The Origins of Self: An Anthropological Perspective

Author: Martin P. J. EdwardesPublisher: UCL PressPaperback:ISBN 10: 1787356310ISBN 13: 978-1787356313Hardcover:ISBN 10: 1787356329ISBN 13: 978-1787356320The Origins of Self explores the role selfhood plays in defining both human society and each individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialization and language, and the types of selves we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Martin P. J. 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 on