Agency, personhood and the 'I' of discourse in the pacific and beyond

Sahlins bases his account of Polynesian 'heroic history' partly on the fact that chiefs used the pronoun 'I' in reference to their whole group. Mosko (1992) argues that Sahlins's consequent emphasis on 'encompassment' as the modality of chiefly action is diametrically opposed to Strathern's on 'partibility', the effacement of parts of the person as a condition of action. Drawing on comparative material from the New Guinea Highlands, where big men also use 'I' for their whole group, and on Benveniste's and Urban's accounts of the meaning and use of personal pronouns, I argue instead that moments of both encompassment and partibility are inherent in language, corresponding to two distinct dimensions in which the pronouns are meaningful (the 'direct indexical' and the 'anaphoric'), and that close attention to the interaction between the two can yield new insights into the nature of personhood and social agency.