Sunsum
Personality-soul / spirit-substance — chest
Sunsum — the personality / spirit substance: that which gives a person their distinctive force, their 'weight' in social interaction, the felt quality that other people register as character. Sunsum can be heavy or light, dignified or fearful, healing or harmful; an Akan saying compares it to the shadow that a person casts and to the moral stamp they leave on a room. The philosophical literature has not resolved whether sunsum is a quasi-physical inheritance (Wiredu's position: sunsum is roughly the body's animating temperament and dies with the body) or a non-physical spirit-substance distinct from the body (Gyekye's position: sunsum survives death as the pre-incarnational personality-bearer). Both positions are well-attested in the source material, and the apparent inconsistency is genuine. Ritually, sunsum is associated with the breath and chest; we anchor the rendered point at the mid-sternum landmark, the canonical chest-locus.
Point 2 of 3 in Akan Three-Soul Schema — Ɔkra / Sunsum / Ntoro
Cross-tradition overlaps
No overlapping points are registered for this point.
Sources
J. B. Danquah, The Akan Doctrine of God (primary_canonical)
Danquah, The Akan Doctrine of God, ch. III, discusses sunsum as the personal spirit or character-bearing power distinguished from the bodily person. This is the principal source for the file's account of sunsum's individuality and moral-social force; later Akan philosophers disagree over its post-mortem status.
Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars (secondary)
“Sunsum is best understood as the quasi-physical character or temperament of the person, communicated to the child by the father, and dissolving at death along with the body whose force it constitutes.”
Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (secondary)