Saturday, May 13, 2006
Other than human persons
I said hello to a neighbor and her two dogs the other morning when I was coming back from the gym, and I realized that I used a very different tone of voice addressing the dogs than addressing the woman: not condescending, or baby talk, or anything like that, but definitely more playful. Not a tone of voice which I would typically use with a human.
Which got me to thinking about the concept of "other than human persons," which I first encountered in reading an essay by A. Irving Hallowell called "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View." At least according to Hallowell, an anthropologist, the Ojibwa have a grammatical and conceptual category of persons, that includes both human and other-than-human persons. This latter can include the sun, characters from myth and dreams, and what Westerners are trained to think of as "inanimate" objects. Hallowell cites an episode in which he was talking with an older Ojibwa man, trying to understand the concept of how stones can be in the animate grammatical class.
"Are all the stones we see about us here alive?" Hallowell asked him.
"He reflected a long while and then replied, 'No, but some are.' "
Of course, it's not like the West doesn't have other than human persons. In fact, the law has had to adopt the term "natural person" to distinguish flesh and blood human beings from entities like corporations and trusts, which are for some purposes treated like persons. And then, the US Constitution famously indicated that slaves constituted some different category of 60% personhood, at least for the purposes of apportioning representation.
So I'm willing to give the old Ojibwa guy's point of view a little thought.
Which got me to thinking about the concept of "other than human persons," which I first encountered in reading an essay by A. Irving Hallowell called "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View." At least according to Hallowell, an anthropologist, the Ojibwa have a grammatical and conceptual category of persons, that includes both human and other-than-human persons. This latter can include the sun, characters from myth and dreams, and what Westerners are trained to think of as "inanimate" objects. Hallowell cites an episode in which he was talking with an older Ojibwa man, trying to understand the concept of how stones can be in the animate grammatical class.
"Are all the stones we see about us here alive?" Hallowell asked him.
"He reflected a long while and then replied, 'No, but some are.' "
Of course, it's not like the West doesn't have other than human persons. In fact, the law has had to adopt the term "natural person" to distinguish flesh and blood human beings from entities like corporations and trusts, which are for some purposes treated like persons. And then, the US Constitution famously indicated that slaves constituted some different category of 60% personhood, at least for the purposes of apportioning representation.
So I'm willing to give the old Ojibwa guy's point of view a little thought.
