I am overwhelmed with perspectives right now. Each story I hear leaves a residue on my skin that I am unable to wash off. Even the unspoken anxieties of others are an oversized heavy coat. It feels cumbersome. Awkward.
We talk about “the” world when there is no such thing. Rather, there are many worlds. I’ve always known this. I think you have too. But right now, this strange, unfamiliar limen is a little crowded. While I have experienced trauma before, it has been my trauma. My perspective has been the perspective. And the energy and love of others around me has been full, consistent, and buoyant. But there has never been a bigger “we” than the “we” we’re experiencing now. And while we may be navigating the same waters, we’re not in the same boat. When I share my perspective, I sometimes feel as though I am taking from others. And when they share theirs, I feel they rob me of mine.
I am struggling with this. I feel simultaneously strong and vulnerable; independent and dependent; loved and unloved; included and excluded. I am choking on dualisms. I feel so close to people I know very little about, yet strangely distant from those I do. I feel vulnerable for needing people so much. This, to me, is terrifying.
Within this unpredictable storm of conflicting emotions, I am trying to write a paper. It is already late but, thanks to an empath, due dates on all assessments have been removed. As I struggle to put my disparate thoughts in order, I do what I often do and revisit previous papers I have written to remind myself that I can actually write. In doing so, I bump into Viveiros de Castro and his ethnography of the Amazonian Araweté. The Self and the Other are knitted into his writing, as they are into mine.
To the Araweté, being human is not to be static, but rather, in perpetual transformation. Identity is continually redefined “in relation to“ the Other. They use the phrase “in the middle” to describe life on Earth, for it is a temporary condition. A “just passing through” of sorts. The anti-Narcissus nature of their social organisation nullifies the absoluteness of Self that is prevalent in western presentations of persons as rational, bounded and autonomous — the kind of Self you see on LinkedIn, in personal brands, in advertising, and on Instagram. The Self that has been thrown violently about Maslow’s Pyramid this past month. The Self in this indulgent blog post.
Our relationship with institutions is being tested. Whether they are employers, clients, suppliers, Government departments or simply “us” as sole proprietors. Corporations are multiply-composed legal persons full of individual persons with their own individual legal rights and responsibilities. A person full of persons. Persons inside a person. There is a paradox at play here where “despite Western culture’s normative championing of the rational individual, we are happy enough to speak of business corporations … as persons, and to ascribe … meaningful action to them”. We want the corporation to care about the environment. We want it to value diversity. This paradox suggests that the bounded individual may not be playing as prominent a role in defining modern personhood as we generally assume.
In 2012 the New Zealand Government recognised the Whanganui River as a living being, ascribing it legal personhood. To the Maori people, the river is both an ecological phenomenon and a spiritual ancestor. Ignoring the law of contradiction (you can’t be both a river and something else), they adopt Levy-Bruhl’s law of participation in which “phenomena can be, though in a way incomprehensible to us, both themselves and something other than themselves”. Crazy stuff right? Maybe not. For while we struggle to understand how others can deem rivers and mountains “persons”, we seem more than comfortable speaking of the virus as if it were demonstrating an intent to kill.
Here, “relational persons” means people that see and are seen as selves only in and of relations with a plurality of others; persons are like mosaics, made up of elements that are performed and elicited in transactions with others ~ Paige West drawing on the work of Marilyn Strathern
Ongoing concerns about corporations and rivers as persons question whether the sharp boundary between the self and others in Western culture is in fact as sharp as it seems. This is why understanding the multiplicities of human understandings in varied ethnographic contexts is so valuable: it enables us to comparatively analyse what it means to be an other, and in doing so what it means to be ourselves.
This tension between the individual and relational self is threaded through me now. I need people, and I want to need people. I realise that I am not a human being but rather a human becoming and a different kind of me is emerging. Still very much me, but also a little bit more you. To adopt the perspective of the Araweté “the truth always lies with the Other and always in the future – which is one and the same thing”.
You are my Other.
You are my future.
Image: Alberto Bigoni on Unsplash
1 Viveiros de Castro, E. 1992, From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
2 Mills, M. 2013, ‘The opposite of witchcraft: Evans-Pritchard and the problem of person’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), Vol.19, pp.18-33
3 Levy-Bruhl, L. 1984, ‘The Law of Participation’, in How Natives Think, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp.69-104
4 Appuhamilage, U, ‘A Fluid Ambiguity: Individual, Dividual and Personhood’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Vol.18, No.1, pp.1-17
5 West, P, 2016, Dispossession and the Environment, Columbia University Press, New York
6 Smith, K. 2012, ‘From dividual and individual selves to porous subjects’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol.23, pp.50-64