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4 Personhood and the Animistic Amerindian Perspective Before proceeding to flesh out the contexts and relationships between human beings who express Taínoness and these other things imbued with cemí power, it is useful to first discuss what is meant by the terms “person” and “personhood,” especially because these have not yet been contemplated in analyses of Caribbean material culture. Here I follow very closely the notions of person and personhood discussed by Chris Fowler in his excellent book The Archaeology of Personhood. Fowler (2004:124–125, table 5.1) produced a very useful table in which he compares the animistic, totemic, and naturalistic worldview perspectives, each with its own particular modes of personhood construction.This table should be consulted as I develop the arguments to follow below. (For copyright reasons, it is not reproduced here.) A person is “any entity human or otherwise that may be conceptualized and treated as a person,” while personhood refers to the “condition or state of being of a person as it is understood in any specific context. Persons are constituted or constructed , de-constituted, maintained, altered, and transformed in social practices through life and death” (Fowler 2004:7). Fowler goes on to say that “exactly who or what may or may not be a person is contextually variable,” and, of course, what each person is, is very much dependent on the interrelationships with other human beings and with other beings and things. “Personhood is attained and maintained through relationships not only with human beings but with things, places, animals and the spiritual features of the cosmos. Some of these may also emerge as persons through this engagement. People’s own social interpretations of personhood and the social practices through which personhood is realized shape their intentions [and I would add motivations] in a reflexive way, but personhood remains a mutually constituted condition” (Fowler 2004:7). Personhood is not, therefore, a cumulative set of fixed, distinguishing personality traits. Rather, as Fowler noted, the life and afterlife of a person is an ongoing process where “personhood of different kinds is sought, struggled with, and attained ” (Fowler, personal communication 2007). Personhood is in effect the state of being rather than the process per se, but “the process of becoming a person is vital to the state of being of a person,” and thus “personhood deals with that process ” (Fowler 2004:7). And in an animistic world, persons and personhood include not just human but also other beings and things. Persons are constantly evolving Personhood and the Animistic Amerindian Perspective 49 and changing; one might detect particular phases of changes in personhood status , such as those captured in Arnold van Gennep’s famous rites de passage (for a review of religion from an archaeologist’s perspective, see Insoll 2005). The broad and flexible definitions of person and personhood set up a framework in which to approach the analysis of the interaction between iconic artifacts imbued with cemí and the Taíno human beings that socially engaged them. Following Fowler and others (Descola 1996; Gell 1998; Viveiros de Castro 1996), there are three basic modes or fields of personhood: animism, totemism, and naturalism (Fowler 2004:table 5.1). These refer to the forms that person and personhood relationships “are supposed to take” (Fowler 2004:7). But in order to address these fields or modes in relation to person and personhood, it is necessary to first define several key concepts that, in Fowler’s words: “describe the overarching logic of being a person within any social context and in the specific long-term trends in the practices that support that logic. . . . People actively engage with these trends, and with that particular concept [mode] of personhood, when they pursue strategies of interaction. As a result of these interactions, each person is constructed in a specific way” (Fowler 2004:7). The first set of features of personhood that need to be defined relate to the contrastive notions of individual, individuality, and indivisibility on the one hand, and of dividuals and dividuality on the other. As might be intuitively guessed, individuality refers to the common concept of personal uniqueness that all persons have (Fowler 2004:7–9). As Fowler noted, in common usage, “all people are individuals ,” but it does not follow that individuals have an indivisible nature. Indivisibility refers to a state of being indivisible, whole—a unitary person.This state of indivisibility is the prevalent, contemporary “western mode” of personhood identity, where “individuality lies at the core of a fixed...

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