The Essentially Contested Vocabularies Related to Fetal Personhood

Hannah Bulloch’s (2016) article is a welcome contribution to the growing volume of studies of everyday religion in both various contemporary contexts as well as earlier historical periods. These studies shift interest in social science research from institutions of religious traditions to everyday religious practices of individuals and groups within and outside such religious traditions.

The specific focus of Bulloch’s article on fetal personhood is timely and important, as it adds an important and neglected dimension to this much-discussed and, to use W. B. Gallie’s term, “essentially contested concept” (Ruben 2010). Her ethnographic approach relying on interviews and oral histories from Siquijor informants analyzes vocabulary from these discourses and other related practices without disregarding other social factors. The article concludes that “local notions of personhood are processual” and “ensoulment, while thought to occur at conception, is not sufficient to produce a person” (Bulloch 2016, 195).

The article’s approach and argumentation are clearly articulated and highly commendable. Its analysis of native discourse related to fetal personhood is rightly based on a view of language and its usage as carrier of cultural meanings and nuances, and offers insights into the social world of the local population that other approaches may not be privy to.

Like any piece of serious research, Bulloch’s article also opens doors to fundamental issues and questions for further consideration. The first, often discussed in translation studies, involves the relation of terminology in different languages, be it translation however that is taken, paraphrase, or any rendering from one language to another. This obtains in Bulloch’s discussion of Visayan discourse in English. It notes that “the term Cebuano speakers use to denote the person is tawo, which also means ‘human’—importantly the concepts of human and person are not differentiated as they are in English” (ibid., 208). Such a lack of differentiation is not interrogated at all but simply accepted as given. One may ask whether there is a Siquijodnon equivalent to the Tagalog expression, Madaling maging tao pero mahirap magpakatao (It is easy to be human, but difficult to be humane). Furthermore, the Visayan word kalag is taken to be somehow equivalent to the English “soul”: “A tawo is constituted by body and soul combined. In other words, all persons have a soul—it would be impossible to be tawo without a kalag—but a soul can exist independent of a body and therefore a soul can exist without being a person” (ibid.). Even without debating whether “soul” or “spirit” is the better rendition, one cannot avoid questions regarding what kalag means in Visayan or how it is related to the Visayan word lawas for body. The “body-soul” vocabulary is used differently in various everyday cultural contexts as well as in different technical areas (e.g., Brown et al. 1998).

My studies of this vocabulary in Tagalog (katawan-kaluluwa) serve to illustrate the point. My first study, which is on a late-sixteenth-century missionary manuscript, reveals that, despite the presence of the Catholic understanding of the vocabulary then, the use of loob (literally, inside) in relation to both katawan and kaluluwa subverts the binary relation implied in the vocabulary (Francisco 2001).

My second work, that on cultural, theological, and scientific perspectives on the body-soul relationships, shows that Filipino notions of kaluluwa are not the same as the Catholic Church’s understanding of soul (anima, Latin) in its official documents (Francisco 2006). On the one hand, some indigenous communities view the soul as “invisible” except to those it wishes to appear to or persons as having multiple souls related to different body parts, human activities, or animals (ibid., 136–37). On the other hand, Catholic teaching drew from cultural and philosophical resources through various historical periods to condemn forms of materialism that denied the spiritual nature of humans or of dualism that viewed matter and body as evil. The Christian concept of “soul” expresses this spiritual nature and is related to each person’s relation to God as ultimate origin and immortal destiny (ibid.,140–46). Given these divergences in...