Social Ecologies in Court

Abstract

Rather than explore personal identity from the perspective of Western philosophical traditions—which tend to regard ‘persons’ as human individuals endowed with reason, as the likes of Aristotle and John Locke would have it—this article will introduce personhood as a state of being that is, at once, variegated, culturally constructed, and notably interspecies. By drawing on three ethnographic case studies (North India, Papua New Guinea, and the Amazon), it will outline some of the ways in which ‘persons’ are shaped and reshaped through shared meaningful interactions with(in) their natural environments, hence understood differently from one culture to another. In doing so, it will show how anthropology’s distinct way of accounting for and championing cultural heterogeneity (i.e., through ‘intercultural-glocal glasses’) can bolster religious studies, for as much as the former challenges Eurocentric assumptions that have beset the latter, usually expressed as dyadic categories (e.g., human- and other-than-human entities). I propose that this cross-disciplinary dialogue—seeking to heed pluri-ontological deixis, or bringing multiple voices and life-worlds to the deliberating table—is a timely methodological move for diversifying beyond the apodictic propositions held about personhood, not only in religious studies, but also in legislative frameworks more widely.