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A Reader's Guide To The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality - Part II - Somatosphere
A Reader's Guide To The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality - Part II - Somatosphere
A Reader's Guide To The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality - Part II - Somatosphere
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This article is part of the series: A Reader's Guide to the Anthropology of Ethics and
Morality (http://somatosphere.net/series/a-readers-guide-to-the-anthropology-of-
ethics-and-morality/)
Editor’s note: We asked several scholars which readings they would recommend
to students or colleagues interested in familiarizing themselves with the
anthropology of ethics and morality. This is the response we received from Webb
Keane (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/webbkeane/), George Herbert Mead
Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Reading lists
from other scholars will be forthcoming in this series.
So what’s new about the current ethical turn? For many of the authors I list
below, at least three things are at issue (although in any given case, these
authors may disagree vehemently with one another). First is the relative
absence of any totalizing model of “culture” from the discussion; where it
exists, it must at least be defended. If the Durkheimians risked identifying
ethics with society, and the Boasians with culture, most contemporary
ethnographers of ethics are wary of doing either. Moreover, many of them
also tend to assume that any given ethical world is not going to be self-
consistent and coherent—when we do encounter something like a morality
system empirically, for instance in a religious piety movement or
revolutionary cell, it calls out for explanation. Second is the emphasis that at
least some anthropologists have placed on freedom. This is a controversial
move within the field, but it follows from the previous point: if your values or
your sense of right and wrong turn out to be determined by cultural norms,
cognitive proclivities, or fear of punishment, then (in this view) they don’t
really amount to “ethics.” As some philosophers might say, either you haven’t
had a choice in the matter, or if you chose but only under compulsion, in
either case you aren’t adhering to them for ethical reasons (no doubt there are
ethnographic challenges to this position but this is where the current
discussions have tended to work). A third follows from this, that ethics entails
notions of responsibility that are predicated on local concepts of action,
agency, and their ontological preconditions. To understand these, however, is
not simply to reconstruct some pre-existing normative system or script that
people are playing out, nor does it require we unearth a fixed ontological
model. Rather it takes us into the nature of social interaction and the kinds of
reflexivity that involves. The ethical turn invites the ethnographer to tease out
the ways in which people, finding themselves accountable to one another,
come—in ways that are ongoing and likely to be inconsistent—to understand
what they are up to, and why.
Das, Veena. 2010. Moral and spiritual striving in the everyday: To be a Muslim
in contemporary India. In Ethical life in South Asia
(http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=476610),
edited by Anand Pandian and Daud Ali. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
__________. Rotting bodies: The clash of stances toward materiality and its
ethical affordances (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678290). Current
Anthropology, 55: S312-S321.
__________. 2016. Book Symposium. Ethical life: Its natural and social
histories (Webb Keane)
(http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/issue/view/hau6.1/showToc).
Hau: Journal of ethnographic theory 6 (1): 433-492.
Lambek, Michael, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane. 2015. Four
lectures on ethics: Anthropological perspectives (http://haubooks.org/four-
lectures-on-ethics/). HAU Books/University of Chicago Press
Lambek, Michael. 2015. The ethical condition: Essays on action, person, and
value
(http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo21263571.html).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist
subject (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9563.html). Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. Two virtue ethics and the anthropology of morality
(http://ant.sagepub.com/content/12/2/161.abstract). Anthropological
Theory 12(2): 161-184.
__________. 2016. Moral laboratories: Family peril and the struggle for a good
life (http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520281202). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Rogers, Douglas. 2009. The old faith and the Russian land: A historical
ethnography of ethics in the Urals
(http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100781430).
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a
Papua New Guinea society (http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?
isbn=9780520238008). California.
Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. Moral breakdown and the ethical demand: A theoretical
framework for an anthropology of moralities
(http://ant.sagepub.com/content/7/2/131.abstract). Anthropological Theory
7(2): 131-150.
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