LEWIS HYDE: I’ve been interested lately in the word dividual. In-dividual means something that cannot be divided. So an individualist myth asserts that the single person is indivisible, a sort of atomic unit of social life in which you can find no subsets, no particles. Whereas the word dividual means that the thing can be divided up. It turns out the word dividual has become of interest in anthropological circles. Because sometimes when anthropologists go into communities and see how people think of themselves, they find that people think of themselves in terms of multiplicity. I am made up of my family, and my gods, and the nature that surrounds me, my job—these many different parts make me up. And if they were to disappear—and certainly if all of them were to disappear—I would disappear. It’s one of the reasons that we think of solitary confinement as a cruel and unusual punishment. If you really strip someone of all of the webs of connection that we each have—that person would not exist anymore. This at any rate is the belief of a dividualist culture. In the United States, the individualist argument is the myth we can’t get out of. A new online exclusive interview with Lewis Hyde: the.blvr.org/1xZUqOH
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 18:31:03 +0000
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