Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:25:12.216Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Gender, Sociality, and the Person

from Part Two - Knowledges and Domains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2023

By
Cecilia McCallum
Edited by
Cecilia McCallum ,
Silvia Posocco  and
Martin Fotta
Cecilia McCallum
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Silvia Posocco
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Martin Fotta
Affiliation:
Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Get access

Summary

The chapter traces how anthropologists reconfigured theorizing the social through gender-sensitive ethnographic work, which led to a turning away from the “society thinking” rooted in liberalist humanism, to a greater emphasis on process and on notions of sociality and the person. An appreciation of Marilyn Strathern’s contributions to this reconfiguration, at distinct moments of its history, structures the discussion, which is elaborated with reference to ethnographic analysis. Thus, the central section of the chapter considers ethnography of Indigenous Amazonian peoples, to discuss the relationship between naming, practices of the person (rather than personhood as a state), and lived sociality. This leads to a reappraisal of Mauss’s foundational essay on the person. In the penultimate section, the chapter sets out current debates on the “dividual” or “partible person” with respect to distinctions between “relationalist” and “individualist” conceptual fields of personhood. Finally, it explores how anthropology has come to investigate power and difference as part of the constitution of historically emergent personhood.

Keywords

socialitypersonhoodgenderdividualsociety thinkingMarilyn StrathernMarcel Mauss
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality , pp. 155 - 183
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amit, V., ed. (2015). Thinking through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts. Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Anderson, E., Willett, C., and Meyers, D. (2020). Feminist perspectives on the self. In Zalta, E. N., ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2020 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/feminism-self/ (accessed October 5, 2020).Google Scholar
Bialecki, J., and Daswani, G. (2015). Introduction: what is an individual? The view from Christianity. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(1), 271–94.Google Scholar
Boyce, P., Gonzalez-Polledo, EJ, and Posocco, S., eds. (2020). Queering Knowledge: Analytics, Devices and Investments after Marilyn Strathern. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Busby, C. (1997). Permeable and partible persons: a comparative analysis of gender and body in South India and Melanesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3(2), 261–78.Google Scholar
Busby, C. (2000). The Performance of Gender: An Anthropology of Everyday Life in a South Indian Fishing Village. London: Athlone Press.Google Scholar
Cacho, L. M. (2012). Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: University Press.Google Scholar
Carsten, J. (2004). After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,Google Scholar
Cromer, R. (2019). Racial politics of frozen embryo personhood in the US antiabortion movement. Transforming Anthropology, 27(1), 22–36.Google Scholar
De la Cadena, M. (2010). Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflections beyond “politics.” Cultural Anthropology, 25(2), 334–70.Google Scholar
De Matos Viegas, S. (2012). Pleasures that differentiate: transformational bodies among the Tupinambá of Olivença (Atlantic coast, Brazil). The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(3), 536–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Descola, P. (2001). The genres of gender: local models and global paradigms in the comparison of Amazonia and Melanesia. In Gregor, T. A. and Tuzin, D., eds., Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 91–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durkheim, E. (2001 [1912]). Introduction. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Carol Cosman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–21.Google Scholar
Edwards, J. (2014). Undoing kinship. In Freeman, T., Graham, S., and Ebtehaj, F., eds., Relatedness in Assisted Reproduction: Families, Origins and Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 44–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ewart, E. (2013). Space and Society in Central Brazil: A Panará Ethnography. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Franklin, S. (1991). Fetal fascinations: new dimensions to the medical-scientific construction of fetal personhood. In Franklin, S., Lury, C., and Stacey, J., eds., Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 190–205.Google Scholar
Franklin, S. (1997). Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Goldman, M. (1996). Uma categoria do pensamento antropológico: A noção de pessoa. Revista de Antropologia, 39(1), 83–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, S. (2017). Conclusion: thinking through proliferations of geometries, fractions and parts. In Lebner, A., ed., Redescribing Relations: Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 197–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gregory, C. (2015 [1982]). Gifts and Commodities, 2nd ed. Chicago: Hau Books.Google Scholar
Harris, O. (1981). Households as natural units. In Young, K., Wolkowitz, C., and McCullagh, R., eds., Of Marriage and the Market: Women’s Subordination in International Perspective. London: CSE, pp. 49–68.Google Scholar
Hernández Castillo, R. A. (2010). The emergence of indigenous feminism in Latin America. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35(3), 539–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hess, S. (2006). Strathern’s Melanesian “dividual” and the Christian “individual”: a perspective from Vanua Lava, Vanuatu. Oceania, 76(3), 285–96.Google Scholar
Hirsch, E. (2014). Melanesian ethnography and the comparative project of anthropology: reflection on Strathern’s analogical approach. Theory, Culture and Society, 31(2–3), 39–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschon, R., ed. (1984). Woman and Property, Women as Property. London: CroomHelm.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (1996). Introduction. 1989 debate “The concept of society is theoretically obsolete.” In Ingold, T., ed., Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 57–9.Google Scholar
Jolly, M. (2018). Gender and personhood (individual, dividual). In Callan, H., ed., The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2375.Google Scholar
Kensinger, K. (1995). How Real People Ought to Live: The Cashinahua of Eastern Peru. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Kopenawa, D., and Albert, B. (2013). The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lagrou, E. (1998). Cashinahua cosmovision: a perspectival approach to identity and alterity. PhD thesis, University of St. Andrews. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1676 (accessed November 25, 2020).Google Scholar
Lea, V. (2012). Riquezas Intangíveis de Pessoas Partíveis: Os Mẽbêngôkre (Kayapó) do Brasil Central. São Paulo: Edusp.Google Scholar
Lea, V. R., and Kayapo, M. P. (2020). Indagações a respeito das transformações na vida das mulheres Mẽbêngôkre. In Miranda, M., da Cruz Borges, Á. A., Santana, A. C., and Sousa, S. A., eds., Línguas e Culturas Macro-Jê: Saberes Entrecruzados. Barra do Garças, MT: GEDELLI/UFMT, pp. 95–118.Google Scholar
Leacock, E. B. (1981). Myths of Male Domination: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Lebner, A. (2017). Introduction: Strathern’s redescription of anthropology. In Lebner, A., ed., Redescribing Relations: Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1–37.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962). La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.Google Scholar
Long, N. J., and Moore, H. L., eds. (2013). Sociality: New Directions. Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Lukes, S. (1985). Conclusion. In Collins, S. and Carrithers, M., eds., The Category of the Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 282–301.Google Scholar
MacCormack, C., and Strathern, M., eds. (1980). Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Madi Dias, D. (2018). O parentesco transviado, exemplo guna (Panamá). Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad: Revista Latinoamericana, 29, 25–51.Google Scholar
Marriot, M. (1976). Hindu transactions: diversity without dualism. In Kapferer, B., ed., Transaction and Meaning Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, pp. 109–42.Google Scholar
Mauss, M. (1985 [1938]). A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self. Trans. Halls, W. D.. In Collins, S. and Carrithers, M., eds., The Category of the Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–25.Google Scholar
McCallum, C. (1996). The body that knows: from Cashinahua epistemology to a medical anthropology of Lowland South America. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 10, 347–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McCallum, C. (1999). Consuming pity: the production of death among the Cashinahua. Cultural Anthropology, 14(4), 443–71.Google Scholar
McCallum, C. (2001). Gender and Sociality in Amazonia: How Real People Are Made. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
McCallum, C. (2009). Becoming a real woman: alterity and the embodiment of Cashinahua gendered identity. Tipiti, 7, 43–66.Google Scholar
McCallum, C. (2020). Making ecumenes: ontogeny, amity, and resistance in Brazilian indigenous pathways. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 26(3), 575–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKittrick, K., ed. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Morgan, L. M. (1996). Fetal relationality in feminist philosophy: an anthropological critique. Hypatia, 11(3), 47–70.Google Scholar
Morgan, L M., and Michaels, M. W. (1999). Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Overing, J. (1986). Men control women? The “catch 22” in the analysis of gender. International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, 1(2), 135–56.Google Scholar
Peletz, M. (1995). Kinship studies in late twentieth century anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 343–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petchesky, R. (1987). Fetal images: the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction. Feminist Studies, 13(2), 263–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pina-Cabral, J. (2016). Brazilian serialities: personhood and radical embodied cognition. Current Anthropology, 57(3), 247–60.Google Scholar
Pina-Cabral, J. (2017). World: An Anthropological Examination. Chicago: Hau Books.Google Scholar
Rosaldo, M. (1980). The use and abuse of anthropology: reflections on feminism and cross-cultural understanding. Signs, 5(3), 389–417.Google Scholar
Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex. In Reiter, R. R., ed. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210.Google Scholar
Sahlins, M. (2012). What Kinship Is – And Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Seeger, A., Da Matta, R., and Viveiros de Castro, E. (2019 [1979]). The construction of the person in indigenous Brazilian societies. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 9(3), 694–703.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sieder, R. (2017). Introduction: demanding justice and security: Indigenous women and legal pluralities in Latin America. In Sieder, R., ed., Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 1–25.Google Scholar
Sillander, K., and Remme, J. H. Z. (2017). Introduction: extended sociality and the social life of humans. In Remme, J. H. Z. and Sillander, K., eds., Human Nature and Social Life: Perspectives on Extended Sociality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–25.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1992). After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1996). For the motion (1). 1989 debate “The concept of society is theoretically obsolete.” In Ingold, T., ed., Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 60–6.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1999). Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (2005). Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (2018). Persons and partible persons. In Candea, M., ed., Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, pp. 236–46.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (2020). Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, M., and Arslan, O. (2018). On the partible person, the relational individual and the multiplicities of kinship. Interview with Marilyn Strathern. https://stsistanbul.org/2018/06/20/on-the-partible-person-the-relational-individual-and-the-multiplicities-of-kinship-marilyn-strathern/ (accessed May 21, 2020).Google Scholar
Strathern, M., and Macfarlane, A. (2009). Marilyn Strathern interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, May 6, 2009. Available at www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/strathern2.htm (accessed April 19, 2020).Google Scholar
Street, A., and Copeman, J. (2014). Social theory after Strathern: an introduction. Theory, Culture & Society, 31(2–3), 7–37.Google Scholar
Toren, C. (1996). For the motion (2). 1989 debate “The concept of society is theoretically obsolete.” In Ingold, T., ed., Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 72–6.Google Scholar
Toren, C. (1999). Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Toren, C. (2013). Imagining the world that warrants our imagination: the revelation of ontogeny. In Long, N. J. and Moore, H., eds., Sociality: New Directions. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 43–59.Google Scholar
Toren, C. (2017). The evanescence of experience and how to capture it. In Remme, J. H. Z and Sillander, K., eds., Human Nature and Social Life: Perspectives on Extended Sociality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 26–40.Google Scholar
Tsing, A. (2013). More-than-human sociality: a call for critical description. In Hastrup, K., ed., Anthropology and Nature. London: Routledge, pp. 27–42.Google Scholar
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012 [1999]). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books and University of Otago Press.Google Scholar
Vilaça, A. (2005). Chronically unstable bodies: reflections on Amazonian corporalities. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11(3), 445–64.Google Scholar
Vilaça, A. (2011). Dividuality in Amazonia: God, the devil, and the constitution of personhood in Wari’ Christianity. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17(2), 243–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, E. (1996). Society. In Barnard, A. and Spencer, J., eds., Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 774–85.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998). Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 469–88.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, E. (2001). GUT feelings about Amazonia: potential affinity and the construction of sociality. In Rival, L. and Whitehead, N., eds., Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Riviere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–43.Google Scholar
Wade, P. (2002). Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, R. (1975). The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, R. (1977). Analogic kinship: a Daribi example. American Ethnologist, 4, 623–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, R. (1991). The fractal person. In Strathern, M. and Godelier, M., eds., Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison de Sciences des Hommes, pp. 159–73.Google Scholar
Wollstonecraft, M. (1992 [1792]). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Wynter, S. (1994). “No humans involved”: an open letter to my colleagues. Forum N.H.I., 1(1), 42–73.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×