Uma categoria do pensamento antropológico: a noção de pessoa

Abstract

The "notion de personne" is certainly one of the most recurring categorics in the conceptual fraime of social and cultural anthropology, but we use to forget the greal number of problems underlying this notion, as well as that its specific sense seems to change from author to author. Beginning wilh Mauss's classic paper about the issue, this article intends to map some of these problems and ambiguitics. To do that it sketches the historical hackground of the question and tries to present some ways to recover the creative potential of a concept that has always pennitted the elaboration of alternalive points or view about social and cultural diversity.