This chapter focuses on the entanglement between people within sites. Analysing evidence for specialized crafts in emporia, it asks why craftspeople went there, and how they contributed to make these places into hubs of particular social networks. It issues from the key observation that crafting activities in emporia were not only dependent on far-flung networks with other locations, but also on entangled webs of people and processes within the immediate community. The need for access to raw materials, opportunities for learning, markets and, perhaps more than anything, the need for collaboration between specialized artisans, was a decisive incentive for strangers to congregate at specific sites. Craft workers in emporia were dependent on these different elements to practise their trade. As a by-product, their work was able to bridge social relationships, which contributed to the social capital of an otherwise inconsistent community. Such interactions thus gave an unprecedented prominence to weak social ties in the intersections of roles and personhood in individuals, and, more broadly, at the level of the assemblage.

Within Hinduism, the notion of the pervasiveness of life is closely linked with the pervasiveness of divine presence. This chapter examines Hindu responses to the astrobiological notion of life as a planetary phenomenon by exploring some early scriptures, more recent environmental ethics, and contemporary ritual practices and conceptions associated with the worship of natural entities such as trees and stones.

Chapter 1 describes how we each become persons over time and through our relations with other people. This makes personhood fundamentally relational and interpersonal: we become who we are – with our tastes, talents and abilities – as a result of our interactions with the environment around us and the people in it. Moreover, this is a lifelong process. The idea that we are always in formative relations with the environment and other people is part of the concept of human vulnerability. Vulnerability can be understood as an expression of our belonging to the world with other people, and it is this belonging together in the human world that drives our capacities to care for one another. This is why skills in managing interpersonal relations and communication are central to the nursing role.

Chapter 1 uses the picture of human creation to “rule” other creatures in Genesis 1 as an entry point for exploring how the category of “animal” most fundamentally identifies a nonhuman being that is a) exploitable if useful or b) expendable if not. At the same time, Genesis 1 provides an occasion to reflect on how agriculturally oriented humans created gods in their image, gods who exhibited both the power and the care of other beings characteristic of domesticators.

Chapter 2 looks at how the Genesis 1 and related domination-oriented onto-stories compare with accounts of domestication that emphasize co-evolution and mutuality of humans and animals. It places human domestication of animals within a broader picture of forms of inter-species relations, including mutualistic symbiosis, parasitic symbiosis, commensalism and mixed categories.

Chapter 8 contrasts ancient, more personal forms of domination (through kings, shepherds, masters) with more impersonal, digitally enabled forms of modern domination that organize work, life, and death on a planetary scale. Confronting the mass loss of wildlife and the industrial confinement of animals – and the possibility that humans may soon share that fate – this conclusion calls for collective action to cultivate more genuinely social forms of relation, knowledge, and spirituality that affirm the intrinsic worth of all beings rather than reducing life to utility.

The Introduction examines the emergence of the psychopath, situating his literary, scientific, popular, and legal representations within a conceptual genealogy of monstrosity in order to frame the interanimating relationship between the form of persons and the form of novels. As a hitherto unrecognized extension of this genealogy, the psychopath marks the impact of a historically specific set of anxieties about white masculinity on more abstract conceptions of the human. The chapters of the book pair masculinity’s others – women, children, black men, queer men, and white men themselves – against a variety of mid-century representational debates about the novel.

This chapter opens with a survey of the literary genres in which the human rights subject emerges: the environmental justice novel, the postcolonial novel, the neo-slavery novel, and the graphic novel. Later, it moves to study the human person as victim, and the community as they are constructed within the genres, making the argument that embodiment, dignity, and collective vulnerability define both the person and the community. In the final section, the chapter narrows the focus to one genre, the environmental justice novel, looking specifically at the works of Isabel Allende, Yaa Gyasi, and Edward P Jones.

Critical thinking on the relationship between fashion and ideas of personhood tends to fall into two approaches: (1) the violation or diminishing of persons by fashion as an oppressive expression of gender expectations and base commercialism; (2) the celebration of fashion as an agential mode of performance and resignification. Both leave uncontested a set of mutually imbricated oppositions between persons versus nonpersons, interiority versus exteriority, essence versus surface, organic body versus synthetic dress. What happens to how we think about fashion and beauty when they take place on the denigrated, racialized, and gendered body? The woman of color presents a provocation about the toggle between personhood and objecthood. What if race is fashion (that is, stylized, transferable, synthetic), and what are the political implications of posing such a question?

The Conclusion draws together the book’s various thematic strands: the perceived primacy of the ‘reason’, the right of its possessors to rule, the exculpatory effect of a frenzy diagnosis, and the high cost paid by those who received one. It returns to the larger question posed at the outset: whether the organ of the brain and the faculties of the mind were seen as constitutive of ‘personhood’ in pre-1700s England. The responses to frenzy which we have encountered in this book suggests that they were. The operations of the mental faculties known as ‘reason’, ‘will’, and ‘memory’ (or simply the ‘wits’) were located in (and often colloquially identified with) the brain. The functionality and continuity of these faculties was integral to the maintenance of legal, social, and spiritual personhood. Yet what troubled frenzy’s witnesses the most, the Conclusion argues, was the way it disrupted its sufferers’ predictable ways of being in the world – the values they had once held dear, the ways they had once looked and spoken. It was a disease which had the power to change friends, neighbours, and loved ones beyond recognition.

Chapter 4 examines local concepts of right(s), dissecting the ways in which brokering and begging were viewed as charitable compensations for the lack of government protection for disabled people, but claimed by the recipients as forms of work. Aspiring to have their activities recognised as rights, they spoke a local language of entitlement that conflated the value of independent work with the ethical and political right to care, asserting obligatory rights or taxes, against the donors’ perception of gifts. The language of ‘rights’ is a space of mutual evaluation, a rich and powerful language for discussing issues of inequality, membership, personhood, welfare, and power in Kinshasa today. It is perhaps most significant as a claim for distribution than as a legal premise of entitlements. Here, the question of a rightful share becomes pertinent, as givers and receivers evoked differing views on the same transaction that expressed contradictory aspirations and values. In the absence of formal institutions to enforce informal disability privileges, people had to recognise the right to be beggars or brokers on an interpersonal level, requiring constant value tests on whether claims to assistance were legitimate. The chapter thus disrupts the classic Maussian focus on giving and production to consider the moral and political controversies associated with asking and distribution.