On Being Singular In A Plural Society: Self-Construction, Affects, And Identities
9 December 2025, 1:15pm – 5pm
Organisers: Camille Van Deputte (Fyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow) and Ramon Sarró (Emeritus Professor, SAME).
The purpose of this workshop is to comparatively discuss the desire to “single out” in society. By and large, anthropologists have viewed singularization as exceptionality, as though only extra-ordinary members of the society (ritual specialists, prophets, shamans, diviners, mystics, heroes, chiefs, queens or kings) could be conceived of as being singular. We propose to see the process of singularisation as a universal part and parcel in the construction of subjectivity, applicable to all members of society. How can ethnography and anthropology help us compare and theorize processes of singularisation?
The structure of personality has been considered a domain that psychologists ought to be dealing with, but not relevant enough for anthropologists’ work. However, in order to escape the temptation to see societies as amorphous crowds, we should be attentive to the tensions between socio-cultural logics and individual affects and desires, between the centripetal and centrifugal forces that shape our selves, between the expectation, more or less enforced, to be a good member of the community and the desire to attain a satisfactory degree of “self-realization”.
Human singularity results out of a combination of ascribed identities and self-perception. As Brubaker and Cooper (2000) suggest, what needs to be examined is the implementation of a subjectivity situated at the crossroads between the self-understanding of one’s social location and the feeling of groupness generated by sharing attributes and relational attachments. The singularisation of the person seems to take place at the intersection of relationships, events/affects and ascribed positions.
Programme
1:15 pm. - Welcome and preliminary thoughts on singularity by Camille Van Deputte and Ramon Sarró.
SESSION 1 1:30 pm. – 2:30 pm.
1:30 pm. Peyton Cherry - ‘Finding Nakama: Individual emotions and motivations in Japanese activist practice’.
1:45 pm. Marguerite de Villiers - ‘Category of one: from musical misfit to mainstream Maverick’.
2:00 pm. Alice Catanzaro - ‘Ethical scaffolding: mixing media and guidance in Morocco’
2:15pm. Panel discussion. Chair-Discussant: Ramon Sarró.
Coffee Break 2:30 pm. – 2:45 pm.
SESSION 2 2:45 pm. – 3:45 pm.
2:45 pm. Elizabeth Ewart - ‘(Re)visiting the relationship between the person and concepts of beauty among the Panará’.
3:00 pm. Dolores Martinez - ‘One singularity leads to another’.
3:15 pm. Camille Van Deputte - ‘"Being obliged" in Korhogo region (Côte d'Ivoire): ages, self-fulfilment and solidarity’.
3:30 pm. Panel discussion. Chair-Discussant: David Zeitlyn.
Coffee Break 3:45 pm. – 4:00 pm.
SESSION 3 4 pm. – 5 pm.
4:00 pm. João de Pina Cabral - ‘Being Nove-Nove: metaphysical pluralism and spirit possession in São Tomé and Príncipe’.
4:20 pm. Deborah Durham (via Microsoft TEAMS) - ‘Family matters’.
4:40 Panel discussion leading to a global discussion. Chair – Discussant: Zuzanna Olszewska.
