ABSTRACT
In its engagement with embodied and role-enacting individuals, the self typically engages in an array of situationally changing relations with social others. These range from, at one extreme, total identification with the social whole or the general will, to, at the other extreme, the self concerned only with calculating and achieving advantage over others. The latter possibility is represented in anthropology in the theory of transactionalism and 'strategizing man'. Between these extremes, the individual is more usually involved in a set of supra-individual identifications, some ephemeral, others long-lasting, at various levels of collective selfhood, from local-group faction to tribe or nation. A branch of human knowledge which offers tantalizing clues to the hidden nature of the human self is infant psychology. The dialectical drama between the possessed and his spirit, between (human) self and (spirit) other, may well provide an allegory for the confrontation between the ethnographer and his people, between modern man and the primitive.
