Toying with Canonical Figures: Counterhumanist Experiments and the Politics of Personhood at the Heart of Professional Training in France

The stand-alone, bounded humanist figure of the individual has long been critiqued by anthropologists, who challenged its exclusionary stakes and its position as the natural starting point of questions and debates in the social sciences. In confronting the shadows of dominant models of being, such as Homo economicus, in their field, anthropologists of welfare and the economic imagination reveal a gap between intended results and the socially complex realities they observe ethnographically, which slip through the abstractions of such models. This article builds on and extends these critical insights by inverting the terms of analysis. Instead of showing how hegemonic economic models of being can be undermined through ethnography, it inquires into what keeps them alive. The contribution suggests a different theoretical point of departure by adopting Sylvia Wynter’s concept of ‘being human as praxis’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). Being human as praxis is a playful experiment that offers generative pathways in thinking beyond the humanist trope of neoliberal subjectivity. It allows us to consider the enactment and regeneration (or not) of dominant mythologies of being human, and their racial ontologies, through an inclusive and dynamic understanding of being human, centered on storytelling and praxis. Grounded in fieldwork at a simulation-based training center in Lyon preoccupied with ‘professional reconversion,’ where play emerges as a praxis of mastery and worldmaking, I argue that Wynter’s conception of humanness as a verb rather than a noun shifts our focus from the trope of autonomous subjects towards a politics of personhood enacted through everyday reproductions of autonomy as symbolic life.