Ordinary Ethics Research Articles

ChatGPT in the public eye: Ethical principles and generative concerns in social media discussions

With ChatGPT’s rapid adoption, concerns regarding generative artificial intelligence (AI) have shifted from theoretical to practical. Drawing upon the “algorithmic imaginary” framework from critical algorithm studies and the anthropological concept of “ordinary ethics,” we analyzed Twitter discourse during ChatGPT’s initial deployment, examining 368,359 tweets. Our analysis identified five topics reflecting functional and critical aspects of ChatGPT. We specifically point to two topics with a critical perspective: “Ethics” and “Concerns.” The first aligns with scholarly discussions in AI ethics on fairness and transparency, while the second focuses on ChatGPT’s generative capabilities. This highlights an emerging trend: While the academic discussion on AI ethics has gained popularity, especially in scrutinizing ChatGPT, the conversation is now expanding to more nuanced ethical deliberations. We analyzed the posts’ engagement and sentiment over time, demonstrating the AI ethics community’s influence in addressing the potential and harms of generative AI systems.

Social media and the ordinary: Marginalized voices in neo/non-liberal China

Thirty years into China’s internet development, much recent scholarship has focused on rather daunting forces—big data, algorithmic control, surveillance, and platformization, to name a few. This article centers the “small,” or how social media is articulated to the ordinary practices, pursuits, feelings, passions, ethical decisions, and struggles for voice of people who are socially, economically, and/or politically marginalized. I focus on these processes and practices among marginalized young creatives and domestic workers in a context I call “neo/non-liberal China,” which manifests as an amplification of prior discourses regarding self-responsibilization, happiness, and harmony along with greater social stratification, platformization, repression, and an emphasis on creativity and innovation. The analysis is grounded in theories of “ordinary affects,” or the inarticulable energies, passions, and forces that move bodies, and “ordinary ethics,” or the ethical aspects of practices, choices, and judgments that make up daily life and, thus, selfhood. I argue that centering diverse marginalized individuals’ passions, feelings, and ordinary ethical decisions, as these are articulated to social media, enables deeper insight into their dreams and goals and the challenges and obstacles they face in achieving these. Their experiences also speak to larger ongoing transformations in China.

Relational care and ordinary repair in diverse craft economies

The commentary attends to India's rapidly changing craft economy to notice how individual economic actors in the craft sector make complex and often contradictory ethico‐political choices realising hopeful possibilities. Through the mode of care and repair, the commentary examines how the artisans operating within diverse economies negotiate with exploitative labour regimes and survive a dwindling craft sector. It considers how a woman owner‐artisan creates an atmosphere of togetherness and extends her notion of family by cooking for her team of workers. Care ethics, in this analysis, is not only a gendered feeling but realigns with co‐dependent economic exchanges essential for collective survival. The second case focuses on the everyday repair of musical instruments as an alternative act of ordinary ethics. The commentary argues, even when these small doings do not bring immediate and intentional change in the economic organisation of the two crafts, they require pivotal consideration as already existing alternative value systems anchored within everyday world‐making practices.

Ordinary Aesthetics and Ethics in the Haiku Poetry of Matsuo Bashō: A Wittgensteinian Perspective

AbstractThis article explores how the notion ofordinary aestheticscan stem, as well as the one ofordinary ethics, from thatrevolution of the ordinarystarted by Wittgenstein and further developed by philosophers like Cavell and Diamond. The idea ofordinary ethicsemphasizes the importance of everyday life and the particular details of our experiences. This concept can be extended to aesthetics, forming the basis of a modality of aesthetic appreciation that recognize values and importance in the details and nuances of everyday experience. One example of suchordinary aestheticscan be found in thehaikupoetry of Bashō. Bashō’s poetry often focuses on the ordinary and mundane aspects of life, such as the changing of seasons, the sound of rain, or the sight of a bird in flight, but also on that lower world made of insects, rotten foliage, and excrements. Bashō conveys in poetry the core ofZenphilosophy, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things and the value of living in the present moment. This approach to aesthetics offers an alternative to more traditional modes of aesthetic appreciation, which tend to prioritize grandeur, spectacle, and formal perfection. Ultimately, the concept of ordinary aesthetics invites us to find the intrinsic importance in the simple things that surround us and to cultivate a deeper appreciation for the richness of our everyday lives.

The play of ‘dirty politics’: ordinary ethics and the evidence of experience on the workfloor in New Delhi, India

AbstractThis article explores the tensed sociality amongst precariously employed service economy workers in the retail outlets of a prominent eyewear company in New Delhi, India. The bickering staff label the ongoing interpersonal strife ‘dirty politics’. Linked to this are their confident assertions that, in fact, all politics is dirty, and dirty politics is the only type of politics possible – rejecting formal party politics and labour unions as morally vacuous and motivated by utilitarian individualism. Engaging with the anthropology of ordinary ethics, the article demonstrates how the affectively charged experience and talk of petty politicking on the neoliberal workfloor provides critical ‘evidence’ that ‘confirms’ such a politico‐ethical view.

Teachers’ perspectives on ethics education – expressed as opportunities and challenges

ABSTRACT In Sweden, ethics education occupies a prominent position in the curriculum, both in the general, introductory sections and as a part of the subject religious education. The aim of this article is to investigate teachers’ insights regarding ethics education and to contribute knowledge about opportunities and challenges with ethics education, by analysing interviews with ten teachers. Five of the teachers used a fiction-based ethics education within a research and evaluation project, and five teachers used their ordinary ethics teaching. The analysis shows five different themes, time, the students’ background, safe relations, lesson plans, and fiction, to be crucial for ethics education, in relation to both opportunities and challenges. The analysis shows that ethics is a subject that occupies a special position, giving students an education that points to the world and provides opportunities to encounter and explore important situations, in other words, an education that develops a multidimensional ethical competence.

Uncanny ethics

The recent anthropological focus on “ordinary ethics” emerges out of a concern to attend to the ethical aspect of social action that is intrinsic to the human condition. Ethnographic and theoretical contributions to this literature have drawn on a variety of philosophical approaches to the study of the “everyday” and the forms that ethical practice takes therein. However, a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic is far from the “everyday” that is the domain of ordinary ethics and calls for a reconceptualization of the ethical, which could provide coordinates of meaningful interaction in the unfamiliar social. In this “uncanny” world, I seek to explore the layered meanings of care and its implications for an ethics of the uncanny. While the uncanny is an epistemological condition of modernity itself, the alteration brought about by the pandemic makes it ontologically uncanny too. Locked in a cyclical relationship, the uncanny and the everyday inexorably follow the other, making it imperative to conceptualize an ethics that can accommodate the singularities of both.

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

Рец. на кн.: AMIRA MITTERMAIER. GIVING TO GOD: ISLAMIC CHARITY IN REVOLUTIONARY TIMES. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. XIV+233 p.

Amira Mittermaier’s book examines the practices of Islamic charity in contemporary Egypt. To answer the question of how and why pious Muslims engage in charity in their mundane lives, the author visits not only mosques, shrines, charitable and volunteer organizations, but also Tahrir Square in Cairo, an important locus for understanding Islamic piety. The place became widely known in 2011 due to the massive anti-government protests that came to be known as the Arab Spring in Egypt. The study of political activism allows the author to get a better grasp on the ordinary ethics of Islamic charity that considers the issues of social justice to be no less important compared to the political activism. But unlike liberal emancipatory projects, the understanding of social justice within the framework of Islamic piety relies on a fundamentally different ethics, political ontology, and temporal orientations. Drawing upon different cases, Mittermaier demonstrates the diverse ethical repertoire of Islamic giving, ranging from the examples of radical asceticism and self-denial, based on the Sufi ideal of the gift, to the more utilitarian approaches to charity, where gift exchange is considered to be a means to collect divine rewards for performed virtues. By comparing the Islamic gift ethics with the secular projects of social restructuring and reducing poverty, the author urges the reader to rethink Islamic charity as having a specific political meaning and potential vis-a-vis progressive ideas and politics.

The Most Beloved Cow in Gokulpur

SUMMARYDuring ethnographic fieldwork in West Bengal, India, I witnessed the comingling of disgust and desire in shaping religious identity, the effervescent force of crowds, and moments of ordinary ethics enacted through labor. This short story is set in a fictional town: Gokulpur is a microcosm of the tension between rural idiosyncrasies and urban aspirations in India, permeated by growing right‐wing Hindu sentiments. Through the evolving relationship between a boy and his family's revered cow, I explore what it means to navigate companionship, community, and everyday life in an increasingly politicized village—and the reverberations of our choices. The piece originates from a desire to inhabit unfamiliar perspectives through closely observed characters and scenes, testing the potential and limits of imaginative empathy as a tool for social understanding. This work of fiction engages with anthropological scholarship on cross‐species friendship, nonhuman agency, religious ritual, and the ethics of care. [fiction, religion, India, animals, agency, ethics of care]

When Ethics Can't Be Found: Evaluative Gaps in Ordinary Life

At a sparsely populated wake in Luang Prabang, Laos, the guests appeared to restrain themselves from evaluating the deceased’s son-in-law to his face, even as they said to one another that he had neglected his mother-in-law and pocketed the funds for her wake to feed his methamphetamine habit. What are we to do with moments of apparent restraint like this, those meaningful silences in which signs of evaluation seem partially withheld, transfigured, or utterly absent? What do they mean for accounts of ordinary ethics? In unpacking the events of Paa’s wake, I suggest that such moments force us to reckon with the relation between signs of evaluation and meta-ethical accounts of them, as they also give flesh to the descriptive claim that humans are evaluative. Doing so makes clear that, at times, whether a particular person is being evaluative in a particular moment remains uncertain. At other times, people appear to be not only evaluative but so omnivorously evaluative—so fundamentally oriented to evaluation’s possibility—that they keep their evaluations to themselves.

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Religion and Relationality in Punk: Musicking and Ordinary Ethics

Engaging with Christopher Small’s notion of musicking and Veena Das and Michael Lambek’s notion of ordinary ethics, this article analyzes research on religion in punk from religion studies, sociology, and theology to offer a (self) critique of the representation of religious belief and relationships in punk. Focusing on the presence of evangelical Christianity in contemporary punk, and emphasizing relationships as central to the activity of musicking, this article draws attention to exclusions and essentializations in research in this field. Focusing on the ordinary ethics enacted through punk musicking, rather than the normative ethics located in sometimes polemical punk statements and scholarship, it is argued that a more accurate understanding of the place of religion in punk becomes apparent by focusing on quotidian relational practices.

“NÃO MUDOU QUASE NADA”: ÉTICA ORDINÁRIA E FORMAS DE VIDA EM TEMPOS PANDÊMICOS

Abstract In this article, we reflect on the daily life of a white middle-class family living in southern Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic. Approaching care as a practical activity sensitive to the details of everyday life, we emphasize the relevance of the notion of ordinary ethics developed by Veena Das. Through the narratives of members of this family, it is possible to see the invisible and invisiblized work necessary to maintain ordinary life and the weaving together of the ordinary and the extraordinary revealed in the relationship of three generations in the same house. Finally, we argue for the fundamental connection between ordinary ethics and forms of life, highlighting how the domestic space is not only a crucial structure of care in the Brazilian scenario of social and political vulnerability, but is also an active element in which forms of life take form and come to life.

Sufism, subjectivity and parapsychology: refashioning the dirbāsha ritual among Sufis in modern Iraq

Abstract This paper explores the ritual of the dirbāsha as an extraordinary miracle performance and its role as a bodily practice in the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities among the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya Sufi communities in Iraq. During the climax of collective dhikr gatherings, male Sufi novices perform extraordinary and dangerous acts, perforating parts of their bodies with swords or long skewers without seriously injuring themselves. From the Sufi perspective, this ritual is, first of all, interpreted as the miracle of a Sufi shaykh and not of the performing Sufi novice since it is seen as an expression and proof of God’s power as transmitted through the shaykh. Moreover, it has been argued that the ritual is constitutive for the formation of the religious subjectivity of the performing Sufi novice since it allows the embodiment of mystical concepts as emotional, sensorial and existential realities. For the individual ritual experience to work, the social construction and constant reframing of these “miracles” needs to be taken into account as well, namely the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary which allow the miracles to be perceived as such. The present case of the Kasnazāniyya will show how Sufis combined their pious with a modern, critical and self-reflexive subjectivity and successfully managed to reframe this highly controversial practice – which is criticised by religious reformists and secularists alike – beyond its traditional ritual context with the modern science of parapsychology.

THE AESTHETIC LIFE OF RELIGION AND ETHICS ON LONG STREET, CAPE TOWN

AbstractThis ethnography explores the aesthetic dimension of religion and the sensational ways in which it contributes to shaping ordinary ethics on Long Street in Cape Town, South Africa. In the context of everyday social life on Long Street, homeless peoples’ claim of an ethical character is denied recognition. Long Street is a public space of conviviality and differences, a hybrid social reality marked with growing urbanization, globalization, and neoliberalism, and overseen by a continuous presence of security units. It is a street saturated with ever‐increasing social problems resulting from a revival of class differences. Ordinary ethics on Long Street is complex, unpredictable, dynamic, and vulnerable, and stands the risk of potential breakdown. Against this backdrop, this ethnography recounts the ways in which aesthetic formations of religion stimulate technologies of imaginations that offer homeless people sensory experiences of refuge, recognition, being, and belonging amidst social exclusion and a harsh lived experience. Aesthetics of religion are ethics made visible in public life.

“Hey there, Brian”: Voicing Mormon Cosmopolitanism in a College Apartment

In this paper, I discuss a humorous form of voicing called Brian Voice (BV) used by myself and my former roommates, all of whom are students at Brigham Young University and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bringing the tools and methods of linguistic anthropology together with the anthropology of morality (especially ordinary ethics), I demonstrate the ways in which my roommates and I use this voicing to simultaneously inhabit the two seemingly contradictory identities of, on the one hand, a reverent Mormon and, on the other, a modern cosmopolitan. BV facilitates this identity by enabling speakers to voice both irreverence and anti- cosmopolitanism without incurring the normal social consequences associated with those stances. I contend that BV accomplishes this mitigation of negative consequences through indexing ridiculousness and absurdity. By situating BV within its Mormon context, I demonstrate that in distancing speakers from both hyper-reverence and irreverence, BV entails a practical engagement with the ethics, principles, and ideals of both Mormon morality and cosmopolitan morality, thus allowing speakers to inhabit a simultaneously Mormon and cosmopolitan self.

‘In the Meantime’: Ordinary Life in Continuous Medical Testing for Lung Cancer

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Danes undergoing CT scans as part of follow-up testing for potential lung cancer, we explore how access to technologies generates diagnostic uncertainty and trends of continuous testing. Our research is set in the context of a welfare state that has cultivated forms of government whose public health branches focus on early diagnosis and cancer control. Many studies on biotechnologies emphasise subject-making and power relations. Inspired by the work of Veena Das, we adopt an approach that focuses on the entanglement of diagnostic investigations with everyday life. We argue that being followed establishes a mode of being which we call ‘in the meantime’. Life in the meantime is equally characterised by a dramatic mode of being—that is, waiting for death—and an ambiguous mode of being: feeling quite well. As with any life crisis, it involves some sense of agency. We show in this paper how life in the meantime informs an ordinary ethics that encourages three ethical concerns in everyday life: firstly, how to inhabit life in the meantime? Secondly, what good is the testing for? And finally, what is a good death?

How is it between us? Relational ethics and transcendence

AbstractIn this article, I engage the recent debate on transcendence/the transcendental within the anthropology of ethics with the claim that ‘How is it between us?’ is the most fundamental of all ethical questions. In doing so, I contrast relational ethics with ordinary ethics to show that ethics begins with a demand that emerges from a situation within which one finds oneself with others; a demand that pulls one out of oneself to respond in a modality of concern and care for the between where we dwell together. This attuned response is both an ethical and a political one; a response that opens possibilities for being‐together‐otherwise. Such possibilities, I argue throughout, can only begin with a relational ethics. I illustrate this with an ethnographic example from harm reduction practice and anti‐drug war political activity in both New York City and Vancouver, Canada.

The moral case for coal: The ethics of complicity with and amongst Australian pro‐coal lobbyists

AbstractConcern with climate change, and coal's contribution to it, has centred coal in an intensely moralised politics of accusation in Australia. This paper discusses the ordinary ethics through which pro‐coal lobbyists in Australia relate to this moralised landscape and offers an analysis of the everyday and ordinary production of complicity with climate change. It argues that complicity is not just something that insufficiently ethical people engage in, but instead highlights the ways in which the coal industry derives a moral weight for its defenders. This complicity is made and reproduced precisely through the everyday practices of ethical deliberation figured in response to interpersonal moral accusations. These insights are made possible through the author's own positionality and surprising affinities with pro‐coal lobbyists, and thus this paper argues for an anthropology of extractive industry which embraces the interplay of anthropological rapport with complicity.