Nonhuman Personhood

“If green gas on the moon speaks to an astronaut, how do we know if it’s a person?”
–Peter Ossorio

Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept maps the common ground of behavioral science. The absence of a shared foundation has given us fragmentation, a siloed state of psychological theory and practice. And the science? The integrity of choice, accountability, reason, and intention are necessary commitments at the cornerstone of civilization and any
person-centered psychotherapy, but when taught along with a “scientific” requirement for reductionism and determinism, reside in contradictory intellectual universes. Peter Ossorio developed the Person Concept to remedy these problems. This book is an introduction to his
work and the community of scientists, scholars, and practitioners of Descriptive Psychology.

Ossorio offered these maxims that capture the discipline’s spirit:
1. The world makes sense, and so do people. They make sense to begin with.
2. It’s one world. Everything fits together. Everything is related to everything else.
3. Things are what they are and not something else instead.
4. Don’t count on the world being simpler than it has to be.

The Person Concept is a single, coherent concept of interdependent component concepts: Individual Persons; Behavior as Intentional Action; Language and Verbal Behavior; Community and Culture; and World and Reality. Descriptive Psychology uses preempirical, theory-neutral formulations and methods, to make explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. The goal is a framework with a place for what is already known with room for what is yet to be found.

Key Features
• Provides a way to compare theories, coordinate empirical findings, and negotiate competent disagreement
• Offers guidance for effective case formulation and integration of therapies
• Explores the dilemmas of personhood and the complexities of human and nonhuman action, investigating “what is a person, and how can we be sure?”
• Follows the implications of Hedonics, Prudence, Ethics, and Aesthetics as intrinsic perspectives and reasons for action
• Applies these concepts to personality and social dynamics, consciousness, relationship change, emotional behavior, deliberation, and judgment
• Provides a guide to establishing and restoring empathy––especially when it’s difficult

Les décisions de justice qui confèrent une personnalité juridique à la Nature se multiplient à travers le monde. Cette notion, inspirée de philosophies éco-centriques, consiste à octroyer de véritables droits à des éléments de la Nature, qui deviennent ainsi des personnes juridiques à part entière, à l’égal de n’importe quelle personne physique ou morale. Cette proposition nouvelle est sujette à diverses interprétations, traduites d’autant de façons dans les droits nationaux. La question centrale qui est posée dans ce travail est la suivante : « Quelle plus-value cette notion apporte-t-elle en terme d’accès au droit de l’environnement ? ».
La deuxième partie entend dresser le tableau, esquisser le cadre juridique dans lequel cette question évolue. Elle répertorie les fondements juridiques qui peuvent être mobilisés lors d’une action en justice en matière d’environnement. En droit international dans un premier temps, puis dans les droits nationaux des trois pays sur lesquels nous avons choisi de nous attarder : l’Equateur, la Colombie et l’Inde. L’Equateur est le pays qui a le plus intimement intégré la notion de personnalité juridique pour la Nature puisqu’elle figure au sein même de sa Constitution. La Colombie consacre quant à elle la notion à demi-mots dans ses textes de lois, et à voix haute lors de décisions judiciaires. Alors qu’en Inde, c’est la décision qui précède la loi.
La troisième partie se concentre en détail sur les éléments qui différencient les pays qui adoptent l’idée de personnalité juridique pour la Nature et ceux qui ne le font pas. Trois sous-questions sont posées quant à l’octroi d’une personnalité juridique à la Nature. La première est de savoir si elle implique une définition plus large de ceux et celles qui peuvent en exiger la protection dans le chef des pays qui adoptent la notion. On remarque que l’intérêt à agir est considéré plus largement, entre autre parce que l’intérêt collectif est pris en compte et que tous les citoyens sont a priori concernés. En Equateur, il est possible de se présenter au nom de la Nature. En Colombie, de nombreux mécanismes ainsi que le droit à un environnement sain garantissent une grande implication des citoyens. En Inde, il existe un statut spécial de représentant et de citoyen ainsi qu’une interprétation large du droit à la vie. La deuxième sous-question concerne les juridictions susceptibles d'en assurer la protection. En Inde, un « tribunal vert » a été créé. Ailleurs, les juridictions demeurent plutôt classiques, mais s’emparent de ce concept nouveau. La dernière sous-question traite de l’existence de mesures originales. En Equateur, il est possible de demander l’inversion de la charge de preuve, des mesures de protection ne serait-ce qu’en cas de « doute », ainsi que des mesures au nom de la Nature elle-même. En Colombie et en Inde, la mesure réellement nouvelle est la mise sur pied d’un système de gardiennage ou de tutorat pour la Nature.

This paper analyses the way Richard Powers portrays plant life in his 2018 novel The Overstory. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, trees are presented as actors and not passive objects. By undermining the mind/ matter, human/nonhuman distinctions Powers reduces the gap separating his human protagonists and trees. The latter have agency, intentionality and the ability to communicate. Powers also attempts to find a new way to give his vegetal life voice. Instead of anthropomorphizing them, plants talk in their own material way. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by, among others, Donna Haraway Anna Tsing, Lowenhaupt, Mark Jackson, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and also from Michael Marder’s and Serpil Opperman’s ideas on plant language and storytelling.

"This article argues for a specifically Darwinian etiology of the image of the monstrous plant, so ubiquitous in the modern genres of speculative fiction. In the profusion of such narratives in the late 19th century, we can identify a collective anxiety about the implications of universal common descent: acknowledging a shared evolutionary heritage for plants and animals threatens the boundary between the two kingdoms that had always permitted the purely instrumentalist and exploitative relationship between humans and plants. Evolutionary anxiety projected onto the figure of the man-eating plant only multiplied in the early pulp magazines, and continued on through John Wyndham's triffids and beyond. Considering the many monstrous plants of early speculative fiction in this way can help expand the purview of the critical formation known as animal studies: while this paper does not advocate for the development of a "plant studies," it invites further thinking about the implications of taking the word "species" in animal studies a little more literally, as the word so often seems to mean “mammal species" or "animal species."

I argue that contradictions between contemporary urban Hindutva and more rural and subaltern Bengali Hindu and Muslim religious practices highlight not just deep-seated ideas about caste and community but also reveal a particularly distinct relation to the nonhuman.

Personhood has become an important element of archaeological theory in the last two decades. Following C. Fowler's (2016) analysis, most approaches to the study of personhood conceptualise it through either a Single-Spectrum or a Multiple-Spectrum model. The former tends to assume that the tension between individual/dividual personhood is a central, structuring element of personhood, usually making use of extensive ethnographic analogies. The latter, on the other hand, rejects the centrality of the individual/dividual tension, along with any evolutionary understanding of the development of personhood and any sort of aprioristic assumption about how it might have looked in any given society. At the same time, the increasing popularity of posthumanist approaches, including the arrival of both the Ontological and Affective turns, raise questions about how these new trends will contribute to debates on personhood. This session aims to debate the current state of approaches to personhood in archaeology, particularly focusing on the following questions:
• To what extent are historical and ethnographic analogies still useful for the archaeological study of personhood?
• How can new approaches, such as New Materialism and the Ontological Turn, contribute to the study of non-human personhood?
• Is the single-spectrum model still relevant to the study of prehistoric personhood?
• How can archaeological approaches contribute to the study of personhood in contemporary societies?

This essay takes as its starting point a recent judgment by the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, which denied habeas corpus from the chimpanzee Tommy. The conclusion of the judgment is not challenged, but rather its underlying premise: that legal personhood could be straightforwardly equated with right-holding and/or duty-bearing. The Tommy case was not about granting the first legal right to the chimpanzee, because it already holds numerous rights. Neither can it be claimed that legal personhood concerns the capacity to be a party in legal relations, as nonpersons participate in Hohfeldian legal relations, too. The essay argues that legal personhood should rather be understood as being encompassed in the specific legal institutions that distinguish legal persons from nonpersons.

What does it mean to be a person? The designation of personhood is given to those entities who have moral and/or legal status, and the significance of the designation varies depending on whether one is contemplating metaphysical, moral, or legal personhood. In this era of exponential technological advances, our previous understandings and worldviews are challenged ; we are witness to the creation of new life-forms and the interconnectedness of current life-forms. The lines between persons and property are becoming increasingly blurry. There are at least three major areas in which technology is challenging and even forcing us to reconsider traditional notions of personhood: fetal personhood, animal rights, and human-machine mergers.

In recent years, humanists and social scientists have shown increasing interest in human-animal relations – to the point where many now speak of an ‘animal turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Across history, psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology, philosophy, and law, an interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies has been forming. Certain common themes run through this diverse field, not least the reproduction of human-animal difference, and the conditions and the implications thereof.

Despite the long history of language use as a marker of such difference, the academic quest to investigate the boundary between human and nonhuman has, somewhat surprisingly, not taken root within rhetorical studies – at least not until now. For this edited volume, we therefore call for chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our ‘brute roots.’ In other words, this book invites contributions which enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. Would such a turn imply, for instance, that rhetoric needs a nonanthropocentric reconfiguration? The question, perhaps, is this: What difference would it make to the discipline if we assumed that nonhuman forms of communication were as interesting as human ones?

In this article, I focus on the ways advertising language has helped precipitate the idea of corporate personhood, and how corporate 10.1353/bio.2014.0013personality has come to supplant human personality in particular aspects of U.S. culture. Corporations use advertising to create an impersonal persona to convince people they have a relationship with the things (products) they buy. Drawing on Sharon Cameron’s work regarding impersonality in a somewhat different context, I argue that the mechanisms of advertising, which simulate and manipulate human emotions and relations, are intertwined with the creation of corporate personhood and corporate biography. While noting that the concept is fluid, Cameron proposes that “representations of the impersonal suspend, eclipse and even destroy the idea of the person as such, who is not treated as a social, political or individual entity” (ix). In addition to the “nonhuman” attributes Cameron identifies with the impersonal, I would add, in the context of corporate personhood, the mechanical, generic, and parasitic: that is, impersonal systems function as simulacra of the personal and siphon personal qualities from people or imitate human processes (x). Advertising, the corporate speech I depict as impersonal and depersonalizing, provides a primary register for creating corporate “autobiographies,” which I define as the networks of representation that reify corporations as coherent and personalized entities, rather than treat them as legal fabrications. As one would expect in a zero-sum game, these issues related to advertising, language, and corporations are intimately connected—one can’t apprehend the corporate person separately from the corporate language of advertising. I argue that, though it is mediated, advertising is the most (quasi-)autobiographical utterance a corporation can make; most biographical representations of a “corporation” embody and ratify it as a coherent entity.

What does it mean to be a person? The designation of personhood is given to those entities who have moral and/or legal status, and the significance of the designation varies depending on whether one is contemplating metaphysical, moral, or legal personhood. In this era of exponential technological advances, our previous understandings and worldviews are challenged ; we are witness to the creation of new life-forms and the interconnectedness of current life-forms. The lines between persons and property are becoming increasingly blurry. There are at least three major areas in which technology is challenging and even forcing us to reconsider traditional notions of personhood: fetal personhood, animal rights, and human-machine mergers.

In this account of interspecies intimacy in the enclaved institution of the Nepali elephant stable, I explore not-just-human figurations of personhood and argue for the methodological inclusion of nonhuman informants as subjective actors and contributing participants in ethnographic research. I explain how my experience forming a trusting, working relationship with a female elephant in a hybrid community of humans and elephants revealed the conceptual limitations of a human-focused tradition of ethnography ill-equipped for the generative sociality of interspecies encounters. I discuss questions of nonhuman personhood and I consider developments in the animal behavioral sciences, while also investigating the cultural logic by which Nepali mahouts attribute personhood to their elephants. This exploration of apprenticeship, personhood, and affective encounter is situated in a distinctly interspecies strand of multispecies studies, and is a contribution to ethnoelephantology as an interdisciplinary approach to the social, historical, and ecological relations between humans and elephants. It is 5 a.m. and as I open the door of my hut I see Sitasma Kali and Kha Prasad silhouetted in the wintry mist. Mother and baby are waiting as usual, tethered to their post, ready for the first duty of the day: grass cutting. Barefoot, armed with a stick and a sickle, and carrying a sack to sit on, I approach my elephant companion. As usual, she extends her trunk, curling it around me for an olfactory probing in what has become a communicative ritual of loving trust. Her warm breath caresses my skin as my hand

Monica Sousa considers how VanderMeer’s biotech postapocalyptic novel Borne (2017) explores ideas of posthumanist empathy towards animals created through biotechnology. Borne follows a scavenger, Rachel, in the ruins of a nameless future city who finds Borne, an enigmatic hyper-advanced genetically produced organism, whose body and mental capabilities rapidly evolve, resulting in Rachel blurring the boundaries between plant, animal, and person. While Borne invites readers to consider how biotechnology can have dire consequences and to consider the implications and consequences of creating
genetically modified animals, a larger focus of Sousa’s chapter is to consider human responsibility towards these creations once they have been created, exploring posthumanist empathy in the novel, and further concerns about the notion of personhood.

This paper analyses the way Richard Powers portrays plant life in his 2018 novel The Overstory . Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, trees are presented as actors and not passive objects. By undermining the mind/ matter, human/ nonhuman distinctions Powers reduces the gap separating his human protagonists and trees. The latter have agency, intentionality and the ability to communicate. Powers also attempts to find a new way to give his vegetal life voice. Instead of anthropomorphizing them, plants talk in their own material way. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by, among others, Donna Haraway Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt, Mark Jackson, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and also from Michael Marder’s and Serpil Opperman’s ideas on plant language and storytelling.

The aim of this paper is to argue that the best way to understand most of the questions raised by Personal Identity Online (PIO) is to drop the assumption that it is simply a special case of the more general and well-known Personal Identity (PI) problem and that, as such, one can resort to standard PI approaches to explain PIO.
I argue that this assumption be dropped because standard approaches to PI often fail to recognize that many of the questions they address are not Strict PI (SPI) issues (i.e. questions about the persistence of persons in time) but different philosophical problems related to (and in some sense even dependent on) the concept of the person and the most fundamental problem of the conditions of personhood.
Having described the different philosophical problems related to the concept of the person and argued that personhood is the fundamental problem to be addressed, I then proceed to substantiate that claim with regards to online situations, examining a number of them (e.g. social network profiles, bloggers’ profiles, avatars, etc.) in the light of this methodological classification. I argue that, in most cases, online situations are on a par with offline situations (some taken from everyday life; some from PI’s well-known thought experiments) and that the answer to be given depends on what exactly the situation and its features are.
Building on this, I finish the paper with a discussion of how successfully certain existing approaches to PI can be applied to online situations. Specifically, I claim that psychological approaches to the PI problem may be better equipped to deal with most of online situations than their somatic counterparts. I also claim that, within the wider range of psychological approaches, narrative theories can provide a reasonable starting point to assess online situations.

This article considers objections to current litigation strategies of the US-based Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), which seek to extend legal personhood and liberty rights to nonhuman animals who possess 'practical autonomy'. By tying personhood to intellectual abilities, so the objections go, such strategies endanger the present legal standing of humans with profound cognitive impairments. This article will argue that such cause for concern is largely misplaced for two reasons. First, the NhRP argue that practical autonomy is only a sufficient condition for personhood, not a necessary one. Second, drawing on theoretical and empirical literature, the article will argue that speciesism itself is a multiplier of oppressive theories, attitudes, beliefs and practices that negatively affect marginalized humans, including humans with cognitive impairments. The NhRP's attempts to reduce speciesism in the legal domain are thus hypothesized as being part of the solution to discrimination against marginalized humans, not as part of the problem.

1. Personhood from the Legal Perspective. 2. Philosophical Underpinnings of the Legal Approach to Personhood. 3. Contemporary Natural Sciences and Their Implications. 4. Radical vs. Modest Naturalisation. 5. The Idea of Non-Personal Subjects of Law. 6. Conclusion

The felt sense of whoness is not a me-ness…me is self-fixation and in fact the sense of whoness can free us from objectified self-fixation. The sense of me often replaces the sense of who. When the experiential nonconceptual felt sense of who is not known or experienced, the felt sense of me-ness arises desperately. The sense of who is unfixatedness and this innate sense of no-thingness can be found and even experienced as ongoing timeless awareness in time. Innermost awareness in its manifestation can be experienced as whoness, no-thingness and open knowingness. The sense of me-ness is self-fixated, self-referencing and this me-ness can obscure the experiential arising of whoness. The sense of me-ness reflects the being in mind alone, and the sense of whoness reflects being deeply within the awareness field. Whoness manifests most directly as pause and within the pause. The pause is unbound in betweeness…the space in between..transitional spaciousness. When the spaciousness of the breathless breath opens whoness can be felt as uncontained and unbound. Whoness is experiential openness….openess without a name or prior to name. We may say openness prior to mind. Dasein to use Heideggarian language. When the breathless breath manifests the experience is always mysterious. What does breathless breath mean? Breathless means no breath, there is no breath. The word breath here, in this context signifies that there is no breath but there is respiration. There is this inner most experience of no breath, no inhaling or exhaling of air and yet there is respiration. There is a respiration without breath and beyond breath. For instance, in the Kechari mudra this breathless breath experience takes place. The breath stops and yet there is an inner sense of breathless respiration. This experience of respiration without breath is described in various traditions of eastern philosophy. In the Dzogchen tradition Longchenpa describes the experience in his great text Words and Meaning. This

Estudios etnográficos sobre grupos cazadores recolectores y pescadores dan cuenta de un mundo de la vida en donde la agencia, la noción de persona o la capacidad de interactuar no se reducen a los humanos sino que pueden estar presentes en entidades no humanas del entorno, conformándose así una socialidad extensiva hacia los distintos elementos del paisaje. Bajo esta premisa se plantea una propuesta teórico metodológica que deriva en un modelo para el estudio del paisaje arqueológico desde un enfoque relacional. Entender el paisaje desde un enfoque relacional implica que las diversas entidades del entorno (objetos, animales, lugares, imágenes, etc.) dejan de ser elementos pasivos o externos al sujeto para ser concebidas como entidades potencialmente activas y dinámicas involucradas en una red de relaciones en cuyos contextos de interacción tienen injerencia.
En este libro se aborda el estudio del arte rupestre de un sector de la costa central de Sonora, México. Por lo general, el arte rupestre es considerado como la representación gráfica de algo, sean animales, humanos o fosfenos. Esto implica que la figura sea vista como algo que en realidad no es, y por tanto como una entidad estática, externa al sujeto e inanimada. La noción de agencia y persona en el marco de una ontología relacional, permite analizar el papel activo de las figuras pintadas en la roca como parte de los mecanismos de formación y negociación de las identidades.
Pinturas espirituales. Identidad y agencia en el paisaje relacional de sociedades cazadoras recolectoras y pescadoras es un libro de profunda reflexión ontológica y epistemológica acerca del quehacer arqueológico y de cómo este paso es necesario para el desarrollo de nuevas formas de abordar el estudio del pasado.

Los kirineris constituyen un subgrupo matsigenka de contacto reciente. Desde las primeras noticias de su presencia han sido considerados, por matsigenkas ribereños y blancos, como los salvajes de las cabeceras en la margen derecha del Urubamba. En tal escenario regional aún de actualidad, un jefe kirineri explora e incorpora la alteridad mientras produce su propia identidad. Este ensayo examina los discursos y acciones con los que este jefe ejecuta la «facultad mimética». Son dos las entidades a las que hace frente con este propósito: el caníbal salvaje desprovisto de intencionalidad, y la intencionalidad invisible del libro. Con el fin de entender este idioma de la alteridad, un foco central de este ensayo será la teoría matsigenka de la persona.

Might we be facing the end of the human species? This question can be understood at least in two ways: we (humans) as a species will become obsolete and give way to a new, possibly better, species or we might go extinct altogether due to disastrous consequences we have contributed to on Earth. We might give a conclusive answer to both of them on the ground of John Harris’s moral thought. To the first meaning of the question, we can give an anti-essentialist answer referring negatively to identity driven vision of humanity. To the second one we can give a moral answer that refers to personhood and to what matters morally. In order to view this question from a slightly different point of view, a notion of a cyborg is helpful.

A cyborg is not only what it is—a cybernetic organism (a combination of machine and human)—but also what it is in relation to a given environment. In the case of the classic definition of a cyborg, cosmic space is mentioned. Apart from the vision of a cyborg defined in relations to body, to subject, to humanity, we can view it as a concept that can be defined as a moral category. In this sense we can ask which cosmos matters morally now?

With this theoretical merger of moral theory and cyborg ontology I will try to take a look at the imagined visions of humankind futures (in speculative evolution novels and afrofuturistic vision of an Afronaut) and the more corporeal examples of persons who might be cyborgs. Is there a moral difference between human being and a cyborg? From John Harris’s perspective of there might be non. However, the very notion of a cyborg, insofar as it is compatible with the project of enhancing evolution, perhaps indicates that in a moral sense we have a duty to cyborgise.

Zoological consultants in Western Australia survey northern quolls (a small, cat-like marsupial) for environmental impact assessment. Confronted by habitat destruction and on the verge of extinction, northern quolls are protected as a conservation significant species, yet their precarious ecological position is made visible only through zoological work. This article explores how consultative zoologists negotiate relationships between themselves and northern quolls in order to both craft detailed population studies and mobilise the species’ power to reframe human development. Traversing environmental legislation, zoologists nurture (rather than take for granted) quoll relations, manifesting an attentiveness that entangles the animal in fact-making and modes of environmental protection. Drawing from a growing compendium of multispecies scholarship, this article questions how attentiveness can bring new entanglements into being, and how these entanglements can be managed in order to both make sense of the world and level the playing field for those nonhumans who inhabit it.

Simple dog burials, dating primarily to the second half of the 1st millennium b.c.e. (Persian–Hellenistic periods [ca. 6th–1st centuries b.c.e.]), have been excavated at more than a dozen Levantine sites, ranging from a handful of burials to more than 1,000 at Ashkelon. This study systematizes previously discussed canine interments, distinguishing intentional whole burials from other phenomena (e.g., dogs found in refuse pits), and suggests a new interpretation in light of human mortuary practice in the Iron Age II–III-period (ca. 10th–4th centuries b.c.e.) Levant. The buried dogs seem to be individuals from unmanaged populations living within human settlements and not pets or working dogs. Frequent references to dogs in literary and epigraphic Northwest Semitic evidence (including Hebrew, Phoenician, and Punic personal names) indicate a complex, familiar relationship between dogs and humans in the Iron Age Levant, which included positive associations such as loyalty and obedience. At some point in the mid-1st millennium b.c.e., mortuary rites began to be performed by humans for their feral canine “neighbors” in a manner resembling contemporaneous low-energy–expenditure human burials. This behavioral change may represent a shift in the conception of social boundaries in the Achaemenid–Hellenistic-period Levant.

Punishing animal cruelty strengthens nonhuman rights and common justice.  Today, bystanders should not be liable for reasonably protecting other animals from such abuse.  If anything, the law should encourage these interventions by exculpation.  This article outlines how existing legal doctrine can serve this end.  Three familiar defenses can be made to justify force here, though with varying mileage.  A “defense of property” theory would be familiar to the traditional legal status of nonhumans.  Yet this permission is ordinarily limited to property owners and non-deadly force, making it a less robust avenue of defense.  The historical and lingering inconsistencies of treating other animals solely as items of property also point away from this regime.  Instead, arguments may be made that at least in terms of their emerging protection from cruelty, nonhumans are legal persons.  Therefore, bystanders who enforce this right should argue that their actions fall under a more permissive theory of “defense of persons,” which has the benefit of allowing a wider range of actors and force.  Likewise, appeals to the public good and lesser evil of using moderate force against animal abusers could allow an extension of the situational defense of “necessity.”  In any event, due to the shocking nature and unfortunate prevalence of animal cruelty, a reasonable third-party permission to intervene should be discussed.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations are legal persons--meaning not that they are human, but that as entities they have certain legal rights equivalent to persons.  My thesis is that this fluidity in perception and definition of what counts as a “person” also parallels our increasingly common struggles with determining our evolving relationship with animals and Artificial Intelligence.  Recent lawsuits by Stephen Wise and the Non-Human Rights Project regarding the “legal personhood” of captive apes and other animals, as well as our animals’ continued evolution from working servants to members of our families, and even the similar titles of recent books such as Citizen Canine and Cyborg Citizen (both about the increasing elision of our definition of personhood) display common themes of ambivalence toward our non-human companions—artificial and natural—in Western society.

En este artículo discuto las posibilidades que se abren para la defensa del territorio indígena desde una perspectiva de análisis ontológica y señalo algunas limitaciones de los discursos ambientales y multiculturales. A partir del caso de la ocupación del cerro Inarwa por el ejército, en territorio del pueblo iku, en Colombia, y de una metodología etnográfica, profundizo en el territorio indígena como tejido de relaciones entre seres del cosmos. Estas relaciones movilizan
potencias que se incorporan para constituir cuerpos y personas. Tanto el
territorio como el cuerpo son entidades inestables e interdependientes que se transforman en función de las relaciones que establecen.

Both Jotterand's (2010) and Bostrom's (2005; 2007) use of the term “dignity” with regard to human versus posthuman miss the mark; they create a dichotomized,“us versus them” scenario, rather than recognizing the interconnectedness of all sentient beings—interconnectedness, as in nonseparability and entanglement and in feminist theory (Barad 2007 2. Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes' concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor—in modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes' political thought, they are assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it.

Environmental pragmatism is rightly described as " cynical " if good reasons exist to worry its advocates would endorse oppressive measures to achieve its goals. Given the history of human chauvinism, moreover, this worry is not far-fetched. It is, however, misguided: conflation notwithstanding, human chauvinism and human-centeredness (anthropocentrism) are not the same thing. " Chauvinism " describes an objectionable but alterable course of human history; anthropocentrism is an indigenous feature of the experiential conditions of Homo sapiens from which no particular course of human history necessarily follows. Properly understood, I argue, human-centeredness is an ally in the quest for environmental responsibility—not its foe.