How do humans, who are materially composed biological constructs, come to transcend – that is, to see themselves as present in – the world? This article sustains that, in order to understand ...transcendence in personhood, we have to see the latter as a product of dividual not individual participation, as initially proposed by Lévy‐Bruhl and recently developed by a number of phenomenologically inspired cognitive scientists. This being the case, it becomes necessary to account for the relation between essence and existence in the case of metapersons (ghosts, deities, ancestors, some animals, etc.). In this essay, I suggest that this, too, must be explained by reference to the ontogeny of persons‐who‐wakingly‐live‐in‐the‐world. In order to explore this issue, I discuss an occurrence that took place in my presence without my noticing it at the time when I was visiting an Afro‐Brazilian temple compound in coastal Bahia (Northeast Brazil) in July 2011.
Abstrait
Ma mère ou mon père : personne, métapersonne et transcendance dans la théorie ethnographique
Résumé
Comment les humains, constructions biologiques composées de matière, en viennent‐ils à transcender le monde et à s'y voir présents ? L'auteur affirme ici que pour comprendre la transcendance du statut de personne, nous devons considérer celui‐ci comme un produit d'une participation dividue et non individue, comme cela a été proposé initialement par Lévy‐Bruhl et développé par plusieurs chercheurs en cognition inspirés par la phénoménologie. Dans ce cas, il devient nécessaire de rendre compte de la relation entre essence et existence dans le cas des métapersonnes (esprits, déités, ancêtres, certains animaux, etc.). L'auteur suggère que cela aussi doit être expliqué en faisant référence à l'ontogénie des personnes‐qui‐vivent‐éveillées‐dans‐le‐monde. Afin d'explorer cette question, il discute d'un événement qui s'est produit en sa présence, sans qu'il le remarque à l’époque, alors qu'il visitait un temple afro‐brésilien sur la côté de Bahia (Nord‐est du Brésil) en juillet 2011.
This paper investigates from a phenomenological perspective the origins of self-illness ambiguity. Drawing on phenomenological theories of affectivity and selfhood, I argue that, as a phenomenon ...which concerns primarily the 'personal self', self-illness ambiguity is dependent on distinct alterations of affective background orientations. I start by illustrating how personhood is anchored in the experience of a specific set of non-intentional affects - i.e. moods or existential feelings - alterations of which are often present in mental ill-health. Also through the exploration of the phenomenology of acute and long-term anxiety, I suggest that self-illness ambiguity originates in the presence of moods or existential feelings that are in tension with the ones that structure the person's experience prior to the onset of the illness or when its symptoms are not experienced. More specifically, I claim that due to their ability to 'block' or 'suspend' some of the person's affective and cognitive responses, such affective orientations may unsettle one's self-defining evaluative perspective, leading to uncertainty and doubting about one's personal self.
This article centres the testimonies of young hijabi Britons as social landscapes shift toward ideological culturalism. Exploring the idea that culture is the defining element of social life and that ...individuals are bound to closed cultural categories, it sets out a context of endemic cultural racism, as voices from across the political spectrum marshal the veil to vilify Islam and promote cultural homogenization. The paper reports on a qualitative study privileging the testimonies of 18 hijabi women, aged between 18 and 26. It advances "everyday culturalism", a social standpoint that shapes everyday relations to reflect culturalist ideologies and undermine cultural plurality. Three themes illuminate the young women's experiences of being addressed in ideologically embedded ways: the white scripted hijabi subject; harm, silencing, and exclusion; and resistance through re-narration. Ultimately, participants' reflections reject culture as the organizing force for selfhood, instead, asserting hijabi identities as multi-vocal, contextually contingent and contradictory.
Anti-caste traditions in India work to understand and examine the idea of personhood which the majority in India is deprived of by virtue of being born in the lower rungs of the caste hierarchy. This ...paper examines the historical continuity in Brahminism and the rupture Jotiba Phule presents to it through his art and activism which serves to disturb the regular flow of singular continuity of what is perceived as history and historiography. Jotiba’s quest is for finding the essence/personhood of, what Butler calls, a ‘precarious subject’ and recognizing that precarious subject – the Shudra, as a subject of history. But the personhood of this precarious subject is never a complete personhood. Therefore, Jotiba attempts to unveil the path towards achieving complete personhood which is embedded in reaffirming the lost or concealed truth – by discontinuing the historical flow of the social structure of caste and establishing a new subject rising out of crisis in social structure in history. I have chosen two works from Jotiba’s works as new methodological tools for history writing and historical criticism, and made hermeneutical and phenomenological readings of the both. The works are his poem Kulambin (a peasant woman), and the Satyashodhak (truth-seeker) marriage as the public performance of protestas they are both - the essential and the mundane to his life, which exemplifies the truth Jotiba followed and established an organization Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of Truth Seekers) as a testament to it.
The importance of relationality in ethical leadership has been the focus of recent attention in business ethics scholarship. However, this relational component has not been sufficiently theorized ...from different philosophical perspectives, allowing specific Western philosophical conceptions to dominate the leadership development literature. This paper offers a theoretical analysis of the relational ontology that informs various conceptualizations of selfhood from both African and Western philosophical traditions and unpacks its implications for values-driven leadership. We aim to broaden Western conceptions of leadership development by drawing on twentieth century European philosophy's insights on relationality, but more importantly, to show how African philosophical traditions precede this literature in its insistence on a relational ontology of the self. To illustrate our theoretical argument, we reflect on an executive education course called values-driven leadership into action, which ran in South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt in 2016, 2017, and 2018. We highlight an African-inspired employment of relationality through its use of the ME-WE-WORLD framework, articulating its theoretical assumptions with embodied experiential learning.
Artificially intelligent machines are increasingly capable of accomplishing tasks that have until now been considered exclusively human abilities. One such task is the ability to invent. In 2021, an ...Australian court became the first court in the world to recognise an Artificially Intelligent system as the inventor in a patent application, raising the question of whether AI systems could be considered the responsible actor of their actions, instead of the human using the AI. This paper examines the question of autonomy: how the concept of autonomy underpins the granting of legal rights to humans, and whether it is justified to grant legal rights to AI systems that are autonomous. We propose that there are two distinct and separate concepts of autonomy, Person Autonomy and Machine Autonomy, and that this distinction can guide how the law should treat AI systems.
Psychiatric diagnosis has become pervasive in modern culture, exerting an increasing influence on notions of personhood, identity practices and forms of self‐governing. The broadening of diagnostic ...categories and increasing awareness regarding popular diagnostic categories has led to an increased demand for formal diagnosis within clinical encounters. However, there is continuing ‘epistemological uncertainty’ (Fox 2000) surrounding these entities, in part due to their lack of associated clinical biomarkers and their ‘fuzzy boundaries’. Meanwhile, this diagnostic expansion has encountered resistance from those concerned with the alleged ‘over‐pathologisation’ of emotional distress. Drawing upon the concepts of ‘diagnostic cultures’ (Brinkmann 2016) and the ‘looping effects of human kinds’ (Hacking 1995), this article considers some of the competing forces acting upon the contested boundaries of diagnostic categories as they play out within diagnostic interactions. The study involved ethnographic observations of diagnostic encounters within several UK‐based mental health clinics. By focusing on interactions where diagnosis is negotiated, findings illustrate the role played by different kinds of diagnostic uncertainty in shaping these negotiations. It is argued that diagnostic reification plays a key role in the moral categorisation of patients, particularly where there is uncertainty regarding individual diagnostic status.
Recent scholarship in economic anthropology examines how the intersection of multiple forms of temporality shapes the time of debt relations. This article builds on and refines these approaches by ...analysing debt as a social relation that ‘folds’ the time of other relations within itself. It does so through deploying the concept of the ‘fold’ drawn from continental philosophy and anthropological literature on personhood. This approach provides a novel way of illuminating and reflecting upon a temporal tension at the heart of debt relations, in which the timely performance of debtor‐creditor relations is contingent on the harnessing of temporalities formally outside their scope. This argument is made in relation to an ethnographic study of malchny zeel (the ‘herder's loan’) issued by commercial banks in a pastoral region of Mongolia.
Abstrait
Le temps des dettes : hétérochronie et prêts bancaires dans la Mongolie rurale
Résumé
De récents travaux d'anthropologie économique examinent comment l'intersection de formes multiples de temporalité façonne la dimension temporelle de l'endettement. Cet article s'appuie sur ces approches et les développe en analysant la dette en tant que relation sociale qui « plie » le temps des autres relations en son sein. Pour ce faire, l'auteur déploie le concept du « pli », tiré de la philosophie d'Europe continentale et de la littérature anthropologique sur le statut de personne. Une telle approche s'avère novatrice pour réfléchir et faire la lumière sur une tension temporelle au cœur des relations d'endettement : la réalisation à temps des relations débiteur‐créancier dépend de la maîtrise de temporalités normalement situées hors de leur périmètre. Cet argument est issu d'une étude ethnographique autour des malchny zeel (« le prêt au berger ») qu'accordent les banques dans une région pastorale de Mongolie.
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