Anthropologists have suggested that members of some cultures in South Asia lack a notion of individuality. Data from the Gurungs of Nepal show that a high value on interrelationship does not preclude a well‐defined concept of the individual. The Gurungs are a people for whom integration in a social network is of paramount importance, yet they conceive of the person as a discrete entity with distinct needs and impulses that may run counter to demands for social cohesion. Gurung concepts of the person reflect the importance placed on social embeddedness and a recognition of an individual being that is embedded. Concepts of individuality and relatedness and the ways in which they are articulated and reconciled express tensions inherent in South Asian social life. [South Asia, person, culture and experience]

Global changes during the last three decades have greatly altered the spatial and moral orientations of individuals in Nepal. This has caused a reordering of gender relations that has influenced the life experience of many women, challenging existing notions of feminine identity. Here, I apply a feminist psychological anthropology to understanding the ways in which social transformations in Nepal have shaped the hopes, ideals, and actions of a particular young woman who has been empowered, rather than burdened and displaced, by the changes of globalization. Her example shows how an analysis of individual lives can illuminate the motivating forces and differential effects of globalization and demonstrates that attention to gender is necessary for understanding the complex relationship between power and experience.

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OrientationsThis article involves several layers of investigation meant to be mutually illuminating. At the core of my discussion is an ethnographic analysis of beliefs about the self (which I define for these purposes as the perceived locus of identity and experience) among Gurungs in Nepal, framed by a discussion of local interpretations of Buddhism and the ways in which these impinge on concepts of self. Surrounding this analysis is an examination of the shared tenets of the philosophic system of Buddhism expressed in many varied locales and a consideration of the implications of Buddhist philosophy for debates about the contingency of knowledge and the apprehension of truth, especially in relation to questions of representation and understandings of self.The acknowledgment or even valorization of contingency in Buddhist contexts has powerful implications for the experience of self and constructions of relationship. Giving Buddhist psychology the dignity it is due as an intellectual system commensurate in sophistication with psychological paradigms in the West, I compare Buddhist conceptions of self and other with ideas expressed in object-relations theory in psychoanalysis. 1 Both Buddhist and object-relations theories of the psyche take a highly contextualized approach to the self and demonstrate the complexity and ambiguity of self-other boundaries, though they diverge in their ultimate aims. Their contrasts and their areas of convergence offer insights into the deep interrelationship between subjective experience, social forms, and relations of power that should be of value and interest to anthropologists. A Methodological ApproachMy discussion revolves around questions of fragmentation and coherence in human life approached through a focus on contingency. These questions were a fundamental concern of the people with whom I lived in Nepal whose experience provides the basis for my discussion. They are also primary areas of Cultural Anthropology 17(2):2IO-24.V