What Is The Significance Of The Fact That Concepts Of The Person Vary From One Society To The Next?

What is the significance of the fact that concepts of the person vary from one society to the next?

The idea of the person is innate, natural to the human mind. As an idea it is internally apparent as a fundamental seat of morality. The concept of the person, Mauss continues to assert, has been gradually solidified in European academic thought to reach its present formulation (1985), yet it remains a notion of some mystery in other societies. Mauss tackles the concept of the person from both a legal and moral perspective, electing not to engage the linguistic complexities that surround expressions of the 'self'; nor those of psychology. All people live a conscious existence, aware of their own independence as an entity from the human beings around them. There has not been one single conception of personhood that has evolved over time, but rather many different inter-related and competing conceptions. These cross-culturally variable conceptions are conditioned by, but also reproductive of, the 'systems of law, religion, customs, social structures and mentality' (Mauss 1985:3); in which they are conceived. Mauss traces, historically, the many developmental strands of the concepts of personhood. Although he delineates their separation into evolutionary tracts in different societis, he pulls them together thematically, giving the impression of contrast. As such, by arriving lastly at the modern, Western conception of the person he suggests a hierarchy of ideals, the pinnacle of which rests in our own society. His monograph, therefore takes on the air of an evolutionary history, a method that even at the times of its writing was considered outmoded. Mauss best substantiates the history of 'our own' conception of the person; largely by explaining the progression from a naturalised, innate idea to the category of self through a number of theoretical stages, deconstructing the Western idea into what are essentially consitituent ingredients (1985). Mauss begins with the person as a locus of moral conscience and legal right; claiming that the Romans established the legal entity of the person and the Christians its metaphysical foundation (1985). As such the modern Enlightenment and in turn Kant established the person as a transcendental seat, rational entity and finally a philosophical catergory. Mauss' discussion draws all the conceptions of person upon which he touches into a trajectory, culminating in the current Western conception. Mauss' argument, La Fontaine (1985) begins, proposed the notion that the 'person' of moral and social significance is a concept common only to Western society. Mauss (1985:3) states his belief that there does not exist a social group without a linguistic device and notion therefore, of the 'self'. This is to say that he attests to the universality not of the concept of the 'person' as a discrete entity of agency, but of consciousness of self, namely an 'awareness of the body and spirit'(Mauss 1985). La Fontaine argues that Mauss' conclusion might be constructively reconsidered in the context of 'new' ethnographic material. Making her central claim that societies around the world, and not merely the West, sculpt individual conceptions of the person. She criticises the presumed interchangeable nature of the terms 'individual' and 'person' that has arisen from the sequentially theories of both Mauss and Dumont, who posit in favour of the categorical uniqueness of the 'Western person' (La Fontaine 1985). By highlighting the distinction between the natural concept of human self-awareness and the 'social concept' of the person (:124), La Fontaine establishes the parameters within which she challenges the notions that a) conceptions of the 'person' are uniquely consigned to the collective representations that constitute the 'Western individual', and b) that Mauss' Eurocentric approach isolates many other conceptions of the 'person' in other societies. In opening her argument, La Fontaine delineates between the ontological fact of Mauss' 'personne morale', an object which might be attributed social significance, from the 'concept of personhood' which can be seen as the idea which ascribes this social significance (1985). In saying that the 'person' is societies confirmations of ones identity as a self-aware entity La Fontaine somewhat undermines the criticisms she mounts against Mauss (1985). As Mauss (1985:7) exemplifies the Kwakiutl, amongst other societies, saying that 'persons. give satisfaction to one another through a vast exchange of rights, goods and services, property, dances, ceremonies, priveleges and ranks'. Surely this is recognition on Mauss' part of 'personhood' through confirmation by society that La Fontaine insists is absent. On the one hand, La Fontaine argues that Mauss isolates the concept of 'person' to a Western idea, and a specific group of cultural representations therein; on the other Mauss clearly expresses what he considers to be the various manifestations of the 'concept of person', or a 'catalogue of forms that the notion has assumed' in an array of societies from Western to North American Indian, Central American and Oriental. Mauss, therefore, attests directly to the cross-cultural variability of the concept of person by considering not just Western Europe; and does not deny the presence of a social reality of the 'person, rather than merely a fact of human self-consciousness, in societies other than our own. La Fontaine's argument falls short. The evolutionary approach that Mauss takes may seem to undermine the validity of the notion of 'person' which he considers first with respect to subsequent examples, arriving ultimately at the Western conception. His conclusion clearly attests to the belief that Western societies have arrived at a more 'whole', correct formulation of the category of the person. This does not, despite his Eurocentric assumptions, make valid La Fontaine's argument that Mauss rejects the idea that the 'person' exists beyond a Western conception. As such her critique is somewhat off-target. Whilst La Fontaine appears to contend that Mauss sets apart the Western 'person' on the basis of it conceptual uniqueness and greater sophistication of thought; the latter is certainly true, the former is not. Neither Mauss, nor La Fontaine deny the cross-cultural variability of conceptions of the person. By exemplifying the Tallensi alongside the Lugbara, Taita and Gahuku-Gama, La Fontaine illustrates the broad variability of concepts of the person; as well as the fashion in which 'legitimate' authority governs these concepts. Amongst the Lugbara women and children lack orindi and thereby lack responsibility sufficient to be ascribed jural rights. Andro, a divine essence of sentiment, is common to all humans but does not help to control erratic whims and therefore cannot legitimise the legal autonomy of women and children. The Taita view the human head as the seat of consciousness and thereby the encompassment of the 'total person'. By extension the male 'person' is stronger than the female and men normally have larger more robust heads and necks. La Fontaine remarks, in reference to Fortes, of the Tallensi that sii imbues both the body and possessions on an individual, governing the success of social relationships and delineating taboo which may result in conflict between the sii of fathers and their sons. A male individual may reach maturity, but may not attain ritual and jural autonomy whilst his father lives. The individual must live long enough to receive segher or benevolence from his father's father in order to later achieve 'personhood'. Upon their death, an individual may be deemed a full 'person'; as such the concept of person for the Tallensi is externally validated and vested in ancestral entities rather than the material and immaterial elements of the individual (Fortes 1987). Ultimately La Fontaine (1985) successfully exemplifies the idea that the status of 'person' is composed in different places of very different cultural representations. The Greco-Roman-Christian concept that Mauss (1985) describes is thereby, in La Fontaine's reckoning, but one of a myriad social concepts connected to the 'person' to have emerged in different societies. Althusser's (1971) consideration of the 'subject' is broadly interchangeable with that of the 'person'. Just as La Fontaine (1985) asserts that the social concept of the person is solidified by confirmation by society, Althusser says it is reified by ideology; namely the social and cultural conditions in which the human individual is embedded. The comparison can be elaborated in that Althusser notes that the 'subject' is governed by and manifests in 'rituals and conventional behaviour' making it a social concept. Althusser goes on to refers to the fact that the solidification of the individual as a 'subject' can take place before they are born; saying 'it is certain in advance that it [the child] will bear its Father's Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable'; referring to the irreplaceability of the social 'person' rather than the genetically unique human (1971). In a vein similar to La Fontaine's endeavour, LiPuma (1998) seeks to highlight the difference between the Melanesian conception of the person and that in the West. He hints at the ideological solidification of the individual as a 'person' or 'subject'; here, however he is extrapolating the Western-like 'image of the individual (ideologically defined as an autonomous, self-animated, and self-enclosed agent)', a conception Mauss would surely recognise, to the future personhood as a category in Oceania. Through 'colonially inspired political insititutions' (1998:53) LiPuma argues that emerging states will be defined in the image of the West, opening the door to more elements of cultural assimilation in many areas beyond personhood. In this way LiPuma highlights the crux of the issue of cross-cultural variability of conceptions of the 'person'. The variability pertains first and foremost to the phenomenon of staggering cultural heterogeneity against a backdrop of universal humanity.