ABSTRACT
Anthropology’s engagement with concepts of self and subjectivity has changed radically. Over the last 30 years, in response to a watershed period that we call the critical disruption, the discipline recast its core concept of culture and refigured the significance of discourses and practices of the self. Anthropologists now place greater emphasis on the conditions that cultural imaginaries and powerful institutions set for self-formation and grant greater recognition to the ways that gender, class, race, and other social divisions refract day-to-day experiences and the selves that take shape in them. In turn, they insist that all these social forces-discursive imaginaries, durable institutions and formative divisions-are refracted and transfigured by daily experience and the selves that transact and register it.1
