1. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1996) has written an elegant essay examining Hindu-Bengali nostalgia for “the village,” in the aftermath of the 1947 partition of West Bengal from East Bengal, when East Bengal became East Pakistan (in 1971, this same territory became Bangladesh).

2. On South Asian notions of person or self, see, e.g., E. V. Daniel 1984; Dumont 1980a; Ewing 1990, 1991; Lamb 1997b; Marriott 1976, 1990; Marriott and Inden 1977; McHugh 1989; M. Mines 1988, 1994; Ostor, Fruzzetti, and Barnett 1982; Parish 1994; Parry 1989; Roland 1988; and Shweder and Bourne 1984.

3. I write about “impurity” here at some length, partly because the topic has received so much attention in the anthropological literature on India and partly because it at first seemed to me so important to the local constitution of open persons and intersubstantial social relations. However, I gradually learned that social relations for Bengalis do not by any means center on avoiding impurity.

4. Spiro (1993) discusses these South Asianists particularly on pp. 115, 123–27, 132, where he concentrates on Shweder and Bourne’s (1984) notion of a “sociocentric” self.

5. Spiro supports his argument on self-other differentiation by drawing on James (1981 [1890]) and Hallowell (1955).

6. On shared karma, see Wadley and Derr 1990 and S. Daniel 1983:28–35.

7. For a detailed examination of how diverse theories of karma are used simultaneously by Tamil villagers, see S. Daniel 1983.

8. On de-emphasizing individuality in South Asia, see, e.g., Marriott 1976, 1990; E. V. Daniel 1984; Dumont 1980a:185, 231–39, and passim; and Shweder and Bourne 1984. Note that “individuality” is a polysemous term whose implications differ among these scholars.

9. For examples emphasizing the South Asian “individual,” see McHugh 1989; M. Mines 1988, 1994; M. Mines and Gourishankar 1990; and Parish 1994:127–29, 186–87. Marriott’s position is also more complex, variable, and nuanced than simply holding Hindu persons to be “unbounded.” Much of his work is devoted to what he sees as strenuous Hindu efforts toward closing boundaries (cooling oneself, minimizing interactions, “unmixing,” etc.).

10. Much of the confusion surrounding the cross-cultural study of personhood stems from a lack of specificity about what is meant by terms such as “person” and “self.” “Self” often implies what we might consider to be a psychological entity, such as an ego or a subjective experience of one’s own being. I therefore prefer to use the broader, more open term “person.” Beliefs about what it is to be a person in any cultural-historical setting might include notions and practices concerning some or all of the following: a subjective sense of self; a soul or spirit; the body; the mind; emotions; agency; gender or sex; race, ethnicity, or caste; relationships with other people, places, or things; a relationship with divinity; illness and well-being; power; karma or fate (perhaps ingrained in or written on the body or soul in some way); and the like. Our task as anthropologists studying personhood is to investigate what defines being a person, or being human, for the people we are striving to understand. For other discussions of what anthropologists mean by the terms “person” and “self,” see Harris 1989; Lindholm 1997; Pollock 1996; and Whittaker 1992.