Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course

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.

Poses personhood as a question and breaks new ground in anthropological debates on personhood and relatedness Develops a unique and richly comparative analysis of how personhood is a concept 'put to work' cross-culturally in a multitude of ways Crafts a novel analysis of how personhood as a notion and a value shifts not only according to cultural context, but also across different moments in the life course

Auteur
Cathrine Degnen is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Newcastle University, UK.

Contenu

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.