Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course

Cathrine Degnen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781137566416
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137566423
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring notions of the person through a wide range of anthropological literature, Cathrine Degnen analyses how personhood is built, affirmed, and maintained during various life stages and via multiple cultural forms and practices. In discussing the life course, she investigates personhood as a concept at the beginning of life, throughout life as lived, at the edges of being, and ultimately at life's end. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course moves beyond the human person in isolation to consider how personhood is fashioned with regard to place and how non-humans can also be recognised as persons. Through multiple ethnographic accounts, Degnen shows that personhood emerges as a relational and processual entity, brought into being via reciprocal fields of social relations.

© The Author(s) 2018

Cathrine DegnenCross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Coursehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56642-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Making of Personhood

Cathrine Degnen¹

(1)

School of Geography, Politics & Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

End Abstract

Introduction: Personhood as a Question

Without ever intending to, I have become entirely captivated by the question of personhood. On the one hand, I find compelling the confidence, certainty, and regularity with which personhood permeates the everyday. That is to say, knowing who and what is a person is something seemingly so obvious that it can feel almost absurd to pose the question in the first place. In the everydayness of getting on with life, the question of personhood thus becomes both omnipresent and invisible. Without a second thought, we regularly assess the existence or absence of personhood in the other entities we come across, for whether or not they are persons matters for how we manage our interactions with them. We are so adept at this—and so reliant on it for helping making sense of the world—that the question of personhood disappears into the background during the usual course of events. Common sense tells us who (and what) is a person and who (and what) is not. In this sense, the question of personhood is simple. It is mundane.

On the other hand, and for very similar reasons, personhood is rivetingly complex. This is because in helping us make sense of the world, personhood is also fundamentally implicated in creating the worlds in which we live. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ethnographic record charting the staggering range of answers human beings have devised to answer the question of personhood. Who and what counts as a person? How do we know? When and how is personhood attributed? To what extent does place shape personhood? Can personhood be “lost”? Is personhood only for the living or is it a question for the dead too? The diversity of responses to these questions attests to tremendous cultural resourcefulness in addressing what are profoundly existential matters. The answers given to the question of personhood are dependent on the cultural setting, worldview, and context within which they are asked. Indeed, some of these questions only make sense in certain cultural and historical contexts—the extent to which place shapes personhood, for instance, or that non-human beings can be persons and significant social actors—and the cultural answers given are historically contingent, contested, and shifting.

Consequently, when we contemplate cross-cultural answers given to the questions of personhood, the responses we receive can often be ontologically destabilising. That this might be the case when considering examples from cultural contexts other than one’s own will not be surprising for an anthropological audience. As two illustrations, out of many, consider this material from Mapuche people in Chile and from Beng people in the Côte d’Ivoire, examples that I return to in much greater detail later in the volume. For Mapuche , “to be considered a true person, or che, means you have to have both proper human physicality as well as proper human sociality. Thus…beings which possess human bodies but fail to demonstrate proper human sociality, like infants and drunken people, are … not considered to be che” (Course 2010, 156). On the other hand, Beng infants in the Côte d’Ivoire are understood to “lead profoundly spiritual lives”, much more so than Beng adults themselves (Gottlieb 1998, 122). This is because after death, Beng souls go to a “spirit village”, a world parallel to the human world known as wrugbe . It is from here that Beng souls are “reborn as newborn humans”; thus, “in the Beng view, infants have just recently been living their lives” in wrugbe in a full and adult way amongst the other ancestor souls present there (1998, 123). Once born, Beng infants begin a gradual process of withdrawal from wrugbe , a process that takes place over a period of several years (1998, 123–5). Given this framing of infants as in some respects more adult than adults, Gottlieb shows how Beng notions of child development, linguistic ability, and the establishment of personhood are markedly different than those of Mapuche or putatively Western models.

But as I hope to show throughout this volume, and as the anthropological literature on personhood increasingly demonstrates, what “we” think we know as a Western audience about “our” own cultural truths of personhood can also result in surprising answers. The clarity of how and when personhood is attributed, certainty of what the essential characteristics and markers of personhood are, and the boundaries demarcating the edges of “the person” are not nearly as neat and tidy as we might assume. The question of personhood is not always as simple and as mundane as we might think, and I propose in this volume that these issues come more sharply into focus when we contemplate personhood via the life course. That is to say, in my captivation by the question of personhood, I am also intrigued by how responses to those questions may change over the life course. Questions of personhood also speak implicitly to the ways in which personhood is intrinsically connected to—and changes with—the various phases of the life course.

As I write in Chap. 6, it was whilst conducting research on issues of later life and older age with people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s in the north of England that I first began to wonder about how personhood might be more secure at certain points in the life course and more precarious at others (Degnen 2012). For instance, during that time I remember visiting Betty at home one day, a friend in her 80s. During my visit, Betty spoke to me about the increasingly erratic behaviour of our mutual acquaintance and neighbour, also in her 80s, called Eleanor, whom Betty had known for several decades. As she leant across the table for some milk for her tea, Betty said to me: “The trouble with Eleanor, Cathrine, is that she is not all there anymore.” I nodded. This was not an unusual turn of phrase in my fieldwork experiences. Our conversation moved on. But I wondered about those words Betty spoke, and what it meant for the shifting qualities of personhood that Eleanor was entitled to claim, and what was being attributed to her now compared to her in the past. And what about personhood at other moments in a lifetime? How is personhood reckoned, what aspects matter in determining it, and are these differently weighted at different points in life?

Betty’s clarity about Eleanor’s claim on full personhood and my own uncertainty in the face of that statement stays with me. Whilst anthropologists have been extremely adept at focusing on particular aspects of the life course and personhood in specific societies, there has been little consideration to date of personhood cross-culturally and across the life course. In this book, I want to use both in order to ask what we might better understand about the question of personhood and how it moves, both in different cultural settings but also through the various parts of life. This chapter lays out the guiding principles of the book that helps me achieve those goals. It introduces the conceptual and theoretical framings to personhood and the life course explored in the chapters to follow and addresses the multiple challenges of such an undertaking.

Personhood and Anthropology

Anthropological interest in personhood has its own particular history, and the literature on personhood in anthropology is substantial. Charting all of it in detail would be in and of itself a book-length project, and this is not that book. I have not set out to write the definitive text on personhood in anthropology. Instead, I have been selective in my focus, choosing examples that best help me address the questions I set out above. There are key elements in the history of personhood and anthropology that I outline here in order to help orientate the reader for the chapters that come, but I am cognisant that this can only be an introduction to the breadth of the field. Much of the depth and texture of the literature will become more apparent as the chapters of the book unfold, contextualised by the detailed ethnographic examples in the text. Also of note is the way in which some of the core areas of anthropological inquiry from the earliest eras of the discipline intersect with personhood and substantially pre-date any explicit analysis of personhood. As I will elaborate on in later chapters, these have included central topics such as kinship, animism , death and mortuary rituals, and the body. As such, the history of ideas in anthropology is itself bound up with questions of the person, even if personhood as a specific object of inquiry is a comparatively more recent project. Arguably, it was not until the 1980s when the contemporary framing of personhood as an anthropological analytical challenge really began to take a coherent shape. This shift was linked with both the rise of a feminist anthropology and the many challenges to a structuralist erasure of the human subject.

Thus, Marcel Mauss’ essay (1985 [1938]) on the person as a category of the human mind, which is conventionally cited as a landmark publication in the field, was notably ahead of its time. In it, Mauss argues that the concept of the individual is a uniquely Western category, traces its historical development, contrasts its social and moral significance in Western cultural settings, and proposes its absence in non-Western settings (LaFontaine 1985, 123). Not long after, the concept of the “individual” is parsed from that of the “person” by Radcliffe-Brown, with the form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Making of Personhood
• 2. Making Babies and Being Pregnant: The Debated Beginnings of Personhood
• 3. Personhood, Birth, Babies, and Children
• 4. Place and Personhood
• 5. Human People and Other-Than-Human People
• 6. Older Age and Personhood
• 7. Endangered Forms of Personhood
• 8. Dismantling the Person?: Death and Personhood
• Back Matter