized cultural norms “can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience” (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , p. 224). They also argue that there are cultures where the individual is no longer “the primary unit of consciousness” (p. 226) and where “others rather than the self […] serve as the referent for organizing one's experiences” (p. 246). Statements like these suggest a strong cultural determinism, where cultural models and theories of selfhood ultimately constitute subjective experience. But the evidence offered to support such a view is puzzling. One study discussed by Markus and Kitayama found that whereas 64% of European‐American mothers stressed building children's “sense of themselves” as an important goal of child‐rearing, this only held true for 8% of Chinese mothers (Markus and Kitayama 1994 , p. 572). As interesting and as telling as this (by now probably outdated) finding might be when it concerns the question of where and when normative imperatives about individual flourishing are promoted, it is hard to see why such findings should be of any relevance to the question of whether the subject of experience is an individual or the group.

THE RETURN OF SUBJECTIVITY

Perhaps it could at this point be objected that Geertz and Markus and Kitayama probably would not actually argue that subjective experiences are through and through socially constructed. By failing to distinguish different dimensions of selfhood, they have simply unwittingly advocated more radical views than they might have realized. I think this explanation is likely, but it merely highlights one of my main points, namely, the need for and importance of being clear about the scope of one's claims. The texts I have been discussing do not contain careful distinctions between the experiential and the conceptual, the ontological and the cultural, nor for that matter clear evidence (be it empirical or theoretical) for why one cannot or should not make such distinctions.

In more recent work, the situation is markedly different. In a 2006 article, for instance, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann complexified the anthropological debate in a significant and important way by drawing on contemporary emotion research. On the one hand, emotions are often listed as paradigmatic examples of subjective experiences, but on the other, they have also often been used, for instance by Geertz, to illustrate the impact of culture. As Luhrmann points out, however, emotions are complex and contain private, universal, public, and culture‐specific dimensions. Drawing on componential accounts of emotions, she then lists six factors that an account of emotions must consider: (subjective) feeling, physiology, facial expressions, display rules, appraisals, and representations (Luhrmann 2006 , p. 355). Whereas the first three according to Luhrmann are universal and common to all humans, the latter three are culture‐specific. One can always discuss some of these details, but Luhrmann's intervention is important since she is precisely offering the more nuanced analysis I have found missing in other anthropological and cultural psychological contributions. Given the multifactored structure of emotions, it would not be appropriate to home in on, say, the display rules and to argue that since they are culture‐specific, emotions in toto are culture‐specific as well. 4

Can one then conclude that the radical social constructivism I have been criticizing is ultimately a strawman, a position nobody actually defends? No, unfortunately not. Specifically targeting the experiential self, clinicians Suze Berkhout, Juveria Zaheer, and Gary Remington have recently argued that even the most basic pre‐reflective sense of self, the most intimate first‐person experience, is enabled by discursive relations of power and therefore social and relational through and through ( 2019 , pp. 443, 462). To suggest that the self is a pre‐social singular entity with determinate ontological boundaries is in their view simply a Eurocentric misconception (pp. 446, 459). In reality, the self is a complex and fluid intersectional construction. In support of the claim that the experiential sense of self, subjectivity, and the first‐personal character of phenomenal consciousness is socially constituted and distributed, they refer to recent work in ethnography, anthropology, gender studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial and poststructuralist scholarship (pp. 442, 446, 459, 462). As a case in point, consider the introduction to the volume Postcolonial Disorders :

The increasing use of the terms ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’ in anthropology points to widespread dissatisfaction with previous efforts to understand psychological experience and inner lives in particular cultures, characteristic of an earlier generation of psychological and cultural anthropologists—however important and incomplete that work was. ‘Subjectivity’ immediately signals awareness of a set of historical problems and critical writings related to the genealogy of the subject and to the importance of colonialism and the figure of the colonized ‘other’ for writing about the emergence of the modern (rational) subject. Subjectivity denotes a new attention to hierarchy, violence, and subtle modes of internalized anxieties that link subjection and subjectivity, and an urgent sense of the importance of linking national and global economic and political processes to the most intimate forms of everyday experience. It places the political at the heart of the psychological and the psychological at the heart of the political. Use of the term ‘subject’ by definition makes analysis of the state and forms of citizenship immediately relevant in ways that analysis of the ‘self’ or ‘person’ does not. (Good et al. 2008 , pp. 2–3)

That anthropology has become interested in subjectivity is a significant step when compared to Claude Lévi‐Strauss’ famous assertion in The Raw and the Cooked that it might be best if anthropology would disregard “the thinking subject completely, [and] proceed as if the thinking process were taking place in the myths, in their reflection upon themselves and their interrelation” (Lévi‐Strauss 1969 , p. 12). As anthropologist Sherry Ortner has rightly pointed out, it is crucial to restore subjectivity to social theory, not only because it is a major dimension of human existence, but also because it is connected with agency and has political importance (Ortner 2005 , pp. 34–35). As should be clear from the introduction quoted above, however, it would be a mistake to assume that this interest would automatically go hand in hand with an increased recognition of the irreducibility of first‐personal experience. In this context, the reference to subjectivity is indebted far more to the work of philosopher and historian of ideas Michel Foucault and post‐structuralism than to, say, Husserl and phenomenology. Partly playing on the etymological roots of the term “subject” (one is always subject to, or the subject of, something), Foucault claimed that people come to relate to themselves as selves, come to engage in practices of self‐evaluation and self‐regulation, within contexts of domination and subordination. As he writes, “the subject who is constituted as subject—who is ‘subjected’—is he who obeys” (Foucault 1990 , p. 85). On such an account, subjectivity is not an inherent feature of experience, but an ideological category produced in a system of social organization.

It is at this point important not to conflate different explanatory agendas. It is one thing to show that what we experience can be influenced by social relations and power structures, that the significance we attribute to personal experience might be historically and culturally modulated, that our social identity categories are discursively constructed, and that the normative self—defined in terms of moral commitments, endorsed values, and the like—is a social entity. Arguing for all these claims would be uncontroversial. To argue that experience as such, that is, the very fact that we have experiences is a product of discursive power structures and that the experiential self—defined in terms of the first‐personal or subjective character of phenomenal consciousness—is socially constituted and constructed is entirely different and far more controversial. But often, the topics are lumped together; often, authors move from the claim that our experiential life is shaped by social interaction and culture to the claim that it is enabled by social interaction and culture. But these are by no means identical claims, and because of this confusion, authors often advocate claims that far outstrip the evidence they present and the arguments they offer.

As anthropologist Anthony Cohen has pointed out, being clear about the difference between individualism and individuality is important (Cohen 1994 , p. 14). Whereas individualism privileges and valorizes the non‐social individual, to ascribe individuality to community members is simply to recognize them as distinct subjects of experience. One cannot without explicit evidence conclude that sociocentric cultures that do not promote individualism, that is, cultures where individual interests are subordinated to the good of the collective do not contain individual subjects. Maybe North Americans are more likely to describe themselves in terms of unique and distinctive features and character traits than Japanese who might be more inclined to define themselves in terms of social ties and group affiliations. Does this difference point to interesting cultural differences between North Americans and Japanese? It probably does. Does it entail that Japanese are not individual subjects of experience but indistinguishable and interchangeable bearers of the social roles they perform? Hardly. We should not conflate a particular ideology of individualism, which might be distinctive of certain cultures, with the possession of first‐personal experience, which arguably is part of what it means to be human.

This was recognized by Mauss. As he clarifies in his 1938 article, his target was the concept of self as a cultural category and the question of how individualism came to acquire its contemporary significance in the public and institutional domain. Mauss was concerned with historically and culturally divergent conceptions of self and was not discussing or criticizing the sense of self and its psychological role. As Mauss writes, “it is plain, particularly to us, that there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical” (1985, p. 3). 5

The tendency to conflate different explanatory agendas and to base very radical claims about the social construction of experience and selfhood on irrelevant evidence can not only be found within anthropology and cultural psychology. As the following two examples can show, it is far more widespread.

In a landmark article from 1991, historian Joan Scott criticized the idea that experience is a source of incontestable evidence. Scott's agenda was historiographical. She was critical of a tendency prevalent in feminist studies to base its understanding and theorizing of women's reality on the reporting of personal experience. Whatever merits this criticism might have, however critical we ought to be vis‐à‐vis the claim that nothing could be truer than a subject's own account of what she has lived through, Scott eventually veered into metaphysical terrain. She ended up claiming that experiences are linguistic events, that the coherence and unity of selves are socially constructed, and that subjects and identities are all constituted discursively (Scott 1991 , pp. 776, 793).

In the concluding chapter of his influential book Interaction Ritual Chains from 2004, sociologist Randall Collins writes that a core sociological position throughout the 20th century—a position that allegedly has gathered plenty of supporting empirical evidence—is that individual subjectivity is a social product. Microsociology has shown that we are all socially constructed and, as he puts it referencing Goffman, that the self is the product rather than the cause of a successful interactional performance (Collins 2004 , pp. 345–346).

It is interesting to see what kind of arguments Collins offers supporting this view. Rather than engaging with issues in philosophy of mind, Collins repeatedly refers to Mead's claim that thinking is an internalized conversation (Collins 2004 , pp. 45, 203), and he then proceeds by investigating how something like the admiration for individual uniqueness and nonconformity as well as developing an introverted personality type has emerged historically (pp. 345, 347). As he remarks at one point, whereas people traditionally were conformists and simply participated in the normal collective life, it was only “around the nineteenth century, when mansions were built with separate entrance corridors (instead of one room connecting into the next) and back stairways for servants” that the fully private introvert became common (pp. 362, 367). As interesting as this observation might be, is it really of pertinence to the topic under discussion?

A direct implication of a strong social constructivist account of experience is that creatures who are not yet enculturated and who have not yet participated in robust discursively shaped interpersonal interactions—as well as all non‐social organisms—lack experience. A crying newborn would, by this reasoning, not be experiencing distress and would not yet be a subject of experience. That already seems a highly counterintuitive claim, but the real challenge is to explain how this experienceless creature becomes phenomenally conscious as a result of being discursively regimented.

None of the authors I have discussed offer any such account. None have shown how states initially non‐conscious can be transformed into subjective experiences through social interaction, enculturation, and interpellation. Perhaps it might be objected that the real issue of contention is not about having phenomenal conscious states but about coming to experience and classify them as inner, private, subjective, and as mine rather than as yours. The argument could then be, that this only happens at a relatively late stage of development and that it results from interpersonal communication and enculturation. It is only in interaction that the child comes to acquire a sense of the perspective of others and thereby comes to appreciate the particularity of its own perspective. As has also occasionally been claimed, we learn to think silently and privately only after having learned it publicly in communication with others, and our experiential life is only privatized through social experience. Both norms of decorum and strategic reasoning gradually teach us to “edit and filter what we say publicly about ourselves, and thus to render ever more aspects of our experience private” (Crossley 2011 , p. 99). However, to make such an argument—which I agree with—would be to shift the focus of the conversation. The claim that our experiential life is fundamentally first‐personal is not a claim about how we classify and categorize our experiences. It is a claim about the nature of phenomenal consciousness. It is the claim that our experiences, in virtue of being the phenomenally conscious episode they are, are also presented to us in a way that differs from how they are available and accessible to others. The claim would be that this first‐personal (and self‐involving) givenness is manifest in the very having of the experience and that it even obtains when we lack the conceptual skills to articulate or appreciate it (Zahavi 1999 , 2014 , 2020 ).

To dispute this claim, it is not sufficient to show that the norms that guide our lives are socially derived or that a variety of emotional experiences are influenced by social relations. What has to be shown is rather that first‐personal experience is constitutively dependent upon social interaction, not merely when it comes to its specific content but as regards its very being . Absent relevant social interaction and discursive regimentation, there either would be no experiential life or this experiential life would not be first‐personal, but rather publicly available and epistemically accessible to a plurality of subjects, in the same way as cobblestones and clouds. But none of the theorists discussed above has ever mounted anything like an argumentative defense of such a claim. 6

CONCLUSION: INDIVIDUALITY AND COMMUNITY

Why do anthropologists and cultural psychologists engage with and address the question of self in the first place? One argument has been that such an engagement is called for if one wants to clarify and understand social relations, collective identities, and communal rituals (Cohen 1994 , p. x; Sökefeld 1999 , p. 418). Bearing this ultimate agenda in mind, might one then not claim that the appeal to a form of irreducible first‐person subjectivity is a non‐starter since such an approach can never offer a satisfactory clarification of the topics of sociality, intersubjectivity, and community? Was that not precisely the Achilles heel and central weakness of Husserlian phenomenology? Let me by way of conclusion suggest that the fact of the matter is very much the reverse (see also Zahavi 2001 ). Experiential subjectivity is not an obstacle but a requirement for any proper intersubjectivity, just as individual minds are pre‐conditions for genuine we‐phenomena. To conceive of the difference between self and other as a founded and derived difference, say, as a difference that arises out of an undifferentiated anonymous life, obscures that which has to be clarified, namely, inter‐subjectivity understood as a relation between subjects. In a similar manner, underived plurality lies at the heart of communal life. Collective intentionality and we‐experiences do not require or amount to a single unified consciousness. Even though a we involves some kind of unity, some shared perspective, a we is a first‐person plural . Every we involves plurality; every we involves a diversity bridged rather than erased. Difference must be preserved to make possible a genuine being‐with‐one‐another (Zahavi 2021b ). To quote the philosopher Hannah Arendt, togetherness and co‐operation require a preservation of diversity and should ultimately be understood not as a fusional one‐ness (Arendt 1958 , p. 123) but as a “paradoxical plurality of unique beings” (p. 176).

The self is a multifaceted phenomenon. A comprehensive understanding of its complexity necessitates conceptual differentiation and clarification and ultimately an integration of various levels of analysis. To argue, without further qualifications, that the self is discursively constituted and socially distributed, that it is nothing without the collective, indistinguishable from the social context, and that our individuality is reducible to the particular intersection and amalgamation of culturally determined social roles we inhabit are indefensible claims. A failure to properly distinguish cultural, conceptual, and experiential perspectives on the different dimensions of self will inevitably lead to a mischaracterization of the research domain and also to poor social science. This is by no means to deny the fundamental importance of sociality. We come to acquire a more robust view and voice of our own by being committed and devoted to a certain set of values and by leading a life in the light of specific norms. We would not have the normative commitments (and entitlements) we have, were it not for the social relationships in which we engage. To that extent, others might be said to be constitutively involved in our lives. But acknowledging this, and acknowledging that the attitudes of others, their respect and support, are of central significance for one's quality of life, for our social status, and for our flourishing as individuals, does not entail that the experiential sense of self, the very subjectivity of experience, the self understood as a locus of awareness, is also socially constructed.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jason Throop and Dominik Zelinsky for their comments on an early version of the article. I am also very grateful for the constructive comments of four anonymous reviewers. The article derives from a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 832940) and from the Carlsberg Foundation (Grant ID: CF18‐1107).

DAN ZAHAVI is a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen.

1 Markus and Kitayama do recognize that their distinction between the independent and interdependent construal of self is not absolute. They concede that there might be other views of self that cannot be classified according to this binary model (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , p. 225), and they also admit that even if the independent construal of self might be said to be prototypical of “White, middle‐class men with a Western European ethnic background” (Markus and Kitayama 1991 , p. 225), it might actually be less apt when it comes to women in general, as well as men from other ethnic groups or social classes. Given all these qualifications, given that the independent construal on their own admission is not considered applicable to half of the population, namely, women (Markus and Kitayama 1994 , p. 575), one might wonder why they labeled it the Western conception of self in the first place.

2 For a more extensive presentation of Husserl's position, see Zahavi ( 2021a ).

3 To support their claim regarding the interdependent and culturally shaped nature of self, Markus and Kitayama also appeal to neuroscience, and in particular, to a well‐known study by neuropsychologists Zhu et al. ( 2007 ) that purports to show that culture affects the psychological structure of self and that there are marked neural differences between the Western self and the Chinese self. What is remarkable about the study in question is that the authors at no point define what they mean by self. This conspicuous lacuna is unfortunately quite common in much neuroscientific literature on the neural correlates of self and self‐representation (Zahavi and Roepstorff 2011 ). Whereas great effort is typically invested in explaining the experimental setup and discussing and interpreting the results, much less time is devoted to discussing and clarifying the alleged explanandum. But a lack of clarity in the concepts used leads to a lack of clarity in the questions posed and thus also to a lack of clarity in the design of the experiments supposed to provide an answer to the questions.

4 There is much to like in Luhrmann's article, but I also think her analysis falls short in one specific regard. When talking about the feeling component, the raw subjective experience, the qualitative what‐it‐is‐likeness, Luhrmann claims that it is the least researchable factor, and something that ultimately must remain unknowable, inaccessible, unsharable, and inarticulable (Luhrmann 2006 , p. 349). I think Luhrmann has here been misled by a certain type of analytic philosophy. I think much more can be said about the subjective feeling component, and I think phenomenology has developed the resources for doing so (see Gallagher and Zahavi 2021 ; Szanto and Landweer 2020 ).

“It is also sobering to reflect on the psychic costs, the existential penalties of our egocentrism, our autonomous individualism. There are costs to having no larger framework within which to locate the self. Many in our culture lack a meaningful orientation to the past. We come from nowhere, the product of a random genetic accident. Many lack a meaningful orientation to the future. We are going nowhere—at best we view ourselves as ‘machines’ that will one day run down.” (Shweder and Bourne 1982 , p. 132).

As an attempt to capture the identities and self‐experiences of Western subjects, this depiction must not only be classified as simple‐minded; it also replicates in the most caricatured manner, the Occidentalist picture of Westerners as uncultured machine‐like creatures.

6 Some cognitive scientists do in fact defend the claim that human beings who are denied all social interaction would be like zombies, “completely self‐less and thus without consciousness” (Prinz 2003 , p. 526). For a criticism, see Zahavi ( 2014 ).

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Australian Community Media cuts dozens of editorial jobs from newspapers including the Canberra Times and Illawarra Mercury

ABC Illawarra

Topic: Media

The Illawarra Mercury is among the regional newspapers where journalist jobs will be cut. ( ABC Illawarra: Justin Huntsdale )

Australian Community Media (ACM) is set to cut 35 editorial roles at its largest newspapers.

Staff were told at a town hall meeting that multiple positions at the Canberra Times, the Illawarra Mercury and the Newcastle Herald will be made redundant as well as the company's Tasmanian papers.

ACM says applications for voluntary redundancies for its New South Wales papers opened on Wednesday.

Australian Community Media (ACM) has told staff it will cut dozens of positions at some of its largest newspapers in the latest round of budget cuts.

The media company informed staff in a town hall meeting on Wednesday of its decision to make 35 editorial positions redundant across its business.

Staff affected included journalists, photographers and production and design staff.

Voluntary redundancies would be offered to staff first while journalists from the video, agriculture, property and federal politics teams would be protected from job losses. 

Staff were told voluntary redundancy applications for the Canberra Times, Illawarra Mercury and Newcastle Herald opened on Wednesday.

The ABC understands there is expected to be six redundancies at each of the papers, while the Mercury will only lose two current staff as it has yet to fill four vacant journalist positions.

From next week, redundancy applications will open at ACM's two Tasmanian publications, the Burnie-based Examiner and the Advocate which covers Northern Tasmania from Launceston. 

Further redundancies will then be explored at the company's remaining NSW and Victoria newsrooms.

In an email to employees, ACM managing director Tony Kendall said the job losses were a consequence of Facebook's parent company Meta withdrawing funding .

"As this funding loss has approached we have taken prudent, but difficult, steps to reshape our portfolio," he said.

"We now have no choice but to lower our staff costs in line with the reduced revenue we are receiving at our core mastheads."

ACM journalists have told the ABC the job losses were a kick in the guts for already under-resourced regional newsrooms. 

Media Entertainment Arts Alliance acting director Michelle Rae said the cuts were a devastating blow to regional journalism.

"These job cuts are coming from newsrooms that already do not have the resources to tell the vibrant and vital stories of their regional communities," she said.

"If we keep cutting how do we do quality journalism?

"The communities these papers serve are the real losers in this situation."

Regional newspapers cut 

The latest job losses come just a week after ACM announced eight regional newspaper mastheads would discontinue print editions in the coming weeks.

The final copies of the Inverell Times, Moree Champion, Tenterfield Star, Glen Innes Examiner, Country Leader, Dungog Chronicle, Gloucester Advocate and Milton-Ulladulla Times will be published on September 16.

It said nine roles across sales and editorial could be made redundant if staff could not be redeployed.

Mr Kendall said while the papers' websites would remain running, local journalists would be redeployed to larger mastheads and continue to cover the regions from a distance.

"Sadly, local reporting won't exist in those areas," he said.

"When a big story breaks in one of those particular towns, we'll obviously cover it from one of the nearest papers we've got, but there will be no local people on the ground.

"If [the journalist] can't be redeployed their role will be made redundant."

Antony Catalano purchased ACM in 2019. ( Supplied: ACM )

A significant drop in government advertising alongside the new Meta deal has also contributed to the restructure. 

"The details of those commercial arrangements [Meta] are confidential, but certainly the government advertising spending has fallen by 70 per cent since the government came into office," said Mr Kendall.

"The future of regional journalism is going to require government intervention at some stage."

Mr Kendall said the decision was a difficult one to make because of the impact on staff and the communities.

"The reliance people need on quality, independently sourced local news, that hasn't changed," he said.

"We've seen in Canada, the government introduced a 30 per cent tax rebate for journalists after Meta pulled the funding over there, those sorts of positions would actively encourage people to hire and recruit more journalists."

"Or simply by taxing Meta and having some of that come back to sustain regional journalism."

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