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52 2 The Experiential Basis of Subjectivity How Individuals Change in the Context of Societal Transformation arthur kleinman and erin fitz-henry For years, the study of subjectivity has been dominated by theories of the self that interrogate cultural representations and performance. These studies have a certain richness in helping us understand how societies change because they are able to deal with collective transformations through major cultural meanings and practices. But they usually leave the intimate subjectivity of individuals unanalyzed, like a black box, or bring to it a decidedly sectarian view, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, which has long been overworked and overreached as an explanatory framework. However, anthropology has downplayed, at least since W. H. R. Rivers, the importance of theories of experience for understanding subjectivity. The study of the collective and individual poles of experience—and the insights it can give us into affect, memory, and other deeply subjective self processes—curiously has not been a major source of recent anthropological theory or research. A problem in the study of subjectivity that troubles all anthropologists is the ongoing emphasis in philosophy, psychology, and other social science disciplines on a kind of universal human nature that is held to be neurobiologically hardwired and historically unchanging. Denis Diderot, for example , writing in the eighteenth century, asserted that “Human nature is the same everywhere,” a sentiment echoed by twentieth-century structuralist anthropologists and even some contemporary cultural psychologists . Scholars have frequently invoked this notion of a unified human nature as the rationale for universals of all kinds, and it continues to be used as a justification for Western ethical discourse, which assumes a static, generalized subject that does not vary with changing historical circumstances, cultural contexts, or sociopolitical institutions. Such formulations are problematic for anthropologists who, while respecting the neurobiological underpinnings of human behavior and cogni- Experiential Basis of Subjectivity / 53 tion, as well as the urgent necessity of ethics discourse, recognize that human beings’ complex commitments and moral challenges are far too intricate to explain by biological reductionism. Although infant and twin studies may offer important insights into the genetic bases of behavior,they still largely fail to account for the enormous complexity of human social experience —war, genocide, structural violence, poverty, and displacement— and the highly nuanced subjective states that those experiences engender. In dealing with the genocide in Rwanda;the civil wars in Cambodia,Liberia, and Sri Lanka; the repressive regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala; the street violence in Los Angeles; the suicide bombings in the Middle East; or even the more “routine” violences of social neglect and institutionalized racism, neurobiology simply cannot show itself to be immediately consequential . Our subjectivities certainly have a biology, but they also, and perhaps more critically, have an equally influential history, cultural specificity, political location, and economic position. In short, we are as responsive to biological blueprints as we are to alterations in political economy and social positioning,both of which,in turn,refashion the very biology of those blueprints . To understand human subjectivity, then, we cannot simply resort to a biologically grounded universal human nature or take refuge in abstract,ahistorical ethical discourse;we need to affirm the variability,heterogeneity,and contingency of our subjectivities as they unfold within the realm of experience . Following Michael Oakeshott (1933) and many others, we define experience as the felt flow of interpersonal communication and engagements, or as William James says,“reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will . . . by reality here I mean where things happen” (1977: 96). Experience is intersubjective inasmuch as it involves practices, negotiations, and contestations with others with whom we are connected. It is also the medium within which collective and subjective processes fuse, enter into dialectical relationship, and mutually condition one another. We are born into the flow of palpable experience, where our senses are first patterned by the symbols and social interactions of our local worlds. But our emergent subjectivities also return to those symbols and interactions, recon figuring, repatterning, and sometimes even completely reinterpreting them. Experience, then, has as much to do with collective realities as it does with individual translations and transformations of those realities. It is always simultaneously social and subjective, collective and individual. Thus, we can talk of moral experience as the fusion of affect and moral meanings in the interpersonal realm, where, for example, “loss of face” is simultaneously a personal and a collective process. [18.191.135.224] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16...

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