It's not going too far to imagine a tribal consciousness in your near ancestry. A small group like an extended family with an identity of its own, an identity which is far more real than that of any of the individuals making it up. And at the same time a differentiated social organism with clearly specified roles which are filled in turn by members in well-ordained and legitimated lineages. There are rules in the form of lore which are known but not explicit, and there are custodians of the lore, again as roles successively filled by qualified group members. There are rituals and rites of passage, which include marriages and births, deaths and funerals, responses to the cycles of nature and their volatility, totems and legends which pose and answer the fundamental questions of existence. The lore also covers relation with other tribes that are encountered, although here far more uncertainty prevails. In a structure of this kind you possess an individual identity, but this exists in dynamic equilibrium with levels of undifferentiated participation. As an adolescent growing up and into your own place in the structure there are many moments of uncertainty - of choice of role and direction, of discovering what your place is to be in the various interwoven hierarchies - in which a sense of monadic individuality, even a certain estrangement, becomes salient, but only in relation to a pre-given understanding of who you are deemed to be with respect to the overarching identity of the tribe. There are accommodations for the transient alienations which work more or less well. Take a structure of this kind and now imagine it transforming under the effects of tribal amalgamations as they form larger and larger units, and this process continuously expanding until it reaches the condition of existence in a modern state, or hyper-community in excess of the state. It is possible to see this process as a single evolution in which all the original elements remain present but changed and changing in their mutual relations and intensities. The self arises in dependence on a theory of the self and any such theory is incomplete if it does not include its own genealogy. What does the self look like then, if its intrinsic theory is fully cognisant of its own genealogy?