Anthropology’s ethics: Moral positionalism, cultural relativism, and critical analysis

Abstract

In a programmatic article, published in late 2008 in Anthropological Theory, the French anthropologist Didier Fassin explores the vexed question whether anthropology should be moral or not. Observing a general discomfort with the question of morality in the discipline of anthropology, Fassin argues that such a discomfort might actually serve a valuable heuristic function for the development of a moral anthropology in the near future. What Fassin means by moral anthropology is essentially a form of empirical inquiry that investigates how social agents articulate and negotiate moral claims in local contexts. In this response to Fassin’s article, I address a crucial challenge at the heart of moral anthropology, or the anthropology of ethics, as I prefer to call it. The challenge is to bring the anthropology of ethics into a productive relationship with the ethics of anthropology. Building on Fassin’s argument, I suggest that the discomfort with ethics indeed serves a valuable heuristic function because it is the spontaneous articulation of an ethics of discomfort.