Abstract
“Have you ever spotted a self down the corridor?” sniggered an eminent anthropologist, while exhorting against the reification of a concept replacing an ethnographic substance. Still, the discourse of selfhood is not only an analytic device, but also mainly a reflection of a certain social gaze under which cultural engendered practices are expressed. Scanning social action, this gaze recognizes and identifies the presence of selves according to their culturally audible utterances. This intriguing mixed metaphor conflating the spectral and the audible renders the self a vocal function confirmed by visual means. Attempts at disentangling the two by introducing a self-sustaining audible constant into the management of the discourse of the self are increasingly prevalent. Thus, underprivileged groups, for example, often phrase their claim to power as the right to have their own voice. Confining terms of selfhood to its spoken representations suggests the possibility of a polyphonic self composed of a multiplicity of voices.
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Hazan, H. (1998). The Double Voice of the Third Age. In: Lomranz, J. (eds) Handbook of Aging and Mental Health. The Springer Series in Adult Development and Aging. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0098-2_9
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