Idiosyncrasy and the problem of shared understandings: The case of a Pakistani orphan
Individuals participate in a social world of shared understandings and activities, yet they organize their experience idiosyncratically. Over the years, anthropologists have put forth a variety of arguments for ignoring the idiosyncrasies, focusing only on the symbols that constitute “culture,” that is, shared understandings. Even psychoanalysts who focus most of their attention on uncovering the possible multiple significances of every utterance learn how to conduct a psychoanalysis more as an art than as a specifiable body of techniques. The problem of moving beyond the interpretive world of the informant or analysand to cross-cultural comparisons and experience-distant statements about things like psychological organization is one that has been a locus of controversy among anthropologists. The idiosyncrasies discernable in a person’s use of cultural symbols may act as markers of particular ways of organizing experience.
