What Constitutes a Person? Inalienability, Value, and Personhood in Anthropological Theory

In anthropology, inalienability as a theoretical concept may seem to be about the economy or grammar of significant objects, but most fundamentally-across both linguistic and cultural anthropology-it is about the constitution of personhood.Linguistically, inalienable possessions may be evidenced through either grammatical structure or discursive practice.Either way, the basic idea is the same: some things and beings take part in the very fabric of a person or social group.For example, in the Susu (Sosoo) language of West Africa, in which I conducted research for the first decade of my career, body parts, consanguine family members (excluding children), and homes are grammatically coded as inalienable by the omission of a possessive pronoun.In English, although we do not use grammar to mark "arm" as inalienable, there are discursive conventions that make it clear that "arm" is part of the person.It would be strange to say, for example, "I met a woman who had an arm," but we could easily say "I met a woman who had a dog" (see Kockelman 2019:28).Cultural anthropologists, for their part, have focused largely on inalienable wealth in the form of heirlooms or other important objects which are intimately bound up with social identity (Godelier 1999; Mauss 1990;