Personhood

The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people’s narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology.

In order to create a better future in the struggle with climate change, many people are turning to Buddhism and its environmental principles of interconnectedness and compassion.  But do Buddhist values really lead to ecological sustainability, and if so, how?  Do Buddhists of different types even agree on how we should live ecologically?  This seminal book is the first to answer these questions through a comprehensive, critical, and innovative examination of the theories, practices, and real-world results of Buddhist environmental ethics.  In synthetically exploring lived ecological experiences across seven Buddhist worlds from ancient India to the contemporary West, this book helps one to discern attitudes and practices that lead to beneficial ecological interactions from alternative orientations that may result in unsatisfying outcomes.  Further, the book’s journey clarifies our understanding of crucial contours of Buddhist vegetarianism or meat eating, nature mysticism, as well as cultural speculations about spirituality in nonhuman animals.  With its accessible style and personhood ethics orientation this book should appeal to anyone who is concerned with how human beings interact with the nonhuman environment.  Representing the definitive analytic treatment of Buddhist environmental ethics, the book also offers great value in university classrooms involving environmental studies, religious studies, cultural studies, or philosophical ethics.

Social changes in the contemporary era have directly influenced human life and existence, especially the meaning of marriage. In light of these contemporary developments, researchers have emphasized the urgent need to deconstruct marriage and re-constitute it, fundamentally altering its traditional characteristics and meaning in the process. Conversely, the Orthodox Church views the essence of marriage with an interminable consistency and continuity characterized by the mysterion of love in Christ. Is it viable to live the meaning of this mysterion in today’s postmodern era? To examine this issue, this study initiates an interdisciplinary dialogue between postmodern perspectives on marriage and family on the one hand, and the vision of Orthodox theology on the other. This new and unexplored dialogue endeavors to contribute to the positive engagement of the Orthodox Church with the postmodern world.

Resumen: en los sistemas religiosos de inspiración afro, como el espiritismo cruzao, la santería, el palo monte y el vodou, entre otros, la oralidad ocupa un lugar relevante. Esto se puede apreciar en diferentes niveles, como la enseñanza de las tradiciones, las prácticas rituales y el quehacer religioso, aspectos que se encuentran íntimamente vinculados. Los mitos, las plegarias y los cantos que aparecen en la escena ritual vehiculizan las posibilidades de transformar la realidad fenoménica de los participan-tes. De aquí se desprende la idea de un decir-hacer, lo cual indica que la palabra no solo es nomina-tiva o enunciativa; la palabra es acción. Sin ella los objetos, las imágenes y las plantas utilizados con fines terapéuticos serían tan solo objetos desprovistos de poder. Así, a partir del trabajo etnográfico y narrativo basado en el trabajo de campo realizado en Cuba en 2013 durante una ceremonia de entrega de Olokun, se discutirá el lugar de la palabra dentro de la santería.

Palabras clave: decir-hacer, oralidad, patakís, religiones de inspiración afro, santería cubana

Sayaing-Doing in an Olokun Ceremony

SUMMARY In Afro-inspired religious systems such as Espiritismo Cruzao, Santeria, Palo Monte and Vodou, among others, orality plays a central role. This can be observed at different closely linked levels such as the teaching of traditions, ritual practices, and religious work the myths, prayers, and hymns that appear on the ritual scene support the possibilities of transforming the phenomenal reality of the participants. This gives rise to an idea of a saying-doing, which indicates that the word is not only nominative but also expository; the word is action. Without it, the objects, images and plants used for therapeutic ends would be simple objects devoid of power. Thus, drawing from the ethno-graphic and narrative work based on the fieldwork carried out in Cuba in 2013 during an Olokun ceremony, I will discuss the role played by the word in Santeria.

Keywords: Afro-inspired religions, Cuban Santeria, orality, patakís, saying-doing

A review of the book: Laura Gustafsson &Terike Haapoja (eds.), A Museum of Nonhumanity (Goleta, CA Punctum Books, 2019)

https://nome.unak.is/wordpress/volume-15-no-1-2020/book-review-volume-15-no-1-2020/laura-gustafsson-terike-haapoja-eds-a-museum-of-nonhumanity-goleta-ca-punctum-books-2019/

L. Wittgenstein and M. Polanyi both recognize a tacit background to knowing, but vary significantly in their understanding of how we know, what we can know, and what we can say about it. This paper explores whether we can say anything about the person as an emergent entity and how we know it, as Polanyi believed we could, or whether, as Wittgenstein early and late believed, the person is among those purported things that can only be shown and attempts to say how we know it lead to nonsense-if there even exists such an entity apart from the actions we may describe.

Recent debates about corporate political speech have focused on the question of corporate personhood and the rights and obligations it implies. But even for those of us for whom the notion of corporate personhood is a crucial concept, it may make sense to think of corporations, in their lobbying activities, as tools of humans with interests, rather than as the holders of interests themselves. This paper examines the corporation not as a lobbying agent, but as a lobbying instrument, and asks whether framing lobbying in terms of the appropriate use of technology can enlighten on a vexed topic.

On the basis of two thought experiments, I argue that self-building technologies are possible given our current level of technological progress. We could already use technology to make us instantiate selfhood in a more perfect, complete manner. I then examine possible extensions of this thesis, regarding more radical self-building technologies which might become available in a distant future. I also discuss objections and reservations one might have about this view.

The EU’s is a curiously atypical legal system which construes the on-going shift from citizenship to personhood in global constitutional law in quite an atypical way. The advent of the person boasts, globally, a powerful ability to remedy the harsh edges of the arbitrary exclusionary legal fiction of citizenship by embracing those who do not qualify to benefit from it. In the EU, however, the turn of constitutionalism to personhood plays quite the opposite role: it disables the protections of EU citizenship. This curious turn, which this paper aims to document and discuss, has two consequences. Firstly, it annihilates citizenship as a meaningful legal status in the EU, since its declared benefits and protections can always be overridden by personal circumstances of the holder: precisely what citizenship, at its inception, was supposed to make impossible. Secondly, it deprives of protections of citizenship precisely those who need it the most, since they become invisible in the eyes of the powers that be. As a result citizenship in Europe is turning into a ‘citizenship of personal circumstances’ – a figure of inescapable individualism imposed on those in need, who are thereby detached from other citizenry and branded out as not good enough in the eyes of the Union – leaving little space to the grand ideals of the past.

This paper examines how middle-aged and older post-Soviet immigrants in eastern Berlin navigate the neoliberalized landscape of work-based integration in face of their long-term unemployment. I first show how these immigrants’ own insistence on the centrality of paid work for their feeling integrated contributes to their experience of collective despondency and enrollment in exploitative quasi-markets, including workfare. Focusing on this insistence, I examine how it draws strength primarily from their continued subscription to the conceptions of self as deeply socially embedded, and of work as a practice of such an embedding, adopted through their Soviet-era socialization into the culture of dispersed personhood and obligation to work, rather than from their adoption of neoliberal concepts of citizenship in Germany. Contributing to geographies of post- socialist experience of neoliberalized regimes of citizenship and immigrant integration this paper thus highlights how some of the aspects of post-socialist subjectivities dovetail unexpectedly with the neoliberal project.

Starting from the premise that people are essentially narrative beings, I argue that the onset of severe mental illness compromises the narrative enterprise of being able to construct one's Self and one's relationships in meaningful and coherent ways. This is due to both the curtailment of opportunities for narrative engagement and the dispossession of those whose narratives do not conform to the current conceptualization of narrative and narrativity. In these circumstances, supporting the narrative enterprise is an ethical endeavour that requires that we examine not only which narratives we construct, but also how we construct them. This requires a re-thinking of what might constitute narrative and how we might facilitate or enhance the narrativity of people with severe mental illness. Following this, I suggest four means to support the narrativity of people with severe mental illness: through maintaining narrative continuity, maintaining narrative agency, countering master narratives and attention to small stories.

Presentación de la obra

Según se percibe del título de esa obra (“El concepto jurídico moderno de ‘persona’: histórico y problematización”), son dos los objetivos que se buscan a partir de ese estudio. Teniendo en cuenta la consolidación de un nuevo estatus del término “persona” con la codificación, se intenta demostrar que el uso de esa palabra en el lenguaje jurídico, desde fines del siglo XVIII, va dirigirse hacia una visión restrictiva de la persona, de donde la personalidad, que es su atributo en sentido jurídico, muchas veces es entendida por la doctrina (y por consecuencia por la jurisprudencia y la legislación) como no aplicable a todos los seres humanos; de ahí se ve la consolidación de un modelo que es llamado de “personista”, que refleja esa visión restrictiva de “persona”, la que, a su vez, no comprendería algunos seres humanos (como a los “nascituri”, los niños por nacer, entre otros) como sujetos de derechos. En ese sentido, en ese estudio se presenta un análisis histórico (1) del uso del término jurídico “persona”, desde las perspectivas de sintaxis, semántica y pragmática, siempre partiendo de un momento fundamental de ese nuevo uso sistemático, que se daría con los primeros Códigos civiles y con la visión de la Escuela Histórica de Savigny, lo que de hecho se impartió en el libro en los capítulos 2, 3 y 4. Y, de otro lado, la problematización (2), que se centró más específicamente en el tema del estatuto del “nasciturus”, cuestión muy relevante en la determinación del sentido jurídico de “persona” en los dos últimos siglos, lo que hemos demostrado en el capítulo 1 y en la conclusión.
La obra así sirve para el estudio del lenguaje jurídico aplicado en nuestra tradición romano-germánica en el período contemporáneo, comprendiendo un análisis histórico-conceptual y una crítica filosófico-jurídica a partir de la propuesta del uso del término “persona” de modo más amplio, llegando a todos los seres humanos, en particular a la “persona por nacer”, según decía el reconocido civilista brasileño Freitas en sus textos, lo que después se utilizaría en Códigos del siglo XIX, como el argentino elaborado por D. Vélez Sarsfield.

Negotiating Personal Autonomy offers a detailed ethnographic examination of personal autonomy and social life in East Greenland. Examining verbal and non-verbal communication in interpersonal encounters, Elixhauser argues that social life in the region is characterized by relationships based upon a particular care to respect other people’s personal autonomy. Exploring this high valuation of personal autonomy, she asserts that a person in East Greenland is a highly permeable entity that is neither bounded by the body nor even necessarily human. In so doing, she also puts forward a new approach to the anthropological study of communication.
An important addition to the corpus of ethnographic literature about the people of East Greenland, Elixhauser‘s work will be of interest to scholars of the Arctic and North, Greenland, social and cultural anthropology, and human geography. Her conclusion that, in East Greenland, the ‘inner’ self cannot be separated from the ‘public’ persona, will also be of interest to scholars working on the self across the humanities and social sciences.

The rapid evolution of information, communication and entertainment technologies will transform the lives of citizens and ultimately transform society. This paper focuses on ethical issues associated with the likely convergence of virtual realities (VR) and social networks (SNs), hereafter VRSNs. We examine a scenario in which a significant segment of the world's population has a presence in a VRSN. Given the pace of technological development and the popularity of these new forms of social interaction, this scenario is plausible. However, it brings with it ethical problems. Two central ethical issues are addressed: those of privacy and those of autonomy. VRSNs pose threats to both privacy and autonomy. The threats to privacy can be broadly categorized as threats to informational privacy, threats to physical privacy, and threats to associational privacy. Each of these threats is further subdivided. The threats to autonomy can be broadly categorized as threats to freedom, to knowl...

This paper considers the hotly debated issue of whether one should grant moral and legal personhood to intelligent robots once they have achieved a certain standard of sophistication based on such criteria as rationality, autonomy, and social relations. The starting point for the analysis is the European Parliament’s resolution on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (2017) and its recommendation that robots be granted legal status and electronic personhood. The resolution is discussed against the background of the so-called Robotics Open Letter, which is critical of the Civil Law Rules on Robotics (and particularly of §59 f.). The paper reviews issues related to the moral and legal status of intelligent robots and the notion of legal personhood, including an analysis of the relation between moral and legal personhood in general and with respect to robots in particular. It examines two analogies, to corporations (which are treated as legal persons) and animals, that have been proposed to elucidate the moral and legal status of robots. The paper concludes that one should not ascribe moral and legal personhood to currently existing robots, given their technological limitations, but that one should do so once they have achieved a certain level at which they would become comparable to human beings.

The concept of person is associated with intensional questions about the individuality, transtemporal identity, constitution and rationality of a subject. Extentional questions arise as to whether all humans are persons and whether there are also non-human persons. In the history of philosophy, three paradigms can be distinguished: (1) The ontological definition of the person as “an individual substance of a rational nature” (Boethius). (2) The self-consciousness-based definition of the person as a being that “can conceive itself as itself” (John Locke). (3) The moral-philosophical definition of the person as “an end in itself” (Immanuel Kant). In current analytical debate, the focus has shifted to the relationship between bodily organism and person. The theory of animalism (Eric T. Olson) states that persons are essentially animals and that mental or psychological attributes play no role in their identity. Constitution theory (Lynne Baker), on the other hand, attempts to define the person as a natural and at the same time self-conscious being: the bodily organism constitutes the person without being identical to it. Rather, it forms with it a “unity without identity”. A promising candidate for conceiving the natural-rational unity of the person has emerged recently in the concept of the “person life” (Marya Schechtman).

Este trabalho procurará analisar a representação de clones humanos na série televisiva Orphan Black com base nas obras de Donna Haraway e Jean Baudrillard, ao ponderar aproximações e distanciamentos entre as abordagens propostas pela série e os dois pensadores citados. Para tal, as ideias de clonagem humana artificial e biotecnologia retratadas em Orphan Black serão analisadas, com ênfase nos campos da bioética, transhumanismo e individualidade. A partir desses aprofundamentos, a pesquisa discutirá como Orphan Black traz informações pertinentes a respeito da biotecnologia para seu público. A metodologia empregada será a análise de episódios de Orphan Black baseada em conceitos dos Estudos Culturais Críticos propostos por Kellner (2001). A revisão bibliográfica se também se faz necessária, tendo como base as obras de Jean Baudrillard e Donna Haraway.

In a friendly interdisciplinary debate, we interrogate from several vantage points the question of “personhood” in light of contemporary and near-future forms of social AI. David Gunkel approaches the matter from a philosophical and legal standpoint, while Jordan Wales offers reflections theological and psychological. Attending to metaphysical, moral, social, and legal understandings of personhood, we ask about the position of apparently personal artificial intelligences in our society and individual lives. Re-examining the “person” and questioning prominent construals of that category, we hope to open new views upon urgent and much-discussed questions that, quite soon, may confront us in our daily lives.

For "AI and Law—Ethical, Legal, and Socio-political Implications." Ed. John-Stewart Gordon. Special Issue of AI & Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication.

https://rdcu.be/cc0OT (Full Text)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01129-1
https://philpapers.org/rec/GUNDWI

El estudio de las ideas sobre la corporalidad y las almas se ha consagrado en años recientes como uno de los temas más importantes en el conocimiento de los pueblos mayas del pasado y el presente (Pitarch 1996, 2011; Figuerola Pujol 2010; Velásquez García 2015). En el caso de los k’iche’ de Santiago Momostenango, importantes trabajos se han centrado en temas como las prácticas calendáricas (Tedlock 1992), la cosmología (Cook 1981) y la etnohistoria (Carmack 1995), pero la información sobre el cuerpo humano y las almas resulta todavía poco sistemática. Siguiendo la propuesta de Pedro Pitarch en torno a la persona maya (2011), en este artículo presento nueva información sobre las ideas en torno de la corporalidad y las almas entre los momostecos. Destaca la existencia del chikop, un alma con forma de pájaro muy similar al “ave del corazón” de los tzeltales, la cual puede ser castigada por las divinidades ancestrales cuando una persona olvida hacer ofrendas en los altares del patrilinaje.