Persons and partible persons

Abstract

This chapter touches on broad areas of anthropological theorizing of which it is necessarily but a digest. It creates a focus for the reader through drawing mainly on two recent collections of essays: 'The anthropology of personhood, redux: Views from Christianity', edited by Bialecki and Daswani, and 'Gender and person in Oceania', edited by Morgain and Taylor. The chapter notes that each component of the range – person, individual and so forth – may equally be understood as a discrete object of enquiry, and thus in another way appears in terms relevant to one of them, namely 'individually'. The phrase 'relational person' approaches that stress the embeddedness of persons in relations. For concomitantly with a renewed interest in personhood, a new kind of conceptual space seems available for the 'relational', an epithet applying to all manner of links, ties and connections, whether concrete or abstract. Partible person, then, explicitly divided itself off from the dualism of individual and society.

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