Rethinking the Human - A collection of papers

This collection is the result of a conference at the Centre for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Speakers were asked to present papers on the topic of "Rethinking the Human." As the introduction reads, scholars were challenged to interrogate Western universal ideas of the Human without reconstructing a new universalism.

Below is a brief summary of the speakers and their papers.

Arthur Kleinman talks about the practice of caregiving through providing care to his wife. Human beings are born not fully human, and it is through "the demanding practice of caregiving [that] we begin to realize the fullness of our humanity, as well as the limits of our capability to transcend the self and develop the interpersonal moral potential of what it means to be human."

Veena Das explores the ways in which nonhuman entities and spirits call forth certain moral responsibilities of human beings. She demonstrates this through a case study of one of her interlocuters. "The person then is an aspect of this conjugation of human and inhuman rather than an aspect of humanity as an abstract concept."

Charles Hallisey rethinks the human by rethinking the very long life. The talk is entitled "The Secret of a Woman of Ninety: Rethinking the Very Long Life"; the woman being referred to is his mother. He handles the topic in an indirect way through French essayist Charles Peguy, Adorno, Buddhist philosophy, and novelists like Mishima, in order to attempt an understanding of a subjective experience that is impossible for him.

Lila Abu-Lughod offers kinship as an "alternative model for thinking about humans" that escapes thw dichotomies of universal and particular, and global and local. She relates her kinship with the Haj and his family, among whom she had done her fieldwork. She uses this experience to complicate the language used by liberal feminists of universal human rights and human development; while she lives in the world of liberal university campuses, the Haj lived in a thoroughly patriarchal society.

​Finally, Michael Puett discusses ritual theory from early China. In his reading, the world ("Heaven and Earth") that is described in ancient Chinese texts "possess no pattern or order" (a chaotic world). His assertion is that the ancient Chinese view of the human being is in contrast with the assumption of the autonomous individual, who stands outside of tradition as a modern subject with agency. In the former view, human experience is inherently fragmented; human beings are "a conglomeration of energies, emotions, and desires" that can "be quite dangerous and can lead people to do horrible things to each other..." Through ritual, human beings domesticate the world and themselves by creating "pockets of order." However, the effort is never complete--these spaces exist briefly before being infringed upon by the chaotic world.

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