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PERSONHOOD

The first chapter of this book surveys a series of debates about animal musicality that unfolded in print during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. Competing theories of evolution structured these debates around assessments of sentience. By examining the process by which evolutionary theories of music were tied to assessments of interiority, this chapter outlines a crucial context in which later studies of animal musicality occurred. At stake in these assessments was the right to personhood, for the debate about animal musicality was a debate about who was, and was not, a person.