Notes and Queries 17

posed. But is this so? Would the enactment of someversion of the constructed self on seminar occasions,such as this, through self-conscious strategies/tacticsof speaking and dialogue make possible anythingother than the colonial discourse which, it seems, wemust inevitably generate? And is there anythingwrong with colonial discourses of the self per se? Un-der what conditions do they meet ethical criteria thatwe subject them to? Getting out from under a privi-leged, lumped-together, constructionist positionshould provoke all of these questions for us.

So my primary interest here is to suggest that welook for the most interestingly strategic sites of inter-vention within Western debates about the self for pur-suing (and, probably, inevitably colonizing) discus-sions about the self among others elsewhere. Now forthe specific choice of site of my own for such an inter-vention . . .

I am interested in the consequences for the con-struction of subjectivity (of the author—the writing orspeaking self—as well as of the self referred to in writ-ing and speaking) of experimental (often avant-garde)attempts to rupture narrative in literature, film, andother media. The so-called diffuse subject of postmod-ernism (and modernism before it) comes most pow-erfully from such critical rupturing strategies. In thename of what critical project or purpose do we chal-lenge authority, play with strategies of fragmentation,challenge coherence, or reveal the multiple determi-nation of any self's identity? This is, of course, one ofthe "big questions," and I have drawn on Paul Smith'sDiscerning the Subject (1988) to provide us with somebackground on the specific issues.

While I am very aware that everything he has to sayis not about universal, but local, Western discourses,Smith still does not confront the implications for theprojects of critique of radically dispersed subjectivityon a canvas of cross-cultural otherness. His hopes restwith feminism, the other within, to make the con-structionist view of the self produced by the latest in-tellectual movement that seeks to challenge the line-arity of realist narrative, both politically and ethicallyresponsible. The example of Barthes, perhaps Smith'smost interesting chapter ("Autobiography"), sug-gests that without addressing the possibilities of otherworlds whose views of the self are in complex dialogicrelationship to one's own, rupturing strategies, dif-fuse subjectivity, and the like, are not sustainable.Bourgeois individualism and the coherent self arepowerful, and too much in the fabric of everyday life,even for the experimental intellectual, and Barthesinevitably returns to his essential self. In the absenceof committed engagement with otherness throughsome strategy of communication and representation(e.g., through ethnography, or an obsession with eth-

nography and its problems), critical deconstructionsof linear narrative, no matter how revealing and op-positional, are bound to be ephemeral. The introduc-tion of the cross-cultural offers more hope, more op-tions; at least this is the faith of anthropologists andother cultural theorists these days.

I am interested in the historical circumstances thatlead to experimental attempts to disrupt realist, linearnarrative in the West, the practices for doing so, theresulting production of particularly powerful, radical,and convincing understandings of the constructed na-ture of the self within the framework or traditions of fa-miliar Western discourses, and the openings, finally, tounderstandings of the self by others elsewhere thatthis attack on conventional narrative facilitates. So wehave a diffuse self produced by strategies of disrupt-ing narrative that can now be examined as the com-plex ally of specific other understandings of the self inthe many elsewheres of the ethnographic archive.

REFERENCE CITED

Smith, Paul1988 Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Metaphoric Selves: Indian Writersin English

WlMAL DlSSANAYAKEInstitute of Culture and CommunicationEast-West Center

In After Virtue, a book that played a crucial role inbringing ethics back to the center of philosophical dis-cussion, Alastair Mclntyre (1988) makes the point thatselfhood is created and best understood in a contextof narration, and that unity of selfhood resides in theunity of narration. This certainly is a very interestingline of approach. Mclntyre, however, does not exam-ine the question of language which enters so power-fully into this equation—as becomes evident when wepause to examine the works of novelists who havesought to create a selfhood for themselves through fic-tion.

The complex relationship between self, narrative,and language makes its presence known in a veryproblematic way when we examine the works of In-dian writers in English like R. K. Narayan, Mulk RajAnand, G. V. Desani, and Raja Rao. These writers areIndians who use the English language for fictional cre-ation, even as they are seeking to rediscover their au-thentic self by "decolonizing" the English language

18 Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly (16)1

and the consciousness that goes with it. Many of themsee the English language as the instrument of a he-gemonic colonial discourse. They wish to liberatethemselves from its clutches by probing deeper anddeeper into their historical past and cultural heritageso as to recreate an identity for themselves. What isinteresting is that they seek to accomplish this libera-tion through the English language.

I wish to characterize these writers as subvertingmetaphoric selves. I am using the term "metaphoricself" in two senses here. First, metaphor, in its origi-nal sense as derived from Greek, denoted the act ofcarrying across. What these writers are attempting todo is to carry their selves from one cultural discourseto another. Second, they are trying to recreate theiridentity through language; that is to say, through theinstrumentality of metaphoricity.

The problematic that writers like Anand, Desani,and Rao present touches on a variety of issues relatedto the concept of self: self as a cultural artifact; the im-plication of self as a linguistic product; the ramifica-tion of self as a process; self as multiple as opposed tothe unitary; the self's situatedness in a specific spatio-temporal axis; and self as a textual practice. I wish topresent the problematic presented by Indian writersin English with reference to Raja Rao, who only lastyear was awarded a prestigious U.S. literary prize.

Raja Rao is one of the most distinguished Indian au-thors writing in English. His novel The Serpent and theRope (1988) is a thinly veiled autobiographical work offiction which has as its theme the recovery of self.Thematically it works at the level of metaphysical re-alization of self, while linguistically it is preoccupiedwith the creation of an indigenous self. These twoprojects are linked though not necessarily congruent.

Ramaswamy is the protagonist of the novel. He isfrom South India. He wins a scholarship and leavesfor Paris to conduct research in history. There hechances to meet Madeleine Rousselin, a lecturer inhistory. He falls in love with her and they marry. Ra-maswamy's plan is to complete his doctorate and thenreturn to India with Madeleine and become a profes-sor of history. However, events take a differentcourse. Their first child dies at the age of sevenmonths; Ramaswamy hears that his father is dyingand returns to India. Back in India he undergoes achange; he begins to feel a greater identification withIndian culture and a need to excavate his roots.Changed by the Indian experience, he returns toParis. Gradually, Madeleine and Ramaswamy becomeincreasingly incompatible and they begin to driftapart. On a visit to India he meets Savithri, a womanwith whom he establishes a deep rapport. Later theybecome lovers. At the end of the novel, Ramaswamyhas obtained a divorce from Madeleine, and Savithri

has married another man. Ramaswamy experiences adeep and inexplicable yearning to unite with the Ab-solute.

In this novel, Raja Rao is primarily interested in thetheme of the recovery of self; this desire is reflected atthe levels of both theme and language. At the level oftheme, he seeks to explore the true nature of the me-taphysical self which informs so much of the philo-sophical thought of the Indian tradition. At the levelof language, he attempts to exploit the movement,musicality, and loftiness of the Sanskrit idiom. In es-sence, Raja Rao's intention is to create a novel draw-ing on the metaphysical imagination of Advaita Ve-danta philosophy. Advaita Vedantins maintain that"to know" is "to be." To write a novel giving expres-sion to an Advaita Vedantic viewpoint is a formidableundertaking. On the one hand, the novelist is com-pelled to locate his experiences in the incessant flowof sensory impressions without a determinate reality.On the other, he has to use language which isgrounded in phenomenal experience of plurality tocapture the Advaita Vedanta notion of a nondualisticexperience.

All this is further complicated by the fact that he isusing the English language for this purpose. As Raohimself has commented, "One has to convey in a lan-guage that is not one's own that spirit that is one'sown. One has to convey the various shades and omis-sions of a certain thought-movement that looks mal-treated in an alien language" (Rao 1978:24). Many pas-sages in the novel bear eloquent testimony to the ar-duousness of this effort:

All the roads, as the Gita says, lead but to the abso-lute. . . . In the recess of our beings there are great tractsof the unknown, pastures of the invisible, in which thefamiliar, the sons of the family, go driving our cattle. Theland knows it is not from boundary-stone to boundary-stone, but as it were from bush and boulder and tree, sothat even the evening birds know where to roost, and inwhich register of God their names be writ, for their nest-ing and for the births of their young ones. Civilization isnothing but the familiarity with which we go into this in-ner property, cultivated and manured from age to age.[Rao 1986:88]

So what Raja Rao is seeking to do, in effect, is to re-cover his authentic self and the cultural universe thatproduced it through English, the language that wasinstrumental in the first place in distorting that selfand submerging that cultural universe. Here we findan intriguing dialectical interplay between self andother, and this interplay is related to a number of com-plex issues. First, although for all intents and pur-poses Raja Rao is seeking to initiate a new discourserelated to self and language, he is in point of fact theproduct of a powerful discourse from whose strangle-

Notes and Queries 19

hold he is seeking to liberate himself—namely, the he-gemonic discourse associated with British imperial-ism. Second, although he is attempting to subvert theEnglish language so as to give expression to a truly in-digenous Indian self, he is, in effect, widening itsrange and tonalities and enriching its significatorypower. Both these phenomena relate to James Clif-ford's (1988) observation that the present "ambiguousmultivocal world makes it increasingly hard to con-ceive of human diversity as imbedded in bounded in-dependent cultures."

There is another interesting facet of the novel whichbears on the construction of self. Although the protag-onist of the novel is seeking to create a unified self,there are competing voices, each suggestive of its owndistinctive self. Here the competing voices are not rep-resentations of heteroglossia in the Bakhtinian sense,but are diverse voices within the same articulation. AsGilles Deleuze (1986) says, "Who speaks? It is alwaysa multitude even within the person who speaks andacts." For example, in Rao's novel we have the voiceof South India:

Savithri, like most Indians today, knew little of the Bud-dha. In fact, Madeleine was astonished at this strange ig-norance of so great a wisdom. I explained that Buddhismhad merged into Hinduism so that today you cannot dis-tinguish the Dravidian tradition from the Aryan tradition,and truly speaking Aryan wisdom seems to have found amore permanent place in South India than in the AryanNorth, [p. 135]

Then the voice of North India:

The whole of the Gangetic plain is one song of saintly sor-row, as though truth began where sorrow was accepted,and India began where Truth was acknowledged. Sorrowis our river, sorrow our earth, but the green of our treesand the white of our mountains are the affirmation thattruth is possible; that when the cycle of birth and death isover, we can proclaim ourselves the Truth. Truth is theHimalaya, and Ganges humanity, [p. 33]

As Ramaswamy is a product of the East and the West,it is hardly surprising that we encounter a voice rep-resentative of European culture:

What an imperial river the Thames is—her colour may bedark or brown, but she flows with a majesty, with a ma-turity of her knowledge of herself, as though she grew thetall towers beside her, and buildings rose in her image,that men walked by her and spoke inconsequent things—as two horses do on a cold day while the wine merchantdelivers his goods at some pub, whispering and frothingto one another—for the Londoner is eminently good. [p.196]

George Marcus (personal communication) haspointed out that in the productional modern selves,

the desire "to play with strategies of fragmentation, tochallenge coherence, to reveal the multiple determi-nations of self's identity" merits very close analysis.Here, in this novel, we find this desire at work, partlyconsciously and partly unconsciously. To create a selfthrough a work of literature, whatever the historicalconjuncture may be, is an undertaking fraught withgreat ambiguities and uncertainties of intent and ef-fect, for in works of literature we enter into a con-tested terrain of language, history, and ideologywhere questions of difference enact their stances verypowerfully. This naturally gives rise to the multipleand fragmented expressions of self that Marcus is al-luding to. This is seen very clearly in The Serpent andthe Rope.

Another interesting question that this discussion islikely to generate is what kind of approach to lan-guage is at the bottom of this effort of Raja Rao. Thishas important implications for the concept of self.Richard Rorty (1989) discusses three approaches tolanguage and reality. The first is the positivist ap-proach that sees "language as gradually shaping itselfaround the contours of the physical world." The sec-ond is the Romantic approach that sees "language asgradually bringing spirit to self-consciousness."Third, there is the Nietzschean approach that sees"language as we now see evolution, as new forms oflife killing off old forms." I think Raja Rao's theory oflanguage comes closer to the third approach outlinedby Rorty. However, as the novel vividly demon-strates, "killing off old forms" of language and replac-ing them with newer forms is easier said than done.This effort is deeply situated in history and the circu-mambient cultural discourse.

An examination of the metaphoric selves of Indianwriters in English in general and that of Raja Rao inparticular presents us with a set of issues that servesto illuminate the complex relationship that existsamong self, narrative, and language. In the contem-porary world cultural legacies and the selves con-structed out of them are not singular and unified, butplural, diverse, and interactive.

REFERENCES CITED

Clifford, James1988 The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press.Deleuze, Gilles

1986 Cinema I: The Movement-Image. London:Atheone.

Mclntyre, Alastair1981 After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre

Dame Press.Rao, Raja

1978 The Caste of English. In Awakening Conscience:Studies in Commonwealth Literature. C D . Narasim-naiah, ed. New Delhi: Sterling.

20 Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly (16)1

1986 The Serpent and The Rope. New York: OverlookPress.

Rorty, Richard1989 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

The Diversity of Concepts of Selvesand its Implications for ConductingCross-Cultural Research

MARIKO FUJITA

Soai UniversityOsaka, Japan

In several presentations during this seminar, we havean appeal to approach our topic in terms of dispersingselves. Presenters caution us to avoid the use of thegeneric singular, "the self," because there are manynotions of selves, not only cross-culturally, but withinour own society. (I will follow this suggestionthroughout.) Recent developments in anthropologyalso point in this direction, calling on us to be moresensitive to the various notions of selves. Amongthese developments are:

1. In fieldwork situations, we often encounter oth-erness; that is, a feeling that "natives" and heldwork-ers have fundamentally different assumptions aboutlife, agency, and so forth. Such an encounter leads usto wonder what these differences are.

2. Recent literature in cultural theory reminds usthat concepts are socially, culturally, and historicallyconstructed. To ignore this point is to impose Westernconcepts on others.

3. Meaning is contextual; we cannot know themeaning(s) of a concept until we have examined howit is used.

All these points indicate that we can no longer talkabout a singular, accepted concept of the self. Wehave to be more sensitive to the differences in funda-mental assumptions about "society" and "selves"that people of each culture make. To ignore these dif-ferences is to skew our understanding of other cul-tures. For example, Helen Merrill Lynd (1958) haswritten:

There may be wide differences in what is conceived aspossible according to whether one starts with the as-sumption of separate individuals and then considers howthey may be linked together, or starts with the assump-tion of related persons and then considers how they maydevelop individuality within the group, [p. 159]

Elaborating on this point, David Plath (1980) has ar-gued:

Both dimensions, the individual and the personal, arepart of human condition elsewhere. . . . Any explanationof maturity will be skewed to the extent that it is basedupon the idea of the monad individual to the neglect ofthe social person. But the heritages of thinking in the Eastand West have started from these contrasting assump-tions, and this contrast makes for difficulties in any East-West dialogue about maturity, [p. 215]

The awareness of cultural differences in fundamen-tal assumptions, however, poses a vexing problem forthose of us conducting cross-cultural research. Beforewe can compare two cultures, we need some kind ofcriterion for comparison; and yet the criterion is pre-cisely what is called into question. The problem thatwe face today is: How can we conduct cross-culturalresearch and still be sensitive to the cultural construc-tion of meaning which underlies both systems?

I would like to call attention to two dimensions ofselves not sufficiently covered in the seminar: the tem-poral and the social. We have discussed the self as ifit were a snapshot. Expressions like "enduring self,"for example, imply that notions of the self (or selves)do not change throughout a life cycle, a contestablenotion at best. It is important to ask the question: Howdo notions of selves change as one passes through dif-ferent stages of the life cycle?

Wimal Dissanayake has pointed out that there arethree frameworks in which discussions of the selfemerge as an important topic: philosophical texts,symbolic media and interaction, and the concern forcontemporary social problems. We have discussed thefirst two, but have fairly ignored the third. What is theimplication of research on the self for our day-to-daylives? We need to bring the discussion down to earth.

For the last ten years I have been studying how so-cial and cultural elements shape concepts of selves,especially in American and Japanese cultures, focus-ing on the relationship between notions of selves andstages of the life cycle. As postindustrial societies,both Japan and the United States share similar "prob-lems": longevity in post-retirement life, women par-ticipating in the labor force, balancing work and fam-ily, and so forth. In my research I have compared theresponses of Americans and Japanese at similar stagesin the life cycle and in similar settings to questionswhich address some of these postindustrial "prob-lems": What does it mean to grow old (1984, 1986,1989)? What does it mean to be parents (1989)? I havebeen concerned with both comparing and contrastinghow Americans and Japanese interpret the situationsurrounding each problem and how their respectiveinterpretations influence their ways of dealing withthe problem.

Before discussing some approaches which I havefound useful in cross-cultural research, I would like to