Next
session of JNEI will consist of a workshop entirely dedicated to the
anthropology of psychological essentialism. Our two speakers will be Charles
Stépanoff (EPHE) and Denis Regnier (IJN):
Anthropology of
psychological essentialism
Date: Friday
24rd January
Time: 11:30 – 12:45
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Charles Stépanoff (EPHE)
Title: “Understanding
individuality: About
individual essences and categories”
Abstract: Why do we essentialize social
categories? Why do people consider belonging of individuals to certain
categories as innate, inalterable and giving a lot of information about them
(about their character, their vices, or their skills)? Social essentialism has
been interpreted as the result of a transfer from folkbiology to social groups
(Atran, Boyer, Gil-White): we essentialize social categories because we
mistakenly treat them as biological species. This hypothesis, called
“analogical transfer”, is based on the theory of the modularity of the mind.
Other students interpret essentialism as a domain-general mode of understanding
that permits interpreting causality in many domains independently from biology
(Gelman, Hirschfeld). Ethnography can help to untangle empirically these
questions. Among Tuvans (Southern Siberia), belonging to the category of
shamans is innate and inalterable. However, their category is not
conceptualized as a biological species, for shamans are supposed to eat each
other. I advocate for the hypothesis of individual essentialism that helps to
understand essentialization of high ranked categories (e.g. aristocracy), and
leads to discard the “analogical transfer” hypothesis.
*
Time: 12:45 – 14:00
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Denis Regnier (IJN)
Title: “Clean
people, unclean people: History, cognition and the essentialization of ‘slaves’ among the Betsileo”
Abstract: In
the southern highlands of Madagascar, Betsileo descendants of ‘commoners’ (olompotsy) essentialize slave
descendants: they think that slave descendants have an ‘inner essence’ that
makes them what they are, cannot be cleansed and will be passed on to their
children, no matter what they do. This case of psychological essentialism, as strong as it is among the Betsileo,
raises the questions of why, when and how such an essentialization has taken
place, since there is evidence that slaves in pre-abolition times (i.e., before
1896), although deemed ‘unclean’, were not essentialized – or only weakly
essentialized – by ‘clean’ and free people.
The paper will discuss Betsileo history and ethnography, as well as
recent research on the essentialism of social categories to suggest an answer
to these questions.
