Personhood

You might use the terms “person,” “individual,” and “human being” interchangeably, but a person in the Fifth World would not.

Anthropologists often write of animist peoples like those that inhabit the Fifth World as dealing with “dividuals,” particularly in contrast to “individuals.” Where an individualist would describe the world first in terms of the set of individuals in it, and then perhaps touch on the relationships between them, the dividualist would describe the world first in terms of a web of relationships, with the people in those relationships defined first and foremost by whom they relate to and how. With the way that orality trains one’s attention to notice processes that unfold in a series of social exchanges, it shifts our focus from the individual to the dividual.

As animists, people in the Fifth World recognize the personhood of a wide range of other-than-human beings — animals, yes, but also plants and even rocks, places, stories, ideas, and abstract concepts. Other-than-human persons certainly experience the world differently, but nothing about them provides certainty that they don’t experience the world. They can communicate (perhaps not in the same language, and perhaps not in any language at all, but the same goes for any number of human beings), they can participate in ceremony (even if their ceremonies seem peculiar to us), they can give us gifts and receive them — most of all, underlying all of these, they can relate. They have their places in that great web of relationship that connects us all, and if we focus on that web and the connections rather than a taxonomy of beings, we can see that they play the same role in it as any of us do.

When the rules speak of “a person,” then (as in the core principle to “Let people make their own decisions”), this refers to both human and other-than-human persons, not just human beings. Always bear in mind the possibility that the person you meet doesn’t have to take human form.

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