ABSTRACT
Western social thought is built upon the Cartesian notion of self consciousness (as expressed in the cogito) as the distinguishing characteristic of humanity; it is impossible to imagine what our intellectual traditions might have been like if they had not proceeded from this premise. This makes all the more remarkable the fact that social anthropology, the most questioning of social science disciplines, has taken consciousness largely for granted, neglecting-even, perhaps, denying-its significance and relevance. Anthropologists have apparently been content to assume that it is there, somewhere, and to regard its explanation as somehow beyond our reach. If we have tied ourselves up in knots of philosophical angst about the difficulties of understanding other cultures, we have largely dismissed as ‘not our business’ the more fundamental problem of understanding other minds. The great modernistic paradigms provided anthropologists with justifications for this disinterest, and supplied their own broad brush explanations which located consciousness in the structures of historical materialism, or of the mind and human cognition, or of culture, or of society. British social anthropology, of course, developed predominantly under the influence of the last of these positions, and so its practitioners became used to identifying the consciousness of any individual with the structural logic of that individual’s social circumstances. If I am a Nuer, then I must think like a Nuer. Anthropologists thereby provided themelves with a simple means of defining away the problematic of consciousness, Their
task was to provide a plausible interpretation of what the Nuer does, If social structure could not provide the answer, ‘culture’ could always be called in aid. In other than pathological or deviant cases, we simply assumed that people had similar kinds of consciousness if they could be depicted as ‘sharing’ culture or as being located within common social structures. Consciousness was simply not a problem, and the relationship of consciousness to either culture or social structure barely figured on the theoretical agenda.
