Moral Anthropology Research Articles

Moral Horizons of Land and Place

ABSTRACTA recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.

‘A good neighbour is not one that gives’: detachment, ethics, and the relational self in Kenya

AbstractSince Mauss, anthropologists have been drawn to gifts because they are understood to index the moral, often in contrast to the amorality of the market. Giving is considered to bring people closer together, weaving them into the fabric of sociality. However, in Korogocho, a low‐income informal settlement in Nairobi, women recognize the dangers of giving and of closeness. Not only could others be a burden on them, but they could also be a burden on others. Thus, women seek ways in which they can detach from one another. Beginning with the assumption of the relational self, I argue that this detachment is an ethical practice that can be best understood as what I term a ‘care for relationships’. In making this argument, this article aims to contribute to debates within the anthropology of ethics and morality concerning social relationships by showing the way in which relationships might be the explicit object of ethical practices.

Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology: Obligations and Requirements. LisetteJosephides, ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. 238 pp.

Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology: Obligations and Requirements. LisetteJosephides, ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. 238 pp.

Failing well

Since the early 1970s, the small town of Mayapur in West Bengal has been home to a multinational Gaudiya Vaishnava community of International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) devotees, popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. Although the land of Mayapur is understood to be sacred and therefore conducive to spiritual life, devotees often struggle with the practices and prohibitions that are deemed indispensable for their salvation. They are also, however, both prone to and adept at articulating their inability to live up to the ideals of Krishna consciousness, so much so that narrating failure itself becomes a privileged mode of moral self-cultivation. Devotees inhabit the moral system not simply by conforming to a set of Vaishnava ideals but by articulating their failure to do so consistently within Vaishnava moral narratives that account for the aperture between precept and practice. In other words, they inhabit the moral system by failing well. This article contributes to recent debates in the ethical turn that center on the twin problems of identifying and locating ethics. I suggest that beyond a focus on virtue, the anthropology of ethics must also account for how people relate to vices, and how moral systems accommodate the problem of moral failure.

Working with bacteria and putting bacteria to work: The biopolitics of synthetic biology for energy in the United Kingdom

The UK government has made significant investment into so called ‘fourth-generation’ biofuel technologies. These biofuels are based on engineering the metabolic pathways of bacteria in order to create products compatible with existing infrastructure. Bacteria play an important role in what is promoted as a potentially new biological industrial revolution, which could address some of the negative environmental legacies of the last. This article presents results from ethnographic research with synthetic biologists who are challenged with balancing the curiosity-driven and intrinsically fulfilling scientific task of working with bacteria, alongside the policy-driven task of putting bacteria to work for extrinsic economic gains. In addition, the scientists also have to balance these demands with a new research governance framework, Responsible Research and Innovation, which envisions technoscientific innovation will be responsive to societal concerns and work in collaboration with stakeholders and members of the public. Major themes emerging from the ethnographic research revolve around stewardship, care, responsibility and agency. An overall conflict surfaces between individual agents assuming responsibility for ‘stewarding’ bacteria, against funding systems and structures imposing responsibility for economic growth. We discuss these findings against the theoretical backdrop of a new concept of ‘energopolitics’ and an anthropology of ethics and responsibility.

Finding Freedom and Rethinking Power: Islamic Piety in English High Security Prisons

Prison ethnographers are often confronted with everyday examples of people trying to achieve some conception of the human good. Yet, descriptions of how people achieve this good in a prison environment-the techniques and aspirations of the ethical subject-are rare. With the help of recent developments in the anthropology of ethics and Foucault's later work on freedom, this article examines the formation of ethical subjectivity practiced by some Muslim prisoners in two English high security prisons. The case of Muslim piety serves to deepen ethnographic research through recognizing the place of freedom and ethics in everyday life, and challenges criminological accounts of power and agency in view of how people accomplish virtue.

Alternative Models of Knowledge as a Critique of Epistemic Power Structures – Introduction

Based on four case studies from India and South America, this Special Issue aims to analyse ‘Indigenous’ knowledge practices and ontologies that challenge prevailing epistemological orders and paradigms. The projects and initiatives discussed are mostly considered as alternative to the ‘Western’ knowledge system, but, at the same time, they refer to it and even appropriate particular strategies that have become typical of institutionalised knowledge production and transmission. The introduction to this Special Issue proposes an anthropological perspective on this matter. It discusses relevant approaches of anthropology that deal in manifold ways with the concept of ‘Indigenous’ or ‘alternative’ knowledge (e.g. Ward Goodenough, Harold Conklin, Evans-Pritchard, and Franz Boas). I contextualise the discourse on Indigenous knowledge in space and time, and also address the assumed dichotomy between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Western’ knowledge systems. ‘Alternative’ or ‘Indigenous’ knowledge is not fixed, but rather draws on transformed, revitalised and (re)constructed epistemologies and techniques. Finally, I reflect on the ethics of anthropology in regards to researching and representing alternative (and often marginalised) forms of knowledge.

Art as ethical practice: anthropological observations on and beyond theatre

This article discusses a central tenet of anthropological approaches to ethics, namely the notion of conduct. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary German theatre professionals, this article highlights how actors and directors within a public theatre institution cultivate artistic forms of conduct through the practice of the rehearsal. It analyses how rehearsals emerge as both spaces and practices of self-conduct, building on what actors refer to as Haltung – a term that simultaneously denotes attitude, posture, and conduct. Rehearsals facilitate a collective locus and modus of reflected action, suffused with the authority of the director, but ultimately aimed at training actors’ capacity to make ethical and aesthetic choices. The aim of this discussion is to show how emic artistic concepts and practices may refine existing and open up new pathways for dialogue between the ethnographic study of art and the anthropology of ethics.

The (extra)ordinary ethics of being HIV‐positive in rural Papua New Guinea

HIV/AIDS continues to be intimately entwined with the moral domain, and thus a positive diagnosis can cast doubt on a person's moral status. I draw on recent literature in the anthropology of ethics and morality, as well as feminist moral philosophy, to analyse the post‐diagnosis practices of HIV‐positive women in Papua New Guinea as they attempt to recuperate their moral personhood and make their ethical commitments visible to others. I argue that they carve out a repertoire of (extra)ordinary ethics from the ‘ordinary’ domain and that their practices tend towards a deontological ethics, rather than a virtue ethics, orientation.

A Dog's Life: Suffering Humanitarianism in Port‐au‐Prince, Haiti

ABSTRACTIn the Bel Air neighborhood of Port‐au‐Prince, Haiti, most residents are dependent on humanitarian and foreign assistance for food, services, aid, and jobs. Yet, some residents feel that the conditions under which such aid is provided actively blocks their ability to live a life they find meaningful. In this article, I explore how some Haitians theorize this humanitarian condition through the figure of the dog, an animal that exemplifies, for Haitians, the deep history of violence, dehumanization, and degradation associated with foreign rule. I then contrast this with how foreign aid workers invoke the figure of the dog to illustrate their compassionate care for suffering others. Drawing on research among Bel Air residents and foreign aid workers in the years after a devastating earthquake destroyed much of Port‐au‐Prince, I show how the figure of the dog is central both to Haitian critiques of humanitarian aid and to the international humanitarian imaginary that responds to forms of suffering it deems cruel. [humanitarianism, suffering slot, anthropology of ethics, compassion and cruelty, Haiti]

Anthropological Ethics and the Communicative Affordances of Audio‐Video Recorders in Ethnographic Fieldwork: Transduction as Theory

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to the development of professional anthropological discourses about audio‐video recording technologies in ethnographic research. Synthesizing scholarship on ethnographic partiality, doing ethnography in sound, and multimedia technologies, the article reflexively applies the concepts of transduction and affordance to analyze how recorders may be theorized as part of fieldwork encounters. This is based on fieldwork with a Zulu gospel choir comprised of people living with HIV in South Africa. Here, I discuss how research participants guided my use of recorders amid inequality and HIV stigma. I analyze the ethical‐communicative affordances of recording technologies, examining how the design of audio‐video technologies intersects with cultural and communicative conventions for use and evaluation of use of these technologies. This analysis suggests that the ethical‐communicative affordances of transducers yield both an extension of an ethnographer's social self and a disconnect from that self in ways that can be productively navigated during fieldwork. [ethnographic methods, technology, stigma, ethics]

Learning from the Past: Considering the Ethics of Appropriation

Learning from the Past: Considering the Ethics of Appropriation

The poetics of wisdom divination: renewing the moral imagination

This article makes a critical contribution to interpretive anthropology by recovering its interest in the moral imagination, while linking this to the poetics of wisdom divination, primarily among Tswapong of Botswana and more widely across a vast part of Southern Africa. This mode of divination appeals to imaginative moral reflection and ethical deliberation along with practical wisdom in the quest for well‐being. The esoteric oral literature in wisdom divination is rich in cross‐cultural understandings, transmitted over considerable barriers, and re‐created over centuries. Its evocative praise poetry, having no known author, is archived in the memories of experts, the diviners, and is recited and interpreted selectively during diagnostic séances. Yet anthropologists and literary scholars have not paid serious attention to the oral poetry and its remarkable wide‐ranging archive. Against that, this article documents the acrobatic stylistics of the divinatory poetry and shows how it appeals artfully for reflexivity, for heightened consciousness, and for unmasking the hidden in everyday life. The main analysis carries forward an anthropology of ethics that overcomes the usual division of labour between the study of ethics and aesthetics.

Response to Fuambai’s Strength by Carlos David Londoño-Sulkin

Comment on Londano Sulkin, Carlos David. 2016. “Fuambai's Strength” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 107–133.

Auld lang syne

Auld lang syne

Economization, moralization, and the changing moral economies of ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’ among Cuban migrants in Spain

This article aims to establish a dialogue between approaches in economic anthropology and the anthropology of ethics and morality, assessing the complementarity and the possible points of juncture between these two theoretical lines of enquiry, their analytical potential, as well as their limits. It highlights the importance, for research on moral economies, of uncovering what counts as ‘economic’ and as ‘moral’ in a given empirical context, and proposes the analytical lenses of economization and moralization as a productive way to address such question. The theoretical contribution is grounded in ethnographic research in Spain that examines how Cuban migrants seeking to improve their lives and livelihoods navigate different political-economic systems and changing material conditions. While discussing their trajectories, future projects, and the expectation they associate with ‘capitalism’, ‘communism’ and their respective changes and crises, people are led to articulate different moral economies that delineate conflicting regimes of value and evaluations of what makes for a good life, and what ought to be the place of the economic in it. The analysis of the empirical material enables us to consider various instantiations of the moral economy, to explore the different realities the term can cover, and to clarify the scope and applicability of this notion.

L'analyse morale de l'erreur chez Pierre Nicole

Nicole is one of the finest French seventeenth-century examiners of the human mind. One can find in his Essais de morale a number of brilliant developments on the characteristic themes of Jansenist anthropology: weakness of reason towards the passions, power of self-love (overestimation of one’s own mind and properties), tendency to flee the truth and take refuge in comforting illusions. But in Nicole’s writings, self-blinding is rarely complete. Besides, men’s errors are due for a noticeable part to a form of inertia of the mind, which can be compared with laziness as described at the same time by La Rochefoucauld. The moral anthropology one encounters when striving to measure the power of reasoning is therefore less unitary than expected.

What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

A focus on ordinary or everyday ethics has become perhaps the dominant concern in the rapidly developing anthropology of ethics. In this article, I argue that this focus tends to marginalize the study of the ways in which religion contributes to people's moral lives. After defining religion and transcendence in terms that make them less uncongenial to the study of ethics than many proponents of ordinary ethics suggest, I examine values as one sometimes transcendent cultural form that often informs ethical life. I draw on Victor Turner (along with Durkheim) to develop an account of how rituals often both present people with and allow them to perform transcendent versions of values. These encounters, in turn, shape people's ethical sensibilities, including those they bring to bear in everyday life, in ways we cannot understand unless we accord religion a more central role in the anthropology of ethics than it has played to this point. I illustrate my arguments with material drawn both from Turner's Ndembu ethnography and from my own research on Christianity in Papua New Guinea.

What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

La experiencia moral: una ética sin verdades absolutas

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the Zubirian approach to the moral kind of knowledge. It is, therefore, necessary to examine Zubiri’s writings on moral anthropology from the 1950s, starting from the most complete one, namely Sentient intelligence . If there is the possibility of contemplating a moral knowledge, we should discover its reference system and determine how it is built upon the contents given in the primordial impression of reality, mediated by the logos and its particular form of knowledge, with all the outlines, experiences and truths. On this basis, we prove that is impossible to found morality in a universal and absolute sense. In any case, the possibility of a universal sphere should not be conceived as something a priori , but rather as a regulative ideal of moral experience, that is, something that reason always tends towards, but never reaches.