The Origins of Self
An Anthropological Perspective
Martin P. J. Edwardes (Author)
The Origins of Self explores the role that selfhood plays in defining human society, and each human individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialisation and language, and the types of self we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood.
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 one of them are internally generated models, and the only non-model, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self.
Developed in relation to a range of subject areas – linguistics, anthropology, genomics and cognition, as well as socio-cultural theory – The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.
Prologue: Down the Rabbit-hole 1. What Is a Self? 2. Where Did Self Come From? 3. The Modelled Self 4. How Do We Become Selves? 5. Where Did Social Calculus Come From? 6. The Language of Self 7. Metaphors of Self 8. What Is a Self? There and Back Again 9. Epilogue: Snarks or Boojums? Glossary
Bibliography
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781787356306
Number of pages: 248
Number of illustrations: 5
Publication date: 22 July 2019
PDF ISBN: 9781787356306
EPUB ISBN: 9781787356337
Hardback ISBN: 9781787356320
Paperback ISBN: 9781787356313
Poetics and Politics of Islamic Imaginaries
Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Fatemeh Sadeghi, Sumrin Kalia, Erol Saglam, Alexander Pymm,
01 October 2026
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, María Iñigo Clavo, Beatriz Lemos, Florencia Portocarrero,
20 May 2026
The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 14
Philip Schofield, Tim Causer, Chris Riley,
07 May 2026
Nolwenn Bühler, Nils Graber, Victoria Boydell, Cinzia Greco,
04 December 2025
Alexander Mullan, Riley Smallman, Herre de Bondt, Juliette Waterman,
13 May 2025
The Origins of Self
An Anthropological Perspective
The Origins of Self explores the role that selfhood plays in defining human society, and each human individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialisation and language, and the types of self we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood.
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 one of them are internally generated models, and the only non-model, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self.
Developed in relation to a range of subject areas – linguistics, anthropology, genomics and cognition, as well as socio-cultural theory – The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.
