UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

The Origins of Self: An Anthropological Perspective

Edwardes, Martin P.J.; (2019) The Origins of Self: An Anthropological Perspective. [Book]. UCL Press: London. (In press). Green open access

[thumbnail of 9781787356306_Web.pdf]
Preview
Text
9781787356306_Web.pdf

Download (15MB) | Preview

Abstract

The Origins of Self explores the role that selfhood plays in defining human society, and each human individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialisation and language, and the types of self we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Edwardes argues that other awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only non-model, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self. Developed in relation to a range of subject areas – linguistics, anthropology, genomics and cognition, as well as socio-cultural theory – The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.

Type: Book
Title: The Origins of Self: An Anthropological Perspective
ISBN-13: 9781787356306
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781787356306
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356306
Language: English
Additional information: This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Edwardes, Martin P.J. 2019. The Origins of Self: An Anthropological Perspective. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356306
Keywords: Self; Selfhood; Anthropology; Psychology; Linguistics; Evolution; anthropology; philosophy
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10077603
Downloads since deposit
3,295Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item