Stephen David Siemens (California State University, Northridge) Azande Baby ‘Rites of Passage’: Personhood by Degrees Presented at the Third Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association Childhood and Youth Interest Group February 23, 2012 2:15PM Royal Pavilion, Riviera Hotel Las Vegas, Nevada Symposium: The Cultural Construction of Identity: How Children Become Persons, Part I David Lancy, Organizer and Chair Abstract: Azande babies receive indicators of personhood from the midwives that delivered them in a gradual process that has public rituals at key points. My fieldwork in Southern Sudan included 19 months of participant observation in a rural community during 1984‐85. Azande seclude mothers and babies until a public ‘rite of passage’ that identifies the baby’s minimal attributes of personhood. Azande ‘rites of passage’ intervene to bring helpless babies into society as minimal persons. Azande babies receive gender, kinship and ranking among peers in the first ‘rite of passage.’ Azande babies then enter a stage that is less liminal than seclusion but is still restricted. At first the baby is referred to with the animal pronoun as less than a real person. A human pronoun comes from the baby’s recognized resemblance to a particular person in the baby’s ancestry. About four months after the first ritual, the midwife makes the baby presentable in public and identifies the baby as transportable, in a second ritual. An Azande midwife compared a baby ritual to mourning. Both intervene to instill personhood and both are controlled by old women. Azande in Kampala still perform baby rituals, modifying them for urban dwellings and medical midwives. [Show Title Slide} Throughout their lives Azande vary in degrees of personhood (cf. Fortes 1973:295) as expressed by their presentations of themselves to others. Personhood combines relations to kin, to peers, to the opposite sex, to affines and to the land. Personhood is evident in an individual’s appearance, terms by which a person is referred, territorial locations, individual and social abilities, and mortuary rituals. Some of the attributes of personhood are conferred and demonstrated in ‘rites of passage’ while others happen at less public transitions. Old Azande women are the most concerned with conferring abilities of social