Moral Anthropology Research Articles

Questions of conscience in a confessional state: From ‘Freedom of conscience’ to ‘Objections of conscience’ in Malta

ABSTRACT While there is an ample body of literature in the anthropology of moralities there is a surprising dearth of research on conscience per se. In Malta over the last ten years there has been a proliferation of a public discourse of ‘conscience’ – its affordances, freedoms and its legal safeguards. This has been the result of debates over reforms leading to the liberalization of sexual and family life, including most recently debates over the legalization of abortion. While the language of conscience in various human rights instruments claims a universal character its meanings, inflections and significance can vary in important ways. There is a blurred boundary between conscience and religion. This paper examines the ways in which conscience is deployed and the significance of the appeals to a national conscience in a European confessional state. It looks at the specific meanings of conscience in Malta and a brief lexical and political history It then moves on to look at the ways objections of conscience are framed in contemporary Malta in light of theological debates and their ramifications in Catholic Malta.

When do no harm becomes harm done: Re‐centering ethics in anthropology

AbstractAs we continue to define anthropology for the 21st century, I argue that ethics—what we mean by ethics, how we invoke ethics, and how we demonstrate our ethics—should be at the center of our conversation. Through this presidential address, I offer a challenge to center an ethics of care in our work that derives not from the Common Rule or broad policies of US institutions, but rather is derived from our responsibility for the impact of our actions, whether intentional or unintentional, and is situated in the moral narratives of the communities that we serve.

Artificial Intelligence and an Anthropological Ethics of Work: Implications on the Social Teaching of the Church

It is the contention of this paper that ethics of work ought to be anthropological, and artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, which is the focus of work today, should be anthropological, that is, human-centered. This paper discusses the philosophical and theological implications of the development of AI research on the intrinsic nature of work and the nature of the human person. AI research and the implications of its development and advancement, being a relatively new phenomenon, have not been comprehensively interrogated in the social and ethical teachings of the Catholic Church. This paper, therefore, proposes a path for this interrogation by expounding a discourse which is believed to be epistemically helpful in the developing discourse of AI in the ethical and social teachings of the Church. The advancement in the research on AI is not only redefining the meaning of work, but, even more so, it is questioning the metaphysical notion of the human person and the theological notion of work as an intrinsic part in the selfhood and dignity of the human person.

Towards meaningful institutional change: Responsive bureaucracy and the governance of anthropological ethics

This article advocates for a deeper engagement with the organizational structures that shape the governance of research ethics in anthropology. The authors argue that anthropological critiques of bureaucracy often sidestep the kinds of knowledge needed to pursue meaningful institutional change. They show how different regulatory dynamics and organizational arrangements across jurisdictions produce more or less responsive bureaucracies, comparing Institutional Review Boards in the United States with a case study of a European university's Ethics Review Committee. The authors suggest that such organizational understandings of bureaucratic processes can more meaningfully inform their redesign and contribute to developing more appropriately scaled ethics governance. In so doing, ethics review promises greater responsiveness to the particular demands of ethnographic research while remaining legible to regulatory stakeholders.

The art of jieyuan: ethical affinity and the cultivation of Chinese Buddhist spirituality in Tanzania

AbstractEthical encounters in cross‐cultural contexts have been a major concern in the anthropology of morality and religion, yet the dominant view assumes that processes of ethical transformation and conversion emphasize the centrality of texts and beliefs. These discussions are influenced by epistemological frameworks associated with Christian theology and practice. Yet studies of other religions have brought about challenges by either doubting whether ‘belief’ still serves as a fruitful analytical tool or stressing the diversity of non‐text‐driven and multimedia forms of conversion. Based on fieldwork in a Chinese Buddhist monastery in Tanzania, this essay examines how Buddhist monks from China seek to cultivate Buddhist spirituality among Tanzanian locals in an embodied and allegorical way. By ethnographically teasing out the Chinese Buddhist notion of jieyuan, it provides a way of understanding religious suasion not just as a rational and intellectual conversation, but also as a process of embodied illumination that induces gradual, inductive, sympathetic changes in others.

The Ordinariness of Ethics and the Extraordinariness of Revolution

In this article I present experiences of Egyptians too young to have taken part in the street protests and movement of the 2011 revolution. Today in their early twenties, they narrate their experiences during the early months of the uprising. None claimed to be revolutionaries then or now, but the revolution seems to animate them in complex and long-lasting ways. The January revolution failed to bring about change at the level of state power. Yet more is at stake than the political endgame. I turn my attention to how people narrate the revolution as a process of ethical reflection and self-formation through everyday relationships and settings that took on new meanings. These accounts challenge notions of what it means to participate in a revolution and where it is located and generate a conversation between the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of revolutions.

Moving Beyond Practice

Anthropology’s “ethical turn” opens space for dialogue with Christian ethicists engaged in the “ethnographic turn” using a common virtue-inflected language and set of concerns. While moral theologian Michael Banner has called for such a dialogue, there has been a lack of cross-pollination between Banner’s account and the broader ethnographic turn, which has turned to the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu as its main social scientific interlocuter. In this essay, I argue that the limits of practice theory call for a diversification of social scientific conversation partners in the ethnographic turn. I demonstrate how the anthropology of ethics offers one auspicious way forward in its ability to account for moral agency in everyday life.

Trolleyology and the Anthropology of the Ethical Imagination

Abstract It matters what people do. It also matters what people would do in counterfactual circumstances. Perhaps less obviously, it matters what people think or say about what they would do in counterfactual circumstances. In this article, I consider some of the ethical challenges raised by the ethics of thinking about what to do in counterfactual circumstances. In doing so, I connect some of the most influential recent work on thought experiments in moral philosophy with some of the most influential recent work in the anthropology of ethics.

The making of a mushroom people: Toward a moral anthropology of psychedelics beyond hype and anti‐hype

As regulatory agencies have put psychedelics on an expedited path to market approval, North Americans and Europeans might turn away from their repression and join the subset of cultures that have institutionalized the use of hallucinogenic drugs. What is the place of anthropology in this psychedelic renaissance? More specifically, how should anthropology relate to the cycles of hype and anti‐hype, which have been identified as a recurrent pattern in the careers of new drugs as psychedelics have entered a second round of cultural enthusiasm and critique? This article suggests extending ethnographic studies of the psychedelic renaissance from medical to moral anthropology. The case of psychedelics is especially interesting for moral anthropology because these drugs frequently induce mystical‐type experiences, which can play an ethically irritating role as mysticism challenges a strict moral order enforced through disciplinary practices. What cultural consequences would the spread of mystical experiences have for contemporary European and North American societies?

An Ethical Question: Acknowledging Contentious Ethics in Medical Anthropology and Allied Fields


 Editorial to the April issue of 2023.
 

Family, Time, and Meaning toward the End of Life in Japan

In contrast to media images of lonely deaths, stereotypes of Japanese calm acceptance of dying, and the “naturalness” of dependency in old age or illness, this paper explores the complex ways that changing perceptions of time refocus people on the question of how to live. Time both narrows to the level of medication schedules and bodily functions, and expands to more immediate engagement with others in the past and future. The idea of a moral timeline of such changes builds on recent work in the anthropology of morality by recognizing these shifts in the ideas and actions people take to retain agency through suffering. People near the end of life in Japan commonly employ cultural idioms of effort, reciprocity, and gratitude to express their continued striving to be moral persons in a social world. Ultimately such efforts determine not only how they see themselves and are seen by others through their final days, but whether theirs will be judged to be a “good death,” and thus the nature of the person’s continued social existence in spirit and memories after death. Ethnographic data on which this article is based come from a participant-observation study of adults of all ages with life-threatening illnesses and from an interview study of frail elderly and their family caregivers in the late 20th and early 21st century in urban and rural settings.

Чистая и нечистая философия в метафилософии Канта

Kant’s metaphilosophy has three main parts: (1) an essentialist project (“What is philosophy?”); (2) a methodological project (“How do we do philosophy?”); and (3) a taxonomic project (“What are the different parts of philosophy, and how are they related?”). This paper focuses on the third project. In particular, it explores one of the most intriguing yet puzzling aspects of Kant’s philosophy, viz. the relationship between what Kant calls ‘pure’ philosophy vs. ‘applied’, ‘empirical’ or what we can broadly refer to as ‘impure’ philosophy. (As we shall see, in order to be able to address this third project, we shall also need to examine the other two projects in detail.) My plan is as follows. First, I discuss four main areas of pure vs. impure philosophy: (i) ‘pure logic’ vs. ‘applied logic’; (ii) ‘rational psychology’ vs. ‘empirical psychology’; (iii) ‘pure metaphysics of nature’ vs. ‘physics’ and (iv) ‘pure morality’ or a ‘metaphysics of morals’ vs. ‘moral anthropology’, ‘practical anthropology’ or ‘applied moral philosophy’. Based on this, I identify four key differences between pure and impure philosophy. Second, I critically examine four different readings of Kant’s views about the status of ‘impure’ philosophy: (a) that it is not genuine philosophy; (b) that it is bad or inferior philosophy; (c) that it is instrumentally valuable; and (d) that it constitutes an indispensable part of Kant’s philosophy, both in a theoretical and practical sense. I argue that Kant is best interpreted as endorsing readings (c) and (d). Third, I offer some concluding remarks.

Attuned Fathering and the Moral Dimensions of Caregiving

:Individuals with severe cognitive disabilities are often thought to be born with limited interpersonal capacity, rendering their emotional lives inaccessible. Family caregiving for individuals under these circumstances is portrayed in the contemporary literature variously as ranging from being a positive transformative experience to being a burden. If we focus on the experience of caregiver burden, we see communication or language issues can complicate caregiving, given the interpersonal impenetrability this sometimes entails. However, this focus overlooks the inter-bodily dimensions of caregiving and how parents gain access to the emotional lives of their children in the absence of language. In limiting our disciplinary focus to particular kinds of relationships premised on normative forms of intimacy or reciprocity, we do more to reproduce a particular moral philosophic tradition that views human personhood as dependent upon cognition and language. This article contributes to an anthropology of disability and moralities by exploring how the practice of caregiving within the context of severe cognitive disability shapes the moral lives of fathers. Drawing on my own experience as the father of a multiply disabled son and ethnographic research on men in similar circumstances in the United States, I show how parents become ever-more attuned to the practical and emotional needs of their children through intimate, everyday acts of care and the shared meanings that grow and deepen on the basis of the body’s capacity for resonance and fellow feeling.

To Walk the Same Road: Convivial Possibilities and Ethical Affordances in Borderlands Schooling

In this article, I explore how teachers and students in two distinct regions of the US-Mexico borderlands, southern Arizona and south Texas, treated social difference as an ethical affordance (Keane 2014) or a resource for moral stancetaking. Inspired by work in the anthropology of morality and ethnomethodological analyses of “accountable moral choice” (Heritage 1984, 76) in interaction, I examine how the salience of social difference can become an imaginative affordance for probing experiences of and possibilities for living with difference. When axes of social differentiation became relevant to ongoing interaction, participants used them to frame their own actions or others’ actions as morally admirable, justifiable, or questionable. At times, they did so in ways that foreclosed possibilities for conviviality; at other times, their “ordinary” ethical activity (Das 2012) suggested new possibilities for dealing with social difference in diverse contexts. The analysis testifies to the “internally riven” nature of the moral universe (Keane 2011, 173)—the different stances available to be taken up, even in relation to the same people and the same objects of evaluation—and underscores that conviviality is better viewed not as a lasting state of affairs, but as a provisional interactional achievement and a site of struggle and contradiction.

Introduction to the special issue

Rules are a crucial part of much religious thought and practice. Their importance or insignificance, their strictness or laxness, and their rigidity or flexibility in the face of change are constant themes of debate, both within and outside religious communities. Yet they have arguably not been given the attention they deserve within recent anthropology. Since the rise of practice theory, rules have more often been considered something to look past in the search for agency. Where the new anthropology of ethics has addressed religious orthopraxy, it has largely been through the lens of the cultivation of virtuous self, or the ways in which moral rules may become especially salient in extraordinary circumstances, such as moments of radical cultural transformation. But religious rules are not just a function of ethical crisis or virtuoso projects of the self. They are also a taken-for-granted part of everyday life for millions of people worldwide. In this introduction and the case studies that follow, we thus aim to move beyond current perspectives, reflecting on both the nature of religious rules themselves and the ways in which they are negotiated in believers’ everyday lives. Keywords: Rules; anthropology; religion; ethics

Religious rules and thick description: some thoughts from the anthropology of Islam

The recent anthropology of ethics has sought to look beyond rules to themes such as the cultivation of the virtuous self. Anthropology generally has grown impatient with what Bourdieu called ‘the fallacies of the rule’ as a key term for describing the social. But rules remain a crucial dimension of ethical practice in many contexts, including religious ones. This article focuses on British Muslim conceptions and practice of the religious rules of Islam in order to highlight the complexity, diversity, and subtlety of everyday practices of rule-following. Sticking to the rules, even in the non-Muslim majority setting of the UK, is important to many, although what it means to follow the rules and how to do so are not always straightforward. By going beyond stereotypes of ‘mere’ ‘rigid’ rules, blindly followed or boldly evaded, I demonstrate both the necessity and the possibility of a thicker description of religious rules. Keywords: Rules; piety; ethics; morality; Islam; Shia; sharia

Beyond Asian ‘mask culture’: understanding the ethics of face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic in Singapore

ABSTRACT During the Covid-19 pandemic, face masks became widely used and sometimes mandatory anti-infection devices across the world. While anti-mask protests emerged in several Western countries, nearly universal mask-wearing is commonly seen in Asian countries. Journalistic and popular accounts suggest that an Asian ‘mask culture’ explains the acceptance of mask-wearing and associates mask culture with political authoritarianism in Asian countries. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with residents of Singapore, an Asian city-state that implemented a mask mandate in 2020, we uncover a wide diversity of beliefs, motivations, and practices of mask-wearing that challenges the existence of a homogeneous ‘mask culture’. Drawing on a recent theoretical movement known as the anthropology of ethics, we draw attention to individual judgments and engagements with cultural norms and obligations in order to characterise how it became ‘desired and desirable’ for a diverse population of Singapore residents to wear masks.

Fields of Commitment: Research Entanglements beyond Predation

Abstract: The boundaries of fieldwork not only define the scope of research but also circumscribe and delimit the bounds of responsibility. This essay proposes a return to the whereness of the field as an antidote to treating the powers of description and historical dispersal as absolute and uncontested. Linking classic critiques of social science’s mapping of nature and culture, of the authors and subjects of research, to contemporary debates about the ethics of field research and anthropology’s complicity with colonial systems of rule, it offers a reappraisal of the field as a ground from which to build new solidarities across incommensurable political and scholarly commitments. By approaching fields not as empty retainers but as comprised of and defined by research interlocuters and their politics, scholars can better account for global slippages and dispersals without subtly reviving the figure of an inert nature under duress, in/organic or otherwise.

Spacialising and Contextualising the Queer Movement in India: A Book Review of Naisargi N. Dave's Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics through a Philosophical Anthropological Perspective

Spacialising and Contextualising the Queer Movement in India: A Book Review of Naisargi N. Dave's Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics through a Philosophical Anthropological Perspective

Struggling Along in Nigeria: Depression, Treatment, and Morality

AbstractIn this article, we analyze the multiple ways of moral being with depression in urban Nigeria, including those of the ethnographer. This approach fits recent theorizing in moral anthropology and mental health that aims at uncovering how mental illness and ethical being come into being in between patients and meaningful others. We argue that the Nigerian experience of depression does not follow the Heideggerian model of moral breakdown and ethical performance but is rather a shared experience of struggling along without the ideal of a full recovery. By proposing a radical reconsideration of existing care models that are largely based on cure and correction, struggling along draws attention to the unfinishedness of depression. This is best described as a heightened everyday awareness that lingers in between reflective and unreflective modes of being that comprise both the physical and metaphysical worlds young Nigerians inhabit and allows for moral being with mental health struggles.