Brazilian Serialities: Personhood and Radical Embodied Cognition

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between personhood and family in light of the impact that radical embodied cognition has had in anthropological theory over the past years. The paper is based on a study of onomastic seriality among siblings and cohabiting cousins in Brazil, where it became clear that interruption of the series is more common than full compliance. Since name attribution is a central aspect of launching early personal ontogeny, the paper argues that this kind of interrupted seriality amounts to a narrative strategy of triangulation that fosters the creative imagining of familial persons. The paper attempts to deepen our understanding of the modes of operation of personhood by diverging from the established representationist theories of cognition that remain dominant in anthropological circles.