Toward an Anthropology of the Will

236 Pages·2010·1.18 MB·English

by  Keith Murphy

TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY
OF THE WILL

TOWA R D A N
A NTHROPOLOGY
OF THE W ILL
Edited by Keith M. Murphy
and C. Jason Th roop
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All
rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written
permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Toward an anthropology of the will / edited by Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason
Th roop.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8047-6887-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Will—Anthropological aspects. 2. Act (Philosophy) 3. Cognition
and culture. 4. Personality and culture. 5. Ethnopsychology. I. Murphy,
Keith M. II. Th roop, C. Jason.
bf611.t69 2010
302′.1—dc22
2009025678
Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 10.5/15 Adobe Garamond
CONTENTS
1. Willing Contours: Locating Volition in
Anthropological Th eory 1
Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Th roop
2. In the Midst of Action 28
C. Jason Th roop
3. Moral Willing As Narrative Re-Envisioning 50
Cheryl Mattingly
4. By the Will of Others or by One’s Own Action? 69
Linda C. Garro
5. Willful Souls: Dreaming and the Dialectics of
Self-Experience Among the Tzotzil Maya of
Highland Chiapas, Mexico 101
Kevin P. Groark
6. Transforming Will/Transforming Culture 123
Jeannette Mageo
vi contents
7. How Can Will Be Expressed and What Role Does the
Imagination Play? 140
Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern
8. Emil Kraepelin on Pathologies of the Will 158
Byron J. Good
Afterword: Willing in Context 177
Douglas W. Hollan
Notes 197
References 203
List of Contributors 217
Index 221
TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY
OF THE WILL

c h a p t e r 1
WILLING CONTOURS
Locating Volition in
Anthropological Th eory
Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Th roop
There is a longstanding tradition
in Americanist anthropology to engage in psychologi-
cally oriented research in eff orts to expand our understanding of the cul-
tural and personal patterning of subjective experience. From dreaming to
reasoning, desiring to thinking, motivation to internalization, psychological
anthropologists have interrogated the nuanced nature of subjective life as a
means for destabilizing many taken-for-granted assumptions about what it
means to experience the world as social actors. At the core of this enterprise
sits a motivated interest to question what psychologists, philosophers, and
other human scientists view to be the basic faculties, processes, and contents
of subjective life (cf. Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007). Somewhat paradoxi-
cally, however, when engaging the problem of culture and subjective life, it
is still largely the case that psychological anthropology, and the discipline