Facilitated personhood

Abstract

Anthropological models of personhood suggest that the individual is produced through relational ties to others, including humans and nonhumans. American ideas about the individual are deeply ideological, obscuring the human relations that make ‘personhood’ a possible, desirable concept that motivates subjection. Attending to neurological disorders and the technologies that attempt to remedy communication impairments shows that not only is the labour of other humans obscured in producing the individual, but so are the facilitating capacities of technologies and institutions. This article focuses on memoirs of disability and ethnographic and historiographic research on neuroscience to show how personhood is facilitated and produced through engagements with people, technologies, and institutions that attempt to render particular forms of subjection through communicative practices.