ABOUT NON-HUMAN PERSONHOOD
What is a person and who gets to be one? What is our ethical obligation to others? How do we classify those others so that we know what we should and should not do to them and with them? Other beings we believe we have certain ethical obligations to because of their self-determination and inherent worth we call “people” (because it’s shorter and less annoying to say). Are all human beings people? Are only human beings people? Where do our own ideas of who is and is not a person come from? Have other people in different places come to different conclusions? How have these ideas about personhood changed over time?
‘Personhood’ comes to us from the old Etruscan word phersu, through the Latin persona- a theatrical mask, later an actor’s role. The term was carried from theater to theology by the second century Berber theologian Tertullius in his discourse on the triune nature of the Christian god (tres personae, una substantia, “three persons, one substance.”) Later theologians interpreted and expanded upon this saying to derive the modern concept of a person as someone (as distinguished from something) capable of self-determination and possessing inherent worth. Today the word person carries both its older theatrical definition of a generic role- personhood in a legal sense- and its later theological identification with the actor playing that role, in the colloquial sense of the word.
Words and concepts analogous to the English/Latin/Etruscan person/persona/phersu have emerged independently on every continent in multitudes of different societies. A brief and incomplete survey of some different versions on the personhood concept from around the world:
Yua - This Yupik word refers to a willful essence that inheres in all things. Everything discretely formed, be it grown or crafted, has a way and a will. Yua may be more directly translated as ‘soul’, but the universal presence of equivalent yua across all species and objects (from this perspective objects are impossible; all things are beings) renders the concept ethically analogous to the English ‘personhood’.
Wiht - Old English, usually translated as ‘creature or thing’, but also used to mean a human being. The Old English wiht shed a great deal of its meaning as it evolved into the archaic modern English wight ‘a man or manlike being’. From Michael Alexander’s The Earliest English Poems:
“People in Anglo-Saxon times living uncomfortably [sic] close to the natural world, were well aware that though creation is inarticulate it is animate, and that every created thing, every wiht had its own personality. Though the forces of earth, air, and water were not regularly propitiated or invoked, an awareness of the old methods of sympathetic identification seems to have lingered on, by habit and instinct, in the arts. Some element of impersonation is involved in any creative act, but by performing the poet extends and diversifies our understanding of- or at least our acquaintance with- the numinous natural world, of whose life, or even existence, modern men are becoming progressively more unaware.”
Te Awa Tupua – More of a case-study than a concept, in 2014 a 160-year-long effort by the Whanganui iwi of Aotearoa to establish formal personhood rights for Te Awa Tupua, the Whanganui River, finally bore fruit. Rationale for the legal redress is perhaps best explained by the local expression Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au: ‘I am the river, the river is me.’ The selfhood and personality of the human constituents of the Whanganui iwi is mutual and inextricable within the selfhood and personality of their home landscape, the Whanganui River valley. The Crown government of New Zealand apparently was persuaded to agree. Minister Chris Finlayson: “I know some people will say it's pretty strange to give a natural resource a legal personality, but it's no stranger than family trusts, or companies, or incorporated societies.” Full text of the Te Awa Tupua Bill here.
U-ba-hi – One of the most common glyphs in the Classical Mayan hieroglyphic script, U-ba-hi is frequently associated with visual depictions of plants, tools, and natural phenomena with human faces. U-ba-hi indicates a sort of shared pool of personhood that expresses itself through an entity when certain conditions are met. Sometimes a shovel (for instance) is an object, sometimes it’s a person. Some shovels are always people; some shovels never are. Personhood in this worldview is dynamic, potential, emergent, and inconstant.
In this case, as in all of the above, much meaning has been lost in translation.
There are as many examples of more-than-human personhood as there are cultures on Earth. In researching the diverse ways in which human being people talk about people in general, it becomes apparent that the overwhelming norm for humanity is a recognition of shared self-determination and inherent worth across the boundaries of species. Even inanimate entities like stones, tools, continents, winds, corporations, and buildings have been considered people by somebody somewhere.
The question emerges: Why doesn’t our culture recognize anyone other than humans as people?
Are we terribly smart and is everybody else in the world terribly stupid? Did our intellectual ancestors figure out what’s really going on where everyone else failed spectacularly to adequately comprehend the personal loneliness of our reality?
We doubt it.
Between the lot of us human beings, we’ve got something like 200,000 years of collective experience- 200,000 years of genius-level intellects, complex scientific methods, incisive logic, and self-analyzing philosophies developed a thousand times over in a thousand different societies. 200,000 years of independent double-blind studies, followed by plenty of inter-cultural peer review have resulted in a general human consensus that the elements of personhood- consciousness, will, self-identity, and so on- are common to at least most, if not all, living organisms, and likely quite a few abiotic phenomena as well.
This general theory of personhood was summed up by the Miletesian mathematician and early materialist philosopher Thales some time in the 5th century BC as- something we have no record of, but which was later quoted by Plato: “All things are full of gods.”
So why is Plato’s metaphor of the cave taught in high-schools all over, but not Thales’ dictum? Why did it seem strange to Minister Finlayson that a river was actually a person, and why did he refer to them with the demeaning name “natural resource”? Why has the word person survived for almost 3,000 years more or less intact through three different languages, while we lost the endemic English word wiht in just a few centuries’ time?
Describing the course of Europe’s colonization first of itself and then the rest of the world from the early Middle Ages through to the present day, including the effects of Inquisitional and missionary religious and philosophical suppression and the imposition of a stripped-down monotheism onto pantheistic and polytheistic indigenous populations, is beyond the purview of this article. In short, most of us in the colonized world do not believe that a river is a person because our ancestors would have been tortured or killed had they expressed such a sentiment. So they hid their beliefs, or died for them, and their children forgot it could ever be any other way.
Despite all this, the rudiments of a philosophy of multi-species personhood have emerged into the Western canon from time to time. In the 1920’s German Jewish theologian Martin Buber posited two distinct types of relationship a person might have with others in the world: I-It, and I-You. An I-It relationship is between a self-determining individual and someone else they decide has no agency or authority to determine themselves: socks, restaurant workers, natural resources, prisoners, etc. An I-You relationship occurs when that protagonist realizes that the other party is a self-determining individual in their own right, and behaves accordingly. Buber framed this discourse in a way that made it clear that plenty of humans initiate I-It relationships with their fellow human beings. Interestingly enough, Buber deliberately left the door open for the possibility of I-You relationships between humans and other, by this measure ethically equivalent, non-human beings.
From this and other historical evidence, cross-cultural philosophical background, and our own lived experience within this living world, we have come to the conclusion that all entities are self-determining and possess inherent worth. The landscape is made of people, not things. Whether capable of or interested in communicating with us, the organisms we interact with on a daily basis deserve respect and humane treatment. This core philosophy informs Little Bluestem’s actions in the world.
We are the landscape, the landscape is us. We just happen to be the part of the landscape with thumbs.
