On Apperception

“Our eyes wouldn’t adjust to seeing without the lenses. But we have the metacognitive ability to become aware of their shape and understand the conditions of our own apperception, as Boas did and entreated us to do too. ‘I’ can, to an extent, stand beside the ‘we’ of which each of us is such an intricate part. In this way, we may retrieve its hidden or forgotten elements, perhaps overcome prejudices and neuroses, as Freud helped us do, and so help cultivate a healthy, plural, attentive and democratic collectivity.”

Noga Arikha - https://aeon.co/essays/who-am-i-when-i-care-emotion-through-the-lens-of-franz-boas. An interesting summary on the link between psychology and anthropology with reference to Franz Boas’s work. The idea that anthropology is an investigation into psychological lenses or conditions of apperception is connected to my own recent work on situated cognition, which I think has a lot of undeveloped potential for cultural studies of a variety of sorts.