Personhood, Self, and Individual JANET MCINTOSH Brandeis University, United States We are born human beings but personhood does not attach to all humans; rather, it is something to be attained or imputed. Tis, anyway, is a starting point for anthropo- logical discussions of personhood, which see it as an attribute understood diferently by each society and ofen (though not always) a quality thought to be constituted through- out the life course through rituals, exchanges and interactions, moral bearing, and so forth. A large corpus of ethnographic work suggests that although not every society has a term for “personhood,” all of them have beliefs and ideologies about the quali- fcations necessary to be classifed or treated as a full person in the world. Many, too, have distinct ontological and ethnopsychological ideas about the constitution of per- sons, including persons’ articulation with others, their interpenetration with the world around them, their moral or jural capacities, and the qualities of their agency. If per- sonhood is socially imputed, anthropologists ofen understand the term “self” to refer to the subjective and experiential sense that one is or has a locus of awareness—a pri- vate consciousness that, while it may be a universal human trait, is also socioculturally mediated. Te terms “personhood” and “self” have been used variably in a vast liter- ature that leaves room for much confation of terms and muddy distinctions between insiders’ (emic) and ethnographers’ (etic) points of view. Nevertheless, several themes with enduring resonance may be extracted from the literature. Anthropologists’ keen interest in personhood and selfood is ofen traced to a 1938 lecture in London by French sociologist Marcel Mauss ([1938] 1985). Mauss suggested an analytical distinction between selfood (moi)—awareness of one’s own individuality—and personhood (personne), in which one plays out a social role as part of a collectivity. Te self-consciousness that seems utterly natural to Westerners, he argued, is the relatively recent product of a long and shifing history. Subsequent scholars have criticized the absolutism of Mauss’s distinctions as well as his evolutionist stance, particularly the implication that societies that do not place the autonomous individual in a position of primacy are somehow primitive or defcient (Comarof and Comarof 2001). Still, his insight that diferent social organizations are bound up with diferent ideas of personhood and experiences of self has been highly infuential. Mauss’s distinctions gathered momentum afer the 1970s and received endorsement in Cliford Geertz’s (1973) analysis of Balinese naming practices that emphasize socially embedded personae rather than monadic individuals. In a widely cited statement, Geertz concluded that the “Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe … [is] rather a peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures” ([1974] 1984, 126). In her exploration of Te International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1576