ABSTRACT
We have already investigated how objects may contain the same qualities and have the same effects as people, and how they may emerge out of persons and as persons in their own right. We have also seen how the components of the dead are relocated throughout the universe. Vitally charged substances and qualities may also interpenetrate people throughout life, and we have already seen how important maintaining such flows is in the maintenance and transformation of personhood. This chapter focuses on the transmission of substances between bodies and through the cosmos as a way towards understanding the connection between the human and non-human in societies that accentuate relational concepts of the person. As we will see, this is one of the greatest differences between indivisible individuals and dividual personhood. Partibility will be revealed as a feature of societies other than Melanesian ones, though made sensible through rather different conceptions of the person and cosmos, and the general permeability of people will be suggested as an equally widespread phenomenon. Overall, it will be argued that relational and dividual personhood involves the continual production, consumption and circulation of essences out of which persons are produced.
