Toward a Cultural Phenomenology of Personal Identity

HOwdoes our inherited world of meaning relate to our fundamental experience of ourselves as persons? Is there a core of self-consciousness that is sequestered from the constitutive reach of culture and language? Can we speak of an unmediated basis for personal identity? These are the questions I will explore in this chapter. My method will be analytic, not comparative or ethnographic. Psychological anthropology and cross-cultural psychology have produced rich literatures showcasing the diversity of conceptions of the person in terms of its physical, mental, and spiritual properties (Csordas, 1994; Fogelson, 1982; Heelas & Lock, 1981; Marsella, DeVos, & Hsu, 1985; Morris, 1994). I will not review these ample literatures here. Rather, my purpose is to provide a warrant and direction for considering self-consciousness as a thoroughly cultured form of experience. My argument will involve reviewing and questioning the commitment to a phenomenological universalism, exemplified by Kant's transcendental account of the I. From there, I will proceed to a sociocultural discussion of the temporality of subjectivity, as it manifests in both the synchronic and diachronic unity of personal identity. By taking subjective time as my focus, I will demonstrate how cultural forms are implicated in even the most immanent and fundamental aspects of self-consciousness. Psychologists intent on uncovering the universal operations of the mind often give short shrift to arguments for the cultural contingency of these operations. Relativistic claims of any sort strike them as misguided at best and scientifically retrograde at worst. Oftentimes it is a short road from dismissal to annoyance. In discussing consciousness as a symbolically-and therefore culturally-mediated experience with anti relativist colleagues, I am at times reminded of the vivid line from Hanns Johst's play Schlageter, made infamous by the war criminal Hermann Goring: "Whenever I hear the word culture ... I release the safety-catch of my Browning." Granted, few if any psychologists are guilty of such fierce anti-intellectualism. Still, one has the sense that a focus on the cultural description of human