Brazilian Serialities. Personhood and Radical Embodied Cognition

This paper investigates the relationship between personhood and family in light of the impact that radical embodied

cognition has had in anthropological theory over the past years. The paper is based on a study of onomastic seriality

among siblings and cohabiting cousins in Brazil, where it became clear that interruption of the series is more

common than full compliance. Since name attribution is a central aspect of launching early personal ontogeny, the

paper argues that this kind of interrupted seriality amounts to a narrative strategy of triangulation that fosters the

creative imagining of familial persons. The paper attempts to deepen our understanding of the modes of operation

of personhood by diverging from the established representationist theories of cognition that remain dominant in

anthropological circles.