6 - Reconciling social science and cognitive science notions of the ‘self ’

Summary

The preceding chapter has shown that the combination of studies produced by anthropologists with those of other cognitive scientists such as psychologists or neurologists seems, at first, impossible since what they propose appears contradictory. However, we saw that if we introduce the notion of different yet interconnected levels the apparent contradiction disappears and a richer picture is revealed. This chapter continues the argument that such an approach is also valuable when it is applied to the very core of our studies: that is what makes human individuals. Again we shall see that what appears at first as incompatible conclusions emanating, on the one hand, from psychologists and neurologists and, on the other, from social and cultural anthropologists, becomes, when theoretically combined, a dynamic whole.

The history of the social sciences and especially that of modern anthropology has been dominated by a recurrent controversy about what kind of phenomenon people are. On the one hand, there are those who assume that human beings are a straightforward matter. They are beings driven by easily understood desires directed towards an empirically obvious world. The prototypical examples of such theoreticians are Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer or more recently the proponents of rational choice theory. These early social science theories have also been the assumptions underlying most cognitive science; in some cases this has been quite explicit (Tooby and Cosmides 1990; Boyd and Richerson 2005). By contrast, these positions have been criticised, again and again, by many modern social scientists, more particularly social and cultural anthropologists. They have stressed that in theory there can be no place for actors who are simply imagined as ‘generic human beings’ since people are always the specific product of their particular and unique location in the social, the historical and the cultural process. Among the writers who have made this kind of point are Durkheim, Dumont and more recently Michel Foucault and the post-modernists.