Beyond 'Individualism' : personhood and transformation in the reclaiming pagan community of San Francisco

Abstract

Many social scientists have sought to understand the dynamics of personhood in Western modernity, asking in particular whether it can be said that personhood in 'the West' is more individualistic than is typical elsewhere. Following Marcel Mauss, a number of anthropologists have suggested that the dominance of commodity exchange in modern Western societies lays a basis for individualised social relations over and above the relational patterns of gift exchange prevalent in many smaller-scale societies. Theorists from Weber to Foucault have likewise suggested that rationalised institutions in Western modernity condition an individualisation of subjectivity. Members of the San Francisco Reclaiming Pagan tradition seek to challenge the individualism, atomisation and rationalisation of social life they associate with wider US society, through ritual magic, activism and community-building. At times, they are able to create numinous worlds of beauty and interconnection against what Weber calls the "disenchantment of the world" (Weber [1919]1991 :155), helping to forge, in part, a more relational basis to their sociality. In doing so, they foreground many sites of relationality that exist in US society under a veneer of individualism, from gift exchange among kin networks to corporeal dissolution in crowds. Yet, their theories and cosmologies also valorise a particular type of artistic, expressive individualism, while their practices absorb and mirror some of the individualising and rationalising tendencies of wider systems and discourses they seek to resist. As a result, patterns of personhood and sociality in Reclaiming illustrate some of the complexities obtaining in US sociality more broadly. Examining these complexities highlights the individualising effects modern Euro-American institutions can have on subjectivity, while calling into question any overly-simplistic link between Western societies and 'individualism'. As such, this study can contribute to the project other anthropologists of personhood have begun: of problematising the dichotomy of 'Western-individualism' and 'non-Western-sociocentrism' which has at times underpinned anthropological studies of personhood.