Franco La Ceda and Piero Zanini, The Culture of Ethics. Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013.119 pp.The Culture of Ethics is a work of charming and (one lengthy citation / of Bourdieu aside) accessible prose. It might, more representatively, have been titled Cultures of Ethics because it is resolutely committed to the ongoing existence of bounded collectives marked by common habits, commitments, and systems of symbols, even as it attends to global processes and flows. Geertz remains among its theoretical touchstones, as do what Le Ceda and Zanini refer to on more than one occasion as tribes (17, 54). In any event, its scope is broadly comparative and its chief focus is ordinary ethics, loosely defined as a tenuous but constant form of rule and of (17). These aren't directly rules of good and bad, but rather constitute a tissue of one or another art of living on which we depend in order to manage the everyday and to know how to get along with those who live next to (17). This is in accord with what Michael Lambek (2010) intends in introducing us to ordinary ethics-the term and the phenomenon-save one crucial difference. Like most everyone else who works in the still-indefinite currents of the anthropology of ethics (or moral anthropology), Lambek would not license the casual reduction of ethics to rules. With most everyone else, he agrees that such a reduction, credited to or blamed on Durkheim, has done far more to hinder the program matization of an anthropology of ethics than to further it. This is just one instance of a tendency toward intellectual nonchalance that makes the book less effective as an introduction to the anthropology of ethics than it might otherwise be.Even so, it's a book with many merits. Several of its chapters extract from additions to the ethnographic corpus vivid instances of the confusions and dilemmas that come when distinct ethical systems bump up against one another and the relativization of relativism (21) that often results. They call effectively on Unni Wikan (2000), Joel Robbins (2004), and Karen Sykes (2008), but most provocatively on Michelle Rosaldo (1980) and Renato Rosaldo's (1980) research among the (formerly) head-hunting llongot, leading La Ceda and Zanini to pose the inevitable question:What kind of morality is this? Is it possible that an entire community was held together by this violent cosmology? Yes, obviously, it is possible, and there are many similar cases. (44)La Cecla and Zanini rightly suggest that such bumps are one of the conditions that account for the very emergence of the anthropology of ethics and their identification of other such conditions is equally on the mark (34). Again somewhat casually, they put the case of the llongot to further use in contrasting culturally specific of every day with such universal moralities as that of the Decalogue, concluding largely in favor of the llongot that it isn't just but also all theologies that manifest a repugnance of the (48).The phrase is a spin off of Stanley Cavell's accusation that philosophy's concentration on the meaning of particular words and phrases, in isolation from a systematic attention to their concrete uses, constitutes a rejection of the (1979:206-207), and it is chiefly from Cavell (and Wittgenstein before him) that the authors take or at least lend authority to what might be called their culturalist humanism, which is nowhere more evident than in their subtle and provocative critique of the philosophy of human rights (87-95). …