Anthropology Personhood and the Body
by
Abou Farman, Miranda Tuckett
  • LAST MODIFIED: 19 February 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0307

Introduction

As an analytic category in anthropology proper, personhood dates only to Marcel Mauss’s 1938 seminal essay on the topic, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self.” But as a central concern in European and American legal and philosophical thought it dates back much further—indeed, as Mauss himself points out, its genealogy may well be traced to Roman law where it appears as a way of distinguishing aspects of a public persona (legal and political) from a private or metaphysical identity. For Mauss, coming from a Durkheimian lineage where a key distinction was between organism and social being, the category of person offered the possibility of carving out a domain of analysis for the social sciences, distinct from the ascendant biological, cognitive, psychological, and metaphysical forms which were increasingly describing the figure of the human through essentialized, universal, and materially reductive determinations. Thus, only two years after Mauss, AR Radcliffe-Brown 1940 elaborates on functionalism in the essay “On Social Structure,” by writing: “Every human being living in society is two things: he is an individual and he is also a person. As an individual he is a biological organism. . . . . The human being as a person is a complex of social relationships. . . . ” In other words, the person has had analytic and moral value for the social sciences precisely in so far as it could be separated from a materially-determined (and thereby also racialized and sexed) body. And yet, given the metaphysical ambiguities and juridicopolitical histories (including the history of slavery and modern race-making), the separation has never been clean; neither have personhood and humanity been neatly coterminous categories. Yet it is precisely this tangle that has generated the dynamic anthropological reflections on the overlaps and separations of persons, bodies, and things across cultures and histories, especially in light of the perennial anthropological problem of translation across languages and cultural forms. Today, with increasing technological intervention into bodies and minds around the globe, the distinction has become more salient if muddled and so the tangle has rather thickened. As rivers, mountains and robots gain status as persons, the criteria of personhood and the secular human behind it are expanding beyond the older metaphysical assumptions that divided the world into humans and things, thus raising new questions about what it is to have mind or to have body, and to have philosophical, legal, and political frameworks around these.

Key Concepts in Personhood

The texts in this section are largely concerned with defining personhood or key concepts which relate to the subject of personhood based on some of the long-standing personhood debates in anthropology, from core notions regarding the self, to foundational ideas about relationality and distinctions between legal and moral personhood. The texts show the malleability of personhood as a concept as well as its politico-legal use in exclusionary politics. The sections will highlight the place of the body in these debates and the ways in which key oppositions in the Western construction of personhood (animate/inanimate; male/female; owner/property) have been challenged.

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