Overview

The Origins of Self explores the role selfhood plays in defining both human society and each individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialization and language, and the types of selves we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Martin P. J. 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 nonmodel, 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 sociocultural 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.  

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9781787356313

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Martin P. J. Edwardes is a visiting lecturer at King’s College London, where he has taught at BA and MA levels. He is currently teaching two new modules at BA level on Language Origins and Language Construction. Martin was Web Editor for the British Association for Applied Linguistics, 2004-2007 and 2010-2016, and has edited a weekly newsletter, The EAORC Bulletin, for the evolutionary anthropology community since 2003. His first monograph, The Origins of Grammar: An Anthropological Perspective, was published in 2010.

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