Lecture 5: Mauss on the Person

Mauss’s contribution

• Establish the ‘person’ as a concept

• Person as a social compound of jural rights and moral responsibility.

• Person vs. Self

• Self is universal – awareness of body, spiritually and physically

• Person varies

Mauss – historical development

• Personage - mask or character

•Persona/ Personne morale – legal entity. Role player and ‘the real person behind the mask’

•Moi– indivisible self/individual, possessing self knowledge and consciousness

Structural functionalists

Radcliffe-Brown:

• The individual is a biological organism

• Person is a complex of social relationships.

Meyer Fortes

• The ‘moi’ is universal

• Objective side – qualities, capacities and roles endowed by society

• Subjective side – how the individual knows himself/herself to be that person

Tallensi Personhood• Non-human, corporate, inanimate or animate

persons• Biological embodiment and legal, moral, ritual

status – Living entities contained within a social system

• Personhood is associated with ‘office’• Moral career: birth, sibling, household, ritual

office …• Public person and individual identity (Sii)• The union of social person and the inner self –

ritual observance, observance of taboos, …

Social structure and the person

• Social structure is reflected in the definition of the person

• The constraints that shape a person’s life are felt to be external – ancestors, mystical powers, Fate

• Self-awareness – as personne morale. The person is a microcosm of the social order

Durkheim’s legacy

• Evolutionary development of social solidarity and the individual

• Society as a social fact and the idea of collective conscience

Enduring concepts

• The social person is defined and created by society.

• Self – The human being as the locus of experience .

The ‘Western’ notion of the self/person

“The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement and action organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is … a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”(Geertz cited in Csordas, Self and Person)

Comaroff and Comarrof

• Misleading to oppose the ‘autonomous person’ of modernity with the relational pre-modern person

• The ‘autonomous individual’ is not the end point of a world-historical telos

• The Southern Tswana conception of personhood is also ‘modern’ – there are multiple modernities

Tswana personhood• Nobody could be known except in relation to

a wide array of significant others• Constantly engaged in a practice of self-

construction – a state of becoming• Tiro – labour/fabrication• Self distributed in traces and relations• Witchcraft or ‘eaten’ by a more powerful

other– stopped becoming• Integration of the fractal human person at the

funeral