Moral Anthropology: A Critique 9781785338694

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Moral Anthropology

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2 GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3 CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4 EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 5 STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6 THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7 OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 8 NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition Edited by George Baca

Volume 9 Identifying with freedom Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Tony Day Volume 10 THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE COMMONS’ Edited by Donald M. Nonini Volume 11 Security and Development Edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie Volume 12 MIGRATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND TRANSNATIONALIZATION A Critical Stance Edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Thomas Faist Volume 13 War, Technology, Anthropology Edited by Koen Stroeken Volume 14 ARAB SPRING Uprisings, Powers, Interventions Edited by Kjetil Fosshagen Volume 15 THE EVENT OF CHARLIE HEBDO Imaginaries of Freedom and Control Edited by Alessandro Zagato Volume 16 moral anthropology A Critique Edited by Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold

Moral Anthropology A Critique

k Edited by

Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Paperback edition published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any infor­ mation storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kapferer, Bruce, editor. | Gold, Marina, editor. Title: Moral anthropology : a critique / edited by Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold. Other titles: Moral anthropology (Berghahn Books) Description: New York : Berghahn, 2018. | Series: Critical interventions ; Volume 16 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018004177 (print) | LCCN 2018005583 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785338694 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781785338687 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Anthropological ethics. Classification: LCC GN33.6 (ebook) | LCC GN33.6 .M67 2018 (print) | DDC 301—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004177 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78533-868-7 paperback ISBN 978-1-78533-869-4 ebook

Contents Introduction: Reconceptualizing the Discipline Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold 1 I. Orientations Steps Away from Moralism Martin Holbraad 27 Moral Anthropology and A Priori Enunciations Kirsten Bell 49 The Question of Ethics and Morality Terry Evens 57 Why I Will Not Make It as a “Moral Anthropologist” Don Kalb 65 II.  Situating Morality Ethnographically Facts, Values, Morality, and Anthropology Christopher C. Taylor 79

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Contents

Moral Anthropology, Human Rights, and ­Egalitarianism, or the AAA Boycott Marina Gold 88 Empathy, as Affective Ethical Technology and Transformative Political Praxis Elisabeth Kirtsoglou and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos 104 Anthropology’s Atavistic Turn: An Animist Perspective Caroline Ifeka 133 III.  Moral Anthropology: An Antipolitics Machine The Horizon of Freedom and Ethics of Singularity: The Social Individual and the Necessity of Reloading the Spirit of 1968 Jakob Rigi 155 An Obscure Desire for Catastrophe Rohan Bastin 169 Situating Morality Jonathan Friedman 182 Afterword 199

Introduction Reconceptualizing the Discipline

k Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold

We must force into the conscience of moralities an awareness of their own presumption—until they finally are collectively clear about the fact that it is immoral to say “What’s right for one man is fair to another.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Part VII—Aphorism # 221

The general question raised in this short collection con­ cerns the importance of the anthropology of morality to the discipline of anthropology. The moral (or ethical) turn in anthropology—if it may be glossed as such—is a return to some of the foundational defining orientations of the subject. It comes with potentially major methodological (theoretical, conceptual, and practical) importance for anthropology as a whole and its more pragmatic, often wide-ranging involvement in humanitarian and social matters usually of a liberal reformist, if not radical, political nature. In other words, the current focus on the anthropology of morality (and ethics) is far more than developing a new ethnographic topic, or revamping an old one, or even establishing a new sub-branch of the “anthropology of . . . ” kind in the ever-expanding incor­ porative bureaucratizing net of the discipline epitomized by the organization of the AAA. Instead, the anthropology

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of morality (and the questions of ethics with which it is entangled) demands critical attention, for it is little short of an effort, certainly among some of the key proponents, to define (or effectively redefine) the discipline and to set its course for the future. The current “moral turn” is not the first and will prob­ ably not be the last, although the present direction has some alarming implications. In 1959 May and Abraham Edel timidly explored the possible connections between anthropology and moral philosophy in Anthropology and Ethics, a work that remained largely inconsequential for anthropology until more recent interest in moralities surged. They focused mostly on making conceptual dis­ tinctions between larger ethical questions (ethics wide) and concrete ethical systems in situ (ethics narrow). In 1997 Signe Howell put together an edited collection called Ethnography of Moralities that aimed to explore morali­ ties ethnographically from a methodological perspective. She purposefully avoided making the definition of moral­ ity her central concern, recognizing the impossibility of defining morality in an absolute sense. In 2009, however, Monica Heintz’s edited collection The Anthropology of Moralities extended its focus beyond methodological issues emerging from studying moralities in different contexts to consider the epistemology of moralities. The more recent expression of moral interest—or interest in morality—represented by Fassin’s (2012) A Companion to Moral Anthropology revisits the connection between anthropology and moral philosophy and focuses on defini­ tions of the good, the moral, and value, where “the object of moral anthropology is the moral making of the world” (Fassin 2012, 4). Fassin’s objective, however, is more ambitious still: to reformulate the discipline of anthropol­ ogy and interrogate the delimitations of its object of study. By means of a Foucauldian-influenced Durkheim­ ian perspective, moral anthropology is proposed as a new episteme, with a totalizing compass that draws different



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orientations to focus on current issues of human suffer­ ing, violence, human rights, or humanitarian crises. This leads moral anthropology to appear as a politically critical and self-reflexive anthropology, engaging the discipline both theoretically and practically. However, we aim to discuss the risks of reducing the radical critical potential of anthropology and the resulting consequence of making anthropology instrumental in furthering Western hege­ mony. This is a difficulty that Fassin himself recognizes but that the different approaches in moral anthropology do not manage to overcome. Three central issues emerge in moral anthropological studies as the starting points for analysis: relativism vs universalism, the importance of freedom and individual­ ism in forming and acting upon moral precepts, and the centrality of social interactions in the formation of ethical life (see Heintz 2009; Keane 2013, 2015). Moral anthro­ pologists vary slightly in their approaches. Whereas James Laidlaw presents the anthropology of ethics as a tool for “the enrichment of the core conceptual vocabulary and practice of anthropology” (2014, 1), Joel Robbins (2009, 2012, 2016), an influential proponent, sees the moral turn as being something akin to Thomas Kuhn’s (1970 [1962]) discussion of paradigm change in science. This is not only an overstatement but also a failure to recognize sufficiently the political and economic forces of which the moral turn is an expression. Anthropology has never had an overarching paradigm either of orientation or agreed theory. This was so from its beginnings as an academic subject in the nineteenth cen­ tury up to the immediate World War II years. After the war the field began to expand, leading to the extraordinarily diverse subject that it has become today—in conceptual orientation and topics of interest encompassing the arts, humanities and the sciences, with subfields of visual, physical and biological, linguistic, medical, social, and cul­ tural anthropology. In the early period—until as recently

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as the 1990s in the broad fields of cultural and social anthropology (those that are the main reference of the moral turn)—anthropology was characterized by rivalrous “schools” of orientation that often centered on specific departments and espoused particular perspectives (or mix of orientations) variously described as functionalist, struc­ turalist, culturalist, materialist, and so on. For a time some theoretical or general conceptual perspectives achieved a degree of preeminence—for example, the L’Année school founded by Durkheim in 1898 and Mauss in France and with some variation in England, or the culturalist tradition of Boas in America. In fact, shades of the rivalries between the various perspectives in the early days of the discipline persist to this day. Although they were perhaps exemplary of a subject as a pre-science in the Kuhnian sense, they did not give rise to the formation of an overall integrative paradigm. We would hazard that by and large the different schools of thought have dissolved or dissipated into the mass of topics and orientations of a virtually all-inclusive subject (anthropology as a catch-all) that focuses on most areas of human endeavor and practice bridging the arts, humanities, and the sciences. Anthropology—or, rather, social and cultural anthro­ pology—the chief reference of the moral turners, is more a-paradigmatic than paradigm directed in the sense that Kuhn described for the physical and biological sciences. More to the point, anthropology achieved its importance (a degree of recognition by other disciplines) through its challenge to overarching paradigms or ruling theoretical or conceptual orientations rather than its acceptance or confirmation of them. Twentieth-century anthropology often contested such ruling theoretical positions as that of evolutionism or those that were overly determinist or essentialist (i.e., asserted a fundamental and universal human nature). The kind of challenge anthropology once presented (epitomized in Malinowski’s use of his Trobri­ and evidence to contest major theoretical positions)—and



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here we note the radical point of the concepts of society and especially culture in anthropology—has arguably declined or retreated. It could be said that anthropology has in many senses become more domesticated to domi­ nant biological, economic, political and psychological approaches. The comparative anthropological project based on long-term ethnographic research, shaped by Malinowskian anthropology, has been central to the discipline’s commit­ ment to the production of knowledge that frequently chal­ lenges or problematizes taken-for-granted (paradigmatic) assumptions. The firm establishment of an overarching paradigm is difficult in a subject that comprises a virtu­ ally open field of analytical and theoretical possibilities, especially given the diversity of disciplinary approaches that inhabit its subject space. Furthermore, the acceptance of an overarching paradigm is complicated by anthropol­ ogy’s ethnographic commitment that is oriented to the production of theory from the ground of practice (or social action). This commitment involves a suspension of judgment (a particular bracketing) whereby authority, at least temporarily, is given to the practice and its logic (a dimension of the morality of practice) vis à vis metro­ politan, dominant, or ruling theoretical assumptions or suppositions (see Holbraad this volume). Anthropology (especially sociocultural anthropology), we contend, is not theory driven. It does not begin with theory; rather, it suspends particular theoretical com­ mitments subject to the ethnographic exploration of the nature of the phenomenon about which abstract theo­ retical statements of potentially more general application or importance can be made. Anthropology is a practice of conceptual and theoretical emergence—an arena or open space for realizations of human potential and the building of frameworks (eventually paradigms perhaps) for their more general recognition and understanding. As an open space of emergence, anthropology is in constant

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critical crisis that is congenitally subversive of overarching paradigms and certainly narrow reductive assumptions as to what the nature of human being is. There is a tension in anthropology—a feature that it does share with much science—to question particular paradigms of human understanding and to do this through the ethnographic; that is, to paraphrase Levi-Strauss, ethnography is what anthropologists think with when assessing established perspectives and investigating new possibilities. The anthropology of moralities manifests dimensions of the a-paradigmatic spirit of anthropology. It is a field that, in its common focus on morality, is marked by dis­ agreement. The adherence to a Durkheimian perspective by Didier Fassin (2008, 2012), a major inspiration of the moral anthropological project, is contested by the Fou­ cauldians (e.g., Laidlaw 2002; Zigon 2007, 2010), who go beyond Durkheim into the domain of a subjectivizing (and individualistic relativizing) postmodernism. Associ­ ated with this is an expansion of the influence of phenom­ enology, of both an ego-centered (strongly subjectivist sort) and more sociocentric kind (e.g., the later Husserl, Schutz), the latter tending to give way to the former. However, we add, the current phenomenologizing trends (exemplified, e.g., in different ways by Michael Lambek and Veena Das) have been involved in asserting positions (and to some extent an individualist, Western-centered philosophical hegemony) rather than engaging a phenom­ enological perspective exploratively, which we think was more the case initially in anthropology. Phenomenology is now made into a theory rather than a method. There are various approaches to the recent develop­ ment of an anthropology of morality, represented in Fas­ sin’s (2012) edited companion to moral anthropology and independently elsewhere, but little that is outstandingly novel. So much appears to be a reinvention of the wheel, so to say, which is not to be negative, although it does question the claims of those proponents for introducing



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a new radically innovative perspective (or paradigm). Important new moral perspectives such as Veena Das’s (2015) stress on everyday events or Zigon’s (2007) focus on what he refers to as situations of moral breakdown pursue orientations that had already been developed and upon which they may have usefully extended rather than effectively ignored. The situational analysis approach of Max Gluckman’s Manchester School is one instance (see Werbner 1984; Kapferer 2010; Evens and Handelman 2008). Gluckman (see, e.g., 1940), although a staunch Durkheimian (but strongly influenced by Marx), sought to modify the struc­ tural functionalism of the time. His method of “situational analysis” focused on everyday events of crisis in which ordinary expectations for action were thrown into question and taken-for-granted values opened to interpretation with potentially system-changing effects. Gluckman’s method stressed the heterogeneities of value in practice and the conflicts and tensions in interpretation and judgment. It was developed from Evans-Pritchard’s (1937, 1940a, 1940b) Azande and Nuer ethnographies, in which ideas and values are contextually shaped (the logic of the situ­ ation). The method aimed at extending the importance of Malinowski’s stress on in-depth ethnography (a notion well in advance of Geertz’s “thick description”) to the under­ standing of complex contemporary worlds and the conflict­ ing and contradictory forces influencing and brought into play through individual action. A key focus of Gluckman was on anthropology as the study of social action as moral action, grounding Durkheim’s abstractionism, of course a feature too of social phenomenology (see Schutz 1962; Berger and Luckmann 1967, 1995). Gluckman understood the normative values of the social to be in continual pro­ cesses of construction and situated differentiation best grasped in the breach (at moments of conflict) than in the taken-for-granted routine or in abstract or normative reflec­ tions on everyday practice. This is well demonstrated in

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his work on law and the sociomoral dilemmas surrounding witchcraft accusations. Gluckman’s perspective broke with the overly normative orientations of anthropology of his time. Not content with describing and illustrating the force of the moral order or with showing how social practice expressed dominant overarching values, Gluckman and his colleagues concentrated on the foundation of how value is produced and formulated in practical terms through indi­ viduals’ actions as they encountered sociomoral dilemmas and conflicts in value expectations. More positively, the significance of the moral turn is less in its methodological recommendations than in its re-insistence that social and cultural anthropology be centered in the study of human being: on the contexts of their practices and perhaps, above all, on the construction of values, the orientation of practice within such values (that of the observers as well as the observed), and those values’ existential implications. The key position of valuerelated practice in anthropology inescapably involves a concern with moral forces, but not necessarily in any moralistic sense. Sociocultural anthropology has in the main been relativistic, at least in the first instance; that is, the sociomoral orders of other systems have, by and large, been considered in themselves prior to submitting them to more universalistic assessment (or engaging them to question certain universalisms or else adjust these). Anthropology, given its concern with the diversities of human value and practice on a global scale, has been directed to examine the degree to which assumptions from one sociomoral universe might skew understanding in another—hence the key place of comparison in socio­ cultural anthropology and the concern to set particular contexts in the more global understanding of similar and different practices elsewhere (see Kapferer 2015; Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2016). We add that anthropology early on was conscious of its birth in the circumstances of Western imperialism and, often despite itself, developed



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a critical understanding that contested imperial authority. Anthropology became more fully conscious of this later in the context of mid-twentieth-century wars of colonial resistance (see Wolf 2010). Its enduring self-critique has been, arguably no doubt, in the forefront of attacks on the hegemonic prejudices of Western value involved not just in its own endeavors but more generally in the humani­ ties and social and biological sciences. This is clear in the work of Levi-Strauss, among numerous others, whose aim was to elevate the importance of other systems of knowledge and practice that had been marginalized and suppressed by Western power and the overriding author­ ity that it ascribed to its ruling values. Important critiques of anthropology by anthropologists (e.g., Asad 1973) build on a critical self-awareness in anthropology of its role as a bearer of not only the unwarranted superiority of occiden­ talist value but also the problematic engagement of such value in the construction of difference and of the Other. Anthropologists are, in the main—or were—particu­ larly sensitive to the historical circumstances of their intellectual beginnings made especially poignant by Said’s (1978) orientalism critique. Much of the debate in anthropology is revolving around individualist assump­ tions, a concentration on the dynamics of choice, a sub­ jectivist orientation (that in certain respects has arisen in a new guise in the new moral anthropology) vis à vis more socio-centered, structural perspectives. Ingrained within this debate is a concern with the distortions of Western-centered value assumptions in the comparative understanding of human social action and thought. The work of Louis Dumont (1980, 1992) (and reactions to his approach) expresses such debate. We note that Dumont is often charged with orientalism, but a reading of his work might detect a strong attack on the orientalism of much comparative sociological understanding. Anthropologists, it is suggested here, have been endur­ ingly concerned not only with the implications and

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consequences of sociomoral value and action within the realities of their investigation but also with the meth­ odological implications of the values embedded in the way they go about their work, as the Scheper-Hughes/ D’Andrade debate exemplified (see Gold this volume). Most anthropologists eschew a value-free objectivism, and few would doubt that the conceptualizations and theories that they might apply to the realities of their studies are without sociomoral value assumptions. This is at the root of major debates in anthropology (e.g., the formalist/substantivist debate in economic anthropology). Why then the moral turn in anthropology? What accounts for the re-insistence of the central position of morality in anthropology? Broadly, we hazard, although moral anthropology is a continuation (or extension) of already well-established arguments in anthropology, it is a reaction (perhaps unconscious) to structural changes in the discipline that have dissipated or fractured a sense of a coherent and relatively distinct project. This is an effect both of the great expansion in the number of practicing anthropolo­ gists combined with the growth of subdisciplinary areas within anthropology. As a result of the latter particularly, anthropology has been emptied of much of its erstwhile distinction, becoming more a subbranch of other disci­ plines in the sense of being defined by their perspectives and paradigms. Concepts of culture and society, or that of the social, over which there has been hot debate, have been reduced in their once-analytical significance. They have often become loose descriptors. Being an anthro­ pologist has value as a statement of identity, but it has lost much of the methodological and theoretical worth it had begun to achieve in the course of establishing itself as an academic discipline. The opening up of the discipline to other paradigms and perspectives whose prime focus is not on human being itself—although undoubtedly leading to fruitful



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lines of analytical thought—has, albeit arguably, made anthropology more a vehicle for ruling thought rather than its challenge. Such challenge was once a function of the priority anthropology gave to human practices and their motivating or underlying values over the authority given to abstract conceptualization or theory (see Kapferer 2014). The moral turn in anthropology can be seen as a return to the concerns and methodological issues that gave anthropology a relatively distinct coherence and in which human being and the diversity of its nature in prac­ tice was always at the center (see Bell this volume). The critical reflection on Durkheim by some proponents of moral anthropology (see Bloch 1975, 1983; Robbins 2016) might underscore this.

Moral Anthropology as a Diminishing of Radical Critical Potential The anthropology of morality can, somewhat paradoxi­ cally, be conceived as vital to the very processes behind its emergence; that is, it is part of forces that have over­ come what could be described as anthropology’s particu­ lar resistant discourse (or its immanent possibility), one that committed itself to an understanding of particular practices and their logics (i.e., their value orientations and the social and political constraints affecting them). Thus, a feature of the work of many moral anthropologists (e.g., those who strive to take a dominant role—Lambek, Das, Laidlaw, etc.) is that they tend to subordinate their discus­ sion to conceptual and theoretical concerns that are part of the dynamics or the status quo of commanding orders (see Ifeka this volume). In many senses they are bound to the terms of Western liberal and moral philosophy very much implicated in currently renewed efforts for the imperializing hegemony of Western value. They do not challenge the discourse so much as accept its overarching

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terms or, more to the point, reinforce its universalizing claims and the power structures it so often underpins. The terms of Western liberal philosophy, the significance of its arguments certainly not to be disregarded, is given great impetus in anthropological discussion, as Evens (this vol­ ume, see also Holbraad) discusses. As such, the anthro­ pology of morality manifests a moralism underneath, a repressed or suppressed moralism despite declarations against it, that extends from the Western imperialism of the past (and its ideological roots in Western Christianity secularized into an engine of modernity or the dynamics of contemporaneity). One feature of this is its ethnocen­ trism and its implicit furtherance of Western value domi­ nance, even as this may be denied (see Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos this volume). But here we contend that the moral turn in anthro­ pology is clearly part of a more general humanitarian discourse. We hazard that it is less driven by intellectual or scholarly motives internal to the discipline than it is by ideological forces of a global nature that encompass anthropology (see Kalb this volume). Humanitarian dis­ course (its very great positivities notwithstanding, e.g., its cries against the inequities of poverty, the abjection and suffering of war, the inhumanities of state oppression) is a global ideology produced in the very forces of the politi­ cal economy of globalization, whose disastrous effects it counterbalances but with which it is often complicit, good intentions aside (see Taylor this volume). Humani­ tarianism and the concern with ethics are ideologically integral to the political economy of contemporary global­ ization, which offset the frequently disastrous effects of new directions in the transitions and transformations of techno-capitalism (that create new forms of abjection in war and poverty, e.g., as they may also reinforce earlier, even more traditional modes of oppression). Humanitar­ ian discourse and ethics ameliorate the forces of inhuman­ ity, but they may also, often unintentionally, become the



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very instruments that facilitate the forces whose effects they are openly declared to offset (see Rigi this volume). Neoliberalism, processes of state transformation, new excesses of capitalism (the new corporatism associated with digitalization and the internet), connected with socioeconomic abjection in the West and growing distress and inequalities in the South (associated with the refu­ gee crisis, e.g.) are connected with a greater intensity in humanitarian discourse and concern with ethics and its component notions such as freedom and equality1 (see also Bastin this volume). These are not merely ideological or practical efforts to deal with the disasters of transitional or transformational processes (or the spirit of transpar­ ency in the progressive egalitarianism of the age) but, we suggest, are dynamically and ideologically integral to the forces they appear to combat. The current concern with ethics is an extension of biopolitics and is part of a dis­ course of political control and regulation, as many in this collection have argued (see especially Friedman). There is a tendency among the proponents of a new moral anthropology to overintellectualize their cause, which they conceive as a problem for anthropology some­ how separate from wider political economic processes. James Laidlaw’s (2014) important intervention on the matter of morality and ethics is a case in point. He steers the course away from the anthropology of the recent past that was strongly oriented to a critique of the status quo (the anthropology of the 1960s). Laidlaw points to the questionable nature of its reductionist materialism, con­ cerns with agency, obsessions with power and resistance, and so on. However, in doing so, Laidlaw avoids many of the critical aspects of the world in which anthropology is thoroughly enmeshed and insufficiently recognizes that the moral and ethical philosophical and existential mat­ ters he and others discuss are conditioned by the politi­ cal and economic forces of history. Laidlaw’s approach returns anthropology to an intellectualism of which many

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of the scholars he attacked at the start of his argument are sharply critical. Here the argument comes back to the issue of paradigms that began this brief introduc­ tion. Kuhn, of course, saw paradigm changes in science as being connected to the larger political and economic circumstances and cosmologies of human life and ori­ entation. It seems to us that many of the proponents of the new moral anthropology and ethical turn direct their attention away from such matters. In 1937 Edmund Husserl published his Crisis of the European Sciences. It was significant for many reasons, not least because Husserl aimed to correct a certain overego-centered (or individualistic) dimension of his phenom­ enological method and a subversion of his own concern with comprehending how human beings came to form their existential circumstances and act within them. Hus­ serl wrote during the apotheosis of Nazi Germany. The disaster of this was all too apparent to him, and he saw it as being connected to the overriding domination of science and technology as providing the true method for human understanding. The nature of human knowledge was both dehumanized in itself and driven towards a disastrous (for human being) orientation to human realities. Husserl’s Crisis has relevance for the discussions of moral anthropology not least because many adopt a phenomenological course (often Heideggerian, if not Husserlian) that is strongly individualistic (self-reflective) in manner, even psycholo­ gistic, though it is far from the kind Husserl attacked. But the feature we highlight is that moral anthropology has emerged out of a political and economic climate in which science and technology reign supreme and might be said to be thoroughly engaged in transforming modern realities. It is through metaphors and understandings drawn from dominant scientific and technological orientations to the world that—arguably, we admit—increasingly dehumanized approaches to human-created realities are emerging. Earlier human-centered or socio-centered



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approaches in the humanities and the social sciences are being cast aside sometimes, we believe, a little too enthu­ siastically. Some (DeLanda 2002, 2013; Latour 2004, 2013) announce a new metaphysics grounded in science (failing to discern that science itself is often oriented along the human-centered paths apparent in the very metaphysics that it overtly discards; see Rubenstein 2008; Schrempp 2012, 2016). Posthumanism is being celebrated in certain quarters, human being becoming decentered as it were in processes of re-forming the humanities and the social sciences. Perhaps moral anthropology can be seen, as we have already indicated, as a reaction to aspects of these reorientations. If so, however, it should turn more than it has so far done specifically in the reconceptualization of its key problematic to the political and socioeconomic circumstances in which it has been spawned.

The Papers: The Sequence of Argument and Discussion The papers in this volume address moral anthropology from three main angles: orientations, implications, and situation. Section I, Orientations, explores how politi­ cal and socioeconomic circumstances have conditioned the scope and impact of moral anthropology. This sec­ tion provides important critique of moral anthropology’s approach to central definitions—morality/ethics, good/ evil, action/theory—thus introducing themes that are explored in detail throughout the book. The papers by Holbraad and Bell engage with the major contributors in moral anthropology and identify the main issues emerging from this turn: the ethnocentrism result­ ing from placing ethics and morality as the starting point and core of the object of study as well as the pre-eminence given to freedom as a constitutive category of morality. Moral anthropology, argues Holbraad, in trying to avoid

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passing judgement, does not settle the question of moral­ ism. He argues for the priority of the ethnographic—the situation—and contends that morality, value, and, indeed, the constraints of choice and the resistance of structural (moral) determinisms or dictates are integral to the ethno­ graphic situation and must emerge from it. Bell addresses the issue raised by Holbraad regarding “What is the good?” (a notion that dates at least from Aristotle’s Ethics) and delves into an analysis of the role of ethics and morality in the making of humanity. Bell does this by identifying the dangers of moral anthropology’s totalizing capacity. She points to moral anthropology’s claims to redefining the discipline methodologically: in asserting that a moral positioning in our objects of study needs to be reflexively considered, moral anthropology starts from “a normative moral position” itself. Bell identi­ fies the problematic distinctions between morals and eth­ ics, initially raised by Holbraad and explored at length by Evens in the following paper. Terry Evens tackles the complexity behind the meaning of terms such as ethics, morality, and value, inherently connected to ideas of the good, arguing that “what con­ stitutes the good is palpably an open rather than closed question, and that therefore the essential nature of ethics and morality is likewise open.” For Evens, ethics emerges from an understanding of selfhood as the locus of the reflexive relationship between self and other, examined further by Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos in the context of Greece. Therefore selfhood “describes the essential condition of ethics” because the self is essentially social. Evens makes the important point that ethical preferences have an essential ambiguity that can be suppressed when moralisms, given their status as rules, determine ethical preferences through a dualist lens of good and evil. Don Kalb’s provocative conclusion to the first section considers the neoliberal context behind the emergence of moral anthropology. He identifies moral anthropology’s



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attempt to redefine the discipline at a time of turbulent crisis in a world “hungry for ethics” and its intention to interact with moral philosophy as a mechanism to engage with the “big ethical issues in the world rather than proverbial village concerns.” This, Kalb suggests, is a consequence of the penetration of technological orders into the social—epitomized by robotic killing machines and hyper-intelligent algorithms. He argues that ethical visions and practices need to be understood in the context of class formation, a product of politics and power. How­ ever, politics and power are placed on a secondary plane by moral anthropology, which, according to Fassin, favors “politics within.” The essays in Section II, Situating Morality Ethnograph­ ically, contextualize and develop further the critique set out in more abstract terms in Section I. Both Taylor and Gold may be understood as raising the importance of sus­ pending moral judgment, at least initially, in the anthro­ pological ethnographic exercise. They indicate the way in which the moral values of the anthropologist can not only distort ethnographic understanding but also might para­ doxically weaken the potential of anthropological critique (as well as the role of specific moralities and moralisms in the systematic dehumanization of human populations). Taylor’s account of his role as anthropologist and as wit­ ness of the Rwandan genocide explores the distinctions between anthropological analysis and critique and com­ mitted political engagement. He is concerned with how value dominates anthropology, particularly in politically sensitive debates, thereby undermining the capacity for anthropology to deliver relevant critique. Gold’s paper shares dimensions of Taylor’s concern as she explores the relation between value and power. She starts with the moral issues raised by the 1955 ScheperHughes/D’Andrade debate, taking these forward into a consideration of the AAA boycott of Israeli academics in 2015. Gold highlights the historically based factors

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integral to moral/ethical concerns and the moral conflicts and confusions that arise when critique and activism are merged, in which the positive concerns of both can be defeated. The conflation of activism, humanitarian principles, and solidarity has been key in recent events in Greece— given the debt crisis and the subsequent arrival of large numbers of refugees. Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos explore how humanitarian discourse handles the notion of “what is good” through a discussion of empathy and sympathy in austerity-stricken Greece, especially during the refugee crisis. This timely analysis elucidates the implications of moralizing language as it extends beyond academic debates into fields of policy and action. Human­ itarianism is an important source of inspiration for moral anthropology, often unintentionally generating asymme­ tries through its engagement with neoliberal morality. Neoliberal morality, it must be remembered, has strong Christian influences. Ifeka further discusses the implica­ tions of moral anthropology when applied to concrete ethnographic cases, revealing the ambiguities of moral anthropology debates in practice with a discussion of animism in London. She focuses on the influence of Chris­ tianity underpinning the notion of the moral in Western liberal thought, which gets imported into other locations with different constitutions of personhood. She attacks moral anthropology and development practitioners alike for producing standardized bourgeois models of civic “man” with a global god. Ultimately, she asks of moral anthropology how it would “explain recent manifestations of subaltern animist sociality in London—a world center of finance capital accumulation by dispossession—where ritualized killings and sacrificial acts are deemed by the law and national media to be crimes of murder?” Many of the authors in this collection argue that moral anthropology does not sufficiently acknowledge the extent to which it is a product of its own situation. The essays of



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Section III, Moral Anthropology: An Anti-Politics Machine, further elaborate the hidden politics in moral anthropol­ ogy raised in Section I and the implications for a critical anthropology. Particular attention is placed on the emer­ gence of moral anthropology in the contemporary Western discourse of neoliberalism. Rigi presents a historical analysis of the connec­ tion between moral anthropology and neoliberalism. He argues that a critique of moral anthropology requires an interrogation of general principles of currently prevalent ethics. This interrogation, however, cannot be undertaken from within current ethical principles, as they are enabled by neoliberalism. Moral anthropology, he argues, is the neoliberal-induced globalisation of ethics, and propo­ nents of this branch of anthropology have not sufficiently problematized the very reason for its rise: “an entrepre­ neurial enterprise in tune with neoliberal commoditisation of the academic world.” Such commoditisation is also at the core of Bastin’s analysis. However, he focuses on the economy of value within which moral anthropology emerges, questioning whether moral anthropology indeed produces an ethics of truth or, rather, is connected to the economic system of values encapsulated in the sense of necessity and is a result of the herd instinct of slave morality. He identifies moral anthropology as a symptom of a larger crisis, a sur­ rendering to the market, and a feature of the discipline’s engagement in “late capitalism”—a condition of neoliber­ alism and a result of the rise of the corporate state. Friedman’s closing paper notes the constraints of politi­ cal correctness among intellectuals and aims to further unmask the antipolitics of moral anthropology. He consid­ ers the successive “turns” in anthropology as expressions of a trajectory that is not linear but rather dependent on the larger context in which intellectual discourses emerge, transform, and disappear. His argument situ­ ates the emergence of moral anthropology and the way

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it generates particular representational configurations. Important in his analysis—given the predominance in the moral anthropologists’ writings—is the role of freedom as the “neoliberal turn.” This volume aims to critique moral anthropology’s efforts to redefine the project of anthropology as a disci­ pline. All the essays examine how the current fashion for moral anthropology may undermine the critical potentials of anthropology and, in certain instances, counter even the radical critical aims of some of the most ardent follow­ ers of moral anthropology to address various dehuman­ izing processes at what seems for many to be a critical moment in global history. The authors of the essays in this volume share the deeply human concerns of anthropology and of many in the current wave of moral anthropology generally. However, the point is to at least raise some doubts regarding the current direction and the way it may defuse rather than enhance the critical potential of anthro­ pology and its concern for human beings everywhere. We hope at the very least that this volume will contribute to further opening the debate that the anthropologists of moralities have begun. The intention of this collection is, as Nietzsche suggests in the opening quote, to “force into the conscience of moralities an awareness of their own presumption,” to aim to reposition anthropology not in the center of the status quo but in a more marginal posi­ tion, from whence it can level a more radical critique.

Acknowledgments This project is funded by the ERC Advanced Grant “Egali­ tarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons” (project code 340673) led by Professor Bruce Kapferer at the University of Bergen in Norway.



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Bruce Kapferer is director of the EU-supported Project “Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons” (project code 340673) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Bergen and Honorary Professor at University College Lon­ don (UCL). He has published widely on Africa, Sri Lanka, India and Australia. Among his recent publications is 2001 and Counting. Kubrick, Nietzsche and Anthropology. (2014), In the Event. Towards an Anthropology of Generic Moments (2015) and Against Exoticism (2016). Marina Gold is a researcher for the ERC Advanced Grant project “Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons” (project code 340673) led by Professor Bruce Kapferer at the University of Bergen in Norway. She is the author of People and State in Socialist Cuba (2015) and is currently working on the relationship between NGOs, human rights discourse and the refugee crisis in Europe.

Notes 1. Quite apart from the virtues in abstract of such egalitarian ideology as the importance of human freedom and the capacity of individuals to make choices concerning their existential circumstances, the discourse of freedom is central in political ideologies (often of an imperial expansionist kind). Freedom— and individual freedom—is a major instrument of legitimation in the maintenance of the status quo and not infrequently in programs that produce the forces of human anguish born of inequality, poverty, many forms of oppression, and war. We note that the discourse of freedom is vital in some anthropological discourse on morality.

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References Asad, Talal, ed. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Penguin Books. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1995. Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning: The Orientation of Modern Man. Güt­ ersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung. Bloch, Maurice, ed. 1975. Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology. London: Malaby Press. Bloch, Maurice. 1983. Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship. Oxford: Clarendon. Das, Veena. 2015. “Lecture Two: What Does Ordinary Ethics Look Like?” In Four Lectures on Ethics. Anthropological Perspectives, ed. G. da Col. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Accessed from https://haubooks.org/viewbook/four-lectures-on-eth­ ics/05_ch02 on 19 December 2017. DeLanda, Manuel. 2002. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum. DeLanda, Manuel. 2013. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London, New York: Continuum. Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, Louis. 1992. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. London: University of Chicago Press. Edel, M., and A. Edel. 1959. Anthropology and Ethics. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Evens, T. M. S., and Don Handelman, eds. 2008. The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940a. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940b. “The Nuer of the Southern Sudan.” In African Political Systems, ed. M. Fortes and E. E. EvansPritchard, 272–296. London: Oxford University Press. Fassin, Didier. 2008. “Beyond Good and Evil? Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4: 333–344.



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Fassin, Didier, ed. 2012. A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Chichester, Oxford, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Gluckman, Max. 1940. “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.” Bantu Studies 14, no. 1: 1–30. Heintz, M., ed. 2009. The Anthropology of Moralities. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Howell, Signe, ed. 1997. The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. 1970 [1936/54]. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. “Introduction: In the Event—Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments.” Social Analysis 54, no. 3: 1–27. Kapferer, Bruce (2014). 2001 and counting. Kubrick, Nietzsche, and anthropology. University of Chicago Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2015. “Afterword: When Is a Joke Not a Joke? The Paradox of Egalitarianism.” In The Event of Charlie Hebdo. Imaginaries of Freedom and Control, Vol. 15, ed. A. Zagato, 93–114. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Kapferer, Bruce, and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. 2016. Against Exoticism. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Keane, Webb. 2013. “Ontologies, Anthropologists, and Ethical Life.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 1: 186–191. Keane, Webb. 2015. “Lecture Three: Varieties of Ethical Stance.” In Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives. Chicago: HAU Books. Accessed from https://haubooks.org/viewbook/ four-lectures-on-ethics/06_ch03 on 19 December 2017. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970 [1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laidlaw, James. 2002. “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Free­ dom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, no. 2: 311–332. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Joel. 2009. “Value, Structure and the Range of Possibilities: A Response to Zigon.” Ethnos 74, no. 2: 277–285.

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Robbins, Joel. 2012. “Chapter 7: Cultural Values.” In A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. D. Fassin, 117–132. Chichester, Oxford, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Robbins, Joel. 2016. “What Is the Matter with Transcendence? On the Place of Religion in the New Anthropology of Ethics.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22: 767–808. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. 2008. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Schrempp, Gregory. 2012. The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing. Montreal/Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Schrempp, Gregory. 2016. The Science of Myths and Vice Versa, Vol. 49 of Paradigm. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Some Leading Concepts of Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Werbner, Richard. 1984. “The Manchester School in South-Central Africa.” Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 157–185. Wolf, E. R. 2010. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley, London, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 200). “Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities.” Anthropological Theory 7, no. 2: 131–150. Zigon, Jarrett. 2010. “Moral and Ethical Assemblaged: A Response to Fassin and Stoczkowski.” Anthropological Theory 10, no. 1–2: 3–15.

I Orientations

Steps Away from Moralism

k Martin Holbraad

Moralism and Ethnocentrism In 1995, in an article that in retrospect can only be described as prescient, Roy D’Andrade identified a shift in anthropol­ ogy from what he called “objective models” to “moral” ones. The discipline at the time, D’Andrade felt, was swept by a “wave of moral righteousness” (1995, 408), such that one could “have a moral career in anthropology [by being] known for what one has denounced” (400). Certainly the rise since then of just the kinds of moralizing approaches D’Andrade decried, exemplified by the prominence of anthropologists’ concern with what, in a critical review of his own, Joel Robbins has called “the suffering subject,” has been palpable in this period. It so happens, however, that the same period has seen the advent of morality cast explicitly as an object of anthropological investigation, giv­ ing rise to a body of literature that has come to be tagged as the discipline’s “ethical turn” (e.g., Lambek 2010). So it may be reasonable to ask whether this turn to morality and ethics could be interpreted as a dimension—if not also a symptom—of the shift to anthropological moralism. It seems indicative that even prominent contributors to this literature have expressed worries about the extent to which writings associated with the ethical turn succeed in avoid­ ing the trap of “analyzing ethnographic data through the lens of our own moral assumptions, traditions and concepts

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[or] falling into moralizing analysis motivated by the urge, for example, to reveal the injustices uncovered through fieldwork” (Zigon 2014b, 746). On the face of it, such concerns would seem perverse, since proponents of a turn to ethics in anthropology characteristically put forward the nonmoralizing study of moral phenomena as one of their central aims. For example, presenting the idea of a descriptive rather than prescriptive “moral anthropology” as the common denominator of Durkheim and Weber’s legacy to the dis­ cipline (the scientific study of “moral facts” and “value judgements,” respectively), Didier Fassin is forthright on this point: A moral anthropology, in this sense, does not support par­ ticular values or promote certain judgements more than political anthropology would favor a given partisan posi­ tion or recommend a specific public policy. . . . It takes . . . moral tensions and debates as its object of study and con­ siders seriously the moral positions of all sides. A moral anthropology has no moralizing project. (2012, 2–3)

Other prominent proponents of a renewed anthropological attention to morality and ethics could be cited in support of Fassin’s assertion. Particularly telling for our purposes is the way in which Robbins, himself a contributor to the recent debates on ethics, contrasts the ethical turn to the rise of anthropological moralism D’Andrade diagnosed. For Robbins, whatever one might make of its anthropo­ logical potential and political contributions, the literature on suffering is “premised on the universality of trauma and the equal right all human beings possess to be free of its effects, [and thus remains] secure in its knowledge of good and evil and works toward achieving progress in the direction of its already widely accepted models of the good” (2013, 456). A complement1 to such an approach, suggests Robbins, would be to turn “the good” itself into



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an object of anthropological study. The point of such an “anthropology of the good,” he explains, “is not to define what might universally count as good [but rather] to explore the different ways people organize their personal and collective lives in order to foster what they think of as good, and to study what it is like to live at least some of the time in light of such a project” (2013, 457). We may take it as read, then, that the ethical turn in anthropology constitutes an attempt to avoid the moral­ ism of passing judgement on the materials we study as anthropologists by measuring them against moral stan­ dards we already take for granted. Still, avoiding such deliberate attempts to pass moral judgement hardly settles the question of anthropological moralism. On the one hand, it is perfectly possible to be moralistic by appeal to moral standards other than the ones one already takes for granted (e.g., I could undergo any manner of moral conversion and then become a born-again zealot). On the other hand, in a sense at least, one can also be moralistic despite oneself. Be they familiar or unfamiliar, particular moral standards (e.g., Robbins’s “models of the good”), may in one way or other be embedded in and perhaps have an influence over the analytical procedures one brings to bear on the materials one seeks to elucidate. To the extent that they spin the analysis of the materials in question in particular moral directions, such hidden moral presuppositions can end up having a moralizing effect, albeit an inadvertent one.2 My feeling is that a lot of the literature associated with the ethical turn in anthropology has vestiges of moralism in either or both of these senses. To show this, I start by pointing out an entirely basic way in which any anthro­ pological attempt to set morality or ethics (for present purposes the distinction is not important) as an object of study is peculiarly prone to moralism and particularly to moralism of the inadvertent variety. This is because moralism of this kind is the form that the standard and

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ever-present pitfall of so-called ethnocentrism3 needs must take when anthropology sets up morality and ethics as its objects of study. The idea is simple. Say that, broadly speaking, the danger of ethnocentrism resides in allowing one’s own “cultural” assumptions (however one chooses to define that idea) to skew one’s understanding of one’s ethnog­ raphy. And let’s say also that this danger is ever-present because the very terms we use to describe—let alone ana­ lyze—our ethnography are always liable to be laden with such assumptions. What kinds of assumptions may be at issue in each case will depend partly on what we take to be the nature of the ethnographic materials in question. For example, if the ethnographic material concerns what we might describe as cosmological classifications (e.g., for Buddhists in Asia, the Buddha has divine qualities), then our description runs the danger of being “cosmo­ logically” ethnocentric (e.g., is our notion of the “divine” appropriate to the Buddha, or is this just a projection of our own theology? cf. Durkheim 1995, 28–31)? Or if, say, the ethnography concerns what we might describe as social or political organization (e.g., Indian society is socially stratified according to caste affiliation), then our description runs the risk of being sociopolitically ethnocentric (e.g., is our notion of social stratification appropriate to the study of caste in India, or is this just a projection of our own ideology of individualism [cf. Dumont 1980, 3–4]?). Note that such forms of ethnocentrism do not imply a moralizing stance ipso facto, although they may do so more indirectly (e.g., both a belief in a higher being, and a commitment to egalitarian individualism could be treated as moral dicta, and thus their projection onto diverse ethnographic materials could come to acquire a moral dimension). But when it comes to ethnographic situations that pertain to dimensions of life that are deliberately treated as moral or ethical, as they are so



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programmatically by authors associated with the ethical turn, the danger is indeed that of “moral” or “ethical” eth­ nocentrism, and that, I would suggest, is tantamount to the danger of inadvertent moralism. Even the very broad quotation I provided from Robbins’s manner of framing his anthropology of the good can be used to illustrate the problem. Such a study, Robbins says, explores how people live in the light of “what they think of as good.” As we saw, the “what they think of as” part of the phrase is meant to assuage the suspicion that an anthropology of the good would seek to export what we (anthropologists) think of as good to the people we study—that being an overtly and inadmissibly moralizing project sensu Fassin. But the term good in itself does, of course, carry within it assumptions that are informed by just that, namely what we think of as “good” (how could it not?). So avoid­ ing ethnocentrism, in this case, must involve somehow neutralizing or otherwise bypassing those assumptions in order to allow what the people we study take to be “good,” including what such a word might even mean, to emerge. But note the moral qualities that this standard anthropo­ logical problem comes to acquire in this case. Unlike the cases of Buddhism and divinity or caste and social strati­ fication, a failure to neutralize our assumptions on this score would land the anthropologist, ipso facto (though, of course, inadvertently), in a moralizing stance because the assumptions at issue here are moral ones—they are assumptions, after all, about what the good is. Failure to avoid ethnocentrism, in other words, would land us with projecting our own “models of the good” on the people we study, which is exactly what we have defined as the danger of moralism. Although I cannot review here the diverse and increas­ ingly voluminous literature on the ethical turn, I want roughly and indicatively to use this way of setting up the problem of ethnocentrism in moral anthropology to distin­ guish three strategies that could be adopted to avoid the

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moralism to which it can give rise. Each of them turns on the possibility of what I shall call analytical displacement, which involves finding different ways to bypass standard assumptions about what morality and ethics look like in order to allow alternative moral possibilities found in dif­ ferent ethnographic situations to be expressed. Mapping these three strategies roughly onto some representative examples from the literature, I want to suggest that the vestiges of moralism one feels when one reads these works can be understood according to the manner and degree to which their strategies of displacement fail. I shall then close by suggesting a fourth strategy, which I brand as analytical reversal, and that I think has the anthropologi­ cal virtue of being constitutively nonmoralizing.

Three Steps Away from Moralism If moralism, as we have defined it here, consists in (eth­ nocentrically) reading ethnographic materials through the prism of our own moral and ethical assumptions, then strategies of analytical displacement can be understood as attempts to avoid that by shifting the standpoint from which those materials are viewed. One way of doing this, as I have already suggested, is to replace our standing moral and ethical assumptions with new ones. Sticking with the spatial metaphor, we can think of this as a sideways displacement: one set of moral and ethical assump­ tions is put to the side in order to be replaced by another one that is presumably better suited as a starting point for understanding the moral and ethical dimensions of the ethnographic materials in question. Perhaps the most prominent example of this approach in the recent debate about ethics in anthropology is the return to the “virtue ethics” of Ancient Greece and Rome. Influ­ enced by Foucault’s classically inspired late writings on ethi­ cal self-formation as well as the twentieth-century revival in



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moral philosophy of Aristotelian concepts of virtue (explored particularly by English-speaking philosophers as an alterna­ tive to the standard dilemma between Kantian deontology and utilitarianism), a number of anthropologists have in recent years posited classical notions of virtuous conduct as a compelling framework for understanding the moral and ethical stakes of the modes of living in which they are inter­ ested ethnographically. As Cheryl Mattingly points out in an astute commentary on these writings (2012), virtue ethics has seemed appealing to anthropologists keen to avoid, on the one hand, simply conflating morality and ethics with all that is social (and particularly the notion, associated with Durkheim, that morality is a matter of unreflectively fol­ lowing rules; cf. Laidlaw 2002) and, on the other, imagining ethics as the prerogative of autonomous individuals able to stand above their otherwise contingent historical and sociocultural circumstances so as freely to choose their own moral destiny (this being also known as the moral view from nowhere, as Mattingly calls it [2012, 163], that both Kantian categorical imperatives and utilitarian happiness-calculi arguably presuppose). Very much in line also with the practice of ethnographic research, Mattingly suggests, virtue ethics is “in broad sympathy with anthropological critiques of universal reason.” According to this view, [a] moral decision or action cannot be determined through some universal set of rules, procedures or reasoning pro­ cesses. . . . Rather, the moral is always historical, always shaped by social context. . . . [T]he moral in any society is dependent upon the cultivation of virtues that are devel­ oped in and through social practices. The moral is centrally bound up with practices of self-care and self-cultiva­ tion. . . . It is an integral and pervasive aspect of social life . . . a communal enterprise; there are no persons here who are independent of the practical communities which shape the technologies of virtue and the aspirations about the good life to which individuals ascribe. (Mattingly 2012, 164)

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It is clear that this move back to the Ancients is not intended to be moralizing, since it deliberately avoids investing “the moral” with any particular content, as it would—for example, if it were to recommend some vir­ tues over others. Nevertheless, if the move is partly an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism and particularly the prob­ lem of taking for granted the quintessentially modern idea of a rational individual as the universal agent of moral judgement, then it is worth noting that it does so only by inviting us to adopt as our analytical starting point a set of assumptions about morality that are just as contingent. Virtue ethicists’ emphasis on social practice may indeed be more in line with anthropological concerns than more abstracted ideas of reasoning or calculating individuals as free moral agents. But they are no less historically and socioculturally contingent for that and, therefore, no less liable to skew analysis of potentially divergent ethno­ graphic materials—only now in a classical rather than a “modern” direction. While the image of the self-forming person may have become hegemonic in anthropology due to the influence of Foucault, it is hardly any more neutral as a premise for what—or who—it is to be a moral subject than the image of the reasoning/calculating individual. The dangers of a modern ethnocentrism are swapped for those of a classical one. And since morality is at issue, as per my argument above, the specter of moralism persists. A standard strategy for overcoming this kind of prob­ lem in anthropology is to add, if you like, a vertical dimension to the analytical displacement by ascending from historically and/or socioculturally particular analyti­ cal points of departure to universal ones. In the context of the aforementioned philosophical debates about the definition of morality, we may note in passing that if Kant himself—the arch-universalist of Western philosophy— has been found wanting in this respect, then improving on his attempt to formulate universal criteria for identify­ ing what counts as a “moral judgment”—and, indeed, for



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exercising it—must surely be a tall order. Be that as it may, it is in principle conceivable that one could transcend the contingencies of particular moral and ethical traditions (be they the ordinary assumptions embedded in our own or any other peoples’ moral judgements or behavior or the more explicit moral frameworks articulated by philoso­ phers, whether modern or Ancient) in order to formulate a framework that would be capacious (that is to say, neu­ tral) enough to allow us to identify and analyze the moral and ethical dimensions of diverse ethnographic materials without skewing them in one moral direction or another. Sticking with the spatial metaphor, we may call upward this venerable strategy of analytical displacement (some would view it as the holy grail of anthropology, others as an ill-advised and, in any case, impossible dream). On my reading, James Laidlaw’s book-long (2014) attempt to formulate an anthropology of ethics centered on the idea of “reflective freedom” (147) is the most compelling example of such an approach. Critically inter­ rogating a vast array of moral philosophers—and not least Foucault, Aristotle, and the Anglo-Saxon virtue ethicists— Laidlaw suggests that a capacity to “‘step back’ from and evaluate our own thoughts and desires and decide reflectively which desires we wish to have and to move us to action” is “intrinsic to the very idea of ethics” (ibid., 148–149). Much as with classical ideas of virtue and phronesis, on which Laidlaw builds, such a conception of freedom is thoroughly compatible with anthropological intuitions about the historical and sociocultural constitu­ tion of action. Crediting Foucault with making this most explicit, Laidlaw emphasizes that “the forms reflectivity takes, constituted as they are through socially instituted practices and power relations, are historically and cultur­ ally various. And therefore various also are the ethical agents so constituted” (2014, 149). Accordingly, a great deal of Laidlaw’s book is devoted to dissecting analyti­ cally diverse ethnographic treatments of moral and ethical

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comportment in different parts of the world so as to show that they can be understood as historically and sociocul­ turally variable realizations of people’s exercise of reflec­ tive freedom, giving rise to equally variable processes of ethical self-constitution. Laidlaw’s synthesis is incisive, leaving one thoroughly persuaded that freedom and reflectivity are indeed at the heart of the dimensions of life one would want to call ethical and that attending to their varied realizations in different ethnographic contexts can serve, as he puts it, to “expand one’s moral horizon” through the exercise of “ethnographic imagination” (2014, 216). This is an activity that, as Laidlaw points out at the very end of his book, is itself a “mode of reflective self-formation” (2014, 224) and hence an ethical exercise in its own right. Indeed, for the sake of our argument here, we may accept Laidlaw’s the­ sis that reflective freedom is inherent to all the otherwise varied phenomena we would want to describe as ethical.4 It follows that reading reflective freedom onto diverse ethnographic materials, as he does, is not ethnocentric because, as we have accepted ex hypothesi, such freedom is inherent within them. Still, from the point of view of our question regard­ ing moralism, I would suggest that a slightly different problem—one that is in a sense equivalent to ethnocen­ trism—remains. Even if we do accept that freedom is a common denominator of otherwise diverse ethnographic instances of ethical comportment, it would perhaps be uncontroversial to accept that such phenomena would quite naturally include a host of other dimensions, some of which may also be relevant to their ethical nature. To avoid having to exercise one’s ethnographic imagination too much here, one can simply refer to all the other fea­ tures in which anthropologists dealing with such materi­ als have at different times and in different contexts been interested: normativity, rule following, virtues, values, judgements, compulsion, social respect, human dignity,



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good and evil, or what have you. Productive as it may be, bringing phenomena as diverse as these to analytical heel with reference to the idea of freedom necessarily involves presenting them in a particular light. Phenomena, that is, that can be assumed to be “bigger” than just the ques­ tion of freedom are analytically slanted, say (rather than “skewed,” which would convey the stronger distortion implied by the charge of ethnocentrism), as varied expres­ sions of human freedom. But then the moral character of the very concept of freedom renders the approach moralistic in the same sense and for the same reasons I presented in relation to the sideways displacement of the virtue-ethicists: here too ethnographic materials are read through the prism of a particular set of assumptions about what counts as ethical in the first place. And again, because those assumptions— in this case the idea of freedom—are themselves ethical in nature, their adoption lends a particular moral spin to the material in question as well as to its analysis. In fact, I suspect that Laidlaw would have little trouble accept­ ing that his approach is moralizing in this admittedly restricted—though, in my view, no less significant—sense. Throughout the book, after all, he is open with his admi­ ration for liberal philosophers and the values of freedom they have propounded, and one suspects he would be happy to acknowledge that his anthropology of ethics and freedom can be read as a distinctively anthropological contribution to lines of thinking originating in the liberal tradition of social and political philosophy. However one might feel about these commitments, from an anthropological point of view, one cannot help but ask how far the slant towards a particular moral-cumpolitical direction might amount, after all, to a restriction of the ethnographic imagination (see also Robbins 2007). How far can an anthropology of ethics settled on the question of freedom allow the contingencies of particular ethnographic materials to suggest alternative ways of

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imagining what might be at stake in moral and ethical conduct? Again, even if we were to agree that all such conduct involves an element of freedom (and the point would hold for any other concept one might choose to put at the heart of one’s definition of ethics), we could still wonder whether all the other elements involved in any given ethnographic case could not, in their contingency, suggest alternative ways of imagining what ethics might be and how it might operate. Indeed, the point can be generalized. Whether one seeks to displace one’s initial moral/ethical intuitions sideways or upwards, as we have seen, the problem is that whatever (new) starting point one chooses will put its own moral/ethical spin on the ethnography. And this is because the new starting point— classical ideas of virtue, liberal ideas of freedom, or what­ ever other framework one chooses—is itself moral/ethical in character so inevitably ends up coloring in such terms the ethnography on which it is brought to bear and, in this sense, “moralizes” it. This brings us to a third strategy of analytical displace­ ment, which seeks to bypass just this problem by avoiding moral and ethical frameworks altogether as the starting point for the anthropological study of moral and ethical comportment. According to this approach, if the problem of moralism arises because anthropologists assume that to study morality and ethics you must first provide a suitable definition of what might count as such by using moral and/or ethical concepts in particular ways, then the way to avoid moralism must be to frame one’s analysis in a manner that avoids moral and ethical concepts altogether. To complete the spatial image, I visualize this manner of displacement as moving downwards, inasmuch as the idea is to go underneath moral and ethical concerns to find a deeper level of inquiry at which such phenomena can be framed in terms that are not themselves moral or ethical. (Note that this blurs my metaphor: if the upward displacement was a move towards the universal, one



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would expect the downward one to drill into the particu­ lar. Nevertheless, here I mean downward as “deeper” or “underlying” rather than in some sense more “specific” or “contingent.”) The most steadfast proponent of such an approach in the ethics literature in anthropology is Jarrett Zigon. In a series of publications (e.g., 2014a, 2014b) he has been arguing that, in building their analytical frameworks around ethical concepts such as virtue, freedom, dig­ nity, good and evil, or right and wrong, anthropologists have willy-nilly tended to foreclose the question of what might constitute morality or ethics in any given ethno­ graphic context. Explicitly distancing himself from neoAristotelian and Foucauldian approaches, for example, Zigon argues that reliance on such ethical philosophical frameworks “restricts our research and analysis because it limits what we might recognize as moral experience beforehand” (2014a, 16)—this being the nub of the prob­ lem of moralism as I have defined it here. “[T]o counter such a limitation”, Zigon continues, “we are best served with a broad and open framework that allows us to discern the diverse and oftentimes wide-ranging moral claims, acts, and dispositions we may find in the world” (2014a). To this end, much of Zigon’s work has been oriented towards developing an analytical framework built not on ethical concepts such as virtue or freedom but rather on the more primordially ontological dynamics that, accord­ ing to Zigon, underlie people’s diverse moral and ethical comportments. In particular, he draws on such Heidegge­ rian ideas as Dasein, dwelling, and being-in-the-world, as well as on Deleuzian conceptions of relation and assem­ blage, to suggest that moral and ethical life is best framed as a matter of what he calls “attunement” to the relational assemblages in which people are necessarily entangled. Such relational entanglements, Zigon suggests, come to constitute a life trajectory with which the subject is by

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definition concerned and to which s/he is committed in different ways—whether positive, neutral, or negative— thus maintaining a stance Zigon brands as “fidelity.” The upshot of this is a distinction between comfort in and anx­ iety about one’s relations: “I am advocating an approach that posits moral ways of being-in-the-world that have as their primary concern dwelling comfortably in a world one has found oneself in and reducing the anxiety one feels when the relations that constitute this world become problematic” (2014a, 27). Without going into the detail of Zigon’s ontologically minded framework, here I want only to draw attention to the strategy he adopts to develop it, which proceeds in three steps. First, in a critical spirit, Zigon points out that each of the available ethical frameworks that anthropolo­ gists of morality have adopted is underwritten by particu­ lar ontological commitments, pertaining most obviously to the kinds of beings that can be given the role of moral actors. For example, just as deontological approaches pre­ suppose the existence of a law-following rational being and consequentialist ones assume the existence of a calculative one, so Foucauldian approaches are premised on the existence of a “transformative being that is able to enact . . . transformation through its own work on and care for the self” (2014a, 20). From this critical observa­ tion follows Zigon’s second move, which is to suggest that to avoid trapping one’s analysis of moral and ethi­ cal comportment in the terms of these established moral and ethical frameworks, one must revise the ontological commitments that underpin them. Hence, Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world is adopted as the deep­ est touchstone on which an alternative set of ontological commitments could be developed—Dasein, dwelling, relational being, and other such conceptions being some of the building blocks. And this sets the (ontological) premises for the third and final step, which is to draw out consequences for human comportment that, as Zigon



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seeks to show, can provide an alternative framework for studying moral and ethical dimensions of life—one that, in Nietzsche’s sense, goes “beyond good and evil” (2014a, 25). Attunement, fidelity, comfort, anxiety, and so on become the new terms through which moral and ethical life is anthropologically conceived. Zigon’s revision of moral and ethical intuitions is in itself attractive—it reads as nothing short of an alterna­ tive ethical theory with an integrity of its own. But from the point of view of our argument here, that’s exactly the problem. Although articulating alternative ontological premises for one’s understanding of ethical comportment may indeed provide new ways of appreciating the moral and ethical dimensions of diverse ethnographic materi­ als, it hardly removes the problem of skewing or slanting those materials in very particular ways. To be sure, as Zigon insists, the alternative ontological starting point he articulates, in terms of being-in-the-world, relationality, dwelling and so on, may not be as explicitly moral or ethical in nature as the notions of virtue, freedom, or good and evil that it seeks to displace “downwards” (although it is worth noting that Zigon does not provide a clear criterion for identifying what concepts may or may not be taken to count as moral/ethical—e.g., why exactly are virtue or freedom to be taken as ethical concepts while dwelling or attunement are not?). But the analytical framework that Zigon goes on to elaborate on the basis of these ontological commitments most certainly has a moral/ethical hue of its own. Just as, say, Foucault pro­ pounds an image of self-cultivating, caring, and, indeed, free (sensu Laidlaw) selves, so Zigon proposes the notion of subjects who care about the relationships into which they are thrown, seek attunement to and, thus, comfort in them, and so on. And this ethics, as he calls it too (2014b), provides the starting point for Zigon’s analy­ sis of ethnography just as much as the ethics of virtue or freedom do for others. So, surely, the problem of

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moralism persists: particular moral and ethical concep­ tions spin the analysis of otherwise diverse ethnographic materials in a way that, with respect to these basic (albeit novel) analytical-cum-ontological commitments, remains uniform. Ethnography, again, formatted to the analyst’s chosen moral and ethical presuppositions or, at least, as per Zigon’s downward displacement, to the ontological commitments that undergird them.

An Amoral Volte Face We may note at this point that all three of the strategies of analytical displacement that we have reviewed—side­ ways, upward, and downward—are basically similar in their structure. To see this, it is helpful to imagine the problem with which all three of them are designed to deal—namely the problem of ethnocentrism and the risk of moralism that rides on it—as a sort of confrontation between two sides. On the one hand, we have ethnog­ raphy (and particularly those dimensions of it we would want to thematize as moral or ethical), and on the other, we have the analytical concepts and procedures that the anthropologist brings to bear on it. The problem of eth­ nocentrism (and moralism), then, consists in the danger of the latter spinning the former in a particular moral or ethical direction. Note, then, that all three strategies for assuaging this problem involve displacing potentially problematic (viz. moral spin inducing) analytical assump­ tions by introducing a third player in this confrontation—a mediating one that can diffuse it. Classical ideas of virtue, universal conceptions of freedom, or Heideggerian con­ cerns with dwelling all do the same thing in the structure of these arguments: they provide an analytical starting point that is considered, for different reasons in each case, better equipped to reveal the moral and ethical dimen­ sions of the ethnography.



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Still, if none of the three approaches fully avoids the problem of moralism—the problem of reading particular moral and ethical conceptions onto otherwise diverse and potentially divergent ethnographic materials—that is because of a basic premise they all share: namely, the idea that the analytical decisions as to what might count as “moral” or “ethical” at all, and how these dimensions are to be identified (let alone analyzed) in any given eth­ nographic situation must be made before the analytical encounter with the ethnographic materials takes place. The strategy, in other words, is first to build up an ana­ lytical framework (drawing centrally, as we have seen, on various moral philosophers—Heidegger, Deleuze, or whomever) and then to “run” it on different ethnographic materials, showing how the framework allows us to get a handle on moral and ethical dimensions inherent within them. Admittedly, as Laidlaw in particular makes clear, the ethnographic materials, in all of their diversity, can have a reciprocal effect on the analytical framework, expanding or otherwise modifying our understanding of morality and ethics in the process of its ethnographically driven analy­ sis—this being the power of the “ethnographic stance,” as Laidlaw calls it (following Bernard Williams), to expand our moral imagination. But note how this way of imag­ ining the reciprocity between analysis and ethnography confirms the basic idea that the former’s power resides in its capacity to frame—or, in a Dumontian, hierarchical sense, “encompass” (1980)—the latter. While the speci­ ficities of any given ethnographic situation might serve to expand or otherwise modify the coordinates of our chosen analytical framework, they are by no means meant to exceed or undermine them, let alone contradict or negate them. Reverting to our spatial metaphor, we could say that the basic strategic assumption here is that analysis must move—or even march—forward: having decided on one’s basic analytical framework, one then goes ahead and ratifies it by showing all the ways in which it can shed

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light on different ethnographic situations, even as those situations invite one to further develop, expand, deepen or otherwise modify the framework itself. Find the best analytical starting point, then go forth and conquer the ethnography with it, and remember: what doesn’t break you makes you stronger! But then we may conclude that the problem of mor­ alism as we have articulated it is a direct concomitant of this basic and entirely commonplace assumption about how anthropological analysis must operate. If one assumes that developing an anthropological approach to the study of morality and ethics must involve first decid­ ing on what may count as such, then one effectively builds the danger of moralism into the very infrastructure of the whole endeavor. After all, the problem of moral­ ism always comes down to the tendency in one way or other to make certain basic decisions in advance as to what morality and ethics are going to end up looking like in one’s ethnography (self-formation, freedom, relational comfort, or whatever). But this, it turns out, is merely an endorsement of a particular view of what it is to do anthropological analysis at all. It follows that at least one way of freeing the anthro­ pology of morality from the problem of moralism would involve imagining an altogether different way of doing anthropological analysis. In particular, it would involve reversing the relationship between analysis and ethnog­ raphy so as to give the latter logical priority over the former (see also Holbraad 2012, 2013; Holbraad and Ped­ ersen 2017). The whole point of anthropological analysis would in this way be turned around: rather than settling on a framework for the analysis of morality and ethics in order then to go on to shed light on diverse ethnographic materials, the idea would be to use the diversity of these materials to unsettle the analytical framework in ques­ tion—which is to say, to be prepared not just to expand



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or modify it but rather, if and when the ethnographic exigencies so require, critically to alter, negate, and even replace it wholesale. The power of analysis, on this understanding, would reside not in ratifying one’s initial point of departure but in articulating the many ways in which it may come up short when exposed to the con­ tingencies of different ethnographic situations. Each of these encounters with ethnographic contingency would have the potential to produce a new analytical framework because such frameworks, on this image, are conceived as an outcome of rather than a premise for analysis. There could therefore be as many analytical frameworks as there are ethnographic encounters with which to challenge any one of them. The basic reversal of this way of thinking, in short, can be imagined as a way of moving backwards from our initial suppositions, being prepared to see the encounter with ethnographic specificities as an occasion to conceive in new ways what morality and ethics might be and how they may operate. The upshot would be an anthropology of morality that, rather than trying to encompass ethno­ graphic diversity within a single set of analytical coordi­ nates, would be prepared to use this diversity as a lever for multiplying the number of possible moral and ethical frameworks. The contingency of different ethnographic situations, then, could, in principle, be transmuted as a contingency of analytical models of morality and ethics. And this would be a manner of expanding the moral imag­ ination in the most open way possible, rendering inher­ ently unstable the very ideas of the moral and the ethical in the process. Moralism, on this account, could scarcely get off the ground, for the question of what “the moral” or “the ethical” might even be would be left deliberately open and ready to be answered in different and potentially unforeseeable ways according to the ethnographic circum­ stances and their diverse analytical exigencies.

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Acknowledgments I am grateful to Joanna Cook, James Laidlaw and Jar­ rett Zigon for their critical comments on drafts of this text—comments that, particularly in the case of Laidlaw’s, I have not been able to address fully in my revisions. Writing has been possible thanks to an ERC Consolida­ tor grant (ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP) for a project on revolutionary personhood.

Martin Holbraad teaches social anthropology at Uni­ versity College London (UCL). He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago, 2012) and co-author of The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge, 2017). Cur­ rently he conducts research on revolutionary personhood in Cuba and elsewhere.

Notes 1. One senses that Robbins could have just as well called it an antidote, and this is what Veena Das, in a recent riposte (2015), takes him to have meant. 2. To be sure, the charge of moralism in such a case may be considerably weaker and also somewhat mischievous, as part of the sting of calling someone moralistic is that the charge pertains to his or her intentions. So if inadvertent moralism is moralism despite one’s intentions, the charge admittedly has something unfair about it. Still, one can feel that someone is moralizing even when s/he does not mean to be. 3. The term ethnocentrism is itself far from unproblematic, though I use it here to tag a set of problems immediately familiar to anthropologists, however they may feel about the best way to conceptualize them. 4. Still, we may fairly wonder to what degree and under



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what conditions this claim could be falsified: Would Laidlaw entertain the possibility of an ethnographic instance that both counted as an example of ethical comportment and was shown, nevertheless, not to involve the exercise of reflective freedom, or would such a lack of freedom be enough to rule it out as an example of ethical comportment by fiat?

References D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. “Moral Models in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3: 399–408. Das, Veena, Hayder Al-Mohammad, Joel Robbins, and Charles Stafford. 2015. “There Is No Such Thing as the Good: The 2013 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory.” Critique of Anthropology 35, no. 4: 430–480. Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Live. Trans­ lated by Karen E. Fields. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fassin, Didier. 2012. “Introduction: Toward a Critical Moral Anthro­ pology.” In A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. D. Fassin, 1–20. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, Martin. 2013. “Scoping Recursivity: A Comment on Frank­ lin and Napier.” Cambridge Anthropology 31, no. 2: 121–127. Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2002. “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Free­ dom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 8, no. 2: 311–332. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: Towards an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael, ed. 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. “Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality.” Anthropological Theory 12, no. 2: 161–184. Robbins, Joel. 2007. “Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change.” Ethnos 72, no. 3: 293–314.

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Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Slot: Toward an Anthro­ pology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, no. 3: 447–462. Zigon, Jarrett. 2014a. “Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions for Morally Being-in-the-World.” Ethos 42, no. 1: 16–30. Zigon, Jarrett. 2014b. “An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 20: 746–764.

Moral Anthropology and A Priori Enunciations

k Kirsten Bell Numerous commentators have pointed to an ethical turn in anthropology since the beginning of the twenty-first century, which has seen the emergence of an approach focused on questions of morality and ethics. Under the rubric of “the anthropology of ethics” (Faubion 2011; Laid­ law 2014) and “moral anthropology” (Fassin 2008, 2012),1 it has been described as “one of the fastest-growing fields within the discipline” (Fassin 2014, 430). At first glance the ethical turn seems merely to call for an expansion of the anthropological gaze to include a new set of concerns: the “ethnography of moralities,” to use Signe Howell’s (1997) older term. But closer inspection reveals a strik­ ingly ambitious project—one that essentially calls for a wholesale revisioning of anthropology. For this reason it is deserving of sustained scrutiny. In principle, I have no problem with anthropologists turning their gaze towards the study of morals and “how moral questions are posed and addressed or, symmetri­ cally, how non-moral questions are rephrased as moral” (Fassin 2008, 4). Nor do I disagree that morals should be a legitimate object for social anthropology in much the same way that politics or medicine is, although I think that “morals” are objects of a fundamentally different order than either of these examples—and not just because of the normative connotations of the term moral itself.

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There are dangers here, ones that relate to the question of what is meant by “morals” and “ethics”; this is some­ thing glossed over in many accounts. For example, Didier Fassin explicitly avoids defining these terms, justifying this via recourse to the lack of philosophical agreement on their meaning and “because for social scientists there is a benefit from proceeding in this inductive way” (Fassin 2012, 6). But “morals,” “morality,” and “ethics” are loose and encom­ passing concepts. Especially when used as synonyms for “values”—which they generally seem to be by those who have piloted the ethical turn—they are “far too broad, far too promiscuous” (Edel and Edel in Howell 1997, 2); poten­ tially anything and everything is within their ambit. This encompassing scope is something proponents themselves occasionally highlight. For example, James Laidlaw argues that the anthropology of ethics shouldn’t be thought of as a new specialism: “Instead, its mission should be an enrichment of the core conceptual vocabu­ lary and practice of anthropology, and its proper place an integral dimension of the anthropological enterprise as such. The reason for this is that ethical considerations pervade all spheres of human life” (2014, 1–2). Indeed, the anthropology of ethics is presented both as something new and simultaneously what we have always done. To quote Laidlaw again: I have said that the anthropology of ethics has developed largely within the last couple of decades, and in the rel­ evant sense this is true. . . . But it is also and equally importantly true that morality has never been absent from anthropological thought. Many of the greatest ethnogra­ phies written throughout the discipline’s history have at their heart sophisticated discussions of moral concepts and reasoning. (Laidlaw 2014, 10)

He goes on to produce a strikingly presentist account in which various classic ethnographies are reclaimed as



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examples of the anthropology of ethics—among them E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande. There is little question that Evans-Pritchard saw notions of witchcraft as morally invested; in his words, “It is in the idiom of witchcraft that Azande express moral rules which mostly lie outside of criminal and civil law” (Evans-Pritchard 1976, 51). But what happens when an ethnography whose primary significance resides in the ways it “opens up new horizons of understanding that are embedded in magical practices” (Kapferer 2002, 3) is reduced to a discussion of local conceptions of the person and prevalent moral values? I would argue that prefiguring “the moral” in this way serves to transform the phenomenon in question: reducing it to terms external to it and foreclosing other equally important “horizons of understanding” that magical beliefs and practices speak to. In fact, this danger is something alluded to—albeit unwittingly—by Laidlaw (2014, 2) himself, who points to the study of gender as a precedent for the anthropology of ethics, noting that what started out as a subdiscipline of anthropology (feminist anthropology) ultimately became a pervasive modification of the field as a whole. I suspect the analogy is more accurate than he intends because the past quarter century has made the “totalizing gestures of feminism” (Butler 1990, 18) starkly apparent—not only in relation to the binary of sex/gender it was founded upon but also in terms of the ways that “gender” has been prefigured at the expense of everything else (e.g., class, culture, race, religion). Thus, if anything, the comparison illustrates the need to proceed cautiously. This brings me to the second premise of the ethical turn, which makes a series of claims not only about what we should study but also how we should study it. It is in relation to the latter topic that the extent of the ambition to reshape anthropology becomes apparent.

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Although a preoccupation for all those involved in the field, it arguably reaches its clearest articulation in Didier Fassin’s (2008, 2012) work. As Carlo Caduff (2011) notes, Fassin essentially proposes a means of bringing together the anthropology of ethics and the ethics of anthropol­ ogy; indeed, this is precisely why Fassin prefers the term “moral anthropology.” This term, he suggests, urges us to consider our own moral positioning: “whether we recog­ nize it or not, there is always a moral positioning in the objects we choose, the place we occupy in the field, the way we interpret facts, the form of writing we elaborate” (Fassin 2012, 5). Despite moral anthropology’s disavowal of normative moral positions, there is an implicit normative moral posi­ tion being taken here. In other words, its assertion that there is a moral positioning in our objects of study that needs to be reflexively considered is itself a normative moral position. Thus, moral anthropology seems to slide into exactly the sort of moral discourse it interrogates; it too is “enunciated a priori (it knows where good and evil are located) on the basis of intangible principles: it does not need ethnographic validation” (Fassin 2008, 339, emphasis added). In essence, doesn’t this perspective assume the very thing it aims to study? Just to be clear, I am not asserting that our work is “neutral,” “objective,” or a “view from nowhere”—assumptions that were deci­ sively shattered with the postmodern turn (which moral anthropology is arguably the latest incarnation of). But I am far from convinced that the “values” that drive it are a priori moral ones. Let me turn to an example Fassin himself provides to illustrate my point.2 Fassin (2012) argues that until twenty or thirty years ago, topics such as violence, suffering, trauma, humanitarianism, and human rights received little attention from anthropologists; instead, “kinship or myths, witchcraft or rituals, peasantry or development” (2012, 5) were the primary objects of our gaze. Today,



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however, the tides have turned, and studies of the former topics now proliferate. This “remarkable evolution,” Fas­ sin suggests, has frequently been accompanied by a more engaged positioning, raising the question of why we were so oblivious to “the tragic of the world before and, sym­ metrically, why we became so passionately involved in it in recent years” (2012, 5). Fassin does not attempt to explain the reasons for this transformation in the anthropological gaze, although it is clear that he sees it driven to some extent by “moral indignation” (2008, 337) and the emergence of a moral hierarchy of legitimate objects of study that increasingly dictates what we study and how (Caduff 2011). But there are other ways this “evolution” might be read. As Bruce Kapferer notes, “the major problem with some views con­ cerning new developments in anthropology and cognate disciplines is a failure to examine them against processes occurring in the wider global political scene” (2000, 175). More recently Kapferer has highlighted the “intense pres­ sure” anthropology faces “by governments and business to be pragmatically relevant” (2012, 815)—surely this, as much as anything, explains anthropology’s growing preoccupation with social “problems.” To echo Wiktor Stoczkowski’s (2008, 349) observation, even the overtly morally committed anthropologist “does not cease to be a homo economicus academicus.” Writing in 1997, Simon Marginson highlighted the rise of what he termed the “managed university” and the ways in which institutional autonomy and academic freedom were being fundamentally reworked. I suspect that the shift in topics Fassin highlights over the past two or three decades maps quite neatly onto these transformations in the acad­ emy that anthropologists have elsewhere explored under the guise of audit culture (e.g., Shore 2008; Strathern 2000) and the rise of the neoliberal academy (e.g., Shore 2010). For example, in Canada, where I resided for more than a decade, academics are expected to focus on research that

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contributes in a direct way to solving social, economic, and cultural challenges and problems (Dehli and Taylor 2006). Thus, the anthropologist studying violence, suffering, and trauma—especially if her research promises to produce the holy trinity of “impact,” “relevance,” and “significance”— stands a far better chance of obtaining funding (on which academic tenure increasingly depends) than the one study­ ing “kinship or myths, witchcraft or rituals.” The decision to pursue these topics is as much a matter of livelihood as morality, even if framed in moral terms.3 In sum, moral anthropology aims to introduce new objects of study whilst respecting (and protecting) the epistemological grounds of our work—opening up the “black box” (Fassin 2008, 338) of our own moralities and those we study. But by prefiguring “the moral” as the pri­ mary grounds of our engagements, I cannot help but feel that one black box is being replaced with another.

Kirsten Bell is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Roehampton. She has published widely on the anthropology of public health and her most recent book is Health and Other Unassailable Values: Reconfigurations of Health, Evidence and Ethics (Routledge, 2017).

Notes 1. Although there are differences in anthropologists’ individual positions, I treat the “anthropology of ethics” and “moral anthropology” as largely synonymous (although I tend to use the anthropologists’ own designation when talking about their work). I think this is justified by the fact that there are common strands in their vision and arguments, despite the evident contrasts. 2. See Bastin (this volume) for a more in-depth overview and critique of Fassin’s arguments about the ostensible “transformation” of the anthropological gaze.



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3. To such observations Fassin might well respond that this is precisely the sort of thing moral anthropology seeks to uncover! After all, moral anthropology is not only concerned with how moral questions are posed and addressed but also “how nonmoral questions are rephrased as moral” (Fassin 2008, 4). But I suspect this says more about the colonizing tendencies of the “morals-as-values” frame than it does about the nature of the phenomenon in question.

References Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Caduff, Carlo. 2011. “Anthropology’s Ethics: Moral Positionalism, Cultural Relativism, and Critical Analysis.” Anthropological Theory 11, no. 4: 465–480. Dehli, Kari, and Alison Taylor. 2006. “Toward New Government of Education Research: Refashioning Researchers as Entrepreneur­ ial and Ethical Subjects.” In World Yearbook of Education 2006: Education Research and Policy—Steering the Knowledge-Based Economy, ed. Jenny Ozga, Terri Seddon, and Thomas S. Popke­ witz, 105–118. London: Routledge. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon. Fassin, Didier. 2008. “Beyond Good and Evil? Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4: 333–344. Fassin, Didier. 2012. “Introduction: Toward a Critical Moral Anthro­ pology.” In A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. Didier Vas­ sin, 1–17. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Fassin, Didier. 2014. “The Ethical Turn in Anthropology: Promises and Uncertainties.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1: 429–435. Faubion, James. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press. Howell, Signe, ed. 1997. The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge. Kapferer, Bruce. 2000. “Star Wars: About Anthropology, Culture and Globalisation.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 11, no. 2: 174–198. Kapferer, Bruce. 2002. “Introduction. Outside all Reason: Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology.” Social Analysis 46, no. 3: 1–30.

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Kapferer, Bruce. 2012. “How Anthropologists Think: Configurations of the Exotic.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 813–836. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marginson, Simon. 1997. “How Free Is Academic Freedom?” Higher Education Research and Development 16, no. 3: 359–369. Shore, Cris. 2008. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 3: 278–298. Shore, Cris. 2010. “Beyond the Multiversity: Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Schizophrenic University.” Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale 18, no. 1: 15–29. Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Stoczkowski, Wiktor. 2008. “The ‘Fourth Aim’ of Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4: 345–356.

The Question of Ethics and Morality

k Terry Evens

In preparation for her bat mitzvah, the young Hannah Arendt was sent by her parents to consult with the rabbi. Being intellectually gifted as well as honest to a fault, she felt it necessary to confess to him that she did not believe in God. In response, the rabbi said (words to this effect): what’s that got to do with it; all that is necessary is for you to do good things. Leaving aside the deftness of the rabbi’s response, ethics and morality, as is well known, are generally understood as matters of the good. Obviously, though, this consideration raises the question of what exactly is “the good”? As a rule, those inclined to invoke ethics and morality when it comes to designating the right and the good tend to readily presume a specific, concrete answer. Nevertheless, it could hardly be more plain that what constitutes the good is palpably an open rather than closed question and that, therefore, the essential nature of ethics and morality is likewise open. But this is not to say that ethics and morality are meaningless concepts. In my view, selfhood is the essential condition of eth­ ics, for that state of existence bespeaks the emergent, evo­ lutionary property of responsibility in being. If selfhood necessarily describes a reflexive relationship between self and other, as is undeniably implicit in the transparently dyadic nature of self-consciousness (consciousness of

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self), then selfhood also describes the essential condition of ethics. Insofar as humans conduct themselves, in the sense of determining their own means and ends, they can be held to answer for their actions—at least in significant part and even if, in any particular case, responsibility can be sensibly distributed equally or unequally as between men. In other words, conduct, as I use the term here, whatever else it is, always and essentially is a question of ethics. This remains the case despite the consideration that all human actions convey atmospheric reflections many times removed from the immediate actors, to the point where we can speak of such thoughts as preconcep­ tions. In this light, for all its rhetorical power and seem­ ingly common sense, Nietzsche’s famous analogy (1967, first essay, sec. 13) between archetypically “strong” men (ubermenschen or overmen) and birds of prey is mislead­ ing. Although raptors cannot be held responsible for their rapacious behavior, as if they were under an obligation to leave little lambs be, humans can. When it comes to humans, Western politico-economic presumption notwith­ standing, it is no more “natural” to prey on our fellows than it is to refrain from doing so, as human nature is signally second nature: if in being self-responsible the self is ever other to itself, then, logically, by virtue of its very constitution, the self is necessarily responsible for itself as other-to-itself and for other others and otherness at large. Put another way, the self is essentially social. Obviously, this picture is a far cry from the standard interpretation of ethics as just another branch of phi­ losophy—like, say, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ontology, and so on. Rather, as I see it, ethics is encom­ passing, a virtual first order of humanness, in the sense that, in so far as we conduct ourselves, whatever we do cannot help but project an ethical outlook. Whether we are working, playing, teaching, fighting, thieving, or something else, an ethical perspective of one sort or another is intrinsically in play. This is because, by critical



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contrast to occurrences of nature, human actions are given to choice, and choice, well considered or not, pre­ sumes a sense of the good and, therewith, of ethics. This is the case even when ethics, the term, may be seen (albeit counterintuitively) to subsume conduct that, in the eyes of some, might be regarded as downright unethical—a cir­ cumstantial possibility that brings us back to the question of what constitutes the good. The ancient Greeks grappled, over time, with this ques­ tion, aiming to define virtue proper, but ever arriving at different interpretations of it: such as justice, happiness, utility, wisdom, health, wealth, pleasure, profit, honor, valor, concern for others, sacrifice, and so on (Snell 1982). In effect, an establishment of a moral universal proved, so to speak, out of the question. Nonetheless, in the end, owing especially to the philosophical genius of Socrates, an ethical sense of the good was realized: the sense in which the good amounts to the search for it. That is to say, the existence of the good was basically found not in any substantial phenomenon but in the existential human dynamic of the incessant pursuit of the good. Perhaps it is no accident that in a profound and intel­ lectually challenging lecture on ethics, yet another cel­ ebrated philosopher, this one from the twentieth century, also arrived at an understanding of the good that has the feel of the Greek position. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1993), as with Socrates, found that ethics were irreducible to mate­ rial facts. Instead, he saw them as running up against the boundaries of meaningful language and, for this reason, as nonsensical. His point, though, was not to mock them but to grasp nonsensicality as their very essence. He held that, in line with religion and aesthetics, it simply is not possible to talk or write ethics; instead, ethics must be shown in action. Concluding that they add nothing to our de facto knowledge, he thought of them in terms of a desire to “say something about the ultimate meaning of life” and the “absolute good.” And he went on to surmise

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that ethics amounts to “a document of a tendency in the human mind,” one that he himself could not help but respect “deeply” and would never ever “ridicule.” Thus, like Socrates, he held that ethics were not a question of moral universals but of an interminable quest for the good, a quest that transcended worldly particulars. As drawn by Socrates and Wittgenstein, the transcen­ dental sense of ethics, by contrast to matters of fact, captures a profound difference. Despite this difference, though, when they are understood in terms of the notion of morality and a flatly dualistic choice between good and evil, ethics are normally taken as common usage. In fact, Wittgenstein and Socrates aside, ethics, when considered in terms of rules of morality—that is, as matters of fact— continue to serve as a taken-for-granted standard pertain­ ing to the good. Obviously, rules of this kind—in effect, moralisms—do not all speak in one voice. On the con­ trary, they, and the sense of good they define, markedly vary. This is easily seen if we take, for example, religion. Between, say, Judaism, Christianity, and Mormonism, the good can have distinctly different meanings: polygamy is the good, say the Mormons; according to Christians the good is the prodigal son, and for Jews (as Hannah Arendt was given to ponder), to do good things is the good. Although simplistic, the point of this example is that when selecting the factual good, ethically significant differences abound. Indeed, all it takes to demonstrate that one man’s good is another man’s poison is to conjure up the phe­ nomenon of global conflict, an all too familiar scenario. At least when tied to formal moral orders, these com­ mon differences of ethical outlooks do indeed tend to be understood in terms of rules of morality. As a con­ sequence, in relation to questions of morality, ethics is primarily concerned with matters of fact rather than performance. That is, when it is rule bound, the moral load of ethics is determined beforehand—which is to say (an adage that Wittgenstein himself might well have



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conscripted): the horse and the cart have changed places. Having to choose between predetermined preferences of good and evil is, in accordance with the ordinary West­ ern acceptance of “morality,” simply one manifestation of ethics and by no means the most elementary one. In fact, precisely when the options are fixed and decided beforehand, thus forestalling creative conduct, the ethi­ cal process is, in a substantial sense, suppressed. This is because moralisms, given their status as rules, eclipse the essential ambiguity of ethical preferences, naively pictur­ ing the latter through the all too familiar dualism of good and evil. Hence, rethinking this dualism is worth doing. That Adolf Hitler was a conspicuously vile human being is hard to deny. Surely, what he proposed to do and in fact did must be regarded as radical evil. Yet, unde­ niably, he and his dedicated followers saw themselves in terms of the good. Although this consideration can scarcely move one to doubt the hellish depth of Hitler’s malevolence or to fail to celebrate his demise, it does compel one to contemplate with less certainty and more complexity the dualism of good and evil. The atrocity of the Holocaust speaks for itself. But that it was carried out on behalf of a supposed good is highly significant, as it cannot help but make plain that when it comes to eth­ ics, different men are motivated differently and that these contrasting persuasions can vary profoundly in the degree to which one sees them as good, or not so good, or even as evil. Whereas the cut-and-dried conception of good and evil has its source in religious thought, the assessing of right and wrong is in fact fundamentally relative, a matter of perspective of whomever is judging. As a consequence, regardless of whether one identifies with religion, decid­ ing the right and the good necessarily reduces to a relative matter, not an absolute one. Being an exemplar of fascism, Nazism might be thought to rank as a veritable end case of an ethic in which inhumanity—a condition that humans alone can

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affect—is brought to bear. The fact is that Nazism, in addition to its military goals, pursued death as an end in itself. The number of cases in which ethics are keyed to inhumanity is arrestingly sizeable. In today’s world one can cite, for a preeminent example, the Islamic State and its murderous slaughter of unbelievers, a participant act in this movement’s measure of the good. But the ethic of which I speak may appear also in more subtle forms and gradations, such that its inhumane nature tends to be cov­ ered over. Consider a formally democratic nation in which a political party sees itself in terms of democratic rule but holds ideological beliefs that smack of antidemocratic leanings—say, for example, the pursuit of overweening wealth and power coupled with a profound disregard for “the people.” Insofar as these leanings are brought to frui­ tion, the citizenry is likewise brought to its knees. Which is to say that, now open to an ethic (even if masked) of inhumanity, the lives of “the people” are scarcely thought to matter in the eyes of the controlling forces. Although the extremely small class of the very rich and powerful may not directly aim to obliterate the poor, the stunning economic difference between them has the effect of, in one sense or another, taking the lives of the poor. Having addressed the question of moralisms, I want now to return to Wittgenstein’s position that ethics can­ not be meaningfully written or said but, rather, must be shown or practiced. In other words, however ethics are regarded in terms of rules, reason, and logic, their essence is brought to bear only in the actual doing of them, and such self-conduction must constitute a relationship of self to itself-as-other and to others and otherness. Herein rests Wittgenstein’s understanding of ethics as, rather than the good in itself, the unending pursuit of it: a form of life that transcends rule boundedness in favor of life as a mystery in its own right, requiring a constant search for life’s meaning. At bottom, ethics is a matter of values. But value judg­ ments presuppose a given Value, one in the very nature



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of human being. It is a value that gives rise to us mak­ ing judgments and, therewith, the fashioning of our very own meaningful worlds. In effect, it defines our humanity and conveys our capacity for choice. As such, relatively speaking, it transcends sheer animal existence, thus describing a form of life that does not reduce to digestive systems but is principally mediated by a driving—if also ultimately limited—sense of self. That is, in significant part our existence is its own achievement. This means that although we are tied to our material ground, our peculiar nature also depends on a pronounced freedom from it. I suggest that Wittgenstein’s considered interpre­ tation of ethics as rising above our material being to sat­ isfy a desire to “say” something about the meaning of life and the absolute good was his felt need to call attention to the profound significance of the degree to which our fundamental ties to the ground leave room for meaningful transcendence. The position taken here on the nature of ethics is unorthodox. Although it does not make light of the usual definition of ethics, it does open it to questioning by drawing a critical distinction between ethics thought of in the material terms of the so-called good and ethics under­ stood as, instead of the good as such, the unrelenting pursuit of it. This difference is profound. Taken in terms of rules, morality bumps into the obvious fact that the good differs from one faith, or social order, or individual to another. And insofar as the rules are fixed and appre­ hended as the good, they incline to exclude the validity of most any ethos that differs from them. But if, by compel­ ling contrast to materially determinate rules, ethics are grasped as an unending pursuit of the meaning of life, they cannot help but present themselves as essentially relative. Still, although the fundamental relativity of eth­ ics quite rightly denies the absolute dualism of good and evil, in itself, alas, evil remains too apparent and runs too deep to be denied.

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T.M.S (Terry) Evens is Professor emeritus of Anthropol­ ogy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester in 1971. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the University of Calcutta, and Asmara University, Eritrea. He is author of Two Kinds of Rationality: Kibbutz Democracy and Generational Conflict (1995), and co-editor of the collection The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology (2006).

References Nieztsche, Friedrich, 1967. “First Essay: Good and Evil, Good and Bad.” The Genealogy of Morals. 1-40. New York: Boni and Live­ right Publishers. Downloaded from https://en.wikisource.org/ wiki/The_Genealogy_of_Morals/First_Essay Snell, Bruno, 1982. “The Call to Virtue: A Brief Chapter from Greek Ethics.” In The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, 153–190. New York: Dover Publications. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1993. “A Lecture on Ethics.” In Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, 36–44. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

Why I Will Not Make It as a “Moral Anthropologist”

k Don Kalb

If I were to behave well, I might still make an accomplished member of the “moral and ethical anthropology” club, which has recently been crystallizing around the activities of some very talented anthropologists such as Didier Fassin, James Laidlaw, Michael Lambek, and Joel Robbins, among others. Good chance, though, that I will misbehave. My state of service on the ethical-moral terrain is certainly non-negligible: I studied shoemaking communi­ ties in Dutch Brabant in the early twentieth century that became deeply and collectively involved in a socio-ethical project of social-Catholicism, expressed in popular antialcohol campaigns and weekly meetings and marches. I also showed how these shoemakers, in a short series of local riots, extended, as it were, Thompson’s “moral economy” notion to the sphere of production itself— “moral production” I literally called it—in rejecting the new minute divisions of labor, the emerging formal hier­ archies, and the general speed-ups of the fledgling factory systems in the region. Then I went on to work on one of the most openly ethical and moralizing big corporations in the modern world, Philips, in Eindhoven, the Nether­ lands. I studied the ethical visions and social and cultural technologies by which it sought to build, quite success­ fully, an alternative industrial urbanism that rejected the

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tenets of individualist materialism and the short-termism of market capitalism as much as its socialist materialist competitors. Instead, it promoted a gospel of “care” and “social responsibility” within its factories, the surround­ ing neighborhoods, and the families of its tens of thou­ sands of employees, inculcating a strong public consensus around these symbols and practices. It also did so within the emerging Dutch welfare state. I went on to study Cen­ tral and East European workers in their extrication from really existing socialism, in particular in Wroclaw, Poland. Again I went into factories and working-class neighbor­ hoods and discovered the emergence in the late 1990s of vernacular moralizing projects that in the 2000s increas­ ingly concatenated into a biting right-wing subaltern pop­ ulism. These right-wing popular sensibilities then became politically hegemonic in places like Hungary and Poland, coining itself as a new “illiberal” sovereign state project. This unfolding ethical state project is currently clashing with the European Commission, which sees itself as the guardian of what are proclaimed to be European “core val­ ues,” such as civil society and pluralism. It has also been an engine in the accumulating xenophobic wave spread­ ing across Europe. It is therefore almost no exaggeration to say that I devoted a good part of my career to studying ethics and moralities—mostly of the less than liberal sort, often religiously inspired, generally antisocialist. This, however, is no surprise. Many, perhaps most, anthropologists in their ethnographic studies have always dealt extensively with ethical and moral issues, discourses, contestations, rituals, and technologies, even when some brought them together under the label of kinship, for example, and others, like me, were more interested in perceiving the politics of it all. This engagement with moralities has been a consistent hallmark of the discipline in the twentieth century. The conveners of “moral/ethical anthropology” do not deny that. Why, then, the current excitement around moral anthropology?



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There are various reasons. First, the moral/ethical anthropology push presents itself not as a self-contented return to an established practice but as a galvanizing revi­ talization movement that seeks a sharper self-conscious­ ness, a more candid practice, and a fresh sales pitch for something that apparently was insufficiently conscious of itself. Secondly, this revitalizing energy acquires urgency, we are told, from a wider world in turbulence and, there­ fore, is hungry for ethics—a fact regularly called up by leading “moral anthropologists.” Thirdly, this new-old moral and ethical anthropology seeks conversations and alliances with the grand discipline of moral philosophy, thus allowing anthropology to put up a new self-conscious theoretical high-brow face and facilitating engagement with the big ethical issues in the world rather than pro­ verbial village concerns. Fourth, the energy within the movement seems partly to be driven by a tangible com­ petition between some of the key actors: Fassin is doing very different work and on a very different scale from Laidlaw, Lambek, or Robbins, whose trajectories within the discipline have been much more conventionally anthropological. These key actors control considerable resources, which helps to create events and consequent bonding, excitement, and publications. Moral anthropol­ ogy appears driven, to an extent, by a pleasurable potlatch among the chiefs. Although I love a good potlatch, I will not join. My reasons are non-negotiable. I studied ethical visions and practices as part of the agonistic politics and antagonisms of class and, indeed, of class formation within the wider spatiotemporal power fields of capital accumulation. I did so because I was interested not in any moral claim as such but rather in people and their transforming historicalspatial habitats—indeed, in people in (“definite”) mutual relationships of dependency to each other, within and between classes, generations and genders, and entwined within (“definite”) relationships of social reproduction.

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And not just at one moment in time but as they willy-nilly engaged with a world changing and shifting over decades in (“definite”) and describable ways, with a particular rhythm and direction, and for (“definite”) and analyzable reasons, all of which had to be discovered and concep­ tualized. As a consequence of this engagement I began to rethink Marxism (“circumstances not of their own choosing”), capitalism (“value”), and class (a key axis of relational dependency, inequality, and exploitation) in ways that brought relationality, unevenness, space/place, and, indeed, culture more into play, to “anthropologise” it, so to speak. Moral anthropology, however, has geared up to reso­ lutely downgrade politics and power—despite Didier Fassin’s arguments for the legitimacy of a focus on politics within it. More than that, it seems pervaded by a veritable anti-Marxian cleansing impulse, from Lam­ bek’s confessed impatience with power and structure, to Faubion’s readings of Foucault, to Laidlaw’s unmea­ sured elevation of freedom as ethical anthropology’s key concept. Significantly, it is so avowedly anti-Marxian exactly at the moment when capitalism is increasingly and openly running against the wall and world elites are visibly panicking about their dwindling social legitimacy, as the World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering in Janu­ ary 2016 in Davos once more showed. The WEF has now begun to fund its own social research on popular revolts and declining trust: WEF attendants were not pleased to hear the outcomes. Is it far-fetched to suggest that moral anthropology sees the ghost of Karl Marx as a major com­ petitor for the hearts and minds of the disaffected within anthropology and its potential middle-class audiences? Ethics and morality against (an imaginary?) Marxian left: a well-known figure. Anti-Marxism, however, is a moment in a wider move against social analysis in general. In particular, Laid­ law’s work (2014), which may be moral anthropology’s



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penultimate programmatic formulation, exalts in an aggressively antisociological celebration of fundamental ethical human freedom. It tends to lift the capacity to envision and live ethical designs entirely out of its wider social textures and leads to an aspiration to stylize ethical strivings into quasi-models for living in and engagement with the social world that can be held up sui generis for discussion and comparison. This may be good for a con­ versation with moral philosophers, but it is, it has to be said, bad social science. That fundamental freedom, inevi­ tably, also implies that any effort at social explanation must end up as futile or even ill-willed. And it is precisely explanation, next to discovery, that a revitalized anthro­ pology concerned with the turbulent world out there, in my eyes, should seek to embrace, however much it goes against the discipline’s ingrained methodological modesty and the wish to treat our craft as an art. Moral anthropology has been constituted as a conflu­ ence between parts of the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of humanitarianism (and humanitarian efforts are, of course, closely intertwined with religious organizations and actors). The combination of the two has resulted in what both Lambek and Robbins have called the “anthropology of the good.” Lambek regularly reiter­ ates that people are in fact commonly focused on doing good: the people that anthropologists encounter “are trying to do what they consider right or good, are being evaluated according to criteria of what is right and good, or are in some debate about what constitutes the human good.” But anthropological theory, he goes on, “tends to overlook all this in favor of analyses that favors structure, power and interest” (2010, 1). Lambek seems to almost wilfully ignore that what people think is good may well be shaped by these historical structures of power and interest and that their good actions may therefore end up repro­ ducing precisely those same structures. That is a basic insight of any “anthropological theory of structure, power

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and interest.” That is why irony and skepticism in relation to the professed good, rather than elevation, are called for. We hit here at the intellectual and, indeed, ethical origins of the social sciences themselves. Critique of “the good” is, therefore, essential, a term that moral anthropologists readily use, even though their critique is no critique but a celebration. The common counterproposition against this basic sociological truism is that these sentiments of the good are “not reducible,” and that is indeed what we hear—from Laidlaw in particular. But are we not far beyond such crude functionalist reasoning these days? Who said they are “reducible”? Does the intuition that notions of the good are embedded in the social texture and its inequali­ ties and that they are implicated in the reproduction of these definite textures imply that they can simply and always be “reduced,” one to one, to transparent selfinterests within those structures? Laidlaw writes as if we have learnt nothing in the last thirty years about the com­ plexities of history, power, signification, and meaning. A relational perspective on power would assume that social relations—rather than “structures”—do exert pressures and set limits, to use Raymond Williams’s terms. More seriously, why would it be far-fetched to assume that people have in fact interests and often know them and act on them, the more so the bigger such interests are? This is not the same as suggesting that everything they ever say and do must therefore be seen as a direct effort to defend or further them. In moral anthropology I see the exact same straw men and rhetorical figures reappearing that were broadly employed in the 1980s to make way for the “cultural turn” (and postmodernism) in the social and human sciences and against social explanation, indeed against the Marxism of the seventies. Laidlaw pushes this basic sociological refusal to a level of almost self-righteous extravagance. For him, Bourdieu, Giddens, even Sherry Ortner all become crypto or less



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crypto Marxists as they strive to explain “the economy of practices” from the positions of their self-interested practitioners in a social field. They also make any indi­ vidual agency futile, in his eyes, as they require it to have “structural significance” or not count as agency at all. He sees this apparently as a belittling of the individual ethical effort. After what must amount to the crudest rejection of Bourdieu I have ever read, he concludes that “sociologi­ cal theory descended from Comte, Marx, Durkheim, and Bourdieu similarly abstracts from freedom of action” (214, 9). Then the triumphal moment follows: “The reason . . . that an anthropology of ethics must be more than merely a new sub-discipline is that for it to succeed requires the development of a notion of explanatory adequacy—of what an effective social explanation might be—that does not re-describe the conduct of responsible agents as effects of causal ‘forces’ or the mechanical self-reproduction of ‘objective structures.’” (214, 10) This triumphal moment comes down to nothing else than a repeat of the classical relativist position of the early Wittgenstein on language and social forms, later extended toward moral philosophy by Peter Winch, who argued in his The Idea of a Social Science (1958) exactly that: we can only understand and explain people in the terms they themselves have chosen. Emic knowledge is the only valid explanation of motives and actions. And those terms are within this paradigm indeed held to be chosen freely. I imagine Ernest Gellner grumbling in his grave. The ethos of the anthropology advocated by Laidlaw and Lambek—but not Fassin—is entirely in consonance with that idealist relativism-cum-sociological refusal. It is, in essence, a good old hermeneutic Geertzian anthro­ pology—and Geertz, a Wittgenstein fan, is indeed amply present in their texts—expanded with the ambition to engage with high-brow moral philosophy. It is therefore subject to all the known limitations attached to Geertz’s interpretivism grafted onto fieldwork. In practice, this

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moral anthropology seems to aspire to small-scale ethnog­ raphy of fairly delineated communities, often religiously defined (as a good sociologist would say with an ironic and slightly condescending smile: selected on the depen­ dent variable), tuning into the everyday moral-ethical conversations and micro-histories of relatively articulate common people but, in particular, also leaders of move­ ments or sects or exemplary practitioners. The anthro­ pological practice the moral anthropologists of the good advocate hardly matches their theoretical chutzpah. It is a safe return to the ancestors. For a Marxian anthropologist of and in Europe (and actually located in Eastern Europe) this is the most fasci­ nating contradiction of the new moral anthropology: the moral anthropologists are acutely aware that the rising public interest in ethics and the good from which they derive their intellectual energy must be somehow asso­ ciated with the rising anxieties of the troubled Western middle classes (Lambek 2015, 1–4, 12–15), but at the same time none of them is seriously willing to engage with or analyze these anxieties and troubles; they merely translate them into a call for ethical contemplation. They do not even bother to take note of what others have writ­ ten about them. On the contrary, they seem positively annoyed by what has been written so far. Laidlaw indulges regularly in angry swipes against “neoliberalism”—not to condemn it but to condemn those who use the term to try to explain the rising anxieties of the middle classes, for example. Lambek suggests, without becoming precise, that anticapitalist critiques, with which the “literature is replete,” have been immodest, complacent, too confident of their own “anachronistic” truth. Against them he offers an ethical agenda that would include asking such ques­ tions as “how is autonomy achieved, obligation assumed, respect given and received, accountability acknowledged, dignity enacted, apology made, forgiveness accepted, adversity met, a full life lived?” (2015, 12). Clearly, the



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ethical imagination at work here proceeds at a good and noble remove from the confrontational interactions from which actual politics or large-scale transactions are made or, for that matter, from the stark realities where lives are made redundant, blood is freely spilled, and whole spaces become condemned to structural violence or slow implo­ sion. Ethical anthropology sometimes appears as a place offered to the well-meaning but troubled Western middle classes for hiding safely in all their solemn beauty. With their classical ethnography of the fairly small community circumscribing their research imagination, what moral anthropologists have failed to see is that the neoliberalism so angrily rejected by Laidlaw has in fact been an epoch-making ethical project based in the virtues of applied micro-economics aligned with the phil­ anthropic concerns of humanitarianism. It is an update to the Protestant ethic and, thus, a classic Western bourgeois moralizing project indeed, but not quite of the small com­ munity type. That ethical project was also the policy ver­ nacular that Western capitalism began to speak as it was mobilizing for its class war from above against labor and the welfare state in the late 1970s and that it still spoke when it began creating a transnational quasi-state legality after 1989 to allow capital to globalize and to create and find new exploitable proletariats, surplus populations, raw materials, and state guarantees worldwide. It was also the ethical vernacular that presented the privatiza­ tion of the educational and urban commons in so many places as a virtue. And it was, in one form or another, the moral legitimation for shareholder value and corporate “short termism” as well as the practical argument for the deregulation of financial markets and the consequent financialization of daily life that led to the crunch of 2008 and all the ongoing turbulences, public subsidies to the bankers, and austerity for the rest in its aftermath. “And so on,” as Žižek would say. Now that the borderless world for capital has ushered in borderless crisis, the Western

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middle classes are finally becoming slightly troubled by the ethical and deeply self-interested free choices they have made—though far from freely—over the last forty years. The good news is that moral anthropology is ready to tell us some fine philosophical stories about the good as perceived and practiced here and there. Jonathan Friedman was making a somewhat sardonic blink to Freud as he mentioned the “huge civilizational repetition compulsion” of capital accumulation for its systematic cyclical abandonment of older territories in favor of new spaces at the moment when its profitability and domination begin to wane. Friedman—but also many authors on neoliberalism such as the Comaroffs (2012)— have noted how, in the present moment, the turn to law and ethics is part and parcel of the current transforma­ tions of capital, labor, politics, and society. This is surely too grand a dose of “power, structure, and interest” for the moral anthropologists to digest. But they may appreciate a smaller-scale repetition compulsion that they them­ selves are enacting as they write. As the crisis of capital in the 1970s was resolved into a new techno-financially driven neoliberal and imperial globalization of capital, interpretivist anthropology became one of the sources of inspiration for the cultural “turnists” who declared the end of “social explanation” in history and historical sociology (Harvey 1989; Hunt 1992; Kalb 1997, 2005, 2015; Sewell 2005). They in their turn were part of the even larger movement of postmodernism in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, architecture, and literary studies. The end of the grand narratives was also the end of social explanation as we knew it, and the turn to the micro was heavily imbued with the quest for the hermeneutics of local meaning. As I said, Laidlaw (2015) is repeating all the straw men and rhetorical figures summarized by the idea of nonreducibility deployed by the cultural “turnists” and the radical interpretivists of the 1980s. The “ethical turn” in anthropology serves a similar function in the



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contemporary transformative speed-up of capital: to mys­ tify how (“our own”) social values are or become part and parcel of the accumulation of surplus value, and how and why our intellectual forms and disciplinary practices become so easily complicit in that appropriation.

Don Kalb recently moved to the University of Bergen where he serves as professor of Social Anthropology and leads the “Frontiers of Value” project. He is a senior researcher at Utrecht University and co-leads the “financialization project” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. His most recent book is Anthropologies of Class (Cambridge U.P), 2015. He is Founding Editor of Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology and of FocaalBlog.

References Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2012. “Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving towards Africa.” Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology 22, no. 2: 113–131. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell: Cambridge and Oxford. Hunt, Lynn, ed. 1989. The New Cultural History, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2015. “Detachment and Ethical Regard.” In Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking, ed. Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, Catherine Trundle, and Thomas Yarrow, 130–146. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lambek, Michael, ed. 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Kalb, Don. 1997. Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850–1950. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kalb, Don. 2005. “From Flows to Violence.” Anthropological Theory 5, no. 2: 176–204. Kalb, Don. 2015. “Introduction: Class and the New Anthropological Holism.” In Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality, ed. James G. Carrier and Don Kalb, 1–27. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press. Sewell, William H. 2005. Logics of History: Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. Routledge.

II Situating Morality Ethnographically

Facts, Values, Morality, and Anthropology

k Christopher C. Taylor

On April 16, 1994, my plane from Bujumbura, Burundi, arrived in Nairobi, Kenya. My fiancée, a Rwandan Tutsi, and I had been evacuated from Rwanda about one week before our arrival. My stay in Rwanda on this occasion had lasted only a bit more than five months (I had done fieldwork in Rwanda before), much shorter than the two-year period stipulated in the contract I had signed with Family Health International (FHI). We remained in Nairobi until mid-August 1994, a total of about four months. During this time the genocide raged, claiming the lives of close to one million people. Except for the French Operation Turquoise, whose results were mixed, the world community dithered. Numerous attempts by the United Nations to arrive at an intervention plan to stop the genocide were met with opposition, which emanated for the most part from the United States, still bristling from its costly intervention in Somalia and hesitant to open another African can of worms. Finally, in August we returned to Birmingham, Alabama, where I resumed teaching in the anthropology department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. While in Nairobi I occupied an office at the local headquarters of FHI. Because our project—STD and HIV prevention in Rwanda under the aegis of the US Agency

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for International Development—was in a state of suspen­ sion and the outcome of the violence was not yet clear, I worried about the fate of Rwandan friends of mine who were still there. In our free time my fiancée and I inter­ acted mostly with Rwandans who had managed to escape the violence and make it to Nairobi. Most were Tutsi, but not all. Many were Hutu who had not supported the Habyarimana regime nor the extreme Hutu elements bent on genocide. I spoke with them and would often visit the Shauri Moyo YMCA where the UNHCR were housing other Rwandan refugees. Because my official duties with the Nairobi FHI were minimal, I spent most of my time in the office reflecting upon the latest news reports covering the genocide and writing about it. I also attended weekly UN-sponsored meetings for people who had sought refuge in Nairobi and had been involved in the various development projects in Rwanda. Sometime in July of 1994, with the violence pretty much at an end, I returned to Rwanda by hitching a ride on a UN flight. I attempted to recover materials associated with our project. My sojourn in Nairobi was a depressing one. It seemed like every other day news would arrive of yet another Rwandan acquaintance who had been killed by Hutu extremists. One afternoon the phone rang, and my fian­ cée’s sister, living at the time in England, informed her of their parents’ deaths at the hands of Interahamwe militants. As the genocide continued, I wrote short papers that I would fax to the US State Department, to Bill Clin­ ton (then president), to members of the US Congress, to the secretary general of the United Nations (Boutros Boutros-Ghali), and to any others I could think of who could possibly influence the course of events in Rwanda. I urged them to support a military intervention. Although the fax machine recorded each message as “sent,” I never received acknowledgment from any of the addressees that these brief papers had been received, let alone read.



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I did not write these papers in the customary language of an anthropologist. I wrote them in the language of an advocate—a particular type of advocate, of course, one familiar with those aspects of Rwandan history and politics that might have had a bearing on the prevailing situation. In the papers I frequently emphasized that Rwanda was not like Somalia. Whereas Somalia was characterized by clans and lineages with labile and evershifting alliances, Rwanda had been a centralized state for three centuries, and clans did not have the same political significance as they did in Somalia. Where the social loci of power were diffuse, competitive, and not always clear in Somalia, they were focalized in Rwanda. Somalia was a hydra and Rwanda was a tiger. Cut off the head of a tiger and you kill it; cut apart a hydra, and each fragment regenerates. I wanted policy makers to understand that the two countries and their political circumstances were quite different and that peacekeeping and peacemak­ ing operations would need to follow different courses. The Rwandan situation could have been managed more conventionally than the Somalian one. What needed to be done was to neutralize a handful of key actors in the Rwandan government and then confine Rwandan gov­ ernment forces to their bases. These actions would have required additional UN troops, of course, and there prob­ ably would have been some casualties among them, but it would have saved tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Rwandan lives. Conflating the social and political situations in Rwanda and Somalia was factually incorrect. But policy makers had not only gotten their facts wrong; their valuational assessment of the Rwandan situation in my opinion had also been faulty. Because the United States was a signa­ tory to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN in 1948 and put into force in 1951, it seemed clear to me that it had a moral obligation to intervene, militarily if necessary, to

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put a stop to the genocide. Hadn’t “never again” been an agreed upon principle among the nations of the world after World War II? Of course, I was making a value judg­ ment. That judgment was: genocide is morally wrong, and appropriate measures should be taken to stop it wherever and whenever it occurs. My description of Rwandan social and political organization, however, was not a value judg­ ment. It was based upon information gleaned from field­ work and extensive readings about Rwanda. One might argue with my interpretation of the facts, but questions of value would be largely irrelevant to the discussion. It is perfectly legitimate to advocate as an anthropologist cer­ tain courses of action where policy matters are concerned. But it is not legitimate to distort or problematize the facts in order to bolster one’s political or moral prejudgments. Advocacy has a long pedigree in anthropology: Waller­ stein states that anthropologists have a social responsibil­ ity to provide wise counsel about the problems of the day (2003). Many years before that, Durkheim spoke in favor of a social science that would bring about positive social and political change. Although most anthropologists would agree with Wallerstein’s support of “wise counsel,” he does not advise us to conflate issues of fact and value. In my opin­ ion that is a perspicacious stance, one that encourages anthropological civic duty but does not dictate the form and content this should take. This stance contrasts with the thinking of many anthropologists today who would claim that it is impossible to disentangle issues of fact from issues of value. The latter assert that there is no value-free social science, no value-free categories of analy­ sis. Our role as reporters of social and cultural “facts” are so intertwined with our role as political actors and advocates of policy that it is in vain to claim otherwise. We might as well be straightforward about our inten­ tions and articulate our policy leanings clearly. Then we should unabashedly go about the business of correcting



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social wrongs, which in practically all cases would mean championing the political and economic aspirations of the disenfranchised and the disempowered. Although it is one thing to promote more equitable treatment of the world’s oppressed, an aim that few of us would contest, it is quite another to find the correct formula for doing this. The simple assertion that one’s politics are superior to someone else’s does not constitute proof, nor is it likely to persuade political leaders and policy makers. Moreover, the political correctness of the present can quickly become the oppression of the future. If we examine the record of professional anthropologists and their advocacy of certain moral or political issues, we often find that this advocacy has been misguided. Recently, for example, the American Anthropological Association came very close to boycotting Israeli universi­ ties (as is further explored by Gold below). Because the Netanyahu government in Israel had yet to show that it was serious in dealing with the Palestinians and that it was encouraging continued Israeli settlement on the West Bank, many members of the AAA wished to protest Israeli actions. They could have expressed their opposition in many ways, but why boycott Israeli universities? Granted, some in these universities may have been supporters of Netanyahu and his government’s policies, but it was also in these universities where one could find ardent critics of Israeli policies. The Israeli university system was arguably one of their most effective venues. To my thinking this was an instance when political and moral valuation had usurped the role of fact. It is often stated that the Israeli government metes out collective punishment on all Pal­ estinians for the actions of a small number, but was not the AAA in this instance about to do the very same thing? A few years ago, in another excess of zeal on the part of some AAA members, the latter decided to criticize the actions of a member of the AAA, Napoleon Chagnon, best known for his work on the Yanamamo. According

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to Chagnon’s critics, several years ago he had aided a medical researcher to perform questionable clinical tri­ als among the Yanamamo. The activists wanted the AAA to censure Chagnon’s actions. Later it was shown that the charges against Chagnon had not been justified. In other instances anthropologists have been criticized for not passing a moral judgment on a social practice and for refraining from advocacy of specific remedial measures. Janice Boddy, for example, discusses the practice of clito­ ridectomy and infibulation in her book Wombs and Alien Spirits (1989). She does not denounce the practice as sex­ ist, nor does she recommend action against it, though it is also obvious that she is not in favor of clitirodectomy and infibulation. The intention of the book was to make the practice comprehensible in terms of the local symbol­ ism, not to preach against what many see as an immoral practice. In that respect she was respecting the central les­ son of anthropology that warns us against ethnocentrism. All these examples point to the theoretical issue of facts and values, so it behooves us to consider what is meant here. When we talk about facts, we are talking about information that can be placed into an explanatory framework. We might argue about the validity of the infor­ mation, we might consider the source of the information, and we might very well reject the information if it appears to be false, biased, or irrelevant to the phenomenon we are trying to explain. When we talk about values, we are not talking about information but about issues of right and wrong and what course of action to take to reverse social wrongs. Both forms of discourse are necessary in anthropology, and there are certainly ways to mediate between them. Scott Lash, in his book Another Modernity, a Different Rationality, traces some of the intellectual history of this issue (1999). In their earlier incarnations, the social disciplines wrestled with the question of how much weight to attribute to science and how much to attribute



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to philosophy. Soon three positions began to crystallize: positivism, Lebensphilosophie, and neo-Kantianism. Posi­ tivists believed in the strict separation of facts and values, with facts and science taking precedence in explanation over values, philosophical positions, and religious beliefs. Lebensphilosophs, however, inheritors of the Romantic tradition, did not see a strict separation between fact and value. According to them facts grew out of values; they were determined by values and constituted more than con­ stitutive. Between these two poles were the neo-Kantians. They also saw facts and values as occupying separate epistemological realms, but neither facts nor values were necessarily determinative in the final analysis, mediat­ ing between the two forms of discourse was the way to both explain and to advocate intelligently. Thinkers along neo-Kantian lines included Durkheim, Weber, Tonnies, and Dilthey, with Durkheim tending a bit towards positiv­ ism and Dilthey tending towards Lebensphilosophie. I believe anthropology needs to return to its neo-Kantian antecedents. Certainly we should attempt to bridge the hiatus between factual discourse and valuational dis­ course, but we should not collapse them into one, as the Lebensphilosophs would have it. The validity of many facts is not directly dependent upon value judgments. Gravity is one such phenomenon, even if its mathemati­ cal formulation took place in a social context that placed value upon the use of scientific methods to explain it. The earth does indeed revolve around the sun, even though the valuational mission of the Catholic Church led it to persecute people who held that belief. In like fashion it is clear that mass violence along ethnic lines did occur in Rwanda in 1994. An event happened, and we can agree that is a fact. When it comes to discussing genocide and measures to address it, however, explanation needs to be enhanced by addressing the values involved. Whether a discussion based on facts or a discussion based on val­ ues takes precedence depends upon the circumstances.

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Veering overly much to the positivistic side is an extreme that undermines any potential advocacy that anthropology might provide. However, questioning the epistemological status of all facts and claiming that our values determine the facts leads us into the land of “anything goes.” In order for there to be discussion and dialog in anthropol­ ogy, there needs to be a corpus of words, concepts, and events that we can all generally accept. Although there may be no absolute way by which we arrive at completely value-free concepts, it is possible for us to work with these concepts even as we revise and improve upon them. Oth­ erwise anthropology slips into the realm of theology and we become preachers rather than credible observers of the human condition.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Daniel Wolk for comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Christopher C. Taylor is an independent scholar. He is primarily a specialist in symbolic and medical anthro­ pology and has done fieldwork in Rwanda, Kenya, and the Ivory Coast. He has also worked in applied medical anthropology on the sociocultural and behavioral aspects of HIV transmission. At the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda he was employed by Family Health International under the auspices of the United States Agency for Inter­ national Development.



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References Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lash, Scott. 1999. Another Modernity, a Different Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2003. “Anthropology, Sociology and Other Dubious Disciplines.” Current Anthropology 44, no. 4 (August– October): 453–465.

Moral Anthropology, Human Rights, and Egalitarianism, or the AAA boycott

k Marina Gold

In the iconic debate within Current Anthropology Nancy Scheper-Hughes envisioned a “new cadre of ‘barefoot anthropologists’, . . . the producers of politically compli­ cated and morally demanding texts and images capable of sinking through the layers of acceptance, complicity, and bad faith that allow the suffering and the deaths to continue” (Scheper-Hughes 1995, 417). Twenty years later her call claimed a major victory when, in November 2015, the American Anthropological Association endorsed a boycott on Israeli academic institutions in protest of Israel’s “ongoing violations of Palestinian rights” (AAA 2015). In the web page dedicated to the boycott,1 Lisa Rofel and Ilana Feldman (2015) best exemplify the danger within the actions of the AAA and the degree to which Scheper-Hughes’s call for “barefoot anthropology” has impacted the discipline. Rofel and Feldman declare that “in its best moments, anthropology is a discipline that is dedicated to social justice.” Although the American Anthropological Association’s actions may have the merit of wanting to speak out against neocolonial repression, turning anthropology into a mechanism of social justice is



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perilously akin to missionizing efforts, reducing its role to a tool of government and limiting its application to those deemed worthy of saving. During the meeting at the AAA conference Feldman introduced the boycott thus: As anthropologists we are committed to stand with oppressed peoples. Here we have a historic opportunity to stand with human rights—to put our voice behind this col­ lective movement for justice. . . . The aim of the boycott is to reject the status quo and to support academic freedom for all. (Anthroboycott 2015a)

There is an underlying thread between the ethical turn in anthropology that started in 1995, the emergence of the branch of moral anthropology, or anthropology of morali­ ties, and the AAA boycott. This essay will interrogate the ethical turn in anthropology and its interconnection with human rights in order to argue that the materialisation of a moral anthropology specialisation embodies larger struc­ tures of power subordinating the discipline to a political agenda. Debates over the appropriateness of the boycott merely highlight pre-existing tensions within the discipline.2

In the Name of Freedom The AAA was engaged in developing the boycott for three years, since 2013, and created a task force for gathering data and drafting a report that would “assist the AAA Executive Board consider the nature and extent to which AAA might contribute—as an Association—to addressing the issues that the Israel/Palestine conflict raises” (Heller and Liebow 2015). The objective of the task force was partially to produce critical anthropological knowledge on the appropriateness of the boycott and to assess how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “directly concerns the

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Association” and whether the “Association has an interest in taking a stand.”3 The success of the pro-boycott vote in the business meeting on November 20, 2015, meant that the issue was carried forward to the entire member­ ship of the AAA for a final electronic ballot in spring 2016 (Anthroboycott 2015b), which barely saw the boycott defeated. This process of consultation and legal evalua­ tion recalls Stoczkowski’s critique of moral anthropology as paralleling a “mutation of social practices and ethical representations” that see the emergence of ethics commit­ tees as the materialisation of the individual conscience into a social authority that regulates the codes of practice mediating anthropology and its objects of study (Stocz­ kowski 2008, 352). Those who oppose the boycott4 refuse to “cede authority to the AAA to make corporate decla­ rations about what is right-minded and true” (Shweder 2016). It is important to remember who was asserting this moral position. This was clearly exemplified by the com­ ment of a member of the opposition of the boycott as she stated that “in speaking against the boycott she would probably never get a job in an anthropology department” (Shweder 2016). The demand of the AAA boycott to cast a vote on humanity has polarized members into antago­ nistic and often tension-ridden positions. The AAA boycott exemplifies the practical implications of Scheper-Hughes’s call for a militant anthropology, which has shifted into moral anthropology. The concern with what is called by Fassin (2012) a “moral anthropol­ ogy” must be considered in relation to the rise of human rights discourse (as Rofel’s comment exemplifies). Rofel’s claim, that anthropologists in the past have been silent collaborators of colonialism and war machines, could also be leveled at the very act of endorsing the boycott. By doing so, anthropologists become involved in the same war machine they claim to oppose; not this time by col­ laborating with colonial powers, against which they are outwardly protesting, but instead by framing their actions



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within the language of freedom and human rights and endorsing a program whose practical implications are complicit with structures of power that extend beyond the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. By asserting a moral posi­ tion that is difficult to oppose (recognition of Palestinian fundamental rights), the AAA has drawn attention away from the real issue: the role of the United States in the colonial history of the Middle East. The United States is central and complicit to Israel’s role. As Chomsky (2014) argues, “failed initiatives harm the victims doubly—by shifting attention from the plight to irrelevant issues (antisemitism in Harvard, academic freedom, etc) and wasting current opportunities to do something meaningful.” The boycott does not exonerate the complicity of anthropology in Western repressive and colonial history. The case of the boycott parallels the emergence of moral anthropol­ ogy and its relationship to the discourse of human rights as a tendency within the discipline to cleanse itself from its colonial history by redressing the harms caused by colonialism, a point raised by many in this collection (cf. Bastin, Kalb, Friedman). In the introduction to A Companion to Moral Anthropology Fassin (2012) argues that the aim of the volume is to study “morals through issues, themes, regions of the world and periods of history from a critical perspective,” taking these “moral tensions and debates as its object of study and [considering] seriously the moral positions of all sides” (2012, 2) and understanding “the local sense of right and wrong” (Fassin 2008, 336). This project is problematic not merely because value or morality are not always about right and wrong; the danger with making morality the focus of anthropology is that the discipline becomes subsumed under a totality—morality—that then informs every discussion under a totalizing system of values. The development of a moral anthropology (or an anthropology of morality) inadvertently creates and repro­ duces structures of immorality, particularly expressed

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in terms of insecurity: war insecurity, for example, but worse, civil insecurity. Civil insecurity enables the exten­ sion of the state into civil spheres through surveillance, increased policing, and increasingly common states of exception (Agamben 2003). Furthermore, the perpetual condition of civil insecurity also enables the demoniza­ tion of people, particularly refugees and increasingly Muslims, who become now the individual embodiment of the potential for danger. One need look no further than US president Donald Trump and his December 4, 2015 “hate speech” declaring Muslims will no longer be welcomed in the United States. In this same process people are turned into victims and become thus the focus of study. This is not a new incident within anthropology, as was noted by Washburn (1987) regarding the Statement on Human Rights submitted to the United Nations in 1947 by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. Washburn argued that actions such as that of the AAA demonstrated “anthropologists’ commitment to those who were perceived as the victims of Western civi­ lization” (1987, 939). The focus on victims of oppression and suffering has had many voices since (see, e.g., Das 1997; Das and Kleinman 1997; Kleinman 1997; ScheperHughes 2004), but the connection between victimization and the discourse of human dignity (Wallach 2013), or human rights, has remained unexamined and ought to shed light on the underlying structures of power that articulate both a concern with a global state of well-being and the motivation of moral anthropology to understand the different ethical parameters and their interaction with global understandings of right and wrong. In the third volume of the collection edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ram­ phele, and Pamela Raynolds, the concluding comments of the introduction propose a different meaning of “heal­ ing” in the context of people’s daily lives as victims of suffering:



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The term “healing,” as it is used in truth commissions, retains its defining conflation of medical and religious action. Community healing, as we read in chapters in this volume, means repair, but it also means transformation— transformation to a different moral state. (Das et al. 2001, 343)

Here, people’s lived experiences are subsumed under the moral order—in this case for their necessary healing and overcoming of trauma. It is “the juxtaposition of translocal ethical perspectives on ethnographic descriptions of local moral worlds” argues Das and colleagues (2001, 393), that “makes for a bifocality of perspective” that sheds light on the imperatives and limits of each moral perspective. However, the validity of an ethnographic study of South African truth commissions or atomic bomb survivors is not so much in the analysis of different moral orders and their interaction nor in the capacity of people to transform into different moral states. The study of violence and suffering must extend beyond witnessing or moral healing to assess the processes and structures of power that have given rise to such violence. Therein lies the contribution of anthropol­ ogy in the study of war and genocide or forms of everyday violence, as Taylor argues for the Rwandan case above.

Moral Models and Hierarchies of Values I began this paper by recalling Scheper-Hughes’s militant anthropology and her critique of anthropological views that remain inactive in the face of violence. In that respect, there is a thread of logic between the 1995 debate and the emergence of moral anthropology today, in spite of Fas­ sin’s insistence that what Scheper-Hughes proposed was a moralist anthropology and that his program was one for an anthropology that provides a historically and culturally situated account “of the local sense of right and wrong”

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(Fassin 2008, 336). While Scheper-Hughes and D’Andrade were debating more concretely on methodology rather than content, the universalist logic of a common morality that extends beyond cultural differences—at the core of Scheper-Hughes’s point—again becomes relevant when anthropology is conceiving a new branch that aims to focus precisely on morality. In response to ScheperHughes, Roy D’Andrade (1995) pointed out that morality was used to understand the purpose of explicatory mod­ els, to identify what is good and what is bad in order to redress the problem. It is this last point that is becoming an issue for the discipline—especially with respect to the boycott—blurring the distinction between anthropology, social work, development studies, and political activism. In the anthropology web page Allegra lab, Lara Deeb commented on her students’ reflections on the Israeli/ Palestine issue and their call to “do something about it”: she observed that “[a]s educators, when we participate in the boycotts, we provide a responsible model of solidarity and political action for our students, . . . in order to pub­ licly take a stand critical of Israeli human rights abuses” (2015). This is precisely what D’Andrade was picking up in Scheper-Hughes’s approach—a moral model of the world. This is complicated when the underlying justifica­ tion for the boycott is not only a moral model but also one that rests on universality by harnessing human rights language, such as freedom of speech, and the practice of voting—a democratic trope par excellence, but not one devoid of problems. One of the arguments against the boycott has been in favor of respecting academic freedom of expression. In response, the proponents for the boycott argued that there are, in fact, many Palestinians and Jews critical of the sys­ tem that are denied their rights to freedom of expression and that “the boycott seeks to make academic freedom truly inclusive. The principle is and must be a universal one” (Allen and Subramanian 2015). This implies that the



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model that the AAA proposes as exemplar of solidarity is supposed to be a universal one, in which freedom of expression is fundamental. This recalls Scheper-Hughes’s insistence, following Robert Redfield, on positioning anthro­ pology “squarely on the side of humanity” (1995, 420). This is the very claim that human rights discourse rests on: a common humanity that needs to be respected above all else. It seems a simple proposition. How can it be prob­ lematic to imply that human beings the world over have a right to be respected in their humanity? And yet the end of the twentieth century and the first decade and a half of the twenty-first have seen countless “cruel little wars” (Joxe 2002) in the form of humanitarian interventions, waged in defense of universal human rights. The conflation of war and humanitarian aid, Joxe argues, often helps to mask the political meaning of events: “by using humanitarian aid, war ceases to refer to politics and becomes angelic, in other words, disincarnate” (Joxe 2002, 95). The danger with human rights and actions in the name of humanity is that these can and often are recruited by politics—and its continuation, war—in order to forge values out of violent conflict. Human rights most strongly emerge in conflict zones and times, where there is an absence of them and, therefore, implicitly, a need for them. The urgency of their violation can therefore justify any means for their protec­ tion—humanitarian aid, humanitarian intervention, and military intervention. At the core of the notion of human rights is the univer­ salist claim “that everyone is the same because they share a common humanness (which can be usefully thought of as a biological sameness invested with a moral quality)” (Goodale 2009, 219). However, the universality of human rights is also a normative claim; that is, it refers to the institutions and organisations in charge of enforcing the respect of human rights, with democracy as its preferred political model. Therefore, human rights are also—and much more powerfully—a legal, ethical, and procedural

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regime articulated by subtle structures of power: the law, international organisations, transnational institutions, and corporate bodies. Many have pointed out the importance of untangling the conceptual and normative levels of human rights (see Mutua 2002) and argue for understand­ ing human rights as multiple—neither universal nor com­ pletely relative. Given the complexity of the concept of human rights and the critiques it has increasingly received by anthropologists (see Goodale 2013), it is important that anthropology as a discipline should not fall into the trap of resorting to human rights uncritically in order to sustain its moral-cum-political projects. As the study of human being, anthropology focuses on social and cultural—necessarily value—differences, which constantly forces anthropology to consider the relation­ ship between those factors that are unique and specific (locally, temporally) and how they are connected to the broader elements of human (and recently nonhuman) life. Therefore, the universality of human rights cannot be the only objective of anthropology, regardless of its militant commitment. The relationship between universalist and relativist claims ought not be considered as antagonistic but rather as complementary, as anthropologists aim to understand both the unity of human kind at the same time that it wishes to highlight radical, often irreducible cultural differences (Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2016). Fassin places great importance on the concept of cul­ ture as the space in which moral discourse and moral practice are constructed, contingent of place and time. He nonetheless rejects cultural relativism and argues that the role of moral anthropology is not to promote its own morality or to produce a relativist description but rather to engage in a critical account of the social world—of which the anthropologist is part. It is reflexivity rather than relativism that he proposes (Fassin 2008, 341), and the discomfort of morality for the anthropologist should serve as a heuristic function for the development of a



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moral anthropology (342). This is therefore not so dif­ ferent from Scheper-Hughes’s claim that her continued return to Bom Jesus da Mata resulted from a belief that “ethnography could be used as a tool for critical reflec­ tion and for human liberation” (1995, 418). She describes a commitment to her informants based on their shared humanity: “the pursuit of those small spaces of conver­ gence, recognition and empathy that we share” (1995, 418). The understanding of the anthropological obligation towards a “shared humanity” denotes, as Wallach (2013, 317) argues, an understanding of “a physiological con­ glomerate or aggregation of human beings—but ascriptive and prescriptive, an idea of humanity that carries moral standing,” one subjected to valorisation. In a paper published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory in 2013, André Iteanu5 analyzes the relationship between value and hierarchy by looking at the interaction between French society and the banlieus in relation to the headscarf debate. Iteanu points to the egalitarian nature of Euro-American ideology, which shuns hierarchies as founded on political power, and the democratic value of laïcité in France is an example. Recent measures taken in the name of equality between men and women forbade girls from wearing headscarves in school. In spite of the French commitment to respect Islam (by granting funds to Islamic groups and highlighting the importance of variety within French culture),6 when confronted with “such phenomena that assert a value different from power, Western ideology, even with the best intentions, finds no other choice but to supress it by force” (Iteanu 2011, 7563). Iteanu argues that values, as social norms shared among people, should “always be associated with hierarchical ordering” (Iteanu 2013, 155). This is unproblematic in societies where hier­ archy is not demonized, such as in India; however, in Euro-America “hierarchy is held in contempt and often considered incompatible with anything that deserves to be valued” (Iteanu 2013, 156). Within Western ideology

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equality is the overarching value, and it can be just as sup­ pressive as hierarchical value (Dumont 1992). A particularly relevant example for the purpose of this paper is the politi­ cal and philosophical discourses that have as their goal the creation of a better world where everyone respects common values, such as gender equality, race, and culture—namely, human rights. In this case it is fundamental to heed Iteanu’s warning regarding any possible device “conscious or not, operating to blur the link between value and hierarchy” (2013, 156). The effect of the dominant egalitarian value, as seen through the case of France, is assimilation—or exclu­ sion—of those with different values7 (see Kapferer 1988). Therefore, when an organisation supports a boycott of academics in the name of the universal right to freedom of expression, it is important to question what kind of hier­ archies are at play that are being obscured by the denial of the link between value and hierarchy claimed under a human rights issue, under the support of a powerful North American academic institution. There are many forms of violence, such as the denial of rights to other citizens within the context of concern, and this is indeed the problem in Israel, as it is in the United States as well as in France and in Australia, to name a few. Similarly, an anthropology that focuses its efforts on the study of moral systems, subsum­ ing analysis to that of the moralities studied, is also at risk of overlooking the links between hierarchy and value and missing out on the possibility of launching and pursuing powerful critiques that anthropology is capable of contrib­ uting, thus becoming complicit in the antipolitics machine.

Marina Gold is a researcher for the ERC Advanced Grant project “Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons” (project code 340673) led by Professor Bruce Kapferer at the University of Bergen in Norway. She is the author of People and State in Socialist Cuba (2015) and is currently



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working on the relationship between NGOs, human rights discourse and the refugee crisis in Europe.

Notes 1. “The Resolution,” Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions, https://anthroboycott.wordpress.com/ the-resolution. 2. A few examples include the debate from 1995 in volume 36 of Current Anthropology; another in 2008 in volume 8(4) of Anthropological Theory, and in this journal volume 14(3) 2014 printed three more articles debating the new directions in moral anthropology. 3. The full text can be found on the “Participate & Advocate” page of the American Anthropological Association’s website, http://www.americananthro.org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/ CommitteeDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=2247. 4. For critiques of the boycott, see Gitlin (2014), Desimone (2014), Chomsky (2014), and Post (2015). 5. Iteanu is a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École Pratique des Hautes Études. 6. This insistence with variety of cultures and their equality was purposefully made explicit through the visual depictions of people onto the Arc de Triomphe on December 31, 2015, for the New Year celebration. Following the Paris attacks in November, the New Year celebrations aimed to demonstrate that terrorism had not destroyed equality, fraternity, and freedom. The marked presence of the military and the random police operations on the streets of Paris suggested otherwise. The state of emergency was declared on November 25, and the French government informed the secretary general of the Council of Europe that the state of emergency measures would derogate certain rights guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, such as the right to respect private and family life (Article 8), the right to liberty and security (Article 5), the right to freedom of association (Article 11), and the right to freedom of expression (Article 10) (see Informationsplattformhumanrights.ch). 7. Consider German reactions to the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne and media responses declaring the need to teach refugees German values, as refugees must be “educated (by others and by themselves) into their freedom” (Žižek 2016).

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Marina Gold In other words, as Žižek fails to clearly articulate, it is the liberal value of freedom (for both men and women) that is overarching.

References AAA. 2014, October. “The Statement.” Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions. https://anthroboycott. wordpress.com/the-statement. Agamben, G. 2003. “State of Exception.” YouTube. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=n-HZCyQnMq8&playnext=1&list=PL62 321266A3214266. Allen, Lori, and Ajantha Subramanian. 2015. “Engaged Anthropol­ ogy: The AAA’s Israel/Palestine Task Force Report #Palestine.” Allegra lab. http://allegralaboratory.net/engaged-anthropologythe-aaas-israelpalestine-task-force-report-palestine. Anthroboycott. 2015a, November 24. “A Historical Night for the American Anthropological Association.” Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions. https://anthroboycott. wordpress.com/2015/11/24/a-historic-night-for-the-americananthropological-association/#more-680. Anthroboycott. 2015b, December 7. “‘Our Liberation Will Not Be Complete Until Everyone’s Is’: A Report from the #AAA2014 Business Meeting.” Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions. https://anthroboycott.wordpress. com/2014/12/07/our-liberation-will-not-be-complete-until-every­ ones-is-a-report-from-the-aaa2014-business-meeting. Chomsky, Noam. 2014, August 4. “On Israel-Palestine and BDS.” Open Security. https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/ noam-chomsky/on-israelpalestine-and-bds. D’Andrade, R. (1995). “Moral Models in Anthropology. ” Current Anthropology, 36(3), 399-408. Das, Veena. 1997. “The Act of Witnessing. Violence, Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity.” In Violence and Subjectivity, ed. V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele, and P. Reynolds, 205–225. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Das, Veena, and Arthur Kleinman. 1997. “Introduction.” In Violence and Subjectivity, ed. V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele, and Paula Reynolds, 1–17. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Das, Veena, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds. 2001. Remaking a World: Violence,



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Social Suffering and Recovery. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Deeb, Lara. 2015. “Redux: An Educator’s Perspective on the Aca­ demic Boycott of Israeli Institutions #BDS#Palestine.” Allegra lab. http://allegralaboratory.net/an-educators-perspective-onthe-academic-boycott-of-israeli-institutions. Desimone, Arturo. 2014, September 27. “Critique of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement, from a Jewish Supporter of the Palestinian Cause.” Open Democracy. https://www.opende­ mocracy.net/arab-awakening/arturo-desimone/critique-of-boy­ cott-divestment-sanctions-movement-from-jewish-support. Dumont, Louis. 1992. Essays on Individualism. Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. London: University of Chicago Press. Fassin, Didier. 2008. “Beyond Good and Evil? Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4: 333–344. Fassin, Didier, ed. 2012. A Companion to Moral Anthropology, Kin­ dle ed. Chichester, Oxford, Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Gitlin, Todd. 2014, October 28. “BDS and the Poli­ tics of ‘Radical’ Gestures.” Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/todd-gitlin/ bds-and-politics-of-%E2%80%98radical%E2%80%99-gestures. Goodale, Mark. 2009. Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights, Kindle ed. Stanford, Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni­ versity Press. Goodale, Mark, ed. 2013. Human Rights at the Cross-Roads. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Heller, Monica, and Ed Liebow. 2015. “Task-Force on AAA Engage­ ment on Israel-Palestine.” American Anthropological Associa­ tion. http://www.americananthro.org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/ CommitteeDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=2247. Informationsplattformhumanrights.ch. 2015, December 28. “State of Emergency in France—Softening of Human Rights.” Infor­ mationsplattform. http://www.humanrights.ch/de/interna­ tionale-menschenrechte/nachrichten/terrorbekaempfung/ ausnahmezustand-frankreich-aufweichung-menschenrechte. Iteanu, André. 2011. “Chapter 11: Hierarchy and Power: A Com­ parative Attempt under Asymmetrical Lines.” In Hierarchy. Persistence and Trasnformation in Social Formations, Kindle ed., ed. M. Rio and O. H. Smedal, 7445–7791. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Iteanu, Adnré. 2013. “The Two Conceptions of Value.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 1: 155–171.

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Joxe, Alain. 2002. Empire of Disorder. Los Angeles, New York: Semiotext(e). Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People Myths of State. Bathurst: Crawford House Publishing. Kapferer, Bruce, and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. 2016. Against Exoticism. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kleinman, Arthur. 1997. “The Violence of Everyday Life: The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence.” In Violence and Subjectivity, ed. V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele, and P. Reynolds, 226–241. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Mutua, Makau. 2002. Human Rights. A Political and Cultural Critique, Kindle ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Post, David. 2015, November 24. “A Personal Note on the American Anthropological Association’s Boycott of Israeli Academics.” Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/11/24/a-personal-note-on-the-ameri­ can-anthropological-associations-boycott-of-israeli-academics. Rofel, Lisa, and Ilana Feldman. 2015. “Why Anthropologists Should Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions.” Anthro­ pologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institu­ tions. https://anthroboycott.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/ why-anthropologists-should-boycott-israeli-academic-institutions. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propo­ sitions for a Militant Anthropology and Comments.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3: 409–440. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2004. “Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death.” In Violence in War and Peace. An Anthology, ed. N. ScheperHughes and P. Bourgois, 275–280. Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. Shweder, Richard A. 2016, March 24. “Targeting the Israeli Acad­ emy: Will Anthropologists Have the Courage to Just Say ‘No’?” Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-ashweder/targeting-the-israeli-aca_b_9540974.html?1458837831. Stoczkowski, Wiktor. 2008. “The ‘Fourth Aim’ of Anthropology: Between Knowledge and Ethics.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4: 345–356. Wallach, John R. 2013. “Dignity: The Last Bastion of Liberalism.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights 4, no. 2: 313–328. Washburn, Wilcomb E. 1987. “Cultural Relativism, Human Rights and the AAA.” American Anthropologist 89, no. 4: 939–943.



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Žižek, Slavoj. 2016, January 13. “The Cologne Attacks Were an Obscene Version of Carnival.” New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2016/01/ slavoj-zizek-cologne-attacks.

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Empathy, as Affective Ethical Technology and Transformative Political Praxis

k Elisabeth Kirtsoglou and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

In this essay we re-assess some of the analytical potential of the concept of “empathy” and, in particular, the con­ cept’s ability to address the tension between a humani­ tarian ethos (seen as representative of normative, often conservative values) and grassroots political action, which is expressed as solidarity towards troubled others. We invite the reader to join us in a journey that unites ideas from seemingly disparate thinkers—philosophers, soci­ ologists and, anthropologists—in an attempt to salvage empathy from the semantic nexus of pity, compassion, sympathy, and related sentiments that form the basis of humanitarian antipolitics (Ticktin 2011). We argue that empathy, despite its mistaken association with neoliberal­ ism, can be used as a politically nuanced analytical notion that has the potential to subvert power and play a role as an affective, ethical technology of resistance. One of our main aims is to stress the value of “empa­ thy” as a conceptual tool that can potentially evade typologies of humanitarian action conceived as either “moral code” or “moral agency” (see Fassin 2014). The empathetic point of view triggers an auto-didactic and



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transformative process of sharing—knowledge, perspec­ tives, resources—that has the potential to destabilize fixed conceptualisations of social structure and subjectivity. Borrowing inspiration from Castoriadis (2007), we enter­ tain the possibility that the empathic capacity to teach oneself how to imagine the world from the other’s point of view can be seen as affirmative political praxis established in radical imagination. In a recent monograph Carolyn Pedwell has fore­ grounded empathy as a sociopolitical relation that arises within (but also reconstitutes) “social and geo-political hierarchies and relations of power” (2014, xii). We share her concern with what we call—paraphrasing Hannerz (2004)—the two faces of empathy: the happy and the worried one. The first can be seen as a self-congratulatory attitude on the part of the relatively privileged empathizer, whereas the second reflects distress about the asymmetries in humanitarianism and the practice of giving. Pedwell, for sure, goes to great length to highlight the neoliberal entanglements of empathy. For example, the manner in which empathy has been appropriated by Barack Obama’s election campaign (Pedwell 2012a, 2014) or the depoliti­ cisation it propagates in the context of international aid and development (Pedwell 2012b, 2014; see also Cheliotis 2013; Fassin 2005, 2011a, 2011b; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Ferguson 1994; Povinelli 2011; Rozakou 2012). Such thoughts lead us to interrogate whether empathy merely conveys the self-transformation of the privileged subject, the empathizer, or engenders the potential of transformative political action (that challenges established asymmetries). To contemplate the second possibility, Pedwell (2014) uses the work of feminist and antiracist theorists (Ahmed, Spelman). We draw instead our inspira­ tion from philosophers (Nitzsche, Levinas, Deleuze, and Castoriadis) and anthropologists (Hollan, Throop, Fassin, and Rosaldo). We also provide brief examples from the austerity and refugee crises in Greece, which indicate how

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empathy may encapsulate humanitarian perspectives that depart from neoliberal humanitarian ethics.

Empathy as an Anthropological Concern We should make visible from the start our intention to defend the usefulness of empathy as a political tour de force that will enrich the anthropological analytical vocabulary. The crisis of neoliberal capitalism, exempli­ fied in the spread and escalation of international conflict, forced displacement, and global hierarchies of power has intensified anthropological concern about humanitarian action, intervention, and responsibility. We can see the emergence of a politico-ethical doctrine (see Kapferer and Gold this volume), whose relation to advanced capital­ ism does not seem to be a matter of pure of historical coincidence. The failures and distortions of advanced capitalism have been increasingly portrayed as “crises.” The use of the term crisis is itself a technology of gover­ nance that serves to solidify this politico-ethical doctrine by displacing accountability and introducing multiple states of exception (cf. Agamben 2005) in modern politi­ cal and economic systems. Successive financial crises, for example, are never discussed in terms of economic implosions and the proliferation of casino capitalism (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2001); instead, there is a system­ atic attempt to incriminate labor rights and the welfare state and to introduce “exceptional” measures that involve the methodical modification of employment laws and the abolishment of welfare systems. Forced displacement—another phenomenon that has been described as a “crisis”—is being discursively divorced from military interventions (Kapferer 2004) and historical relations of economic violence that date back to colonial times. Artificial dichotomies between “refugees” and “economic migrants” attempt to establish



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multiple hierarchies of eligibility, states of exception, and ideas about the radical difference between the “ordered,” “advanced,” “secular,” and democratic West and its troubled others (cf. Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2016). In this political and, dare we say, ideological climate, we insist that empathy, the ability to imagine the world from the other’s point of view, may be a useful tool that has the potential to question the discursive and practical basis of this new politico-ethical doctrine by inspiring actors to acknowledge the commonality of their political predicaments. Seen within a broader context of humanitarian depoliti­ cisation, empathy has been ignored (at best) by socio­ cultural anthropologists or treated—along with other sympathy-related concepts—as representing complicity with the status quo. In political rhetoric humanitarian aid directed towards displacement and austerity “crises” has played an exonerating role, diverting attention from the foci of power and the violence of inequality (see Fas­ sin and Pandolfi 2010). Neoliberal governance literally depends on the idea that it is the responsibility of the third sector and of ordinary citizens to absorb the shock waves produced by “integrated world capitalism” (Guat­ tari 2000). The political ramifications of certain “cultural tropes” such as engagement and participation (cf. Candea et al. 2015) have led many scholars to closely scrutinise the foundations of the ethical modalities that underpin such concepts. Standing in unison with voices that challenge the foundations and effects of conventional political praxis and in line with the critical perspective introduced in this volume, we will focus on the semiological and ideological divide that separates empathy from other compassionrelated concepts and emphasize the role of empathy as an ethical technology. Empathy, we feel, can serve as a versatile and politically nuanced concept to aid analysis within the expanding fields of political anthropology,

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humanitarianism, and moral anthropology. It is, in fact, quite surprising that anthropology, a comparative disci­ pline deeply concerned with other points of view, has given so little attention to it (Hollan 2008; Hollan and Throop 2008, 2011; Throop 2008). In our view this inatten­ tion is related to a semantic confusion regarding the poly­ semy, cultural variation, and specificity of the empathetic viewpoint, which is, in turn, further conflated with the empathetic projections of the analyst and the independent trajectory of empathy (as an analytical, philosophical, and deeply political concept). Hollan and Throop have made a significant contribu­ tion in advocating for the reinstatement of empathy within general contemporary anthropology. In their introductions to two collaborative projects (Hollan and Throop 2008, 2011) they recognise an anthropological ambivalence towards empathy, dating back to Boaz and exacerbated by Geertz. The latter, in his famous essay “From the Native’s Point of View,” caricatures the empathetic ethnographer— “the chameleon fieldworker . . . a walking miracle of empathy” (Geertz 1983, 56). His position represents a wider anthropological tradition that prioritizes “the struc­ ture and contextual meaning,” over the thoughts of other people “understood as psychological individuals” (Rob­ bins and Rumsey 2008, 416). For Geertz, ethnographic empathy is a mere projection, the presumptuous super­ imposition of the analyst’s thoughts and experiences on the ethnographic subject. Instead of attempting to place the experience of others in empathetic terms defined by a Western perception of personhood, Geertz recommends that the ethnographer should interpret other experiences in their own culturally embedded terms (1983, 59). Hollan (2008) compares Geertz’s rejection of empathy with the deeply empathetic and experiential approach taken by Rosaldo (1989). In his essay “Grief and a Head­ hunter’s Rage” Rosaldo makes visible a fundamental dimension of empathy: to better understand another’s



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predicament, you need to experience a similar predica­ ment yourself. Here, Rosaldo’s well-known anthropo­ logical narrative—of how he truly understood Ilongot rage and mourning after the tragic death of his wife—demon­ strates that empathy relies “on personal experiences that are homologous to the experiences we are attempting to understand” (Hollan 2008, 478–479). Rosaldo’s experiential position also highlights the role of emotion in the empathetic encounter: in order to under­ stand another, you need to feel like another, an argument that redirects attention to the double dimension of empa­ thy as a feeling and a mode of thinking. Hollan1 brings the two dimensions together by stressing how empathy “is embedded in an intersubjective encounter that neces­ sitates on-going dialog for its accuracy,” implicating “the imaginative and emotional capacities” of the empathizer and the beneficiary of empathy (2008, 487). We consider Hollan’s holistic view of empathy as a step in the right dimension, but we would like to add to the definitional properties of empathy two important, additional dimen­ sions. First, the need to think of empathy not as simply rooted in homologous experiences but as the result of radical imagination—namely, of the ability of subjects to imagine the world from the other’s point of view, even if they cannot gain firsthand experience of this world. This understanding of empathy as the quality of radical imagination prevents the Other from being simply col­ lapsed onto the self and safeguards difference. Second, we should not forget, as Pedwell (2014) has argued, that empathy is also a political relation. Our primary aim in the remaining part of this essay is to examine empathy not as a feeling but as a capacity to feel and to learn how to see the world through the stand­ point of others. The empathic view entails the potentiality of transformative experience exemplified in the ability of social actors to create alternative value systems and resist normative moralities. Even if we accept that such

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alternative value systems are not fully developed or articulated, we feel compelled to highlight that empathy presents us with an analytical opportunity to renegotiate accountability and political causality. This opportunity emerges from separating the analytical implications of empathy from its semantic connotations and the moral baggage of sympathy and neoliberal humanitarianism.

From Sympathy to Empathy Adam Smith is perhaps one of the earlier thinkers who discussed the phenomenon of sympathy as recognition of and identification with the feelings of others. Sym­ pathy, according to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1853 [1759]) is the result of a process of mirroring by which the self is able to use the imagination in order to understand how the other is feeling in a given situation. Smith’s understanding of sympathy is inspired by Hume’s Treatise (1911 [1738]) but also significantly departs from it insofar as Smith recognizes that we can never be at one with the feelings of other people. Sympathy as recogni­ tion is intimately connected to sociality, which opens the way for emplacing ethics in social relations. The problem with Smith, however, arises from his idea that morality is ultimately a private and individual project, a framework that effects a challenging separation of moral from politi­ cal life, as he makes apparent in the Wealth of Nations (1804 [1776]). Modern critics like Ticktin (2011, 2014) and Fassin (2005, 2007, 2011a, 2011b) draw our attention precisely to the separation of the moral from the political, which can been seen as a necessary step for launching a healthy critique on humanitarian antipolitics (cf. Ticktin 2011). Most of the poststructuralist tradition in fact has sought to reunite ethical and political concerns both in terms of their respective origins and with regards to their joint



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effects (see, e.g., Agamben 1998; Arendt 1958, 1963; Braidotti 2012; Deleuze 1994; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Derrida 2001; Foucault 2008; Levinas 1991, 1999). The driving intellectual force behind a number of post­ structuralist works on the political implications of ethical doctrines has been undoubtedly the work of Nietzsche— most prominently exemplified in Human All Too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1978). Nietzsche’s contribution to our understanding of ethics is of paramount importance with regards to three specific but interrelated points: (a) the relation­ ship between ethics and morality, (b) the potentially problematic dimensions of moral sentiments, and (c) the role of imagination, creativity, and transformation. For Nietzsche there is no such thing as universal morality. The Nietzschean subject is not constrained by established moral codes but is instead able to use the imagination in order to self-assertively create ethical values in a constant effort to transform negative emotions into a positive life force. Sentiments, such as pity, sympathy, or compassion, are regarded by Nietzsche not only as signs of weakness but also, and perhaps most importantly, as profoundly self-driven and condescending. The foundations of com­ passion are to be found in feelings of superiority vis-à-vis the recipient, who is effectively denied the opportunity to exercise agency and becomes locked in an asymmetrical power relationship. Nietzsche’s suspicion towards com­ passion greatly resembles Marx’s or Oscar Wilde’s (2001) classic aversion towards philanthropy.2 Even the most careful reading of Nietzsche, however, cannot resolve the semantic ambiguity that emerges from the translation of concepts addressing a concern for the predicament of others. When speaking of com­ passion Nietzsche employs the term Mitleid, which can be understood as compassion, sympathy, or pity. The indeterminacy of translation here forces us to both accept Nietzsche’s conclusions and to radically differentiate our

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perspective from his. The range of emotions that spring out of human sociality is diverse, and although we agree that Mitleid understood as sympathy and pity has depoliti­ cizing and denigrating qualities, we claim that Nietzsche’s concept of Mitleid is radically different from our under­ standing of empathy, which stems from an eclectic syn­ thesis of Levinas, Castoriadis, and the explicitly Deleuzian tradition of nomadic ethics as epitomized in the work of Rosi Braidotti (2012). The term empathy started its intellectual life as a maladaptation of the ancient Greek term empathis (pής, passionate). Lotze (1899) used the Greek word as a basis for the German term Einfühlung—“feeling into,” originally coined by Lipps (1906; cf. Throop 2008, 403)—which was finally translated by Titchener (1909) into English as empathy (cf. Barrett-Lennard 1981, 1997; Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1994; Vischer 1994). Successive and unsuccessful translations have not helped to clarify the differences between empathy, sympathy, compassion, or pity. As Engelen and Röttger-Rössler note, pity and sympathy are most likely to occur towards persons one is related to or who belong to one’s own in-group but less often towards out-group members who are perceived with suspicion (2012, 4). If we wanted to be absolutely clear about the difference between empathy and all other sym­ pathy-related terms, we would need to adopt additional terminological clarifications (drawing from Greek con­ cepts, according to the philosophical tradition)—perhaps enthymisis (to partake in someone else’s feelings) or katanoisis (which is more akin to the English understanding). Nevertheless, Occam’s razor commands that we endeavor to salvage empathy, instead of adding on the perplexity of existing terms. Let us therefore state once more that empathy is not about sympathy and that it is radically different from pity or compassion. Strictly speaking, empathy is not a senti­ ment or emotion but rather an affective capacity more



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akin to Spinoza’s potentia (Braidotti 2012, 183). With a nod to Malinowski—as our concern here is to reformulate the concept for anthropological use—we conceptualize empathy as a process that entails a desire and the capac­ ity to adopt another’s point of view. But in contrast to Geertz (1983), we don’t see empathy as a mere exercise of interpretation (of another’s view) but rather as an experiential concept (Rosaldo 1989) that “emerges in an intersubjective field” (Hollan 2008; Hollan and Throop 2008, 393). The capacity to empathise with an other is not single-handedly empirical, cognitive, or affective but rather encompasses all the aforementioned faculties and is embedded in sociopolitical relationships (Pedwell 2014). Empathy as immanent potentia can only be exhibited by a subject embodied and embedded in a rhizomatic web of relations (Deleuze and Guattari 1988; cf. Braid­ otti 2012, 174–175) by an agent-cum-patient (Carrithers 2005; cf. Lienhardt 1961) who affects as much as she is affected by human and nonhuman others. Materiality and embodiment are crucial in this process, which is elegantly described by Levinas as an epiphany caused by the other’s face. Facing the Other creates responsibility, which Levinas understood as a form of recognition that constitutes social relationships (1991, xix). Unlike Levinas’s understanding of the effects of this epiphany, however, the notion of empathy that we propose does not efface the difference between the self and the other. Furthermore, it not only emerges in the context of pain and vulnerability but often represents a wider predisposition in life—for example, a politically inspired position that attempts to subvert the asymmetry of the provider-beneficiary relationship. Fifteen years ago Vassos Argyrou (2002) produced a pro­ foundly insightful postcolonial critique of the postmodern turn in anthropological practice. In Anthropology and the Will to Meaning, Argyrou (2002) demonstrates how the driving force of much ethnographic work had been an ethic of “salvation” by which the self and the Other were

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deemed to be equal yet presented as being the same. To resolve the emerging paradox, we need at this point to take some inspiration from Levinas. Empathy implies responsibility and, as Levinas claims, a certain degree of accountability as well. For Levinas, identification with the Other holds the self “hostage” and “accountable for what one did not do, accountable for the others before the oth­ ers” (Levinas 1991, xxix). Accountability—stemming out of the realisation of the profound inequalities between the anthropologist as well as many of his informants and the historical routes and dimensions of those inequalities (Wolf 1982)—led many postmodern ethnographers to resort to redemption tactics (Argyrou 2002). Argyrou explains how anthropological analysis systematically attempted to locate the other in the self, or the Self in the Other, until the two parties proved to share a soothing sameness. We believe that the notion of empathy provides us with an opportunity to ease, if not to resolve, this tension. As we will demonstrate in the following section, empathy entails the capacity of teach­ ing ourselves how to relate to another’s perspective yet without becoming the same as the other. In this respect the empathetic point of view destablizes the idea of radi­ cal alterity (cf. Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2016).

Empathy as Radical Imagination, or How to Teach Yourself the Other’s Experience We have put forward the claim that empathy, as affirma­ tive political praxis and as transformative, affective ethical technology, can potentially subvert and has the possibil­ ity of deconstructing narratives of radical alterity while still respecting difference. This claim poses a theoretical problem. If subjects are not under the illusion that they are essentially the same, how is it possible to claim to understand how a given condition makes others feel?



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How can we avoid both moral and cognitive relativism, analytical projections, and a tantalizing sense of incom­ mensurability? We have partly answered this question already by claiming that the empathic subject is always in the process of becoming an intersubjectively consti­ tuted part of relational rhizomes, and “in ongoing dialog” (Hollan 2008, 475) with others. The permeable, multiply composed subject who experiences life as an open-ended process does not allow enough room for incommensura­ bility. The problem posed by other commensurable minds is an artificial one if those other minds are not regarded as clearly delineated entities but instead as parts of webs of relationships. A processual, relational understanding of subjectivity, however, does not preclude the importance of instances of asynchronicity; it does not entirely solve (or safeguard) the question of difference. Empathy as affective recogni­ tion of the other’s circumstances and feelings is difficult to explain if we conceive of subjects as socially and culturally constructed beings with different experiences, historicities, and positionalities. How do we empathise with the other without causing subjectivities to collapse onto each other, and how do we indeed empathise with others who nominally belong to the same community with us without relying on an essentialist conceptualisa­ tion of community? How can we understand empathy as an open ecology (Guattari 2000) of human relations to the nonhuman environment? In order to answer these sig­ nificant questions, we draw inspiration from the work of Castoriadis and, more specifically, from his book Figures of the Thinkable (2007). Castoriadis (2007) is reading Sophocles’s Antigone and specifically the excerpt known in the Anglo-Saxon world as “Ode to Man.” Ode is devoted to Anthropos (the human being), who is, according to Sophocles, the most formidable, amazing, achievement-capable entity. Many characteristics and human accomplishments are listed in

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thirty-one verses praising human inventions and explain­ ing the resourcefulness of Anthropos, who knows only death as the limit of one’s creativity. One particular verse, however, which describes how humans taught themselves to speak—creating, thus, language—is especially perplex­ ing. How can one teach (oneself) something she does not already know? Anthropos, Castoriadis argues, “creates himself as creator in a circle whose apparently vicious logic reveals its ontological primacy” (2007, 16). In order to deepen our understanding of empathy we will borrow from Castoriadis the emphasis on the capacity to be an autodidact and the concept of vis formandi—the power of creation, the ability to create, to form, to imagine and to invent (2007). According to Castoriadis’s formulation, the subject’s capacity for empathy rests upon (and attests to) the existence of vis formandi, expressed in this instance as the ability to imagine what the Other’s world may feel like. The presence of the Other—her joy, bereavement, happiness or pain, strength or vulnerability, abundance or need—invites the self to initiate a process of autodidaxis—that is, a process of teaching oneself how to cope (with new conditions, including the presence and pre­ dicament of the other). We can therefore feel (and see, understand, experience) the world from the Other’s point of view not because the self and the other are fundamen­ tally the same but because they are uniquely capable of becoming autodidacts in each other’s experiences as well as learning from one another. This process of creating (instituting) and sharing knowledge makes empathy an equally cognitive and affective process between embodied subjects capable of transforming their world or creating by means of their imagination—where imagination is social practice (Appadurai 1996)—“scapes” of empathy. Creativity, originality, and invention emerge as effects of the radical imagination, the capacity to produce de novo (but not necessarily ex nihilo) original figurations



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(Braidotti 2002, 133; Kirtsoglou 2004, 2010; see also Bruner 1993; Hallam and Ingold 2007). Empathy cannot be understood separately from the faculty of radical imagi­ nation, not only because of the stumble of incommensu­ rability or the need to safeguard difference but also, and perhaps most importantly, because radical imagination allows us to understand how empathy establishes an open relationship between living things and their environments and can be extended beyond the human community.

Empathy in Times of Crisis: An Affective Technology of Resistance It will be helpful at this point to provide two examples that illustrate the relevance of empathy as an analyti­ cal concept that motivates radical imagination from the grassroots. The two particular cases we briefly discuss provide us with an opportunity to reveal, reflexively, the circumstances that inspired us to reconsider the impor­ tance of empathy and our insistence to separate the empa­ thetic approach from other sympathy-related perspectives. Both examples emerged in austerity-ridden Greece. As a response to austerity policies—implemented as an alleged remedy to the financial “crisis” after 2010—we have seen the emergence of spontaneous empathetic initiatives led by ordinary citizens who engaged in acts of solidarity aim­ ing to alleviate the predicament of suddenly impoverished citizens and, more recently, forcibly displaced persons who attempt to enter the European Union. Our first example takes us to the vibrant social con­ text of the Greek anti-austerity solidarity movement. The term solidarity (allilegíi)—which has roots in radical political thinking (Rakopoulos 2016)—has been widely adopted by left-leaning humanitarian initiatives, several of which emerged spontaneously at the local level as groups of citizens came together to provide help to fellow

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citizens afflicted by austerity. Since the first years of the crisis, spontaneous, informal groups of “solidarians” have worked together to provide dry, fresh, or cooked food to impoverished families as well as psychological care and legal advice. Institutionalized sources of citizen sup­ port—municipalities, NGOs, the church—complemented the local humanitarian landscape by maintaining food, cloth, and medicine banks. Interestingly, and as recent anthropological work has documented (Cabot 2014, 2016; Rozakou 2016a, 2016b; Theodossopoulos 2016), the overwhelming majority of participants to humanitarian initiatives3 maintain an aversion towards the notions of philanthropy and charity and a clear preference for the term solidarity, a more politically conscious alternative (Rakopoulos 2015, 2016; Theodossopoulos 2016), which resonates more closely with the empathetic approach. A cynical observer could easily argue that the empha­ sis on the notion of “solidarity” in the Greek context is merely rhetorical, a superficial replacement of the terms “charity” and “humanitarianism.” Yet, as an emerging body of ethnographic work has shown (Bakalaki 2008; Cabot 2014, 2016; Rakopoulos 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016; Rozakou 2012, 2016a, 2016b), the choice of words here has a political significance because it captures the desire of situated local actors to resist austerity (Theodossopou­ los 2016). Voluntary work dedicated to the provision of food for impoverished fellow citizens is seen by solidarity volunteers as a conscious political standpoint that con­ veys a message of defiance towards austerity: “we will not passively accept the imposition of austerity rules,” have said some of the volunteers, and “we will not stay inert when our neighbor next door is suffering.” As individual citizens come together to participate in humanitarian soli­ darity initiatives, they reconstitute their local community, creating networks of support that can be used as loci of political action beyond humanitarianism. Through work­ ing together in solidarity, explain many volunteers, we



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learn to rely on our fellow citizen (see Theodossopoulos 2016). Here lies empathy’s empowering and auto-didactic dimension. Through bonding in precariousness—here, caring for the fellow human—groups of solidarians real­ ize the politically enabling dimension of cooperation: they learn from one another and from each other’s experience. In a wider sense they have taught themselves how to work together to help others and, through working together, to defy the demoralizing shadow of austerity. The political connotations of this rediscovery of “self and local com­ munity”—engendered through working with and learning from others (while attending the needs of the other)— cannot be described in apolitical “sympathy”-related terms. The deeper political message of the grassroots solidarity initiatives in Greece was one of the reasons we were encouraged to reconstitute—and in this process, deneoliberalize—the notion of “empathy” as an ethical and political technology. Words here—and their culturally or politically embed­ ded meaning—are of importance. In as much as “empa­ thy” is not equal to “sympathy,” philanthropic activity is not the same as solidarity. Repeatedly, the asymmetrical implications of giving create a burden that local actors attempt to overcome. In Greece the sociality of hospital­ ity (see Cabot 2014; Herzfeld 1987, 1992; Papataxiarchis 2006, 2014; Rozakou 2012) is often contrasted to the inequality of gift giving, which establishes hierarchies (Gkintidis 2014; Herzfeld 1992; Hirschon 1992, 2000). In the everyday sociality of humanitarian activity such semiological distinctions matter: they carry political weight and help define one’s position regarding the ethics of giving (see Theodossopoulos 2016). Our second example shows that a short empathetic distance separates the demoralizing and antisocial con­ sequences of austerity—being yourself suddenly impov­ erished—from the fate of refugees/migrants who have

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been forcibly displaced from their homes either because of protracted war and conflict or because of conditions of eco­ nomic violence that results in a profound “loss of control over one’s life situation” (Graeber 2014, 76). A large num­ ber of Greek citizens experienced the arrival of displaced persons in their austerity-ridden country as a condition of multitemporality (cf. Knight 2013, 2015), where past and present experiences of wars, famines, destitution, and geo­ political dependence wove themselves in the same messy collective narrative (cf. Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2016). In particular, many Greek citizens saw the predicament of the refugees (who struggled to cross the Aegean Sea) as mirror­ ing the experience of their forcibly displaced grandparents who had crossed that same sea in 1922. Prosfygiá (refugee­ ness) as collective narrative (cf. Hirschon 1989; Tsimouris 1998) and transgenerational trauma (cf. Anastasiadis 2012) has become for a large part of Greek society a mechanism of substitution—in the way in which Levinas (1981) has talked about the process of putting oneself in the place of another. Many people identified with the stranger as another human being in need—here, conceived as similar to the Self. Encounters with refugees encouraged many Greek citizens to establish an empathetic connection that should not be confused with compassion, pity, or sympa­ thy—any of which can effectively displace the recognition of social and political rights (Fassin 2005; Rozakou 2012). Empathy, in most of its vernacular Greek articulations, related to the recognition that both the Self and the Other exist in similar conditions of precarity, alterity, and tan­ talizing ambiguity. One’s subjective position—of relative safety—proved to be a matter of luck rather than the effect of righteous choices (as the politico-ethical doctrine of capi­ talism would urge us to think). The realization that precar­ ity affects both the self and the other constitutes perhaps the most important demystification that can take place in contemporary times. Empathy as identification can trans­ form precariousness into an idiom of resistance, crashing



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the concept of “radical alterity” as a foundation myth of capitalist modernity (cf. Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2016). Although no one can deny the existence of Nazi re-activism, nationalism, xenophobia, and racism in Greek public culture, an unprecedented number of Greek citizens reacted to the arrival of displaced persons by expressing their conviction that “today it is them (who find themselves in this situation), tomorrow it might be us.” The capacity to imagine circumstances of war, con­ flict, and lack of safety and the ability to work and prosper in one’s own country was facilitated by analogical think­ ing (cf. Sutton 1998) that led people to consider past his­ torical events and to proclaim that “we are all migrants” and “we are all refugees.” As Maria, a forty-five-year-old woman told us, When you see these people coming out of the boats, it feels like a thousand eyes are looking at you. Their eyes, the eyes of your dead grandparents, the eyes of your children, the eyes of the unborn who will be reading about these events one day in their history books. A thousand eyes, a million eyes, looking at you, asking you: “what are you going to do?” When I was learning about the Holocaust, or listening to my grandmother’s story of being a refugee, I kept asking myself: What were other people doing? Why no one tried to do something? I cannot bear the thought of future generations thinking of us as having turned the other way. The sea has a thousand eyes and they all stare at us with a question: “what are you going to do?”

In an explicitly Levinasian fashion, Maria transforms the ethical into an explicitly political stance. The need to demonstrate solidarity towards the other does not come as a result of pity or sympathy but rather as the effect of empathy as identification that bears two important realisations. First is the understanding that everyone and anyone (regardless of race, color, religion, historical tim­ ing, effort invested) can find themselves in conditions of

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precarity, uncertainty, and need. Second, that everyone and anyone (as a result of the above) has a political duty to act towards the alleviation of the other’s predicament. In the scope of empathy the self and the other become connected in a nonhierarchical fashion, as all hierarchies prove to be fleeting and provisional. Today it is you, tomorrow it might be me.

Conclusion We are concerned with—but also inspired by—the ambi­ guity generated by empathy. Its happy face is often taken for granted—for example, as unquestionably good (Pedwell 2012a, 281)—a moralizing apology for neoliber­ alism’s inequalities. Such an undeconstructed view may encourage projections, the assumption that we act for the benefit of others, and that we know what is good for the other. Here, the empathic projection may very well represent the wishes (or subject position) of privileged parties—for example, the ethnographer (Geertz 1983), or the provider of aid (Pedwell 2014; Spelman 1997). We see this type of empathy as sympathy in disguise. Our concern for the happy, undeconstructed face of empathy encourages attention to the asymmetries gener­ ated (or, more often, concealed) by humanitarian projects and the neoliberal morality that often sustains them (de Waal 1997; Fassin 2011a; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Kapferer this volume; Muehlebach 2012). Critical engage­ ment with such apolitical empathetic views encourages us to acknowledge that empathy’s happy and worried faces are two aspects of the same coin: it is unrealistic to assume that a complete break from neoliberal influ­ ences (and empathic self-justifications) may be, in fact, possible. The dichotomy between a good and a bad empathy, argues Pedwell (2012b, 174), is artificial. Never­ theless, we strongly feel, it is important to foreground this



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problematic: the dialectic between empathy’s happy and worried face inspires the repoliticisation of the concept. By making visible the neoliberal entanglements of empa­ thy (for example, as humanitarian practice), we open the way for re-evaluating its role as a politically nuanced, antihierarchical, and transformative notion that addresses an emerging theoretical as well as grassroots demand to differentiate humanitarianism from the neoliberal project. In fact, empathy’s emancipatory potential as a political project lies in its very distinction from humanitarian sym­ pathy. Where sympathy is laden with asymmetrical con­ notations, empathy engenders the possibility of teaching ourselves how to connect with Others without subscribing to neoliberal morality. For example, many situated activists in crisis-afflicted Greece argue that philanthropy (inspired by sympathy) should not be equated with humanitarian solidarity initiatives (motivated by antihierarchical empa­ thy) (see Cabot 2016; Rakopoulos 2016; Rozakou 2016b; Theodossopoulos 2016). Empathy as identification is cru­ cially antithetical to neoliberal values, as it questions the idea that there is a way out of precarity based on one’s hard work and righteous life choices. It follows, then, that empathy is also antithetical to philanthropy, which rests on the conceptualisation of the self as being in a safely better position vis-à-vis the other. Our commitment to stress the political dimension of empathy—as a political relation (Pedwell 2014)—in addi­ tion to its intersubjective and affective dimensions (Hol­ lan and Throop 2008, 2011), has led us to Nietzsche and Castoriadis. Nietzsche’s vision of existence as a continual becoming, and his circular treatment of time (Kapferer 2014) are at the core of an antinormative, antihierarchi­ cal conceptualisation of empathy: the recognition that the pain of the Other can be—in a nonlinear world of changing possibilities—your pain. Whereas Castoriadis’s transformative emphasis on our autodidactic potential can help us explain how we transcend, sometimes, the

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fundamental barrier of being other, without projecting— as Geertz would have said—our experience on otherness. The emancipatory potential of empathy relies on our capacity not to become other but to teach ourselves how to relate to each other’s predicaments. The question of difference—conceived in sociocultural terms—is of crucial importance here. Empathy has the potential to challenge perceptions and representations of radical alterity, and this is precisely why it is an ethicalcum-political technology. In our capacity to feel the world from the other’s point of view, we are also capable of identifying our common political ground; we are capable of not just understanding but also bonding in precarity. This process is drastically different from attempts to eradicate or downplay our differences. Identification with others does not happen at the level of persons—for example, individual vs. dividual—but on the basis that different persons are sharing a common status; in fact, it is our shared status— primarily with respect to precarity—that produces an affec­ tive response.4 The face of the other holds us accountable in the Levinasean sense. Additionally—and perhaps most importantly—it provides a cue to the other’s feelings visà-vis some given limitation and an insight to the other’s abilities to overcome these limitations. Recognition of the predicament of Others is thus revealed to be a complex, multifarious process that is not exhausted in the politics of compassion towards vulnerability. Being vulnerable—disenfranchised, in pain, exposed, or unjustly treated—are conditions that can happen to anyone (Rap­ port 2014). Vulnerability can be the predicament of the Other as well as the Self. This realisation—epitomized in our respondents in Greece saying, “today it is you, tomor­ row it is me” (símera esí, áurio egó)—is deeply political in its denial of radical alterity. For it views both strength and vulnerability as strictly provisional. The Other is not the object of pity for three reasons: first, because her status as vulnerable is only circumstantial; second, because under the



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same circumstances anyone would be vulnerable; and third, because the other is as capable as the Self to fight these circumstances. In all these possibilities the Other is not lesser than the Self. Other and self are both part of a “flat,” nonhierarchi­ cal ontology (Braidotti 2012, 174). The provisionality of the Other’s vulnerability—the realisation that we are all subjects of precarity—does not oblige subjects to act mor­ ally (although it urges them); it does, however, remove hierarchy from the equation. The absence of hierarchy that empathy is able to generate is further demonstrated in the fact that the presence of the Other encourages the Self to transform from an inward-looking entity to an outward-looking subject who feels compelled to initiate a relationship. The introduction of the Other in the selfevaluation of a certain predicament5 is forcing the Self to relate: to create and institute new relationships, to initiate new networks and rhizomes of affectivity. In a relation­ ship constituted in empathy, it is difficult to distinguish the agent from the patient (Carrithers 2005; Kirtsoglou 2010; Lienhardt 1961). Both subjects are intersubjectively constituted in their relationality, ultimately dissolving the boundaries between agency and patiency, attesting to the constraining and enabling nature of power (Foucault 1978). It is in such terms that empathy can be seen (and experienced) as transformative ethical technology of affir­ mative praxis: in the empathetic context, subjectivity is an assemblage of forces rather than a bound sovereign entity.

Acknowledgments The empirical research that inspired this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC): project ES/L005883/1 “Household Survival in Crisis’ and project ES/N013727/1, “Transitory Lives: An Anthropological Research of the Migration Crisis in the

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Mediterranean,” funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and DFID.

Elisabeth Kirsoglou is an Associate Professor in Anthro­ pology at Durham University. She has researched and published extensively on gender and politics in Greece. She is the author of For the Love of Women: Gender, Identity and Same-Sex relationships in a Greek Provincial Town (Routledge), and co-editor of United in Discontent: Local Responses to Cosmopolitanism and Globalisation (Berghahn). She is also the Deputy Director of Durham Global Security Institute, an interdisciplinary research institute for the study of securitisation, conflict, inter­ national diplomacy and peace processes. Since 2015, Elisabeth is the Principle Investigator of Transitory Lives, an ESRC/DFID funded research project that focuses on migration issues in the Mediterranean. Dimitrios Theodossopoulos is Professor of Social Anthro­ pology at the University of Kent. He has made critical interventions on a variety of topics that include resistance, populism, exoticisation, authenticity, and the politics of cultural representation and protest. He is also involved in the promotion of “graphic ethnography,” a new ethno­ graphic and reflexive medium. Theodossopoulos is author of two ethnographic monographs: Troubles with Turtles (2003 Berghahn), and Exoticisation Undressed (2016 Uni­ versity of Manchester Press); and editor of When Greeks Think about Turks (2007 Routledge), United in Discontent (2010 Berghahn), Great Expectations (2011 Berghahn), De-Pathologizing Resistance (2015 Routledge) and Against Exoticism (2016 Berghahn).



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Notes 1. Drawing inspiration from Jodi Halpern (2001), a professor of bioethics. 2. See Marx and Engels (1998), Wilde (2001), and, for a discussion of the particular problem, Theodossopoulos (2016). 3. These were primarily volunteers of spontaneous solidarity initiatives but also included a good number of employees of institutionalized humanitarian providers, such as municipal employees (primarily social workers) and Red Cross volunteers (which is not, by all means, a left-leaning institution). 4. In this sense our notion of empathy is much more inspired by queer politics than moral concerns. 5. Or, in one’s joy, as empathy is not limited only to negative contexts.

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Anthropology’s Atavistic Turn An Animist Perspective

k Caroline Ifeka

Animist religions of worship, spirit possession, and blood sacrifice, known in West Africa as Vodou, hold in common the worldview that humans share with nonhuman enti­ ties, such as animals, plants, water and rocks, a life-giving essence—breath, spirit, life—that is “fed” by drinking and/ or soaking up blood. Disseminated by African slaves and, since the twentieth century, free men and women migrating from West Africa to the Americas in search of better lives, Vodou-Christian syncretic rituals in the New and Old Worlds presently attract upwards of one hundred million devotees (Cosentino 1995) and more—who also attend mainstream churches and mosques (Christian Research Institute 2016). Variously named, Vodou temples hold in common ani­ mism’s central principle that multigendered human and nonhuman entities share the same energizing substance and interiority nourished by dance, possession-trance, and sacrifice of pristine offerings. Historically, animism is the world’s first universal religion (Descola 2013, 129ff; Tylor 1903 [1874], I:417ff) and its beliefs, symbolism, and rituals accommodate monotheism. It flourishes today in capital­ ism’s global hubs, from Lagos and Cotonou to Sao Paolo, Havana, New York, and London, diffused by immigrant subalterns across class, ethnic, and religious divisions.

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In this paper I outline an animist perspective with which to critique scholars and development practitioners currently “pushing forward” a uniform vision of a moral anthropology dedicated to understanding the other in terms of a standardized bourgeois model of civic “man” equipped with a global god and global civil society (Juer­ gensmeyer, Geiego, and Soboslai 2015). This is a myth (Kapferer 1988): an imaginary of the Western capitalist state and its anthropological interpreters who are fearful after 2001 of armed attacks on their civilisation’s Christian faith, their “crusader” armies’ brutal and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 to terminate the “Axis of Evil” revealed Western liberalism’s precious “social compact” to be utterly fictitious. Its concept of the global person focuses on the moral ends of political action; though, as Machia­ velli would argue, we should be focussing on its causes and effects (Cassirer 1946). This version of liberal theory has another conceptual flaw: it has not understood that moral anthropologists and fellow traveling philosophers are projecting their own Euro-American capitalist mono­ theistic conceptions of the moral person as an autono­ mous contractarian “male” individual onto Africa’s 1.1 billion polytheistic-oriented subaltern masses, subsisting in historically enduring noncapitalist clan-based relations. Moral anthropologists are reproducing their own bour­ geois logic by converting diverse noncapitalist others into a medium through which they speak their ethical agenda. I ask moral anthropology: How would you explain recent manifestations of subaltern animist sociality in London—a world center of finance capital accumulation by dispossession—where ritualized killings and sacrificial acts are deemed by the law and national media to be crimes of murder? Will you stick to your Euro-centric guns and say, “Yes, it is immoral, murder”? Conversely, some relativists argue that morality—and I would add religion— is not a universal cultural system (Parkin 2013). In which case, the sacrifice of pristine offerings, including human



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beings, may be an act of love when authorized by wider collectivities, as in some political economies (Sahlins 1985), but when detached from such entities it may be deemed by smaller collectivities of the sacrificer’s clans folk as an amoral act of ritualized killing. Anthropological judgement is suspended.

The Torso in the Thames In September 2001 the torso of a five-year-old Nigerian boy was found floating in London’s River Thames along­ side Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The British media reported he had been sacrificed according to prescribed ritual procedures, because, when found, the body had no legs, arms, or head, and it had been drained entirely of its blood. All that remained was the trunk of a nameless small boy, its lower half clad in a pair of bright orange shorts. His head, arms, and legs had been removed with skilful precision, while his lower intestine contained a very unusual mix of plant extracts, traces of the toxic Calabar bean (Physostigma venenosum), and clay par­ ticles containing flecks of pure gold (Farrington 2014; Greenwood 2011). An African religions expert advised that the Calabar bean was commonly used in Nigeria by witch doctors for Vodou. His body had been drained of blood, as an offer­ ing to whatever god his murderer believed in. Human sacrifice is believed to be the most “empowering” form of sacrifice—and offering up a child is even more empower­ ing (Mauss 2001; Montgomery 2009; Tylor 1903 II:398, 402). Young bodies like this are even more permeable and powerfully animated, thus a fitting sacrificial offering to a spirit being whose assistance is sought for human benefit or thanked for previous services. Animist epistemology has it that the offering infuses and mediates spiritually empowering relations between devotees, the sacrificer,

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the spirit-being recipient, and the wider cosmic commu­ nity (Bird-David 1999; Hubert and Mauss 1964 [1898]; Mbogoni 2013). In 2005 other cases in the UK were reported: over three hundred London school children had disappeared; children were accused of witchcraft, tortured, and killed according to court cases of “Satanic abuse” involving African Pentecostalist churches whose pastors profited financially from the ritualized killing of uncircumcised boy children for protection against mystical attack; and various forms of fetishism had involved the use of body parts in the manufacture of spiritually potent powders, lotions, and liniments against mystical attack (British Broadcasting Corporation 2005, 2012). These instances all complied with “traditional” West African practices, and witchcraft accusations commonly involve close relatives (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Gluckman 1963). Clearly, several African immigrant communities as well as some native British ones believe that their children or close kin can be possessed by evil spirits, sorcerers, and witches who are liable to attack them (La Fontaine 1998). Though at times working as waged labor for capitalist employers, these subalterns, including even salaried middle-class professionals, have not yet achieved the financial where­ withal that might sustain in the longer term faith in the “liberal” vision of humankind everywhere “bursting asun­ der . . . chains . . . of superstition,” at liberty to embrace the challenges of life in the capitalist political economy of self-sufficient individualism and bourgeois morality (Har­ vey 2005, 2010; Taylor 2012).

Animism, Sacrifice, and the Person Animism comprises at base a belief that “one’s local environment is moved by extra-normal (i.e. ‘spiritual’)



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forces—this belief constitutes a minimal definition of reli­ gion . . . Man . . . very commonly believes that between the object and the image of it there is a real connection” not originating in the observer’s subjective processes; all external bodies, natural or artificial, are animated by a life essentially analogous to our own . . . ” as evidenced in liminal states as dreams, hallucinations, rituals of sac­ rifice, trance-possession, shadows, and so on (Tylor 1903 [1871], 477–478). Animism thus offers a highly empirical, existential ver­ sion of personhood. Its contextually varying models of ethical personhood underpin different belief systems. Each is mutually justifiable in a morally real sense (Cassaniti and Hickman 2014). We should reject moral anthropol­ ogy’s interpretation of such different kinds of personhood, historically and geographically, in the domineering and homogenizing terms of the Western contractarian person. For New World Vodou-Christian syncretic formations vary considerably across time and space in the details of devo­ tee practice worship and liturgy while consistently coher­ ing around a core of spirit-possession beliefs and rituals of sacrifice that devotees experience as reinvigorating individual lives and sociality. Animism thus demonstrates an ethical pluralism that accommodates on equalitarian terms capitalism’s Judeo-Christian Salvationist religions. Yet it rejects monotheism’s asymmetric elevation of “man” over “nature” as a domain of supposedly inani­ mate (e.g., stones) and animate (trees, animals) things for “his” exclusive and destructive wealth-accumulating use. Drawing on a rich literature pertaining to Old and New World animist religions as well as on field work in Nigeria and Cameroon, I suggest the following represent definitive characteristics of animist personhood in noncapitalist as well as in capitalist subaltern economic and cultural set­ tings, past and present (Green 1941; Greenberg 1946; Ifeka 1996, 2015a; Napier 2014; Palmer 1914; Tremearne 1914).

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The animist person is: 1. Constructed and gendered by spirit entities (souls, ghosts, supernatural beings) existing within and without the open, permeable human body, and in some practices persons may constitute an ambiguous gender between masculine and feminine (Beattie 1980; Mur­ rell 2010; Rivers 1915; Rosenthal 1998; Salamone 2007). 2. Defined as sharing with all cosmic entities (e.g., lineage lands, trees, animals, water, reptiles, the moon and sun, etc.) the same interior animating vitalizing energies and is thus an equalitarian coparcener with them in cosmic life-giving substan­ tialities (Ifeka 1998, 2015a ), interiorly of the same substance but externally represented as different— and the same—through human identification with the life-giving substantiality of different nonhuman animate and inanimate entities, that is, animist eth­ ics (Besmer 1973; Deren 1953). 3. Socially embedded and therefore existing in moral relations connecting human and nonhuman enti­ ties, contingent upon other human and nonhuman entities with whom he/she shares the same interior life and death-giving substantiality, and no explicit identification of human-nonhuman relationality, with virtue achieved through wealth accumulation. This formation contrasts with that of Western liberal theory’s concept of personhood. The bourgeois person is: 1. Singularly constructed with one soul located, often, in or near the physical heart in the one bounded impermeable exclusively human body, tacitly assumed to be of the masculine gender. 2. Uniquely human, each individual is completely unique in consciousness, body, and moral



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ratiocinating capacities and is thus superior to non­ human natural species and matter deemed inani­ mate; persons are interiorly uniquely different but externally similar in terms of physicalities (Descola 2014, 122), and egalitarian coparceners with other human entities, socialized into egalitarian ideologies of equality with all human “male” claimants to liberty, equality, and property (United Nations 1948). 3. Socially detached from obligations towards imme­ diate others in the service of individual selfsufficiency, accumulation of wealth, and achieved leadership in capitalist political economies and bourgeois cultures that identify virtue with wealth accumulation (Englund 2011). Vodou’s equalitarian vision of relations on earth and in the cosmos among human and nonhuman entities who share the same substantial interiority is broader than and therefore transcends visible inequalities in relations among human patron-clients. Hierarchical connections of spirit and human beings active in, for example, the Hausa Bori religion’s “House of Jangare” (Greenberg 1946) represent an external ordering of nonhuman/human entities sharing the same interiority but manifesting as different in their external physicality; this latter kind of difference becomes part of spiritual sameness during a spirit-being’s possession of a devotee’s interiority. It manifests as well in sacrifice perceived by, for example, kings, lineage, and earth shrine priests as acts of love and/or piety. In Yoruba and Daho­ mean orisha religion, human sacrifice was the highest type of sacrifice when public virtue was accumulated. The occa­ sion when a living victim was offered “was more often than not a matter of national or communal importance” (Idowu 1962, 118; Peel 1997; Polyani 1968, 209). Sahlins records how hegemonic erotic ontologies articulated the Hawaiian kingdom’s cosmological project of sexual reproduction in

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which rites of human sacrifice fused together spirit beings and human chiefs’ life-giving potencies in a “political economy of love” (Sahlins 1985, 20). Likewise, Haitian Vodou followers say, “There is a lot of love inside the Vodou . . . it is our heart and blood”; in terreiros (yards) a tree, positioned as the central post of a temple, channels the lwa (spirit) to enter into communion with serviteurs through pristine sacrificial offerings to spirit entities who possess priestesses and mediums (McAlister 2016; Paravisini-Gebert 2005; cf. Wall and Clerici 2015). Some anthropologists distinguish human sacrifice from other forms of ritualized killing because the former high­ lights the precious and generally loved life of the victim, which is given in the service of the greater (collective) good. In contrast, nonsacrificial killing of humans, includ­ ing children, focuses on the life in the possibly unloved (captured) victim whose body parts are cut off in order to utilize the flesh and fluids as blood “medicine” (Ruel 1990). Fetishisation or human management of objects requiring re-animation by animal or occasionally human sacrifice is done by native priests who are socially embed­ ded in local communities; they prepare victims ritually and consecrate objects with warm sacrificial blood that captures and persuades spirit entities to animate and thus empower the interior of objects as trees, rocks, fertility dolls, amulets, and so on (MacGaffey 1994). However, in the culturally and economically alien, socially disembed­ ding contexts of immigrant and under-class life in Western capitalist cities such as London, where subalterns fashion new consociations blending clan and class in African (Ala­ dura) Pentecostalist contexts (Harris 2006), our lack of indepth knowledge calls for an ethically plural analysis rather than formalistically upholding Ruel’s (1990) distinction, regardless of context (cf. Csordas 2013; Kapferer 2002). Contemporary African personhood and subaltern socio­ political relations are grounded in contradictory sociali­ ties. First, an ancient habitus of unequal power relations



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among dominant patron and dependent client articulates connectivities between capital and noncapitalist modes of production—as well as within the latter—in ontologies of consumption, of “eating” (meat) and “drinking” fluids (i.e., blood), enacted in animist imaginaries and realities of sacrifice in which human and nonhuman patrons and cli­ ents are coparceners. Second, an equally ancient habitus of equalitarian relations sustaining animist ontologies articu­ lates sacrifice to spirit recipients; their invited presence can soften rivalrous envies, infusing relations amongst brothers and sisters, human and nonhuman, with love and respect (Bird-David 1999; Mwadkwon 2010; Smith 2011).

Moral Anthropology and Animism Rather than deeming religions of blood sacrifice “primi­ tive” relics of an irrelevant past, let us adopt an animist viewpoint from the capitalist world’s subaltern under­ belly: it speaks in opposition to liberal theory’s bourgeois interpretation of subaltern personhood to the effect that the morally autonomous male person’s political obliga­ tions depend upon the social contract (Rousseau 1968), legitimizing capitalism’s democratic state and civil society in which citizens may hold government accountable. This happy state is achieved, notionally, when integration into capitalism through wage labor and/or a Pentecostal God hypothetically helps the culturally diverse “superstitious” (i.e., animist) oppressed to burst free from (noncapital­ ist) chains of tradition and nonachievement. In this way, capitalist-dominated under-classes abandon epistemolo­ gies of “darkness” for the joys of enlightened ratiocination peddled by the bourgeois world’s ideal person: self-suffi­ cient thrusting male individuals standing free and equal, as befits Rawlsian man (Gray 1995; Rawls 1971). Emmanuel Kant, moral anthropology’s founding father, saw his anthropology as aiming, in cosmopolitan mode, at

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“knowledge of the human being as a citizen of the world” (Louden 2002, 3); in other words, anthropology should not be local but general, “for the local characteristics of human beings are always changing, but the nature of humanity does not.” This knowledge is arrived at not, as in modern ethnographic field work, inductively working up from particulars to universals but by the inverse deduc­ tive generalizing procedure based on observation of what one witnesses at home as well as analysis of historical, literary, and biographical data. Moral anthropology’s core is formalist, universalizing, and atavistically based on eighteenth century philosophy referring back to the Reformation and beyond (cf. Bryson 1932). It may seem “natural” to some anthropologists brought up on latter-day bourgeois norms that sanctify human greed into virtuous capital accumulation by dis­ possessing subalterns of collectively held assets as land, water, trees, medicinal plants, and mystical knowledge. But it took the Reformation to reinterpret the sins of human greed into the virtues of humankind’s universal right to own property and accrue merit by accumulating wealth (Tawney 1938 [1926]; United Nations 1948 art. 17). However, we urgently need to question an anthropol­ ogy that supports capitalism’s remoralization of person­ hood in images that normalize capital’s destruction of the earth’s and humankind’s life systems for the material ben­ efit of the few at the expense of the many (Davies 1991; Kapferer, Eriksen, and Telle 2009; Oxfam 2016). In fact, moral anthropology’s values of bourgeois ethical commit­ ment conflict with classical anthropology’s epistemologi­ cal values (Stoczkowski 2008; cf. Zignon 2010). “Moral” anthropology includes some who are discom­ fited when reminded of this pivotal empirical reality— vastly unequal, ever-growing concentrations of economic power sustained through capital accumulation by enforced dispossession, warfare, and violence (Harvey 2010; Kap­ ferer, Eriksen, and Telle 2009a). In 2004 an “A” team of



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leading moral anthropologists criticized Paul Farmer—a distinguished, popular medical anthropologist, who, in his prestigious Sydney Mintz lecture, deployed the well-known concept of structural violence to critique the kleptocratic ruling classes of countries such as Haiti for their theft of public funds, governmental malfeasance, and nondelivery of centuries overdue infrastructural social and physical services (Farmer 1996, 2004; Wig 2014). Yet others inter­ pret Haitian history in postmodernist modes floating airily above capitalism’s acquisitive greed (Ho 2009), unanchored to objective processes of accumulation and bourgeois ide­ ologies as moral anthropologies that erase noncapitalist or syncretic cultural formations from analysis. Some schol­ ars of Haiti express great astonishment that “such great global inequalities as now exist are unfathomable . . . (or) unimaginable” (Benedicty-Kokken 2014).

Ritualized Killings Girard (1977 [1972], 306) might contend that rituals pre­ senting and enacting blood sacrifice—as in the case of the boy in London—commemorate and mask the real collective violence and victimization that gave rise to human society. For Girard, religious rituals spring from a pristine surrogate victim; likewise, all the great institutions of humankind, both secular and religious, sprang from ritual. Or, in ani­ mist terms, is it that the ritualized killing of children gen­ erates through young, pristine, bloodshed potencies that soften harsh experiences of personhood disembedded from former social relations in the atomizing processes of labor and reproduction in global capitalist hubs? Is it possible that, as Sahlins contends, culture is the organisation of the current situation in the terms of a past? For in capitalism’s heartlands and in West African cities of peripheral capitalism as Lagos or Cotonou, Vodou rituals of human and animal blood sacrifice are offered to honor

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and please named spirit entities. They enter and “ride” their “mounts” (mediums), at times penetrating them— metaphorically and/or physically (Matory 2005 [1994]), while temporarily extinguishing other multigendered spirit entities embedded within the human body. Are the ritualized sacrifices of twenty-first-century London responses to the articulation of contradictory relations between capitalism, which employs labor for a wage less than the cost of subaltern reproduction of their labor, and the reality of subsisting in noncapitalist modalities, some of which are defined by the modern state as “illegal”?

Afterword Animist religions offer the world an ontology of collec­ tive sharing in what Sahlins calls a “political economy of love,” featuring a universal conception of humankind’s existential and equalitarian union with cosmic and natural forces. Animism is inclusive of extraordinarily diverse cul­ tures, cosmologies, and ways of living beyond the human body that, in their present forms, are antithetical to global capitalism’s pursuit of wealth for the very few at the risk of humankind’s extinction amidst massive societal strife and planetary collapse (Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009). Animism is utterly alien to moral anthropology’s atavistic notion of the self-sufficient male person made moral through virtuous capital accumulation. Animism’s conception of humankind’s universal existential union with cosmic and natural forces is equalitarian and inclusive of many dif­ ferent cultures and modes of interaction with nonhuman entities; its moralities of love are antithetical to capital’s insatiable pursuit of wealth for the very few (Oxfam 2016). In noncapitalist, collective contexts, human sacrifice secures cosmically derived life and goodness for all human life forms. But in capitalist atomizing contexts, cases of sacrifice labeled ritualized killing reveal how some African



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subaltern immigrants seek to re-enact through animist rituals experiences of living as socially embedded in and contingent upon relations among human and nonhuman entities with whom one shares and reciprocates the same interior life- and death-giving substantialities. Lacking such wider societal framing of individual intentionality, human sacrifice may become ritualized killing for personal empow­ erment—both material and spiritual. Nonetheless, today animist cosmologies are receiving confirmation from disciplines treasured by liberal theory’s passionate faith in the virtues of modern science. Some cosmic physicists argue, admittedly “provocatively,” that the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties (England 2013). Ancient Greek astronomers (Thales and Herclitus, c.75 BCE) taught that there is a form of life in all material objects, either as part of an overriding entity or as living but insensible entities. The Enlightenment rationalist and metaphysician Leibniz critiqued materialism and Cartesian dualism through his pioneering theory of monads (elementary particles) as the ultimate elements of the universe, centers of force and, hence, of substance: for Leibniz, “life” is the immaterial perceiving monads, not the organic body (cf. Smith 2011, 127–131). More recently Martin Buber’s (1996 [1923]) quasi-hylozoic approach maintains that there is a soul within each thing, while Bruno Latour interprets nonliv­ ing things as active agents possessing a metaphorical resemblance to hylozoism—the ancient philosophical principle that consciousness characterizes the material universe and plant world (Latour 1999).

Caroline Ifeka has a PhD in Social Anthropology and is currently a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. Her research interests include corruption,

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oligopolies and coercion in predatory networks of power, Africa and the West and she has published in Contributions to Indian Sociology and Review of African Political Economy. Since the early 1990s she has been based in the UK and Nigeria, where she is Senior Adviser to the Board of Directors of the African Research Association, a leading Nigerian NGO working with pastoralists and farmers for more sustainable development. She focuses on indigenous cosmologies in political violence and changing responses to Christianity and Islam in West African formations.

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Cassirer, Ernst. 1946. The Myth of the State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Christian Research Institute. 2016. “Santeria: Rapid Growth in Urban America.” http://www.equip.org/article/ santeria-rapid-growth-in-urban-america. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff, eds. 1993. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cosentino, Donald, ed. 1995. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Csordas, Thomas J. 2013. “Morality as a Cultural System.” Current Anthropology 54, no. 5: 523–546. Davies, Stephen. 1991. “Towards the Re-moralisation Of Society.” Sociological Notes no. 12. London: Libertarian Alliance. Deren, Maya. 1953. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London: Thames and Hudson. Descola, Philippe. 2014. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: Chicago University Press. England, Jeremy L. 2013. “Statistical Physics of Self-Replication.” Journal of Chemical Physics 139, no. 12: 121923. Englund, Harri. 2011. Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio. Bloomington and India­ napolis: Indiana University Press. Farmer, Paul. 1996. “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below.” Daedalus 125, no. 1, Social Suffering: 261–283. Farmer, Paul. 2004. “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” (Syd­ ney Mintz Lecture for 2001.) Current Anthropology 45, no. 3, June 2004: 303–325. Farrington. Ian. 2014. “Human Sacrifice.” A lecture in the Course: Death and Mortuary Practices. School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra. Girard, René. 1977 [1972]. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Gluckman, Max. 1963. “The Logic in Witchcraft.” In Custom and Conflict in Africa, ed. Max Gluckman, 81–108. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gray, John. 1995. Liberalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Green, Margaret. 1941. Land Tenure in an Ibo Village in SouthEastern Nigeria. London: P. Lund Humphries. Greenberg, Joseph. 1946. The Influence of Islam on a Sudanese Religion. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Greenwood, Chris. 2011, March 30. “Was This Boy the Torso in the Thames?” Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-1370917/Torso-Thames-identified-Victim-voodoo-ritualnamed-5-year-old-Adam.html. Harris, Hermione. 2006. Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ho, Karen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1964 [1898]. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions. Trans. W. D. Halls. Foreword by E. E. EvansPritchard. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Idowu, E. Bolaji. 1962. Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief. London: Longmans. Ifeka, Caroline. 1996. “Concepts of Land Ownership and Land Reform in Nigeria.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 27, no. 2: 137–148. Ifeka, Caroline. 2015a. “Animist Religions and Rituals of Sacrifice in the Old and New Worlds: An Anthropological Approach.” Lecture delivered to the Division of Anthropological Sciences. University of Malta, Old Valetta, Malta. Ifeka, Caroline. 2015b. “War and Its Transformations in West and North Africa.” Seminar Paper to the School of Archeology and Anthropology. Australian National University, Canberra. Ifeka, Caroline, with E. Flower. 1998. “Witchcraft, Kinship and Identity in Boki Society, Nigeria.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 17, no. 2: 137–148. Juergensmeyer, Mark, Dinah Griego, and John Soboslai. 2015. God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kapferer, Bruce, ed. 2002. “Introduction.” In Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery, 1–30. London: Berghahn Books. Kapferer, Bruce, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, eds. 2009. Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.



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Kapferer, Bruce, Annelin Eriksen, and Kari Telle, eds. 2009. “Intro­ duction: Religiosities toward a Future—in Pursuit of the New Millennium.” Social Analysis 52, no. 1: 1–16. La Fontaine, Jean. 1998. Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Louden, Robert B. 2002. “‘The Second Part of Morals’: Kant’s Moral Anthropology and Its Relationship to His Metaphysics of Morals.” 1–13. ftp://logica.cle.unicamp.br/pub/kant-e-prints/ Louden.pdf. MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1994. “African Objects and the Idea of Fetish.” RES. Anthropology and Aesthetics no. 25: 123–131. Matory, J. Lorand. 2005 [1994]. Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo-Yoruba Religion. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Mauss, Marcel. 2001 [1902]. A General Theory of Magic. Translated by Robert Brain, with an introduction by David Pocock. London: Routledge.Mbogoni, Lawrence E. Y. 2013. Human Sacrifice and the Supernatural in African History. Dar-Es-Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota. McAlister, Elizabeth. 2016. “Haitian Religion.” Encyclopaedia Britannica: Vodou. http://www.britannica.com/topic/Vodou. Montgomery, Heather. 2009. An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. 2010. Afro-Caribbean Religions. An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mwadkwon, Simon David. 2010. Silencing the Spirits of the Shrines: The Impact of Mining on Berom Religion and Ecology. PhD The­ sis, University of Jos, Nigeria. Napier, A. David. 2014. Making Things Better: A Workbook on Ritual, Cultural Values and Environmental Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxfam, 2016. “An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped.” https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/economy-1. Palmer, H. R. 1914. “‘Bori’ Among the Hausas.” Man 14: 113–117. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2005. “‘He of the Trees’: Nature, Envi­ ronment, and Creole Religiosities in Caribbean Literature.” In Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and

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Culture, ed. Elizabeth M. Deloughrey, Renee K. Gosson, George N Handley, 182–197. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Parkin, David. 2013. “Comments.” In “Morality as a Cultural Sys­ tem,” by Thomas J. Csordas, 538. Current Anthropology 54, no. 5: 523–546. Peel, J. D. Y. 1997. “A Comparative Analysis of Ogun in precolonial Yorubaland.” In Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New, ed. Sandra T. Barnes, 263–289. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Perry, John. 2014. God, the Good and Utilitarianism: Perspectives on Peter Singer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polanyi, Karl. 1968. Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi. Edited by George Dalton. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rivers, W. H. R. 1915. “Medicine, Magic, and Religion.” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2864: 751–753. Rosenthal, Judy. 1998. Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1968. The Social Contract and Other Political Writings. Edited by Christopher Bertram. Translated by Quin­ tin Hoare. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Ruel, Malcom. 1990. “Non-Sacrificial Ritual Killing.” Man, New Series 25, no. 2: 323–335. Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: Chicago Uni­ versity Press. Salamone, Frank. 2007. “Hausa Concepts of Masculinity and the ‘Yan Daudu.’” JMMS: The Intimate Connection 1, no. 1: 45–54. Smith, Justine E. H. 2011. Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stoczkowski, Wiktor. 2008. “The ‘Fourth Aim’ of Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4: 345–356. Tawney, Richard. 1938 [1926]. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Taylor, Jerome. 2012, March 1. “Couple Guilty of Horrific Witch­ craft Murder.” The Independent. http://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/crime/couple-guilty-of-horrific-witchcraft-mur­ der-7468465.html. Tremearne, A. J. N. 1914. Ban of the Bori: Demons and Demon Dancing in West and North Africa. London: Heath, Cranton and Ouseley.



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III Moral Anthropology: An Antipolitics Machine

The Horizon of Freedom and Ethics of Singularity The Social Individual and the Necessity of Reloading the Spirit of 1968

k Jakob Rigi

Our era, beginning in 1970, has been a time of utterly extreme uncertainty. The breakdown of the patriarchal fam­ ily and the crisis in heterosexuality; the problematisation of old religious faiths and the nation (Hobsbawm 1995); the crisis in the values of the Enlightenment (Lytoard 1984); the pervasive permeation of social life by information technolo­ gies (Castells 1996); the globalisation of neoliberal policies (Harvey 2013); the crisis of hegemony in global capitalism (Arrighi and Silever 1999), which includes a crisis of the state (Kapferer and Bertelesen 2013; Nazpary 2002); the formation of multinational corporatism of state and capital, wars, and the rise of ethnic and religious fundamentalism and massive displacements of population, including the so-called refugees crisis—all have been among the major causes of this uncertainty. The neoliberal restoration result­ ing from the defeat of emancipatory struggles of 1968 has been the main framework of these conditions. Various forms of apocalyptic religious revivalism, the rise of communitarianism,1 and the rise of ethics have been apparently major responses to neoliberal chaos and uncertainty. However, these are ideologies of neoliberalism

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and have entrenched its effects further. What makes them instances of neoliberal ideologies is their inability to recognise (1) that the neoliberal incertitude-chaos is the ontological condition of their dramatic growth, and (2) that what makes them appealing is the spiritual vacuum that the defeat of 1968 created. In this essay I am con­ cerned with ethics and its two main strands, namely the ethics of difference and that of human rights. The ground of current moral anthropology (Fassin 2011, 2012; Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2002; Lambek 2010; Mahmood 2005) is the neoliberal-induced globalisation of ethics. Moral anthropologists have tried to carve small spaces for themselves in the global landscape of ethics without problematizing the very reason for the existence of this landscape. This has been pretty much an entrepreneurial enterprise in tune with neoliberal commoditisation of the academic world. A main blindspot of this anthropology, regardless of whether it is garbed in Kantian/Durkheimean or Foucauldian terms, is that it has failed to highlight the neoliberal underpinnings of the ethical turn. Thus, it has been unable to understand that the currently hegemonic ethics are parts and parcels of the neoliberal ideology and that the ethical opium is meant to pacify emancipatory struggles against capitalism. Consequently, this anthropol­ ogy has become a subgenre of neoliberal ethics and not its antipode. It is an anthropological reflection of ethics on itself. Its explorations of ethics of various fields such as rights, piety, religion, mourning, poverty, inequality, sexu­ ality, charity, medicine, war, finance, and violence (Fassin 2012) have been ways of legitimizing and entrenching the current ethical turn, if not this or that specific ethic. Thus, a critique of moral anthropology requires an inter­ rogation of general principles of currently prevalent ethics. But this interrogation cannot be undertaken from a position within current ethics because, as argued, these ethics are ignorant of the fact that they are enabled by neoliberalism. In this essay I sketch a critique of the hegemonic ethics



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from the vantage point of the spirit of 1968, which to some extent, if not fully, has been revived by anticapitalist move­ ments such as the Zapatista revolt in 1994, alter-globalisa­ tion movement, and the Occupy protests of 2011. I do not suggest that we do not need ethics but rather that ethics are components of social struggle and we must challenge the current neoliberal ethics from the vantage point of the desire for freedom that has informed the spirit of 1968 and the current anticapitalist struggles.

Neoliberal Restoration and Its Morality A moral crusade preaching and inculcating the virtues of the monadic male individual and his family has been a significant component of neoliberalism (Srnicek and Williams 2015). Under the flag of the freedom of the individual, neoliberalism has waged brutal wars against workers, women, nations, and indigenous people, creat­ ing social chaos and ecological disasters. The neoliberal morality has two pillars. The first is an unbridled indi­ vidualism characterized by extremely insatiable lust for money and power and wild proclivity to use all means, including brutal violence, to secure them. Its motto, to rephrase Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, is “Everything that serves my interests and lusts is permitted.” The second is a conservatism that preaches the values of the patriarchal family and purity of religious, national, and racial communities. The ubiquitous commoditisation of everything through violent processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2013; Nazpary 2002) has led to the disintegration of the social fabric of daily life and the criminalisation of urban and rural social spaces. Thus, small and big criminal gangs that have become an important feature of our urban and rural life and stuff of media spectacles are agents of the neoliberal ethos of violence and plunder. Criminals, however, are not the

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most typical representatives of this ethos. It is, rather, epitomized by the thoughts and practices of some univer­ sity professors and pundits and those who have occupied seats of power in places such as the White House, Down­ ing Street, Elise Palace, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the headquarters of multinational companies and major media outlets. Whereas criminals create chaos and havoc on the streets, their more refined counterparts do the same on the global level. The dispos­ session of the majority of the inhabitants of our planet from the means to a decent life through mass unemploy­ ment, recurrent economic crises, wars, communitarian violence and cleansing, unprecedentedly massive forced displacement of people, criminalisation of social space, and an eminent environmental catastrophe are some of the main results of their deeds. The rise of communitarianism is arguably the most horri­ ble result of neoliberalism. Although a reaction to neoliberal chaos, communitarianism not only fails to tame it but also exacerbates it. Because, in our urbanized world in which neighbors, workmates, and schoolmates come from so many diverse backgrounds, communitarianism tears apart real communities in the name of imagined ones (Hobsbawm 1995; Nazpary 2002). Now let us see how the ethics of dif­ ference and human rights relate to this barbarism.

The Postmodern Ethic of Difference Neoliberalism was the solution of the financial bourgeoisie not only to the crisis of the Keynesian mode of development but also a crisis of modernity at large that was unleashed by the defeat of 1968. The success of neoliberalism was not at first due to its own intellectual strength but instead the impotence of its partially overlapping postmodernist and liberal rivals. Declaring the death of grand narratives of



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modernism, postmodernism denied that capitalism existed as a system and rejected the antisystemic emancipatory struggle claiming that such notions were totalizing and, therefore, totalitarian. It idealized local and small politics, which were of a discursive nature and evolved around various cultural identities. Its ethic focused on difference and tolerance for it: different sexual, religious, gender, and racial identities should have a peaceful coexistence and respect each other. There are, however, four problems. First, this ethic is inconsistent, as its logic collapses in the face of Nazism, racism, sexism, fundamentalism, and ter­ rorism. Shall we tolerate differences that tend to annihilate difference and tolerance or make exceptions? Who—and by what rights and means—can make these exceptions? Our neoliberal masters by imperial rights, bombers, and guns? Second, although postmodernism denied the existence of capitalism as a total system integrated by the logic of commodity, difference itself has become one of the most sought-after commodities that is the hallmark of contempo­ rary capitalism (Badiou 2001). Thus, the ethic of difference has become the ethic of forms of entrepreneurship that pro­ duce and trade various signs of difference as commodity. A striking aspect of such a commoditisation is the culture of celebrity, which has regrettably integrated even leading leftist intellectuals into the circuits of commodity. Third, those who have been under neoliberal attack, in addition to tolerating each other’s particular identities, have a need to build a common front against this common enemy. They need to become one, and this has been far more challeng­ ing a task than recognizing and respecting differences. The postmodern ethic of difference has undermined efforts towards this unification and, thus, has aided the neoliberal aggression against the dispossessed. Fourth, this ethic of difference fails to account for singular subjectivities in which freedom in Marxian-Nietzschian sense resides (see below).

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Liberal Ethic of Human Rights The ethics of human rights proclaims the following uni­ versal morality: all human being are born free and equal individuals and are entitled to basic natural rights, namely human rights. However, a universal evil presenting itself in various guises endangers these rights. As the individual is fragile vis-à-vis the evil and falls a victim to its violence, the benign intervention of the liberal state is necessary for sustaining these rights. There are at least two problems with this ethic: (1) abstract equality between abstract individuals is a fic­ tion of the capitalist ideology that belies real inequalities between real individuals, and (2) a universal morality has never existed. Things that have been considered in some times and places as good have been rejected in other times and places as bad (Engels 1968; Godellier 2011; Nietzsche 2000). The assumed universality of this ethic has been a vehicle of colonialism and imperialism, on the one hand, and stigmatisation of emancipatory politics on the other. If the West possesses this universal ethic, then it is its humanitarian duty to save the rest from remaining the victim of its own evils. The spectacle of West as the savior has been displayed by charity and war. Television networks and newspapers juxtapose the afflicted faces of victims of neoliberal-induced upheavals (crisis, wars, etc.), depicted as helpless animals, with the Western gov­ ernments and relief organisations as donors-saviors. The construction of the victim is necessary for the construc­ tion of the charitable white person. In the case of war, the spectacle of the savior has acquired a more perverse and brutal shape. Starving infants through “humanitar­ ian sanctions” (in the case of Iraq), bombing countries back to the Stone Age, and killing women and children by drones in remote rural areas are done in the name of enforcing human rights and combating evil.



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This ethic is inherently conservative. Its abstract trinity of good, evil, and victim constitutes an eternal ontology of evil and victimhood out of which there is no way. Accord­ ingly, human misery is not a result of concrete social rela­ tions and structures that are historical and, therefore, can be overcome by individuals but instead workings of an eternal evil to which human beings inevitably fall victim, requiring the knights of human rights to protect them. The most sinister side of this conservatism has been its confla­ tion of revolutionary anticapitalist spirit of 1968 with evil. Any effort for subverting capital and state is depicted as a form of extremism, considered the hallmark of evil.

The Necessity of Reviving the Emancipatory Spirit of 1968 at Present The spirit of 1968 had negating and creative components. In terms of negation, it aimed at the revolutionary subver­ sion of repressive social institutions and relations, most notably capital and commodity, state and patriarchy, and their moral and ideological baggage. Its uncompro­ misingly revolutionary attitude was certainly inspired by socialist and anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles that had been underway since the nineteenth century. However, 1968 radically differed from these struggles in being explicitly against the authoritarianism of states and parties in both the East and the West. The Prague Spring and revolts in Shanghai and Paris were the highlights of this new spirit. The major novelty of 1968, however, was not its negat­ ing rage but its prodigiously productive and creative desire for freedom. This concept of freedom was not freedom from repressive powers, which was certainly important and sought vigorously, but rather the power to create oneself as a singular subjectivity. The mode of production

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of such a self was that of art. The artist materializes desire by creating the work of art through experimenting with various possibilities. Free subjectivity operates in the same way, but it is both the artist and the work of art. Driven by its own desires, it produces itself in a contingent way. The singularity of this subjectivity is also similar to that of the work of art. It is unique. This singular subjectivity is the same as the free social individual in Marx’s concep­ tion (1961 [1844], 1973). Here, social does not merely refer to the truism that an individual is social merely by living in society; rather, it refers to a sociality similar to that of a work of art. The free individual becomes social through consciously and universally addressing herself, as her own product, to the humanity at large and seeking the latter’s recognition. This addressing is the giving of oneself to everyone without losing oneself. This giving is the very materialisation of freedom and happiness of the social individual, because through it she, in her very singularity, becomes a manifestation of the human spe­ cies (Marx 1961 [1844]). In other words, one becomes a free human being through creating oneself as a singularity addressed to humanity at large. A society that consists of such subjectivities is free from economy and its calcula­ tions, because giving is constitutive of the desire of the social individual. She produces in order to give: “Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine!” (Nietzsche 1961, 39). Marx (1961 [1844]) called such a society communism. This, however, does not mean that the creation of the social individual is conditioned upon the existence of a communist society; rather, various processes of the creation of social indi­ vidual under capitalism prefigure communism. The ethic of singularity is not conditioned by differ­ ence. First, any human being, regardless of her collective identities, is capable of becoming a singular subjectiv­ ity. Second, this singularity addresses itself to everyone regardless of her identities (Badiou 2003). This, however,



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does not mean that this subjectivity is indifferent to class and gender domination as well as various forms of discrimination. It uncompromisingly aims at subverting all forms of domination. Its truth is a universal gift to humanity at large and, thus, does not exclude members of oppressing groups from this gift. It even addresses members of ruling classes, sexists, fascists, and racists and attempts to inspire them to desert their misery and aspire to become singularities. Its mode of the combina­ tion of singularity and universality sets it apart from the ethic of difference. Its universalism, however, is not that of human rights. The latter reduces individual subjectivity to an empty abstraction. The individual becomes universal by being reduced to nothing. The ethic of human rights as a shadow of money erases singularity and thereby reduces human subjectivity to a shadow of commodity. This equalisation belies the most brutal forms of exploitation and domination. The universalism of social individuals, however, springs from its very irreducible singularity that defies the abstraction of right commodity. The equality between social individuals is not based on a reductive equalisation but rather the absence of hierarchy and domination between them. Each singularity is recognized in her own terms. The defeat of 1968 paved the way for the rise of the above-mentioned neoliberal restoration, accompanied with the twine ethics of difference and human rights. The restoration persecuted the revolutionary and subversive spirit of 1968 as the most dangerous manifestation of evil. The ethics of difference and human rights each in its own way supplemented this attack on 1968. Postmodernism assimilated desire into consumerism and, thereby, made subjectivity a matter of the consumption of commod­ ity signs and not singularity achieved through creativity and revolutionary activity. Passion for difference became a component of the general consumerist orgy, as com­ munities/identities of difference were imagined through

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attachments to certain commodity signs (ethnicity, faith, race, gender, fashion items, sport clubs, etc.). The accom­ panied cynicism that fostered the disbelief in truth, real freedom, and revolution was the ideological hallmark of this gluttonous subjectivity. Human rights discourse displaced the emerging social individual by presenting a fragile figure of a self-con­ tained, egoistic, and isolated individual whose abstract rights could only be guaranteed by the imperial power. With the conquests of China and Eastern Europe, the neoliberal regime brought the whole planet under its sweeping powers. Thus, its haughty pundits declared the end of history, claiming that capitalism would eternally remain the only game in town and would bring peace, prosperity, and democracy to everyone (Fukuyama 1992). This delusional complacency, however, was exploded by post-1989 wars, chaos, communitarian genocides, dispos­ session, catastrophic climate change, and havoc wrought by neoliberalism. Thus, the triumphal rhetoric of the end of history was eclipsed by alarmed discourses on evil, which acknowledged the current chaos and misery but attributed it not to neoliberalism but to evils that suppos­ edly originated from non-Western cultures. There were two major lines of imagining of evil in this vein. The first saw the rise of communitarianism as the main source of evil, attributing it to the cultural weakness of certain civilizations, typically Africans (Kaplan 1998). The second embedded the construction of evil in an alleged “clash of civilisations.” It argued that the Western civilisation— originating from the Greek and Roman antiquities, West­ ern Christianity, Renaissance, and Enlightenment—was based on individualism, the rule of law, democracy, and reason. These values were jeopardized by emerging pow­ ers that represented the allegedly despotic civilisations of Islam, Confucianism, and Byzantine Christianity (Hun­ tington 1997). This polarity of good and evil, mapped onto a polarity between the West, representing the good



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and the rest of the world generating the evil, gave rise to a moral ferment and fury that called for military interven­ tion for propagating and protecting human rights. Indeed, all imperial wars since 1989 have been fought in the name of human rights against evil. Thus, humanitarian milita­ rism became a main ideological trope of neoliberal rule. But neoliberal aggression was challenged from an unex­ pected quarter. On the first of January in 1994 a group of indigenous peasants occupied San Cristobal city in Chiapas in Mexico and declared war on neoliberalism. The date was chosen consciously, as it was the date in which NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) went into effect. The group, which came to be known Zapatista, called themselves the Zapatista National Army of Liberation (ZNAL). Zapatista’s uprising heralded a new wave of anti­ neoliberal movements, the most spectacular of which were the so-called alter-globalisation movement and the leftist electoral turn in Latin America. The alter-globalisation movement questioned the neoliberal claim that capitalism was the only game in town by declaring that another world was possible. Using the internet, it invented a relatively horizontal form of organisation for large-scale mobilisation and made prefiguration a core aspect of its practices. Prefig­ uration means that subjectivities of and relations between the participants of emancipatory social movements must prefigure those in the emancipated society they want to cre­ ate (Maeckelbergh 2009). The Occupy protests of 2011, as the culmination of this new cycle of anticapitalist struggle, seemed to be the rebirth of history (Badiou 2012). Yet the neoliberal regime succeeded in sustaining its chaotic order. Although these movements have considerably subsided for the time being, their militant spirit is far from extinguished. It reverberates in two major developments. First, there is a considerable, though not overwhelming, shift of ordi­ nary people towards the left. Second, there has emerged a new global militant intellectual milieu in which activists of anticapitalist movements reflect on the weaknesses of

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these movements, on the one hand, and imagine programs for change on the other. The general spirit is not one of pessimism and defeat but instead a temporary retreat and regrouping for preparing a more serious attack on capital­ ism. An anthropology that is inspired by 1968’s doubleedged spirit of the revolutionary negation, on the one hand, and creation of singularities on the other can play a major role in this new historical opening (see Kapferer 2014).

Jacob Rigi has a PhD in anthropology and sociology from SOAS, London University. He has taught at Cornell University, and CEU and has been a research fellow in the University of New York, University of Edinburgh, and Manchester University. His current research is focused on a critique of contemporary capitalism and anti-capitalist social movements.

Note 1. While communitarianism—Hindu nationalism, for example— may resort to religion and instigate religious revivalism, the two are different.

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Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of Network Society. Cambridge: Blackwell. Engels, Friedrich. 1968. “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Clas­ sical German Philosophy.” In Marx and Engels Selected Works, 594–632. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Fassin, Didier. 2011. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fassin, Didier, ed. 2012. Moral Anthropology. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Faubion, James D. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Godellier, Maurice. 2011. The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Translated by Nora Scott. London: Verso. Harvey, David. 2013. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press. Hobsbawm, Eric John. 1995. Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1997. The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order. London: Simon and Schuster. Kapferer, Bruce. 2014. 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kapferer, Bruce, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2013. Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. New York: Berghahn.Kaplan, Robert D. 1998. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. New York: Random House. Laidlaw, James. 2002. “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Free­ dom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, no. 2: 311–332. Lambek, Michael. 2010. “Toward an Ethics of the Act.” In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action, ed. Michael Lam­ bek, 39–63. New York: Fordham University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Mas­ sumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maeckelbergh, Marianne. 2009. The Will of Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement Is Changing the Face of Democracy. Lon­ don: Pluto Press. Mamood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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An Obscure Desire for Catastrophe

k Rohan Bastin

Economy, which Badiou (2012) describes as necessity, seemingly so devoid of ethics, is the virtuality that mea­ sures and thereby appears to make virtue in our world. Although economy can thus appear to be beyond good and evil by simply being good and bad, in the triumph of necessity it more accurately acquires the mantle of encompassing good and evil according to a transcen­ dent value and an ever-commanding sense of chance. The strikingly uniform structure of our daily TV news broadcasts, for example, affirms this notion of the “play of necessity as the objective basis of all judgements of value” (Badiou 2012, 32). By presenting global stock market reports in simplistic score-like forms that parallel the sports results and the weather, the “market” response to the day’s news culminates the manufacture of events with the necessity of chance, underlined in the parataxis at the end of the broadcast of the market news with sport (ritual) and weather (theology and, increasingly, escha­ tology). Market “weather reports” thus both culminate the broader narrative construction while providing a sense of history’s moral compass. What Dumont (1977) aptly called the “triumph of economic ideology” is thus played out in these daily accounts of chance and neces­ sity. Going back to Badiou, they serve to articulate the

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complementary desires of, on the one hand, unbridled economy interwoven with the “rule of law” and, on the other, a sense of mastery over life and death. Identifying the fundamental nihilism of such a world, Badiou (2012, 38) comments, Every age—and in the end none is worth more than any other—has its own figure of nihilism. The names change, but always under these names (“ethics,” for example) we find the articulation of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe.

To escape such a condition of “smug nihilism,” Badiou demands a new ethics of truth where the possibility of a world not formed by necessity and a gaze not driven by catastrophe is celebrated. Instead of being beyond good and evil, these ethics of necessity are beneath them and should be so reinscribed. The characterisation of our pres­ ent condition bears comparison with Nietzsche’s concepts of slave morality and ressentiment that he identified as prevailing sentiments of his age. The sense of abasement and victimhood, of the will displaced by an imagined superior and fundamentally moral being, created a stifling pietism wherein awareness of the human capacity for creating mayhem was repressed (enabling it to proceed apace). The solution was to celebrate not mayhem or even the will to power but rather the eternal return and with that the uniquely contingent nature of the age. It was not a rejection of what Jaspers (1953) would later call the axial age, but it does caution against the smugness (and herd instinct mayhem) that can arise. The question addressed in the following is whether anthropology’s current moral turn is achieving an “ethics of truth” or if, like the TV news, it is tied to the play of necessity and, with that, to the smug nihilism and herd instinct of a slave morality. Imagining moral anthropology or an anthropology of ethics as something new and indeed



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necessary, for the reinvention or resubscription of the dis­ cipline suggests something of the latter. It is symptomatic of what I have described elsewhere, after Jameson (1991, 1998), as a “surrender to the market” (Bastin 2003). In that instance, the trends of postcolonial historical revi­ sion and the applied anthropology of consultancy were identified as features of the discipline’s engagement in “late capitalism” and the dynamic between culture and economy wherein both the anthropological subject and the anthropologist were rendered as commodities (see also Bastin and Morris 2004). In light of reading and more recent analyses, I would now characterize such surrender as the subjectivity that is a condition of neoliberalism (Dardot and Laval 2013; Lazzarato 2012), the new forms of surveillance or “audit” by “a veritable army of moral fieldworkers (NGOs)” (Strathern 2000, 2), and the rise of the corporate state (Kapferer 2005), with its new forms of accountability that mask a broader freedom from respon­ sibility and cosiness between corporations and states that out of necessity (debt) rescue them. Significantly, none of these analyses, their concepts, or perspectives seems rel­ evant to the spokespeople of this new moralist turn. Not even Faubion (2001), for whom a critical engagement with Foucault’s concept of subjectivation is central, applies his consideration of ethics to the nature of the current moment and how our ideas are always situated. Instead, the new moral anthropology is presented as both norma­ tive and prescriptive for a discipline viewed as in need of revival. It is as if anthropology has returned to the mother ship of moral philosophy, a ship hovering permanently in abstract space crewed by Titans along with a handful of dissidents in the brig. Moored, anthropology can recharge its moral batteries, re-educate its crew, and recruit a new generation of practitioners (“moral fieldworkers”). Fully versed in the discipline’s reflexive confessional turn of the 1980s, when the “anthropology of anthropology” was deemed to be Ariadne’s thread for escaping the

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guilt-ridden colonial labyrinth, the new moral anthropol­ ogy highlights the importance of self-reflection—but only in confessional instead of analytic terms. The following statement by one of the foremost spokespeople of the moral turn, Didier Fassin (2012, 5), is worth considering: Indeed, the reflexive posture I plead for should include a broader questioning of our recent interest in moral issues. Two or three decades ago, anthropologists did not work on violence and suffering, trauma and mourning, prisons and camps, victims of wars and disasters, humanitarian­ ism and human rights. These realities existed but received little attention from the discipline. Other objects, whether kinship or myths, witchcraft or rituals, peasantry or devel­ opment, were seen as more relevant for the understanding of human societies. This transformation of our gaze and of our lexicon has been accompanied by the development of frequently more engaged positioning. Such a remarkable evolution raises the question of why we were unaware of or indifferent to the tragic of the world before and, sym­ metrically, why we became so passionately involved in it in recent years. It also elicits an interrogation about what was gained, and what was lost, in this evolution, or, to say it differently, about how our apprehension of the human condition has been reconfigured. The moral turn of anthropology is thus an object of reflection per se for a moral anthropology.

An evolutionary reconfiguration of our moral compass as the anthropology of kinship and myth becomes the anthropology of death and disaster. And it has happened in the last two or three decades—the mid-1980s and the era of Reagan and Thatcher, of military spending and Gorbachev, and the sinking by France of the Rainbow Warrior and a few last nuclear detonations before declar­ ing itself “nonproliferating” (i.e., “good”). It has been an era of sponsored dirty little wars, the often causally related World Bank structural adjustment policies, and



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the privatisation of state institutions in the midst of what Fidel Castro called casino capitalism and Lazzarato calls the “making of indebted man”—the neoliberal condi­ tion that suggests a new slave morality as it makes every individual subject a dividual figure of guilt (Lazzarato 2012, 30). And perhaps most significantly for the rise of moral anthropology, we have seen the rise and rise of the NGO and its attendant “civil society,” replete with its hordes of self-employed consultant anthropologists that the post–World War II universities produced in everincreasing numbers without further growth of the facto­ ries or the ideas they had celebrated. And then there is the proliferation of NGOs from the mid-1980s combined with the transformation of development aid, including its shrinkage. What Natsios (2010) calls the “counter bureau­ cracy” of auditing quick impact and pursuing medicalized (pathological) development over infrastructure to satisfy attention-deficit stakeholders demanding “accountability” combines with the old development agencies that are becoming increasingly corporate funding bodies, with their hosts of clients and consultants. The trend had also spawned the concept and discourse of “global civil soci­ ety,” a Latourian assemblage of actants (hyper-individuals whose furniture even has agency), distinguishing them­ selves from other global voluntary associations such as Al Qaeda by the criterion of “transparency” for which can be read “morality” (Bastin 2013). As the moralizing wars on abstractions (terror, drugs, poverty) expanded (Hardt and Negri 2004), so too has increased the need for new chaplains for the “army of moral fieldworkers.” For indeed, there must be a moral compass for this new world order, what some theologians and others are willing to boast is a second “axial age” (Bondarenko 2011)! Who better to provide it than the experts on cultural relativism acting at the interface of dependency and “necessity” as well as the interface of the increasingly corporate academy, its occidental moral

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philosophy, barely disguised Christian theology, and the face-to-face encounter with humans in the world who have managed to hoodwink the academy into thinking their “method” (ethnography) is both personable (i.e., moral—the natives’ point of view) and oracular? Drawing inspiration and symbolic capital from a narrow selec­ tion of Titans on the mothership (Kant, Aristotle), the moral anthropologists strive to participate in what Zadek (2008) describes in an aptly titled Brookings Institution collection, “Development 2.0,” as the “accountability governance” of a “Fourth Estate” that hovers postmod­ ernistically between the three estates of State, Corpora­ tion, and Civil Society. Such a Fourth Estate, which is both everywhere and nowhere, is, indeed, the mothership assemblage with nothing but a moral compass—a hyperindividual. Its crew comprises the consultants and policy interventionists (with “engaged positioning”) who are seemingly purely moral beings—missionary accountants of the new world order for whom a narcissistic illusion of transparency prevents the compass from spinning. It is easy to challenge Fassin’s characterisation of the old anthropology as unaware or indifferent. Nevertheless, the challenge needs to be made. From Gluckman’s account of a South African bridge opening or the bonds in the color bar, to Evans-Pritchard’s far-from-isolationist intervention on the nature of Nuer statelessness and his subsequent work on the Sanusi, to Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty,” Georges Condominas’s denunciation of the Vietnam war, and Eric Wolf’s study of the “people without history,” the discipline has long had politically and morally aware prac­ titioners. Perhaps their hearts were not on their sleeves in the manner that the neo-moralists would prefer, but that should never mean we dismiss the underlying moralism of their work as well as such work as Boas’s (and Mead’s and Lévi-Strauss’s) stance against the social Darwinists or the salvage anthropology that rightly or wrongly identified disappearing worlds. We might instead, perhaps, question



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how well versed the new peddlers of the morally strange are in the history of their discipline. More importantly, though, we need to share their sense of surprise and dis­ covery to ask what it is they think is so new and profound about this “evolution”? I suggest it is the sense of engaged positioning associated with the neoliberal transformation of the academy and, with that, the discipline. Research ethics policies and procedures are a part of this change to the academy and academics. Dominated by medical researchers and their horror stories of ghoulish (evil) practitioners (Badiou’s “obscure desire for catastro­ phe”) set against the fundamental life-saving goodness of their work, albeit with little genuine sense of how their fields of study are the most financially profitable that a university can undertake, the university ethics commit­ tees create the bridge between value and necessity, piety and profit (“impact”). Bioethics thus encompasses eth­ ics and thereby informs a biopolitics otherwise known as audit society. The starting point and stance for such a risk assessment is the inherent unworthiness of the past and the necessary mistrust that must be shown towards any research concerning people deemed to be at risk—the child, the indigenous, the mentally ill. Instead of bringing their stories to light, the risk-averse (actu­ ally risk-obsessed) ethics committees, concerned for their institution’s “brand,” actively suppress freedom of thought. As Badiou (2012, 38) declares, such “pompous, made-for media conscription of bio-ethical authorities [instances] . . . have a nasty smell about them.” They do so, moreover, with a profound sense of themselves as moral beings. With many moral anthropologists partici­ pating in this process, a measure of disquiet is felt as to how the engaged positioning in such “ubiquitous distrust” (Lazzarato 2012, 136) is a form of evaluating surveillance tied to debt (here as liability) rather than morals and ethics per se. With, I’m told, one in five professionally employed anthropologists in the United States working in

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medical anthropology, many of them directly employed in teaching hospitals (an obvious albeit missed factor in Fassin’s account), this conjuncture of moral anthropology and bioethical gate keeping is growing. They even claim suzerainty over methodology, declaring that it would be unethical to permit poorly designed research to be done. The surveillance apparatuses of the digital age provide the technology to accompany the institutions and should also be considered as part of the material conditions of the moral turn. In a world rendered as a vast panopticon, to which WikiLeaks attests, we are constantly reminded that like those ethics committees, surveillance is not a problem for the folks who do the right thing. How timely, then, that we have this upsurge in moral anthropology and celebration of its self-reflecting Dudley-do-Rights acting to transform the society of discipline into one of control by engaging anthro­ pology “at the intersection of human rights, environmen­ talism, and biotechnology . . . to disentangle the multiple referents in humanity” (Feldman and Ticktin 2010, 3). In noting these features of what I see as anthropology’s neoliberal positioning, I am not suggesting that morals and ethics should be eschewed; rather, I am suggesting that a more critical stance on the nature of the current situation is required. Evens’s (2008) Anthropology as Ethics is impor­ tant in this regard, particularly as I would not group his work under the moralist turn. Evens argues for a nondual­ ist approach while characterizing dualism as the dominant trend wherein concepts of human isolates fail to engage humanity as a multiplicity of singular differences rather than as variants on a universal theme composed merely of multiple referents. Any anthropologist, especially medi­ cal, will chant the anti-Cartesian mantra, but that is not simply the dualism Evens opposes. Rather, he argues that the reduction of otherness to a monadic self, a sense of the self absurdly imagined as the foundation of being, informs the dualistic conception of the world and fails, thereby, to achieve any genuine and, with that and indeed much



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more importantly, ongoing encounter with humanity as difference. The new moral anthropology that sees itself as part of “the government of threat and care” (Feldman and Ticktin 2010) strives to imagine this encounter as over. This has always been a lurking possibility for an anthropology with implicit “all God’s children” assumptions regarding human nature. It would now seem, though, that the global­ ized world has caught up with and overtaken difference, enabling a Kantian universality to hold sway. For Evens, the principles underlying the need for an anthropology as ethics are normative. We should remain attentive to human possibility, to ways of being and not simply ways of being moral. The production of a monadic self or isolate mitigates this need. However, it is not simply a matter of identifying such an intellectual posi­ tion but also of grasping its situation. Evens misses, for example, the extent to which individualisation is a feature of “indebted man” (Lazzarato 2012, 130ff). So although I agree with him and argue for an anthropology as ethics rather than of ethics, I also argue that such an anthropol­ ogy as ethics requires a thorough deconstruction of the neoliberal turn. This must start with the question posed by Dardot and Laval (2013, 3) about the lack of resistance to such a turn. Linked to this, we should question the hegemonic complicity evinced by such neoliberal opposi­ tion as the Occupy movement, for such a movement is closely linked to the new morality. Returning to the hovering mothership of moral phi­ losophy, whose existence I have likened to Zadek’s “Fourth Estate,” one of the Titans consigned to the brig is Nietzsche, whose concepts of master and slave moral­ ity, guilt and the situational nature of concepts of evil receive little more than lip service. This is unsurprising for two reasons: the postcolonial guilt and the new uni­ versalism noted above. For Nietzsche, more than the other Titans, demanded less an abstract reason than an acute interrogation of the current moment and its historical

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contingency—its genealogy. In slave morality and its associated ressentiment Nietzsche identified the power component that always attaches to morality, acting to situate morality in the unevenness of the world. When that morality posits itself—indeed, indentures itself to a sovereign master such as evil, sin or death—helplessness follows. This is not the helplessness of passive fatalistic endurance or of suffering at the hands of another but rather the aggressive desire to blame and dominate pre­ cisely because of one’s abasement. Slave morality can thus be the most violent morality of all because it takes as its object of desire the entire being of that object. Racial and ethnic violence, their gender and age components feature prominently. Missionary zeal and the desire to convert, whether that be to God or simply to the (Humani­ tarian) Good are also expressions of the slave morality. The task for the human is to think through this situation and strive to transcend it, not to discard it for an imag­ ined discourse of mastery. To do so, however, requires a great deal more than the redemptive engaged positioning and collaborative governance that the protagonists of the moral turn imagine. It remains, then, for anthropologists to be less enthralled by the moral turn and instead to embrace what Evens defines as an ethics of engagement open to human pos­ sibility and to continue their specific research at specific sites of human practice and possibility. In Sri Lanka, for example, where I have previously researched on religious practice in the circumstances of civil war (Bastin 2002), albeit without any sense of Fassin’s aggrandizing departure from the past, the postwar society is one where new social formations are voicing ethical concerns regarding political theology and the rights of minorities to practise their reli­ gions. Animal sacrifice by Tamil Hindus (and Sinhala Bud­ dhists attending Hindu temples) as well as the slaughter and consumption of beef by Muslims (and Christians) are issues provoking antagonism from elements of the Sinhala



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Buddhist majority. Politicized monks of the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force) have staged protests, including a self-immolation at the entrance to the country’s holiest temple in mid-2013 and a riot the following year where four Muslims were killed. Islam is the principal target for these Buddhists who engage extensively with militant monks in Burma and Thailand while also aligning with anti-Muslim Hindus in India. Anti-conversion legislation is also demanded, with new global forms of evangelical Chris­ tianity being targeted. At the same time, proponents of new forms of Islam target longstanding Sri Lankan Sufi tradi­ tions, challenging their authenticity and promoting in their place a new globally engaged moral order that denigrates not only forms of worship but also everyday practice. New Buddhist sects promoting meditation over traditional forms of social engagement and the organisational structure of religious orders and their temples reflect a similar Puritan­ ism. GodTV broadcasts the soft-rock version of the Ameri­ can Bible Belt. Because they do not target the secular West, these moralists avoid our nervous attention. They should all be linked to the profound sense of crisis and sovereignty sweeping many parts of the world (cf. Bondarenko 2011). To engage simply with a moral anthropology over the recent events in Sri Lanka is to risk missing a deeper understanding of a society emerging from decades of civil war and the myriad human rights abuses that took place and continue to take place. It is also to risk failing to under­ stand the global contradictions attending an anthropology between empires elsewhere identified as a crisis of the state (sovereignty) by imagining, as Fassin does, a new axial age in the history of the discipline where “engaged” (mis­ sionary) positioning strives to demonstrate its relevance— indeed its necessity—to a new world order and “humanity.” Instead of thinking in the abstract universalizing terms of moral philosophy, anthropology needs to grasp the fact that “axial ages” are rife throughout the world where new and contested forms of sovereignty articulate new challenges to

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the future of human difference with many of them convey­ ing Badiou’s obscure desire for catastrophe as the necessity of anthropology’s moral turn. There is, in short, a profound evolution occurring, but Fassin and the discourse of which he is a part are merely a poorly tuned second fiddle striv­ ing vainly to keep up with Nero. The moral turn is thus extremely interesting as another moment in the history of the discipline, specifically a history of its ideological com­ plicity with the broader world orders it serves.

Rohan Bastin teaches anthropology at Deakin University in Australia. He is the author of The Domains of Constant Excess (2002) and edited, with Barry Morris, the Critical Interventions volume Expert Knowledge (2004). He was recently awarded an Australian Research Council Discov­ ery grant to conduct a comparative study of religion in post-war Sri Lanka.

References Badiou, Alain. 2012. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated and introduced by Peter Hallward. London: Verso. Bastin, Rohan. 2002. The Domain of Constant Excess: Plural Worship at the Munnesvaram Temples in Sri Lanka. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bastin, Rohan. 2003. “Surrender to the Market: Thoughts on Anthropology, the Body Shop, and Intellectuals.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 14, no. 1: 19–38. Bastin, Rohan. 2013. “Development Aid, Civil War and the Contain­ ers of Capitalism.” In Critical Reflections on Development, ed. Damien Kingsbury, 69–89. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bastin, Rohan, and Barry Morris. 2004. “Introduction.” In Expert Knowledge: First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology, ed. Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin, 1–6. Critical Interventions, Volume 5. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bondarenko, Dmitri M. 2011. “The Second Axial Age and Metamor­ phoses of Religious Consciousness in the ‘Christian World.’” Journal of Globalization Studies 2, no. 1: 113–136.



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Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2013. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Translated by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso. Dumont, Louis. 1977. From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evens, T. M. S. 2008. Anthropology as Ethics: Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Fassin, Didier. 2012. “Introduction: Towards a Critical Moral Anthro­ pology.” In A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. Didier Fas­ sin, 1–17. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Faubion, James D. 2001. “Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Fou­ cault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis.” Representations 74, no. 1: 83–104. Feldman, Ilana, and Miriam Ticktin. 2010. “Introduction: Govern­ ment and Humanity.” In In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, ed. Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, 1–26. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London: Verso. Jaspers, Karl. 1953. The Origins and Goal of History. Translated by M. Bullock. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2005. “New Formations of Power: The OligarchicCorporate State, and Anthropological Ideological Discourse.” Anthropological Theory 5, no. 3: 285–299. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Natsios, Andrew. 2010. “The Clash of the Counter-Bureaucracy and Development.” Center for Global Development Essay. www. cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424271. Strathern, Marilyn. 2000. “New Accountabilities: Anthropologi­ cal Studies in Audit, Ethics and the Academy.” Introduction to Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, ed. Marilyn Strathern, 1–18. London: Routledge. Zadek, Simon. 2008. “Collaborative Governance: The New Multi­ lateralism for the Twenty-First Century.” In Global Development 2.0: Can Philanthropists, the Public, and the Poor Make Poverty History?, ed. Lael Brainard and Derek Chollet, 187–200. Wash­ ington DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Situating Morality

k Jonathan Friedman

Since the decline of modernist anthropology in the early eighties there have been a number of so-called turns that form a kind of succession. The first and most general was the cultural turn, a reactive movement against structural­ ism, cognitivism, and materialism. This period is marked by the rise of textual anthropology—the reduction of culture to readable objects. The focus on culture and the elimination of structural accounts is also accompanied by a turn from the collective to the individual. The latter led to an increasing focus on the self, on experience, and, ulti­ mately, to the moral turn and the ontological turn. These changes are not self-generating! They are expressive of a trajectory that is not linear but rather dependent on the larger context in which intellectual discourses emerge, transform, and disappear. The dominant materialism and functionalism of the late forties and fifties were replaced by structuralism and structural and structuralist Marxism in the sixties, all of which rode on the crest of a powerful modernist intellectual surge. This was also the last and soon-to-be-ended imperial swell of the West. From the mid-seventies on, there was a massive export of capital to East and South Asia and other smaller places, a rapid deindustrialization, wage stagna­ tion, and an increasing feeling among many that the future was fading. The past (roots, cultural identity) became increasingly attractive, and in the academy, culture surged



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as the focus of attention. One can follow these shifting interests in the work of leading anthropologists and sociolo­ gists such as Marshall Sahlins and Daniel Bell and the rise of Geertzian textualism in the eighties. The latter is often referred to as the cultural turn. It matched the increasing concern with self and identity in this period, a marked elimination of the social, especially in the sense of social determinism, which was practically outlawed to make way for individual freedom. One might see this as a neoliberal turn in which multiplicity, complexity, and assemblages replaced ideas of structure and system. However, while rational actor and actor-network approaches were on the rise, the collective context loomed large, I would argue, because the new individualization was not a renewal of the strong ego of modernism but rather a nervous and increas­ ingly fearful and sensitive narcissism. This became crucial in ensuing developments of the moral and then the ontological turn, the latter represent­ ing a recollectivization in a certain sense. The difference is that the collective is reduced here to the self and its rep­ resentations. There is no return to the social, and if there is a deterministic aspect of the ontological turn, its locus is the self and the cultural logic of the latter’s construc­ tion of the world. This accounts for the transition from work like that of Strathern to the more recent ontological approaches. The locus of interpretation for Strathern is the self, and the cultural construction of dividuality as opposed to individuality (1988). No reference to the social order within which such log­ ics are embedded appears necessary in these approaches. The combined culturalization and individualization of this ideological shift is a prerequisite for the discourse of the moral in which the relation between the self and the ethical quality of action is established on the basis of choice. Without such choice, morality is merely structure or unquestionable rules (which are, as such, not even rules except as understood from an external perspective).

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Another strain in this development was the increas­ ing dominance of “globalization” insofar as it was also a reflex of individualization in which collective specificities are erased, leaving only the individual self in the larger world, now the entire globe. Globalization is closer to rational-actor theory and in conflict with the culturally specific moral and ontological turns, but the latter too are based on an individualization of the cultural in the form of cultural experience, even if that experience, such as suf­ fering and pain, might be construed as universal (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Robbins 2013, 453). The argument thus far is that the moral turn ensues upon the cultural turn and the contraction or even erasure of the social structural as a fundamental reality in the accounting of human action. The intensive focus on the individual subject as a cultural totality implies the strong possibility of a turn to morality as a way of accounting for what happens in the world, eliminating the social context as a framework of understanding. The shift is part of the decline of Western hegemony and its framework of mod­ ernism that entered into a steep decline in the late 1970s. This is not a critique of any particular turn, merely an attempt to situate a process and the way it generates par­ ticular representational configurations. When I refer to era­ sure of the social structural I include the political economic as well, not least because the situating of a discourse in a world historical process implies the political economic in the broadest sense of the term. The emphasis on morality, whether as a way of going about politics by finding evil to be eliminated, including evil people, is, then, part of a larger shift of focus from strategies of power and control to logics of value, all of which follows from the shift to the culturalist framework. A significant aspect of this issue is the fact that it has not been recognized as such but instead appears somehow “naturally progressive.” Even where individualism takes us “beyond culture,” the framework of subjective values and representations remains central.



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This is clearly expressed in the recent surge in studies whose object is suffering. Thus, poverty is not a structural phenomenon to be understood as such but instead a hor­ rible fate with all of its terrible consequences for those who experience it. This is part of the large-scale shift outlined above, from the collective, the structural, to the cultural and the individual and the latter’s experience, which can then become the subject of moral judgment. Anthropological empathy replaces anthropological under­ standing. This in turn leads to a “new” kind of politics based on the anthropologist’s moral judgment and takes the form of “activist” anthropology, one curiously devoid of any theoretically informed agenda. Fassin has discussed this shift in several places and attempted to take a neutral position with respect to the phenomenon (Fassin 2012). His discussion of “humanitarian reason” does attempt to situate the latter in recent history, but in his Foucouldian framework much of moral discourse is about power by reason of the fact of classifying some “other.” Although this may be true as it is true of all academic discourse as generative of authority, it does not explore the conditions in which the discourse itself emerges.

Case Study: The Moral Turn in Politics Moral discourses have pervaded increasingly broader domains in a way that has become quite systematic. If everything was politics in a previous decade, now every­ thing is morality. The locus of the political is an excellent place to pinpoint the changes that concern us in the cur­ rent situation. In the past twenty years there have been many sub­ stantial changes in the way political discourse is framed. Politics has always contained a core moral element, usu­ ally related to the notion of justice. However, political oppositions have usually been expressed in precisely

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political terms and not often in terms of good and evil, even if there are such cases, such as Nazism’s genocide project. But there has been a stronger moral turn in political culture that I think can be linked to the following transformations of politics itself. I have previously written (2008, 2012) about the move from diametric to concentric dualism, in which the center left and right have fused into what is sometimes called purple governance, where, not least, social democrats have become the champions of neoliberal solutions while con­ servative parties have also become increasingly neoliberal and liberal. This fusion implies that differences between a former left and right have become smaller. In this process increasing numbers of citizens have lost interest in vot­ ing and lost faith in the political project of what appears increasingly a political class that no longer reflects the “will of the people,” a term that has been increasingly associated with the extreme right. In this process the core of the power structure is seen as embodying democratic values while those who are marginalized in this process are declared antidemocratic, from Haider in Austria to RedKen Livingstone in London. Democracy is about values rather than about the arena in which political representa­ tion is practiced. Democracy is identified as the good mak­ ing nondemocratic the equivalent of the bad, and the latter becomes a value in itself. There are no good dictators. Thus, the stage is set for a transformation of politics into morality, following the liberal logic that has become so evident in recent years. This is a possible and real structural transformation because politics contains a moral aspect or even core. However, politics is about gain­ ing power, and power is about control over one’s own and others’ conditions of existence. Morality as a fixed set of values overrides the political and makes it irrelevant. It is part of the inversion of which we spoke above involving the shift to culture. What makes this difficult to grasp is that morality as the rule of the absolute is a form of



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absolute power, one that goes much further than political power in general, because it penetrates deep into the indi­ vidual subject. Without probing political philosophy, one might say that the moral tendency is a tendency to classify one’s political enemies as evil, thus eliminating all com­ munication and negotiation from the “political” arena.

The Devil’s Advocate In order to try to provoke some rethinking of issues, I play the role of the cynic in order to get the reader’s reac­ tion, which might be more predictable than one might assume. A New York Times article (Kolata 2015) revealed what some had suspected and others had documented: that there is a huge population of white poor people who have a very high mortality rate, suicide rate, and drug issues (Case and Deaton 2015) similar to the black popu­ lation. A large number are from areas where industry has declined and where many have physical disabilities from work and, thus, are relying on pain medications. Some will move on to heroin, as it is significantly cheaper. The net result is addiction and, often, overdose and/or suicide. When I took it up with some of my colleagues they showed little interest and sometimes implied that “these people” are white racists and “it fits their lowlife style” so they probably deserve it. It is noteworthy that such reactions express the turn away from class, as if the two terms were opposed. This is part of the transition from the left to the latte left, a new bourgeoisie whose only enemy is the white sector of the bottom of society. It is what transformed the renowned Stanley Fish from a liberal to a leftist in the self-understanding of the “left” and what makes the critique of free speech into a new kind of revolutionary liberation. Free speech is accepted as long as you have the right values, and these, of course, are the core of a moral discourse. One should not talk to

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Republicans and listen to Fox News because they are just a bunch of liars and representatives of evil. This is the negation of political debate on the grounds that the enemy is beneath contempt not intellectually—although this is often implied—but morally. The recent migration crisis in Europe is a clear example of this kind of transformation. Liberal regimes on the left and the right have framed immigration in general as a great benefit to the host country, from labor power to cultural enrichment, this in spite of the fact that there is much to debate with respect to real effects of this process. Immi­ gration in the past was more correctly framed in terms of cheap, often indentured labor or slavery and was certainly a source of economic growth, even if not much fun for the migrants themselves. It was also, inversely, an integral part of the colonization process. Both of these were part of the process of imperial expansion. Immigration today occurs in a period of decline of Western hegemony and has led to displacement of more expensive labor in coun­ tries where labor migration is dominant (Rowthorn 2004). It has also implied a serious overload on the welfare sec­ tor in those countries (i.e., the Nordic countries) where refugees are dominant in the human flow. Migration has also become a major industry in recent years, involving vast amounts of capital for both transportation and hous­ ing, ultimately financed with tax money or loans by host states themselves. The discourse on migration makes no reference to the larger political-economic conditions, even if wars in other places are often blamed. Instead, immi­ gration is dealt with like weather, just like globalization: something that needs to be adapted to and to be desired for all of its benefits, except for working classes, of course. However, as Juillard (1997) noted, for the latte left, immigrants have replaced the working class as sacred object. The spinning of discourses on migration has come to a head with the recent surge, which liberals identified as the Syrian crisis (see below), even if, in fact, not more



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than 20 percent of the migrants come from Syria (Desilver 2015). I do not seek to belittle the tragic circumstances surrounding the situation in 2015 but rather to gain a perspective on the conditions in which such tragedies are occurring. In a world of heightened moral sensibilities, media play a crucial role in creating situations of resonance to suffer­ ing. There are numerous events that have sparked major reactions at a distance in the recent past. The image of the drowned boy in the water off the Turkish coast was a trig­ ger that set off reactions all across Europe to urgently wel­ come and take care of the refugees. The dominant account was that these were all from Syria, fleeing the internal warfare—but from where were they coming? There was no analysis of the association with the death of a boy and the responsibility to take in thousands of refugees. Angela Merkel was the first to invite refugees to Germany. Sweden decided to give Syrian refugees permanent residence, but then things changed when it became apparent that this was not going to work—no room at the inn after the first 750,000. Sweden, which had taken the greatest number per capita, is still buckling under what has come to be called the refugee crisis. The left is variably represented by the following positions: the only reason that there are complaints is because of racism, we are so rich we can afford this, this is in itself enriching, we need immigrants to solve the problem of an aging population. Most of the rhetoric comes from those who have not borne the burden of the recent transformations of the world order. One need not argue that one should not help people in need, but we ought to be realistic about the nature of the situation, which is more complex than the image of a drowned boy. The latter was the son of a man accused of being a smug­ gler, and a woman on the boat who lost her own child has accused this poor father of misconduct and recklessness in his “humanistic” activities. Zainab Abbas, a native of Iraq, told Sky News (Oliphant 2015) that Abdallah Kurdi was

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from the beginning the leader of the boat that left the coast of Turkey for Greece and was introduced as the captain, to be paid for the crossing by the passengers, writes Le Point (2015). It also reported that Abdallah was driving too fast and that passengers did not have lifejackets. After sinking, when all the occupants of the boat were in the water, Kurdi urged all not to say that he was in command: “I’ve already lost my wife and children, please do not say anything to the police.” Equally, Zainab Abbas lost two children during the crossing. Conversely, in statements made to the Wall Street Journal (The Globe and Mail 2015) he maintained his point of view regarding the accident, insisting he took command of the boat after the captain had left it before the wreck. It seems likely that he was not a smuggler, as he lost his entire family in the wreck—his wife and two sons. Aylan’s aunt reported the last words of the boy: “Daddy, please do not die,” said the little boy in his last moments of life. The three-year-old child begged his father to save him while he was engulfed by the Aegean Sea, said his aunt. Aylan’s brother of five years and their mother, Rehan, both died on this voyage in their desire to reach Canada. The baby’s body was brought on shore to a beach in Turkey in order, apparently, to get a good photo. Some people criticized this as a kind of pornography of death. Brendan O’Niell in the Spectator stated, “The global spreading of this snapshot . . . is justified as a way of raising awareness about the migrant crisis. Please. It’s more like a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migra­ tion in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers.” It had an enormous effect as BBC put it “It was one of those moments when the whole world seems to care.” (Devichand 2016)

The media effect was based on a drowned refugee child, and the issue of refugees is exemplified by a “save the



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children” ethic. But how many children are we talk­ ing about, since they are clearly the trigger mechanism involved? And where are they all coming from? As it turns out, according the UNHCR and PEW (Connor 2016), the vast majority are not from Syria—that is, 80 percent—and most are young men between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five, only a smaller percent are women, and a sig­ nificant proportion come from Turkey, where some have been for many years. The larger context that has received scant attention is a series of political crises and violence related to the disinte­ gration of the Western imperial order over the past thirty years and that the only real political solution might be the formation of a new such order. But this is never an issue because world politics is about the institution of democ­ racy as a moral order—not as an arena of competing posi­ tions but as the production, or not, of democratic subjects who believe . . . what? This is never stated quite clearly. How can he say such horrible things? Has he no feel­ ings? How can he be so unreceptive to SUFFERING? Joel Robbins has addressed the rise of the “suffering slot” in anthropology (Robbins 2013), and we have discussed the preconditions for this emergence in the rise of subjectivity following the cultural turn and the moral turn. This issue is also addressed in Boltanski’s La Souffrance à distance (1993), which highlights how distant victims become a focus of our empathy even while we ignore those closest to us. This is emphasized in the discourses of globaliza­ tion in which we should be more concerned with those who are not immediate members of our society than with those ungrateful citizens who have become so nationalist. Is this merely oikophobia? The recent ISIS attack in Paris is a case in point. Again, the world mourned the death of 129 people plus 350 wounded, many of whom have died from their wounds. But is mourning what is needed, and is morality the issue? However horrible such phenomena may be, we are again

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faced with a moral issue rather than a political one. And again the left and even the right are unified in the agenda of condemning the act and immediately disassociating it from anything like Islam, and the issue of Islamophobia looms even larger than it did previously. We do not need to echo Schmidt (1985, 1996) to differentiate between the notion of enemy and that of evil. Of course, it is not a question of essentializing, but it would be foolish to say there is no connection between religion and violence of this kind. Thus, one could go on forever discussing the com­ plexities of the issue, just as previously there are many Muslims who defended the actions as a reaction to the existing Islamophobia in the West. However, what is cru­ cial here is that the plane of the current discourse is not politics but rather morality. It seems difficult to face the realities involved, which are political more than moral. ISIS promotes world sharia and death sentences for those who break the sacred law—by leaving the religion, for example, or being homosexual or being Jewish. This is not an issue that can be assimilated to Western moral discourse without a great deal of distortion. Nor is it the case that such fundamentalism has nothing to do with Islam, as the politically correct are so adamant in declar­ ing. In the inverted world of occidentalism it is hard to argue against ISIS. This is politics—violent politics in the name of another morality perhaps, but it carries with it the baggage of religion as a political practice to transform the world. The logic of this development is as follows: the central­ ization of the political sphere and formation of a concen­ tric dualism in which a purple elite becomes dominant and implies a kind of absolutism, as there is only a single way of doing things, of governing. This is why new public management has become so popular. As there is no longer a choice of what to vote for and voters stop voting, there



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is a legitimacy crisis in the elites. The defensive pose that is generated by this crisis is one in which the people are redefined as basically backward and reactionary while the elite is progressive. The legitimacy issue is solved by internalizing and essentializing the democratic process in the form of democratic values embodied in those who exercise power, thus beginning a transformation of demo­ cratic social orders into absolutistic orders. The embodiment of democratic values, as they are now called, is most strongly concentrated in the leaders themselves. The discourse is one of the equal value of all human beings, especially in a world in which political elites accumulate an increasing share of social wealth and power. Democracy is reduced in this way to a set of correct values embodied by a certain elite that is said to rule as the representative of democracy, which is in this way no longer the representative of the people. It becomes an autonomous ruling interest, using its embodied values of democracy as the basis of absolute authority. And when the political universe becomes a universe of values, then political judgment becomes moral judgment. Where there was once a political project, there is today only a set of gestures featuring the good, the good life, the moral self, multiculturalism, tolerance of the other on general grounds but also on the grounds that we in the West have oppressed all others. I had a friend who wrote important works on the nature of imperialism and was engaged in anti-imperial politics until, in the mid-seventies, he gave it up and went increasingly cultural—that is, that what was wrong with the world was not Western political-economic imperialism but rather the cultural imperialism on which the former was grounded. The Iranian revolution and later Islamist movements could be seen as vanguards of progressive change simply because they were against Western values.

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This is what is referred to above as occidentalism, the inversion of a former orientalism that is a reflex of the real decline of Western hegemony.

The Trajectory of “Development” The brief history of development parallels the general trend outlined above. The links from democracy are embodied in rights, human rights defined as moral and not political rights, as the latter need to be issued by a political instance with authority to enforce, and the UN is not such an authority except for those who subscribe to the institution. After World War II, development was a direct, handson project. This was eclipsed by a help-them-developthemselves approach. Because they need to be directly involved in the process, this was part of the critique of Western authority. Following this, the entire project came under scrutiny as a Western model, and what emerged was the concept of alternative development. By the eighties, development itself was on the wane, the entire problematic seen as a form of imperialism. It was also an age when it became almost obvious that development pro­ grams were a colossal failure at the same time as certain regions appeared to be developing rapidly for another rea­ son: imported capital. Finally the new agenda of human rights and democracy became almost exclusive, along with sustainability. Both of these projects were strongly moral in scope. Although this is an oversimplification of UN policy changes, it reflects a shift from an economic growth perspective to one focused on individual subjects and their “rights” to a “good” life. The “good” here is largely an empty category that can be filled with whatever seems appropriate in the specific circumstances, but there are certain shifter categories at play, referred to above that are relative to what is conceived as good living standards,



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health, access to welfare, respect for difference, and so forth. Class is not part of this list.

Anthropology and Morality What has anthropology to contribute to this change? Is it not instead a product of the latter? The purpose of this essay is to situate the emergence of the focus on moral issues as part of a larger historical transformation of West­ ern discourses and representations of the world. How can anthropology contribute to this shift, of which it is itself an expression? I think very little, not least because it has not understood its own focus on morality as part of a larger ideological transformation. The analysis of difference, of different moral frameworks, is where anthropology has always been. There is today among so-called activists a new tendency to moral universalism in the form of human rights, which has a contradictory history, at least it does in the AAA. This is bound up with the absurd notion that anthropology in general can contribute to the making of a better world by virtue of its basic conceptual framework. Cultural relativism was used to argue against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it bor­ dered on imperialist imposition. However, moral relativism has been used to argue for the legitimacy of some pretty nasty social institutions on the grounds that they are inter­ nally consistent with local moral orders. So where are we in all of this? I suggest that we are nowhere at all! We have nothing to contribute other than detailing difference itself.

Conclusion The very truncated argument offered here suggests that morality can be situated but that it can hardly be the object of anthropological research except insofar as it

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is culturally specific. The moral turn, especially in the realm of the political, is more of an expression of the bankruptcy of political thinking. This emptiness is clearly visible in the merging of left and right, in the discourse of human rights and the struggle for a “better” life, and “opening our hearts,” as the conservative prime minister of Sweden said in reference to the most recent wave of refugees (Wikipedia n.d.). This echoes the political talk of “hope,” “yes we can,” “the crisis is over,” and such, all dealing with fixing the social order, bailing out the banks, debating more or less welfare, and so forth. This is not to say that such practical solution–oriented politics is somehow wrong. What is noteworthy about it is that it is conceived as working for the “good” in some kind of evolutionary perspective that we are moving toward a moral goal. This is the “humanitarian reason” so rightly characterized by Fassin. He also realizes that this is a fundamental regime shift from class to race, from politics to morality, one that needs to be understood in terms of the kinds of transformation we have suggested here. If we cannot see the process from the outside, then we risk becoming part of the problem, as it is often said. At the end of a decade of student left politics, which also needs explanation, the exhaustion that was in fact the transi­ tion to the kind of liberalism that, in the United States, made Fox News into the extreme right and the New York Times into a communist newspaper is one that may have led Tom Petty to write his famous song, “Into the Great Wide Open,” characterizing the shift (Petty 1991).

Jonathan Friedman is Professor Emeritus Department of Anthropology, University of California San Diego and Directeur d’études, EHESS Paris. He has written numerous books and articles on the issues of global systems, Indig­ enous politics in the Pacific, Southeast Asia and, more



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recently, immigration and multiculturalism in Europe. Friedman has done research on Southeast Asia, the Pacific, including extensive fieldwork in Hawaii, Europe and, to a lesser extent, the Republic of Congo.

References Boltanski, Luc. 1993. La Souffrance à distance. Paris: Métailié. Case, A., and A. Deaton. 2015. “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Cen­ tury.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 46: 15078–15083. Connor, Phillip. 2016, August 2. “Number of Refugees to Europe Surges to Record 1.3 Million in 2015: Recent Wave Accounts for about One-in-Ten Asylum Applications since 1985.” Pew Research Center. http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/08/02/num­ ber-of-refugees-to-europe-surges-to-record-1-3-million-in-2015. (See also the final report: Phillip Connor, “Number of Refugees to Europe Surges to Record 1.3 Million in 2015.” Pew Research Center. http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/ sites/2/2016/08/14100940/Pew-Research-Center-Europe-AsylumReport-FINAL-August-2-2016.pdf.) DeSilver, Drew. 2015. “Europe’s Asylum Seekers: Who They Are, Where They’re Going, and Their Chances of Staying.” Pew Research Center. http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2015/09/30/europes-asylum-seekers-who-they-are-wheretheyre-going-and-their-chances-of-staying. Devichand, Mukul. 2016, January 2. “Alan Kurdi’s Aunt: ‘My Dead Nephew’s Picture Saved Thousands of Lives.’” BBC. http:// www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-35116022. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Friedman, Jonathan. 2008. “Power, Pluralism and the Transforma­ tion of Governance in an Era of Declining Hegemony.” In The Troubled Triangle: Unravelling the Linkages between Inequality, Pluralism and Environment, ed. Wil G. Pansters, 65–84. Amster­ dam: Rozenberg Publishers.

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Friedman, Jonathan. 2012. “Diametric to Concentric Dualism: Cosmopolitan Elites, Cosmopolitan Intellectuals and the Reconfiguration of the State.” In The State: Alternatives, Futures and Utopias, ed. A. Hobart and B. Kapferer, 261–290. Wantage, Oxon: Sean Kingston Publishing. Juillard, Jacques. 1997. La faute des élites. Paris: Gallimard. Kolata, Gina. 2015, November 3. “Death Rates for Middle-Aged White Americans Rising, Study Finds.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-risingfor-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html. Le Point. 2015, September 12. “Le père d’Aylan accusé d’être un passeur Une rescapée du drame, qui a elle aussi perdu ses enfants, conteste la version d’Abdallah Kurdi et l’accuse d’avoir conduit l’embarcation depuis le début.” http:// www.lepoint.fr/monde/le-pere-d-aylan-accuse-d-etre-un-pas­ seur-12-09-2015-1964151_24.php#section-commentaires. Oliphant, Vickiie. 2015, September 12. “Father of Aylan Kurdi Accused of Driving Boat That Killed His Fam­ ily.” http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/604730/ Father-Aylan-Kurdi-accused-of-driving-boat-that-killed-family. Petty, Tom. 1991. “Into the Great Wide Open,” in Into the Great Wide Open by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, MCA Records. Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 3: 447–462. Rowthorn, Robert. 2004. “The Economic Impact of Immigration: Exploring the Economic and Demographic Consequences for the UK.” Civitas. http://www.civitas.org.United Kingdom/pdf/Row­ thorn_immigration.pdf. Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.Chicago: Chicago University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press/ The Globe and Mail (Canadian Press). 2015, September 11. “Iraqi Couple Allege Alan Kurdi’s Father Was Captain of Capsized Boat.” https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/iraqi-coupleallege-alan-kurdis-father-was-captain-of-the-boat-that-capsized/ article26335827/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&. Wikipedia. n.d. “Öppna era hjärtan” [On prime minister of Swe­ den’s speeches on immigration, 2017]. https://sv.wikipedia.org/ wiki/%C3%96ppna_era_hj%C3%A4rtan.

Afterword A Parthian Shot

k Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold

Moral anthropology has gained traction with the intensi­ fication of crisis in world politics. In a period of ruptures, an attempt to grasp the ethical crisis of the times seems a welcome project. The rise of the right in Europe and Latin America, the Trump presidency in the United States, and Brexit in the UK signify the challenge to governing elites symptomatic of a reconfiguration of structures of political, economic and social relations with the increasing corpora­ tization of state and societal processes (see Kapferer and Gold 2017). The institutions and procedures of democracy are being subverted, undermining citizen interests. Move­ ments such as Occupy Now and Los Indignados attempted to reclaim the participatory democratic potential of critical political debate, increasingly relegated to limited democratic moments of electioneering and referenda. The shrinking of critical open democratic space is fur­ ther effected by the growing penetration of violence into everyday life. Terrorism fuels the discourse of insecurity, heightening surveillance and producing a sharply polar­ ized politics that expands the oppressive potential of the state, either dampening or redirecting the terms of moral discourse. The cybersphere has thus become a space of open moralities in which what constitutes a moral dis­ course has been increasingly problematized, giving rise

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to discourses of a potentially dangerous intensity. The current crisis is largely a crisis of morality itself: the emer­ gence of a field of contested moralities opens up the very nature of what morality is. An intensely moral discourse emerges as individualized judgements, enabled by the opening of spaces of moralities, free the demos into a new area (e.g. through social networks), unleashing a Hobbes­ ian nightmare resulting from intense individualism. In some ways this resembles Hegel’s view of the Terror in the French Revolution (see Outlines of the Philosophy of Right), a negative freedom that destroys the whole. Amidst the intensification of crisis, how is moral anthro­ pology involved in processes that reconfigure state structures, particularly in relation to the discipline of anthropology as a whole? Anthropology in general has to some extent become a vehicle for ruling thought. Moral anthropology (a reaction to structural changes in the discipline) tends to subordinate its discussion to conceptual and theoretical concerns that are part of the dynamics or the status quo of commanding orders (such as Western liberal philosophy), strongly implicated in currently-renewed efforts for the imperializing hegemony of Western values. The rise of ethics in the social sciences in general, and the controlling role of ethics committees (in ser­ vice of anthropology’s methodological requirements) in par­ ticular, also aim at controlling the potential for critique. This is the case despite their explicit efforts to protect subjects while simultaneously protecting universities from litigation, objectives that are coterminous with the concerns of the risk society. The increasing interaction between humanitarian workers, activists and anthropologists is also symptomatic of larger structural reconfigurations of universities as centers of knowledge management, policy and consultancy, rather than spaces of radical critique, increasingly vulnerable to funding expectations and ideological consensus. In such an atmosphere of control, the popularity of moral anthropology, seen as addressing issues relevant to humanitarian concerns, ethical questions and activist problematics, deserves further

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scrutiny. It is in this respect that we most insistently stress the need for anthropology to remain a critical discipline at the frontiers of consent and for anthropologists to maintain a position of dynamic unknowing (Kapferer in press, Mimica 2010) to interrogate all taken-for-granted ideas and popular trends. The timeliness of moral anthropology is in the reopening of debate about the nature of the discipline when the radical critique of dominant paradigms is indeed most welcome. The debates surrounding the emergence of moral anthropology, central in the critiques raised in this volume, are also important for humanitarians and activists, who might benefit from the capacity for critique that anthropology can offer, a view from the margins that could enhance awareness of their own compromised posi­ tions and vulnerabilities in the face of larger hegemonic forces. As we close this collection, our intention is not to fire a concluding (nor conclusive) Parthian shot at moral anthropology, but to urge that the important issues it raises be critically interrogated in the continuous crisis that science, as process and not institution (see Feyera­ bend 2008 [1975]), should embrace.

References Feyerabend, P. 2008 (1975). Against Method. London, New York: Verso. Hegel, G. W. F. 2008. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Kapferer, B. (In Press.) “From the Outside In: Anthropology as a Dialectic of Unsettlement.” Social Analysis. Kapferer, B. and Gold, M. (2017) “The Cuckoo in The Nest. Thoughts on neoliberalism, revaluations of capital and the emer­ gence of the corporate state, part 1.” Arena 151: 31–34. Mimca, J. (2010). “Un/knowing and the Practice of Ethnography. A reflection on some Western cosmo-ontological notions and their anthropological application.” Anthropological Theory 10, no. 3: 203–228.