personal-liberty laws Laws passed by U.S. states in the North to counter the Fugitive Slave Acts. Such states as Indiana (1824) and Con¬ necticut (1828) enacted laws giving escaped slaves the right to jury trials on appeal. Vermont and New York (1840) assured fugitives the right of jury trial and provided them with attorneys. Other states forbade state authorities to capture and return fugitives. After the Compromise of 1850, most Northern states enacted further guarantees of jury trials and punish¬ ment for illegal seizure. These laws were cited by proslavery interests as assaults on states’ rights and as justification for secession.
personal property See real and personal property
personalismo Spanish "personalism" In Latin America, the prac¬ tice of glorifying a leader. It often involves sacrificing the interests of political parties, ideologies, and constitutional government out of loyalty
the genus Diospyros in the ebony
American persimmon (Diospyros vir¬ giniana).
H.R. HUNGERFORD
© 2006 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
1478 I personality ► Peru
to a leader. Political parties throughout Latin America have often con¬ sisted of the personal following of a single individual, a fact reflected in the popular terms for the partisans. Members of Argentina’s Justicialist National Movement, for example, are called peronistas (Peronists), for its charismatic founder, Argentine president Juan Peron, and the followers of Cuban leader Fidel Castro are fidelistas. See also caudillo.
personality Totality of an individual’s behavioral and emotional char¬ acteristics. Personality embraces a person’s moods, attitudes, opinions, motivations, and style of thinking, perceiving, speaking, and acting. It is part of what makes each individual distinct. Theories of personality have existed in most cultures and throughout most of recorded history. The ancient Greeks used their ideas about physiology to account for differences and similarities in temperament. In the 18th century Immanuel Kant, Charles- Louis Montesquieu, and Giambattista Vico proposed ways of understanding individual and group differences; in the early 20th century Ernst Kretschmer and the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung offered competing personality theories. Freud’s model rested on the power of psy- chosexual drives as mediated by the structural components of the ID, EGO, and superego and the interplay of conscious and unconscious motives. Par¬ ticularly important was the array of defense mechanisms an individual employed. Jung, like Freud, emphasized unconscious motives but de-emphasized sexuality and advanced a typal theory that classified people as introverts and extraverts; he further claimed that an individual personal¬ ity was a persona (i.e., social facade) drawn from the “collective uncon¬ scious,” a pool of inherited memories. Later theories by Erik H. Erikson, Gordon W. Allport, and Carl R. Rogers were also influential. Contempo¬ rary personality studies tend to be empirical (based on the administration of projective tests or personality inventories) and less theoretically sweeping and tend to emphasize personal identity and development. Personality traits are usually seen as the product of both genetic predisposition and experience. See also personality disorder; psychological testing.
personality disorder Mental disorder that is marked by deeply ingrained and lasting patterns of inflexible, maladaptive, or antisocial behaviour to the degree that an individual’s social or occupational func¬ tioning is impaired. Rather than being illnesses, personality disorders are enduring and pervasive features of the personality that deviate markedly from the cultural norm. They include the dependent, histrionic, narcissis¬ tic, obsessive-compulsive, antisocial, avoidant, borderline (unstable), paranoid, and schizoid types. The causes appear to be both hereditary and environmental. The most effective treatment combines behavioral and psychotherapeutic therapies (see behaviour therapy; psychotherapy).
personnel administration See industrial relations
perspective Depiction of three-dimensional objects and spatial rela¬ tionships on a two-dimensional plane. In Western art, illusions of volume and space are generally created by use of the linear perspective system, based on the observation that objects appear to shrink and parallel lines to converge at an infinitely distant vanishing point as they recede in space from the viewer. The vanishing point may have been known to the Greeks and Romans but had been lost until Filippo Brunelleschi rediscovered the principles of linear or “mathematical” perspective early in the 15th cen¬ tury. Linear perspective dominated Western painting until the late 19th century, when Paul Cezanne flattened the conventional picture plane. The Cubists and other 20th-century painters abandoned depiction of three- dimensional space altogether. See also aerial perspective.
Perspex See Lucite
perspiration Fluid given off by the skin as vapour by simple evapo¬ ration or as sweat actively secreted from sweat glands to evaporate and cool the body. When the body temperature rises, the sympathetic nervous system stimulates eccrine sweat glands to secrete water to the skin sur¬ face, where it cools the body by evaporation. Human eccrine sweat is essentially a dilute solution of sodium chloride with trace amounts of other plasma electrolytes. In extreme conditions, human beings may excrete several litres of such sweat in an hour.
Perth City (pop., 2004 est.: 1,457,639), capital of Western Australia state, Australia. Located on the Swan River 10 mi (16 km) from its mouth, Perth was settled in 1829. It developed rapidly after the discovery of goldfields around Kalgoonie in the early 1890s and the opening of Fremantle Har¬ bour in 1897. It is now a major industrial centre with a rapidly expand¬ ing economy. The site of the 1987 America's Cup, it is the seat of the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University.
Perth City (pop., 1995 est.: 42,000), central Scotland. Located on the River Tay, northwest of Edinburgh, Perth was a Roman settlement; it became a royal burgh in 1210. It was the capital of Scotland until 1437, when King James I of Scotland was murdered there. At the Church of St. John the Baptist in 1559, John Knox denounced idolatry; the result was the plunder of Perth’s monasteries and altars. It was a Jacobite city dur¬ ing the Scottish uprisings of 1715 and 1745. The economy is based on whisky blending and distilling and on manufacturing. It is also an agri¬ cultural market centre.
pertussis See whooping cough
Peru officially Republic of Peru Country, western South America. Area: 496,225 sq mi (1,285,216 sq km). Population (2005 est.): 27,968,000. Capitaclass="underline" Lima. Almost half of the people are Quechua Indians,
nearly one-third are mestizos, and most of o ioo 200 mi th e remainder are Aymara Indians and
0 11 ’ 150 ’ ' 300 km' people of European ancestry. Languages:
Spanish, Quechua, Aymara (all official).
Religion: Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholic [official]; also Protestant). Currency: new sol. Peru is the third largest country in South America and may be divided into three geo¬ graphic regions from west to east: the coast, which consists of a long, narrow belt of desert lowlands; the Sierra (highlands), which is the Peru¬ vian portion of the Andes Mountains; and the Montana, the vast, forested eastern foothills and plains, consisting mainly of the tropical rainforests of the Amazon River basin. Peru has a developing mixed economy based largely on services, manufacturing, agriculture, and mining. Most indus¬ tries, including the petroleum industry, were nationalized in the late 1960s and early ’70s, but many were privatized again in the 1990s. Peru is a republic with one legislative house; its head of state and government is the president. Peru was the centre of the Inca empire, whose capital, Cuzco, was established in the 12th century. In 1533 the region was con¬ quered by Spanish adventurer Francisco Pizarro and thereafter was domi¬ nated by Spain for almost 300 years as the Viceroyalty of Peru. It declared its independence in 1821, and freedom was achieved in 1824. Peru was defeated by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-83). In 1941 a bound¬ ary dispute with Ecuador erupted into war, which gave Peru control over a larger part of the Amazon basin; further disputes ensued until the bor¬ der was demarcated again in 1998. The government was overthrown by a military junta in 1968; civilian rule was restored in 1980. The govern¬ ment of Alberto Fujimori dissolved the legislature in 1992 and promulgated a new constitution the following year. The government later successfully combated the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru rebel movements. Fujimori won a second term in 1995, but charges of fraud accompanied his elec-