Indian Perception Of History

[acharya]

The Model of Self in Asian Culture



I would like to suggest that neither this experience nor the associated notion is a part of our world. In Asia, even though I conjecture it to be true of African as well as American-Indian Cultures I shall continue to speak only about our part of the world, we experience ‘self’ very differently. This is “a difference which makes a difference”. Those existing social sciences which have to assume a ‘reflexive self’ are incompatible with our folk psychologies, with our world models. Consequently, they could not possibly make much sense.



The ‘self’ in Asia, to the extent it makes sense to speak of one at all and as it is embedded in our world models, I submit, is a relational predicate i.e. it is a property which is ascribed to a relationship. Being a rough first approximation, this statement is capable of being explicated by means of an equally rough analogy. For example, consider the relation of biological descent: between any two biological organisms A & B there obtains such a relation, just in case the organism A has the relationship of being-a-parent with the organism B, which has the relation of being-an-offspring. This relationship can be re-described from the perspective of the two relata by saying that A has the ‘property’ of being-a-parent-of B, and that B has the ‘property’ of being-an-offspring-of A. “Parenthood” and “selfhood” can thus be seen as being roughly analogous. But even at this juncture, it is important to stress that A does not have the property of being a parent (like, say, it has the property of being dark-skinned) any more than some material object has the property of being “scarce”. ‘Parent’, scarcity’, ‘self, etc., are properties of relationships, as described from the perspective of one or some of the relata. This would imply that there is no ‘self’ outside of such relationships as might obtain.



It is important to bite into this question a little bit deeper. I am not just saying that the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ distinction’, or the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ difference, arises in a relationship. Such a suggestion would almost win a universal consent. What I am saying is that, the roughness of the earlier analogies becomes apparent here, the ‘self’ is a way of describing a relationship from the point of view of one of the relata. (Let us assume a dyadic relationship in order to keep the discussion simple.) But, from the perspective of which of the two relata? It is here, I believe, that the fundamental difference between the two cultural conceptions of self begins to emerge.



Let me use two dummy letters ‘A’ and ‘B’ as picking out two human organisms so as not to clutter up the discussion. It is important to emphasize that A and B do not create or even enter into a relationship. Rather, it is the case that some relationship has brought A & B together (To express it like this may make it sound counter-intuitive to the Western-educated sensibilities. But if you will try to think in your native languages, and see how absurd it sounds to say, for example, that A & B created the relations of teacher-pupil, doctor-patient, son-father etc., you will realize that the language I am using makes it counter-intuitive to say what I did.) In this relationship, the ‘self’ of A is parasitic upon the perspective from which B sees A. To begin with, A’s ‘self’ is constituted by those actions of B which are directed towards A. These structure A’s representation of its own actions. Actions of B towards A are crucially dependent upon B’s representation of A. If I may speak only of representations, without considering the relationship between action and its representation, then it can be said that the representation of A that B builds constitutes not so much the raw material out of which A builds his ‘self’, as much as it is a first-order representation of the ‘self’ of A. Upon this constitution of A’s identity by B, there arises another representation constructed this time by A: A constructs what A takes to be B’s representation of A. This second-order representation, i.e. A’s representation of B’s representation of A, constitutes the ‘self’ of A. Self-representation is parasitical i.e. it is always a derived representation.



Loosely put, A becomes a ‘self’ in a relationship and he becomes that when B constructs him as one. There is nothing complicated about this: you are a son, a pupil etc., when you are recognized as a son, a pupil etc. In a very strict sense, even this second-order representation is not a ‘self’: it is one’s identity as a son, father, wife etc. i.e., B does not construct A’s ‘self’ ,because there is no ‘self’ for A outside of what he is to different people. Ignoring this complication does not vitiate the points I want to make later on, but will only facilitate the discussion. If this complication is not ignored, we will have to nest so many representations within one another that the discussion will become complex without adding anything of importance. So, I will simply say that one is a ‘self’ as a pupil, son, father, wife etc., when I talk of Asian cultures.



Is there a difference between what I claim to be implicit in our world models and the views prevalent in the West? Yes, there is. The process is seen differently, or so one is led to believe, whether one takes the world models or theories in the West as the reference point. In the relationship between A & B, A creates/builds up her/his identity, firstly, by distinguishing her/himself from B. Here, the ‘other’ is the background against which the self should take form; the distinction between ‘you’ and ‘me’ is preliminary to sketching out an ‘I’. Such an identity is preliminary because, at this stage, one has arrived at one’s self negatively, i.e., as a ‘Not-You’ or as a ‘Not-Other’. The second moment of building up a self involves a positive specification of some suitable properties. Whether this entire conceptualization is itself question-begging, as I think to be the case, or not, it is nevertheless the case that the construction of one’s self is an active process involving the organism whose identity is being talked about. The ‘others’, insofar as they play a role at all, are secondary to this process and function, where they do, in the same way the ground does with respect to a figure.



This difference may not be evident if one thinks of the way children build up their identity, more so when one thinks of the ideas of Cooley or G.H. Mead. But it must become obvious if we think of adults. For the latter, others’ representation is not even the raw material using which one sustains one’s identity. It is used, if at all, in ‘self-appraisal’, to use Wylie’s characterization which is not just hers alone. The self of an adult, in the Western culture, is its own foundation.



Self-consciousness and the Conscious ‘Self’



Should what I have said so far be true, then it would be true to say that the experience one has of oneself in Asia is not direct by virtue of it being a second-order representation or a mediated construction. What one is, a ‘self’, is crucially dependent upon what others think and make of oneself. This is not the same as saying, as Western social psychologists are wont to, that others’ appraisal of our selves is crucial to our self-appraisals, because the very nature of the ‘appraisals’ themselves differ in our two cultures, more about which later. This does not imply either passivity in terms of the agent or arbitrariness with respect to others’ representation of oneself. Both are avoided, the latter by means of constraints of sorts (This is dealt with in the next section).



Such a ‘self’ is not only a construction, but also a second-order ‘entity’ always subordinated to first-order entities. As ‘others’ construct my ‘self’, so do I construct others’ ‘selves’ (It is in this sense that there is no passivity.) But how one does so, as I indicated, depends upon the nature of the relationship that brings people together.



‘Relations’, to be sure, do not float around in the air waiting, so to speak, to bring people together. I do not want to discuss the notion of relations as it obtains in our world models, but two short remarks may still found to be in order. Firstly, at any one time, as one is within networks of arrangements and institutions, these are both logically and temporally prior to one’s existence as an organism. In our world models, they also have causal efficacy. Secondly, insofar as each ‘self’ is a network of relationships (constructed at two levels), the contact between any two or more ‘selves’ (at times, even fleeting one) is one of being brought under some relationship or the other. May be, a very ordinary illustration familiar to most of us (I suspect) would make this point more perspicuous.



One of the most common features of non-westernized (which is not the same as non-urbanized) families in India is the structure of their ‘living rooms’, by which I refer to the place where visitors to one’s abode are received. In most Indian families, this is where the contrast with the Western Culture becomes striking, such a space (be it a room or a corner) is totally bare, completely unstructured. It gets structured when a visitor comes in, and the structuring it gets depends upon the relationship he “brings with him”: the kind of seat he gets to sit upon or even whether he gets one; the kind of seat you ‘choose’ or even your ‘choice’ to sit on the bare ground; the distance between the two of you; the pitch of the voice; the eye-contacts etc. All of these and many more depend neither upon you nor upon him as individuals. It is entirely dependent upon the relationship, which, described from the point of view of one of the relata, could be: a guest, a friend, a teacher, a ‘priest’, a ‘priest’-as-a-visitor, a ‘priest’-with-a-marriage-proposal for your off-spring, playmate … etc. These are not ‘roles’ which a visitor plays; to dub it as such, à la Goffman, is to baptize it with a Christian name while at the same time depriving it of all of its explanatory force. As a ‘host’, you do not structure your living room according to your ‘tastes’ and indicate that the others adjust themselves to it as is the case in the West and ‘Westernized’ Indian families. (It is not the lack of urban trappings like chairs etc., which are responsible for it. It is very common to see chairs being carried away from the living rooms, at times even into the kitchens, while the family prepares to receive the visitor, only to be brought back once the visitor has come into the living room! The embarrassment of being ‘civilized’, one would say!) Whether or not you are to be a host at all even in your own abode is dependent upon the relation that brings you and someone else together. I know this is not a sufficient explanation of the notion of relations as I have been using it, but it is sufficient to indicate one other thing. It shows how completely futile it is to use Western anthropological methods to study, at least, the Asian culture.



Proxemics, to take the method appropriate to the illustration, is a methodology devised to study the use of cues by people in communicative processes. Individuals use spatial (e.g., a seating arrangement), acoustic (e.g., tone and pitch of the voice), visual (e.g., the nature of eye-contacts), tactile (e.g., touching or holding hands) etc., cues to give structure to their relations-in-communication. The difference between cultures, according to this methodology, would then be expressed in the different ways these cues are used and the different cues as they are used by people living in different cultures. This method has had a wide currency; it has at its disposal the usual, but formidable mathematical apparatus for statistical significance testing of the results arrived at; it is considered by some as a necessary part of any decent anthropologist’s repertoire. Some students of Hall, the father of Proxemics, consider this to be the “science of human behaviour” (this is actually the sub-title of a book about proxemics written by a student of Hall), and have gone even further by tracing the biological roots of proxemic behaviour.



“Science” or not, obviously, the problem with this methodology is the assumption it embodies: an individual structures a situation and uses these cues to express his relation with others. This is not a fact about human behaviour, appearances notwithstanding, but a model of self which has taken the force of being a fact. It makes a world of a difference whether one sees an individual using cues to establish a relation or a relation structuring the ‘cues’, which includes the individual himself – the difference between our world and that of the West, precisely! But, if we use this method to study our cultures, the questions we ask and the answers we give will be no different from those that the Western anthropologists already have. I hope that this illustrates my sentiment, expressed in the introduction to this paper, about looking at the world the way the West does, etc.



All of this has become a bit of a digression and should have been relegated to the footnotes. ( Ah, the virtue of footnotes! ) So, let me return to the main theme of this paragraph.



The kind of self that I have talked about so far is conscious, to be sure. But its awareness of itself-as-a-self is dependent upon others’ recognition and construction of it as-a-self. This means to say that it lacks that reflexivity which a ‘self-consciousness’ is supposed to have. As a result, the ‘self’ has no direct access to its thoughts, feeling, etc. It has no privileged epistemic access to itself either. As far as our intuitive world models are concerned, the motto “Know Thyself” is an empty slogan. To the question “who knows me better than myself?” there is an answer in our world models: “your parents, your family, your teachers, your friends, your acquaintances, … etc.”.



In a rather trivial sense, it is of course true that the ‘self’ of each individual (in both cultures) is constituted out of the actions and the relations of the individual in question. When put baldly like this, there is not much room for controversy. It is only when the suggestion is made that one’s self is (this ‘is’ is one of identity not of composition) one’s second-order representations of one’s actions and relationships with the world and nothing more, and that the ‘self’ itself be seen as a complex function of representations of actions and relations that controversy can arise. Once put like this, the distance between our notions of ‘self’ and other superficially similar notions, like, say, that of a Cooley become evident.



Ironically enough, just why it is an irony will become clear later on, it is Marx who comes closest to suggesting something similar. (Nietzsche, another thinker who may readily come to one’s mind in this connection, belongs to the West here.) When he suggests that man’s essence (read: ‘selfhood’) is an ensemble of social relations and remarks elsewhere that relations can only be posited, he is almost saying that ‘self’ is an ensemble of representations. (More about this later.)



Before going further, a peripheral remark might be of some interest and of some relevance. Not so long ago, the European Economic Commission (EEC) sent an enquiry team to Japan. It came back with a report which said, amongst other things, that the Japanese were ‘workaholics’ and they lived in “rabbit thatches”. Also, sometime ago, someone (I forget who) published a book about the Japanese. Where the former report caused furore, there the latter became a best-seller. What is interesting about both of these incidents is the way Europeans perceived them: the European press, for example, thought that it betrayed an obsessive preoccupation of the Japanese with themselves which, they said, is unbecoming of an industrial giant. They found it both incomprehensible and even mildly disgusting that a nation like Japan should make such a bother about how others see it. They felt that Japan has come of age and must put all such adolescent problems behind it, etc. If what I am saying is true or even remotely close to being that, such an action has nothing to do with the obsessive preoccupation of the Japanese with themselves. The identity of the Japanese as a people is what they take others to think of themselves. Contrast this attitude, for example, with that of the Americans: quite independent of what the world thinks of them, they know what they are and, they claim, they are what they are.



This kind of extension and extrapolation should not be read as implying too much. I merely wanted to say that the notion of ‘self’ embedded in our intuitive world model does appear to shed some light on some behaviour, or at the least makes it appear less bizarre.



Our ‘Selves’ and Their Experience



What would be the corresponding experience in our daily lives? If our intuitive world model embeds the kind of self I talked about, what would our experience of it be like? Introspection should reveal to us, though this is no evidence for my claim, that we cannot answer to ourselves the question, “Who am I?” We should experience hollowness when we try to answer this question. In the process of answering this question, if we take away or abstract from others’ representation of our actions and relations, we ought to experience ourselves as ‘empty’. To use a metaphor, we would see ourselves as onions stripping whose layers would resemble the bracketing of others’ representations of actions and relations from our selves. What we are left over in each case is the same: nothing – and that, I put to you, would be our ‘selves’.



In the literal sense of the word we lack a ‘self’ to experience which, claims the Western culture, is the absolute foundation of one’s intercourse with the world. An adult who experiences her/himself as empty or hollow, the learned psychoanalysts tell us, is pathological. Such a condition is “secondary or pathological narcissism”, a characteristic trait of a “borderline personality”. If we stick to psychoanalytical theories, leaving out confused pronouncements of figures like Marcuse, and generalize it to a culture, it appears to me that we have but three choices:



(a) Asian culture is pathological, narcissistic. This opinion was held by early psychoanalytical studies of Indian culture like, for example, Carstairs and Spratt and by renowned Indologists like Moussaieff Masson. To some extent, this idea still has some currency in the West. Recall, as evidence, the response of the European press to the Japanese.



(<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='B)' /> Psychoanalysis is no science of the human psyche. At best, it is a description/explanation of the Western man.



© Our experiences regarding the absence of self are universal. The Western man is told to experience something which he has not got! The conflict between what they are told to experience and their inability to do so results in the kind of crises endemic to the people in the West. Psychoanalysis and branches of psychology, in that case, stand convicted of being ideological in a pejorative sense of the term.



It appears to me that there are simply no good reasons to accept (a). The choice is really between (<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='B)' /> and ©. Even here, for the moment, we cannot decide upon the alternatives. It is only when we build an alternate theory of psychological development that we can decide one way or another. To attempt to do so is precisely to engage in the task of ‘decolonizing’ the social sciences.



In summary: Asian culture has no notion of ‘self’ corresponding to the one in its Western counterpart. Our identities as ‘selves’ are derived and irreflexive. In the full sense of the term, our ‘selves’ are complex functions of secondary representations. To put it a bit nonsensically, in our culture there is no ‘self’.



One last observation before going on to the next section. Models of self not only structure the way we experience ourselves, but, equally importantly, also generate models and thus structure the experiences of the ‘other’. Is there some difference between the way people in the West experience others and the way we do? What kinds of “self-other” interaction models obtain within these two cultures? How do these differing models of self structure the way people experience ‘their’ bodies? How, to look in another direction, do these models structure the use of language? To give an example, if the nature or the frequency of the use of personal pronouns in a discourse or communicative situation varies between the two cultures, how might that alter the very structure of “discourse” itself? Are there significant differences in discourse processing and comprehension between these two cultures worth investigating into? The presence of cognitive/ linguistic universals or Whorfian linguistic relativity hypothesis is not at issue here: the question centres upon the pragmatics of language use and comprehension, i.e., does the “self-other” interaction model give form to or shape the strategies one uses to comprehend a discourse? Are there culturally specific strategies of language and discourse processing?



These and other questions are crucially tied to an explication of the model of ‘self’ as it is embedded in our cultures. I have not been able to tackle these questions, partly due to reasons of space and partly due to absence of clarity on my part. As such, it has impoverished the account of ‘self’ I have given. Far from being even the first word on the subject, what I have said so far (and will say later) should be seen as a preliminary to speaking.