Babies, Bodies, and the Production of Personhood in North America and a Native Amazonian Society

Abstract

Each society must determine how its youngest will come to achieve the status of persons, how they will be recognized and granted a place within a human community. This article examines the social processes involved in turning fetuses and infants into social beings in two societies: the United States and the Wari'1 (Pakaa Nova) Indians of Rondonia, Brazil. We are specifically concerned with how cultural models of the body are invoked in the social production of personhoods. Concepts of personhood are contingent on the social meanings given to bodies-newly forming babies' bodies in particular-and, in turn, on how body imageries are used to create and transform social relationships. The issue of how to define personhood is, of course, at the heart of some of today's most vexing social debates. In the United States, controversies over abortion, the use of fetal tissue, and life support for extremely premature infants reveal the beginning-of-life period to be one of deep moral ambiguity and uncertainty for the social collective. In all societies, the complexities and contradictions in normative ideologies of personhood are heightened during the