Mauss’s investigation begins with the ‘mask’ culture of the Native American Pueblo of Zuñi, and the pre-Roman Etruscans; he finds in their practices the notion of the ‘person’ as something like a mask or role – that is, like dramatis persona.448 And while the
practices of the Pueblo of Zuñi are far removed from the historical process out of which the ‘personal identity’ debate emerge, this use of person is – as many have noted – apparent in the etymological roots of the English word ‘person’, as a mask, through which (per) resounds the voice (sonare). (Wiggins himself recognizes this.)449
447 Mauss 1938: 1
448 This is an example of the unfortunate consequences of his evolutionary analysis; the, still extant, Native American cultures are seen to be in some senses ‘stuck’ in the ‘aboriginal state’ (Mauss 1938:4) out of which our own culture emerged.
449 Wiggins 1996: 282 n.27. It is worthwhile noting that Mauss questions this reading: ‘In reality the word does not even seem to be from a sound Latin root. It is believed to be of Etruscan origin, like other nouns ending in ‘-na’ (Porsenna, Caecina, etc.). Meillet and Ernout’s Dictionnaire Etymologique compares it to a word, farsu, handed down in garbled form, and M. Benveniste informs me that it may come from a Greek borrowing made by the Etruscans, πρόσωπον (‘perso’).’ (Mauss 1938: 15) Nevertheless, as he emphasizes, either way it emerges from the Etruscan’s mask civilization. (Mauss 1938: 15)
In these ‘mask cultures’, the communities, or ‘totemic groups’ are described as possessing only a fixed number of names450 – and in naming rituals, these ‘characters’ or
‘roles’, or ‘persons’ are conferred on members of the group. Following this baptismal rite, the bearers of the name are regarded, at any time, as the reincarnation of the original bearer.451 Indeed, for Mauss, this account of ‘person’ as mask is central to the logic of
reincarnation, where a single person is seen to span different biological lives: The individual is born with his name and his social functions… The number of individuals, names, souls and roles is limited in the clan, and the line of the clan is merely a collection (ensemble) of rebirths and deaths of individuals who are always the same.452
On first reading, these kinds of ethnographic details might seem to register on a completely different level to the one that Wiggins is working on. But attention to S&S, and his earlier paper, ‘Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness’, reveals that he explicitly engages with exactly this kind of hypostatization of social roles, in analysing our understanding of what it is to be a ‘person’.453 His point of reference is Clifford
Geertz’s Person, Time and Conduct in Bali rather than Mauss, but the issues discussed are strikingly similar, focussing on ‘the strange fusion of role and human being that is involved in [the Balinese] system of naming’.454
Wiggins’ comments about Balinese naming practices surface in his discussion of fission. Fission becomes a conceptual possibility on the neo-Lockean model because an exclusive focus on consciousness cannot proscribe against, e.g. hemispherectomies, and subsequent so-called ‘deltas’ in the stream of consciousness.455 One aim, in ‘Locke,
Butler and the Stream of Consciousness…’ and S&S, is to demonstrate how this sort of splitting would destabilize our everyday usage of the term, since it presents persons as things that can transcend bodies, and individual lives.456 If this is right, then for the
descriptivist the neo-Lockean’s focus on memory and consciousness cannot be seen to constitute personal identity (since it clashes so forcefully with our everyday pre- theoretical practices). He writes:
450 Allen 1985: 32 451 Ibid: 32
452 Mauss, as quoted in Allen 1985 (33) 453 Wiggins 1976: 146, and 1980: 166 454 Wiggins 1980: 166
455 See Wiggins 1976 for this ‘delta’ terminology. 456 Wiggins 1980: 163ff
The conceptual possibility of a delta in the stream of consciousness jogs our whole focus on the concept of personhood.457
Geertz’s study of Balinese society becomes important, therefore, because it describes an ‘extant conception’,458 where person functions less like a substance sortal, and more like
what Wiggins calls a ‘concrete universal’.459
What is a ‘concrete universal’? Wiggins’ discussion of these entities is only cursory (emerging in dialogue with his reading of Plato’s Parmenides).460 He outlines the
idea we have of a type of being with potentially spatially and temporally dislocated parts – the collection of all Cox’s Orange Pippin trees, for example,461 or, in this context, the
collection of those who wear the same mask.462 (An ancillary point to be made here, and
revisited below, is that whatever they are, concrete universals have a different metaphysical character to substances). For the Balinese, a single person may be comprised of distinct individuals. Nor is this hypostatization of social roles restricted to the Balinese, and the Zuñi, and the pre-Roman Etruscans; Wiggins finds a version of this concrete universal conception of person in our own culture (or, as he puts it, ‘a neighbouring compartment’). He quotes from Sartre’s commentary on Flaubert:
Un homme n’est jamais un individu; il vaudrait mieux l’appeler un universal singulier; totalisé et, par la même, universalisé par son époque, il la retotalise en se reproduisant en elle comme singularité.463
[A man is never an individual; it would be better to call him a singular universal; total, and also, universalized by his epoch, he retotalizes it by reproducing it as a singularity.]
Examples abound in Western literature.464 The point is that, in these contexts, ‘person’ is
understood as a role that is played, and which can be played by different individuals. It
457 Wiggins 1980: 169 458 Ibid: 167 459 Ibid: 166 460 Wiggins 2001: 229 461 Wiggins 1980: 166 462 Ibid: 167 463 Ibid: 167
appears that it is not only an ‘extant conception’, but one which exists (if residually) in our own thoughts about what persons are. And it is one, as Wiggins notes, that clashes with the simultaneous and persuasive thought that a person is an entity with an individual biography:
[T]here is no question of building up a coherent historical record of the individual passions, thoughts and actions of an individual person. There is little or no provision for the individual or, as it were, the perspectival aspect of human experience. The whole ordering of the events of human history is interpreted so far as possible in terms of the recurrence of generic types of doing or suffering. And where there scarcely is such a thing as history, the idea of biography loses all purchase…465
Wiggins sees the concrete universal conception to clash too strongly with our everyday attitudes to person and the practices that relate to them – so he tries to shear it from the central notion. Yet more needs to be said for this to be other than arbitrary. The clash between the ‘mask’ conception of person and our everyday practices is taken as grounds for rejecting that conception of person; but could it not equally be taken as evidence of the contradictory make-up of the notion itself? It is true that the ‘concrete universal’ conception sits awkwardly alongside our use of ‘person’ to pick out a locus of moral attributes, but perhaps this is because our notion is syncretic, with elements organized by diverse rationales. It is not immediately clear what licenses Wiggins’ disavowal of the ‘concrete universal’ conception. It is, maybe, significant that this discussion of Geertz and the Balinese disappears after S&S (and is not referred to in the secondary literature).