Murphy Keith M. - Toward an Anthropology of the Will

Douglas W. Hollan

I HAVE WANTED TO WRITE THIS AFTERWORD for a long time now. Not only because the topic is a stimulating and challenging one, but also because I made a promise to the editors to do so. Many things have intervened and have made it difficult for me to accomplish my task, however. At least I tell myself this. I have been swamped with prior and competing obligations, some professional, some personal. I have been traveling a lot. I have been learning how to teach large, undergraduate courses again, after several years of not teaching such demanding courses. I have been helping to develop a new academic program on campus. The reasons go on and on.

What does my failure to write up until now say about my will to write, if anything? Are we to take my reasons for not writing at face value? To presume that the will does not always provide a way after all, when other people and things or duties and responsibilities intervene? Or is my failure to write up until now prima facie evidence of my lack of will, perhaps even of a pathology of will, the kind that might have caught the attention of the pioneering German psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin (Good, Chapter 8)? And if this is a lack or failure of will, who is to blame (Garro, Mattingly, Groark, Mageo, this volume)? Must I shoulder all the responsibility myself or do the chains of agency (Stewart and Strathern, Chapter 7) extend beyond myself to the people and community around me, perhaps even to the spirits, gods, and ancestors around me, whom have either enabled or impeded my work? Is it possible that other people not only share responsibility for my failure to write, but have intervened actively, magically or otherwise, to prevent me from writing (Garro, Chapter 4), so as to hurt or embarrass me?

Or is the whole line of thinking a form of self-deception (Fingarette 1969) and bad faith (Sartre 1974) on my part, which allows me to evade my personal responsibility and lack of will? Perhaps I have other less conscious or even unconscious motives and desires that have interfered with my will to write (cf., Mageo, Groark, this volume). Perhaps I worry that I will disappoint people and let them down. Or fear excessive and unfair criticism. Or perhaps I harbor secret feelings of defiance toward anyone or anything that appears to constrain my freedom, so that my apparent lack of will is actually an indirect and disguised assertion of will, the willfulness of noncompliance.

But if the reasons for my failure to write are potentially so varied, complex, and multi-layered, how are we ever to decide which reasons are actually at play, which descriptions of my will (or lack of will) most accurate and convincing? What kinds of information would you need to know about me to determine that? And how would you go about obtaining such information in an ethical, nonjudgmental, anthropological way?

The chapters in this volume help us think through such puzzling issues about the will and related phenomenal states. All of them make the will or some aspect of willing the primary and explicit focus of analysis, which as the editors note, is unusual in the anthropological literature, even within the more specialized field of psychological anthropology. This alone makes the volume an important contribution. But more significantly, these chapters when taken collectively throw light on a paradox at the very heart of our conception of the will: namely, that our sense of volition and control over ourselves and other things, even when felt most strongly, is always embedded in and influenced by biological, social, and cultural processes of which we are usually unaware or that extend far beyond ourselves. Acknowledging this does not necessarily mean conscious will is a complete illusion, as Daniel Wegner (2002) has argued recently. But it does mean that the will is more complex and over-determined that we often have taken it to be, and that grand old debates about free will versus determinism will need to be recast more in terms of free will and determinism (cf. Mitchell 1988, Groark, Chapter 5). Indeed, cross-cultural perspectives such as these enable us to recognize the extent to which many of these grand old debates are themselves rooted in cultural traditions that valorize, morally and pragmatically, individual initiative and autonomy over other types of human action and behavior. I will have more to say about this later.

I will not comment at length on all the contributions here, even though all are worthy of extended comment. Rather, I will discuss several issues that interweave among the chapters. I separate these themes out and highlight them for purposes of analysis, but as we shall see, almost all of them entail one another, both logically and ethnographically. My points of departure are the central organizing questions that all of the authors address, either directly or indirectly: What is the will? Where it is located (in both space and time)? What is its moral valence? Does it imply conscious awareness and choice?