Creating an Ideal Self: Theories of Selfhood and Pedagogy at a Japanese Ethics Retreat

In recent years, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to indigenous notions of selfhood and emotion (for example, Geertz 1973; Rosaldo 1980; Lee 1982; LeVine 1982; Smith 1983; Shweder and LeVine 1984; White and Kirkpatrick 1985; Marsella, DeVos, and Hsu 1985). As attempts to capture cultural difference (cf. Marcus and Fischer 1986) and as challenges to Western notions of individualism (cf. Dumont 1980; Bellah et al. 1985), such studies are of crucial theoretical, ethnographic, and epistemological importance.