The concept of "social person" or "social mask"

 Social persons or social masks are narratives of primitive determination elaborated by a human group in relation to the function and valuation of its individuals in social life. As we know, primitive determinations are developed after economic determinations, so we will find different persons according to the degree of complexification of a particular society.

The simplest forms of social masks are those that appear in the narratives of Anima Mundi societies (cold societies), such as those of the Blackfoot myth, whose three characters, the old man, the woman and the child, delimit the population by gender and age. The double opposition between men-women and young-old (the latter opposition that can be given by the categorization into three ages, child, young-old) operates both in human communities and (in its male-female variant) between the great apes and group mammals. The distinction is completely relevant from an emotional point of view. In archaic human groups, the opposition between men and women is seen in secret societies with initiatory content, in which the most basic biological actions are worshiped, and the first epistemological models based on reproduction are developed.

In these mythico-ritual settings, the separation between the genders is radical, and different forms of violence are exercised against those who cross the ceremonial limits, a system of punishments by which the valuation of the ritual is perfectly explicit. The initiation rites of cold societies, the so-called rites of passage, do not only imply an action of the reproductive physiological elements (in the case of women) or of those corresponding to the dopamine system for hunting (in men), but that a new psychological person is built: children, abandon a social person, die to their childhood, to become adults, with different emotions

The new social mask has responsibilities, a set of functional actions that are typified in the general accounts of the group and, in particular, in the mythical-ritual actions that are performed in the passing ceremony. The male-female opposition is fixed, in fact, these are the two fundamental social persons, while the other persons (adult and elder) are the ones that arise in temporal development, and as such are vital self-consciousness engines, especially when being performed in an initiatory ritual setting. The line of personal temporal transformations for men and women leads to the projection of a person for the dead. The same previous initiations are a form of death, and continuity is guaranteed by the particular characteristics of the linguistic phenomenon. In a group with a small number of social persons, what characterizes one individual, except for some phenotypic traits, is equivalent to what characterizes another.