ABSTRACT
One place where we might begin to address the question of the specificity of the concept of ‘the individual’ is in social anthropology, where the diversity of personhood has been explored in recent years. Put simply, the important finding has been that many people in the world today do not understand themselves as individuals in the Western sense, and do not act in ways commensurate with ‘individuality’. Meskell produces a series of arguments for being wary of the accounts of ethnographers:
Anthropologists have often made ethnocentric claims that ‘primitives’ have no real concept of the individual separate from their social roles and no morally universal idea of the person . . . in our unconscious ethnocentrism, we accord the possibilities of self-awareness or detachment to ourselves, but seldom to others.
