SCHOLARLY INTERESTS | kurtbruder

Scholarly Interests

From the time I was engaged in fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation, I have held to a single theoretical focus: investigating how the sense of self is shaped and maintained in human interaction. Not satisfied merely to describe “selfing” practices in different communities, I have sought to make approaches to interaction that contribute to the practitioners’ health, well being, happiness, and growth more readily and widely available.

I plan to continue my research in support of a writing project that is consistent with my career-defining investigation of selfing-in-interaction, a book, tentatively entitled Minding Your Soul, in which I attempt to re-conceptualize folk notions of "soul," "spirit," ”self” (and related themes) in terms of processes of social interaction and their artifacts.
The language—and consequent conceptual categories—most commonly used to discuss this more subtle dimension of human experience is anchored in inherited terminology that encourages the misguided reification (“misplaced concreteness”) of what are, in fact, dynamic, distributed social processes. These include categories from Greek antiquity, those associated with Cartesian body/mind dualism, Christian tripartite anthropology (mind, body, and spirit), and a materialism (modern and postmodern) that is hostile to most efforts at treating consciousness seriously, as well as others from a variety of Eastern mystical traditions.

All of these fail to account for the essentially social and semiotic character of so-called spiritual and psychic phenomena. They don't typically recognize the distributed (i.e., shared between multiple minds) nature of soul, or the actuality of (at least a species of) immortality to be found in the enduring influences that pass between people. In this project I offer answers to such age-old questions as “What are soul and spirit made of?,” and, ”What are the boundaries of the self?,” not in terms of some invisible, immaterial, immortal (and ultimately non-empirical) entity, but rather in terms of dynamic processes of human interaction (and their artifacts) through an interdependent network of "voices" (literal and mediated). Indeed, in this work I conceptualize voice itself as closely related to what has been commonly called by the terms “soul” and “spirit.” When we observe the enormous constellation of interconnected voices (with their many extensions), together with the innumerable social and institutional effects of all this interaction—both among beings at a point in time (synchronically) and through multiple lines of influence over time (diachronically)—we may be equipped to recognize useful connections between notions like Jung's "collective unconscious" (what he called the "objective psyche") and the mythic residue of these ancient categories in a model of human experience based on processes of communication that have been insufficiently appreciated until now.