Mosko, “Unbecoming individuals”
Mosko, Mark. Unbecoming individuals: The partible character of the Christian person. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1), 2015
According to the received wisdom in Melanesian ethnography and elsewhere, Christianity is âunrelentingly individualisticâ (e.g., Robbins 2004: 293). In this article, drawing upon the notion of âdividualâ or âpartible personhoodâ of the New Melanesian Ethnography and implicit in the classic Van Gennepian model of rites of passage, I revisit Louis Dumontâs, Kenelm Burridgeâs, and Max Weberâs authoritative conceptualizations of Christian personhood. I seek to demonstrate that in the early Christian church and the later Protestant Reformation of Luther and Calvin, the person, whether human or divine, qualifies instead as a dividualâa kind of agent radically distinct from the canonical âpossessive individualâ of Western political and economic discourse. Following Dumont, Burridge, and Weber on close reading, I argue that the seeming âindividualityâ of Christian persons consists merely in singular moments of overarching processes of elicitive detachment, gift-transfer, incorporation, and reciprocation whereby the constituent parts of total or overall dividual persons are transacted. Christian âindividualism,â in short, is nothing less than an instance of dividual personhood and agency, fundamentally distinct from the possessive individual of modern secular society.