ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the kinds of subjects that inhabit such nontraditional, nondeveloped spaces and in doing so returns to the main issue in peasant studies—namely, social differentiation of the peasantry. It argues that the strategic point at which to reconceptualize modern social thought is the sites where images of its self are culturally constructed so as to become socially constituted. It is that the deep structuring of social identities is formed, social identities that come into official consciousness as unitary social subjects are types of the prototypic self that is constructed as the individual. The chapter explores how the opposition between interpretive and scientific anthropology is predicated on the same basic worldview assumptions out of which the dualist individual—imagined as 'mind' and 'body'—is constructed. Rational actor theory, largely an offshoot of neoclassical economic theory of the rational maximizing individual, employs a narrow definition of value based on a calculus of desire.
