The Anthropology of Personhood

optional courses

In this course, students will familiarize themselves with the anthropology of personhood. The course describes different ethnographic perspectives on the construction of personality and the often-fractious relationship between anthropology and psychology.

This course analyzes the creation of personhood cross-culturally, focusing on themes like the body, childhood and education, initiation rituals, modern individualism, marriage, play, and power relations. It describes the importance of the works of Melville Herskovits, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson in their pioneering work on Culture and Personality, and how it continues to have an influence today. The course familiarizes students with the current debates on the anthropology of personhood with an emphasis on ethnographic contemporary data.

Bateson, Gregory. 1936. Naven: A survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter XIII. Ethological contrast, competition and Schismogenesis”. Pp171-197.

Csordas, Thomas. 1990. “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos

18(1): 5–47.

Day, Sophie. 2007. On the Game: Women and Sex Work, London: Pluto Press. “Simply Work” Pp. 34-54.

Dumont Louis. 1999, “A Modified View of our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of

modern Individualism”, in in M. Carrithers, S. Collin, and S. Lukes (eds) The Category of the Person; Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp.93-122.

Godelier, Maurice. 1991. “An Unfinished attempt at reconstructing the social process which may have prompted the transformation of great-men societies into big-men societies”, in Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia, edited by Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, 275-304. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Gottlieb, Alma. 1998, “Do Infants Have Religion? The Spiritual Lives of Beng babies” in American Anthropologist, 100(1), pages 122-135.

Herskovits, Melville. J. 1941, “The significance of Africanism” in The Myth of the Negro Past, New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Pp.1-32.

Jackson, Michael. 1983. “Knowledge of the Body.” Man 18(2), 327–45.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. “The Sorcerer and His Magic”. Pp. 167-85.

Lock, Margaret (2002) Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, London: University of California Press. “Japan and the Brain-Death Problem”, Pp. 130-146.

Mauss, Marcel. 2001. Socjologia I antropologia. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Kr. Część piąta i Część szósta. Pp.361-390 and 391-424.

Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow and Company.

Orbach, Susie. 1993. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic´s Struggle as a Metaphor of our Age. London: Routledge. Chapter 5. “Hunger Strike”. Pp. 78-95.

Wagner, Roy. 1991. “The Fractal Person.” In Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia, edited by Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, 159– 73. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

At the end of the course, students will identify the main anthropological approaches to studying personhood. They will learn how to address the problem of the person ethnographically and will know the different methodologies to do so. Students will assess the importance of personhood in the construction of the body, illness, power, gender, and aesthetics.

A final essay about one of the course topics, with a value of 60%. Participation in class and exposition of a relevant theme: 40% Attendance is mandatory.