Persons in Translation: An old concept-metaphor in cross-cultural comparison

What if we focused on what it means to be a person rather than what it means to be human?

In Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese (three languages that have strong historic ties), the boundaries between the terms ‘human’ and ‘person’ arise in different ways. Although they are often made interchangeable when translated into English, their translated form in East Asian languages gestures towards other epistemologies and ontologies. This slippage in translation has led me to ask what the affordances of the term person might be. In many East Asian languages, the word person is a prolific modifier to all sorts of terminology that use the term in more explicit ways than their equivalents in the English. In Chinese you are not Australian or British but rather aodaliyaren or yingguoren, an Australian or British person (ren). Similarly, a robot is not an exclusively different entity, but rather a jiqiren a ‘machine person’.

As Tobias Rees notes in After Ethnos (2018) anthropologists are increasingly turning to topics that branch away from ‘the human’, focusing on phenomena such as mushrooms (Tsing 2015), insects (Raffles 2010) and cheese (Paxson 2012). Through this shift in focus, Rees argues, the question of ‘the possibility “of” the human/ after “the human” emerges’ (2018: 40). The focus of much of this work has been on forms of life beyond the classic remit of the humanities and social sciences. Yet, I would suggest that persons and/or personhood is an equally compelling challenge to the human. Ethnographic data suggests that the concept of person, denoted in a single term, is an incredibly common cross-cultural phenomena (Antweiler, 2016) whereas the term ‘human’, is historically and culturally a more recent invention.

The understanding that the term and concept of ‘human’ is a modern invention is relatively well established, having inspired approaches such as antihumanism (Smith 1985), posthumanism (Haraway, 1991), and Foucault’s efforts to move past ‘the subject’ (2013). Although contested, the term ‘human’ originally connoted beings ‘of the earth’ with some suggested connection to the modern English humus (for soil). One of the earliest instances of definitive ‘the human’, where humanity is conceptualised as an abstract framework for understanding people, appeared in 1755 when Denis Diderot defined it as ‘the unique term from which one has to begin and to which one has to return’ (Rees 2018: 36). Yet, from these inquisitive and reflexive origins, the human soon became a species classification, and a particular kind of idealised modern subjectivity. Sylvia Wynter notes that ‘the human’ as a noun is a biocentric and Eurocentric manifestation of the colonial era (2007; McKittrick 2014). Despite its potential for inclusion, argues Wynter, this biocentric approach to humanity relied on fixed notions of shared substance. Prior to the discovery of DNA, these substances were identified through morphological traits (such as skin colour), and social organization. Wynter takes inspiration from Judith Butler’s critique of gender and substance, showing how an emphasis on substance creates taxonomic exclusions (you are either male or female, human or not-human), which in turn inspired racist, orientalist and colonialist regimes of power.

Wynter’s observation intersects with the history of the term ‘human’ in East Asia in interesting ways. The concept of ‘human’ as a racialised biological term first entered Japanese vernacular in the late nineteenth century after the popularisation of Tokyo’s anthropological society in 1882 (Dikötter, 1997). The word chosen to represent this new scientific approach (jinrui) was later exported to other countries, such as China, Korea and Vietnam, which imported much of their scientific language from Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, there was a curious etymological and epistemological slippage in choosing this term. First used in Zhuangzi’s classical Chinese Daoist philosophical text Knowledge Wandered North, the term jinrui (or renlei in Mandarin) was more akin to ‘personkind’ historically speaking. It combines the character for person (ren) with the character for ‘likeness or kind’ (lei).

Furthermore, the passage where the term originally appeared is not a commentary on what it means to be human so much as a discussion of the transient nature of personhood and the universe.

《庄子·知北游》
人身的天地之间，若白驹之过隙，忽然而已… 已化而生,又化而死,生物哀之,人类悲之。

A person’s place between heaven and earth is like a sudden glimpse of a white colt through a gap in the wall, brief and that is all…Already transformed we are born, and through another transformation we die. It is the pathos of all living things, grieved by personkind. (author’s translation)

This text would later become influential in Daoism and Zen Buddhism, filtering into the Japanese lexicon and eventually transforming into the modern ‘human’. Both the original and the Zen Buddhist usage of renlei/jinrui referred to a pluralistic cosmology where fairies, celestial beings and bodhisattvas were also of ‘personkind’. I take inspiration from the disjuncture between the historical and current mean of ‘person/human’ in Northeast Asia, seeing it as reflecting the possibility of turning away from ‘the human’ to rediscover the possibility of persons as/and/instead of humanity. I also see it as a gesture towards the wider cross-cultural potential of ‘persons’ and ‘personhood’ as an interdisciplinary field of research.

Cross-cultural comparison often comes across ways of living that include a wider range of ‘beings’ and ‘persons’ than might be commonly thought of as human. Anthropology and its cognate disciplines, has long been curious about how ‘people make up people’ in discourse and practice (Hacking 1986). Historically this was summarised into the individual, self, and person to represent the biological, psychological, and sociological respectively (Harris 1989). Efforts to move away from this purified, cartesian, and Eurocentric taxonomy in the late 1980s yielded new terms, from Strathern’s anti-individualist ‘ dividual’ (Strathern 1988) to Maurice Bloch’s jovial and radically inclusive use of ‘the blob’ (2011). Viveo de Castro’s work on Amazonian ontologies, for example, presents what he calls a ‘perspectivist’ cosmology where all beings are persons, depending on their perspective, (Castro, 2014). Where prey-relations define personhood, to a Jaguar (who is a considered a person), humans are pigs, and to pigs humans are Jaguar. Working from the Chinese context, Yan Yunxiang (2017) draws inspiration from the Chinese ‘doing personhood’ (zuoren) to argue along similar lines to Wynter that it is the performance or practice of being human that matters the most.

To think beyond ‘the human’, as Donna Haraway has noted in her work on primates and cyborgs, afford new ways to think about our shared present and future (1991; 2013). Yet, we must also be wary of traps hidden within thinking beyond humanity. For example, bioethicists such as Singer and Tooley have argued for a move away from species-centric humanism by focusing on persons (Singer 2004). However, my suggestion radically differs from their approach. Singer and Tooley start their conceptual argument by defining ‘persons’ as beings ‘capable of desiring to continue as a subject of experience’ (Tooley 1976). The reliance on abstract definitions within this tradition, where desire, ability, subjectivity and experience are all treated as context-free phenomena betray a kind of conceptual inflexibility that could have disastrous consequences. In particular, their definition’s reliance on cognitive ability is unable to include the status of those with differing cognitive abilities in a ethically justifiable way (Kittay and Carlson 2010).

Instead of definitions of ‘the person’, I suggest we see ‘persons’ as a concept-metaphor that have ‘no adequate referent’ but rather serve as one of the ‘domain terms that orient us towards areas of shared exchange’ (Moore 2004:73). A focus on the person, allows us another perspective from which to think the cultural and historical diversity of humanity as it is practiced and performed Thinking cross-culturally has led me to see persons as encounters, comparisons and ambiguities that emerge at the interstices of the taken-for-granted. And so, taking inspiration from East Asian uses of person filtered through the practice of translation and anthropology, I argue that a shift to persons could be a methodology for thinking of the human/after ‘the human’.

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