Ancestral personhood and moral justification

Abstract

In this article I seek to elucidate the theoretical relationship between the concepts of morality and personhood. I argue that cultural models of personhood are more concretely available to the imagination as compared to philosophizing about objective moral goods, despite the fact that people commonly gravitate toward moral realism. Models of personhood provide a more practical underpinning for conceptual moral goods. I demonstrate these connections through an exegesis of a Hmong model of ancestral personhood and its relationship to moral discourse collected during my fieldwork. Future emphasis on these explicit connections between cultural models of personhood and moral discourse will help answer some of the methodological and theoretical concerns in the evolving anthropology of morality.

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