Are we individuals or co-dividuals? An encounter between biology and anthropology

There is nothing more natural than thinking of ourselves as individuals: “I’m me, full stop”. But anthropologists have found very different ways of representing the self or personhood in other societies, where beings are plural and divisible and are defined as dividuals. On further consideration, one discovers these beings are often also viewed as small societies. The I is a whole, a coexistence, neither an individual nor a “dividual”, but a co-dividual. Anthropologists thought they’d made a great discovery. But actually no: from the time biologists started studying microorganisms and the forms of internal symbiosis, they started to question the concept of the individual and personal identity and discovered what we usually call individuals are actually “co-dividuals”. So, biologists and anthropologists have travelled two very different paths, which at one point intertwined, to the satisfaction of both of professions (and perhaps not only them).