Personhood Research Group
04 Sep 2026 - 15 Sep 2026
- So far pretty loosely defined:
right now, I have a list of research questions more than aims, per se. i.e. What is a person and how has that understanding been constituted differently in different times and places? What is life and how does it intersect with personhood? How do related disciplines like Animal Rights and Ecology understand the subject, in contrast to human personhood? And finally, how might any of this be applied to AI?
- Readings
- This was Sarah Friends' initial list
- Marcel Mauss, "The Notion of Person" (1938)
- Ask Claude
- Here is a structured overview of Marcel Mauss's "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self" (1938):
Marcel Mauss, "The Notion of Person" (1938)
Context & Publication
- This was one of Mauss's last essays on the concept of a person, first delivered as the Huxley Memorial Lecture in 1938 and then printed in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 68 (1938).
- A transcription of the one-hour lecture later appeared in the edited volume The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History.
Central Argument
- Mauss argues that the very concept of the individual as a distinct, autonomous entity is a product of specific historical and cultural conditions, rather than a universal given.
- His essay argued that across time and space, everywhere, something like a self is present, but it is not always expressed by the concepts "me" or "I."
- In short, Mauss's theory explains personhood as a social and historical construction rather than a universal natural category.
The Historical Stages
- Mauss traces the evolution of the concept of the person through several stages:
1. Tribal/Primitive Societies: Personnage
- Mauss begins with North American (Pueblo in the south-west US, Kwakwaka'wakw on Vancouver Island) and Australian conceptions, rooted in personnage, or role in society determining identity.
- In traditional societies, the notion of the person is deeply embedded in social and cosmological frameworks, with individuals deriving their identity and status from their position within a complex web of kinship, clan, and spiritual relationships.
- Citing examples from Australian societies as well as from Native Americans — Zuñi, Kwakiutl, Winnebago — Mauss stressed the importance of names for the establishment of personhood. Names were not necessarily the hallmark of the individual, but rather of a persona, a fixed role or position within a society.
- Masks and ritual performances also expressed personhood: a person wearing a ceremonial mask could represent an ancestor, spirit, or social office. The role was recognized collectively, and the individual temporarily became the social personality associated with the mask. Mauss used such examples to show that the person was originally understood as a role or character within a structured social system.
2. Rome: Persona as Legal Category
- Mauss identified Roman law as an important stage in the development of personhood. The Latin word persona originally referred to a theatrical mask or role, and later became a legal term describing an individual with recognized rights and status. Roman law helped transform the person from a ritual character into a legal subject.
- However, not every human being had equal legal personhood — slaves had limited or no independent legal status, while citizens, family heads, and officials possessed different rights.
3. Stoics & Christianity: The Moral Self
- The lecture traces the evolution of the 'person' from the strictly delimited tribal 'role,' through the Roman persona — a mask or character in a dramatic play as well as a legal subject — all the way to the modern sense of a 'moral person' who is 'conscious, independent, autonomous, free and responsible.'
- The later development within Christian institutions of religion and morality leads to the emergence of a system in which the status and attributes of personhood are attached to an inner principle of monitoring and control: conscience.
- Roman law developed the legal person, Christianity strengthened the moral individual, and modern Western thought emphasized autonomy and rights.
4. Modern Western Individualism
- Mauss contrasted the relatively fixed conception of personhood in non-European societies with a dynamic vision of the changing idea of personhood in Western Europe, through Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian theology, and ultimately the Enlightenment. The end result of this evolution was a conception of personhood in terms of individual consciousness rather than as the embodiment of set social relationships.
Key Concepts & Vocabulary
- Personnage: The self as social role or character, not an interior individual.
- Persona: Originally a theatrical mask; evolves into a legal and moral subject.
- Catégories de l'esprit humain:
- One of the principal difficulties in reading Mauss's essay is what he means when he speaks of catégories de l'esprit humain (categories of the human mind). His use of these categories can be traced to the French neo-Kantian school of philosophy, particularly Charles Renouvier and Octave Hamelin.
Intellectual Legacy & Critiques
- Mauss's classic essay remains to this day a central point of reference for all social scientists — social psychologists, social historians, sociologists, and anthropologists.
- However, his argument has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of anthropologists who reject any teleological dichotomy between European societies as essentially dynamic and non-European ones as static. That said, his insistence that conceptions of the person are culturally and historically constituted and constantly subject to change provided the foundation for most subsequent anthropological writing on the subject.
- The essay is historical, anthropological, and genealogical (in the Nietzschean sense), performing the goal of making the past and our preconceptions strange. The two most important conceptions of identity in philosophy and political theory — the rational, scientific Cartesian/Kantian identity and the political, Hobbesian legal person — are laid out as historical constructions. Nonetheless, nowhere does Mauss necessarily say that by revealing their contingent and constructed nature they are rendered powerless.
Key Takeaway
- Mauss's essay is foundational for anthropology, philosophy, and social theory because it denaturalizes the modern Western concept of the self, showing it to be the product of a long historical and cross-cultural evolution — not a timeless truth about human nature.
- Christopher Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing?" (1972 essay version) Jonathan Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024, selected chapters) Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself (2020, selected chapters) "What Lives? A Meta-Analysis of Diverse Opinions on the Definition of Life" (2026
- 2d week reading https://personhoodresearchgroup.isthisa.com/readings/2026-09-13-should-trees-have-standing.pdf
- focus on legal rights – not the same thing as personhood in my book, although it relies on it.
We have been making persons of children although they were not, in law, always so. And we have done the same, albeit imperfectly some would say, with prisoners,9 aliens, women (especially of the married variety), the insane,10 Blacks, foetuses, 11 and Indians.
- footnote on embryos includes
Hohfeld's scheme that the "jural opposite" of someone's right is someone else's "no-right."
- that's a new one, relevant to today's LGM flame
- My intro
- Hi folks, I've been out of touch for awhile so just heard about this group, which seeems quite interesting. Personhood is something I've thought about and written about for a long time, see here for the collected works.
- Applying a protocol perspective to personhood seems very promising! Especially in an age of AI where we are marinating in pseudo-persons.
- In some sense persons are built directly with and from protocols; parent-infant interaction is the ur-protocol. (See the Kenneth Kaye book in my linked notes).
- As it happens my wife has studied medical anthropology with a focus on how different cultures treat terminated pregnancies, where the concept of personhood becomes challenged in different ways.
- personhood as a necessary fiction
- Personalization + (eg, thinking of trees or artworks as persons)
- Personalization - (thinking even humans are machines and only nominally persons or agents)
- Convo
- Yes! My thought was that questions of personhood can be divided into two piles: one more about how or why we treat nonhumans as persons (like the legal arguments in the current readings) or determine the boundaries of the personhood for humans (eg fetuses). What is the API of personhood.
- The other is more interior – what is it like to be a person, how are persons constructed, how does personhood work, what are the mechanisms? Given that we have to perform personhood on an ongoing basis, how do we do that?
- The first class is more amenable to a protocol approach for obvious reasons.
- Random incoming
- Claude inanimate objects charged with a crime
Ancient Athens. One of the five homicide courts sat at the Prytaneion and had jurisdiction over animals and inanimate things that had killed someone — a falling beam, a stone, a tree. If condemned, the object was formally cast beyond the borders of Attica. Aristotle mentions the court in the Constitution of the Athenians, and Demosthenes refers to the procedure.