Paper short abstract:

Civil engineers working in the Andes extend a notion of personhood to non-human matter. Alternative approaches to living being in the Andes are less categorical about the distinctions between the human and the non-human. The paper asks how anthropology might fold a comparative understanding of living matter into its understanding of personhood.

Paper long abstract:

A road construction engineer commented to me once that "a road is like a person - it is not static, it is dynamic - it grows - everyday you learn more about its problems". This paper considers notions of personhood that recognise the living force of non-human presence, and engage such force via the attribution of human-like capacities. My question concerns the ways in which such recognition compares with notions of living being where distinctions between the human and the non-human are less categorical and are either subject to attentive concern, or assumed as only ever provisional. Theoretically such questions involve a return to existing anthropological literatures on animism, agency and the fetish - to ask again, via the lived experience of contemporary engineering practice,. At a time when the Bolivian constitution has assigned rights to the Earth it is perhaps timely for these debates to be revisited.