Rhetorics of Self-Making

Departing from an essentialist concept of the self, this highly original volume advances the cross-cultural study of selfhood with three contributions to the literature: First, it approaches the self as an ideological process, arguing that selfhood is culturally situated and emergent in social practices of persuasion. Second, it demonstrates how postmodernity problematizes the experience and concept of the self. Finally, the book challenges the pervasive practice of equating an individuated self with the Western world and a relational self with the non-Western world. Contributions cover a broad range of topics—from the development of the eccentric self to the ritual circumcision of Jewish males.

Debbora Battaglia, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College, is the author of On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society (1990).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

1. Problematizing the Self: A Thematic Introduction
Debbora Battaglia

2. Self-Exposure as Theory: The Double Mark of the Male Jew
Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin 

3. On Eccentricity
George E. Marcus 

4. If You Have the Advertisement You Don't Need the Product
Roy Wagner 

5. On Practical Nostalgia: Self-Prospecting among Urban Trobrianders
Debbora Battaglia 

6. Nostalgia and the New Genetics
Marilyn Strathern 

7. Production Values: Indigenous Media and the Rhetoric of Self-Determination
Faye Ginsburg 

CONTRIBUTORS 
INDEX