ABSTRACT
Consciousness is a term which has been employed from time to time in anthropology but hardly as a systematic tool or analytical concept. I trace its current prominence to the recent convergence of interests on personhood. Whatever else personhood implies, it must include at least the idea of a thinking, intentional entity that therefore possessed agency and the capacity to choose certain forms of action as against others. Such a conglomerate idea cannot fail to depend on an idea of consciousness. Consciousness has also been a leading theme in the development of cognitive science and the study of the brain, where it appears usually in conjunction with theories of evolution and the emergence of humanity and thus fits into another stream of anthropological theorizing. When we attempt to utilize the term for crosscultural ethnographic purposes, however, we face the question of variation: consciousness, agency and so on may be viewed very differently in different cultures. There is a further difficulty, also, in the fact that consciousness appears to be a mentalistic concept and as such is to some extent bound up with our own local historical concepts of mind versus body. To counter this tendency anthropologists have adopted the term embodiment, and there is currently a kind of post-personhood explosion of works which deal with the body and embodiment in diverse ways, all designed to redress an earlier mentalistic bias. Since trance and spirit possession are obviously examples of ‘embodied
mentality’ it is clear that embodiment must rank along with consciousness as one of the key concepts to be deployed. Embodiment, also, sometimes functions as the replacement in discourse for the unconscious; yet its dynamic is more sociogenic than psychogenic in the Freudian or Jungian sense. Consciousness, the body and embodiment thus represent a domain of ideas where the psychogenic and the sociogenic meet and overlap.
