Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course by Cathrine Degnen

Author:Cathrine Degnen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Challenging the Binary Modes of Western Thought and Their Implications for Personhood

[Hallowell ] viewed the Ojibwa concept of person as more inclusive than that of the culture that produced anthropology. (Ridington 1988b, 100)

How then can we build from these examples to examine more closely ideas of personhood and Western ontology ? One of the most evident starting points is perhaps the series of divisions in Western thought that the material above makes visible. In building this argument, I am deeply indebted to the work of Tim Ingold, and in what follows, I use his insights to help me develop my account. Ingold is an anthropologist who first conducted fieldwork with Saami people in northern Finland. He has worked on northern circumpolar reindeer herding and hunting more broadly as well as human-animal relations, perception, and skilled practice.

Ingold argues that the tradition of Western thought is underpinned by a series of separations that come back to a “basic contrast between physical substance and conceptual form, of which the dichotomy between nature and culture is one expression” (2000, 41). Other forms this dichotomy takes are mind/body, subject/object, active/passive, person/thing, reason/instinct, and human/animal. Westerners can be characterised by their way of understanding the environment in which they live “as an external world of nature that has to be ‘grasped’ conceptually and appropriated symbolically within the terms of an imposed cultural design, as a precondition for effective action. They…see themselves as mindful subjects having to contend with an alien world of physical objects” (Ingold 2000, 42). Consequently, it follows that within Western ontology it is taken for granted that the mind is separate from the world; that in turn the mind must “literally formulate [the world] – to build an intentional world into consciousness – prior to any attempt at engagement” with the world (Ingold 2000, 42).

Ingold then contrasts this normative Western way of apprehending the world with that of hunter-gatherers. He argues that hunter-gatherers take “the human condition to be that of a being immersed from the start…in an active, practical and perceptual engagement” with the world, something he terms an “ontology of dwelling” (2000, 42). As he says, apprehending the world thus becomes “not a matter of construction but of engagement…not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it” (2000, 42). This then is an understanding of the world not predicated on a fundamental division into two realms of nature and culture, mind and body, subject and object, persons versus organisms or things. It instead perceives a world composed of one realm, a world that issaturated with personal powers , and embracing both humans, the animals and plants on which they depend, and the features of the landscape in which they live and move. Within this one world, humans figure not as composites of body and mind but as undivided beings, ‘organism-persons’, relating as such both to other humans and to non-human agencies and entities in their environment. (2000, 47)

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