The concept of the person, like other comparative concepts such as kinship or the state, designates a zone of enquiry within which there is enough commonality across societies to ensure that comparison is reasonable, yet enough variation between them to make enquiry fruitful. Enquiries in this zone concern conceptions of the human psychophysical *individual. This is territory for the psychologist and the philosopher as well, of course, but anthropologists are guided by two special considerations. First, we expect that a society’s conceptions of people as individuals, of how people work, can be related compellingly to its forms of social institution, of how society works. Second, we have come to learn that other societies’ ways of anatomizing individuals’ thought and form may be profoundly, and startlingly, different from those we take for granted.
Indeed the differences between versions of the person are a matter not only of thought but of feeling and experience as well. Consider, for example, †Godfrey Lienhardt’s (1961) ethnographic account of the Dinka, in which he shows that Dinka regard themselves, indeed experience themselves, very differently to the way people of the North Atlantic do.
In the matter of a bad debt, for example, North Atlantic peoples assume that the power to recollect a bad debt—the faculty of the conscience, in other words—is wholly internal to the thinking subject, the person. But among the Dinka such recollection is not a property of the debtor’s own mind or conscience. Rather, the debtor who owns up to his debt does so because the spirit Mathiang Gok has laid hold of her and forced her to recollect the debt and respond to it. Rather than an internal conscience directing her, in other words, the debtor experiences an external power. Similarly, members of certain clans among the Dinka have as a special divinity, the spirit which Lienhardt translates as Flesh. The divinity Flesh appears within them as their own flesh when their muscles begin to quiver and they become *possessed during ritual *sacrifices. In other words, their own body becomes at once spiritual and subject to another power, neither of which properties are familiar in a North Atlantic perspective. To this extent, the person is very differently conceived and experienced in the two societies.
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