What makes a person? The question seems abstract until history turns brutal. In times of war, conquest, dispossession and imperial violence, the answer becomes a matter not of metaphysics but of life and death. Who counts as fully human? Who may claim rights? Who can be harmed with impunity? Who is imagined as capable of responsibility, grief, reason or moral relation? Every political order, whether it admits it or not, rests on some answer to the question of what a person is.
Modern liberal societies often answer by pointing to the individual. A person is a bounded centre of consciousness, a bearer of rights, a moral agent who can make choices, hold property, enter contracts, obey laws and be held accountable for actions. This picture is powerful, and in many contexts indispensable. Without it, legal protections can collapse into paternalism or collective domination. Yet as an account of how persons actually come into being, it is strangely thin. No infant arrives as a sovereign self. No child invents language alone. No moral agent first exists in isolation and only later discovers society.
Around the age of one, most human children begin to display capacities that make personhood visible to others. They learn to speak or gesture within a shared language. They develop object permanence, recognising that things continue to exist when no longer seen. They begin to respond to others not merely as stimuli but as intentional beings with whom they are entangled in expectation, care and demand. They become, in a recognisable sense, persons. But this becoming does not happen inside a sealed mind. It happens among faces, hands, voices, rhythms, prohibitions, touches, absences and returns.
A century of anthropology, phenomenology and developmental science has made it increasingly difficult to treat personhood as a private substance hidden inside the individual. Persons are not discovered like stones. They are formed. They emerge through participation in other persons, in households, in languages, in histories, in landscapes, in ritual and in the everyday circulation of responsibility. To be a person is not first to stand apart. It is first to be drawn into a world already inhabited by others.
The difficulty is that participation can sound like a soft word. It may suggest cooperation, belonging or social involvement, as though the person already exists and then decides to take part. The argument I want to trace is more radical. Participation is not something added to personhood after the fact. It is the condition through which personhood becomes possible at all. We do not begin as isolated selves who later enter relation. We begin in relation and only gradually learn the fragile art of saying “I”.
In September 1926, two of the most important anthropologists of the early 20th century met for the first time in New York. Franz Boas, a German-born Jewish scholar who had become a leading figure at Columbia University, had transformed American anthropology by attacking racial determinism and insisting on the dignity and complexity of all human cultures. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, also Jewish and European, was a professor in Paris whose work had moved from ethics into the comparative study of thought. Both men were learned, politically liberal and committed to the unity of humankind. Yet they did not agree on how to describe human difference.
Lévy-Bruhl had begun as a philosopher of responsibility. His doctoral thesis concerned the legal and moral conditions under which persons may be held accountable. What fascinated him was that responsibility did not seem to arise first as an abstract rule. It appeared earlier, and more deeply, as a felt relation. Before one can obey a law, one must already experience others as beings to whom one is in some way answerable. Moral life, in this view, begins not with a command but with a bond.
That insight led him toward a larger question: how do human beings become thinking persons? Do all humans think in the same way? Reading ethnographic accounts from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and reflecting on his own travels in China, Lévy-Bruhl became convinced that many peoples described by ethnographers did not organise experience according to the logical assumptions that European philosophers had treated as universal since Aristotle. Their reasoning, especially in ritual and religious contexts, appeared to tolerate contradiction, identification and overlapping being in ways that Western logic struggled to recognise.
His language now sounds dated and troubling. He wrote of “primitive mentality”, a phrase that later generations would rightly find dangerous. Yet his claim was not that such people were unintelligent or incapable of practical reasoning. On the contrary, he repeatedly insisted that they solved ordinary problems with competence and subtlety. His point was that their worlds seemed to be structured by what he called participation: a mode of being and thinking in which persons, ancestors, animals, objects, places and powers could share existence without being reduced to separate, self-contained units.
The word drew on a long philosophical history. Plato had used methexis to describe participation, and medieval theologians had developed participatio to speak of creatures sharing in divine being. Lévy-Bruhl adapted the term to describe forms of life in which people appeared not simply to represent the world but to take part in it through relations of shared substance, obligation and presence. In such worlds, a person could be linked to a clan animal, an ancestor, a name, a ritual object or a place in ways that were not metaphorical in the thin modern sense.
The scandal was not that others lacked logic, but that European logic lacked a theory of relation.
For Lévy-Bruhl, this presented a theoretical problem. If these forms of thought did not obey the law of non-contradiction in the way philosophers expected, how should they be described? Were they inferior, earlier, mystical, prelogical, or simply different? He and Émile Durkheim debated the matter. The terms they inherited were inadequate, and some were contaminated from the beginning. Even when used without biological racism, words such as “inferior” or “primitive” carried a hierarchy that could easily be weaponised.
Boas understood that danger with particular clarity. Working in the United States, where racial classification shaped education, immigration, citizenship and everyday humiliation, he feared that any claim about “primitive mentality” would be read as evidence of congenital intellectual deficiency. In the American context, the assertion that some peoples ignored contradiction could sound too much like the racist fantasy that they were incapable of reason.
The disagreement between Boas and Lévy-Bruhl was therefore not merely empirical. It concerned audience, consequence and political danger. Both men rejected crude racism. Both believed in the unity of humankind. Both respected the peoples about whom they wrote. But they inhabited different intellectual climates. Boas, in a settler society organised around racial difference, emphasised cultural relativism and the incommensurability of historically formed worlds. Lévy-Bruhl, writing within French academic universalism, was more willing to speak of varied mentalities along a shared human trajectory.
From our present vantage point, we can see what each perceived and what each risked. Boas saw the violence that follows when difference is treated as deficiency. Lévy-Bruhl saw that personhood and thought do not everywhere take the form assumed by post-Enlightenment individualism. Boas protected equality by resisting hierarchy. Lévy-Bruhl exposed the limits of an abstract universal person modelled too closely on the modern European individual. Neither position was sufficient alone.
By the 1930s, as fascism spread across Europe and the catastrophe of war approached, Lévy-Bruhl began to revise his own work. He had become troubled by the small but decisive pronouns that structured his earlier writing: we and they, our mentality and theirs, modern and primitive. The distinction no longer held. European populations, supposedly heirs to logic, science and rational self-command, were participating in mass political passions that defied contradiction and dissolved individuality into collective myth. If modern people could think and act through participation, then participation could not define the primitive. It had to belong to humanity as such.
In his late notebooks, Lévy-Bruhl moved toward a more radical conclusion. Non-modern peoples use logic when circumstances call for it. Modern peoples are never purely individualistic. Human beings everywhere move between analytic separation and participatory involvement. The error lay not in the ethnographic observation that people participate in others and in the world, but in treating participation as the mark of a lower stage of thought. Participation was not a primitive residue. It was a universal condition.
This late reversal did not simply rescue his theory from its earlier hierarchy. It transformed the theory’s meaning. Participation was no longer a peculiar mentality found among distant peoples. It became a clue to the constitution of persons everywhere. We become ourselves not by escaping participation, but by emerging from it. The child’s earliest relation to caregivers, the felt co-responsibility that precedes explicit rules, the emotional and bodily entanglement through which a world becomes meaningful — all these show that participation is prior to individuality.
Lévy-Bruhl compressed the insight into a marginal note: Être, c’est participer. To be is to participate. The phrase could sound mystical, but its implications are concrete. The self is not an atom with social attachments. It is a history of attachments that has learned to speak in the first person. The singular person is real, but never original in the sense imagined by individualist philosophy. Singularity is achieved through relation and remains open to further relations.
This is why responsibility mattered so much in his earliest work. Rules do not produce the first sense of obligation. Rather, the experience of being with and for others gives rules their force. A child does not become responsible by first grasping an abstract law. She becomes responsible within relationships in which others already matter to her. Norms crystallise out of participation. Law formalises a more primitive, in the deeper sense of prior, experience of answerability.
A person is not an island that later builds bridges, but a crossing where others have already arrived.
The tragedy was that Lévy-Bruhl did not live to develop the full argument publicly. He died in 1939. Paris was soon occupied. His late notes remained obscure until after the war, when former students recovered small moleskin notebooks from his damaged home. In them lay the most transformative part of his thinking: not the old contrast between modern logic and primitive participation, but the possibility that participation is the ground of all personhood.
For several decades, the notebooks exerted only limited influence. Yet the conditions for their rediscovery gradually emerged. French Marxism in the 1970s renewed interest in the formation of persons within historically structured worlds. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus offered a powerful way to think about dispositions embodied through social environments. Persons were not simply bearers of culture as a set of beliefs. They were formed through practices, gestures, spaces, classifications and expectations that became second nature.
Phenomenology also helped reopen the question. Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida all treated the person not as a self-enclosed mind but as ethically, bodily and linguistically constituted. The body was not a container for consciousness. The other was not a secondary object. Language did not merely express thought after the fact. These philosophical movements made it easier to hear what Lévy-Bruhl had been trying, awkwardly and sometimes dangerously, to say.
Anthropologists then returned to the problem of personhood with new tools. Marilyn Strathern’s work in Melanesia, for example, challenged the assumption that persons everywhere are imagined as bounded individuals. She described persons as partible and dividual: constituted through relations, exchanges, gendered substances and social connections. Tim Ingold and others developed related approaches, emphasising that persons emerge through dwelling, movement, skill and participation in environments rather than through detached cognition alone.
At the same time, developmental psychology and cognitive science were making similar claims from another direction. Researchers such as Boris Cyrulnik in France and Colwyn Trevarthen in Scotland showed that the individualist model could not adequately describe early childhood development. Infants do not first become complete subjects and then enter intersubjective relations. They develop subjectivity within relations that are already affective, rhythmic and communicative.
The word intersubjectivity can mislead if it suggests a meeting between finished subjects. The infant and caregiver do not encounter one another as two already constituted rational agents. They coordinate gaze, touch, sound, expression, feeding, soothing, absence and return. The child’s sense of self emerges within these patterned interactions. Reflexive thought is not placed inside the child from outside, nor does it unfold from a private interior seed. It forms in the interval between bodies.
This view makes it possible to reconcile universal personhood with diverse local forms of becoming a person. All humans come into personhood through participation in others, but the forms of participation differ. Language, kinship, food-sharing, hierarchy, ritual, household space, gender, naming, labour and care vary across societies. Personhood is therefore both universal and local: universal in the process by which selves emerge through relation, local in the worlds that give those relations shape.
Christina Toren’s work in Fiji illustrates the point. Fijian children come to inhabit hierarchical values not by memorising rules as external commands, but by growing within patterned relations of food-sharing, household order, respect and obligation. They learn what it is to be a person by participating in forms of sociality already organised around responsibility. Their moral world is not installed after personhood. It is part of the process by which personhood develops.
Such examples help move us beyond older debates about culture. Culture was often imagined as a set of beliefs or customs held by already existing individuals. Participation suggests something deeper. The person does not first stand outside a culture and then acquire it. The person becomes capable of standing anywhere through forms of life already inhabited by others. The local world is not an accessory to the self. It is one of the materials from which the self is made.
Intersubjectivity is not the decoration of personhood, but its workshop.
By the early 2000s, new philosophy of cognition extended this insight further. Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo developed accounts of participatory sense-making, arguing that perception and meaning arise through coordinated activity in interaction. We do not simply receive the world as passive observers, like photographic plates exposed to light. We act, respond, anticipate, adjust and make sense with others. Social interaction can generate meanings unavailable to any individual alone.
This argument deepens Lévy-Bruhl’s late claim that participation enters into the constitution of things themselves. Experience is not built by isolated minds representing external objects. It is formed through embodied engagement. Objects, persons and worlds become meaningful within patterns of action and relation. Participation is not a mysterious fusion that erases identity. It is the process through which identities become experientially available.
Marshall Sahlins gave this line of thought a powerful formulation in his 2011 work on kinship. Kin, he argued, are “members of one another.” This phrase captures a truth often obscured by modern legal individualism. Close relations are not merely external connections between separate persons. They are internal to what persons are. A child, sibling, parent, lover or ancestor may be part of oneself in ways that cannot be reduced to emotion, metaphor or property.
Kinship, in this view, is not only a classification system. It is a mode of shared being. Those who are kin participate in one another’s existence. Their suffering, honour, debts, memories, names and futures are not entirely separable. This does not mean that individuality disappears. Rather, individuality is lived through relations that partly compose it.
Unexpectedly, this reverses a common developmental assumption. We often imagine that children must learn how to be with others. In one sense they do. But at the beginning of life, they must also learn how not to be others. They are first absorbed in rhythms of care and response. Differentiation is an achievement. The child learns to say “I” by gradually separating from a prior field of “we”.
Pronouns reveal the accomplishment. To use “I” and “you” properly, one must grasp a shifting perspective. The speaker who says “I” also knows that another person says “I” from elsewhere. Language requires the person to relate to herself as one among others. Reflexivity is therefore social from the start. The first person is never merely first. It is learned in a world where others also speak.
Edmund Husserl recognised something close to this in a 1935 letter to Lévy-Bruhl. Persons, he wrote, find themselves as members of families and associations, living together, acting upon and being affected by a world that has sense and reality through their shared experiencing, thinking and valuing. The “I” and the “we” are not sequential stages. They arise together in the human world.
Once this is accepted, many philosophical perplexities begin to shift. Participation is not the opposite of individuality. It is the condition of individuality. Transcendence — the ability to stand back from immediate experience, to reflect, judge and speak of oneself — does not abolish participation. It grows from it. We become singular because we have first been plural.
The mistake of some modern thought was not to value individuality, but to imagine it as self-originating. Rights, duties and moral accountability do require persons who can be addressed as singular agents. Yet those agents are sustained by relations that precede and exceed them. A legal subject may stand alone before the law, but the human being who becomes capable of such standing has never been alone in that sense.
Political consequences follow. If personhood is participatory, then rights cannot be grounded only in autonomy understood as independence. They must also protect the relations through which autonomy becomes possible: caregiving, language, home, bodily safety, community, education, memory, land, and the social conditions of responsibility. To violate a person is not only to injure an isolated unit. It is to damage a web of participations through which that person lives and through which others live in them.
War and imperial oppression reveal this with particular cruelty. Such violence rarely destroys only bodies. It attacks kinship, language, burial, dwelling, memory, ritual, land and the conditions under which persons recognise themselves and one another. Forced displacement, the removal of children, prohibition of language, desecration of sacred sites, humiliation of elders and destruction of homes are assaults on participation. They aim to break the relations through which people continue to be persons in a particular world.
This does not mean that groups have moral priority over individuals in a simple sense. Lévy-Bruhl’s personalism remains important. Persons should not be dissolved into collectives. The point is subtler: individuals are not protected adequately when the participatory conditions of their existence are ignored. A politics that sees only the isolated rights-bearer may miss the forms of harm that make a life unliveable while leaving the individual formally intact.
To defend the person is also to defend the relations without which no person can appear.
The same insight matters in contemporary arguments over identity. Much public discourse treats identity as a categorical label: race, nation, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship. These categories can be politically necessary, especially where injustice is organised through them. But if participation is the ground of personhood, identity is not simply a box into which one fits. It is an ongoing process of being formed by, and answerable within, relations.
A person may participate in a language she no longer speaks fluently, in ancestors she never met, in a city that shaped her body, in a faith she doubts, in a family that wounded her, in a political history she did not choose, in ecological dependencies she barely perceives. Some participations nourish; others burden. Some are chosen; many are not. Personhood consists partly in negotiating these overlapping forms of membership without ever becoming reducible to any one of them.
This helps explain why debates about belonging are so intense. They are rarely only about recognition as an abstract right. They concern the conditions under which people can inhabit their own lives as meaningful continuations of others. To be denied participation in a community, language, history or place is not merely to lose an affiliation. It may be to lose one of the forms through which one becomes intelligible to oneself.
Responsibility also appears differently from this vantage point. If we are made through participation, then responsibility is not only a burden imposed on the autonomous will. It is a response to the fact that others are already in us and we in them. Care, guilt, obligation, shame, gratitude and grief all register this mutual presence. They are not irrational residues beneath moral law. They are the affective ground from which moral law draws its force.
Grief is perhaps the clearest example. To lose someone close is not merely to lose an external object of affection. It is to suffer the alteration of oneself. The dead remain in gestures, words, habits, fears, recipes, names, silences and expectations. Mourning hurts because persons are members of one another. The boundaries of the self do not coincide with the boundaries of the skin.
Love, likewise, is not well described as a relation between two self-sufficient individuals who exchange affection. Love changes what the lover is. It redistributes attention, vulnerability, memory and future. The beloved becomes part of the world through which one thinks and acts. The same can be said, in darker registers, of domination, humiliation and trauma. Participation is not always benign. One can be formed by violence as well as care.
A mature theory of personhood must therefore resist both romantic holism and abstract individualism. Participation is not always harmony. Relations can sustain, deform, imprison or liberate. Families may nurture or crush. Communities may protect or exclude. Nations may generate solidarity or demand sacrifice. Ritual may deepen life or enforce hierarchy. The fact that persons are relational does not make all relations good.
Still, the remedy for oppressive participation is not the fantasy of relationless individuality. It is the transformation of relations. Children need better care, not no care. Citizens need just institutions, not the absence of institutions. Colonised peoples need restoration of land, language and political agency, not a universal subjecthood that leaves the conditions of participation destroyed. Freedom is not exit from all relation. It is the possibility of inhabiting relations that do not annihilate the person.
Anthropology’s contribution has been to show that there are many ways of arranging this balance between singularity and participation. Some societies emphasise descent, others exchange, others residence, ritual, names, land, gendered substances, shared food, divine relation or legal citizenship. No one arrangement exhausts the human. Yet all must solve the same problem: how beings who come into life through others become persons who can answer, act, remember and be held.
The universal and the particular meet there. Every child must become a person through participation. Every society organises that process differently. Human unity does not require identical mentalities, and cultural diversity does not require abandoning the shared conditions of personhood. This is the lesson that Boas and Lévy-Bruhl, each from his own anxiety, were circling. Difference need not imply hierarchy. Universality need not imply sameness.
Returning to their 1926 meeting, we can now see why the disagreement mattered so much. Boas feared that claims about different mentalities would feed racism. Lévy-Bruhl feared that a universalism based on modern individualism would misrecognise the participatory character of many human worlds. Both fears were justified. Modern anthropology has inherited the task of holding them together: to describe real differences without ranking humanity, and to affirm common personhood without reducing all persons to the liberal individual.
This task remains urgent. Public life is still full of crude theories of intelligence, civilisation and human worth. War propaganda still depends on turning enemies into less-than-persons. Imperial projects still justify domination by claiming to bring reason, order or development to those imagined as deficient. At the same time, bureaucratic and legal systems still often recognise only the individual abstracted from kin, land, language and history. One error dehumanises by ranking. The other dehumanises by thinning.
Participation offers another route. It asks us to begin from the way persons actually come into being: through embodied dependence, social responsiveness, historical worlds and shared meaning. It allows us to say that all humans are equally persons not because they are identical, and not because they approximate a single model of rational individualism, but because each becomes a person through relations that are locally shaped and universally necessary.
Such an account also has implications beyond human society. If persons are constituted through participation in environments, then the nonhuman world is not merely a backdrop. Landscapes, animals, plants, weather, houses, tools, food and paths enter into the formation of selves. This need not mean that every entity is a person in the same sense. It does mean that human personhood is ecologically extended. We become ourselves in worlds that are more than human.
Many Indigenous and local traditions have long known this. Mountains, rivers, animals, ancestors and places may be participants in social life, not inert scenery. Lévy-Bruhl’s early language misframed such worlds as primitive departures from logic. A better reading is that they preserve a truth modernity often obscures: persons are not made by humans alone. The world participates in us, and we in it.
Contemporary ecological crisis gives this insight new force. Climate change, species loss and environmental destruction are not only external threats to human wellbeing. They alter the participatory worlds in which persons are formed. A child raised without birdsong, shade, clean water or seasonal familiarity inhabits a different field of becoming. Communities displaced by drought, mining, flood or deforestation lose not only resources but forms of personhood tied to place.
Technology, too, changes participation. Digital platforms, artificial intelligence, surveillance systems and mediated communication are not mere tools used by pre-existing individuals. They shape attention, memory, intimacy, comparison, shame and public selfhood. If persons emerge through participation, then new technical environments are also new environments of person formation. The question is not simply what individuals do with technologies, but what kinds of persons technologies help bring into being.
This brings us back to ethics. The rights and duties of persons cannot be understood if persons are imagined as fully formed before relation. Duties arise because others are already part of us. Rights matter because persons require protected conditions in which participation can produce singular beings rather than domination or erasure. Justice must therefore attend both to the individual and to the worlds through which individuality is made.
Lévy-Bruhl did not give us a finished theory. His early work remains marked by categories we should reject. His terminology was caught in the evolutionary assumptions of his time. Yet his late insight remains profound. The problem was never that some peoples participate while others reason. Human beings reason from within participation. Logic is one discipline of the person, not the whole of personhood.
To be is to participate. The sentence does not dissolve the person into the group, nor does it deny the dignity of singular lives. It says that singularity is born from sharing, that responsibility precedes rule, that the self is an achievement of relation, and that every “I” carries within it the history of a “we”. The challenge is to build moral and political worlds adequate to that fact.
We become persons by being held, addressed, fed, named, corrected, mourned, imitated, resisted and loved. We remain persons by continuing to participate in others and by allowing others to participate in us. No theory of rights, no account of culture, no politics of identity and no ethics of responsibility can be complete if it forgets this beginning. To ask what constitutes a person is therefore to ask what forms of participation make life human, and what forms of violence destroy them.
