their article on‘the mindful body’( 1987 ). Thefirst thinker we will work
with here is Anthony Cohen and his book‘Self Consciousness’( 1994 ). In
the Preface to this book he announces a long-standing concern that gnaws
away at the putative foundations of structural functional analysis and its
holism, a direct descendant of the work of Emile Durkheim. Cohen points
out that individuals may interpret very differently community-based sym-
bols (p. 1). He goes further and notes that individuals are the focus of his
research, and as such they often hold misunderstandings about themselves
and others. These individuals in hisfield area in Shetland also felt it was
problematic to generalize factors about them that would allow observers
to construct them into communities. So, for Cohen, while individuals
remained very palpably real, community and society were elusive, perhaps
speculative. Cohen reaches a perceptive conclusion, akin to ourfigure of
the two sides of a coin motif. He suggests that it is proper for anthropol-
ogy to study‘society’(American anthropologists might have written
‘culture’here, with the same import), but that we cannot do this in a
sensitive fashion unless we take full account of individuals (p. x). Such a
process of accounting must further depend, we may note, on what folk
theories of self and person influence the ways in which people see them-
selves as individuals and what meanings they give to the term: for example,
whether it implies autonomy of action or not. Awareness of the complex-
ities engaged here can be a useful way to improve the scope of ethno-
graphic accounts, as Cohen remarks (referring to Okely and Calloway
1992 ). Perhaps the most valuable overall part of Cohen’s discussion is
that he insists we do not deny to the people we study the self-conscious-
ness that as anthropologists we claim for ourselves (p. 5).
In his discussion of these topics, Cohen is not only questioning prac-
tices of anthropological writing but he is also fundamentally questioning
and breaking down the frames that had informed such writing. He is
further turning problems inside out. Instead of taking it as axiomatic
that humans are social he asks how it is that individuals as selves can be
motivated to form social groups. He notes, significantly, the importance of
mind and language as individuals use these resources to reflect on their
actions and choices of action (p. 9). This is a fundamental observation
which is worthy of much more unpacking. Clearly reflecting on his own
experience, Cohen also writes that the conflicts between individual sensi-
bility and social demands placed on the individual are often causes of
anguish and difficulty. This is an entirely common sense remark and this
existential condition is the stuff of almost all dramas and narratives. So
36 BREAKING THE FRAMES