Personhood and Selves in the Asia-Pacific: Beyond the Individual and Beyond the Human

This course explores the rich anthropological literature on the multifaceted dimensions of self- and personhood across the Asia-Pacific region to collectively reflect on what personhood entails from an array of non-western vantage points. The Asia-Pacific region is home to a range of distinct indigenous intellectual traditions that have developed and interacted for millennia, each with their own ideas of self and personhood. This diverse cultural context provides fertile ground for examining how spirituality, kinship, modernity and technology intersect with individual and collective identities.

Notions of personhood in the Asia-Pacific reflects the region’s complex history of trade, warfare and migration and thus requires historicizing ideas about relationality, hierarchy and communalism. In contrast to prevalent western intuition about individuality as self-contained and matters of personal truthful expression, the anthropology of the region offers ethnographic insights into how selfhood and personhood become constituted in relation to the collective and the environment. While western assumptions about personhood tend to extend ideas of personhood only to human beings, in the Asia-Pacific artefacts, technologies, and spirits are typically endowed with their own forms of personhood and agency. This course explores these concepts through a series of comparisons within the Asia-Pacific.

By engaging discussions and comparative readings across the region students will navigate the complexities of identity construction in relation to themes like animism, multiple selves, religion, citizenship and colonialism and examine how variedly communities grant personhood to spirits and monsters, robots and artefacts, animals and nature.

The Asia-Pacific region’s diverse array of cultural practices, belief systems, and social arrangements helps anthropologists enrich our understanding of selves, personhood, and subjectivity and question the distinctions we draw between humans and alter-human beings or between self and other. Through the exploration of this dynamic region (emphasizing a comparison between Japan and the Malay speaking world) students become equipped with valuable insights into what personhood and selfhood entails across diverse cultural landscapes in a comparative investigation of literature that do not implicitly take the West as the norm.