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

Course content

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.

Education

The course is open to:

  • Exchange and Guest students from abroad
  • Credit students from Danish Universities

 

Full-degree students enrolled at the Faculty of Social Science, UCPH 

  • Bachelor and Master Programmes in Anthropology
  • Bachelor and Master Programmes in Psychology 
  • Master Programme in Social Data Science
  • Master Programe in Global Development 
Learning outcome

At the end of the course, the students will be able to:

 

Knowledge:

  • demonstrate a wide knowledge of concepts of selfhood, personhood and subjectivity within the Asia-Pacific region.
  • explain and understand key elements of the Asia-Pacific region’s modern history and contemporary political conditions.
  • explicate basic features of relevant intellectual traditions (Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, Animism) and their role in the contemporary Asia-Pacific.

 

Skills:

  • read anthropological and social scientific scholarship critically and comparatively with regards to regional differences.
  • historicize and contextualize ideas of self, personhood and subjectivity.
  • establish and operationalize regional tendencies through regional history and intellectual traditions.

 

Competences:

  • comparatively analyze how Asia-Pacific ideas of self- and personhood are articulated and enacted in both practice and discourse.
  • understand and identify complex concepts of selfhood and personhood in relation to socio-cultural, political, cosmological and historical contexts.
  • reflect upon the importance of socio-historically specific senses of self in understanding societies across the world and relativize western ideas of self- and personhood.

The course will consist of a combination of lectures and seminars.

MA students must include supplementary literature in the exam, which the student selects.

The course assumes familiarity with basics of social scientific theory and experience working with anthropological analysis and methodologies. While we expect some basic conversance about the geography of East and Southeast Asia, no formal knowledge about the Asia-Pacific region is expected.

Continuous feedback during the course of the semester

 

Ongoing feedback in the teaching process.
We will have ongoing sessions of essay development and feedback throughout the course. Students will be encouraged to write essays in groups in order to collaborate on more comprehensive analyses.

ECTS
7,5 ECTS
Type of assessment
Home assignment
Type of assessment details
Free written home assignment
The assignment can be done in groups of up to 4 people. In group assignments, each student’s contribution must be clearly marked in the assignment. The length of the assignment must be a maximum of 10 pages for BA students and a maximum of 12 pages for MA students. For group submissions, an additional 3 pages per extra BA student and an additional 3 pages per extra MA student are allowed. For groups where BA and MA students write together, the page limit corresponds to that of MA students.

Students must indicate on the first page of the assignment whether they are BA or MA students. In the case of a group assignment, the individual student's contribution must be clearly marked in the assignment.

The number of standard pages is calculated according to the assumption that a standard page is defined as 2,400 keystrokes including spaces. Read further about Formal requirements for written assignments and exams in Curricula’s Common Part for the Faculty of Social Sciences
Aid
All aids allowed

Policy on the Use of Generative AI Software and Large Language Models in Exams

The Department of Anthropology allows the use of generative AI software and large language models (AI/LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in written exams, provided that the use of AI/LLMs is disclosed and specified (i.e., how it was used and for what purpose) in an appendix that does not count towards the page limit of the exam.

 

If AI/LLMs are used as source, the same requirements apply for using quotation marks and source referencing as with all other sources. Otherwise, it will be a case of plagiarism.

Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
No external censorship
Re-exam

Free written home assignment

1st re-exam: A new written assignment submitted. The new assignment must be submitted by the deadline for the re-exam. 

 

2nd re-exam: A new written assignment submitted. The new assignment must be submitted by the deadline for the re-exam.

Criteria for exam assessment

See learning outcome

  • Category
  • Hours
  • Lectures
  • 42
  • Preparation
  • 100
  • Exam
  • 64
  • English
  • 206

Kursusinformation

Language
English
Course number
AANA18141U
ECTS
7,5 ECTS
Programme level
Bachelor
Bachelor choice
Full Degree Master
Full Degree Master choice
Duration

1 semester

Placement
Spring
Studyboard
Department of Anthropology, Study Council
Contracting department
  • Department of Anthropology
  • Department of Psychology
  • Social Data Science
Contracting faculty
  • Faculty of Social Sciences
Course Coordinators
  • Kristian Hoeck   (14-737a717b7c7169763670776d6b734869767c707a7736737d366c73)
  • Asmus Randløv Rungby   (3-657676446572786c7673326f7932686f)
Saved on the 09-05-2025

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