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Do Individuals exist?

Oct 25, 2006
5 min read

Well, it depends on what you mean by individuals.

Invisible Man. Photo by MrGiles.

There wasn’t going to be a post today, but I’ve put this up because I want to refer to the articles listed below when I’m in the library and this is a convenient place to list them. I also think that many readers will have a better perspective on the problem than I have, so feel free to suggest more stuff for me to read below. I need to do some reading because I’m really struggling with the concept of the individual. In fact for the past couple of months I haven’t been certain at all that individuals exist. This is a problem for a couple of reasons. One is that there evidently is – if you don’t a have a sense of self then you have problems, so surely I have to engage in some pretty esoteric sophistry to argue there isn’t. A bigger problem from a practical point of view is that an awful lot of archaeologists also believe in individuals. Since the Thatcher period individuals have become tremendously popular in the UK and they’re the basis of uncounted masses of books and articles. For many archaeologists the existence of the individual is a matter of faith, and by faith I mean a belief that exists regardless of any evidence or the lack of it. What I’m struggling to find are many archaeologists that actually engage with the concept of what an individual is. Ian Hodder (2000) has. He’s noted that the problem with individual is is that it may be a Western notion (Hodder 2000:23). So has Gosden (2004:33-5) who briefly mentions the dividual concept, hyper-briefly speaking a divisible individual who is the sum of his parts, and mentions Strathern’s (1998) work, which could be useful. However while there’s lots of talk about whether society is the sum of individuals or if individuals are important I’m struggling to find examples of archaeologists who have defined what they mean by the term individual. In Hodder’s case the individual is flesh. The limit of the body marks the boundary between self and the external world and from the brevity of discussion he gives it, the existence of the individual itself is a solved problem.

Derrida helps a bit. In Monolingualism of the Other he argues* that culture colonises the individual (Derrida 1998). By that he means that no individual automatically inhabits a culture. The reason I found that helpful is because when I think about it I’m forced to disagree. As a thought experiment could a human raised outside a culture meaningfully think? Certainly the concepts I’m using, the way the thoughts are structured and arguments mustered are purely a product of culture, therefore am I the flesh and bones or am I the cultural construct inhabiting the flesh and bones? If I am a cultural construct then I exist only in relation to the external world and therefore the concept of me as a firmly bounded island probably doesn’t work.

This poses a serious problem. If individuals don’t exist then how come so many societies have them? It’s worse than that. I’m open to the idea that non-human societies have them too. Apes have been observed attempting to deceive other apes. There is a theory of mind there which runs I know that you do not know this fact. In this case the existence of a concept of you strongly suggests the existence of a concept of I. I’m not completely convinced a single chimp may think of itself as We rather than I and I haven’t the faintest idea of how you test for that.

The reason this matters for me is that I’m looking at acculturation and how societies change. I can see how you can examine a society at a supra-individual level because a society is a supra-individual entity. I can see how you can examine acculturation at a sub-individual level, we play many different roles in society and these roles which are only a part of us may alter independently from other roles. What I cannot see is how you can meaningfully examine acculturation at the individual level because acculturation is a cultural not a biological process. The individual appears to be a biological term. Cultures need to be able to refer to biological units just as they need to other artefacts or ecofacts (an ecofact is is a naturally made artefact).

That’s pretty much where I am at the moment, in that I recognise that individuals do exist. Further, I can see concepts of the individual can work if you have a question about cultural units that have a definition of self. What I don’t see that the individual is a purely natural construct or the default scale of interpretation of the past (which is nothing ground-breaking). This in turn has consequences when you try and apply ‘agency’ to archaeology because the assumption is that agents are individuals and I don’t see why a cultural construct has to be in a single location to be an agent. I’m not saying distributed agents exist, but I don’t know if they don’t either because very few people have looked for them. A recent issue of Archaeological Dialogues set up what I thought was a false opposition between memetic and agent-based explanations in archaeology. If a meme is a distributed agent (and an agent is simply defined as something which responds to varying inputs in a varying manner) then Agency could be Memetics viewed at a human scale. I’m not convinced memes exist, but Ben Cullen’s Cultural Virus Theory could have a serious shot at unifying the two problems.

*or so I’m told. I haven’t read the book yet, hence the link to the library. What he says and what someone thinks he says are not necessarily the same thing.

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Bibliography

Derrida, J. Monolingualism of the Other. Stanford University Press.

Hodder, I. 2000. ‘Agency and Individuals in long term processes’. in Agency in Archaeology eds. M-A Dobres and J. Robb. Routledge. 22-33

Gilchrist, R. 2005. Introduction: scales and voices in world historical archaeology. World Archaeology 37.3. 329 – 336. DOI: 10.1080/00438240500168335

 
 
 

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