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Is the West Peculiar? Personhood and the Self in Philosophy and Anthropology

Ideas about personhood and the self are important, but are often conflated in discussion in both Philosophy and Anthropology. Dr. Orton explores how we can move the debate forward. 

 

For university-level scholars or independent researchers, we’ve included clickable links to useful literature and canonical scholarship you need to be acquainted with to get started. For those who are simply interested in anthropology, enjoy these case studies from different cultures all over the world!


Detail from Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation

 

I have big concerns with the way we deal with the concepts of “personhood” and the “self” in intellectual history and the impact that this seems to be having on other academic fields. I’ve read scholarly works of Anthropology and heard discussions at Religious Studies conferences that casually contrast “Western” and “non-Western” ideas of personhood as though there is a distinct division to be made. In Philosophy, much of the scholarship seems to ignore the long-standing schools of thought that dispute Cartesian ideas of the self.

 

For undergraduates and new researchers, these terms themselves can be confusing; current academic conversations even more so. A good starting point to understanding the debate is to think about the concepts of “self” and “person” in Western philosophy, two concepts that are often mixed up, even in academic papers.

 

Personhood in Moral Philosophy

 

In moral philosophy, the concept of personhood is used to determine moral considerability, including questions such as which individuals have human rights and responsibilities. Personhood is not synonymous with being human: some people think that some or all non-human animals deserve personhood status and some people think that not all humans deserve this status.

 

When it comes to the nature of personhood beyond moral philosophy, Louis Dupre argues that the Enlightenment in the West saw the association of personhood with individualism and autonomy. This kind of argument often opposes Western concepts of personhood to the relational concept of personhood found in many indigenous and Eastern religions.

 

Some societies have a sociocentric conception of the person as part of the social whole. Sociocentric conceptions of personhood have been identified in Classical Indian Philosophy, in which the caste system, karma and dharma dictate the nature of the person.

 

The Self in Western Philosophy

 

One big problem with this debate I’ve noticed is that these ideas of the person are conflated with the idea of the self. Rather than being something that grants moral considerability within society’s norms, the self relates to the individual’s own experience as conscious being.

 

In terms of the self, a pivotal moment in Western philosophy occurred when Descartes proposed the subject/object distinction: the idea that there is a single, indivisible self that persists through time and is separable from the physical world and body. The self is the subject, the “thinking thing,” according to this view, whereas the body and the external world is the object, the “non-thinking” thing.


John Evangelist and Eagle, Lindisfarne Gospel

 

Descartes is associated with Cartesian dualism, where the mind is separate from the body and personhood requires a soul. Click the link to read about Descartes’ theory and its influence on Western philosophy! Descartes’ theory is by no means endorsed by all Western philosophers, let alone by Western people as a whole – yet, I cannot count the number of times I’ve seen academics write about Descartes as though he embodies Western thought.

 

Conversely, scholars do not commonly ascribe Descartes’ view to non-Western societies. Although Descartes’ view of the self is that it is seen to be contained within (bounded by) the physical body, Isak Niehaus found that the Bushbuckridge people of South Africa see the body as permeable and partible: it can be transferred to others through bodily fluids.

 

Marcel Mauss argues that all cultures have an awareness of individualism, but the concept of the “self” changes culturally. He gives the example that Maori gifts are returned because they are taken to contain within them the spirit of the donor. This would certainly contrast with Descartes’ view of the self as indivisible, contained within the body.

 

Another view comes from the Buddhist concept anatman (no self). According to this view, a person is not a permanent, indivisible entity that persists through time but rather a succession of causally connected, fluctuating mental states. According to some Buddhists, the aim of nirvana involves the elimination of the self entirely.

 

I’ve noticed that, while scholars do acknowledge that there are different ideas about the self across the world, there are two issues holding the debate back: firstly, there is not enough recognition of differing ideas about selfhood and personhood within societies and secondly, scholarship tends to conflate the self and the person.

 

Two important studies from the 90s address this debate. I think their insights have been forgotten, so I’d like to highlight them here.

 

The Peculiarity of the West

 

In 1974, Clifford Geertz claimed that the “The Western conception of the person…[is] a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.”

 

Geertz studied Javanese, Balinese, and Moroccan society and he felt that the West as a whole saw the person “as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe; a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background…”


Eagle, Bestiaire of Guillaume le Clerc

 

This idea has taken off among scholars and, in my opinion, has spiralled into something that we no longer seem able to question. Just one example comes from Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama who propose that the “peculiar” Western concept of self has consequences for cognition, emotion and motivation.

 

This has been challenged by two important articles in the 1990s. Melford Spiro pointed out that these arguments often conflate the person with the self. Moreover, “the person or self has been studied in only a small fraction of human societies.”

 

Spiro argues that if we distinguish between “person” and “self”, the person usually refers  “holistically to the psycho-sociobiological individual, ‘self’ to the individual’s own person.” In that case, “typically, anthropologists (and comparative social psychologists) do not investigate the self or the individual’s conception of his self (the self-representation), but the cultural conception of the person.”

 

“Most of these studies,” says Spiro, “assume that cultural conceptions of the person are isomorphic with the actors’ conceptions of the self, and some also assume that they are isomorphic with the actors’ mental representations of their self, and with their self itself.”

 

Spiro’s own research on Buddhism in Burma found that, although Theravada has anatta - the doctrine that there is no atman, or soul – people nonetheless “believe that any person’s current and future incarnations are the karmic consequences of the intentional acts…of his or her, and only his or her, own person.”

 

Spiro contends that what Geertz was describing was people’s self-presentation, not their sense of self or their self-representation. He also says that other studies, that claim to show non-Western societies to be sociocentric organic and Western societies to be egocentric, actually gave different instructions to Western and non-Western participants.

 

Spiro’s point is that we can find evidence of sociocentrism and individualism in both Western and non-Western societies.

 

The Wari’ Ethnographical Study

 

Also in the 1990s, Beth Conklin and Lynn Morgan argued that there are different concepts of personhood within cultures.

 

Conklin and Morgan point out that Western conceptions of personhood are diverse. In debates surrounding abortion, for example, models of personhood focus on when a foetus develops capacities such as consciousness or the ability to survive outside the womb: “Pro-life (anti-abortion) advocates equate personhood w the moment of conception, when biological life begins; pro-choice advocates look for other, equally concrete markers of personhood later in gestation or birth. The fixed, irreversible nature of such criteria makes fetal personhood an either/or, all-or-nothing proposition: once a fetus is deemed to be a minimal person, it is held to have individual rights.”


Ba, the Soul Bird, detail from an Egyptian Coffin

 

Moreover, the “Western body is conceived as a material entity, a biological organism that is controlled largely within by asocial (“natural”) processes…North Americans take it for granted that one's is separate from other bodies and bounded by the skin; to suggest otherwise seems nonsensical…”

 

Conklin and Morgan compare these ideas with those of the Wari’, indigenous people who live in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. In Wari’ society, personhood is defined by social ties.

 

While Conklin and Morgan accept Spiro’s point that the Western individualistic/non-Western socicentric dichotomy has been “wildly overdrawn” when it comes to the self, they did find differences when it comes to personhood in American and Wari’ society.

 

They say that, in terms of the self, the “Wari’ acknowledge the separateness of individuals in the idea that the interior self is unknowable to others.” However, the term “relationality” is useful when thinking about Wari’ society, whereas “individualism” is more appropriate when thinking about the US.

 

The Wari’, on the other hand, “believe that a fetus is created from the union of maternal blood (which forms fetal blood) and paternal semen (which forms the fetal body). Like many other native American peoples, they believe that conception occurs when a quantity of semen accumulates after multiple acts of sexual intercourse close together in time. Wari’ women ridiculed Conklin's suggestion that one might get pregnant after a single sexual encounter.” Conklin and Morgan remark that, for the Wari’, failure of a couples to have sex often during pregnancy will endanger the baby.

 

One thing to note is that even the concept of personhood is not always clear in Conklin and Morgan’s study. For example, “Wari’ ethnicity/personhood is somewhat mutable, at least for women. A non-Wari' woman can “become Wari’”) if she bears a Wari’ child… the blood of a pregnant woman merges completely with the blood of the fetus in her womb, and the mother's blood takes on the qualities of the child's blood.”

 

This is not the same as the moral conception of personhood mentioned above: here, Conklin and Morgan are speaking of personhood as membership of a group, not moral considerability.

 

Wari’ babies acquire personhood gradually after birth and traditionally do not receive a personal name until they are about six weeks old. Moreover, say Conklin and Morgan, “The Wari' do not consider menarche, menstruation, or male maturation to be events produced solely within an autonomous individual body. Rather, they believe them to be produced through interactions with other people…”

 

One striking example from Conklin and Morgan’s study is that of infanticide in Wari’ society, which has been abandoned since the study was done. Miscarried foetuses and stillborn infants were not mourned publicly, whereas new-borns who lived long enough to be nursed are ritually mourned. At the time of the study, infanticide was socially condoned in cases of incest as long as it was done immediately after the baby’s biological birth and before the baby had been nursed by its mother. In such cases, the body was “disposed of elsewhere and treated the hostile gestures otherwise reserved for enemies killed in warfare. The primacy of blood in constituting consanguinity was evident in how the maternal kin who did the killing treated the infant: they severed their kinship to the new-born by draining the blood from its corpse.”

 

That is, moral personhood, for the Wari’, was acquired through the act of nursing by the mother after birth.

 

Importantly, Wari’ society is not a monolith, as Conklin and Morgan point out: “…many precontact infanticide decisions were contested among family members and sometimes actively opposed by the unwed mother herself. Every case of precontact infanticide that Conklin learned about came to light because a woman used the interview with the anthropologist to voice her resentment…[about the infanticide] that she, as a young, dependent girl, had been powerless to prevent.”

 

A lesson from the Wari’ study is that ideas about personhood are by no means uniform within societies; they are diverse, fluid, and often challenged by members of these societies. This is true of Wari’ society and many others – including Western societies.

 

In this post, I’ve taken quite a strict definition of personhood, as you might find in moral philosophy. This definition almost requires a social aspect. Likewise, the way I’ve defined the self presupposes that there is a singular individual having that experience.

 

I’ve done this in order to allow us to recognise when scholarship is conflating these concepts, which do seem to be recognised by people across many societies, but it’s true that we could take much broader definitions of the two concepts. In my next post, I’ll take a broader look at rights and personhood within Western philosophy.

 

Find Out More:

 

To learn more about Dr. Orton’s research into philosophy, anthropology and religion, visit Our Research Page to listen to her lectures. Click the links to read our blog series on Research MethodsAnthropology, Philosophy and Religious Studies.

 

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