The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics (Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology) 1108482805, 9781108482806

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The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant developments in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established and emerging leaders in the field and makes the results of this fast-growing body of diverse research available in one volume. Topics covered include: the philosophical and other intellectual sources of the ethical turn; inter-disciplinary dialogues; emerging conceptualizations of core aspects of ethical agency such as freedom, responsibility, and affect; and the diverse ways in which ethical thought and practice are institutionalized in social life, both intimate and institutional. Authoritative and cutting-edge, it is essential reading for researchers and students in anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and theology and will set the agenda for future research in the field. is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King’s College. He is the author of The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (with Caroline Humphrey,1994), Riches and Renunciation (1995), and The Subject of Virtue (2014), and the editor of The Essential Edmund Leach (with Stephen Hugh-Jones, 2000), Ritual and Memory (with Harvey Whitehouse, 2004), Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science (with Harvey Whitehouse, 2007), and Recovering the Human Subject (with Barbara Bodenhorn and Martin Holbraad, 2018). JAMES LAIDLAW

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cambridge handbooks in anthropology

Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a subdiscipline or major topic of anthropological study and research. Grouped into broad thematic areas, the chapters in each volume encompass the most important issues and themes within each subject, offering a coherent picture of the latest theories and findings. Together, the volumes will build into an integrated overview of the discipline in its entirety.

Published Titles The Cambridge Handbook of Kinship, edited by Sandra Bamford The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Luann De Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber

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The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics Edited by James Laidlaw University of Cambridge

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108482806 DOI: 10.1017/9781108591249 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-108-48280-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Contributors 1 Introduction

page vii

James Laidlaw

1

Part I Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements 2 Moral and Political Philosophy Hallvard Lillehammer 3 Virtue Ethics Jonathan Mair 4 Agonistic Pluralists: Three Philosophers of Value Conflict James Laidlaw and Patrick McKearney 5 The Two Faces of Michel Foucault Paolo Heywood 6 Phenomenology Samuel Williams 7 Cognitive Science Natalia Buitron and Harry Walker 8 Theology Michael Banner Part II Aspects of Ethical Agency 9 Making the Ethical in Social Interaction 10 11 12 13 14 15

35 65 96 130 155 177 205 229

Webb Keane and

Michael Lempert Freedom Soumhya Venkatesan Responsibility Catherine Trundle Emotion and Affect Teresa Kuan Happiness and Well-Being Edward F. Fischer and Sam Victor Suffering and Sympathy Abby Mack and C. Jason Throop Ambiguity and Difference: Notation, Ritual, and Shared Experience in Constructing Pluralism Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller

Part III Media and Modes of Ethical Practice 16 Self-Cultivation Joanna Cook 17 Exemplars Nicholas H. A. Evans 18 Ritual Letha Victor and Michael Lambek 19 Values Julian Sommerschuh and Joel Robbins

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231 251 281 309 335 359

389 409 411 433 460 485

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20 Rules Morgan Clarke 21 On Ethical Pedagogies

James D. Faubion

Part IV Intimate and Everyday Life 22 Care Cheryl Mattingly and Patrick McKearney 23 Kinship and Love Perveez Mody 24 Cooperation and Punishment Anni Kajanus and Charles Stafford 25 Favours David Henig and Nicolette Makovicky 26 The Inimical Gaze: Morality and the Reproduction of Sociality in Amazonia Carlos D. London˜o Sulkin 27 Animals and More-Than-Representational Ethics Rosie Jones

McVey 28 God

T. M. Luhrmann

508 536 559 561 591 610 629

649 677 706

Part V Institutional Life 729 29 Modern Capitalism and Ethical Plurality Robert W. Hefner 731 30 The Ethics of Commerce and Trade Paul Anderson and Magnus 31 32 33 34

Marsden Activism and Political Organization Sian Lazar Philanthropy China Scherz Science: The Anthropology of Science As an Anthropology of Ethics (and Vice Versa) Matei Candea Communist Morality under Socialism Yunxiang Yan

Index

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760 791 817 839 871 897

Contributors

Paul Anderson is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Acting Director of the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, and is the author of Exchange Ideologies: Commerce, Language, and Patriarchy in Preconflict Aleppo (2023). Michael Banner is Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His publications include Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (1999), Christian Ethics (2009), and The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human (2014). Natalia Buitron is Jessica Sainsbury Assistant Professor in the Anthropology of Amazonia at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College. Her current research connects Indigenous politics and political theory to explore the plurality of Indigenous sovereignties emerging from Amazonia. Matei Candea is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King’s College. His publications on anthropological epistemology and the anthropology of science include Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method (2018), ‘I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat’, American Ethnologist (2010), and ‘Suspending Belief: Epoche´ in Animal Behaviour Science’, American Anthropologist (2013). Morgan Clarke is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Keble College. His publications include Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from Anthropology and History (2021). Joanna Cook is Reader in Anthropology at University College London and the author of Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life (2010) and Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty-First Century (2023).

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Nicholas H. A. Evans is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the author of Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian (2020), and a co-editor of Against Better Judgment: Akrasia in Anthropological Perspective (2023). James D. Faubion is Radoslav Tsanoff Chair and Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and the author of An Anthropology of Ethics (2011). Edward F. Fischer is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing Initiative at Vanderbilt University; he is the author of The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing (2014). Robert W. Hefner is Professor of Anthropology and Global Affairs at the Pardee School of Global Affairs at Boston University. He has authored or edited twenty-two books and organized eighteen international conferences, drawing on specialists from political science, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, and law. With Zainal Abidin Bagir of Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia), between 2019 and 2022 he co-produced five documentary films on ‘Indonesian Pluralities: Religious Diversity and Citizen Belonging’. David Henig is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, a co-editor of Economies of Favour After Socialism (2016) and Where Is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy (2022), and the author of Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (2020). Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Durham. Prior to this he was Junior Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees. He is the author of After Difference (2018) and a number of contributions to debates over anthropology’s ‘ontological turn’. Rosie Jones McVey is Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, with research interests in human–animal relationships, ethics, and mental health. Her publications include ‘Responsible Doubt and Embodied Conviction: Infrastructure of Embodied Horse/Human Partnership’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2017), ‘An Ethnographic Account of the British Equestrian Virtue of Bravery, and Its Implications for Equine Welfare’, Animals (2021), and Human-Horse Relations and the Ethics of Knowing (2023). Anni Kajanus is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. Her publications include ‘Children’s Understanding of Dominance and Prestige in China and the UK’, Evolution and Human Behavior (2020) and ‘Mutualistic vs Zero-Sum Modes of Competition: A Comparative Study of Children’s Competitive

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List of Contributors

Motivations and Behaviours in China’, Social Anthropology (2019). Her current research is on irritation in connection to morality and cooperation. Webb Keane is George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in Anthropology, University of Michigan, and the author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (2016), Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (2007), Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (1997), and Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives (2015, with Michael Lambek, Veena Das, and Didier Fassin). Teresa Kuan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the author of Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Childrearing in Contemporary China (2015). Michael Lambek is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where he also held a Canada Research Chair. His publications include The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Madagascar (2002), Ordinary Ethics: Language, Anthropology, and Action (ed., 2010), A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion (ed., 2013), The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value (2016), Island in the Stream (2018), and Concepts and Persons (2021). Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College. Her publications include El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (2008), The Anthropology of Citizenship: A Reader (2013), The Social Life of Politics: Ethics, Kinship, and Union Activism in Argentina (2017), and How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour (2023). Michael Lempert is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, the author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (2012), a co-author of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message and the American Presidency (2012, with Michael Silverstein), and a co-editor of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life (2016, with E. Summerson Carr). Hallvard Lillehammer is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Social Sciences, History, and Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His publications include ‘Consequentialism and Global Ethics’ in M. Boylan (ed.), The Morality and Global Justice Reader (2011), ‘Ethics, Evolution and the A Priori: Ross on Spencer and the French Sociologists’ in R. Richards and M. Ruse (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics (2017), and ‘The Nature and Ethics of Indifference’, Journal of Ethics (2017). Carlos D. London˜o Sulkin is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Regina and the author of People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon (2012).

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T. M. Luhrmann is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and the author of (among other books) Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989), When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012), and How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020). Abby Mack is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Weber State University. Jonathan Mair has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Manchester, and Kent and is now a visiting researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid. His publications include ‘The Anthropology of Buddhism’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion (2023) and he is the editor of The Anthropology of Ignorance (2012) and the special edition, ‘Ethics across Borders: Difference, Affinity, and Incommensurability’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2015). Nicolette Makovicky is Lecturer in Russian and East European Studies, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She is the editor of Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies (2014) and a co-editor of Economies of Favour after Socialism (2016) and Slogans: Subjection, Subversion, and the Politics of Neoliberalism (2018). Magnus Marsden is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sussex and the author of Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience on Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier (2005), Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers (2016), and Beyond the Silk Roads: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics across Eurasia (2021). Cheryl Mattingly is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy at Aarhus University. Her book publications include Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (1998), The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland (2010), Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (2014), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (2018), and Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Perilous World (2022). Patrick McKearney is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. He is a co-editor of several books and journal articles, including Against Better Judgment: Akrasia in Anthropological Perspective (2023) and ‘For an Anthropology of Cognitive Disability’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2018). His recent publications include ‘The Limits of Knowing Other Minds: Intellectual Disability and the Challenge of Opacity’, Social Analysis (2021) and ‘Disabling Violence:

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Intellectual Disability and the Limits of Ethical Engagement’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2022). Perveez Mody is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King’s College. Her publications include The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi (2008), Marriage: Rites and Rights (2015), and Spaces of Care (2020). Joel Robbins is Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College. His publications include Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (2004) and Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (2020). China Scherz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia and the author of Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda (2014). Adam B. Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University. Winner of the Leopold Lucas Prize in 2020, he has a long history of writing about and struggling to achieve pluralism. His books include The Idea of Civil Society (1992), The Problem of Trust (1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (2000), and Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (2015). His long-standing collaboration with Robert Weller has resulted in multiple joint publications including three co-authored books: Ritual and Its Consequences (2008), Rethinking Pluralism (2012), and How Things Count as the Same (2019). Julian Sommerschuh is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hamburg His publications include ‘From Feasting to Accumulation: Modes of Value Realization and Radical Cultural Change in Southern Ethiopia’, Ethnos (2020) and ‘Respectable Conviviality: Solving Value Conflicts through Orthodox Christianity’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2021). Charles Stafford is Professor of Anthropology and Pro Director, Faculty Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the editor of Ordinary Ethics in China (2013), a co-editor of Cooperation in Chinese Communities (2018), and the author of Economic Life in the Real World: Logic, Emotion and Ethics (2020). C. Jason Throop is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of California–Los Angeles. He is the author of Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (2010) and editor of The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies (2011). Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the Department of Public Health, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia. She is the

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author of Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion and Belonging (2015) and a co-editor of Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking (2015) and Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life (2017). Soumhya Venkatesan is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her publications include Craft Matters: Artisans, Development, and the Indian Nation (2009), ‘Giving and Taking without Reciprocity: Conversations in South India and the Anthropology of Ethics’, Social Analysis (2016), and ‘Putting Together the Anthropology of Tax and the Anthropology of Ethics’, Social Analysis (2020). Her current research is on libertarian activists in the UK. Letha Victor has taught anthropology and religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in publications such as Anthropological Theory (2019), the Journal of Eastern African Studies (2017), and most recently Bruce-Lockhart et al.’s Decolonising State and Society in Uganda (2022). Sam Victor is a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University’s School for Religious Studies and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal (CIRM). His research examines the intersections of ethics and knowledge in the context of religious pluralism. Harry Walker is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His current research seeks to build a dialogue between anthropology, philosophy, and psychology in order better to understand the changing moral and political landscape in Amazonia. Robert P. Weller is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan (2001) and Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan (2006), and a coauthor of Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies (2018). His long-standing collaboration with Adam Seligman has resulted in multiple joint publications including three co-authored books: Ritual and Its Consequences (2008), Rethinking Pluralism (2012), and How Things Count as the Same (2019). Samuel Williams is a research fellow in the Department of Anthropology of Economic Experimentation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork on contemporary commerce in a number of historic marketplaces in Istanbul, and his current research focusses on the intellectual history of post-World War II US anthropology. Yunxiang Yan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California–Los Angeles. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and

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Social Networks in a Chinese Village (1996), Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999 (2003), and The Individualization of Chinese Society (2009) and the editor of Chinese Families Upside Down: Intergenerational Dynamics and Neo-Familism in the Early 21st Century (2021). His research interests include family and kinship, social change, the individual and individualization, and moral transformation in China.

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1 Introduction James Laidlaw

Two apparently contradictory things are both true about the anthropology of ethics. It is true that the academic discipline of anthropology has been concerned with ethics and morality throughout its whole history. It is also true that until the last couple of decades there was nothing that could reasonably be called the anthropology of ethics. Its advent has been felt to be such a distinct development that we are routinely said to have undergone an ‘ethical turn’, yet people also feel moved, equally routinely, to point out that anthropologists have been writing about morality all along, and they are indeed correct in saying this. So, what exactly is new? As the chapters in this book demonstrate, there is no single theoretical orientation that defines or dominates the anthropology of ethics. Approaches are diverse and by no means straightforwardly reconcilable. There is not even agreed nomenclature. The title of this volume uses ‘the anthropology of ethics’ as a broad encompassing term for several overlapping styles of enquiry. I shall also use ‘morality’ both as a rough synonym for ethics, in line with normal English-language usage, and in a slightly technical sense for a subset of the wider phenomenon, as described later. Some anthropologists (including some contributors to this volume) prefer to talk of the anthropology of moralities, or the good, or values, or ‘moral anthropology’. Significant differences lie behind some of these choices. The field is united only by a very general proposition: that enough of the time to make a difference, people act in accordance with evaluations they make, including affective responses they have to their own and others’ conduct, and they do this in light of ideas, ideals, and values that they hold. Explicitly and implicitly, consistently and inconsistently, concertedly and by-the-way as they go about their everyday lives, they act in ways that constitute at least partial answers to the questions of how one ought to live and what kind of life is a good life. This pervasive evaluative dimension of human social life, whose conditions, forms, affordances, and variations we have hardly begun to delineate, is the subject of the anthropology of ethics. The ideas, ideals, and values involved in these processes are of course social phenomena, as are the relationships, practices, and

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institutions in which they are embodied and expressed, and so the implication of this proposition, for anthropologists, is that studying human social life necessarily involves the study of ethics, and equally, to study ethics is to study forms of social life. This last point is one reason why the anthropology of ethics has important implications beyond anthropology. Given the very general nature of this underlying proposition, it is unsurprising and indeed productive that the anthropology it has motivated has taken diverse forms. But the diversity is not without limit. Although little else may be agreed upon, any form of the anthropology of ethics must, I think, constitutionally oppose two positions that are quite widely held, though often unconsciously, and not only by anthropologists. It must deny that the ethical is unimportant or illusory. And it must deny that we already know what it fundamentally is. Understanding why these denials need to be asserted, and why they are related, helps to clarify what is new about the anthropology of ethics as it has developed in recent decades. That said, it must be added that the interpretation that follows of these two precepts is mine alone: once again, the anthropology of ethics is a vibrantly diverse field characterized by lively disagreements and debates. Contributors to this volume are not committed as such to any, still less to all, of what follows in this introductory chapter. The idea that the ethical is unimportant or illusory is not incompatible with acknowledging that moral rules and values vary between societies, or with ethnographic description, even quite rich and detailed description, of this variation. It is possible, and for a long time in anthropology it was fairly routine practice, to describe the varying rules and values found in diverse societies, to see and acknowledge that human social life is shot through with ethical language, reflection, affect, response, and interaction, but for this not to give rise to sustained theoretical reflection on this ethical dimension of human life or on what its implications might be for how we understand social relations. Anthropological theorizing focussed very little on trying to understand ethics. In what kinds and aspects of interactions, practices, and institutions is it manifest, and how do these differ across space and time? What implications does it have for what we can know about human sociality? Not asking such questions was possible because and insofar as it was thought, or implicitly assumed, that all this is relatively unimportant or epiphenomenal in relation to more determinant structures or forces. Social life might, on the surface, be full of talk and action that seems to refer to ethical values and ideals, but it might nevertheless be that underneath, something harder is determining what really happens, which makes it possible to explain prevalent moral rules and values and their variation, and how people abide by them or not, as the effects of causal forces such as biological and social evolution, stages in technological development, systems of production, class conflict, or the interplay of forces of power and domination. Moral ideas and values might be edifying,

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Introduction

and people might genuinely believe in them and think they are motivated by them, but because these ideals and values are detached from and contrary to the underlying realities of life, they have only a superficial impact on how things are really organized and who does what and to whom. Really, whatever people may think or say, social life is driven, in the most influential versions of this reductionism, by the realities of power and the pursuit of self-interest. Beneath the surface, it is a zero-sum game of power and domination and maximization of advantage in wealth and status. Everything else is ideology: insubstantial illusion, strategic disguise, or self-deception. Probably few anthropologists have ever really thought this consistently, especially about the people whose lives they have shared in extended participant-observation (or indeed in their own lives). And good ethnographic description always makes clear that there is much more than this to any given form of social life. For these reasons, the tendency to take an explicitly dismissive and eliminative approach to ethics has been rarer, and more often protested against, among anthropologists than in most other social-science disciplines. Throughout its history, beginning with figures now recognized as immediate precursors to modern social and cultural anthropology such as Marett (1902) and Westermarck (1906–8) as well as Durkheim (1973 [1914]), through mid-century figures such as Evans-Pritchard (1950), there were eloquent recognitions that anthropology is a ‘science of moral life’ and concerned with ‘moral facts’, and that this made the discipline distinctive among approaches to the study of humanity. But although there were repeated attempts to give this conviction sustained expression in the formulation of social theory, and to conceive of a form of anthropological theory for the study of morality (examples include Firth 1951; Kluckhohn 1951; Read 1955; Edel and Edel 1968 [1959]; Gluckman 1972; Wolfram 1982; Pocock 1986), none prevailed against the persistent and mostly unarticulated tendency to think that explanation requires the critical reduction of the phenomena of ethical life to a purportedly underlying reality. Metaphors of appearance and substance, or base and superstructure; imagery of ‘structure’ as a reality that lies deeper than experience, or of ‘ideology’ as inversion, mask, or disguise; and ideas of culture as a local idiom in which universal global dynamics are expressed all make possible – though, of course, they never require – the explaining away of what people understand to be their motivations, values, ideals, and aspirations as no more than the effects of postulated entities, structures, or forces, imagined as existing on a larger scale or at a deeper level or in a different temporal realm to the people whose conduct they are said to cause. For much of the history of social theory, many have assumed that performing a reduction of this kind is just what it is to practise (or commit) a social science. Given this inheritance, it takes a concerted effort to resist these reductionist tendencies, to subject the phenomena of ethical life – so routine and pervasive as to be

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easily taken for granted – to reflective focus and analytical attention, as realities in their own right and irreducible, essential facets of human social life. I think that part of the explanation for why this concerted effort began to be made in anthropology around the turn of the millennium was that at that time its negation was being asserted so uncompromisingly. But one needs to begin slightly further back. In 1984, Sherry Ortner published an influential survey of anthropological theory since the 1960s (Ortner 1984), in which she proposed that the central theoretical problem social theory should concern itself with was the relation between structure and agency: how to theorize the determination of social life by larger structures in such a way as to make it compatible with the agency of individuals. This was the agenda for what became known as ‘practice theory’. From the point of view of the anthropology of ethics, it has obvious drawbacks, not least the imagination of social order as part–whole relations between ‘the individual’ and ‘larger’ entities. But it was at least an attempt to moderate the reductive ambitions of theories of structural determination, interpellation, and so on, and to acknowledge some obvious aspects of what human life is like. In 2016, Ortner published a sequel to that paper, updating her narrative of the major trends in anthropological theory to cover the period roughly from the mid-1990s to the time of writing. In this latter paper, although Ortner does not comment on the fact explicitly, the structure–agency problematic is not mentioned at all, which confirms that in its own terms the ‘practice theory’ project had failed. The proponents of the kind of anthropology Ortner rightly presents as preponderant in the later period – what she calls ‘dark anthropology’ (Ortner 2016) – had lost interest in maintaining the balancing act it required. The relevance of this here is that the cluster of meta-narratives and explanatory moves characteristic of what Ortner identifies as dark anthropology have in common the implication that the ethical can only ever be epiphenomenal at best. No place exists for it to have any kind of substantial role in human life as understood in that paradigm. The mission of dark anthropology, as Ortner puts it, was to emphasize ‘the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience, and the structural and historical conditions that produce them’ (2016: 49), in circumstances in which ‘a new and more brutal form of capitalism was expanding rapidly over the globe’ (2016: 48). And crucially, it was and remains a key tenet of dark anthropology that we already possess not only an understanding of the fundamental underlying ‘harsh and brutal’ nature of human life, and a narrative that identifies the only really important thing – neoliberalism, however defined – that is currently happening to the world but also the theoretical concepts we need to describe and explain all its local manifestations. ‘Dark theory’, a selective melange of Marxist political economy, the Gramscian concept of hegemony, and some ideas derived from a partial reading of Foucault (see Chapter 4), ‘asks us to see the world almost

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Introduction

entirely in terms of power, exploitation, and chronic pervasive inequality’ in which ‘there is no outside to power’ (Ortner 2016: 50). A seemingly unlimited range of widely dispersed and apparently diverse phenomena – revival of established practices, startling innovations, intensified conflicts, and changing aspirations and concerns – all demanded to be understood as ‘local’ responses to the globalization of modernity and neoliberalism, so that the anthropological challenge became to re-translate ‘local vocabularies of cause and effect’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1998) back into critical social theory’s concepts of capitalism and exploitation, power and resistance, and to assign them their place in the paradigm’s meta-narrative. The mission of bringing to light the many and widespread forms of cruelty, systematic domination, exploitation, injustice, and suffering in the contemporary world is undoubtedly an important and urgent one, and anthropologists who can do so in a manner that conveys the intimate experience of individuals and communities in emotionally affecting ways make a distinctive contribution (Robbins 2013). Fine works have been produced within this paradigm. But the value and impact of such works are blunted rather than otherwise by a partiality and one-sidedness that is, in Ortner’s own account, all but explicitly avowed, and by routine repetition. Early in the development of this paradigm, Marshall Sahlins (1993) observed and ridiculed its unimaginative predictability and gloom. But more dispiriting than the unremitting miserabilism of this anthropology has been its theoretical aridity. Presenting what she calls, following Joel Robbins, ‘anthropologies of the good’ as a complement to dark anthropology, Ortner describes the relation between the two as a matter of difference of mood and tone, and as if the former’s value were as a sort of therapeutic remedy for the emotional effects of the latter. They are ‘a positive and humane counterweight’ and ‘a refreshing and uplifting counterpoint’ (2016: 60). But there is no reason why the anthropology of ethics should be necessarily cheerful, and its glasses ought not to be rose-tinted. It would be no more defensible for it to exclude brute and difficult truths than is dark anthropology’s exclusive focus on them. Importantly, it must include the study of forms of ethical life whose contemplation will not necessarily make most academic anthropologists feel good. Not coincidentally, some of the most influential formative ethnographies (notably Mahmood 2005) have been attempts to take seriously, precisely as forms of ethical life, religious movements that are rebarbative to Western ‘progressive’ opinion and sensibility. Identifying an instance of the ethical does not imply approving of it. And contemplating some of the ways in which people have pursued what they have conceived to be human excellence (extreme asceticism, mysticism, utopianism, artistic vision, military prowess), including the costs they and others have paid for their quest, can and should be sobering in many instances rather than necessarily ‘refreshing’. After all, can we be sure that more harshness and brutality have not been exercised in the

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furtherance of attempts to make the world perfect and the people in it pure or heroic than from the shamefaced pursuit of personal wealth and advantage? The important objection to dark anthropology is theoretical rather than being a matter of emotional colour, or even accuracy in representation of the world. The reason dark anthropology is a dismal kind of ‘normal science’ for anthropology is that theoretically it leaves no room for ‘local vocabularies of cause and effect’ to be anything other than grist to its dark satanic mill, to tell us anything we didn’t already know about the world, or to contribute to the conceptual repertoire we have for thinking about it. We might pile up examples and provide ever more personal, emotive, and outraged descriptions of them, and we might show ingenuity in adding to the existing catalogue of institutions or situations whose deformities are explained by the dark workings of power and domination; we might take more interest than heretofore in different vectors of oppression and different categories of victim; but the narrative and explanatory frameworks are essentially complete. There is no invitation for ethnography to contribute new insights or concepts of general applicability that might enable or require us to think differently. The anthropology of ethics was not the only new departure in the discipline founded, in at least partial reaction to dark anthropology, on the ambition that the ethnographic study of diverse forms of life might fuel more radical revisions to our conceptual vocabulary and to our understanding of the world. The roughly contemporaneous ‘ontological turn’ (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Henare et al. 2006; Costa and Fausto 2010; Holbraad 2012; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Heywood 2017), different in many respects, has in common with the anthropology of ethics a rejection of the ‘analytical high-handedness’ (Englund and Leach 2000) of this style of anthropology, as for instance in Morten Axel Pedersen’s (2011) rich account of the not-quite-revival of shamanism in northern Mongolia (see also Laidlaw 2012). Pedersen carefully shows how much would be missed by understanding Mongolian shamanism in the aftermath of the collapse of state socialism as an ‘occult economy’: the ‘local’ expression on a symbolic ‘level’ of the real ‘structural’ forces of advancing neoliberalism. One way in which proponents of the ontological turn expressed their central concerns was as an attempt to ‘take seriously’ the terms in which their ethnographic interlocutors communicate their interests and aspirations and their understandings of the world. This involves actively seeking to make it the case that the forms of life we study can tell us something about how things are that we do not already know. This means holding that not everything about them is necessarily comprehended by existing social theory, considering that our understanding of human sociality might require substantial correction if it is to be able to account for the full range of human social experience, and aspiring to learn not only about but also from the people and forms of life we study. Notwithstanding their well-rehearsed differences, these shared ambitions,

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Introduction

requiring as they do a rejection of the hegemony of dark anthropology, are a substantial matter of convergence between the recent ontological and ethical turns in anthropology. The caricature of human life as a bleak zero-sum game of power gains a degree of plausibility from the idea that the only alternative to the narrow set of motivations it recognizes is an idealization of ‘morality’ as a set of precepts and principles that is fundamentally at variance with – perhaps even a symmetrical inversion of – the hard realities of life thus conceived: ‘altruism’ as opposed to ‘self-interest’; the ‘moral point of view’ as a singular perspective on the world excluding any but its own pure principles as sources of motivation; an abstract, de-personalized, universalizing view from nowhere in particular; the impartial benevolence of the ‘point of view of the universe’. It is a necessary precondition for an anthropology of ethics to problematize this concept of morality because ethical life can take many other forms. This concept of morality is not an artefact of academic philosophy only. It has considerable currency in public and general discourse, but this has not always been so. In broad comparative and historical terms, it is singular. Philosophers as different as Friedrich Nietzsche (1994 [1887]), Elizabeth Anscombe (1958), Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), and Bernard Williams (1985), and also in slightly different terms Michel Foucault (1986 [1984]), have suggested that it is the result of a contraction in Western moral thought that has occurred in the modern era: a formalization, conceptual impoverishment, and narrowing of what is recognized as morality. Although their views about the nature and causes of the change have differed, they have all argued that morality is not a timeless, trans-historical concept but requires to be understood genealogically, in the way that anthropologists have learned to understand the category of ‘religion’ (Asad 1993). Williams (1985), following Nietzsche (1994 [1887]), sees what he calls this peculiarly modern ‘morality system’ as representing in important respects a secularization of Christian asceticism, but also as scientistic in form and adapted to the needs of the bureaucratic state, and although it has become powerfully institutionalized and influential on how we think we ought to think, it has not yet wholly colonized everyday life and judgement. He also shows that it suffers from a number of unresolvable internal contradictions. These might mean that it would be impossible to live by it consistently, which might in turn explain why its dominance in everyday life remains incomplete. However that may be, it is clear that, anthropologically, this ‘morality’ is just one form of ethical thought and an anthropology of ethics needs resolutely to free itself from many of its peculiar and parochial presuppositions. For much of human history and in many parts of the world – and even in societies in which the morality system is discursively dominant – when people more or less reflectively consider what kind of life they wish to lead, they have reference to values other than those the ‘morality system’

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considers to be good. And still more perhaps as they go about their everyday lives, responding to situations as they arise, their conduct is informed by values other than those. Noting this, and following many of Williams’s arguments, the philosopher Susan Wolf (2015) observes that a society composed entirely of what she calls ‘moral saints’ would be highly dysfunctional, and that such people are by no means wholly admirable. A life lived by the light only of ‘moral values’ is a narrow one, and she makes a persuasive case for the importance of non-moral values, including especially personal love. This is helpful in many ways, but because Wolf takes a purely analytical rather than a genealogical or comparative approach, she takes for granted that there is, in the abstract, a universally relevant question to which morality is the answer, that question being to what extent and in what ways people should ‘constrain and guide their choices for the sake of others (or the common good)’ (2015: 4). The abstractness of the ‘others’ in this formulation, and the casual identification of them with an imagined social whole, places this formulation squarely within a modernist social imaginary, as does the egalitarianism which Wolf takes for granted must be a central element of morality. It is a formulation that presupposes a specific sociology: addressed implicitly to formally equal citizens of a modern polity, unencumbered by unchosen social relations. That indeed is why Wolf thinks this set of values must be supplemented by and to some degree subordinated to others in the living of a worthwhile life. But the de-socialized nature of her understanding of the question of morality means that Wolf takes it as a given that philosophical reasoning alone might be able to arrive at a determinate, universally applicable answer to it. Williams takes a significantly different approach. He distinguishes philosophy conducted within the terms of the morality system – ‘moral philosophy’ – from the very much wider range of ways of reflecting on the question of how one ought to live, which he calls ‘ethics’. Broadening the object of study from ‘morality’ to ‘ethics’ helps to free us from ethnocentric and historically parochial assumptions that hinder our ability to recognize forms of life that do not conform to our unreflective expectations of the morally good. Williams noted that for this an ethnographic sensibility is required, and in that spirit he attempted to carry out a historicalanthropological reconstruction of the ethical life of classical Greece (Williams 1992). And a number of anthropologists have, at least for some purposes, adapted Williams’s terminology in preferring ‘ethics’ and ‘ethical life’ to designate the very broadly conceived object of our enquiries, while also noting the possibility of institutionalized forms of ethical life that share some of the features Williams identifies as distinctive of the morality system, and which might not be confined to the modern West (e.g. Laidlaw 2002; Stafford 2013; Keane 2016). But adopting this terminology is not of course the only way to achieve the important objective, which is to avoid pre-emptively assuming that everywhere and always

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Introduction

ethical life must take forms we already recognize from the morality system: hence the terminological diversity noted earlier. If what is new in the anthropology of ethics is therefore systematic reflection on the forms and variation of the ethical dimension of social life, this does not give rise to a new sub-discipline within anthropology, defined by a subject matter separate from that of the rest of the discipline. It is very important not to imagine that the anthropology of ethics implies the study of a distinct domain of social life that might be supposed to be separate from (or to overlap with) other domains, such as politics. Instead, it consists of a way of looking at the subject matter of the whole discipline, which is new insofar as it is motivated by attention to a pervasive and constitutive aspect of that whole subject matter that had not been properly attended to before. It involves recognition that there is an ethical dimension to all human social life, and a conscious effort to reckon with that. This turns out to require revision to much of our conceptual vocabulary, rethinking some long-established key concepts, bringing others to a new prominence, and casting some very venerable anthropological topics in a new light. It requires, in other words, work towards something of a conceptual retooling for social analysis. The structure of this book and the themes of the parts into which it is divided are designed to facilitate this re-tooling. In the past (Laidlaw 2014: 2), I have compared the ethical turn to the anthropology of gender in the 1980s. What previously had seen itself as a specialism of one kind or another – the ‘anthropology of women’ and then ‘feminist anthropology’ – gave way to a recognition that the gendering of persons, practices, and processes is a pervasive aspect of all social life, and an aspect of what needs to be discussed, whether one is studying the state, new media, religious movements, or whatever, as much as kinship or labour. This meant that over time, the sense that there was a distinct ‘anthropology of gender’ dissipated somewhat as it became expected that some attention to matters of gender would be integral to any anthropological study, whatever else it was about. Although this no doubt meant a loss of camaraderie among those who had pioneered the movement, and perhaps disappointment as the spotlight of academic fashion moved on, it was an index of success. The anthropology of ethics, which requires a still more thorough refocussing of attention and revision of analytical habit, cannot yet lay claim to that level of success. This volume may be seen as a large collective effort towards that end.

Part I: Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements The development of the anthropology of ethics has been built upon, and has in turn fuelled, renewed dialogue between anthropology and neighbouring disciplines that are also concerned with understanding the nature and dynamics of ethical life. The most obvious of these is philosophy, and

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Hallvard Lillehammer in Chapter 2 provides a wide-ranging guide to moral and political philosophy in the Anglophone analytical tradition, which brings out the many substantive points of contact with the anthropology of ethics. On a number of fronts, as Lillehammer shows, engagement with anthropology contributes to debates within philosophy, including those which challenge venerable assumptions that both ethical life and ethical theory are adequate only if characterized by universality and internal consistency. As this dialogue develops, philosophers are coming to see that anthropology provides them not only with material for exotic thought experiments (designed according to methodologically individualist principles that tend to entrench those rationalist assumptions) but also with the conceptual resources to develop an altogether richer understanding of the intrinsic sociality of ethical life. We then have two chapters that deal with two overlapping bodies of writing within Anglophone philosophy that are of special interest for anthropology. ‘Virtue ethics’ is a problematic category, as Lillehammer notes. Some of its proponents present it as a species of ‘ethical theory’ to rival consequentialism and Kantianism, while others maintain that its value lies precisely in its not being a ‘theory’ of like kind as them. Whom to number among its proponents is also not agreed. The three authors discussed in Chapter 4 are often treated as virtue ethicists, but this is not how any of them have represented themselves. So despite its undoubted far-reaching influence in the development of the anthropology of ethics, it remains unclear just what kind of beast virtue ethics is. Rather than attempting an anatomy of this chameleon in Chapter 3, Jonathan Mair focusses on the feature that has most attracted anthropologists – the potential to enable us to think outside the assumptions of the modern ‘morality system’ and establish a much wider comparative framework for understanding the full diversity of human ethical thought and practice. Mair notes that despite good intentions, the historical and ethnographic imaginations of most virtue ethicists have remained somewhat parochially Euro-American, and he argues that attempts to incorporate non-European ethical traditions have not generally been well formed. He sets out an agenda for remedying these deficiencies. In Chapter 4, Patrick McKearney and I compare and contrast the thought of three philosophers, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum, who have all been influential in the development of the anthropology of ethics, as references to them in chapters throughout this volume demonstrate. This chapter makes the case that it follows from the pluralism of which they are in different ways exponents that moral philosophy needs to depart radically from its traditional de-contextualizing and universalizing tendencies, and needs in fact to re-constitute itself as something like a form of anthropology, a concerted practice of theoretically reflective comparative social description.

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The thinker with the single greatest influence on the development of the anthropology of ethics was probably Michel Foucault, who is also sometimes treated, just to confirm how complicated designations are in these matters, as himself a virtue ethicist (Mattingly 2012). In Chapter 5, Paolo Heywood gives an account of the basis of his influence and addresses the vexed interpretative question of the relation between Foucault’s later works, which have most directly inspired anthropologists of ethics, and the earlier writings routinely cited as authority for Ortner’s dark anthropology. Foucault was never a system-building thinker, and to some extent revelled in paradox, inconsistency, and changing his mind (including with respect to some conspicuously rash misjudgements), but, as Heywood shows, in the relevant respects there is no radical discontinuity of the kind some commentators have detected. In particular, he was not shifting from a study of power to a study of ethics, as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives, because his conception of power does not exclude but is instead a precondition for ethics. So, in his later work he was not recanting on a view he did not admit to having held. As he wrote in 1984, ‘the idea that power is a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot be attributed to me’ (2000: 293). Heywood’s analysis helps us to understand why this misreading of his thought should have been so oddly tenacious. The term ‘phenomenology’ covers a rich and diverse set of philosophical traditions, which anthropologists have drawn on in a range of ways. A number of chapters in this volume (including those by Kuan; Mack and Throop; and Mattingly and McKearney) draw extensively on phenomenological thought. Samuel Williams, in surveying the emerging phenomenological current in the anthropology of ethics in Chapter 6, notes the in many respects puzzling prominence of the figure of Martin Heidegger. Not only did Heidegger write only very disparaging things about ethics as a branch of philosophical thought, but the personal and political conduct that indicates an ethical sensibility well outside the contemporary academic Overton window is also hard to detach from a philosophy that aspired strenuously to systematic consistency (Wolin 1993, 2016; Faye 2009). So any hope of finding in that philosophy insight into ethical life might seem unlikely. Williams’s chapter helps us to see some partial answers to this puzzle, and to see beyond it. In addition to observing the distinctly divergent directions in which different anthropologists have interpreted Heidegger in developing their own thinking about ethics, Williams suggests that Heidegger may serve, consciously or unconsciously, as a counter-weight against Foucault, and that this is so in at least two ways: as support for a sceptical reaction to Foucault’s emphasis on self-conscious reflection in his characterization of ethics, and as a spectral return of Foucault’s own highly ambivalent and mysterious engagement with Heidegger. And Williams ends by pointing to a different strand of thought about ethics in the phenomenological

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corpus – running from Husserl through Scheler and concerned with values – which contains further resources that are beginning to be drawn upon by anthropologists. Chapter 7, by Natalia Buitron and Harry Walker and Chapter 8, by Michael Banner, survey the dialogues that have been developing, as an aspect of the development of the anthropology of ethics, with cognitive science and moral theology. They both see considerable potential mutual benefit in the further development of these dialogues, but also highlight the obstacles, both theoretical and practical, that are likely to continue to make these dialogues demanding for both sides.

Part II: Aspects of Ethical Agency Much of Western moral philosophy, together with political philosophy and legal theory and practice, is resolutely individualist in its basic presuppositions. Individuals are held accountable for their actions; and an individual’s mental states – motivation, intention, emotional state, the presence or absence of mental illness – are counted as being key to assigning judgement, praise, blame, reward, and punishment. Ethical agency is conceived as a quality internal to the subject, and key terms in the description of moral life – freedom, responsibility, character traits such as courage or compassion – are widely understood to be something that individuals themselves do or do not possess, as internal attributes. And the same is true of morally significant states such as happiness and suffering; they too are typically understood as internal states of individuals. A good deal of the anthropology of ethics has joined a small but significant minority of philosophers and legal theorists in seeking to ‘socialize’ our understanding of these crucial components of ethical agency, in the sense not necessarily or for the most part in seeking to reassign them from individuals to collectivities (the idea of collective agents is an important one, but not the heart of the matter), but rather in seeing them as being features that come to be and have their existence within social interaction itself; in other words, as intrinsically relational states of affairs. In this sort of view ethical agency is not so much collectivized as seen to be distributed among parties to interaction. Here, the anthropology of ethics overlaps with and draws ideas from linguistic anthropology, including the often rather technical field of conversation analysis. It is also one of the other ways in which critical dialogue with experimental psychology (described by Buitron and Walker in Chapter 7) is being pursued. How do we take account of relevant research in experimental psychology, correcting for the reductionism that characterizes much of that research? A good deal of groundwork is required to adapt the tools developed in these neighbouring disciplines so that they may serve for describing how specifically ethical dimensions get elicited

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within particular social situations. Webb Keane’s idea (2014, 2016) that species-wide cognitive and affective features of human psychology may be seen as affordances that make the ethical possible, rather than determinately causing it, brings into view as a focus for ethnographic study what he and Michael Lempert, in Chapter 9, call ‘ethicalization’: the processes whereby ethical concepts and criteria get invoked, introduced, applied, challenged, or affirmed in the course of interaction. A friendly exchange of pleasantries turns tense, when an implicit note of criticism is introduced, in a way that seems to require self-justification; a neutral discussion of options changes register entirely when it is suggested that one of those options is ethically reprehensible in a way that the others are not. Keane and Lempert suggest that understanding how this happens – in the course of a short conversation or a fleeting interaction – can help us understand parallel macro-level processes of ethicalization, as when formerly neutral or unquestioned habits and practices come to be seen as matters for ethical concern and valuation, and thereby become politically contested. Mathias (2020) provides an illuminating analysis of an example of just this kind of interactional event. Appiah (2011) provides a different kind of analysis of several historical episodes when something of this kind occurred. Ethics, on this view, is an emergent quality of interaction, although this does not prevent interaction in turn becoming the object of ethical evaluation. The challenge is to make it possible to make sense at the same time, and within the same theoretical framework, with the ways in which ethics is woven into everyday life and gives rise to some highly marked and self-conscious practice and motivates significant and sometimes radical historical change, without having to think of these as competing conceptions of the ethical, still less as different kinds of (e.g. ordinary as opposed to some other kind of) ethics. Seen in this light, apparently rather grand, abstract concepts such as freedom and responsibility from the vocabulary of moral philosophy, and the vocabulary also of moral and political contest and conflict, may become amenable to ethnographic investigation. So, as Soumhya Venkatesan shows in Chapter 10, freedom is best conceived not as an absence of sociality but as a range of conditions that are variously enabled by social relations and cultural forms, including notably relations of care, and even when these take the form of a renunciation of personal autonomy. Saba Mahmood’s now classic study (2005) shows participants in the Cairene women’s piety movement can find something they want to call freedom (at least some of the time) in the willed submission to authority and to norms of pious conduct. Venkatesan’s own study of libertarian political activists in the UK charts the ways in which they invoke a range of contextual and pragmatic criteria in reaching judgements about where to see freedom being enhanced or threatened in policy proposals, and how they seek to balance or resolve apparent conflicts with other goods they also value. Seeing that ‘freedom’ has a lively and diverse life as an

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ethnographic category has obvious benefits for anthropology. The harder question, as Venkatesan also explores, is how to develop our own analytical vocabulary for discussing freedom that might enable us to describe how different forms of freedom are made possible or precluded for the people we study in different social and historical situations, and what kinds of commitments they might have in relation to those possibilities. That requires a degree of detachment from our own contests and concerns, and the humility to work to articulate concerns and values we may not share. Similarly, in Chapter 11, Catherine Trundle illustrates how concepts of responsibility are rarely applied unidirectionally (they tend generally to involve some degree of mutuality) and are always a framework for action. Analysing how these concepts work – what states of affairs different agents may be imagined to be responsible for and the kinds of claims that can be made to stick – shows how responsibility is emergent from reflexive social processes. Equally, a social process is the way a state or community retrospectively works through the aftermath of baffling or horrific events, such as the Rwandan genocide, testing the application of notions of individual and collective responsibility in order to achieve some pattern of accountability out of the murky mass of entangled narratives and remembered events. Such processes are never matters entirely of detached and disinterested ratiocination. Emotions are, as Teresa Kuan shows in Chapter 12, powerful engines of ethicalization and essential to an understanding of moral motivation. Kuan illustrates the connection between emotion and narrative – one of the reasons literature so powerfully captures moral reasoning – and the aspects of ethical experience that respond to particulars rather than general or abstract principles. She explores the question of what kinds of theoretical language best enable ethnographers to capture the part played in ethical life by feelings, sentiments, emotions, and moods, aspects that philosophers since David Hume and Adam Smith at least have recognized as central to ethical life, and she looks beyond the established literature in the anthropology of emotion and affect theory to resources in neo-Confucian philosophy. We then have a pair of chapters, notably different in theoretical orientation and tone, that address respectively the positive and negative emotional dimensions of ethical life. Edward F. Fischer and Sam Victor’s chapter, ‘Happiness and Well-Being’ (Chapter 13), engages with the expansive sets of literature on happiness, ranging from psychology to welfare economics. They argue for the value of distinctively ethnographic ways of paying attention to the good in people’s lives and their different ways of conceiving it, when so much policy-orientated research on such matters proceeds on the assumption that we already know what good lives look like, of what the good in them consists, and how to measure it. They propose investigating the diverse ways in which people conceptualize

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Introduction

and seek to pursue the realization of values, care for others, and aspirations and hopes, none of which are reducible to ‘self-interest’, let alone to a maximization of power or wealth. Abby Mack and C. Jason Throop in their chapter, ‘Suffering and Sympathy’ (Chapter 14), draw on a very different range of philosophical and other intellectual sources. Their entry point to the anthropological study of ethics is through people’s responses to suffering. They argue for distinguishing sympathy and empathy as two overlapping but different forms of pathic response, grounded in basic features of human being in the world. An ethnography of pathic responses to suffering provides a way, they suggest, of understanding the entanglements of ethics, politics, and the ontological conditions of life, and of capturing those aspects of responses to suffering that exceed the individual subject, in phenomena such as shifting public moods. In Chapter 15, Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller reflect on the implications for ethical life of the fact that difference and ambiguity are ubiquitous aspects of human experience, and therefore that the human condition is necessarily one of ethical pluralism. In an essay of striking breadth and interpretative brio, they suggest that there are, historically and cross-culturally, three broad ways in which ambiguity and difference have been ordered and structured and therefore in which ethical pluralism has been constructed, which they call notation, ritual, and shared experience. This essay, together with the arguments for ethical pluralism from Berlin, Williams, Taylor, and Nussbaum summarized in Chapter 4, prompts a reflection about what follows if we take seriously the suggestion that a situation comprising plural and conflicting values, and therefore the requirement of living with irresolvable conflicts and tragic choices, is inescapably the human condition. The utterly harmonious ‘traditional’ society of seamless moral consensus – whether Durkheim’s ‘mechanical solidarity’ or the many other formulations – may not even be a coherent idea and in any case has always been a nostalgic fantasy. Anthropologists have known this almost from the beginning. The intriguing question is why the idea that somewhere there is a society that lives in ethical harmony refuses to die, however often and decisively it is disproven as a description of any actual societies, and however reliably attempts to create one have resulted in moral calamity in the real world. The answer lies partly in the fact that living by a unified, consistent, and conflict-free moral code has been throughout human history a recurrent aspiration for some – usually a rather small minority of people, but often a vocal one. Whether by escaping to the desert, the forest, or the mountains, or enclosing themselves in monastic fastness or otherwise cutting all ties of kinship that impose conflicting claims, or setting out to be the vanguard of a utopian future in which all conflicts will be resolved and all interests harmonized, groups of people seeking to realize a condition of moral

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certainty and unanimity have been a strikingly recurrent feature of the moral landscape. So, they certainly merit serious anthropological attention (see Lazar’s chapter on activism (Chapter 31) and Yan’s on socialism (Chapter 34) in this volume). But in providing such attention, it is perhaps not best for anthropologists to include such people’s improbable presuppositions or aspirations among their own theoretical assumptions. But it is also notable that throughout history, the force of such millennial projects has been felt disproportionately by clerisy and intellectuals. The possibility of a condition in which all that is required to achieve unimpeachable virtue is following a clear and consistent moral code with rigorous logical consistency and vigour, such that one’s virtue is entirely invulnerable to time and chance – in which one is ‘in the right’, whatever unpredictable circumstances might occur and whatever the actual outcome of events – has gripped the imagination of a strikingly large majority of influential philosophers. And who should wonder? Who, if not intellectuals, should be attracted to the idea that all you need in order to be good is logical rigour and rational consistency, and to the idea that a world that makes this possible might be out there somewhere or imminently achievable? It would be remarkable if anthropologists were entirely invulnerable to the force of that kind of vision of ‘the good’. Indeed, there is reason to believe that youthful fantasies of Shangri-La are part of what attracted a nonnegligible number of us (I do not exclude myself) to studying the discipline in the first place. But it is quite important that such utopian aspirations should not structure the ways in which we approach studying the world as it is, or dominate the conceptual vocabulary with which we do so. For almost everyone, almost all of the time, there are real hard choices and trade-offs to be faced, and disappointments and regrets to be lived with, and our conception of ethical agency has to put this at its centre. I hope that the chapters collected in this Part of the book provide resources to help anthropology to do that.

Part III: Media and Modes of Ethical Practice The chapters in Part III survey some of the work that is being done on the basic modes and media of ethical thought and action. How are ethical ideas and values instantiated, organized, transmitted, and mobilized in social life? The chapters included here do not pretend to be exhaustive. If the list could be extended, it would obviously include entries on narrative, visual representation, and roles, the latter of which has also attracted recent attention among philosophers (Ames 2011; Dare and Swanton 2020). Initially, a fairly prominent aspect of the anthropology of ethics was a reaction against the longstanding tendency in the discipline to think of morality as largely taking the form of rules. This tendency, strongly present in Durkheim and in structural-functionalist and structuralist

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Introduction

approaches that developed drawing on his legacy, as well as in various conceptions of culture that drew on metaphors of language and games for their concepts, was of course part of a general propensity among social scientists to think of rules as the fundamental way in which society is organized. This way of conceptualizing ‘social order’, together with the tendency that often went with it to equate morality with society (the individual is intrinsically amoral or even immoral, and is rendered moral by being disciplined within ‘society’), imported into the heart of social theory a very specific and historically particular conception of morality and an unhelpfully juridical model for ethical life in general (Laidlaw 2002). So, the search was on for ways other than rules in which the ethical is instantiated in social life. As Joanna Cook describes in Chapter 16, Foucault’s framework for the analysis of projects of ethical self-cultivation has been the starting point for a range of ethnographic studies, and not only of relatively formally scripted and institutionalized religious and political projects. The trope of self-cultivation, she shows, can be illuminating in relation also to how people cope with contingencies in everyday life, where their reflections and conduct are not guided by anything like a definite project, and where the self in self-cultivation does not resemble an ‘autonomous’ subject. Some have seen an objection to the idea of self-cultivation in the obvious fact that no one is consciously reflective and detached in relation to their conduct all of the time, and that many people are so only very rarely or hardly at all (e.g. Scheele 2015), but these facts support at best qualifications and complements rather than objections. In saying, with Foucault, that the capacity for reflective freedom is fundamental to ethics, no one ever imagined that this means we all are – still less that it would be good if we were – tortured soul-searching introverts. The capacity for reflection and self-cultivation marks out human ethical life and makes the forms of interaction and conduct it sustains distinctive, even where that capacity is exercised only intermittently, and even where it is exercised by others on behalf of those who are unable to do so themselves (McKearney 2021, in press). Caroline Humphrey’s classic paper, ‘Exemplars and Rules’ (1997), which pointed to the way in which Mongols take certain specific individuals – sometimes living, sometimes historical, sometimes mythic – as lodestars for their ethical thinking, set in train another productive line of thought about how ethics is instantiated in social life: that the interpretation and emulation of exemplars is a different and separate source from rules in giving guidance for people on how to behave and make choices, and is a distinctive non-rule-like way in which ethical ideals and values make themselves manifest in social life. Humphrey suggests that moral worlds organized around exemplars appear to be able to accommodate greater degrees of plurality and much looser consensus than is possible in those that strive for ideological unanimity, with people sharing

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exemplars but relating to them in different ways. As Nicholas H. A. Evans explains in Chapter 17, those who have followed up on this insight have been able to draw on a long history of studies of charisma and charismatic authority, of heroes and heroic political systems (Sahlins’s work on kingship), of the agency of representations (Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency), and of state forms that differ from Western bureaucracies (Tambiah on galactic polities and Geertz on ‘exemplary centres’) in elucidating the forms that exemplars take and how people relate to them. These exemplary forms include rituals, which may be seen as forms in which participants experience, if fleetingly, the full and perfect realization of values and ideals. And Evans shows how some recent work supplements all of this – which had mostly to do with very high-status and remarkable exemplars – with studies of how the exemplary mode of moral authority persists in modified form in modern political systems, both in authoritarian ones such as socialist China and in liberal democracies, where we see a plethora of apparently paradoxically ‘everyday exemplars’ (see also Heywood 2022). The idea of rituals as instances of the exemplary is not the only account anthropologists of ethics have given of why ritual is an important part of how ethics is socially organized and made manifest. Letha Victor and Michael Lambek (Chapter 18) explicate a set of approaches to ritual, conceived as a mode of action, that bring out the importance of ritual to ethical life. Such approaches might also go some way towards explaining why conscious and directed projects of ethical self-cultivation consist to such an extent of highly ritualized practices, whether confession, prayer, or fasting in religious selfcultivation, or meetings, demonstrations, or consciousness-raising or re-education sessions among political or sexual activists. As Victor and Lambek argue, following Rappaport (1999), ritual creates and imposes criteria against which subsequent conduct is accountable and evaluated and therefore is a highly pervasive social technology for what Keane and Lempert call ethicalization. On a number of occasions before in the history of the discipline, when anthropologists have sought alternatives to rules as a way of conceptualizing the regularities in social life, and especially its ethical dimension, they have explored the possibility that values might be thought of as abstract or immaterial entities that stand in some kind of structured relation to each other, and that theorization of how these structured relations work might preserve some of the virtues, without the disadvantages, of conceptions of social structures or ‘cultures’. In Chapter 19, Julian Sommerschuh and Joel Robbins set out the case for the recent revival of this project for developing an anthropological theory of values, which they see as overlapping with the anthropology of ethics, but as having a different scope because it encompasses what they distinguish as non-moral as well as moral values. Since the anthropology of ethics also sees its scope as wider than that of ‘morality’, thus

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Introduction

defined, this may be more of a terminological than a substantive difference, but however this may be, the project is certainly of the first interest. As Sommerschuh and Robbins show, the new incarnation of this enterprise draws somewhat on the structuralist legacy of Louis Dumont and others, but also increasingly on the tradition of thought within the phenomenological tradition identified in Chapter 6 by Williams and exemplified in the writings of Max Scheler. So, during the last couple of decades we have seen systematic exploration of a range of forms, other than rules, in which the ethical is socially instantiated and organized, including projects of self-cultivation, exemplars, ritual, and values. But it has also become clear that the initial reaction against rules in the anthropology of ethics may have been unduly peremptory. As Morgan Clarke argues in Chapter 20, when imagined not as the beginning and end of morality but as one among a range of media in which ethical thought may take place, rules become more interesting. Some ethical traditions seem to favour codification in rules more than others. Why might that be? What are the specific features and affordances of rules, as, among other things, a technology of the self? Why, as Clarke so persuasively puts it, are some ethical traditions ‘ruly’, while others are comparatively unruly? And on examination, ethical rules turn out to be more different among themselves than we had originally thought (although we should not in the first place have forgotten so much of the thinking that went on in structuralfunctionalist and structuralist anthropology about different kinds of rules). They come in a variety of forms. And just what it is to follow a rule is construed differently in different traditions too. These questions appear perhaps especially acute in the Abrahamic religions, in all of which, though to different degrees, ethical reasoning has often been couched in explicitly legalistic form. Broadening the imagination of anthropologists about ethical life probably did require a dedicated effort to think outside the assumptions of those traditions and to search for forms of ethical thought other than rules, but, having done that, as Clarke shows, we now have the opportunity to find ethical legalism newly interesting. We cannot understand how people exercise their ethical capacities, or how ethics is instantiated in social life, whether in any of the media surveyed in these chapters or otherwise, without understanding how these matters are learned and taught. Only ideas and practices that can be learned and retained can structure ethical life. The study of ethical pedagogy therefore is both a necessary dimension of understanding how these modes of ethical life function and gives insight into how they comport with each other in specific contexts. James D. Faubion’s chapter on ethical pedagogies (Chapter 21) is therefore in its way a synoptic overview, from a distinctive point of view, of this aspect of the whole field.

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Part IV: Intimate and Everyday Life Turning now from questions of how we conceive moral agency and how we find it instantiated in social practice, what difference does it make, if we take the fact of the ethical dimension of social life to be central, to how we might approach the description and understanding of everyday life, social institutions, and historical processes? If kinship, economics, politics, and religion remain the bread-and-butter diet of anthropological analysis, what new items appear on the menu? What new treatments of staple fare become possible? We consider these questions in this group of chapters, first in relation to intimate and everyday life (in part because the category of the ‘everyday’ has had a certain currency in early debates in the anthropology of ethics), before turning to the study of ethical life in the context of formal institutions. The topic of care has been the focus of a great deal of interest in anthropology in the last few decades. As Cheryl Mattingly and Patrick McKearney point out in Chapter 22, however, a good deal of this interest has been fuelled by a sentimental idealization of care as warm and relational, set against the supposedly cold formality of liberal ideals of autonomy. Mattingly and McKearney take us beyond the comfort afforded by framing the study of care in this way, and insist on the importance of confronting the hierarchical and coercive aspects of caring relationships, to give us a richer picture of their inescapable asymmetry and ethical complexity. They explore the nature of care, drawing on two different sets of conceptual and analytical resources, from virtue ethics and phenomenology, to build up a composite picture without attempting to meld these resources into a single framework, but instead retaining a sense of the tensions between their different sets of concepts and the themes they help bring to the fore. The coercion in care is also very vividly evident in Chapter 23, where Perveez Mody’s discussion of ‘Kinship and Love’ based on her research in Delhi on ‘love marriages’ – marriages contracted without parental arrangement or approval between lovers from different castes or religious communities – movingly describes the cruel double-binds these lovers find themselves faced with as they try to reconcile the demands of their natal families with those imposed on them by their love. Accused on one side of self-centredness, but also of losing their true selves to their ungoverned passions, they speak of themselves as experiencing loss of self both in their love and in the self-sacrifice demanded by kinship. An opposition between morality and self-interest fails completely to have a purchase on their heart-rending experience of conflicting loyalties that cannot be reconciled and fundamental fracturing of sense of self. Another focus has been cooperation, a topic that brings anthropology unavoidably into dialogue with psychology and even evolutionary science.

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Introduction

Within the latter, there is a peculiar fascination with cooperation. Because it often begins from the assumption that evolution involves processes of competition between axiomatically ‘selfish’ units of selection, the very possibility of cooperation presents itself as a key explanatory puzzle. And the question of how to understand ethical life gets radically narrowed and reduced to the question of explaining how cooperation between these exhypothesi ruthlessly self-interested agents might be possible. On this view, morality is first defined as any mechanism that enables these presupposed self-interested agents to achieve cooperation. The test is to show that apparently altruistic conduct is ‘really’ self-interested after all, by showing that it confers a selective advantage on those who engage in it. This can lead triumphantly to the circular conclusion that ‘morality’ (assumed to be exhaustively encompassed by altruistic behaviour) may be ‘explained’ as ‘fundamentally’ a mechanism for securing the evolutionary benefits of cooperation (Curry 2016; Curry et al. 2019; Gellner et al. 2020). In their chapter, ‘Cooperation and Punishment’ (Chapter 24), Anni Kajanus and Charles Stafford take a different approach, although they do seek to draw on insights from psychology and evolutionary science, but in this case from a conception of human evolution that sees it as inextricably both biological and social. They argue that it is possible to aim at meaningful large-scale comparison, informed by studies of evolved cognitive capacities and propensities, without resort to just-so stories and without losing ethnographic specificity, and they show that the technical concept of ‘punishment’ derived from evolutionary studies helps in the interpretation of rich ethnographic data on child development conducted in schools in Nanjing, China. Another area of interest has been the giving and receiving of favours. In relation to this, David Henig and Nicolette Makovicky in Chapter 25 pursue an exactly opposite analytical strategy to that which seeks to explain cooperation by showing that it is ‘really’ self-interest. Pervasive ‘economies of favour’ under socialism, which under conditions of chronic scarcity, misallocation of resources, and corruption were the only way people who were not well placed in party hierarchies could secure access to resources, and the persistence and even growth of such practices under post-socialist conditions, were initially explained in generally reductive, economistic terms. While not denying partial validity to such accounts, Henig and Makovicky follow Humphrey (2012) in pointing out that these economistic approaches miss the distinctive ethical qualities of the practices involved. For although corruption, clientelism, and informal economic exchange may well be substantially driven, for at least some participants, by economic motivations and by the pursuit of power, it is materially important that typically that is not how they are experienced, or how actions within such systems are performed. This is not just the point that bribes and so on often need to be carried out as a favour or gesture of friendship, lest they be rejected. There is also the much deeper

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point that acts of gratuity, spontaneity, and disinterested favour do occur. And in some socio-economic systems, such as these, they are structurally central and often key to people’s survival. How might we attend anthropologically to manifestations of spontaneity, free will, and favour? What forms do such expressions take? What are their social consequences? What are the appropriate ways to respond to them? And how do they relate to prevailing ethical ideas, values, and norms? In addressing these questions, Henig and Makovicky draw creatively on Julian Pitt-Rivers’s writings on honour and grace. This is a pattern of classic studies being seen in a new light and taking on new significance that is visible in a number of fields within the anthropology of ethics. If this interpretation of acts of gratuity thus seeks to rescue them from reductive interpretation in terms of a cynical maximizing logic, it must not be thought that the anthropology of ethics is all about seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles. I have already mentioned a number of instances in which it requires recognizing as ethical practices and forms of life with which anthropological writers and readers may find it extremely hard to empathize, let alone approve of them or even view them wholly dispassionately. Grasping the radical alterity of some forms of ethical life presents anthropologists with an ethical as well as an analytical challenge, insofar as it requires real effort of the moral imagination. This is obviously true, for example, of those Amazonian societies in which enemies are a constitutive feature of the ethical landscape and where enmity is a key ethical relation, where seduction is figured as a form of predation, and where both predatory and mortuary cannibalism often are part of the picture too. As Carlos D. London˜o Sulkin shows in ‘The Inimical Gaze’ (Chapter 26), relations of alterity and enmity constitute the central features of a distinctive ethical world. It can be appreciated that this is a form of ethical life at all only insofar as one frees oneself from the assumptions of the morality system, which expects to find it orientated to values that are already recognized in modern liberal societies as ‘morally good’. The intellectual challenge of grasping what some like to see as the ontological otherness of these moral worlds is difficult enough; appreciating that they are ethical worlds, in all their alterity, requires from us a normative as well as an intellectual openness. In those moral worlds, as is well known, people have highly consequential and morally charged relations with non-human others: not only spirits but also living animals (or animal species), trees, and even the forest itself. There are tricky interpretative questions to be asked about these ethical relations as to whether (and if so, in what ways) the nonhuman entities may be thought to be ethical subjects themselves, or whether it is instead humans that relate ethically to them. In Chapter 27, Rosie Jones McVey turns this question around: what can studies of human–animal relations bring to the fore about ethics that might be less salient and more difficult to discern in human–human

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Introduction

relations? She suggests that precisely because animals do not (at least in the way humans do) use language, these studies draw our attention to aspects of ethical interaction and response that are non-representational. But equally, they bring home to us how different these interactions are from so much of what is central to human ethical life. Thus these studies are productive in helping us to test the boundaries and integrity of what we think we know as ‘the ethical’ by drawing to our attention the fact that there is a necessarily representational dimension to human sociality, and ethics in particular, even as those studies also give us tools for studying the other-than-representational aspects of ethical life. If studies of ethical life organized around enmity and studies of human– animal relations present creative challenges for anthropology in thinking about ethics, Tanya Luhrmann suggests that the venerable topic of religion still presents perhaps the most testing challenge of all. In her chapter, ‘God’ (Chapter 28), Luhrmann argues that even in these days when some have begun to congratulate themselves on having become ‘post-secular’ (e.g. Furani 2019), the most demanding interpretative and ethical challenge is taking seriously not ontologically exotic worlds in Amazonia and elsewhere, or relations between humans and other species, but the spiritual lives and moral values of religious people who may live around the corner or down the road, such as evangelical Christians, devout Jews, or pious Muslims, who not only seek to live by God’s word but also form an intimate relationship with Him. The point Luhrmann makes, and which was missed by generations in the anthropology of religion that focussed on questions of belief, cognition, and the rationality of religious belief and practice, is that those to whom God ‘talks back’ are changed very intimately in that relationship, in how they see themselves, the kind of person they want to be in the relationship, and what they come to value: changed morally, that is, as deeply and intimately as in a marriage. ‘Faith’ for such believers, she points out, tends not to take the form of cognitive certainty so much as moral purpose and commitment in the face of uncertainty. ‘That is why faith takes effort’, she says, ‘and why faith changes the faithful.’ On this view the moral commitments that come with religious life are not best understood as assent to propositions or obedience to institutions, though they may include those. They are first of all consequences of being in a relationship with God: yet another illustration of the fundamental relationality of ethical life.

Part V: Institutional Life Luhrmann’s chapter on religious spirituality is placed under the heading of ‘intimate’ rather than ‘institutional’ life not because either Luhrmann or I are unaware that religion lives in institutions, but rather because the dimension of the study of religion that has so far been most conspicuously

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enriched by our heightened interest in the ethical has been in understanding the sense of intimacy religious people can have with God (or the gods). But it is also because the main theme that has emerged so far from ethicsinspired anthropological study of institutional life, as we see from the chapters in Part V of this volume, is much less relevant in relation to religion than it is to the institutions of the modern state, national and global markets, and the activities of globalized, cosmopolitan agencies and networks. That is the fact that in conditions of contemporary modernity (post-modernity, late modernity – choose your own preferred terminology here) such institutions are often seen and represented, by their optimistic advocates and also by their detractors who prefer to see things as ‘dark’, as being in some way removed from the ethical, even inherently amoral. Trade and commerce in capitalist markets, we are told, involve the pursuit of raw economic self-interest and the relentless pursuit of profit, and the moral subject is thinned out to the point where everyone is merely a self-exploiting entrepreneur. Others express the same observations differently: because anyone’s money is as good as anyone else’s, the market is a realm of freedom, unfettered by inherited status, irrational taboos, and social prejudice. Both sides agree that for good or ill, the market has no morality. Politics in the modern state, say the pessimists, is a realm of raison d’e´tat and contest for power, whereas for its proponents the liberal state that guarantees rights and procedural justice is neutral between communities and their clashing visions of the good life and morality. It stands outside and above the fray of identity and morality. Global philanthropy, humanitarianism, and human rights activism are revealed by sceptical analysis, under the surface, to be no more than politics by other means, and rest on dehumanizing reduction of the moral dignity of those who come within their purview. Is it the case that science is or at least should be ‘value free’ in the disinterested pursuit of truth; or is it dangerously amoral in its pursuit of merely instrumental control of the natural world? Normatively opposite conclusions may be drawn from the same postulate of amorality. Perhaps the most important and far-reaching lesson, and just for that reason the most difficult for even most anthropological readers to take on board, is that this notion of the condition of modernity as one from which ethics has been extracted is pervasively misleading. Robert W. Hefner’s wide-ranging comparative survey on the ethical dimensions of capitalism (Chapter 29) shows that capitalism is not a single moral (or amoral) order, but governed instead by markedly different ethical imperatives, and embedded in different moral relations, in different parts of the world. He contrasts, for instance, the socially embedded ‘ordinary’ ethics of commerce in maritime Chinese capitalism with the highly specialized and explicit discourse on the ethics of commerce in the Muslim world. He notes also that one distinctive feature of capitalism in liberal democracies is its propensity to generate (and for the state to

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Introduction

fund) notably diverse and entrepreneurial agencies critical on moral grounds of the basic premises of the system. This endows it with a remarkably vocal (if not necessarily especially cogent) public realm of moral debate. Paul Anderson and Magnus Marsden’s chapter (Chapter 30) moves us from global comparison of capitalist economic systems to the more bottom-up perspective of ethnographic study of the ethics of specific communities of traders, both long-distance and those operating in diverse societies. Such traders’ business activity is not just a matter of participation in ‘the market’, so that anthropological approaches built intellectually on concepts of exchange are insufficient. Such traders are also constrained by the necessity of dealing with state and other potentially violent agencies, and must practise diplomacy, manage problems of mistrust, and build and maintain relationships across cultural differences. Anderson and Marsden show that in order to describe the ethical lives of such traders, attention is required to a range of dynamics of ethical interaction, including conflicting values, ethical dilemmas, and forms of selfmaking. An extraordinarily rich efflorescence during the last couple of decades of studies of political activism has made clear the extent to which their politics rests on concerted ethical self-cultivation, both individual and collective. As Sian Lazar notes in Chapter 31, the concept of selfcultivation helps us to understand aspects of politics which ‘political’ analysis finds it hard to bring into focus because they elude analysis in terms of material interests or power competition. This includes the extent to which activist political agents constitute themselves as composite ethical subjects. China Scherz, in her survey of the recent anthropology of philanthropy (Chapter 32), notes the critique that has been directed in recent decades against global humanitarian and human rights organizations. But while much of the literature seems to attribute their faults to structural determination or political self-interest, perhaps hypocritically misrepresented as ethical concern, Scherz makes the important point that much is in fact due to the moral values that inform them: to precisely the cosmopolitan, globalist, humanist, and egalitarian moral doctrines and values that motivate the global elites who oversee these processes, values that are in large part shared by many anthropologists, including those who have so vigorously exposed the weaknesses of humanitarian organizations. Grasping the complexity of how these processes work requires questioning the distinction between the moral and the political, and between altruism and self-interest. In addition to questions of the effects of humanitarianism and philanthropy, Scherz considers them also as grounds upon which people cultivate forms of ethical subjectivity, and anthropology’s own complex relation to projects understood to be promoting some conception of the good.

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In his chapter, ‘Science’ (Chapter 33), Matei Candea shows how recent studies have brought to light the extent to which vocational detachment is not predicated on an absence of ethical value but is itself a distinctive ethical stance, and the subject of elaborate pedagogy. Candea also observes that the category of ‘science’, which when viewed through the lens of other forms of analysis appears to be an unproblematically unified category, from the point of view of the anthropology of ethics appears as designating a rather heterogeneous entity (and the same might be said of ‘politics’, ‘philanthropy’, and ‘commerce’). One final area within the anthropology of the ethics of institutional life, which stands out as somewhat distinctive in relation to the fields I have just briefly mentioned, is the study of socialism, both the historicalanthropological study of ‘really existing socialism’ in its heyday and the study of enduring socialist systems today. This stands out because although there was a strain of Marxist theory that denounced morality and moralism as bourgeois self-indulgences, in power, Marxist socialism was an extraordinarily overt, ambitious, and thorough attempt to remake the moral character of the citizens who lived under it. The communist parties who governed the socialist states of Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Castroist Cuba, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia carried out what were probably the most ambitious experiments in top-down ethical reform ever undertaken in human history, and the extent to which they inspired absolute devotion and sustained self-sacrifice (as well, of course, as requiring the sacrifice of others) is probably also unprecedented in scale. As Yunxiang Yan shows in our final chapter, there is much to be learned from re-analysing what happened under those regimes, with a view to what we can learn about the fundamental dynamics of the ethical dimension of human life, not only for general interest but also in relation to understanding the trajectory of states such the People’s Republic of China today, which has recently renewed and redoubled its ambition of creating moral subjects in its own image, even if various other aspects of its socialist inheritance have been to a greater or lesser degree side-lined. In light of this, and finally, it is perhaps interesting to consider briefly a general question that arises in relation to projects of ethical selfcultivation that are part of campaigns for political change. In a seminar at which I was present, Webb Keane presented material from his book, Ethical Life (2016), on a range of instances where projects of ethical selfcultivation were part of political movements, including consciousnessraising in American feminism, religious piety movements, and Vietnamese communism. The question was asked if it is possible or desirable to draw a distinction between cases which it makes sense to see as ethical movements on the one hand, and those that might better be regarded as indoctrination or forced ‘engineering of souls’ on the other. If the latter are not really ‘ethics’, how do we distinguish them from the former? Ethical projects are virtually never just dreamed up by individuals

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Introduction

for themselves. They have histories, are institutionalized, codified, and taught, and they come to most individuals as to some extent already formed and external to them: one ‘takes on’ a project devised and constructed by others. So, is there some form or degree of freedom that participants enjoy in relation to ethical projects that distinguishes them from political indoctrination? Or is ‘indoctrination’ just a name given to projects of ethical change of whose political objectives one disapproves? I think it is possible to draw a useful analytical distinction, and the case of feminist consciousness-raising helps in delineating it. As Keane describes, feminist consciousness-raising was introduced at a women’s liberation conference in 1969 by a group of radical feminists, who hoped that it would prove to be a tool for revolutionary mass mobilization. It was a new method, put together drawing on a number of sources and precedents, of inducing ethical reflection through organized interaction. In small groups, women exchanged accounts of their personal experience and engaged in collective re-examination of those experiences, reevaluating previously taken-for-granted aspects of their love affairs and marriages, domestic and family life, work, and experience of associational life, including political activism. As participants shared and compared what they discovered to be common experiences and emotions, they formulated new objectified categories that could become the basis for selfunderstanding and ethical judgement: ‘thick’ ethicized categories (on which see Chapter 5) such as ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘date rape’ that combined description and evaluation. These processes facilitated the shifting of responsibility for feelings of unhappiness away from the self to newly constituted structural entities such as ‘patriarchal society’. This technique was explosively successful in the wider women’s movement, and resulted in conceptual innovations that have become part of everyday language with powerful long-term effects on how sex and gender are lived and debated. It was successful also well beyond the radical feminist circles in which it originated, spreading rapidly and adopted in less radical women’s circles as well as gay rights and illness and disability groups and well beyond. Very soon, the practice became ‘part of the equipment of the general American therapeutic culture’ (Keane 2016: 190). People in a range of walks of life deployed the technique to pursue ends that were very different from those envisaged by its creators, and their participation led them to develop ideas, aspirations, and self-understandings that could be quite at variance with those the originators had hoped to foster. This was a cause of regret and disillusionment for some of its originating activists, but it is a critical point in relation to our question here. Although published accounts of Maoist struggle sessions were one set of sources drawn upon by its inventors, those inventors would not have been able, even had they wished, to replicate the coercive social relations that constituted those practices in Chinese communism and ensure that the outcomes of struggle sessions there stuck faithfully to Party doctrine. As

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consciousness-raising developed in the USA and then elsewhere, by contrast, the social relations in which it took place turned out, as many of the chapters in this volume would lead us to expect, to be essential to how the practice worked. It slipped its moorings, and rather than remaining an instrument for directing participants towards already-determined conclusions, it became a site of creativity and innovation, and enabled participants to develop in an increasingly wide range of unanticipated directions. Crucially, the fact of the matter of the specific experiences that participants brought with them powerfully affected the dynamics of interaction and therefore the conclusions generated in different contexts. As increasingly diverse groups of people, with increasingly diverse interests and concerns, adopted and adapted the techniques, consciousness-raising developed in ways that far exceeded and even in many cases ran counter to its progenitors’ intentions. And we might say that the difference between the instrument of political indoctrination that was at least part of its origins, and the polymorphous and promiscuously multi-purpose technique of ethical cultivation that it has become, lies precisely in the degree to which its outcomes cannot be known in advance. This points, I think, to something general and important about the ethical dimension of social life, and about the human condition.

References Ames, Roger T. 2011. Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Anscombe, G. E. M. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Philosophy, 33: 1–19. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2011. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: Norton. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 1998. ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes on the South African Postcolony’. American Ethnologist, 26: 279–303. Costa, Luiz and Carlos Fausto. 2010. ‘The Return of the Animists: Recent Studies of Amazonian Ontologies’. Religion and Society: Advances in Research, 1: 89–109. Curry, Oliver Scott. 2016. ‘Morality as Co-operation: A Problem-Centred Approach’, in Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen (eds.), The Evolution of Morality. Cham: Springer: 27–52. Curry, Oliver Scott, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse. 2019. ‘Is It Good to Co-operate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies’. Current Anthropology, 60: 47–69. Dare, Tim and Christine Swanton (eds.). 2020. Perspectives in Role Ethics: Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation. London: Routledge.

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Durkheim, Emile. 1973 [1914]. ‘The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Conditions’, in Robert N. Bellah (ed.), On Morality and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 149–63. Edel, May and Abraham Edel. 1968 [1959]. Anthropology and Ethics: The Quest for Moral Understanding. 2nd ed. Cleveland, OH: Case Western. Englund, Harri and James Leach. 2000. ‘Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity’. Current Anthropology, 41: 225–48. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1950. ‘Social Anthropology: Past and Present – The Marett Lecture’. Man, 50: 118–24. Faye, Emmanuel. 2009. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Firth, Raymond. 1951. ‘Moral Standards and Social Organization’, in Elements of Social Organization. London: Athlone: 183–214. Foucault, Michel. 1986 [1984]. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2. London: Viking. 2000. Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984 – Volume 3. New York: New Press. Furani, Khaled. 2019. Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gellner, David N., Oliver Scott Curry, Joanna Cook, Mark Alfano, and Soumhya Venkatesan. 2020. ‘Morality Is Fundamentally an Evolved Solution to Problems of Social Co-operation’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 26: 415–27. Gluckman, Max (ed.). 1972. The Allocation of Responsibility. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Henare, Amira, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.). 2006. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Heywood, Paolo. 2017. ‘The Ontological Turn’. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ontological-turn. 2022. ‘Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating “the Everyday” in the Birthplace of Fascism’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64: 91–121. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia’, in Signe Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge: 25–47. 2012. ‘Favors and “Normal Heroes”: The Case of Postsocialist Higher Education’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2: 22–41. Keane, Webb. 2014. ‘Affordances and Reflexivity in Ethical Life: An Ethnographic Stance’. Anthropological Theory, 14: 3–26. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1951. ‘Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification’, in Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (eds.), Towards a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 388–433. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311–32. 2012. ‘Ontologically Challenged’. Anthropology of This Century, 4. http:// aotcpress.com/articles/ontologically-challenged. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marett, Robert Ranulph. 1902. ‘Origin and Validity of Ethics’, in Henry Sturt (ed.), Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford. London: Macmillan: 221–87. Mathias, John. 2020. ‘Sticky Ethics: Environmental Activism and the Limits of Ethical Freedom in Kerala, India’. Anthropological Theory, 20: 253–76. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12: 161–84. McKearney, Patrick. 2021. ‘What Escapes Persuasion: Why Intellectual Disability Troubles “Dependence” in Liberal Societies’. Medical Anthropology 40: 155–68. in press. ‘At the Margins of Liberal Care: Ethics Between Dependence and Freedom’. Current Anthropology. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1994 [1887]. On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. ‘Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26: 126–66. 2016. ‘Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6: 47–73. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pocock, David. 1986. ‘The Ethnography of Morals’. International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, 1: 3–20. Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read, Kenneth E. 1955. ‘Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama’. Oceania, 25: 233–82. Robbins, Joel. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–62. 2015. ‘Ritual, Value, and Example: On the Perfection of Cultural Representations’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 18–29.

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2018. ‘Where in the World Are Values? Exemplarity, Morality, and Social Process’, in James Laidlaw, Barbara Bodenhorn, and Martin Holbraad (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject: Freedom, Creativity and Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 174–92. Sahlins, Marshall. 1993. Waiting for Foucault. Chicago, IL: Prickly Pear Press. Scheele, Judith. 2015. ‘The Values of “Anarchy”: Moral Autonomy among Tubu-Speakers in Northern Chad’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21: 32–48. Stafford, Charles (ed.). 2013. Ordinary Ethics in China. London: Athlone. Swanton, Christine. 2003. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralist View. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4: 469–88. Westermarck, Edward. 1906–8. The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas. 2 volumes. London: Macmillan. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Collins. 1992. Shame and Necessity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolf, Susan. 2015. The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfram, Sybil. 1982. ‘Anthropology and Morality’. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 13: 262–74. Wolin, Richard. 1993. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2016. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Part I

Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements

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2 Moral and Political Philosophy Hallvard Lillehammer

Anthropology and Philosophy A contemporary student could reasonably be forgiven for thinking that anthropology and philosophy are completely separate areas of study. To some extent, this impression is borne out by how these disciplines are presented in the specialist literature. Yet this hides a more interesting and complicated story. Prior to the institutional emergence of the social sciences, philosophers would not generally have considered anthropological questions as beyond the limits of their ‘subject area’ (see, e.g., Aristotle 350 BC/1988; Hume 1739/1978; Nietzsche 1887/1967). Until recently, anthropological thought was generally considered continuous with philosophical thought, in the sense that ethnographic and historical facts were recognizable to philosophers as part of what they ought to know about. Also, after the emergence of anthropology as a separate ‘discipline’, anthropologists and philosophers continued to make use of arguments and theories from the other discipline, even if this is not always explicitly recognized or reflected on (see, e.g., Westermarck 1906, 1932; Macbeath 1952; Brandt 1954, 1979; Ladd 1957; Winch 1958; Shweder 1991; MoodyAdams 1997; Lear 2006). In this chapter, I describe some of the areas of interaction and overlap as these are reflected in contemporary moral and political philosophy. In doing so, I shall set aside the history of how discussions in anthropology and philosophy have intersected over time (see, e.g., Hylland Eriksen and Sivert Nilsen 2001). I shall also be extremely selective in the choice of topics to illustrate the interface between anthropology and philosophy, taking as my examples a small number of issues that have recently preoccupied both disciplines. For example, I shall have little to say in this chapter about the philosophical reception of recent empirical work in moral psychology. (For a discussion of moral psychology and cognitive science, see Chapter 7 by Natalia Buitron and Harry Walker in this volume; see also Blackburn 1998; Doris 2002; Nichols 2004; Joyce

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2005; Prinz 2007; Haidt 2012.) Finally, I shall approach these issues almost exclusively through the lens of recent work in Anglophone philosophy. This is obviously not the only way to exhibit the links between these disciplines (cf. Das et al. 2014; Cahill et al. 2017). It is, however, one effective way of doing so.

Ethics, Morality, and the Political In accordance with recent convention, it is natural to divide moral philosophy into three intersecting branches, the integration of which would constitute a ‘system’ of philosophy in the sense of the systems produced by Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, or Hume, Kant, and Hegel in the modern. The first of these branches, sometimes called ‘moral theory’, investigates the nature and connections between basic concepts of ethical interpretation and criticism, including ‘the good’ (e.g. value or utility); ‘the right’ (e.g. duty or obligation); and ‘the virtuous’ (e.g. character or selfcultivation). The connection between moral theory and anthropology is revealed once we ask which of these concepts to employ as the central units in the interpretation of human behaviour. Thus, it has recently been argued that an anthropology focussed exclusively on rule-based concepts, such as duty or obligation (or what Bernard Williams (1985) called ‘the Morality System’), fails to make sense of the contextually situated agency and deliberation of ethical subjects and should therefore be supplemented by an anthropology of ‘virtue’, or ‘the good’ (see, e.g., Lambek 2008; Robbins 2013; Laidlaw 2013). At the same time, the idea of virtue, understood as a stable character trait, has been criticized by philosophers who are sceptical of appeals to character traits in the interpretation of human action (see, e.g., Harman 1999; Doris 2002). I explore these connections between anthropology and philosophy in the section titled ‘The Good, the Right, and the Virtuous’ later in this chapter. The second branch of moral philosophy, sometimes called ‘applied ethics’, investigates ethical problems that individuals, groups, or institutions face in the real world. Thus understood, applied ethics is a branch of social criticism, and is often focussed on complex and divisive issues such as assisted reproduction, the ethics of sex and gender, human rights, or other topics at the forefront of public debate (see, e.g., Frey 2005). The point of contact between applied ethics and anthropology extends beyond the fact that anthropology itself has an ethically ambiguous history when it comes to some of the issues it investigates, such as questions of legitimacy in a ‘post-colonial’ world (see, e.g., Mbembe 2005; Goodale 2017). Anthropologists also need to reflect on the terms they apply to describe the topics investigated, such as ‘regime’, ‘socialism’, and ‘neoliberal’ (see, e.g., Ortner 2016); and they need to do so with as much critical scrutiny as they apply to the main targets of their

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interpretation or criticism. The case for ‘applied ethics’ taking account of work in anthropology is equally overwhelming and arises partly from the danger of thinking that the main task of social criticism is to take a moral theory formulated in the abstract and then apply it without being sensitive to context (see, e.g., Singer 2011; Keane 2016). I explore this issue further in the section titled ‘Equality, Justice, and the Cosmopolitan Ideal’ later in this chapter. The third branch of moral philosophy, sometimes called ‘metaethics’, investigates the nature of ethical claims, including their cognitive status (‘Are ethical statements expressions of emotion?’); their epistemological aspirations (‘What is moral knowledge?’); and their metaphysical foundations (‘Is there a single true morality?’). The close connection between metaethics and anthropology is revealed once we ask how to interpret different social practices or groups (including our own), and how this question relates to the plausibility of ethical relativism (see, e.g., Plato 380 BC/1997; Westermarck 1932; Williams 1985; Rorty 1991; MoodyAdams 1997; Harman 2000; Prinz 2007; Wong 2006). For example, the extent to which we should expect to discover ‘sameness in difference’ or ‘difference in sameness’ is a question to which both the conceptual tools of the philosopher and the interpretative data of the anthropologist are equally relevant (cf. Keane 2016: 3–12, 260–2). I explore this theme in the section titled ‘But Isn’t It All Relative?’ later in this chapter. So far I have said very little about what is known as ‘political’ philosophy as opposed to ‘moral’ philosophy or ‘ethics’. This omission is indicative of a deep controversy within philosophy itself. On the one hand, political philosophy is often thought of as a branch of applied ethics, namely the branch that applies moral theory to public and other social institutions, such as the state (see, e.g., Rawls 1971; Dworkin 2011). This view of political philosophy has deep roots in modern philosophy, and in some parts of the Anglophone sphere it has, until recently, been largely dominant. On the other hand, the idea of regarding political philosophy as a form of applied ethics has been criticized by those who claim that the ‘moralism’ embodied in this notion involves a mistaken detachment of philosophical thought about politics from the real world, a detachment that results in a set of theoretical abstractions that fail to capture how the social world actually works (see, e.g., Badiou 2002; Williams 2007). According to this criticism, the correct place to locate political philosophy is ‘outside’ ethics as conventionally understood (see, e.g., Geuss 2005, 2010). I shall make no attempt to adjudicate this controversy here. (For a parallel controversy about the anthropology of ethics versus the anthropology of politics, see, e.g., Fassin 2015; Ortner 2016.) What I shall do instead is take as the focus of my discussion a set of issues from the recent literature on international justice that vividly bring out what this disagreement between ‘moralist’ and ‘realist’ approaches to political philosophy is about.

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The Good, the Right, and the Virtuous Moral theories provide conceptual tools for the interpretation of attitudes, actions, or states of affairs. As normally conceived, they are ‘normative’, as opposed to ‘descriptive’, theories of human behaviour. There is a vast literature that warns us against confusing ‘descriptive’ claims with ‘normative’ claims; inferring an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; or committing what has come to be known as the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’ (Hume 1738/1978; Moore 1903; Sinclair 2019). Yet in practice, descriptive and normative claims are always likely to be somewhat entangled, and anthropology is one of the areas of social thought where the presence of such entanglement is at its most poignant (see, e.g., Geertz 1973: 3–30, 140–1; Williams 1985). It is therefore worth considering what relevance (if any) a substantially normative moral theory might have for the anthropology of ethics and morality. One answer is that much work in anthropology itself has a substantially normative agenda, the concepts and assumptions of which can in principle be mapped onto one, or more, of the moral theories that have been articulated by philosophers. I shall return to this possibility shortly. A second answer is that normative assumptions can sometimes enter into description, explanation, or interpretation because what we are doing is ‘describing’ something as an approximation to (or ‘in the light of’) some normative standard, or ‘ideal’ (see, e.g., Hurley 1989; MoodyAdams 1997; Davidson 2004). There are at least three reasons why a project of interpretation could employ substantially moral assumptions along these lines. First, by making what is a simplifying assumption about the beliefs and attitudes of the people they are trying to understand, a theorist may succeed in improving their ability to predict or explain what those people are up to. Second, by making such an assumption, a theorist may succeed in making the behaviour of the people in question look less unfamiliar and more ‘like their own’. Third, by making such an assumption, a theorist may succeed in making the people in question come across as reasonable or good, and therefore less exotic or offensive, to an initially sceptical or biased outsider. In each case, the moral theories developed by philosophers can be of use in working out what the substantially normative assumptions in question might be. According to one way of interpreting the current state of moral theory, it is a contest between consequentialism and ‘the rest’ (see, e.g., Scheffler 1998). The issue in contention is what kind of ethical ideas (such as thoughts about ‘the good’) we should regard as basic in the interpretation of ethical thought, and whether we can interpret all other ethical ideas in those terms. Contemporary consequentialism is maximally ambitious in this respect as it seeks a foundation for all ethical thought in terms of one single idea, namely the idea of a good, or desirable, state of affairs (such as the reader of this chapter experiencing pleasure). Stripped of their bells

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and whistles, consequentialist theories can be thought of as having two parts (see, e.g., Pettit 1991): (i) a theory of desirable states of affairs (its ‘theory of the good’) and (ii) a theory about how these states of affairs should be realized (its ‘theory of the right’). On a consequentialist account, what is right is always a function – however complex – of the good. And a good consequentialist, it is natural to assume, is a person who (in some way or other) acts for the best. The idea that a theory as reductively simple as consequentialism is philosophically standard might strike contemporary anthropologists with a combination of horror and surprise (but see, e.g., Barth 1966; Kapferer 1976; Popkin 1979; Bailey 1996). Yet in other parts of the human sciences, from decision theory to economics, the interpretation of people in broadly consequentialist terms is frequently considered a default option for anyone seeking to interpret human action in terms of the rational pursuit of desires in light of beliefs. It is important to bear in mind, therefore, that in its purely schematic form the consequentialist framework is in principle consistent with the good consisting of virtually anything whatsoever, one content-neutral label for which is ‘utility’. (Hence its alternative name, ‘utilitarianism’.) Indeed, ever since the original rise to prominence of utilitarianism in the works of Bentham, Mill, and others, much attention has been devoted to the question of how to understand the consequentialist notion of ‘the good’; in particular, whether to restrict this idea narrowly to features of mental states such as agreeable experiences, or to include a wider range of desirable states of affairs as well, such as physical health, human perfection, social equality, individual freedom, or natural beauty (see, e.g., Feldman 2004). Understood as a normative theory, consequentialism is not a descriptive account of how people actually behave. It is a theory of how they ought to behave, or of that towards which they ought to aspire. Yet one of the most important features of consequentialism is that it does not automatically tell people to think like consequentialists. Indeed, in one of its most influential manifestations (associated with another one of its early champions, Henry Sidgwick), it does not even tell people to believe in consequentialism (Sidgwick 1907). This feature of the view derives from its schematic structure, from which it follows that what agents ought to do is think, feel, believe, or act in such a way that more good will be produced, whatever it takes. Another way of putting the point is to say that you cannot directly infer from a consequentialist criterion of right actions a decision procedure for how to guide your behaviour in the course of ethical thought. It all depends on what will, in fact, produce more good; and that could (at least in principle) be most effectively achieved by way of many, or even most people, rejecting consequentialism in favour of traditional moral codes, such as local religious precepts. Bernard Williams’s label for this idea, ‘Government House Utilitarianism’, is one that has stuck because of the

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way it brings out the paternalistic implications of a view that lets the average member of the ‘polis’ carry on as normal within structural constraints imposed by a class of ‘enlightened’ consequentialist rulers (Williams 1995: 153–71). In any case, consequentialism is consistent with a view of ethical thought according to which ethical insight is esoteric. It is an interesting question at the interface of anthropology and philosophy to what extent these and comparable ideas of ethical insight as esoteric have been similarly embodied in the self-understanding of ethical subjects in different times and places, and in the context of different cosmologies and systems of religious belief (cf. High, Kelly, and Mair 2012). Much of the philosophical controversy over consequentialism concerns its theory of ‘the right’, according to which (in some way or other) it always turns out that the ends justify the means. A potentially more interesting source of controversy from an anthropological perspective is the fact that in its schematic form consequentialism treats all goods as malleable (or in principle possible to aggregate) across time, place, persons, or institutions. To oversimplify somewhat, as long as there is more good in the world, it does not matter where that good resides, or with whom. Critics therefore complain that consequentialism fails to respect ‘the separateness of persons’ (see, e.g., Rawls 1971). The fact that this is thought of as a serious problem brings out that both consequentialists and their critics have tended to assume that persons really are ‘separate’ in the required sense, and that the fundamental locus of ethical value is the individual human being (or ‘soul’), understood independently of its relation to other individuals or a greater whole. (See, e.g., Parfit 1984 for an interesting exception.) I shall return to this issue, and its relevance for anthropology, in the next section. If moral theory is a dispute between consequentialism and ‘the rest’, then who are ‘the rest’? It is common to identify two separate strands of ‘non-consequentialist’ moral theory, widely known under the labels ‘deontology’ and ‘virtue theory’, respectively (see, e.g., Miller 2011). Where consequentialism takes the idea of ‘the good’ as basic, deontology takes the idea of ‘the right’ as being prior to (or at least as basic as) ‘the good’, thereby potentially inverting the interpretative schema employed by consequentialism and giving an account of moral goodness and virtue that makes essential reference to the idea of right action, or action according to the right principles (see, e.g., Kant 1785/1998). Although it is in principle neutral about the exact origin or source of these principles (but see Nietzsche 1887/1967; Anscombe 1958), arguably the most influential form of deontology in contemporary philosophy is a family of secular (or partially secular; cf. Taylor 2007) views focussed on the idea of hypothetical agreements made between rational individuals for the regulation of society in accordance with their independently specifiable desires or interests (cf. Gauthier 1986). According to one of the currently most influential versions of this idea, morality is a system of shared principles that no one

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already motivated to find such principles could reasonably reject (see, e.g., Scanlon 1998). The idea that morality constrains the behaviour of ethical subjects by prescribing a set of moral principles, at least some of which may be thought of as exceptionless or ‘absolute’, is arguably as old as ethical thought itself (cf. Durkheim 1912/2008; Irwin 2007). Yet, as critics have pointed out, the idea that a ‘morality system’ is derivable from some rational agreement or ‘contract’ is an historically quite specific manifestation of ethical thought, and one that finds its most important roots in the philosophical theories developed in Europe during the ‘early modern’ period (Williams 1985; Geuss 2001; see also Hobbes 1651/1994; Locke 1689/1988; Rousseau 1762/1997). Moreover, in its contemporary manifestations, this kind of contractualist deontology has a number of striking limitations that have led many critics to look elsewhere. At least three limitations of contractualist deontology are worth noting in the context of a discussion of the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. First, a contractualist deontology has comparatively little to say about the place in ethical thought of vulnerable persons or nonhuman beings who are not candidates for playing the role of contracting parties to rational agreements. One important area of ethical thought is therefore left ‘off stage’ by contractualist deontology (see, e.g., Held 2005). Second, although by focusing primarily on the question of what contracting parties cannot reasonably reject contractualist deontology might offer a viable account of what is morally permissible or impermissible (where what is impermissible is thereby obligatory to avoid), it does not offer an account of what, among permissible ways of carrying on, is good, better, or best. Thus, it has been argued that a deontological morality focussed exclusively on the notion of duty and permissibility will struggle to make sense of the fact that some things people admire or aspire to are so favoured precisely because they are beyond the call of duty, ‘supererogatory’, or otherwise excellent (see, e.g., Heyd 1982; Raz 1986). Third, the model of the ethical subject as an independent and rationally calculating individual whose commitment to other ethical subjects is conditional on their acceptance of principles agreed to as a matter of contract is not obviously suited to make sense of how individuals actually identify themselves as ethical subjects whose ethical lives are structured by special ties and particular histories, where the ties in question are often regarded as historically ‘given’, and are therefore not in any interesting sense ‘contracted’ into at all (see, e.g., Taylor 1989). This gap between model and reality gives rise to two further challenges for contractualist deontology. The first is that insofar as the model of the ethical subject as morally committed ‘subject to contract’ fails to describe a self-conception that is reflectively available to that subject, there is an aspect of intrapersonal ethical understanding that the model fails to capture (cf. Skinner 1969). The second problem is that insofar as the model of the ethical subject as morally committed

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‘subject to contract’ is meant to provide some critical leverage on the selfconception available to that subject, it puts the interpreter in a position where the conceptual tools employed are potentially at odds with those accepted by the people they are trying to understand. It is an interesting question whether some aspect of this problem is present in all anthropological fieldwork, even at the absolute limit where the ‘fieldwork’ in question is conducted on oneself (cf. Geertz 1973; Moody-Adams 1997). However that may be, the risk of ‘missing the point’ is always a real one where the model of the ethical subject employed by an interpreter diverges from that accepted by the subjects being studied, or (assuming that we can get our head around that notion) from what they are ‘really’ like. Thus, it is a frequent complaint about the deontological moral theory attributed to Immanuel Kant, for example, that it attributes to human beings a kind of ‘transcendental’ freedom, independence, and rationality that human beings do not actually have (see, e.g., Williams 1985; Kant 1785/1998). Whatever else one might think of it, contractualist deontology has the advantage of placing the concept of agency at the centre of attention, where entering a contract or accepting a principle is something that agents are assumed to be able to choose or decide freely, or for themselves. A different model of the ethical subject that equally puts the concept of agency centrestage is that of the ethical subject as a ‘subject of virtue’ (see, e.g., Lambek 2008; Laidlaw 2013; cf. Foucault 1997). This model of analysis, which in philosophy goes by the name of ‘virtue ethics’, takes as its primary focus the idea of an admirable disposition or character trait, the aspiration, cultivation, or manifestation of which is regarded as a basic factor in ethical interpretation (see, e.g., Hursthouse 1999; MacIntyre 1984; Foot 2001). The introduction in recent anthropology of the model of the ethical subject as a subject of virtue raises a number of questions that strike right at the heart of virtue ethics considered as a ‘third way’ in moral theory. Two of these questions are of particular interest here. The first is whether talk about admirable character traits attributes to people a set of stable dispositions they do not actually have. The second is how virtue ethics relates to consequentialism or deontology, and whether it is helpful to think of virtue ethics as a distinctive kind of moral theory at all. (The anthropology of virtue is treated at greater length in Jonathan Mair’s Chapter 3 in this volume. The anthropology of freedom is treated at greater length in Soumhya Venkatesan’s Chapter 10. For the relationship between virtue and freedom, see, e.g., Laidlaw 2013: 47ff.) The first question arises from studies in social psychology that claim to establish that the manifestation of ethical behaviour by human beings is highly situation specific and sensitive to contextual cues that are frequently not apparent to the subjects who display them and that are, in any case, often of dubious ethical significance (Doris 2002; Haidt 2012). Among well-known studies of the kind are the infamous Milgram

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experiments, where apparently normal people were enticed to inflict serious pain on others during the course of their professional activities (Milgram 1974), but also more recent experiments where responses have been elicited to actual or imaginary scenarios involving arbitrary subjects being hit and sometimes killed by lethal trolleys and the like (Greene 2013; cf. Keane 2016: 6ff.). The problem is that an ethics of virtue seems to presuppose the existence of character traits that experiments like these reveal either not to exist or to be ethically misguided. Recent work in anthropology not only speaks to but also contains an important critical perspective on arguments against virtue ethics based on scepticism about character traits. There are at least two reasons for this. First, as described in recent ethnographies of self-cultivation, it is a common assumption that virtue can be extremely difficult to achieve, or perhaps is not even fully achievable at all, for most human beings (cf. Humphrey 1997; Pandian 2009). It is no objection to virtue thus understood that ordinary people can be easily enticed to act contrary to virtue in a wide range of circumstances. Indeed, the fact that they are so easily enticed is arguably embodied at the very heart of much organized religion (see, e.g., Mahmood 2004; Hirshkind 2006). There might be very good reason for someone to pray five times a day, for example, if the aim is not to stray from a narrowly prescribed path of pious action, thought, or feeling. Second, another common assumption is that virtue is irreducibly social, and so – in many cases – not achievable by one person in isolation. Thus, Webb Keane has argued that social practices function as ‘exoskeletons’ that make our character traits more robust than they would be if they were to depend entirely on what is ‘within’ us alone (Keane 2016: 97). It is no objection to virtue ethics thus understood that individuals are easily enticed to act contrary to virtue in a wide range of ethically inhospitable scenarios. Indeed, the fact that people are easily so enticed is implicitly recognized in the idea that the achievement of virtue is only likely against a background of shared practices of socialization in which such enticements are either absent or explicitly proscribed (cf. MacIntyre 1984). And even if attributing stable character traits to real human beings does involve an element of idealization, this is hardly a compelling argument on its critics’ behalf (cf. Weber 1970). After all, it is not as if competing models of the ethical subject as a ‘utility-generator’ (consequentialism) or a ‘rational contractor’ (contractualist deontology) do not equally involve some degree of idealization. The second question concerns the classification of virtue ethics as a distinctive way, or ‘third way’, in moral theory. There is a good case for thinking it is not. First, both consequentialist and deontological theories have historically included a ‘theory of virtue’ that interprets the idea of self-cultivation on their own distinctive terms. Thus, consequentialists are likely to interpret virtuous self-cultivation in terms of someone striving to ‘act for the best’ (cf. Adams 1976). Deontologists are likely to interpret

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virtuous self-cultivation in terms of someone striving to live as ‘a person of principle’ (cf. O’Neill 1996). Second, the very idea of virtue is one that involves the idea of some good (namely a good way for people to be) towards which individuals, groups, and institutions are meant to aspire. To this extent, virtue ethics shares with consequentialism its teleological structure and can therefore be thought of as a species of the genus ‘ethics of the good’. This ambiguous feature of virtue ethics has direct implications for the anthropology of ethics and morality, where the label ‘anthropology of the good’ has recently been used to describe a model of interpretation that includes both consequentialist and virtue-theoretic elements (see, e.g., Robbins 2013), and which could therefore benefit from conceptual disambiguation. The case for disambiguation arises partly from a problem that is as old as philosophical discussion of virtue and the good itself (see, e.g., Irwin 2007). This problem can be summarized in the question: ‘What is virtue for?’, one that could be variously answered by saying that some virtue (such as generosity) is: (i) ‘its own reward’; (ii) a ‘means’ to the achievement of good things (such as happiness); or (iii) only present when the subject of virtue is in fact both displaying her virtuous character and reaping the rewards (such as being both generous and happy). Once we have these distinctions to hand, we can see that there is a sense in which the paths of different kinds of virtue ethics are importantly distinct. (See, e.g., Kraut 1989; Annas 1993; Irwin 2007.) On the one hand, there is an interpretation of virtue ethics that understands the value of character traits as being essentially a matter of their conduciveness to the promotion of independently specified (or ‘good’) states of affairs. On some interpretations of Aristotle, for example, virtue is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for living a ‘good life’. A virtue ethics of this kind is arguably indistinguishable (except in emphasis) from some versions of consequentialism. On the other hand, there is a kind of virtue ethics that understands the value of character traits as being a basic feature of ethical appraisal that does not need to be independently explained or justified in consequentialist terms. On some interpretations of Plato and the Stoics, for example, virtue is both necessary and sufficient for living a ‘good life’. A virtue ethics of this kind is clearly distinguishable from most versions of consequentialism. (It might also be the kind of virtue ethics that has the better claim to be an ‘ethics of freedom’; cf. Laidlaw 2013.) Either way, the task of accurately describing and evaluating such virtues (and vices) as have actually been thought to exist is one that any plausible moral theory will benefit from. An anthropology of the good can contribute to this task, whether it is focussed on virtue as interpreted in terms of some religious framework or along more secular lines (see, e.g., Faubion 2011; Lambek 2010; Lambek et al. 2015). One theme emerging from this discussion of moral theory is that of different theories approximating each other by explaining or incorporating the insights of the others. This is not an accident. The utilitarian Henry

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Sidgwick, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century, argued that when properly thought through the morality of ‘common sense’ will emerge as a version of consequentialism (Sidgwick 1874/1907). Derek Parfit, one of the most influential Anglophone moral philosophers writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, argued that when properly thought through consequentialism and contractualist deontology describe complementary ways of ‘climbing the same mountain’. (Parfit counted Kantian deontology as another attempt at the same summit, and therefore named his result the ‘Triple Theory’: Parfit 2011, 2017.) Yet if different moral theories shade into each other this way, what’s the point of having all of them? One response is to point out that moral theories provide alternative models of interpretation, the different versions of which may be variously suitable to capture the ethical experience of historically located ethical subjects on terms that they themselves would understand. The fact that there are alternative ways of doing so is no indictment if the different ways of conceptualizing ethical thought end up endorsing broadly the same forms of life. A second response is that they don’t shade into each other at all, or at least not perfectly so. In order to make it look otherwise, philosophers have arguably had to ignore crucial aspects of ‘common sense’ (in some times and places), or have had to twist the interpretation of ethical experience to cover up remaining issues of deep disagreement (cf. Huddleston 2016). Consider, for example, the various ways in which people have historically understood the allegedly selfevident claim that ‘All men are created equal’ (USA 1776; my italics). Recent work in anthropology has much to contribute to the evaluation of this response insofar as it is likely to put pressure on our ‘shared’ understanding of: (i) whom to include in ‘everyone’; (ii) whom to count among the ‘men’; (iii) what to understand by being ‘created’; and (iv) what to understand by the term ‘equality’.

Equality, Justice, and the Cosmopolitan Ideal In contrast to influential currents of European thought during the latter parts of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Dumont 1967/1980; Le´vi-Strauss 1974; Bourdieu 1977; but see also Fassin 2014), much of Anglophone philosophy during this period was narrowly individualistic, with the systematic study of the nature of collective and institutional agents, such as business corporations or ‘group minds’, only having gained prominence towards the end of the century (see, e.g., French 1984; List and Pettit 2011; Searle 2010). In the Anglophone tradition, the study of collective, corporate, or institutional entities has traditionally been the preserve of political philosophy, with particular focus on the nation state and its duties of primarily ‘distributive’ justice (Rawls 1971; Nozick 1974). This primary focus of political philosophy is currently a source of much controversy.

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Part of the controversy concerns whether the focus of interpretation is better confined to individual ethical subjects, or whether it is more helpful to focus on the structures, institutions, or collectives within which these ethical subjects are embodied as vehicles, incubators, or victims of power or constraint (see, e.g., James 1984; Young 2011). Another part of the controversy is focussed on the idea that political philosophy is a branch of moral philosophy; namely, the moral philosophy of large institutions, the nation state being the paradigm example of these (see, e.g., Geuss 2005). On this topic, there is a furious debate between those who subscribe to a so-called realist as opposed to a so-called ideal-theory interpretation of political thought (see, e.g., Galston 2010). To see what these debates are about, and to illustrate their significance for issues at the interface of anthropology and philosophy, it will help to have a concrete example to hand. There is no better example of the kind than the topic of social (including global) justice. Two paradigm examples of the dominant methodology in Anglophone philosophy can be traced to a particular moment in recent history, when the professional literature took a ‘practical turn’ in response to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. In his 1971 monograph A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls introduced a thought experiment in which the basic distributive principles of a reasonably ‘well-ordered’ society were to be arrived at by imagining mutually disinterested persons choosing such principles behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ in which they don’t know how well off they will be once the principles chosen are applied. (The reader may recognize this model as a version of contractualist deontology discussed in the previous section.) Rawls argued that the individuals in question would prefer a ‘risk-averse’ solution that guarantees that inequalities are only permitted if they benefit the worst off. In his 1974 monograph Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick objected that Rawls’s egalitarian solution is incompatible with the freedom of individuals to responsibly exercise their natural rights to control themselves and their property through continuous voluntary exchange. In effect, Nozick accused Rawls of licensing a form of ‘theft’ when the state appropriates the legitimately acquired benefits of the best off and redistributes them to the worst off. At roughly the same time, in his 1972 paper ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Peter Singer introduced the ‘Shallow Pond’ thought experiment. In this thought experiment, you are to imagine walking past a pond in which another person is drowning who can easily be saved at little or no cost to yourself. The question is whether you have a duty to do so. The expected reaction is to think that you should obviously save the drowning person, from which Singer argues – by parity of reasoning – that you should equally save any other person in dire straits, whether they are nearby or far away; drowning or dying of starvation, and so on, for example by making such moderate sacrifices as giving money to charity or supporting worthy causes in other ways. Later commentators have argued that with respect to vast numbers

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of afflicted people across the globe, the relationship of the average citizen in the affluent West is more like that of someone faced with a person drowning who either they, or some member of their community, have previously pushed into the pond in the first place. Some of these commentators have gone further and combined the conclusions of Singer’s and Rawls’s thought experiments into a single theory that interprets the duties of distributive justice on a global scale along the same egalitarian terms that Rawls proposed for individual states (see, e.g., Pogge 1989, 2008). The result is a comprehensive system of prescriptions for moral and political thought that applies equally across the world, conceived of as one gigantic and increasingly connected ‘global village’. What matters for present purposes are not the details of these and other similar philosophical thought experiments (cf. Kamm 2007; McMahan 2009). What matters here is to understand how these arguments are supposed to work, namely by deriving practical recommendations for individual and institutional behaviour in highly complex circumstances from schematic hypothetical scenarios interpreted in moral terms. There are at least three controversial features of this methodology, each of which is directly connected to questions of interpretation and criticism at the intersection of anthropology and philosophy (cf. Banner 2014). The first is that all else is never equal (cf. Fassin 2012). When people find themselves in a situation that is structurally similar to Shallow Pond, they will do so at the end of very different histories; with very different beliefs and expectations; with very different ways of describing the wider context; and with very different degrees of knowledge and confidence in their ability to make the right kind of difference by acting in one way or another. The anthropological study of particular situations where similar issues have arisen (e.g. of the way that actual historical persons have conceptualized their place in events of varying degrees of extremity) arguably offers some hope of protecting people from the distortions that can result when interpreting current and historical events in terms of abstract, schematic, and moralized templates like Rawls’s Original Position or Singer’s Shallow Pond (cf. Das 2007; Humphrey 2008). The second controversial feature is the generally individualistic way in which the dominant methodology has tended to cast the agents involved in its schematically described thought experiments. (It is an ironic fact that the subjects in Rawls’s original thought experiment were imagined to be ‘heads of households’.) This feature has the unfortunate potential to obscure from view that ethical subjects face moral and political decisions not only as arbitrary individuals but also as people who identify as participants in collective histories, religious communities, or ethnic groups, where relative to each of these different ‘social identities’ the question of who should decide, and on what basis, will often vary across conflicting but simultaneously embodied identities in the same situation (cf. Kymlicka 1991; Sandel 1998). As already noted, the philosophical

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literature on joint, collective, and corporate agency and responsibility in Anglophone philosophy has expanded considerably in recent years (see, e.g., French 1984, 1992; List and Pettit 2011; Bratman 2013; Gilbert 2014). Having said that, there are few signs of Anglophone philosophers abandoning their basic individualistic instincts; and even less of them seriously contemplating the idea of treating entities like information systems or other ontologically heterogeneous ‘networks’ as ethical subjects in their own right (cf. Latour 2005). One explanation for this might be the politically unfortunate entanglements with totalitarian ideologies that philosophical systems appealing to collective social entities like ‘spirit’, ‘Dasein’, or ‘the collective unconscious’ got themselves into during the twentieth century (see, e.g., Hegel 1821/1992; Heidegger 1927/1978; Jung 1969; Berlin 1952/2014). More relevant for present purposes is a concern about the legitimacy of power; in particular, the power accorded to collective or corporate agents in virtue of assigning them the status of ethical subjects. If we are really to assign institutional systems (such as multinational corporations) moral duties towards the individuals their activities affect, then what – if anything – are we thereby committed to assign them by way of moral rights against those individuals? (As ‘legal persons’, corporations are granted both legal rights and duties in many jurisdictions.) A third explanation is the widely held view that individual subjects can be morally responsible not only for what they do but also for what they participate in (see, e.g., Arendt 2003; Kutz 2000). The issue here is that in moving our focus from individuals to collectives or structures we shall only succeed in ‘throwing the ethical baby out with the bathwater’ by letting ethically responsible individuals ‘off the hook’. In the background of this and similar concerns is a deeply rooted assumption in modern moral philosophy that concepts such as right, duty, and responsibility only make sense if interpreted in terms of goings-on that are somehow internal to individual human beings who are – at least potentially – rational, in control of themselves, mutually independent, and otherwise free from external constraint (see, e.g., Kant 1785/1988). There is currently a growing literature in moral philosophy that explores the potentially distorting defects of this view, and how it has tended to underplay the social dimensions of moral agency and responsibility (see, e.g., Strawson 1962; Williams 1992; Hutchison, MacKenzie, and Oshana 2018; see also Laidlaw 2013 and Venkatesan’s Chapter 10 in this volume). A third controversial feature of the dominant methodology is that far from merely ‘abstracting’ from context, it also tends to idealize the relationships between individuals by describing them in normatively tendentious terms, for example as mutually independent rational individuals ethically constrained (only) by the voluntary exercise of natural rights over self and property. This is an assumption that, in Raymond Geuss’s provocative formulation, is then left ‘flapping and gasping for breath like a large moribund fish on the deck of a trawler, with no

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further analysis or discussion’ (Geuss 2010: 64; see also Gray 1989, 2000. Geuss’s complaint was directed at Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia). The point is that by interpreting the relationship between real historical actors in these idealized terms, the theoretical schema fails to do justice to how, at any given time and in any given place, all social thought is practically embodied in a complex psychosocial ecology, the precise contours of which are rarely visible from the philosopher’s armchair. The recent anthropology of ‘ordinary ethics’ vividly illustrates this point. Thus, when in Life and Words Veena Das describes how women are especially vulnerable to rape and murder in conditions where they have to leave the comparative safety of their dwellings in order to defecate, the issue is not so much that an abstract theory of justice is in principle incapable of addressing the issue (of course it could) as that from the perspective of abstract idealization the significance of something so ordinary as the passing of bodily waste is unlikely to be given much of a hearing among theorists whose primary interest is in how to ‘divide the cake’, or similar questions of traditional concern in recent political philosophy (Das 2007; cf. Levinas 2005). The trade-off between abstraction and context cuts both ways, however. This point is readily observable in recent anthropological discussions of multiculturalism, global justice, human rights, and the interpretation and criticism of the ‘post-colonial world order’ (see, e.g., Asad 2003; Goodale 2017). Much as one has to strongly agree with the compelling diagnoses contained therein of the blinkered prejudice, hypocrisy, internal inconsistency, and covert oppression embodied in various manifestations of this ‘world order’ (see, e.g., Rabinow 1996; Mbembe 2001; Zˇizˇek 2014), the ethical terms in which these diagnoses are standardly articulated are often the very same terms in which the distinctively modern, Western (and sometimes Christian) culture that is held responsible for this ‘world order’ has historically articulated its universalistic, or cosmopolitan, ethical aspirations (see, e.g., Appiah 2007; Lillehammer 2014a, 2014b). These are ethical aspirations the articulation of which owes more than a trivial amount to the kind of philosophy that finds its expression in thought experiments like Rawls’s veil of ignorance and Singer’s Shallow Pond (cf. Rousseau 1762/1997; Kant 1793/1996). Exactly what to make of this in practice, such as when interpreting appeals to human rights from groups who explicitly reject the assumptions that have given human rights discourse its wide social currency in the first place, is a notoriously difficult question to answer (see, e.g., Kuper 1994). Whatever one makes of it, there is no doubt that while a conceptually perspicuous anthropology has the potential to contribute to progress in moral philosophy in virtue of correcting for a range of common distortions or omissions, an empirically tractable moral philosophy has the potential to contribute to progress in anthropology in virtue of being conceptually perspicuous.

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But Isn’t It All Relative? Is there a single true morality? The ethnographic and historical data might be thought to speak for themselves. The ubiquity of ethical difference and disagreement presents a formidable obstacle to the view that if only we get straight about what we really (dis)approve of, we will realize that at bottom we really (dis)approve of the same things. Whether it be the ethics of what we kill and eat (e.g. in vegetable, animal, or human form); how we manage and reproduce our families (e.g. gender norms; the number and kinds of partners we have; what counts as ‘our own’ children); or how different social groups relate to each other (e.g. as ‘equals’, hierarchically, or as little as possible), the claim that there is a single and unified object of thought called ‘morality’ is one that stretches the limits of empirical plausibility. Moreover, the fact that people often tend to approve of a certain kind of life because they happen to live that life as opposed to living that life because they approve of it is evidence that whatever people get up to in cultivating an ethical sensibility, this is not a matter of grasping some single and unified body of truth called ‘morality’ that exists independently of our contingently evolved psychology and social practices (Mackie 1977; Joyce 2005). Short of drawing the sceptical conclusion that there is no such thing as getting it right or wrong in ethical thought at all, the most reasonable view might seem to be some form of relativism, such as the claim that actions are right or wrong (or people good or bad) only in relation to the norms that are approved of within a given group, society, or culture (Harman 2000; Prinz 2007; Velleman 2015). The problem of relativism is one of philosophy’s interminable puzzles which arguably goes back as far as the subject itself, as witnessed by Plato’s discussion of Protagoras’s claim in the Theaetetus that ‘man is the measure of all things’. Yet even if there is no prospect of conclusively resolving this puzzle, there are other important questions nearby on which progress can be made, and to which both anthropology and philosophy can speak in illuminating ways. To illustrate this, it may help to draw some simple distinctions that are easily missed in discussions of ethical difference and disagreement in both disciplines, sometimes to deleterious effect. The first distinction is that between relativism as a ‘metaethical’ claim and relativism as a ‘normative’ claim. Metaethical relativism says that there is no single true morality. Normative relativism says that it is wrong or inadvisable to judge people by standards that they, or their culture, would not accept. (We can imagine the latter claim being made by someone who defends the value of intercultural accommodation.) The importance of drawing this distinction is that accepting one of these claims does not logically force you to accept the other (cf. Williams 1972). Thus, I might propound a culture of accommodation whereby no one is judged by norms rejected by their own culture because intercultural

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accommodation is an attitude required by ‘the single true morality’ (cf. Mead 1928). In other words, I may accept normative relativism but reject metaethical relativism. Moving the other way, I might think that there is no single true morality while simultaneously rejecting an attitude of intercultural accommodation, instead judging all people according to the norms of my own culture. This would be consistent if the norms of my own culture forbid me from judging people from other cultures with conflicting ethical norms by the norms of their own culture. In other words, I may accept metaethical relativism but reject normative relativism. It is hard to overstate the significance of this distinction when thinking about interpreting ethical thought. First, the truth or otherwise of metaethical relativism does not in itself tell you what attitude you (e.g. a practising ethnographer) should take towards the ethical norms of the people you are trying to understand. In practice, you have no alternative but to employ your own judgement in deciding what to think (e.g. whether to judge others by your own standards; play along; suspend disbelief; or ignore the issue as far as possible). Moreover, this exercise of judgement is one that will inform your actions whether you think about it or not. In the choice of what groups to study (e.g. perpetrators of genocide); how to study them (e.g. observing their killings without interfering); how to describe what they are doing (e.g. the slurs with which they describe their victims); what to make of it all (e.g. as an alternative, or revolutionary, ‘lifestyle’); and how to disseminate the results (e.g. online or in a popular science bestseller), ethical questions arise, whether recognized or not, both during fieldwork and beyond. While answering these questions does not depend on first having an answer to the interminable puzzle of relativism, it does involve an exercise of ethical thought (e.g. concerning at what point a ‘participant’ stance is no longer ethically advisable to adopt in practice; see, e.g., Li 2008), or what distance to adopt between the vocabulary employed in interpretation and the vocabulary employed by the people interpreted (see, e.g., Geertz 1973: 3–32, 126–41, 193–233; 2001). Metaethical relativists sometimes appeal to the fact of moral difference and disagreement as data in support of the argument that ethical systems or practices are irreducibly plural and distinct (see, e.g., Prinz 2007). Yet this only raises the question of how it is possible for observers external to those practices to understand them in the first place (see, e.g., MoodyAdams 1997). Ethnographic data frequently bring to light surprising similarities and analogies that permit an external observer to make at least minimal sense of the norms and values studied on their own terms. This may happen, for example, in the context of studying a practice of eating human flesh, where this practice is heavily ritualized and understood to involve some kind of sacrifice (and not only by the person eaten (see, e.g., Conclin 2001; Laidlaw 2013)). Once we bear in mind that the intelligent ethnographer does not need to endorse every aspect of the practice

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observed in order to interpret it (no more than I need to endorse every aspect of my colleague’s hostility in order to understand what she’s up to when she blanks me in the corridor), the path is clear for an ethnographically informed challenge to the relativist claim that human moralities are irreducibly plural and distinct. Moreover, insofar as this latter claim has traditionally been supported with reference to the persistence of ethical difference and disagreement as depicted against a background of ‘descriptive or ‘natural’ facts about humans that are somehow assumed to be independently known, a direct engagement with anthropology can help to identify at least some ways of moving beyond the interminable puzzle of relativism in its traditional form, even if this engagement stops short of embracing what anthropologists know as ‘the ontological turn’, and according to which the idea of a single world on which different ethical beliefs provide different perspectives is itself put in question (see, e.g., Viveiros de Castro 1998; Holbraad 2009). On this, as on so many issues at the intersection of the two disciplines, both anthropologists and philosophers can find inspiration from some surprising quarters (see, e.g., Quine 1969; Goodman 1978; Putnam 1982). A second important distinction is that between relativity and context dependence. Let’s understand relativism as the claim that there is no single true morality, only irreducibly plural and distinct ones. Context dependence is the claim that the norms and values that apply to people (and how those norms and values apply) are dependent on, and so ‘relative to’, the particularities of social and historical context. Context dependence does not imply relativism as that view was just defined. Failure to attend to this fact is a potential cause of much confusion. Some element of context dependence is an invariant fact about all norms and values, the interesting question being how context dependent those norms and values are. For example, the Decalogue tells us not to kill, but philosophers and theologians have been working to specify the range of acceptable exceptions to this (such as when it is permissible to kill in self-defence) virtually since its reception (see, e.g., Aquinas 1265–74/1989). Even a high degree of context dependence is consistent with the claim that ultimately (possibly at some very high level of abstraction) there is a ‘single true morality’ that applies equally in all circumstances, but differentially so. Thus, on the ‘parametric universalist’ view propounded by T. M. Scanlon, all moral claims concerning right and wrong are ultimately explicable in terms of a basic set of principles that no one seriously interested in coming up with a system of principles for how to live together could reasonably reject (Scanlon 1998). Suppose that everyone so motivated would agree to a principle that prescribes the reduction of avoidable pain during the final stages of life. What this would actually involve in any given situation would obviously have to be very different in a high-tech urban society with sophisticated systems of palliative care than in a low-tech society of nomadic existence. It does not follow that the two practices of end-of-life care are in serious

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disagreement. Nor does it follow that the extent of agreement between the two practices will be obvious to the untrained eye. Moreover, while the truth of parametric universalism would provide a fool-proof guarantee that any apparently residual disagreement is ultimately resolvable in principle, the ethnographic task of working out what any case of apparent disagreement amounts to does not depend on being able to decide on the truth or falsity of parametric universalism in advance. The task of deciding the latter question is a project so abstract and esoteric as to be likely to play at best a marginal role in the interpretation of actual social practices. What the distinction between relativity and context dependence teaches us is that whether or not to stop applying ‘universalist’ pressure at some point of apparent difference or disagreement always involves a decision; a decision that will sometimes have to be sensitive to ethical considerations, such as what to make of the way in which the practice under consideration conceives of itself. For example, we might ask whether the practice in question can be plausibly interpreted as including any universalistic aspirations on its own behalf, or whether the task of adopting a conflicting ethical perspective is something its participants could undertake without engaging in wilful ignorance or self-deception, or otherwise losing their ‘grip on reality’. If the answer to either question is negative, it might be argued that continued insistence on pursuing the question of ‘who is right’ would be expressive of an ill-informed, narrowminded, provincial, or otherwise inadvisable attitude that would be better abandoned in favour of the suspension of judgement, or of what Bernard Williams called a ‘relativism of distance’ (Williams 1985; for a contrary view, see Moody-Adams 1997). A third distinction is that between relativism and indeterminacy. Whereas ethical claims are relative if they can correctly be made only relative to the norms of a given system or practice, ethical claims are indeterminate if there is no fact of the matter whether they are correct or not. There are at least three facts to bear in mind about the possibility that some ethical claims are indeterminate. The first is that indeterminacy is not peculiar to ethical claims but is observable wherever human thought is subject to vagueness. Consider, for example, how the different colours shade into each other on the colour spectrum, with some shades not normally being counted as being one determinate colour or another (Williamson 1994). The second is that the presence of indeterminacy in ethical thought (such as in hard cases) does not imply that there are no determinate answers to be had – much less that there are no better and worse answers anywhere (cf. Banner 2014). In some cases, the issues in question are so complex and difficult that the most reasonable attitude to take is one of uncertainty about what to think, as opposed to certainty that there is nothing to think (Dworkin 2011). The third fact to bear in mind is that indeterminacy can obtain both within and across different ethical systems or practices. In the first case, there might be no

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determinate fact internal to the norms accepted by a given society whether assisted reproduction involving mitochondrial donation is permissible. Maybe no one in the relevant society has ever thought about human reproduction involving three ‘biological parents’, and existing practice fails to set a precedent either way. Even so, when the possibility presents itself, the people involved will have to decide what their reproductive norms are going to be, as countries across the globe were actually in the process of doing at the time of writing (see, e.g., Clarke 2009). In the second case, there could be no determinate fact about which, among two or more conflicting sets of ethical norms, is preferable or correct. This possibility is arguably easiest to contemplate in cases where the systems or societies in question are located at a great distance from each other, whether conceptually or in space and time (see, e.g., Sreenivasan 2001). As Bernard Williams argued, in the context of the world as we currently have it the ethical systems and practices we actually observe are generally so interconnected that the issue of relativism should rarely arise, or, if it does (as when confronting a so-called hyper-traditional society), it is arguably ‘too late’ (Williams 1985: 158–9). Be that as it may, it would still be the case in any such situation that people have to decide what to think, say, or do, and that in some cases the answer to this question could be (within some suitable range) indeterminate. Similar questions arise when we compare the conflicting demands experienced by individuals and groups who embody the norms of more than one ethical system or practice within a given society, such as fellow citizens who recognize their affiliation both to a secular ideal of individual autonomy and a potentially conflicting ideal of communal authority, and who are therefore faced by what David Wong has called a ‘fact of ambivalence’ (Wong 2006). According to Wong, this ‘fact’ is symptomatic of a situation in which the ethical subject will experience the pull of competing ethical claims that may each be correct relative to some basically acceptable ethical framework, but where the choice between these frameworks is itself indeterminate. Regardless of the overall plausibility of this view, Wong’s moderate relativism arguably goes a long way towards capturing one important feature of the sense of vertigo that some people have felt in the face of serious ethical dilemmas that seem to be without a uniquely overriding answer (cf. Sartre 1946/2007; Derrida 2005). It may also go some way towards explaining the apparently paradoxical experience, sometimes felt in response to social sanction or punishment, that although what someone did was obviously morally inappropriate or transgressive, it was nevertheless neither bad nor (possibly) wrong (cf. Stafford 2010). Wong is one of the few contemporary Anglophone philosophers to have seriously theorized the idea of ambivalence, or the fact that as ethical subjects we are prone to be plural or divided against ourselves as we move between different social roles (e.g. sibling versus

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professional); social expectations (e.g. legal redress versus claims of personal pride); or foundational worldviews (e.g. being a citizen of secular society and a pious believer in religious truth (cf. Weber 1970; Gray 2000; Berlin 2002). Recent work in anthropology contains valuable resources for improving our understanding of this aspect of ethical experience, in particular as it relates to the reflective self-understanding of the ethical subjects involved (see, e.g., Robbins 2004; Laidlaw 2005; Rogers 2009). There is some evidence that the underlying lessons of this work are independently recognized in some parts of ‘mainstream’ philosophy as well (see, e.g., Applbaum 1999; Coates 2017). Traditionally, however, the Anglophone philosophical canon has tended to regard it as an aspiration, if not a requirement, that people strive to iron out ambivalence or conflict in their ethical selves (cf. Seligman and Weller’s Chapter 15 in this volume; see also Plato 380 BC/1997; Kant 1785/1988; Frankfurt 2004; Lukes 2008). In its most extreme version, the claim is that a commitment to consistency and coherence is part of what constitutes a fully developed human morality, and is therefore in a sense what makes us what we are (Korsgaard 2009). In spite of some valiant attempts to temper the most coercive ambitions of this tendency (see, e.g., Hume 1739/1978; Nietzsche 1887/1967; Freud 1995; Berlin 2002), its underlying commitment to unity and coherence continues to exercise a formidable pull in moral philosophy. The increasing body of ethnographic work that reveals not only the existence of but also the potential virtues embodied in ethical lives that neither achieve nor seriously aspire to this kind of coherent unity presents a noteworthy challenge to this philosophical tendency (see, e.g., Boellstorff 2005, 2008). In the end, it may sensibly be asked who it is that gets to speak about all of this, and what actually gets heard when they do. The question is partly epistemological: why should we assume that external observers are able to fully understand the experiences they purport to describe (e.g. cultural ambivalence, prejudice, discrimination, or oppression) if they have never been subject to those experiences themselves, or (as in the case of ‘participant observation’) have not been subject to them as much, as often, or in the same way as the people studied? The question is also ethical and political: why should we accept that external observers are well placed (or have the right) to give an account of other people’s experiences, especially where this account is assumed to take the place of the first-personal accounts of the persons described? In each of these forms, the question presents a challenge to anthropologists and philosophers alike, insofar as original voices are vulnerable to being ignored, misunderstood, marginalized, trivialized, silenced, or otherwise treated with insufficient respect. (For feminist critiques along these lines, see, e.g., Smith 1974; Harding 1991; Fricker 2007; for criticism, see, e.g., Bar On 1993; Longino 1992; see also Luka´cs 1971; Kuper 1994.) At the same time, it is an inescapable assumption of any serious

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study of social life that human beings are in principle able to say something sensible about how things are with others, in spite of the social distance or asymmetric power relations that may separate them. The alternative is a form of interpretative solipsism that is likely to be both intellectually incoherent and practically self-defeating.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the editor and three anthropological readers for their helpful comments on a draft version of this chapter.

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3 Virtue Ethics Jonathan Mair

Introduction Anthropologists have often marvelled in print – one could even say they have evangelized – about the malleability of the human being and the power of socialization to transform the human organism into myriad forms. Bodies, their abilities, the use of the senses, the direction of attention, the use of the memory, tastes, values, sex, and sleep, not to mention the life course and its relation to instituted social roles: all these human characteristics and many others besides are, we know well, subject to dramatic variation. Despite broadcasting this observation far and wide, as if it were very surprising (granted, it is, to some of us), we anthropologists have acted as if the people we study were ignorant of the fact. We explain how they take things for granted as part of their habitus, and so on. The premise of my argument in this chapter is that this assumption is an enormous and consequential mistake. It is clear from ethnographic work as well as literary traditions that people across time and from diverse cultures are far from ignorant about human variation. On the contrary, many traditions incorporate explicit reflection on the possibilities and challenges that the variation and malleability of the human organism bring to everyone, everywhere. Since the malleability of human being depends to some extent on human action and can lead to different results, the mere existence of the possibility invites judgements about which actions to take (to promote transformation in one direction or another) or about which results are to be celebrated and which to be regretted. This makes it an ethical issue. These two elements make up my working definition of virtue ethics: (1) the recognition of the malleability of human beings, and (2) the idea that some outcomes of this process are good (happy, virtuous) and others regrettable (vices).

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Let us call this ‘virtue ethics as such’ to distinguish it from any particular, historical version of virtue ethics. My aim here is not to argue for a single correct definition that will displace all others. A pragmatic definition, which serves the purpose of revealing something anthropologists have been slow to see, is all that is required. The combination of malleability and judgement is so hard to escape, so fundamental to the human condition, that it would take rather special conditions to allow people to convince themselves virtue ethics in this sense is not an important aspect of life. Yet anthropology for most of its existence practically ignored virtue-ethical concerns, and in fact some of the discipline’s core theories about culture, the body, and morality made virtue ethics almost impossible to notice. I touch on the story of how that came about later. As anthropologists of ethics have observed, a similar and related fate had overtaken moral philosophy until the development of the study of virtue ethics by figures such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, and others in the second part of the twentieth century. I argue, as others have done, that drawing on that literature has been, and will continue to be, useful precisely because it is engaged in trying to throw off certain prejudices that are, or were, shared by modern philosophy and modern social sciences. On the other hand, there are some dangers inherent in relying on modern philosophical literature, which I also outline. That might be thought to leave us facing a choice. On the one hand, we might choose to rely on the categories provided by the modern philosophical literature on virtue ethics at the cost of tacitly adopting its ethnocentrisms. On the other hand, we might choose to reject it altogether, sticking close to the emic categories that emerge ethnographically in whichever setting we happen to be studying, preserving local conceptual integrity, perhaps at the cost of leaving our theoretical prejudices unexamined. I propose a way of steering a course between these two unsatisfactory options, and in the second part of the chapter I provide some examples of how it might work. In short, I propose that a comparative anthropology of virtue ethics as such can be built as a catalogue of problems that face anyone who engages in evaluative deliberation about human malleability. The problems I have in mind are not substantive questions about the universal nature of the virtues (What is courage? What is wisdom?) so much as the formal ones (What is the relation between different virtues? How does virtue correspond to, or crosscut, categories of personhood and community?). To my mind, the substantive questions will only really be posed satisfactorily, let alone answered, to the extent that we have addressed some of the formal questions. In her ‘Non-Relative Virtues’, Martha Nussbaum (1988: 39) proposes ‘a sketch for an objective human morality based upon the idea of virtuous action’ inspired by Aristotle’s own comparative study of ethics in different societies in the Politics. Nussbaum argues that Aristotle’s ‘analysis of

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the Virtues gives him an appropriate framework for these comparisons’. If I may be so bold as to gainsay both Aristotle and Nussbaum, that seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse. If our aim is to understand multiple societies, our framework, or parts of it, will probably have to be the product of comparison rather than the basis of it. Or rather: it is my argument in this chapter that this is the case, as a matter of fact. For these reasons I take my inspiration here more from Michel Foucault’s work on ethics than from the modern Anglophone virtue ethicists. Foucault proposed a list of four aspects that any project of ethical formation must address, aspects that I think can usefully be thought of as formal rather than substantive. I begin by addressing those four aspects. However, I aim to show how they might be extended, in both number and depth, by admitting to the discussion comparative cases drawn from a wider range of societies than those on which Foucault’s discussion is based.

Is Virtue Ethics Even Ethical? Before going further, it seems important to address a question that will certainly arise for some readers – whether virtue ethics is ethical at all. The anthropology of ethics has given rise to a number of critiques, from within as well as without, and they generally address issues that are connected with virtue ethics, in the broad sense that I have given it here. It is precisely the concern in the anthropology of ethics with people’s reflection on and evaluation of forms of life, and the idea that they can make responsible choices in relation to the lives they live and the values they live by, that has riled detractors. It has been argued variously that these concerns are not ethical, in the sense that they are outside of the scope of ethics, that they are unethical, and even that anthropologists who focus attention on these things are immoral. There are a number of grounds for these arguments. One strand of reasoning is that ethical cultivation is a concern only of elites of one kind or another and is a distraction from the real substance of ethics, which is about caring for the suffering, something that happens among and between the oppressed, where power relations are not a factor. Reflection on elevated values and aesthetically refined forms of life is something only available to those who enjoy the luxury of leisure. It is selfregarding and self-centred, the opposite of the ethical. Ethical cultivation is, on this view, at best a vain pursuit of a minority that has nothing to do with ethical life. At worst it is a way for self-righteous bearers of cultural capital to lord it over the time-poor masses, symbolic violence through which exploitative power relations are expressed. Anthropologists who treat self-cultivation as an important object of study and dignify it as ‘ethics’, the conclusion goes, inflict a double injury on the humble,

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downplaying the importance of the spontaneous, unreflective ethics of care, and implying that they are less than ethical because they don’t have the resources to aspire to virtue. (For a good example of some of these arguments, see the contributions by Veena Das and Hayder Al-Mohammad to the 2013 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (Al-Mohammad et al. 2015).) Taking a different tack, other critics allege that holding oneself responsible for one’s own character is something that is uniquely characteristic of the ‘neoliberal era’ (e.g. Song 2009; Hoffman 2010; Zigon 2011). Either way – whether self-formation is seen as the preserve of religious, moneyed, gendered elites or as a product of contemporary capitalism – critics have argued that the upshot of taking it seriously as a field of ethical action is to side with power and divert attention from what really matters: injustice, inequality, exploitation, and power. It has even been alleged, in a recent polemical pamphlet, that the anthropology of ethics functions as an ‘anti-politics machine’ – its practitioners the stooges of neoliberal capitalism – because it focuses on the responsibility of the individual to reflect freely on abstract values, supposedly independently of social, economic, and political context (Kapferer and Gold 2018; Friedman 2018). One question lurking in the background here is the definition of ‘ethics’. But more importantly, all these arguments are based on assumptions about ethical formation (and by implication virtue ethics) that it seems to me are easily disposed of For one thing, the claim that either the anthropology of virtue ethics in the broad sense outlined earlier, or the kinds of ethical practices it studies, aim at the erasure of political context simply does not stack up. Anthropologists of ethics have explicitly, and from the beginning, argued against any such de-politicization (see, e.g., Keane’s (2021) recent re-statement). Even Aristotle, whose ethical teachings as they have come down to us are relatively abstracted from social context, emphasizes that successful cultivation of the virtues depends on the privilege of freedom and leisure. Indic religious traditions, various forms of which have been the subject of studies in the anthropology of ethics, frequently emphasize the importance of karma in defining and constraining personal and group opportunities for development, including social status. Nor does a concern with individual character necessarily preclude taking note of the importance of power or justice. Foucault’s study of ancient sexuality shows that it was precisely virtue-ethical concerns that made the power imbalance intrinsic to pederasty a source of anxiety. At the same time, the fact that virtue ethics sometimes sees an important role for wealth, power, and even luck in facilitating ethical progress does not mean that those who are in the midst of diverse kinds of suffering cannot still find resources within themselves to invest in the goal of selfcultivation, as Keum Young Chung Pang’s medical anthropological

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monograph on the travails of elderly Korean migrants in the USA demonstrates, to take one example (Pang 2000). A casual survey of the work of anthropologists who have taken virtue ethics seriously shows that a concern with character can be central to political movements of all kinds (e.g. Mattingly 2012: 163; Wright 2016; Muehlebach 2012; Dave 2012). The claim that ethical discourse and practice in general can be ways to keep people in line clearly has something in it, and obedience is sometimes an explicit aim (e.g. Mahmood 2001). Indeed, many ethical regimes are self-consciously described by their subjects, powerful and powerless, in precisely this way. In particular, attempts to cultivate character are often based on disciplinary techniques either self-imposed or imposed through pedagogical relationships, which must be, at least temporarily and provisionally, unequal (Faubion 2013). But it would be a mistake to think that discipline is necessarily politically or personally conservative or that it is always simply an elite concern. In many cases, the aim is radical transformation and liberation – conceived spiritually and eschatologically, as in many religious traditions, or socially and politically as in, for example, Maoist attempts to effect revolution by creating new kinds of humans (Lynteris 2012; Munro 1982, 1971; see also Yan, Chapter 34 in this volume). Meanwhile, one can agree that widespread transformations in patterns of employment in recent decades have resulted in more people in many places having to be entrepreneurs and to think of themselves as a product that they are always preparing for evaluation by the market. But it would not be reasonable to conclude from this that critical attention to one’s own character in general is historically novel or necessarily ‘neoliberal’. Andrew Kipnis (2008) makes this point well in his stinging critique of anthropologists’ claims that pressures on contemporary Chinese workers to audit the self are evidence of neoliberalism at work. The workers themselves are more likely to see these practices as ‘Socialist’ – a reversion to the kind of self-work that characterized the Maoist period, and in general ‘[s]elf-discipline and self-cultivation, for example, are easily read out of Confucius, Mao Zedong, and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as “neoliberal” thinkers’ (282). It is worth noting that the grounds for criticism of the students of virtue ethics I have described are related to precisely the assumptions about ethics that anthropologists of ethics and others have argued the study of virtue ethics can help us to avoid. If, for instance, power and selfinterest are assumed to be opposed to ethics as a matter of definition, rather than being a part of it, then it follows that analysing character formation as an ethical project must be to ignore the politics of it, as critics allege (see Mair 2015). I will have more to say about these assumptions and the attempts of modern philosophical virtue ethics to overcome them later.

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Ancient Virtue Ethics, Modern Philosophical Virtue Ethics, and Virtue Ethics as Such Although the term ‘virtue ethics’ itself has not been used all that frequently in the literature of the anthropology of ethics, many contributors have dwelt at length on aspects of what I have called virtue ethics as such. To do this, they have drawn on three kinds of sources: (1) Probably the most influential source has been the work of a single author; or rather, part of the oeuvre of a single author: the ‘late’ Foucault and his work on the ethics of self-cultivation, especially in relation to ancient Graeco-Roman and early Christian cultures. Foucault often speaks of ‘selfcultivation’, and this term has become widespread in the anthropology of ethics. I prefer ‘virtue ethics’ (which Foucault does not routinely use) or ‘ethical formation’ (which he does) because ‘self-cultivation’ gives a misleadingly egoistic impression of a process which, even in Foucault’s ‘art of living’ moments, is thoroughly social and dialogical (see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume; Cook, Chapter 16 of this volume). (2) The second category of source is the work of certain modern academic philosophers in the Anglophone tradition who have been reacting against established assumptions in their field. Since the 1980s, they have either designated their subject matter as ‘virtue ethics’ or it has been so designated by others. They include writers such as Philippa Foot (1978), Martha Nussbaum (1986), Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), and Catherine Swanton (2003), who have all taken Aristotle as their starting point (though Swanton went on to write about the virtue ethics of Nietzsche and Hume (2015)), and Michael Slote (2001) who, in more recent work, has relied instead on Hume and Adam Smith (2010) and then taken an interest in Chinese philosophy (2013, 2020). More idiosyncratic within the field of modern philosophical virtue ethics, but by far the most influential among anthropologists, are Bernard Williams (1985), Charles Taylor (1989), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) (see Laidlaw 2014, ch. 2; Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). (3) The final category comprises those ancient authors on which the modern philosophical virtue ethicists have mostly based their work. Anthropologists of ethics have sometimes had direct recourse to such thinkers, especially to Aristotle (most notably, Michael Lambek 2015). While all three of these categories contain some fascinating material, there is an obvious problem in relying heavily on them to build an anthropology of virtue ethics as such: they are all drawn from a narrow, overwhelmingly European or Euro-American genealogy. Once we recognize the extent to which existing thought about virtue ethics has emerged from a very specific history, those of us interested in understanding ethics in different societies, or in understanding it in a comparative frame, face a question. Can the

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concept be applied beyond the cultures from which it emerged? Are traditions outside of the Aristotelian-Thomist-Reformation-Modern trajectory traced by some of the modern philosophical virtue ethicists to be admitted to a broader category of virtue ethics or should they be regarded as sui generis? For example, strands of Buddhism and Confucianism clearly have much in common with Aristotle – are they varieties of virtue ethics? There are at least three possible responses to these questions. The first is to conclude that virtue ethics is too embedded in local and historically specific assumptions to be viable as a basis for comparison and analysis cross culturally. Jarrett Zigon (2014: 17) has made this argument about ethics in general, perhaps surprisingly given his other work. Martin Holbraad (2018) has recently come to much the same conclusion about virtue ethics in particular, as has Alice Forbess (2015) in the context of her work on Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She argues that while anthropologists have tended to think of virtue ethics as being fundamentally Aristotelian in form, that is not true even of Christianity; Orthodox monastics draw on sources with subtly but consequentially different assumptions. To avoid confusion, she argues, we should cleave tightly to the ethnography, working with and explaining the emic categories rather than introducing new ones from outside. The second response would be to argue that philosophical virtue ethics represents a working-out of a coherent orientation that other, non-Western religions or wisdom traditions may or may not share. Following this approach, we would first have to work out what the essential core of virtue ethics in the Western tradition is, and what is purely contingent on the cultures in which it happened to emerge. Then we would be in a position to compare other traditions in order to establish whether they meet the criteria. There have been a number of attempts to do this, especially for Confucianism (e.g. van Norden 2007; Loy 2014). This could be more than a simple classificatory exercise – if we believe that virtue ethics has a certain internal coherence and we have positively identified a given culture as being an instance of it, then we might expect to be able to draw inferences about that culture on the basis of what Aristotle, or MacIntyre, say, tells us. This strategy seems wrongheaded to me for two reasons (putting aside for a moment the fact that it is an unequal comparison in which the Western tradition is always the giver, not the taker of the categories of analysis; see Liangjian 2013). First, it depends on identifying a common core of the putative ‘Western’ tradition in order to establish a measuring stick by which other traditions can be rated as virtue ethical or not. This must overlook the disputatious and varied nature of ideas about character from the time of Homer, through the Socratics, the Stoics, and down to modern virtue ethicists. Second, it treats virtue ethics as a natural kind in which all its characteristics are always associated, but there is no reason to think that ethics works in that way. Take Damien Keown’s The Nature of Buddhist Ethics (1992), an accomplished and erudite example of this approach. Keown begins by identifying

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an unresolved area of debate in Buddhist studies. The Buddhist path includes ethical strictures such as avoiding doing harm to other beings. The path as a whole is explicitly described in Buddhist scriptures as a vehicle or raft that can take a person from the shore of suffering to the shore of enlightenment. The question is whether the path and its ethical precepts are only this – are Buddhist ethics purely instrumental? If so, are the enlightened liberated not only from suffering but also from the requirement to be moral? Are they ‘beyond good and evil’, as Nietzsche put it? Or, on the contrary, do the practices taught by Buddhism have intrinsic value beyond their utility? Scholars have found support in Buddhist scripture for both answers. Keown’s approach is to argue that Buddhist ethics is a virtue ethics because it shares characteristics with Aristotle’s ethics. For instance, Buddhist and Aristotelian moral psychology have many comparable points. Aristotle’s understanding of virtue as found in the Nicomachean Ethics can then, he appears to think, be used as a guide to what the Buddha meant when he taught. Aristotle taught that the happy life was one of exercising virtues perfected through practice, so it would make no sense to complete the Buddhist path and not continue to walk it, as it were. But in doing this, Keown neglects the variety that characterizes virtue ethics in the philosophical sense, and even in Aristotle himself – the final section of Nicomachean Ethics appears to contradict the rest of the book on exactly the question of whether active practice is constitutive of the good life or not (Lear 2000). More importantly, while there are striking similarities between the teachings of Aristotle and the Buddha, that is no justification for using Aristotle as an ‘illuminating guide to an understanding of the Buddhist moral system’ in order to settle questions on which Buddhist sources are silent or ambiguous (Keown 1992: 21). The third approach, which I propose here, would be to recognize virtueethical issues not as characteristic of one mode of ethics among a number of mutually exclusive alternatives, but as recurrent problems to which all humans find themselves having to attend. Comparison would then serve the function of highlighting and elucidating the problems and scope for variation by capturing contrast, rather than assuming homogeneity within cultural borders that are, in this case, impossible to define (for a general form of this argument, see Cook, Laidlaw, and Mair 2009; and in relation to Buddhism, Mair 2023). This approach would allow us to put different traditions on the same analytical level rather than having the ‘West’ provide the analytical mill and the ‘rest’ provide its ethnographic grist. Relieved of the task of establishing the definitive characteristics of the Western tradition (which is only a tradition when read backwards from some endpoint, and then forwards again, teleologically), we can disentangle the subject matter from its sources, understanding the latter as contributions to arguments made at different times with overlapping concerns and contrasting assumptions.

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Having said all that, although I think the goal of an anthropology of virtue ethics as such should ultimately be to get beyond the local specificities of the sources it has relied on to date, the modern philosophical literature on virtue ethics is not just another contribution to human thought about virtue and moral cultivation. It contains lessons that have to do with the rejection of a set of prejudices about the nature of ethics that are widely shared in the societies from which modern academic philosophy and the social sciences both emerged: precisely the prejudices that characterize the critics of virtue ethics discussed earlier. This is why the interest in philosophical virtue ethics should not be dismissed as another example of anthropologists’ deference to philosophy in general. The writings involved are of special interest to anthropologists not because they have special authority in describing all other societies, but because they give special insight into some of the ethnocentric peculiarities that have been bequeathed to anthropology and which we must overcome. I am not the first to make this argument – see, for example, James Faubion’s (2011: 15) introduction to An Anthropology of Ethics.

The Emergence of ‘Virtue Ethics’ as a Concern of Modern Academic Philosophy Briefly, then, what are the lessons anthropologists of ethics have taken from philosophical virtue ethics so far? To answer this question, it will be necessary to explain something of the aims of its originating authors. The term ‘virtue ethics’ came into use in the 1980s and 1990s to describe a development in philosophy that had begun several decades earlier. Its genesis is usually traced to Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1958) article, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Anscombe argued that academic moral philosophy, since at least as early as Hume and Kant, had become narrowly and unhelpfully concerned with questions of duty or obligation. In her view, this process had begun with Christianity, which had adopted a legalistic model of ethics from the Torah. To Jews or Christians, a legalistic model made sense, since, by their lights, there was a God, and living in obedience to God’s law was what it meant to be a good person. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers had sought to ground ethics in nature, independent of God, and this had left them searching in vain for an alternative source of moral law (similar interpretations are given at much greater length in MacIntyre 1981; Taylor 1989). They continued to believe that being good was a matter of understanding and complying with obligations or duties but struggled to explain what that would mean in the absence of a divine lawgiver. The attempt to answer this conundrum came to take the form of a battle between two contrary approaches. One – deontology, typified by Immanuel Kant – claimed good acts were those in conformity with moral

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law, now no longer guaranteed by God but a product of reason. The other – consequentialism, epitomized by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill – claimed that the right way to act in any situation was that which would bring about good consequences, defined in various ways. In an attempt to resolve the standoff between these two approaches, moral philosophers came to focus on ‘hard cases’ – usually imaginary, abstract, and rather extreme moral dilemmas, designed to reveal intuitive knowledge about ethical reasoning. But this focus on what people ought to do as a matter of moral obligation ignored other considerations such as what they ought to do in order to flourish (Anscombe 1958: 7). Aspects of our characters, distinct forms of life, and whole lifetimes can, like acts, be judged good and bad, and those judgements may be as important as judgements about particular acts, or even more so. Understanding virtue in these senses requires an appreciation of moral psychology – the structure of thinking and feeling that permits the cultivation of virtue – and of the life course, and of the various instituted forms of life within which humans grow, live, and die. Bernard Williams went further in spelling out the peculiar assumptions of this modern approach to ethics, which he called the ‘Morality System’ (1985: especially ch. 10; Laidlaw 2002, 2014: 44; see also Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). These include the assumption that ethics is fundamentally about judging voluntary acts in the light of obligations and assigning blame. The obligations with which the Morality System is concerned are of a special kind; they trump all others and are inescapable, unlike the obligations one can put oneself under voluntarily (but one may have a general moral obligation to honour such commitments). As the problem was posed in this historical, narrative form, it made sense that the remedy recommended by all these writers, in one way or another, was to take inspiration from the past, to try to turn back the clock to the time before the Morality System had come into being. In most cases, that meant going back to classical thinkers and especially to Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics presents a systematic account of what it means to lead a flourishing life. Foucault’s work on ethics, especially in his series on the history of sexuality (1978, 1985, 1986) and associated interviews and essays (many of which are collected in Foucault 1997), deals with many of the same issues as the Anglophone philosophical virtue ethicists. Some have noted differences (notably Mattingly 2012, 2014), and there are indeed differences on some important issues. For instance, freedom, which is so important in Foucault’s conception of a relationship to the self, plays a more ambiguous role in the ethics of MacIntyre and Williams. However, the basic features of the narrative are shared (see Levy 2004 for a detailed comparison). Whereas Williams and the others speak of moral obligation and duties, Foucault speaks of codes, but he too finds that there are

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societies in which codes proliferate and others in which practices of selfcultivation dominate, and that it is because the culture of most modern historians and philosophers is of the former type that they find it difficult to understand examples of the latter (see, e.g., Foucault 1985: 29). Foucault too draws his source material for understanding the ethics of character formation from the ancient Mediterranean. What the anthropologists of ethics who have harnessed this material have realized is that the criticisms these thinkers levelled against history and philosophy apply strongly to anthropology too. This case is made most clearly in one of the literature’s founding texts, James Laidlaw’s 2001 Malinowski Lecture, ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’ (Laidlaw 2002). Laidlaw draws on both Williams and Foucault in an analysis of the Durkheimian underpinnings of anthropology (Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals is also an important part of the argument but there will not be space to go into that here). The Durkheim of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1976), he pointed out, located the moral in the social, so that ethics amounted to a series of ‘moral facts’, including lists of obligations and prohibitions that properly socialized individuals would find automatically compelling. Durkheim’s work (especially beyond Elementary Forms) may leave room for other interpretations (Lambek 2010: 12), but his distinctive account of moral facts as an irresistible code installed in collective consciousness through ritual is his enduring legacy for anthropology. As Laidlaw (2002: 315) argues, ‘it is impossible, if this is your vision of human life, to see how specifically ethical considerations might be distinguishable from the other causal factors that make the bits of the system – the people – function as they do’. Laidlaw’s main point here relates to the automaticity and collectivism of Durkheim’s moral facts, which means that the individual has no need to, indeed cannot, understand or reflect on ethical matters. This is a fatal problem for an understanding of any kind of ethics, including varieties of the Morality System such as Kantian ethics, as Laidlaw points out. However, it is also worth noting that it raises a specific problem in relation to the ethics of character. Durkheim may have challenged Kant by locating the source of morality in a pre-reflective, collective consciousness rather than in the individual rational agent. However, his model reproduces a dichotomy fundamental to Kant, or at least to many of Kant’s followers, namely the distinction between desires and the body on the one hand, and reason and morality on the other. (Though note: it has been argued that Kant had a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between virtue, reason, and duty than he has been credited for by many of his interpreters and detractors; O’Neill 1983, 1996.) Morality for the Durkheim of The Elementary Forms must always be a matter of socially sanctioned reason, experienced as the ‘superorganic’ overcoming individually embodied desire. Most accounts of virtue ethics, by contrast, do not oppose reason and desire in this way. On the contrary, virtue is achieved through the cultivation of both, through practice that combines both.

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Talal Asad makes this point strongly in his Genealogies of Religion, arguing that in mediaeval Christianity ritual was not merely a symbolic rendering of socially accepted truth, but was the means and expression of ‘the proper organization of the soul – of understanding and feeling, desire and will’ (1993: 138), and the means through which truth was achieved. Asad argues that the Durkheimian separation of reason and desire led anthropologists to treat religious practice as merely symbolic, as representative, a disembodied text that could be read and interpreted (an approach that reached its logical conclusion in Le´vi-Strauss’s structuralism). As a result, Asad alleges that anthropology has missed the disciplinary or pedagogical function of religious practice. He claims that Mauss understood this problem and tried to escape from it in his essay on ‘Techniques of the Body’, which introduces Aristotelian concepts such as hexis (habit), but that his efforts were misunderstood by later anthropologists in thrall to Durkheim. Mauss was attempting to define an anthropology of practical reason – not in the Kantian sense of universalizable ethical rules, but in that of historically constituted practical knowledge, which articulates an individual’s learned capacities. . . . [T]he human body was to be viewed as the developable means for achieving a range of human objects, from styles of physical movements (e.g., walking), through most of emotional being (e.g., composure), to kinds of spiritual experience (e.g., spiritual states). (1993: 76) Asad goes on to praise Pierre Bourdieu for picking up where Mauss left off in his work on habitus, arguing that Bourdieu’s practice theory promises to overcome the body/mind dualism characteristic of modernism (for similar endorsements of Bourdieu, see Faubion 2001: 26; Lambek 2010: 21). Bourdieu of course takes full account of the virtue-ethical truism that dispositions, including forms of belief and reason, are products of practice. According to Bourdieu, accumulated practice generates a habitus – a set of dispositions to act in a certain way. A habitus is associated with a social field, which is a shared context for practice and evaluation. An individual may be a member of many social fields. Mastery of a field is achieved by acquisition of a habitus, and this gives one a ‘feel for the game’ and the power to make authoritative determinations within that field, and thus power over others (Bourdieu 1990: 66). So far, Bourdieu’s model shares a great deal with accounts of virtue ethics, such as Aristotle’s, but there is a crucial difference (this is part of the objection to Bourdieu in Lambek 2000; on the contrast between Foucault’s ethics and the ‘habitus’, see Laidlaw 2002: 324; 2014: ch. 1). For Bourdieu, what makes the habitus (and the actions, beliefs, and evaluations that stem from it) persuasive is that it appears natural. A crucial part of belonging to a social field is the set of unquestioned beliefs that make it

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meaningful, ‘Doxa’, ‘the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense’ (Bourdieu 1990: 68). The capacity of the human organism to embody standards and express them in a creative and apparently spontaneous manner hides, he thinks, the process of socialization and the symbolic violence it perpetuates. Thus, he claims that the most effective habitus is acquired during childhood at a time when its acquisition can easily be forgotten. Bourdieu is adamant that embodied belief cannot be achieved by an act of will. A game is defined by its arbitrariness and artificiality. In contrast, recognizing that the subjective doxa shared by members of a field is a product of practice objectifies it and precludes its embodiment as subjective knowledge. That is why Bourdieu believes that anthropologists who try to live the belief systems of others, like Evans-Pritchard who lived by Zande witchcraft beliefs and famously found them ‘as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of’ (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 270), succeed only in making ‘arbitrary faith a continuous creation of bad faith’ (Bourdieu 1990: 68). The most accomplished feel for a game will be attained by those with the most naı¨ve view of the social field – the view of a native. Bourdieu does acknowledge that the practical sense corresponding to a given social field may be acquired later in life, but in any case it seems to be a condition of successful acquisition that the process of learning is forgotten, since it is through ‘unawareness of the unthought presuppositions that the game produces and endlessly reproduces, [that the game] reproduces the conditions of its own perpetuation’ (1990: 67). This emphasis on the importance of authenticity, naturalness, nativeness, and hence on ignorance of the process of formation seems to me to be an odd, and perhaps a distinctively Anglo-French, prejudice, reflecting a fear of inauthenticity and self-regard that is far from universal. Perhaps the idea of the unreflectiveness of embodied culture is also intrinsically attractive to anthropologists – if mastering a practice really meant being oblivious to the process of mastery, then outsiders such as anthropologists really would be offering a distinctive kind of insight. But being a good person, and being recognized as such, does not always require erasure of the process through which one acquired one’s good character. ‘Faking it to make it’ is a widely accepted way of going about things, and epic, selfconsciously willed feats of self-transformation are often seen as grounds of legitimacy, not as exercises in bad faith. To summarize my argument so far, I have noted that anthropologists interested in the issues surrounding virtue ethics have drawn on sources from a narrow range of traditions. I have suggested that this may be a problem if we want to understand virtue ethics as such, because it risks introducing ethnographic assumptions that apply in, say, ancient Greece but not in, say, China. I have now defended the idea that, nonetheless,

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these sources have something special to teach us because they deal with prejudices of philosophers that are also shared by anthropologists, as products of a discipline steeped in the post-Christian Morality System. In order to complete the argument, I want to suggest that, having identified these prejudices in a way that would have been difficult without the help of modern philosophy, we are in a position to extend our exploration of the possibilities of virtue ethics using this as a framework for broadening the comparative scope. There are endless ways in which this might be achieved. In the next section I give two brief examples. The second starts from observations principally in the work of Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum about the fragility of goodness under virtue ethics. But I begin by addressing the four questions that Foucault proposed must be faced by any ethical project based on a relationship to the self. In both cases, the comparative material I shall add to the discussion is drawn from Chinese Buddhist and Confucian examples, since these are the traditions I am familiar with.

Firing the Pots, Smelting the Pans: Issues Arising in Virtue Ethics as Such Having defined virtue ethics as such and distinguished it from other kinds of virtue ethics, the path is clear for us to develop an understanding of the issues it raises. If my argument is right, this will be a significant and ongoing undertaking, certainly not something that could be addressed in a comprehensive way here, so what follows in this section is intended to provide an idea of what kinds of consideration might be relevant and interesting in further research. Part of the reason understanding virtue ethics as such will be an ongoing job is that virtue ethics does not limit the range of considerations that can be taken into account in ethical reasoning in the way the Morality System does. Under the Morality System as Williams described it, thinking about ethics is like being a lawyer or a judge: to decide what is moral, to praise or condemn, one simply needs to identify the act and any relevant obligations. Justice is blind and the extent to which any other considerations can properly be taken into account is limited. Thinking about virtue ethics is more like being a manufacturer in that it is proper to take into account a much wider range of variables. One needs to understand the raw materials at one’s disposal, the range of operations – refining, forging, casting, polishing, and so on – that one can subject the material to. One needs to have an idea of the products that can be made out of the materials that are available, and which are preferable, and one might have thoughts about why one is producing them that are germane to the way one goes about the process. For instance, is one producing in order to make money by meeting the conditions of an existing contract, or

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to sell on the open market? Or perhaps money is not the only or most important consideration – perhaps the thing is to be an artisan, or to serve a public need, or perhaps the social routine of the factory that is organized around production is the true purpose of all the activity. If human nature is malleable, then the same kinds of considerations will need to be taken into account. It is not surprising that manufacturing or craft metaphors are common in traditions of ethical formation. The title of this section is a translation of an idiom used by Chinese Buddhists to describe the process of training virtue. What is the raw material of human being, after all? What techniques are available for working it into something new? What kinds of human product – second natures – can be brought about by those techniques? Will everyone turn out the same or are there a limited number of alternative outcomes, and, if so, which is best? Or perhaps the range of human products is unlimited. And just as the factory manager must have in mind the ultimate reason for production, so anyone thinking about ethical formation may ask: ‘why bother in the first place?’ These are questions that are likely to arise in any project of ethical cultivation. Perhaps some of them are unavoidable. Foucault proposes four such questions, which relate to what he regards as the four aspects that must make up any reflective relationship with the self: (1) ethical substance, (2) mode of subjectivation, (3) work, or ascesis, and (4) telos, or the final goal at which cultivation aims (1985, 1986, 1997). Each of these issues is raised by modern virtue ethicists as we might expect, but Foucault’s formulation is a useful place to start because of its intrinsically comparative and open approach. Of the four, what Foucault calls the mode of subjectivation is perhaps the hardest to grasp, and the most likely to lead to misunderstandings if one is used to thinking about things from the point of view of the Morality System. There has, unfortunately, been some muddying of the waters as a result of the looseness with which the term ‘subjectivity’ is often used in anthropological and other writing. Foucault defined the mode of subjectivation as the way ‘in which an individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obligated to put it into practice’ (1985: 27). In other words, it is an answer to the question: under what kind of obligations do I find myself as a result of being the kind of thing I am? The interesting point about subjectivation for anthropologists is that the mode of subjectivation can vary through discursive, historically, and culturally specific processes that may be self-conscious and contested. As Foucault shows, the practices such as rules for the regulation of pleasure that were central to classical Greek, Pagan Roman, and then early Christian ethics were remarkably stable. What changed dramatically was the way in which those involved felt themselves to be called to comply with those practices – because, for example, the practices were

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anathematized or because they were considered unconducive to the virtues of an adult man. To make this more concrete, take the idea that men should be faithful to their wives and not be sexually involved with boys. These themes remained remarkably constant in ancient Greece and Rome, Foucault concluded, but they were taken up in response to different modes of subjectivation at different times. Foucault identifies three broad stages in this development. First, an aesthetic mode. In this stage, no one was obliged to comply with sexual rules, though they may choose to do so for the sake of a glorious or beautiful life. This was an optional and conditional rule that would only even be a live possibility for those who felt they were in a position to achieve a beautiful life in the first place. Later, Stoics came to argue that these practices were not something one might take or leave, but something that any person with a clear understanding of the conditions of human life would be compelled to pursue for reasons of rationality. Finally, Christianity performs what Foucault calls ‘an internal juridification of religious law’ – observation of the rules came to be seen as binding on every human qua creature of God (1997: 266). This is a schematic summary, and Foucault’s descriptions are more nuanced when he gets into the detail, but the general principle is clear and is echoed by others studying the history of virtue ethics, and not only in relation to the ethics of sexual pleasure. For example, Bernard Williams identifies a general transition away from the aesthetic and elective approach of heroic ethics towards a rational grounding in Greek thought and attributes it to Plato (Williams 1985: 34). These kinds of transformations may seem abstruse and far removed from the issues anthropologists usually deal with, but, in fact, recognizing this type of variation can be of real ethnographic significance. This can be especially true in situations where practices have travelled between two settings in which people generally understand their relation to rules in different ways. For example, it has been fairly common for around a century for people who have grown up in societies that have traditionally been dominated by Christianity to become interested in Buddhist philosophy and practices and sometimes to ‘convert’ to Buddhism. One of the practices that has proved most compelling to such people is meditation, though historically, in the lands where Buddhism has long been established, meditation was usually an elite practice (Cook 2010). For those who have been brought up to expect religion to be about recognizing and complying with a moral code that imposes law-like obligations, it can be difficult not to see meditation as a duty. But as it turns out that sustaining a meditation practice is difficult and that practitioners go through more or less successful phases, these acolytes are routinely racked with guilt and their gurus have to spend a good deal of their time telling them that Buddhist practice is not a moral obligation, so there’s no need to feel guilty for missing a session; and that on the contrary, feeling guilty is to

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misunderstand the whole project – to misunderstand, I suggest, the mode of subjectivation. Conversely, friends in Inner Mongolia China in the early 2000s told me of a village where a missionary had delivered the Christian Gospel some years earlier and with it the practice of prayer. The religion, thus introduced, had developed into two distinct sects. One, known as ‘the religion of Jesus Christ’ (yesu jidu jiao), seemed unremarkable and like other forms of Protestantism found in the region. The other, known as ‘the religion of Christ Jesus’ (jidu yesu jiao), had come to focus on prayer as a feat of endurance. Practitioners would sit outdoors with a wet towel on their heads for long periods – a dangerous proposition given the climate – and were rewarded, it was said, by the increase of their livestock. In a neighbouring village, I met someone who was rumoured to be a member of the Christ Jesus sect and was keen to speak to her to learn more about it. I began by confirming with her that she was a Christian. ‘No, no’, she told me, ‘I’m too busy at the moment, but I’m planning to be a Christian in the winter when I have more time.’ This response would be utterly baffling to many Christians, because, like the convert Buddhists, they see disciples of religions as being subjects of an obligatory moral code; once the code is recognized as legitimate, the only proper response to noncompliance is guilt . . . not scheduling! But the woman’s response makes sense when interpreted under different modes of subjectivation, for instance if one sees oneself as a potential master of a wide repertoire of transformative religious and medical techniques, each of which is rather demanding in terms of time and other resources (for an example that could perhaps be interpreted along similar lines, see Kirsch 2004). Returning to the rest of Foucault’s four questions, let us consider the first: ethical substance. If something about human being can be transformed, what is it? Of all the things that can be altered, which are the proper object of ethical formation? Which are irrelevant distractions? Ethical formation is about changing human persons, but, as anthropologists well know, the boundaries of persons are complex. Whether we are talking about the human body, the mind, or the self, boundaries are porous and open to interpretation. Like the question of modes of subjectivation, this can lead to differences of approach to ethical formation within as well as between traditions. For example, Buddhist traditions often distinguish between a heart/ mind that is the seat of emotion and reason on the one hand, and the body on the other. Is the thing to be transformed in the course of ethical formation the mind, the body, or both? In the Thai monastery in which Joanna Cook carried out fieldwork, the answer was clear – the task was to cut attachment (of the mind) to the body. One way to bring about this change was meditation on corpses. Another was a ban on all physical exercise (Cook 2010: 23f.). In some ways, this approach is similar to the disdain for the body found in some Christian asceticism (Faubion 2001:

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128), but how different is it from the attitude common in Chinese Buddhist monasticism, in which elegant or athletic ways of training the body, such as kung fu, are tied up in complex ways with training the mind (Laidlaw and Mair 2019; Shahar 2008)? As Master Hsing Yun, leader of Fo Guang Shan, a modern Chinese Buddhist movement, has written, Keeping both the mind and body healthy is important, for the body is the vehicle that we use to practice the Dharma. Like all things, the mind and the body are interdependent; the health of the mind influences the health of the body and the health of the body influences the health of the mind. Using the healthy body as a tool, we can cultivate a compassionate heart and a clear mind. With a cultivated mind, we are able to examine ourselves, clearly see the nature of our problems, and work to resolve them. We will then approach the path to true health. (2007: 1f.) Recognizing the interdependence of mind and body in this way does not preclude treating the mind as being, ultimately, more important, and prioritizing its care when resources are limited. Matthew Walker (2013) has argued that this was Mencius’s approach. So a project of ethical formation might single out for particular attention this or that part within the perimeter, so to speak, of the individual – ‘carnal pleasures’, the passions, or the will, say. Nor, contrary to claims that virtue ethics is fundamentally individualist (see, e.g., Held et al. 2006), is there any reason why the ethical substance on which transformation is to be effected cannot be bigger than an individual. It is true that virtue ethics is not altruistic by definition in the way that Kantian deontology is. It is also true that one could see the modern virtue ethics of, say, Williams, or Foot, as a rejection of the twentieth-century philosophical assumption that one’s obligations to others are the sum total of ethics. However, none of that means that ethical substance in projects of subject formation must be coextensive with an individual human person (as if such a thing had easily identifiable boundaries anyway!). As Foucault (1997: 175–84) shows, before Christian monastics were turning their attention inwards, to their souls, to do battle with their own, individual libido, their late Roman, Pagan forebears were concerned with sex as an expression of social relations, such that thinking about it in terms of an isolated individual would have been meaningless. Asad (1993: 111f.) argues that even the early Christian work on desire that Foucault discusses was at the same time fundamentally about the cultivation of pedagogical relationships based on humility. For this reason, the criticism levelled at the anthropology of ethics that it is intrinsically about individuals (see, e.g., Al-Mohammad and Peluso 2012) – and therefore selfish – is ill-founded. James Faubion (2011: 119), for example, insists that ‘neither methodologically nor ontologically does

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an anthropology of ethics have its ground in the individual’. Anthropologists of ethics have argued that the object of subject formation need not be an atomic individual, but might be a ‘dividual’ in, for example, the Melanesian style (Faubion 2001: 128; Lambek 2010: 16), or even a complex cyborgic corporation that may or may not incorporate human beings among other elements (Faubion 2011: 119). Perhaps a good example of the latter would be nation states which, Jane Cowan (2021) has recently argued, are judged to act with or without virtue in their interactions in international institutions, mediated by the behaviour of their diplomats. The next of Foucault’s questions concerns ‘ethical work’; that is, the practices that are employed to bring about the transformation of the subject. Common forms of ethical work include restrictions on diet or sexual activity, and regimes of daily activity. It is clear that certain practices cause transformations: abstaining from alcohol has an effect on the mind and emotions, as does a fixed routine of prayer. One recurrent theme in theoretical and ethnographic work on the cultivation of virtue is the importance of reflection, or what Foucault called the ‘hermeneutics of the self’. This may involve introspection, or it may be a case of producing an externalized account of one’s current state in the form of a journal or confession, such as Marcus Aurelius gives us in his Meditations. However, ethical work could refer to almost any action or abstention from action that is thought to effect transformation of the human being. Despite this intrinsic variety, there are issues of general interest when taking a comparative perspective. One is the relationship between the work that will bring about an ethical transformation and the goal it is designed to bring about. Modern virtue ethicists tend to follow Aristotle’s principle that virtue is to be perfected through the practice of virtue. That means that there is no real distinction between what one does in order to become excellent and the manifestation of that excellence. Though Aristotle does recognize the important pedagogical function of good laws, one must conclude that the laws are a kind of embodiment of the principles of virtue (notwithstanding the problems of non-codifiability; see later). However, in many ethical traditions, submission to rules serves as a form of training in its own right, independent, to a greater or lesser extent, of the content of those rules (see Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume). Submission might be seen as a way to develop a relationship to a specific master, or of cultivating humility in general. Taking vows to undergo forms of hardship, in particular, can be a way of training resolve and forbearance, which may be ends in themselves, or may be required for pursuing other, more advanced goals later on (on the importance of vows for ethical formation, see Laidlaw 1995: 151–229; 2002: 326; Laidlaw and Mair 2019). When it comes to telos, the final of the four questions, Foucault has in mind the kind of person that the cultivator decides to be, but that goal can

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be specified in a number of different ways and the differences can be consequential. To be part of a practical project, it must be specified in some concrete form and that can be done in a number of ways, which need not be mutually exclusive, and each of which adds its own flavour to the recipe. Most modern virtue ethicists (but not all; notable exceptions include Slote 2001; Zagzebski 2010) endorse Aristotle’s idea that any kind of living thing has a unique tendency and that the good is about fulfilling that potential to the utmost. This is often described, using an agricultural or horticultural metaphor, as ‘flourishing’. Conceived in this way, an important part of an ethical project will be a kind of natural history of the human animal that seeks to understand what its potential is, but there is a prior question. Is flourishing about fulfilling all human potentials, including those we share with other animals (having a glossy coat and a bushy tail)? Or is it about maximizing our unique or distinguishing tendencies (for self-awareness or creativity, say), perhaps at the cost of other goods? In either case, compared to the manufacturing metaphor, the agricultural metaphor expresses a less creative approach: though there’s room for pruning and training, the tendencies of the plant are there in the seed ready to be brought out. We are still working at a high level of abstraction – an ethical telos can be specified with a greater degree of concreteness. One way is to try to describe the goal of ethical formation in terms of the characteristics of the flourishing human; that is, as a list of virtues (or, by way of contrast, of vices). Aristotle did this in the Nicomachean Ethics, listing virtues such as courage and honesty, and his list is the basis of many modern discussions. Other traditions do this too. Buddhist sources enumerate various lists of perfections, or pa¯ramita¯s, that include virtues such as generosity, patience, and resolution (Apple 2017). Mencius, an important sage in the Confucian tradition, distinguished three main virtuous attributes – benevolence, propriety/righteousness, and wisdom – and seven secondary virtues including filial piety and love of learning (Loy 2014). Understanding flourishing in terms of lists in this way raises the potential problem that the various virtues come into conflict. Tact and frankness can both be considered virtues, for example, but they will often be in tension (Slote 2013). Wisdom, in the sense of the capacity to resolve conflicts between competing considerations, seems to have a special place in all three traditions. Lists of virtues may be made more concrete still in the form of a category of person who embodies virtue, such as Aristotle’s megalopsuchos or greatsouled man, the junzi or gentleman of Confucianism, or the bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, a being who has determined to achieve enlightenment in order to rescue all other beings from suffering. Or the goal may be expressed in more concrete terms yet, in the form of narratives about the lives and deeds of specific moral heroes (Evans, Chapter 17 of this volume). The transition from abstract virtues to specific categories of person, or

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specific persons, is a very significant one because whereas virtues can be considered independently of other characteristics of a person, a category of person and, even more so, any specific person must be imagined with all of those characteristics in play. Unlike a categorical model (the bodhisattva, the junzi), a specific person (the Buddha, Confucius), real or imaginary, has a biography made up of different stages of the life cycle (perhaps multiple life cycles). They will have a body, usually sexed, and will have relationships, including kin relations, with a range of other people. They will belong to something like a social class or status group. All of this has a number of consequences. We will need to decide which of the exemplar’s characteristics are mere by-products of contingent circumstance and which were essential to their virtue. These questions do not arise in the same way in relation to an abstract category, still less to abstract lists of virtues. Surely anyone can try to be generous, courageous, and wise. A category such as megalopsuchos already brings specificities: is it essential to be a male? To be free and not enslaved? A biography in time and space is even more specific and brings the potential for endless interpretation. Follow Christ? – fine, but when he rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, did that mean that those who follow him should not oppose government in general or that they should not oppose the Roman Empire specifically? The Buddha, like Christ, left his family behind to travel and teach. Should their followers leave their families behind too? Or on the other hand, perhaps an exemplar conceived of as a concrete person, who must come with relatives and other specific personal relationships, gives rise to a greater emphasis on the particularistic (rather than universalistic) mode of morality, in which obligations always attach to particular relationships rather than to an abstract stranger (Read 1955; Loy 2014: 288). Ethical reasoning that takes the emulation of exemplars as its goal also imposes a requirement for a distinctive kind of ability, which might be considered a virtue in itself: narrative interpretation according to the specificities of one’s own probably very different circumstances. Mongolians in the Soviet and post-Soviet period who sought to emulate Chinggis found themselves in a world where the rules were quite different from those under which the Great Khan operated, so while one might memorize and learn from narratives, adapting the lessons for the present required an imaginative leap of interpretation (Humphrey 1997). One final consideration in relation to the telos of ethical cultivation is the degree to which the goal is in plain sight at earlier stages of the process. This is an aspect that has received little attention in the modern virtue ethics literature, which is perhaps not surprising given the assumptions of transparency of discourse on which academic philosophy depends. However, in cases in which ethical transformation is thought to act on intellectual capacities such as wisdom and insight as well as the will, it will not be surprising if beginners are not always thought to be capable of

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understanding the destination of the journey they have embarked on under the guidance of more advanced minds. Working under guidance in this way does not erase the will of the tutee, which is why subterfuge may sometimes be necessary. A famous case is found in the Lotus Sutra, one of the key texts of Mahayana Buddhism: a father returns home to find his house on fire, and his three children playing with their toys inside, oblivious to the danger. He tries to call out to them to explain their predicament, but they pay him no heed, unable to appreciate the urgency as they are absorbed in their amusement. He then tempts each of them in turn, each with a description of a different toy that awaits outside. When the children arrive outside, they find that what awaits them is much grander than they could have imagined. This story is taken as justification for adapting teachings in whatever way will be acceptable and useful for potential cultivators, at whichever stage of the path they happen to be on, substituting the final goal of enlightenment and Buddhahood with intermediate and inferior goals if that is the best way of providing motivation.

The Fragility of Goodness When considering the right way to act in a given situation under deontological theories, we are considering an act that exists at a particular moment, under fixed conditions and with the current extent of knowledge and ignorance of the parties involved. This juridical approach is also, as we have seen, characteristic of what Bernard Williams called the Morality System. Consider the case of a judge who orders that a detainee should be set free on human rights grounds. Imagine that the prisoner goes on to commit an entirely unanticipated act of heroism that saves the lives of many people. That outcome in no way makes the judge’s decision a better or more just decision, judged in terms of human rights. It continues to be as just or unjust as it was when it was handed down. Ancient virtue ethics sources, because they locate value in character and happiness as well as in acts, complicate this picture. If acts are considerations mainly to the extent that they contribute to the goal of cultivating a good life, however that telos is conceived, their goodness is not guaranteed in the same way. Unexpected events can cast them in a new light, progress can be lost, meanings can be reversed. This aspect of virtue ethics, for which Bernard Williams coined the term ‘moral luck’, is likely to strike adherents of his modern Morality System as particularly shocking. For it contravenes a central axiom of that system: that people are not to be judged as morally deficient or praiseworthy on the basis of events or conditions beyond their control. In Kantian terms, morality, the kingdom of ends, is not dependent on the realm of nature; morality is the area of life in which anyone can distinguish themselves by their good will regardless

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of their external conditions (Nussbaum 1986). If some varieties of classical virtue ethics seem scandalous to modern sensibilities because they flout this principle, others seek, in a way that would be recognizable to, say, Kant, to isolate morality from luck. In fact, whether it was possible to do this was one of the major fields of difference among systems of ethical thought in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. On the one hand, there is a strand of classical thought that teaches that virtue is the only good and that good and bad fortune are irrelevant to real happiness and should be met with indifference. A clear expression of this principle is found in Plato’s Apology. There, Socrates, condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens, accepts his fate with equanimity, asserting that no harm can be done to a good man – in other words, goodness and happiness are found in virtue and virtue alone. Later, Stoic authors would echo this approach. Seneca, for instance, famously taught that there is ‘nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so’. On the other hand, Greek literature from Homer onwards was dominated by accounts of the moral consequences of bad luck in the form of tragedy, where characters had been placed in morally disastrous situations as a result of events beyond their voluntary acts. Bernard Williams, in a book-length treatment of the issue, argues that the ancient poets had an appreciation for a universal truth that modern moral philosophers had come to deny: ‘All conceptions of responsibility’, he claimed, ‘make some discriminations . . . between what is voluntary in this sense and what is not; at the same time, no conception of responsibility confines response entirely to the voluntary’ (1993: 66). Consider a paradigm case. Oedipus kills King Laius and later, without realizing that she was Laius’s widow, marries the queen, Jocasta. Eventually he discovers that Jocasta and Laius are his mother and father and that he is an unwitting incestuous parricide. His actions in respect of these crimes were unintentional. Yet, as Williams points out, the ancient dramatists who wrote about the legend recognized that he was nonetheless responsible for them. He may not have intended his father’s death, but he was its cause, and he carried the pollution of homicide, miasma. As Williams writes, even putting ideas about spiritual pollution aside, tragic characters such as Oedipus and Ajax had to face up to the challenge of holding the values they did while simply being the person who had done what they had done. In many cases, they found that the simultaneous experience of these two conditions was unbearable and they committed suicide. The lesson that Williams takes from all this is that the poets had insight into a truth that the philosophers vainly denied: that reason is incapable of protecting us against the moral effects of misfortune. Another modern virtue ethicist has drawn a different conclusion. In The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum argues that reason can be defended in the face of the vulnerability of the good life. In fact, she explains, there is a range of

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positions on this question, not just two. Human life is beset by chaos, and reason sets out to isolate us from this. The question is: what is the right degree of isolation? If we open ourselves up to too much vulnerability, then our life will not be sufficiently stable to be a happy one, but if we care about nothing, then we are excluding much of what makes life worth living at all. In particular, she is thinking about caring relationships. The Stoics, for example, rejected reliance on human relationships to the extent of condemning compassion as moral weakness (Roberts 2017). What is the significance of all this for the anthropology of ethics? Nussbaum and Williams are both engaged in a discussion about what is the right position to take on these matters, in a philosophical idiom that seems to draw on our shared, unacknowledged, but pre-existing intuitions about what makes a good life (an approach that is bound to seem ethnocentric from an anthropological perspective). However, the questions that the ancient authors they both draw on were contending with are bound to arise in any account of ethical formation, and it is important for anthropologists to be able to see and understand them. Greek tragedy dealt in bad luck. And although Socrates and the Stoics thought that the sage was capable of withstanding any external disaster through inner strength, they too were oblivious to the good fortune that provided the conditions for becoming a paragon in the first place. Williams (1976) calls this luck that produces the sage ‘constitutive luck’. Perhaps this is one area in which a comparative approach would help to shed light on the full range of possible ethical thought. The Confucian tradition is particularly rich in this respect, perhaps because, like Aristotle, its thinkers have tended to hold that virtue is strongly associated with contemplation and the independent state of the mind, but also that it issues in action. This can lead to a nuanced position. For example, according to Mencius, the gain or loss of wealth is an external factor that does not make an automatic difference to our nature, but it can have effects. On the one hand, wealth can insulate us from the sort of worries that prompt us to cultivate the mind in the first place; on the other, it can provide the sort of stability and leisure that are necessary for sustained cultivation (Walker 2013). Wang Yangming, author of an important Ming Dynasty Confucian text, Instructions for Practical Living, considered the issue of luck not in relation to ordinary people or victims of tragedy but in the case of sages (the following discussion is based on Huff 2013). This issue arises in Confucianism because it emphasizes sages as moral exemplars. A sage is one who has succeeded in completely identifying the mind with the principle of nature, so that they are omniscient and have complete equanimity. According to the Confucian classic The Great Learning, on which much of Wang’s text is a commentary, the sage abides in the good in order to deliberate, and then manifests goodness – in other words, the sage combines contemplation with action.

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Wang asks whether all sages can be considered equal. His response falls somewhere between the positions that Williams identifies, but is also different from Nussbaum’s compromise. He concludes that there are two characteristics by which sages can be judged: traits and achievements. In terms of traits, since the defining characteristic of a sage is to have completely unified the mind with nature, all are equal. But achievements depend on the opportunity to perform great deeds, and in this respect, sages differ. Wang likens these two axes to the way in which we evaluate gold: we consider its purity, and in those terms one example of pure gold is the same as any other, but we also consider its quantity, which may differ independently of its purity.

Conclusion In this chapter I have explored some of the issues that arise in virtue ethics as such and shown how a variety of sources can provide inspiration for thinking about them. I have defined virtue ethics in a very broad sense as those issues that arise as a consequence of the fact that human beings are malleable creatures who are capable to some extent of moulding their own characteristics, and that the characteristics they acquire can be subject to evaluation. If Bernard Williams is right, this process is a universal experience, but it is hidden by the doctrines of the Morality System, according to which there is a special species of obligation and evaluation from which many relevant considerations are excluded in principle. Modern writers on virtue ethics such as Williams, Foucault, and the rest have worked to free themselves from these assumptions by returning for inspiration to ethical thinkers who operated at a time before the Morality System developed. As anthropology emerged with many of the same assumptions, this means that their approach is uniquely valuable for us as a starting point in recognizing some problems in our own theoretical assumptions. However, I have also argued that, if we start with modern virtue ethicists, we should not stop with them. Not only do they draw on a culturally narrow range of thinkers, with overwhelming emphasis placed on a single work – Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics – but their purposes are different from anthropologists’ too. In most cases, they aim to reduce ancient virtue ethics to abstract enough principles that it can be transposed to modern liberal society, conforming to modern liberal intuitions. In doing so, they risk stripping the ancient sources of the context that Williams recognized is so important, and at the same time imposing, through selection and adaptation, concerns that derive from their own times. So while these writers are invaluable for the questions they raise, we should be chary about treating any of their prescriptions for how they think virtue ethics ought to look as definitive accounts of how either any

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particular variety of virtue ethics or virtue ethics as such actually works. That clearly applies to those writers who limit themselves to Aristotle, but it also applies to those who take a more comparative approach, such as Foucault, MacIntyre, Williams, and Taylor – these authors were also grinding axes in order to defend a favoured version of virtue ethics. As I mentioned at the outset, there is already a genre of comparative work on virtue ethics, one that I have not spent space on here, namely work that takes as its purpose establishing whether a given non-European tradition is an instance of virtue ethics or not. Some of this work provides interesting and valuable discussions, but I find the whole approach to be misguided. It depends on a circular path of reasoning that begins by defining which characteristics of the Western tradition (usually Aristotle) are essential and definitive of virtue ethics, then testing some other tradition against that list, then declaring it to be virtue ethical or not. For instance, in his work on Confucianism, Roger Ames (2011, 2020) argues that Confucianism cannot be considered a virtue ethics because the goal is expressed in terms of roles – a good father, a good son, and so on – rather than in terms of virtues such as courage. The contrast is indeed an illuminating one, but I cannot see the interest from an anthropological point of view in defending or rejecting the proposition that the category of virtue ethics should be made to turn on the presence of a list of virtues rather than, say, of the notion of the good life. Some other questions of definition that have exercised modern virtue ethicists also seem to me to be of little interest for anthropological purposes. For instance, there has been considerable debate over whether the category of virtue ethics includes only those cases in which virtue is the only criterion of the good (Baron 1985; Hursthouse 1999), or whether virtues can be understood as a condition of a higher-level good that includes more than just the virtues (Foot 1978). Other modern philosophical debates on virtue ethics that I have not been able to address here do suggest interesting comparative questions for anthropologists and may, in turn, be clarified by ethnographic evidence. One is the role of practical judgement or wisdom, its sensitivity to the particularity of a given situation, and its sometimes antagonistic relationship with codification. Another related and complex question is the issue of plurality of values in the light of virtue ethics. Both of these issues – particularism and value pluralism – are of pre-eminent concern to anthropologists and it is not surprising that anthropologists of ethics have already drawn on virtue-ethical sources to elucidate them. There is already a danger, I think, of treating the sources as if they provide an answer to the ways in which these things work in general, rather than ways of glimpsing a fraction of the possible variety. Further discussion of these topics is, regrettably, not possible in this chapter. In the areas I have discussed I have limited myself to discussing possible comparison with traditions about which I know a little – mainly Buddhism

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and Confucianism. It might be argued that this is misleading. Chinese traditions clearly prioritize elaborate techniques of the self. Perhaps the same could be said of Indic traditions. But could it be said equally well of ethical traditions that have emerged in other regions? Could it be applied to the Amazon, for instance, or in Africa? Foucault suggests that some societies are dominated by codes of rules in a way that squeezes out room for the reflection and freedom he thinks are essential to self-cultivation. Williams, by contrast, seems to suggest that the Morality System is more a question of aspiration and self-description – even self-deception – than an accurate account of ethical experience under modernity, and that the issues elaborated so eloquently in tragedy by ancient poets remain common to all. The question of which is right seems to me to be an eminently anthropological question.

Acknowledgements This chapter was completed while I was a visiting researcher at the Departamento de Ciencias de la Comunicacio´n Aplicada at the Complutense University, Madrid, though sadly the pandemic meant that my visit has been more virtual than I had hoped. I am grateful to Nuria Villagra Garcı´a and Patricia Nu´n˜ez Go´mez for their invitation. I thank three anonymous readers as well as my former students Tom Bell, Haiying Ni, Barbara Denuelle, Laura Burke, and Marko Barisic for penetrating comments and the editor for embodying the pa¯ramita¯s of wisdom and patience.

References Adkins, Arthur W. H. 1960. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Al-Mohammad, Hayder and Daniela Peluso. 2012. ‘Ethics and the “Rough Ground” of the Everyday: The Overlappings of Life in Postinvasion Iraq’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2): 42–58. Al-Mohammad, Hayder, Veena Das, Jonathan Mair, Joel Robbins, Charles Stafford, and Soumhya Venkatesan. 2015. ‘There Is No Such Thing as the Good: The 2013 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’. Critique of Anthropology, 35(4): 430–80. Ames, Roger T. 2011. Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. 2020. Human Becomings: Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Anscombe, G. E. M. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Philosophy, 33: 1–19. Apple, J. B. 2017. ‘Pa¯ramita¯’, in K. T. S. Sarao and J. D. Long (eds.), Buddhism and Jainism: Encyclopedia of Indian Religions. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baron, Marcia. 1985. ‘Varieties of Ethics of Virtue’. American Philosophical Quarterly, 22(1): 47–53. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Cook, Joanna. 2010. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Joanna, James Laidlaw, and Jonathan Mair. 2009. ‘What If There Is No Elephant? Towards a Conception of an Un-Sited Field’, in MarkAnthony Falzon (ed.), Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research. London: Routledge: 47–72. Cowan, Jane K. 2021. ‘Modes of Acting Virtuously at the Universal Periodic Review’, in Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilac¸a and Maria Varaki (eds.), Ethical Leadership in International Organizations: Concepts, Narratives, Judgment and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 176–202. Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. ‘Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology’. Ethos, 18(1): 5–47. Dave, Naisargi. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1976 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Routledge. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Faubion, James D. 2001. The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. ‘The Subject That Is Not One: On the Ethics of Mysticism’. Anthropological Theory, 13(4): 287–307. Foot, Philippa. 1978. Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Forbess, Alice. 2015. ‘Paradoxical Paradigms: Moral Reasoning, Inspiration, and Problems of Knowing among Orthodox Christian Monastics’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 113–28. Foucault, Michel. 1978 [1976]. The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. 1985 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. 1986 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Three: The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon. 1997. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume One. Edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Allen Lane. Friedman, Jonathan. 2018. ‘Situating Morality’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 182–98.

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Held, Virginia et al. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoffman, Lisa M. 2010. Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Holbraad, Martin. 2018. ‘Steps Away from Moralism’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 27–48. Huff, Benjamin I. 2013. ‘The Target of Life in Aristotle and Wang Yangming’, in Stephen Angle and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 119–29. Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia’, in Signe Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge. Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kapferer, Bruce and Marina Gold. 2018. ‘Introduction: Reconceptualizing the Discipline’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 1–26. Keane, Webb. 2021. ‘From Ethics to Politics. Comment on Grohmann, Steph. 2020. The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 11(2): 813–17. Keown, Damien. 1992. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kipnis, Andrew B. 2008. ‘Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Governing?’ American Ethnologist, 35(2): 275–89. Kirsch, Thomas G. 2004. ‘Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief’. American Anthropologist, 106(4): 11. Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2): 311–32. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laidlaw, James and Jonathan Mair. 2019. ‘Imperfect Accomplishment: The Fo Guang Shan Short-Term Monastic Retreat and Ethical Pedagogy in Humanistic Buddhism’. Cultural Anthropology, 34(3): 328–58. Lambek, Michael. 2000. ‘The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy’. Current Anthropology, 41(3): 309–20. 2010. ‘Introduction’. In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 1–38. 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Lear, Jonathan. 2000. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levy, Neil. 2004. ‘Foucault as Virtue Ethicist’. Foucault Studies, 1: 20–31. Liangjian, Liu. 2013. ‘Virtue Ethics and Confucianism: A Methodological Reflection’, in Stephen Angle and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 82–9. Loy, Hui-chieh. 2014. ‘Classical Confucianism as Virtue Ethics’, in Stan van Hooft (ed.), The Handbook of Virtue Ethics. New York: Acumen Publishing: 285–93. Lynteris, Christos. 2012. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Berlin: Springer. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth Books. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’. Cultural Anthropology, 16(2): 202–36. Mair, Jonathan. 2015. ’Proposing the Motion: The Concept of Neoliberalism as a Moral Schema’, in Soumhya Venkatesan (ed.), ‘Debate: The Concept of Neoliberalism has Become an Obstacle to the Anthropological Understanding of the Twenty-First Century’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21: 911–23. 2023. ‘The Anthropology of Buddhism’, in Simon Coleman and Joel Robbins (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12(2): 161–84. 2014. ‘The Moral Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother’. Ethos, 42(1): 119–38. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Munro, Donald J. 1971. ‘The Malleability of Man in Chinese Marxism’. The China Quarterly, 48: 609–40. 1982. The Concept of Man in Contemporary China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988. ‘Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 13: 32–53. O’Neill, Onora. 1983. ‘I. Kant after Virtue’. Inquiry, 26 4): 387–405. 1996. ‘Kant’s Virtues’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live: Essays on the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 77–99. Pang, Keum Young Chung. 2000. Virtuous Transcendence: Holistic SelfCultivation and Self-Healing in Elderly Korean Immigrants. London: Routledge. Read, Kenneth E., 1955. ‘Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama’. Oceania, 25(4): 233–82.

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Roberts, Robert C. 2017. ‘Varieties of Virtue Ethics’, in David Carr, James Arthur, and Kristja´n Kristja´nsson (eds.), Varieties of Virtue Ethics. Berlin: Springer: 17–34. Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shahar, Meir. 2008. The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Slote, Michael A. 2001. Morals from Motives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. Moral Sentimentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013. ‘The Impossibility of Perfection’, in Stephen Angle and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 99–109. 2020. Between Psychology and Philosophy: East-West Themes and Beyond. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Song, Jesook. 2009. ‘Between Flexible Life and Flexible Labor: The Inadvertent Convergence of Socialism and Neoliberalism in South Korea’. Critique of Anthropology, 29(2): 139–59. Swanton, Catherine. 2003. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. Chichester: John Wiley. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. van Norden, Bryan. 2007. Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Matthew D. 2013. ‘Structured Inclusivism about Human Flourishing: A Mengzian Formulation’, in Stephen Angle and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 110–18. Williams, Bernard. 1976. ‘Moral Luck’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 50: 115–51. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press. 1993. Shame and Necessity. London: Taylor & Francis. Wright, Fiona. 2016. ‘Palestine, My Love: The Ethico-Politics of Love and Mourning in Jewish Israeli Solidarity Activism’. American Ethnologist, 43 (1): 130–43. Yun, Hsing. 2007. Buddhism, Medicine and Health. Hacienda Heights, CA: Buddha’s Light Publishing. Zagzebski, Linda. 2010. ‘Exemplarist Virtue Theory’. Metaphilosophy, 41(1– 2): 41–57. Zigon, Jarrett. 2011. ‘A Moral and Ethical Assemblage in Russian Orthodox Drug Rehabilitation’. Ethos, 39(1): 30–50. 2014. ‘Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions for Morally Being-in-the-World.’ Ethos, 42(1): 16–30.

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4 Agonistic Pluralists Three Philosophers of Value Conflict James Laidlaw and Patrick McKearney

The collapse of faith in the possibility of objective and timeless moral truth that occurred across European civilization, beginning towards the end of the nineteenth century, had many causes and many authors, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) often being credited with some of its most influential early articulations (2001 [1882], 1994 [1887]). Much of the history of both philosophy and the social sciences in the twentieth century and since has been, as Geuss (2014), among many others, has observed, the story of responses and counter-responses to that collapse. In the Anglophone world, the process was comparatively gradual, and in the middle of the twentieth century the schools of thought that dominated moral philosophy – utilitarian consequentialism and Kantian deontology – still shared an aspiration to ground moral knowledge in foundational principles unassailable by doubt, applicable to moral agents conceived in resolutely individualistic terms and also abstractly, in the sense that they would be essentially the same whenever, wherever, and however they lived. These moral principles, it was assumed, could therefore be arrived at without the need for empirical study by any actual social forms of ethical life, historical or contemporary. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was a pivotal figure in effecting change. His later teachings and posthumous writings (1953, 1969) marked a decisive break from logical positivism – an early twentieth-century attempt in analytical philosophy to shore up and police the boundaries of objectivity – and, for many who have come after him, he accomplished decisively ‘the demolition of all attempts to understand the human mind in isolation from the social practices through which it finds expression’ (Scruton 1995: 291). His influence was decisive in bringing the broader collapse of faith in timeless objective truth to moral philosophy. The ‘ordinary-language philosophy’ that developed among some of Wittgenstein’s followers made it possible to investigate ethics through attention to the minutiae of linguistic practice, such as John Austin’s

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(1957) much-cited anatomy of excuses. But while such moves might easily have encompassed an interest – perhaps logically ought to have encompassed an interest – in social and historical variation in forms of ethical life, this did not in fact occur (Williams 1985: 120–31). Meanwhile, some of Wittgenstein’s closest students, led by Elizabeth Anscombe (1958), initiated the development of a broadly Aristotelian virtue ethics that became the principal rival in Anglophone moral philosophy to consequentialism and deontology. This movement absorbed Wittgenstein’s insistence that ethics can exist only as part of a form of social life, but has not yet succeeded in taking what anthropologists know of cultural diversity seriously into account (see Mair, Chapter 3 of this volume). And change was not always in one direction. John Rawls, in the 1950s, was also strongly influenced by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in his view of morality as an inherent part of a ‘form of life’ (Forrester 2019: 8–9), but his thinking slowly developed in an increasingly ahistorical, abstract, and technocratic direction, with ideas drawn from cybernetics, game theory, and welfare economics, and it crystallized into a distinctive contractarian Kantian structure that purported to provide a universalist basis for liberal egalitarianism. So, as finally published, his A Theory of Justice (1971), surely the most influential single work of Anglophone moral and political philosophy of its era, represented a decisive reassertion of faith in universal, objective moral knowledge. The systematic account it provided of the foundations for a universal set of rules and rights set the agenda for much of the most globally influential legal, moral, and political thought, as well as much far-reaching policy formulation in the succeeding half-century. In this chapter, we consider three Anglophone philosophers – Bernard Williams (1929–2003), Charles Taylor (1931–), and Martha Nussbaum (1947–) – who came to prominence during that period, and are generally regarded, with considerable cause, as exponents of virtue ethics and as influential intellectual dissidents from Rawlsian rights-based orthodoxy. The position is slightly more complicated than that, however. Although highly influential on the development of virtue ethics, these authors also stand slightly apart from it, declining to use the label for themselves and even denying that it designates a coherent category (e.g. Williams 1994; Nussbaum 1999b). And Nussbaum, as we shall see later, has become increasingly sympathetic to Rawls in many respects. Nevertheless, they all also articulate a conception of philosophy strikingly at variance with his. None of them are ‘relativists’ in anything like the sense in which that slippery term is generally used by philosophers, or anthropologists, or in everyday parlance. Nevertheless, they all dissent from the conception of the philosophical enterprise, exemplified by Rawls but going back as far as Plato, that aims at universal and objective moral truth. They have each declared such ambitions not only impossible to realize in practice but also positively harmful to pursue. The reason for this is that they are all, though not in identical ways, value pluralists. Fundamental facets of the human

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condition – the fact that life takes place only in history, in social institutions, and in personal relationships; that meaning and value exist only within the social practices that make up a form of life; that the goods of any such form of life are fragile, plural, and incommensurable, and may be in irreducible conflict – mean that Socrates’s confidence that ‘the good man cannot be harmed’ has never been justified, unless that ‘man’ is defined as something other than the beings we actually are. The importance of our three authors for the anthropology of ethics thus lies in the fact that their work points towards a conception of ethical enquiry that takes us beyond the idea that our discipline requires a satisfactory dialogue with moral philosophy. Insofar as their most fundamental claims are accepted, the difference between moral philosophy and the anthropology of ethics will tend to dissolve, requiring at least as much change in philosophy as in anthropology. The logical consequence of their views, we shall suggest, is that ethical inquiry needs to be an empirical and comparative study of the ethical dimension of lived forms of social life. On the philosophical side, one can see the beginnings of such a change already, in the varied recent work of a number of moral philosophers in which empirical study of forms of social life is at least an essential part (e.g. Amanda Anderson 2016, 2018; Elizabeth Anderson 1993; Appiah 2005, 2008, 2010; Chappell 2014; Dan-Cohen 2016; Joyce 2006; Lear 2006; Pettit 2018; Prinz 2007; Raz 1986, 2005; Snow 2015; Swanton 2003; Tully 2008; Velleman 2015; Wong 2006). Our argument here is that informed critical appreciation of the work of Williams, Taylor, and Nussbaum will advance the anthropological side in this development. We shall begin by describing their shared dissent from contemporary moral and political philosophy conceived on the Platonic model, and their shared conviction that ethical enquiry should be concerned with ethical selves that are always located in the particulars of social relations and historical context, rather than as abstractly conceived rational agents. We shall then proceed to explore the different ways in which they develop this general position, in different interdisciplinary engagements and in the themes they develop in their major writings. We then examine the relationship between their philosophical convictions and their political and religious commitments, and the extent to which these incline them towards making normative prescriptions. Finally, because they represent different possibilities for the anthropology of ethics as much as for moral philosophy, we shall explore the overlapping but different conceptions of the nature of ethical enquiry exemplified by their respective oeuvres.

Modern Moral Philosophy: Footnotes to Plato In her first major work, The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Nussbaum describes ancient Greek tradition as locating humans between the animal world, from which we are distinguished by reason, and the gods, from whom we

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are distinguished by our materially dependent and vulnerable animality. That tradition recognized that ‘a lot about us is messy, needy, uncontrolled, rooted in the dirt and standing helplessly in the rain’ (2). The tragic poets powerfully represented our consequent vulnerability to three pervasive causes of luck and circumstance: personal relationships and attachments, conflicts between the things we value, and our non-rational appetites, feelings, and emotions. Plato, Nussbaum argues, represented the most ambitious philosophical attempt to rescue us from this condition by denying its ultimate reality (see also Lloyd 2005). She reads his middle-period dialogues as a ‘heroic attempt’ to save us from the tragic view of the world. For Plato, ‘no tragic poem . . . could be a good teacher of ethical wisdom’, for it aims to arouse pity and fear in relation to what can happen to us (1986: 129). According to Plato, philosophy (including in the parables of the line and the cave) shows us that our common ways of perceiving the world are radically misleading, and that the reality lying beyond sensory experience is that we are rationally self-sufficient and invulnerable. Having access to the reality of the singular nature of the good, ‘which can render all alternatives commensurable’ (110), dispels the dangerous illusion that conflicting values make irreconcilable claims upon us. The Republic provides instead a blueprint for a social order so systematic that Plato imagines it will realize an ethical state in which there are no real value conflicts to be faced (136–64). Taylor and Williams do not agree with everything in Nussbaum’s analysis of Plato or in her championing of Aristotle as the alternative: Taylor (1988b) has more sympathy, as a Roman Catholic and for essentially religious reasons, with Plato’s aspiration to the transcendent; Williams (2006a: 339) thinks Nussbaum finds in Aristotle ‘a rather more openminded and exploratory humanism’ than is in fact there. But while all three of them express immense admiration for the power of Plato’s dialogues, they also share the view (first adumbrated at length by Nietzsche) that his magnificently systematic project is ultimately incoherent and deeply misguided, and that it has shaped modern moral philosophy for the worse (see Taylor 1988b; Williams 2006a: 148–86). This shared position is rooted in value pluralism and what they see as the realities of human existence. They all think the tragic poets were right that value conflicts are real: that the goods of human life are many, often rivalrous, and present us with genuinely tragic choices. They also think the poets correctly portray our happiness as vulnerable, such that goodness alone cannot protect us. If this is so, then Plato’s enterprise is fundamentally misconceived, and modern moral philosophy, insofar as it inherits Plato’s rationalism, his assumption of ultimate commensurability, and his denial of the reality of tragedy, inherits this incoherence. If tragic choice is an ineradicable aspect of the human condition, then Plato’s project of freeing us from what he regarded as the mere appearance of conflict and harm amounts to a futile attempt to solve human problems by imagining

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us as other than human. It seeks, as if it were a higher and better life for us, what is really the life of an altogether different sort of being (Nussbaum 1986: 379). The real meaning of Plato’s ascent from the cave to the sunlight is, as Williams (2006a: 169) puts it, ‘a departure from human concerns altogether’. Our three authors each insist on the trans-historical and cross-cultural reality of value conflict (e.g. Williams 1981: 71–82; Taylor 1985b: 230–47; Nussbaum 1990: 106–24). Williams and Taylor are indebted for this view to their teacher at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin (1969, 1978, 1979, 1990; see Gray 1993: 64–9; 1995), and Nussbaum is influenced in turn by Williams. Williams summarizes Berlin’s position thus: Berlin warns us against the deep error of supposing that all goods, all virtues, all ideals are compatible . . .. This is not the platitude that in an imperfect world not all the things we recognise as good are in practice compatible. It is rather that we have no coherent conception of a world without loss, that goods conflict by their very nature, and that there can be no incontestable scheme for harmonizing them. (1978b: xvi) In an early paper, ‘Ethical Consistency’, Williams identifies as a pervasive problem in mainstream moral philosophy the assumption that beneath all apparent ethical conflict there is always only one genuine obligation, and insists on the contrary that ‘moral conflicts are neither systematically avoidable, nor all soluble without remainder’ (1973a: 179). For Taylor (1985a: 15–44), the ontological plurality of goods means that moral agency consists of reflective choice between incommensurables. For this reason, utilitarianism, with its attempt to recast all ethical decisions as a weighing up of a single good, is doomed. Nussbaum (1986: 112, 117, 121) finds in utilitarianism a vulgarized rendition of Plato’s experiment, in the Protagoras, with pleasure as the single good – one that frequently forgets its origins as a deliberate break from common sense, and mistakes its normative injunctions for descriptions of how we really think (e.g. Singer 2010: 344; see also Williams 1985: 16). Modern Kantianism’s insistence that there is a distinct domain of moral value that is both overwhelmingly more important than anything else and entirely immune from luck recapitulates Plato’s aspiration to rational invulnerability (Nussbaum 1986: 4–5, 186–7). One of Williams’s most influential papers, ‘Moral Luck’ (1981: 20–39), was designed to disprove just this idea of the invulnerability of the moral will to the assaults of fortune. So, on this basis our three authors reject what they see as some widespread features of mainstream analytical moral and political philosophy. They deprecate its scientism, both the aspiration to emulate scientific styles of presentation (Williams 1985: 106; Nussbaum 1990: 3–19, 36) and the attempt to adopt a detached point of view external to ethical life (Williams 1981: 101–14; 1995: 153–71; Taylor 1985a: 45–76; Nussbaum

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1990: 187); its reductionism, in the search for ‘some one reason for everything’ (Williams 1985: 114) or a ‘single principle of morality’ (Taylor 1994b: 250); its universalism, which involves abstracting from and ignoring particularity and historical and cultural variation (Williams 2006b: 193–4); and its spendthrift attitude to the ethical knowledge embedded in everyday custom and practice, such as in our love of particular people and places (Nussbaum 1986: 191, 260; 1990: 167). Philosophy from Plato through Kant to Rawls and others has conceived of the moral self as an independent and essentially ‘characterless’ abstract entity, each identical to every other, and able through reason to adopt a stance outside itself (Williams 1993: 158–9). Systematizing moral theory of this kind, says Williams (1985: 117), ‘typically uses the assumption that we probably have too many ethical ideas, some of which may well turn out to be prejudices’, which includes any that cannot be shown to be derived in rationalist fashion from abstract principle or expressed as universal rules. ‘Our major problem now is actually that we have not too many [ethical ideas] but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can.’ This underlies another significant commonality among our three authors: a turn away from deduction to engagement with descriptive sources to inform ethical reflection that takes place within, rather than outside of, human life. How has it come to be that modern moral philosophy tends, as our three thinkers believe it does, to impoverish rather than enrich our ethical life? Williams offers a historical argument with his notion of the ‘Morality System’. His early essays (see 1973a and 1981) carefully exposed several paradoxical and untenable aspects of ‘morality’ as conventionally understood: it allows for no credible notion of personal identity, it requires people to become alienated from their deepest commitments and personal relationships, it can make no sense of salient features of moral experience such as regret and personal integrity. Something profound, he cumulatively suggests, is wrong with our concept of morality. Then, in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), he historicizes this diagnosis with the suggestion that these confusions and incoherencies are features not of ethical thought as such, but of a highly specific variant of ethics that has come to dominate modern Western societies. This ‘Morality System’ is a historically unusual and narrow conception of what counts as answering the Socratic question, ‘How should one live?’. It is a version of ethics that has roots in Platonic rationalism but has taken a specific form and has come to have an unprecedented dominance in modern societies. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were arguing against a dominant culture that made different presuppositions, but modern Kantian and consequentialist philosophers, while they are happy enough to dismiss common-sense moral intuitions where they conflict with their theories, are arguing for ideas that have become powerfully institutionalized and ideologically dominant in conditions of modernity. The immense success of both utilitarianism

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and theories such as Rawls’s in influencing public debate, legal thought, and state policy are expressions of this ideological dominance. They are adapted to the needs of state bureaucracy, and their radically individualizing notion of obligation conceals the vital social dimensions of ethical life (1985: 174–96). Williams refers to this modern Morality System as ‘the peculiar institution’. This expression was a euphemism for slavery in the antebellum South (Jenkins 2006: 69), which is to say a system that was in some people’s interests at the expense of others, undoubtedly, but also dehumanizing for everyone involved. Implicitly, it is also a reference to Nietzsche’s idea of ‘slave morality’ (Nietzsche 1994 [1887]). And like Nietzsche, with whose ideas he became increasingly engaged, Williams thought that a secularization of Christian ascetic values accounted for a good deal of the content of the Morality System. While he credited Kant with its most formative and influential systematization, much of Williams’s critical attention was directed to the work of utilitarians and contemporary Kantian contractarians such as Rawls who, by continuing to refine the system, shore up its inconsistencies, and weave it into the legitimation of modern institutions such as democracy and human rights, are inadvertently making matters worse. Their efforts further exclude and marginalize, and make it harder even to recognize as ethical at all, ideas and practices that do not conform to the system, such as concern with one’s own integrity as an agent, or more generally in resisting the demand that one’s life be transformed into little more than a cypher for the fulfilment of duties that present themselves as categorical and absolute but which are in fact anything but (1973a, 1973b, 1981). Taylor largely agrees with Williams on the general character of the Morality System, and its radical inadequacy for our needs (1989a: 53–90; 1995b). He offers an alternative historical story about its origins that traces its deficiencies to scientific naturalism and its associated atomism and universalism, rather than Christianity. Indeed, for Taylor, the goods valued in modern society – freedom, equality, reason, individualism, benevolence – have their origins in Christianity (1989a: 36–40, 495–8; 2007), and it is part of the weakness of modern philosophical thinking that it cannot recognize this. Nussbaum’s early work (1986, 1994) has close affinities to Williams’s attempts (especially 1993), in ethnographic mode, to recover overlooked or disparaged ethical ideas from the ancient world, to enlarge our collective ethical imagination by making available to us concepts and insights of which the Morality System tends to deprive us (Nussbaum 1986: 4–5). But she offers no equivalent of either Williams’s or Taylor’s critical, historical accounts of the moral culture of modernity, perhaps because her later work on flourishing and human development brings her increasingly close to the perspectives and concerns of states and international bodies, which Williams and Taylor regard as constitutive of the Morality System.

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Taken together, these authors offer a distinctive set of arguments about the inadequacy of modern moral philosophy as a way of pursuing ethical enquiry. We move now to describing how, by turning to different sources beyond the analytical tradition, they each develop more relational conceptions of the ethical agent, more sociologically informed versions of ethical knowledge, and a more descriptive kind of ethical enquiry.

Descriptive Moral Philosophy: Three Versions Charles Taylor Taylor’s DPhil at Oxford was completed under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin, and Berlin’s influence becomes evident again in Taylor’s later writings. But his early career took a divergent direction. An enthusiasm for Marxism, and especially for Marx’s early writings, led to an interest in Hegel, and for some time Taylor was the leading exponent among Anglophone analytical philosophers of both Marx (1966, 1974, 1978) and Hegel (1975). And from Hegel, his interests extended to Heidegger and other continental phenomenologists (1985a: 248–92; 1995a: 61–78, 100– 26; 2011: 56–77; Dreyfus and Taylor 2015). Although based in predominantly Anglophone institutions – Oxford, McGill, and Northwestern – he is bilingual in French from his upbringing in Quebec, closest of our three authors to mid-twentieth-century European social theory, and the most holistic in his conception of the social. So, his accounts of modern individualism can sound a lot like Durkheim or Dumont. ‘The free individual of the West is only what he is by virtue of the whole society and civilization which brought him to be and which nourishes him’ (1985b: 206). Like Durkheim, Taylor argues that it is possible to accept the modern world’s moral evaluation of the individual without accepting the ‘atomistic’ metaphysical individualism that typically justifies it. Although his views on many matters evolve over time, Taylor never repudiates the holistic and teleological inheritance of this Hegelianism. The structure of Taylor’s social theory of morality is evident in his 1989 book Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, which begins with an analysis of what he regards as the ‘permanent structures’ or ‘ontological features’ of moral life (1989a: 25–52). These arise from the fact that we are reflective, language-using, and, as Taylor puts it, ‘self-interpreting animals’ (1985a: 45–76). This centrally includes the fact that we engage in what he calls ‘strong evaluation’, which is ‘something like a human universal, present in all but what we would clearly judge as very damaged human beings’ (Taylor 1994b: 249). The idea is derived from Harry Frankfurt’s (1971) notion of second-order desires. As language-users, and as conscious and reflective beings, we chronically subject our own conduct (including our thoughts and feelings) to interpretative description. We have stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing, and we cannot carry on without

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such narratives. An important dimension of this is self-evaluation: we approve, embrace, and identify with some but not all aspects of how things are with us. Some of our desires are desires we desire to have; others are very much otherwise. And these evaluative self-interpretations are ‘constitutive’ in the sense that, as they are formulated, they can alter the state of affairs they describe so that changes in the terms in which we understand our experiences are also changes in our experience (1989a: 101). Furthermore, these self-interpretations are not merely internal or private. They are dialogical. Our selfhood necessarily takes place relationally (25– 42). Indeed, especially in his later writings (Taylor 2016), there are suggestions that strong evaluation takes place in part in the language itself, in the background, as it were, of people’s conscious activity (see Abbey 2000: 19– 20). For all these reasons, only a creature with language can engage in the strong evaluation without which it is not possible to be a moral agent in Taylor’s terms (1985a: 263). Having put in place this general description of the social nature of moral agency (much of which is roughly shared by Nussbaum and Williams), Taylor then makes the distinctive move in his account, which is his claim that not only is strong evaluation central to our moral experience, such that ‘we cannot do without some orientation to the good’ (1989a: 33), but also that this fact allows us to infer, as the best description we can conceive of the ‘transcendental conditions’ of human life as we experience it, the existence of the good towards which we are thus orientated. As Williams remarks, this is to move from what he agrees is a brilliant and compelling phenomenological account of moral experience ‘very rapidly uphill, metaphysically speaking’. The good to which Taylor thinks we are inescapably orientated, and whose existence we may therefore infer, is of course a depersonalized God, or, as Williams puts it, ‘the pale Galilean, in some generic, Platonic form’ (2006: 309). This is one of several respects, especially in the second half of Taylor’s long career, in which his Roman Catholicism makes itself apparent in his account of moral life. Taylor’s conception of the moral self as reflexively constituted through processes of self-understanding suggests that to comprehend moral life in the present, we must develop an account of how it has been shaped historically. Accordingly, Sources then describes at length the various ways in which moral value has come to be vested, in the modern world, in inwardness (1989a: 111–98), in ordinary life (211–302), and in nature (305–90). These discussions of individualism, puritanism, deism, utilitarianism, romanticism, and artistic expressivism are characterized by two pervasive features. First, the tone is affirmatory. It is a story, on the whole, of the enlargement of our moral sensibilities. Even bad philosophies, such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, which cannot articulate the bases of their own appeal or their own deepest commitments, nevertheless give expression to values – such as benevolence and impartiality – which are in Taylor’s view cumulative achievements of modernity. He sees his task as

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enabling us to acquire a more articulate understanding of this precious inheritance than these theories themselves can afford us. His book is, as he puts it, a work of ‘retrieval’ (520). Second, these achievements are in turn shown to have grown out of religion, which indeed remains the hidden source of their ‘spiritual power’ (203). Once we have understood their religious sources better, we shall be able more discriminatingly to embrace these modern values. For instance, if we can overcome the difficulty the modern individual finds in grasping that its individuality is itself not a natural given but constituted dialogically in its relations with others, it will be easier to realize its ideals of autonomy and self-responsibility (1985c: 278). Secularization means that for moderns, belief in God has gone from being virtually unchallengeable to only one (rather embattled) option among others (Taylor 2007). Taylor argues against the common understanding of this process – he calls it the ‘subtraction thesis’ – as consisting simply of throwing off old illusions and superstitions. Instead, he describes a more complex process which has left modern selves with three general orientations towards the good. The first, the most direct product of secularization, is a humanism that is ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘exclusive’ in that it is entirely this-worldly and thinks that it requires no hierarchical mediation to reach the good. But even this, with its distinctive features such as equality among citizens, has its roots in Christian impulses. The second is a counter-Enlightenment reaction, which appears to be Taylor’s rendition of Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981, 1988, 1990) proposed return to Thomist tradition. This, Taylor says, does not convince because it reads modernity only through ‘its least impressive and trivializing offshoots’ (1989a: 511). The third, his own, he refers to as a ‘capacious theism’, which embraces much of the moral legacy of the Enlightenment as well as non-Christian forms of spirituality but not its metaphysical premises, and acknowledges, which selfsufficient humanism cannot, that humans simply have an ‘ineradicable’ yearning for transcendent meaning. No moral framework that fails to respond to that yearning can be wholly satisfying to human subjects, as Taylor conceives them. Secularization has tended to disguise this from us and thus encouraged the impoverishment of self-understanding Taylor finds in the Morality System, but cannot change the underlying fact.

Bernard Williams Williams, trained in classics and philosophy at Oxford, taught successively in Oxford, London, Cambridge (where he became Provost of King’s College), and Berkeley, before returning to Oxford in 1990. He drew on a broad range of intellectual resources. His understanding of the ancient

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world shows the impress of anthropology, including anthropologically informed classicists. He engaged in print with the work of the classical Greek philosophers, but also such diverse modern figures as Descartes (1978a), Hume, Kant, Sidgwick, Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Nozick, Rorty, and Nagel (1985, 1995a, 2006a, 2014). He also engaged with literature and the arts, especially opera (2006). He was not undiscriminatingly eclectic, however, and unlike Taylor expressed only contempt for Heidegger: ‘the only world-famous philosopher of the 20th century about whom it can seriously be argued that he was a charlatan’ (2014: 183; see also 2005: 44). The most important modern philosopher for Williams, from outside the Anglophone analytical tradition, was Nietzsche. For Williams, as for Taylor, understanding the sociality and historicity of ethical life needs to be underpinned by a rich phenomenology of ethical experience, ‘of what we believe, feel, take for granted; the ways in which we confront obligations and recognize responsibility; the sentiments of guilt and shame’ (Williams 1985: 93). This phenomenology must be clearsighted and unsentimental (hence his pointed inclusion of guilt and shame). Williams persistently complained that his colleagues, especially optimistic contractarians such as Rawls, smuggled overly optimistic assumptions into their descriptive vocabulary, imagining humanity rather too much in the image of mild and well-meaning philosophy professors. They needed a much more realistic (which is not to say ‘value-free’) moral psychology (1995a: 65–76; 1995b: 202–5). When Williams speaks of philosophy’s unhelpfully ‘moralized’ psychology, he means not ‘value-laden’ language as such, but the use of concepts that are informed not by honest description and analysis of the not always pretty ways in which actual people think and conduct themselves, but by the wish-fulfilling requirements of ethical theory. He traces the practice to Plato (1993: 42–3), and his tripartite division of the soul, which re-describes our experience of conflicting desires, whose reality Plato wanted not to have to acknowledge, as being a matter of our having allegedly different kinds of desires, located in different parts of the psyche. But this is a cheat: these purported differences and their putative locations have their origin entirely in their function of providing Plato with a morally agreeable dissolution of the conflicts. Nothing, other than their function in making painful conflict seem more comfortingly tractable, suggests that these different ‘parts of the psyche’ exist. Aristotle’s assertion of the unity of the virtues is another instance, for Williams, of this idealization of ethical life. One of the spurs for his interest in Nietzsche was the immunization the latter’s bracing genealogical analyses of morality provide (Nietzsche 1994 [1887]; 2001 [1882]), in particular against believing things about humans simply on the basis that it would be nice if they were true (Williams 1995: 65–76; 2001). Williams argues that ‘ethical understanding needs a dimension of social explanation’ (1985a: 131), and the adoption of an ‘ethnographic stance’

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(1986: 203–4). His own sustained exercise of this kind is his reconstruction, in Shame and Necessity (1993), of ancient Greek ethical life. In that book, he argued against the established view that the Greeks ‘lacked’ some allegedly important ethical ideas, such as the ‘moral will’. This concept, Williams argued, was a moralized invention of bad philosophy (36), motivated by the Morality System’s requirement that blame be reserved for actions that are in a deep sense intentional. And it brings with it a host of philosophical pseudo-problems. The ancient Greeks had managed without any such entity, and we too would be better off without it. ‘If we can liberate the Greeks from patronizing misunderstandings of them, then that same process may help free us of misunderstandings of ourselves’ (11). In fact, the Greeks shared with us a range of concerns and emotions that the Morality System cannot accommodate: our loyalties, the most important of which we will not have chosen; the projects and commitments we strive to fulfil because they are ours (and not because we have dispassionately evaluated them ‘from the point of view of the universe’ or from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’); moral emotions such as regret, guilt, and shame; and our ultimate vulnerability to necessity and chance. Myopia about all of this, combined with its prejudicially moralized psychology, endows most of our moral and political philosophy with a deep dishonesty. It presents the world as if it were ‘safe for well-disposed people’, which it is not (2006a: 59). Nowhere does Williams attempt a detailed historical account of the origins and development of the Morality System comparable to Taylor’s rich narratives in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. His sociological observations are mostly fragmentary, such as that the requirement for ethical thinking to mirror bureaucratic procedure – ‘transparency’ and so on – tends to undermine and de-legitimize our richest ethical concepts. What Williams called ‘thick’ ethical concepts, such as ‘courageous’ or ‘rude’, unite description and evaluation, judgement and emotion, and therefore violate that totem of modernist purification (Latour 1993), the fact–value dichotomy (Williams 1985: 140–5, 217–18; 1995b: 205–10; 2005: 47–8; see Goldie 2009; Kirchin 2013). They are both ‘world-guided’ and evaluative at the same time, such that we can talk about their truth or falsity as judgements. And retaining these concepts requires us to confront the aspects of human emotion and motivation, such as envy and shame, which too much liberal moral and political philosophy has preferred to wish away. Rather than being conventionally explanatory, Williams’s historical writings are genealogical, and while critique of the Morality System is a common theme, these exercises in genealogy are distinctive (and in this respect like Taylor’s) in being largely recuperative. Shame and Necessity aims to recover for us ethical knowledge of which our modern theories tend to deprive us. And Truth and Truthfulness is designed to rescue our devotion to truthfulness from the demoralizing effects of the

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fashionable ‘deconstructive vortex’ (2002: 3). By telling a ‘vindicatory’ genealogical story of how our concern for truth might have developed from a state of nature, he makes the case for the ‘virtues of truth’ in the hope of persuading those whom he refers to as ‘the deniers’ that ‘to the extent that we lose a sense of the value of truth, we shall certainly lose something and may well lose everything’ (2002: 7; see also 2014: 405–12). Williams’s emphasis on the historical and social constitution of ethical subjects thus does not lead him to anything like a repudiation of ethical knowledge (even if he also thought that such knowledge is not all we need) or of the idea of truth, and it does not lead him to relativism. What he called ‘standard relativism’ is, he insisted, simply idle: a response to a predicament that does not exist. ‘Cultures’ are not and virtually never have been hermetically sealed worlds, and so the problem-situation relativism is designed to solve is not a real or live one (2005: 29–39; cf. also 1972). This is sometimes misunderstood because he did espouse an idea he called ‘the relativism of distance’, which involves noting that there are circumstances in which it becomes invalid to apply contemporary moral categories or criteria to the past (1981: 132–43). But this is not itself a relativist claim. On the contrary, it is premised on the possibility of coming to understand the past in a rich and detailed way, through a kind of historical ethnography. An ‘insightful but not totally identified observer’ (1985: 142; see also 1986) is able to learn to understand and use other people’s evaluative concepts in ways that do not simply require agreement with them, but equally do not preclude discovering truth in what they say (1985: 145; 1995b: 206). This is what makes it possible, on the model of ethical enquiry Williams promoted, not only to learn by means of historical or ethnographic analysis about other forms of ethical life but also to learn from them, as Williams claimed we can from the ancient Greeks. And this provides one possible basis for the practice of anthropology to be a form of ethical cultivation, such that we might see the reading or writing of ethnography as a spiritual exercise (e.g. Laidlaw 2014: ch. 6; McKearney 2016; see also Luhrmann, Chapter 28 of this volume).

Martha Nussbaum Educated in theatre studies as well as classics, and having spent some time in professional theatre, Nussbaum gained her PhD in ancient philosophy from Harvard. After being the first woman to be elected to a Harvard Junior Fellowship, she has taught successively at Harvard, Brown, and since 1994 at Chicago. For Nussbaum, the social dimension of the ethical self is a matter of the relational processes that make us into particular individuals. Her exploration of these processes begins, in The Fragility of Goodness (1986), with her account of Aristotle’s view of the emotions as ‘identical with the

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acceptance of a proposition that is both evaluative and eudaimonistic’ (2001a: 41). This ‘acceptance’ abolishes the Platonic distinction between emotions and reflection. Emotions register changes in things beyond the self’s control in a visceral, rather than detached, way precisely because this information is about our flourishing, our dependence on the body and its relationship to the world, and thus our vulnerability to contingency (2004: 6). Nussbaum reads Greek tragedies as offering philosophical insights compatible with Aristotle’s into the various forms this vulnerability can take, as well as what a proper recognition of it would entail. She gives the example, from Euripides’s The Trojan Women, of the overwhelming grief Hecuba expresses following the destruction of her family in the fall of Troy, and her own enslavement (1986: 312–17). She contrasts a Platonic view of this emotion as an uncontrolled physical impulse that generates moral misperception, because these misfortunes do not really harm Hecuba’s soul, with her own view, following Aristotle, that the overwhelming nature of the emotion constitutes a direct and accurate perception of the loss of irreplaceable individuals and circumstances on which Hecuba’s flourishing and identity really did foundationally depend. The real, full recognition of that terrible event . . . is the upheaval . . . the very act of assent is itself a tearing of my self-sufficient condition. Knowing can be violent, given the truths that are there to be known. (2001a: 45; original emphasis) Throughout Fragility, Nussbaum refers to the damagingly Platonic tendencies in both utilitarianism and Kantianism. In Love’s Knowledge (1990) she decries the concentration, in moral philosophy generally, on universalizing rules as the mark of rationality, arguing that perception of the particular is the highest form of reasoning, thus dissolving the boundaries between ethical reflection, emotional reaction, and interpersonal recognition. She turns to modern novels which, she argues, confront the generalizations of ethical theory with attention to the rich individuality of characters and relationships. They demonstrate, in their very form, the storied nature of the self: neither characterless nor immune to chance. Novels, like tragedies, embody an anti-Platonic conception of the agent because they display things happening to people. In particular, they demonstrate the ways in which people who take up utilitarian and Kantian moral doctrines, hoping thereby to gain immunity from such contingencies, end up having to confront the tragic nature of a world of particularity, plurality, and vulnerability (1986: 199, 382; 1990: 4, 17; for an analogous project of which Nussbaum approved, see also Cavell 1987). By the end of Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum’s divergence from Plato and Kantianism is at its most pronounced, as she wonders whether erotic and romantic love of a particular person might be more important than ethics altogether.

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In The Therapy of Desire (1994), she elaborates these anti-Platonic arguments about the necessary rooting of ethical reflection within the human condition through a medical analogy: Plato is like a doctor who develops a conception of health ‘without any knowledge of the feelings, needs, pleasures, and pains of actual living creatures’ (1994: 19). By contrast, we need to define health in relation to human embodiment and concerns. She turns to Epicurean, Skeptic, and especially Stoic philosophers to help her develop Aristotle’s cognitive account of emotions, by drawing upon their discoveries of unconscious beliefs, desires, and motivations, which have been re-discovered only recently by psychoanalysis (26, 490) and are still inadequately appreciated in modern philosophy (507–8). And she suggests that if the interdependence of emotion and reason is acknowledged, philosophy can be more than merely descriptive. Philosophical analysis can serve, as it did in the ancient world, as a therapy of desire, enabling us to overcome universal experiences arising from our vulnerabilities, such as anger, anxiety, and despair. In this context, she acknowledges an exception to the recent philosophical neglect of Hellenistic thought in Foucault’s Care of the Self (1988 [1984]). But she objects to his treating philosophical techniques du soi alongside ‘religious and magical/superstitious movements of various types in their culture’. Because of Foucault’s (alleged: see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume) view that ‘knowledge and argument are themselves tools of power’, he was unable to acknowledge how philosophy differs from superstition (1994: 5–6). Here, it is worth noting that alongside her opposition to Platonic transcendental objectivity, another set of opponents feature increasingly in Nussbaum’s writings. These are philosophical viewpoints, including some forms of ordinary-language philosophy, virtue ethics, and postmodernism, that articulate and affirm the ways we currently get along in the world and with each other, and abjure the possibility of thoroughgoing critique and reform of existing social arrangements carried out in the name of reason. In a way that was less obvious in her earlier writings, Nussbaum from this point on increasingly seeks to make (not transcendentally but empirically) objective claims about human nature and what it is we value as humans. If we remain accountable to the particularities of the human condition, she contends, then just as we can with health, we can make broader claims about moral flourishing. This sets Nussbaum on something like the trajectory earlier followed by Rawls in the development of his ideas, from a somewhat pluralist position influenced by Wittgenstein towards a more universalist Kantian conception of general moral principles and universal requirements of justice. Accordingly, although she does not follow Rawls all the way, her references to his work become markedly more positive. In Upheavals of Thought (2001a), Nussbaum develops Aristotelian and Stoic insights into a comprehensive theory of the emotions as cognitiveevaluative instruments of moral reasoning. She corrects the Stoic theory

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of emotion (itself a correction of Aristotle’s) by considering evidence from animal-behaviour studies, anthropology, and developmental psychology. The Stoics were mistaken in assuming that because animals and infants are not fully rational, they do not experience emotions. Also, they did not realize that emotions might be subject to cultural variation. Nussbaum rejects theories (in psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology) that treat emotional life ‘as universal in all salient respects’ (2001a: 143). But cultural and historical difference is not fundamental to her understanding of ethical selfhood in the way it is for Taylor and Williams. She sees too strong a view of social construction, and an excessively holistic sociology, both of which she finds in much anthropology of emotions (143–4), as obscuring both individual differences between people and commonalities between cultures (154–5): The human personality has a structure that is at least to some extent independent of culture, powerfully though culture shapes it at every stage. (2000a: 155) So more important than cultural variation is variation between individuals, including within any given culture. The Stoics did not appreciate how profoundly emotional life is shaped by the contingencies of one’s personal story: infantile experience and the tragic fortunes of childhood, friendship, and love. Upheavals goes on to explore the implications of her account of the emotions for political life and morality, drawing her readers into a transhistorical conversation about the nature of ethical selfhood that includes, for instance, Aristotle, Dante, Mahler, and Joyce, and proposes an ideal of interpersonal love as the ethical pinnacle and purpose of human life. This does not mean that human emotions may safely be taken as they are. The long period of infantile helplessness in humans, for example, leaves us with a primordial experience of ungovernable fear. We have a ‘problematic relationship’ with our neediness and mortality. Exploiting these weaknesses, retrograde social systems evoke emotions such as shame, disgust, and anger that disfigure and distort social relations and politics (2004, 2006, 2013, 2016, 2018). So, a healthy democracy needs the therapy of philosophy as much as did the ancient world, and Nussbaum proposes an Aristotelian programme of moral education – including latterly even three years of compulsory non-military national service (2018: 241–3) – through which citizens might learn to become truly reflective and control these dangerous emotions.

Agonistic Liberals: Divergent Political and Religious Convictions In the mid-1980s our three authors appeared close to each other philosophically: anti-rationalistic, interested in human frailty, emotion, personal commitments, and questions of identity and integrity in

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understanding ethics. They were reading each other and reacting largely positively, and pursuing philosophical projects that were distinctive for being grounded in the description of lived human life. But over time they diverged philosophically. This included divergence in the degree to which their philosophy was explicitly normative, although they all came to describe their politics, either for the first time or more insistently than before, as ‘liberal’. Nussbaum describes herself as liberal all along, latterly also as ‘on the left’ (2018: 219). A controversialist, she has written famously blistering reviews of authors on both the right, such as Allan Bloom (2012: 36–52), and the left, such as Judith Butler (2012: 198–222). Her experience beyond academic philosophy brought out the universalizing and normative potentialities in her thought. In the late 1980s she began working for the World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) and for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This included empirical research in several developing countries, especially India, and collaboration with the economist Amartya Sen, and resulted in proposals for the measurement of well-being that have influenced UN policy. This experience appears to have been decisive in motivating her to link her philosophical convictions about vulnerability to interventions beyond the academy. The ‘capabilities approach’ began with an Aristotelian account of ‘non-relative virtues’ (1988) and matured into a list (changing slightly in different versions) of essentially human capabilities which it is the responsibility of governments to ensure for all their citizens (Nussbaum and Sen 1993; Nussbaum and Glover 1995; Nussbaum 1993, 1999a, 2000a, 2006, 2011, 2018). Nussbaum thus promotes her account of human ethical development and emotional maturity into a universal standard. In 1993, she served as an expert witness in a court case in Colorado on legal protection for gay people. The case ended in the US Supreme Court and generated much publicity. By its conclusion, she had become a high-profile public progressive intellectual and has since published in a much more prescriptive fashion than in her earlier work on an ever-widening array of policy debates, including affirmative action, human cloning, disability rights, sex-work, ageing, nationality, and populism. In The Frontiers of Justice (2006), Nussbaum identifies in terms of practical politics closely with the liberal egalitarianism of Rawls and his followers, but seeks to rectify what she sees as the most important limitations of the contractarian foundations of that position: its postulation of autonomous agency and its neglect of our vulnerable and dependent nature. This places her neatly between liberal egalitarianism and its feminist critics: criticizing Rawls on feminist grounds (see also 2000a: 241–97) and differing from feminist critics of Rawls (e.g. Kittay 1999, 2003) on liberal grounds (2000a, 2000c, 2006; see also McKearney 2018, 2021b, forthcoming; Mattingly and McKearney, Chapter 22 of this volume).

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Williams was politically well connected but never a party-political man (Hawthorn 2005: xvii). His first wife, Shirley Williams, was one of only three front-rank female politicians in the UK in the early 1970s, and when she (by then his ex-wife) left the Labour Party to found the Social Democrats in the early 1980s, he was sympathetic. By that point, he was himself well known for having chaired a Royal Commission (ad-hoc ‘greatand-good’, non-party-political public enquiry) on the regulation of pornography in the UK. Although never fully enacted in legislation, the report (1979; published as Williams 2015) was nevertheless consequential in holding back demands, from both right and left, for more effective censorship. His early academic writings, however, were largely non-political and when he did come later to write about politics systematically (see the essays in 2005), it was in analytical rather than normative mode. He consistently represented his position, along with the societies whose politics he sought to understand, as liberal. The overall thrust was antiutopian, and the prevalent theme was diagnosis of the frailties of political moralism: the expression, in the realm of politics, of the kind of wishfulfilment he deplored as ‘moralized psychology’ in his writings on moral philosophy. Taylor has made the longest journey politically. A student activist at Oxford, a founder of both the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and what became the New Left Review, and, after returning to his native Canada, several-times parliamentary candidate for the New Democratic Party, Taylor’s early writings include explicitly Marxist pieces advocating a planned economy (1960, 1969, 1974). As late as 1973 he was wondering if the answer to how humanity might create a non-exploitative society would come from Communist China (1985a: 137; cf. also 1975: 541). But Taylor’s conviction that self-sufficient humanism was an inadequate response to fundamental human impulses was an important factor in his subsequent break with Marxism. At a conference in 1987 commemorating the creation of the New Left Review, he identified what he had come to see as the intellectual flaws at its core. One was its conception of social order and freedom, inherited ultimately from Rousseau, which allowed a vanguard minority to claim to embody (and therefore impose) the true will of the people; the other was its ‘militant atheistic materialism’, which meant that it had ‘nothing to say about death, finitude, our relation to nature, and only shallow things to say about human distance or sin or moral transformation’. Consequently, Marxism ‘manages to live only where Marxist regimes are not’, and as a philosophy ‘from the Elbe to the Mekong Delta it is dead behind the eyes’ (1989b: 67–70). By the late 1980s he was describing his own style of political and moral philosophy as ‘civic humanist’ and ‘Tocquevillean’ (1989b: 64, 76). This change of stance foreshadowed a new set of political themes in Taylor’s philosophical writings from the 1990s. He became an important exponent of multiculturalism (1993, 1994a), both as a framework for Quebec to remain peacefully within his native Canada

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and generally as a model for successful cultural pluralism within liberal, democratic states. His contention that liberal democracy requires ‘a politics of recognition’ was one of the most influential formative articulations of the case for what developed as state-sponsored multiculturalism. By soon after 1990, his self-description too had become ‘liberal’. This apparent convergence on liberalism makes sense, however, only if we bear in mind how radically internally diverse is the category ‘liberal’. It encompasses not just diverse positions on balancing equality and freedom and in relation to the power of the state, such as are registered by the different locations on the political spectrum of those who call themselves liberals across Western democracies (the ‘Liberal Party’ is left-of-centre in Canada but right-of-centre in Australia, etc.). Roughly speaking, Nussbaum uses the word as part of an American, Williams as part of a British, and Taylor as part of a European political lexicon. There are also deeper differences. John Gray (2000) helpfully distinguishes between the monist liberal tradition, represented by Locke, Kant, Hayek, and Rawls, that strives for the creation of a rationally justified, universal socio-political order, and the pluralist tradition that aims rather for peaceful coexistence between deeply different dispensations, represented by Hobbes, Hume, Oakeshott, and Berlin. Judith Shklar (1989), cutting the cake somewhat differently because she construed liberalism as a political doctrine rather than a more encompassing philosophical orientation, distinguished the liberalism of rights (Locke, Jefferson, Kant) from the liberalism of selfdevelopment (Montaigne, Mill, Emerson), and these in turn from the variant she herself espoused, the liberalism of fear. This latter form of liberalism, forged in reaction to the religious conflicts of post-Reformation Europe and in horror at the cruelty those conflicts engendered, is primarily an insistence on the toleration of differences in values and a warning that the first and necessary step of any successful liberal politics is the prevention of cruelty. These are just a few categories which we draw quickly here to indicate the divergent sorts of liberalism our three authors come to espouse. Williams and Taylor are unambiguously on the pluralist side of Gray’s monist–pluralist distinction. And in terms of Shklar’s political doctrines, Williams (2005: 52–61) explicitly subscribed to the liberalism of fear. He thought that political liberalism has a very robust justification but a historically specific and conditional rather than metaphysical one: it is just the best way to run societies of a specific historical kind, with no grander claim to universality (9, 29–39). He rejected Rawls’s prescription for a just liberal order precisely because he thought it did not leave room for genuinely various conceptions of human beings and of ways of life within it (2014: 326–32). For Taylor, the minimalism of the liberalism of fear, with its focus on damage limitation and ‘non-aggression pacts’ between diverse versions of the good life, has never been quite sufficient. As self-interpreting animals,

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we require recognition by others, and for that and other reasons liberal freedom requires political participation (1994a). Taylor is therefore attracted to the revival of classical Republicanism (1995: 181–203, 204– 24; Taylor, Nanz, and Taylor 2020) espoused by Quentin Skinner and others (Skinner 1998, 2008; Pettit 1997, 2012). Williams was sceptical about that (2005: 9–10, 75–96) and sensitive to the authoritarian potentialities Berlin (1969, 2002) had identified in positive conceptions of liberty. So he was withering about any dalliance with the idea that people might need to be forced to be free (2005: 81–5, 115–27). Taylor, while perhaps increasingly mindful of this danger in later life, has been eloquent on the other hand on the insufficiency of negative liberty (1985b: 211–29). This puts Taylor much closer to Shklar’s liberalism of self-development. And he gives qualified approval, which Nussbaum (1997a, 2002) generally does not, to values of patriotism and loyalty to one’s political community, because they are necessary to sustain a degree of solidarity that a procedural liberalism of rights alone is not capable of securing (1995a: 204–24, 225–56; 2002). Nussbaum is closer to the monist than the pluralist liberal tradition, in Gray’s terms. She acknowledges some importance to historical and cultural difference, and the existence of clashing interests, passions, and motivations in human life. But she also claims this is uniformly so for humanity as such: the same goods are always and everywhere in the same relations of conflict, and this means that in her later writings she confidently proposes which values need to be realized by all political orders everywhere. Like Rawls, she leaves open the possibility in theory of different means of doing so and of different forms of life within a political system (2000a: 167–240; 2000b: 59, 96). But in practice cultural differences are typically regarded as obstacles to be overcome, in achieving the global convergence at which she aims, rather than as sources of value in themselves or as varied sites in which ethical life must be differently lived. For her, unlike Williams and Taylor, there is nothing fundamentally illconceived about aspiring to global justice, secured by a single political and social order for the whole of humanity. Because we are dependent animals and not just rational agents, the state must provide and direct the allocation of the material, emotional, and educational resources people need to develop into subjects equally capable of participation in liberal democracy (2000c, 2006, 2013, 2018; see also McKearney forthcoming). There is a strong strand of Shklar’s liberalism of development here, and of rights too. While capabilities are distinguished from rights, they occupy similarly universalizing and normative ground (2000b: 97, 100–1; 2004), entail the same prioritization of equality and fairness, and mandate a more positive than fearful stance in relation to state power (2000a: 56). These differences in the kinds of liberalism their philosophical views informed are connected with their differing religious commitments. And these in turn are differences that speak to contemporary debates on the

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possibilities and perils of ‘post-secular’, ‘theologically informed’, and/or ‘moral’ anthropology (Banner, Chapter 8 of this volume; Luhrmann, Chapter 28 of this volume; Fassin 2008, 2012; Fountain 2013; Furani 2019; Lamb and Williams 2019; Larsen 2014; Lemons 2018; McKearney 2016, 2019, 2021a; Robbins 2020; Willerslev and Suhr 2018; Yang 2020). Nussbaum, a convert from an Episcopalian upbringing to Conservative and then to Reform Judaism, describes her reforming zeal as supported by a highly conditional but avowedly messianic faith that individual wellbeing and the common good can ultimately be harmonized under the wise government of an impersonal God (2003b): another expression of the limits to her pluralism. Taylor’s liberal pluralism, which applies not only to goods and values but also to forms of life and visions of the good, informs a more cautious politics than Nussbaum’s, and one that is also more tentatively uplifted by religious hope. As Isaiah Berlin (1995) pointed out, in a comment on the differences between Taylor and himself, Taylor’s Hegelianism and Christianity give him an openness to teleology that Berlin himself could not share. In response, Taylor admits to a distant hope of a social and political order that might reconcile the goods of modernity with those that have been lost in the process (1995b: 224). Williams was the only one of the three without religious faith and also the least inclined to political utopianism. For him, the ancient Greek tragic vision is important precisely because it ‘refuses to present human beings [as] ideally in harmony with their world’ and ‘has no room for a world that, if it were understood well enough, could instruct us on how to live in harmony with it’ (1993: 164; cf. 2014: 310–11). In contrast to the differently faithful optimisms of Nussbaum and Taylor, Williams’s more pessimistic version of liberalism followed Nietzsche’s injunction to accept that God is dead, which requires rethinking our values in light of that fact. Williams was not only not religious but also specifically a sceptic about Christianity. Comparing his views with those of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, both Roman Catholics, Williams once remarked, All three of us, I could say, accept the significant role of Christianity in understanding modern moral consciousness, and adopt the three possible views about how to move in relation to that: backward in it, forward in it, and out of it. (2005: 53–4) MacIntyre’s illiberal preference is to undo the Enlightenment along with the Reformation and re-establish an authoritative moral order on Thomist principles; Taylor’s preference is to deepen our appreciation of the values modernity has inherited from Christianity – individualism, sincerity, and so on – including by articulating their Christian pedigree, to make possible a modernity more at peace with its Christian past. By referring to his own preference as ‘out of it’, Williams signals his Nietzschean view that subterranean Christian ideas – the idea that

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morality should be opposed to self-interest, the idea of the moral will, and an overemphasis on intention in our thinking about responsibility – are among the more disabling features of modern morality. Despite their shared appreciation of tragedy, Nussbaum found Williams’s interpretation of the tragic vision problematic for its neglect of the ‘essential practical function’ (1997b: 528) of ethical enquiry. Observing that she had never seen Williams angry, Nussbaum interprets his approval of the ancient Greek tragic vision of misfortune as ‘resignation’: ‘it means that there is nobody to blame and nothing more to do. We can sit back and resign ourselves to the world as it is’ (2003a, 2009b). Instead, she urges ‘an intensification of moral or political effort’ (2009b: 220). When confronting misfortune, we need to ask, ‘is the cause immutable necessity, or is it malice or folly?’. Williams is likely to have replied that there is danger in assuming that this must always be the choice. He counselled also against philosophy or cultural criticism in which the desire to do good (or ‘being helpful’) takes precedence over ‘getting it right’ (2014: 363–70). Philosophers who make that choice are likely, he believed, to do neither.

Conclusion: The Social Nature of Ethical Enquiry Our three authors were all influential pioneers in arguing, in their different ways, that the ethical self is not a timeless entity but powerfully shaped by its relational context, and therefore that moral philosophy, as conventionally conceived, needed to be expanded into a more socially and culturally descriptive kind of ethical enquiry. But they never agreed on precisely in what ways the self is relational, or therefore on what kind of knowledge moral enquiry might hope to achieve. Over time, these differences deepened, including through the ways in which they responded to each other’s writings. Here, we describe the different views they developed on the nature and limits of ethical enquiry. Insofar as these options point towards a merging of moral philosophy and the anthropology of ethics, the differences between them illustrate some of the choices that are open to anthropologists in how best to pursue the study of ethical life. Williams (1985: 153) insists that there is nothing we can know about human needs and motivations conceived somehow before or outside of a social world. So, it makes no sense to ask what the human social world would best be like. There is no such thing, for Williams, as a ‘general’ ethical subject and therefore no morally optimal social order. As a result, ethical understanding of necessarily diverse ethical agents is inseparable from social explanation. This means ethics is ‘radically contingent’ in a way that science is not. Whereas science can at least coherently hope to move, in any line of enquiry, towards convergence on an answer that represents in some

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sense ‘how things are’, in ethics there is no such coherent hope (1985: 136). ‘An ethical system should not try to have the same virtues as a scientific theory’ (106; cf. 2014: 367–8). At the same time, however, ethical enquiry is in some respects constrained by science. Our understanding of moral psychology – whatever sense we make of the notion of free will, for example – must be compatible with the naturalistic account of processes of thought and decision we currently hold (1995a: 3–21). But science is not going to tell us what that understanding of moral psychology itself should be. Ethnographic imagination enables us to recognize commonalities – and to overcome the limitations of our ethical theories – across historical and cultural difference. So, we can enrich our ethical thought by learning not only about but also from other social forms of ethical life. Ethical enquiry is a practice that takes place within human life, and that means from within the socially and historically particular life we have, the ‘we’ of ethical discourse not normally for practical purposes being as broad as humanity itself. Famously, Williams rejects what he calls ‘ethical theory’. By this, he does not mean any generalizations or logical arguments or discussion of conceptual matters. He undertakes plenty of those himself. What he means to exclude as ‘ethical theory’ are systems that claim to give us formal and ideally universal decision procedures, such as the utilitarian calculus of the greatest good, a Kantian categorical imperative, or a doctrine of universal rights. The search for ‘theory’ of this kind has not only dominated mainstream moral philosophy but also has a powerful hold on our public and political imagination. But equally, a system that claimed on theoretical grounds that there could in principle be no such tests – as many deconstructive or relativistic doctrines do – would also be an ‘ethical theory’ on Williams’s account. What he proposes instead is a stance that would not take finding universal tests to be anything like its principal aim, because it would not assume that satisfactory ethical knowledge must take this form, or necessarily be knowledge of ‘the universal’. ‘It is an outlook that embodies scepticism about philosophical ethics, but a scepticism that is more about philosophy than it is about ethics’ (1985: 74). Moral enquiry can still reflect on issues of theoretical depth, such as the relationship between agency and responsibility, without being ‘ethical theory’ in this sense: instead, for instance, articulating the specific ways in which these relations were imagined and conducted in ancient Greece in ways importantly different from and richer than contemporary moral philosophy imagines. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams briefly considers one possible way – not unlike Aristotle’s, but shorn of its Socratic requirement of providing grounds requiring any rational individual to accept it – of aiming at objective ethical knowledge (1985: 152–5). ‘Granted that human beings need to share a social world’, what might they have in common in

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terms of their needs and basic motivations? Is there anything sufficiently substantive that we can know about ‘human nature’ that would enable us to say what kind of social system might maximize human flourishing? Interestingly, this describes rather exactly the distinctive kind of ‘ethical theory’ Nussbaum seeks to construct in the following decades, including both her work on the emotions and that on capabilities. Williams made clear in his book, avant la lettre, that he thought such a project could not succeed. We need only compare Aristotle’s catalogue of the virtues with any that might be produced now, he remarked, to see that our nature does not timelessly demand a life of any particular kind. The results of such enquiry would have to be either too indeterminate to be much practical help or would involve an undesirable constriction of human possibilities. There are no signs that Nussbaum’s subsequent work ever overturned this opinion, but he had described this potential project as not sharing the fundamental incoherence of most ethical theory (high praise for Williams), and indeed as ‘the only intelligible form of ethical objectivity at the reflective level’. Nussbaum finds in Aristotle precisely what Williams denies: the basis for a philosophical method that differs from Plato’s in being ‘based on and responsible to actual human experience’ (Nussbaum 1990: 173), yet can deliver objective and universal moral truth about ‘the human’. Although she acknowledges history and cultural difference, they play no formative role in her conception of the ethical self, because: There is no . . . pure access to . . . human nature as it is in and of itself. There is just human life as it is lived. But in life as it is lived, we do find a family of experiences . . . which can provide reasonable starting points for cross-cultural reflection. (1988: 49) She therefore turns to developmental psychology and literature as sources to excavate cross-cultural continuities. This is one of the features of her work that makes it less obviously anthropological than Williams’s. But at least some anthropologists might see this as an experiment in articulating ethical categories broad enough to enable ethnographic comparison, and thus raising those questions that Williams doubts have any meaningful answer: what, if anything, might be said in universal terms about ‘the human’, if one were to take the diversity of the ethnographic record more fully into account than Nussbaum herself does? In Fragility and Love’s Knowledge the accent falls on the particularity of individual lived experience (1986: 243; 1990: 54–106). But this focus was never meant to preclude ethical enquiry from yielding objective ‘transcontextual truths’ (1994: 9, 23). So, Nussbaum was unhappy to find Fragility being read as a work of virtue ethics and as making a case, alongside MacIntyre and others, against the Enlightenment and in favour of custom,

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tradition, and emotion over reason as sources of moral knowledge. These views she repudiated as obscurantist and politically reactionary (2012: 53– 68; 1999b, 2000b, 2001b). She made plain that she had never intended a rejection of Enlightenment reason, but on the contrary aimed to recruit ancient Greek thought for ‘an expanded version of Enlightenment liberalism’ (2001b: xvi). She also observed that proponents of irrationalism often took her to share their own opposition to systematic theorizing in ethics, and she rejected this imputation. This question of the status of ‘theory’ she returned to repeatedly, often specifically in relation to Williams’s views (1995, 1997b, 1999b, 2000b, 2001b, 2003, 2009, 2014). Her early work was influenced by him, and she often expressed admiration. Indeed, in the disarmingly disclosive manner she sometimes adopts, she has described having developed a sort of crush on him on first meeting (recalling vividly the pink mini-dress she was wearing at the time) and subsequently having to manage the anger occasioned by these feelings (2003a; see also 2014). She and Williams developed a mutually supportive professional relationship, commenting generally positively on each other’s writings, but on this matter they were apparently at odds, and Nussbaum sought to defend her commitment to theory and urged Williams to clarify or shift his position. Williams did not reply extensively in print (but see 1995b: 194–202), although he does seem to have done so in personal correspondence (Nussbaum 2000b: 80, ft. 10; 2001b: xxxiv, ft. 60). Nussbaum never thought Williams guilty of the irrationalism she saw in many virtue ethicists as well as ordinary-language philosophers and post-modernists, and went so far as to dedicate to him the preface to the second edition of Fragility, in which she set out to refute irrationalist, virtue-ethical readings of her book (2001b: xiii, ft. 1). But she also perceived a tension between his sceptical views on the ‘limits of philosophy’ and her ambitions for philosophical theory as an instrument of personal therapy and political reform. A favourite example is Catherine MacKinnon’s ‘theory’, as Nussbaum calls it, of sexual harassment. It may lack nuance, she concedes, but only such ‘simplicity and systematizing power’ can prevail against entrenched dogmas, and so effect societal change (1997b: 528). These writings by Nussbaum are not always helpful because many of the merits she claims for ‘theory’ – internal consistency in argument, open debate, and so on – suggest that what she wants to defend is not what Williams was against. Her rhetorical flights also tend to exaggerate the distance between them. But there is undoubtedly an underlying divergence of view. For Taylor (1989a), historical and social differences much more profoundly shape what ethical subjects are like than they do for Nussbaum. But if this places him closer to Williams, Taylor differs from the latter too. Even in very different ethical worlds humans share a condition of dependency, a need for sociality, and – here is where the difference between them arises – an orientation towards the transcendent. Taylor is a more

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thoroughgoing sceptic than Williams about science as a mode of understanding human conduct (see Geertz 1994). He is more hostile to scientific psychology (1964; 1985a: 117–212), and this standpoint rests not only on the observation that humans are self-interpreting in a way that nothing else in nature is, but also, ultimately, on a faith that there is something transcendent in the human. For Taylor, like Williams, the main work of moral philosophy is not abstract theory but ‘articulation’, trying to spell out what we normally only implicitly suppose (1989a: 26). This may sound unambitious compared with ‘theory’, but because we are self-interpreting, articulating our presuppositions in this way changes us. It promotes a richer self-understanding and this in turn increases our chances of rational debate and appreciation of the moral bases of each other’s positions. So, for example, while a thoroughly consistent utilitarian ‘would be an impossibly shallow character’ (1985a: 26), Taylor thinks the utilitarian subscribes to certain ‘constitutive goods’, which the theory itself cannot recognize, and bringing this out through ‘articulation’ has the potential to enlarge the utilitarian’s moral sensibility (1985b: 266; 1989a: 31–2, 88, 332– 40). His conception of ethical enquiry includes striving, as generously as possible, to articulate the underlying appeal of even one’s opponents’ ethical visions (see Williams’s approving discussion of this; 2006a: 303). Taylor’s historical account of the development of modern moral sensibilities thus has a similar general structure to Williams’s ‘vindicatory’ genealogical exercises, and a great deal in common with the predominant interpretative ethic in all but the most suspiciously ‘critical’ anthropology. Taken together, these authors present a forceful challenge to philosophical approaches that seek to abstract from the embodied, social character of human ethical life to universalizing theory. They therefore help us to construe the anthropological study of ethics not as a competitor or even as a complement to the real work of moral philosophy, but as its fulfilment. Taken separately, they offer different ways of conceiving what an anthropologically descriptive ethical enquiry might amount to: what it might need to presuppose, how descriptively close or normatively detached it could be from the ethical knowledge embedded in social practice, and therefore what kinds of things it might enable us to say.

Acknowledgements For helpful comment and advice on earlier drafts of this chapter, the authors would like to express their warmest gratitude to the following: Joanna Cook, Cecile Erikson, Paolo Heywood, Teresa Kuan, Hallvard Lillehammer, Carlos London˜o Sulkin, Jonathan Mair, Cheryl Mattingly, and Paul Sagar. Errors and omissions remain, of course, the responsibility of the authors.

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1969. ‘Either We Plan Our Economy, or We Become a Branch-Plant Satellite’. Maclean’s Magazine, 83 (December): 77. 1974. ‘Socialism and Weltanschauung’, in Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire (eds.), The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal. London: Quartet Books: 45–58. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978. ‘Marxist Philosophy’, in Bryan Magee (ed.), Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy. London: British Broadcasting Corporation: 42–59. 1985a. Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985b. Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985c. ‘The Person’, in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (eds.), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 257–81. 1986. ‘Human Rights: The Legal Culture’, in Paul Ricoeur (ed.), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights. Paris: UNESCO. 1988a. ‘The Moral Topography of the Self’, in Stanley Messer, Louis Sass, and Robert Woolyolk (eds.), Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 1988b. ‘The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, by Martha Nussbaum’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18: 805–14. 1989a. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989b. ‘Marxism and Socialist Humanism’, in Robin Archer et al. (eds.), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On. London: Verso: 59–78. 1993. Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 1994a. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. With K. Anthony Appiah, Ju¨rgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1994b. ‘Reply and Re-articulation: Charles Taylor Replies’, in James Tully (ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 213–57. 1995a. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1995b. ‘A Most Peculiar Institution’, in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 132–55. 1999. A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture. Edited by James L. Heft. New York: Oxford University Press.

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2002 [1996]. ‘Why Democracy Needs Patriotism’, in Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country? Edited by Joshua Cohen. Boston, MA: Beacon Press: 119–21. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles, Patricia Nanz, and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor. 2020. Reconstructing Democracy: How Citizens Are Building from the Group Up. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tully, James. 2008. Public Philosophy in a New Key. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Velleman, J. David. 2015. Foundations of Moral Relativism. Second expanded edition. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Weber, Max. 1948 [1919]. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge. Willerslev, Rane and Christian Suhr. 2018. ‘Is There a Place for Faith in Anthropology? Religion, Reason, and the Ethnographer’s Revelation’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8: 65–78. Williams, Bernard. 1972. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. New York: Harper & Row. 1973a. Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1973b. ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978a. Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1978b. ‘Introduction’, in Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories. Edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1981. Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. 1986. ‘Reply to Simon Blackburn’. Philosophical Books, 27: 203–5. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994. ‘Ethics’, in A. C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 545–82. 1995a. Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers 1982–1993. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995b. ‘Replies’, in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006a. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy. Edited and with an introduction by Myles Burnyeat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006b. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Selected, edited, and with an introduction by A. W. Moore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006c. On Opera. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2014. Essays and Reviews 1959–2002. Foreword by Michael Wood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2015 [1979]. Obscenity and Film Censorship. Originally published by HMSO (Cmnd 7772) as the Report of the Committee on Film Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. 1969. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. Wong, David. 2006. Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yang, Mayfair. 2020. Re-Enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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5 The Two Faces of Michel Foucault Paolo Heywood

What, do you think that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing . . . if I were not preparing – with a somewhat shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture . . . in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. Michel Foucault (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge: 17

Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear. Michel Foucault (1980), ‘The Masked Philosopher’: 321

Foucault’s Labyrinth In an after-dinner speech to a meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, published as Waiting for Foucault (1993), Marshall Sahlins remarked on the strangeness of taking utterly seriously one particular set of texts written by Michel Foucault, the ‘man of a thousand faces’ (1993: 40). This was in 1993, and the set of texts in question were those concerned with power (for instance, going by Sahlins’s brief summaries: Abu-Lughod 1990; Jacquemet 1992; Limo´n 1989). Sahlins’s speech neatly skewered an attitude in anthropology of the period he summed up as ‘Power, power everywhere, and nothing else to think’ (1993: 20), listing just a few of the phenomena (nicknames in Naples and scatological horse-play among Mexican-American workingclass men, for example) that ethnographers had explained as instances of ‘power’ or ‘resistance’.

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Two and a half decades later, we have something else to think: ethics. The anthropology of ethics has furnished the discipline with new terminology, new objects, and arguably a new way of understanding its own purpose, as this volume describes. It has moved, in some respects, from a notion of ‘subject’ as in ‘one subject to power’ to a ‘subject’ tied to their own practical experience and self-knowledge (Foucault 1982a: 781); from ‘technologies of domination’ to ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1982b: 19); and from a search for the strategies and mechanisms of power to one for ‘practices of freedom’ (Foucault 1984a: 3). Yet these transformations also originate, at least in part, in Foucault’s labyrinth. What, then, is the relationship between these two faces of Foucault, both of which have had such a significant impact on anthropology and beyond? This chapter will aim to describe some of the content of Foucault’s work on ethics and its impact on anthropology. But the question of how that work relates to his earlier, and equally influential, work on power is more than a footnote in intellectual history, let alone in the biography of a particular thinker. One can ask it in those forms, but its relevance to understanding the anthropology of ethics and its relationship to the discipline as a whole lies also in the fact that the question scales up: debates about the relative importance of different parts of Foucault’s oeuvre (see, e.g., Allen 2000; Burkitt 2002; Flynn 1985; Harrer 2005; Hofmeyr 2006; Menke 2003; Paras 2006) replicate debates about the relative importance of politics and ethics in late twentieth-century philosophy more generally (see the case made in Bourg 2007 and Rancie`re 2006), which in turn replicate debates about the proper focus of social and cultural anthropology (for instance, Laidlaw 2002, 2013; Kapferer and Gold 2018). As a consequence, the main body of the chapter will summarize some important aspects of Foucault’s intellectual biography before moving to discuss some debates surrounding how to interpret the legacy of his work, in anthropology and beyond. I will not attempt to resolve the question of how his two ‘faces’ relate, in part because I will argue that there may be a lesson to be learnt from Foucault’s own apparent unwillingness to resolve this question.

A Passion for System Before his turn to ethics, Foucault’s work was united by what some (e.g. Habermas 1987; Honneth 1991; Taylor 1984) have read as a fundamental rejection of the centrality of the subject in philosophical thought. His early works – Madness and Civilisation (in English, 1964 – based on the longer Folie et De´raison, 1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) – were heavily influenced by the vogue for structuralism then sweeping French intellectual life. In this period Le´vi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser were replacing Sartre and Camus as

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the dominant figures in philosophical circles, and a formalist concern for language and the internal relationships between its component parts seemed poised to triumph over existentialism and earlier incarnations of Marxism, together with their interests in humanism and history. The Order of Things in particular caused some sensation, claiming as it did that ‘Man’ was an invention of the modern discursive formation, a product of the end of the eighteenth century, the development of the ‘human sciences’, and the problem of how to classify into ‘the order of things’ the subject of classification itself (points further developed anthropologically in Rabinow 1989). Even more radically, Foucault concluded the book with the wager that soon ‘Man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ (1970: 422). This period of his work was dominated by a method he called ‘archaeological’ and set out at some length in The Archaeology of Knowledge. The basic thrust of this procedure is the premise that discursive formations or systems of thought – as they were described in the title he chose for his chair at the Colle`ge de France – are underwritten by a set of rules or regulative principles that determine their conceptual possibilities and can be excavated, and their contingency thus grasped. These rules are structural principles and have nothing to do with individuals, their intentions, or the meanings they seek to convey, and in The Archaeology of Knowledge they appear not even to be linked to particular political and economic situations. On the subject of morality Foucault is almost entirely silent at this time, with the exception of claiming, in The Order of Things, that ‘no morality is possible’ for modernity (1970: 357). However, as early as his inaugural lecture at the Colle`ge de France, delivered in 1970 and subsequently published as ‘The Order of Discourse’, there were signs that he was beginning to shift his focus away from purely epistemic considerations and towards politics. He outlined his intent to direct a course on ‘the will to know’, introduced the concept of ‘genealogy’, and attributed far more importance to nondiscursive influences on systems of thought than he had done previously (1971; see also Paras 2006: 54–7). This first ‘turn’ is definitively visible in the essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1978a), which Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) argue demonstrates the enormous impact that Nietzsche’s understanding of power as a productive force in history had on him. His friend and colleague Gilles Deleuze’s book Anti-Oedipus (1972), co-authored with Fe´lix Guattari, with its vision of power as a dispersed arrangement of connected ‘machines’ was also an influence (see, e.g., Paras 2006: 64–7; Eribon 1989: 408–9). Perhaps more fundamentally, changes in the climate of French intellectual life, as well as in Foucault’s own personal experiences, meant that a turn to ‘power’ must have seemed like a natural transition rather than the ‘break’ it has appeared to some in retrospect. May 1968 and its afterlife jolted Foucault and a number of others out of the fascination with

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structuralism, and he participated in some of the 1969 protests at Vincennes, even sharing a stage with Sartre, his erstwhile opponent (Eribon 1989: 375). In 1971, together with his partner Daniel Defert, he formed the Group for Information on Prisons, and it is in relation to penal institutions that his sustained interest in power developed, though ‘power’ and ‘politics’ do appear in The Archaeology of Knowledge as qualifiers of the struggle over discourse (1972: 120). Coupled with knowledge, the subject of his earlier work, and developed over the course of several lecture series at the Colle`ge de France and two books, Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), it would become a concept that would have a revolutionary effect on anthropology and the humanities and social sciences more broadly. The most obvious explanatory contrast to draw is with Marxism, though Foucault himself also contrasted his concept of power with Freudian psychoanalysis and other such ‘juridical’ models. One of Foucault’s teachers at the E´cole Normale Supe´rieure had been Louis Althusser, a structural Marxist who had influenced Foucault’s early anti-humanism. His essay on ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1971), written at precisely the time at which Foucault was beginning to think about power, neatly illustrates the tipping point between Marx and Foucault. Orthodox Marxist accounts of the functioning of power, in addition to describing the ways in which the bourgeoisie might use overt force and violence in order to retain control of the means of production, would often also refer to the notion of ‘ideology’. By this they usually intended an untrue or misleading set of ideas imposed upon people to sustain their ‘false consciousness’. Althusser refers to the distinction between force and ideology as being between ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ and ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, but his real focus is the latter. He has two theses on ideology: the first (‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’) is a fairly straightforward rendering of ideology as a misleading, ‘unreal’, ‘imaginary’ depiction of actual conditions, opposable to ‘science’. The second, though, brings us almost to Foucault’s revolution: ‘Ideology has a material existence.’ By this he roughly intends a sort of political version of Pascal’s gambit: ideology is what we believe, but what we believe is really made manifest (and ‘real’) by what we do (1971). We are what we do, and we do what we are told. The two theses are also obviously contradictory (how can ‘ideology’ be both ‘material’ and ‘imaginary’?) and the claim that ‘ideology has a material existence’ is on the face of it oxymoronic. There is little direct evidence to suggest that Foucault was influenced by Althusser’s argument (though see Montag 1995). But that second thesis on the material existence of certain sorts of knowledge, divorced from the first, and shorn of abiding reliance on a ‘truth’ in opposition to ideology and on the state as the main fount of authority, comes very close to summing up Foucault’s position: ‘power’ (or at least modern, ‘disciplinary power’) does not operate upon

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subjects from the outside, constraining them to do or think things that are against their nature. Power is exactly what makes a subject into a subject (hence his evolving use of the term ‘subjectivation’ or ‘assujettissement’; see later). There is no ‘free’ remainder of the subject left over to act against it, and it does not mask a real ‘truth’ beneath its operation. In fact, often it works most effectively in the form of scientific knowledge or a politics of liberation. Moreover, it does not emanate from a central authority, like a state or a sovereign, in opposition to individuals, but is ‘capillary’, developing and abiding in the micro-contexts of everyday life. Foucault illustrates these ideas in his examinations of the penal system. Discipline and Punish famously begins with a gruesome description of the execution of an attempted regicide. Juxtaposed to this drama is the precisely timetabled set of activities of a reformatory eighty years later, in which time is allotted for work, education, hygiene, food, and prayers. The difference between the two is striking, and the temptation is obviously to read the first as a barbarous act of cruelty and see the second as the consequence of the dawning of a more enlightened and humanitarian age. Foucault’s point instead is that they exemplify two different styles of power: the first is spectacular and discontinuous, and its purpose is to restore a political order put out of joint by doing public violence to the body of the violator. The second, on the other hand, is uninterrupted and ubiquitous, and it operates not on the body but on the soul by exhaustively organizing, distributing, and surveilling subjects (1977a: 3–11). Bentham’s panopticon is the epitome of this second form of power in the context of the carceral system, a central observation tower from which all cells could be observed, but the interior of which was invisible to the cells themselves. Unable to be sure of whether or not they were being observed at any given moment, prisoners would effectively govern their own behaviour in the panopticon without the need for any form of external intervention. They would police themselves. In the spectacular, sovereign form of power the only relevant ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ is of the culpability of the criminal. In the second, the whole being of the criminal and the criminal act is produced, made visible, and interrogated. Just as Foucault had already described in the case of the birth of ‘man’ through the human sciences, this form of power creates subjects (the criminal, the lunatic, the pervert) rather than simply operating on them post-hoc. Althusser’s claim that ideology has a material existence is here taken to its logical conclusion, and the influence of Nietzsche’s pragmatism is clearly evident: knowledge is power because its product is real, material truth. This historical shift was not set in motion by any particular individual or group, and disciplinary power is not at the service of any specific section of society. It emerges piecemeal and in haphazard fashion, crystallizing in institutions such as prisons, asylums, and clinics, and through the practices and techniques of those at the heart of such institutions, as well as in

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the human sciences of which Foucault had already written. But for Foucault this transformation is definitive of modernity more broadly, and his first volume of The History of Sexuality would set out this theoretical vision at its clearest. It further extended the analysis to cover ways in which this form of productive power was employed in the government not just of individuals but of whole populations, a phenomenon he called ‘bio-power’. Sexuality sits precisely at the intersection of these two forms of modern power, and both Foucault and his successors would go on to make productive use of these insights in studies of the ‘governmentality’ of welfare, colonial, and neoliberal states (see in particular Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991 and the review of this literature in Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006). Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality has been called the ‘bible’ of modern queer activist movements (Halperin 1995) because of its central thesis that sexuality – indeed, sex itself – is nothing more than a ‘fictitious unity’ (Foucault 1978b: 154), a nexus for the medical, legal, therapeutic, and punitive interrogation of subjectivity in the modern age. This book also makes even more explicit the revolutionary nature of Foucault’s conception of power. For if it is the case that power operates not by means of repression, negation, or deduction but by production, incitement, and cajoling, then this has radical implications for discourses of liberation in politics and psychology. If power operates by obliging us to produce truth about ourselves, then psychoanalytic notions of freeing an ‘inner self’ repressed by a Victorian morality are not opposed to power but rather a perfect example of how it functions. The same is true of revolutionary political movements which pose the problem of governance in terms of the liberation of a true consciousness of human essence, or of the transgression of illegitimate norms. Foucault’s work on power has had a substantial impact on anthropological studies of politics, the state, colonialism, and anthropology’s own practice (for instance, Ferguson and Gupta 2008; Mitchell 1988; Rabinow 2003; Scott 1995; Stoler 1995). It gave birth to that extensive corpus of anthropological literature on power that Sahlins sought to skewer in Waiting for Foucault as a ‘neo-functionalism’, in which everything could be explained as an instance of power (or resistance). Yet even as its results were being published, his ideas were undergoing further transformation. By 1975, for instance, his brief post-’68 de´tente with the Marxist left appeared to be over (Paras 2006: 79–81). Discipline and Punish contains some ideas sympathetic to Marxism, such as the notion that techniques of discipline were incorporated into the broader capitalist economy, but it fundamentally rejects the thesis that the purpose and origin of such techniques are economic or about serving the interests of a specific class. The History of Sexuality, volume 1 is clearly in part a critique of Marxism’s inherited Hegelian notions of ‘labour as the essence of man’ (Foucault 1978c: 13) and its juridical and ideological conception of power. The

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French intellectual climate was also changing: the events of 1968 were receding into memory, and the mid-1970s saw the rise of the nouveaux philosophes such as Bernard-Henri Le´vy and Andre´ Glucksmann, who were bitterly critical of what they saw as a complicity with Stalinism on the part of sections of the French left (Bourg 2007: 227–302). Foucault positively reviewed Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers (1980), noting in its spirit that ‘the decisive test for the philosophers of Antiquity was their capacity to produce sages . . . in the modern era, it is their aptitude to make sense of massacres. The first helped men to support their own death, the second, to accept that of others’ (1977b). By 1977 his friendship with Deleuze – who despised the nouveaux philosophes – seemed also to be over, after a disagreement over Deleuze’s positive position on the Baader-Meinhof gang (Eribon 1989: 411–13). In terms of this chapter’s focus, we have now reached the crucial juncture in Foucault’s intellectual biography. The exact timing of his ‘ethical turn’ is something of an open question, and if one takes the position that there is thoroughgoing continuity across his various phases, then one may not wish to see any kind of turn at all. But there is undoubtedly a change of some description that takes place around this time. Foucault himself described an ‘abrupt’ abandonment of his former style around 1975–6 (Harrer 2005: 77); his 1977 course at the Colle`ge de France, ‘Security, Territory, Population’, introduced the terms ‘government’ and ‘governmentality’ in the place of ‘power’ as a way of speaking about ‘conduct’, as both a transitive verb (to lead others) and a noun, an ‘open field’ of possible behaviours (1982a: 789); the 1978 course, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, opened an interest in liberalism and the individual; and when the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality finally appeared in 1984, they looked nothing like the books he had projected writing when he began the first volume (see, e.g., 1978b: 21). Yet there is also evidence of significant continuities. Though Foucault has a well-known tendency to read his earlier work retrospectively in the light of whatever he happened to be writing at the time (Flynn 1985: 532), in 1982 he himself made a coherent case for seeing his entire corpus of work as an examination of ‘games of truth’ in relation to the techniques human beings use to understand themselves (1982b). Of these techniques, some are techniques of power and domination, ‘which determine the conduct of individuals’, and on which he had hitherto primarily focussed. Some, on the other hand, are ‘technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’. He would set out a very similar schema in the introduction to volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, suggesting that his work had always been about ‘games of truth’, whether in relation to knowledge, power, or, as it would now become, the self (1985: 4–5).

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What is certain is that Foucault’s interest in the prehistory of modern subjectivity and its roots in Christian confessional practices and the production of truth led him further back in time than he had imagined, and to a topic he had not yet had cause to treat: ethics.

‘The Return of the Subject’ The French subtitle to the first volume of The History of Sexuality is ‘The Will to Knowledge’, and we have already seen how central the concerns of truth and knowledge were to Foucault’s work. In the project of The History of Sexuality this took a particular form: while it began as a project about how telling the truth about one’s sexual identity and desires was central to the modern understanding of subjectivity, it became a project about the roots of that concern with subjectivity and truth itself. From the beginnings of the project, Foucault knew that it would take him further back in history than he had hitherto ventured, into Christian confessional practices formalized at the Lateran Council of 1215. Already in the first volume, however, he was distinguishing between what he called an ars erotica and a scientia sexualis: the latter corresponded roughly with our modern concern for producing ‘truth’ about sexual identity, while the former he characterized – clearly with more sympathy – as an ‘Eastern’ interest in the cultivation of pleasure. As he pursued his research into early Christian asceticism further and further back into history, he found a much more concrete instantiation of an ars erotica in GraecoRoman antiquity. This discovery would allow him to pursue the project of a genealogy of the Christian attitude to subjectivity by demonstrating both its roots and its contingency. The ‘will to knowledge’ that Foucault identifies as the basis of our modern understanding of selfhood emerged slowly and gradually out of a different way of relating to the self, an ancient ‘arts of existence’. Though a fourth volume of The History of Sexuality, devoted to Christian confessional practices, was published posthumously (against Foucault’s express wishes in his will) in 2018, most of its content was written before the second and third volumes, and these would focus squarely on classical Greece and republican and imperial Rome. The distinction between pagan and Christian subjectivity is by no means meant to be absolute, and neither does Foucault present the two categories as in any way homogenous: the third volume of The History of Sexuality charts the transition and interpenetration of imperial Roman and early Christian understandings of the self, and the pre-Raphaelites and Baudelaire are cited by Foucault as at least two examples of a modern version of an aesthetics of existence (see also Faubion 2014). But the differences between pagan and Christian attitudes to sexuality illustrate the way in which this genealogical project led Foucault to an interest in ethics.

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In pursuing his history of sexuality, Foucault found that the rules and codes governing sexual behaviour actually changed remarkably little over time (1985: 15–22). Infidelity, for instance, or homosexuality, were as much problems for the Greeks and the Romans as they were for early (and of course later) Christians. But the manner in which they appeared as moral problems was quite dramatically different. This is the root of a basic distinction often adopted by anthropologists (though not always in the same fashion – e.g. Laidlaw 2002; Fassin 2015; Zigon 2008): morality, on the one hand, is composed of the set of prescriptive norms and values that determine appropriate behaviour in any given context; ethics, on the other, is the practical and reflective way in which one conducts oneself in relation to such norms and values (although Foucault himself speaks of ‘moralities’ in the broadest sense as encompassing both codes of behaviour and forms of subjectivation – 1985: 29). It is the way in which one constitutes oneself as a (moral or ethical) subject. In a manner reminiscent of his early critiques of ‘juridical’ models of power, Foucault thinks that though certain contexts may lend themselves more to the codification of morality than others and that this might merit some attention, it is the dynamic variation in ethics that is fundamental to the formation of subjectivity (Foucault 1985: 23–5, 30). To this basic distinction, between ‘moral codes’ and ‘ethics’, Foucault adds four further analytical sub-categories to the latter: ‘practices or techniques of self’; ‘mode of subjectivation’, or how one brings oneself to subscribe to a particular moral code; ‘telos’, or the proper ends of ethical action; and ‘ethical substance’, the ‘prime material’ of moral conduct (1985: 26–8). In the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes how the primary object of ethical concern in ancient Greece was not ‘desire’, as in the modern West, or ‘flesh’, as it was for early Christians, but pleasure, or aphrodisia. This, in turn, entails an entirely different set of techniques or practices of the self to our own. Practices or technologies of the self are in some ways the most obviously anthropologically relevant of Foucault’s analytics of ethics, given that they consist of practical, observable activities that may be extreme in their asceticism (e.g. fasting to death, as in Laidlaw 2005; see also Cook 2010 and Chapter 16 in this volume) but may also be fairly quotidian: paying attention to one’s diet, doing certain forms of exercise, or keeping a diary are all examples. Such practices are work one performs upon oneself as part of forming oneself as an ethical subject. Immediately striking about all of this is how far we seem to have travelled from Discipline and Punish: here, rather than ‘subjectivation’ referring to the production of subjectivity by mechanisms of power, it is now chiefly the work the subject performs upon itself to make itself a subject. A concrete version of this shift is visible in Foucault’s own descriptions of historical changes in technologies of the self. For instance, Christian confessional practices and our own therapeutic society are dominated by

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a ‘hermeneutics of the self’, in which what is important is to produce the truth about oneself and one’s desires, whereas what is important in classical Greek ethics is the cultivation of a certain attitude of self-mastery in relation to pleasure. In spheres such as dietetics and erotics the crucial issue was to develop the general capacity for judgement about when, how, and in what way one might take exercise, eat, or have sexual relations, rather than to know what specific sorts of activities are permitted or illicit. The point was not to investigate the nature of the acts of pleasure, or of one’s desire for them, but to make proper, temperate, and austere ‘use’ of them (the title of the second volume is ‘The Use of Pleasure’). So, the particular techniques of the self that Foucault investigates in antiquity are not devoted to the production of an authentic, true self but to the continuous fashioning of a subjectivity in control of its relationship to pleasure, giving form and style to its existence. A subject, in other words, capable of exercising power over itself in order to create a good and beautiful existence (cf. Faubion 2014). This notion of ethics or virtue as a matter of craft, technique, and the cultivation of self is a central tenet of Socratic, Aristotelian, and Stoic moral philosophy, one other moral thinkers have also developed (see, e.g., Anscombe 1958; MacIntyre 1981; Mair, Chapter 3 in this volume), and Foucault drew on the work of classical scholars such as Kenneth Dover (1978), Peter Brown (1978), and his friend Paul Veyne (see Foucault 1985: 8). In contrast to deontological models of morality and ethics, in which ‘doing good’ is a matter of following rules and prescriptions, the notion of virtue as a craft or techne, and the virtuous life as ‘crafting oneself’, or ‘taking care of oneself’ (techne tou biou), means taking one’s own life and existence as an object of continuous work. This is important to the broader implications of Foucault’s work because it involves a distinctly non-modern articulation of the relationship between self and other. By now it should be clear that it is at least possible to read this work as a radical departure from Foucault’s earlier interests, as some scholars have (see later). In contrast to his ‘early’ period, in which the subject appears as a blip in the grand history of systems of thought, and in very marked contrast to his ‘middle’ period, in which the subject is not the premise or the fount but the outcome and product of power relations, here the object of concern for Foucault is the subject’s relationship to itself. As one critic of this later work has put it, ‘the obvious paradox of a reflexive account of self-construction is that the self must already exist in order to construct itself’ (Dews 1989: 40), and admirers of ‘late’ Foucault often make exactly the same point in criticism of his work on power: ‘once some kind of subject was acknowledged to precede [power] . . . then the notion that the subject was “produced” at all lost a great deal of its force’ (Paras 2006: 126). These questions are at the heart of this chapter and it will treat them more fully as we proceed. But it is worth dealing now with one particular contention regarding Foucault’s work on ethics, both because it will help

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in coming to grips with what is entailed by that work and because it is often reproduced as a criticism of anthropological writing that draws on Foucault’s claims about ethics. This is the claim – articulated forcefully by Peter Dews and Martha Nussbaum, for instance, among others (Dews 1989; Nussbaum 1985) – that this later work is deficient in paying too much attention to the self and not enough or none at all to the self in its relation to others and in its social or political context. It is true, as Timothy O’Leary (2002) points out, that Foucault places a good deal of rhetorical weight on the aesthetic dimension of selfcultivation at times, a fact which has led to charges of dandyism from some, such as Pierre Hadot (1995). What Foucault is describing, so this critique goes, is a process of fashioning the self as a work of art, and that this is fundamentally an amoral and apolitical project. This is effectively the inverse of earlier critiques of Foucault’s work on power which charged him with leaving no space whatsoever for ‘freedom’ or ‘agency’ (see, e.g., Alcoff 1990; Fraser 1981; Habermas 1987; Taylor 1984; Walzer 1986). Both criticisms are rooted in an opposition which Foucault himself diagnoses in a lecture he gave in 1982, since published as Technologies of the Self. In it he points out two characteristic and related features of modern perspectives on the self: the first is the idea that there is something egoistic, selfish, and inappropriate about the idea of ‘taking care of the self’, and that doing so is ‘an immorality . . . a means of escape from all possible rules’, an attitude due in part to the Christian ascetic tradition of self-renunciation (see also his discussions of exomologesis and exagoreusis – for instance, 1982b); the second is the related idea that morality consists of an external set of rules imposed upon the individual. However, precisely the point of his description of classical ethics – those found in particular in volume 2 of The History of Sexuality – is that this distinction between ‘morality’, or relations with others, and ‘taking care of the self’ does not apply in that context. In other words, Foucault’s descriptions of classical ethics are – in some part – descriptions of a world in which ‘the government of the self and others’ (as his 1982 lecture course was titled) are related enterprises. ‘Taking care of the self’ and ‘taking care of others’ were to some extent part and parcel of the same project. ‘Ethical’ action – understood in Foucault’s sense of the word – and ‘political’ action could be one and the same thing (see Williams, Chapter 6 in this volume; Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 in this volume; and for the most sustained phenomenologically inflected critique of Foucault’s understanding of self, see Mattingly 2012 and 2014). This is clear in Foucault’s descriptions themselves, as David Halperin (1990), among others, has noted. His analysis of the Alcibiades I, for instance, makes clear what Timothy O’Leary calls ‘the isomorphism between self-mastery and the mastery of the other’ (2002: 62). In it, Alcibiades and Socrates discuss the former’s political ambitions. Socrates demonstrates that none of the wealth, prestige, and power Alcibiades

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possesses are sufficient to distinguish him from his political rivals (1982b). It is ‘technique’, or ‘care of the self’, contemplation and meditation on the soul, instead, which will ensure Alcibiades’s path to success, because it is only by cultivating virtue in himself that he will become capable of exercising it in the governance of others. Several things are notable about this description. The first is the very explicitly political nature of the ends of self-cultivation in this context. Alcibiades must ‘take care of himself’ in order to be capable of ‘taking care of others’. The second is that this practice of self-care happens in relation to another – in this case Socrates – not in isolation: the soul must be contemplated through its reflection in another, and Socrates’s pedagogy is an instance of this relation (see 1982b: 25; Faubion 2001 and Chapter 21 in this volume). Thirdly, this set of relations explains the persistent importance of temperance and austerity in classical ethics, despite the lack of Christian notions of sin: it is not that certain acts are bad or sinful by nature, it is that over-indulgence in them, or indulgence in them of the wrong form, demonstrates a lack of self-government, one that is incompatible with a capacity to govern others. This is also famously visible in the classical and Hellenistic problematization of homosexual relations. Greek and Graeco-Roman ethics were fully and unashamedly masculine (as Foucault notes; see, e.g., 1985: 83). But, as in ethnographic descriptions of comparable attitudes (see, e.g., Kulick 1997), what made one a man was not the gender of one’s sexual partner but the dynamic of one’s sexual relationships. Men were dominant, active, penetrating partners, while only those unfit for command – women, boys, slaves, improper men – were submissive and penetrated. Self-mastery, in other words, was linked to political mastery directly by the masterful attitude one adopted in one’s sexual practices. This also helps explain the dynamic attitude to ethics and self-cultivation: the risk of losing one’s self-mastery, or of losing one’s dominant position over one’s sexual partner, was constantly present and had to be constantly guarded against by those who sought the highest offices (hence the serious moral problem of sexual relations between men who were dominant and boys who were submissive, but who would or should nevertheless grow up to be dominant men). Hadot’s critique of Foucault for ‘dandyism’ is levelled at volume 3 of The History of Sexuality (‘The Care of the Self’) in particular, but this very particularity tells us something: in this volume, as in the others, what Foucault is describing is itself a particular context. By this point he has shifted focus from classical, Socratic ethics to Hellenistic and imperial Stoic ethics, and unsurprisingly the nature of those ethics has changed. ‘Taking care of oneself’, which for Alcibiades and Socrates was the proper pursuit of a specific group of men inclined to the leadership of the polis, has now become a generalized activity that is in some respects good in and of itself. This is what Foucault refers to as the Roman ‘cultivation of self’

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(1986: 39), rooted in the universalist Stoic principles of reason and nature. If we recall Foucault’s quadripartite analytic of ethics, many of the practices of the self remain the same, and it is still ‘pleasure’ that is the central focus; but now it is ‘reason’ that demands that people take up these practices (as the mode of subjectivation), and it is to the enjoyment of a virtuous and happy life, rather than to political success, that they are directed (as telos). It is this model, furthermore, which lends itself to uptake and further transformation in Christian ethics, in which believers – whether a small group of spiritual virtuosi in early Christianity or the whole flock, as in Calvinism – will be expected to subject themselves to a continuous and increasingly codified process of self-examination and self-decipherment, the goal of which is self-renunciation. So, there is a sense in which Hadot and others are correct: Stoic ethics is not – at least in Foucault’s description – directly concerned with political action in the same way as was classical ethics. But at the same time, that change is part of the much broader historical transformation that leads us back to volume 1 of The History of Sexuality: ‘[a]s the ethical system becomes more generalised in its application it becomes more ruthless in its individualising; the emphasis in the process of ethical subjectivation shifts away from the subject as centre of deliberation and activity and towards the subject as “subjected”’ (O’Leary 2002: 84). In other words, Foucault is telling us a story about transformations in the relation between the injunctions to care for the self and to care for others, transformations that are affected by wider historical processes. We should not expect that relationship to remain exactly the same between (comparatively) democratic classical Athens and imperial Rome, or between the Victorian age and our own.

Janus, or ‘The Masked Philosopher’ Foucault’s work has inspired and continues to inspire countless interpretations and exegeses, many of which focus on the difficult question of whether or not ‘Foucault’s work’ has any kind of continuity to it. I have already noted his own perhaps characteristically inconsistent responses to this question: on the one hand, he describes himself as constructing a labyrinth into which he can disappear and re-appear at different points, forcing his critics to play philosophical whack-a-mole; on the other hand, he has a notable tendency to read whatever his present concerns are back into previous work, briefly giving us a glimpse of potentially solid philosophical ground before diving back into the detail of whatever bit of history he was examining. A complete overview of all of these exegeses of Foucault’s work on power and ethics is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead I will briefly outline two basic types of position one might take on the relationship

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between these two ‘faces’ of Foucault, and their attendant implications for anthropological work on the subject, before going on to sketch out a third such position in my conclusion.

Janus We have already encountered some versions of the first position one might take on the relationship between conceptions of power and ethics in Foucault, namely that they are incompatible and entirely distinct. This position emerges in polemical form in the work of those – such as Hadot or Nussbaum, but see also Dews (1989), Privitera (1995), Hiley (1984), and Best and Kellner (1991) – who attack Foucault’s late work on ethics for its ‘dandyism’ and a perceived over-emphasis on the aesthetic purposes of selfcultivation. But it is also present in work such as Eric Paras’s (2006) Foucault 2.0, in which the same inconstancy is noted but now lauded as rescuing Foucault from the totalizing optics of power in which he had previously been caught. A similar point is made less dramatically by Thomas Flynn (1985), who argues that Foucault’s late work ‘fills a gap’ in an otherwise largely structuralist project by supplying an ‘individual, responsible, agent’. Giorgio Agamben similarly declared Foucault’s late work to have focussed on the one hand on ‘the study of political techniques’ and on the other on ‘technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivation bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity . . . and, at the same time, to an external power’ (1998; cited in Faubion 2001). This sort of position is put most starkly by Thomas McCarthy, a critic of both ‘faces’ of Foucault: [in Foucault’s early period] everything was a function of context, of impersonal forces and fields, from which there was no escape – the end of man. Now the focus is on ‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct but also seek to transform themselves . . . and to make their life into an oeuvre’ – with too little regard for social, political, and economic context. (1991: 74; cited in Allen 2000) Put so polemically, it is hard to see much value in Foucault for an anthropologist if this sort of position is an accurate depiction of his work. Depending upon whether one’s bent is for the ‘early’ or the ‘late’ version, a ‘Foucauldian’ account would either be entirely determinist in its depiction of ‘impersonal forces’ or it would be a strange and isolated description of ‘voluntary actions’ unmoored from their contexts. It is hard to credit this reading of Foucault for a number of reasons, some of which we have already examined, and some of which we will look at in the following section. Yet this sort of position is worth attending to for the manner in which it is replicated in some of the ways in which anthropologists talk to one another about the way they make use of him.

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We have already met Marshall Sahlins’s acerbic description of the ‘power, power, everywhere’ school of Foucauldian anthropology. Twenty-five years later we find this characterization echoed in Sherry Ortner’s description of some of Foucault’s work as ‘a virtually totalizing theory of a world in which power is in every crevice of life, and in which there is no outside to power’ (Ortner 2016: 50). In somewhat similar fashion, and citing Sahlins, James Laidlaw noted in his 2001 Malinowski Lecture that Foucault might have seemed an unlikely ally to muster in support of an ‘anthropology of ethics and freedom’, since he was widely read at the time as ‘an advocate of a bleakly totalizing vision of societies as systems of power/knowledge, where domination and resistance are necessary, pervasive, and mutually implicating aspects of all social relations’ (2002: 322). Laidlaw also notes, as I have, that Foucault himself was ambiguous about this reading of him, but that from the very moment Discipline and Punish was delivered to its publisher, Foucault was ‘thinking himself out of that conception’ (322). Ortner too concedes that some of Foucault’s later work ‘moves way from the relentless power problematic’ (2016: 51). Conversely, Harri Englund articulates in careful fashion a not uncommon feeling of discomfort with the Foucauldian project of the anthropology of ethics when he points to the ways in which a focus on ethics as opposed to morality can over-privilege ideas about ‘personal choices’ and, when ‘cast in pathological terms’, lead to the notion of ‘the separate person’ as the basic unit of human action (2008: 45). Yunxiang Yan is equally concerned by the anti-Durkheimian, anti-‘social’ bent of the new anthropology of ethics, arguing in contrast that ‘morality does not exist in an isolated individual’ (2011). In somewhat less careful fashion, the editors of Moral Anthropology: A Critique claim that ‘[m]uch of the debate in anthropology is revolving around individualist assumptions, a concentration on the dynamics of choice, a subjectivist orientation (that in certain respects has arisen in new guise in the new anthropology of morality)’ (Kapferer and Gold 2018: 9); the anthropology of ethics, at least in its lateFoucauldian versions, is accused of failing to recognize that ethics is ‘conditioned by the political and economic forces of history’ (13). In the same volume, Don Kalb condemns the Foucauldian anthropology of ethics as an ‘aggressively antisociological celebration of fundamental human freedom. It tends to lift the capacity to envision and live ethical designs entirely out of its wider social texture . . . that fundamental freedom, inevitably, also implies that any effort at social explanation must end up as futile or even ill-willed’ (69). In a further parallel, this sort of accusation is also sometimes coupled with the assertion that the reasons behind this imputed ‘individualism’ lie in a conscious or unconscious sympathy for ‘neoliberal’ politics, something of which Foucault has also recently been accused (see, for instance, Behrent and Zamora 2015; Behrent 2010; Zamora 2014).

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For a range of reasons, some of which I will treat next, I think it is very hard to sustain McCarthy’s characterization of either of Foucault’s ‘faces’. But anthropologists drawing on both of those aspects of his work have been accused of virtually the same sins: of entirely neglecting either context or the subject. It seems unlikely, though possible, that such accusations have any more purchase when levelled at Foucault’s anthropological heirs than at the man himself, as I will set out in what follows in the case of the anthropology of ethics. Yet the fact that such accusations persist, and are unlikely to cease in the near future, does at least indicate that the ‘Janus’ position has some weight of numbers behind it, and I will return in my conclusion to the question of why this might be the case.

‘The Masked Philosopher’ A number of Foucault’s philosophical interpreters have made the case for seeing continuity, rather than discontinuity, in his work. In many ways, as far as the intellectual biography of Foucault is concerned, this case feels considerably more plausible than the ‘Janus’ reading, certainly in the latter’s extreme, polemical forms. I have already noted, for instance, one way in which Foucault’s genealogy of subjectivity can be read as a continuous project, in response to Hadot’s critique of ‘dandyism’. It is on the face of it simply incorrect to claim that Foucault ceased to be concerned with ‘politics’, ‘relations with others’, or ‘context’ in his later work. Not only did he repeatedly argue that models of self-cultivation ‘are proposed, suggested, imposed . . . by . . . culture . . . society, and . . . social group’ (1984a: 291), he also specifically focussed on practices of self-cultivation by those responsible for ‘the government of others’, and on the importance of pedagogy – that is, the often hierarchical relationship between a teacher and student – to such practices (e.g. 1982, 1984a; also Faubion 2001 and Chapter 21 in this volume). This is not even to mention the work he was doing when he died on parrhesia, or truth-telling practices, and their political importance in the classical world and their function in confession and the penal system (e.g. 2011, 2012, 2014). This continuity is furthermore reflected in Foucault’s use of the same word (‘assujettissement’) to describe both the phenomena he was concerned with in Discipline and Punish and those in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality. The notion that subjectivation is the same process, whether it takes place in the panopticon or by means of a set of philosophical exercises, is perfectly consistent with his famous claim that there is no ‘outside’ to power’s productive capacities. The two kinds of practice are, as Christoph Menke puts it, ‘so close that [one] often seems to be nothing other than [the other] illuminated and evaluated in another light . . . the two faces of one Janus head’ (2003: 200). Likewise, the notion of ‘surveillance’ found in Discipline and Punish, as Sebastian Harrer points out, sounds

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remarkably like the practices of ‘spiritual guidance’ found in ethical pedagogy, and he notes that Epictetus even exhorted his disciples to live as if he was constantly watching them; as if, indeed, they were in the panopticon (2005: 80). Furthermore, of course, the whole point of the panopticon was self-discipline, so Agamben’s distinction between one’s ‘identity’ and ‘external power’ seems decidedly anti-Foucauldian. Turning to anthropology: as I suggested at the outset of this chapter, it is hard to overstate the influence of Foucault’s late work on the development of the anthropology of ethics. Two ground-breaking essays in that field, published nearly simultaneously, both make extensive use of ‘late Foucault’ in setting out an agenda for what would become the anthropology of ethics. The first is Laidlaw’s Malinowski Lecture, which I have already mentioned. In the remainder of that piece Laidlaw sets out Foucault’s vision of ethics more or less as I have here, pointing to the centrality of ‘freedom’ to projects of self-cultivation. Freedom here is not a thing that one can possess but rather something that one exercises, the very practice of ‘subjectivation’, of making oneself a subject, ‘choosing the kind of self one wishes to be’ (2002: 324). It does not take place in a vacuum, or in opposition to power or constraint, but through the models and values that the subject finds around itself (see also Heywood 2015). All of this is very much in evidence in Laidlaw’s ethnographic descriptions of Jain practices of selfrenunciation (see also his 1995), which he directly analogizes with Foucault’s discussions of early Christianity. In both cases, self-revelation and arriving at certain truths about oneself is an important pre-condition to self-renunciation. But in the Jain case, the proper object of such techniques is not sexual desire but the harm one has necessarily caused to other living beings in the course of simple activities such as breathing and walking, and so the ‘work’ that one performs upon oneself consists of directing infinitely careful attention to one’s every action and movement. Though the remark about Foucault’s earlier ‘bleakly totalizing vision’ might suggest that a version of the ‘Janus’ argument is being made here, that is in fact not the case. Laidlaw’s position on the matter is stated clearly elsewhere: The apparent divergence between two different ways in which Foucault’s ideas have been adopted and adapted by anthropologists owes more to the interests the latter have had in reading him, and to the other intellectual traditions they have been engaging with as they did so, than to any profound discontinuity in Foucault’s own thought, that proceeded in general by incremental steps, taking up new problems and questions as they came into view, correcting what he thought were overemphases and blind-spots in earlier studies, and broadening the historical and cultural range of his enquiries, to address, ever more searchingly, ever more fundamental questions. (2018: 182)

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This is perfectly consistent with the repeated emphasis throughout the Malinowski Lecture and other programmatic work on ethics (e.g. Laidlaw 2013) that the concept of ‘freedom’, drawn from Foucault, ‘is of a definite, historically produced kind. There is no other kind’ (2002: 323). In the same year in which Laidlaw delivered his Malinowski Lecture, James Faubion published a similarly agenda-setting essay titled ‘Towards an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis’ (2001). Setting out the fundamentals of Foucault’s work on ethics and its potential for anthropology, Faubion is also quite clear about where he sits in the ‘continuity’ argument: ‘that antagonists on both sides of [the decisionism versus determinism] quarrel have claimed Foucault as an ally is, I think, indicative less of his ambiguity than of his belonging no more to one side than the other’ (2001: 94). Or even more explicitly, in describing the centrality of pedagogy to ethical practice: ‘[h]ence . . . Foucault’s insistence that the self in its relation to others is “the very stuff” of ethics’, and later definitively: ‘There is no thinking of ethics without thinking of power’ (96– 7, original emphasis). Foucault has appeared in a similar guise in a range of subsequent anthropological work on ethics in diverse areas of life (e.g. Dave 2012; Faubion 2011; Hirschkind 2006; Laidlaw 2013; Mahmood 2004; Robbins 2004; Zigon 2011). I would guess that none of these anthropologists believe that Foucault’s later work can be understood entirely in isolation from that which preceded it, and I think that trying to find a claim or assertion or even an implication in any of this work to the effect that ethical practices take place without reference to power, politics, or context would be a near-impossible task. Yet, as I suggested at the end of the previous section, the idea persists, in both studies of Foucault and anthropological arguments more broadly, that there is something unsatisfactorily one-sided about studying ethics in Foucault’s sense of the word. We are no longer ‘waiting for (late) Foucault’, to paraphrase Sahlins, but his arrival seems to have simply changed the way in which some people object to the use of his work rather than done away with the objections altogether. There are probably not many anthropologists who, like McCarthy, disapprove of both faces of Foucault, but there remain plenty who disapprove of one or the other, and many who, despite all arguments to the contrary, cannot reconcile the one they like with the one they do not.

‘Philosophy without a Happy End’ Despite its brevity, I hope that the sketch I have provided of some of the debates surrounding both Foucault’s intellectual biography and his uptake in the anthropology of ethics makes two things clear: that in the case of the former, an argument for continuity is plausible (to say the least); and that in the case of the latter, a minimally charitable reading would struggle to

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characterize this work as blind to the importance of context, politics, or power. Yet arguments persist on both counts. Why might this be? Is there anything to be gained from ‘taking caesurism seriously’ in the case of Foucault and ethics (cf. Candea 2018: 174)? One potential answer to the problem of why these debates persist is suggested by Faubion’s point that Foucault belongs to neither side, and by Foucault’s own remarks on the relationship between ‘care of the self’ and ‘relations with others’ in our modern context: that the ‘Janus’ reading is a product of that same opposition, the contingency of which he sought to demonstrate. The persistence of these debates is not, then, really about one side or the other (hence the frequent mischaracterizations of either side by the other) but about the power of the distinction itself: it is, at some fundamental level, difficult for us to see both of Foucault’s faces at once. This may also help to explain why metaphors of ‘focus’, ‘illumination’, ‘emphasis’, and ‘blind-spots’ are so prevalent in the exegetical literature on ‘continuity’. Even when we attempt to speak about Foucault’s two faces at the same time, we tend to fall back on a language of difference, albeit a heuristic difference of method or perspective. This is brought out most clearly and elegantly in a piece by Amy Allen called ‘The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis’, in which she makes a convincing case for identifying this methodological difference in Foucault’s own work: his analyses of power/knowledge ‘are devoid of references to the concept of subjectivity because they have to be’, she argues. ‘[T]hey have to be devoid of such references because precisely the point of these works is to shift subjectivity from the position of that which explains to the position of that which must be explained, from explanans to explanandum’ (2000: 120–1). Ex hypothesi the same could be said of the (comparatively) limited number of references to power in the later work. This reading is also supported by an obvious but important fact about Foucault’s work: for the most part, he obliges his readers to do the work of connecting power and ethics themselves, where possible. He does not coin neologisms, and he does not expect to resolve the problem in a single text (both of which Bourdieu, dealing with the problem of ‘structure and agency’, does, for example). The works of Foucault in question span nearly two decades, and range enormously in empirical focus. At no point does he snap his fingers and declare the dichotomy dissolved. What we get instead are long, slow, detailed, empirical analyses of what might appear to be entirely divergent issues, but which to a closer reading may (or may still not) appear related. Given that even this manner of dealing with the relationship between power and ethics has failed to convince many a reader, it should perhaps not surprise us too much that it is hard for Foucault’s successors to do so in the space of, say, a single article. His friend Paul Veyne called his philosophy ‘the rarest of phenomena . . . philosophy without a happy end’, in its refusal to ‘convert our finitude into the basis

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for new certainties’ (1993: 5). So, it may be that he was quite content with the notion that the relationship between power and ethics was not a problem it was his job to resolve. Perhaps one consequent lesson to be drawn from debates in intellectual history surrounding Foucault’s legacy is that even if it is true, for methodological reasons, that it is fundamentally difficult as an enterprise to consider both ‘power’ and ‘ethics’ simultaneously, it is at least possible to consider them separately in such a way that they do not directly compete with one another. Despite his playful remarks about changing his mind, Foucault himself gives us no serious reason to believe that he suffered some world-altering intellectual rupture somewhere between 1975 and 1980, and it would seem somewhat psychologically implausible to assume that he did. In his own mind, at least, it seems to have been a matter of different emphasis, as Allen’s argument and those of numerous other commentators suggest. Different emphases in different arguments need not contradict or compete with one another, and it would be absurd to imagine that Foucault really did have ‘two faces’, each engaged in an ongoing battle with the other. If there are differences in his work, it surely makes more psychological sense and is more faithful to his own self-understanding to see them as different, but complementary, rather than contradictory. Whether or not it is possible to see debates in anthropology surrounding the current focus on ethics in a similar light is a question beyond the scope of this chapter, but perhaps one worth exploring further.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, and James Laidlaw for their careful reading and advice on this chapter. I am also very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’. American Ethnologist, 17: 41–55. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alcoff, Linda. 1990. ‘Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration’, in A. Dallery and C. Scott (eds.), Crises in Continental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Allen, Amy. 2000. ‘The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject’. The Philosophical Forum, 31: 113–30.

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Althusser, Louis. 1971 [1970]. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anscombe, Elizabeth. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Philosophy, 33: 1–16. Behrent, Michael. 2010. ‘Accidents Happen: Franc¸ois Ewald, the “Antirevolutionary” Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State’. The Journal of Modern History, 82: 585–624. Behrent, Michael and Daniel Zamora. 2015. Foucault and Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity. Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. London: Palgrave. Bourg, Julian. 2007. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Brown, Peter. 1978. The Making of Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burkitt, Ian. 2002. ‘Technologies of the Self: Habitus and Capacities’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 32: 219–37. Candea, Matei. 2018. Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Joanna. 2010. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dave, Naisargi. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Giles and Felix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus. London: Viking Press. Dews, Peter. 1989. ‘The Return of the Subject in Late Foucault’. Radical Philosophy, 51: 37–41. Dover, Kenneth. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. London: Duckworth. Dreyfus, Hubert and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Englund, Harri. 2008. ‘Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations: Beyond Morality in the Anthropology of Africa?’ Social Analysis, 52: 33–50. Eribon, Didier. 1989. Michel Foucault. Paris: Flammarion. Fassin, Didier. 2015. ‘Troubled Waters: At the Confluence of Ethics and Politics’, in M. Lambek, V. Das, D. Fassin, and W. Keane (eds.), Four Lectures on Ethics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Faubion, James. 2001. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis’. Representations, 74: 83–104. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. ‘Constantine Cavafy: A Parrhesiast for the Cynic of the Future’, in J. Faubion (ed.), Foucault Now: Current Perspectives in Foucault Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Ferguson, James and Akhil Gupta. 2008. ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’. American Ethnologist, 29: 981–1002. Flynn, Thomas. 1985. ‘Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault’. The Journal of Philosophy, 82: 531–40. Foucault, Michel. 1967 [1964]. Madness and Civilisation. London: Tavistock. 1970 [1966]. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. 1971. ‘Orders of Discourse’. Social Science Information, 10: 7–30. 1972 [1969]. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. 1973 [1963]. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Tavistock. 1977a [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon. 1977b. Les Maıˆtres Penseurs. Le Nouvel Observateur. 9 May 1977. 1978a [1971]. ‘Nietzsche, Geneaology, History’, in J. Richardson and B. Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978b [1976]. The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. 1978c. ‘Dialogue on Power’, in Simeon Wade (ed.), Chez Foucault. Los Angeles, CA: Circabook. 1980. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. Interview given to Le Monde, republished in 1994 in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984: Volume One, Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. Paul Rabinow (ed.). Paris: Editions Gallimard. 1982a. ‘The Subject and Power’. Critical Inquiry, 8: 777–95. 1982b. ‘Technologies of the Self’, in L. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Press. 1984a. ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984’, in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds.), The Final Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1985 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. 1986 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Three: The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon. 2006 [1961]. History of Madness. London: Routledge. 2011. The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1982–1983. London: Palgrave. 2012. The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1983–1984. London: Palgrave. 2014. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1981. ‘Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions’. Praxis International, 3: 272–87.

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Glucksmann, Andre´. 1980 [1977]. The Master Thinkers. New York: Harper & Row. Habermas, Jurgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hadot, Pierre. 1995 [1989]. ‘Reflections on the Idea of the “Cultivation of the Self”’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life. Cambridge: Blackwell. Halperin, David. 1990. ‘Two Views of Greek Love: Harold Patzer and Michel Foucault’, in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrer, Sebastian. 2005. ‘The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault’s Lecture Series L’Herme´neutique du Sujet’. Foucault Studies, 2: 75–96. Heywood, Paolo. 2015. ‘Freedom in the Code: The Anthropology of (Double) Morality’. Anthropological Theory 15: 200–17. Hiley, David. 1984. ‘Foucault and the Analysis of Power: Political Engagement without Liberal Hope or Comfort’. Praxis International, 4: 192–207. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hofmeyr, Benda. 2006. ‘The Power Not to Be (What We Are): The Politics and Ethics of Self-Creation in Foucault’. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 3: 215–30. Honneth, Axel. 1991. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jacquemet, Marco. 1992. ‘Namechasers’. American Ethnologist, 19: 733–48. Kalb, Don. 2018. ‘Why I Will Not Make It as a “Moral Anthropologist”’, in B. Kapferer and M. Gold (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. Oxford: Berghahn. Kapferer, Bruce and Marina Gold (eds.). 2018. Moral Anthropology: A Critique. Oxford: Berghahn. Kulick, Don. 1997. ‘The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes’. American Anthropologist, 99: 574–85. Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Economy and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311–32. 2005. ‘A Life Worth Leaving: Fasting to Death as Telos of a Jain Religious Life’. Economy and Society, 34: 178–99. 2013. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018. ‘The Anthropological Lives of Michel Foucault’, in M. Candea (ed.), Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory. London: Routledge. Limo´n, Jose´. 1989. ‘Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian Batos, Disorder, and Narrative Discourses’. American Ethnologist, 16: 471–86.

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MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Mahmood, Saba. 2004. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12: 161–84. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. McCarthy, Thomas. 1991. ‘The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School’, in Ideals and Illusions: On Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Menke, Cristoph. 2003. ‘Two Kinds of Practice: On the Relation between Social Discipline and the Aesthetics of Existence’. Constellations, 10: 199–210. Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Montag, Warren. 1995. ‘“The Soul Is the Prison of the Body”: Althusser and Foucault, 1970–1975’. Yale French Studies, 88: 53–77. Nussbaum, Martha. 1985. ‘Affections of the Greeks’. New York Times Book Review, 10 November 1985. O’Leary, Timothy. 2002. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum. Ortner, Sherry. 2016. ‘Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6: 47–73. Paras, Eric. 2006. Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge. New York: Other Press. Privitera, Walter. 1995. Problems of Style: Michel Foucault’s Epistemology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rancie`re, Jacques. 2006. ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’. Critical Horizons, 7: 1–20. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde. 2006. ‘Governmentality’. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2: 83–104. Sahlins, Marshall. 1993. Waiting for Foucault. Chicago, IL: Prickly Pear Press. Scott, David. 1995. ‘Colonial Governmentality’. Social Text, 43: 191–220. Stoler, Ann. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1984. ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’. Political Theory, 12: 152–83. Veyne, Paul. 1993. ‘The Final Foucault and His Ethics’. Critical Enquiry, 20: 1–9.

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Walzer, Michael. 1986. ‘The Politics of Michel Foucault’, in David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Yan, Yunxiang. 2011. ‘How Far Away Can We Move from Durkheim? Reflections on the New Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropology of This Century 2. http://aotcpress.com/articles/move-durkheimreflections-anthropology-morality. Zamora, Daniel. 2014. ‘Foucault’s Responsibility’. Jacobin Magazine, 15 December 2014. Zigon, Jarrett. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg. 2011. ‘HIV Is God’s Blessing’: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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6 Phenomenology Samuel Williams

Existence is surely a debate Kierkegaard (2014 [1844])

A Haunted Tradition Phenomenology is one of the formative traditions of twentieth-century philosophy. Founded by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), it counts among its principal exponents such influential thinkers as Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95). Historically, it developed in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, and flourished particularly in France at the cusp of the Third and Fourth Republics. During the second half of the twentieth century, phenomenology came to play a prominent role in the mainstream teaching of philosophy in both these countries, and many subsequent movements of German and French thought, including Frankfurt School social theory and French structuralism, can be understood in part as reactions against or developments of phenomenology. Indeed, one occasionally encounters the term ‘phenomenology’ used in English as a byword for post-World War II French and German thought tout court (e.g. MacIntyre 1981: 2–3). Thus, in addition to its own intrinsic interest, some understanding of phenomenology is helpful for navigating the wider intellectual terrain of what is more regularly glossed in English as continental philosophy, typically in opposition to analytic philosophy, a tradition which came to dominate the teaching of philosophy in Great Britain and the United States where phenomenology never achieved a comparable institutional prominence. Over recent decades, however, as an increasing number of Anglophone philosophers have explicitly engaged with aspects of twentieth-century French and German thought,

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classic work in the phenomenological tradition has emerged as perhaps the most frequent point of contact. Hence a familiarity with the scholarly landmarks of phenomenology now sometimes provides a useful compass for exploring contemporary debates in English-language philosophy too, especially in philosophy of mind, if more rarely in ethics and moral philosophy. What is phenomenology? Coined as early as 1736 by the Lutheran theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (Bokhove 1992), the word means literally the study of phenomena, from the Greek phaino´menon or appearance; the study of how things appear, as distinct – one might think – from how things really are. In anthropology, chatting around the water cooler, one most commonly encounters the term today used in this rather literal, rough-and-ready sense to refer to any approach to an aspect of social and cultural life that focusses primarily on the experience of ‘what it’s like’ for people to live that way, and as with various other ‘-ologies’ (including ‘psychology’, with which it is sometimes conflated in the discipline), phenomenology is readily used by extension to refer not only to an approach that analyses some pattern of experience but also to the pattern of experience itself. But why would a philosopher or anthropologist be concerned with people’s experiences of how something appears, especially if such experiences are distinct from what the thing one’s actually interested in really is? Although phenomenology entered philosophical discourse in the 1760s with the negative connotation of the study of false appearances (Lambert 1990 [1764]), early philosophers who conceptually operationalized the term – including Kant, Fichte, and Hegel – virtually always did so because they believed a well-worn distinction between appearance and reality in some philosophical domain was ill-conceived and hence a systematic analysis of how experience of that domain was structured had some positive, usually epistemological, significance (Rockmore 2011; Waibel et al. 2010; Ferrarin et al. 2017). Although one occasionally encounters a twentiethcentury philosopher (such as Lukacs and Cassirer) using the word ‘phenomenology’ explicitly to develop one or other of these early approaches, the phenomenological tradition established by Edmund Husserl is built on a quite specific claim about experience that diverges from the recognized tenets of both Kantian critical philosophy and continental idealism. Concerned in the first instance particularly with conscious experience, Husserl (1970 [1900/1901]) argued that what distinguishes consciousness is its capacity to reach beyond itself – to be conscious is to be conscious of something. I am not consciously aware of a mind-dependent appearance separate from any mind-independent reality, nor is all reality in some way mind-dependent, but I am aware of a thing itself, some thing or other as it really is given to me in experience. Adapting a mediaeval scholastic term that had been reworked recently by the Roman Catholic priest and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838–1917; see Brentano 1995), Husserl dubbed

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this characteristic reaching of conscious experience beyond itself ’intentionality’, and among those who first followed Husserl in calling themselves phenomenologists, phenomenology was initially understood as the entwined study of consciousness and its objects: if psychology was fundamentally concerned with consciousness itself as a dimension of the human psyche, phenomenology was concerned with consciousness as a route to grasping fundamentally what we are conscious of. Indeed, the early catchcry of the phenomenological movement was ‘to the things themselves!’, and to a large extent one can understand the subsequent development of the phenomenological tradition as a series of interventions about how this germinal Husserlian approach to consciousness and its objects needed to be extended or radically transformed to reach the world in all its diversity as it really is given to us in experience, conscious or otherwise. That said, the phenomenological tradition proved most influential during the twentieth century for approaching subjects broadly associated with philosophy of mind, and a reader may perhaps question what, if any, contribution it has made to the study of ethics and moral philosophy, subjects that on the continent are often still called – after Kant – practical philosophy. Browsing through graduate-level ethics textbooks, one rarely finds reference to a major philosopher from the phenomenological tradition, let alone a chapter on phenomenology, while in basic introductions to phenomenology or even monographic surveys of the tradition, ethics is largely absent. This neglect is not without its reasons. Three of the five key figures mentioned at the outset – Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty – published little to nothing explicitly on ethics during their lifetimes. Indeed, in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1978 [1946]: 141–83), Heidegger came infamously to dismiss ethical theorizing about how one should or shouldn’t live as akin to the production of ‘-isms’ for a ‘market of public opinion that continually demands new ones’ with so-called thinkers ‘always prepared to supply the demand’ for dogmatic directives that do not even merit description as genuine thought. The two remaining thinkers – at least one of whom Heidegger had in mind penning those remarks – certainly did write on ethics, copiously so, but each poses his own peculiar problem. Sartre wrote so copiously, forever promising a definitive work that would fully unpack the ethical implications of some new turn in his thought, that it is something of a challenge to find where in all the hundred visions and revisions of his finished and unfinished texts ‘Sartre’s ethics’ actually is. Levinas wrote less copiously, yet came to identify all his mature philosophical work as ethics; however, as his conception of ethics is so idiosyncratic, the challenge is rather to find where in ‘Levinas’s ethics’ the actual ethics is. Thus, although most readers – casting their minds over their own ethical vocabularies – will find words they use that were coined by a writer in the phenomenological tradition (existential angst, authenticity, bad faith) or words whose ethical usage is shaped by the writing of some phenomenologist or other

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(empathy, care, recognition), the suspicion may remain that this is all pretty piecemeal and when it comes to a well-defined phenomenological tradition of ethical or moral thought, like Oakland, there is no there there. If not exactly a tradition, a wasteland is certainly one guiding image for the wider intellectual terrain across which one can trace the crisscrossing paths these writers took in their sometimes fraught engagements with ethics; a sparse realist landscape which follows the rough contours of finde-sie`cle debates about the meaning of human existence, stripped bare by the catastrophic experience of two world wars, down to its most abstract, jagged features. Particularly among those primarily interested in social and cultural theory, the course of late nineteenth-century continental philosophy after Hegel is frequently characterized as an idealistic if staunchly antiidealist trajectory via Marx to Nietzsche, animated by the hopes of an age of political revolution and aspirations for social and cultural renewal (Lo¨with 1964). At least when it comes to contemporaneous debates bearing on ethics and moral philosophy, a rather more profound pessimism looms in the background, epitomized by Schopenhauer’s stark claim (1990 [1818]) that life is meaningless and not worth living, as philosophers responded to a pervasive unease about the meaning and value of human existence amid the collapse of earlier theological frameworks, alternatively seeking to affirm some deep metaphysical significance in life itself or to set the study of values on firm epistemological foundations (Beiser 2016). If in 1914 Schopenhauer was the most widely referenced, late nineteenth-century philosopher in continental Europe, Henri Bergson’s life philosophy (2003 [1907]) had come to dominate French thought in parallel to a neo-Kantian turn to values in German practical philosophy. Yet in the wake of World War I, these belle e´poque ventures in moral philosophy sounded passing faint bells. One response, forcefully articulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the closing pages of the Tractatus (1961 [1921]), was to argue that there is simply no human experience which could be solid empirical ground for the ways people have historically talked about good and evil, right and wrong – it is a dimension of life that cannot be put into words, that lies beyond sense – leading to his famous last words, ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. For Wittgenstein in his personal life this was ever an opening towards a certain mysticism when it came to ethics, although he consistently eschewed writing about anything so ineffable well into his late philosophical work. This argument, however, became the basis for his early readers’ logical positivist dismissal of any talk of ethics as experientially unverifiable nonsense – pseudo-statements ripe for demagogues – an attitude which, once transplanted from Austria first to Britain and then the United States, hardened by mid-century into the common sense of analytic philosophy common rooms and was the background against which a post-World War II generation of Anglophone philosophers who wished to talk about ethics had meta-ethically to justify

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themselves (see Ayer 1936, 1959). On the continent, however, the budding phenomenological movement around Husserl promised an alternative. What if a truly rigorous approach to human experience could demonstrate there really are values we are aware of suffusing the world? Rather than a simple-minded positivist approach to experience as so many bits of sense-data which threatened a moral descent into mysticism or nihilism (akin to Kant’s critique of British empiricism), and rather than rework the legacy of Kant’s appeal beyond experience to universal claims of reason which seemed destined to collapse into an empty formalism explaining away any felt tension between values as a relic of faulty reasoning (akin to Hegel’s critique of Kant), what if a close intentional analysis of consciousness and its objects could really lead us to values themselves in all their diversity, could let us grasp the world not as a moral wasteland but as riven between different real values, where philosophy might offer some practical help in a Europe in the years after World War I, for realizing what actually matters when one is torn in a conflict over particular goods, or indeed particular evils? If, building on Husserl’s early unpublished lectures on ethics, a distinctive approach to the study of values began to crystallize around World War I in the so-called realist phenomenological movement among his first students, one of the reasons it is difficult to speak about the subsequent development of a singular phenomenological tradition of ethics is that later debate about these issues did not follow the trajectory so familiar in other domains of phenomenological thought. In the pivotal years leading up to World War II, what emerged as the pressing question was not whether this germinal approach to the intentional analysis of moral experience needed to be extended or radically transformed objectively to reach values in all their diversity, but whether or not reckoning with competing values is what thorough intentional analysis revealed moral experience to be fundamentally about. Still to this day, on the (rare) occasions that historical surveys of phenomenology actually deal with ethical thought, there are often not one but two chapters, evoking two paths that seemed to have diverged by mid-century; one concerned with values, another resolutely not. If there is a single chapter, it tends to tell a jarringly bifurcated story, where a conversation about what matters for a person who feels rent between different objective values found itself transfigured amid the ruin of World War II into a conversation about the nature of freedom and responsibility, about what it truly means to be ethical. Rather than the eerie image of two paths diverging in a wasteland, it is perhaps more helpful to picture how these years haunt phenomenological thought by imagining writers trying to find their bearings from what remained of the scholarly landmarks of pre-World War II phenomenology, some dramatically more battle-scarred than others, scouring the rubble of war-torn experience for what had made a practical difference. Was it that

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some people had heeded what they really felt in their hearts? That despite the most brute conditions, some had dared to choose otherwise than circumstances urged? That instead of looking out for number one, some had responded to the plight of others? To answer yes to one alternative doesn’t entail answering no to the other two, and most phenomenologists have wrestled with ways each of these three aspects of experience matter in how the ethical appears at stake in our lives; because we feel, because we choose, because we are responsive. Yet if such feelings, choices, and responses have struck phenomenologists as what we are grasping for words to fathom when we talk of ethics, each of these aspects of experience when analysed intentionally – as experiences reaching beyond oneself of something really at stake – leads to a different reckoning of what these stakes actually are, of what we are fundamentally concerned about in the ethical dimension of our lives. Not simply beings who perceive objects and know this or that, if it is through feelings that we find ourselves in a world where things actually matter – now attracted, now repulsed by things that ought to be and ought not to be – then isn’t ethics fundamentally a call to weigh the different and potentially competing values we feel animating a world so fraught with ought: is the ethical dimension of life thus reckoning an ordre du coeur, acts of evaluation whereby a person strives to love what really is good and hate what truly is evil? Yet if a person reckons with feelings rather than being driven by them, isn’t that because such a person is actually reckoning with something much more fundamental about who one really is, facing up to the reality that values matter precisely because one finds oneself with a choice in some matter: isn’t the ethical dimension of life rather owning up to the significance of this capacity to choose, reflectively acknowledging the real stakes of one’s freedom in a situation? But if feeling after values seems pretty blind without a reflective subject called to choose, doesn’t grounding ethics in a subjective recognition of one’s own freedom seem a bit empty? Isn’t what matters not my ability to choose but precisely how I find my choice limited by a demand that comes from beyond myself, when I find myself faced not with a choice but face to face with another person, reckoning with someone other than myself: rather than owning up to our freedom, isn’t the ethical dimension of life actually owning up to our responsibilities, where what’s really at stake is what we owe to others? Held together and apart by the moral force of these questions, there are three formative orientations to the ethical that phenomenologists have drawn from the (poorly known) ethical writings of the (well-known) figures mentioned at the outset: a personalistic ethics of value that builds directly on Husserl (2013 [1931]); an existentialist ethics of freedom, which found a champion in young Sartre (2018 [1943]) and a sympathetic critic in Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]); and an ethics of alterity and responsibility, which shudders through Levinas’s life-long project to re-ground all philosophy in ethics as ‘first philosophy’ (1987 [1947], 1999 [1995], 2000

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[1993]). With the exception of Levinas, however, the range of ways each of these key figures struggled with such questions across their life’s work is not readily encompassed by any of these three orientations. That none bar one of these philosophers was ever able to settle on an ethics adequate to their experience of these defining decades of European history is doubtless the reason phenomenology never developed a well-defined tradition of ethical thought. Rather, the legacy these thinkers bequeathed was a philosophical tradition unsettled to its very core by these years – not a phenomenological tradition of ethics but a phenomenological tradition haunted by ethics. Certainly, compared to the other intellectual traditions surveyed in this volume, there is something harrowed to phenomenology, and the starkness of the underlying philosophical anthropologies may well seem gaunt to empirical anthropologists; in fact, hard to stomach. Yet to appreciate the intriguing work phenomenology does today in anthropology of ethics, and also more broadly in the discipline, the riddle is why anthropologists may find themselves at once peculiarly drawn to such a ravaged tradition, yet drawn so often to shave the corners off what is most distinctive in its jagged modernist portrait of being human, airbrushing Picasso. In anthropology of ethics, one clue to this riddle is that anthropologists have rarely found themselves drawn to phenomenology writ large but to one phenomenologist in particular; the one defining figure whose thought cannot easily be located amid the constellation just described, but is rather the moral dark sun, the ethical black hole, around which these questions first came to gravitate. For if phenomenology is a haunted tradition, phenomenologists have come to be uniquely haunted by the ethical stakes of their varying intellectual commitments to the landmark work of this philosopher; and somewhat surprisingly for a discipline as skittish about the personal and the political as ours, anthropologists are drawn not to the ethical reflection of the old philosopher denounced by the Nazis, or the young gentile intellectual involved in the Resistance, or the French soldier imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp, but the man who spent these defining years as a member of the National Socialist Party and came to dismiss ethical reflection as barely even thinking.

The Spectre of Heidegger As a couple of wags once quipped, ‘It’s not always easy being Heideggerian’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 108). This rather raises the question: why begin philosophizing with Heidegger in the first place (Critchley 1992: 9)? When it comes to philosophizing about ethics (Golob 2017), the question is – for three reasons – especially pointed. First: although his Collected Writings would someday stretch to 102 thick leather tomes, Heidegger seldom published or wrote privately about any of the staple

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issues of his day in ethics and moral philosophy. Second: on the rare occasions he did engage with a classic work of moral philosophy, he was typically interested in some aspect of it that he did not think of as moral, and was not only personally uninterested in debates about ethics or morality but, frankly, dismissive of those interested in such matters. Third: given his personal and institutional commitments to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly how he justified these at the time in his own philosophy, there is ongoing controversy over whether such commitments do indeed follow from his philosophy, a debate which is not helped by the fact that Heidegger never publicly addressed this issue after the war and made little reference to it privately (see Wolin 1993). If Heidegger did not count himself very interested in ethics, what was he so interested in that scholars might think to begin philosophizing, or indeed anthropologizing, about ethics from this signally fraught oeuvre? As Heidegger came to see it, his life’s work was devoted to one question and one question only – the meaning of being – or, as he phrased it in the closing words of his inaugural address on succeeding to Husserl’s chair in 1929, ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’ This doesn’t, on the face of it, seem a particularly phenomenological question – what experience can one analyse intentionally to answer that?! – in fact, it sounds decidedly metaphysical, and the emergence of being rather than consciousness as Heidegger’s fundamental concern is probably the most famous instance of the tradition’s defining movement, radically transforming an earlier phenomenological approach to experience really to get ‘to the things themselves!’. During the early 1920s, initially as Husserl’s charismatic teaching assistant, Heidegger became convinced that we can only become reflectively conscious of something because we are already pre-reflectively aware of it. If intentional analysis was to reach the world as it really is given to us in experience, intentionality had to be approached in the first instance not as what theoretically structures our consciousness of the world but what practically structures our activity as a being in the world. Heidegger’s preferred term for a human being, Dasein, literally means being there, which he glosses as thrown projection [geworfener Entwurf] – at once thrown yet able projectively to throw off this thrownness – and his basic contention in Division One of Being and Time is that something can stand out as a matter for conscious reflection only because we already find ourselves somewhere, pre-reflectively delivered over through our moods and appetites in the thick of everyday concerns, yet somewhere we also pre-reflectively understand as a place of possibility, where understanding in the first instance is not so much contemplation but a practical activity, seizing hold of concrete possibilities that present themselves to further these quotidian cares. This is the task Heidegger embarked upon in Division One of Being and Time, the book he published unfinished in 1927 to secure his professorship, but analysing how the world is pre-reflectively given to us in

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experience still seems rather remote from riddling why there is something rather than nothing. In fact, what interested Heidegger about human beings, as he reveals halfway through the book, is that we are the one kind of being who has the capacity to question the meaning of our own being – to ask: what is the point of my existence? – and in Division Two, Heidegger set forth to analyse what someone who chooses reflectively to face up to this question discovers through the experience: that what it means to be human lies in reckoning with time, finding significance in life through living with the awareness that one shall cease to be. If by the end of Division Two Heidegger believed he had begun to make some headway on the meaning of being human, where exactly had that got him with the meaning of being writ large, why there are beings at all: as Husserl apocryphally remarked upon closing the book, ‘is this not anthropology?’ As Heidegger left the podium in 1929 with his final question hanging in the air, it was unclear how he would deliver what he had promised to begin in Division Three, as yet unwritten. Division Three, ‘Time and Being’, would never be written, and in the turn [Kehre] of his thought from being human to being in general – which had begun by the 1930s and would orient the rest of his work – Heidegger sought to show how the meaning of being, although it seems a metaphysical question, involves the overcoming of metaphysics in a history of being: what can really be and what really cannot – including possibilities and limits of human being – are at once revealed and concealed [unverborgen] through the shifting metaphysical horizons of passing world-historical epochs. While Heidegger always insisted on the overarching coherence of his socalled Denkweg – the path of his thought – those influenced by his work have rarely been so convinced, but it shapes why Heidegger personally never counted himself very interested in ethics: any ethical question about how a human should live seemed decidedly secondary to the ontological question of what a human is. A classic work of moral philosophy may occasionally offer insight into the question of what it means to be human, especially if posed as a special instance of the broader question of what it means to be; however, if Heidegger was not just uninterested in but increasingly dismissive of ethics, it was because the answers moral philosophers gave tended to assume some or other metaphysical picture of the world – typically with an essentialist account of being human slap bang in the centre – and were thus too limited to apprehend the history of being, where what it can really mean to be human emerges only in the broader unwinding of what the world unconceals of itself from one epoch to another. Yet despite Heidegger’s own framing, it is not hard to see why, especially for those working in the phenomenological tradition, the publication of Being and Time was seen to have significant import for philosophizing about ethics, both critical and constructive. If intentionality in the first instance is not a structure of consciousness but a structure of being in the world, rather than privileging theoretical knowledge over praxis and

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searching for the ground of ethics, after Husserl, in a deeply felt awareness of values, Division Two could easily be read as opening a new path; grounding ethics in the search for a particular way of being in the world that practically faces up to the question of the meaning of one’s existence, striving – in Heidegger’s terminology – for authenticity. Although not a widely cited reference in anthropology of ethics, the first three chapters of Division Two are thus the classic place to begin to look for any Heideggerian contribution to ethical thought. If it seemed unlikely that there was any experience one could analyse intentionally to solve the riddle of the meaning of being, in fact Heidegger ends his analysis in Division One of how the world is pre-reflectively given to us by singling out just one such experience – anxiety [Angst]. While one fears something or other, anxiety appears strikingly different because the mood is all-encompassing; a dreadful sense that everything – the entire world as we ordinarily encounter it in everyday life – is meaningless, and Division Two sets out intentionally to analyse what it is one is anxious about. In later works, Heidegger analyses a variety of similarly all-consuming moods – the joy of love, profound boredom – but anxiety comes with a particular nineteenth-century provenance that informs Division Two. It was Søren Kierkegaard (2014 [1844]) who first diagnosed anxiety as having such existential import, and he argued that to be so troubled by the meaning of one’s existence involves a capacity to appreciate one’s life as a whole, and this is only possible through apprehension of something which lies entirely outside one’s life. What can this be, Kierkegaard ventured, but a transcendent deity, and he proposed that one can only truly find meaning in a religious mode of life, searching for what really matters at any moment in relation to the overarching significance of one’s existence as a finite whole apprehended with respect to God’s infinite goodness. But there is something else that stands entirely outside one’s life, Heidegger contends, and in the face of which one experiences such all-encompassing anxiety – death. As Wittgenstein remarked towards the end of the Tractatus (1961 [1921]), ‘death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death’, yet while none of us live to experience our death, Heidegger insists that a person lives at any instant with an apprehension of being towards death [Sein zum Tode]. Indeed, rather than lying beyond the bounds of sense, Heidegger ventures it is a uniquely human capacity to appreciate the significance of mortality, which enables any of us to seek what really matters in life as a temporally finite whole, apprehending death as the ultimate horizon. Critically, for death to have this singular, allencompassing significance, what matters is appreciating the unique significance of one’s own [eigen] death. While in Division One, Heidegger had stressed that our ordinary pre-reflective awareness of ourselves is being just like anyone [Das Man], discovering what really [eigentlich] matters at any moment in life involves facing up to this

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unique owned-ness or real-ness [Eigentlichkeit], conventionally translated as authenticity. From the vantage of Division Two, Division One’s analysis of how the world is pre-reflectively given to us in everyday experience is life lived inauthentically, and Division Two re-analyses what it is to live such a life authentically – summoned into the moment by an individual call of conscience, owning up to any singular guilt or indebtedness for how one finds oneself through resolutely resolving to do what one is uniquely called to do, discovering what matters from moment to moment thanks to the overarching significance afforded by the anticipation of one’s own death, realizing there is no ultimate metaphysical meaning of being beyond time. When historical surveys of phenomenological approaches to ethics cleave in two, the fork in the road is Division Two of Being and Time – older conversations about objective values seemed eclipsed and new conversations about what it means to be an ethical subject developed. Indeed, it was through these passages on anxiety, death, and authenticity that Heidegger by mid-century first became well known beyond academic philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic, not least in the United States where Heidegger was often read initially as the evangelist of a secular theology, and a pop interpretation of authenticity appealed at once to a certain can-do strain of American individualism but also intellectuals seeking a foil against which to critique such cultural values (Woessner 2011). Yet as the century drew to its close, academic philosophers, especially those working outside the phenomenological tradition, rarely identified these hundred-odd pages as where Heidegger’s enduring philosophical significance was to be found. Among analytic philosophers – when mid-century preoccupations with philosophy of language were overtaken by concerns in philosophy of mind – Division One of Being and Time emerged as a reference of some interest for those seeking alternately to ground or (more often) critique dominant subject/object models of mind in cognitive psychology, which hold that subjects apprehend objects via cognitive representations. This new-found Anglophone interest frequently resulted in analytic clarifications of Heidegger’s arguments that were in some tension with how Division One had come to be understood both by continental phenomenologists and their critics; in particular, Hubert Dreyfus emerged as Heidegger’s most vocal champion stateside, propounding an anti-representationalist account of pre-reflective perceptual experience of a thing unmediated by mental conceptualization as something or other and generalizing this pragmatist reading of Division One into a theory of mind where reflective subjective awareness is but a ‘derivative and intermittent condition’ for beings habitually engaged in ‘skilful absorbed coping’ with the familiar everyday world around them (Dreyfus 1991). In continental philosophy, however, it was Heidegger’s later writings that exerted a profound influence, particularly in the development of French structuralism among those referred to in English as

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post-structuralists. In critical conversation with Jacques Derrida who rose to fame initially as a virtuoso Heidegger scholar (see the lectures from the 1960s published as Derrida 2016), these writers often understood their thought – in explicit opposition to continental phenomenology – as the true intellectual heir to Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics, where any traditional privilege accorded a conscious human subject as the fons et origo of meaning had to be de-centred through historically informed analysis of what unconsciously structures possibilities of meaning from one epoch to another. If late twentieth-century analytic interpretations of Heidegger can seem rather metaphysical to continental readers, grounded in essentialist claims about what it is to be human, continental interpretations easily appear constructionist to analytic eyes, threatening historically determinist anthropologies. The one thing these late twentieth-century readers tended to agree on (albeit for different reasons) was that Heidegger’s abiding significance lay in turning philosophical attention away from the subject – note, the reverse of continental philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition who had typically identified the historical significance of Being and Time for ethical thought with catalysing a turn to the subject in response to his conception of authenticity. In fact, although by the close of the century no influential reading of Heidegger either side of the Atlantic any longer identified (or dared to) what still mattered most in his work as its positive significance for philosophizing about ethics, there was often a sharp moral edge as to why it mattered that a rival reading of Heidegger was not just wrong but wrong. Looming in the background was the spectre of a second address that Heidegger gave soon after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, stepping to the podium now to assume his own elected position as rector of the university and publicly associating his philosophy with National Socialism. It was an argument that hinged on an appeal to authenticity, extrapolating from how an individual can choose to face up to the meaning of one’s own existence to how a community can own up to its unique historical destiny by resolving to yield to the will of a single Fu¨hrer: not only could one be an authentic Nazi, Heidegger seemed to suggest, but authenticity demanded for his audience at that historical juncture a commitment to Nazism. Safely ensconced in Division One, analytic philosophers of mind such as Dreyfus might feel at some remove from Heidegger’s later fumbling turn from time to history with which continental philosophers dangerously tangled. Meanwhile, securely grounded in the historical notion of truth as unconcealment and world disclosure central to his mature thought, continental philosophers might consider themselves immune to any unresolved metaphysical tendencies in Being and Time that led a less mature Heidegger to go so astray in the ‘Promethean willing’ (Lo¨with 1995: 34) and ‘massive voluntarism’ (Derrida 1989 [1987]: 37) of his rectoral address.

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This portrayal of Heidegger reception by the end of the twentieth century is naturally broad brushstroke. However, it throws into relief a striking feature of anthropological scholarship on ethics and morality that has developed over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. If it is surprising that phenomenology would emerge at all as an influential philosophical source for largely British and North American anthropologists when it is (still) so marginal to Anglophone moral philosophy and ethics, what is even more surprising is that the phenomenologist anthropologists have overwhelmingly turned to Heidegger, whose work even his most fullthroated proponents either side of the Atlantic rarely vouchsafe as a helpful place to begin philosophizing about ethics. Yet among those anthropologists of ethics who avowedly ‘take Heidegger seriously’ (Zigon 2009: 286), the Heidegger one meets through their work is strikingly dissimilar to any conventional portrait of Heidegger’s ethics of authenticity. That said, what is unfamiliar also varies strikingly between serious Heideggerians. If a sympathetic reader may detect more than one Heidegger at work in anthropology of ethics (Mattingly 2014a: xvi), a less sympathetic reader might well remark in some exasperation that what anthropologists are doing involves ‘turning . . . Heidegger on his head’ (Faubion 2011: 85). More strikingly still, when a reader does discern the contour of an authentically Heideggerian move in anthropology of ethics, the argument is frequently traced back to a different philosopher entirely, generally one of two key thinkers at some distance from the phenomenological tradition. Indeed, not only is the connection to Heidegger’s thought disavowed but sometimes it is explicitly denied, even branded anti-Heideggerian. Certainly, amid this work of avowal, disavowal, and forthright denial, anthropology of ethics is peculiarly galvanized by odd readings of Heidegger, both for the defence and the prosecution. But just because readings are seriously odd, that doesn’t mean they aren’t serious, and one can perhaps appreciate what many of these anthropologists are up to with Heidegger as searching, if not for an ethics of inauthenticity, at least for ways to take inauthenticity far more seriously than conventional readings of Heidegger are wont. To chart the range of ways anthropologists defamiliarize Heidegger in their work on ethics, the three divisions of Being and Time offer in rough outline a sort of mental map or guide for further reading. For anyone seeking to take inauthenticity seriously, the most obvious place to look is the beginning of Being and Time where Heidegger analyses how the world is pre-reflectively given to us in everyday experience, and anthropologists who positively identify their approach to ethics with Heidegger tend to ground their work firmly in Division One. Their interpretations, however, pull Division One in two rather different directions, emphasizing now one profile, now the other, of Heidegger’s initial Janus-faced portrait of being human as thrown projection. With the accent on thrown projection, Jarrett Zigon’s writings (2007, 2008,

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2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2014a, 2014b, 2018) offer a sustained empirical test-case for just how much people navigate what matters in their lives without much self-conscious reflection at all. Informed by a Dreyfusard reading of thrown projection as skilful absorbed coping, Zigon in his earliest work finds in Heidegger’s treatment of the way we ordinarily perceive things such as hammers a dramatic analogy for the claim that ethical reflection depends on the existence of moral expectations and dispositions which are ‘normally unquestioned, unreflected upon, and simply done’. More contentiously, he seeks to demonstrate that self-conscious deliberation plays only a minor role in how people actually work through what matters in their lives, largely limited to situations of ‘moral breakdown’ when ‘dilemmas, difficult times, and troubles . . . arise from time to time’. If Zigon locates the moral dimension of our lives in how we find ourselves delivered over through our moods and appetites, more or less skilfully coping with everyday concerns, Cheryl Mattingly (2012, 2013, 2014a, 2014b; Mattingly et al. 2018) hears in Division One a call to investigate how we subjectively understand the situations in which we find ourselves as ‘spaces of possibility’, foregrounding what she terms a ‘first-person perspective’. Putting the stress on thrown projection, Mattingly contends that such subjective understanding is not so much a contemplative stepping back for ‘personal introspection and reflection’ as a practical working through of possibilities akin to ‘experimenting’, and she locates the moral dimension of our lives in how we more or less carefully attend to the potential significance of ordinary situations as ‘moral laboratories’, reaching to ‘create experiences that are also experiments in how life might or should be lived’ (2014a). If Zigon’s notion of breakdown originates in Dreyfus, Mattingly’s laboratories recall Charles Taylor’s (1995) adaptation of Heidegger’s concept of world disclosure after Hegel to analyse spheres of ethical life [Sittlichkeit] in terms of ‘spaces of disclosure’, although Mattingly’s soccer fields and hospital waiting rooms are conspicuously pedestrian compared to the spaces that tend to interest Taylor, such as high mass for a devout Catholic, perhaps, and its transcendent glimpse of the eternal mystery of the incarnation in the daily miracle of transubstantiation. Whatever tensions there may be between their sources in Anglophone philosophy of mind and social theory, however, as a matter of Heidegger interpretation, these original anthropological analytics of moral breakdown and moral laboratories each face challenges as readings of Division One; on the one hand, Heidegger’s insistence that pre-reflective awareness of things such as hammers is fundamentally different from pre-reflective awareness of oneself carefully relating to such things, and on the other hand, his adamance that any subjective awareness of oneself at play in the mundane cares of daily life is of oneself being just like anyone else, Das Man, ‘The They’.

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Whether habitual coping or experimental becoming, what is common to these attempts to take inauthenticity seriously is that they locate the moral dimension of life in the thick of some positive reconstruction of Heidegger’s account of the pre-reflective structures of everyday life at the beginning of Being and Time, largely eliding the book’s subsequent analysis of self-conscious reflection on the meaning of one’s own existence and stripping any treatment of later themes such as temporality from the nuts and bolts of Heidegger’s argument about death, conscience, and guilt. Another approach, however, begins not from affirming some reading of Division One but critically interrogating Division Two, identifying a constitutive role for inauthenticity in the very process of authentically resolving how to live and locating the ethical dimension of our lives in this reflective movement. In ‘implicit contrast’ to authenticity envisaged as a heroic overcoming of everyday inauthenticity, Veena Das’s anthropological approach to ethics as a ‘descent into the ordinary’ (2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2015, 2020) locates the moral dimension of our lives in the down-beat of reflection – not so much a stepping away as a descent or falling back – a ‘mode of being in the world’ that recovers what really matters in the ordinary (2015: 54). Although framed as anti-Heideggerian, Das’s argument echoes the mainline of post-World War II Heidegger criticism on the continent (Lo¨with), which as a corrective to the can-do-ism of pop interpretations of authenticity and a diagnosis of where Heidegger himself erred in his rectoral address emphasized a double movement in Division Two – stepping away reflectively only ever to fall back – and while cardcarrying Heideggerians resist attaching any ethical valence to this movement, the philosopher Stanley Cavell (1979, 1990) drew on this as an interpretative key to read late Wittgenstein’s ordinary-language philosophy not as an intellectual caustic dissolving philosophical pretensions to pontificate about morality but an ethical call to transform how we ordinarily inhabit the world, to face up to what the ordinary really is. Das’s harrowing vision of what the ordinary really is, however, differs markedly from Cavell’s inclination to Harvard Yard screwball (1981): privileging the vantage of South Asian survivors of traumatic violence and the ‘poisonous knowledge’ of the past they bring to the present, Das identifies in ordinary life neither a homely domain of routine and repetition nor inexorable becoming, but an ‘everyday . . . taut with moments of world-making and world-annihilating encounters that could unfold in a few seconds or over the course of a lifetime’. Neither Zigon’s pre-reflective coping nor Mattingly’s experimenting are for Das quite up to the challenge of navigating ordinary life, where what really matters is this chilling insight into its liability to burst apart at the seams, but rather for Das probing the ethical dimension of life involves following a situated movement of reflection – her preferred conceit is ‘knitting pair by pair’ – where there is ‘no real distance’

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between analysing how her slum-dwelling interlocutors strive reflectively to hold their lives together and the philosophical work of a thinker like Cavell ‘in every word he has ever written’ (2007: 221). Avowed or disavowed, if certain Heideggerian tendencies recoil through anthropology of ethics, one clue for the reason is to be found in the explanation these writers themselves offer for their motivation and, for each of the three anthropologists surveyed, one prominently stated intellectual target is the same – Foucault (Zigon 2007: 133; Mattingly 2012, 2014a: xvii; Das 2015: 55, 103–14). Indeed, an intellectual hallmark of anthropological debates about ethics over the last two decades has been the formative role of rigorous engagement with Foucault’s writings from the years immediately prior to his death in 1984; in particular, contentions over the foundational claim that anthropologists have tended to theorize normative dimensions of social life virtually as a ‘science of unfreedom’ in which any ‘experience of freedom is deemed illusory’, and the merits of adapting Foucault’s mode of subjectivation analytic to investigate the ethical dimension of life as ways ‘everyday conduct is constitutively pervaded by reflective evaluation’ (Laidlaw 2014: 44). Such Foucauldian approaches emphasize, as it were, the upbeat of reflection – the stepping back, ‘the motion by which one detaches oneself [from what one does], establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem’ (Foucault 1997 [1984]: 117) – and one straightforward explanation of what’s going on with Heidegger in anthropology of ethics is that there is an intellectual temptation to interpret any approach to ethics which foregrounds experiences of freedom in self-conscious reflection as an ethics of authenticity. On this hypothesis, anthropologists have responded to this opening gambit by exploring a range of paths of resistance to popular interpretations of authenticity, mapped out with peculiar gusto during the last half of the twentieth century by philosophers seeking to read Heidegger against such (mis)conceptions and demonstrate how he takes inauthenticity seriously, anthropologically identifying either some ethical significance in Division One’s account of everyday inauthenticity or specifying a constitutive role for inauthenticity in an ethically charged interrogation of Division Two’s account of self-conscious reflection. An alternative hypothesis is that these dynamics are not based on a (mis)reading of Foucauldian approaches as an ethics of authenticity, but are the not entirely conscious working-out of a play of avowal and disavowal vis-a`-vis Heidegger that emerges from any serious scholarly engagement with what Foucault was up to in his final years. Framed explicitly against ‘soaring’ conceptions of freedom, if Foucauldians do privilege the conceit of stepping back, what they champion in Foucault’s mode of subjectivation analytic is precisely its interpretative purchase for tracing how any ‘reflective motion of stepping back’ not only involves ‘standing somewhere in particular to begin with’ but also stepping back

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somewhere in a particular fashion (Laidlaw 2014: 103), enabling an anthropologist to compare how any experience of freedom is ‘constructed out of the role given to choice in various cultures and in various domains within specific cultures’ (Robbins 2007: 295). Although remote from Heidegger’s everyman account of self-conscious reflection in the face of death in Division Two, key moves that these anthropologists esteem in Foucault’s later writings resonate with characteristics of the much-vaunted turn in Heidegger’s own thought, when, having reanalysed the everyday from the vantage of temporality in Division Two, he struggled with how to reanalyse temporality from the vantage of history in Division Three, an unfinished project which began with a specific focus on the constitutive relation between freedom and normative obligation: Obligation and being governed by law in themselves presuppose freedom as the basis for their own possibility. Only what exists as free could be bound by obligatory lawfulness. Freedom alone can be the source of obligation. (Heidegger 1984a [1928]: 25) With a deep legacy in German philosophy (Kant 2012 [1785]: part 2), if Heidegger’s opening move presages the significance anthropologists have found in late Foucault to critique social theory as a science of unfreedom (Laidlaw 2014), the precise mechanics of Foucault’s mode of subjectivation analytic – moving from a historically framed ontological question, by way of a marked emphasis on deontology and the constitutive role of a certain freedom in striving to realize some obligation, to the ultimate question of what is revealed and concealed in that epoch as fundamentally mattering in the world – resemble a schema of how Heidegger came historically to approach freedom and obligation at times during his later National Socialist years (1979/1982/1984/1987, 1984b) as he turned away from writing Division Three. One tentative suggestion pending further research is that Foucault’s late turn through normativity to freedom is profoundly, if tacitly, shaped by a back-to-front reading of Heidegger’s own turn during the 1930s and 1940s through freedom to normativity, as Foucault reckoned with the significance of his own life’s work as a whole; now avowing (the 1984 US preface to volume 2 of The History of Sexuality (1985)) now disavowing (the French preface, 1983) any resonance between his earliest concerns in the 1950s informed by existential psychoanalysis and his final project, and ultimately revisiting the rather brutal dismissal of his first turn in the 1960s by Derrida for its crude reading of Heidegger (2010, 2011), the thinker he finally, ambivalently acknowledged in his last interview (Foucault 2000 [1984]: 240–1; see Rayner 2007) had been throughout his life ‘the essential philosopher’, an author ‘with whom one thinks, with whom one works, but about whom one does not write’ (my italics). That said, he had to confess, ‘I hardly know Being and Time’.

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Exorcising the Wasteland If, through a glass darkly, a phenomenological spectre is haunting some recent debates in anthropology of ethics that dimly resembles the little magician from Messkirch, it is not the sort of revenant that only appears when summoned by name, rattling the furniture of self-styled phenomenological approaches. Certainly, compared to the range of sources that inform phenomenological approaches to other dimensions of social and cultural life in anthropology, recent phenomenological approaches to ethics in the discipline are distinguished by a remarkably close engagement with Heidegger. Yet, equally striking is the fact that anthropologists of ethics drawing on distinct philosophical traditions well beyond phenomenology in virtue ethics, ordinary-language philosophy, and late structuralism may on occasion find that what feels so exquisitely at issue between them can be analysed in part as ricocheting along the fault-lines of Heidegger’s Denkweg, a spectral grip guiding the planchette round the Ouija as they seek to spell out these intellectual stakes. Whatever the explanation for this Heidegger v Heidegger v Heidegger dynamic – two alternate hypotheses have been hazarded – wider engagement with approaches to ethics and morality in the phenomenological tradition may have a peculiar salience for anthropology of ethics, especially if one understands phenomenology as the tradition of continental philosophy most intimately troubled with what it means ethically to find oneself variously committed to aspects of Heidegger’s work. Framed against the threats of blind subjectivism in moral sentiment theories (identified by Kant) and empty formalism in Kantian claims of reason (critiqued by continental idealists), Edmund Husserl’s life-long conviction was that the ethical dimension of life is substantively grounded in personal acts of feeling and willing but that this does not undermine either the objectivity of values or general validity of ethical reasoning (see Woodruff Smith 2013: 339–82). It was a claim he first articulated in his early lectures on ethics where, building on Brentano, he sought to develop a phenomenological approach to ethics foregrounding acts of affective valuation and reflective evaluation. Distinct from approaches to value developed by phenomenologically informed philosophers elsewhere in Europe (Ortega y Gasset, Gabriel Marcel), Husserl’s value ethics comprised an axiology or study of value that intentionally analysed how objective values and disvalues are apprehended in emotional experiences of valuefeeling [Wertnehmen] and a theory of praxis that analysed how values are ranked, including an account of how a person deals with conflict between values that cannot be clearly hierarchized by choosing to devote one’s whole life to a particular class of values as paramount for one’s personal ethical calling or vocation [Berufung]. By the end of World War I, a threefold commitment to objectivity of values, emotional intentionality, and

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ethical personalism had come to characterize the dominant phenomenological approach to ethics in German philosophy, most famously in the work of Max Scheler (1973). As indicated in Chapter 19 in this volume by Sommerschuh and Robbins, this other phenomenological approach to ethics is beginning to attract the attention of anthropologists, as an alternative and/or complement to those roads taken by way of Heidegger.

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2016. Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Faubion, James D. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferrarin, Alfredo, Dermot Moran, Elisa Magri, and Danilo Manca (eds.). 2017. Hegel and Phenomenology. Berlin: Springer. Foucault, Michel. 1983. ‘Usages de plaisirs et techniques de soi’. Le De´bat, 27: 46–72. 1985 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. 1997 Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954– 1984. Volume 1. New York: New Press. 2000 [1984]. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. Volume 3. New York: New Press: 239–97. 2010. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982– 1983. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2011. The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the College de France 1983–1984. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Golob, Sacha. 2017. ‘Heidegger’, in Sacha Golob and Jens Timmermann (eds.), The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 623–35. Heidegger, Martin. 1962 [1929]. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. 1978 [1946]. Basic Writings. London: Routledge. 1979/1982/1984/1987 [1961]. Nietzsche. 4 vols. New York: Harper & Row. 1984a [1928]. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1984b [1936]. Shelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970 [1900/1901]. Logical Investigations. 2 vols. London: Routledge. 2013 [1931]. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. 2012 [1785]. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 2014 [1844]. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin. New York: Liveright Publishing. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambert, Johan Heinrich. 1990 [1764]. Neues Organon. Berlin: AkademieVerlag. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987 [1947]. Time and the Other. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

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1999 [1995]. Alterity and Transcendence. New York: Columbia University Press. 2000 [1993]. Entre-Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Lo¨with, Karl. 1964. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston. 1995. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. New York: Columbia University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12: 161–84. 2013. ‘Moral Selves and Moral Scenes; Narrative Experiments in Everyday Life’. Ethnos, 78: 301–27. 2014a. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2014b. ‘Moral Deliberation and the Agentive Self in Laidlaw’s Ethics’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4: 473–86. 2016. ‘Accounting for Oneself and Other Ethical Acts: Big Picture Ethics with a Small Picture Focus’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6: 433–47. Mattingly, Cheryl, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.). 2018. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. Oxford: Berghahn. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Rayner, Timothy. 2007. Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience. London: Continuum. Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72: 293–314. Rockmore, Tom. 2011. Kant and Phenomenology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2018 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge. Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1990 [1818]. The World as Will and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waibel, Violetta L., J. Daniel Breazeale, and Tom Rockmore (eds.). 2010. Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961 [1921]. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge.

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Woessner, Martin V. 2011. Heidegger in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolin, Richard. 1993. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Woodruff Smith, David. 2013. Husserl. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’. Anthropological Theory, 7: 131–50. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg. 2009. ‘Phenomenological Anthropology and Morality: A Reply to Robbins’. Ethnos, 74: 282–8. 2010a. Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow. Leiden: Brill. 2010b. ‘Moral and Ethical Assemblages: A Response to Fassin and Stoczkowski’. Anthropological Theory, 10: 3–15. 2011. ‘HIV Is God’s Blessing’: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2014a. ‘Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions for Morally Being-in-the-World’. Ethos, 42: 16–30. 2014b. ‘An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20: 746–64. 2018. Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. New York: Fordham University Press.

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7 Cognitive Science Natalia Buitron and Harry Walker

Introduction Having enjoyed a rapid rise to prominence, the anthropology of ethics and morality remains diverse and vibrant. If still somewhat lacking in systematic intellectual organization – as has been pointed out on more than one occasion (Faubion 2001: 83; Laidlaw 2002: 311; Robbins 2012a: 1) – its very eclecticism can also be read as a sign of vitality. Yet if philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Foucault have been warmly embraced by anthropologists, the latter have also, with just a very few exceptions, largely given the cold shoulder to a vast range of powerful and relevant empirical findings in psychology, economics, and experimental philosophy. As such, anthropologists remain relatively disconnected from some lively cross-disciplinary discussions and debates. The anthropological literature is often ignored by these other disciplines, and its divergent methodologies and theoretical eclecticism can make the task of integration and comparison difficult. This is not to say that anthropologists should adopt the methods, agendas, or theoretical frameworks of the (other) cognitive sciences: far from it. One of our aims in this chapter is to show how anthropology might better strengthen and elucidate, as well as critique, key findings in the scientific study of morality and ethics, and how all sides might be enriched as a result of dialogue conducted on an equal footing. Psychologists might well always complain about the lack of rigour in anthropology’s methods and the lack of transparency in its theoretical process (cf. e.g. Quinn and Strauss 2006: 273), while anthropologists will continue to object that the experiments of psychologists are artificial and disconnected from everyday life (Astuti 2007). Moral psychological and other experimental research characteristically relies on questionnaires, experiments, or games, rather than ethnography, and these all carry with them their own advantages and disadvantages. While often yielding valuable data, the vast majority of such research has of course also been conducted in

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Western educational and post-industrial settings, limiting the applicability of conclusions that are sometimes assumed to be universally valid; and even where cross-cultural research has been carried out, interpretations of unusual findings are often limited by the relatively narrow quality of data obtainable through such approaches. Various cases have already been made for deeper anthropological engagement with cognitive science generally, as have calls for caution and scepticism (see, inter alia, Bloch 2012; Astuti and Bloch 2012; Jenkins 2014; Laidlaw 2016b; Shweder 2012). Wherever one stands on these debates, there are some good reasons why anthropologists and cognitive scientists with an interest in morality and ethics might collaborate in developing a shared research agenda. Whether focussed on evolutionary origins, brain mechanisms, or the cognitive processes informing moral judgements, emotions, and actions, most cognitive scientists agree that our species’ uniquely social and moral capacities have been selected far less by the physical environment than by the complex social environments humans have created over time: what Esther Goody (1995) referred to as ‘social intelligence’. Morality and group living go hand in hand. While insisting that evolutionary processes place constraints on the kind of morality individuals can entertain, most can agree that morality only develops in social context, and that we need to account for how children develop both ‘the morality that is particular to their culture and the morality that is particular to themselves’ (Haidt and Bjorklund 2008: 206). The vast cognitive science agenda spans the evolution of the human species as well as the specific moral and ethical lives of individuals, leaving plenty of room for social and cultural considerations, including, say, the role played by values or the human capacity to shape one’s own moral self, as well as that of others. Intellectual overlap notwithstanding, the effective implementation of a programme of inter-disciplinary research capable of integrating considerations of both cognition and culture has proven a very challenging undertaking. As Astuti and Bloch (2012: 453) point out, cooperation and dialogue are possible, even necessary, but ‘must proceed from the recognition of anthropology’s unique epistemology and methodology’. In a recent attempt to integrate what he refers to as natural and social histories in the study of ethical life, Webb Keane (2016: 5) has also lamented that scholars in each field ‘rarely take advantage of what they could learn from one another’s research. Indeed, they often have principled criticisms of other styles of research, which can reinforce the idea that their findings contradict each other’. Keane rightly emphasizes that neither approach alone can provide a satisfactory account. His book is impressive in its scope and ambition, although the part of the book dedicated to psychological research comprises just one chapter and remains only loosely integrated with those that follow. In her commentary, Astuti (2016) observed that the very idea of ‘dialogue’ between two ‘histories’ raises certain problems of its own: ‘when all is said and done, natural and social histories continue to feature . . . as separate

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processes, which make contact with one another in various ways but which are not constitutive of each other’ (2016: 450). Thus, the cognitive and emotional abilities of infants represent the natural history of ethical life, as natural capacities, but are not part of social history per se: ‘Making them so would mean acknowledging – and finding methodological and conceptual ways of analysing – the dynamic way in which human psychology enables, constrains, and is transformed by the historical process’ (2016: 451). In other words, our aim should be to reveal how human psychology and social history are not two parallel processes to be brought into dialogue, but two windows into one and the same process; the psychological foundations of ethical life are shaped by the historical process and are a constitutive part of it. The challenges involved in achieving such a synthesis should not be underestimated. We reflect on some of the theoretical and methodological obstacles in what follows, as they arose in our own recent journey, as relative outsiders, into a few specific areas of the vast moral terrain mapped out by the various cognitive sciences. Needless to say, we do not attempt here anything like a comprehensive overview. Moreover, our explorations – partial as they are – have very much been shaped by the specific themes and concerns of an ongoing collaborative research project, about which we say more later, focussing on notions of justice and injustice with specific reference to the indigenous peoples of western Amazonia.1 One goal of the project is to strengthen inter-disciplinary collaboration between anthropology and neighbouring disciplines in seeking to understand better the social, cultural, and cognitive bases of people’s judgements around what is right or just. We have been especially interested in how norms of fairness and equality are established, both socially and developmentally, and how judgements of responsibility and wrongdoing are shaped by cultural and institutional factors. As such, these are themes we have prioritized in this chapter. We hope to make clear that, despite the challenges and obstacles, there are myriad ways in which anthropology can profit from deeper engagement with the cognitive science of morality and ethics – and vice versa – on both conceptual and methodological levels. We draw this out firstly with reference to discussions around the evolution of cooperation and its relationship to fairness (see also Kajanus and Stafford, Chapter 24 of this volume), before proceeding to some important recent developments in the moral psychology of wrongdoing.

The Evolution of Morality Contemporary psychological theories of human morality tend to fall into three broad overlapping groups: evolutionary ethics; gene–culture coevolution; and moral psychology (see Tomasello 2016: 137–43). The first two 1

See www.lse.ac.uk/amazonia.

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broadly seek to explain how natural selection might have shaped human morality, focussing specifically on theoretical principles of cooperation as they might apply to the human case (for a useful review, see James 2011). While a number of scholars work at the intersection of both groups, exponents of theories of gene–culture coevolution explicitly highlight the role of cultural selection in evolutionary contexts, proposing that natural selection operates, through culture, at the level of the group, as well as at the more conventional level of individual traits.2 Moral psychology, meanwhile, focusses less on evolutionary processes and more on proximate psychological mechanisms, even if these are still generally assumed (whether explicitly or implicitly) to have evolved as adaptations to ancestral selection pressures. The focus of this latter approach is often on people’s judgements of harm, and a very typical methodology has been to pose explicit questions to participants: about runaway trolley cars, for instance, or incest scenarios (e.g. Cushman, Young, and Hauser 2006; Graham et al. 2011). In recent years, one of the more vibrant topics of research within evolutionary ethics and gene–culture coevolution has been the evolution of fairness. Several theorists have proposed an understanding of human morality as a combination of something like ‘sympathy’ (or ‘empathy’) and ‘reciprocity’ (or ‘fairness’). If the former is foundational when humans cooperate with kin and close friends, a different set of predispositions is typically deemed necessary to support more binding and extensive agreements between strangers. A shared sense of fairness (or justice), in particular, is seen as a prerequisite for large-scale cooperation with non-kin and the creation of reciprocal relations of mutual benefit beyond altruism or self-interest. While the majority of proponents couch their models in terms of evolutionary processes, it is striking to us how often they draw inspiration, whether explicitly or implicitly, from the Western philosophical tradition. The spectre of the social contract lurks behind much work in the genre, as formulated by thinkers ranging from Hobbes and Rousseau through to Rawls. This tradition also reverberates, of course, through a century of anthropological thinking about sociality; it is well known, for instance, that evolutionary concerns underpinned Mauss’s treatise on the gift, and that his preoccupation with the obligation to return reflects a similar concern with the origins of the modern contract, with its capacity to overcome mistrust and the Hobbesian ‘Warre of all against all’ (see Parry 1986: 457; Sanchez et al. 2017). Evolutionary psychologists commonly echo this Maussian emphasis on the obligation to return, but locate its origins in evolved adaptations to ancestral environments rather than in social institutions. Baumard et al. 2

Anthropologists might be interested in Richerson and Boyd (2005); Henrich (2017); Boyd (2018). For useful reviews, see Joe Henrich’s webpage (https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/publications/research-topics-new/cultural-groupselection) and Price (2012); see also West et al. (2007) for a critique.

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(2013), for instance, reformulate the concept of reciprocity in terms of a ‘mutualistic’ theory that humans have evolved a moral disposition to value fairness in mutual relations. This would effectively offer the evolutionary ‘building blocks’ of John Rawls’s theory of justice: a moral sense of fairness motivates people to act ‘as if’ they had agreed on a contract with others. These authors position themselves against the so-called costly punishment approach, which suggests that it is instead a determination to punish uncooperative free-riders, even if it comes at a cost, that best explains the stability of cooperation (see e.g. Fehr and Ga¨chter 2002; Boyd and Richerson 2005). This willingness to punish manifests itself not only when people are themselves subject to cheating or unfairness but also as third parties in anonymous situations (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004).3 Yet according to Baumard et al. (2013), avoidance and social selection are more effective than punishment in sustaining cooperation. That is, co-operators simply desert cheaters and seek out more cooperative partners, and informal sanctions such as gossip and reputation select for a psychological disposition towards fairness. Competition to be chosen as a cooperative partner over millennia made it essential to be seen as reliable and trustworthy, and as willing to share the benefits of joint activities in an impartial, mutually advantageous, or ‘fair’ way (Baumard, Andre´, and Sperber 2013: 63, 68). Those who contribute more should receive more; when someone deserves punishment, this should be proportional to the crime; and so on. For this scenario to work out, individuals must be on the lookout for free-riders or inauthentic co-operators. The authors thus propose that the most cost-effective way to secure a good reputation is to behave as a ‘genuinely moral person’ (2013: 65), though they essentially reduce this to mean someone who behaves fairly towards others. This is a debate where anthropologists could make important contributions by fleshing out the culturally variant meanings of fairness (a project we return to briefly in the final section), or by expanding the possibilities of ‘being moral’ in ways that complement, contrast with, or even exceed the idea that morality equals fairness. Tomasello’s (2016: 139) alternative, mutualistic account of the evolution of morality (which combines elements from each of the three approaches just mentioned) argues that reciprocity simply cannot account for the manifold aspects of human moral psychology, from self-regulating feelings of responsibility, guilt, and obligation to the making of promises and the enforcement of social norms. He emphasizes the role of interdependency rather than reciprocity in mutualistic cooperation: a sense that ‘I depend on others, just as they depend on me’, which in evolutionary terms paves the way for a fundamental sense of group belonging or ‘we-ness’. Caring about the welfare of others, or helping them, are natural parts of 3

See Henrich et al. (2006) for a discussion of substantial cross-cultural variation in willingness to punish and Guala (2012) for ethnographic and ‘in-the-wild’ evidence that contradicts the costly punishment account.

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life and there is no need for actors to weigh up objective costs and benefits. His theory essentially seeks to account for the evolution of human morality in two key stages: in the first, ecological changes some 400,000 years ago forced humans to forage together with others to avoid starvation. This new form of interdependence meant that early humans had to extend their feelings of sympathy for kin and friends – something chimpanzees and bonobos also experience – to other, more distant collaborative partners. But this meant developing new cognitive skills for coordinating and communicating effectively in order to form a joint goal, or what Tomasello (drawing on philosophical accounts by Gilbert, Searle, Tuomela, and others) terms ‘joint intentionality’. Over time, partners in face-to-face joint projects develop shared normative standards and a concern with how they are evaluated by others. They begin to treat one another not merely with sympathy, but with an emerging sense of fairness, motivated by the idea that while two or more parties are necessary for success, any partner could, in principle, play either role. In short, the social outcome of more collaborative foraging was a kind of ‘second-personal morality’ based on a genuine attempt to behave virtuously, in accordance with joint commitments, rather than simply on the strategic avoidance of punishment or reputational attacks (Tomasello 2016, 2018). The second stage in the evolution of morality occurred some 150,000 years ago, according to Tomasello, when groups became larger and more complex and competition between them intensified. At this point, the challenge for modern humans was to scale up from a life of interdependent collaboration with well-known partners to life in a larger cultural group with all kinds of interdependent groupmates (Tomasello 2016: 85). At this point, sympathy towards known partners expanded into a more general form of group loyalty. The cognitive skills that underpinned joint intentionality meanwhile transformed into ‘collective intentionality’, which enabled the creation of conventional cultural practices, roles, and norms, which are detached from individuals. Human morality shifts from being essentially local and face to face to being group-minded and ‘objective’, in the sense of being orientated towards more general, normative ideals of right and wrong (2016: 87). While accounts such as these can be compelling on their own terms, we would like to draw attention to the strong teleological dimension: an abiding sense that morality has evolved in a clear and linear direction to take the form of ever more abstract, general, and impartial moral norms. Also left largely un-interrogated, in what can sometimes take the form of ‘just-so’ scenarios, are assumptions that early human groupings were egalitarian and that social and moral complexity are functions of increased scale and hierarchy.4 The tendency to associate progressive ‘stages’ of 4

For a critical perspective of this narrative of social evolution informed by anthropological and archaeological findings, see Graeber and Wengrow (2021).

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morality with an increasing capacity for abstraction and impartiality is particularly evident in Tomasello’s narrative, according to which the evolution of fairness in the human species largely mirrors its ontogenetic development at the level of the individual. Thus, young children only begin to show ‘group-mindedness’ and ‘collective intentionality’, and the propensity to enforce social norms on others, after around three years of age, which is well after they become capable of forming simple joint goals with others (Tomasello et al. 2012: 685). Toddlers first display a tendency to collaborate and act pro-socially towards other specific individuals (‘secondpersonal morality’), and only gradually (especially during their school years) begin to develop a full-blown concept of fairness, or an impersonal, ‘norm-based’ morality (Tomasello and Vaish 2013). The latter transcends particulars, insofar as children’s judgements increasingly articulate objective standards of behaviour. What matters now is less the opinions of individuals and their specific relationships and more the opinion of the group, or some other, larger entity (such as the group’s gods). When children begin to understand that norms apply to everyone in the group, they enforce them from a third-party stance, even when they themselves are not directly involved or affected by the norm violation (see also Fehr et al. 2008; Robbins and Rochat 2017). It is illuminating to consider these arguments in light of recent developments in the anthropology of ethics and morality. A key contribution of this literature has been to foreground questions of freedom and agency; it has been proposed that moral action can only take place when actors are free reflectively to adopt and cultivate a moral stance. It is precisely this self-reflective process of decision-making, whether in critical moments of everyday self-cultivation or situations where actors willingly reproduce conventional moral norms, which distinguishes the ethical domain from group morality (Laidlaw 2002, 2014). This has led to a re-evaluation of the significance of agentive moral reproduction, as well as moral doubt, moments of breakdown, and inconsistency in moral experience (Robbins 2007; Zigon 2007; Cassaniti and Hickman 2014). These developments pose some problems for the accounts of moral development discussed earlier, and their assumption of a species-specific shift towards ever more objectivity and impartiality. This is particularly the case insofar as these accounts conflate the moral with the collective, thereby removing ethics from the picture. ‘Morality’ tends to figure primarily as an instrument of social control for encouraging cooperation and ensuring the group’s survival. A closely related abiding assumption of much of the cognitive science literature is that social groups tend to be stable, homogenous, and cohesive. And yet a very significant contribution of anthropologists over the past fifty years has been to move beyond this tendency to reify social groups, and the assumption that pre-modern, small-scale societies are collectivistic wholes (see e.g. Collier and Rosaldo 1981; Strathern 1988; Rapport and Overing 2000: 334; Stasch 2009). A charitable reading of

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Tomasello would see his theory as helping to explain precisely how such stable roles and collectives, or what Bloch (2012) calls ‘essentialised groups’, might come to be imagined; and yet, being able to imagine and even identify with the group need not entail group loyalty of the kind presupposed. Unfortunately, Tomasello’s engagement with social anthropology is very limited: despite the recent flourishing of anthropological theorizing, he resorts quite explicitly to Durkheim’s views on morality and religion in order to explain how humans sacralize cultural institutions and values (see e.g. 2016: 105, 131). Accordingly, his analysis of morality relies heavily on concepts of conformity, social control, and moral codes – all of which betray a certain reduction of human moral life to the study of moral rules. A similar propensity may be discerned in other recent work. Curry et al. (2019) present evidence that seven forms of cooperative behaviour – specifically, helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession – are seen as morally good virtually everywhere one might care to look. Yet these authors show little interest in moral phenomena that do not fulfil and may even clash with cooperative goals: values of autonomy or purity, say, or ideals of a worthwhile life that prescribe aesthetic practices, without fulfilling any apparent social function (Wong 2019; see also Gellner et al. 2020). On the other hand, to define the ‘morally good’, the authors sometimes appear to conflate the virtuous and the obligatory, or values and rules. As Faubion (2001: 83–4), among others, has pointed out, such an analytical strategy dissolves value into obligation and the desirable into the normative. The danger here is that the rich stuff of ethics which Tomasello seeks to explain on an individual, psychological level – responsibility, virtuosity, and feelings of obligation, resentment, and guilt and the like – is lost in the abstract language of imperatives: in a vision of human life lacking in ethical complexity, decision, and doubt (see Laidlaw 2002: 315). That is to say, the reflexivity characteristic of ethics, along with fundamental questions about how one should live (rather than simply what one should do next), is collapsed into highly normative moral systems. Evolutionary theories often appear to provide a rational ground for the progressive evolution of morality. People’s interdependence on one another, for instance, makes it rational for individuals to be concerned about their groupmates’ welfare (Tomasello 2018: 662). Other psychologists even propose normative accounts which defend the pre-eminence of reason in human morality: Bloom, for example, argues that what makes us distinctively human is our capacity to strive beyond empathy, which can actually lead to bad decisions and outcomes, through the use of reason and cost–benefit analysis and by drawing instead on ‘a more distanced compassion and kindness’ (Bloom 2016: 39, 239; see also Greene 2013). Of course, in this case, human reason works against the evolved dispositions

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rather than being the foundation of morality. Yet in envisaging more advanced moral stages in terms of a shift towards more objectivity and reason, such theories do risk unwittingly importing what we might well describe as a rationalist (and probably also ethnocentric) bias (see also Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). In the context of developmental psychology, the assumption that impartiality reflects a more advanced form of moral reasoning was critiqued forcefully by Gilligan (1982) in her foundational work for what became known as the ethics of care. Gilligan was responding to Kohlberg’s (1981) influential paradigm of moral development, which was principally concerned with the emergence of a sense of justice: in the first, ‘preconventional’ level, children are solely concerned with the self, as they have not yet internalized social conventions; only by the third, ‘postconventional’ level do ever more principled individuals gradually come to perceive themselves as separate entities from society. They are capable of exercising abstract reasoning in order to evaluate social rules and laws and may choose to diverge from the latter to follow their individual conscience, or respect universal principles such as liberty and justice. Gilligan observed that her female subjects in particular, however, were often more concerned with the maintenance of social relationships than with enforcing general moral principles. The elevation of the latter to a later stage of development, in her view, was the product of male bias, and highly problematic (see also Mattingly and McKearney, Chapter 22 of this volume).5 Some recent work in moral psychology does, to some extent, offer a corrective to the stage-like, rationalist emphasis of evolutionary accounts of morality. Jonathan Haidt, in particular, has developed a compelling case that intuitions come first and reasoning second: that an individual’s moral judgements are best understood as deriving from the sudden insights or gut reactions they experience when confronted with moral dilemmas. The elaborate reasoning people might offer in response to questioning is ultimately a justification of their intuitions. Reasoning is not entirely discounted but has a distinctly social rather than individual character, playing a causal role ‘only when it runs through other people’ (Haidt and Bjorklund 2008: 193), when a person engages in moral discourse in response to others. Even when people reflect privately, they benefit from imaginary role-taking, putting themselves in others’ shoes to generate an emotional response. That this proposal supports a kind of moral pluralism increases its appeal for anthropologists. People everywhere may recognize the pull of 5

It is worth noting that Sarah Hrdy (2009) offers a female-centric riposte to (implicitly masculine) theories of cooperative hunting or foraging, privileging instead the pressures of alloparenting: the need to draw on the help of grandmothers, older siblings, and others to raise offspring made humans better at monitoring the mental states of others and selected for greater cooperation and altruism. The broader question still remains, though, how cooperation and empathy were extended beyond the local (alloparenting) group.

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a plethora of moral truths, even though only some are fully activated or institutionalized locally. The value of justice, for instance, may be recognized in some form by everyone, even though some people may place greater importance on other values – care, say, or duty – which they can appeal to in sophisticated and original ways to resolve moral dilemmas (Shweder et al. 1997; Shweder and Haidt 1999: 363). This points to the relevance of studying the dynamics of everyday social interaction as well as the forms of ethical objectification, an area where anthropological research can make significant contributions (see Keane and Lempert, Chapter 9 of this volume; Keane 2016). This approach also resonates with a number of anthropological accounts of ethical life that study hierarchies of value, or differences between monist and pluralist societies (Sommerschuh and Robbins, Chapter 19 of this volume; Robbins 2012b), as well as those that connect moral variation to cross-culturally conflicting conceptions of personhood and the moralization of emotion (Cassaniti and Hickman 2014).

Experiments in Fairness The development of culturally or historically specific moral dispositions has been a focus of theories that emphasize the role of social institutions over evolved psychological dispositions. Proponents of gene–culture coevolution, concerned more with the selective pressures facing different social groups, have sought to uncover the particular institutions or cultural norms that give rise to a concern with fairness: participation in large communities but also world religions, penal institutions, and market integration (e.g. Henrich et al. 2000). These approaches support the claim that the preoccupation with fairness and associated concepts based around rights, justice, and the avoidance of harm all reflect a distinctly Western, liberal form of morality (see also Haidt 2012 and Shweder et al. 1997). They also resonate closely with anthropological evidence that world religions such as Christianity help people to envisage and sustain large, anonymous communities (e.g. Whitehouse 1998). In support of this theory, Henrich and his collaborators turn not to ethnography but to economic experiments, such as the Dictator and Ultimatum Games, which reveal how individuals behave when asked to distribute money with a partner following a given set of rules (for a critical overview of the field, see Guala 2012). One general finding of such experiments is that participants – in Euro-American contexts – are mostly surprisingly ‘cooperative’, willing to give resources to others even when the rules of a particular game allow them to be as selfish as they like; and often appear to value fairness for its own sake, to the extent that they would rather forgo monetary gain than be treated unfairly, or even see someone else treated unfairly. When Henrich et al. (2010) carried out these

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experimental games among small-scale, forager-horticulturalist populations, however, they observed some quite different patterns: in contrast with the ‘fair-minded’ behaviour found among members of industrialized societies, for instance, many Amazonian players displayed little willingness to provide an equal share, a low expectation to be treated fairly, and almost no desire to punish unequal divisions (see also Gurven and Winking 2008: 185–6). In short, they appeared to display a radically different sense of fairness to that found in the industrialized West, but one also – it should be pointed out – squarely at odds with the ‘ethic of sharing’ so often assumed to characterize such subsistence-orientated societies. Especially in the absence of more detailed ethnographic data, it can be difficult for anthropologists to know how to interpret these kinds of results. We can readily surmise that participants asked (and usually paid) to participate in such experiences may face decisions and scenarios, not to mention forms of social interaction, that are unfamiliar to them and which do not really replicate the options and strategies available in reallife cooperative dilemmas (see Baumard and Sperber 2010; Guala 2012). Different cultural conventions or ethical commitments around ownership, work, and merit, for instance, could presumably influence people’s judgements during experimental trials, but their importance could only be drawn out if the interpretation of experimental results is accompanied by relevant ethnography. One productive way forward might be to pay more careful attention to the different spheres of social life in which distribution actually takes place, and to use these kinds of experiments in a more naturalistic way, as a methodological tool that augments but does not replace ethnographic study.6 Games might offer new insights into non-game behaviour, while existing ethnographic evidence should be used to probe psychological findings, and perhaps to refine and relativize the concepts of fairness deployed in experimental contexts. Consider, by way of illustration, the account of distributive justice that emerges in the following episode, as recounted by Crocker for the Brazilian Canela: Another aspect of caring among the Canela is the leaders’ concern that everybody receive a fair portion in any distribution. The apparent sense of fairness and justice is supported by feelings of concern for the person who does not obtain her or his portion or who does not receive anything at all. For example, it is easy to cut and apportion meat and to divide rice or manioc flour into as many piles as necessary for each individual or family to receive its due. However, some shared items are not so easily apportioned. When I was trading with iron implements, it was not possible to divide a machete or an axe 6

An interesting option, though one that could raise ethical questions, would be to conduct what Harrison and List (2004) call ‘natural field experiments’; in these researchers manipulate one variable of interest in an environment that is otherwise left intact so that participants remain unaware that they are participating in an experiment.

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among several people who might want it. There could not be an iron tool for everybody, only one or two for each family, as was agreed to in a tribal council meeting. However, I was considered unfeeling if I did not have items of this sort for certain individuals who felt they must have them, even if this exceeded their family’s quota as I had set it. If Canela individuals presented themselves to me and wanted an item strongly enough, fairness was not of primary importance; concern and feeling for other people came first. Rules previously agreedupon between the council of elders and myself had to be broken because iron items could not be supplied to everybody; the degree in intensity of the requester’s feelings would require that he be given the axe he wanted. (Crocker 1990: 185) In this particular ethnographic context, we might propose that although a morality of fairness does appear to exist, it is counterbalanced (or perhaps even encompassed) by something like a morality of sympathy, or an ethics of care. Latent here too is a respect for other principles of distribution beyond fairness or merit, such as need. To the extent that considerations of fairness underlie distributive decisions, they may still be based on radically different value systems. Rather than striving towards impartiality or a concern with merit on objective grounds, fairness in Amazonia might operate as one component of people’s concern for others: one can be fair, we might say, only by keeping sympathy close to heart.

Wrongdoing: Intentionality and Responsibility Shifting gear now to moral psychology, the relationship between moral evaluations and ascriptions of intentionality is one important field of enquiry in which extrapolation from studies carried out in Western cultural settings has proven challenging, but also laced with some intriguing possibilities for dialogue with ethnography. How intentionality is ascribed in a given cultural context, as Keane (2016: 117) points out, tends to affect whether an action is considered morally significant, who bears responsibility, and to whom it is relevant. Psychological research has shown that, generally speaking, intentional harms – those done on purpose – are judged more harshly than unintentional harms and as more deserving of punishment (e.g. Cushman 2008; Young et al. 2006). Rather counterintuitively, however, it has also been shown that the line of influence also runs in the other direction: it is not simply the case that people attribute moral responsibility for an act and its consequences – and thus whether (or the extent to which) it is deserving of blame or praise – based on a prior assessment of intentions. Research on the so-called Knobe effect (described further later) has shown that bad outcomes are more likely than good

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outcomes to be judged as brought about intentionally (e.g. Knobe 2003). The very concept of intentional action that ordinary people hold is not neutral, as philosophers have long held, but fundamentally moral in nature. Findings such as these are sometimes linked to ideas of a universal and biologically based human morality, or ‘universal moral grammar’ (e.g. Mikhail 2007). Unsurprisingly, however, most research has been carried out among those peoples memorably if contentiously characterized as ‘WEIRD’ (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; cf. Henrich et al. 2010), leaving open questions about the extent to which such findings will hold across a more diverse range of cultural settings. Western philosophical reflection on the nature of meaning and action has tended to place great emphasis on intentionality while assuming this to be a property of the individual actor, to be found within the self; anthropologists, by contrast, have been more sceptical of the idea that individual intentionality plays the same role everywhere, if indeed it plays any role at all (Keane 2016: 118; see also Duranti 2015; Trundle, Chapter 11 of this volume). This has been a theme in recent anthropological discussions of the tendency prevalent in many Oceanic societies, but also elsewhere, to downplay knowledge of the mental states of others: what has been referred to as the ‘doctrine of the opacity of other minds’ (e.g. Robbins and Rumsey 2008). There are suggestions that this too may connect with considerations of morality and ethics: Stasch (2008), for instance, has argued that West Papuan Korowai people’s public disavowal of knowledge of what others might be thinking stems from a moral and political concern not to impinge on their personal autonomy. Studies in experimental psychology have begun to explore more systematically the role of intentions in moral evaluations. One recent crosscultural study found that while intentions appear to play a significant role in people’s moral judgements in some places, they appear to play little or no role elsewhere (Barrett et al. 2016). While the perceived intentions or motivations of agents did affect peoples’ moral judgements in all ten societies studied, the degree to which such factors were viewed as excusing varied significantly, as did the types of norm violation for which these were relevant (Barrett et al. 2016: 4692). These authors suggest that while theory of mind is universally available as a resource for moral judgements, it is not always used in the same way, if it is used at all, in each population or even in each domain of action within a given social setting. They have little to say, however, about possible reasons for the societallevel variation they observed, hoping simply that ‘future research might reveal a relationship between the scale and structure of human societies and their norms of moral judgement’ (Barrett et al. 2016: 4693). Of potential relevance, they speculated, might be such factors as whether disputes are adjudicated by third parties on the basis of explicit standards of evidence – which might lead to an elaboration of norms involving reasons for

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action, the presence or absence of witchcraft (where ‘the overactive attribution of malevolent feeling . . . can lead to cycles of violence and revenge’), or notions of corporate responsibility in which members of a group – say, a kin group – are held responsible for the wrongdoings of individual members.7 Another recent study (Robbins et al. 2017) sought to test the crosscultural purchase of the Knobe effect, mentioned earlier: the finding that people are more likely to construe the foreseen side-effect of an action as having been brought about intentionally when that side-effect is morally bad rather than good.8 In Knobe’s original studies, participants were presented with one of two almost identical scenarios, each involving a board chairman who makes a decision to press ahead with a project that will increase company profits, while emphatically claiming to have no interest in its entirely predictable and foreseen consequences: ‘harming’ the environment, in the first scenario, or ‘helping’ it in the other. Knobe found that a sizeable majority of participants, when presented with the ‘harm’ scenario, felt that the chairman caused that harm intentionally, while only a small minority, when presented with the ‘help’ scenario, felt he had helped it intentionally. Adapting and translating these scenarios into a range of different cultural and linguistic settings, Robbins et al. (2017) found that this intriguing finding of asymmetry in intentional action attributions was in fact supported in most of the eight populations they studied. However, it appeared inverted in Samoa (and, to a lesser extent, in Vanuatu), where participants were asked to judge the actions of a village high chief who decides to plant a new crop that will make money but have either a positive or negative effect on the environment. Here, the chief’s actions were more often seen as intentional when they helped, rather than harmed, the environment. The authors of the study took this to imply that participants in the South Pacific tend to ascribe intentionality in very different ways to those in other parts of the world. In seeking to interpret their findings, the authors noted that the meanings of high-ranking status may be quite different in this cultural context, as would be the consequences of blaming a high-status individual.9 In particular, it may not be the prerogative of a commoner to accuse a highranking chief of wrongdoing. The example clearly shows how ethnography is really needed to support the interpretation of such experimental findings. Work by Duranti (2015), for instance, on how intentionality attributions vary with factors such as the discursive context and social status would appear very helpful, not just in order to develop a fuller 7

See Laidlaw (2014: 179–212) for discussion of very similar themes.

8

For an overview of the considerable literature on the Knobe effect, and the various competing explanations, see Cova (2016).

9

James Laidlaw (personal communication) has suggested too that villagers might well see high chiefs in a different ethical light to the way board chairmen are seen among US undergraduates; and it would be interesting to re-run the experiment in the United States with the chairman replaced with a ‘community organizer’.

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explanation of these findings but also to probe the areas where further, more targeted research would be most promising and interesting. Studies such as these also bring to light an important methodological question concerning the extent to which participants – in particular, those in relatively ‘exotic’ locations, where such experiments are highly unusual – can be relied upon to interpret the questions as intended by the experimenter, and to offer answers guided purely by their moral intuitions. This is an issue taken up by Astuti (forthcoming) in a recent reflection on the prospects for combining the research methods of anthropology and psychology. When she tried to determine whether Vezo (Madagascar) adults would display the Knobe effect, using suitably modified stories, she found that people reasoned on the basis of their prior experiences and what they considered pragmatically appropriate in the circumstances, rather than on the more purely logical basis intended by the questioner. Much like the Samoans discussed earlier, Vezo people were reluctant to punish a wrongdoing farmer in one vignette, not because he was undeserving of punishment per se but because they knew that attempting to punish such a rich and powerful person would only get them into trouble. On the other hand, they attributed intentionality to an agent in the help condition – in this case, a trader who, in pursuit of his profits, improved the fish stock as a side-effect, even though in the story he claimed not to care about improving the fish stock.10 Vezo people reasoned that, regardless of what the story explicitly told them, such a trader would make more money by having more fish around to trade, and so would certainly want to cause the stock to increase. Astuti suggests that this kind of effect – which she refers to as the ‘incursion of the social’ into the experimental setting – is ultimately inevitable and that researchers should embrace it rather than attempting to eradicate it. Many of the claims made by psychological cross-cultural research must be treated with caution, insofar as it is not always clear precisely what question is being answered in a given experimental setting. For instance, the intuitions of Samoans as to whether an agent acted intentionally may not differ much, in the end, from those of people elsewhere, though it may certainly be the case that concepts of intentionality are less salient generally, or less likely to figure in everyday discourse. The professed disinclination to mind-read apparently common in the region only highlights the need for further ethnographic research on how people learn to construe the nature of the mind in culturally specific ways. Conversely, experimental research can help to reveal how understandings of mind or intention also interplay with social considerations such as authority and status. 10

In Knobe’s original example, when the environment is helped only as a foreseen side-effect of the actions of a chairman pursuing profits, study participants tended not to see that helping as intentional.

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This all points to an interesting nexus of collaboration with recent anthropological theorizations of intentionality and responsibility. Luhrmann (2020) has proposed that one important dimension along which cultural models or ‘theories’ of the mind vary is the extent to which they are regarded as ‘bounded’ or ‘porous’. For instance, it appears that while in places like Amazonia and Melanesia, the minds of others are often considered ultimately unknowable, they are also thought of as porous, and as susceptible to external attack or capture. These premises sit in interesting tension with one another, as they give shape to a strong form of individualism that is at the same time hyper-relational, and which likely inflects how personal responsibility is understood in each region. While autonomy and freedom in action are highly valued, attributions of responsibility frequently draw attention to a chain of intentional agents that extend, blur, or distribute the locus of agency and authority beyond or within the individual (cf. e.g. Laidlaw 2014: ch. 5).

Pathways to Dialogue In this final section, we illustrate some of the preceding ideas with a brief reflection on some of the challenges we have faced in our own ongoing research into concepts of morality and justice in Amazonia. Over the past few decades, the native peoples of western Amazonia have experienced an extraordinary and rapid transition from a highly mobile lifestyle based in small, fluid, politically autonomous family groups to a relatively sedentary life in large, nucleated communities, whose members are no longer primarily related through kinship. This shift has occurred primarily in response to state intervention and expansion, and it has led to radical changes in redistribution and exchange practices, mechanisms for dealing with and resolving disputes and disagreements, ideas of responsibility and accountability, and a range of other facets of moral and political life. In requiring people to cooperate with non-kin in ever larger communities, we felt that in some ways these transformations appeared to restage hypothetical scenarios for the evolution of fairness as a function of increasing scales of cooperation, providing an exceptional opportunity for the empirical study of how morality and ethics are shaped by wider social conditions and constraints. Thus, we were interested in exploring how people’s moral judgements were affected by their degree of integration into markets and the state, and the logic of the ‘community’: how such integration might be prompting forms of moral reasoning based less on the logic of interpersonal relationships, for instance, and more on abstract principles such as fairness. In one recent study, designed and implemented in collaboration with Rita Astuti and Gre´gory Deshoulliere, native Shuar and Urarina participants (based in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon, respectively) were

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presented with three short vignettes, each describing a particular moral dilemma involving a basic conflict of interest or tension between the potentially conflicting values of ‘kinship’ on the one hand and ‘community’ on the other, which is to say the formal, legally recognized group which effectively stood in for formal rules, roles, and the logic of the state. The vignettes were structured around the themes of ‘shaming’, ‘helping’, and ‘cooperating’, respectively, and we assessed each participant’s degree of integration using a separate survey comprising a series of questions and a short life history. Rather than present results here, we wish to draw attention to some methodological considerations. Firstly, we will look at the design of the vignettes themselves. This proved a key challenge, but also central to what we saw as the need for ethnography in experimental design. We were dissatisfied with the way many cross-cultural studies have employed vignettes with little seeming relevance to, or grounding in, the cultural context. As already noted, a key issue for much cross-cultural experimental research, especially when assessed from the standpoint of anthropology, is its external validity. Rather than inventing artificial scenarios, then, we drew on our own extensive fieldwork experience to come up with vignettes based on actual moral dilemmas that we knew one or more of our interlocutors had had to negotiate. Because the vignettes were being presented in two different populations – among the Ecuadorian Shuar and the Peruvian Urarina – we had to ensure that they were intelligible in each context. This was harder than we initially expected: we found that what was eminently plausible in one context no longer made for a compelling narrative in the other. This certainly made us wonder about the studies in which a single vignette was told in societies from very different parts of the world. To ensure comparability across the field sites, then, we had to compromise a little on the ‘catchiness’ of the dilemma in each of the contexts, as we note later. Ensuring a reliable translation was also an interesting challenge, but quite revealing in its own right. We realized how many slight changes of meaning were virtually inevitable when translating to a language so different from English. For example, the question, ‘what should Juan do?’, when put in Urarina, could also be interpreted as ‘what could Juan do?’ or ‘what might Juan do?’. Expressing explicitly and concisely the quality of obligation inherent in the English ‘should’ did not seem possible in the Urarina language, which relies on the irrealis mood to express conditional possibilities. Incidentally, a similar kind of challenge confronted our earlier attempt to reproduce the Knobe effect, discussed earlier, insofar as there seemed to be no term or concept for ‘deliberately’ or ‘intentionally’ in Urarina, and no way to express concisely the idea of a difference between intended and foreseen harm. Despite these and other difficulties, however, the Knobe effect was, in the end, discernible in the results: somewhat to our surprise, Urarina did appear more predisposed to ascribe intentionality to acts they considered blameworthy than to those they

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considered praiseworthy. That said, the difference between intentional and accidental harm seemed overall less relevant to participants than whether a given action or norm violation could and should have been avoided. Further difficulties confronted our translations of other core concepts of the study, such as ‘the community’, or ‘the will of community members’: both entered the political vocabulary of the area only after the creation of state-recognized legal communities in the 1960s and 1980s. While commonly used today when people speak in Spanish, these terms do not have precise equivalents in the Indigenous languages. The Shuar word to denote community, irutkamu, nominalizes the verbal root irur-, which expresses the action of gathering and reuniting; it does not specify the number of people gathered, which can range from a small family group to a whole village. This minor detail highlights the risk of reifying group life or generalizing the justifications people provided about meeting social expectations to the whole community as an objective entity. Another acute challenge surrounded the recruitment of participants. While the sample sizes required for statistically significant results can be obtained relatively straightforwardly when one is based in a city, or where people can easily drop in and out of a lab, this is far from the case in a remote Amazonian village, where the population density is very low, and people are generally eager to get on with tasks that typically take them far from the village. Recruiting just twenty-four participants to sit and listen patiently to vignettes proved a logistical challenge for a lone fieldworker in a remote location, as well as a drain on our social capital; and yet this is considered an extremely small sample size by the standards of mainstream psychological research. It also means trends in people’s responses must be very pronounced if any statistically relevant effects are to be claimed. Moreover, taking part in the study itself – though only requiring around thirty minutes of people’s time – seemed to be quite onerous, even intimidating for some, especially those who had not attended school, and who found responding to questions one after another to be an extremely unusual and potentially threatening format of interaction. Add to this the difficulty of finding ways to work in isolation with just one person at a time, in order to avoid the ‘contamination’ of results. On occasion we had to devise ingenious ploys to distract curious husbands and wives from overhearing (and potentially intervening in) the discussions. We came close to exhausting our reservoirs of goodwill, and were it not for the fact that we had already established good rapport with all participants during prior fieldwork, we doubt we would have persuaded people to engage seriously and constructively with the task. The responses people gave to the vignettes turned out to be somewhat more homogenous than we had initially expected. We found during piloting that some moral dilemmas were consistently answered in a particular way – that they were perhaps not really ‘dilemmas’ as we had imagined,

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insofar as the answers seemed to be relatively obvious to a majority of respondents. This emphasized to us the need for a very lengthy piloting phase, as even with our considerable knowledge of the cultural context, getting the stories ‘just right’ so as to probe moral intuitions required extensive tweaking and refining. That said, however, even where people gave very similar responses to the main questions, their justifications varied much more widely. In a sense, at least for some parts of the study, people’s justifications – solicited outside the main experimental framework – turned out to be more interesting than the official experimental results themselves, for they revealed people’s thoughts about how various kinds of problems could or should be solved. In the ‘helping’ dilemma, for example, we asked people whether the treasurer of the village should steal community money designed to celebrate the anniversary of the community, in order to take his father to hospital after the latter was bitten by a snake. Most respondents said the treasurer should indeed take the money, because saving his father’s life was a matter of emergency. However, justifications differed widely, and often in accordance with state and market integration. For instance, when asked how villagers would respond once they found out that the treasurer had stolen the money, one elderly unschooled Shuar woman, who had scored low on our scale of state/market integration, replied that ‘villagers won’t say anything, they will understand because they help one another when illness strikes, and because they love each other’. By contrast, a middleaged male Shuar schoolteacher who had scored highly on integration replied that ‘villagers will be upset and demand that the treasurer repays the money’, emphasizing that the protagonist should first try every avenue to seek approval from the president of the community. When asked what to do if the treasurer did not have the money to repay his debt, he continued: ‘To avoid problems and live well, then he must work for the community to pay off his debt.’ On the face of it, this kind of difference between the older woman’s appeal to love and understanding and the younger man’s appeal to a principle of fair exchange would seem to bear out Henrich et al.’s hypothesis that higher participation in market and state institutions increases a concern with fairness. Upon closer inspection, however, respondents in both cases emphasized emotional states (love, upset) and a concern with maintaining social relationships (helping one another, living well). In fact, a common trend in this study was that compliance with general standards or rules was typically justified in terms of sustaining relations and avoiding disharmony. This returns us to our suggestion earlier that fairness in an Amazonian context might operate as one component of a more overarching ethics of care, or an ethics of keeping the peace, rather than as a more ‘advanced’ achievement of human morality. We return again to the need for studying moral dispositions like compassion and fairness ethnographically, alongside any formal experiments that

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might take place. We have not yet found evidence to support a stage-like, unilinear shift to communal ‘objective’ morality, as some theories would have predicted; what has emerged instead is evidence that people can and do move back and forth between different (and potentially competing) ethical frameworks and standards of moral judgement, as they do between kinship-based and ‘community-based’ forms of social living (Buitron 2016). Whether the older lady and the younger schoolteacher do in fact operate with different concepts of fairness is a question that experimental methods – such as economic games – might be strongly placed to shed light on.11 At the same time, precisely what kinds of behaviour or moral reasoning such labels as ‘care’ or ‘fairness’ refer to is above all a matter of ethnographic investigation.

Conclusion The trails we have traced here through the vast terrain inhabited by the cognitive science of morality and ethics hopefully illustrate the need for greater dialogue and collaboration. It is often easier for scholars to talk past one another than to engage critically and constructively with different ways of carrying out research. Anthropologists are often guilty here too of not making their ethnographic findings more accessible to nonspecialists. As it stands, most theories developed in cognitive science not only ignore recent trends in anthropology but also actively reproduce ideas or approaches that have already been subject to extensive critique. Psychologists do sometimes look to anthropologists to help them design more effective and appropriate protocols for cross-cultural research. Yet we cannot emphasize enough that creating a meaningful interdisciplinary agenda should involve using ethnography, not merely to better interpret or inform psychological hypotheses and experiments, but to critique and redefine the concepts themselves and for the generation of theory. Conversely, anthropologists could take stock of psychological theories to learn something new about their field sites. The use of experimental vignettes directed our attention to novel dimensions of everyday forms of justice, even though (and in some cases precisely because) we did not always obtain the expected results. Rather than taking psychological hypotheses and experiments as conceptual or methodological straightjackets, anthropologists might set about using them creatively, to interrogate their own ethnographic theories and to develop comparative perspectives that in turn facilitate their engagement with wider interdisciplinary debates. In some cases, the toolkits of cognitive scientists 11

Indeed, variation between individuals within the same group is an important yet understudied area in such studies (see Lamba and Mace 2013).

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could help to shed light on individual and cultural difference and diversity, as opposed to just similarity or moral universals, and further refine ethnographic theories that help to explain such difference. At times, this could mean working to ensure that ethnographic arguments remain plausible in light of the comparative empirical work produced by psychologists or experimental philosophers and others; at other times, it could mean working to problematize these theories and the assumptions on which they rest. This is essential if we are to avoid partially replicating a certain version of humanity – and human morality – everywhere we look.

Acknowledgements Our research has been made possible thanks to the willingness of our Urarina and Shuar friends and interlocutors to host us over many visits to their homes and to engage patiently and constructively with our work. Rita Astuti and Gre´gory Deshouliie`re played key roles in the design and implementation of the study we describe. In Urarina territory, we are grateful to Juana Lucı´a Cabrera Prieto for her help in carrying out the study, and to the staff of Clinica Tucunare´ and Colegio CRFA for logistical support. In Shuar territory, we are especially grateful to Manuel Maiche Tzapacu, Sunur Maiche Manchu, and the community of socios of Kuamar. We are thankful to James Laidlaw, Rita Astuti, Charles Stafford, Iza Kavedzˇija, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of earlier drafts and useful suggestions for improvement. This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 715725).

References Astuti, Rita. 2007. ‘Weaving Together Culture and Cognition: An Illustration from Madagascar’. Intellectica: revue de l’Association pour la Recherche Cognitive, 46/47: 173–89. 2016. ‘On Combining Natural and Social Histories into One and the Same Process. Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1): 449–54. forthcoming. Combining Methodologies. Talk given at Harvard University. Astuti, Rita and Maurice Bloch. 2012. ‘Anthropologists as Cognitive Scientists’. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4: 453–61.

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Barrett, H. Clark et al. 2016. ‘Small-Scale Societies Exhibit Fundamental Variation in the Role of Intentions in Moral Judgment’. PNAS, 113(17): 4688–93. Baumard, Nicolas. 2016. The Origins of Fairness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baumard, Nicolas and Dan Sperber. 2010. ‘Weird People, Yes, but also Weird Experiments. [Letter]’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 33(80–1). Baumard, Nicholas, Jean-Baptiste Andre´, and Dan Sperber. 2013. ‘A Mutualistic Approach to Morality: The Evolution of Fairness by Partner Choice’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 36(1): 59–78. Bloch, Maurice. 2012. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom, Paul. 2016. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyd, Robert. 2018. A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boyd, Robert and Peter J. Richerson 2005. The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buitron, Natalia. 2016. ‘The Attraction of Unity: Power, Knowledge and Community among the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia’. Doctoral Thesis. London School of Economics and Political Science. Cassaniti, Julia and Jacob Hickman. 2014. ‘New Directions in the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 14(2): 251–62. Chibnik, Michael. 2005. ‘Experimental Economics in Anthropology: A Critical Assessment’. American Ethnologist, 32(2): 198–209. 2011. Anthropology, Economics, and Choice. Austin: University of Texas Press. Collier, Jean and Michele Z. Rosaldo. 1981. ‘Politics and Gender in Simple Societies’, in Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds.), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 275–329. Cova, Florian. 2016. ‘The Folk Concept of Intentional Action: Empirical Approaches’, in Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. London: Wiley-Blackwell: 121–41. Crocker, William H. 1990. The Canela (Eastern Timbira), I: An Ethnographic Introduction. Washington, DC: Smithsonian. Curry, Oliver Scott. 2016. ‘Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach’, in Tod K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen (eds.), The Evolution of Morality. New York: Springer International Publishing: 27–51. Curry, Oliver Scott, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse. 2019. ‘Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-asCooperation in 60 Societies’. Current Anthropology, 60(1): 47–69.

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Roberts, Simon. 1994. ‘Law and Dispute Processes’, in Tim Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life. London: Routledge: 962–82. Sahlins, Marshall. 2011. ‘What Kinship Is (Part One)’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 17: 2–19. Sanchez, Andrew et al. 2017. ‘“The Indian Gift”: A Critical Debate’. History and Anthropology, 28(5): 553–83. Shweder, Richard. 2012. ‘Anthropology’s Disenchantment with the Cognitive Revolution’. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4: 354–61. Shweder, Richard and Jonathan Haidt. 1999. ‘Commentary to Feature Review. The Future of Moral Psychology: Truth, Intuition, and the Pluralist Way’. Psychological Science, 4(6): 360–5. Shweder, Richard A., Nancy C. Much, Lawrence Park, and Manamohan Mahapatra. 1997. ‘The “Big Three” of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the “Big Three” Explanations of Suffering’, in Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin (eds.), Morality and Health. New York: Routledge: 119–69. Stasch, Rupert. 2008. ‘Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology’. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(2): 443–53. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2016. A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2018. ‘Precis of a Natural History of Human Morality’. Philosophical Psychology, 31(5): 661–8. Tomasello, Michael and Amrisha Vaish. 2013. ‘Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality’. Annual Review of Psychology, 64: 231–55. Tomasello, Michael, Alicia P. Melis, Claudio Tennie, Emily Wyman, and Esther Herrmann. 2012. ‘Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation’. Current Anthropology, 53(6): 673–92. Walker, Harry. 2013. Under a Watchful Eye: Self, Power, and Intimacy in Amazonia. Berkeley: University of California Press. West, S. A., A. S. Griffin, and A. Gardner. 2007. ‘Social Semantics: Altruism, Cooperation, Mutualism, Strong Reciprocity and Group Selection’. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 20: 415–32. Whitehouse, Harvey. 1998. ‘From Mission to Movement: The Impact of Christianity on Patterns of Political Association in Papua New Guinea’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 4(1): 43–63. Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised. New York: Oxford University Press.

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8 Theology Michael Banner

Introduction Any question regarding the genuine novelty of the anthropology of morality is neatly finessed by talk of anthropology’s recent ‘ethical turn’. The phrase suggests a new emphasis or focus of attention without insisting that such attention is wholly unprecedented. It does seem safe to suggest, however, that the recent and emerging dialogue between anthropology and theology (meaning here Christian theology, a qualification and limitation to be noted later), though not itself absolutely unprecedented, may be more confidently deemed something of a novelty – and one which has been stimulated by the ethical turn’s overcoming of any occlusion of ethics from anthropological attention. In some ways this novelty should seem surprising, since theology and social anthropology have always had one another in their sights. Theology, for its part, has consistently identified anthropology – meaning here ‘the doctrine of man’ as it was traditionally termed – as one of its own proper themes. Of course, any theological account of what it was to be human was very definitely understood to be a matter of doctrine, which is to say that its relationship to empirical science, if any, was by no means straightforward. Theology’s anthropology provided an account of the human orientated chiefly by reference to the purported goodness of a created order which was severely dissipated or practically lost in the realities of a fallen world, and thus to the supposed gap between these two worlds. But if the anthropologies of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Barth were neither plainly nor simply empirical, they did not wholly eschew observed realities, even if such realities were read through doctrinal lenses. So it is at least somewhat surprising that since the emergence of anthropology in the modern sense, theology has generally avoided any very clear or consistent engagement with this ‘other’ anthropology, thinking on the whole, it seems, that the existence of this alternative endeavour is neither likely

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to be especially helpful nor for that matter especially troubling. Pannenburg (1985) is something of an exception, whereas Kelsey (2010) is a weighty example of theological anthropology in classic and purely theological mode. Of course, many theologians would have been able to name such anthropological celebrities as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, or Clifford Geertz. And within particular subfields of theology (most noticeably perhaps in biblical studies), practitioners have been keen, certainly from the 1970s on, to deploy anthropological assumptions and insights in investigating the cultural context of key texts and their ideas. See the diverse contributions to Lawrence and Aguilar (2004) and the more recent and sophisticated discussion in Barclay (2015), re-reading Pauline texts on grace with the aid of anthropological treatments of gift. But passing acquaintance with certain anthropologists, and even immensely serious use of anthropological approaches and ideas, seems not to have inspired any systematic reflection on the relationship between the disciplines as such – and scanning the dictionaries, handbooks, and encyclopaedias which indicate something of a subject’s general self-understanding suggests that theology has felt no pressing obligation to take any great interest in social anthropology or account for its proper relationship with it. Nor has social anthropology, in the past, taken much interest in specifically Christian thought and practice. In some ways this parallels the situation just described from the side of theology. Just as theology has claimed anthropology as one of its proper subjects, but has generally taken no systematic account of social anthropology, so anthropology, from its earliest beginnings, has very plainly attended to religious life and practice, while largely eschewing any close attention to Christianity in general or to its moral life in particular. The reasons for this chosen ignorance are rehearsed (but not accepted) in an article which is itself one of the signs of the beginning of a new era of openness: Christians have seemed unpromising subjects of disciplinary attention, either as insufficiently exotic (when being exotic mattered), as too exotic (specifically in the sense of being morally repugnant, which is to say conservative), or, where converts, as too superficial in their Christianity to provide anything of sufficient depth to be worthy of the anthropological gaze (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins 2008). In addition, of course, anthropologists have been so conscious of the influence of Christianity on their conceptions of, say, belief (Needham 1972) or religion itself (Asad 2003) that they have been inclined to think that rooting out Christian ideas is more pressing than attending to them more closely. Certainly since 2000, however, a new conversation (or better, conversations) between the two disciplines has emerged. Given anthropology’s ethical turn and the centrality of ethics to Christian life and thought, an important aspect of these conversation has been to do with ethical themes; though since moral theology or Christian ethics (the former term

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traditionally used in Roman Catholicism and the latter more commonly found among Protestants, but here used interchangeably) are themselves, in various ways, shaped by doctrinal assumptions, even a dialogue around ethics ends up ranging over a wider territory of topics. In any case, it is now well-nigh impossible to mark all the subjects and sites of engagement between theology and social anthropology, and in this chapter I will aim to provide only an indication of some of the pathways which the recent and emerging conversation between theology and social anthropology is taking, specifically as they relate to ethics. Since, however, and in the usual way of things, the character and course of conversations are generally affected by who begins them, it will be helpful, I think, to consider the conversations as starting out from two different sides – as being a matter of anthropologically engaged theology, or theologically engaged anthropology, as it has been put (Lemons 2018) – even if the two streams of dialogue are certainly not wholly separable or distinct. If the character of a conversation is partly a function of which one of the dialogue partners gets it going, it is equally obvious that who is chosen to represent each side, so to speak, will make a difference. But immediately it is put like that, it will be obvious that the bilateral relationship between two disciplines must, to be fully comprehensive, reflect a multiplicity of voices on either side. There can, plainly, be no single dialogue between the moral theologian and the anthropologist, only many dialogues between representatives with indefinite articles. That said, an attempt to introduce the conversations cannot imagine and represent all possible joinings, but only some – so what follows makes no pretence to a God’s-eye view of these dialogues, but is instead the view of an interested participant from the theological side of the conversation.

Moral Theology and Anthropology The history of the development of moral theology’s deeper interest in social anthropology might be said to have three stages. Brief surveys of this history – such as in Tranter and Torrance (2018), Bielo (2018), and McKearney (2019) – are agreed on finding various shoots in the first ten years of this century, and commonly cite Adams and Elliot (2000), Healy (2000), Swinton and Mowat (2006), Whitmore (2007), and Fulkerson (2007) as providing encouragement for what was to follow. The search for the roots which lie further down is trickier – certainly Don Browning (1990) had some influence, but it is perhaps more helpful to look, as Bielo does, to a more fundamental turn towards social and cultural theory of which Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine (1984) was an important and influential sign. More importantly, however, and I shall return to it presently, what might be termed the liberationist strand in Christianity has pressed theology to be more attentive to what, borrowing Hall’s (1997) term, is often

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referred to as ‘lived religion’, and which, as Hall and his collaborators put it, called for a history of practice. However these different strands may be thought of as nourishing the roots of the new conversation, the surveys are agreed on regarding the blossom as breaking out only in the first years of the second decade of the twenty-first century, when from whatever suggestive and scattered glimmerings there emerged some sort of settled engagement indicative of a general movement within the field. Two collections of essays, involving more than two dozen Christian theologians or ethicists, are generally regarded, then, as marking the fact that by the 2010s a proper conversation was underway (see Scharen and Vigen 2011; Ward 2012). The dominant theme of the two volumes is just that ethnographic research is a vital resource for Christian ethics and theology. One might question, however, whether what emerges here is really quite yet a conversation with social anthropology, rather than simply a conversation about it – or, more specifically, a conversation about ethnography, with both the conversation and the ethnography being very often conducted by and between theologians. The product of this work is sometimes labelled ‘ethnographic theology’, which is theology produced not through engagement with anthropology but through a borrowing of and reliance on some of its methods – even while (as certain contributors to the collections warn, such as Phillips (2012)) the enthusiasm for ‘ethnography’ does not always conform to what an anthropologist would mean by that term. Bielo (2018) reflects further on what ethnographic theology may yet need to learn from anthropology about research design, methodology, analysis, and presentation. McKearney (2019: 229) warns that in the early stages of such an interchange as this, scholars may be especially drawn to particular approaches in the other discipline that best serve their own ends, with the risk that notwithstanding ‘an aspiration for dialogue’ what may result is ‘just a monologue that uses the words of another’. This is not to say that these early ventures do not represent a turn towards anthropology, or at least ethnography, but just that not all are necessarily indicative of the full potential of a genuine conversation. My own contribution to the emerging discussions attempts to engage with social anthropology itself across a range of themes or subjects, and by doing so to indicate something of the promise of that conversation (Banner 2014). One commentator refers to it as ‘a kind of capstone to the past few decades’ methodological reflection in theological ethics’ (Mathewes 2019: 192), and it has garnered critical attention from anthropologists (e.g. Banner et al. 2015; McKearney 2016) and from theologians (e.g. Brock 2019; Tranter and Torrance 2018; Lamb and Williams 2019). Its sources and inspiration lie at something of a tangent to the previous discussions, and it is perhaps best to understand the book, its somewhat impatient tone with dominant strains in moral philosophy, bioethics, and moral theology,

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and its enthusiastic turn to social anthropology from its origins in a very particular problem. The Alder Hey scandal concerned the unconsented retention over many years by an NHS hospital in Liverpool, in the north of England, of postmortem material, especially from foetuses and young children. From 2005 I served as a member of the Human Tissue Authority, set up under the Human Tissue Act of 2004 and charged with developing regulations for handling human tissue after the situation at Alder Hey Hospital came to light. I was thereby familiar not only with the scandal itself but also with subsequent reflection on it – and what was most striking in this reflection was the willingness of the medical establishment and the ‘commentariat’ to declare the parental distress at the retention of bodily material to be simply emotional, irrational, and incomprehensible. Of course, to someone familiar with bioethics, such a dismissal of the parental attitudes might seem unremarkable. It is, after all, characteristic of the dominant consequentialist and Kantian strains within bioethics (see Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume) to declare ethical attitudes as coherent or incoherent just as they are in accordance or not with whichever is taken to be the favoured perspective – and even a philosopher such as MacIntyre who rejects the crude either/or of Kantianism versus consequentialism begins his influential After Virtue (1981) by declaring popular morality to be incoherent. Bioethics, then, schooled by such traditions, could make no contribution to the social comprehension of the parental interest in the return of their children’s bodies – it had forgotten, chosen to overlook, or deemed it irrelevant that morality may be viewed as a social practice, the meaning and rules of which may be immanent to that practice, and not something to be discerned a priori and used as a critical tool to improve – or simply to discount – practice. Lesley Sharp’s powerful treatment of the moral lives of the recipients of organs, especially in their relations with donor families, in her study Strange Harvest (2006) pointed me towards social anthropology as providing the ethicist, whether theologically minded or not, with better social intelligence. It was something of a dogma in the UK in discussions of whether recipients of donated organs should be allowed contact with donor families that such contact would be somehow dangerous, and was to be discouraged or prevented. Sharp’s work was especially telling for me in demonstrating that when, as in the United States, such contacts do occur (whether or not with official sanction), the participants in these relationships engage in serious moral labour by means of the construction of what Sharp terms ‘fictive kinship’ – whereby, for example, a deceased donor’s mother becomes ‘mom’ to the recipient, and he may become ‘son’ to her, receiving a birthday card on the day of the dead son’s birthday, for example. By means of structuring and imagining their relationship in these terms, the participants are enabled, so Sharp would suggest, to acknowledge and address such elements of their circumstances as the

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facts of sudden loss, unexpected new beginnings and connections, and tragically unresolved endings and ruptures. Sharp’s study, demonstrating the possibility of a social comprehension of which bioethics was plainly incapable, suggested the value of a wider engagement with what was then the emerging anthropology of morality, especially important for me being the work of Lambek (2000), Faubion (2001), Laidlaw (2002), and Robbins (2004), now more developed, of course, in Lambek (2010), Faubion (2011), Laidlaw (2014), and Robbins (2013). The crucial point which emerged from that engagement was just that anthropology had a better understanding of morality and moral practice, and of the principles of interpretation which would be required to make sense of that practice, than typically does moral philosophy – and better, of course, than moral theology too, since moral theology had very largely been inclined to take its bearings from moral philosophy. Moral theology, that is to say, has generally been content to be as purely prescriptive in its ethics as theology in its anthropology, with very little regard for, or even interest in, any descriptive enterprise. It has thus denied itself knowledge of the complexities and subtleties of Christian and non-Christian moral worlds – and indeed in its typical subject matter has disdained what might be called ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ ethical life. The Ethics of Everyday Life (2014) proposed, then, a new direction for moral theology, and one which makes systematic use of social anthropology. The book notices that the two subjects are, in fact, for all their recent mutual disregard, already implicitly engaged with one another, just in the sense that they share an interest in such major moments in the life course as, for example, conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial. Christianity has often approached these moments through extended and profound meditation on the course of Christ’s life, in which these moments are accorded particular significance (and specifically mentioned in the Creeds) – thus in academic theology, but more importantly through the drama of the liturgy and the liturgical year, in sermons, prayers, biblical commentary, exegesis, and contemplation, in art of all kinds, in devotional writings, mystery plays, poems, and other forms of literature, in hymns, oratorios, cantatas, spirituals, and every other type of musical work, Christ’s life has been imagined, represented, enacted, expounded, and interrogated. So imagined, this life has, of course, in complex ways, been held to be regulative in relation to ordinary human existence. This imagining and commending of a particular version of human life brings theology into connection with social anthropology, then, just insofar as social anthropology is itself concerned to describe other and quite different representations of the human. Thus moral theology and social anthropology find a quite natural and unforced conversation waiting to happen around these particular topics. And what does such a conversation promise? At least two things seem important, speaking from the side of moral theology. We might term them

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rather crudely as having to do with context and content, and one may be discussed by reference to surrogates, the other by reference to saints.

Context: The Meaning of Surrogacy First, Christian ethics, taking itself to be a normative intervention into contemporary moral life, may be expected to want to understand the context into which it speaks and especially those modes of life of which it is inclined to speak either critically or in commendation. It is only as it comprehends the world it addresses that Christian ethics, as proposing a conception of what it is to be human, can speak effectively, neither busily condemning merely imagined evils nor commending what we might call dreams of humanity. As Joel Robbins (2018) has put it, the best social anthropology is concerned to give an account of how people live which is ‘at once psychologically and socioculturally realistic’, and moral theology must reckon with such realities. This is not to say that moral theology will eschew other engagements, with history, sociology, and literature, for example, or that it will abandon its own norms of judgement. But in its own particular concern for the current moment of moral responsibility, it may be expected to take a lively interest in the social worlds which are made and lived here and now, and revealed through the lens of social anthropology. In The Ethics of Everyday Life (2014), I draw on the findings of a variety of social anthropologists writing about kinship and assisted reproductive technologies (e.g. Thompson 2005; Carsten 2004), birthing and parenting (Davis-Floyd 1992; Rapp 1999; Klassen 2001), suffering (Biehl 2005; Fassin 2012), old age (Cohen 1998; McLean 2007), dying (Hockey 1990), and burial practices and mourning (Danforth 1982; Francis et al. 2005) to conduct this conversation and reveal its promise across a broad sweep of topics of ethical concern. To illustrate that promise here, I take a slightly different example from any discussed in the book, namely surrogacy. Of the various means of addressing infertility which are grouped under the term ‘assisted reproductive technologies’ (hereafter ARTs), it is surrogacy which has, it seems, generally caused the most anxiety. Surrogacy refers to the bearing of a child on behalf of another, and in the most common contemporary cases the ‘other’ is typically a woman whose partner provides the sperm to inseminate an egg which grows to term in the surrogate. That egg, of course, could be the surrogate’s own (in what is sometimes called ‘full surrogacy’), or it could be provided by the intending mother (who for whatever reason cannot carry a child) or by a donor, in which cases there is what is often termed ‘gestational surrogacy’. The degree of suspicion which surrogacy attracts is sharply illustrated in the UK’s Warnock Report (1984), which was an early official ‘bioethical’

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review of the emerging technologies, and not only influential in shaping subsequent regulation in the UK but also widely regarded and noted as a model for addressing the issues and devising regulations. The Report’s prohibitive stance towards surrogacy is especially conspicuous just because it is so generally accepting of what were, when the Report was being written, some relatively new and controversial practices, such as the use of early embryos for experimental purposes and artificial insemination by donor. For while the Report rehearses familiar arguments both for and against surrogacy, it comes down hard against it, proposing such extremely stringent restrictions as would very likely have deterred it altogether had they been enacted – it recommends, for example, that medical professionals knowingly assisting in the establishment of a surrogate pregnancy should be guilty of a criminal offence, and that surrogacy agreements should be deemed illegal contracts and thus unenforceable in court. ARTs in general have raised a good deal of disquiet, but surrogacy seems to have been the focus of the most intense suspicion, criticism, and condemnation – as in the case of the Warnock Report. According to one commentator, ‘What emerges from any consideration of the ways in which surrogacy is dealt with in different jurisdictions is that a sense of profound anxiety and ambivalence has tended to pervade the thinking of professionals, policy-makers and legislators where surrogacy is concerned’ (Cook and Schlater 2003: 2). And according to another, ‘surveys investigating attitudes towards the practice in several countries have indicated that the majority of the public disapprove of the practice and perceive surrogacy as the least acceptable of the reproductive technologies’ (Teman 2010: 7). The anxieties which give rise to the general suspicion of surrogacy, and provoke the sometimes prohibitive or at least stringent regulation of it, often have to do, it seems, with its potential commercialization. It is just this potential which leads to familiar headlines about ‘selling babies’ and ‘wombs for rent’, which speak of the perceived threat this technology poses to certain cherished ideas about motherhood and children. To speak only of the latter, the commercial use of the technology is considered especially to risk rendering children commodities, when those who express such fears are likely to contend that children are properly to be regarded as gifts. A common view is captured in the comment that ‘the issue of commodification of the child remains an insurmountable objection to any financial reward over and above legitimate expenses’ in relation to any surrogacy arrangement (Blyth and Potter 2003: 237). What is striking about the debate here, touched on merely in outline, is just that its regular lines in the sand depend on some deep-seated assumptions about what effect technology, perhaps by itself, but certainly where it is accompanied by the apparatus of contracts and consideration, may have on the meaning of a child, specifically in rendering the child

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a commodity. This is exactly the sort of case, then, in which the moralist who is conscious of the ability of anthropology to disturb familiar lines of thought and expectation might wish to turn to ethnographic data and anthropological theory. Two studies are worthy of (albeit brief) mention. In her investigation in the United States of what she terms ‘traditional surrogacy’ (‘full surrogacy’ in the terminology I used earlier; that is, where the surrogate is inseminated with sperm from the male of the commissioning couple), Helena Ragone´ (1999: 74) reports that ‘the gift lens’ is used on both sides of the relationship to construct what is going on. On the side of the surrogates, their unease with the construction of the relationship as simply commercial is indicated by the fact that while they readily acknowledge that they are being remunerated for what they do, they reject the notion that they perform this service for the sake of the remuneration. According to Ragone´ (1999: 61), while surrogates admit ‘that remuneration was one of their initial considerations . . . they consistently deny that it was their primary motivation (and nearly all surrogates state – repeatedly – that the importance of remuneration decreased over time). When questioned about remuneration, surrogates consistently protest that no one would become a surrogate for the money alone because, they reason, it simply “isn’t enough”’. The following are ‘typical surrogate responses’ to the question as to how the prospect of payment influenced their decision to become surrogates: ‘It sounded so interesting and fun. The money wasn’t enough to be pregnant for nine months,’ and ‘I’m not doing it for the money. Take the money. That wouldn’t stop me. It wouldn’t stop the majority,’ and again, ‘what’s ten thousand bucks? You can’t even buy a car. . . . Money wasn’t important. I possibly would have done it just for expenses, especially for the people I did it for. My father would have given me the money not to do it’. (Ragone´ 1999: 69) As Ragone´ interprets this, surrogates’ ‘devaluation of payment’ allows them to assert, as has been acknowledged in effective advertisements for surrogates which invite them to ‘Give the Gift of Life’, that ‘their act is one that cannot be compensated for monetarily’. These advertisements frame ‘surrogacy in a poignant and life-affirming light, more clearly locating it in the gift economy’ (Ragone´ 1999: 71), and surrogates adopt a like framing. The power of such a way of thinking about surrogacy depends, it seems, not just on the burdens of surrogacy but also on the nature of the service or good provided – which is, of course, the ‘priceless’ child of late modernity.1 1

Referencing Viviana Zelizer. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

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This stress on the reality of the relationship as structured by gift rather than by payment goes to the heart of the dealings between the parties: Even though surrogates are discouraged from thinking of their relationship to the couple as a permanent one, surrogates recognize that they are creating a state of enduring solidarity between themselves and their couples. This belief complicates the severing of that relationship once the child has been born, even though the surrogate knows in advance that the surrogate-couple relationship is structured to be impermanent. . . . Surrogates’ framing of the equation as one in which a gift is given thus serves as a reminder to their couples that one of the symbolic functions of money, namely the ‘removal of the personal element from human relationships through its indifferent and objective nature’ (Simmel), may be insufficient to erase certain relationships, and that the relational element may continue to surface despite the monetary exchange. (Ragone´ 1999: 71) But recall that both parties, according to Ragone´, construe the encounter in these terms – it is not just the surrogates themselves but the receiving parents who also use the gift lens, and ‘by acknowledging that the surrogate child is a gift, the couple accepts a permanent state of indebtedness to their surrogate’ (Ragone´ 1999: 72). The tokens of this acceptance are found in the common phenomenon of the commissioning parents bestowing ‘additional gifts on their surrogates (as they do from the moment the pregnancy is confirmed to the moment the child is born and even after)’ (Ragone´ 1999: 73). This is to acknowledge that they are part of a gift economy – and ‘Gifts are given with such regularity and predictability by couples to their surrogate (and to her children as well) that such acts have become encouraged by surrogate programs’ (Ragone´ 1999: 73). Of course, the very problem here is just that by design the surrogate is typically meant to cease to have a part in the child’s life at the point of birth; but even this can remain within the ‘gift lens’, for ‘the actual birth of the child and the surrogate’s relinquishment of the child to the couple are viewed by all the participants as the embodiment of the ultimate act of giving/gifting’ (Ragone´ 1999: 73). Thus: It is . . . of interest that couples routinely bestow on their surrogates gifts of jewelry that feature the child’s birthstone. Much as in the case of pregnancy loss explored by Layne . . . the gift of jewelry simultaneously symbolizes the ‘preciousness’ of the child and the enduring relationship between mother and child even in the face of a lifelong physical separation . . .. Worn on the surrogate’s body, the jewelry symbolizes and validates the special intimate bodily connection between surrogate and child and represents an acknowledgment

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that gifts such as vacations are mere tokens of appreciation that cannot repay the extraordinary generosity of the surrogate. (Ragone´ 1999: 73) At the very site, then, where the risk of conceiving a child as a product is most remarked upon and worried about in discussions of surrogacy and IVF, the participants (in this study at least) work hard to construe their relationship to each other and to the child in different terms – terms quite contrary to what to some has seemed the natural construction of what they do. Of course, the interpretation of their efforts is itself a matter for discussion, since those very efforts suggest consciousness of the moral dissonance, so to speak, between what might seem to be happening and certain prevailing norms – and the question becomes whether those efforts are best understood as reconstructing what is going on or rather as a somewhat insistent (but unconvincing) bid to conceal it. There are arguments (which have appealed to theologians) that seem to attach a deterministic meaning to relationships mediated by technology, such that surrogacy, for example, entails the construction of the child as a product (O’Donovan 1984). A mistrust of the ‘cash nexus’ only heightens the worries about the risk of commodification. But the imposition of such an interpretation on the actions of participants in Ragone´’s study seems problematic in a number of ways. One might grant, for the sake of argument, that bringing the having of children within the scope of modern technology, as has occurred with the use of various means of assisted reproduction, carries the risk of converting ‘begetting’ to ‘making’, as this worry has been put – and further that the ‘making’ is capable of commercialization, and that that may enhance the risk. But does the technology and its commercialization not only risk a certain way of viewing children, but actually entail it? Can it not be dissociated from a mentality with which it might well be associated? The assumption that it cannot seems to discount the meanings which the actors studied by Ragone´ find in what they do, and more generally the plasticity of actions to social framing. One response to Ragone´’s study might be to think that perhaps gift language is more likely to be deployed in the case of full surrogacy – that is, where the surrogate provides the egg, as well as carrying the child. And Ragone´ indeed suggests that less ‘gift work’ is needed in the case of ‘mere’ gestational surrogacy (where the surrogate is implanted with either an embryo produced from the ovum of the intending mother or from a donor). Here ‘the gift rhetoric is much less common’ (Ragone´ 1999: 74). But it is by no means clear that this finding is at all generalizable, and Elly Teman’s (2010) important study of gestational surrogacy in Israel shows that the language of gift flourishes perfectly well even where there is no biogenetic kinship between foetus and surrogate. As surrogates and intending mothers form bonds between themselves, the surrogate

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dissociates herself from the developing child, and nurtures the relationship between the foetus and its intended mother. Again, on both sides, the language of gift is pervasive – and developed with nuances and inflections which reflect the particularities of the context. Of course, to an anthropologist, the ability of ethnographic study to unsettle the tired and rather stale assumptions of popular polemics is not itself newsworthy. But debates in bioethics very often follow just such tramlines, and in moral theology too. In making an anthropological turn which it is the purpose of my book to encourage, moral theology gains, then, not only social intelligence but also the encouragement and ability critically to examine its own cultural entanglements. There is perhaps none more significant in and around the discussion of ARTs than the one to which I give some attention in The Ethics of Everyday Life, namely the tendency of much moral theology to parrot what Schneider (1980) termed ‘the folk theory of kinship’ (i.e. Western conceptions of what kinship ‘really is’), notwithstanding thinking and practice within the theological tradition itself which are radically at odds with any such theory. These resources, rather neglected by moral theologians, lie in the traditions of spiritual kinship of which practices of god-parenthood are the most common expression. These practices, among others, radically qualify, question, and reconfigure claims of ‘natural kinship’ – think simply of the symbolism of godparents, not parents, naming a child in the rite of baptism. Here, then, social anthropology provides a lens through which Christian ethics may learn a greater reflexivity and connect with its very own tools of social critique.

Content: The Lives of the Saints The first point is, then, that Christian ethics needs to make a turn to social anthropology for the sake of understanding its context, in which diverse ways of living human lives are variously in contention, implicitly if not explicitly, with each other and with theology’s own normative anthropologies (in their own diversity). There is, however, a second and equally important point regarding moral theology’s engagement with social anthropology, and this lies behind the enthusiasm for ethnography previously mentioned. The point here is not about grasping moral theology’s context, but its content – for it could be claimed that Christian moral life and thought must be comprehended ethnographically just because, on some understandings of Christian ethics, they are constructed and revealed in embodied social forms. Of course, the construction of these social forms is itself governed by certain norms (typically derived from the Bible or from Church teaching or traditions) – but just as one would not know how American politics goes by reading the Constitution, so one might say that even as the form Christian life takes emerges just as the world is engaged on Christian terms, the form and character of that life is

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never solely knowledge of those norms. So, to go back to an example already mentioned, if ‘the imitation of Christ’ has been an important conception by which Christians have governed their lives, as indeed it has, then the actual form and character of the practical realization of that enterprise demands description. To put it in shorthand – knowledge of the Christian life is in part knowledge of the life of the saints (Banner 2016). More formally: Christian ethics is discovered in practice, and is known ethnographically through knowledge of this practice. This claim echoes a theme which has been important (if not always articulated in quite these terms) in a strain of theological reflection over the last fifty years developed especially in liberationist (Gutierrez 1973), Black (Cone 1975), womanist (Williams 2002; Cannon 1995; Coleman 2008), and Mujerista (Isasi-Dias 1993) theology.2 What is common, I think, to these different but related traditions is that they take the moral life which particular communities sustain in the face of grave adversity as a reality that needs to be accounted for. Thus Delores Williams, to take just one example, says that the ‘black community can celebrate the moral, intellectual, spiritual and emotional strength poor black women have exercised as they have withstood trouble and trials in a hostile world’ (Williams 2002: 108) – where ‘celebrate’ means to describe and comprehend the moral lives which Black women have created and sustained. The theological adage ‘Faith seeks understanding’ demands, for Williams, a turn to a descriptive, quasi-ethnographic enterprise – and one which answers the plea Orsi (2010: xxiii) makes for the comprehension of what he termed ‘lived religion’, again following Hall. Orsi, of course, prefers the phrase ‘lived religion’ to the alternative ‘popular religion’, since he thinks that the word ‘popular’ was used to mark off certain instances of religion from ‘religion as such’ – and those who took themselves to speak on behalf of religion without an adjective sat in judgement on its popular forms. The broad stream of theological reflection to which I have referred concerns itself exactly with the explication of the logics of lived religion. And this is very much an ethical project, since, as Orsi puts it: The study of lived religion explores how religion is shaped by and shapes the ways family life is organized, for instance; how the dead are buried, children disciplined, the past and future imagined, moral boundaries established and challenged, homes constructed, maintained, and destroyed, the gods and spirits worshipped and importuned, and so on. Religion is [thus] approached in its place within a more broadly conceived and described life-world, the domain of everyday existence, practical activity, and shared understandings, with all its crises, surprises, satisfactions, frustrations, joys, desires, hopes, fears, and limitations. (Orsi 2010: xxxii) 2

And it was a failure on my part not to appreciate the importance of this body of work when I wrote The Ethics of Everyday Life, as is gently and helpfully pointed out by Stephanie Mota Thurston in her contribution to Lamb and Williams (2019).

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Although it doesn’t belong to the stream of theological reflection just mentioned, but is the work of an anthropologist, Juliet du Boulay’s (2009) powerful and compelling study of a Greek village as its life is construed and constructed by the cosmology, liturgy, and traditions of Orthodoxy is perhaps the best example of what ‘ethnographic theology’ might properly be – the perspicuous presentation of the warp and weft of everyday life, as that life is shaped and formed by a religious imaginary with its rituals and routines, creating patterns of daily existence with their particular and characteristic modes of knowing, feeling, thinking, and acting (albeit that the critical reader may wonder whether the tale is somewhat idealized). So it is perhaps right to recognize – to go back to where we started – that theology’s turn to social anthropology is not wholly and utterly new, and in particular in the traditions of theological reflection just identified there has been, going back over fifty years, a concern to identify and describe everyday lives lived in particular communities as compelling expressions of moral wisdom. But that said, the conscious attempt to engage with social anthropology itself, as enabling moral theology the better to understand the dynamics of the Christian life and the context in which it is lived, does seem a new moment – and one which promises to strengthen and to challenge theological reflection.

Social Anthropology and Theology The conversation which is opened up by the thought that moral theology may be renewed by engagement with anthropology is complemented by a conversation which begins from the other side, and contends that anthropology may find resources through an engagement with theology. A spate of recent publications evidences the emergence of a lively interest in the possibility: Lemmons (2018), Meneses and Bronkema (2017), Mathews and Tomlinson (2018), Furani (2019), Tomlinson (2020), and Robbins (2020). This conversation should be distinguished from the anthropology of Christianity, even if some of the leading figures in the emergence of the anthropology of Christianity (such as Joel Robbins) are also found at the centre of the new discussions. Of course, if it was the case that what was proposed was simply that anthropologists of Christianity should look to theologians as a (rather particular) class of native informants, contributing to the ethnographic record, then even if this brings substantial insights, there is nothing especially new here. After all, as Seeman puts it, ‘Theological ways of thinking about and interacting with the world are . . . “social facts” like any other’ (Seeman 2018: 338). But Robbins’s proposal in Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (2020)

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is for an engagement between anthropology and theology which will amount to more than each mining the other for data. His hope is that the relationship between the two may be ‘transformative’, just insofar as we construe the relationship between theology and anthropology not as consisting of theology borrowing anthropology’s method and anthropology treating theological arguments as ethnographic data bearing on the nature of Christian thought, but as one that takes place between two equally theoretically ambitious disciplines with their own varied versions of systematic thinking about how the cosmos, and the human beings who inhabit it, come to be the way that they are and about what might be the best ways for human beings to realize the potentials inherent in the lives they lead. (Robbins 2020: 7) Thus Robbins proposes to treat ‘theology as a potentially cooperative donor of theoretical inspiration for anthropology’, exploring the possibility that theoretical concepts developed from within theology may contribute to general anthropological analysis. The chapters of Robbins’s book are organized in what he terms a gradient, beginning with topics from theology which have had little place in anthropology to date (such as that of interruption, as characteristic of God’s presence to the lives of believers) and moving on to ones which are already familiar (such as the gift) to ‘suggest that even fairly developed and quite general anthropological topics might be pushed in new directions by a consideration of the theoretical import of theological discussions that cover similar terrain’ (Robbins 2020: 27). Perhaps the most striking argument comes in chapter 5, when Robbins argues that the theological (more specifically Lutheran) notion of passivity could illuminate and enrich anthropological discussions of the gift – which is, of course, to take theological reflection to territory that anthropology has traditionally regarded as very much its own, and as rather well trodden. As Robbins notes, the theme of the gift has concerned theologians from the beginning and throughout the tradition, since God’s grace is typically conceived in terms of a gift – thus Luther reads Thomas who reads Augustine who reads Paul on the theme of the gift of grace. And it is in Lutheran theology that Robbins finds an understanding of the ‘role of passivity in the constitution of the gift’ which, he claims, may augment anthropological theory. Robbins notes that for Mauss, the gift is constituted by the three obligations to give, to receive, and to return – and that it is giving and returning which have received most attention from anthropologists. But according to Robbins, contemporary Lutheran theology (specifically Dalferth 2016) has paid close attention to the matter of the reception of the gift, and within that to the role of passivity.

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Dalferth’s ‘anthropologically unfamiliar argument’ contends, according to Robbins, that ‘a gift does not become a gift when someone acts to receive it. Rather, it becomes a gift when someone gives it to someone else and by virtue of their agency in doing so makes that person into a receiver. In this scheme, where it is the fact of being given to someone that makes something a gift, a person becomes a receiver passively’ (Robbins 2020: 148). And this amounts to an ‘improvement’ on Mauss, says Robbins, since Dalferth has revealed something about the gift that Mauss rendered invisible when he called the second obligation that makes the gift what it is the obligation to receive. It would be more accurate, and I think more ethnographically fruitful, to call this second obligation an obligation not to receive, but to respond to both the gift itself and to the position of receiver into which the gift has put one. Reception itself, as Dalferth demonstrates, happens more or less in passing, and in a passing way – it is not an obligation, but a fate. (Robbins 2020: 148) Furthermore, as Dalferth suggests, this reception of the gift amounts to an ‘interruption’ in a life – and in chapter 2 of his book, Robbins speaks of interruption as another theological concept which may prove ethnographically and anthropologically fruitful. Or as Robbins puts it: I think Dalferth has shown us a way in which we can learn something new about what anthropologists sometimes call gift economies and human agency more generally by doing justice to the moment of passivity that constitutes reception of the gift, and to the way that giftinduced interruptions that render us passive do in fact open up for people new ‘life-opportunities’ that they could not on their own fashion for themselves. (Robbins 2020: 149–50) Notwithstanding his hopes for a ‘transformative’ relationship between the disciplines, Robbins also reflects on the limits of the engagement between anthropology and theology, set, as he sees it, by the disciplinary presuppositions of each. Robbins quotes Kapferer’s adage that ‘anthropology is secularism’s doubt’ (Kapferer 2001) – and it is as secularism’s doubt that it seeks to ‘explicate . . . ways of understanding that are not the product of secular conditioning, and to show how successfully they can provide the basis for flourishing human lives’ (Robbins 2020: 179), including, of course, theological ways of understanding. Anthropology is nonetheless always secularism’s doubt and so does not abandon the fundamental premises of secularism, which include scepticism ‘in relation to the God question understood in terms of belief’, as Robbins puts it (2020: 179). Even a transformative dialogue between the disciplines will not lead to anthropology abandoning this disciplinary assumption (but see also Luhrmann,

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Chapter 28 of this volume) or to theology abandoning its ambition to speak truthfully of God. And yet, those limits acknowledged, Robbins thinks a transformative dialogue remains possible and fruitful, as his discussion suggests.

Conclusion Looking back, there is some irony in the drift of these two conversations, starting from two different places, with an anthropologically engaged theology looking increasingly towards lived religion, just as theologically engaged anthropology is discovering the higher reaches of theology. But that in no way sets the two at odds with one another or prevents their dialogue. Unlike meetings, however, conversations do not have an agenda – so one can have no great certainty about the future courses of these dialogues. But without trying to predict or plot their paths, one may reasonably express hopes for them. So, in conclusion, I identify three wishes which have been made for specific developments in the conversations now underway. My own proposals anticipate a widening of moral theology’s social understanding, and a deepening of its self-understanding, through a thorough-going turn to social anthropology. This turn promises both a better comprehension of diverse enactments of the human outside the sphere of Christian life and the possibility of a better narration of the Christian life itself just insofar as we learn to give more adequate accounts of the everyday life of lived religion. Of course, the scope of the first of those projects is vast – and my book merely ventures preliminary thoughts in relation to some particular moments in the life course. The particular moments are suggested by the special attention which has been given to them in the Christian tradition, specifically in virtue of the central place they have in the life of Christ as recounted in shorthand in the creeds. There is, then, very plainly, a case for the further development of this conversation in relation to those many topics and materials which were not even touched on in my book. Essays in the volume edited by Lamb and Williams (2019) turn to eating, education, the giving of humanitarian aid, life and work in the light of contemporary technology and the growth of flexible capitalism, and practices of lending and borrowing – with the aim of extending, or testing, the methodological approach recommended in my book. The potential for such engagement by moral theology with anthropological findings is virtually limitless – or at least in principle limited only by gaps in anthropology’s treatment of human life where the moral theologian may have an interest. For all that anthropology has overcome its focus on the exotic, it is still the case that it is easier to find ethnographies dealing with ARTs, gay parenthood, fostering and adoption, still birth, and the birth of disabled children than it is to

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discover studies which might help one understand the practices and meanings that surround the birth of the average child in the average hospital. The second aspect of the project – having to do with the better narration of lived religion – is also quite daunting, since the beginnings which have been made are just that. There are whole swathes of Christian life which have not been elucidated by Christian ethics, with its traditionally rather limited interest in, and its eschewing of much of the material which has shaped and expressed, lived religion. An example of a major theme in Christian life which has suffered neglect within moral theology would be the significance of saints (as argued in Banner 2016). The saints, alongside Christ, have provided one of the key sites where Christian anthropology (in its informal sense) has been crafted and expounded. The volume of material – itself signalling the importance of the saints in Christian self-understanding – is extensive. Bartlett’s (2013) magisterial account of the rise and role of the saints in Christian thought and practice up until the Reformation has forty-four pages of bibliography of primary printed sources, and, of course, his study does not consider the translation of sainthood into modern terms (encompassing Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela for sure, and probably Princess Diana) or the place of seemingly more traditional devotions in the contemporary Catholic imagination (on which see, e.g., Casten˜eda-Liles 2018). That the saints are exemplary is, of course, a commonplace. But the nature, form, and content of that exemplarity bears further elucidation by an anthropologically informed moral theology which aspires to capture the features of lived religion. (And see Evans, Chapter 17 of this volume.) That is a suggestion, then, about the future path of the conversation made from one side of the dialogue. There are two further suggestions coming from anthropologists, which nonetheless ought to be warmly welcomed by theologians. Seeman (2018: 351) wonders ‘how the current conversation about anthropological engagement with theology might move beyond its initial, quite natural preoccupation with Christian theology and the anthropology of Christianity’. As he rightly insists, Theology is not only an academic discipline situated in mostly Christian schools of divinity but a family of different kinds of expert discourse about religion, each differently situated with respect to the vernacular discourses that exist alongside them. . . . My point is not just that engagement between anthropology and theology needs to include and be open to non-Christian theologies but that this can only happen when we are willing to evince a methodological openness to the question of what counts as theology in the first place. (Seeman 2018: 353) The opening up of this question may, I suspect, be as liberating for Christian ethics as for anthropological engagement with theology (widely

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conceived), since a challenge to the narrowness of traditional conceptions of theology may not only invite other partners to the dialogue but actually unsettle some of the ideas of the Christians first invited to the table. Perhaps the most intriguing possibility for future engagement is one which Robbins entertains at the end of his work but does not explore. Moral theology’s recent interest in social anthropology can be understood as an interest on moral theology’s part in arriving at a better understanding of how its prescriptive vocation can be advanced, informed, and disciplined by description, and in particular by anthropological description. But turning that round, there is a question for social anthropology about its relationship to moral judgement (Banner 2015: 137). At the end of Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life, Robbins is led precisely to wonder whether the conversation between the two disciplines might move to this territory. As Robbins notes, anthropologists have traditionally not judged those they study. But the impulse not to judge ‘has begun to break down’, for a reason that ‘Ortner has recently noted’, namely that ‘much of anthropology is now “dark”, studying situations in which people are poor, suffering, ill, and/or oppressed. Those who work in these situations often want not just to describe them but also to name and judge the darkness that besets them’. But, says Robbins, for this possibility to be realized, anthropologists ‘will need to learn, as theologians learned long ago and continue to teach their students, how to work out explicit criteria for judgement, rather than judging only on the basis of our own inherited sensibilities about what good and bad lives look like’ (Robbins 2020: 182–3 and see also 95–104). Theologians may not recognize themselves possessing ‘explicit criteria for judgment’, depending quite what that implies, but certainly arguing to and for normative conclusions is central to Christian ethics. Discussions between anthropologists about normativity can, to an outsider, take on a surprisingly testy character. McKearney mentions the ‘fraught’ divide between what he terms ‘activist versus culturalist or intellectualist ways of tackling the question of normativity’, activists being those who think anthropology has a role in standing in solidarity with or even representing and advocating for the marginalized (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Biehl 2005), whereas intellectualists (Robbins 2013) ‘are more wary of direct normative engagement’ (McKearney 2019: 223). Plainly, given Robbins’s proposal, wariness is not to be read as meaning ‘opposition to’ but perhaps better as ‘awareness of some of the pitfalls of’. In any case, given my own sense of the need for theology to get better at what Robbins thinks theology may be doing well, there is surely room for a profitable conversation over this very ground. In particular, to return to where this essay started, the prospect of two disciplines challenged (and even chastened) by their encounter to do better in displaying the logic and forms of the moral life promises not only theoretical or intellectual but perhaps also practical gains. The Alder Hey parents, we might say, were doing better than we think – for

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the social incomprehension which they experienced had much to do with the inability of dominant understandings of morality, especially in bioethics and official thinking influenced by it, to grasp the character and meaning of their deeds. It may just be that the conversation between anthropology and moral theology will not only enrich these disciplines separately and together but may also enable them to contribute to a better level of social intelligence.

References Adams, Nicholas and Charles Elliot. 2000. ‘Ethnography Is Dogmatics: Making Description Central to Systematic Theology’. Scottish Journal of Theology, 53: 339–64. Aguilar, Mario I. and J. Louise Lawrence. 2004. Anthropology and Biblical Studies: Avenues of Approach. Leiden: Brill. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Banner, Michael. 2014. The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology and the Imagination of the Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. ‘On What We Lost When (or If) We Lost the Saints’, in B. Brock and M. Mawson (eds.), The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist: The Future of A Reformation Legacy. London: Bloomsbury 175–90. Banner, Michael, Lesley A. Sharp, Richard Madsen, John H. Evans, J. Derrik Lemons, and Thomas J. Csordas. 2015. ‘Anthropology and Moral Philosophy: A Symposium on Michael Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 33: 111–39. Barclay, John A. 2015. Paul and the Gift. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Erdmans. Bartlett, Robert. 2013. Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bialecki, John, Naomi Haynes, and Joel Robbins. 2008. ‘The Anthropology of Christianity’. Religion Compass, 2: 1139–58. Biehl, Joao. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bielo, James S. 2018. ‘An Anthropologist Is Listening: A Reply to Ethnographic Theology’, in J. Derrick Lemons, Theologically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 140–55. Blyth, Eric and Claire Potter. 2003. ‘Paying for it? Surrogacy, Market Forces and Assisted Conception’, in Cook and Day Sclater (2003), 227–42. Brock, Brian. 2019. ‘“I Exist in Believing”: Anthropology as a Theological and Emancipative Pursuit. A Response to Michael Banner’. Louvain Studies, 41: 238–48.

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Browning, Don S. 1990. A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Cannon, Katie Geneva. 1995. Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. London: Bloomsbury. Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casten˜eda-Liles, Marie de Socorro. 2018. Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadelupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Lawrence. 1998. No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Coleman, Monica A. 2008. Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Cone, James H. 1975. God of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Cook, Rachel and Shelley Day Sclater. 2003. Surrogate Motherhood: International Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalferth, Ingolf U. 2016. Creatures of Possibility: The Theological Basis of Human Freedom. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Danforth, Loring M. 1982. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. 1992. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. du Boulay, Juliet. 2009. Cosmos, Life and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village. Limni: Orthodox Logos. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Faubion, James D. 2001. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogics of Autopoesis’. Representations, 74: 83–104. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Francis, Doris, Leonie Kellaher, and Georgina Neophytou. 2005. The Secret Cemetery. Oxford: Berg. Fulkerson, Mary Mcklintock. 2007. Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Furani, Khaled. 2019. Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gutierrez, Gustavo. 1973. A Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Hall, David D., ed. 1997. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Healy, Nicholas M. 2000. Church, World and the Christian Life: PracticalProphetic Ecclesiology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hockey, Jenny. 1990. Experiences of Death. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Isasi-Diaz,Ada Maria. 1993. En La Lucha/In the Struggle: A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2001. ‘Anthropology: The Paradox of the Secular’. Social Anthropology, 9: 341–4.

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Kelsey, David H. 2010. Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology. Westminster: John Knox Press. Klassen, Pamela E. 2001. Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311–32. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, Michael and Brian A. Williams, ed. 2019. Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2000. ‘The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy’. Current Anthropology, 41: 133–57. ed. 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Lemons, J. Derrick. ed. 2018. Theologically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindbeck, George A. 1984. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Westminster: John Knox Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue. London: Duckworth. Mathewes, Charles. 2019. ‘Sacramental Ethics and the Future of Moral Theology’, in Lamb and Williams (2019), 192–210. Mathews, Jeanette and Matt Tomlinson. 2018. ‘Anthropology, Theology, and History in Conversation’. St Mark’s Review, 244. McKearney, Patrick. 2016. ‘The Genre of Judgment: Description and Difficulty in the Anthropology of Ethics’. Journal of Religious Ethics, 44: 544–73. 2019. ‘Everyday Ethics: A Bibliographic Essay’, in Lamb and Williams (2019,), 221–40. McLean, Athena. 2007. The Person in Dementia: A Study of Nursing Home Care in the US. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press. Meneses, Eloise and David Bronkema, eds. 2017. On Knowing Humanity: Insights from Theology for Anthropology. London: Routledge. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language and Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donovan, Oliver. 1984. Begotten or Made? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orsi, Robert A. 2010. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. 3rd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pannenburg, Wolfhart. 1985. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. Louisville, KY: Fortress Press. Philips, Elizabeth. 2012. ‘Charting the “Ethnographic Turn”: Theologians and the Study of Christian Congregations’, in Ward (2012). Ragone´, Helena. 1999. ‘The Gift of Life: Surrogate Motherhood, Gamete Donation, and Constructions of Altruism’, in Linda Layne (ed.), Transformative Motherhood. New York: New York University Press: 65–88. Rapp, Rayna. 1999. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge.

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Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–62. 2018. ‘Where in the World Are Values?’, in J. Laidlaw, B. Bodenhorn, and M. Holbraad (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scharen, Christian, and Aana Marie Vigen, eds. 2011. Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics. London: Continuum. Scheper-Hughes,Nancy. 1995. ‘The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology’. Current Anthropology, 36: 409–40. Schneider, David. 1980. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Seeman, Don. 2018. ‘Divinity Inhabits the Social: Ethnography in a Phenomenological Key’, in Lemons (2018), 336–54. Sharp, Lesley. 2006. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Swinton, John, and Harriet Mowat. 2006. Practical Theology and Qualitative Research. London: SCM Press. Teman, Elly. 2010. Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thompson, Charis. 2005. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thurston, Stephanie Mota. 2019. ‘Engaging the Everyday in Womanist Ethics and Mujerista Theology’, in Lamb and Williams (2019), 28–40. Tomlinson, Michael. 2020. God Is Samoan: Dialogues Between Culture and Theology in the Pacific. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Tranter, Samuel, and David Bartram Torrance. 2018. ‘Ethnography, Ecclesiology, and the Ethics of Everyday Life: A Conversation with the Work of Michael Banner’. Ecclesial Practices, 5: 157–71. Ward, Pete., ed. 2012. Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Erdmans. Warnock Report Warnock Report (Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology). London, 1984. Whitmore, Todd David. 2007. ‘Crossing the Road: The Role of Ethnographic Fieldwork in Christian Ethics’. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 27: 273–94. Williams, Delores S. 2002. Sisters in the Wilderness. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Zelizer, Viviana. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

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Part II

Aspects of Ethical Agency

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9 Making the Ethical in Social Interaction Webb Keane and Michael Lempert

Introduction Much of anthropology’s ‘ethical turn’ counters the tendency to explain away ethical life, for instance by reducing it to something else such as social conventions, political interests, or psychological forces. The ethical turn shifts the social from foreground to background, so that it serves people as a resource rather than as a primary determinant or explanation for what they do and how they understand one another. We define the ethical as that dimension of value judgements and goals that is not reducible in the first instance to some instrumental purpose (Keane 2016; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2010: 1–36; Mattingly 2012). But might this not risk hypostasizing the individual or depoliticizing the field of analysis? Focussing on the dynamics of ethicalization in social interaction, we argue that, quite the contrary, it can productively recast our understanding of persons and the political. We argue that other people are not mere objects of ethical concern: they play a productive role in fostering the very recognizability of actions as being ethical matters in the first place. Other people’s actions in turn contribute to the historical transformation of values, practices, and concepts, and the emergence of new ones. This chapter surveys some of the processes through which this transpires. It treats social interaction as a key site of processes we call ethicalization. As we will explain, that an action or a way of living is even a matter of ethical concern at all is not necessarily given in advance. Ethicalization refers to the emergent character of ethics in interaction, the role played by enactment and the motility of stance, and their contribution to historical transformations.

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This emergent character and its political consequentiality have been brought into sharp relief in recent years in the United States, where the authors are based. Although the # MeToo movement was sparked by acts of blatant sexual violation, it directs attention to a wide range of more subtle harms, and in doing so contributes to their ethicalization, which forms a springboard for the politics that follows. Likewise, the recognition of racial microaggressions (Pierce 1970) draws what were once unnoticed and apparently innocent details of interaction into the visible frame of ethical politics (Lempert n.d.; Love 2016). Much as feminist consciousnessraising did in the early 1970s, these transform the ethical landscape by giving names to its previously unremarked features (Keane 2016). As the feminist Gloria Steinem remarked long ago, ‘Now, we have terms like sexual harassment . . .. A few years ago, they were just called life’ (1995: 161). More generally, the politics of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, class, and caste often focus on pronouns and other features of everyday interaction precisely because of their ethical implications for how people stand towards one another (Alim, Rickford, and Ball 2016; Goebel 2010; Hillewaert 2020; Inoue 2006; Love 2016; Shohet 2021). This focus is not peculiar to any one society or historical moment – for instance, pronouns, terms of address, and other details of interaction were taken very seriously by early twentieth-century Indonesian nationalists (Errington 1998), mid-century Vietnamese revolutionaries (Luong 1988), and contemporary post-revolutionary Cambodians (Yin 2021). In this chapter, however, we attend to the more humdrum but ubiquitous dimensions of everyday life. Our working assumption is that we can best understand the ethics and politics of interaction by starting with their more unremarked but omnipresent forms. What makes ethics compelling for individuals? Does anthropology have an alternative to such common answers as the universal rationality of a Kantian categorical imperative or Rawlsian veil of ignorance, the doctrines of religious tradition, or the underlying functionalism presumed by evolutionary psychology? Echoing Durkheim’s substitution of social foundations for theological and philosophical ones, Ruth Benedict (1934) notoriously boiled down morality to that which is socially approved. But sociocentric approaches like hers seem to reduce ethics to conformism or habit. This reduction threatens to remove from ethics the distinctive qualities involving judgement, choices among alternatives, and, therefore, the attribution of responsibility to self-aware ethical agents. Another objection is that the social conformism model tends to assume too much consensus: what happens when (as is usually the case) society doesn’t provide a single set of ethical precepts, guidelines, or habits, but many, unevenly distributed or mutually contradictory – to say nothing of the inescapability of political contestation and structures of power that make these alternatives consequential? Arguments around #MeToo and racist microaggressions are so fraught in part because of deep disagreements

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about the ethics of the most ordinary aspects of daily life. People who in many respects share political positions may differ profoundly in where they will find the political. This is one reason to pay close ethnographic attention to the most mundane processes of face-to-face interaction.1 For anthropologists, the alternatives to Benedict’s position pose their own challenges. The rationalist traditions of moral philosophy’s deontological and utilitarian schools seem either empirically unrealistic or Eurocentric in their assumptions. Virtue ethics can seem to emphasize acceptance of existing, agreed-upon mores over invention, contradiction, dispute, or rebellion. Appeal to the universalism of moral psychology, in turn, seems problematic on several grounds. Empirically, the data derive almost entirely from educated populations in highly developed, largely urban societies, and the experiments often work with problematic conceptualizations of the ethical. They tend to replace ethical judgement proper with more or less involuntary cognitive, emotional, or other psychological mechanisms. To the extent that psychological explanations of ethical intuitions are deterministic, they seem to eliminate a crucial feature of ethics as usually understood, that, in any given instance, the actor could do otherwise. To the extent that the psychological processes they describe work below the agent’s consciousness, they seem to eliminate or minimize ethical self-awareness and reflection. In both instances, it is hard to attribute responsibility or judgement to such actors. And yet some findings of moral psychology seem robust. Proto- or quasi-ethical emotions such as repugnance and empathy, and cognitive resources like reciprocity of perspectives and third-person norm enforcement, seem to be ubiquitous, if not universal (Appiah 2008; Tomasello 1999). Surely anthropology would stand on firmer ground if it could demonstrate how ethnographic research articulates with the world described in other social sciences, rather than insisting on the exceptionalism of our sphere of knowledge (Keane 2016)? Ethics may not be reducible to either psychology or social pressure, but ethnographers of social interaction and linguistic anthropologists allow us to recognize points of connection between these two. They would argue that the dynamics of social interaction and the semiotic mediation of ethical awareness bridge the general claims of moral psychology and the social-historical specificities of ethics as it is actually lived. Like most of our colleagues, we are sceptical of the stronger universalizing claims often found in psychological explanations of social and cultural phenomena. We do, however, grant as indisputable that humans share certain basic cognitive and affective features. But we argue that rather than causing ethical judgements, actions, and habits, these features are affordances that can be 1

We treat ‘morality’ here under the encompassing rubric of ‘ethics’. For terminological discussion, see Keane (2016: 17– 22). As rough heuristics, we take as distinctive features of the ethical both judgements (as in deontology) and value orientations (as in virtue ethics) that cannot, from the perspective of the people involved, be understood as means towards some further end (Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2010: 1–36; Mattingly 2012).

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taken up within particular ethical projects, under particular historical circumstances. An affordance is a property of something that is potentially available to an agent, something to which people can respond, but that does not determine that they will do so, or in what way and to what end (Gibson 1977; Ingold 2000; Keane 2016, 2018; see also Mead 1967: 280ff.). What we find useful about the concept of affordance is that it acknowledges the constraints and causalities of human biology, patterns of interaction, discursive knowledge, and institutional structures without inviting reductionism or determinism. In this chapter, we trace some of the many ways in which these affordances are drawn on in social interaction as part of a process we call ethicalization.

Social Interaction Focussing on the productive and emergent quality of ethics, we recognize but do not privilege the role of prohibitions and obligations imposed on the individual by groups or institutions. We also recognize that communities are variegated and fissured rather than a source of a single, cohesive, overarching ethos or culture. The aim of the analysis is to establish the ethical on its own terms, the evaluative dimension of people’s lives together that is not wholly reducible to something else such as power, interests, or instinctual forces. Yet where does this anti-reductionism leave us? Due perhaps to an old and stubborn antinomy, the ethical turn may seem to steer us back towards the individual as we take leave of the social. When contemporary anthropologists have taken up virtue ethics, along with phenomenology and affect theory, they often stress bodies over minds, habit over reflection, and sensibility or affect over reason. Some approaches, emphasizing the role of human freedom in ethics, risk reproducing Western modernity’s ideologically loaded figure of the voluntaristic individual. Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop (2018) observe that anthropologists, unlike moral philosophers, ‘have been leery of attention to [the] biographical self, fearing that this approach commits them to some sort of individualism’ (Mattingly and Throop 2018: 481; see also Laidlaw 2014: 179). They recognize the need to defend their phenomenological approach against the charge that privileging of the first-person perspective ‘does not refer to some singular isolated individual and his or her inner experience’ (Mattingly and Throop 2018: 482). To those who insist that ethics is grounded in individual intuitions and actions, many anthropologists would counter that these actions and intuitions inevitably have a shared character and draw on public sources, saturated with historical contingency and power effects. In short, anthropologists of ethics broadly agree that the individual cannot be the explanatory source for ethical life any more than the social

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can. Individuals do not invent their ethics all by themselves, nor do they engage in ethics in isolation. While we may know that the ethical is not just a private matter, we do not always appreciate the manner in which and the extent to which ethical practices, from the life-long cultivation and enactment of virtue to momentary events of reflection and choice, involve other people and often require their active presence. Philosophical, sociological, religious, and historical approaches to ethics tend to focus on abstract concepts that circulate publicly, such as freedom, justice, mercy, and power, evil, betrayal, dishonesty, and so forth. Granting their importance, the anthropologist must still ask what, in practice, makes these abstractions inhabitable, recognizable, and consequential in concrete terms. We must also account for the relations between such explicit concepts and the unspoken and intuitive, the gutlevel quality of what Veena Das (2007), Michael Lambek (2010), and others call ‘ordinary ethics’. Social interactions are the primary locus for talk about and enactments of honour, dignity, respect, and shame (confining ourselves here just to the English lexicon). Attention to interactions also shows the limits of individualistic approaches that focus solely on habits, emotions, intuitions, decisions, and reasoning. They demonstrate how self and other are mutually involved in the production and practice of the ethical. And if ethics is realized in interaction, interaction itself can become subject to evaluation – that is, there is often a morality of interaction as well. But if ethics cannot be reduced either to individuals or collectivities, these cannot be dismissed either. Social interaction is the critical point of articulation between the world described by moral psychology and affect theory, on the one hand, and that encountered through history and ethnography, on the other. Although we focus on co-present social interaction among humans as the paradigmatic site for this articulation, ethicalization can in principle involve human interaction with agencies of any kind, be they spirits and divinities, animals and the environment, machines and media, as well as highly distributed agents like corporate shareholders and political constituencies.

Ethical Stance-Taking Developmental psychologists and linguists agree that the full-fledged ability to speak a language depends on cognitive capacities for role reversal and shared intentionality (Tomasello 1999). During language acquisition, children master shifters such as first- and second-person pronouns that require them to switch and track speaking parts. These cognitive capacities are conditions of possibility for ethics in several respects. They facilitate the motility of stance, and they endow semiotic form with affordances for value judgements. They account for the relative freedom and reflexive

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capacities of ethical agents without the individualism and voluntarism that many theories of ethical freedom presuppose. They help us describe the ubiquity of ethical responses without determinism. We consider these in turn. Motility of stance refers to the basic ability that any individual possesses for shifting between what we can call the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives on themselves, others, and the actions they are involved in (Keane 2016). By ‘first person’, we mean the emotions, intuitions, and thoughts that form a core sense of self. For example, the first-person stance may denote that part of ethical life that responds unreflexively and immediately to situations that provoke empathy or moral disgust (Haidt 2001). The ‘second person’, on analogy with speech addressed to another person, is dialogic in character. It posits an external point of view on the self as seen by another person who is situated (as opposed to a generic ‘other’), who can be addressed, and whose judgements matter to the self (Mead 1967). This is the domain of what Erving Goffman (1955) called face-work. It is only once one can shift between first and second person that one can enter into cooperative play. This is interaction that is valued for its own sake, rather than for an instrumental purpose (e.g. tossing a ball, as opposed to joining forces to carry a burden too heavy for one person). Cooperative play commonly involves rules or norms, which brings us to the ‘third-person stance’. In language, the third-person pronoun refers to someone or something that is outside the conversation in which it occurs (Benveniste 1971). As a more general perspective, it can refer to the normative perspective of ‘anyone at all’ as opposed to the ego-centric or interaction-centric perspective grounded in a context. Here we use it to refer to the position of the outside observer, who evaluates persons or actions with reference to socially recognizable, nameable, and even purportedly objective categories. The underlying cognitive condition for the third-person stance appears in what psychologists call ‘third-party norm enforcement’. We see this when young children object to a violation of rules in a game or to the unfair distribution of birthday cake, even when they do not directly suffer harm. In this respect, the third-person perspective is a cognitive affordance on which certain ethical theories draw. For example, deontology depends on the capacity for standing outside one’s own situation in order to make judgements with reference to some principle or norm that is taken to be independent of one’s own desires or interests. This capacity for decentring the self underwrites such ethical systems as Kant’s categorical imperative, Rawls’s veil of ignorance, and many religious systems of prescription, taboo, and proscription. The third-person stance is an especially clear expression of one defining feature of the ethical, namely evaluations of persons or actions that do not arise directly from technical considerations (for instance, better or worse ways to plant rice) or instrumental purposes (such as serving as means to sex, riches, or glory). However, in contrast to much of European moral

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philosophy, the anthropology of interaction does not privilege the thirdperson stance as the true locus of ethics. For one thing, much of everyday ethics is best described in terms of the first- and second-person stances, a point we develop further later. Moreover, it is hard to explain how people come to have strong ethical feelings and commitments without the intimacy of the first- and second-person stances. Knowing that something is wrong (from the third-person stance) does not necessarily mean I (in the first person) will care about it. This brings us to the second point: the affordances of semiotic form. Because the acquisition of language, and of semiotic capacities more generally, entails inferences about other persons’ intentions, and purposes, semiotic form affords judgements about things that are not directly observable. These can include not just other people’s thoughts and intentions but also, more generally, their values, normative orientations, and character – how, for instance, they will act in the future – which has been important in virtue ethics. Philosopher Stephen Darwall (2009) defines the second person not just as address but rather as a demand to be treated with respect for one’s dignity. The idea of dignity, a core ethical concept for him, is irreducibly interactive. It depends on a semiotics of behaviour: your respect for my dignity must be perceptible to me, and ideally to other people as well. In cannot remain an inner quality you alone possess, nor can I claim it for myself unassisted. This, again, demonstrates the distributed nature of ethical practice. People in many societies (but not all) are called on to draw inferences about one another’s unobservable character on the basis of observations in the present (Carr 2011, 2013; Reed and Bialecki 2018a, b). The role of others in one’s own sense of character is reflected in a remark by the conversation analyst Harvey Sacks (1972) that ‘Human history proper begins with the awareness by Adam and Eve that they are observables . . .. By the term “being an observable” I mean having, and being aware of having, an appearance that permits warrantable inferences about one’s moral character’ (281, 333 n.1). That is, the inner self is shaped by the experience of being an outer self for others, which is enabled by the ability to shift between first- and second-person perspectives. The most ubiquitous medium on which those perspectives draw is the semiotics of social interaction. Erving Goffman’s (1955) analysis of face-work showed the amount of conscious or unconscious effort that people make to accept and sustain the self-image that others, their interlocutors, try to project. To sustain, or refrain from challenging, another’s claims to having a certain kind of character and reputation can be both an imperative in its own right and a contribution to the ongoing ethical development of each participant in the interaction. The reinforcement provided by other people is part of the scaffolding for one’s character. As such, other people’s talk can be an especially sensitive register of ethical norms and medium for their transgression.

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Ethicalization in Interaction One benefit of the ‘ordinary ethics’ approach (Das 2007, 2012; Lambek 2010) is that it redirects attention away from highly self-conscious rational reflection and social institutions to more routine and less conspicuous moments of daily life. To this we would add that even tacit embodied actions take place in and through social interactions that, at some point, are likely to be mediated by language use. In his pioneering works on social interaction, Goffman wrote of human social encounters as moral through and through. In his somewhat Durkheimian perspective, morality meant tacit normativities that bind persons to each other, and that, when threatened, demand repair. We can see this in his treatment of the contagious nature of embarrassment: ‘When an individual finds himself in a situation which ought to make him blush, others present will usually blush with him and for him’ (Goffman 1956: 265). His essay on alienation, for instance, catalogued forms of ‘misinvolvement’ (Goffman 1957). Thus, one may suddenly become painfully self-conscious about how the interaction itself is going. Why show involvement at all, Goffman asks, and why should interlocutors instinctively rush to the rescue when embarrassment erupts or involvement flags? All this reciprocal attention and responsiveness stems not from concern over the plight of individuals per se but over the fate of interaction itself as a moral order. ‘Conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf’, Goffman famously wrote; ‘it is a little social system’, ‘a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains’ (1957: 47). Goffman (1955, 1959) depicted the delicate reciprocity of face-work, where people protect each other’s self-image and thereby strain to uphold something sacred: the self. Critics (e.g. MacIntyre 1984) have questioned whether this should be called morality at all rather than, say, etiquette, because Goffman liked to stress how face-work did not require sincerity (see Keane 2002) or, indeed, any specific mental state at all. His expression ‘merchants of morality’ epitomized this view, because, ‘qua performers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these [moral] standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized’ (Goffman 1959: 251). Goffman bracketed interior states in part to stress that the obligations of interaction do not stem from individual psychology but from normativities specific to human co-presence. In broad terms, Goffman’s microsociology is vulnerable to the same well-rehearsed critiques of Durkheim that helped incite the ethical turn. It risks reducing morality to the social (Laidlaw 2002, 2014; Robbins 2007). How might the details of interaction nonetheless shed light on everyday ethics? We note several aspects: its processualism; its careful attention to the

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discursive dimensions of ethical practice, including forms of reflexivity; and its redistribution of ethical subjecthood beyond the scope of the monadic individual. We address each of these in turn. Alive to the mercurial flow of discursive life, interactionists focus on process as they trace the way actions, relations, stances, and identities continuously change, how they twist and turn, form and fall apart. They bring a heightened sensitivity to contingency and precarity in social interaction as it unfolds over time. Observing that ‘[o]rdinary or mundane conversation is not of course pervasively about morality’ (1998: 296), Paul Drew makes clear that people have to do things communicatively to make morality surface. By contrast, to assume that ethics pervades every moment of interaction – as if ethics were always, everywhere ‘immanent’ (Lempert 2013, 2015; see also Lambek 2015; Sidnell, Meudec, and Lambek 2019) – risks rendering it ethnographically invisible, in the sense that it does not invite us to scrutinize when, how, and with what effects ethics manifests itself (Lempert 2015). This is why we find it necessary to seek out the semiotic work of ethicalization. It prompts us to ask: when and how does ethics become intersubjectively recognizable and pragmatically relevant? When and how do people register and communicate the ethical? When is this response tacit, when must it be made explicit? At what point does ethicalization become consequential enough to change the course of an event or prompt reflexivity and responses such as self-justification, apology, repair, accusation, and so forth? And when do people deny that an act or circumstance has any ethical implications at all – that, for instance, merely instrumental or practical considerations are relevant? Finally, how do such moments of interaction come to have broad, long-term social consequences?2 Studies of interaction provide fine-grained methods for addressing questions like those posed above and thereby contribute to our understanding of what we may broadly call ethical pragmatics. As we survey later, all facets of ethical life – from the cultivation and display of character to expressions of outrage, from modelling behaviour to moralizing sermons, from problematization (Foucault 1997; Laidlaw 2014) to explicitly accounting for oneself (Butler 2005) – can be approached as discursive practices that prototypically take place with others. Indeed, we would argue that even apparently solitary introspection stages an internal dialogue with a projected interlocutor (Tomasello 1999). What is more, interactants may not register a behaviour as relevant to morality until it is charged as being problematic. It is precisely the work of ethicalization, when it occurs, to ‘reveal’ the ethical dimensions of a norm, or at least attempt to do so (Lempert 2013). People’s conversational failures, disruptions, and conflicts are revealing not simply because they expose 2

For example, where some would argue for economic redistribution on the ethical grounds of fairness, neoliberalism might deny there are any ethical questions at all, only instrumental ones of efficiency (Keane 2019).

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what is taken for granted but because they are candidates for becoming ethical events in their own right – a process that is neither automatic nor one whose outcome is guaranteed. If nothing is guaranteed, neither is anything off limits, for close attention to interactions shows that anything can be ethicalized. Even seemingly trivial features of interaction can assume ethical weight, as Harold Garfinkel (1967) showed in one experiment. He directed his students to spend time at home acting as if they were in a boarding house. Towards small differences in behaviour, such as being extra polite, speaking only when spoken to, or asking permission to take food from the refrigerator, their parents were often offended, even outraged. Parents accused the children of arrogance, indifference, and a host of affronts to face, dignity, respect, and other ethical values. Features of interaction that serve as technical devices for facilitating communication can thus be subject to ethical evaluation under certain interactive circumstances and within certain historical contexts.

Beyond Habit and Reflection Attention to interaction highlights a contrast between habit and reflection. As noted earlier, anthropologists influenced by virtue ethics, phenomenology, or affect theory often discount the role of self-conscious awareness in ethical life. Yet it is a familiar experience that ‘sometimes we are in the midst of action’ and ‘sometimes we seem to stand apart from it’ (Keane 2010: 69; see also Keane 2014). This movement in and out of the flow of action has been subject to debate in the anthropology of ethics. Some identify morality with the flow of habitual normativity. From this perspective, reflexivity is an aberration due to moral breakdowns that disrupt that flow, to which the impulse is to recover and settle back into a state of unreflective normativity (Zigon 2009). Others suggest the difference between habit and reflexivity entails distinct kinds of morality, what Joel Robbins calls the unself-conscious ‘morality of reproduction’, on the one hand, and the self-aware ‘morality of choice’, on the other (Robbins 2007, 2009). To be sure, the rationalism of deontology or utilitarianism perches far above the messy, concrete realities of everyday ethics and those responses and intuitions that are simply unavailable to consciousness (Haidt 2001; Kahneman and Tversky 1979). But not all self-conscious reflection is austere, rationalistic, or elite – nor, we propose, is it necessarily a post-hoc or secondary rationalization. If deontological and consequentialist traditions propose unrealistic goals, we agree with Laidlaw (2014: 124–37) that privileging the habitual and unself-conscious smuggles in its own teleology of ‘authenticity’. As an alternative, we may envision a continuum on one end of which is the unself-aware immersion in the flow of everydayness, at the other the

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full-tilt moral breakdown in which everything screeches to a halt and people have to talk and reflect on how things should be. Studies of social interaction show that ethicalization comes in degrees and varies in explicitness. There is no simple divide between habit and reflection. Nor should we expect to find any one type of alternation among the more and less ‘reflective’ moments of ethical life. Reflection itself is such a fraught term. It is still too often understood to require rational self-consciousness and imagined as seated in the mind of a monadic subject. Given the metaphysical trappings this subject can involve, it is useful to speak instead of reflexivity. In linguistic and semiotic anthropology reflexivity refers to a variety of ways, implicit or explicit, in which signs can be used to refer to or frame other signs (Agha 2007; Keane 2010, 2014). Reflexivity is not limited to the special case of talk about talk.3 Tacit verbal and non-verbal responses, such as facial displays of discomfort, speech dysfluencies, and activities like gift giving, can be potently reflexive and ‘suffice to give a statement a moral tinge’ (Bergmann 1998: 281), in ways consistent with other discussions of ordinary ethics (e.g. Das 2007, 2010). Reflexivity comes in many forms, but, we propose, it always arises in response to some instigation, whether that be the demands of a philosophical vocation, say, or the probings of gossip. Although this reflexivity usually occurs within the flow of interaction – only rarely does it cause an interaction to stop – it can do quite a lot. It can induce an ethical reframing of that interaction by pointing to an alleged problem and subjecting it to evaluation. In response, interlocutors may adjust their stance towards one another, by apologizing, accounting for their behaviour with reasons, disputing the allegation, or making other efforts to redefine the situation.

The Distributed Subject This semiotic approach to reflexivity offers an alternative to some of the ethnocentric assumptions about the individual that psychologism can smuggle in. Attending to modes of communication shows what emerges through people’s engagement with one another, which is arguably where the idea of ethics really gains purchase. The claim that reflexivity is not something that an individual’s mind does brings us to the most instructive, if unsettling, lesson from the interactionist literature, which has to do with the scope of the ethical subject. Those relations need not be with living humans. Karma, for example, can extend the subject backward in time, beyond this life (Laidlaw 2014: 105−6). Sometimes this subject can be 3

The ability to put into words ‘what is going on here’ can be important, but reflexivity does not require denotational explicitness (see esp. Agha 2007). Linguistic and semiotic anthropologists have identified many forms and ‘degrees’ of reflexivity, some of which are highly implicit (cf. Siegel 2005: 19ff.).

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stretched synchronically so that they are co-extensive with, say, a kingroup. As a linguistic anthropologist writing of Vietnamese families puts it, ethics is never reduced to ‘care of the self’ (in Foucault’s words), since everyone is ‘always already entangled in multiple relations and obligations to others’ (Shohet 2021: 181). The ethical subject can be found across a range of spatial and temporal realizations. Close attention to social interaction reveals ways in which ethical subjectivity is distributed across actors. If we take seriously the idea that interaction is not just the coming together of discrete individuals but a joint achievement (which does not mean an egalitarian one), this can reveal aspects of ethical life that we might not otherwise notice. Ethical practice is not only sensitive and responsive to others’ presence; it also often requires others to play a critical role in its enactment. Moralizing gossip, for instance, goes nowhere without the collusion of others. Hints and innuendo about wrongdoing often protect the speaker’s character by inviting others to figure out what allusive remarks ‘really’ mean (Lempert 2012). In Foucault’s account of virtue ethics, even individual self-cultivation depends on social relations. He emphasized truthtelling practices that institutionalize the ethical role of others, such as the father confessor. As Summerson Carr (2013: 38) notes, he viewed confession as a ‘discursive event, whose efficacy relies on the ritual management of the confessant’s speech’ (e.g. Foucault et al. 2011: 5; see also Butler 2004). Such ethical practices distribute roles across participants (Carr 2013: 39). As research on distributed cognition and situated learning shows, even seemingly solitary actions like reasoning involve other people (e.g. Lave 1988; Mercier and Sperber 2019). This insight is all the more germane when we consider something as fundamentally interpersonal as ethics.

Action under a Description Thus far, we have viewed ethicalization from an event-centred perspective, where it refers to the semiotic means by which the ethical is made recognizable and consequential in analytically discrete moments of interaction. We have argued that conversational interaction is the natural home of ethical reflection.4 But treating ethics as ubiquitous and habitual can render its historicity hard to grasp. As we have suggested, if the concept of ethics is to be meaningful and empirically available, we should not expect to find it spread evenly throughout the flow of personal experience or social interaction. By tracing how ethics emerges in response to particular promptings and circumstances in people’s lives with one 4

This does not require that we view face-to-face interaction as if it were an intrinsically ‘small-scale’ domain of social life (Lempert 2016).

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another, we can gain insight into the transformation and social circulation of ethical norms, sensibilities, and systems. Even when interaction flows smoothly, ethics is not confined to unquestioned habit, intuition, or silent introspection. As people shift among first, second-, and third-person stances, so too they shift modes of reflexivity. A characteristic feature of social interaction is that people hold one another accountable for their behaviour. Sometimes this accountability manifests itself as reasons, excuses, or justifications, sometimes in more subtle ways, such as not responding at all when a response is expected. Accountability depends on explicit or tacit appeal to normative principles that all parties can recognize. But ethics is not merely the application of existing cultural, religious, or philosophical systems. The ongoing push and pull of interactive challenges and responses exerts pressure on the normative as well, contributing both to its momentary stabilization and historical transformations. When someone reflexively targets behaviour as ethically problematic, this can lead to explicit meta-communicative behaviour, even to sustained efforts at what Judith Butler (2005) calls ‘giving an account of oneself’. Ethicalization runs through quite mundane moments of selfcharacterization whose effects derive from being woven into the texture of interaction. In her studies of Black and Latina schoolgirls, Marjorie Goodwin finds that in negotiating the rules of their schoolyard games, ‘girls are extraordinarily adept and articulate in producing moves that explicate a sense of justice. Girls display intense engrossment in formulating logical proofs and demonstrations for their positions’ (Goodwin 2006: 246). In arguments, the girls often deploy a range of explicit ethical categories for actions and persons. ‘Indeed, within a single utterance a girl can invoke a coherent domain of action: a small culture, one that includes identities, actions and biographies for the participants within it, in addition to a relevant past that warrants the current accusation, and makes relevant specific types of next actions’ (Goodwin 2006: 7). Arguments like these involve explicit ethicalization, in which the takenfor-granted is reflexively foregrounded with the help of denotational language. Language spells out a practical norm with reference to an underlying ethical principle with the expectation that others will recognize it. During the quick flow of interaction the very definition of what is happening may take shape over time in part by means of people’s descriptions of action. In her study of romantic breakups among American college students, Ilana Gershon notes an incident in which one reports trouble with her boyfriend. The student says, ‘I got into an argument. I guess we got into a fight and I didn’t even know that we got into a fight, I thought we were just arguing . . .. I thought we were just having a discussion’ (Gershon 2010: 400). The competing descriptors – ‘argue’, ‘fight’, ‘discuss’ – illustrate how people can use language

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reflexively to define – and contest – ‘what kind of action are we engaged in?’ and their moral consequences.5 The characterization of actions and of the persons who enter into them is central to the ways in which explicit ethical categories enter the fabric of social life beyond individual intuitions.

Conclusion We should be wary of the drive to find the ‘basis’ or ‘source’ of ethics in specific capacities of the mind, emotions, conversational dynamics, cultural norms, philosophical reasoning, religious teachings, or social institutions. Ethics can draw on any or all of those capacities as affordances, because what makes something count as ethical depends on discursive behaviour, informed by social context and people’s background assumptions. Rather than trace ethics back to its supposed roots, which often means trying to anchor ethics in a disciplinarily defined object like ‘the social’ or ‘biology’, an appreciation for affordances redirects our attention towards its emergence in ethicalization processes. The concept of affordances invites us to trace out how the ethical is assembled from diverse and often far-flung materials rather than trying to locate the true basis of ethics in any one source. The ethnographic record quickly reveals enormous variety not just in ethical values and judgements but also in what even counts as ethically relevant at all – aspects of clothing, posture, dress, speech, food, the handling of money, and so forth that are neutral matters of taste or instrumental rationality in one context may be subject to powerful value judgements in another (Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller 1990). In his study of environmental activists in Kerala, India, John Mathias (2019) notes his surprise at the way in which, during a protest march, the offer of a softdrink and cookie, which hadn’t been ethically fraught, suddenly became so simply because someone raised an eyebrow. As he observes, activists were primed for this shift in stance towards details of their own behaviour by their general critique of the environmental costs of consumerism. The resulting ethical stance became contagious, prompting activists to heightened self-awareness and emergent modes of self-cultivation. Cases like this demonstrate the need to explain the processes through which and conditions under which something becomes ethical and stays so. To the extent that ethics is a meaningful and unified category, this results from social-semiotic processes that happen in interaction. The outcomes of these processes may be ephemeral. But they may also result 5

Explicit meta-pragmatic descriptors are neither necessary nor sufficient for determining what kind of action is occurring. Explicit descriptions cannot be taken at face value, as in the argumentative statement ‘I’m not arguing with you!’ For recent reflections on the pragmatics of explicit descriptions, see Enfield and Sidnell (2017); on timeless, ‘generic’ claims, see Zuckerman (2021).

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in objectifications that scale up and take on an enduring and widespread public life. Objectifications like the ethical lexicon facilitate the generalization and abstraction characteristic of the third-person perspective. The historicity of ethical vocabularies can be seen in the coinage of new terms like ‘nepotism’ in the seventeenth century, ‘racist’ in the nineteenth century, or ‘sexist’ in the twentieth, the demotion of older ones like ‘simony’ or ‘le`se-majeste´’, and the value reversal of yet others from positive to negative, like ‘condescension’, or negative to positive, like ‘democracy’. Once explicit categories like ‘liberated woman’ or ‘patriot’ enter the world of public discourse, they become affordances available for appropriation in the flow of interaction. Through what Ian Hacking (1995) has called ‘looping effects’, they can become new ways of being a person, being with others, and judging interactions, ways that are recognizable to others – even when serving as points of contention. Once formulated as explicit concepts, ethical categories enter a public realm where they can be invoked in daily interactions and public forums. When people invoke them, they expect that they will be recognizable descriptions of types of action and actor, and serve as legitimate, shared grounds for excuses, accusations, justifications, and so forth. They can be used reflexively, where they direct attention to communicative behaviour itself. English words like ‘dignity’ and Nuyorican ‘respect’ find their primary referents in social interaction and its intersubjective effects. So do key ethical terms elsewhere. The Chewong of Malaysia speak of pune´n, the dangerous consequences incurred by not inviting another to share one’s meal (Howell 1989). Inuit ihumaquqtuuq is the dark effects of relations gone bad (Briggs 1970); Sumbanese dewa characterizes the individual’s charismatic efficacy (Keane 1997), which can be damaged by insults and repaired by public signs of esteem. The production and invocation of such objectifications are not the content of ethics but, rather, are crucial moments in the ethicalization process. Their visibility facilitates the articulation of public discourses and intimate experiences, and renders them available for reflection, critique, and transformation. Much of the traditional ethnography of ethics and morality enters the social scene in which these descriptions and types are already in place. But consider the meta-pragmatic category ‘microaggression’, a term psychiatrist Chester Pierce (1970) introduced in the late 1960s to describe subtle forms of racialized violence and provocation directed at African Americans, as noted earlier. This term has come to circulate widely over the last decade, during which, as Heather Love recounts, its scope has been extended and used as a ‘key activist tool in combating racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bias, denigration, and exclusion’ (Love 2016: 423). As a reflexive analytic, the concept of microaggression has emerged as part of large-scale if contested efforts to ethicalize interaction in new ways.

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Viewed in empirical terms, then, we argue, the natural home of ethical life is neither the autonomous individual nor some encompassing social or cultural sphere, but social interaction. This holds for the full range of modalities in which we encounter the ethical, from highly discursive events of reasoning and justification to tacit enactments of embodied virtue. The capacity to see oneself from the perspective of another and the demand that one account for oneself, and in doing so the responsive shift into the third-person stance, are all interactional by definition. When these processes instigate ethicalization, they can result in the objectifications that endow ethics with its historical character and political consequentiality, things that endure beyond the momentary situation but that can also change beyond recognition. Thus even such publicly visible artefacts as moralizing tracts, sermons, catechisms, philosophical texts, professional guidelines, didactic handbooks, and lists of virtues should be understood interactively, since they always imply someone who is being addressed. The process of ethicalization depends on people’s fundamental capacity to move between the relatively unproblematic flow of habit and intuitive responses and that of heightened reflexivity – and back again. People are prone to shift back and forth between the habits and subjectivity of the first-person stance, address to others in the second person, and the relatively objectifying viewpoint of the third-person stance. This motility is crucial to how publicly circulating concepts enter into subjective life – sometimes becoming deeply felt intuitions that never enter into awareness, and, conversely, to how inchoate experience can give rise to fully articulated ethical positions. It is what enables individuals to actively affirm or to take a critical stance towards the implicit and explicit norms and virtues proposed by their social milieu. The capacities for ethical reflection, criticism, and purposeful action on which attributions of ethical responsibility so often turn depend on this motility. The semiotic mediation of ethical life shows how people find themselves accountable to one another, what resources they draw upon in order to provide such an accounting, and what the consequences are. This can be a process of self-discovery – people do not just pick up existing values and norms. Rather, through the processes of ethicalization they may come to be aware of their values, how norms do or do not apply to them, and as a result take a stance towards their own desires and actions – claiming or disclaiming them. For ideas about justice, generosity, responsibility, conscience, and so forth are not invented on the spot, nor are they universal ideals simply available to rational introspection. They are affordances available for ethicalization processes that are not predetermined by the resources they may take up. These processes transpire not in the privacy of inner reflection but in the company of, in response to, and sharing an ethical vocabulary with other people.

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Acknowledgements For astute comments on this chapter, we are grateful to Paolo Heywood, James Laidlaw, and Michael Lambek.

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Mead, George Herbert. 1967. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Vol. 1. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber. 2019. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pierce, Chester. 1970. ‘Offensive Mechanisms’, in Floyd B. Barbour (ed.), The Black Seventies. Boston, MA: Sargent: 265–82. Reed, Adam and Jon Bialecki. 2018a. ‘Special Section 1: Anthropology and Character’. Social Anthropology, 26(2). Reed, Adam and Jon Bialecki. 2018b. ‘Special Section 2: Anthropology and Character’. Social Anthropology, 26(3). Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72(3): 293–314. 2009. ‘Value, Structure, and the Range of Possibilities: A Response to Zigon’. Ethnos, 74(2): 277–85. Sacks, Harvey. 1972. ‘Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character’, in David N. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press: 280–93. Shohet, Merav. 2021. Silence and Sacrifice: Family Stories of Care and the Limits of Love in Vietnam. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Shweder, Richard A., Manamohan Mahapatra, and Joan G. Miller. 1990. ‘Culture and Moral Development’, in Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. New York: Cambridge University Press: 130–204. Sidnell, Jack, Marie Meudec, and Michael Lambek. 2019. ‘Ethical Immanence’. Special Issue of Anthropological Theory, 19(3). Siegel, Jerrold E. 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinem, Gloria. 1995. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: H. Holt. Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yin, Cheryl. 2021. Khmer Honorifics: Re-emergence and Change After the Khmer Rouge. PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan. Zigon, Jarrett. 2009. ‘Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in Social Life’. Ethnos, 74(2): 251–76. Zuckerman, Charles H. P., ed. 2021. ‘The Generic. Special Issue 4’. Language in Society, 50(4): 509–621.

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10 Freedom Soumhya Venkatesan

The concept of freedom has been relatively neglected in anthropology. I explore why this has been the case and argue that freedom, especially when placed in tandem with care, is crucial for an anthropology of ethics, which is not focussed on rule-based morality but rather on the ways in which people work out what constitutes a life worth living and how to lead it. I make this case both by drawing on emic invocations of freedom which often incorporate social critique and by analysing individual ethical choices via a family of concepts, which includes freedom, regard, care, and responsibility. In doing so I liberate ‘freedom’ from its associations with both individual autonomy and radical change, focussing much more on its relational dimensions.

Introduction Most people can agree that freedom is a good thing, but when we come to ask what is meant by it, the answers become increasingly difficult. This is partly due to the many cognate terms associated, and sometimes interchangeable, with freedom (e.g. liberty in English) but also because words with different implications can be translated into English as ‘freedom’. For example, in Hindi, moksha, swaraj, nirvana, mukti, and azaadi all refer to freedom, but of different kinds. Thus, swaraj (or self-rule) and azaadi (a Persian origin word) refer to freedom in the political register, while moksha and nirvana refer to freedom in the soteriological sense; that is, freedom from the cycle of births and rebirths. These terms are used in Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism, albeit in different ways. Mukti spans both the soteriological and sociological realms in lay usage. The ubiquity and variety of freedom-concepts is simultaneously productive and troubling. On the one hand, it is clear that concepts that are recognizably about something we can translate as freedom exist in very many different contexts around the world. In other words, freedom is not simply a ‘Western’ or even ‘modern’ concern. On the other hand, it is

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important to keep the different meanings separate without collapsing them into a baggy notion of ‘freedom’ or drawing on them to speak to a strawman-like notion of ‘Western liberal freedom’. Indeed, as a perusal of Freedom: A Philosophical Anthology (Carter et al. 2007) reveals, there is a multitude of ways in which liberal philosophers approach the concept of freedom, its definition, its boundaries, and its many aspects and dimensions. There is no single uncontested liberal conception of freedom. This is something Laidlaw points out too (2014: 142). What does this mean for anthropologists, who encounter invocations of freedom in the field, or who might want to draw on freedom as an analytical concept? I will address the second question later, but one way of approaching freedom ethnographically is to ask how the people we work with use the term. Even here, the answer is not straightforward, as I have found in my research with an English libertarian right-wing organization that puts freedom at the heart of its political activism. Members of this organization find it difficult to articulate exactly what they mean by freedom when specifically asked. Indeed, some told me that they hoped speaking with me might help them to clarify their own understanding of freedom, something they felt they simply took for granted. Many of our discussions ended up centring on markets free from state interference, thus placing freedom within the economic domain. All other individual freedoms were subsequently derived from the freedom of the markets. This, in turn, sets up a hierarchy of specific freedoms – to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labour, to live life as one sees fit, to raise one’s children according to one’s own values, and so on. In other words, freedom tended to vanish, replaced by specific freedoms that are ranked differently by different individuals. However, the inability to grasp freedom as a singular concept does not mean that many of my interlocutors do not hold what Crowe (2009: 78) refers to as a notion of ontological freedom. That is, many espouse a basic propositional belief that humans are born free: with a natural right to self-determination and actualization. They further espouse a normative understanding that this freedom should be preserved, especially as human freedom can be and is progressively restrained by various forces. Their political activism, then, comprises in reining in the restrictions to human freedom in ways that ensure or promote individual self-determination by addressing extant political, economic, and social arrangements. My interlocutors are heirs to a long intellectual tradition that takes ontological or natural freedom as a priori. Some of them refer to Rousseau, Paine, and Nozick. This assumption, of course, does not necessarily obtain elsewhere. For instance, Saivite Hindu cosmologies posit bondage as the fundamental human condition. The soul, contained within the body, is already fettered by its very presence in the body and becomes more so as the person acts in the world. Freedom here is not a condition that can be attained in this world. The soul has to break free, through the

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efforts of the person, from the cycle of rebirths (Venkatesan 2014). As anthropologists, we might ask how people come to hold the ideas of freedom that they do, and what efforts they expend to achieve such freedom(s). We might also ask how certain notions of freedom can affect the ways in which one group of people might understand the lives of others. This is what Mahmood (2001) does in her discussion of how certain feminist understandings of agency ignore the freedom of Egyptian women of the piety movement to choose ethical projects of selffashioning because these projects embrace rather than resist what, from particular liberal perspectives, appear as oppressive. In a similar crosscultural vein, Humphrey (2007) contrasts British and American politicians’ invocations of an intuitive liberal freedom with three freedom terms in Russian (svoboda, mir, and volya). She shows not only that each term has a very different valence and trajectory but also that ‘each contains its own Nemesis; that is, what can seem to be “good” about them in one context, or from one perspective, can seem dangerous and wrong from another’ (2007: 1–2). Through careful explorations of how these terms have played out in Soviet and post-Soviet imaginaries, Humphrey shows not only that freedom is not a universal value; even in the same place, what people understand by freedom does not remain stable. Both Mahmood and Humphrey perform what are classic moves in anthropology; that is, the disturbance of what are held to be universal values in one place (usually ‘the West’) by introducing views and practices from elsewhere. In Mahmood’s case, this is a certain liberal understanding of freedom and agency as resistance to power and authority; in Humphrey’s case, it comprises showing that far from valorizing freedom, Russians are conflicted about and even suspicious of it. In doing so, both authors challenge what might be termed intuitive understandings of freedom that obtain in the Anglosphere, whether pertaining to the condition of women or as espoused by politicians. Philosophers dispute the place of ‘commonsense intuitive’ understandings of freedom and similar concepts in their own explorations (see Nahmias et al. 2005); anthropologists ground such understandings in pedagogical projects, intellectual, religious and folk traditions, political and social contexts, and relational practices. In what follows, I will place different anthropologists’ work on freedom in conversation with each other, and also with related work by sociologists and philosophers: firstly, to discuss the relative neglect of the concept in anthropology, and secondly, to map out the terrain within which the anthropology of ethics has come to focus on freedom. I will show that while anthropologists have been alive to emic invocations of freedom, they nonetheless remain suspicious of its invocation. This is because freedom is too often conflated with individual autonomy, and thus putatively opposed to the kinds of things in which anthropologists are interested – the

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complicated caring, obligatory, or otherwise inescapable relations within which human lives are enmeshed. However, there is more to freedom than autonomous individualism, and I will argue that anthropologists should pay more attention to this concept, not only because people with whom we work invoke it, often as social critique, but also because it gives us a language to explore the complex choices, evaluations, and work people put into what they identify as the good or right. I thus couple freedom with another key term in the anthropology of ethics – care. In the old English usage, cares are ‘burdens of mind’, and caring demands ‘serious mental attention’. A somewhat later usage identifies care as an action or relation extended towards an ‘object or matter of concern’. These ways of understanding care – as something one thinks about and attempts to do something about – bring freedom into focus in two related ways. Firstly, it moves us away from rule-following morality (but see Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume) and into exploring how people exercise their freedom to conceptualize a project of care, which they see as good and right. Secondly, we can enquire about whether and how individuals and collectives find the freedom to enact this caring purpose and what they might sacrifice in order to do so. It goes without saying that the first freedom does not mean that the second can be exercised, effectively or otherwise. Equally, it is important to note that one can reflect on one’s individual or the wider situation and decide that no unreasonable burden is imposed on oneself or others, leaving oneself free not to act or to continue acting in accordance with established mores. Care is an ongoing activity, but working out what to care about/for, how and why, and evaluating the effectiveness of care requires a reflexive stepping back from the flow of life. Such reflections help generate answers to the ethical questions: ‘how ought I to live?’ and ‘what ought I to enable?’ Freedom is a crucial aspect of the formation and enactment of ethical purposes that are reflexive and rooted in relations of care – for the individual self, for the ‘plural I’ as Mattingly (2014) puts it, or for unknown others. Its exercise is thoroughly enmeshed in religious, political, economic, and other social domains. A focus on freedom allows us to think through the relationship between individual and society in ways that take into account reflexivity, critique, and articulations and enactments of an ‘otherwise’.

Early Anthropological Approaches to Freedom In On Liberty, J. S. Mill discusses a vital question which, he says, has exercised mankind ‘from the remotest ages’ and concerns ‘the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’ (1932 (1859): 1). This ‘struggle between Liberty and Authority’ (1932 (1859): 1) has made freedom a central concept in political philosophy. However, despite its focus on collective social life, Kelty (2011)

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points out that anthropology has had little direct engagement with the concept of freedom.1 Indeed, early anthropologists such as Boas (1940) argued that freedom was a non-problem in ‘primitive societies’ where all individuals are in complete harmony with their culture. Such persons do not hanker after freedom from their culture. They have no need to. The desire for freedom arises when people feel conscious of the limitations of their culture or when alternatives to existing forms of life emerge and gain partial currency. This leaves some people desiring other kinds of lives than those permissible, leaving them feeling unfree. In short, Boas’s argument is that individuals in well-integrated societies do not display a concern with freedom; the more differentiation within a social group, the more freedom emerges as a problem and a motor for change. However, as Woodburn (1982) shows in a number of hunter-gatherer groups and Stasch (2008) discusses in relation to the Korowai, the most undifferentiated and egalitarian societies are intensely concerned with individual freedom and autonomy and deploy several strategies to enable and maintain freedom of association, movement, and self-determination. These studies reveal that individual freedom from others can be a key value even in the kinds of society that Boas was thinking about as ‘primitive’. This does not necessarily contradict Boas, because freedom is woven into the fabric of these cultures and thus supported; the desire for autonomy is not an oppositional one. Malinowski (1947: 78) suggests that Boas’s discussion of freedom is meaningful only in a subjective sense. This is because individuals feel free when they are in harmony with their culture and do not feel free when not in harmony. Such a subjective understanding of freedom, Malinowski argues, is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to observe subjective feelings of harmony. Secondly, it is possible to indoctrinate, as Hitler did with Nazism, people to feel in harmony with a particular culture no matter how oppressive it is, such that they feel free within it (1947: 62). Malinowski also rejects what he terms an ‘intuitive approach’ to freedom. Such an intuitive meaning as formulated by ‘the man in the street’ conceives of freedom as ‘the ability to do what one likes or to do nothing’ (1947: 45); that is, the intuitive core of freedom is the absence of all restraint. This intuitive understanding is thus ‘essentially negative and strictly individual’ (1947: 61). Rejecting that kind of understanding of freedom, Malinowski argues that we need to look at freedom in the realities of human action and in their cultural contexts. While he argues that the intuitive sense of freedom as lack of any restraint lies in the realm of the imagination, freedom can only be achieved through rules sanctioned by organized constraints. This is very often forgotten: by determinists who imagine that the existence of structures and constraints means there is no such thing as freedom, and by 1

https://savageminds.org/2011/07/06/the-anthropology-of-freedom-part-1.

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thinkers influenced by Romanticism, who imagine freedom as the absence of all constraint. For Malinowski, rather, freedom is only possible through rather than from culture (reflecting perhaps a powerful strain in liberal thought that sees freedom as possible only within the rule of law). Thus culture, which restrains human action, is also the enabler of human freedom. Indeed, as Srivastava points out, for Malinowski, freedom ‘originates with culture, and culture defines the content of freedom’ (1993: 182). This is because it is culture that provides the conceptual categories (including freedom) that direct human behaviour and define people’s aspirations. Behaviour, in this understanding, should be described both as a fact and a value; the latter in the sense that behaviours are attuned to values, and judged in terms of values. Srivastava identifies a productive dialectical tension between culture and freedom in Malinowski’s work. This is the twin identification of culture as an instrument of freedom (in terms of security and prosperity) and as an instrument of constraints (by regulating behaviour and circumscribing possibilities). This dual role of culture means that it is malleable and open to manipulation – culture can both be deployed to deny freedom and be a means to attain freedom. Investigating this leads to the question of power – how it can be concentrated in a few hands, distributed across a population, exercised or questioned in the name of tradition or rules or in terms of values (1993: 184–5). Institutions are important in Malinowski’s understanding of freedom and culture. As repositories and guardians of cultural knowledge and values, institutions provide patterns and directives for action. However, institutions rely on individuals, either singly or in groups, actually to act. This may be through education or other modes of producing consent, persuasion, or coercion. Such institutions include the state, which can promote freedom and hence human flourishing or deny freedom, usually through violence. To what extent institutions promote freedom depends on who controls them, how and for what purpose. This is an ethnographic question, but how that question gets posed does depend on the analyst’s idea of the content of freedom, rendering it somewhat problematic. Malinowski’s Freedom and Civilization, as its political prelude shows, was aimed at protecting freedom from totalitarianism. It is shot through with the spectre of Nazism. This makes it as much a political tract as a scholarly study. A reviewer from the time decries the book as neither analytically rigorous nor anthropologically convincing (Cook 1945). Notwithstanding this, Malinowski’s definition of freedom as ‘the conditions necessary and sufficient for the formation of a purpose, its translation into effective action through organized cultural instrumentalities, and the full enjoyment of the results of such activity’ (1947: 25) is translatable into anthropologically interesting questions about freedom. We can ask what purposes are deemed suitable and supported within

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a particular social formation, and also what freedoms exist to form and realize dissenting purposes.

Positive and Negative Freedoms The relationship between freedom, constraint, and purposes is one that has occupied other scholars too, including the political philosopher and liberal theorist Isaiah Berlin. Like Malinowski, Berlin was concerned with freedom in the long shadow cast both by World War II and the Cold War. Berlin argued that ‘almost every moralist in history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems to be able to resist’ (1969: 121). In his famous 1958 lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Berlin traces the ways in which liberal thought has developed two antithetical notions of liberty, each of which has profoundly different implications for the ways in which lives can be lived. To coerce a man is to deprive him of his freedom, Berlin says, but further asks, ‘freedom from what?’ His answer to this question delineates two senses of freedom – the positive and the negative. The negative sense of freedom is involved in the answer to the question: ‘what is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ (Berlin 1969: 121–2). Being free in this sense is not ‘being interfered with by others. The wider the area of noninterference the wider my freedom’ (Berlin 1969: 123). In terms of the role of the state in constraining individual liberty, Berlin suggests that the questions to ask are: ‘how far does government interfere with me?’ and ‘what am I free to do or be?’ (1969: 123). But, Berlin argues, some baseline conditions need to be met before negative freedoms can be thought of: ‘to offer political rights, or safeguards against intervention by the state, to men who are half-naked, illiterate, underfed and diseased is to mock their condition; they need medical help or education before they can understand, or make use of, an increase in their freedom’ (1969: 122). How these are to be assured, of course, is a matter of continuing debate, often with regard to taxation (Venkatesan 2020). Further, we might ask about how certain initiatives may be conceptualized as restrictions of a person’s negative freedoms and nevertheless be welcomed as promoting a larger good, or opposed as unwarranted. A contemporary example is the ban on smoking in enclosed public and workspaces. Supporters point to the freedom of non-smokers to inhabit these spaces without putting their health at risk; detractors, such as some of my libertarian interlocutors, see this as a threat to their freedom to enjoy the same public space and pre-emptively campaign to

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prevent a similar blanket ban on e-cigarettes. As anthropologists, we may ask how such initiatives are conceptualized as freedoms or the lack thereof, and form the grounds for political activism and policy. If negative freedom may be characterized as ‘freedom from’, positive freedom is characterized by ‘freedom to’. On the face of it, the freedom to be a particular kind of person, do particular kinds of things, and so on seems to engage with the individual as his/her own master. However, Berlin shows that this is not a simple case of reframing negative freedom or ‘freedom from’ more positively as ‘freedom to’. Indeed, it has darker connotations – even potentially leading to tyranny and authoritarianism. For Berlin, the difference between the two hinges on the way in which the self may be conceptualized. He suggests that positive conceptions of freedom posit a dual self – a higher and a lower self. In positive terms, the higher self is identified as the real self – that which acts in the individual’s best interests over time and which works or should be made to bring a baser less reasonable self under its control. Such a real self may be conceptualized as wider than the individual – as a social whole, perhaps the nation, a class, an ethnic or religious group, or a race. The collective will, in the name of this real self, may be imposed upon recalcitrant individuals to force them to realize their own higher freedom that accords with that of the wider collective. In Berlin’s words, Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness performance of duty, a just society, self-fulfilment) must be identical with his freedom – the free choice of his ‘true’, albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self. (1969: 133) Berlin suggests that this paradox has often been exposed – ‘we know what is good for X person even if he himself does not realize it now, although he will one day when his rational self comes to the fore’. Interestingly, this is the way in which Humphrey’s (2007) discussion of svoboda-mir freedom – that is, the freedom that comes from subordination of the individual to a collective ‘we’ defined by the Soviet state – appears. We can also place this in conversation with Malinowski’s discussion of freedom as the conditions that make it possible for people to realize and enact purposes within culture. When the purposes are dictated by ‘the culture’ with all the force of authority, tyranny may ensue. This is perhaps why Malinowski himself ends up subscribing to both the notion that freedom stems from a given cultural authority and a notion of individual liberty especially with regard to freedom of conscience (see Bidney 1968: 16).

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In an addendum to his 1958 lecture, Berlin turns his focus to the question of desire and freedom. ‘If’, he argues, ‘I could increase freedom as effectively by eliminating desires as by satisfying them, I could render men free by conditioning them into losing the original desires which I have decided not to satisfy. Instead of resisting or removing the pressures that bear down upon me, I can “internalize” them’ (in Carter et al. 2007: 122). Returning to Humphrey (2007), we can ask how the Soviet state sought to suppress desires for freedom in senses other than those it authorized. Such a question does not have to be restricted to totalitarian states or even to states. An ethnographic case will serve to ground this discussion. The self-described right-wingers among whom I am currently conducting research are clear that their political activism is geared towards the promotion of negative rather than positive freedoms. Indeed, negative freedom is an emic term – one that some of my interlocutors themselves use – which forms the base for a larger project (a smaller state, individual liberties, free markets, and lower taxes). This entire project is couched in ethical terms; that is, it seeks to answer the question of how we ought to be able to live as individuals in a larger polity. This involves, among other things, the reining in of what they see as ‘the nanny state’, which they argue illegitimately forces people to make choices deemed healthy (serving a higher or better self) through punitive taxation of tobacco, alcohol, and sugar. Their argument is that no one should force, directly or indirectly, someone to be healthy by constraining or directing their actions. It is up to individuals to restrain themselves for themselves if they want to do so. Here, freedom is closely tied to individual choice, and the assumption of responsibility for the choices made. However, some of my interlocutors question the legitimacy of some choices, usually those that go against free market principles. Thus a prominent free marketeer argued, to general support, that risk-averse persons who wanted the choice of an utterly safe state-run bank should be financially disincentivized by making such a bank, should it ever be permitted to come into existence, extremely expensive to use. In other words, choices that do not favour free markets should be rendered, ideally, undesirable or at least unfeasible. Leaving aside the apparent inconsistency of punitive charges being allowable in some cases and not in others, what this reveals is the hierarchical valuation of freedom, such that desired freedoms that do not impinge on the free market ideology are more acceptable than those that do. Ethnographically, we can enquire about the mechanisms by which wishes or desires in relation to freedom are shaped or, indeed, some desires eliminated; for example, how do people come to believe that free markets will guarantee their personal freedoms? Why is what some people describe as a ‘caring state’ described as a ‘nanny state’ by others? Questions such as these open up projects of pedagogy, of political activism, and of invitations and injunctions within the larger social setting that naturalize

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some desires and smother others. They also open up the complex relationship between negative and positive freedoms, and the ways in which concepts such as responsibility, autonomy, and the individual are configured in, particularly, ideological projects that seek to grow the negative sense of freedom. We could then ask how such projects intervene in the political sphere and manage or negotiate with dissenting understandings that, for instance, distribute responsibility within the body politic, focus on relational rather than autonomous individuals, and/or desire a more interventionist state. We may also place freedom in the positive and negative senses in conversation with republican freedom, which requires the absence of any structural dependence on arbitrary power or domination (Lovett 2018). What counts as arbitrary, and what as reasonable or even natural? And for whom? Sustained attention to these different approaches to freedom, and the political practices on the ground which seek to realize them through various forms of delimitation, persuasion, and pedagogy, complicates the rather strawman-like invocations of liberal Western freedom often found in anthropological writing, showing them to be multifaceted and the product of different intellectual and political traditions. Of course, the concept of freedom is not confined to the political domain. It is also raised in soteriological terms within various religious traditions. Berlin distinguishes spiritual freedom from the kind of freedom that may be denied or curtailed by an oppressor or tyrant (2007: 122). This is because spiritual freedom is a form of positive freedom that is neither granted nor withheld by another. Rather, it is achieved by, in Foucauldian terms (1988), technologies of the self. However, such positive projects of spiritual freedom are not devoid of relations with others. Laidlaw (1995), Cook (2010), and I (Venkatesan 2016) show how whole communities can be engaged in supporting individual projects of positive freedom. That is to say, one person’s project of realizing spiritual freedom can commit others who support such a project to constrain themselves or others from acting in certain ways even if they want to. This is particularly evident in Laidlaw’s description of lay Jains and their alms-giving practices to renouncers (2000). While all members of a given religious group may recognize and support someone’s attempt to achieve spiritual freedom, such projects may not be recognizable as such from other perspectives. Thus, from a certain feminist standpoint, the women’s piety movement in Egypt about which Saba Mahmood writes and which I have already discussed can be seen as oppressive rather than freeing. For rather different reasons, proponents of both negative and republican freedom may also find this movement problematic; the former because of the way it headlines a positive sense of freedom, the latter because of the gender subordination that is intrinsic to it. But Mahmood’s detailed descriptions and analyses not only open up

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anthropological discussions about freedom, they can also open up new directions in long-standing philosophical discussions about what freedom might look like outside the traditions within which these debates normally take place.

Unfreedom An issue that seems to arise persistently in relation to freedom is that of the ‘natural’ or pre-social freedom of individuals. Whence does this idea come? Both in Hindu Saivite ontologies (Venkatesan 2013) and in Jain thinking (Laidlaw 2002), the very understanding of the embodied soul as being unfree underpins the quest for spiritual freedom. Life, then, in Nietzsche’s vivid words, is treated as a wrong path that one has to walk along backwards (in Laidlaw 2002: 326). Conversely, in the Euro-American tradition, it is more common to find a ‘natural’ notion of freedom, which is progressively constrained as the individual grows into social life. Such a notion of natural freedom might comprise ontological freedom; that is, a propositional belief that individuals are born free; or it might refer to the uniqueness of individuals and the pressure to conform to social rules or laws, leading to loss of freedom. While most thinkers are agreed that some form of social life is necessary for human survival and flourishing, the political and philosophical interest lies in asking what is gained and lost when humans come together in lasting associations. The two disciplines that are most concerned with social life, anthropology and sociology, have approached this question of natural freedom differently, albeit in ways that, until recently, have neglected freedom itself as an object of study. Indeed, Bauman goes so far as to describe sociology as the ‘science of unfreedom’ (1988: 5). Bauman argues that sociology inherited from its inception a commonsense understanding of freedom; that is, the inherent and natural freedom and uniqueness of individuals. This putative natural freedom was understood as constrained and regulated by particular social arrangements. Sociology’s main concerns, then, became (a) to account for the regularities in human behaviour notwithstanding putative ‘natural’ freedom; and (b) in a more normative vein, to explore (or even put forward) the conditions required to prompt the actions of free individuals in a particular direction (1988: 5). While these concerns have yielded important insights, interesting questions about freedom as an ideal, an outcome, or an idea that drives lifeprojects fall by the wayside (1988: 5). In anthropology, the concerns about social order and direction that Bauman identifies for sociology remain, but anthropologists, in general, are less committed to a putative natural freedom. Thus Boas argues that the question of freedom does not arise in well-integrated ‘primitive’ cultures; Malinowski, explicitly repudiating Rousseau’s claim that man is

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born free, argues rather that man achieves freedom through and from culture, which gives him mastery over nature (1947: 33–4). Indeed, as Strathern (1985) points out, what has concerned anthropologists is social order and control – that is, the mechanisms by which individuals are regulated by the larger collective and regulate themselves in accordance with social rules and norms. An extreme version of this is the idea that what is right and good for society is right and good for the individual. This brings us to Durkheim. A founder of the discipline of sociology and profoundly influential in anthropology, Durkheim conflated morality and society so completely that: ‘It is impossible to desire a morality other than that endorsed by the condition of society at a given time. To desire a morality other than that implied by the nature of society is to deny the latter and, consequently, oneself’ (2010 (1953): 18). Here, morality begins with membership of a group – society, which is greater than the sum of the individuals who comprise it. Members’ understandings of themselves, their capacities for thought and action, and, thence, sense of right and wrong/good and bad come from society itself. This renders moot the person’s freedom to work out and enact the good or right. Rather, people garner praise for, or censure for not, performing moral acts. The moral act is aimed at the good of society and has a twofold nature – it is simultaneously obligatory and desirable; that is, individuals who are shaped through and through by society are both compelled by, and want to do, what society deems moral. Freedom, here conceptualized as the freedom of individuals to move outside themselves and above their nature, is achieved through society and not against society. In other words, individuals submit to society and this submission is the condition of their liberation – it is society that helps them both define and reach their full potential. Further, because for Durkheim individuals do not constitute in themselves a moral end, no act which has individual perfection from a purely egotistic point of view as its object can be deemed moral. In other words, society constitutes both the ground of morality and the ends of morality. Before I move on to Laidlaw’s influential critique of Durkheim’s conflation of morality and society, I want briefly to place Durkheim’s understanding of freedom in conversation with Malinowski’s. Even though both scholars agree that individual freedom is only to be attained through culture (Malinowski) or society (Durkheim), Malinowski’s bibliography in Freedom and Civilization does not include Durkheim. Perhaps this is because here Malinowski is most closely concerned with political freedom, and thus with political systems that decrease freedom (totalitarianism) and those that increase freedom (democracy): the latter are to be promoted, the former to be challenged. His focus is the state and its promise and dangers. Indeed, the book ends with a list of suggestions for a federation of nations along with the partial abrogation of state sovereignty (1947: 334). Durkheim’s interest is in society. While he recognizes that society to

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a certain extent invades and violates the individual, this is not a matter of concern because his interest is not in freedom, individual or political, but in how individuals take society’s ends as their own ends such that socially derived morality is not only an imperative but positively desired. In other words, both Durkheim and Malinowski endorse freedom in a positive sense, with society and (the right) culture determining human flourishing.

Freedom and Ethics While Malinowski’s Freedom and Civilization was more or less ignored by anthropologists (Srivastava 1993), Durkheim’s valorization of society has continued to influence anthropology to the extent that James Laidlaw argued two decades ago that inevitably anthropologists who are interested in morality end up studying society, more or less ignoring ethics: ‘Durkheim’s conception of the social so completely identifies the collective with the good that an independent understanding of ethics appears neither necessary nor possible’ (2002: 312). This, he suggested, restricts the focus to collectively sanctioned rules, beliefs, and opinions. Discussions about morality then focus on answering questions about moral rules: how and by whom are such rules formulated? What function do such rules serve? How are they enforced and transmitted over time? By whom are they challenged? Who decides what is in breach of a rule? What are the consequences of breaking rules? While these questions are important, what is left out are the ways in which people (not only as individuals but also in their relations) reflect on and work out the right thing to do, and what constitutes the good, in their view. This latter, Laidlaw insists following Foucault (1988), must take into account the possibilities of human freedom – always located in particular social milieux and exercised in relation to these, and having at its heart the person’s ability to reflect on and cultivate the good. Such a good may be entirely focussed on the individual’s quest for self-perfection and realization. It does not have to have societal benefit as its primary motivation (e.g. in soteriological religious projects aimed at liberation) or the pursuit of artistic authenticity or scientific truth (although Durkheim would argue that these too indirectly aim towards social good; 2010: 17). It neither has to be bound by a system of rules of conduct nor be obligatory or desirable across a social group of which the individual is a member. In order to allow a space for a striving for the good that is not wholly tied up with society and which takes into account reflection and freedom, Laidlaw draws on Bernard Williams (1985) to make a distinction between morality and ethics. Ethics are any way of answering the question ‘How ought one to live?’; morality is one way of answering the ethical question and does so through a focus on rules and law-like obligations (2002: 316; see also 2014: 110–19). The place of freedom in each varies: in some morality systems,

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freedom is a product of following the rules, which are themselves obligatory; ethical projects are shot through and through with the reflexive exercise of freedom. They may involve conscious adherence to morality systems or to social norms, but they may also run against them. They may be socially supported or condemned – indeed, they are always in some relationship to the social, broadly conceived. While it is individuals who act according to ethical projects, they are often pursued precisely though social relations, which may involve elements of persuasion and pedagogy. Groups of people committed to the same ethical projects may come together and press for wider changes, perhaps formulating rules in the process that may take on Morality System-like force. Values and valuations are crucial in the formation of ethical purposes and projects. Indeed, the Jains upon whom Laidlaw (1995, 2002) draws to outline his thesis on ethics and freedom hold non-violence as their highest value. At its simplest, adherence to this value involves the adoption of vegetarianism; at its most elaborated, some Jains embrace death through progressive inaction and non-consumption, thus performing no violence on living creatures (2005). How particular Jains incorporate non-violence in their life is a matter of ethical freedom and involves juggling competing values – of providing for one’s family, for instance, or succeeding in worldly pursuits. In direct conversation with Laidlaw, Joel Robbins (2007) argues that a key question within the anthropology of morality (he does not distinguish between morality and ethics) is to explain why in any given society some cultural domains are dominated by what he calls Durkheimian moralities of reproduction, while others are marked by moralities of freedom. The answer, for Robbins, lies in a model of cultures as structured by values, following Dumont (see also Sommerschuh and Robbins, Chapter 19 of this volume). In cultures where the values are fairly clear, well integrated in relation to each other, with one paramount value that encompasses other lesser values which are themselves hierarchically ordered and generally accepted, what we tend to find, he argues, are moralities of reproduction; that is, the routine performance of normative moral acts without reference to freedom or choice. Robbins then turns to Weber’s understanding of culture as made up of different value spheres (e.g. economic, political, religious, and intellectual), each governed by different imperatives. Further, each value sphere tries to realize its own values to the maximum extent without regard for the values of the other spheres. Thus, the different value spheres stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other. Under such circumstances, Robbins argues, ‘a morality of freedom and choice comes into play and people become consciously aware of choosing their own fates. And it is because in such cases people become aware of choosing between values that they come to see their decisionmaking process as one engaged with moral issues’ (2007: 300).

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Robbins’s intervention is welcome because it engages with the question of freedom at a cultural level. It helps us understand why freedom and choice are emphasized in some societies, particularly those in which value spheres are highly differentiated. It also enables us to understand why moralities of freedom obtain within some spheres, for example the political which is constantly emergent in relation to particular events and to contestations about access to resources and power, while moralities of reproduction might obtain within more settled spheres, such as the religious, where values are set up hierarchically in stable conflicts. Importantly, Robbins shows us how moralities of freedom might cause existential angst, such as among the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea, where the conflicts between different value spheres are so deep that people simply cannot work out the right way to live, particularly as making a choice in relation to one value sphere means giving up something just as important in another value sphere. This is similar to Isaiah Berlin’s notion of value pluralism, in that there is no objective reason to choose one value over a competing one; each is good in its own right. This may lead to subjective angst. How desirable freedom may be, therefore, depends on the conditions within which one chooses or is forced to exercise it. It is, I think, very hard to find pure examples of moralities of reproduction; that is, where individuals never feel called upon to make ethical choices about how they want to live and what is considered a good thing to do. Even where values and rules are clear, we can see the emergence of new ways of doing good. In other words, even what appear to be moralities of reproduction can involve ethical reflection and freedom. Conducting fieldwork among temple consecration priests in Tamilnadu, South India, I noticed an innovation that some priests had adopted. When a temple is re-consecrated, priests ‘empty’ divine presence from the images inside the temple, moving it into water pots which they then ‘recharge’ with presence through the performance of a fire sacrifice and the chanting of consecration-specific Sanskrit mantras (Venkatesan 2013). This water is then poured over the statues and the temple finial. During the ‘recharging’, the images of the gods in the temple are deemed to be ‘just statues’; that is, no worship is carried out to them and worshippers do not have any access to embodied deities. Some priests I was working with had noticed the disappointment of worshippers at the absence of the embodied deities, and had begun to fashion and temporarily induce divine presence into images, made by pasting sandalwood and turmeric onto a wooden frame, so that worshippers could still see and worship the gods. This practice, increasingly common, does not appear in the ritual manuals priests use for re-consecration ceremonies. It is an invention. When I asked about it, one priest said: ‘they come to see the gods and worship. They come out of love. It is not good to disappoint them. So, we

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make these images (murti or embodied deities)’. Other priests present agreed. The priests’ reasoning is explicitly ethical – worshipful love should not be thwarted; people should not be disappointed. Here there is no conflict within the value sphere of religion; overall moralities of reproduction obtain, and priests follow explicit textual rules in their conduct that they claim ensure well-being in the world; that is, they are for the wider good. Notwithstanding this, and even though they know that following the rituals is sufficient, priests are moved to acts of care that come out of their understanding of the disappointment worshippers feel when there is nothing for them to worship. We come, then, to care. The reconsecration rituals are seen to create sorrow, which priests make a matter of concern to alleviate. Their acknowledged expertise frees them to innovate in ways that deploy the rituals but go beyond the texts to enact ethical caring purposes.

Freedom as an Emic Term Priests do not explicitly invoke freedom in this case, rather emphasizing their ability as ritual experts to care both for the deity and worshippers by manipulating divine presence. In other words, it is I who identifies their making of paste images as an act that brings together the burden of care for another’s disappointment, reflection, and the subsequent exercise of the freedom to innovate. I will return to the usefulness of the term from an etic point of view; for now, let us stay with emic invocations. For example, priests explicitly speak about freedom in relation to moksha or liberation of the soul from the cycle of rebirths through human endeavours, usually renunciation. Priests, like many other Hindus, actively support the efforts of renouncers, recognizing their quest for moksha as righteous and worthy. In order to do so, they may constrain their own impulses vis-a`-vis renouncers and also evaluate renouncers by how strictly they hold themselves back from the world (Venkatesan 2016). Anthropological studies show that people around the world desire and organize to achieve freedom for themselves, for others, or for goods that they believe should be unconstrained or unfettered. This ranges from this-worldly invocations of freedom – liberty, emancipation, the freedom of institutions like the market or of things like software, the ability to follow a course of action or to lead one’s life as one sees fit – to conceptions in terms of other-worldly aims – freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth, from the body, from earthly cares, and so on. As a substantial topic of study, then, freedom requires no special pleading. Indeed, there have been a number of studies that have variously focussed on the promises and pitfalls of freedom (e.g. Englund 2006; Hansen 2012); on free software (e.g. Coleman 2004; Kelty 2008, 2014); on evaluations of

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freedom in changing socio-political times (e.g. High 2013); and on freedom in and through religious discipline (Cook 2010; Mahmood 2005), as well as both free markets (Carrier 1997; Jonsson and Saemundsson 2015; Keshavjee 2014) and freedom from markets (Barnard 2011, 2016; Farkas 2017) and the freedom to connect with the world (Pedersen 2018) and to refrain from ‘reading’ and therefore impinging on others (Stasch 2008), to name a few. These studies variously interrogate the meanings of freedom, the desire for and attempts to achieve freedom, and the consequences of achieving freedom. They ask what people mean by freedom when they invoke it. They also ask when freedom becomes a motivating factor, for whom and for what purposes. Importantly, some of these studies evaluate the effects of such invocations and movements towards freedom in the lives of differently positioned people. Noting the diversity of the meanings that freedom attains in use, Wardle and Lino e Silva (2017: 24) suggest that awareness of the existence of freedom, as a topic to be investigated, seems often to start ‘from the presence of a signifier of freedom in the concrete research context extending from there into the various meanings that freedom acquires in daily use’. While different emic invocations of freedom might be radically different in their content, any project that explicitly keeps freedom/free at its heart, I want to suggest, is an ethical project that often involves social critique. Comparing different systematic invocations of freedom and attempts to further it advances the anthropology of ethics by focussing on how people reflexively identify matters of concern to them and attempt to create the conditions to do something about them. This does not have to involve resistance, but it does have to contain a considered reflection of the world or of oneself as presently constituted, a normative vision and some plan to achieve it. Freedom may be invoked variously to protect an existing way of life from threats to it, to challenge existing arrangements, or to change one’s relation to the world in ways deemed good or right. I ground the above observations in the following discussion of three different activist groups for whom freedom/free are emic terms. The content of freedom varies from case to case, but each, as we will see, perceives itself as an ethical project – one that is right and good. None is easy, and all require individual commitment, coordinated action, and wider support that needs to be actively mobilized. Freegans and dumpster-divers forage food that has been thrown away by shops either because it is past its best-by date or because it is not selling quickly enough. Practised in many places from Seattle to New York to Barcelona to Manchester, the noteworthy point about both freegans and dumpster-divers (see Lotman 2013 for the differences between the two) is that they actively choose to root around in skips to find food, both to consume it and implicitly and explicitly to critique capitalist structures that valorize the exchange rather than the use value of food-commodities,

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leading to food waste even as people go hungry. This distinguishes them from the large numbers of people throughout the world who have to rummage in rubbish dumps in order to eat and who would rather not do so. Freeganism, in particular, is an ethical and ethicized way of life, spawning reading groups, redistribution centres, foraging walks, and public protests (Barnard 2011, 2016; Shantz n.d.; Edwards and Mercer 2007; More 2011). It runs counter to socially accepted ideas about waste as dirty, focussing on the potential of some waste to be a good that should be available to anyone who wants it. It also breaks property laws – rooting around in skips that are fenced off on private land can lead to arrests (Balmer 2014). Freeganism is a continuously evolving project that is orientated both towards the individual self and to the wider world. Its aim is freedom from complicity in exploitative and destructive market economies. Freegans, we learn, progress from dumpster-diving to other activities such as bicycle maintenance and repair, sewing, and other forms of self-provisioning. Their understandings of their bodies change and their senses become more and more attuned to finding usable things in a world of waste. In other words, the ethical project expands to encompass more and more areas of life as individuals reflect, in light of their ideals and values, on the world in which they live and seek to change, and how they themselves want to live. My second case study focusses on people and practices that cluster around Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS). This is the antithesis of proprietary software where access to the software source code is heavily restricted, even to users who purchase the software. Kelty (2008: 2) describes F/OSS as ‘a set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation of software source code that is then made openly and freely available through a clever, unconventional use of copyright law’. The cultural significance of F/OSS, Kelty argues, goes far beyond computer programmers and their concerns. Rather, it constitutes a reorientation of power and knowledge extending into various realms that are concerned with intellectual property (music, film, publishing, etc.). F/OSS also speaks to questions of access, is drawn into power struggles between multi-national corporations and nation-states, and is related to development initiatives. It plays strongly into ideas about the gift (Raymond 2001) and questions of freedom – to, from, and of (Kelty 2014). While many people around the world use F/OSS for various reasons – some of it is freely available to download and use – users with the skills can reconfigure the software to suit their particular needs. For significant numbers of self-identified ‘geeks’ (i.e. those who are committed to F/OSS), it is an ethical project rooted in technical capacities. At the heart of this ethical project is the recognition of the importance of computers and the internet in contemporary life, and the attempt to keep the infrastructure that makes information available and knowledge

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possible accessible and modifiable rather than closed off. Anyone can participate in this ethical project; participants do not have to subscribe to a particular politics. A common analogy is with free speech (www .gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html). The mandatory openness of the source code guarantees negative freedom: no restrictions bar one – that the source code must remain open – are placed on what one does with it. Coleman writes: The moral and semiotic load of free software is a commitment to prevent limiting the freedom of others. This is done to realize a sphere for the unfettered circulation of thought, expression, and action for software development . . . freedom underscores an individual’s right to create, use, and distribute software in a manner that will allow exactly the same for others, so long as license rules are followed – the goal of which is to enact a universal sphere for the flourishing of free forms of action and thought. (2004: 509–10) It should be little surprise that the free software movement does not endorse any positive freedoms. Indeed, developers are clear that F/OSS is politically agnostic and neutral – its only concern is ensuring openness and modifiability (Coleman 2004: 509–10). F/OSS adherents and publics, then, look very different in different places. In the USA they range from large corporations to Silicon Valley libertarians to anti-capitalist activists (Coleman 2004: 513–14; Kelty 2008). In India, Folz (2019) shows how F/OSS is harnessed to diverse projects, from those initiated by the Communist parties to anti-Facebook movements, to governmental land registration projects, to giving Dalit school children access to computers. Here, it is not so much the individual’s liberty to know, modify, improve, and control technology that is emphasized as it is the possibility of escaping from the influence of corporations that exert a stranglehold over governments, which increasingly rely on computerized technology and the internet to govern, and thus over people. UNESCO, too, suggests that F/OSS can play an important role in development (https://en.unesco.org/foss). In both F/OSS and freeganism, activists explicitly aim to make certain things free as part of a considered ethical endeavour to improve or change what they regard as unjustifiable. While both attempts play on the notion of free as in gratis, the bigger effort is no less than an attempt to transform existing arrangements by questioning attempts to fence off goods through property logics. Both F/OSS and freeganism/dumpster-diving are ethical projects: they bring together the triad of care, the formation and enactment of purposes, and freedom. Each represents a reflexive and thoughtful attempt to answer the question: ‘how ought one to live?’ Further, they ask: ‘how ought the world to be organized?’ They involve individual effort and, in some cases, sacrifice. Dumpster-diving is illegal in many places; F/OSS activists find themselves unwilling or morally unable to work with

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proprietary software, thus jeopardizing careers in conventional companies. Neither freeganism nor F/OSS understand freedom in terms of individual autonomy, unlike the right-wing libertarians discussed earlier. However, even with the right-wing libertarians, the ideology of individual autonomy sits within a larger project of the freedom of the market, which is seen as more able to promote general prosperity and reward individual effort than does ‘state interference’, however well intentioned. Here, the dangers of positive freedom – that is, the ‘freedom to’ – appear much more clearly emphasized. As we have seen in the opposition to a no-risk banking system and also to taxes on consumer items, such as sugary drinks, this is based on the argument that states can lead people to believe that they would rather forgo individual responsibility than take the freedoms and rewards (albeit risky) afforded by the market. Negative freedom or ‘freedom from’, on the face of it, does not carry such a danger, but people have to be persuaded that their best interests, individually and as an agglomeration of rational individuals, lie with free markets. Individuals may arrive at these ways of thinking either by themselves or in discussion with others. Further, each of the above socio-political projects involves pedagogy and persuasion – adherents want to teach others why their way is good. They therefore involve hierarchies of value: this good is higher and more important than that good, and not just for any single individual but more universally. Anthropological studies of political projects that headline freedom can be compared with each other to understand the content of freedom in each case. Such comparisons can show how each project is not only constructed as ethical but also how ethics forms the ontological grounds for activism (see also Lazar, Chapter 31 of this volume). Finally, we can study how the same national or global settings can spawn completely different kinds of political projects with very different normative purposes and ethical underpinnings. We can thus begin to ask, for instance, how the freedom of the freegans compares with the property- and capitalism-orientated freedom of the right-wing activists and how each attempts to shape the political space according to its notions of the good. This opens up studies of pluralist democracies in interesting ways.

Thinking with Freedom What does a focus on freedom add to our understanding of ethical endeavours when people do not use the term themselves? In ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, James Laidlaw argued that ‘there cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest . . . in freedom’ (2002: 311). We have already seen what Laidlaw understands by ethics: any way of answering the question, ‘how ought one to live?’ Ethics involves the capacity (even

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if intermittently exercised) for reflection – a stepping back from life as it is currently lived or organized – and the capacity (even if severely limited by circumstances) to imagine and work towards a better kind of life. The life one feels one ought to live may be a matter of self-cultivation to embody and enact a better, purer, or more perfect self in accordance with extant values and ideals. It may be a matter of working out and enacting alternatives to current arrangements that are found lacking in some crucial aspect, or deplorable (e.g. Dave 2012). Such attempts may be supported or not by wider society – but the point remains that the individual or groups of individuals concerned understand these alternatives as better. Note that the anthropologist does not have to agree with these projects. We have already seen how particular ethical imperatives lie at the heart of both freeganism and the F/OSS movement. Indeed, as both actively draw on the concept of freedom, it is not too far a stretch to think through what they mean by freedom and how particular notions of freedom underpin their efforts either to critique wasteful capitalism (in the case of the freegans) or to challenge the exclusivity of property rights in software creation and circulation (as in the case of the F/OSS geeks). Likewise, albeit in a very different way, we can see how the freedom of markets underpins the political activism of right-wing libertarians who conceive of themselves as autonomous individuals, but whose collective efforts are orientated towards societal changes that support the ‘free’ flourishing of said individuals. But what does freedom as an analytical concept add to our understanding of ethical projects when participants do not explicitly invoke freedom in their own accounts? Let us turn to the dilemma of the good Samaritan in contemporary China, where individuals who assist unrelated strangers are subjected to extortion attempts by the very person they have helped (Yan 2009). Thus, we hear of a young man, Chen, who helps an elderly woman who has been injured in a road accident. Having taken the woman to hospital and paid for her treatment, Chen is amazed when the woman demands compensation from him, arguing that he must have been responsible in some way for her accident; there would be no other reason for him to help her, a stranger. Yan traces twenty-six such incidents. My interest here is in his argument that people increasingly become scared and unwilling to help strangers, even if their ethical reasoning urges them to do so. When I was discussing this paper in a lecture on the anthropology of ethics, a Chinese student told me that increasingly young people who tend to hold more universalistic moral values (this is something Yan (2009: 20) also suggests) were using their mobile phones to document their attempts to help strangers by collecting video testimonies and contact details from passers-by to prove their non-involvement in the accident itself, leaving them able to assist victims without fear of extortion. In other words, they were exercising their ingenuity in order to secure the freedom to act towards suffering humans in what they felt

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were the right and good ways. Such ethicized motivations to help strangers were neither recognized by the victims they were helping nor by the state apparatus, but clearly motivated these good Samaritans who found ways to enact them. Let us turn to a very different case. Kathryn Paxton George (1994) describes how she became a vegetarian on feminist and animal-rights grounds. Having made this considered ethical choice about how she wanted to live, she was not, however, sure that her ten-year-old daughter should be raised as a vegetarian. George’s dilemma appears to be two-fold: (1) Will a vegetarian diet be nutritionally sufficient for her growing child? (2) If not, and she believes feminists should be vegetarian, should she as a feminist give her daughter meat? In her article, George critically examines the feminist argument for vegetarianism. Her exploration is wide-ranging: she draws on studies about nutritional needs for diverse demographics and analyses what she sees as the male bias in moral theory and thus the inequities inherent in valorizing vegetarianism as a moral ideal. The conflation of ethical vegetarianism with feminism, she argues, is problematic because it presupposes the nutritional needs of a young and healthy adult male and ignores those of females at various developmental stages, children, and the elderly. In other words, she questions the setting up as a moral ideal of a practice that works best for certain male bodies, and which disadvantages people who either cannot live up to the ideal or, if they do, find that it is damaging to them. George concludes that vegetarianism and feminism are not compatible. Thus, while she would continue to be a vegetarian (presumably on animal-rights grounds), she ‘could not restrict her daughter’s diet’ (1994: 417). I read this article as one where the author feels the need to put in a fair bit of work to free herself from imposing her own voluntarily claimed ethical imperative on her child for whose bodily development she feels responsible. She does so by questioning the very basis of feminist support of vegetarianism. While she retains her own freedom to make a positive choice for herself, she also frees herself sufficiently to refrain on ethical grounds from making it for her dependent child. What about the freedom to refuse something to ensure the long-term welfare of the self and another? In 2009–10, during fieldwork among Hindu consecration priests in Tamilnadu, India, I was talking to an elderly woman in a temple that was being re-consecrated. In the middle of our conversation, she called out to her daughter, who was busy with something, to bring her some water. Observing the crowd around the taps, I offered the elderly woman my own (reusable) bottle of water. She refused. I tried to press her to take it, saying that I had not put my lips to it and so it carried no saliva pollution (Tamil yecchal). She refused again, saying that if she, a non-Brahmin, drank from my bottle, then she would reap the sin of polluting me (a Brahmin), as I would go on to use the bottle later. We would both suffer. Nothing I could say, including that I did not subscribe to

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Brahmanical notions of purity, could shake her resolve. Her daughter also failed to convince her. She would rather go thirsty than drink from my bottle. I might not believe in caste, but that did not make the facts of caste less true. This incident bears analysis from two perspectives – the elderly woman’s and mine. Let us begin with hers. Ethically and morally, she is committed to upholding the rules of caste commensality. This is how she thinks she ought to live and, because these rules are generally seen as good and right in this rural part of Tamilnadu, she has the strength to insist that she, at least, will uphold them. My value system is egalitarian. I do not subscribe to caste rules that place Brahmins higher than non-Brahmins. Further, I believe that it is right and good to share water with a thirsty person. What the incident produced in me was a feeling of unfreedom, albeit not in Bauman’s sense. This feeling of unfreedom comes from the inability to exercise the product of one’s ethical reasoning in the social world which one shares with others. It is important to focus on such unfreedom because it reveals that ethical freedom is not a matter of individual will or autonomy – it is exercised in relation to others who might thwart the exercise of one’s ethically derived understandings, not out of malice, but simply because they hold to different truths. I want to put these three examples in conversations with ‘ordinary ethics’ approaches (Lambek 2010), which refuse to treat the ‘ethical’ as a separate domain of human life. Among the distinguishing features of ordinary ethics approaches is their focus on everyday interactions and language, and on the kinds of responsibility people take for each other. The goal is neither transcendence nor revolution; rather, it is to smoothen, to repair, and to make collective life liveable. Because freedom is often associated with transcendence, autonomy, or revolution, ordinary ethics approaches rarely draw on the concept to think with. However, choices about what one ought to do that is good and right for oneself or another – dependant, stranger, or acquaintance – run through social life. Thinking through these three very different cases through the lens of freedom and ethics allows us to see how, in completely different contexts, very different people come to understandings of how they ought to live their lives and find ways to exercise their freedom to act or not in certain ways. In George’s case, we see how worries about the right diet for one’s child may push an individual to question and reject the orthodoxy that couples feminism with vegetarianism. Ideas about shared humanity may guide the ways in which young Chinese people understand their responsibilities to suffering strangers and enact them, despite the risks of being financially stung. The elderly Tamil woman exercises her freedom to refuse my offer because she wants to protect herself and me. In all of these cases, individuals decide what the right course of action is and try and make it possible for themselves to follow it in their current lives as they lead them. This, of course, is well within the purview of ethics, but it is also within the

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purview of freedom because, in each case, the individuals involved could have acted in another way but consciously chose not to, despite their choice not being the easier one. In each case, also, people are able to justify their particular choices in terms of their felt responsibilities towards themselves, or towards others. These justifications are value-laden, and they are about the ways in which people exercise their freedom to take responsibility for the well-being of others. Even where ethics is ‘tacit’ and enacted in the midst of the hurly-burly of life and not a product of reflexive stepping back, I argue, a focus on freedom is not misplaced. Das (2012: 138) draws on Khare’s (1976) ethnography to discuss the difference between inviting poor relatives to a wedding in a manner that does the invitees honour (‘please come and partake of the feast’) compared to one that dishonours them (‘please come – you too partake of the feast’). The rich relative is obligated to invite all kin; how he or she does it is a matter of ethical choice. A badly worded invitation reveals his/her evaluation of the poor relative and, because he/ she was free to make the invitation in a nicer way, is evaluated in turn. Not quite championing ordinary ethics approaches, but also interested in what he calls ‘the rough ground of the everyday’ in which people make their lives in Basra, Iraq, Al-Mohammad (2015) also locates the ethical in acts of care. We hear of Abu Hibba who, though not wealthy, secretly pays the rent of a cook in a restaurant he frequents to help the cook avoid eviction. Abu Hibba’s reason for his generosity is explicit: ‘these people we’ve grown-up and lived with, we have to try to take care of each other as much as we can’ (Al-Mohammad 2015: S112). Abu Hibba couches his generosity as an imperative, but it is a reasoned ethical choice, one that he makes in discussion with his wife and children. Further, while Al-Mohammad does not discuss Abu Hibba’s reasons for his secrecy, again I read this as an ethical choice that seeks to ensure that the cook does not feel under obligation to him. Ordinary ethics, then, ceases to be quite so tacit and unmarked (Lempert 2013), albeit still geared towards making life liveable, bearable, or pleasant even in difficult situations or within asymmetrical relations. It involves the exercise of reflection, evaluations of need, and the extension of care. Importantly, freedom as an analytical concept remains useful because there is no script in terms of how we should act ethically towards others (Keane 2016). Drawing on freedom (and its flip side of unfreedom) as a conceptual lens to think through these very different cases enables both comparison and analyses that go beyond a notion of the atomized individual, locating the individual in responsible and meaningful relations with others without losing sight of people as individuals.

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Conclusion For various reasons, anthropologists have neglected freedom as an object of study. One of these is the common understanding of freedom as pertaining to individual autonomy. Another is the assumption that the concept of freedom is implicated in desires for transcendence or radical change. As I have discussed, neither has to be the case. Further, the prevalence of freedom or freedom-like concepts in different ethnographic settings means that it is imperative that anthropologists engage with this concept – its contents, valences, and relationship to other key concepts such as duty, obligation, and morality. Freedom as a substantive topic of anthropological attention does not require special pleading when it appears as an emic concept. Mobilizing freedom as an analytical concept appears to require some justification. Freedom enters the picture in ethical life in two ways: firstly, in Malinowski’s sense of the freedom to form purposes in terms of the larger invitations and injunctions about a good life that exist in wider social groupings of which the individual is part; secondly, in terms of the freedom to enact such purposes given prevailing norms and practices. In both cases, freedom can only be understood in relational terms, even where the ideatypical free person might be locally understood as an autonomous individual. This is because the ideal of the autonomous individual, whether the renouncer of Hinduism, the hermit of Christianity, or the self-owning libertarian, arises always within specific social settings and requires institutional or interpersonal support to be accepted and enacted. The purposes can be considered ethical when, in Keane’s (2016) terms, they are ‘oriented toward historically specific visions of human flourishing – of what a life should and could be, something that is less constraining than enabling, not abstract but embodied and concrete’. This places the anthropology of ethics and freedom firmly within the purview of care. Such care may be for the self but, as I have sought to show, it can extend beyond the self to care for others (strangers, kith, or kin), for institutions such as markets, or for things such as the creation and continued circulation of F/OSS and access to edible and other useful waste. When people feel unable to realize their purposes, they can feel unfree. This may lead them to find ways to enact these purposes; by recourse to technology, as in the case of the Chinese good Samaritans, by breaking the link between feminism and vegetarianism, by organizing themselves via the creation and use of legal tools as in the case of F/OSS enthusiasts, or, as in the case of the right-wing libertarians, by attempting to shift the entire political direction towards their ideals. In other words, people have to work at creating the conditions to form, articulate, and enact their purposes. Such work can involve pedagogy, persuasion, and sacrifices, for example when freegans sacrifice their physical freedom in pursuit of their avowed ethical (albeit in some places, illegal) purpose of extracting useful waste.

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In her discussion of Held’s (2006) care ethics, Friedman (2008: 548) argues that ‘care is a substantial moral concern of moral agents in practice. Care ethics has the particular strength of developing a plausible account of how moral agents immersed in daily practice go about understanding their situations and determining what to do’. While Held’s focus is to develop a feminist ethics of care that is focussed on emotional and other forms of responsibility towards dependent others (also see Mattingly and McKearney, Chapter 22 of this volume), this way of thinking about care and ethics lends itself both to socio-political and interpersonal ethical projects of the kind I have been discussing, with the addition of freedom in the analytical mix. Even where there is no clear formulation of purposes but rather a ‘thrownin-ness’, because care is ongoing and does not accede in practice to some formulaic understanding, caring does involve choices that can be evaluated and can require the kinds of justification that frees people to do what they feel is right or good for a particular other or in more universal terms, albeit always located in particular settings. Mattingly’s (2014) description of a mother who has to free herself from her fears in order to let her disabled son play soccer can then be placed alongside a neophyte freegan who knows that it is right to take edible food from a skip and has to free herself from her fears of arrest or inadvertent harm to do so. While the mother is thrown into the situation of caring for a disabled child, the freegan has chosen her ethical purpose. Neither is fully supported by wider society and there is no fixed template to follow. Everyone has to work out what is right for the object of care and free themselves to act accordingly, either individually over time or by finding like-minded others. To conclude, it is clear that freedom is central to an anthropology of ethics both as an emic and an etic concept. If, as Mattingly and McKearney argue in this volume (Chapter 22), ‘care is not merely one ethical concern or good, among others, but the ontological ground of ethics’, then freedom has also to be core to discussions of care, not necessarily headlined but as a thread that runs through the ways in which people work out and strive to lead good lives or, at the very least, do right by themselves and others. For the anthropologist, this has the advantage of freeing freedom from its associations with autonomous individualism and also from an overemphasis on resistance.

Acknowledgements My thanks to the right-wing activists, who generously gave me their time and thoughts. My thanks also to James Laidlaw and to the reviewers, who helped me wrestle with this massive subject. All errors and infelicities, of course, remain my responsibility.

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Keshavjee, Salmaan. 2014. Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health. Oakland: University of California Press. Khare, R. S. 1976. The Hindu Hearth and Home. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2000. ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4): 617–34. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 8: 311–32. 2005. ‘A Life Worth Leaving: Fasting to Death as Telos of a Jain Religious Life’. Economy and Society, 34: 178–99. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 1–36. Lempert, Michael. 2013. ‘No Ordinary Ethics’. Anthropological Theory, 13(4): 370–93. Lotman, Aliine. 2013.‘Dumpster Diving’. Material World. www.material worldblog.com/2013/01/dumpster-diving. Lovett, Frank. 2018. ‘Republicanism’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (summer edition). https://plato.stanford.edu /archives/sum2018/entries/republicanism. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’. Cultural Anthropology, 16(2): 202–36. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1947. Freedom and Civilization. London: George Allen and Unwin. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1932 [1859]. On Liberty. London: Everyman’s Library. More´, Victoria C. 2011. ‘Dumpster Dinners: An Ethnographic Study of Freeganism’. The Journal of Undergraduate Ethnography, 1: 43–55. Nahmias, Eddy, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner. 2005. ‘Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility’. Philosophical Psychology, 18(5): 561–84. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2018. ‘Incidental Connections: Freedom and Urban Life in Mongolia’, in James Laidlaw, Barbara Bodenhorn, and Martin Holbraad (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject: Freedom, Creativity and Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 115–30. Raymond, Eric S. 2001. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

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Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72(3): 293–314. Shantz, Jeff. n.d. ‘One Person’s Garbage . . . Another Person’s Treasure: Dumpster Diving, Freeganism and Anarchy’. https://citeseerx.ist.psu .edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.603.1451. Srivastava, Vinay Kumar. 1993. ‘Malinowski and a Reading of His “Freedom and Civilization”’. Dialectical Anthropology, 18(2): 177–204. Stasch, Rupert. 2008. ‘Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology’. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(2): 443–53. Strathern, Marilyn. 1985. ‘Discovering “Social Control”’. Journal of Law and Society, 12(2): 111–34. Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2013. ‘From Stone Statue to God and Back Again’, in Penny Harvey et al. (eds.), Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion. London: Routledge: 72–81. 2014. ‘Auto-Relations: Doing Cosmology and Transforming the Self the Saiva Way’, in A. Abramson and M. Holbraad (eds.), Cosmologies: Making Contemporary Worlds. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 129–58. 2016. ‘Giving and Taking without Reciprocity: Conversations in South India and the Anthropology of Ethics’. Social Analysis, 64(2): 36–56. 2020. ‘Afterword: Putting Together the Anthropology of Tax and the Anthropology of Ethics’. Special Issue, ‘Tax Beyond the Social Contract’, eds. Nicolette Makovicky and Robin Smith.’. Social Analysis.64(2): 141–154. Wardle, Huan and Moses Lino e Silva. 2017. ‘Testing Freedom: Ontological Considerations’. Etnofoor, 29(1): 11–27. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Collins. Woodburn, James. 1982. ‘Egalitarian Societies’. Man (NS), 17(2): 431–51. Yan, Yunxiang. 2009. ‘The Good Samaritan’s New Trouble: A Study of the Changing Moral Landscape in Contemporary China’. Social Anthropology, 17(1): 9–24.

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11 Responsibility Catherine Trundle

Introduction Calls to ‘be responsible’ summon us to action, to attention. They render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims, on others, and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to live within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to live up to the ethical dilemmas that emerge from the sociality of life, be they in families, friendships, communities and nation states, or in relation to non-human worlds. Enactments and assertions of responsibility are thus central to our everyday ethical and moral life-worlds. As anthropological research on ethics has amply revealed, in diverse ethnographic contexts ‘high order principles, virtues, and norms are always already relational. They get mobilized only when people start to figure their responsibility, and hence their proper conduct, in concrete circumstances’ (Brodwin 2013: 17; see also Gluckman 1972; Douglas 1980; Mattingly 2014; Laidlaw 2014). Yet responsibility has rarely been the central focus of the anthropology of ethics. This chapter seeks to critically foreground the ways in which anthropologists have explored practices of responsibility, to spotlight responsibility’s diverse ethnographic hues, so that we might develop a sharper use of this idea as an anthropological concept and better understand the distinct ethnographic ways that ideas and practices of responsibility shape the worlds we study. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility can hinge upon diverse assertions and enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remain no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these aspects of the phenomena; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. Much prior theorizing of responsibility, from a legal

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and philosophical standpoint in particular, has sought to fix the meaning of responsibility in ways that enable us to define universally, in precise and immutable terms, which agents are truly responsible, and for which specific acts, objects, relations, and realities they bear accountability (e.g. Eshleman 2014; Meloni 2007; Tadros 2007). Yet as anthropologists show, how we come to be responsible, claim responsibility, and demand responsibility reflects a diverse array of social, cultural, linguistic, and political practices. After explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter shifts to explore how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life. An anthropology of ethics offers us a rich vantage point from which to explore responsibility. While the ability to think, act, speak, plan, interact, and imagine according to notions of the good life is culturally universal (Mattingly 2014: 11; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2015; Keane 2015; Faubion 2011), ideas about what constitutes a good life, and the right way to achieve it, vary widely. As Laidlaw points out, It is important not to confuse the claim that the ethical dimension is pervasive in human life with the quite different question of how often people meet or disappoint their own or anyone else’s expectations or hopes. The claim on which the anthropology of ethics rests is not an evaluative claim that people are good: it is a descriptive claim that they are evaluative. (2014: 3)

The Origins and Language of Responsibility According to Bernard Williams (1993 [2008]), in all conceptions of responsibility four dimensions are present: ‘cause, intention, state and response’. Yet he makes clear that ‘there is not, and there never could be, just one appropriate way of adjusting these elements to one another’ (55). Indeed, the very notion of a cause, the cultural conception of what constitutes an intention and whether it is even a moral consideration, and the effects and the responses that ensue or do not ensue, are so varied that such a typology struggles to hold across time and space. As this chapter makes clear, we continually butt up against the conceptual confines of language in discussing responsibility. The English word ‘responsibility’, as Christopher Kelty points out, is a concept that emerged in the late eighteenth century to draw together concerns around two moral ideas: agency and answerability. The increased use of the word ‘responsibility’ in subsequent decades reflected shifting conventions and conversations in society, politics, law, religion, and

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philosophy around ‘issues of causes and consequences (imputation) on the one hand, and on the other, intention, effects and understanding (accountability)’ (2008: 2). And ‘while the former signifies a controversy concerning the nature of free will, determinism, necessity, and the definition of human nature, the later signifies a controversy concerning punishment, justice, obligation and duty’ (2008: 4; see also Lacey 2016). Kelty points out that this concept was never a neutral or natural descriptor of the world but rather a culturally imbued set of claims, a framework for action that reflected the social challenges of the historical period in which it emerged (cf. Hage and Eckersley 2012). Responsibility thus appeared in the English language as a morally freighted concept at a moment when new ethical ideas and problems were surfacing, new ideas concerning justice and natural law, citizenship and human rights, governance, the power and limits of leaders and the state, universal suffrage, individual liberty, freedom, rationality, and new political and civic institutions. As Richard McKeon shows, responsibility emerges as a politically potent idea, working according to two symbiotic logics: the individual and the state mutually constitute each other’s responsibilities in ways that ensure the just workings of modern society. ‘A man is responsible under law if he is not subject to arbitrary charge or enforcement; officials are responsible to rulers or to citizens, and a citizen is responsible if he possesses the political means of influencing the politics of government’ (McKeon 1990: 81). Such a logic gradually shifted to extend suffrage, and in the process to transform the logic of responsibility further. While at first only certain groups of people were deemed ready and innately responsible enough to drive the political process (men, property owners), slowly this idea was reversed, and ‘responsible governments depended on a responsible people, but a people acquired responsibility only by exercising it’ (1990: 81). In contrast to authoritarian norms of moral action, ‘free choice’, the competition of ideas, and notions of freedom, became the ideal bedrock upon which a people are able fully to exercise political responsibility. Today, this ideal of responsibility does not simply underpin democracy but also determines it limits. Depending on context, democratic responsibility is still earned by reaching the culturally prescribed age of adulthood. And in many contexts it can be lost, when a person is convicted of a crime. The ‘will of the people’ also can remain conditional when it butts up against the checks and balances of constitutions, human rights doctrines, or rules of law. Parallel to these political shifts were cultural and psychological transformations in the idea of self-responsibility. The philosopher Charles Taylor (2001 [1989]) charts the rise of a new reflexive mode of being, a form of radical objectivity through ‘disengagement’, by which a new subjectivity of the individual self was constituted. While modes of introspection can be traced back much longer, exemplified, for example, in the traditions of Plato and Augustine, in the modern ‘turn inward’ (as

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emergent in the writings of Descartes and later Locke) the self becomes the moral locus of agency, and reflexivity a new method of self-control, freedom, and rationality. ‘It calls on me to be aware of my activity of thinking or my processes of habituation, so as to disengage from them and objectify them’ (Taylor 2001 [1989]: 175), and in the process to develop a new first-person stance towards ethical life. Such a stance links self-exploration with self-control and dignity as the basic of a new individualized identity, and the locus of agency. Corresponding to this shift, Taylor notes shifting religious doctrines and practices in Christian Europe from the time of the Reformation. Human salvation and godliness had been connected to sacred spaces, the expertise of religious and monastic specialists, and the hierarchies of the Church; the relationship between God and humans was a mediated relationship. Slowly this gave way to a more direct, personal, lay, and profane understanding that religious salvation and a good life could occur in ordinary spheres, in the sites of family, labour, and marriage. Ordinary people could practise a private and direct relationship with God, and consequently could cultivate their own morality accordingly. ‘What was needed was personal discipline first, individuals capable of controlling themselves and taking responsibility for their lives; and then a social order based on such people’ (Taylor 2001 [1989]: 229). Such examples risk simplifying the competing and complex crosscurrents of responsibility that have developed historically. And such accounts do not mean that Anglo societies before the eighteenth century, or indeed societies outside of the Anglo world, have not conceptually contended with ideas of accountability and imputation before these wider societal shifts. All societies have ways of holding people to account and assigning agency to them (see, e.g. Gluckman 1972; Douglas 1980). Rather, as Kelty shows, the particular way in which accountability and imputation became fused into the English-language notion of responsibility was culturally and historically emergent. Indeed, even within Anglo settings, what responsibility means, and the practices carried out in its name, are diverse. As an analytical category, the English word ‘responsibility’ does not ethnographically map the breadth of ethical categories we might hope to describe. Rosalind Shaw’s (2017) research on post-war systems of justice in Sierra Leone exemplifies this point. Her research explores how, within Truth and Reconciliation Commission events, ex-combatants were expected to demonstrate the virtue of responsibility for repairing the social fabric in the wake of war, in contrast to prior morally transgressive behaviour. These narratives of ‘subsumed agency’, as Shaw labelled them, constituted excombatants as moral persons able to be reintegrated into society. Rather than have their personal stories of involvement in the civil war interrogated for truth or guilt, ex-combatants had to exemplify responsibility in the form of a ‘cool/settled heart’ (kol at or ka-buth ke-thofel), no longer ‘warm’ or enflamed by the influence of past commanders (2017: 164). Such narratives

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were not ‘signs of responsibility’s absence, but rather of its presence in a register different from that of discursive verbal narration. Instead of being a product of telling the truth, responsibility emerges as a set of dispositions embodied in present actions, self, control, humility . . . and a cool heart – through which moral personhood is manifest’ (Shaw 2017: 166). In a very different form, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski (2017) explores the creation of new forms of sociality, care, and citizenship during older age in post-socialist Poland. By examining participation in University of the Third Age classes, she tracks the emergence of a new constellation of moral values in an increasingly neoliberal sphere, in which a liberalized market took on roles previously performed or controlled by the state. Being a responsible older person involved avoiding isolation and passivity by seeking kolez˙en´stow (collegiality, friendship, camaraderie) alongside aktywnos´c´ (activeness). Here, responsibility cannot be separated from ideas of care, both of the self and others. Robbins-Ruszkowski’s and Shaw’s careful ethnographic and linguistic unpacking of what we might call responsibility both exemplify the necessary readiness within an anthropology of ethics to seek local idioms of seemingly self-evident Anglo categorizes of moral life and personhood, and in the process to question the assumption that we can hold a conceptually consistent idea of responsibility.

Responsibility, Agency, Freedom, and Constraint A focus on responsibility, for some anthropologists, is to concern ourselves with the human capacity to express or subsume agency. Such conundrums are inherently relational. Barry Barnes thus argues that human agency stems from the fact that we live within a ‘system of social institutions and social relationships wherein individual persons are accountable to others for what they do and what is done on their authority . . . to be responsible for a decision or an action is to be answerable and accountable in relation to it, liable to praise and blame for it, obliged to respond to claims ensuing from it’ (2000: 6). As an analytical category, then, responsibility allows anthropology to explore from a new angle some of the foundational debates of our discipline concerning relationality and personhood, structure and agency, and freedom and constraint. As an ethnographic category, when responsibility gets invoked, diverse constellations and understandings of agency, freedom, intention, or action emerge. In understanding agency through the lens of responsibility, James Laidlaw (2014) sets out to overcome the limitations of two prominent approaches to agency within anthropology. One, associated with Sherry Ortner and practice theory, fixes agency within the interiority of an actor and links it to intentionality, power, resistance, and purpose. Such an approach is a commonplace understanding within Anglo settings. The

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other, more counter-intuitive to Anglo common sense and associated with Latour and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), ties agency to causality, assigning agency to both human and non-human things that have effects within chains of causation and which shape the flow of events. As Laidlaw shows, while a practice-based approach based on intentionality narrows agency to the realm of individual subjectivity (to ideas of authentic self-expression, consciousness, and empowerment), an ANT approach is ethically flat. It obscures from view the human ability to reflect, judge, and make sense of actions and events; in other words, the human capacity to assign responsibility. Laidlaw points out that ‘our routine, everyday interaction is shot through with, and its course pervasively effected by, our ongoing judgments about whose presence or absence, whose actions or omissions, whose words or silences, have contributed in which ways to things turning out as they are doing, and by our assigning responsibility accordingly’ (2014: 146). Responsibility framed this way requires us, as Peter Strawson argued, to foreground the ‘non-detached attitudes and reactions of people directly involved in transactions with each other; of the attitudes and reactions of offended parties and beneficiaries; of such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love and hurt feelings’ (1993: 48). Our judgements as to whether someone should be held or made responsible, he argues, thus hinge on our reactive, emotionally layered assessments of their intentions and attitudes, not just the outcome and effects of their actions upon us. Other scholars also emphasize responsibility as an ethical mode of agency hinged to notions of freedom. Andrew Walsh points out, building on Fischer and Ravizza’s conception of ‘the freedom to do otherwise’ (1993), that ‘to be responsible for an act . . . one must have the option not to do it – that is, “the freedom to do otherwise”’ (Walsh 2002: 453). As Walsh demonstrates in relation to taboos in the Anakarna region of Madagascar, ‘that people are responsible or accountable to others and/or for their behavior is indicated by the fact not that they behave in certain ways but that they behave in certain ways when they might behave in others’ (Walsh 2002: 453). This freedom – the possibility of failure or noncompliance – is indeed at the heart of some assertions of responsibility, but it is always culturally coded, and often unevenly ascribed or assumed. While it is universal, as Mattingly claims, that people build towards good lives that work ‘with the odds but also in important ways, against them’ and where ‘the possible is pitted against the predictable’ (2014: 16), as Soumhya Venkatesan argues in her chapter on freedom in this volume (Chapter 10), freedom is not always synonymous with resistance. Freedom, she points out, can entail not only the possibility to act otherwise and against the grain but also the ability to not act at all, or to act in accordance with norms (see also Mahmood 2006). Walsh’s conception of freedom thus

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narrows responsibility to a particular conception of agency unbound from the constraints and power of others. And yet such assumptions about freedom can be central to public accounts of responsibility. Lionel Wee introduced the idea of intentionality and choice alongside freedom in his linguistic analysis of the ascription of responsibility to hunger strikers in Britain, Turkey, and Ireland. While hunger strikers and public commentators commonly assign intention to the hunger strikers, the notion of choice is central to whether they will be held responsible for the consequences of such actions and intentions. In such politically fraught settings, such claims of choice and its lack are asserted, contested, or denied by each side, and the struggle to win popular support for the causes at stake often depends upon the ability to assert virtuous intentions while also controlling the narratives around freedom and its lack. Because the hunger striker presents himself or herself as an actor who has no other choice but to embark on the strike, there is an implicature [sic.] that the actor has been forced into this course of action by the other, more powerful side of the ideological battle. Thus right from the beginning of the strike, the actor, though acting intentionally, is doing so with little or no choice at all. Precisely because of this, the actor cannot be held responsible for the outcome of the action. (Wee 2007: 70) In these cases, intentionality matters, but it can be distinguished from choice and freedom in the attribution of responsibility. Yet in other contexts intentionality and freedom can be downplayed in the social distribution of responsibility. In exploring the linguistic dimensions of the Samoan fono (formal meeting), Alessandro Duranti (2015) explores how individual intentions are not always central in the judgement and imputation of responsibility. Instead, the effects and consequences of what is said, regardless of the speaker’s intention, are key to the allocation of responsibility. ‘Samoans have strong feelings about responsibility and obligations. Individuals and groups may be criticized, punished, or expelled from a community for not having matched the expectations associated with their positional role in society, but they will not be forced to explain themselves in terms of their motivations or intentions’ (2015: 45). Duranti thus argues that he observed in institutional linguistic practices a ‘discursive dispreference for introspection’ in ways that seek to uncover ‘individual-specific psychological explanations of past behaviors’ (2015: 68). Even in English-speaking contexts where intentions are foregrounded in attributions of responsibility, understandings of intentions in moral evaluations of others’ actions are often inconsistent. Psychological studies reveal how the study subjects (often Western college students) judge a person’s intentions less by any internal qualities of the actors themselves

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and more based on whether they evaluated the behaviour itself as morally good or bad. Moreover, how subjects attribute blame to others depends in part on their relationships with them, and they tended to assign less blame to those whom they were close with, or whose views aligned with their own. In other words, ‘people may arrive at different attributions [of responsibility] depending on whether the agent is a beloved partner, a bitter enemy, or a complete stranger’ (Knobe and Doris 2010: 345). Just as anthropology tracks the diverse cultural ideals of attribution, agency, and intentionality, the discipline has also contended with its own politics and ethics of responsibility. How we theorize and represent communities to wider public and political audiences, how we understand, assign, or deny agency, blame, freedom, and choice in our theories of social life, have their own social consequences. Ethnographic discussions of agency and responsibility commonly attempt to show how a group may act in ways that appear irresponsible to an outsider observer, but which are in fact otherwise. The anthropologist thus sees their role here to argue against the wider moral condemnation of the people described, to counter any guilt and blame that is assigned to them by others. Instead, the anthropologist seeks to uncover a localized mode of responsibility that is not easily recognized within the outsider’s own cultural and moral frames, and/or show that their acts may stem from a restriction of agency and thus demonstrate a limit to culpability. In her famous ethnography Death without Weeping (1989), Nancy ScheperHughes defends the seemingly callous indifference of north Brazilian women living in poverty, women who do not openly grieve the deaths of their infants, and indeed sometimes appear fatally to neglect sick infants. She explains their fatalistic attitudes to death as a coping mechanism reflective of the structural violence of poverty, over which they have little control, as cultural practices that ‘defend women against the ravages of grief’ (Scheper-Hughes 1989: 430; see also Castle 1994: 314), and as a strategy to divest emotionally from children unlikely to survive in a resource-deprived community suffering from high infant mortality rates. Such an account describes their behaviours as an adaptive strategy. It reveals them to act responsibly, by which she means rationally, in nonobvious ways – how they channel resources towards those children likely to survive, to continue mothering those who need care in the face of terrible loss – while also casting the women as victims of forms of structural violence and thus (for Scheper-Hughes) not responsible for their children’s deaths. Part of the assumed responsibility of anthropological and ethnographic research and writing has often involved this delicate balance: of casting responsibility in a particular light to grant certain (usually socially marginalized) people freedom and moral agency for their strategies of survival or thriving, but to deny them blame for the suffering that emerges from the powerful political-economic systems shaping their actions. Anthropologists have thus worked to tell stories that refuse to render people passive, but

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which shine a light on injustice and inequality and which critique liberal discourses of personal responsibility or the irresponsible poor. One powerful such critique has centred on contemporary discourses of responsibilization.

Self-Reliant Subjects and Responsibilization Responsibilization refers to a form of governmentality emergent out of Western liberal democracies from the late 1970s, but which scholars argue is now ideologically embedded within a plethora of global and state level institutions. Ideas of responsibilization hold that individual freedom and flourishing is tied to autonomous self-reliance on the part of actors who can assume responsibility for their own welfare, well-being, and circumstances. Responsibilization denotes a particular stance by the state in which citizens are ‘empowered’ towards self-management and self-care. Ideologies of responsibilization are often accompanied by policies in which the social safety nets of welfare, health, pensions, and poverty alleviation programmes, built up after World War II, are increasingly withdrawn, privatized, or transformed. Policies thus aim to discourage dependency and encourage private enterprise and self-reliance. State services, increasingly outsourced by the state to third parties, have been in many Western nations incentivized towards a set of moral values that encourage individual accountability and an active, entrepreneurial attitude towards one’s future and achievements, and which stress the need for individuals to self-manage and take responsibility for the risks they might encounter. Ideas of responsibilization were central to the neoliberal economical political ideologies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and subsequent governments on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The promise of responsibilization was neatly encapsulated in Reagan’s pitch for election in 1980: ‘Vote for me if you believe in yourself, if you believe in your right to control your own destiny and plan your own life’ (PBS 2019). In a similar vein, Thatcher believed that economic dynamism and prosperity, as well as community compassion, depended on recovering or renewing recently neglected forms of responsibility. In an interview in 1987 in which she criticized welfare dependency in Britain, she cautioned against the dangers of the state, under the guise of ‘society’, always being held responsible for social ills and their remedies. It went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society, there is a living tapestry of men and women and the beauty of that tapestry, and the quality of our lives, will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and to turn round and help, by our own efforts, those who are unfortunate. (Quoted in Wintour 2013)

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As Nikolas Rose (1996) notes, the ‘death of the social’ did not signify a simple shift from collective to individual responsibility, but rather the constitution of new collectives that could shoulder responsibilities for the well-being of citizens once assumed by the state. These collectives took the form of new ‘communities’, which today include family, neighbourhood, school, workplace, church, ethnic community, nongovernmental organization, and charity. This shift was not simply directed by the state but also demanded from the ground up, as exemplified in the 1970s and 1980s during the deinstitutionalization of residential care facilities for ‘the unfit’, ‘the infirm’, and ‘the delinquent’ in many countries. Here, disability rights movements, mental health social movements, and youth justice reform movements all sought greater autonomy from the institutional confinements, and at times abuses, of the state (e.g. MacKinnon and Coleborne 2003). The moral trope of responsibilization is evident in Linda Liebenberg, Michael Ungar, and Janice Ikeda’s examination of child welfare, adolescent mental health, and juvenile justice service providers in Canada (2015). They found a ‘systematic discourse of youth responsibility’ (1011) within case-note files in which the onus for change and improvement was placed on clients and their families. When clients’ situations, behaviours, or health did not improve, case workers commonly blamed clients for a lack of effort, willingness, compliance, engagement, or commitment. Indeed, it was commonplace for caseworkers to conclude that youths’ lives were not improving because they were refusing to ‘take responsibility’ for their lives and actions and to work towards their own betterment. The authors thus argue that such case notes ignored what they saw as salient forces in young people’s lives: the wider social pressures, structural inequalities, and hardships that young people and their families faced. Such bureaucratic objects located responsibility for the risks that youths encounter in their own agency, as well as with parents for their lack of parenting skills. In a similar vein, Natai Valdez (2018) argues, in a discussion of epigenetic health research, how the ‘environment’ that epigenetics imagines to interact with genetic processes is highly circumscribed. In prenatal health interventions scientists produce a type of reproductive responsibility by limiting responsibility to the realm of the maternal environment, that of the individual ‘choices’ of the mother regarding diet, exercise, and weight, as well as the home and neighbourhood of the mother. Environmental factors that are harder to quantify and follow, such as racism, stress, violence, class, and pollution, tended not to feature in such models. Thus, Valdez argues that a ‘hyper focus on maternal environments justifies targeting women’s bodies and behaviors for intervention as if they were the only environments responsible for the adverse health outcomes in future generations’ (2018: 428). Such arguments, therefore, are attempts to recast responsibility by visualizing a constellation of wider forces that

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shape human behaviour by constituting ‘the environment’ as a new agentive object. While these studies may appear at first sight as perfect examples of a neoliberal ethos of responsibilization, Liebenberg et al. and Valdez reveal the ways in which responsibility is both individualized and rendered relational in the same moment. They illustrate how calls for responsibility can reflect the values of autonomy alongside obligation and interdependence. In both examples, they argue that discourses of responsibilization focus upon the actions and consequences of individuals in ways that elide the wider influences of environmental and social forces. Yet both child welfare and maternal epigenetics are examples of programmes that focus upon the ‘social good’ and are underpinned by ideas of social well-being and welfare. And as their studies reveal, the care work and shared responsibility within kin networks are crucial to the creation of healthy, autonomous, self-managing individuals (see also Trnka 2017). Moreover, epigenetic healthcare and at-risk youth services are domains within which debates about the ongoing and mutual responsibilities of the state and citizens to protect each other play out, in the form of monitoring and health policy. Such ethnographic cases illustrate the ‘competing responsibilities’ at play in contemporary life. As Susanna Trnka and I have argued elsewhere (Trnka and Trundle 2017), responsibilization discourses are indeed powerful features of modern forms of governmentality, but to cast them as the overarching way in which we have come to understand responsibility is to simplify the diverse meanings and practices associated with an ethics of responsibility in both statecraft and everyday life-worlds. We argue that responsibilization is but one of many projects of self-cultivation that exist today, or have existed historically (see Foucault 2000) and, moreover, that such projects of the self crosscut, intersect, and compete with two other prominent and relational modes of responsibility: those that are underpinned by an ethics of care for the Other, and those that rely upon the mutual dependencies and obligations that exist within social contract ideologies. Such an approach thus pushes us to shift beyond a simplistic version of neoliberal responsibilization as simply the withdrawal of the state and the abandonment of the individual, in ways that can account for the varied claims to responsibilities that exist. Put simply, despite the pervasive and diverse deployments of neoliberal rhetoric of responsibilisation, in everyday practice responsibility – including selfresponsibility – entails a much broader range of meanings. The autonomous, responsibilized subject idealized by advanced liberal theory is in fact enmeshed in a variety of interdependencies within their families to the schools and workplaces, to the environment, to the state, or to global communities. (Trnka and Trundle 2017: 3)

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Reflexivity and Responsibility At the heart of an anthropological approach to ethics is an attention to reflexive process. It is through mundane processes of reflection and practice that people ‘discern their own commitment to collective ideals’ (Brodwin 2013: 11). For Mattingly, reflection is central to her notion of ‘moral laboratories’, those ‘spaces of possibility, ones that create experiences that are also experiments in how life might or should be lived. Each experiment holds its perils. Each provokes moments of critique, especially self-critique’ (2014: 15). In centring reflection, the anthropology of ethics has drawn on Michel Foucault (2000) to explore how the self is actively fashioned into an ethical project. Foucault explores this theme both in antiquity and in the modern era. For example, classical thinkers wrote on the reflective process, a set of ‘technologies of the self’ or a mode of ‘care of the self’, which constituted the ideal ethical subject. These were subjects who ‘effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (1988: 18). In taking a Foucauldian approach, the anthropologist Paul Brodwin (2013) describes how mental health psychiatrists and social workers in the USA grapple with the question of how they should best bear responsibility for the vulnerable members of society they serve. Brodwin shows how even when experiencing a high sense of futility and constraint, such workers cultivated an everyday ethics of decision-making within community psychiatry. As Brodwin reveals, through ongoing reflection each worker chooses ‘a moral goal and then moves towards it through practices of self cultivation: a matter of monitoring, improvising, and transforming oneself’ (Brodwin 2013: 20). One scholar to place reflection at the heart of responsibility is Hannah Arendt (2003). Arendt writes about personal and collective responsibility under totalitarianism and dictatorship. In the aftermath of Nazi genocide, she asks: how much can individuals and whole populations be held responsible for the murderous actions of the Third Reich? In answer Arendt proposes an idea of responsibility that shifts us away from universal normative codes. She makes a distinction between ‘Knowing and thinking, truth and meaning’ (Arendt 2003: 167–8). While the thirst for knowledge can be ongoing, she argues that the desire to know certain things can reach its goal. Knowledge can be stored, it leaves traces of itself, it can be settled and codified. People can accrue and acquire knowledge, and some can even acquire more knowledge of a particular topic than others. Thinking by contrast, is a capacity all humans share, regardless of education, class, or social opportunities. Thinking is deeply reflexive in that ‘if Kant is right and the faculty of thought has a “natural aversion”

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against accepting its own results as “solid axioms”, then we cannot expect any moral propositions or commandments, no final code of conduct from the thinking activity, least of all a new and now allegedly final definition of what is good and what is evil’ (Arendt 2003: 167). For Arendt, thinking is an iterative process upon which ethical life depends. ‘The need to think can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts which I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I can think them anew’ (Arendt 2003: 163). In trying to understand what divided those in German society who accepted Hitler’s persecution of Jews and other minority groups and those who did not, Arendt argues that an ability to engage in reflexive conversation with the self was key. ‘The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself . . . that is, to be engaged in a silent dialogue between me and myself, which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking’. She explains: The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences. In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during Hitler’s regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. More reliable will be the doubters and the sceptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting is wholesome, but because they are used to examine and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves. (Arendt 2003: 45) Arendt helps us to view ethics as a recursive mode of critical practice, rather than a set of steady rules or an established system of knowledge. And by privileging reflexivity, she comes close to the approach taken by anthropologists who seek to understand the contemplative, dialogical dilemmas and decisions that people face in concrete situations. Arendt argues that responsibility emerged when people reflected upon the ways that certain acts would redefine a person’s understanding of self. ‘They asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds . . . they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command, “thou shall not kill” but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer – themselves’ (Arendt 2003: 44). Yet Arendt’s proposition still leaves us with some stubborn universals. It treats thinking as an inherent good, ignoring how deep thinking can be

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put to a range of ends, including dubious, harmful ones – the way in which complex thought and reflection is undertaken to justify a wide range of behaviours, not simply the heroic. It also privileges the more elitist domain of isolated thought over the messy praxis of everyday life and decision-making. Moreover, Arendt does not solve the problem or how one decides what actions and deeds it is possible to live with. Charles Taylor (1989) offers one framework for acknowledging the relational situatedness of ethical reflection. For Taylor, identity is ‘a kind of orientation. To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary’ (Taylor 1989: 28). While many social scientists frame questions of identity in relation to membership of particular communities, Taylor argues that a key aspect of identity concerns the cultivation of an ethical point of view. It is an understanding of what is of crucial importance to us. To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand. (Taylor 1989: 27) And while Taylor’s argument appears to mirror Arendt when he states that ‘to be able to answer for oneself is to know where one stands’ (Taylor 1989: 29), he also contends that ‘one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation to those conversation partners who were essential to my achieving selfdefinition . . .. A self exists only within what I call “webs of interlocution”’ (Taylor 1989: 36). Taken together, Arendt and Taylor posit responsibility as emergent from a reflexive process that links the ongoing work and ethics of self-formation to the negotiation and cultivation of identity, community, and the good life. In contrast to Arendt, in my own research on charitable practices in Florence, Italy (Trundle 2014), I argue that acts of reflection are not a precultural process that leads to better, truer, or more effective knowledge of the world. Rather, there are diverse cultural modes of ethical reflection that have the capacity both to reveal certain courses of actions and to obscure others, to articulate certain forms of responsibility and foreclose others. In exploring the workings of an American church foodbank, I show how financially secure, English-speaking migrant volunteers built up an everyday charitable ethic. They focussed their ethical reflection on face-to-face moments of fairness within the foodbank space, and in the process cultivated an ethos of ‘disinterested equality’ in their treatment of foodbank

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recipients that ensured all participants would receive fair, commensurate treatment. Yet this stance meant the women’s ethical frame was focussed on the immediacy of fleeting interactions between themselves, middle-class and wealthy migrant women, and the financially precarious, often undocumented migrants they served. As a consequence, the wider politics of class, inequality, and social exclusion that created food insecurity among Florence’s marginalized communities was precluded from view, action, or responsibility. In another moment of charitable giving, an English-speaking migrant women’s charity group hosted a fundraiser to support women recently released from prison. Here migrant women of colour from developing nations gave testimonials of their prior precarious lives, their time in Italian prison, and their work at a migrant sewing collective as they rebuilt their lives post-incarceration. In reflections afterwards, those in the audience described both a sense of deep compassion and an inability to truly understand the women’s lives because of the gulf in lived experience. Despite this lack of understanding, and indeed because of it, the women felt compelled towards acts of limited responsibility. They provided money to the women’s group, but most felt unable to engage with them much more. Philanthropic responsibility here relied upon a reflective sense of detachment and privilege, in assertions of the distinct roles of charitable giver and recipient. Like the foodbank, this type of ethical reflection did not lead Anglo women towards wider modes of social and political responsibility across the lines of class and race. Contra Arendt, being more reflexive does not necessarily make one more responsible. Rather, specific modes of reflexivity lead to particular forms of responsibility, and these can shore up certain obligations, relations, and modes of action over other types of action. Reflexivity is never ethically or politically neutral, just as responsibility never is.

Responsibility as Mutuality, Response, and Recognition Claims of responsibility are often entangled with assertions of mutuality. Andrew Walsh (2002) describes mutual responsibility as a process by which different actors or entities develop and come to recognize their reciprocal reliance. And while not necessarily placing them in equitable relations, it undergirds the reciprocal roles and interdependencies between them. ‘Mutual responsibilities’ proves a useful concept for considering the negotiation of obligations that emerge across a range of relations – within communities, between the living and their ancestors or spirits, between human inhabitants and their natural environment. Modes of mutuality mean responsibility hovers between two forms, that of responsibility for and responsible to (e.g. Lomawaima 2013). Responsibility for implies a position of authority, stewardship, or care,

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while being responsible to connotes the ways in which one is called to act by others, of duty, of being beholden to particular obligations, of the specific needs of care recipients that dictate the interaction of care that occur. Claims of responsibility often depend on being able to evoke both of these positions at once. This is visible in Patrick McKearney’s (2018) study of the healthcare workers at a Christian home, L’Arche, for people with cognitive disabilities. He describes how carers learn to act on behalf of those they care for based on an attention to the limitations of those in their care. Simultaneously, they also learn how to act in ways that they believe will support a care recipient’s own agency and responsibility. This is achieved through valuing non-normative models of personhood that do not depend on the rational mind, and which recognize forms of charisma and intuition as unusual and positive abilities that allow those with cognitive disabilities to engage and interact with the world, make choices, and be responsible for the self. Mutual responsibilities are also visible in Elizabeth Davis’s study of psychiatric care in contemporary Greek society (2010). Here she describes a type of therapeutic responsibility that exists outside of the liberal idea of the autonomous self and the individual will. As psychiatric patients are usually enrolled into care by others and often against their own volition, the ‘paradoxical ethical task patients face here is to assume responsibility for an ideal, or duty, or desire, that is determined elsewhere than in the self, and otherwise than by the self, but that is discovered and directed through self-reflection and self-transformation’ (2010: 135). Thus the therapist acts as a proxy for the enactment of individual responsibility, a process that is deeply relationally entangled, and riven with unequal agency. As Davis shows, like their fellow citizens, these patients are expected to function as responsible members of community; but unlike them, are ‘disabled’ from the subjective capacities and desires that define responsible citizenship. The demand for patient responsibility thus initiates a collaborative mode of therapeutic ethics, by which therapists in a sense complete the subjectivity of their patients as they enlist them in treatment. In these relationships, designed to expand the responsibility of patients in proportion to their freedom, therapists occupy a shaky ground between ethical guidance and coercion. (2010: 135) Davis’s study reveals how calls for responsibility, even in settings of vastly unequal power and even when they involve coercion, rely upon the mutual constitution of selves and the mutual recognition of subjectivity. Responsibility can reflect the ways in which we become beholden to each other as we enact our own agency and constrain or enable it in others. Parallels can be drawn here with Cheryl Mattingly and Patrick McKearney’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 22). Here, they reveal how

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asymmetrical relations of dependence lie at the heart of many practices of care. To think about responsibility as a type of mutuality involves, as Mattingly argues, ‘acknowledging our responsivity vis-a`-vis the world, or put differently, the way the world and our responses to it are inextricably entangled’ (2014: 13). Assertions of responsibility commonly involve assumptions about responsiveness, about how one should respond to duties, dilemmas, wrongdoing, unexpected events, risks, and opportunities. Responsibility involves chains of responsivity, as responses call forth further responses. And such sequences are often laden with uncertain potential. Calls for responsibility are thus imbued with the recognition of possible harm, of considering how one’s responses travel and effect future worlds (Hetherington 2013: 70–1). The philosopher Gareth Williams remarks, In the first place, responsibility represents the obligation of each actor to know the world into which s/he acts and – as we usually think it ought to follow – to understand the act s/he proposes. In the second, our attention is drawn to the temporal continuity of our agency, to the fact that our deeds are not the work of a moment, but involve an ongoing responsiveness to the world, including the need to respond for what has been done. We may need to carry forward what has begun, or somehow draw a line under what we judge ought not to have been started. (Williams 1998: 946–7) Here the ability to respond ‘responsibly’ can be tangled up with acts of recognition. And who gets recognized as being able to respond and who is in need of a response often depend upon cultural ideas of personhood, duty, and agency. Across societies, agency can be invested unevenly depending on when a person is recognized as being a moral agent. And in turn this capacity to be recognized and call forth a response from others is dependent on the social power one can marshal or the social position one can occupy, and the material or economic resources that a person can wield in mounting such claims. Some members of a community are always invested with more agency than others, in some domains over others. As Laidlaw points out, being seen as a responsible subject not only carries with it modes of social recognition, agency, and acknowledgement but it also burdens one to act and care and respond to others (2014). Mary Amuyunzu’s research among the Duruma women in Kenya vividly reveals this point (1998). Here women are responsible for protecting their children’s health, and are thus seen as having much agency over this domain of life. To support their children’s health, they sometimes utilize local healers who perform exorcisms to heal sickness in their families. Duruma women believe that a woman’s spirit will control her child,

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its spirit, and its health until the child reaches an age at which they can recognize their own spirit. Thus women ‘represent their ailing children in healing sessions by facilitating a link between themselves, the healer, the spirits and their children’ (Amuyunzu 1998: 499). Children do not have responsibility, and are unable to respond to the threat of illness because they fail to recognize themselves, and thus assume agentive personhood.

Responsible for Whom? Temporality, Spatiality, and Relational Boundaries of Collective Responsibility When entailing chains of response, responsibility’s relational entanglements play out within varied temporal and spatial scales. As Mattingly notes, ‘we are called to respond. And our response has a history, and becomes part of history’ (2014: 19). Responsibility thus dwells within what Mattingly describes as the ‘moral ordinary’, the ‘contingencies of the ordinary can present resources for moral creativity and experimentation’ (Mattingly 2014: 26), as well as what Richard Werbner describes as the ‘alternative world of the imagination’ (2017: 96), those ethical projects as much directed towards dealing with the past, and anticipating the future, the possible, and the desired, as they are concerned with pressing conundrums in the present. Scales of responsibility can shift based on new technologies and techniques that remake chains of agency and causation. James Laidlaw (2014) argues that it has become possible to redistribute responsibility more widely in contemporary life due in part to the effects of new technologies of knowledge. Specifically, he charts how statistical reasoning reconstituted understandings of social inequality by drawing new links between quotidian labour practices and theories of subconscious prejudice. He gives the example of how the implicit bias in job hiring that may disadvantage women or minorities was made statistically and numerical persuasive through the aggregation of new forms of data. These shifting visibilities are not only technological and technical but also political, spatial, and environmental. The contemporary challenges of climate change and the now global reach of pollution and species decline have transformed the way in which the actions of consumers, corporations, and governments now collectively have global consequences. Actions in one locale affect distant and planetary-level populations with increasingly obvious, concrete, and perilous effects. The exponential and increasing pace of climate change in recent years, and the urgency with which it must be addressed, demands of political and economic systems a new and unfamiliar temporal responsiveness and responsibility that can match the pace of current ecological transformation.

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Such expanding global scales of responsibility are not, however, limited to late twentieth-century environmentalism. As Thomas Haskell argues, the rise in a humanitarianism sensibility behind the anti-slavery abolitionist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be traced in part to in the rising tide of the economic order of capitalism. The norms of ‘promise making’ that underpinned the legal contracts within emergent capitalist marketplaces linked consumers, producers, and merchants around the world in new interdependencies (1985b). This is turn led to a ‘change in cognitive style – specifically a change in the perception of causal connections and consequently a shift in the conventions of moral responsibility’ (1985a: 342). As Arendt argues, claims to and for responsibility can link people across time in ongoing and intergenerational relations of obligation, blame, care, and dependence. This is especially so in what she refers to as collective responsibility. According to Arendt, this means being held responsible for an act and event which one did not act in directly, but rather vicariously or indirectly through association with and membership of a group being held responsible. It can involve ‘when a whole community takes it upon itself to be responsible for whatever one of its members has done, or whether a community is being held responsible for what has been done in its name’ (Arendt 2003: 149). This includes forms of political responsibility, in which a government assumes responsibility for the ‘deeds and misdeeds of its predecessor’, or when nations are called to be responsible for ‘the deeds and misdeeds of the past’ (Arendt 2003: 27). Arendt contrasts guilt, as individual legal culpability for direct acts, with the complex social systems of injustice and accountability that emerge over time and for which ongoing collective responsibility may or may not be assumed, but which elide accusations of direct culpability. Yet ethnographically responsibility and guilt are not always parsed. And if they are, then they are separated and reconstituted in diverse ways. Moreover, calls for collective responsibility can sometime hinge upon speech acts that explicitly and publicly assume and admit guilt. Recent political speech in Australia offers one ethnographic example. In 1997, the Bring Them Home national inquiry report revealed in devastating detail the effects of historic policies separating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, commonly referred to as the Stolen Generation. When the report was tabled in parliament, then Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologize directly and in a way that many in Aboriginal communities found satisfying, and he denied that the policy amounted to genocide, as the report claimed. Over the next eleven years a growing Sorry Movement grew nationally, organizing marches, bridge walks for reconciliation, and a national Sorry Day. In 2008 incoming Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized. In his maiden parliamentary speech, he strategically deployed a language of guilt and

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collective responsibility to describe the role of the political domain, and to constitute the links between historical policies and current inequities. He said: We, the parliaments of the nation, are ultimately responsible, not those who gave effect to our laws. And the problem lay with the laws themselves. As has been said of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings from our ancestors; therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well. Therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history . . .. To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification. . . . We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied. (Rudd 2008) Rudd’s apology reflects a specific articulation of responsibility qua political agency. Here the nation state, and by extension its laws, are understood as a corporate entity – in the anthropological sense of a collective body that is continuous through time irrespective of its individual members – and can thus more directly assume agency for the deeds of the past than could citizens or individual state officials, who enacted such policies. By bounding such acts in historical time in this way, Rudd’s politics of responsibility abstracted responsibility (as culpability and blame), distancing it from the interpersonal, the contingent, the agentive, and the improvisational realms of historical specificity. Even as Rudd gave responsibility a human face (his own), he simultaneously located it at an impersonal bureaucratic, legal level, and reflected ideas of social causation that hold no particular historical agents responsible. Some in Australia argued that the above-mentioned performances of responsibility and contrition replace or even stall other forms of ongoing responsibility and function to detract from or stand in for acts that might lead to material restitution. In line with this argument, Janet Wilson thus asks, in the Australian case, ‘who is reconciliation for, the white settler or the Indigene? . . . settler shame is merely a way of redeeming the white settlers’ own unease, not improving the conditions of Aboriginal people, a point which the apology throws into even greater relief’ (Wilson 2017: 309–10). An anthropological vantage on the ethics of responsibility needs to consider the varied discursive registers of responsibility, evident, for example, in the various sides in this debate, and the ways in which communities define or debate the appropriate or inappropriate modes of

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sentiment, contrition, shame, and guilt that need to be displayed, and the ideal symbolic, ritualized, and performative dimensions of such expressions. Such acts reflect the ways in which societies must grapple with the links between individual and collective responsibility, and the boundaries that are drawn and redrawn across time between personal and group responsibility, and between action and consequence. In other contexts, particularly those associated with societal crimes, grappling with collective responsibility can involve the often uneven and complex distribution of guilt within a group, from the individual level through to the entire social structure. Such a process constitutes different types of culprits who display diverse types of agency, freedom, and will, but whose actions nonetheless are made to reflect the pull of wider social pressures and the power of authority. Debates about responsibility thus can reflect a contested collective process of ‘making sense’ of the past in the wake of social upheaval. Calls for responsibility reflect people’s attempts both to enact modes of specific accountability and to find the ‘true’ agentive source of events. But this is often balanced by the need to abstract responsibility, to make the present liveable for those who must go on existing side by side after violence or conflict has ended or simmered back beneath the surface of daily life. Jean Hatzfeld’s (2003) study of Hutu men convicted for the mass murders of Tutsis during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide offers one startling example. In making sense of their own acts of atrocities, these men expressed a sense of there being something larger than themselves, a wider social fervour within which they were swept up. As Hatzfeld recounts, in 1991, in the wake of civil unrest between Tutsi insurgents and the ruling Hutu clan, political speeches and rallies by the ruling elites consisted ‘entirely of threats made against Tutsis . . . [university] professors vied with one another to publish historical screeds and anti-Tutsi diatribes. In the broadcasts studies of popular radio stations . . . the Tutsis were referred to as “cockroaches.” Announcers . . . used humorous sketches and songs to call openly for the destruction of the Tutsis’ (2003: 55). This dehumanization created a population receptive and desensitized to acts of ethnic violence. Yet the violence still needed initiators. Before the massacres the militias, trained by the army and ruling clan, arrived to lead the genocidal ‘operations’, intimidating those ‘who seemed uneasy with the work of killing’ (2003: 36), as one prisoner recalled. Local judges and village officials helped assemble the local men at soccer fields and ordered them to kill. ‘They lectured us, they threatened in advance anyone who bungled the job’ (2003: 15). As one described: The first day, a messenger from the municipal judge went house to house summoning us to a meeting right away. There the judge announced that the reason for the meeting was the killing of every Tutsi without exception. It was simply said and it was simple to

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understand. So the only questions were about the details of the operation. For example, how and when to begin, since we were not used to this activity, and where to begin too, since the Tutsis had run off in all directions . . .. The judge answered sternly: there is no need to ask how to begin. The only worthwhile plan is to start straight ahead into the bush, and right now, without hanging back anymore behind questions. (2003: 11) Those who refused to kill risked execution on the spot or being forced to kill a Tutsi publicly. Often, however, the pressures were more subtle. ‘If you proved too green with the machete, you could find yourself deprived of rewards, to nudge you in the right direction. If you got laughed at one day you did not take long to shape up. If you went home empty handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children’ (2003: 38). Those who refused to kill were fined. Poverty thus was a driving force in participation. As one farmer recalled: The farmers were not rich enough, like the well-to-do city people, to buy themselves relief from the killing. Some doctors and teachers in Kigali paid their servants or other employees so as not to dirty themselves. On the hills, many killed simply to get around their poverty. If they went along with the killings, they did not risk fines, and besides, it could pay off big on the way home. Whoever found a chance to sheet-metal a roof, how could he hesitate? (2003: 74) As Hatzfeld makes clear, the genocide was coordinated and thus enacted at a societal level, and the killers themselves were the violent edge of a much wider collective effort to eradicate Tutsi neighbours. Shop owners, for example, provided supplies and transportation to the killers, and women often supported their husbands. As one participant explained, ‘during the killings, the women continued to prepare the meals in the morning, and during the rest of the day they went looting’ (2003: 109). And yet, despite this abdication of fulsome individual responsibility among killers, the task of reconciling individual agency within acts of collective crimes remained a moral dilemma for many of the men whom Hatzfeld interviewed. As Arendt reminds us, even when responsibility gets meted out in ways that highlight societal levers, in ways that collectivize blame, individuals can still be left haunted by the memory of their own acts, left with the task of living with themselves, their past actions central to the stories they must construct about their moral worth. As Hatzfeld reveals, at one level the men’s stories downplayed their own connections to the crimes they committed, and blurred the notion of

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social madness with experiences of individual pathology, deviancy, and self-alienation. As two interviewees reflected: It is as if I had let another individual take on my own living appearance, and the habits of my heart, without a single pang in my soul. This killer was indeed me, as to the offense he committed and the blood he shed, but he is a stranger to me in his ferocity. I admit and recognize my obedience at that time, my victims, my fault, but I fail to recognize the wickedness of the one who raced through the marches on my legs, carrying my machete. That wickedness seems to belong to another self with a heavy heart. (2003: 48) It became a madness that went on all by itself. You raced ahead or you got out of the way to escape being run over, but you followed the crowd. One man, who rushed off machete in hand, he listened to nothing anymore. He forgot everything, first of all his level of intelligence. Doing the same thing every day meant we didn’t have to think about what we were doing. We went out and came back without a single thought. We hunted because it was the order of the day, until the day was over. (2003: 50) Here the act of not thinking resonates with Arendt’s ideas about the banality of evil, that responsibility in the face of violence is premised upon the ability to think, particularly against the grain of destructive social pressures. Yet Hatzfeld also challenges Arendt’s notion of the thinking, responsible subject. In Hatzfeld’s interviews, the men’s memories and stories remained saturated with ideas of personal initiative, creative agency, individual expression, and crafty will. They are not unthinking social automatons. They understood that even within the sharp pull of history, people manoeuvre in ways that enact forms of freedom and push events forward towards particular devastating ends. Thus, in Rwanda they recalled how ‘natural’ leaders and enthusiastic killers gravitated towards leadership roles during the genocide and tried to ingratiate themselves with militia leaders in order to win favours and rewards. While the militia had at first to pressure groups of famers to go out ‘hunting’ each day, soon these groups self-organized and became accustomed to and self-motivated in the ‘work’. As one killer explained: There were some who turned out to be easy killers, and they backed up their comrades in tough spots. But each person was allowed to learn in his own way, according to his character. You killed the way you knew, the way you felt, each at his own speed. There were no serious instructions on know-how, except to keep it up. (2003: 37)

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Such reflections stand in contrast to Arendt’s ideas of the unthinking subject, and perhaps reflect how her ideas of responsibility were shaped by a very different context, that of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel. An official in the Nazi party who was executed in Israel for his part in the Holocaust, Eichmann asserted in his trial that he was simply following orders, doing his job, fulfilling his duty, and obeying the law (Arendt 1963). While such claims of ‘command responsibility’ are often asserted in military contexts, and indeed in military law (Chantal 2007), Hatzfeld’s case reveals the very diverse contexts of conflict and collective violence that exist, and indeed the range of ethical reflections of responsibility and agency that can emerge from them. The Rwandan case study reflects, in all its devastating detail, the knotty crux in claims of collective responsibility. It reveals how communities grapple with the questions of how to integrate the past into the present and future in ways that apprehend and respond to the variegated shades of responsibilities being claimed. These in turn are underpinned by diverse accounts of what people did and the types of choices and freedoms these acts expressed or enabled, with some acts seen as expressing the true interiority of a person, some floating more abstractly at the level of ‘society’ or associated with the will of ‘others’, and many situated uneasily somewhere in between. In contrast to philosophical ideas such as Arendt’s, which try to define and prescribe the contours of collective responsibility and its distinction from guilt, ethnographic studies uncover the uneasy contestation of collective responsibility in which guilt, culpability, freedom, good, and evil are not easily assigned or fixed. The Rwanda case reveals how evoking ideas about responsibility can lay bare a deep set of tensions in the narratives we try to tell about our actions and the actions of others. They illustrate the complex links and disjunctures that claims of responsibility can create between our sense of freedom and our experiences of constraint, between the sense of our own intentions and our acts, and between our private histories and the flow of social events.

Conclusion Because of the immediacy of their emotional pull, public calls for responsibility often appear self-evident, simple in meaning, and morally persuasive. Yet, as this chapter has sought to reveal, within claims of responsibility the diverse cultural ways that particular ethical claims assign personhood and subjectivity, understand relational obligations, constitute freedom, choice, and intention, and impute actions to actors across time and space become evident. As this chapter argues, responsibility is a concept that describes an array of sometimes competing modes of ethical practice.

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In arguing that responsibility can express myriad possible meanings and actions, I have not sought to undercut the power of this concept. I am not suggesting that it means everything and thus it means nothing. Rather, I have sought to spotlight how responsibility gets pulled into a range of arenas to do significant political and social work, and to suggest an anthropology of ethics should be far more careful in unpacking the precise meanings of these deployments, and indeed remain critical in our own deployments of this term. Moreover, by uncovering the ethnographically diverse range of ways that people attempt to hold each other and themselves responsible, what might emerge is an anthropology of ethics that can more powerfully contribute to wider debates about the different possibilities for responsibility in the social, political, and ecological challenges that we currently face. Calls for responsibility are socially pervasive because they speak to pressing concerns and dilemmas. In a plethora of contemporary settings, the ethical legitimacy of political institutions, economic organizations, family and community ties, and individual conduct are evaluated according to notions of responsible action. Ideas about responsibility are powerful in part because of their ability to stretch across vastly varied scales, from the intimate ties that exist between a parent and child to the obligations of the human species to protect the environment on a planetary scale. For an anthropology of ethics, our work lies in excavating beneath the ideological veneer of responsibility, of identifying its constituent ideals and practices, of revealing the conflicts that such claims generate and seek to resolve, and in understanding the localized life-worlds that specific calls for responsibility enable. By doing so, an anthropology of ethics can reveal the varied relations that we build, comprehend, and sometimes undo through the lens of responsibility.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to the editor of this volume, James Laidlaw, for his incisive advice and careful reading of multiple drafts of this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge my prior work with Susanna Trnka, who, through multiple conversations, helped me to develop an anthropological engagement with the concept of responsibility.

References Amuyunzu, Mary. 1998. ‘Willing the Spirits to Reveal Themselves: Rural Kenyan Mothers’ Responsibility to Restore their Children’s Health’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12(4): 490–502. Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.

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Knobe, Joshua and John M. Doris. 2010. ‘Responsibility’, in John Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 321–54. Lacey, Nicola. 2016. In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Janice Ikeda. 2015. ‘Neo-Liberalism and Responsibilisation in the Discourse of Social Service Workers’. British Journal of Social Work, 45: 1006–21. Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. 2013. ‘Relationships and Responsibility’. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 44(1): 11–14. MacKinnon, Dolly and Catharine Coleborne. 2003. ‘Histories of Psychiatry after Deinstitutionalisation: Australia and New Zealand’. Health and History, 5(2): 1–16. Mahmood, Saba. 2006. ‘Feminist Theory, Agency, and the Liberatory Subject: Some Reflections on the Islamic Revival in Egypt’. Temenos, 42(1): 31–71. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. McKearney, Patrick. 2018. ‘Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 36(1): 40–60. McKeon, Richard. 1990. Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon. Edited by Zahava K. McKeon. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Meloni, Chantal. 2007. ‘Command Responsibility: Mode of Liability for the Crimes of Subordinates or Separate Offence of the Superior?’ Journal of International Criminal Justice, 5(3): 619–37. Public Broadcasting Services (PBS). 2019. Commanding Heights. Episode One. www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ tr_show01.html. Robbins-Rubszkowski, Jessica. 2017. ‘Responsibilities of the Third Age and the Intimate Politics of Sociality in Poland’, in Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle (eds.), Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 193–212. Rose, N. 1996. ‘The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government’. Economy and Society, 25: 327–56. Rudd, Kevin. 2008. ‘Kevin Rudd’s Sorry Speech’. Sydney Morning Herald. www .smh.com.au/national/kevin-rudds-sorry-speech-20080214-gds0xh.html. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1989. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Shaw, Rosalind. 2017. ‘Justice and Its Doubles: Producing Postwar Responsibilities in Sierra Leone’, in Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle (eds.), Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 156–80. Stewart, Michelle. 2016. ‘Fictions of Prevention: Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and Narratives of Responsibility’. North American Dialogue, 19 (1): 55–66. Strawson, Peter. 1993. ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza (eds.), Perspectives on Moral Responsibility. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 45–66. Tadros, Victor. 2007. Criminal Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2001 [1989]. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modem Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trnka, Susanna. 2017. One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility and the Politics of Global Health. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Trnka, Susanna and Catherine Trundle. 2017. Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trundle, Catherine. 2014. Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion and Belonging. Oxford: Berghahn. Valdez, Natali. 2018. ‘The Redistribution of Reproductive Responsibility: On the Epigenetics of “Environment” in Prenatal Interventions’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 32(3): 425–42. Walsh, Andrew. 2002. ‘Responsibility, Taboo and the Freedom to Do Otherwise’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 451–68. Wee, Lionel. 2007. ‘The Hunger Strike as a Communicative Act’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 17(1): 61–76. Werbner, Richard. 2017. ‘The Poetics of Wisdom Divination: Renewing the Moral Imagination’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23: 81–102. Williams, Bernard. 2008. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Williams, Garrath. 1998. ‘Love and Responsibility: A Political Ethic for Hannah Arendt’. Political Studies, XLVI: 937–50. Wilson, Janet. 2017. ‘(Not) Saying Sorry: Australian Responses to the Howard Government’s Refusal to Apologize to the Stolen Generations’, in Geoffrey V. Davis, Marc Delrez, Benedicte Ledent, and Gordon Collier (eds.), The Cross -Cultural Legacy: Critical and Creative Writings in Memory of Hena Maes-Jeline. Leiden: Brill Rodopi: 295–312. Wintour, Patrick. 2013. ‘Thatcher Funeral Address Prompts Tory Praise for Bishop of London’. The Guardian. 17 April. www.theguardian.com/pol itics/2013/apr/17/thatcher-funeral-address-bishop-london.

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12 Emotion and Affect Teresa Kuan

What is an emotion and what kind of work does it do? This chapter reviews how philosophers and anthropologists have engaged this question in their challenges against various academic and common-sense ideas. They include a view of emotion as an obstruction to reason, emotion as a set of psychobiological facts, emotion as something natural, individual, private, and arising from inside a person – a universal substrate on which culture acts. Where emotion is taken seriously as an area of human life that exposes the limits of ethical inquiry, or as a research object in the study of social organization and social process, emotion is instead shown to be very much in the world and not simply in the person. The concept of affect, referring to a moving energy that binds unlike things, makes the point even more robust. My intention in this chapter is not to take a position against the first set of views. Instead, I wish to demonstrate by way of building on the latter the significance of the study of emotion and affect to the anthropology of ethics. Emotion is a relation in which something is at stake in a first-person way. To think in terms of at-stakeness is to engage the language of moral experience; that is, how morality is lived by actual people in concrete historical circumstances (Kleinman and Kleinman 1991; Kleinman 2014). The study of emotion and affect reveals the way in which things matter to people, and it is in this mattering that we discover a moral agent who is responsive and vulnerable, trying to act well in a bewilderingly complex world. The anthropology of ethics seems to have given to some anthropologists the impression that a rational, decision-making subject has been presumed (Good 2019a: 55–6, 2019b: 423),1 as if the anthropological approach has been conflated with the ethical theories it in fact sets out to challenge or complicate. But let us be clear that where reasoning has been the focus, it is a mode of reasoning more accurately characterized as vulnerable reasoning, although, once vulnerability is introduced, 1

Some of the remarks I have observed were made in unpublished conference papers.

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reasoning no longer appears to be an accurate term.2 What we are then left with is vulnerability. What I present in this chapter is a caring subject, someone whose relation to a field of action is characterized by ‘hot’ involvement (James 1981 [1890]: 303) rather than cool detachment, vulnerability rather than rational control. Insofar as the caring subject is also a conscious, intentional subject, their consciousness of self is no cause for celebration. To care and to be acutely aware is a heavy burden and responsibility. This aspect of the human experience is the very antithesis of moral autonomy and freedom.

An Emotion Is a Relation in Which Something Is at Stake In the anthropology of ethics, emotion is rarely a keyword. In raising the question of where to locate ‘the moral drives in human life’ now that the self has been emptied of the ‘naturally constituted ethical drive’ Aristotle had presupposed, one reason being the ‘death of the subject’ (Dyring, Mattingly, and Louw 2018: 11–12), anthropological contributions to the volume Moral Engines locate moral drives in all sorts of places. They are in the ‘hauntings’ that shadow the pursuit of Sufi piety (Louw 2018), in the historically constituted experience of regret (Throop 2018), in the daily pragmatics of forgiving past wrongs in a post-war situation so as to repair broken relationships (Meinert 2018), and in the life contingencies that present themselves in experience; that is, those challenges or ‘ethical demands’ moral actors find themselves having to respond to because the care of an intimate other is at stake (Mattingly 2018). Each answer is lodged in the particular ethnographic context in which the question is engaged, hence the multiplicity of answers given and the irreducible uniqueness of each. One contribution engages Martha Nussbaum’s theory of emotion directly (Louw 2018), while another elaborates a theory of ‘moral mood’ with reference to regret (Throop 2018). But ‘emotion’ is not the key analytic term of the volume, even though, one might argue, it is a perfectly viable candidate for exploring the question: ‘what actually commits and drives us to understand our lives in ethical terms?’ (Dyring, Mattingly, and Louw 2018: 1). This question is related to an old one: what moves a human person to act? What is the nature of moral motivation? Indeed, in anthropology the answer has long been located somewhere outside the subject – culture, society, discourse, and institutional arrangements (if following Foucault), or collective representations and the symbolic practices that revitalize 2

The term ‘vulnerable reasoning’ is from a small talk Cheryl Mattingly gave in 2003 to her research team in Los Angeles; the talk eventually became the chapter ‘Moral Tragedy: The Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother’ in Moral Laboratories (2014). Vulnerable reasoning is no longer the key phrase in the analysis of this case, but Martha Nussbaum remains central to it.

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attachment to the group (if going back to Durkheim). Where emotion becomes a matter of theoretical concern, it is often conceived of as a site for social regulation – named and shaped in relation to broader social, political, and economic imperatives (to be discussed later). Meanwhile, in mainstream moral philosophy, emotion does not occupy a significant place. Where morality is defined in relation to reasoning and judgment, and reasoned judgment is said to consist of impartiality, disinterest, and indifference, emotion is not only rendered irrelevant, it is an obstruction to clear away, a miring to transcend or wall oneself off from. In the Platonic view, ‘The perfect god’s-eye standpoint is the only reliable one from which to make adequate and reliably true judgments’ (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]: 242). It is as if Plato’s ascent from the cave requires a ‘departure from human concerns altogether’, freeing oneself from external attachments and bodily demands (Bernard Williams, quoted in Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). In Kant, the perfect moral agent is an agent ‘noumenally free, so outside space, time, and causality entirely’ (Urban Walker 1991: 22). In this view, ‘moral motivation’ is an oxymoron, if motivation is pictured not in terms of duty but instead in terms of how a subject moves in and is moved by a world. While Bernard Williams does not use the word ‘emotion’ in his argument, his work is indispensable for understanding the ethics of emotion. Arguing against a Kantian view that rests on the separation of agents and a utilitarian view that reduces the individual to a ‘causal lever’ in a satisfaction system (1981: 4), Williams contends it is neither reasonable nor realistic to ask a man to give up his interests (14). The conatus of a person’s desires and concerns, his web of personal relations, ‘propels’ him (12–13). They constitute the ‘condition of his having any interest in being around in that world at all’ (14). ‘Something rivets my attention fatally’ is how William James put it (1981 [1890]: 305). The empirical self follows the destinies of certain things ‘with an excitement that owes nothing to a reflective source’ (304). Harry Frankfurt, picking up on Williams’s line of argument, chooses ‘love’ to think with. For Frankfurt, love is morally significant, though its commands are not grounded in a source ‘constituted by judgments and reasons, but rather by a particular mode of caring about things’ (2006 [2004]: 29). The ‘commands of love’ explain why any person is capable of acting at all, because without love there would be no interest, and without the fusion of interests that occurs in a captivation that ‘binds the will’ there would be no direction but instead an impairment in the capacity to choose and to act – ‘aimless floundering’ (64–6). Martha Nussbaum’s early work is even more indispensable for understanding the ethics of emotion, given how extensively she has written about it (Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). The Fragility of Goodness, to begin with, is a repudiation of the self-sufficient moral subject imagined in mainstream philosophy (2001 [1986]). Aristotle, who serves as her companion, locates moral subject-making in practical

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activity, and he understood that the most cherished of human goods are subject to chance and reversal; that is, things often do not turn out the way we want or expect because of contingencies we have no control over. The two points are related: flourishing depends on externalities which complete us, common to all living beings who share an ‘element of reaching out for something in the world, grasping after some object in order to take it to oneself’ (275). This must be the naturally constituted ethical drive that has been emptied, which, I shall later show, has been restored in certain corners in the world of affect theory. The point to make here is that the very reaching and stretching forward that constitutes practical activity (to absorb sunlight) is the same yielding and opening that makes life vulnerable (no sunshine to be had this season) (340). What further complicates this movement is that the creature has a ‘point of view’ and is selective about what is taken in. ‘The “good” and the “possible” must come together in order for movement to result’ (277). In human life, according to Aristotle, the most cherished of goods are primarily found in two domains of interdependency: political activity and personal love. Nussbaum writes, ‘There is no loving action without someone to receive and return it; there is no being a good citizen without a city that accepts your claims to membership’ (2001 [1986]: 381). This means that the practical activity that gives form to moral character ‘leaves no selfsufficient kernel of the person safely intact. It strikes directly at the root of goodness itself’ (2001 [1986]: 381). In this line of thought, a realistic, empirically grounded moral theory (or anti-theory in the case of Bernard Williams) must reckon with the problem of luck and contingency. Bernard Williams does so in his writings on ‘moral luck’ and the first-person problem of agent-regret (1981, 1993), recognizing how it is possible for an agent to take responsibility for consequences for which they are not responsible, even though it violates the ‘control condition’, subsequently wishing – with tremendous anguish (Kuan 2017, 2021) – one could have acted or done otherwise. Martha Nussbaum, meanwhile, goes on to develop a full-fledged theory showing the entanglement of moral emotions with luck, moving from Greek tragedy to modern literature. In Love’s Knowledge (1990), the significance of the experience of emotions is twofold: emotion is a mode of response and it is a mode of perception. The two are interrelated in that fine perception cannot be taken for granted (148), and when it does happen, it ought to be seen as a moral response to matters at stake. Admirable is the protagonist who feels bewilderment and hesitation because her confusion is a perception of the complexities that make up her situation. She cares too much about too many things, trapping her in a conflict of incommensurable goods (63–4). Rather than try to make a reasoned choice when faced with conflict by ‘picking the top point on a single ordered line’ (65), rather than ‘rewrite the nature of the conflict’ (90), this moral agent takes in what is there (152). To be responsive in this way is to be responsible. Nussbaum

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writes, ‘a willingness to surrender invulnerability, to take up a posture of agency that is porous and susceptible of influence, is of the highest importance in getting an accurate perception of particular things in the world’ (180). These particular things are of course not just any particular things but things on which an agent’s flourishing depends. They make a ‘special contribution to the richness and fullness of the good life’ (60), which consists of activities chosen for their own sake (59). There are many ways ‘the world can impede our efforts to act well’ (1990: 64), but act or move in the world we must. Nussbaum returns to this theme in Upheavals of Thought (2006 [2001]), joining the Stoics with animal studies and psychology in a ‘comprehensive theory of the emotions as cognitiveevaluative instruments of moral reasoning’ (Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). The emotion is a record of our imperfect control over objects that relate to our most ‘cherished relationships and projects’ (31), and we experience this vulnerability as embodied creatures with a point of view (65). Nussbaum’s reading of the vulnerability of parenthood in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder epitomizes the Aristotelian predicament of trying to act well in a world one does not control, adopting on this occasion the language of psychology to make her point: ‘To be a parent is to wish to be omnipotent, and to regain infantile omnipotence: one is supposed to be able to prevent death and harm. Thus the realization of the parent’s own finitude is shameful and a reminder of the more fundamental shame attached to being merely human’ (289). Perhaps what makes Nussbaum’s early work so remarkably salient for the anthropology of ethics is her love for the particular and the importance she gives it in revealing moral-existential themes. Only in narrative, she consistently argues, may we discover ‘things such as much happen’ (2006 [2001]: 240). Whether the question is ‘how one should live?’ (the philosophy question) or ‘what does it mean to be human?’ (the anthropology question), the Aristotelian approach shares with anthropology a conviction that the answers ought to be empirically grounded. Because what counts as the good or the meaningful depends on practical circumstance and cultural context, and because these things cannot be known ahead of time, the possible is entirely a contingent matter. Aristotle defended his method with defiance in the face of ancient philosophy’s hostility against the ordinary, the lived, and the shared (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]: 240–63). In a critique against the Eleatics, a preSocratic school that got lost in the ‘internal progress of their argument’, Aristotle contends, ‘[t]heory must remain committed to the ways human beings live, act, see – to the pragmata, broadly construed’ (247). Taking narrative as a guide exposes the limits of ethical inquiry, replete as Greek tragedy and modern literature is with complexity, variety, and singularity. In other words, we learn the most not from decontextualized formulas but instead from seeing how situated actors dance and negotiate with reality (cf. Mattingly 2014: 99–121).

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Ethnography is also a form of literature in depicting situated, concrete individuals with lives to live and constraints to contend with. Ethnography, too, ought to be counted as a viable candidate for ‘best ethical criticism’ by showing the limits of preconceived theories – theories that either reify human nature or reify social forces. If a good agent is one who grasps their ‘causal inextricability’ and responds to the problem of moral luck with integrity, grace, and lucidity (Urban Walker 1991: 17, 21), then ethnography is full of such characters. They constitute moral agents as we find them rather than as philosophers imagine them (Kuan 2021). Before turning to the anthropological literature on emotion and affect, I wish to make one final point to acknowledge that moral significance can be located not only in tragedy and suffering, where indeed we find the most intense of emotion experiences, but also in the most mundane and unremarkable details of everyday life. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, as demonstrated in Veena Das’s argument for a ‘descent into the ordinary’ (2007, 2012) and in Cheryl Mattingly’s ‘perplexing particular’ (2019). I aim to undertake a similar project in relation to ‘emotion’ in this chapter, in dialogue with Nussbaum. In the final part of Upheavals in Thought, Nussbaum goes in search of a normative ethics for the betterment of plural, liberal democracies, ‘purifying’ love in support of ‘general social aims’ (2006 [2001]: 469). This is just one instance on a trajectory that would take Nussbaum towards ends that are rather baffling in light of her earlier work (see Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). Here, love for the particular is framed by an ‘idealism that also shows mercy and love to the real’ by recognizing how the grand co-exists with the banal (712). As odd as this appears, a deep respect for the ordinary remains, epitomized in her discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses: Bloom’s day, June 16, 1904, like most human days, is a day full of accidents, a day that eludes all of the reader’s most resourceful attempts to compose it into an orderly plot. Tragedy is philosophical because its plots manifest the essential nature of the human soul in its attempt to live well. Bloom’s day is philosophical because it contains fried kidneys, a greedy cat with ‘avid shameclosing eyes’, four slices of bread and butter; because Bloom, obeying in his own way the laws of probability and necessity, eats, defecates, masturbates, urinates, sleeps. (2006 [2001]: 684)

Emotion in Anthropology: From Ethnopsychology to Cultural Politics The anthropology of emotion experienced its heyday the 1980s. Feminist in spirit, the anthropologists who contributed to this sub-field found the study of emotion and sentiment in other fields thoroughly centred in

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psychobiological frameworks (Lutz 2017: 181; see also Lutz 1988: 3–4). They rebelled, and destabilized a set of assumptions that include a materialist view of emotion as a set of natural facts that are essentially universal, its pattern of response ‘stored’ in a biological program (Lutz and White 1986: 406–7, 410); the ‘two layers’ approach found in psychodynamic and psychiatric studies which presumes natural emotions are secondarily shaped, filtered, channelled, and so on by culture (Lutz and White 1988: 407); and a so-called common-sense Western view, which psychoanalytic theory no doubt helped to shape, locating emotion in a private, psychological interior – its ‘leakages’ betraying an authentic inner world (Rosaldo 1980; Lutz 1988: 72). In hindsight, it may be more accurate to say the so-called Western view does not denote the view of a civilization but instead a certain ‘emotional style’ that has come to prominence with the making of capitalism and modernity. As Eva Illouz has explained, ‘Freud’s theory of the self was part and parcel of the bourgeois cultural revolution which moved away from contemplative or heroic definitions of identity and situated it in the realm of everyday life.’ His achievement lies in the way he ‘bestowed on the ordinary self a new glamour, as it was awaiting to be discovered and fashioned’ (2007: 8). As much ethnography as culture critique, studies from the 1970s and 1980s argued for seeing emotion as pre-eminently social and cultural. Starting with Robert Levy’s early classic The Tahitians (1973), the anthropology of emotion came to understand the self and the person – that is, the locus of individual experience – as ‘culturally constituted, positioned at the nexus of personal and social worlds’ (Lutz and White 1986). Contributions analytically synthesized personal experience and social organization in arguing for understanding emotion categories as local idioms for symbolically organizing social life and relationships, and as providing interpretative schemes for making sense of things (e.g. Rosaldo 1980; Lutz 1988). These accounts may be read as portraits of ‘local moral worlds’, unique worlds of meaning in which social experience is deeply felt (Kleinman and Kleinman 1991). From the perspective of emotion research, the major contribution rested in the point that emotion is very much in the world and not simply in the person. Catherine Lutz said it best when she deployed a dramatistic metaphor to theorize how emotion terms order relations and give shape to experience. Emotion terms evoke ‘scenes’, Lutz argued, replete with the basic elements of drama – for example, actors, facial expressions, goals, differing points of view, and relationships in a state of repair (1988: 10). As we find in drama, there is tension and dynamism in the scenes of daily life Lutz describes in Ifaluk: ‘One person’s anger (song) entails another’s fear (metagu); someone’s experiencing grief and frustration (tang) creates compassion/love/sadness (fago) in others’ (1988: 82). Michelle Rosaldo makes a similar point in her classic account of anger/passion, liget, central to Ilongot’s understanding of the energy that drives social life forward

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(1980). The scene of liget also consists of a dyadic relationship: one person’s success is another’s envy and disturbance. This envy is like a fire that could destroy if improperly focussed. Like the partial interest that gives purpose to life and direction for action as discussed in philosophy (Williams 1981; Frankfurt 2006 [2004]), for Ilongot liget makes life possible because it motivates a person to work and to strive. Ilongot conceive of this ambiguous energy as the ‘source of beauty and life’, finding its highest expression in headhunting – a practice that gives meaning to all other practices (60). The anthropological challenge to a psychological view of emotion, namely the idea that emotions originate from a deep interior, has been taken up once again in recent research on the cultural politics of emotion. Here, the target of critique is not other fields of study but instead ‘neoliberalism’, a reflection of broader trends in the field. Allen Tran, writing about the way young, middle-class people in Ho Chi Minh City invoke ‘emotion’ (cam xuc) and corresponding notions of freedom and authenticity in managing their relationships with others and with themselves, argues that ‘the acceptance of cam xuc as the foundation for new types of relationships . . . is not merely the result of Vietnam’s version of neoliberalism but instead is critical to the process of neoliberalization itself’ (2015: 481). A special issue on ‘Emotion Pedagogies’ in the journal Ethos brings attention to the way in which emotional literacy has become ‘curricularized’, teaching participants how to manage the self ‘just as one would manage a business’ (Wilce and Fenigsen 2016: 86). While anthropologists writing about the cultural politics of emotion do not go so far as to argue ‘there is no subjectivity outside the compass of capitalism’, as Eva Illouz has in theorizing how emotions and commodities are co-produced (2018: 22), a common theme may be discerned in an otherwise diverse body of work. The teaching of emotion in formal, institutional settings often consists of imagining and objectifying emotions in a group setting, creating the very objects that are then taken as existing prior to the work of selfdiscovery. While some, though not all, have drawn for help on the Foucauldian insight that the subject is made in and through incitement to discourse, the research, generally speaking, critically interrogates the idea that humans have emotions that are discrete and object-like, things one could take an inventory of in working on the self. Writing about a training camp called ‘ReGeneration’ for children of the elite in Russia, Tomas Matza describes a series of pedagogical activities in which eleven- to thirteen-year-old children are taught to articulate ‘what had been posed as an unarticulated interior’ (2012: 806). In the inner-child workshops Sonya Pritzker (2016) has observed in Beijing, participants – mainly professional white-collar women – are taught to excavate, differentiate, name, and experience putatively buried emotions. In Zigon’s account of a drug addiction rehabilitation program (2010), also in Russia, rehabilitants learn to ‘thaw out’ their ‘frozen feelings’ rather than excavate something buried,

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but here too emotions are objectified in activities such as drawing out emotional conflicts on paper. These practices – minor as they are – are problematized for diverting investment of attention away from the real causes of suffering, adapting people to the needs of a market society rather than engaging them in social change. In trying to understand the psychotherapeutic turn in Russia, Tomas Matza employs the term ‘precariousness of care’ to describe the way psychological idioms and practices ‘oscillate’ between normalization, on the one hand, and something more openended on the other (2018). He takes therapeutic care to be a Janus-faced political-ethical formation through which people ‘wrestle with social concerns’ and ‘seek lines of flight’ (13), himself oscillating between interpreting what is meaningful for his informants, on the one hand, and social critique on the other; that is, noting when practices are ‘not quite radical’ (194) or downright reactionary. While a number of excellent counter-arguments have complicated how modern subjectivity and power relations are to be understood (Kipnis 2007; Cook 2016; Mazzarella 2017b; Trnka and Trundle 2017; Pritzker and Duncan 2019), what I would like to point out here is that an insight from classic studies of emotion has been lost, one that happens to articulate with Martha Nussbaum’s early work. I have in mind emotion’s relation to the question of how people manage to live and to act well in a world one does not control. On the surface, classic studies of emotion put their focus on themes such as selfhood, personhood, meaning, and cultural construction, but read through the lens of an anthropology of ethics, the cognitive and pragmatic dimension of emotion comes to the fore – cognitive in the sense that emotion constitutes a source of understanding of self and world, pragmatic in the sense that such knowledge informs how events are engaged with or responded to. In fact, Lutz and White suggest in their 1986 review of the anthropology of emotion that a framework, not yet realized at the time, for studying emotion anthropologically should not start with the comparison of emotion categories but instead with a set of life problems (1986: 427–9). That emotion is pragmatic, entailing what I think of in terms of the twin questions of ‘what is important to me?’ and ‘what could I do about it?’, was intuited early on when Robert Levy wrote, ‘Emotions seem to be feelings which convey and represent information about one’s mode of relationships as a total individual to the social and nonsocial environment’ (1973: 271). Levy was invited to join a multi-investigator study to the Society Islands of French Polynesia to take up the labour of investigating the ‘private’ aspects of behaviour (xv). He found instead a nexus, writing ten years later: ‘in an “emotion”, say anger, there is an emphasis on something wrong in the relationship of the person to his external physical and social context’ (1984: 221). With Unni Wikan’s Managing Turbulent Hearts (1990) we get a full articulation of how emotion and ethics intersect in the sense the author’s

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interlocutors had – a woman named Suriati in particular – that ‘“there is so much to care about’ (liu anu kenehange)’ (27). There is a multiplicity of concerns at any given time – black magic, limited resources, stakes to defend, preserving mental calm – and no realistic way to compartmentalize problems so as to tackle each one by one (14, 27, 108). For Wikan’s interlocutors, the problems of life are not to be approached with indifference, though such an approach may be valued in other times and places (e.g. Cassaniti 2015). ‘Balinese insist that knowledge must be felt-thought or else one will be bereft of moral guidance and unable to think rationally’ (276). Mirroring the simultaneity of life problems, this view suggests a simultaneity in what occurs in having a feeling-thought: perceiving a situation, gathering information, and sensing the pressure to act. In other words, the moral agent simultaneously feels there is something to do and knows that something is not just anything. The ‘emotion is the whole story’, Richard Shweder has argued (2003: 155). In early Chinese thought, a view that emotion and situation are inseparably continuous is indicated by the fact that the same character, qing, is found in both terms (Kuan 2015: 102). More than patterns of thought and behaviour, the main staple of the ‘classic mode’ in the anthropology of emotions, we have from these early studies a picture of the variable and universal qualities of life predicaments in different locales. They are so often related to the unequal distribution of power and resources – a missing piece in the Aristotelian approach (Mattingly 2014: 118–19). A relation in which something is at stake in a firstperson way, emotion may anticipate and capacitate the active response, like an energy that ‘propels’ (Williams 1981: 12–13), driving movement forward like the fire of liget (Rosaldo 1980). The emotion itself is not action, but it belongs to the same dynamic whole of which it is constituent. Recent ethnographies that have problematized the way in which human emotion has become a site for social regulation, particularly in the context of societies undergoing market transition, may be re-read in this light. In Unknotting the Heart (Yang 2015), a compelling ethnography of the use of psychology to manage the discontent of the unemployed and underemployed in market reform China, it is clear the author takes issue with the promotion of ‘happiness’ and positive thinking on the part of state organizations and representatives. Yang does so for good reason; her outrage extends from the anger of the informants she came to know, who find it hard to smile, having to endure the situation of ‘killing the mule immediately after it finishes work’ (xiemo shalu) (55). Ethically speaking, outrage is an appropriate human response to an unjust socioeconomic situation (cf. Scheper-Hughes 1995), and it informs the book’s theoretical framework, ‘therapeutic governance’. Meanwhile, the anger and the discontent of the unemployed is sharp and lucid, ethical and pragmatic in the sense that the anger has everything to do with what is at stake (dignity and the basic necessities of life), and what one could do to

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pursue what is important (negotiate or fight). Take majie as an example, a ‘local speech genre’ that has ‘distinctive pragmatic features’ – in the linguistic sense – involving cursing on the street and, in some cases, kicking at doors in an effort to obtain resources or waivers for utility payments (99, 184, 189). As a ‘womanish’ genre of speech, majie is a last resort for the men who do it (185). It is an ‘eruption’ (179) of suppressed anger that may be seen as perfect in measure, an expression of the speaker’s fullest humanity, and an intelligent response to an unbearable situation. No amount of anger will bring back the golden days laid-off workers feel nostalgic for, but the effort officials put into promoting positive thinking – what Yang’s informants call out as ‘hoodwinking’ (huyou) – did not achieve its purpose either. The strong emotions in the ethnography point to the ‘distinctive surplus of life’ that is found in a living being’s struggle to maintain a meaningful relation to its circumstances (Guenther 2013: 118, 121). This surplus is extinguished only in the most extreme of situations.

Affect, Mood, and History: The Stuff That Hangs between Us While the previous section ended by highlighting the pragmatic dimension of emotion – what it does – this section will explore what emotion is, in order to make the key point more robust: emotion is a relation in which something is at stake in a first-person way. To explore this question, I turn to the theory of affect. A much more recent development, the affective turn’s connection to the anthropology of emotion is either implicit or it is contentious. It is implicit because anthropological work deploying the concept of affect similarly locates subjective life in the world rather than in the person, understanding affect as a moving, transpersonal force or energy that moves and propels (Rutherford 2016), binding the most impersonal of social forms with the most intimate of sensory experiences (Rutherford 2016: 291; Mazzarella 2017a: 201, 2017b). It is contentious because critics of affect theory understand it as a ‘project of the ruination of other theories’ (Lutz 2017: 186), having located the origin, if you will, of human action below the cognitive level, outside of social processes. For Catherine Lutz, prioritizing the body and the inchoate over language and representation has the effect of reinstating the binaries feminist anthropology worked so hard to undo (2017: 187). For Emily Martin, the humanities scholars who developed the concept of affect have aligned themselves too closely with neuroscience, losing sight of how the social in fact goes ‘all the way down’ (2013: 157). Danilyn Rutherford, in her excellent review of anthropological work taking up the concept of affect, is both sympathetic and cautious – cautious because such work tends towards universalism in its search for ‘the forces at play in the making of social worlds’ (2016: 295), forces that are not themselves social. Rutherford suggests the affective

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turn in anthropology may be related to an ‘insecurity that humanities disciplines are feeling’ in the face of shrinking funds and support, thus a turn towards science (2016: 295). Affect theory in fact refers to a diverse body of writings (Martin 2013: 154; Rutherford 2016: 287), and the way in which anthropologists have used it no less so. While Rutherford’s review comprehensively identifies three majors areas in which affect theory’s impact on anthropology may be observed – studies of immaterial labour and neoliberal self-making, studies of the political, and multispecies ethnography – what I will focus on here is how and why I take affect to be related to ethics. My reading of affect theory is partial to my own contention with the way its deployment has tended towards arguments claiming to show how an economic order goes ‘all the way down’: yet another human capacity, totally instrumentalized. I share with other scholars the view that affect theory offers a productive and vitalizing antidote to social constructivism and determination (Brown and Tucker 2010: 248; Rutherford 2016: 287–8). Because my understanding of ethics begins with the premise that the caring subject acts in a vital web of relations (Kuan 2015), I find in certain strands of affect theory helpful resources for an anthropology of ethics. In my view, thinking with affect is a matter of keeping up with the messy vitality of actual life, tracing, to borrow from Kathleen Stewart, ‘a series of precisions’ that always unfold as a ‘transmogrification of things’ (2017: 193). It offers another avenue for attending to the particular, as Nussbaum does with the details of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, with the theoretical understanding that the particular exposes the limits of grand theories that either decontextualize or reify, returning ethical inquiry to the ‘data of human experience’ (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]: 245). If there is a predisposition towards universalism in affect theory, it is a universalism that presupposes contingent relations and flux, emergence and particularity, in the unfolding of human affairs. Where there is a turn towards science, such turning involves a kind of ‘poaching’, taking what is useful and discarding what is not (Massumi 2002: 19). The strand of affect theory I take to be most relevant to the anthropology of ethics can be traced to the biologist Jakob von Uexku¨ll, whose ideas have informed Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Baruch Spinoza, affect theory’s fountainhead. Affect is good to think with because a social and historical process is a dynamic living process that consists of intimate relations between a multiplicity of actors and materials, not all of them human, all far from inert in the sense that objects are in life (Ingold 2018). The affective turn offers another occasion for locating mind in ecology, as Gregory Bateson would have put it, in a way that takes the felt as seriously as the systemic. In Bateson, the tree, the axe, the eyes of the woodcutter, and each and every cut face constitutes a feedback system ‘that has the characteristics of immanent mind’ (2000 [1972]: 317). Too much system, not enough feelings. There is, on the other hand, more ‘poetry’ in Deleuze

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(Hurley 1988: ii), which may be illustrated in an image he gives in conceptualizing affect, inspired by von Uexku¨ll. In any corner of an immense forest one may find affective relations composed of unlike things, relations in which something is of interest: ‘the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the least hairy place it can find’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 257). The light and the tick, the tick and a smell, and finally the tick nestled close to the body of a hairy terrestrial animal: these are ‘just three affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 257; see also Deleuze 1988 [1970]: 124–5). In this tiny illustration, affect is presented as a relation in which something is at stake in a first-person way, or to put it in von Uexku¨ll’s terms, affect concerns the singular perspective of a living being towards its Umwelt (Guenther 2013: 109). A human is, like other living beings, a being for whom some things matter more than others. Accommodation of the non-human world marks a critical difference between the theory of affect, on the one hand, and the anthropology of emotion on the other, thereby offering a resource for expanding our understanding of emotion and ethics. The non-human world here can include virtually anything, as the notion of affect only requires two bodies in relation, and a body that enters into a relation can be anything: ‘it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (Deleuze 1988 [1970]: 127; see also Seigworth and Gregg 2010). What requires specification, according to Deleuze, is what happens when two bodies enter into a relation: is it a relation of composition or decomposition? Is it a relation of diminishing or flourishing? Whether the effect is either cannot be known ahead of time because what combines is always a contingent surprise. This unknowability creates the space for empirical inquiry and it concerns ethics because an inquiry into what Deleuze calls the ‘order of causes’ ought to inform how to work out the practical problem of arriving at a ‘maximum of joyful passions’ (28): vitality and action rather than impotence, life rather than ‘slavery’ and death. For anthropologists, the project is less a matter of practical ethics than of scientific description – that is, the practical ethics of people observed. But the anthropological project shares in the Spinozist sensibility in that one cannot know ahead of time what a body can do. In other words, one cannot know what human experiences (or emotions) are possible ahead of time since affections are necessarily contingent on relations that are always only ever historical. What Deleuze calls ‘immanent modes of existence’ anthropologists call ‘forms of life’ (e.g. Rosaldo 1980: xiii; Das 2007). Yael Navaro-Yashin (2009) thickly describes a situation in northern Cyprus where Turkish-Cypriots live their everyday lives with the things their enemies have left behind, and with scenes of ruin in the horizon. She

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draws in part on Deleuze’s understanding of affect as ‘intensities that may move through human bodies, but that do not necessarily emerge from them’ (12) to understand how the power of the material world to affect combines with the human propensity to interpret, to produce a discharged energy she calls the ‘affect of melancholy’. In doing so, Navaro-Yashin lodges what was for Freud an intra-psychic, interpersonal phenomenon in a broader context that includes left-behind furniture and household objects, rusted cars in a landscape of ruin, and a shared history that binds Turkish-Cypriots to Greek-Cypriots. With a military border drawing a sharp line between enemies, Turkish-Cypriots relate to the other community through objects (2009: 3). This relation is an outcome of historical contingency, and it is suffused with the affect of melancholy because making life with the plunder of the other made it difficult for people in this community to ‘think well of themselves’ (T. S. Eliot quoted in Wikan 1990: 107). Ethnographic description diverges from the sort of ethics Deleuze proposes as the situation of Turkish-Cypriots is ambiguously one of composition and decomposition, diminishing and flourishing. ‘Everyone’s hand has been dirtied with plunder’, they say (3), but social life in a landscape of ruin is still a form of life. Self-critique appears to be a way to actively keep moral distance from the violence of appropriation even when one is an agent of it (16). Such is the sort of ethics we find in ethnographic work.3 Drawing from affect theory has not only allowed anthropologists to situate deeply felt desires and experiences within broader historical circumstances but has also facilitated theorizations of diffuse, roughly articulated desires and experiences that do not fit well in any emotion category (Throop 2014; Jarrı´n 2017; Collu 2019). In some ethnographic accounts, affect is not the theoretical framework but the descriptions are rich in implications for a re-reading for affections, just as classic studies of emotion may be re-read for moral experience. Generally, anthropologists are no longer writing about emotion in the context of a sub-field defined by the category of emotion itself, and many who are doing so implicitly work at the intersection between medical anthropology and the anthropology of ethics (Garcia 2010; Han 2012; Throop 2014). Notably, the work reflects a shared theme – more states of de-pression which may nonetheless be construed as a form of ethical life. They say something about the capacity to be affected, to merge even, in a situation in which something is existentially and morally at stake. One might say it is an achievement in being ‘a person on whom nothing is lost’ (Henry James quoted in Nussbaum 1990: 152). Borrowing from Sara Ahmed (2010), Jason Throop writes of moral moods as being ‘atmospheric’ (2014: 70). A mood is a feeling that is both inside and outside, as much a ‘surrounding influence’ with no form as a moral 3

My appropriation of Deleuze is informed by Mazzarella’s (2017b) critique of Deleuze’s anti-dialectical vitalism.

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orientation to what is existentially at stake. Throop reads what he calls ‘moodedness’ in the slouched shoulders and despondent tone of voice of his informant Fal’aeg, a sixty-year-old Yapese man who laments ‘the impossibility of returning to a traditional way of life’, yet was vague about what exactly has changed (75). Meanwhile, like Navaro-Yashin, Angela Garcia also gives an account of melancholic subjects living in a landscape of ruin, in this case abandoned irrigation systems filled with discarded heroin needles (2010). The setting is Espan˜ola Valley, the state of New Mexico, southwest United States, where a heroin epidemic was raging. Although the thrust of Garcia’s argument is to underscore the ethics of melancholia in the wake of the death of loved ones, she also writes of a feeling that is as much in the person as it is in the land. In these accounts, there is a circumstance of devastation. In Yap, the ongoing decline and imminent end of American aid will be replaced by Chinese capital. The state governor has already signed an agreement with a company that would bring to an island of 12,000 people 10,000 Chinese workers for the building of massive infrastructure for Chinese tourism. In Espan˜ola Valley, Hispanos are surrounded by a natural beauty that is no longer theirs (Garcia 2010: 83). Land once used for grazing, agriculture, and doing kinship had been expropriated by the federal government for establishing a National Forest and for building the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Although Garcia does not formulate her argument using this term, the kind of melancholy she describes exemplifies many features of a ‘moral mood’. The endlessness of melancholy, a condition her informants say is unalterable and ‘has no end’ (no termina, sin fin), appears to be ‘totalistic’, like Fal’aeg’s mood. The feeling is vague in the sense that it is ‘disconnected from specific recollections of the past’ (79), yet intensely orientated towards something that matters. While Throop argues that moral mood is a way of perceiving a state of emergency (2014: 71–2), Garcia understands melancholy as a way of ‘keeping watch’ over loss (80), and attending to the past as such (110), in a community where addicts fear their own deaths will be quickly forgotten (95–6). In these accounts, it is not clear where a feeling ends, where the person ends, and where the social atmosphere and external historical circumstance begins. While a mood is more diffuse, the pragmatic dimension of emotion discussed in the previous section is still there. In the perception of a state of emergency, in keeping vigil over lives lost, an assertion is made about what matters from a first-person perspective, in a situation where nothing much can be done other than to care, to at least live as a being still animated by the capacity to be affected. The true antithesis of vitality may not be states of de-pression but instead a total withering away of this capacity to care, which may be glimpsed in writings on what happens to a prisoner cut off from social relations – his capacity to ‘comport himself toward something that matters . . . evacuated’ (Guenther 2013: 20).

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My re-reading of ethnographies that do not explicitly draw on affect theory, or do so to a limited degree, stems from my own interest in redeploying it for a mode of inquiry that is not quite the mainstream. What is at stake, from the perspective of anthropological scholarship, is how we understand and theorize the human subject. If humanities scholars have erred too far on the side of trying to find hope and potentiality in pre-social affects ‘located subcortically in the brain’ (Martin 2013: 157), then some anthropologists may have erred too far on the side of social critique in using affect theory to show how the imperatives of changing economic arrangements are reaching ‘all the way down’ (Martin 2013: 157). In the literature on ‘affective economies’ or ‘economies of affect’, indeterminate potential and bodily capacities become salient as the key ingredient in the production of value in the wake of major transformations, variously characterized in terms of a shift to post-Fordist, ‘Toyotist’, or neoliberal economies, or to ‘societies of control’ from ‘societies of discipline’ (Hardt 1999; Negri 1999; Shouse 2005; Clough 2007). Whether we are talking about getting models to do something that will make an impact in a saturated marketplace of images (Wissinger 2007), or the television industry’s shift to lifestyle-orientated programming in recessionary Japan (Luka´cs 2010), or raising the kind of children who will contribute to China’s shift towards an innovation-driven economy (Kuan 2014), or binding non-governmental organization (NGO) workers from the global North to sites in the global South (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009), or getting poor Brazilians to invest in beauty (Jarrı´n 2017), analysts invoke the notion of affect to show how vitality itself has become a form of capital in systems of production that depend on the rapid circulation of information and images. Such work points to how affect provides the fuel for new systems of capture, as if to say the tyranny of capital does not look anything like tyranny because it thrives on free movement and play. With the emergence of affective economies, it has been argued, there is a ‘real subsumption’ of life itself (Clough 2007). You must live even if it kills you! Sometimes, the most illuminating of studies as far as affect is concerned do not invoke affect theory at all. The theoretical point is lodged in a ‘ series of precisions’ (Stewart 2017: 193) that unfurl in thick descriptions of social processes that are historically conditioned yet remain open-ended. Affect theory offers a way to polish the lens (Deleuze 1988 [1970]: 14), to more fully appreciate the immanent quality of ethnography, which, like novels, presents ‘samples of something that might happen in human life’, other lives and situations that bear ‘universal significance’ for the reader (Nussbaum 1990: 166, emphasis original). Rich ethnographic work is philosophical because it illuminates what it means to be an affective human being in a nexus of surprising combinations that have happened in a given historically contingent social formation. Recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s description of an imagined forest scene, just the three affects enumerated, I would argue that

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the more details there are, the more relations described, the more the affects brought to light: because affects are immanent to ‘things such as might happen’ (Nussbaum 2006 [2001]: 240). Take Clara Han’s (2012) ethnography Life in Debt as an example. It is a vitalist account of kin relations and house-making in the Chilean context of severe credit card indebtedness and economic precariousness. The account is thick with misery, to be sure. But there is also at the same time a something-else in its detailed descriptions of everyday life, found in the constant effort people make to be in the present of the other against all the forces constantly tearing relations apart – effort that is not necessarily the exertion of an individual alone but instead ‘drawn forth’ by a web of care relations (cf. Bruya 2010). Han describes one particular household as pervaded with a ‘thick glue of affects’ (154). It is as if the house has an ‘agentive force’ of its own – as suggested by the neighbour who avoids visiting because she feels choked when she is there, and by the daughter’s feeling that a ‘spell’ has been cast on it: ‘It’s always the same: going in circles in the same space.’ Here we find a household thick with sad passions, a stasis and an immobilization of human action in relations of ‘decomposition’ (Deleuze 1988 [1970]). Why that thickness is there relates to a whole series of precisions that have accumulated into an indistinct feeling of ineluctability, situational particularities that are as intimate as they are historical, as much a matter of political economy as they are of human experience. They include a mother’s political exile from Chile, her difficulty in reconciling activism with motherhood, a daughter’s interpretation of her real reason for going to Argentina, and the mounting credit card debts and abandoned bolts of fabric that were supposed to help in paying them off. Add to this a daughter’s sense of existential debt towards the mother she resented for having adopted her from a biological parent who was an alcoholic, and we have a pile of sticky affects that combines resentment with ‘loyalty, guilt, and care’ (150). Han ends this chapter, titled ‘Neoliberal Depression’, with a luminous ethnographic detail. It is a backyard party for the son Oscar who has married, and Julieta the daughter had refused to join because of a squabble with her new sister-in-law over missing money. Just as Han was about to sit with Julieta in the one-room shack the latter rents from her mother at the back of the family property: Oscar knocked on the door, pleading with Julieta to come out and at least greet her grandmother. Sighing, Julieta opened the door and stepped out into the celebration in her pajamas. Oscar handed her a glass of champagne, which Julieta held in her hand without drinking. She sat down next to her grandmother for the next few hours, holding her hand, in silence. (Han 2012: 166, emphases added)

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A brother and a sister, an open door and a glass of champagne, a granddaughter and her visiting grandmother – just three affects in this one description, embedded in an ethnographically dense warp and weft of political and intimate histories. Earlier in the chapter Han argues against ‘taking subjectivity as an initial property of a subject’ in favour of taking it as a ‘singular weave of relations’ (143). I would only add that sometimes a weave of relations becomes so dense it ossifies as a state of stuckness. Then sometimes a tiny shift, a transmogrification, will appear out of nowhere; not necessarily because of an actor’s motivation to move something along. The movement is instead drawn forth by a web of relations. It is an image I borrow from Brian Bruya and the distinction he makes between saying that wind ‘blows’ in a tunnel versus is ‘drawn forth’ in relation to changes in other variables (2010: 216). It is a matter of understanding the world in terms of force mechanics versus fluid mechanics, and revising our models of human action accordingly. In this spirit, it seems important to leave the weave intact – the immense forest of affects as it is so as to avoid introducing discontinuities where discontinuities do not exist – with the understanding that emotion and affect is immanent to morality as people live and experience it. Orientating oneself towards the things and people that matter, the moral agent takes up ‘a posture of agency that is porous and susceptible of influence’ (Nussbaum 1990: 180).

To Extend or to Retreat, to Retreat in Order to Extend In an essay titled ‘Senses and Values of Oneness’, historian of Chinese thought Philip J. Ivanhoe begins his inquiry into why we care and how by critiquing a hypothesis from experimental psychology known as ‘the empathy-altruism hypothesis’. This starts with the notion of an atomistic individual who (1) is endowed with a capacity to have regard for an other, then (2) learns to feel and respond in relation to another individual, and finally (3) develops the capacity to behave altruistically (2015: 238). Ivanhoe offers the ‘oneness hypothesis’ as an alternative, based on neoConfucian ideas of a self ‘coextensive’ with ‘other people, creatures, and things’ – the whole universe (236). This hypothesis differs from the psychological one in starting with the whole rather than the part: ‘We are moved by aspects of Nature because in a fairly direct and intricate way we are one with it’ (241), articulating, Ivanhoe argues, a sensibility that corresponds with ‘our best scientific understanding’ (239). There are many iterations of this kind of argument, and they need not come from East Asia. William James offers one, expressed in the idea that we have as many selves as there are individuals and groups we would like to please (1981 [1890]: 282). For James, these multiple selves constitute a single unity, though not in a 1 + 1 = 2 kind of way. As he writes,

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In its widest possible sense, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. (1981 [1890]: 279–80) Similar to the idea expressed by Ivanhoe above, the self is found in the extension, not in some pre-formed capacity that pre-exists a meeting with the world, and, in this extension, established with the taking of ‘selfish’ interest in material and social objects (e.g. recognition from others), there is freedom, ease, even a ‘delicate rapture’ (298). In this chapter, I have emphasized relationality and connection in thinking about what emotion is and what it does. Emotion can be an orientation, a mode of perception and judgment, a trace of vulnerability, an investment of interest, a mode of care or participation, a force of propulsion, an energy, or the ‘stuff’ between bodies. It might consist of dynamics of ‘hot’ involvement and immersion, influence and emergence, or entanglement and near-total fusion. It is sometimes a target for social manipulation and control, and here, too, there is relationality. But relationality is not everything and the strong attachments that bind a person to other bodies – human and non-human, including one’s own – are not fixed. In different times and places, the intensities that bind are problematized and worked upon with the aid of sociocultural technologies and practices for ‘detachment’, if you will. One may say detachment is still a relation of attachment, for a project to wall oneself off from worldly fluctuations and frustrations makes detachment itself an object of partial orientation, investment, and participation. These practices are worth acknowledging and briefly discussing because they point to the human capacity to exercise power over the experience of relations – relative to existing repertoires, materials, idioms, technologies, and aspirations. Well exemplified in Indic religious practice (Cassaniti 2015; Laidlaw 2015), they constitute another way to approach the ethics of emotion, since practices of detachment are also a response to the problems of life – social, political, and existential. That the practice of science and public administration in a mass society rests on a foundation of cool detachment is already a well-worn trope (Candea, Cook, Trundle, and Yarrow 2015), while recent work on engineers in Peru preparing for road construction – that is, document preparation and laboratory experiments ‘buffer’ them from messy realities and potential responsibilities – offers a particularly fresh case for re-thinking the meaning of detachment as a moral practice (Knox and Harvey 2015). Social theory is of course a morally inflected exercise in detachment, from Durkheim’s problematization of too much bonding in a society or not enough of it (1966 [1951]) to Lauren Berlant’s work on attachments that

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contribute to the ‘wearing out of the subject’ in contemporary life (2011: 28). Clinical psychotherapy may be added to this list too. Based on fieldwork in a systemic couple’s therapy clinic in Argentina, Samuele Collu (2019) came to understand therapy as a ritual of dispossession, which aims to detach couples in crisis from their attachment to the promise of romantic love. Drawing from Berlant, Collu explains how the attachment is like a ‘spirit of impasse’, which, like affects, are in the air and move about, immobilizing the affected with ‘a promise which is not being delivered’ (302). In a systemic family therapy clinic in China, therapy takes an illness as an occasion for addressing family conflicts an adolescent has taken responsibility for, a result of caring too much about tension between parents (Kuan 2020). Not unlike certain divination rituals directed at the problems of everyday life (e.g. Whyte 1997), family therapy deploys readily available cultural idioms to ‘free’ an adolescent from the constrictions of ‘emotional togetherness’ (Bowen 1978). While the problem in certain strands of psychology and philosophy and much popular writing appears to be individualistic self-interest and how to get people to care more, the problem presented in a situation of kinship is the exact reverse of the premise that founds the empathy-altruism hypothesis Ivanhoe contests. In the former, the question of care starts with an atom, and then asks how an atom will be attracted to another atom strongly enough such that it might ‘willingly’ risk and sacrifice its welfare for the sake of another (see Ivanhoe 2015: 238). In the latter, the question is how to lessen the intensity of attachment – conceived in systemic therapy as separation from a ‘clump’ of seemingly discrete individuals – not unlike the practice of ringring described by Michelle Rosaldo (1980) in her account of Ilongot life. Ringring consists of diffusing the heat of liget by easing the heart; it is just one of many other relational practices Ilongot engage in for the sake of getting along with kin – for example, resignation, accommodation, and forgetting. A more comprehensive discussion of what ethnographic research has found in the area of how people ‘do emotion’ (Cassaniti 2015) in practising ‘detachment’ would require a different review essay. Here I only wish to say that the dream of pure agency in a certain tradition of philosophy does not appear to be unique in delineating a project for buffering the self from the messiness of the actual world. Perhaps it is only the intensity with which it does so, a response to the practical necessity of helping to maintain order in a mass society, that makes it unusual.

Coda This chapter began with the question of what an emotion is and what kind of work it does, before embarking on a survey of how the question has been engaged by the philosophers and anthropologists who take it

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seriously as revealing something important about morality or society. The concept of affect, as developed by Gilles Deleuze in particular, was brought to bear for accommodating the non-human in relations of interest and passion, adding a good dose of vitalism to the humanist inquiry this chapter undertook. Whether it is affect or emotion serving as the key analytic term, a prioritization of either brings us into the unique local world that constitutes the web of life in which a moral agent is enmeshed. If literature was crucial for developing a grounded theory of emotion’s moral significance in Martha Nussbaum’s early work, then the same may be true for ethnographic writing in further developing a philosophically engaged anthropology of ethics. The kind of figure that emerges in a fine, empirical description is a subject of care. They are both pitiable and admirable for the way they recognize their interdependencies and take in the weight of a world in their response to it.

Acknowledgements I am immensely grateful to the three anonymous readers and to friends and students who shared ideas and gave challenging feedback on early drafts. They include: Barclay Bram, Darren Fung, Rob McCall, Melissa Park, Lone Grøn, and Horacio Ortiz. A thousand thanks to James Laidlaw for reading every version and for his warm encouragement along the way. All shortcomings are my own.

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Meinert, Lotte. 2018. ‘Every Day: Forgiving after War in Northern Uganda’, in Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. New York: Berghahn: 100–15. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. ‘Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15: 1–18. Negri, Antonio. 1999. ‘Value and Affect’. Michael Hardt, trans. boundary 2, 26(2): 77–88. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001 [1986]. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006 [2001]. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pritzker, Sonya E. 2016. ‘New Age with Chinese Characteristics? Translating Inner Child Emotion Pedagogies in Contemporary China’. James M. Wilce and Janina Fenigsen, eds. Ethos. Special Issue: ‘Emotion Pedagogies’, 44(2): 150–70. Pritzker, Sonya E. and Whitney L. Duncan. 2019. ‘Technologies of the Social: Family Constellation Therapy and the Remodeling of Relational Selfhood in China and Mexico’. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 43: 468–95. Richard, Analiese and Daromir Rudnyckyj. 2009. ‘Economies of Affect’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15: 57–77. Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1984. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling’, in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine (eds.), Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 137–57. Rutherford, Danilyn. 2016. ‘Affect Theory and the Empirical’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 45: 285–300. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. ‘The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology’. Current Anthropology, 36(3): 409–20. Seigworth, Gregory J. and Melissa Gregg. 2010. ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1–25. Shouse, Eric. 2005. ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’. M/C Journal, 8.6. http://jour nal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Stewart, Kathleen. 2017. ‘In the World That Affect Proposed’. Daniel White, ed. Cultural Anthropology. ‘Retrospectives: Affect’, 32(2): 192–8. Shweder, Richard A. 2003. Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Throop, C. Jason. 2014. ‘Moral Moods’. Ethos 42(1): 65–83. 2018. ‘Being Otherwise: On Regret, Morality and Mood’, in Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. New York: Berghahn: 61–82. Tran, Allen L. 2015. ‘Rich Sentiment and the Cultural Politics of Emotion in Postreform Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’. American Anthropologist, 117 (3): 480–92. Trnka, Susanna and Catherine Trundle. 2017. ‘Introduction. Competing Responsibilities: Reckoning Personal Responsibility, Care for the Other, and the Social Contract in Contemporary Life’, in Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle (eds.), Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1–24. Urban Walker, Margaret. 1991. ‘Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency’. Metaphilosophy, 22 (1–2): 14–27. Whyte, Susan Reynolds. 1997. Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wikan, Unni. 1990. Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilce, James M. and Janina Fenigsen. 2016. ‘Emotion Pedagogies: What Are They, and Why Do They Matter?’ James M. Wilce and Janina Fenigsen, eds. Ethos, Special Issue: ‘Emotion Pedagogies’, 44(2): 81–95. Williams, Bernard. 1981. Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993. ‘Postscript’, in Daniel Statman (ed.), Moral Luck. Albany: State University of New York Press: 251–8. Wissinger, Elizabeth. 2007. ‘Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry’, in Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (eds.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 231–60. Yang, Jie. 2015. Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2010. ‘“A Disease of Frozen Feelings”: Ethically Working on Emotional Worlds in a Russian Orthodox Church Drug Rehabilitation Program’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 24(3): 326–43.

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13 Happiness and Well-Being Edward F. Fischer and Sam Victor

Introduction Ixcanul, an award-winning 2015 film by director Jayro Bustamonte, takes place in a Maya community in highland Guatemala where most of the adults and many of the children work at the neighbouring coffee plantation. Because of the low pay and harsh conditions, Guatemalans tend to view such labour as employment of last resort. The movie, the first feature-film shot in Kaqchikel Mayan, follows the tragic story of Marı´a, a young woman torn between her betrothal to an older overseer and her love for a young man yearning to go north to the USA. Ixcanul garnered accolades for its moving portrayal of the hardships of Indigenous life in Guatemala. Shown the movie in the Maya town Nahuala in 2017, however, local viewers reacted less enthusiastically. While finding the basic tragedy believable, and appreciative of the native-language dialogue, they noted that the movie made it look as if their lives were devoid of happiness and joy. Certainly, there is pain and sorrow and discrimination, as they know all too well, but, they said, there is also hope and happiness. Looking at happiness and well-being across cultures, it is tempting to see these as states of being that some achieve, and others do not – the winners and losers in the game of life. Joel Robbins (2013) and Sherry Ortner (2016) observe that over the last decades anthropology has focussed on the apparent losers, and the structural conditions that produce the hardships and anguish of life at the margins. As the Maya viewers of Ixcanul point out, there is value in looking at the good as well as the bad, in representing people and situations in their full complexity. ‘Well-being’ (and its adjunct and sometimes synonym, ‘happiness’) carries different meanings and connotations across historical and cultural contexts. The anthropological challenge then becomes how to capture what notions of well-being (and the good and the good life)

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mean to different people in different times and places – and to build a positive framework based on this range of lived experience. Arjun Appadurai (2013) observes that ‘the missing piece here has been a systematic effort to understand how cultural systems, as combinations of norms, dispositions, practices, and histories, frame the good life as a landscape of discernible ends and of practical paths to the achievement of these ends’ (292). In this endeavour, the dialectic engagement of ethnographic fieldwork is uniquely sensitive to the affective subtleties and quantum-like contradictions behind the answers to survey questions that ask how happy one is. Let us be clear: the anthropologist’s role is not to judge good from bad, but to uncover the evaluative frameworks that those we study invoke to make such judgements. Still, the discipline’s approach to understanding happiness and well-being is charged with moral import, with its focus on bottom-up understandings and the structural economic and political disparities that anthropologists often traverse in pursuit of different ways of knowing and being in the world. In this chapter, we begin by situating anthropologists’ contemporary concern with happiness and well-being in relation to virtue ethics and other disciplines, namely social psychology and behavioural economics, that have long taken a methodological interest in such concepts and how to operationalize cross-cultural evaluative measures for them. Indeed, virtue theory undergirds much of the social psychological research into happiness as well as international development studies’ capabilities-based approach to poverty and well-being. Anthropological approaches to wellbeing also draw heavily on a critical engagement with virtue ethics (see Mair, Chapter 3 of this volume). This involves a concern with moralities and value systems, what is considered ‘good’ and ‘just’ in particular times and places, and how those align with notions of ‘the good’ and ‘the good life’. We then survey a range of theoretical works in anthropology regarding happiness and well-being, as well as ethnographies that shed light on different visions of the good and pursuits of the good life. Among the diversity of contexts and topics, we find an overlapping theoretical emphasis on values and the ways agency gets channelled through selfcultivation. These works suggest that the ways one constructs one’s world may be understood as ‘life projects’ orientated around values about what is considered ‘good’. Drawing on this research, we conclude that the concept of well-being refers to an affective evaluation of commitment (tacit or conscious) to certain future-orientated cultural values that comprise a normative sense of ‘the good’. Such commitment provides symbolic and often deeply felt purpose to individual life projects, but equally important in the evaluation of well-being is an ability to substantively pursue that purpose within the structural constraints of political and economic systems and the aspirational constraints of social and cultural genealogies.

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Happiness Studies and Multidimensional Approaches to Well-Being Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in happiness and well-being. This has been a productive area of research in part because of its inherently integrative and interdisciplinary framing, and also because of its real-world implications. Tellingly, in the global North the field generally falls under the heading of happiness studies, while in the global South it is often referred to as multidimensional approaches to poverty. Largely dominated by social psychologists and economists, the bulk of research has focussed on identifying correlations between variables, searching for ‘determinants’ of happiness and well-being. Both approaches have clear practical applications. Happiness studies has nurtured a significant self-help sub-branch in ‘positive psychology’ and a flurry of bestselling books that point the way to happiness. Jonathan Haidt (2006) argues that emotional attachments (particularly through work and love) are key elements of well-being. Daniel Gilbert (2007) identifies our faulty affective forecasting as the key barrier to happiness: thinking that a promotion or a thing will complete us when in fact we adapt quickly to any new circumstances (good or bad) in terms of an emotional equilibrium. In development studies, a parallel line of research has focussed on multidimensional measures of poverty. Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others have developed a ‘capabilities approach’ to development which expands the focus out from narrow material conditions to nurture greater overall well-being (see Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume, on Nussbaum). Happiness studies and multidimensional approaches to poverty take as their starting point Aristotle’s distinction between hedonism, or positive affect such as joy and pleasure; and eudaimonia, or life satisfaction and selfcultivation. Studies using hedonic approaches to subjective well-being are primarily interested in measuring an individual’s levels of positive and negative affect via ‘biomarkers’ and ‘prime objective determinants’ of happiness that can be examined in conjunction with more qualitative questionnaires and interviews (Layard 2010). In this way, the terms ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ are linked to one another in a conceptual framework of mutually progressive maximization (i.e. the happier one feels, the better off one will be in terms of overall well-being). This can be contrasted with eudemonic approaches in which well-being is considered less in terms of sensory affect and more in terms of the realization of human potentials through Aristotelian notions of virtue and choice as well as the contemporary (liberal) notion of agency. Methodologically, the latter is more likely to be interested in a narrative organization of an individual’s experiences (e.g. in life stories) than a quantitative survey-based

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assessment. While the narrative approach is closer to anthropology’s privileging of ethnographic description, as Deci and Ryan (2006) suggest, the average reader of the Journal of Happiness Studies is likely to be more accustomed to research focussing on hedonic happiness than on eudaimonia. While stark distinctions between such categories never completely hold, we find it productive to use ‘happiness’ to refer to hedonic pleasures and to everyday contentment, which, from an anthropological perspective, is a social as well as subjective quality. ‘Well-being’, on the other hand, denotes a broader sense of ‘life satisfaction’, linked to notions of ‘the good life’. As such, the condition of well-being is more in line with the Aristotelian ideal of human existence: a fulfilled life, a meaningful life, eudaimonia. The Greek roots of eudaimonia aptly carry the connotation of benevolent power over one’s destiny, the power to construct a life that one values. Psychological studies of happiness and well-being have sought to define and evaluate well-being through correlations with a number of variables including income, education levels, social class, physical health, and idiosyncratic personality traits. Psychologists have also attempted to address multifaceted questions related to cultural variation and comparison (e.g. universal indicators vs. cultural particularities) and complex temporal frames (e.g. lifespan psychology) (cf. Ryan and Deci 2001; Veenhoven, 1984, 2000). The relationship between material wealth and life satisfaction has received the most attention (see Layard 1999; Graham 2011a; Kahneman 2013). These studies find that while people with higher incomes and greater material wealth generally report higher life satisfaction, feelings of happiness (e.g. joy, affection) tend to peak at a certain level. These researchers stress that non-material aspects of one’s life and social environment, such as stable marriages/partnerships, employment, and health, are all essential factors. In this vein, Graham (2011) discusses the paradox of ‘happy peasants’, who in response to material impoverishment privilege social relations and modest hedonic pleasures, and wealthier ‘frustrated achievers’ suffering from lack of satisfaction despite, or because, of high aspirations for personal and work life. The question of material wealth remains a point of ambiguity, with studies coming to different and at times conflicting conclusions about its role. A study by Kahneman and Deaton (2010) argues that while hedonic happiness is not tightly associated with income, broader measures of life satisfaction do have a linear relationship. They conclude that (within the USA) ‘high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness’. Graham (2011) reads the same data from a slightly different angle: ‘more money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain’ (36). This research suggests that while income may be important for life satisfaction, it is not determinant, and at certain levels of

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wealth subsequent increments have a diminishing impact on subjective well-being. The question of cross-cultural comparison looms over happiness studies, especially when extended to contexts outside the United States and Europe. As Sara Ahmed (2007) points out, although the field of happiness studies seeks to measure and analyse at the level of universal human capacities, proclivities, and limitations, its roots in Anglo-American intellectual traditions such as English utilitarianism seem mostly to speak to Western contexts. In development studies, largely focussed on nonWestern contexts, gross domestic product (GDP) long served as the key measure of well-being (assuming that material resources are an accurate proxy for the ability to lead the life that one would want). Richard Easterlin’s (2001) work has questioned that assumption, pointing out that between countries, average life satisfaction measures do not rise with income, although wealthier people tend to be happier than the poor. This is to say there is not a significant correlation between national income and national averages of well-being, implying that well-being derives from relative income: if all boats rise, relative poverty leads to the same level of contentment or discontent. Easterlin’s conclusions have been challenged by Stevenson and Wolfers (2008), who find a broad correlation between GDP per head and levels of life satisfaction. Nevertheless, at least above a certain point, income is valued relative to the income of one’s peer group and others, and the well-being and income association is curvilinear (Diener 2009). Paralleling the growth of happiness studies, research into multidimensional measures of poverty and the rise of the capabilities approach to human development has redefined the goal of development as individual freedom and personal well-being. Rooted in the tradition of nineteenthcentury English utilitarianism (with its vision of calculating hedons and dolors), and informed by a cosmopolitan vision of justice, the work of political philosophers and economists such as Thomas Nagel (2005), Martha Nussbaum (2000, 2011), and Amartya Sen (1999, 2002) has positioned wellbeing as the fundamental metric of international development. Sen defines development as the freedom to live a life that one values. He argues that development programmes should work to build capabilities (material and non-material) that allow for empowerment and selfdetermination (i.e. ‘substantive freedom’). Sen is critical of the perspective of happiness underlying utility models in traditional welfare economics (1982, 2002). He observes that in terms of ‘the mental metric of utility’, people tend to adapt their aspirations to the context of what is perceived as possible and realistic (see also Elster 1983). This means that ‘a person’s deprivation, then, may not at all show up in the metrics of pleasure, desire, fulfilment, etc., even though he or she may be quite unable to be adequately nourished, decently clothed, minimally educated and so on’ (Sen 1999: 45). The reduced (‘disciplined’) desires of the severely deprived

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in terms of effective agency and capability are not the same as the ‘confident and demanding desires of the better placed’ (Sen 1997: 11; see also Clark 2009). Sen’s rejection of the welfare utility model compels that new weight be given to life satisfaction and subjective well-being (see Alkire 2002; Graham 2011). But well-being is a rather elusive state when it comes to measurement, and for many subjective well-being (especially life evaluation, not just hedonic happiness) serves as a solid signal of overall quality of life. Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi (2010) write that ‘quantitative measures of these subjective aspects hold the promise of delivering not just a good measure of quality of life per se, but also a better understanding of its determinants, reaching beyond people’s income and material conditions’ (18). Thus, such a capabilities approach takes the goal of development to be improving ‘well-being’ (or ‘quality of life’), understood as comprehensive and multidimensional measures of subjective and objective conditions of life. Indices for measuring well-being and quality of life range from simple life-satisfaction surveys to comprehensive evaluations of an individual’s living conditions and potential for economic and social flourishing. In large part because of their association with public policy agendas, such indices are orientated towards large-scale surveying, measurement, and the attainment of actionable statistics. While some indices such as the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) have proven to be more flexible cross-culturally than, say, the World Bank’s preference for evaluations of ‘standard of living’ in terms of daily spending (i.e. the two-dollarsper-day poverty threshold), the effort to create more comprehensive indices continues. While inherently related in both moral and empirical terms, poverty and happiness are far from simple correlates. The relationships between lived conditions of poverty and subjective evaluations of happiness and life satisfaction are both complex and of great import. To label lived conditions as ‘poverty’ sounds a moral call to action motivated by a recognition that the poor are deprived in ways deemed unjust and intolerable (relative to an imagined baseline such as Agamben’s (1998) bare life). Embedded in this active concern is care not simply for material conditions but for the suffering and unhappiness that are imagined to be associated with a life in poverty. That such an association is not simple and linear poses a fundamental problem to the practice of development: actions intended to alleviate conditions of poverty might reduce subjective well-being. When viewed together, we can see some degree of consensus among these conceptions of a good life insofar as there is a concern for the basic material conditions for life, individual agency/freedom, and meaningful social relationships. We can see the qualitative and aspirational dimensions of wellbeing becoming more important in these metrics, and there is perhaps a space for anthropological expertise to lend its hand. Furthermore, any

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framework that wishes to engage in a more robust cross-cultural comparison must be able to account for non-liberal notions of agency (Laidlaw 2014) and to consider other ways of conceiving of well-being. Such contributions would attempt to consider a diversity of cultural and moral logics but also, and importantly, attempt to think beyond the methodological individualism of psychology and behavioural economics.

Between Value(s) and Virtue(s): Anthropology, Happiness, and Well-Being In anthropology, ‘happiness’ tends to be used interchangeably with ‘wellbeing’ to blend the qualities of what happiness studies and development approaches distinguish as either affective/cognitive aspects or subjective/ qualitative factors. In contrast to happiness studies and multidimensional approaches to poverty, anthropological perspectives on well-being take seriously not only correlations of observable behaviour and material conditions but also people’s desires, aspirations, and imaginations – the hopes, fears, and other subjective factors that drive their engagement with the world. Such motivations are resistant to simple quantification, and as a result they are often dismissed or overlooked in the economic and development literature (Biehl 2005; Sayer 2011). In a wide range of ethnographies, the themes of values and virtues have become a constitutive part of the anthropological lexicon for thinking about happiness and wellbeing. Embracing anthropology’s more qualitative approach to studying wellbeing responds to the epistemological and ontological issues that arise from cross-cultural comparisons and the reduction of complexity down to simple numeric values. One of anthropology’s strengths is in taking a holistic approach to understanding cultural processes in their varied contexts. For this reason, Latour (1993) points to anthropology (at least the anthropology of an earlier era) as an alternative to modernist purification of scientific and social scientific realms of knowledge. Similarly, ‘well-being’ is an integrative concept, positioned as a more holistic understanding of economic and social development (at the personal and the collective levels) than GDP or life expectancy alone. The multidimensionality of well-being links together various measures of flourishing in ways that can help rethink policy goals and aims (Thin 2012). Anthropologists have long looked at the multiple dimensions of livelihoods, but we have not much looked at well-being, in part because we have tended recently to focus on the negative, the dark side of life, the exploitation and marginalization that so often plagues those we study (Ortner 2016; Robbins 2013; Thin 2008). If, as Nietzsche (1969) notes, humans are evaluative creatures, constantly judging the world around us in terms of various evaluative

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frameworks, then determining happiness or well-being might be seen as an evaluative procedure based on visions of ‘the good’ and ‘the good life’. It would then be important to consider that in such judgements people call on many sorts of values, economic and otherwise. People make decisions based not only on the thin utilitarian definition of economic preferences but also on consideration of value(s) in the thick ethical and social sense, reflecting what one considers important, worthy, virtuous. These considerations of value are no less important and informative than seemingly more objective measures such as GDP or life expectancy. Andrew Sayer (2011) describes how, in the practice of taking evaluative stances, those stances become dispositions that form part of one’s character, not only private but also importantly shared and social. Such evaluations are improvised, often intuitively, by individuals, but they are also framed (sometimes rigidly, sometimes loosely) by a porous consensus on underlying values. The question for the social scientist then becomes what sorts of metrics are used and who determines the underlying values. Are people always fully aware of their well-being? Are subjective measures of happiness sufficient to capture well-being, or can people sometimes feel better off than an ‘objective’ (i.e. outsider) view might allow? Can the hedonic happiness of bread and circuses (and the tingling devices in our pockets) distract us from pursuing our best interests? How much freedom do we have in such choices? Cultural and moral values provide a symbolic and conceptual grounding for understanding how the world should be and for evaluating how well thoughts, behaviours, and institutions align with that understanding of ‘the good’ (cf. Robbins and Sommerschuh 2016; Keane 2015; Sommerschuh and Robbins, Chapter 19 of this volume). We may view these as types of ‘imaginative value’ (Beckert 2016), connecting a person to their desired ideals and a larger sense of the good. Linking the personal and the structural, Andrew Sayer (2011: 25–6) defines values as ‘“sedimented” valuations that have become attitudes or dispositions, which we come to regard as justified. They merge into emotional dispositions and inform the evaluations we make of particular things, as part of our conceptual and affective apparatus. They are more abstract than the particular concrete evaluations from which they derive and which they in turn influence’. In this vein, we may view values as generative dispositions, the product of cultural logics of improvised and creative applications of broad underlying orientations (Fischer 2001). The many different kinds of value, from material, economic, and financial to symbolic, cultural, and moral, may be understood as different sorts of evaluative regimes, value worlds, or ‘imaginary totalities’, to use David Graeber’s (2013) term. These arenas of symbolic and material valuation are called upon to frame one’s judgements, but such underlying conventions are always incomplete and open to interpretation and debate (Boltanski and The´venot 2006). Moral values underwrite one’s intuitive sense about what

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is good and bad, right and wrong; while idiosyncratic, they also index conventions that are infused with power relations and that often aspire to normative consensus. While moral values reflect the accumulation of historical experience, they also orientate people to the future, shape a sense of how things ought to be, define what ‘better’ means, and influence social and economic behaviours. Equally, as James Laidlaw (2014) notes, our degrees of freedom are always limited. He argues that a Durkheimian view often leads us (too easily) to equate the moral with ‘the social’. Building on Foucault’s approach to agency and freedom, Laidlaw shows that freedom is always conceived within certain social/historical contexts that result from particular political genealogies. A neo-virtue philosophy seems to offer an ethnographically inclined route to defining virtue (as excellence in a practice, marked by a coherence embedded in tradition). Laidlaw (2014), in his critique of freedom, points out that in Alasdair MacIntyre’s (2007 [1981]) model, ‘agency’ is left to contain both too much and too little. Mattingly (2014) offers a way out with her ‘first-person virtue ethics’ that views the self as the nexus of socially recognized virtues and Foucauldian techniques of self-formation. Drawing on Taylor’s (1985) reflections on the experience-dependent nature of subject-referring properties of human emotion, she ‘consider[s] humans as “self-interpreting” moral beings whose perceptions, interpretations, and actions help shape moral subjectivities in the singular as well as the collective’ (57). In this way, MacIntyrian virtue theory’s shortcomings can be tempered when combined with a Foucauldian perspective on the limits of self-determination and a critical approach to the heterogeneity of identities and solidarities. If purpose and (effective) agency are essential components of an anthropological view of happiness and well-being, this should not be limited to a sense of conscious self-cultivation or commitment to particular practices. Ann Cudd (2014) introduces the notion of ‘tacit commitment’ to refer to the ways implicit norms and values of the sociocultural environment guide one’s actions. While tacit commitments can be made explicit through reflexivity in certain contexts or moments, they usually remain something of an underlying structure that is implicit in one’s decisions and actions. Cudd sees tacit commitment becoming a way of conceptualizing the realm of agency and decision-making that is motivated by ‘other-directed’ commitments. Working in proximity and sometimes even collaboration with the fields of happiness studies and economic development, anthropologists are uniquely disposed to contribute nuanced and contextualized reflections on the tacit commitment aspect of happiness and well-being.

Anthropologies of Happiness, Well-Being, and the Good The attention given to happiness, well-being, and the good in recent anthropological studies is nothing new. In fact, early work sought out

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the good in the other societies quiet explicitly and as part of a theoretical/ political project that aimed to learn from exotic others in order to improve well-being in Western contexts – notably, Margaret Mead’s (1928) romantic portraits of adolescence in Samoa. This search for alternatives to prevailing social and political-economic models remains an ambition for some ethnographic and theoretical work on well-being (e.g. SantosGranero 2015). However, the explicit attention to well-being in contemporary anthropology must be considered in light of the postcolonial concerns that have become so important to the discipline, as well as various pushes for engaged anthropology. In general, this anthropological work differs from the happiness studies discussed earlier in terms of the emphasis placed on measurement and cross-cultural comparison and the role of the social in regard to the individual. Anthropologists tend to focus on cultural context, which problematizes conceptual frameworks based on universal variables. This does not mean that meaningful comparison is impossible, just that it should be more richly contextualized than numerical metrics might allow. Further, anthropologists largely view individuals not as autonomous agents but as part of larger social systems and collectivities. Alberto Corsı´n Jime´nez’s (2008) edited volume Culture and Wellbeing: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics develops a framework for a social theory of well-being and cross-cultural comparison that, especially when compared to happiness studies, locates conceptions of well-being on the societal level rather than uniquely within the individual. Corsı´n Jime´nez focusses on political philosophy and situates common Western notions of well-being in the history of political morality, justice, and economic philosophy. He pulls from a range of authors and traditions from the virtue ethics of Aristotle to Rawls’s primary goods and basic liberties to Sen’s notion of substantive freedoms. In essence, he elaborates a concept of well-being as the ‘unstable and fragile resting place for the political’ and as ‘a holder of limits’ (2008: 4) that ‘signpost the society’s own model of self-consciousness: how society redistributes its own social moments’ (2008: 26). In other words, limitations on well-being and its distribution within a society, when tested and strained, reflect the contours of a given community’s moral imagination of both a just society and a good life within it. Michael Lambek (2008) highlights this fragility and proposes that wellbeing is not just a concept to be consumed but instead it must be actively produced within the particular contexts and conditions in which one lives. In this way, well-being is a lived experience that ‘requires both effort and sacrifice’ (2008: 129) and is always embedded in a particular social context in a way that evades universal measurement. Thus, for Lambek, the challenge for anthropologists is indeed a paradoxical one that implies ‘evaluat[ing] the immeasurable’ (127). Moreover, Laidlaw (2008) points out that the policy-driven theories in the happiness studies and development

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literatures are influenced by political and ethical assumptions that are not necessarily shared the world over (e.g. left-liberal egalitarianism). Thus, we need to be careful when extending the concept and criteria of well-being to peoples and places that might have significantly different conceptions of morality. However, it is important to note that while the moral frames of left-liberal egalitarianism might be present in leading academic notions of the good life, perspectives such as those compiled in Fernando SantosGranero’s (2015) collection on Amazonian cosmologies and public wealth have a more radical objective in mind. The authors in Santos-Granero’s Images of Public Wealth, or the Anatomy of Well-Being in Indigenous Amazonia challenge prevalent neoliberal assumptions about individualism and the possession, accumulation, and consumption of material wealth. This volume describes an opposition in basic conceptions of value between capitalist societies and Indigenous Amazonian peoples. The former strive for personal accumulation and the privatization of common goods, while the Indigenous standard of value emphasizes intangible relations and a social meaning that cannot be accumulated. Santos-Granero describes this alternative approach to conceptualizing well-being as not so much about a quest to ‘strike a balance between the economic and noneconomic factors of wellbeing but, rather, to envision new paradigms of wellbeing that can become an alternative to the current global model of production and consumption’ (Santos-Granero 2015: 6). Gordon Mathews and Carolina Izquierdo (2009) offer another theoretical formulation of well-being in their edited volume Pursuits of Happiness: WellBeing in Anthropological Perspective. Through the various assembled studies, they convey a certain urgency in their appeal to anthropologists to turn our ethnographic gaze towards questions of well-being. Like the contributors to the Corsı´n Jime´nez collection, they express concern with the inadequacy of statistical measures for understanding well-being cross-culturally and in ways that recognize the diversity of conceptions of the good life: ‘The richness of anthropological investigations . . . can serve as an empirical antidote to the straitjackets of comparison adhered to by some other disciplines, such as economics and psychology, which more or less insist on a common standard of measurement for all societies’ (Mathews and Izquierdo 2009: 248). Thus, in a Malinowskian pursuit to ‘grasp the native’s point of view’ (2009: 4), they begin by asking questions such as ‘what matters to them?’ and ‘how do they see/evaluate things?’. The various ‘pursuits of happiness’ that their collection presents reveal a myriad of ways in which people imagine and act upon what is most meaningful to them, whether as an aspiration, an elusive ideal, or a life rhythm. However, despite their critical response to concerns around methodology and the desire to introduce more ethnographic depth into the conversation, Mathews and Izquierdo (2009) still wish at least to attempt a ‘soft comparison’ of well-being cross-culturally. This should be possible, they argue,

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because ‘wellbeing bears a degree of commonality due to our common humanity and interrelatedness over space and time’, despite there being a diversity of ‘culturally shaped visions’ (2009: 5). Thus, they offer a framework built around four experiential dimensions of well-being: physical (the ways in which well-being is experienced in one’s body), interpersonal (the experience of well-being in relation to others), existential (the values and meanings behind notions of well-being), and, finally, the effects of national institutions and global forces on all three. This framework does not seek to elaborate a master definition of well-being that captures all of its constitutive elements and contributing factors. Instead, they intend to offer a selection of analytic foci from which researchers can hone their attention on particular realms of experience (2009: 262). In another formulation that attempts a qualitative cross-cultural comparison, Fischer’s (2014) The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing links Appadurai’s ‘ethics of possibility’ in the context of globalized economic life with an ethnographic approach to values and ethics. Examining the way German supermarket shoppers and Maya farmers in Guatemala make economic and ethical decisions, Fischer portrays the good life as emerging within a system of complex interrelationships between objective (i.e. income, health, physical security) and subjective (i.e. values and meanings) elements that are intermediated by opportunity structures and social networks (2014: 210). He finds that both middle-class German consumers and smallholding Maya farmers similarly engage in larger moral projects that congeal around three key dimensions: aspirations for something better and opportunity structures to achieve those; dignity and the fairness it implies; and commitments to larger purposes. Questions related to the role of ethnography and its methods coevolve with anthropological concerns around epistemology and the often competing pulls of research ethics (see Caplan 2003). The momentum of these theoretical inquiries, particularly around values, points the way towards a hybrid approach situated between the study of happiness/well-being and the anthropology of ethics and morality. This confluence is captured by Joel Robbins’s (2013) essay, in which he develops an ‘anthropology of the good’. Robbins positions his approach as a sort of back-to-the-future ethical and epistemological critique. He acknowledges the compassionate and determined critical eye that characterizes the contemporary preoccupation with inequality and injustice in the world, but is concerned that the ‘suffering subject’ has come to weigh too heavily on anthropological representations of the lives of those living at the margins of the world’s societies (and, indeed, of global processes). This, he argues, can diminish anthropology’s original contribution to knowledge about the human condition: the recognition and conceptualization of other ways of living in and imagining life in the world (Robbins 2013). In other words, despite

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the controversial othering evident in much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology (that Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) astutely criticized as the discipline’s obsession with the ‘savage slot’), Robbins maintains that it is important not to let theories of power hinder anthropologists from recognizing the existence and distinctness of our research subjects’ own ideals and aspirations (2013). In this way, the anthropology of the good is not a repudiation of politically engaged research and it should not displace studies of suffering and structures of violence. Rather, it should try to make good on the anthropological promise ‘that there must be better ways to live’ (2013: 458). Thus, in addition to counterbalancing the evaluative and universalizing tendencies of the science of happiness, the emerging anthropological body of work on well-being we have looked at here can be seen as part of a response to what Sherry Ortner calls the ‘dark anthropology’ that leans heavily on Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives (Ortner 2016; cf. Laidlaw 2017 on misreadings of Foucault in this context). Also in this vein, but on a more cosmopolitan scale, Appadurai (2013) calls for a renewed commitment to an ‘ethics of possibility’ (i.e. of hope, aspiration, desire) that ‘offer a more inclusive platform for improving the planetary quality of life and that can accommodate a plurality of visions of the good life’(299-300). Furthermore, for Walker and Kavedzˇija (2015), anthropological writings on well-being since the late 2000s share an interest in several main factors: its intersubjective and ‘other-orientated’ relational qualities, its location within normative moral logics, and its integration of both social realities and human values. Following Robbins’s (2013) concern with recognizing and understanding the various ways in which the good is conceived rather than simply perceived, Walker and Kavedzˇija observe that studying happiness and well-being necessarily implies studying values. Moreover, this approach understands values as the object of conscious evaluative reflection and describes happiness as serving a role or purpose in people’s social and moral lives (i.e. in echoing Ahmed, it asks what happiness does). This suggests that the anthropological contribution to discussions about happiness and well-being should document its role as ‘an idea, mood or motive in people’s day-to-day lives’ (Walker and Kavedzˇija 2015). Ethnographic approaches are uniquely positioned to build a theoretical understanding of well-being and visions of the good life from the diversity of on-the-ground experiences (Appadurai 2013; Fischer 2014). These include consideration of objective material and social conditions as well as of the conceptual place that well-being occupies in the value worlds of living in disparate cultural contexts and sociopolitical circumstances. In the next section, we will take a closer look at the body of ethnographic work that constitutes a turn towards exploring people’s conceptions of happiness, well-being, and the good as imaginative moral projects.

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Ethnographic Themes of Happiness and Well-Being Conceptually, well-being is defined in relation to conceptions of the good. But what is ‘the good’? The term, which has stimulated much theoretical debate in the discipline (see the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’s discussion of the topic, Venkatesan 2013), speaks to the ways in which people make value judgements about how things are and how things ought to be, what is right and just and proper. In Robbins’s (2013) review of a number of ethnographic studies comprising a move towards an anthropology of the good, he groups these into three main themes: (1) studies of values, morals, and well-being in which the good is conceived as an ambition or pursuit instead of merely something felt or perceived, (2) studies of empathy, care, and the gift that foreground the importance of social relationships in conceptions of the good, and (3) studies of time, change, and hope that take people’s ideals seriously despite the challenges of sociopolitical realities and structures of power. Here, we repurpose Robbins’s typology, positioning ‘well-being’, and its attendant ‘happiness’, as its own meta-category, co-equal to and coconstituent with ‘the good’. As we have seen, well-being has been approached ethnographically not only as a question of values, moral logics, and ambitions but also as encompassing a range of thematic and analytic considerations, from emotion and affect to social relationships and temporal frames. By considering happiness and well-being itself to be an organizing term rather than a subcategory, we can see more clearly why Mathews and Izquierdo refer to it as an analytic rather than an ethnographic term (2009: 3). In other words, in the existing body of work, wellbeing, similarly to ‘the good’, appears more as an analytic framing devise than a constituent of our informants’ vocabularies. In this way, the themes that could be said to fall within the purview of an anthropology of happiness and well-being are themselves revelatory of the attributes we as researchers assign to the concept itself. Following this line, the overview we offer in this section is not meant to be a definitive categorization of the selected ethnographies, as many of them speak to more than one, if not all, of the themes. Instead, it is a presentation of how the proposed thematic typology might help orientate researchers in their framing of their observations and analyses. While we do not have the space to expand on each ethnography here, we highlight some particularly salient contributions in relation to their overarching themes. A lively and growing body of ethnographic description and theory focusses on value worlds and moral projects as lived experience (Engelke 2015; Lambek 2015; Walker 2015; Erickson 2011; Jackson 2011; Laidlaw 2005; Mathews 2009; Santos-Granero 2015; Overing and Passes 2000). For example, Michael Jackson’s (2011) Life within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want is set against the backdrop of a politically unstable Sierra Leone in

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which the urban centres of a rapidly changing economy present rural youths with adventure, risk, and the chance of relative fortune. Jackson’s narrative writing style highlights the fraught aspirations of people in a Kuranko village for whom the material limitations of their circumstances seem at once the condition for and impediment to the realization of various economic, social, and moral potentials. (In this vein, Sayer (2011: 42) observes that humans are ‘needy beings, characterized by lack and desire’.) In this way, Jackson embraces the Senian emphasis on freedom and social relationships in his description of Kuranko well-being as a creative project of managing the expectations of ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract utopias’: [W]ell-being is less an attainable goal than a necessary fiction without which we might conclude that we have little to live for. Like the idea of utopia, the idea of well-being captures a universal yearning to be more than we presently are and to have more than we presently possess. (2011: 38) The influences of Aristotelian eudemonia and a MacIntyre-inspired virtue ethics are evident in Jackson’s reflections. We see this as well in Gordon Mathews’s (2009) ethnography of the Japanese concept of ikigai, a term describing the ‘pursuits of significance’ (2009: 175) and deep social bonds that ‘make life worth living’ for his interlocutors. These commitments include one’s profession or craft, family, religion, creative endeavour, and a sense of patriotic identity, among others. Moreover, as Laidlaw (2005) shows us in his study of Jain asceticism in northern India, such commitments do not always imply that visions of well-being posit a good life of material and bodily comfort and security. On the contrary, the Jain tradition places great importance on the notion of a good death that follows from a committed renunciation from humans’ inherently damaging worldly presence. The apparent paradox of starving one’s self to death (samadhi-maran) through ascetic practices and meditation as being in accordance with Jain principles of non-violence would seem to confound European and Anglo-American conceptions of well-being. Instead of striving for a ‘life worth living’, the Jain view holds that ‘a good life is one that, because it is good, is a life worth leaving’ (Laidlaw 2005: 188). Such moral striving, though, is not just a matter of religious principles, as Matthew Engelke’s (2015) study of British humanists reveals. In their striving to realize the ‘true’ secular reason of the Enlightenment, Engelke’s humanist interlocutors assert that they are emancipated from the withheld happiness of (Christian) religious temporalities and are able to experience hedonic happiness ‘here-and-now’. This ‘ideological commitment’ to happiness and the pursuit of secular humanist ideals are about ‘mak[ing] happiness about the heart, but also the head’ (2015: 89).

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Another set of ethnographies focus on the other-orientated values of commitment and giving (Mattingly 2014; Smid 2010; Stasch 2009). Cheryl Mattingly’s (2014) study of African American families caring for disabled and chronically ill children in South Central Los Angeles stands out. She places neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in conversation with a Foucauldian approach to the processes that produce subjectivities and shape the desires of agency, finding parents propelled to imagine new sorts of lives for themselves around a commitment to an ‘intimate other’. Theirs is a radical commitment to another individual, but subjective fulfilment may well be found in abnegating the self to a collectivity. What is most important here is a deep commitment to something beyond oneself, something worthy of real sacrifice. Mattingly portrays social spaces as ‘moral laboratories’, places of possibilities and the ‘experiments in how life might or should be lived’ (2014: 15). She observes that ‘there is an inherent narrativity to ethical practice and its self-constituting nature. Commitments and projects have a history, and, in taking them up or responding to them, we become part of a history. Cultivating virtues as part of these commitments and projects belongs to a task of moral becoming, and this, too, implies the narrativity of moral life’ (2014: 19; see also MacIntyre 1981). But, Mattingly cautions, a focus on narrative consistency should not blind us to the contingencies of life, and the ways that multiple possible futures are kept in play, the potentiality and hope in everyday life. In Mattingly’s ‘first-person virtue ethics’, moral decisions are informed by a Foucauldian perspective on the self – the processes and techniques of self-cultivation that shape the contours of desire – but, like Laidlaw (2014), she allows room for agency and the serendipities of contextual confluences. Finally, there are ethnographies that highlight the themes of temporal change and future-orientation (of hope and despair) (Gardner 2015; Throop 2015; Vigh 2015; Deeb 2009; Miyazaki 2006a, 2006b; Robbins 2007; Crapanzano 2003; Zigon 2009; Kavedzˇija 2018). Researchers have observed the future-orientated aspect of their informants’ moral reflections, which led to a focus on the notion of hope. On the theoretical level, Vincent Crapanzano’s (2003) observation that anthropology (and more generally the social and psychological sciences outside of theology and philosophy) has essentially ignored hope as an analytical category. By engaging with writings in philosophy, theology, and phenomenological psychology, Crapanzano suggests that ethnographic methods be deployed to explore the ‘discursive and metadiscursive range of “hope”’ (2003: 4), including a critical analysis of the ways in which linguistic differences can affect understandings of temporal frames. Building on this, Hirokazu Miyazaki’s (2006a) fieldwork in Fiji and Japan critiques the tendency for researchers to associate hope and desire as intrinsically connected, and he provides an analytic lens to understand hope as an ‘epistemology’ by recognizing the role of hope and aspiration in understanding regimes of value.

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One helpful example of this perspective of hope and the good emerging from ethnography can be found in Henrik Vigh’s (2015) study of militiamen in Guinea Bissau. This work employs an existentialist approach to describe the ways in which people respond to trying conditions through the pursuit of localized notions of freedom and self-fulfilment. Vigh explores the ‘paths’ and ‘futures’ imagined by his young male interlocutors who periodically engage and disengage in military combat (described as mobilizing). They seek recognition of their ‘social status as a man’ (2015: 104) and keep alive the possibility of fulfilling social responsibilities of care and provision for family in a society whose relational rhythms have been disrupted and stagnated by ongoing conflict. However, Vigh maintains that the ‘enforced presentism’ (2015: 98, in reference to Guyer (2007)) of these young men’s circumstances do not necessarily relegate them to a life of ‘psychic wounds’ and ‘traumatic pasts’ (104). Instead, they envision ‘social futures’ and a notion of well-being ‘informed by relational concerns and obligations to others’ (2015: 98) (see Pedersen (2018) for an alternative approach to the temporal framing of hope and uncertainty among men in post-social Mongolia). At this point, it is helpful to return to Michael Jackson’s (2011) account of well-being among the Kuranko, and his reflections about research ethics and the power dynamics of working as a comparably wealthy and privileged foreign researcher in a marginalized socio-economic context. In his text, he returns again and again to ethical dilemmas encountered in the field, such as being asked for money directly or observing situations that he surmises could be remedied by offering his social networks or his money. In so doing, he speaks to the difficulties of navigating deeply engrained euro-centric humanitarian and development logics that pervade research engagements in postcolonial contexts, both practically and theoretically: ‘a recurring problem is our persistence in seeing the lives of others as more problematic than our own, and of taking strained circumstances and material poverty as signs of an impoverished humanity’ (Jackson 2011) (see also Scherz on philanthropy, Chapter 32 of this volume, and McKearney (2016) on the question of judgement in anthropology and the ethics of ethnographic description). Together, these ethnographies reflect the call to pay attention to the good in people’s lives and the different ways of conceiving of it beyond (or in spite of) sociopolitical power structures. Nevertheless, anthropologists must still remain aware of and work to address questions regarding the influence of either cosmopolitan universalism (Corsı´n Jime´nez 2008) or, more specifically, the political ideologies (Laidlaw 2008; SantosGranero 2015) informing how we as researchers might draw the contours of our frames for organizing – and inevitably, if reluctantly, evaluating – the ideals our informants express in their reflections about wellbeing.

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Conclusion This variety of ethnographic cases suggests that a universal metric for happiness and well-being remains elusive. They are concepts the meanings of which vary greatly across contexts, deeply imbricated with culturally situated values and notions of the good. Still, common threads emerge: the conceptual framing of value worlds and moral projects, the pull of prosocial mores such as commitment and giving, and the role of temporal horizons and future-orientation. These are each categories of practice, interlaced and mutually constitutive; for example, affective values of commitment and purpose are linked to, and defined by, particular value worlds and moral projects in a future-orientated framing. In their specifics, these assemblages emerge from particular genealogies of power and historically developed apparatuses of self-cultivation. At the same time, there is a growing recognition among anthropologists that our subjects live their lives orientated towards the future as much as the past (Bryant and Knight 2019; Janeka and Bandak 2018), and that accounts of other ways of living need to consider not only the weight of tradition but also people’s imagined futures. The example of the Jains is in some ways the most vexing for an anthropology of well-being. As Laidlaw (2005) explains, the most devout Jains are so committed to self-abnegation and not sacrificing life that the greatest good for them would be achieved by starving to death. This is hardly what most of the comfortable readers of this volume would consider to be happiness or well-being. But for the Jains, commitment to a good that is greater than their own happiness gives purpose and meaning to their life. Similarly, the ethnographic setting of Mattingly’s (2014) work would not seem to be an obvious circumstance in which to study notions of the good life. But the African American parents of severely disabled children also find well-being in a radical, other-orientated moral and practical project of care, a commitment that gives purpose to their many daily struggles. In the Santos-Granero volume (2015) on Amazonian societies, we find a more collective understanding of well-being, one linked to pro-social moral values and a commitment to a vision of the collective good. Finally, Michael Jackson’s (2011) account focusses not on satisfying desires but on yearning for what is missing, what one is due; he finds that meaning and well-being come from a commitment to the material obligations of a common good and from striving for harmony in social roles. In these accounts we find well-being bound up with commitments to visions of the good marked by values that go beyond self-interest. Such purposes, whether other-orientated or directed towards a ‘common’ or ‘greater’ good, have to be meaningful as variously defined through arenas of value (‘imaginary totalities’, to use Graeber’s (2013) phrase,

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each with their own genealogies of power) that seek to give moral direction to life. As Cheryl Mattingly (2014: 11) writes, ‘moral striving seems to matter a great deal to people in all sorts of societies’. This returns us to Aristotle’s observation that well-being is not a state to be attained but rather comes from the arduous work of becoming, of trying to live a good life. The concepts of ‘well-being’ and ‘the good’ are evaluative, invoking culturally situated judgements orientated towards notions of how the world should be. Anna Alexandrova (2017) argues that ‘objective’ measures of well-being are never value-free. She shows that research into multidimensional measures of happiness and well-being often make ‘mixed claims’, confusing objective and moral measures. For example, there is a large literature correlating variable x with well-being, with the largely unquestioned presumption that well-being is morally desirable, an absolute good that should be pursued and advocated (alternatively, see Throop (2015) on ‘ambivalent happiness’). Andrew Sayer (2011) similarly argues that objective measures and composite indices must ultimately be based on a value judgement about what variables to include in any given model. Alexandrova and Sayer are not suggesting that we abandon such efforts, just that we recognize the limits and presuppositions of valuefreedom. We should continue to refine our conceptual framings in a way that best positions anthropology to capture this experience, whatever we may call it. Understanding well-being as a form of commitment (implying a futureorientated temporal aspect) to a notion of the good (implying a value judgement that includes subjective and affective considerations) embedded in social relations, structural conditions, and political genealogies, ethnographic analyses are uniquely positioned to draw on the conceptual toolkits of both economic and moral anthropology. If the fields of happiness studies and multidimensional approaches to development unconsciously developed as research programmes whose continued distinction reifies the political-economic lines of the global North and South, anthropological approaches can help to unsettle that divide by documenting the multiplicity of pursuits of the good in the context of local and global economic realities. An anthropological approach to well-being should account for the wide range of values encoded in the varied conceptions of it across individuals, communities, and time. This can open new ways of understanding the role of aspirational projects and temporal and social commitments in life projects. It can also encourage epistemological and ethical reflection about the role of anthropology in political and development discourses. At its best, anthropology makes the world more, not less, complicated; and the richness of the human experience should be explored in its full range, suffering and flourishing. As the viewers of Ixcanul remind us, hope and happiness are not foreign to the poor and marginalized; to understand their lives, we must

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account for the good as well as the bad. Anthropologists should continue this engagement with the good and well-being, not only because anthropology can be more than just ‘the science of un-freedom’ (Laidlaw 2014) but also because a ‘positive anthropology’ could reaffirm the discipline’s relevance to the social questions affecting societies, offering positive alternatives of ‘the good’ that are contextualized in a way that seeks to avoid moral judgement (Fischer 2014; Robbins 2013).

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2008. ‘The Intension and Extension of Well-Being: Transformation in Diaspora Jain Understandings of Non-Violence’, in A. Corsı´n Jime´nez (ed.), Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics. New York: Pluto Press. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017. ‘Ethics/Morality’, in Felix Stein, Sian Lazar, Matei Candea, Hildegard Diemberger, Joel Robbins, Andrew Sanchez, and Rupert Stasch (eds.), Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2008. ‘Measuring – or Practising – Well-Being?’, in A. Corsı´n Jime´nez (ed.), Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics. New York: Pluto Press. 2015. ‘Le Bonheur Suisse, Again’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5: 111–34. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Layard, Richard., ed. 1999. Tackling Inequality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2010. ‘Measuring Subjective Well-Being’. Science, 327: 534–5. Macintyre, Alasdair. 2007 [1981]. After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mathews, Gordon. 2009. ‘Finding and Keeping a Purpose in Life: WellBeing and Ikigai in Japan and Elsewhere’, in Gordon Mathews and Carolina Izquierdo (eds.), Pursuits of Happiness: Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective. New York: Berghahn Books. Mathews, Gordon and Carolina Izquierdo. 2009. Pursuits of Happiness: WellBeing in Anthropological Perspective. New York: Berghahn Books. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McKearney, Patrick. 2016. ‘The Genre of Judgment: Description and Difficulty in the Anthropology of Ethics’. Journal of Religious Ethics, 44: 544–73. Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: William Morrow. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2006a. ‘Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques’. Cultural Anthropology, 21: 147–72. 2006b. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nagel, Thomas. 2005. ‘The Problem of Global Justice’. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 33: 113–47. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New York: Penguin Books. Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Creating Capabilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. ‘Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theories Since the Eighties’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6: 47–73. Overing, Joanna, and Alan Passes. 2000. The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. New York: Routledge. Pedersen, Morten Axel.2018. ‘Incidental Connections: Freedom and Urban Life in Mongolia’, inJ. Laidlaw, B. Bodenhorn, and M. Holbraad (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject: Freedom, Creativity and Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity’. Current Anthropology, 48: 5–38. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–62. Robbins, Joel and Julian Sommerschuh. 2016. ‘Values’, in Joel Robbins, Felix Stein, Sian Lazar, Matei Candea, Hildegard Diemberger, Andrew Sanchez, and Rupert Stasch (eds.), Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, Richard M. and Edward L. Deci. 2001. ‘On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being’. Annual Review of Psychology, 52: 141–66. Santos-Granero, Fernando. 2015. Images of Public Wealth or the Anatomy of Well-Being in Indigenous Amazonia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Sayer, Andrew. 2011. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, Amartya. 1982. Choice, Welfare and Measurement. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 1997. On Ethics and Economics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1999. Development as Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. 2002. Rationality and Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Smid, Karen. 2010. ‘Resting at Creation and Afterlife: Distant Times in the Ordinary Strategies of Muslim Women in the Rural Fouta Djallon, Guinea’. American Ethnologist, 37: 36–52. Stasch, Rupert. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stevenson, Betsy, and Justin Wolfers. 2008. ‘Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox’. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 39: 1–102. Stiglitz, Joseph E., Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. 2010. Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up. New York: New Press. Taylor, Charles. 1985. ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’. Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thin, Neil. 2008. ‘“Realising the Substance of Their Happiness”: How Anthropology Forgot about Homo Gauisus’, in Alberto CorsinJimenez (ed.), Culture and Wellbeing: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics. London: Pluto.

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2012. ‘Multidimensional Concepts of Poverty: Beyond Money, Beyond Measurement, Beyond Minimalism’, in Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Paris: UNESCO/International Association of Universities. Throop, C. Jason. 2015. ‘Ambivalent Happiness and Virtuous Suffering’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5: 45–68. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Veenhoven, Ruut. 1984. Conditions of Happiness. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. 2000. ‘The Four Qualities of Life: Ordering Concepts and Measures of the Good Life’. Journal of Happiness Studies, 1: 1–39. Venkatesan, Soumhya, ed. 2013. ‘“There Is No Such Thing as the Good”: The 2013 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’. Proposing: Veena Das, Hayder Al-Mohammad. Opposing: Joel Robbins, Charles Stafford. University of Manchester: Critique of Anthropology. Vigh, Henrik E. 2015. ‘Militantly Well’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5: 93–110. Walker, Harry. 2015. ‘Joy within Tranquility’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5: 177–96. Walker, Harry and Iza Kavedzˇija. 2015. ‘Values of happiness’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5: 1–23. Zigon, Jarrett. 2009. ‘Hope Dies Last: Two Aspects of Hope in Contemporary Moscow’. Anthropological Theory, 9: 253–71.

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14 Suffering and Sympathy Abby Mack and C. Jason Throop

Birth is suffering. Old age is suffering Sickness is suffering Death is suffering. Sorry and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering. Association with what is unpleasant is suffering. Dissociation from what is pleasant is suffering. To not get what one desires is suffering. In brief, life is suffering Dhammackkappavattana Sutta Siddartha Guatama Buddha Echoing the Buddha, Arthur and Joan Kleinman ground their exploration of the representation and appropriation of images of suffering at a global scale with the observation that ‘Suffering is one of the existential grounds of human experience’ (1996: 1). Despite suffering’s ability to delimit and limit the modes of being that define human existence, this is not an experience, Kleinman and Kleinman argue, that is uniformly distributed. It is an experience that is tightly coupled with, and in part defined by, the social, economic, and political contexts within which it is necessarily emplaced. As ‘one of the existential grounds of human experience’, suffering and its recognition are also significantly refracted through cultural representations that are ‘authorized by a moral community and its institutions’ (1996: 2). In short, what may otherwise be taken to be representative of a universal human existential condition is still significantly delimited by its situational emplacement, articulation, and circulation. As a case in point, consider, for instance, the controversial and painful image of a young, starving Sudanese girl circulated in the mid-1990s and

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discussed by Kleinman and Kleinman (1996). The image, as Kleinman and Kleinman describe it, features a child who is ‘hardly larger than an infant; she is naked; she appears bowed over in weakness and sickness, incapable, it would seem, of moving; she is unprotected. No mother, no family, no one is present to prevent her from being attacked by the vulture [who watches her in the background], or succumbing to starvation and then being eaten’ (1996: 4). The image received international attention and condemnation as the photographer – who later took his own life – did not help the young girl. It is an image which remains seared into the mind of one of our authors, herself a young girl when the national media circulated the photograph for the first time. Or else, consider the image of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian child refugee whose small, drowned body washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean, his head tilted to the left, washed by the lapping waves, his small, sneakered feet pressed together (see Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017). Arising in a later era than the photograph discussed by Kleinman and Kleinman, the image of Aylan was captured and recirculated on social media, remediated in paintings and illustrations, and reproduced by protestors on a beach in Morocco a week later (see, for instance, Parfitt 2015). The circulation of these images mobilizes an articulation of ‘humanity’ and ‘suffering’ humanity that is morally charged and politically consequential, often directly impacting, as Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi (2017) phrase it, shifts in public mood (‘stimmungswechsel’; cf. Throop 2009, 2012a, 2014, 2017, 2018b). What makes such images so charged and consequential? How are such shifts in public sentiment or mood evoked? One answer that is offered by many thinkers – philosophers, social scientists, journalists, activists, and theologians alike – is that such responses have been mobilized by forms of sympathy and/or empathy that arise in the face of such stark painful depictions of human suffering. As Miriam Ticktin has demonstrated, however, what on the surface may be deemed a universalizing sympathetic or empathic response to an apolitical image of suffering in fact depends upon a deeply political rendering of a suffering other as a ‘morally legitimate’ individual human (2017: 611; cf. Ticktin 2006, 2011). In these two cases, global and mediated response to such images of suffering are in part predicated on an orientation to the subjects of such suffering as ‘innocent’ – and therefore not morally culpable – children. Critically, in neither image do we see the face of the suffering other. In the initial circulation of these images the politics of race and nationhood which precipitated their suffering may be visible but rarely mentioned. The tragedy is rendered ‘human’ and thus apolitical, ‘moral’ insofar as we may be outraged, but ‘amoral’ insofar as responsibility for suffering wrought at such large scales as the migrant refugee crisis in Europe remains obscured as a non-thematized background to the image. In the process, ‘humanity’ emerges as an affective and morally resonant

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category that does not cleanly map onto any biological articulation of the human being (Ticktin 2011, 2017). Rather, suffering as the existential grounds for human experience is deeply conditioned by and in turn conditions social, political, and moral articulations of what it means to be human and recognized as such. Working from the contested existential grounds of suffering and its social recognition, this chapter will thus interrogate how suffering may be construed as a conditioning condition, one which potentiates moral experience and the various modes of responsiveness that, in part, constitute it. ‘The human condition is an ethical condition’, Michael Lambek (2015: x) has argued (emphasis original). In principle, we do not disagree. And yet, this chapter seeks to interrogate this question of ethics and conditions from a somewhat different angle. Our goal is to examine the extent to which suffering and responses to suffering may be viewed as conditions of possibility for ethical/moral experience. Following in the footsteps of recent efforts to rethink human existence ‘as a plural form of life in the manifold of its potentiality’ (Schwarz Wentzer and Mattingly 2018: 150) and thus ‘non-self-sufficing’ in its various modes of being-in-the-world (Mattingly 2017, 2018; cf. Zigon 2017), we will work to critically rethink discussions of suffering’s moral and political entailments by examining two intertwined and yet at times competing literatures within the current ethical turn in anthropological theory on sympathy and empathy, respectively. Here, we see a complex entanglement between anthropological theories written in response to suffering as an embodied and relational experience that have distinctive ways of engaging moral and ethical life. Viewing work on sympathy and empathy as illuminating differing regions of possibility for thinking through the ways suffering conditions and is conditioned by ethics/morality, we will then turn to examine the pathic roots of these two distinctive modes of responsiveness. Drawing upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, we will suggest that pathic attunement is the generative, responsive grounds from which sympathy and empathy arise as arguably distinctive orientations to suffering. Moving beyond the either/ or framework that often emerges in discussions of empathy and sympathy, we will argue that a focus on pathos leads to a different way of envisioning suffering as a condition of possibility for moral experience. Without collapsing the ethical and political, we position pathos as a phenomenon through which the recursive relationship between ethical, political, and ontological orientations to the other becomes discernible and therefore analysable.

Conditioned Existence Human existence is, as Hannah Arendt famously argued, ‘conditioned existence’ (1958: 9). Finite, frail, and vulnerable, susceptible to illness,

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pain, hurt, and death, human beings are beings whose mode of existence is necessarily tethered to our worldliness (cf. MacIntyre 2001; Nussbaum 2001). In having and being open to a world – responsive and susceptible to it – our mode of human being is one that is also conditioned by exposure to those various others who inhabit the same world. Indeed, as worldly beings, we find ourselves always already living with, among, and alongside a plurality of others; others who preceded us, are our contemporaries, and are – as successors – still yet to be (see Schutz 1967). Mutually exposed and vulnerable to each other and the world, we are often faced with the concrete realities of suffering, our own and others. Significantly, whether we are confronted with having to respond to the suffering of another or are in the midst of suffering ourselves, a particular existential space emerges – a potentiality that may or may not be actualized – evoking possibilities for moral experience to arise. As conditioned beings, our possibilities for attuning and responding in moral ways to suffering are thus importantly shaped by the fact of our vulnerability and exposure to our own finitude, a plurality of others, and the world. And yet, to say that the modes of being that characterize human existence are conditioned by finitude, plurality, and worldliness is not to say that we are simply defined by such conditions without remainder. Arendt observes: ‘the conditions of human existence – life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth – can never “explain” what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely’ (1958: 11). To suggest that the ‘conditions of human existence . . . never condition absolutely’ is, thus, to recognize the always incomplete, excessive, and uneven ways that we are attuned to each other and the worlds we inhabit with one another. To think of suffering and the various modes of responsiveness that arise in its wake as conditions of possibility for moral experience is thus, in this light, to emphasize the contingency of particular modes of being that – while always shaped by the singular situations that give rise to them – also always exceed them. While it is important not to cover over the ways in which suffering and our various modes of responsiveness to it are significantly conditioned by the forms of moral experience they also condition, contingency always remains. Indeed, these various forms of moral experience entail an excess that escapes the capture of conventionalized norms, values, and ethical assumptions. Given the singularities of circumstance, the particularities of persons, the contingency of action, and the unique and unpredictable nature of events, moral experience always entails more than a replication or application of pre-given normative ethical frameworks. For this reason, as Jarrett Zigon suggests, such conditions not only ‘enable or hinder or provide limits for possible ways of being, becoming, acting, doing, thinking, saying, and so on’, but

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also always entail potentialities to become transfigured and made otherwise (Zigon 2017: 8).

The ‘Suffering-Slot’ and the ‘Ethical Turn’ To speak this way of suffering and responsiveness as conditioning and conditioned by moral experience is to evoke a robust literature that arose within the field of anthropology during the 1990s engaging ethical and moral responses to human pain, illness, hurt, and trauma (Asad 1993; Bailey 1994; Briggs 1998; Brodwin 1996; Csordas 1994; D’Andrade 1995; Delvecchio-Good et al. 1994; Farmer 1992; Fiske and Mason 1990; Hollan and Wellankamp 1994; Howell 1996; Kleinman 1995, 1999; Mattingly 1998a, 1998b; Parish 1994, 1996; Scheper-Hugues 1995; Shweder 1990; Wikan 1989). While the bulk of this work arose ‘in the context of medical, religious, and psychological anthropological research on individual-, family-, and community-level responses to affliction, suffering, violence, trauma and pain’ (Mattingly and Throop 2018: 477), there were arguably much larger sociohistorical forces responsible for foregrounding suffering and trauma as critical sites for scholarly analysis during this time (see Robbins 2013; Ortner 2016). Expanding upon Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s influential essay, ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness’ (1991), Joel Robbins has provocatively termed the widespread shift that occurred in the 1990s to engage with suffering in anthropology ‘suffering-slot’ ethnography. According to Robbins’s analysis at least, anthropological interest in suffering, pain, and trauma in this period can be seen in part as a response to a decade of intradisciplinary critique of the longstanding, and now deemed deeply problematic, anthropological engagement with cultural difference, otherness, and alterity (i.e. the so-called savage-slot; see Trouillot 1991). As Robbins notes following Trouillot, the shift away from the ‘savage-slot’ was motivated by much more than internal disciplinary critiques alone. This shift was also predicated upon a transformation in the ‘geography of the imagination’ in which the ‘changes anthropology was experiencing in the late 1980’s . . . were rooted . . . [in a] broader symbolic organization that defines the West and the savage, transformations by which the narratives of development and progress that had driven Western history were beginning to lose their power to organize our understanding of the world’ (Robbins 2013: 449). When such modes of engaging ‘otherness’ as cultural difference became unthinkable in the discipline, anthropologists had to turn elsewhere to ground possibilities for anthropological inquiry and analysis, Robbins suggests. Where did anthropologists turn in the wake of the collapse of the ‘savage-slot’? It was, as Robbins characterizes it, to suffering and trauma as a new viable ‘link between cultures’ (Robbins 2013: 453; cf. Caruth 1995; Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Here we could see, in Robbins’s phrasing,

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‘how anthropology was in the early 1990’s changing its relation to those it studies from one of analytic distance and critical comparison focused on difference to one of empathic connection and moral witnessing based on human unity’ (2013: 453). Again, this shift was not solely predicated upon critical discussions held in the discipline at the time, but also spoke to a much broader historical context defined by ‘very large cultural transformations in the way the West understands its relation to the wider world – transformations that include the rise of humanitarian and human rights discourses and institutions in their contemporary forms as well as the emergence of the NGO as a key feature of global social organization’ (2013: 453). As Sherry Ortner (2016) details from a different yet resonant perspective, ethnography’s turn to suffering in this period was a response to concrete worldly conditions shaped to a great extent by the ‘emergence of neoliberal capitalism’ and its effects (65). As Ortner characterizes it, ethnographic work during the 1990s was accordingly ‘very dark, emphasizing the harsh, violent, and punitive nature of neoliberalism and the depression and hopelessness in which people under neoliberalism and neoliberal regimes are often enveloped’ (2016: 65). While Robbins draws our attention to the ‘suffering-slot’ and how it putatively differs from what he characterizes as an emerging turn to an ‘anthropology of the good’, it is worth emphasizing for our purposes that while suffering, violence, and trauma were operating at the centre of the literature of this period, a renewed engagement with ethics and morality was also centrally at stake (although, at times, implicitly so) (see Mattingly and Throop 2018; Zigon and Throop 2014). Efforts to trace discernible ethical/moral responses to suffering thus worked alongside efforts to document the ways that experiences of suffering were variously shaped through differing moral/ethical orientations. When understood in this light, the anthropology of suffering has played an important role in bringing about the so-called ethical turn in the field, a turn towards ethics that has been characterized as an effort at problematizing rather than simply assuming the categories of ethics/morality as given (Mattingly and Throop 2018). In a recursive way, the interest in problematizing ethics/morality has become the grounds for again problematizing suffering and the various modes of responsiveness that are attuned to it (e.g. ‘empathy’, ‘sympathy’, ‘care’). There is indeed a relatively small but still growing body of work that has come to question the putative ‘universal qualities of trauma, [and the underlying assumption that] we as observers and witnesses are secure in our abilities to know it when we see it and to feel empathy with those who suffer in “a sort of communion in trauma”’ (Robbins 2013: 453). As we will make clear later, sympathy, empathy, and related modes of responsiveness to suffering are being problematized in a way that has helped to define the development of distinctive approaches within the field; however, the way such concepts are variously deployed in the literature is often decidedly

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unclear and at times inconsistent. After critically reviewing this complex conceptual terrain, we will turn to discuss what we view to be the existential basis from which potentially moral/ethical responses to suffering arise – what has variously been termed in phenomenology our pathic capacity for ‘world-openness’, ‘attunement’, ‘affection’, and ‘responsiveness’.

Sympathy, Empathy, and Suffering Thus far, we have discussed empathy and sympathy primarily as responses to suffering. Of course – to make the obvious point – as ways of attuning, sympathy and empathy are not necessarily about suffering; they may also arise in response to more felicitous situations and events. Yet, considering these concepts in relation to suffering reveals how empathy and sympathy are differentially conditioned by such suffering, often eliciting distinctive ethical orientations. In turn, these orientations may condition suffering, who is recognized as suffering, and how. To understand the relationship between suffering and pathic responses to suffering, we must take a step back and look at these two terms within the context of their philosophical and anthropological histories. In this section, as we review these histories, we trace the origins of a complex conceptual entanglement between empathy and sympathy, noting along the way how elements of each concept’s history have been mobilized in anthropological theory.1 Critically, while this entanglement does lead to theoretical inconsistencies, it also reveals the scope and limitations of sympathy and empathy, and a complex intermingling of ethical, political, and ontological orientations to the world and others. As we will see, this anticipates a more recent move within anthropology’s ‘ethical turn’ towards more explicit considerations of politics and ontology. There is, indeed, a great deal of terminological slippage between empathy and sympathy across a broad range of popular, psychological, and philosophical literatures. This slippage is present, too, in the anthropological literature. Consider, for instance, Danilyn Rutherford’s (2009) articulation of a ‘materialist concept of sympathy’, an inferential, imaginative, and embodied process that arises in our encounters with others, often to political ends. Sympathy, for Rutherford, encompasses ‘empathy, pity, and compassion, but it can spawn hostility as easily as love’ (2009: 4). Erica Weiss (2015), meanwhile, conceives of (empathy, compassion, and sympathy as siblings in emotive politics’(280). 1

As noted in Chapter 22 by Mattingly and McKearney in this volume, the concepts of care, caregiving, and compassion often carry, with notable exceptions (e.g. Buch 2015; Garcia 2010; Stevenson 2014), a discernible, even if implicit, positive moral framing in many anthropological accounts. In contrast, as we will demonstrate later, work on sympathy and empathy has come to critically emphasize the potentially negative and harmful dimensions of such modes of responsiveness to suffering. Accordingly, sympathy and empathy are concepts that map out a conceptual terrain that is notably distinct, even if at times still partially overlapping with the concepts of care, caregiving, compassion, and so on.

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Responding to Miriam Ticktin (2011) and Didier Fassin (2007), whose critical analyses of humanitarian ethics have influenced much of the anthropological theory on ethics and politics of compassion and empathy, Weiss acknowledges how empathy may be stylized as a moral or moralized capacity to negative political ends. Seeking to ‘provincialize’ empathy, Weiss instead privileges the term’s cultural depth and meaning in the lives of her ethnographic subjects to emphasize the role empathy has in shaping ethical orientations to and inspiring transformative political action, even while in other contexts – Weiss concedes – it may also be used to dangerous or problematic ends. The conclusions these authors make are radically different. Rutherford conceives of sympathy as a critical tool for justifying colonial projects and implementing unequal power relations, while Weiss positions a ‘provincialized’ empathy (i.e. one whose definition is articulated by her interlocutors on the ground, rather than philosophical articulations of the term) as a catalyst to a productive, more egalitarian form of engagement in Israel/Palestine. As will become clear later, the ways in which anthropologists deploy the concepts of sympathy and empathy differentially emerge as at times conflicting with or encompassing one another, opposed or related to each other, distinctive from one another or else intertwined, reflecting the complex theoretical history of these terms.

Sympathy/‘Fellow-Feeling’ Sympathy finds its etymological and Western philosophical origins in the Greek term sympatheia (συμπάθεια), often translated as ‘fellow-feeling’. In her investigation of the history of sympathy, Rene´ Brouwer (2015) traces an early, tentative conceptualization of sympathy in Plato’s Dialogues. Here, sympathy emerges alongside an articulation of ‘moderation’ as a compelling, involuntary response to others (yawning after watching another yawn, for instance) (2015: 18). Aristotle later refines the concept in Problems (1965; cf. Brouwer 2015). Moving progressively from physiological behavioural responses like mirrored yawning to suffering when witnessing another suffer, sympathy emerges as a form of co-affection constrained by context (Brouwer 2015). Later, the term is taken up by Stoic philosophers who elaborate a series of concentric relationships between human beings and the world around them from immediate, physical interaction to modes of cosmological being. Here, sympathy extends outward beyond a merely relational capacity of human beings to a responsive ‘breathing’ between entities of the world and beyond it to the cosmos. A common Stoic phrase is ‘the world is in sympathy with itself’ (Brouwer 2015: 22–5). Such a phrase evinces a metaphysics which displaces the human being in favour of a more expansive kind of cosmological being.

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Such early articulations of sympathy are significant for our purposes because they are later taken up by Latin philosophers as a pneumatic mediation of human, material, and cosmological relationships, which were then further developed in Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza in his doctrine of parallelism (Hu¨bner 2015; cf. Melamed 2013). Key to many interpretations of this doctrine, which posits that the ‘order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’, was Spinoza’s concept of ‘metaphysical sympathy’ (Spinoza 2005). A reflection of the essential relatedness of all beings, metaphysical sympathy was also implicated in the canalization of individuals’ positive and negative feelings towards one another (Emilsson 2015; Hu¨bner 2015; cf. Debrabander 2007; Spinoza 2005: 68–112). These iterations of sympathy are traceable through a variety of recent theories of affect (e.g. Deleuze 1988; cf. Probyn 2010), but are also found in anthropological theory seeking to articulate the role of sympathy in the civic life of communities and in mediating various other forms of relationality between people, places, and objects. Catherine Fennel (2012) does this to compelling and productive ends in her work on the cultivation of a ‘sympathetic public’ through the planning of the National Public Housing Museum dedicated to humanizing public housing initiatives and their benefactors in post-welfare Chicago. In particular, Fennel describes how visitors encountered the ‘unsettling familiarity of domestic things’ during an early open house: I attach myself to a 30-something white couple, and we chatted with one organizer. The couple praised the [museum’s] audiovisual installations, raving about how their textured images pulled them into the ‘layers of history’ and made them feel closer to people too often silenced by history and society. But the domestic objects [placed alongside these more formal exhibitions], they noted, paled in comparison. Singling out a midcentury formica-topped kitchen table as absurdly unremarkable, the man joked, ‘I’ve seen that table everywhere! We had a table like it.’ . . . The organizer waved his hands excitedly at us and exclaimed, ‘That’s the point! That table belonged to a public housing family. But all of you have eaten at that table. This isn’t just about that family’. (2012: 654) Fennel draws upon the capacity of a materialist sympathy (citing Rutherford’s aforementioned work) to render alike two previously distinct objects by virtue of their proximity in a museum space and, in doing so, to draw connections between unrelated populations: ‘that family’ and the ‘30-something white couple’ who toured through another’s past. While Fennel’s work echoes these Stoic, pre-Enlightenment forms of sympathy, it is also inevitably and explicitly influenced by the manner in which many aspects of sympathy, especially in Spinoza’s work, were taken

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up by eighteenth-century philosophers to articulate an a-religious theory of morality based upon a human capacity to ‘sympathize with the passions and sentiments of others’ (Hume 2007: 208; cf. Fennel 2012; Hanley 2015). Spinoza’s articulation of sympathy emphasized its capacity for an associationist means of knowing the other, its capacity to inspire (ethical) action, and its psychological egoism (i.e. the emphasis of self-referential and therefore inferential experience of another being) (Hanley 2015; Spinoza 2005: part III, proposition 24). Facing a political sea-change brought on by colonialism, the slave-trade, and increased migration, sympathy emerged in these philosophies ‘as an other-directed sentiment capable of sustaining the minimal social bonds needed to realize the new social order and indeed one capable of so doing without requiring acceptance of the theistic foundations of Christian concepts of neighbor love’ (Hanley 2015: 174). A turn towards sympathy in the Enlightenment served to further ground a metaphysically diffuse phenomenon in the idea of a moral responsivity to specific (often suffering) others. Drawing on Spinoza and the ancient Greeks, David Hume (2007), for example, elaborated a theory of sympathy that operated as a connection and response between objects which, in turn, created the kind of other-referential relationship described in Fennel’s (2012) work and Rutherford’s (2009) ‘materialist sympathy’ (cf. Hume 2007: 167–8). From there, Hume moves to describe our sympathetic responses to others. In so doing, he elaboratesa theory of (moral) judgement where, through affective response to others, the ‘vivacity’ of an idea is amplified to the point of becoming impression-like and entangled with emotional responses that, in turn, may drive our actions (Hume 2007: 206; cf. Sayre-McCord 2015). In direct response to Hume’s work, Adam Smith (1984) advanced a resonant theory of morality dependent upon the sympathetic response. Notably, Smith’s work opens by asking readers to imagine a suffering other, a man upon the rack, and the means by which we may come to know this man’s pain, know his suffering. In this kind of ‘fellow-feeling’, Smith explains, we come not only to sense suffering but also to attune to the broader emotional experiences of others and – in our vicarious pleasure or disgust (and depending on the vivacity of such responses) – we may form particular moral assessments and come to make specific moral decisions. Over the course of the Enlightenment, sympathy became a popular subject for political and religious scholars, and while it is most commonly associated with Hume and Smith, a number of philosophers across the European continent were working over the concept, including efforts to integrate it back into an ‘irresistible compassion’ for others that inspired (Christian and humanitarian) moral action (Fiering 1976, 198; Hanley 2015; cf. Taylor 1989). Thus, the polysemous qualities of ancient Greek and Latin conceptualizations of sympathy come to take on

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additional connotations in this eighteenth-century philosophical polyphony as both a means to provide a foundation for a-religious moral action a` la Hume and Smith and to reinstate a connection to humanitarian and Christian forms of compassionate ‘neighbourly love’. Indeed, as Charles Taylor (1989) discusses, there were a multiplicity of engagements with forms of Christian love and their relations to sympathy in this era, and many (like Lord Shaftsbury’s) drew on and responded to earlier, Stoic conceptions of cosmological being. Today, we can see how these multilayered conceptualizations of sympathy have emerged to similar yet distinct ends in contemporary anthropology. For example, in her archival examination of Dutch colonial practices in Papua New Guinea, Rutherford (2009) draws on several key conclusions from Hume’s writings on sympathy. First, she conceives of sympathy as a morally neutral, inferential process through which one may come to learn another’s perspective (we may see this as a reflection of the psychological egoism present not only in Hume but also in Spinoza’s work on the subject). Next, she draws on Hume’s observation that the sympathetic capacity may dissipate over time and space to highlight the ways that governance itself, in its jurisdictional and material capacities, mediates sympathetic orientations to others. In the process, she conceives of sympathy as a powerful tool for colonial projects which, in sympathizing with colonial subjects, integrate the perspectives and practices of the colonized into the power structure of the colonial effort to predict and control the behaviour of its subjects. Elizabeth Povinelli (2002), meanwhile, engages sympathy as an affective technology in a critique of multiculturalist politics in Australia, where connection and ‘authentic difference’ may be mobilized either to deny or ratify indigenous political, cultural, and territorial projects. Sympathy emerges in Povinelli’s work as a mechanism for political control whose logics move questions of custom and culture into realms of moralized recognition of Indigenous political subjects. In this way, sympathy as a tool for governance becomes a pivotal construct that grounds projects of cultural recognition. Drawing connections between Povinelli’s work and critiques of humanitarian reason (Fassin 2011) and humanitarian aid (Ticktin 2011), Joseph Hankins (2019; cf. 2016) expresses misgivings about constructions of sympathy and compassion wherein – in the most ‘straw-figure form’ of this kind of critique – ’true politics’ are reified in the face of an antipolitics of care (175). Instead, drawing on solidarity efforts between a community of Buraku and Dalit activists, he proposes a ‘dialectical’ relationship between these seemingly opposed dispositions (justice and love) to advocate for a definition of politics as ‘a fundamental, collective concern with how to orchestrate one’s formative engagements with others in order to create venues, scenes, or opportunities in which one might rehearse oneself as one wants to be’ (2019: 186). Hankins brings his

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readers to a moment in which Buraku activists practised writing and reciting stories in English about their experiences with discrimination in Japan. These stories would eventually be told to a Dalit activist audience in an effort to build international solidarity. Further, Hankins writes: The stories were composed to give the Dalit an idea of the personal and private, painful and sometimes triumphant circumstances Buraku people faced in Japan. The Buraku contingent would share their stories, and they would listen to the comparable stories from the Dalit, with the hope of transforming each other from distant strangers to intimate comrades more attuned to how they already lived together and how they hoped to lived [sic] together differently. In this process of crafting these stories, the Buraku activists internalized this rich topography of others, and in so doing transformed themselves individually and collectively, even as they transformed their connection to the Dalit. (2019: 180) In this way, sympathetic engagement not only operates to draw bonds between disparate or disconnected groups but also has the potential to radically reform the self in the practice of such politics with others. Though Hankins draws explicitly on Hume, his approach to sympathy echoes, too, ideologies of (Christian) neighbourly love found in other forms of eighteenth-century philosophies of sympathy, as these projects of political engagement with others are likewise projects of a political (moral) self. The enduring complications and contradictions of (post)colonial (Christian) love and sympathy continue to reverberate beyond their influence in anthropological literature, echoing through today’s neoliberal, global politics as demonstrated in anthropological works such as Andrea Muehlebach’s (2012) ethnographic study on the politics of welfare and citizenship in Italy and – in a very different manner – China Scherz’s (2014) anthropological exploration of the politics of charity in rural Uganda. Such anthropological work on the politics of sympathy has not gone unchallenged, however. For instance, while Hankins (2016, 2019) has emphasized the transformative, political potential for sympathy, Elisabeth Kirtsoglou and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (2018) champion empathy as a critical mechanism for political transformation. Hankins conceives of sympathy as operating laterally, despite some power and hierarchical differences between groups to potentiate solidarity. Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos (2018), meanwhile, pit sympathy against empathy, arguing that empathy is a better tool for subverting power hierarchies to political ends (104). While our reading of the literature is quite different, Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos reject a conceptual, historical, and political relationship between empathy and sympathy in their

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advocacy for empathy as an imaginative and political relation with others. The authors argue that empathy is a phenomenon that includes the capacity to ‘teach oneself how to imagine a world from the other’s point of view’ (105) and, further, that this auto-didactic quality of empathy (as the authors conceive of it) may position the concept as a political ‘tour de force’, one which operates as ‘potentia’, an imminent, affective capacity occurring between others. As an ‘auto-didactic’ capacity entirely distinct from sympathy, the ‘empathy’ Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos describe represents what we recognize as a ‘complex’ form of empathy, a culturally elaborated form of empathy that responds to and reflects the social and epistemological circumstances in which the authors conduct their ethnography and write their work. When we turn to empathy’s history, however, what we find is a confusing polysemic debate on the morality, utility, and political consequences of empathy that is similar to the Enlightenment articulations of the Christian (or not) merits of sympathetic attunement and leads many authors to make stark claims about the utility of empathy and the potential biases or political advantages it may cause (see, for instance, Bloom 2016).

Empathy/Einfühlung Unlike sympathy with its ancient Greek roots, empathy’s origins begin much later, in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German aesthetic philosophy as Einfu¨hlung (‘feeling-into’). Einfu¨hlung is most commonly associated with Theodor Lipps who – critically – reworked the concept in his aesthetic philosophy as a means not only for investigating aesthetic experience but also interrogating the problem others’ minds pose to our experience of the world (cf. Debes 2015; Zahavi 2010; Throop 2008). Importantly, while Lipps was in conversation with psychologists and aesthetic philosophers, he was also closely engaging David Hume’s work. Indeed, Lipps translated Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature into German (Montag et al. 2008; Hume 2004). Hume’s thought had an important, if uneven, influence on Lipps’s efforts. So much so that, even while Lipps’s conceptualizations of Einfu¨hlung sought to highlight the contours of what he took to be a distinctive human capacity (a perspective that continues to influence contemporary understandings of empathy), he at times used sympathy and empathy in ways that suggested and facilitated significant overlap between the two concepts. As a case in point, Lipps (1907) conceived of Einfu¨hlung as a mode of knowing the other that is irreducible, developing a robust critique against arguments of knowing the other by analogy (i.e. I know the other’s feelings and thoughts by virtue of having experienced similar feelings and thoughts myself) (Lipps 1907; Zahavi 2010: 288). Yet, he also – perhaps following Hume (2007: 70) – argued that through embodied mimicry, one

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may project one’s own feeling states into the qualities of an aesthetic object, literally ‘feeling-into’, and later extended this argument to everyday interaction in a manner that seems to reproduce the very argument from analogy that Lipps critiques (Zahavi 2010; Throop 2012b: 410; Throop and Zahavi 2020). There is thus a simultaneous irreducible alterity of and a capacity for psychological unification with the other in tension in Lipps’s conceptualization, a dynamic that pervades Enlightenment philosophies of sympathy and German aesthetic theories of Einfu¨hlung. To make matters more confusing, while elaborating Einfu¨hlung, Lipps at times distinguished this concept from Mitfu¨hlung (‘feeling-with’ or ‘sympathy’) and sometimes used these two concepts interchangeably. The slipperiness of these terms was echoed in Edward Titchener’s introduction of Einfu¨hlung to Englishspeaking audiences as ‘empathy’ in his translation of Lipps. Thus, contrary to Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos’s (2018) claims, we find in Lipps an early and intimate link between Einfu¨hlung and Mitfu¨hlung – empathy and sympathy – that continues to reverberate through contemporary literature along with many of the inconsistencies found in Lipps’s articulation of Einfu¨hlung (Debes 2015; Titchener 1909: 21). Anthropologists Nils Bubandt and Rane Willerslev (2015), for instance, draw heavily on Lipps – reproducing many of the same logical slips between sympathy/ empathy and embodied mimicry/projection in their call to anthropologists to attend to the moral ‘dark side’ of empathy. Drawing on their distinctive fieldwork, on political conflict in Indonesia and hunters in Siberia, respectively – Bubandt and Willerslev point to the empathy required to understand and then hurt another being. In their work, they are responding in part to a common but thin characterization of empathy, present in many popular psychological and some anthropological works, as simply a morally virtuous phenomenon. Yet, in the process, they overlook many critiques of Lipps and a large body of work in psychological, phenomenological, and anthropological theory that had long engaged this so-called dark side (Hollan and Throop 2008; Throop and Zahavi 2020). While Lipps’s work was popularly received in part thanks to E. B. Titchener in the context of American psychological research, on the European continent Lipps’s work received a more critical reception. Key were the critiques launched by phenomenological philosophers (Scheler 2008 [1913/1923]; Husserl 1989; Stein 1989; cf. Heidegger 1996; Levinas 2000). The phenomenological articulation of Einfu¨hlung, in turn, has also deeply influenced the distinctive mobilization of empathy in psychocultural and philosophical anthropology (see, for instance, Hollan and Throop 2008, 2011), and so, for our purposes, it is worth briefly sketching an outline of the phenomenological stance. First, early phenomenological critique emphasized the asymmetrical directness of empathic experience. Our experiences of others may be direct or ‘primordial’ – that which is most fundamentally given – but others’ experiences are not (Husserl 1989; Stein 1989: 7). As Edmund

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Husserl (1989) observed, although we may immediately experience the other as a living being, we do not have immediate first-person access to the other’s subjective states and intentions. We do not and cannot live the other’s experience. We experience their experiences by means of their expression. Our individual streams of experience interlock (or ‘pair’) by means of such expressions, but they do not – contra Lipps – merge or fuse together as one. The phenomenological critique, therefore, affirms the limits of empathic experience and thus empathic understanding. That is, from the phenomenological point of view, empathy is a form of direct experience, but it is the direct experience of the dynamic expressions of another living being. The other with whom we are experientially intertwined still always exceeds us; aspects of their being and experience remain beyond our understanding, beyond our capacity to subsume to our pre-given and typified categorical frameworks (Levinas 2000). There is, thus, a necessary asymmetry between the experiencing subject and the subject who is experienced by them. As previously mentioned, such phenomenological insights directly influenced anthropology’s recent turn to rethink the significance of empathy for anthropological theorizing and research. In 2008, responding to a notable gap in the contemporary anthropological theory, Douglas Hollan and one of the authors of this chapter, Jason Throop, asked, ‘Whatever happened to empathy?’. Struck by the lack of work on empathy in the discipline, the authors re-examined Clifford Geertz’s indictment of empathy in his influential 1974 essay, ‘From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding’. Noting the rupture and scandal caused by the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski’s personal field diary, Geertz challenged what he described as the ‘myth of the chameleon fieldworker’ (1984 [1976]: 123). Not only was the notion that ethnographers were ‘walking miracles of empathy’ a myth, in Geertz’s articulation, but empathy was also an epistemological obstacle to understanding the significance of social life as situated in a given local world. Even when focussed upon explorations of cultural difference, empathy, Geertz argued, encouraged a procrustean analysis of other cultures’ ideas of self to the extent that it assumed an intersubjective interchange between what were considered to be isolated, bounded, individual, and individuated selves, thus forcing such conceptions of self into a Western framework (1984 [1976]: 126). Famously pointing to the parochial nature of such self-conceptions, Geertz claimed the Western conception of self to be ‘a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures’ (1984 [1976]: 31). The influence of Geertz’s dual-edged critique of empathy along with his call for anthropologists to shift to a non-mentalistic hermeneutic approach to understanding other modes of social life effectively foreclosed empathy as both a method and object of ethnographic analysis within the field (Hollan and Throop 2008; Bubandt and Willerslev 2015: 11).

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In a critique of Geertz’s characterization of empathy and in the interests of reviving empathy as an object for anthropological inquiry, Hollan and Throop considered the ways in which empathy functions in social life as a means for understanding intersubjective and moral/ethical experience. In the essays included in the special issue that began with ‘Whatever happened to empathy?’ and in Hollan and Throop’s subsequent anthology (2011), and later works (see, for instance, Hollan 2008, 2011, 2012, 2014; Throop 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2012), the authors call upon a diverse set of literatures (psychoanalytic, medical, cognitive, and phenomenological) to develop a critical framework for understanding and discussing empathy; a framework that is attuned to potentially shared existential dimensions and cultural, temporal, and interpersonal variation in empathic experience. In the process, the authors advance a model of empathy that may be parsed into ‘basic’ and ‘complex’ forms. Following the phenomenological literature, ‘basic’ empathy in Hollan and Throop’s work is not foundationally a form of understanding; rather, it is considered to be a pre-reflexive mode of existential attunement to others that entails the entire sensorium and which various forms of understanding may emerge from, respond to, or otherwise elaborate upon. Meanwhile, complex empathy is culturally, historically, and experientially informed. It may be hybridized with other forms of attunement and intersubjective engagement, including imagination, memory, and mood. A complex empathic experience is processual, and as such may be changed, refined, or negated over time (Hollan and Throop 2008, 2011; Hollan 2012, 2014; Throop and Zahavi 2020). It is thus, as Throop frames it, ‘never an all or nothing affair’ (2010a: 772). Nor is it viewed as necessarily ethically ‘good’. To understand better the ethical/moral issues arising out of such a view of empathy, consider the negotiation of the morality of empathy in the broader anthropological literature. From the standpoint of phenomenology, empathy is a morally neutral experience – not inherently good or bad. Yet, it has been promoted so powerfully in popular and political discourse as a form of positive, moral engagement with the other that theorists not directly engaged in the turn to rethink empathy have often deployed the concept in similar ways (i.e. as a moral good). As mentioned earlier, works such as Bubandt and Willerslev’s (2015) article on the ‘dark side’ of empathy are responding to these more popular conceptions of empathy. In advancing what they call ‘tactical empathy’, a form of empathic identification with the other that is driven by a desire to harm or destroy the other, the authors not only ignore the phenomenological critique of Lipps’s work but also echo Hollan and Throop’s initial framing which argued that ‘first-person-like knowledge of others in the context of everyday social practice is rarely, if ever, considered an unambiguously good thing’ (2008: 389). In the process, the authors also revive an even

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earlier intervention made by psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who was, ironically, an influence on Geertz. In 1981, frustrated with the way his early work on empathy and introspection as theory and method in psychoanalysis was received over twenty years earlier (1959), Kohut attempted again to define empathy as a morally neutral term and reclaim the term for his psychoanalytic work. In the process, he rearticulated what he called the ‘empathic human milieu’ (1981: 127). Kohut argued against a simple articulation of empathy as uncomplicated, positive interaction with others. He also reminded his audience of the kind of cruel empathy it would take, for instance, for Nazis to attach sirens to their dive-bombers, instilling fear in their intended victims as the bombs plummeted to the ground. The empathic human milieu serves as the grounds for human connection (both positive and negative) and, for Kohut, is central to sociality and ultimately to the psychoanalysts work of interpretation. Critically, it is important to note that this lecture, Kohut’s ‘On Empathy’ (1981), represents an intervention into a decades-long frustrated debate about empathy in psychological and psychoanalytic literature – its definition and operation – which, unwittingly or not, continues in anthropological articulations and rearticulations of the moral vicissitudes of empathic experience. Over the course of their histories, sympathy and empathy have come to take on a variety of meanings to no small consequence. Over time, these concepts have elaborated relationships to the cosmos, to aesthetic objects, and – importantly for us – to others, particularly suffering others with a great deal of ontological, political, and moral/ethical significance. In anthropological literature, theories of empathy and sympathy – though frequently contradictory – have been mobilized not only to elaborate the ethical relationship we may have to a suffering other but also to contextualize this ethical relationship within the socio-political circumstances within which such a relationship emerges.

Pathos, Attunement, Mood Suspending concerns over how best to understand and deploy sympathy and empathy in anthropological engagements with morality, ethics, and politics, we would like to think more carefully about what it might mean to reorient the discussion to what underlies the two prefixed modifications of pathos – namely, a pathic response to suffering. It is in fact arguably redundant to use such phrasing given that, etymologically, the Greek pathos is directly related to the terms paskhein, ‘to suffer’, pathein, ‘to suffer, feel’, and penthos, ‘grief, sorrow’. When understood in this light, pathos and suffering are mutually entailing, both referring to the passive undergoing of unbidden events, experiences, or happenings. And yet, as Bernhard Waldenfels suggests, what pathos ‘announces [is] a learning

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through suffering, yet not a learning of suffering’ (2011: 26). That is, pathos is responsive to suffering in a modality that preceded thematic or reflexive modes of understanding. While in some contexts pathos arises specifically in response to pain, discomfort, grief, and sorrow, the more fundamental pathic response is one that is defined by our receptivity, vulnerability, and attunement to situations, events, others, and a world that exceeds us. Returning to the original Greek etymology, we see that pathos can literally be translated as ‘what befalls one’, a phrasing that aptly discloses its passive and prepersonal qualities (Online Etymology Dictionary 2019). As Waldenfels argues, pathos ranges across ‘different degrees of intensity’ that arise when we are confronted with that which is not ‘at our disposal’, that which ‘happen[s] to us, overcome[s], stir[s], surprise[s], attack[s] us’ (2011: 26). Such a confrontation, however, is not with a delimited something prefigured and understood. It is instead a yet-to-be-determined encounter with an incipient something that comes hither from beyond. Disrupting the ‘all too familiar distinctions . . . between subject and object, between objective occurrence and subjective act’, pathos suggests a dawning, an opening, that emanates from and intimates an elsewhere (2011: 28). Pathos is thus associated with what Waldenfels takes to be, following Edmund Husserl, ‘a radical form of ‘original passivity’, which stems from af-fection2 and thus continuously imports elements which are ‘alien to the ego [Ichfremdes]’ (2011: 29). As Husserl explains in his lectures on passive and active synthesis, ‘all activity essentially presupposes a foundation of passivity as well as an object like formation that is already pre-constituted in it’ (2001: 276). The world that is always already constituted in passive synthesis thus impacts us as much as we may actively impact it. The world draws us in, has a hold on us, and pulls our attention towards it. Husserl termed the ‘allure’ or ‘pull’ that various aspects of the world have upon us ‘affection’ (see Throop and Duranti 2014). When understood as a form of ‘affection’ or ‘original passivity’ of ‘what befalls one’, pathos thus underlies what Max Scheler (1961, 2008) termed ‘world-openness’ (Weltoffenheit), which he took to be the foundational condition of our being, being affected and attuned to others and the world (cf. Throop 2014, 2018b). Beings who are defined by ‘world-openness’ are, as Martin Heidegger argued, beings who are dynamically attuned to the worldly conditions into which they find themselves thrown. It is important to recall in this regard that the concepts of mood (Stimmung) and attunement (Befindlichkeit) articulated in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1996: 130) were in fact directly derived in dialogue with Aristotle’s writings on pathos (see Oele 2012; Heidegger 2009). Attunement is one of two equally foundational ways that Dasein 2

Here ‘af-fection’ rather than ‘affection’ emphasizes the action of affecting insofar as ‘af-’ (derived from ‘ad-’, meaning ‘to’) implies a call towards something, a ‘summons’, as Waldenfels (2011: 26) describes it.

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finds itself in the world. Through attunement, Dasein constitutes its ‘there’. Attunement as a pathic response thus has to do with the ‘fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the “how” [Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way’ (Heidegger 1995: 67). As a primordial existential ground that potentiates possibilities for being-in-the-world, Dasein is, as Heidegger phases it, ‘always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement’ (1995: 67). Primarily disclosed through moods (Stimmung), attunement thus reveals the manner or way in which we are coming along in the world with others. So how do such forms of pre-personal, pathic attunement relate to empathy and sympathy? In a critical reflection on empathy (Einfu¨hlung) in Being and Time, Martin Heidegger captures the problem of the relation between empathy and pathos in this way: ‘Dasein as being-in-the-world is always already with others. “Empathy” does not first constitute beingwith, but is first possible on its basis, and is motivated by the prevailing modes of being-with in their inevitability’ (1995: 121). In other words, as worldly beings we are always already in a world with and alongside others. Empathy (and sympathy) does not thus constitute our co-existence; it instead gives us asymmetrical experiential access to how others’ experiences of the world are unfolding alongside and intertwined with our own. In this light, empathy (and sympathy) can thus be understood, following Dan Zahavi (2005), as disclosing ‘forms of intersubjectivity already at work’ (168). In shifting attention to those various forms of pathic attunement that underlie empathic and sympathetic responses to suffering, we expand the range of ways that we are always already so responsive. Whereas experiences of empathy and sympathy arguably focus our attention to the ongoing lived experiences of the singular, irreplaceable, finite being before us, pre-personal forms of pathic attunement as manifest in various moods, for instance, reveal an open atmospheric attunement to conditions that may include but may also exceed the experiences of any one given individual. There may, for instance, be public or collective moods, formed by the subjective and shared attention to a circumstance and event – though unevenly distributed and certainly not universally shared – that imbue a given time period – the year following 9/11 in America, for instance – with a particularly mooded atmospherics. Significantly, such moods can and do shift, responsive as they are to the dynamics of a ‘changing political field’ (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017: 107). In short, public moods make evident the worldly expanse of such modes of attunement. Moods may also be attuned, however, to more circumscribed situations wherein a given mood may be responsive to a diffuse set of conditions that are differentially distributed within the context of a family, household, and/or community. Tine Gammeltoft’s (2018) account

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of ‘domestic moods’ in Vietnam captures these phenomena well. Gammeltoft writes: We entered the yard surrounding the house, placed our shoes on the stairs outside, and went indoors. Coming from the dazzling sunshine outside, the darkness was overwhelming. But something else was overwhelming, too; there was, I sensed, something eerie about the house. I am not sure what exactly gave me the impression. Perhaps it was because the shutters were unusually, tightly closed, letting in very little light. Perhaps it was the silence of the birds in the cages outside the yard. Perhaps it was the ambivalence that Lan’s father-in-law’s body language exuded – he invited us in, and yet there seemed to be a subtle hesitation. Perhaps it was the way in which Lan’s mother-inlaw immediately guided us up the stairs to Lan’s room, rather than, as in-laws would usually do, inviting us for small talk over a cup of tea. Overall, I felt this house seemed to close in on itself, its atmosphere tense and dark. (2018: 585–6) Thinking through how such an initial, mooded impression resonated with the lifeworld of the young mother living in the house whose experience of pressure, anxiety, and depression had become painfully unbearable led Gammeltoft to ask: what ‘does it do to a person to live in a house where the atmosphere is so angry and tense that even passing visitors immediately sense it’? (586–7). To ‘sense’ such a mooded atmosphere of diffuse suffering in the space of a household is thus, we argue, a form of pathic responsiveness that grounds, and yet may also move alongside, specific moments of empathy or sympathy arising in a given face-to-face encounter with the situation like Lan’s. Where empathy and sympathy open us to the singular existence of another with whom we co-inhabit the world, pathic attunement may disclose the more diffuse situational and relational conditions impacting another’s ongoing and shifting experiences (see Throop 2020, 2022).

Conclusion Some of the key early work inaugurating the turn to ethics in anthropology sought to distinguish ethics from politics, in so doing offering a nonreductionistic view of their overlapping entanglements (see Laidlaw 2001; Lambek 2000). In more recent years, while often still building directly upon these insights, others have stressed the significance of exploring more carefully the specifiable points of contact between them (cf. Zigon 2008; Fassin 2011; Ticktin 2006, 2011; Weiss 2015). Moreover, such efforts to trace various articulations of ethics and politics in anthropology have also overlapped with a growing engagement with ontological concerns

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(Mattingly 2019; Schwarz Wentzer 2018; Zigon 2017, 2018), concerns that arise in a marked fashion in anthropological engagements of sympathy/ empathy (cf. Throop and Hollan 2008, 2011; Hermann 2011; Bubandt and Willerslev 2015; Hankins 2019). Consider again, for instance, Hankins’s (2019) elaboration of politics as the creation of ‘venues, scenes, and opportunities in which we might practice ourselves as we want to become’ (175). This conception of politics is one predicated on the development of sympathy and thus a collective engagement in the creation of these political venues. Hankins’s definition of politics as a practice which is predicated on the cultivation of ‘fellow-feeling’ echoes Enlightenment philosophies which posit sympathy as the condition for ethical action, but evokes, too, a kind of virtue ethics where one must, through practice, cultivate the habits of an ethical self (Aristotle 2009; cf. Mattingly 2014). More explicit are those anthropological literatures on empathy which move from a phenomenological concern (Hollan and Throop 2008, 2011; Throop and Zahavi 2020) to an explicitly ethical or else ‘tactical’ tool for political engagement (Bubandt and Willerslev 2015; cf. Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos 2018; Weiss 2015). Read together (though they are quite distinct), these literatures ask us to consider the ethical and political aspects of human modes of being alongside ontological ones – namely, that we are beings who always already find ourselves existing in the world with others, others who may thrive, struggle to get by, or suffer, and with whom we may or may not agree. Such work on sympathy and empathy thus anticipates this most recent move within the anthropological literature on ethics to consider the political and ontological conditions of ethics/ morality as conditioning conditions, ones which are in turn recursively shaped by individual and collective (moral) action. In recognizing complex dynamic relationships between ethics, politics, and ontology in the context of this chapter, we do not advocate for a collapse of these terms. Rather, we invite critical engagement with the dynamic interaction of these phenomena such that they may be held as distinct yet mutually influencing. In a resonant way, in our analysis of sympathy and empathy, we also do not collapse these terms, nor do we hold some as more appropriate theoretical concepts than others. Instead, we hope that our efforts demonstrate the need for a more sustained dialogue between anthropological work on empathy and sympathy to help clarify what these concepts bring to efforts in understanding distinctive responses to suffering; an effort that we believe will help us to further articulate the operation of pathos and its ontological, political, and ethical entailments and limitations. At the core of this generative integration of political and ontological concerns into the ethnographic literature on suffering and ethical/moral responses to such suffering is the primordial existential grounds of pathic attunement from which empathy and sympathy emerge. As we have shown, entangled within the phenomena of pathos, mood, and

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attunement more generally are broader conditions of suffering that may variously rise or fade to prominence within the horizons of our awareness. Though we may be aware of our pathic and mooded attunements to suffering, these forms of passive responsivity do not always or explicitly tell us about the irreplaceable other who may experience such suffering. In this regard, we may ask whether or not sympathy and empathy should be understood as arising when an aspect of another’s existence becomes more thematized, prominent, salient, or problematic, facilitating a specific form of moral, political, and ontological attunement to the other. That suffering (both in first- and third-person forms) may thematize our experience of ourselves and others in a distinctive way, directing the manner in which we empathize or sympathize and the political, ontological, and moral/ethical shape of such responses, is thus an important point that guides the various theoretical interventions we have made in this chapter. In positioning pathos as the grounds for both sympathy and empathy – two modes of experience that variously disclose others as other in the singularity of their suffering – we have further suggested that human beings are always attuned in a both/and way. Focussing on the singular suffering other before us thus does not foreclose our pathic attunement to other aspects of our immediate world. Instead, attention and responsivity are arrayed in a complemental way (cf. Throop 2003) as ethical, political, and ontological concerns about our being in the world with others are able to variously rise to prominence, disclosing in such a way both particularized responses to singular situations and the variously shared socio-political conditions that bring about the mooded atmospherics of a given time and place. Importantly, the flexible movement of our pathic attunement and responsiveness in the world also means that discrepancies inevitably occur. Indeed, dissonant and contradictory forms of attunement – misunderstandings or other forms of social breach – often operate at the core of the ethical, political, and ontological concerns which arise in our encounters with (suffering) others (see Briggs 1971; Garfinkle 2005; Hollan 2008). Significantly, as Garfinkle observed long ago, such breaches make both our ‘background expectancies’ and our normative assumptions about ‘commonplace scenes’ visible (2005). What this means, then, is that we do not – contrary to Robbins’s (2013) conclusions – have to turn to ‘the good’ to get to the cultural point in anthropological theory on ethics. Empathy, sympathy, and other forms of pathic attunement may be elaborated in ways – through breaches, breakdowns, or otherwise – that make cultural differences evident. Moreover, such phenomena also show us something else beyond mere cultural dynamics – namely, the singularity and potentiality of particular persons, circumstances, and situations. In other words, the who, the how, and the way of our existence discloses forms of excess that cannot be captured by normative cultural frames, assumptions, judgements, habits, and so on. *

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As we were finishing this chapter, yet another tragic photograph began ´ scar Alberto circulating through American and global mass media. O Martı´nez Ramı´rez and his twenty-three-month-old daughter Valeria’s drowned bodies were photographed face down along the banks of the Rio Grande. A New York Times article claimed, ‘Photo of Drowned Migrants Captures Pathos of Those Who Risk It All’, calling the image a ‘portrait of desperation’ (Ahmed and Semple 2019). Journalists Azam Ahmed and Kirk Semple quote the chairman of the House Hispanic Caucus, Democrat Joaquin Castro. ‘It’s very hard to see that photograph. . . . It’s our version of the Syrian photograph – of the 3-year-old boy on the beach, dead. That’s what it is.’ Other media outlets claimed mass outrage, and the image was used to justify a house bill passed to provide more aid along the border. In the midst of this cacophony, still others are asking that the photograph not be shown. A recent Newsweek article reads: ‘Stop Sharing “Dehumanizing” Photo of Drowned Migrant Father and Daughter, Immigration Groups Say: “Before They Were Migrants, They Were a Family”’ (Da Silva 2019). Advocacy groups such as the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) have chosen instead to circulate images of Mr. Martı´nez Ramı´rez and his daughter alive and happy, as a family, reminding us of their irreplaceable singularity as beings and directing audiences away from ‘sympathetic’ reactions to the image that position the losses faced by the Ramı´rez family as ‘just another tragedy’ emblematic of the racialized ‘crisis’ at the border (Da Silva 2019). Public media is already too saturated with images of marginalized people of colour in crisis. Indeed, comparing this image to the many others that came before it as ‘our version of the Syrian photograph’ may act as a call to action while simultaneously flattening responses to the image as a general representation of ‘suffering humanity’. Though we cannot possibly represent the full spectrum of this tragedy and reactions to it along the border, what we can do – within the context of this chapter – is recognize the pathic modes of responsiveness to it, including palpable shifts in public mood that are also complexly intertwined with particular empathic and sympathetic responses. This also includes the mutual entanglement of the fraught framings of humanity that arose in the wake of this tragic event, the ethical, political, and ontological dilemmas such a crisis at the border presents (see De Leo´n 2015), and ´ scar Alberto Martı´nez the individual and irreplaceable lives of Valeria and O Ramı´rez.

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15 Ambiguity and Difference Notation, Ritual, and Shared Experience in Constructing Pluralism Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller

How can we live with people who differ from us in essential ways? This problem has been a challenge and source of ethical action and injunctions since ancient times. Biblical admonitions on our obligations to the stranger, for example, stand as a very early indication of this concern with difference and otherness, and with the imperatives of ethical action towards those not of our ‘tribe’. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Hermann Cohen argued that the process by which the stranger was turned into the fellowman formed the core of how we formulate ethical thought and action. As Cohen pointed out in reference to Biblical injunctions on the Israelite’s obligation to honour the Egyptian: ‘Humanity is already so rooted in the stranger that the slave, as stranger, can be admonished to the bond of gratitude’ (Cohen 1995: 120). For him, as for us, ‘the very possibility of ethics was tied to this problem [of the stranger as fellowman]’ (Cohen 1995: 114). This problem is not just limited to the Judeo-Christian traditions: even Zeus, the highest god in the Greek pantheon, was the god of guest-friendship. Zeus was therefore god of something similar to that guest-friendship by which the people of Israel – strangers in the land of Egypt – were mandated to respect the Egyptians. The distinction of self and other, whether understood individually or collectively, is fundamental to the challenge of pluralism. At an individual level, the process of distinguishing self from other has seen a great deal of attention from psychologists. The social version of the question, however, seems increasingly pressing in the current world. How can social groups live together peacefully even though they may not share traits they see as basic to human nature or national character (eating rice, bathing every day, speaking English, wearing clothes that button, accepting Jesus)? How, in other words, is an ethic of true pluralism possible? The line between social self and other nearly always worries people because the difference threatens to undermine so much that we can otherwise take

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for granted as normal. At the same time, however, we always share a great deal with any human other. The boundaries are ambiguous. Ambiguity is always present. It does not appear solely in the presence of the ‘near other’. It exists in the endless possibilities that all moments present and in the particular choices that we make: it lies at the interstices of these choices, of doing x rather than y and their endless possible correlates. It may seem as if ambiguity could be reduced through a more thorough search for knowledge. Yet, we cannot eliminate it entirely from the realm of human relations because ambiguity is inherent to the process of categorization, without which we can neither think nor act.1 Ambiguity is not a function of some lack of information, but of the endless horizon of action and of the openness of human thought, which precludes too great a reliance on the ‘laws’ or ‘regularities’ of social life. It dogs our every step. How do human societies reduce ambiguity to a level we can live with? How can we manage in a world where the laws of regularity too often fail to work, where alternative schemes of categorization confound our conventions, and where we are left with a totally open field of possibilities in our relations to one another? In the pages that follow, we focus on three common ways of responding to ambiguity, and on their quite different implications for the ethics of pluralism. We will call them notation, ritual, and shared experience. Briefly, notation is an attempt to conquer ambiguity by creating ever more categories and rules. Yet, it generally ends up creating new ambiguities, as in the evolutionary biologists’ joke that every time they discover a missing link, it produces two new missing links. By saying this, we do not mean to argue that notation is unnecessary or undesirable; on the contrary, we do not see how human social life would be possible without it. Our claim is simply that notation cannot solve the problem of ambiguity, and that its primary mechanism of establishing new boundaries through categories therefore causes as many problems as it solves. Pluralism will not be solved so much by creating new boundaries as by finding ways of working across them. The anthropological literature is replete with analyses of categories and boundaries, from Durkheim and Mauss to Le´vi-Strauss and beyond (Durkheim and Mauss 1967; Le´vi-Strauss 1966). Our intention is not so much to add to that literature as to show that we can better understand the possibilities of pluralism by examining other, non-notational ways of dealing with ambiguity – through ritual and shared experience. By ritual, we mean primarily those acts that are formalized by social convention and are repeated over and over in ways that people recognize as somehow the same as before. Ritual crosses borders of all kinds: between humans and spirits, men and women, food and people. Like the potlatch, the Olympics, 1

This was, of course, a fundamental point made long ago by the structuralist-inspired work of Douglas and Leach (Douglas 1966; Leach 1976).

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or Trobriand Cricket, it can unite diverse peoples. As in purifications, initiations, or sacrifices, it can transform objects or people from one category to another. At its most fundamental level, it carries us across the boundaries that it creates, the boundaries between everyday life and those moments of ritual life. A third response to ambiguity brackets away the categories of both notation and ritual by focussing on the full complexity and idiosyncrasy of a given moment. On a temporary and ad hoc basis, this strategy lets us take practical action by eliding the problem of categories and the ambiguities they produce. These three analytic models of dealing with ambiguity are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, we argue that all three are necessary and important in all societies. They intermix in different ways, however, and the nature of that mix contributes significantly to the local nature of pluralism.

Ambiguity and Notation Let us begin with a miracle. In the spring of 2014, Robert (one of this chapter’s authors) and a fellow anthropologist, Fatima Bai, went to watch the installation of a new abbot at a major Buddhist monastery in Nanjing. These are relatively rare events, and so the Buddhist world of Nanjing had turned out in force. There were hundreds of monks and nuns, more hundreds of robed volunteers affiliated with various temples, and uncounted onlookers like us. Unfortunately, the leaders had decided that the installation should happen in a very small room, big enough only for the most important people – abbots of other major temples, leaders of the Provincial Religious Affairs Bureau, but not anthropologists. The major players disappeared through a small doorway and up a staircase, while the rest of us idled in a large temple courtyard. It was a brooding, dark day of overcast skies, but as we stood there, the clouds began to clear just a bit, and a few rays of sunlight peaked through, creating patterns in the clouds. One of the temple volunteers looked up and gasped, ‘Namo Amituofo!’. This invocation of the name of Amitabha Buddha is a common greeting and blessing in the Buddhist world, but in this case was intoned because she realized she was witnessing a miracle in the heavens on this auspicious day. Others followed her gaze upward, and soon dozens of voices were crying out their own ‘Namo Amituofo’. People began chanting these words over and over, creating chaos at first, but soon becoming entrained into a single chorus invoking the Buddha’s name. The clouds blew in the wind, and shifted, and eventually the miracle faded, along with the chant. As the chant ended, Fatima and Robert asked people what they had seen. ‘There were two suns in the sky’, said one. ‘The bodhisattva Guanyin’, said another. ‘A spinning dharma wheel’. ‘A flying horse’. ‘A

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unicorn’. Fatima (who was quite certain that she had seen a dragon) and Robert looked at each other in some surprise. We asked how it could be that everyone saw something different, but none of the people involved seemed to find anything surprising in it at all. One person explained that ‘Everyone gets their own divine reward’. That is, our informants showed a far greater tolerance for ambiguity than the two anthropologists did. Everyone agreed that they had seen a miracle, and no one minded that none of them had seen quite the same miracle. No one (except perhaps the anthropologists) felt the need to impose a single category on the pattern in the clouds, nor even a singular reality that everyone must have seen. This is perhaps pluralism at its most trivial, except that it is so easy to imagine a different outcome, where perhaps the failure to have seen Guanyin would indicate a failure of faith. People have been excommunicated and religions have split over less. Instead, however, people refused the notational temptation to define the pattern in the clouds as a singular vision, one that would define a clear and shared category. They chanted as one, but they felt no need to see as one. The story begins to illustrate how other ways of thinking about categories and the boundaries between them offer alternatives to notation. We will return later to the specific work of ritualization that we saw in this story. Unlike these Buddhist volunteers, we often find ambiguous situations difficult to deal with and we seek a way out, usually through one form or another of disambiguating. The most far-reaching of methods to disambiguate has been through constructing ever more precise and detailed categories. Loosely following in the path of John Henry Newman, we have been calling this process of constant clarification ‘notation’. By this we mean the process of intellectual abstraction from real experience or apprehension: ‘creations of the mind’, in Newman’s terms, rather than of direct apprehension (Newman 1874: 40). Language is arguably the most fundamental human way of dealing with the ambiguities inherent to experience. All denotative language abstracts away from the infinite richness of our experience in the world; all of it reduces flow to categories. As many have pointed out, every word is both too general and too specific: too general because it loses the precision and detail of actual objects and experiences, and too specific because it bounds those objects within the clear borders of some class.2 The problem of categories thus remains rooted in the ambiguity of language. To paraphrase Gregory Bateson, one problem is that every communication is both a message and a message about a message (Ruesch and Bateson 1951: 209). It is both descriptive and, in a sense, normative – a claim about the world-as-it-is and a claim about the nature of claims. Any 2

This is not to say, of course, that categories are incapable of transformation, but the possibility of change does not obviate this problem. See Seligman and Weller (2019).

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message can carry multiple meta-messages; that is, it is open to multiple interpretations and thus carries an inevitable ambiguity. Creating categories is thus an example of what is perhaps the most common strategy of dealing with ambiguity – notation. Notation solidifies and refines boundaries. It works through the contrast of categories, through the creation of clearly defined alternatives. It attempts to disambiguate for all times rather than understand its categories as indexed to a particular people or places. It therefore tends towards the abstract and general rather than the local and particular. By encouraging the construction of clearly delimited categories of social selves and others, with very little room left for play between them, notation can sometimes be an obstacle to pluralism. Perhaps the most important field defining the idea of notation is law (nomos). The very term ‘category’ comes from the Greek kategor, that is, ‘accuser’ or ‘prosecutor’. Laws and categories are interwoven. Both attempt to disambiguate in the most critical realm we inhabit: that of human relations. They have been doing this, moreover, for millennia – even before the invention of written codes of law, which merely added to and fortified this tendency. We can see examples of this in some Chinese attempts to resolve ambiguity by multiplying legal categories. Let us give just a couple, which will help clarify some of the alternative ways of dealing with ambiguity that we discuss later. First, there is the problem of ethnicity. China is home to a vast array of social variation, some of which has long been ethnicized, but never in a consistent or orderly way. When the newly formed People’s Republic of China decided to give national representation to ethnic groups in the early 1950s, however, it was faced with the sudden necessity of enumerating and naming its ethnic groups while keeping the number small enough so as not to overwhelm the National People’s Congress with minorities. A 1954 census in just Yunnan Province asking people to self-identify their ethnic group led to roughly 200 different ethnonyms; 92 of these groups had fewer than 100 people, and about 20 had a ‘population’ of just 1 person (Mullaney 2010: 34–6). In the end, the government drew the line at fifty-six ethnic groups. Some of these groupings combined people who had never imagined a collective identity, and some separated people who had a great deal in common. China continues to deal with the consequences. Second, something similar happened with the enormous range of religious variation in the country. The state’s goal was to bring religious actors under institutional control, continuing a project that had begun earlier in the twentieth century under the Republican government. In order to do so, ‘religion’ itself had to be created as a category, and specific religions had to be delineated. In the end, there were only five: Daoists, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics. Confucianism was not recognized, even though Chinese had earlier called it a ‘teaching’ just as they did

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Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity. The extremely widespread practices of local festivals and making offerings to deities and ancestors were also not ‘religion’. Whether we are looking at the fifty-six categories of ethnicity or the five categories of religion, the state’s creation of legal boundaries had powerful effects on people’s lives, but never erased the ambiguities of practice we will see in the cases discussed later. We can see another aspect of the relation between law and practice in the decidedly early and culturally widespread practice of blood brotherhood – from pre-Homeric Greece to contemporary Africa – which exemplifies this ‘legalization’ and hence structuring of ambiguous fields. Blood brotherhood and similar forms of ritualized personal relationships define or include a close relationship with an unrelated other, which should not exist within a cognitive grid based solely on kin classifications (Eisenstadt 1956). Yet, it clearly does. Such ritualized friendships make certain relationships possible, despite the fact that the logic of the system cannot accommodate them. The interstitial or ambiguous points in the system (i.e. its inability to accommodate non-ascriptive ties) are negated through the creation of what is essentially a legal fiction. Friendship (like love) is, after all, a very ambiguous thing. From Confucian sages to modern anthropologists, people concerned with human relations have been struggling to understand just how this rather unstructured, loosely bounded, poorly defined, labile, and often conflicting web of affective ties relates to more structured, institutionalized, bounded, and defined (i.e. notated) roles and expectations (Paine 1974). Love, after all, was seen in the Christian Middle Ages as the ‘dark passion’ constantly threatening social stability, order, and the always tenuous regulation of sexuality within marriage (D’Arcy 1956). Friendship in some societies was seen as no less dangerous, and just as sexuality – in all societies – has to be disambiguated in agreed-upon roles and expectations, friendship too had to be formalized, bounded, and woven into a web of pre-existing and socially understood and accepted expectations of reciprocity and responsibility. Thus, Evans-Pritchard notes in his classic study of blood brotherhood among the Zande: ‘a man could not enter into a pact solely on his own initiative, since its clauses bound also his kin, who became subject to its sanctions. He would therefore first consult his father and uncles and would only carry out the rite of blood brotherhood after he had obtained their consent’ (Evans-Pritchard 1933). The ambiguities of friendship were thus severely circumscribed within a set of clearly defined expectations and obligations that were themselves enmeshed within existing kinship obligations. Of course, this also set up the very real potential that the fictitious blood relations would lead to a competing and conflicting system of obligations to that of existing kinship rights – the stuff of Greek tragedy. In fact, over 150 years ago Henry Sumner Maine explicitly recognized the role of legal fictions in providing such temporary refuge, or, in terms

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somewhat closer to his own, of providing a bridge between the normative order (the law) and the exigencies (what we would term the ambiguities) of history (Maine 1888: 23, 24). Maine roots his analysis of legal fictions in the Roman legal concept of fictio, which was a device to permit jurisdiction in a case involving a foreigner and showed how it continued to be used as a means to maintain the fiction that the law has not changed, that it is as it ever was, while the fact was that it ‘wholly changed’. Interestingly, he cites the ‘Fiction of Adoption’ – that is, the creation of artificial family ties – as critical to the very growth of civilization (Maine 1888: 25, 26). Such legal fictions can be found in all legal codes, of all peoples. The real problem remaining, however, is that regardless of the mechanism invoked, there is simply no way to shun ambiguity – even, or perhaps especially, when attempting to do so through a system of notation.

Living with Ambiguity We have been arguing here that the anxious dialectic between notation and ambiguity characterizes all human thought and social life. Notation, however, is not the only way in which we can deal with the problem of how to set boundaries on a flow that has no firm boundaries of its own. We began with notation because it seems so dominant at first glance. Notation, after all, is not merely the stuff of bureaucrats and lawyers but has become the preeminent model through which we construct knowledge in much of the world today. It shapes, for example, the process of professionalization in fields ranging from urban planning to medicine. In each of these cases practitioners have the job of coming up with solutions to problems that are unique to one particular context and one particular time (an ailing body, a design for a new highway). They attempt to do this, however, through the application of abstracted rules and principles. As Donald Scho¨n has shown, the attempt to notate fields like this has been riddled with problems (Scho¨n 1983). The process we have called notation works by clarifying boundaries and separating categories, in the manner described by an earlier structural anthropology. In this mode the inevitable ambiguities, as we have argued, can only be dealt with through taboos and censorship or through creating ever more categories. Boundaries, however, need not always work as impermeable containers around categories, like the lead shield around uranium to prevent radioactive pollution or the Great Wall of China to keep the barbarians out. Boundaries of some sort are inevitable, but they can work in very different ways. Ritual, for example, presents an entirely different mode of dealing with boundaries. While a great deal of the literature on ritual emphasizes its creation of boundaries, we would also draw attention to the way ritual always crosses boundaries at the same time. Rituals create a kind of

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subjunctive and temporary world in a way not so different from theatre. The ritual worlds of the Roman Catholic Mass, Muslim daily prayer, or the Chinese offering of incense are examples of such subjunctives (Seligman et al. 2008). These worlds must always be entered and exited; that is, the boundaries of the ritual event itself must always be crossed. If we consider notation to be something like standard locutionary acts, like statements of fact, then ritual is more like metaphor, which always crosses between categories. Ritual also implies a very different relationship to time than notation. Rituals repeat. Many do this rhythmically; that is, their repetition is predictable in time – birthdays, annual holidays, weekly services. One could even say that they create time in the sense of defining a shared convention to understand its flows. In so doing, they create a sense of shared pasts and futures, which is so critical to feelings of community. This conventionalized structuring of time allows time to flow in an alteration of ritual moments and non-ritual moments, one kind of subjunctive universe and another. Shared experience enables us to work across boundaries in a wholly different manner: by bracketing out irreconcilable differences. This process can even extend to the point of not attempting to come up with shared meanings at all, as long as we share enough sense of common process and common goals to work together on an ad hoc basis. It can thus create a subjunctive space in which we set aside many of the differences and concerns of life in other contexts. It can sidestep the problem of shared meaning because the actions themselves put participants on the public record as accepting the particular context as defined. This remains true even if they share very little in their interpretations of the meanings of their actions. We saw a minor example of this earlier, with the Buddhist followers who chanted together in spite of having seen different miracles. In the space remaining we will look at some aspects of both ritual and shared experience as ways of dealing with ambiguity that are quite at odds with that of notation and present perhaps a very different way of sharing our world with those of others, of crossing, constructing and re-crossing the myriad borders of these worlds, and so of fostering pluralism.

Ritual By ritual we understand a series of formal, iterated acts or performances that are, in Roy Rappaport’s terms, ‘not entirely encoded by the performer’; that is, they are imbued by meanings external to the performer (Rappaport 1999: 24). We see such ritual acts as crucial to the existence of the relational self. Rituals create a subjunctive space, a shared ‘could be’ where such selves can exist in relation with other selves. This is as true of religious ritual as it is of the rules of civility and etiquette. Ritual, in its

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formal, iterated, and enacted moments, presents a unique human resource for dealing with ambiguity and the multivocal nature of all relationships – with beings human and divine. Ritual defines and binds entities, times, and spaces, and in such border-creating activities it also links such entities, times, and spaces to what is beyond their immediate field. It presents a coherent and embracing way of living in a plural and hence also deeply ambiguous universe, one where order can never really be known but still must be acted upon. When we say that a group of people shares a symbol system, or a set of values, or a common idea of the sacred, we in essence assert that they share the potential space of what ‘could be’, a subjunctive world (Seligman et al. 2008). Much ritual action provides this shared sense of empathy – sometimes even in terms of an explicitly shared ‘what if’. When Jews congregate around the Passover Seder table and are explicitly enjoined to fulfil the commandment to feel ‘as if you yourselves have been liberated from Egypt’, they create that shared space where the communality of the ‘could be’ becomes the very basis of the ongoing collective experience. The Shi’ite enactment of the defeat of Imam Hussein at Karbala and the Catholic participation in the Eucharist all have similar import.3 Confucius, famously uninterested in the world of spirits, still insisted that when ‘he offered sacrifice to his ancestors he felt as if his ancestral spirits were actually present. When he offered sacrifice to other spiritual beings, he felt as if they were actually present’ (Chan 1969: 25). Maimonides enjoins us to attend to our prayers ‘as if’ we are standing before the Creator of the universe (Maimonides 1986: 4). The moral community that E´mile Durkheim outlined in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life exists precisely because it shares such a potential space created through ritual (Durkheim 1995). That shared moral community is never the entirety of social experience in its full complexity of misunderstandings, conflicts of interest, and incompatibilities. By taking part in rituals, we subject ourselves to externally given categories of order, whose source can be anything from a transcendent deity (as in Judaism) to the natural ordering of the physical and social world (as in Confucianism). Ritual concentrates on the performative nature of the act rather than on its denotative meaning. In fact, pure ritual puts questions of belief or truth aside in favour of the shared world that its action creates and requires. The very external, performative aspects of ritual – especially its repetition and recollection of places and times not given to purely rational or instrumental computation – give it a unique lability. Thus ritual encompasses the ambiguity of life in a unique manner. It allows one to ‘play’ with such ambiguity in a way that an undue concern with the authenticity of one’s actions and beliefs would preclude. Ritual 3

Needless to add, shared empathy also invokes the limits of empathy and of those beyond the boundaries of empathy – who are often recalled at the same moment of ritual enactment (as in Jewish Passover and Christian Easter).

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unshackles the mind from a need to believe in a dogma of our choosing, as long as we act within its conventions. Rituals allow us to live with ambiguity and the lack of full understanding. In slightly different terms they allow us to live with the other, with what we do not fully know or understand – as, indeed, we can never fully know or understand any other. The presentation of ritual’s ‘as if’ universe, the subjunctive, requires neither a prior act of understanding nor a clearing away of conceptual ambiguity. Performance simply and elegantly side-tracks the problem of understanding to allow for the existence of order without requiring a full understanding of it. In this way it resembles all manner of decisions we must make to take any concrete action, where we accept that we have as much understanding as we are likely to get, but action must be taken even though our understanding is incomplete (as it always must be). This is true for a medical intervention, a financial investment, a marriage commitment, a declaration of war, or the planning of a highway – for virtually all forms of human endeavour. Through its emphasis on action, on the performative and its creation of a subjunctive universe, ritual creates a world – temporary, fragile to be sure, but not false – where differences can be accommodated, tolerance enacted (if not fully understood), and openness to the other maintained. While ritual activity carries its own form of intentionality, it is important to note that ritual is not necessarily concerned with what is often understood as sincerity. In any ritual, as with saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, performing the act marks acceptance of the convention. It does not matter how you may feel about the convention, or if you identify with it or not. In doing a ritual the whole issue of our internal states is often irrelevant. What you are is what you are in the doing, which is of course an external act. This is very different from modernist concerns with sincerity and authenticity. Getting ritual right is thus not a matter of making outer acts conform to inner beliefs. Getting it right is doing it again and again and again – it is an act of world construction. As an ideal type, the self who does ritual is very different from the self who is sincere. Nonetheless, from the Puritans of the seventeenth century to the talk shows of the twenty-first, a concern with the inner wellsprings of action and sincerity has become almost an icon of modernist culture. This concern, we would argue, is very much at home in the world of notation outlined earlier. The search for the singular and unalloyed (definition, feeling, impulse, or intent) is very much at the core of both the search for sincerity and for the pure or impermeable boundary-line that defines what we have termed notation – as one mode of parsing ambiguity. Sincerity by definition excludes ambiguity. Recall that its dictionary meanings include: ‘being without admixture’, ‘free’, ‘pure’, ‘whole’, and ‘complete’ (Standard Dictionary of the English Language 1937). Samuel Johnson lists among its cognates: ‘unhurt’, ‘uninjured’, ‘pure’, ‘unmingled’, and ‘uncorrupt’. Sincerity, carried to its extreme, is the very search for wholeness, for

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the overcoming of boundaries and the positing of a unitary, undifferentiated, uncorrupted reality. It is a utopian impulse. What we usually call the ‘modern’ period, with its emphasis on the notational impulse and its strong ‘flight from ambiguity’, has given a rare institutional and cultural emphasis to sincerity claims (Levine 1985). As a consequence, ritual has often come to be seen from the perspective of these sincerity claims, and has come to be relegated in our minds to a supposedly ‘traditional’ order that the modern period has heroically superseded. Indeed, so pervasive have these claims become that even revolts against this so-called modern era are done in the name of finding ever more sincere tropes of an authenticity that, at the end of the day, cannot be – and which we would in fact characterize as various types of fundamentalist movements.4 In contrast to this, the realization that our boundaries (and the differences they define) are only artifice – which we can find in a ritual approach – allows us to accept and even play with their inherent ambiguity. While the sincere boundaries of truth seek to root out all ambiguity, the ritual mode has a built-in ability to abide with the inevitable ambiguities of life, even within an equally inevitable impulse towards an ever delayed – yet also never abandoned – impulse towards wholeness and totality. While in some senses rituals may search for a wholeness like that of sincerity, they do so through a recognition of ambiguity, rather than by denying it. Ritual does more than posit a reality. Rather, its pattern is often the classic dialectic of positing a reality, negating it, and ending up with a ‘truer’ reality.5 Ritual’s opening to subjunctive worlds allows this play with different versions of reality, unlike the singular approach of sincerity. It allows for a recognition of the ambiguous nature of empirical reality, in a way that the sincere mode would find threatening and overwhelming. Rituals thus allow a possibility of polytropy, where the openness to multiple interpretations allows them to work pluralistically, across lines of ethnic or religious division (Carrithers 2000). Rituals create boundaries, but they are unlike the pure boundaries of notation. We can cross over ritual boundaries, like a tennis ball over a net. Rituals do of course construct the spaces of the sacred, as has often been studied by social scientists, but they also require us to enter and exit those spaces. Boundaries, we recall, both separate and unite, differentiate and establish contiguity, as anyone who has ever shared an apartment wall or property line with neighbours can attest. Ritual, through its construction of our categories and their boundaries, establishes at the same time their modes of interpenetration. Ritual does this in a second way as well. By creating subjunctive worlds, it also reminds us that otherness is possible, that the world as it appears is not the only possible world. 4

For more on this, see Trilling (1972) and Seligman et al. (2008).

5

We are grateful to Shlomo Fischer for this insight.

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Rituals, that is, are inherently plural in their understanding of the world; pluralism, like empathy, draws boundaries, but allows the possibility of working across them. Rituals may teach us to accept and even to play with the inherent ambiguity of the world, while the very absoluteness of the notational stance attempts to exclude ambiguity. The notational and the ritual, we are claiming, respond to the ambiguity of the world, to what is not of the self, but in ways that have significantly different implications for the organization of the social world. Ritual frames the world as fragmented and discontinuous, which entails our endless work in building and refining our multiple and often conflicting relationships within that world. It helps teach us the powers of ethical action based upon such a vision, tragic though it may be. Understanding the world as discontinuous and ambiguous means that the work of building and refining relationships will never end. The work of ritual is one of the most important ways we live in such an inherently plural world. Repetition is critical to the ways that ritual crosses boundaries. Through repetition, ritual establishes a formal context above and beyond any particular content or ‘meaning’ of the event, gesture, or locution. We may draw an analogy here with ornament (dentils below a roofline, patterns on a picture frame, palmettes along a lintel, etc.) which, like ritual, is a formal repetition of a largely content-free design that exists on and also forms the boundary of the object it frames. The key here is the formal quality of both ritual and ornament, as expressed in Henri Focillon’s dictum that ‘form signifies only itself’ (Focillon 1948: 3). While ornament tends towards pure form, ritual too maintains a strong formal element in its patterned repetition (though, to be sure, not totally divested from all meanings). This highly formalized structure is the crux of the dual role of ritual in both creating and crossing over boundaries. Let us return to China for a moment, and to the interaction between such formal repetitions and the sincere notations of modernism. Life in the villages of Chefang Township, on the rural outskirts of the booming eastern city of Suzhou, had long been characterized by many sorts of rhythms, just like villages across China. Some of these were only moderately ritualized, like the visits between households that took place every evening (chuanmen, ‘stringing together doorways’). Others were highly ritualized, like offering incense at village temples on the first and fifteenth of every lunar month, or celebrating the local deity’s birthday, or marking the major events of the lunar calendar. All of them defined communities, and relations among communities, in the ways we have been discussing. All of this ended twice. The first time began in the 1950s and came to completion during the Cultural Revolution, especially during the late 1960s, when public ritual life was brought to a forced end and most remaining village temples were destroyed. This was the culmination of a set of modernist projects that had begun already in the early twentieth

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century, when first the Republican and then the Communist governments notated something called ‘religion’ for the first time, as we discussed earlier. These village temples, and the local leaders and spirit mediums who supported them, were left outside the realm of religion and generally condemned as superstition – the term for those realms at odds with the notational project of religion. In addition, both governments shared a modernist suspicion of all ritual except for some limited secular rituals dedicated to the nation itself. It seemed by about 1970 that this project had fully succeeded, but in fact, when things loosened up with the reforms that began around 1979, people quickly rebuilt temples and re-established their ritual rhythms.6 The second ending was more permanent because it destroyed not just temples but the villages themselves, again in the name of modernity and progress. In the early 2000s the city of Suzhou expanded eastward, completely bulldozing most of five townships (with a population of about 100,000), including Chefang, to create a new urban area aimed at professionals and entrepreneurs. The agricultural fields and irrigation canals disappeared forever. So did all the houses, villages, and small towns, along with dozens of temples and countless graves. The villages themselves no longer existed as physical or administrative units, and neither did the township. The people were resettled in low-end, massive housing complexes, splitting up villages so that these newly urbanized farmers often did not know the neighbours with whom they shared apartment stairwells and hallways. There was no way to re-establish either the localized communities of the past or the temples that shaped them. Nevertheless, the new urban district agreed to build two new Daoist (a formally recognized ‘religion’) temples to house all the displaced gods. This was unusual in China, but even more surprisingly, various local religious leaders and spirit mediums managed to set up new altars, sometimes in storage rooms in the basements of their apartment complexes, and sometimes in marginal spaces within the new temples themselves. They could not, of course, recreate the kinds of communities that existed before, but they have managed to re-establish social rhythms that foster new forms of community. Once again, the first and fifteenth of the lunar month see very active worship, and the gods’ birthdays allow for larger rituals at the temple, so that it is still possible to see sociality being created in ways separate from the projects of modernist states and urban planners. This sort of ritualization beyond the notated categories of religion in China is pluralist in some important senses. By allowing multiple new communities to form around the various informal altars in the temple and apartment complexes, these rituals make space for co-existing social networks. By embracing multiple gods and, for the first time, concentrating 6

For a broad summary of changes in Chinese religious policy and practice over the twentieth century, see Goossaert and Palmer (2011).

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them in one large space, they encourage people to cross between communities by offering incense to other people’s deities. And probably most importantly, they create a vital kind of pluralism by offering an alternative sense of sociality and subjectivity to the one shaped by state projects.

Shared Experience Context or experience tends to stand in an uneasy relation to notation, but in a way different from ritual. At its most abstract extreme, notation obviates all particular contexts and provides only the most general (and generalizable) grids for all experience. In use, however, context always mediates notation. We recognize this with the role of equity in law, and in myriad other cases as well. Sometimes context can even explode notation. We can see aspects of this in the insights of Marshall McLuhan on the role of the media in the conveyance of any notational message (McLuhan 1964). Walter Ong offered a similar insight in his classic book The Presence of the Word, where he noted that ‘sound is more real or existential than other sense objects, despite the fact that it is also more evanescent’ (Ong 1967: 111). We might even add: precisely because it is more evanescent. The spoken word, after all, exists in real time, thus partaking in time’s quiddity. Sound is rooted in the particular moment, in the real apprehension of experience rather than its notation. In many instances, it not only reflects the context but is also an essential element of any particular and hence evanescent context. At the same time, we modulate sound in the present to produce new realities, whether in street brawls or over romantic dinners – not to mention in more ritual contexts. Words spoken are often inseparable from action. The oral/aural component provides a context to the words that makes them an event. In Hebrew, the tri-lateral rooted d-b-r is the source of the words for both speech and event. The spoken word of God created the world, we recall, in the canonical books of the Western traditions. Similarly, the mystical syllable ‘om’ was the original vibration of the divine at the creation of the world, as described in the Upanishads. While notation is timeless, sound only exists in time, and it is no coincidence that so many traditions link sound so closely to the origins of time. It is not surprising that theorists of performatives like Austin wrote almost entirely of speech acts rather than writing (Austin 1975; Searle 1969). As Ong reminds us, the spoken word is always context rich (the context of its speakers and listeners), while the written word communicates to those who are not there at all. Oral speech is rich in complexities and the messiness of everyday life, including the fuzziness of our thinking on the spot and in dialogue with others (as anyone knows who ever attempted to transcribe and publish any taped discussion). All anthropologists rereading old field notes after having

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returned home have the awful sense of having lost something critical in the move to notation. The aural/oral brings us to the importance of improvisation or bricolage as modes of interacting within the context of shared experience. This stresses action, the doing within particular contexts and their histories, rather than the always already existing knowledge we bring with us to the interaction. Here, participants do not seek an agreed-upon a priori but rather organically begin with difference to produce an evanescent solution to a particular problem (it is evanescent because it is always a particular and unique problem). This solution often ends up being temporary, for as soon as we attempt to generalize from any particular solution to other problems, we are willy-nilly engaged in the making of a new notational system. Constructing categories is one of the fundamental skills that makes up our human capacity for culture. We cannot speak without a language that divides the world into categories, just as we cannot function socially without some concepts of role and personhood. Some scholars describe this as a way of making order out of the underlying ambiguities of experience, just as stories from many peoples around the world describe creation as an act of ordering a primordial chaos. It may be just as useful to turn this around, however. Ambiguity is possible only because categories exist, and cannot be conceptualized except through and in contrast to categories. In other words, ambiguity and order are permanently intertwined. Because our categories, rules, and orders are all constructed – always too abstract and too concrete at the same time – ambiguities threaten to undermine them, and we can never fully avoid this danger. Yet we cannot live without putting some order on the world. The problem is how to live with ambiguity while still retaining order. Shared experience is a concept that lets us put aside the simple demarcations of social notation in favour of highly contextualized action towards an end. By itself, such a mechanism may not suffice to create a full society. Genuinely historical in the full sense of the word, it creates neither a shared past nor future. It takes place instead in the here and now, with all of the potential rewards and instabilities that implies. It requires trust, with all the risks that idea entails. Notation is itself, however, not possible without shared experience. Notational systems often deal with change through more notation; that is, they give rules about how to change the rules. Yet the actual content of the new rules can never be foreseen by the old rules. The substance of notational change has to come from outside the system, from the struggles and hopes of shared experience and from the joint attempt to accomplish an end. One can see how shared experience can, at least for a moment, trump notation when groups who normally shun each other join forces to sandbag a flooding river, for instance. Once the danger has passed, of course, they may return to their earlier antipathies, but the shared work

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of those sandbags also plants a seed, a potential for a reworking of notational categories and possibly a new pluralism. As a final brief example, let us return to the issue of ethnicity, and in particular to two Jewish sisters in Kaifeng. Jews probably entered China along with the Muslims, many centuries ago. With much smaller numbers, however, the community ultimately ended up concentrated in the inland city of Kaifeng, where they were decimated in 1662, along with the rest of the city, by the wars at the end of the Ming Dynasty. They never fully recovered, but some people there to this day still claim Jewish identity, including two elderly sisters whom Robert met in 2014. The elder sister announced with some pride that her national identity card listed her identity as ‘Jewish’. Robert was astonished, because China’s exercise in the notation of ethnicity had settled long before on just fifty-six categories, none of which included Jews. As proof, she pulled out a photocopy of an old card. There indeed, in the space for ethnicity, written in by hand, the card said ‘Jew’. As she explained it, the first round of creation of national identity cards happened in the 1980s, and everyone was supposed to go to the local police precinct to arrange for their card. When the police officer asked her identity, she said ‘Jew!’. He searched around in his various manuals, and finally apologized. There was no such category. ‘Jew’, she said, ‘you have to tell the truth!’ He apologized again and suggested that she choose any ethnic-minority category in order to take advantage of affirmative action programmes. He was willing to put any of the official categories down. Unable to convince him, she finally stormed off with no identification card. Later, however, she managed to pull a few strings and the police finally wrote down ‘Jew’ and gave her the card. Hers was perhaps the only such card in the country, an example of a hard compromise made one afternoon in the police station. Here we see an example of how the complexity of experience can sometimes override strictly notational categories. Unfortunately, there was another round of identity notation a decade later, but this time the cards were created through a national computer system. The interaction in the precinct was almost identical, with the officer asking her identity, and the elder sister demanding to be listed as a Jew. This time, however, writing in something by hand was impossible. The computer system demanded that one of the fifty-six categories be chosen. Again, the officer suggested she choose any minority for the affirmative action benefits, and again she refused. Out of patience, the officer finally said, ‘Enough! You are a Han now’. This is the majority group, so there would be no affirmative action. She went home and told the younger sister of her defeat. When the younger sister went to do her own card, she avoided her sister’s fate by immediately answering ‘Muslim’ to the ethnicity question. These two Jewish sisters, as close as any two siblings can be, thus became members of two different ethnic groups.

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One could look at the first part of this story as a kind of shared experience leading to the unique identification card of the 1980s, followed by a more thorough domination by the notational system a decade later. Yet, the strict notational system created its own absurdities, as two sisters who share all their ancestors ended up as members of two different ethnic groups. The creation of such absurdities may well be inherent to all notational systems, which can never fully resolve ambiguities. Making a new category, after all, just creates new zones of ambiguity at its edges. Thus, even with the second, more notated identity card, these very contingent and ephemeral events created at least the imaginative possibility of new grounds of how people can count as different, and thus new grounds for pluralism.

Conclusion We cannot avoid the ambiguities that are inherent to the socially necessary process of drawing the boundaries between categories or even between people. Our goal here has been to imagine those boundaries in more than one way, beyond the solid line of notational categories, to include the crossable boundaries of ritual and the fractal complexity of shared experience. Each of these approaches moves us in quite different directions. Behind them all, however, lies the pressing problem of pluralism – that is, of trust and ambiguity, where the dominance of notational boundaries limits the ways we think about how to live together with difference, and where a focus on shared experience rather than shared meaning, or shared categories, may offer us important resources for such a life with difference. Ordering ambiguity is a crucial task, and these alternative ways of understanding boundaries may be key to living together with difference. We are not claiming that the penetrable boundaries of ritual or the shifting ones of shared experience are superior to the solid lines of notation. On the contrary, we do not see how either a completely ritualized life or one constantly in the moment of shared experience can create a social life without adding some form of notation. Instead, we are suggesting that these three different ways of thinking about categories are alternative frames. That is, difference does not lie in some absolute sameness or alterity, but instead is a matter of what we count as different. Notation, ritual, and shared experience for us are alternative frames for imagining how difference can work, and how we can work across difference. Perhaps in the end the key is not to see particular differences through one frame or the other, but to remain open to the constant possibility of alternative frames, to be willing to play among them, to be able to think differently about difference.

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References Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carrithers, Michael. 2000. ‘On Polytropy: Or the Natural Condition of Spiritual Cosmopolitanism in India – The Digambar Jain Case’. Modern Asian Studies, 34(4): 831–61. Chan, Wing-Tsit. 1969. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Hermann. 1995. Religion of Reason, Out of the Sources of Judaism. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. D’Arcy, Martin Cyril. 1956. The Mind and Heart of Love, Lion and Unicorn: A Study in Eros and Agape. New York: Meridian Books. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. 1967. Primitive Classification. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Eisenstadt, S. N. 1956. ‘Ritualized Personal Relations: Blood Brotherhood, Best Friends, Compadre, Etc.: Some Comparative Hypotheses and Suggestions’. Man, 56: 90–5. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1933. ‘Zande Blood-Brotherhood’. Africa, 6(4): 369–401. Focillon, Henri. 1948. The Life of Forms in Art, 2nd English ed. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz. Goossaert, Vincent and David A. Palmer. 2011. The Religious Question in Modern China. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leach, E. R. 1976. Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols Are Connected. New York: Cambridge University Press. Levine, Donald N. 1985. The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Maimonides, Moses. 1986. Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Tephila. Jerusalem: n.p. Maine, Henry Sumner. 1888. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. New York: H. Holt. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mullaney, Thomas. 2010. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Newman, John Henry. 1874. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 4th ed. London: Burns, Oates. Ong, Walter J. 1967. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Paine, Robert. 1974. ‘Anthropological Approaches to Friendship’, in Elliott Leyton (ed.), The Compact. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 1–14. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ruesch, Jurgen and Gregory Bateson. 1951. Communication, the Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: Norton. Scho¨n, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seligman, Adam B. and Robert P. Weller. 2019. How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor. New York: Oxford University Press. Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon. 2008. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford University Press. Standard Dictionary of the English Language. 1937. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Part III

Media and Modes of Ethical Practice

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16 Self-Cultivation Joanna Cook

Wherever and in so far as people’s conduct is shaped by attempts to make of themselves a certain kind of person, because it is as such a person that, on reflection, they think they ought to live, to that extent their conduct is ethical and free. (Laidlaw 2002: 327)

The turn of the millennium saw three essays published independently of each other that made programmatic proposals for an anthropology of ethics. They each argued, in different ways, that anthropology might fruitfully explore the ways in which people make moral choices, reflect on their lives, and develop moral judgement. Drawing on Aristotelian virtue ethics and Foucault’s later writing, they each presented positive propositions for how anthropology might take ethics as a field of study, and how anthropologists might understand the ways in which individuals cultivate themselves as moral subjects. They all did so in response to what they variously identified as lacunae in scholarship at the time and sought to position themselves against the analytic pitfalls of both social determinism and atomistic individualism. Lambek (2000) proposed a focus on the practice of good judgement in particular circumstances, a form of practical wisdom which he argued could not be reduced to either an abstract calculation or an institutional discourse (Lambek 2000: 316). He argued that anthropology might account for both ‘the capacity and means for virtuous action as well as the limitations placed upon it’ (Lambek 2000: 309). Faubion (2001a) called for the discipline to examine ‘the ethical’ as an anthropological question. In so doing he sought to provide anthropology with a way of understanding action which avoided either decisionism (economistic or Sartrean), agency, and choice on the one hand, and determinism, structure, and compulsion on the other (Faubion 2001a: 84). Similarly, Laidlaw (2002) sought to introduce an analysis of human freedom to anthropology in part as a way of avoiding the collapse of ethics into social regulation or control. Laidlaw distinguished his concept of freedom from a conceptualization of freedom as acting in conformity with one’s

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‘authentic’ self, or freedom as that which is achieved only once relations of power have been removed. Thus, a commitment to steering clear of the polarities of determinism and independence was built into the beginnings of the anthropology of ethics. It is striking then that despite explicit attempts to get past this binary, critics of the anthropology of ethics have remained so attached to it. The criticism of voluntarism or determinism is often levelled in debate about how we might best understand practices of ‘self-cultivation’ and their place in wider ethical life. One reason for this might be that a focus on ‘self-cultivation’ developed in the anthropology of ethics largely through readings of Foucault, a scholar who has generated entirely contrastive anthropological interpretations of his work (see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume). In his later work Foucault developed a theory of ethical self-cultivation to account for the kind of relationship one seeks to have with oneself ‘and which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions’ (Foucault 2000a: 263). His interest lay in how an individual acquires not only skills but also certain attitudes through ‘the modes of action that an individual exercises upon himself’ (Foucault 2000b: 225).1 Foucault sought to carve an analytic space that did not reduce subjectivity to either a given, ‘a universal form of subject that one could find everywhere’ (1996: 452), or to a theory of the self as wholly subjugated by external forces. In so doing he distinguished his theory of selfcultivation from the two strong interpretations singled out for criticism in different ways by Faubion, Lambek, and Laidlaw: the subject as sovereign and independent or the subject as determined by historical or material forces. In this chapter I will explore these two interpretations of ‘selfcultivation’ and their implications: the first, that self-cultivation reproduces a normative social order; the second, that self-cultivation is a matter of individual choice. To foreshadow my conclusion, I will argue that people are neither wholly self-directed nor wholly socially determined, but the value of approaching self-cultivation through a consideration of these positions is that it might draw attention to the existential efforts that people make in the midst of life. Ethnographies of self-cultivation reveal the efforts that people make to shape themselves and the worlds in which they find themselves. How far such efforts go, the form that they take, and the relationships in which they are embedded will be specific to particular 1

In developing his theory of ethics, Foucault distinguished between acts (conduits) as the real behaviour of people and the moral codes (prescriptions) imposed on them (Foucault 2000a: 263). He framed moral codes as the rules or restrictions that apply to everyone and that are enforced through prescriptive agencies such as school, family, or the church. These codes, Foucault argued, vary very little and moral injunctions such as don’t kill, don’t steal, and don’t lie can be found in similar forms across temporally and culturally distant contexts. He understood ethics, on the other hand, to be the kind of relationship that one ought to have with oneself, made up of voluntary techniques or practices that people adopt, and these he understood to be necessarily historically and culturally specific and analysable (Foucault 2000a: 277). Ethics are related to moral codes but can change independently, as in his extended examples of ancient Greek and Christian ethics in relation to sexual practice.

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lives, but focussing on practices of self-cultivation enables anthropology to account for the reflective efforts that people make to live well. Secondarily, I hope to show that resisting interpretations of selfcultivation as entirely self-directed or socially determined collapses a second dichotomy prevalent in the literature between those practices of self-cultivation found in ‘pedagogic’ ethical projects and those found in ordinary life. I will argue that reflection occurs in everyday efforts to live well and that even in contexts with clearly prescribed ethical aspirations, people experience and respond to contingency, conflicting values, and moral complexity.

Foucault, Self-Cultivation, and Social Control Throughout his work, Foucault sought to explore the relationship between governance, knowledge, and power (see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume). In his early work (1979) he developed his theory of ‘biopower’ defined simply as the ability ‘to make live or let die’: in modern society, power is not enacted through overt force and submission but through more subtle means of shaping behaviours, preferences, and choices through practices that encourage self-disciplining techniques, such as the spatial layout of towns, education, or surveillance – what Foucault referred to as ‘governmentality’. The concept of governmentality does a lot of analytical work for Foucault. It provides a way of accounting for both the more formal apparatuses of state administration and their interventions in people’s lives, and the less formal ways in which human actors are incentivized or enticed to govern themselves. Thus, in one reading of Foucauldian governmentality, it is through self-cultivation that the docile subject ‘makes herself up’ and reproduces a normative ideological structure. This internalization of a ‘top-down’ form of subject formation reflects Goffman’s (1961) emphasis on the ways in which (total) institutions cultivate specific subject positions and moral obligations, or Asad’s impressive early work (1993) on the ways in which individual priorities are brought into line with institutions through techniques of asceticism and bodily discipline. Thus, subjects are not only the products of forms of power but they also willingly enact their own subjugation through practices of selfcultivation. The argument runs that self-cultivation is an effect of broader knowledge practices or social forces (family, neoliberalism, economics, religion, bureaucratization) and the will of the individual, and her capacity to reflect on how she might wish to live and work towards that aim, is symptomatic of these. If ethical projects in which the ‘self’ is cultivated rest on well-formed normative understandings about being in the world, then self-cultivation leads to the reproduction of social organization through predefined self-care practices in ethical modes.

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The most sustained, and cited, example of this approach to selfcultivation is found in Rose’s theory of psychological governance. Rose argued that, in post-welfare societies in which governments had to devise ways of ‘governing at a distance’, psychology offered a promising logic for strategies of regulation and that this was met by a second form of psychological governance ‘from within’, what Rose nicely refers to as the governance of the ‘soul’ (1989).2 Psychological knowledge was passed down by experts and internalized by individuals. In the long run, he argues, this internalization would be far more influential than formal structures of psychological regulation because it bound citizens ‘to a subjection that is more profound because it appears to emanate from our autonomous quest for ourselves, it appears as a matter of freedom’ (Rose 1989: 254; emphasis added). The subjects of governance became ‘Active individuals seeking to “enterprise themselves”, to maximise their quality of life through acts of choice, according their life a meaning and value to the extent that it can be rationalised as the outcome of choices made or choices to be made’ (1996: 57). Thus, for Rose, it is the freedom of actors that enables them to become objects of governance; although in the end, he thinks, this is only an appearance of freedom. In the emphasis on the incitement of psychological subjectivity, either in the governance of populations or the governance of the soul, expert knowledge regulates risky groups and ‘makes up’ individuals. In such analyses society may be flourishing or failing (it is usually the latter) but the efforts of the individual to reflect upon her obligations and engage in moral reasoning are taken as the effects of social forces, which ultimately serve to reproduce those forces. The challenge of theorizing self-cultivation in this way is that if the self is so constituted by the material or social conditions that surround it, it has no capacity to go beyond them. In this way, everyday self-cultivation creates subject positions through the moralizing mechanisms of biopower and what appears to be ethical practice is revealed to be yet more ‘unfreedom’ (Robbins 2007). What is lost in such an approach is any opportunity to account for people’s capacity for moral reasoning and ethical reflection. Furthermore, it implies that citizens unwittingly act against their own interests by engaging in practices of self-cultivation, thereby perpetuating the system. The argument egregiously purports to take reflection seriously, but then concludes that even efforts towards selfcultivation are themselves the symptoms of strangulating social forces. Efforts to shape the self in the light of values are revealed in spite of themselves to be the reproduction of oppressive ideologies and people’s aspirations to lead good lives, variously understood, are rendered naı¨ve. Elsewhere, I have argued that such analytic frameworks take forms of 2

Almost certainly here Rose is referring to Foucault’s playful inversion of Plato, when he says, at the end of Discipline and Punish, that ‘the soul is the prison of the body’.

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power both too seriously and not seriously enough (Cook 2016). People are rendered the marionettes of larger social forces as self-cultivation practices become the unwitting tools of their self-subjugation. Or, alternatively, no analytic space is left to account for the efforts that people make to improve their lives except as a form of false-consciousness. The analysis does not account for those aspects of self-cultivation practices (or engagement with psychological knowledge) that lie beyond social forces or are motivated by optimistic, hopeful, or even utopian ideas about the human condition. And we are left with no analytic space to account for people’s ethical intentions to bring something new into being through practices of self-cultivation except for in bad faith (no matter what they say they’re doing, they’re really enhancing oppressive social forces). Through the efforts that subjects make to pursue happy lives, variously understood, a system of inequality and disenfranchisement is reproduced. In this analysis, however, it is practices of self-cultivation themselves which are the means of subjugation. In what ways might we challenge such a life-denying and bleak analysis? It is clear that self-cultivation involves putting oneself in the care of experts, such that the power dynamics of technologies of domination and technologies of self are conjoined. How, then, are we to make sense of self-cultivation as anything other than the reproduction of a normative moral order? How can people’s (individual or collective) efforts towards self-cultivation be understood on their own terms, ensconced as they necessarily are in a world of socio-economic, political, and structural causalities? Foucault himself sought to address this question. In response to readings of his earlier work on governmentality, he worried that his emphasis on domination had left him open to misreading (see 2000b, 2000c), stating categorically in an interview in 1984 that ‘The idea that power is a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot be attributed to me’ (2000d: 293). In much of his later work Foucault sought to address the challenge of social determinism levelled at his earlier work (by none more so than himself; see 2000c: 177; see also 2000e: 201–3; 2000b: 225) through a sustained focus on ethics. He conceived of power as ‘capillary’ (more like blood vessels that run through the body than the strangulation of bindweed) a necessary and productive aspect of all social relations. For Foucault, ethical self-cultivation is always a response to injunctions to make oneself a certain kind of person within configurations of power, and in order for action to constitute ethical selfformation, it must involve some degree of freedom. In the genealogy of ethics, Foucault continues the exploration of power that was so central to his earlier work on prisons, asylums, and clinics, but here he rearticulates the nature of power through a radical retheorization of freedom. Foucault distanced himself from two common uses of ‘freedom’: that acting freely is to act according to one’s ‘true’ desires and that acting freely is only possible in the absences of constraint, domination, or control. Rather,

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freedom for Foucault is the practice of reflection within power relations in the light of ideals which are necessarily historically and culturally contingent. Foucault used the verb ‘subjectivation’ (assujettisement) to emphasize a process of reflective self-formation and referred to practices of subjectification as ‘techniques or technologies of the self’. These are the practices through which ‘the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions’ (Foucault 2000a: 263). In a quote that has had more citations than the serenity prayer, Foucault defines technologies of the self as practices which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault 2000b: 225) Importantly for his theory of self-cultivation, engagement with such techniques requires reflective thought. For Foucault, ‘thought’ is the capacity for self-awareness. Thought is . . . what allows one to step back from [a certain] way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem. (Foucault 2000f: 117) This capacity for reflection enables the objectification of some aspect of the self (habits, thoughts, relationships, reactions) in order that it might be ‘problematized’: brought into view, reflected on, and worked on. For Foucault, the capacity to do this is what ‘establishes the relation with oneself and with others, and constitutes the human being as an ethical subject’ (Foucault 2000e: 200). Foucault divided ethical self-cultivation into four components. First, he refers to that part of the self which is the object of thought and focus of ethical work as the ‘ethical substance’ (substance ethique). For example, the problematization of ethical practice may be focussed on desire, the body, the will. Work on the ‘self’ in order to become the subject that a person aspires to be is work on the ‘ethical substance’ in Foucault’s terms – be that the soul, the emotions, the pleasures – and that which is the concern of ethical judgement may not always be the same part of oneself. Second, Foucault demarcated the mode of subjectivation (mode d’assujettissement) to inquire into how people are encouraged to recognize moral obligations. The mode of subjectification is the way in which a person evaluates and

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engages in living as a particular kind of being, or a subject of a quality. For example, relating to ideals or duties from a particular role or status: as kin, as an individual, as the faithful. Third, the activity, training, or exercise (pratique de soi or askeˆsis) by which the self is formed; that is, the specific work that the person must perform on her ethical substance in order to become a certain kind of subject. These are the activities that a person undertakes in order to shape some part of themselves, their views, reactions, responses, through engagement in practices. Fourth, the aim of practices of self-cultivation is classified as the telos: that which is sought through practice, the kind of person that one seeks to become as a result of ethical practice, or towards which one aspires. This theory of self-cultivation was a categorical refutation of theories of self-cultivation as social determinism. It rests on recognizing the capacity for reflection (something which Foucault took to be a near human universal), holding that the subject is free to the extent that she has the capacity to reflect upon and respond to invitations or injunctions to make herself into a certain kind of person. Such an approach has been a productive analytic for exploring the place of reflection and effortful self-cultivation in diverse ethnographic contexts (cf. Laidlaw 1995; Faubion 2001b; Robbins 2004). But debate about the extent to which people are reflective has contributed to the other end of the polemic that Foucault sought to position himself against, raising the question: if the subject who self-cultivates is not wholly determined by social forces, is she free to cultivate herself ‘any which way’?

Self-Cultivation, Ethical Substance, and the ‘Idealized Idealistic Individual’ If Foucault positioned himself against an interpretation of the subject as determined by social forces, he refuted an alternative interpretation of subjectivity in his work: that of the subject as sovereign or independent. The ‘self’ of self-cultivation was not to be understood as ‘the idealized idealistic individual’ (Lambek 2000b: 12; for a sustained critique of this reading, see Faubion 2001a, 2014). While Foucault understood reflection as creating the possibility of a relation to the self, and thereby viewed the relation to the self as ‘ontologically prior’ (2000g: 287), he understood the ‘other’ as a necessary condition for reflective practice. A person finds techniques and models of subjectification in his culture. They are ‘proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, his social group’ (Foucault 2000g: 291). The emphasis on self-cultivation is not, then, a distinction between self and others located entirely in the subjectivity of the individual. Modes of subjectification, in Foucault’s terms, are culturally shared. As Laidlaw puts it, ‘the reflective motion of “stepping back” is not negated by the fact that in order for this to be possible you have to be standing somewhere in particular to begin with’ (2014: 124). But it is also

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the case that that which is cultivated, Foucault’s ethical substance, may extend well beyond what might be termed an ‘individual’. Some have argued that the ‘self’ of self-cultivation is located in collectives, for example in a religious or caste group in which collective and individual selffashioning become co-constitutive (Cook 2010; Evans 2016; Heywood 2018; Pandian 2009). Taking this further, Faubion has argued that ‘the ethical subject can be a composite subject of an indefinite number of players and places’ (2011: 16). On Faubion’s terms, any system capable of conscious self-formation could be considered an ‘ethical subject’. Contrastively, Venkatesan highlights that it is also important to examine relations within oneself, what she refers to as ‘auto-relations’ (Venkatesan 2014). In fact, once we begin to explore the categories of self and ethical substance, it becomes unclear that self-cultivation need be in any way limited to the individual. For example, in instances in which rebirth, karma, or the incorporation of the deceased into kin groups are prevalent, it seems clear that ethical life extends beyond the boundaries of the individual body, and beyond the boundaries of a life. The self that one is cultivating may be that of a future life and it may result from the actions of former lives. For example, Laidlaw draws on a Foucauldian framework of self-cultivation in his consideration of the Jain religious practice of fasting to death (samadhi-maran). While very few Jains undertake the samadhimaran, it is understood as the most fitting end of a Jain life (2005: 186). In Jain ascetic practice, progress towards enlightenment and release from the sin of himsa (violence) is attained through the reduction of desire and emotion through ascetic disciplines such as fasting. The Jain ideal of human perfection is a systematic negation of actual human life, and the practices by which this ideal is realized are a matter of enlightened selfinterest ‘where the “self” whose interest is at stake is not that of the living person but the imagined future purified soul one could become after enlightenment and death’ (Laidlaw 2002: 321). How the self is defined and the extent to which it is cultivated are not prescribed by Foucault’s analytic framework and, indeed, we find ethnographic variation in all four of his categories: ethical substance, modes of subjectification, technologies of the self, and telos. That which constitutes the ethical substance may be a clear ontological claim about human nature, for example that the ‘real’ self is a pure soul or that the self is ‘really’ an impermanent compound of cause and effect. But it may also be a more general ambition held about life, such as an aspiration towards happiness, fairness, or absence of ill health. Similarly, the modes by which people are encouraged to engage in self-reflective cultivation may be highly prescribed through institutions (such as those of family, religion, or state) or they may be ‘opt-in’, temporary allegiances with others or private motivations within oneself. Furthermore, the activities by which people seek to shape themselves may be prescribed and ascetic, requiring sustained commitment and discipline (forms of asceticism such as

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meditation, fasting, confession, and penance have all been the focus of analyses that have fruitfully drawn on Foucault in this respect). Meanwhile, others require little to no self-denial, are integrated into daily life, and are often very light-touch – for example, meditation (again), diary keeping, exercise, food intake, and clothing. Similarly, selfcultivation may be aimed towards a clearly defined unitary telos, such as enlightenment, union with God, immortality, and so on. Or it may have vaguely defined aims and may sit within multiple and sometimes competing aspirations. Thus, while Foucault makes a general claim that humans engage in ethical self-cultivation, the form that this takes, and the extent to which subjects are motivated to and capable of doing so, are empirical questions: the nature of the ethical substance, the relationships and institutions in which reflection is encouraged, the practices through which cultivation occurs, and the ends towards which people strive will be historically and culturally variable, and they will always and necessarily be located in shifting power relations which can become more or less asymmetrical through time (see Laidlaw 2014: 108–9). In one of the most sustained anthropological considerations of Foucauldian self-cultivation (see also Faubion 2011), Laidlaw (2014) considers reflective self-cultivation as a constituent part of human life. Drawing on the later writings of Foucault and the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics, most notably Bernard Williams, Laidlaw argues that virtue requires acquiring the practical judgement that will lead to the good being chosen for its own sake (see also Lambek 2008): ‘Being or not being courageous, honest, or generous is something one is responsible for because it is how one has chosen, and continues to choose, to be’ (Laidlaw 2014: 74, emphasis in original). In the Aristotelian account, a virtuous disposition is cultivated through habituation leading to increasingly intelligent discernment (Laidlaw 2014: 74). This phronesis is not the exercise of abstract rationality on the part of an autonomous moral agent, nor can it be reduced to a single choice or an act of will. Practical wisdom is both developed out of experience and informs experience, offering wisdom or guidance for how to act in situations one could not have predicted or has not experienced before. The good life is presumed to be lived in and with community and directed to ideals that encompass collective goods. It is bound up with practices that both express and help in the cultivation of character. As Laidlaw argues, While the acquisition of a virtue might begin with being told what to do and being given examples to follow, and continue through encouragement and punishment, its full mature realization requires the attainment of a conscious understanding of who one is and what one is doing, of on-going reflective endorsement based on critical selfunderstanding. (Laidlaw 2014: 74–5)

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Practices by which people develop practical wisdom and a virtuous character are shaped by social context and are historically specific; they are a pervasive aspect of social life and a communal enterprise. Laidlaw built on a Foucauldian concept of ‘freedom’ for anthropology. In this analytic framework, actively responding to the ethical question of how one ought to live is understood as the exercise of self-constituting freedom (cf. Laidlaw 2002: 324). Freedom is located in the potential for reflective consciousness, but it necessitates self-discipline in order to be actualized. As Laidlaw articulates it, ‘Freedom, though grounded in the general potential of reflective consciousness, is the always-qualified and provisional outcome of on-going efforts and reactions; it therefore stands not in opposition to but requires self-discipline’ (Laidlaw 2014: 108–9). It is as a result of this that people not only choose, but continue to choose, to act virtuously as a result of conscious self-understanding through ongoing reflective confirmation. By highlighting the relationship between moral judgement and selfcultivation, Laidlaw is able to demonstrate that moral life is at least to some degree self-made, freely chosen or aspired to. That is to say, there are at least some aspects of moral life that are associated with forms of moral choice and moral self-making. But Laidlaw’s argument also accounts for situated moral judgement and deliberation and is based on a recognition of the moral pluralism of life. Laidlaw characterizes moral life as plural, necessitating moral deliberation in complex worlds, and seeks to account for the operation of practical reason and judgement in everyday life. People may engage in multiple ethical projects, informed by conflicting values and aspiring towards mutually contradictory aims, or practices of self-cultivation may sit at odds with other forms of desire. This is reflected in Marsden’s work on masculinity in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan, in which pious Muslims contend with the inconsistencies and contradictions of leading virtuous lives (2005). Young men in the region aspire to piety but also seek to realize other values that are understood to be in tension with it. Marsden demonstrates that local forms of masculinity interact and are enacted at different kinds of events, which are evaluated according to different criteria and modes of judgement. Similarly, Schielke (2015) emphasizes that people live with multiple and often conflicting desires and values, and that even great aspirations are experienced as ambiguous in their pursuit. Writing about Egypt against the backdrop of the 2011–13 uprisings, Schielke argues that even when people pursue an aspiration that appears totalizing, such as the moral and spiritual commitments of religion, the obsessive passion of romantic love, or the economic calculus of making money, these ideas are inconsistent with each other in their coexistence in daily life. These tensions and contradictions may at times be oppressive or violent, but at others they may ‘present themselves as a complex patchwork of different kinds of hope, different senses of living a good life’ (Schielke 2015: 11). In so doing, he emphasizes ‘the specificity (situational and historical) of conditions that compel people to

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engage in a reflective questioning about their proper being and possible values and actions’ (Schielke 2015: 20, ff. 10). What this highlights is that neither practices of self-cultivation nor the values that inform ethical reflection are necessarily singular or unitary. Ethical self-cultivation is situated in broader moral lives that extend over time, are shared with others, and are informed by collective goods. The potential for reflective consciousness is met by the degree to which people are motivated to engage in effortful practices of self-cultivation in potentially multiple and conflictual ethical projects.

Pedagogic Projects versus Ordinary Life? So far, I hope to have shown that the framework needed to understand practices of self-cultivation must eschew a contrast between them as either determined by broader structures, be they social, economic, or ideological, or as occurring at the level of the individual and as a matter of individuated subjectivity. We have seen that a limitation of the first position is a determinism that affords no analytic space to account for the motivation or intention that informs self-cultivation: people’s efforts are revealed to be the reproduction of an ethical regime, but we gain no account of the ways in which the subject might act upon herself and upon the social structures in which she finds herself. By unpacking the second position, I hope to have shown that the category of the ethical subject need not be an ‘idealized individuated individual’: that modes of subjectification are culturally shared, that the ‘self’ that is cultivated may extend beyond an individual subject, that self-cultivation may be pursued committedly or on an ad-hoc basis, and that practices may be informed by plural and inconsistent values. Given this, if the subject of self-cultivation is neither wholly determined by social forces nor capable of a profound reflective and self-directed liberation, what is the place of self-cultivation in ethical life? Debate about this question has informed much scholarship in the anthropology of ethics. Das has critiqued the place of reflection in anthropological theory, arguing that attending to ethics in projects of selfcultivation which seek forms of transcendence or the cultivation of the ‘good’, however conceived, misses the immanence of ordinary ethics. She argues that anthropological theory needs a shift in perspective from thinking of ethics as made up of judgments we arrive at when we stand away from our ordinary practices to that of thinking of the ethical as a dimension of everyday life in which we are not aspiring to escape the ordinary but rather to descend into it as a way of becoming moral subjects. (Das 2012: 134)

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Mattingly critiques Foucauldian approaches to self-cultivation, arguing that they are ‘anti-humanist’ because the telos of self-cultivation is known in advance and the ‘self’ is understood to be an effect, rather than a cause, of action. She argues that the limit of the post-structuralist position is that it has insufficient conceptual resources to reveal how individuals struggle to judge how to realize ‘best goods’ in the singular circumstances that ordinary life presents them with. It tells us a lot about school, so to speak, but much less about the vagaries – indeed the tragedies – of human action and experience. (2012: 179) She asks: what of those contexts in which the primary work of ethics is not in the learning of ethical self-cultivation, but in the deliberation of moral decision-making, in contexts in which ‘best good’ is not clear? Mattingly argues that social spaces are sites of ‘moral experimentation’ in which people test possibilities as ‘researchers or experimenters in their own lives’ (2014: 16). With little control over where actions will lead, each act is an experiment in unfolding lives of moral becoming, each moment belonging to a history of experiences and anticipating hoped-for futures. Through the metaphor of the ‘moral laboratory’, Mattingly reveals that even in the face of bleak circumstances, life contains possibility, and her ethnography is a sensitive account of struggles of moral choice demanded of families under the threat of moral tragedy. Her moving ethnography is testament to the moral complexity and uncertainty of ordinary life. For Das and Mattingly, then, self-cultivation acts as a useful pivot point to establish a distinction between the ethics of ordinary life and situations that call for ‘a “stepping back” kind of reflection’ (Mattingly 2014: 482). In the final section of this chapter, I will explore this separation between everyday ethical deliberation and pedagogic projects of cultivation to argue that practices of self-cultivation occur in everyday contexts that exceed them and that even in contexts of prescriptive ethical pedagogy people deliberate and respond to the particularities of everyday contingency. In so doing, I seek to highlight the situated character of ethical cultivation and moral decision-making amidst the particularities of practical action. Two recent critiques that address the place of self-cultivation in ethical life focus on the challenge of identifying the ‘self’ with an autonomous self-made subject. Positioning herself against Foucault-inspired approaches to ethics, Mattingly argues that self-crafting may not be in line with predetermined ethical projects, that moral becoming is embedded in particular lives, and that best goods are to be judged in specific circumstances. As an alternative to Foucauldian approaches, she develops a theory of ‘first-person virtue ethics’, which for Mattingly is ‘humanist’ in the pre-modern sense of emphasizing the fragility of life and the

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vulnerability of action in the face of circumstances beyond human control. Contrastively, in an examination of revelatory dreams in Cairo, Mittermaier (2011, 2012) argues that the concept of self-cultivation obscures modes of religiosity that centre on being acted upon, because it emphasizes intentionality and deliberate action. She argues that revelatory dreams ‘exceed the logic of self-cultivation’ (2011: 5): such dreams may be invited through practices of self-cultivation, but they come ‘from elsewhere’; self-cultivation is not the means by which they are produced, reminding us of the unpredictability of divine intervention and the contingency of life itself (2012: 247). In both cases, an argument is made for recognizing the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of life, and in both cases, it is argued that an idea of self-cultivation is too ‘controlling’: that it does not allow due analytic attention to contingency, uncontrollability, or moral luck. Mittermaier argues that the literature on self-cultivation depends on an idea of an autonomous subject (2012: 260). In contrast, Mattingly positions herself against the free cultivation of the self, arguing instead for the importance of a first-person ‘self’ in ethics, including in ethical selfcultivation. Both anthropologists point to the fact that there is much in life that is uncontrollable: that despite practices of self-cultivation, much lies outside the governance of the self. Does this mean, then, that selfcultivation has no place here? Far from being a refutation of theories of self-cultivation, these authors provide helpful insight into the place of selfcultivation in ethical life. As we have seen, self-cultivation is not premised on an idea of an independent self-cultivator and projects of self-cultivation occur in the midst of broader ethical lives. In the case of prophetic dreams, that which is cultivated is the capacity to receive the dreams, but the dream itself remains beyond the control of the cultivated dreamer (see also Lambek 2000b on the cultivation of mediumship). As Mittermaier writes, ‘dream-visions act upon and through the dreamer; they compel dreamers to act (including to engage in practices of self-cultivation); and they might be the outcome of practices of self-cultivation’ (2012: 252) by which they are invited rather than produced. Similarly, Mattingly foregrounds the social practices that are ‘the various day-to-day technologies of self-care that people draw upon to cultivate, or try to cultivate, virtuous characters’ (2012: 179), while also seeking to account for ‘the human predicament of trying to live a life that one is somehow responsible for but is in many respects out of one’s control’ (2012: 179). That is, both critiques highlight that the ‘self’ of self-cultivation may not be an autonomous subject and that there is much in moral life that exceeds a logic of self-cultivation, either because the ‘self’ is acted upon by other forces or because some aspects of moral life are concerned with negotiating the ambivalences of ordinary life rather than ‘cultivation’ per se.3 3

In some cases, of course, what may be being cultivated is, precisely, the capacity to do this kind of negotiation.

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The perceived tension here between cultivation and deliberation is collapsed once we recognize that practices of self-cultivation are always and necessarily located in contexts that exceed them. The extent to which one might self-cultivate in the ‘self’s production of itself’ (Faubion 2011: 48) will always be encompassed in larger moral worlds which call for ethical judgement and deliberation. Furthermore, once we recognize analytically that what people can do is only partially in their own hands, we can account for practices of self-cultivation in which outcomes may be surprising, satisfying, or disappointing, as well as for hope, ambiguity, and sometimes tragedy in the efforts that people make to live good lives under conflicting demands (see also Orsi 2005). This provides an important way of understanding how people face the unpredictable and how people account for forces that lie beyond human control, be they understood as happenstance, the whim of the Fates, or structural forces. As Schielke argues, ‘The question of how to have existential power over one’s condition is also a question of what works, and if it works, how it works’ (Schielke 2015: 217). This reflects Kuan’s theory of an ‘ethics of trying’ in her consideration of parenting in China. Parents face the pressures of ensuring ‘children’s academic survival while attending to them as psychological selves’ (Kuan 2015: 13), which they experience as forms of moral burden and ethical responsibility: ‘the moral problem consists of whether one has tried everything possible to secure the good life for one’s child in the face of intense social competition’ (Kuan 2015: 18). The foregoing has argued that practices of ethical self-cultivation are located in the messiness of ordinary lives that exceed a logic of selfcultivation. Is it the case then that in those contexts in which subjectivities are shaped through clearly prescribed normative technologies, life is morally unitary and does not demand responses to situated contingency and moral perplexity? For example, in contexts of formal religious training and pedagogy, is self-cultivation a straightforward matter? Is human life here also haunted by vagary and tragedy or is it all ‘school’ and pedagogy? In the anthropology of religion, analysis of the cultivation of virtue has provided a rich descriptive and analytic tool for accounting for formal religious training in Buddhism (Mair 2015), Christianity (Elisha 2011; Engelke 2007; Luhrmann 2005), Islam (Mahmood 2005; Marsden 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Asad 2003; Evans 2016), Jainism (Laidlaw 1995), and Hinduism (Fahy 2017; Parish 1994; Prasad 2007). For example, Lester (2005) demonstrates that Catholic postulants in a Mexican convent engage in bodily practices in order to shape their subjectivities in what they experienced as a progressively acute discernment of God’s plan: ‘they learn to retell and reinterpret the stories of their fleshy selves – their struggles and temptations, difficulties and triumphs – as reflections of their changing relationship with God’ (2005: 20). As the phenomenological experience of embodied gendered dynamics is transformed, the self is ‘mobilised along a different trajectory’ (2005: 19). Postulants progressively

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learnt to experience their bodies as mediating worldly and spiritual aspects of self, and in so doing they came to inhabit new forms of femininity. Lester demonstrates that postulants understand the process of selfformation through religious training as both a personal calling and an urgent social and political obligation through which they address gendered tensions in Mexico. In my own work, I have explored how monks and nuns in a Buddhist monastery in northern Thailand gain experiential insight into the Buddhist truths of impermanence, suffering, and non-self through meditative discipline (Cook 2010). By bringing the three characteristics (as they are referred to) into their awareness on a moment-bymoment basis through mental discipline, the monastics with whom I work explicitly intend to change their worldview and cut attachment to a sense of self. Through meditation, monastics intend to experience, not just to know, that there is no ‘self’ (Cook 2013). The bodily and mental disciplines of meditation are both externally and self-imposed: the practice is institutionally prescribed and guided by a teacher, individuals choose when and how often they do intensive retreat, and meditation requires work done on the self, by the self. Focussing on the place of mae chee, precept-holding nuns, in Thai monasticism, I show that the development of the Thai meditation movement has been crucial in the development of an increasingly respected identity for female renunciates (see also Cook 2009). The opportunities are limited for women to receive full ordination in Thailand and mae chee ordination is only partial. Through the monastic duty to teach and embody the principles of meditation, renunciate women take on highly prestigious religious roles, enabling mae chee to define themselves and be defined by others as monastics. The embodiment of the principles of meditation is both a monastic duty and the means through which monastics cultivate detachment from a sense of self. In these examples, we see projects of self-formation through religious practices. The self ‘acts on’ the self in the cultivation of gendered and bodily dispositions specific to forms of religious aspiration and value. The work of cultivating soteriological insight or a transcendent subjectivity is informed by clear cosmological and ontological understandings of the world and one’s proper relationship to it. And specific forms of religious subjectivity are cultivated in the context of broader social relations and institutional hierarchies. At the same time, they require ongoing reflective practice on the part of a subject not easily classified as ‘individuated’. Arguably here, then, these are the ‘stepping-back’ sort of pedagogic cases which might be distinguished from the messiness of ‘everyday’ moral contingency and plurality. However, what these two ethnographies reveal is that projects of self-cultivation are located in broader social contexts requiring moral deliberation and response to contingency. In my study of Thai monasticism, I showed that while soteriological practice focuses on the psycho-physical ‘self’ and relates this to a moral and cosmic order, self-cultivation occurs in the social relationships of the

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monastic community. Renunciation is not achieved through the act of ordination alone and monastics live in a small community replete with gossip and pettiness, sickness and misfortune, which informs and exceeds the work of self-formation. Disagreements between monastics are rarely publicly displayed but gossip about the behaviour of individual monastics is part of daily discussion. Interestingly, navigating mundane occurrences and interpersonal relationships is commonly presented as an opportunity for further practice. In Lester’s Mexican convent study, the challenges of coming of age during a period of rapid transformation in Mexico informed intimately personal and nationalist concerns for ‘young women grappling with what it means to be a Mexican woman in a time of rapid cultural change’ (Lester 2005: 302). Young women who enter the convent experience anxiety about the uncharted territory of their lives and the transformational process that they experience leads to new understandings of their own womanhood during a time of intense social, economic, and political transition (Lester 2005: 266). Thus, even in a context of highly prescriptive ethical imperative, responses to the daily stuff of life require the exercise of judgement and reflective decision-making. And while people respond to structural conditions, they seek to navigate, master, and push the limits of the worlds in which they find themselves (cf. Jackson 2011). By avoiding a contrast between theories of unreflective everyday existence on the one hand, and pedagogic projects of reflective self-cultivation on the other, a focus on self-cultivation can reveal the ways in which people come to live in the midst of the social conditions that they navigate (cf. Faubion 2011: 20), and we can begin to explore the ways in which subjectivity and culture are dialectically constituted.

Conclusion: Reflection in the Midst of Life In this chapter, I have argued that reflective self-cultivation is found in moral lives, informed by competing moral demands and the uncertainties of practical action. The rejection of the binary between theories of the self as so informed by its circumstances that it has no ability to exceed or transform them, or the self as capable of a profound self-liberating selfdirectedness (Seigel 2005: 9), enables an empirical consideration of the potential and extent of self-cultivation. It is for this reason that the study of projects and practices of self-cultivation has been a central focus in the development of the anthropology of ethics, ranging from those in monastic and formal religious institutions of various kinds, through to more informal and fragmentary forms. It has been drawn on in political anthropology in work on activism (Heywood 2018; Dave 2012) and experiences of the state (Pandian 2009; Singh 2015), in studies of kinship, reproduction, and mothering (Clarke 2009; Paxson 2004, 2006), in medical anthropological work on engagement with science (Martin 2010), and in

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therapeutic interventions (Cook 2015; McKinney and Greenfield 2010; Summerson Carr 2013). Much of the anthropology of ethics rests on the foundational premise that people reflect upon their circumstances and aspire to cultivate virtues in their responses to the vicissitudes of life. Anthropologists have highlighted that the ways in which people reflect upon themselves and seek to act will be informed by the particularities of specific contexts, and that there are at least some aspects of life that are self-directed and self-made. At the same time, they have highlighted that action can be morally risky, achievement can be precarious, and that humans are vulnerable to happenstance. How we make sense of reflection, as a universal capacity informed by the particularities of specific contexts, and its relationship to practices of self-cultivation is the focus of many of the debates in the anthropology of ethics (Heywood 2015; Keane 2016; Laidlaw 2014). As Heywood argues, it is the reconciliation between the universal and the particular that provides much of the theoretical deliberation in the anthropology of ethics: moral reasoning and reflection are universal capacities, and those capacities are contextually inflected (Heywood 2017: 44). Anthropologists in the ‘ethical turn’ have theorized ‘reflection’ in different ways. Das (2012: 138) and Lambek (2015) recognize some kind of reflection as an important component in ordinary ethics. Keane (2010: 69) highlights the ways in which people step back from their lives in his distinction between first- and third-person perspectives (see Mattingly 2014: 26 for a comparative approach). Similarly, for Clarke, ethical reflection is ‘utterly normal’ (2014: 799), and Robbins (2016) reminds us to focus on the reflective aspects of ethical life, rather than collapsing them into habit or ‘culture’ (see also Lambek 2000a). In this chapter, I have sought to avoid a contrast between unreflective everyday ethical life and pedagogic projects of reflective self-cultivation. Rather, the lens of self-cultivation enables an analysis of the place of reflection in effortful practices, be they located in ‘pedagogically’ oriented forms of ethical life or embedded in the routines of daily life. I have argued that moral lives are complex and rarely homogenous, and that people are often faced with diverse and sometimes conflicting values and that self-cultivation occurs in the moral pluralism of messy everyday life. The dialogic self-constitution of the subject in social relations reminds us that practices of self-cultivation occur in worlds which exceed that which might be shaped or influenced by the self. This does not negate but rather supports the fact that people reflect on their circumstances and aspire to cultivate virtues in their responses to the vicissitudes of life. As Laidlaw has argued, ‘The claim on which the anthropology of ethics rests is not an evaluative claim that people are good: it is a descriptive claim that they are evaluative’ (2014: 3). The question then becomes an empirical one, to enquire into the form and the extent of self-cultivation in specific lives without reducing it to a thin analysis of either atomistic individualism or

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social determinism. While we can find ethnographic examples to illustrate the distinction between ‘pedagogic’ projects of self-cultivation and moral deliberation in the ongoing uncertainty of everyday life, there is no analytic reason why the distinction is necessary: forms of reflective selfcultivation are found in the ‘midst’ of everyday practice to varying degrees, and in contexts of intense ethical training people remain vulnerable to moral plurality and the contingency of messy everyday life.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Paolo Heywood, James Laidlaw, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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Elisha, Omri. 2011. Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. Evans, Nicholas H. A. 2016. ‘Witnessing a Potent Truth: Rethinking Responsibility in the Anthropology of Theisms’. JRAI, 22: 356–72. Fahy, John. 2017. ‘Failing Well: Accommodating Vices in an Ideal Vedic City’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(2): 331–50. Faubion, James D. 2001a. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoesis’. Representations, 74: 83–104. 2001b. The Shadow and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. ‘Anthropologies of Ethics: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, Where We Might Go’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1): 437–42. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Pantheon Books. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. 1979. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction. London: Allen Lane. 1996. Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1884. New York: Semiotext[e]. 2000a. ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. London: Penguin Books: 253–80. 2000b. ‘Technologies of the Self’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. London: Penguin Books: 223–52. 2000c. ‘Sexuality and Solitude’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. London: Penguin Books: 176–84. 2000d. ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. London: Penguin Books: 281–301. 2000e. ‘Preface to the History of Sexuality, Volume Two’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. London: Penguin Books: 199–205. 2000f. ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. London: Penguin Books: 111–19. 2000g. ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. London: Penguin Books: 281–301. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. New York: Anchor. Heywood, Paolo. 2015. ‘Freedom in the Code: The Anthropology of (Double) Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 15: 200–17.

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2017. ‘Moral Psychology: An Anthropological Perspective’, in B. Voyer and T. Tarantola (eds.), Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide. New York: Springer: 43–58. 2018. After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Berghahn. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counter-Publics in Egypt. New York: Columbia University Press. Jackson, Michael. 2011. Life within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keane, Webb. 2010. ‘Minds, Surfaces, and Reasons in the Anthropology of Ethics’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 64–83. 2016. Ethical Life: Its natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kuan, Teresa. 2015. Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China. Oakland: University of California Press. Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. JRAI, 8: 311–32. 2005. ‘A Life Worth Leaving: Fasting to Death as Telos of a Jain Religious Life’. Economy and Society, 34: 178–99. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2000a. ‘The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy’. Current Anthropology, 41: 309–20. 2000b. ‘Nuriaty, the Saint and the Sultan: Virtuous Subject and Subjective Virtuoso of the Post-Modern Colony’. Anthropology Today, 16: 7–12. 2008. ‘Value and Virtue’. Anthropological Theory, 8(2): 133–57. 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lester, Rebecca. 2005. Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent. Berkeley: University of California Press. Luhrmann, Tanya. 2005. ‘The Art of Hearing God: Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality’. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 5: 133–57. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mair, Jonathan. 2015. ‘The Discourse of Ignorance and the Ethics of Detachment among Mongolian Tibetan Buddhists in Inner Mongolia, China’. In Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, Catherine Trundle, and Thomas Yarrow (eds.), Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 236–55. Marsden, Magnus. 2005. Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-Western Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Martin, Emily. 2010. ‘Self-Making and the Brain’. Subjectivity, 3(4): 366–81. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12(2): 161–84. 2014. ‘Moral Deliberation and the Agentive Self in Laidlaw’s Ethics’. HAU, 4 1): 473–86. McKinney, Kelly A. and Brian G. Greenfield. 2010. ‘Self-Compliance at “Prozac Campus”’. Anthropology & Medicine, 17(2): 173–85. Mittermaier, Amira. 2011. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2012. ‘Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation’. JRAI, 18: 247–65. Orsi, Robert A. 2005. Between Heaven and Earth: The religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pandian, Anand. 2009. Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parish, Steven M. 1994. Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City: An Exploration of Mind, Emotion, and Self. New York: Columbia University Press. Paxson, Heather. 2004. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2006. ‘Reproduction as Spiritual Kin Work: Orthodoxy, IVF and the Moral Economy of Motherhood in Greece’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 30(4): 481–505. Prasad, Leela. 2007. Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town. New York: Columbia University Press. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72(3): 293–314. 2016. ‘What Is the Matter with Transcendence? On the Place of Religion in the New Anthropology of Ethics’. JRAI, 22(4): 767–808. Rose, Nikolas. 1989. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. 1996. ‘Governing Advanced Liberal Democracies’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. London: UCL Press: 189–208. Schielke, Samuli. 2015. Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Seigel, Jerrold. 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, Bhrigupati. 2015. Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Summerson Carr, E. 2013. ‘Signs of Sobriety: Rescripting American Addiction Counselling’, in Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott (eds.), Addiction Trajectories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 160–87. Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2014. ‘Auto-Relations: Doing Cosmology and Transforming the Self the Saiva Way’, in Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad (eds.), Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 77–94.

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17 Exemplars Nicholas H. A. Evans

In the introduction to a recent special issue about the power of examples, Lars Højer and Andreas Bandak argue that, with a few important exceptions (Needham 1985; Humphrey 1997), exemplarity has never really been a subject of much anthropological investigation (Højer and Bandak 2015: 2). In a very strict sense, this is true: anthropologists have until recently only very rarely taken the word ‘exemplarity’ as their object of discussion. And yet, anthropological theorizing on the exemplary in a more general sense has been vast, from Weber’s notion of ideal types and Durkheim’s understanding of totems as exemplary representations of the social (Durkheim 2001), to ideas about myth as a guiding framework towards particular visions of the good life (Burridge 1969), to theories of heroes and heroic individuals (Sahlins 1985: 35–41; Clarke 2012), to studies of iconic representations and works of art as concentrated representations of their creators’ agency (Pinney 2004; Gell 1998), and to ethnographies of charismatic religious leaders (Gilsenan 1973; Werbner 1995, 2003; Hoesterey 2012, 2016; Copeman and Ikegame 2012, 2014). This list is by no means exhaustive, but it gives us an idea of the bewilderingly diverse set of phenomena that we might wish to gather together under the single category of ‘exemplars’. Some of these exemplars are humans – charismatic prophets or inspiring political leaders – while others are narratives, stories, mythic figures, or even material objects of contemplative beauty. What links them together is that they all serve – to borrow a phrase from Clifford Geertz – as both models of and models for human life. Geertz developed this memorable turn of phrase to refer to religion as a symbolic system. For Geertz, religion is a model of insofar as it enables people to make sense of a confusing and arbitrary world, and a model for insofar as it provides a template for an ‘attitude toward life, a recurring mood, and a persisting set of motivations’ that might guide people as they navigate that world (1973: 124). But for Geertz, religion was also a system of symbols, existing almost independently of a form of life (as is generally the case with Boasian notions of culture) (Asad 1993: 53). The exemplars that I will discuss in this chapter are not abstract

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systems in this way, and they certainly cannot be separated from their social worlds. Instead, they seem to occupy a place between the symbolic and the real; between fact and value. They are objects of imitation and desire, but they are such only because they point towards realms of experience and meaning beyond themselves. This chapter begins by considering why exemplars have been of concern to both philosophers and social scientists. The answer that I give to this question is that exemplars have been valued for their ‘articulatory power’, by which I mean their ability to join seemingly incommensurable fields of existence. In this sense, exemplars have captured the imagination of academics because of their function: because they are seen to enable a linkage between the world of things and the world of ideas; between what is and what ought to be; between individual freedom and determining social structure. Beyond this rather functionalist observation, however, anthropologists have largely avoided formulating general theories of exemplarity. This is partly because who or what counts as an exemplar is highly variable. Exemplars may be things that represent an established social order, or they may be people who are capable of resisting it in a creative fashion. They may be hailed for the universality of their moral example, or for representing something local and particular. In many strands of thought it is the physically and intellectually supreme who are thought of as exemplars, but this is not always the case. Patrick McKearney, for example, has shown how the carers of people with profound cognitive disabilities in the United Kingdom often recognize in those individuals an exemplarity that far exceeds what is possible for the cognitively able (McKearney 2018: 55). In other words, exemplars can be either central to social structure or marginal and excluded from it. In some cases, the influence of exemplars may even stem from the fact that they occupy an ambiguous position between these two poles, a fact most clearly discerned in anthropological discussions of asceticism in Indian religious traditions (Dumont 1970; Parry 1994; Laidlaw 1995, 2000). James Faubion has taken this idea beyond Indian religions to describe exemplary mystics as ‘systematic irritants’ and ‘subjects who are not one’ (Faubion 2013: 304). Given the wide variety of structural positions that exemplars can occupy, we might thus confidently say that there is no such thing as a universally recognized exemplar. And the reason for this fact is, of course, contained within the statement itself. There is no such thing as a universally recognized exemplar because exemplarity exists only in its recognition. This point – first made by Weber in a discussion of a particular kind of exemplar (the charismatic leader) – might strike readers as blindingly obvious, but it has been mostly overlooked in discussions of exemplarity in which the focus has been on what exemplars do (Weber 1978: 241–5). In the second part of this chapter I thus turn to the question of recognition in order to reverse the normal line of questioning (what is the social role of exemplars?) and instead ask: what social forms make the

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recognition of particular kinds of exemplarity possible? Indeed, a quick glance at the literature shows that the recognition of exemplars is often anything but easy, and it can take huge amounts of work for exemplars – in particular, living exemplars – to be stabilized as such. Furthermore, the difficulty of stabilizing exemplars within the world lies behind another feature of exemplarity that has rarely been acknowledged by anthropological analysis, namely that people are often as sceptical about exemplars as they are reverent. Popular exemplary figures are almost always the objects of discussion, debate, critique, and active disbelief. In the final section of this chapter I take up the question of suspicion in order to ask whether contemporary Western society is currently suffering from a ‘crisis of exemplarity’ in which the existence of generally accepted exemplars is no longer possible. My argument is that this is not so, but that our scepticism towards heroic exemplars has led us to emphasize some of the contradictory meanings in our own English-language term ‘exemplar’ as we instead embrace the models offered up by a multitude of ‘everyday exemplars’.

A Point of Articulation The idea that exemplars function as points of articulation between disparate spheres of experience has been widely explored in both anthropology and philosophy. At a basic level, exemplars have been taken as paradigmatic points of mediation between the general and the particular (Højer and Bandak 2015). More specifically, exemplars have been described as the nodal points, where the abstract can be translated into the concrete, where the individual can become a representation of the social, and where the mundane might be transmogrified into the sacred. Perhaps the most eloquent statement of such a position in philosophy is Alessandro Ferrara’s The Force of Example, in which the author explicitly traces his own thinking about exemplars back to Kant’s Critique of Judgement via the work of Hannah Arendt (Ferrara 2008). The core of Ferrara’s argument is that exemplarity is a much forgotten third ‘force’ within the world that bridges the supposedly irreconcilable gap between the is and the ought. The idea that our human understanding of what ought to be is fundamentally different in kind to our descriptions of the world as it is has been a sticking point for many analytical philosophers. It was first articulated by David Hume, and found fuller expression in G. E. Moore’s naturalistic fallacy, a term which Moore coined to describe theories that made just this mistake of collapsing normative statements into positive ones. Ferrara reshapes the is–ought distinction slightly so as to argue that the world of our experience is shaped by two opposing forces. The first is the force of what exists, otherwise known as the force of things, which refers to all aspects of our social world such as custom, culture,

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and convention. We encounter this force most obviously in ‘the resistance met by our efforts to change the world’ (Ferrara 2008: 2). A second force, the force of what ought to be the case is encountered through ideas, principles, moral commands, our conscience, and our sense of justice. The problem, as highlighted by Hume and Moore, is that these realms of experience appear unbridgeable, and that is where a third force, the force of example (or, the force of what is as it should be), comes into play. This force, sometimes known as authenticity, beauty, charisma, or even perfection, is a point of congruence between the world as it is and the world as it could be (Ferrara 2008: 3). For Ferrara, there is a philosophical urgency to his quest to understand this third force, for he argues that in the wake of the linguistic turn, we are currently caught between irreconcilable theories of pluralism (of which anthropology is a prime example) and theories which aspire to universal coherence (cognitive science, academic Marxism, game theory, etc.) (Ferrara 2008: 18). Exemplarity – the force of example – is what offers us a chance of reconciling these domains of thinking. The exemplar, in other words, can function as a point of articulation between what is and what ought to be. In the social sciences, by contrast, the exemplar has been celebrated less for its ability to connect the normative (the ought) with the positive (the is) as for its capacity to overcome another problematic theoretical divide: the gap between the individual and society. This is the question of how free, agentive, and psychologically complex individuals end up reproducing and changing already existing social and cultural forms. This tussle between agency and structure has long been an important question for our discipline, and it lies at the heart of the emergent anthropology of ethics. Indeed, one way of accounting for the widespread turn to discussions of ethics within anthropology is that it offers a way beyond previous and unsatisfactory attempts to understand the links between individual agency and social structure. Thus, anthropologists of ethics have been instrumental in arguing against the shallowness of the Durkheimian understanding of society as a system of rules and against the determinism that remains within Bourdieu’s theory of practice (as most clearly articulated in Laidlaw 2002, 2014). In place of these theories, anthropologists of ethics have proposed both a renewed analytical focus upon the reflective cultivation of ethical character (Pandian 2009, 2010; Laidlaw 2014) and an explicit engagement with the deliberative aspects of moral life (Lambek 2000, 2010; Zigon 2007, 2008). There is also a third – albeit less developed – way in which anthropologists interested in ethics have attempted to avoid positing an opposition between individual agency and social structure, and that is through the notion of the exemplar. Just as philosophers have reached for the exemplar as the connecting node between incompatible realms of experience, anthropologists have proposed that exemplarity might be understood as a point of articulation between seemingly incommensurable dimensions of social reality.

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Perhaps the most influential attempt to do this has been Caroline Humphrey’s now classic essay ‘Exemplars and Rules in Mongolia’ (Humphrey 1997), which has been widely cited by anthropologists writing within the broad church of the ‘anthropology of ethics’ (e.g. Zigon 2008; Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2014), as well as inspiring a number of ethnographic accounts (e.g. Coleman 2015). The starting point of Humphrey’s argument in this paper is an observation that, although Mongols recognize the demands of several different kinds of rule within their lives, they do not really consider these rules to exist within the sphere of morality (1997: 28). Indeed, rules in Mongolia are largely understood as being matters of power and control, and even in the domain of Mongolian religion, taboos and prescriptions appear to have more to do with the avoidance of danger than they do with any concern about what is right or wrong in a more abstract sense. Perhaps most importantly, however, Humphrey tells us that her Mongol interlocutors do not consider the following of rules to be a truly moral activity because it does not open up space for deliberative moral judgement: instead, the person who simply follows rules is, Mongols mockingly note, like a dog that follows a bone (1997: 29–32). It is worth noting that in their insistence that morality is about more than rules, Humphrey’s interlocutors thus anticipate some of the major criticisms of Durkheimian social theory made by anthropologists of ethics (e.g. Laidlaw 2002). Rather than slavishly follow rules, Mongols thus prefer an ethics of selfcultivation in which virtue is developed through a cultivated relationship towards exemplary figures, who serve as points of ethical reflection and inspirations for moral action. These exemplary figures are considered to be neither universal nor permanent, but are instead chosen according to circumstance, and as a result, a major pedagogical goal of Mongol morality is developing the personality of children such that they become the kind of individuals who are capable of choosing appropriate moral exemplars as objects of reflection (1997: 35–6). Mongol morality is therefore relational and individualistic, and highly creative. It would be easy to assume that the moral system described by Humphrey is an outlier. The historical influence of deontological thought on contemporary morality in Western societies is so profound that most of us most of the time unthinkingly talk about morality as if it were little more than a set of rules (and public debates about morality tend to be couched in terms of what we should do, not in terms of what we might become). This is of course a reflection of our own short-sightedness with regard to the limited role of rules in our lives. Humphrey’s article can, however, help us to understand how abstract codes become objects of ethical reflection and deliberation, even in societies such as our own where talk of ‘rules’ abounds. The reason for this is that Humphrey’s discussion points us towards a basic fact about moral life, which is that in almost all settings, the question of what moral rules a person must follow is almost always

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bound up in the question of what kind of character they think they should be, and in this regard, ethical exemplars – as concrete realizations of abstract virtue – are invariable objects of contemplation (cf. Foucault 1992, 1990). This is a fact that is recognized in many moral traditions in which role models are seen as necessary for the effective pedagogical transmission of rules (for an example from China, see G. G. Reed 1995). Indeed, we might expand this observation even further to say that even the most ‘ruly’ of cultural forms could not be transmitted and reproduced without the presence of exemplars which articulate the gap between abstract morality and individual ethical life. To paraphrase Joel Robbins’s comments on Humphrey’s original article, a focus on exemplarity can provide us with an account of ethical life that traverses the gap between psychologically realistic explanation and sociological rigour (Robbins 2018). A particularly compelling example of why Humphrey’s work on exemplars might be important can be found by looking at a tradition that is often stereotyped as being the complete antithesis of the Mongol morality that she describes: Islam. As Morgan Clarke notes in this volume (Chapter 20), rule use within Islam is complex and far more reflective than many stereotypes acknowledge, but Islam has nonetheless historically been a ‘ruly’ tradition in which legalistic thinking ‘is of great importance to many (if not all) Muslims as a means to living righteously’ (Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume; see also Clarke 2014). Given the ‘ruliness’ of Islamic jurisprudence, what role can we thus expect exemplars to play? One argument, articulated very forcefully by Saba Mahmood, is that our failure to appreciate the role of the exemplar in Islam lies behind the popular assumption that certain kinds of Islam are simply incommensurable with secular rationality (Mahmood 2013). The starting point of Mahmood’s discussion is the Danish cartoon controversy of the mid2000s, during which cartoons of Muhammad were published in several Danish newspapers. An immediate result of this publication was widespread protest in many Muslim countries, which led to large numbers of deaths. In response, many Europeans ‘resorted to blatant acts of racism and Islamophobia’ while insisting upon the primacy of free speech (2013: 61). Both sides, however, seemed to agree that what was at stake was a ‘moral impasse between what the Muslim minority community considers an act of blasphemy and the non-Muslim majority regard as an exercise of freedom of expression’ (2013: 60). Indeed, even those Europeans who were highly critical of the Islamophobia of their peers remained troubled by the religious dimensions of the Muslim protests. Try as they might, they struggled to conceptualize the moral injury with which so many Muslims claimed to have been afflicted. For these Europeans, religion was understood primarily as a matter of choice; ‘a set of propositions to which one lends one’s assent’ (2013: 67). Fundamentally, they could not get over the suspicion that the protesting

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Muslims were incapable of engaging in a rational discourse in which they separated out the subject of their veneration (Muhammad as Prophet) from the object of their protests (the cartoons of Muhammad) (2013: 67). The Muslims were seen to have misunderstood the fundamentally arbitrary manner in which signs stand in for abstract belief (Mahmood is here inspired by Keane 2007). In order to account for this sense of moral injury, Mahmood turned to consider the Prophet Muhammad ‘as an exemplar whose words and deeds are understood not so much as commandments but as ways of inhabiting the world, bodily and ethically’ (Mahmood 2013: 69). To follow and to love the Prophet is to attempt an emulation of his very being, as if one were trying to introduce him into the self. The relationship that Muslims have to the Prophet is thus assimilative, and he cannot be reduced to a ‘referential sign that stands apart from an essence that it denotes’ (2013: 70). The moral injury that many Muslims will feel when the Prophet is insulted is thus quite different from the kind of injury normally encoded by the English term ‘blasphemy’, and this difference lies at the heart of the impasse which both Muslims and secularists found themselves in at the time of the cartoon controversy. Fundamentally, a Muslim who is devoted to the Prophet as an ethical exemplar will be vulnerable to a moral injury in which they feel that their own being has been shaken. Mahmood argues that their protest was thus not against the breaking of some abstract prohibition, but against a wounding of the structure of their ethical selfhoods. This type of moral injury remained unintelligible during the cartoon crisis precisely because it could not find expression in the language of blasphemy and free speech that dominated discussion. There are problems with Mahmood’s thesis. It arguably overstates the differences between secular and Islamic ethics, and it makes sweeping generalizations about both. Among Muslims, there is no single agreedupon way to properly to relate to the Prophet, and discussions about how to do so are a frequent topic of sectarian disputation between Muslim groups (Evans 2020: 100). That said, Mahmood’s argument is astute in how it draws our attention to the fact that even the most ‘ruly’ of moral traditions can be understood only through the set of relationships that people cultivate to an exemplary figure. To ignore these cultivated relationships would be to render the Islamic tradition illegible. And this is an observation which we might extend far beyond Islam: a similar point is made by James Laidlaw regarding the often self-denying and even selfdestructive rules of Jain asceticism: ‘nothing in the content of the rules would make sense without understanding the ethical project from which they derive’ (Laidlaw 2002: 326). What Mahmood’s article therefore demonstrates is the paucity of any conception of religion in which that religion is conceived of as no more than a shared set of abstract propositions or concepts to which people lend their assent. Similar critiques have more generally been levelled at

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anthropological conceptions of ‘culture’, in which a person’s culture is seen as no more than an abstract set of rules, prohibitions, and taboos. It is thus of little surprise that another major anthropological attempt to think about exemplarity is explicitly framed as an attempt to understand the origin of shared values in light of the anthropological demise of ‘culture’ as an explanatory paradigm. This is the work of Joel Robbins, who has written about exemplars in the form of both people and rituals (Robbins 2015, 2018). Robbins notes that for much of the twentieth century, anthropologists relied upon a notion of culture to explain how people impose value on an otherwise meaningless world, and to explain why groups of people share a consensus over what those values should be (2018: 177). In recent decades, however, the idea of culture has fallen by the wayside, partly because of its failure to allow for individual agency within the social world. While Robbins does not quite lament the death of the culture concept, he does argue that its demise has left a lacuna in anthropological theory. The problem is that together with our model of culture, we have lost a way of understanding how values emerge within and order social life, and in order to fill this gap Robbins turns towards a consideration of exemplars. For Robbins, exemplars are ‘people or institutionalized cultural forms that realize specific values to the fullest extent possible in a given cultural setting’ (Robbins 2018: 175). Robbins thus proposes that exemplars might provide an answer to a deeper philosophical question about values: namely, where in the world are they? Indeed, Robbins’s work is inspired by Ferrara’s theory of values with which I began this section, for his central point is that exemplars enable people to move between a consideration of the world of matter (the world as it is) and a shared arena of values such as truth, beauty, and the good (the world as it should be) (2018: 176–8). Robbins begins with the observation that most human action is motivated by something which the actors define as valuable. In spite of this, however, most human action fails to ‘realize’ people’s most important values, or at least it does so only in a way that is limited and partial. Nonetheless, ‘there are some actions (or products of action) that realize important values in their fullest forms, or at least come close to this’ (Robbins 2018: 179), and it is this realization of values that makes such actions exemplary. Consequently, Robbins argues that both people and institutionalized cultural forms can emerge as exemplars because of their ability to ‘realize specific values to the fullest extent possible in a given cultural setting’ (Robbins 2018: 175). Robbins is vague about precisely what is meant here by ‘realization’, but it is presumably a matter of social recognition: a major point of his argument is that people come to know values because they see them being realized in others. Robbins’s argument takes form through a consideration of his fieldwork among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. It is important to note that the Urapmin are a society of only a few hundred individuals in which everybody is known to everybody else, and in which specific individuals can thus

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emerge as the singular representatives and paragons of the Urapmin’s three most important values: lawfulness, wilfulness, and relationalism. Those Urapmin who realize the first two of these three values play an extremely important social role: they enable others to understand what those values look like in concrete form. They are also often well-liked individuals, and yet they are rarely taken as objects of imitation, for their obsessive realization of a single value – either lawfulness or wilfulness – means that they are ultimately either excessively passive (and thus incapable of making new social relations) or excessively brusque (and thus incapable of effectively maintaining the social relations they already have). It is instead those who realize the final (and ‘paramount’) value of relationalism who serve as objects worthy of emulation for the Urapmin. These individuals are almost always the ‘big men’ of Urapmin society – proto-politicians who are widely imitated and admired for their ability both to create new bonds between people and to maintain those that already exist. These men hold no official office, but they do not need to do so to be recognized as the undisputed leaders of their communities. In considering these big men, Robbins develops an explicitly functionalist framework: the Urapmin ‘need’ these big men, he tells us, in order to understand ‘the inter-human strings by which they can pull themselves up through their own social lives’ (Robbins 2018: 188). For Robbins, exemplars connect the symbolic realm of values to the actions and imaginations of humans. They are key to understanding social reproduction and, more profoundly, the relationship between individual and collective life. As anthropologists increasingly turn to virtue ethics-inspired frameworks to explore ethical life as something more than just moral obligation, it is likely that exemplars will play an increasingly important role in our theorizing. Inspired by Aristotle’s thought, together with Foucault’s ideas about selfcultivation (see Cook, Chapter 16 of this volume), anthropologists have increasingly begun to ask: ‘what kinds of person do my interlocutors aspire to be?’, alongside more traditional questions such as: ‘what rules do they observe, and whose interests or agenda do these rules advance?’. Our focus, in other words, has increasingly turned to questions of character and the virtues that people seek to cultivate and nurture (see Reed and Bialecki 2018). In this sense, as both Humphrey and Robbins show, exemplarity can be a crucial feature of ethical systems in which people seek to understand what virtues might look like when concretely embedded within character rather than when part of an abstract system.

Recognizing Exemplars In the preceding section I sought to show that academics have often been inspired by the ability of the exemplar to mediate between what is and what ought to be, and thus to enable individuals to engage with otherwise

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abstract registers of value, law, morality, and cosmology. As we saw in the example from Robbins, exemplars might further act as mediators between conflicting values and incommensurable goods. Such figures were, of course, of particular interest to anthropologists of both functionalist and structuralist persuasions (and it is thus perhaps no surprise that Robbins is influenced by both). For Le´vi-Strauss, for example, the idea that certain figures could mediate between structural oppositions helped to explain the recurrent emergence of these figures within human myths. A good example of this was the figure of the North American trickster, which Le´viStrauss argued was often considered a problematic figure by previous anthropologists for its ambiguous qualities and the fact that it was almost always assigned the role of a coyote or raven (Le´vi-Strauss 1963: 224). Le´viStrauss himself argued that to take the trickster’s qualities at face value was to misunderstand its actual significance, which is its place within a mythical system of thought that is constantly moving from an awareness of opposition to the resolution of that opposition. The coyote or raven, as carrion-eating animals, stand at the centre of the cardinal opposition that organizes all North American myth: the opposition between life and death. The trickster must thus be understood as a mediator that stands between two polar terms, and consequently retains ‘something of that duality – namely an ambiguous and equivocal character’ (Le´vi-Strauss 1963: 226). In a sense, the trickster of Le´vi-Strauss’s structural anthropology is thus very much like the big man that we encountered in Joel Robbins’s work: it is an axial figure that holds the attention of others precisely for its ability to balance opposing spheres of value and to overcome contradiction within a system. And yet for all this similarity, there is no suggestion that the people telling stories about the various tricksters of North American mythology necessarily considered those tricksters to be exemplars. The question we therefore have to ask is: why not? The answer is simple; the trickster is an intellectual harmonization of tension, but it does not, by itself, provide a model for how a person is supposed to overcome that tension. The trickster’s moral ambiguity might have been a cause of delight for those telling and listening to myths, but it would rarely have been taken as an object of ethical reflection. Indeed, it is not even clear from Le´vi-Strauss’s account that overcoming tension in the manner of the trickster is the kind of thing to which a person would ever think that they should aspire. For Le´vi-Strauss, it is the purpose of myth itself ‘to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’ (Le´vi-Strauss 1963: 229), but the myth is not a basis for how individuals might begin to understand their own cultivation as virtuous characters. The exemplar, in other words, cannot be understood solely as a point of articulation capable of mediating incommensurability: something more is required. That something, I want to argue, is the recognition by others that the exemplar provides a model worthy of ethical reflection. Just as Weber argued that prophets are charismatic only insofar as their followers recognize

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them as such, so too is the exemplar exemplary only because somebody takes it as an object of ethical reflection. This is a simple point, but it can help us to understand a puzzling feature of the anthropological literature on exemplarity, namely the fact that formal theoretical accounts of exemplarity have been largely confined to observations about articulation, whereas substantive ethnographic descriptions of what exemplars mean to people in various moral traditions have been extraordinarily rich (examples of richly detailed ethnographies of exemplary persons include Eickelman 1985; Mittermaier 2015; Naumescu 2016; Segal 2015). Indeed, we might go even further to argue that a certain ‘thinness’ has characterized some attempts to offer up a social theory of exemplarity, the most obvious example being Rodney Needham’s book Exemplars, which, while being a charming read, offers up little in the way of an integrated thesis, and at times veers towards the self-indulgent (Needham 1985). In this regard, the quest for a theory of exemplarity might thus be said to echo a common characteristic of exemplars themselves, namely that ‘they always face the danger of becoming too little – that is, being reduced to “mere examples” (or simply bad examples that are unable to draw in other material) – or of becoming too much – that is, “excessive exemplars” that allow for the digestion of all other material and, in effect, turn vacuous’ (see Højer and Bandak 2015: 7–8, who are themselves drawing on Geertz 1993: 3–4). Our analytical attention should therefore be on the act of recognition and all of the complexity that it might carry, and this means moving beyond questions such as: who is held up as an exemplar and for what purported virtue? Instead, we have to begin to ask what people understand ethical reflection to entail, and what they consider an ethical model to consist of. In short, we have to begin to ask what kind of relationship people desire with that which they see as exemplary. Are exemplars seen as models for what to do, or models for what to be (and is this even a distinction that makes sense in all moral systems)? Are exemplars understood as specific to the recognizers’ own social role and position, or are they understood as somehow universally worthy of reflection? If one’s relationship to an exemplar should be one of imitation, then how totalizing should that imitation be?1 What should be included and what left out when one comes to base one’s own actions or thoughts on those of an exemplar? These questions are, of course, nascent in the work of anthropologists such as Joel Robbins, but, I would argue, they should be brought even further to the fore in anthropological writing. In other words, the question of the kind of relationship that people seek to cultivate with exemplary models can be extremely complex. Take, for example, Jacob Copeman’s work on blood portraits of independence martyrs in India (Copeman 2013). These portraits, part of an exhibition put on 1

These questions parallel what Foucault meant by the mode d’assujettissement; that is, ‘the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice’ (Foucault 1992: 27).

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in Delhi, were originally produced by using the blood of the exhibition organizer himself. When the original drawings began to fade, however, the paintings were retouched with the mixed blood of many hundreds of donors. The pictures were mostly of young and partly forgotten freedom fighters, who had themselves given their blood for Indian independence, and who were explicitly held up as models of virtuous action for contemporary citizens. As Copeman argues, part of the significance of painting in blood was thus that the paintings could become the emulation which they called for (2013: 159). These pictures were, he tells us, ‘a form of enactive remembering – depictions of blood sacrifice that perform the bleeding they represent and seek to inspire’ (2013: 160). The paintings thus functioned as ‘models of and models for sacrificial bleeding’ (2013: 160): the hope that attached to them was that they could incite an imitative willingness to bleed in the people who contemplated them. Part of what distinguishes the pictures described by Copeman is that the individuals they represented (national martyrs) were seen by the exhibition organizers as self-evident models of virtue. This idea – that exemplars should be easy to discern – is a common one. Many Christian missionaries, for example, have long considered the Jesus of the gospels to be an exemplary figure who can be easily discerned and understood by anybody willing to pay attention, thus granting the Bible a ‘force unto itself’ and an ability to transform society with ease (Engelke 2007: 77). Other ethical traditions, however, have treated their exemplars as more esoteric figures that can become objects of reflection only for those who have already cultivated themselves in some manner, much as Aristotle argued that virtue is something that the non-virtuous simply cannot yet appreciate (and how, therefore, could they recognize it in an exemplar?) (Lear 1988: 158). This distinction brings us to a closely related question, namely of whether exemplars are understood as things that we must seek out, or whether they are understood to impress themselves upon us, perhaps in unexpected ways (Mittermaier 2012; Evans 2016; Taneja 2017; Evans 2020). What I hope to have demonstrated in this section is that if we focus our analysis upon the act of recognition (and the relationship that it implies), then exemplars can become the objects of serious comparative study in a way that is not possible if we focus only upon the exemplary figures themselves or on relations between them. In other words, we have to start thinking about exemplarity as a form of relationship instead of an attribute of persons, things, or rituals.

Heroic Polities The first thing to note when we turn our attention to practices of recognition is that exemplarity (as a social relationship) can have profound effects on entire social orders. At the extreme end of the spectrum are

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what we might call heroic societies: societies in which order, value, and dynamism are seen to stem from the models provided by certain exemplary figures. In such situations, the exemplar can become an axial figure around which all social life might be organized. Take, for example, Marshall Sahlins’s reflections on divine kingship and what he calls the practice of heroic history (Sahlins 1985). For Sahlins, divine kingship produces a way of acting historically that is very unlike that which emerges from the bourgeois cultural orders in which many of us now live. At the heart of heroic polities is the figure of the sacred king/magical chief, who stands as an exemplar before all around him. Reflecting on Maori and Fijian chieftainship, Sahlins argues that in these structures, ‘history is anthropomorphic in principle’ and ‘the king is the condition of the possibility of community’ (1985: 35–6). Such heroic polities produce a form of history, which, Sahlins argued, could not easily be understood through the methods of social history as it was practised at the time of his writing in the 1980s. For many (especially Marxist) historians, it had become a taken-for-granted fact that a history written only about kings and battles was an incomplete and unsatisfactory history, because it ignored the ‘real’ social ontology of class, class conflict, and so on. Surveying Fijian chieftainships, however, Sahlins argues that their history ‘really is a history of kings and battles, but only because it is a cultural order that, multiplying the action of the king by the system of society, gives him a disproportionate historical effect’ (1985: 41). Furthermore, this heroic history has certain structural propensities, among them its ability to produce new exemplars ‘by transforming the intelligent acts of individuals into fateful outcomes for the society’ (1985: 41). These are societies in which some exemplary figures simply count for more than other people, in ways that end up reordering modes of action and even the means that people have to measure time, calculated as it is ‘in dynastic genealogies, as collective history resides in royal traditions’ (1985: 49). For Sahlins, societies in which we find heroic history are those in which mythical relations are continually projected through the practice of historical action. There is a similarity in Sahlins’s account to other formulations of ‘heroic society’, most notably Alasdair MacIntyre’s understanding of the Homeric world, a social order which he argued provided the exemplary stories which were to form the basis of moral education in the classical world. For MacIntyre, this heroic society was one in which a person was identified with their action, and in which virtue and social structure were inseparable (MacIntyre 1984). What distinguishes Sahlins’s account from that of MacIntyre, however, is the former’s focus on practice as remaking the mythic order. Sahlins’s account serves to remind us that exemplars do not exist prior to and thus generate social order. Rather, all exemplars are themselves created even as they provide models for action: they have no existence independent of the practices of emulation that surround them.

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It is worth examining this last idea further with an example from my own fieldwork with a group of Muslims who aspire, much like the Fijians described by Sahlins, to live in a heroic society. My interlocutors are members of a globally dispersed religious organization, known as the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community (Evans 2017, 2020). They are believers in a nineteenth-century Prophet and Messiah, a fact that has led to their ostracism in large parts of the Muslim world on theological grounds. What concerns me here, however, is their social organization: a vast administrative system which encompasses the lives of its members and is organized around a single living exemplar: the caliph (or successor) of the Promised Messiah. Just as Sahlins noted that only a particular social organization could give rise to heroic chiefs, so too can only a very particular kind of society give rise to and sustain the caliph as an axial figure. My Ahmadi interlocutors live within the modern democratic states of India and the UK, and they take loyalty to the laws of their country to be a requirement of Islamic morality. They nonetheless see the caliph as a benevolent source of sovereign power within their lives. In the Indian town of Qadian (which is the place in which the organization was founded and also the location of my most extensive fieldwork), Ahmadis credit the caliph with being the generative force behind almost all decisions of consequence and all positive social changes, despite the fact that he lives many thousands of miles from them in London. Perhaps most importantly, however, the caliph is seen as an ideal man; an exemplar of the very highest order who presents his global following with a living image of virtuous life which itself serves to generate the social possibility of their community. Key to his exemplarity is the fact that he represents an unbroken connection back to the Ahmadis’ Promised Messiah, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who himself is thought to have gained prophetic status by being the person most capable of loving emulation of the Prophet Muhammad.2 Pretty much wherever Ahmadis go in the Muslim world, they find themselves subject to accusations that they are not Muslim, or that they are merely posing as Muslims so as to deceive unsuspecting innocents. For my interlocutors (who find such accusations intolerable), the key to responding to these attacks is imitation of their exemplary caliph. It is the caliph who most resembles the Promised Messiah, and it is the Promised Messiah who most resembles the Prophet Muhammad. To emulate the caliph, they therefore argue, is to cultivate a truly Muslim selfhood. What this quick sketch misses, however, is the sheer amount of work that it takes my interlocutors to maintain the exemplary status of the caliph even as they seek to cultivate his likeness. In a way, the caliph as exemplar cannot exist except through his recognition by his global 2

I have described the complex theology behind these claims in more detail elsewhere (Evans 2020; see also Khan 2015).

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following, which includes a complex mixture of imitation and deference. There is work required to transform the caliph into a generative agent who is responsible for the smooth running of everyday life in Qadian. As I have described in detail elsewhere, my interlocutors employ a large number of discursive and bureaucratic practices to erase traces of their own agency from decision-making in Qadian and emplace the caliph as a responsible figure within local life (Evans forthcoming; 2020: 73–81). Such practices range from making statements about the agency of the caliph to complex processes of paper mediation in which the caliph’s agency is physically distributed through the offices of the town in the form of signed faxes. Despite their differences, however, these practices all share a single goal: to create a utopian society in which the caliph’s will enchants the everyday, and in which individuals might share with him an intimate and direct relationship (Evans 2020: 63–5). That this utopia is considered possible in Qadian is due to the fact that the caliph is understood to be superhuman in his endurance, his wisdom, and his capacity for work. Indeed, if we accept at face value the sheer quantity of things that he is held to be directly responsible for, then we would have to admit that he is superhuman. This ideal image is, however, produced out of the deeds of his followers around the world, who efface their own responsibility for actions (and thus grant responsibility to their caliph) as an act of emulating the model of discipline and obedience before God that the caliph presents to them. In other words, the exemplarity of the caliph emerges precisely in the labour undertaken by his followers as they recognize his superlative qualities and cultivate themselves in his image. Even as his followers take him as their ideal model of good action, his numinous excellence is being continuously inscribed in the world through their actions. As a result, the caliph’s exemplarity is entirely dependent upon the actions of his followers: his power is also his vulnerability (Evans 2020: 85–7). In many cases, the exemplarity of sovereign leaders, chiefs, and kings is maintained only by what Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber describe as the sacralisation of kingship (Sahlins and Graeber 2017: 7–8). This is a specific kind of action undertaken by a sovereign’s people to maintain the sovereign’s meta-human status while curbing his or her power. It involves secluding the sovereign through taboo and custom, perhaps even sealing her off so that her power might be recognized in her separation even as her exercise of it is reduced (2017: 8). It allows the mortal sovereign to retain the image of divine exemplarity precisely through her separation from the people she rules. In such a situation, the personal virtue and character of the sovereign matters not at all. Indeed, she may very well become invisible; no more than a shadow figure of ultimate excellence. This is another example in which the worth of the exemplar is a product of the labour of those who recognize his or her exemplarity. Such exemplars, however, raise a serious challenge for the ‘articulation’ thesis proposed by scholars such as Ferrara. After all, once they are

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sequestered in this way, it is hard to see how they are supposed to provide a link between what is and what ought to be; for their subjects they become purely mythical figures: embodiments of the ought and absent from within the is.3 There is thus something paradoxical about many heroic exemplary figures, insofar as their virtue is constructed by precisely those people for whom it must serve as a model. Indeed, this paradoxical quality is perhaps a feature of exemplarity everywhere, and may be key to understanding the idea that I explore in the next section: the fact that in many places, exemplars can arouse suspicion just as easily as they can invite imitation.

Exemplars as Objects of Suspicion There was a point in the nineteenth century when the ‘great man’4 theory of history reigned supreme, with particular exemplary figures held up as the agents who moved history forwards. The most obvious example of this type of thinking was Thomas Carlyle’s hugely influential 1841 study On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, which argued that society should effectively be understood as a heroarchy, structured around a worship of great men (the true movers of civilization) who appear in the form of gods, prophets, kings, and so on (Carlyle 1901; Frisk 2019: 90). Other Victorian writers were less inclined to stress the agentive role of the great man himself, instead focussing more on what I have here called recognition. Charles Cooley, for example, argued in 1902 that the important fact about heroes is not who they are but rather what they make other people feel, and that it is through the collective aspect of hero-worship that the social solidarity of groups and communities is produced (Cooley 1902; Frisk 2019: 91). It goes almost without saying that the great man theory of history is nowadays mostly dismissed as archaic and inaccurate. But we might extend this observation even further. Many of us currently live in societies in which the impossibility of heroic exemplarity appears to be an accepted fact of life. We have mostly accepted that kings, heroes, and leaders are not adequate exemplars. We rather treat them as objects of suspicion whose exemplarity will necessarily be revealed as illusory given sufficient time and information. As a result, great figures are far more likely to become objects of suspicion than they are objects of veneration. The idea that we should never meet our heroes is axiomatic for most of us in a way that it is not for, say, my Ahmadi interlocutors, for whom meetings with the caliph are never moments of unmasking but rather opportunities for confirming 3

I thank one of the anonymous reviews of this chapter for drawing my attention to this point.

4

And they were, of course, usually men.

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the supremacy of their leader through witnessing. Nonetheless, even for these believers, suspicion is the routine means of approaching any exemplary figure who is not their caliph (for an example, see Evans 2017: 496). That does not, however, mean that the rest of us no longer have heroes who are ‘beyond suspicion’. As the historian Barry Schwartz has argued, we may well live in a post-heroic era, ‘in which great men and women and their achievements count for less’, but ‘the victimized, wounded, handicapped and oppressed count for more than ever before’ (Schwartz 2008: 8; see also Frisk 2019: 98). The irreproachable exemplar par excellence is now the ordinary (and perhaps even slightly downtrodden) individual, who is understood to offer an achievable model of excellence, and perhaps more importantly to be real in a way that the heroic exemplar never was. How can we account for this shift from the epic to the everyday? A straightforward way of reading this societal change would be to argue that we are simply more sceptical of power than our Victorian forebears, and thus more likely to question the existence of exemplary mortals (for the classic anthropological argument that links modernity to scepticism, see Goody 1977). Such an argument does, however, somewhat miss the point that in the last century our conceptual reorganization over who might be considered an exemplar has itself been premised upon a tension internal to the term ‘exemplar’ in modern English. As I argued in the introduction, exemplars can serve as models of and as models for, and they are frequently both at the same time. In other words, exemplars can both represent things as they might be, and reflect things as they are. They can be archetypes and standards, and it is with respect to the relative weighting of these aspects of the exemplar that a bifurcation in the English meanings of the term occurs. On the one hand, many exemplars are primarily thought of as archetypes in the sense that they are superlative and unequalled. These are the kinds of exemplars that I have so far dealt with – the Ahmadiyya caliph, the Fijian chief, the Urapmin big man. These kinds of exemplars stand apart from their imperfect copies, quite possibly timeless and abstract. They are considered the best of their kind in a very positive and evaluative sense, and they are therefore worthy of reflection by others. They are generative and powerful. This is the most obvious meaning of the term exemplary in everyday English. On the other hand, there is a secondary meaning to the term ‘exemplar’ which places far more stress on the exemplar’s status as a pattern or standard, and which has attracted significantly less anthropological attention. This is the idea of the exemplar as the most perfect instance of a particular type, category, or class. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, the exemplar can be ‘an embodiment or personification of a quality or type; a person who or thing which is typical or characteristic of a category, class, etc., or is an illustration or specimen of a quality or thing’.5 This is not a new definition of the term: there are examples of the word being used this way going back to 1475. Such 5

OED, third edition.

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an exemplar might not be particularly virtuous or even especially bad, but is instead exemplary because it is a paradigmatic representation of a specific category (Mar 2016: 535). These kinds of exemplars are, in other words, perfectly average or normal. What I want to suggest is that our ‘post-heroic era’ (Schwartz 2008) has not led to a total collapse in the importance of exemplars, but has instead involved increasing recognition being given to exemplary figures who are able to straddle these two definitions. Thus, our contemporary scepticism towards the idea of the great exemplary figure does not mean that we no longer have exemplars. Instead, contemporary society is perhaps more replete with exemplars than ever before, but they are of a quite different kind to their great forebears. Today’s exemplars are everyday heroes; that is, ordinary individuals who are perceived to make their worlds better through an extraordinary ability to go above and beyond (Frisk 2019: 93–4; Oliner 2002). As private individuals, these exemplars cannot (for moral, but also legal and practical reasons) be the object of journalistic and public suspicion. As at least one commentator has noted, the rise of the everyday hero appears to have been a result of the democratization of exemplarity (Frisk 2019: 93), and any attempt to critique the cultural centrality of the everyday hero is thus to antagonize the egalitarian pretensions behind much contemporary social discourse. Examples of such everyday exemplars can be found in accounts of, for example, the ‘heroic deaths’ and ‘superpowers’ of cancer patients (Seale 1995, 2002), or the determined actions of public servants fighting injustice (Rugeley and Wart 2006). As Kristian Frisk has argued, the very idea of the ‘hero’ as an exceptional person has come under attack in recent academic writing, with many psychologists advocating a far more situationalist understanding of exemplary acts of bravery; that is, an understanding which does not place emphasis on the person’s character (Frisk 2019: 93). Indeed, this line of reasoning has led some to talk about the ‘banality’ of heroism (Franco, Blau, and Zimbardo 2011). A fascinating example can be found in the treatment of healthcare workers during the very early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.6 In the UK at least, doctors and nurses were adulated through weekly rounds of applause, the word ‘hero’ was employed in almost every newspaper article detailing their efforts, and videos of weeping NHS workers on social media were arguably the crucial factor in helping the public to understand the seriousness of the public health crisis. It is no coincidence that the government implored people to ‘protect the NHS’ as the primary ethical act through which we might ultimately care for one another. What is interesting, of course, is that frontline doctors and nurses are not the only possible heroes who could have emerged from this pandemic. In a prescient paper from 2016, the anthropologist Christos Lynteris explored popular representations of the 6

This paragraph was written in isolation in April 2020.

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‘coming pandemic’ (we have known for a long time that a zoonotic outbreak such as Covid-19 was inevitable) in order to explore how the figure of the epidemiologist has emerged in the last two decades as a ‘cultural hero’ capable of embodying and restoring a humanity that is ‘at the brink of extinction’ (Lynteris 2016: 37). And yet, when we were in the midst of the predicted pandemic, ‘hero’ epidemiologists were objects of a deep suspicion that emerged from the very top of the US government down to the deepest pits of Facebook. Healthcare workers, on the other hand, remained unimpeachable exemplars: to question them or their motivations was to break a social taboo in the most unforgivable way possible. And what made them so exemplary, of course, was partly the fact that they are just like us: they live on the same roads as us (and hence heard us clapping in the evening), they shop in the same supermarkets as us (and thus suffered shortages of food when we selfishly bought too much), and they face the same fate as us (if denied proper personal protective equipment (PPE)). The NHS worker as hero was, in other words, admired because they articulated the tension between the typical and the extraordinary, a tension which has always been present in the English word ‘exemplary’. That widespread celebration of this everyday heroism ended so quickly without ever being truly extended to other key workers - shelf stackers, delivery drivers, cleaners - reveals something of the difficulty involved in holding this tension together. Perhaps the most striking result of our contemporary turn to ‘everyday exemplars’, however, is the fact that we have tended to assume that our contemporary exemplars are somehow more concrete than the mythic ‘great men’ whom we now regard only with suspicion. Or to put it another way: our scepticism towards larger-than-life exemplars has meant that nowadays many of us think of ourselves as only recognizing forms of exemplarity that are real, possible, and embedded within social life. We like to think that we have demythologized exemplarity. Thus, we like to think that in making everyday heroes rather than ‘great men’ the objects of our moral imitation, we have somehow escaped the falseness that accompanied past recognition of exemplars in order to arrive at ‘real’ exemplars. In this, modern Westerners are not alone. Throughout the twentieth century, socialist governments raised up supposedly ordinary workers as models of emulation, whose moral worth was rooted in their proletarian background. These individuals were of course understood to be ‘real’ heroes in a way that bourgeois heroes (as ideological mystifications) could never be (Sheridan 1968; Bulag 1999; see also Yan, Chapter 34 of this volume). What this focus on reality misses is the fact that the everyday exemplar, just like her heroic forebear, is very much a product of the recognition and labour of those around her. For a start, we might want to begin to think about the idea of the everyday exemplar being somehow absolutely typical, average, or normal. As a number of scholars have observed, the very

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idea of the normal is itself a relatively recent development in human history, which has itself often been deployed so as to fix an understanding of what the deviant or the pathological might be (Canguilhem 1989), or to enable a linking of the individualist with the collectivist (Hacking 1996: 59). The philosopher of science Ian Hacking has argued that (like the exemplars discussed in the first section of this chapter) the normal can be ‘a powerful instrument for saying what ought to be, for such is the magic of “normal” that it spans is/ought’ (Hacking 1996: 71). But it is also the case that our understanding of what is normal and typical is always something that has to be stabilized through discursive practices and statistical instruments (Rose 2016). The idea of the absolutely typical person is itself a powerful modern myth that nonetheless has profound impacts upon our own understanding of our place in the world. An important consequence of this is that the everyday exemplar is just as paradoxical as its heroic counterpart. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, the ‘affirmation of ordinary life’ is central to modern identity, but it is often tempered by an ambivalence or conflict in that we are torn between our valuation of the ordinary and our valuation of the heroic (Taylor 1992: 24). Our image of the everyday exemplar is one that blends the entirely typical with the exceptional. It is neither fully ordinary nor fully extraordinary but instead seeks to compress the typical and the good into a single ought statement about how the world should be. Modernity’s everyday exemplars are, in other words, shifting, chimeric, and ultimately impossible creatures. Everyday exemplars are thus fruitful objects of ethnographic investigation. For a start, those who hold them to be exemplary consider them to be imitable in ways that has simply never been the case for their more heroic counterparts. Take the Ahmadiyya caliph as a point of contrast: for his followers, he is a font of all virtue and a model of what a perfect man should be. His followers are exhorted to emulate his example, but there is never a serious suggestion that they will actually be able to make themselves anything like him. Rather, it is the effort of trying to do so which matters. Everyday exemplars, however, precisely because they are presented as absolutely average even when they are exceptional, are held up as actually achievable states of being. That exemplars are products of external recognition is thus obscured by an insistence that we can all be like them. And this produces real tensions in the projects of the self that these everyday exemplars inspire; tensions that are ripe for anthropological analysis. Take, for example, Cheryl Mattingly’s portrait of Dotty, a Black mother of a severely ill child in Los Angeles (Mattingly 2014). Dotty feels pressure to cultivate herself along the lines of a particular kind of exemplary motherhood which is much valued by African American women, and which Mattingly refers to (following feminist scholarship) as ‘the Superstrong Black Mother’. This exemplary figure is expected to help and care for others while being exceptionally self-reliant, assertive, strong, and persistent (2014: 126). To put this

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in Robbins’s terms, the ‘Superstrong Black Mother’ is expected to realize the paramount values of African American womanhood. Dotty is remarkably successful in cultivating this exemplary form of motherhood, and yet even so, her ultimate ability to realize the values of superstrong motherhood is always partial. This leads to feelings of moral failure, particularly when Dotty finds that her strength in fighting for her child (she describes herself as a ‘Rambo mom’) conflicts with her duty simply to be a mother (2014: 129– 31). Ultimately, the cultivation of this strong and exemplary form of motherhood leads Dotty to a situation in which she is faced by choices between incommensurable goods – a situation that Mattingly likens to a Sophoclean tragedy. How are we to understand Dotty’s moral dilemma? I would argue that one way of doing so is to see it as the inevitable outcome of an attempt to inhabit a subject position that is seen as being simultaneously exceptional and typical, without ever acknowledging the paradox that lies behind this. What Dotty’s predicament thus shows is that the reorganization of exemplarity that has occurred in the liberal West might be understood primarily in terms of a shift in the kinds of relationship that people think they should be having with exemplars. ‘Everyday exemplars’ do not form a stable category, and any attempt to pin them down as such is likely to end in failure. What can be said with certainty, however, is that Dotty lives in a world with a very different set of ethical dangers to those that afflict, for example, my Ahmadi interlocutors in Qadian. Dotty finds that there is an equivalence between herself and her exemplars in a way that could never be the case for an Ahmadi who looks upon their caliph, and knows that even though they should imitate him, they can never be him. Thus, even though Dotty might acknowledge that her exemplary object of emulation (the ‘Superstrong Black Mother’) is a fundamentally mythical being, she is at the same time convinced that this archetype of motherhood is somehow absolutely achievable. Dotty’s relationship to exemplarity is thus not so much one of emulative distance as of constant becoming and unbecoming. What Dotty’s story can tell us, in other words, is that if we want to tell a history of exemplarity in modern-day America, we have to begin by telling the history of a changing set of relationships to the self and to the other, and we have to pay attention to the forms of emulation, imitation, dependency, and even obligation which give form to those relationships.

Conclusion As many anthropologists of ethics have demonstrated over the past two decades, there is more to human morality than rules, prescriptions, and proscriptions. Exemplars appear to be a hugely important aspect of the ethical lives of many people, providing them with concrete models of virtue

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where more formal codifications might fail, and helping to bridge the gap between abstract moral cosmologies and lived ethical action. As the latter half of this chapter has shown, however, the ethical importance of the exemplar only really begins to become apparent when we stop thinking about exemplars as specific things or persons, and instead begin to think about them as the product (and oftentimes desired goal) of relationships, practices, and cultivated attitudes. As I have argued, living exemplars can be incredibly difficult to stabilize, requiring constant work and an active emulation. The same can, however, be said for non-human exemplars, as well as those who were once alive and are now dead. As much anthropological work on hagiography has shown, establishing the exemplarity of the dead is by no means a straightforward process (Tambiah 1984; Cook 2009; Werbner 2016). More fundamentally, however, I have argued that exemplars rarely exist outside of their own recognition. They are created through practices of emulation and as such should be understood not as independently existing things within the world but rather as forms of ethical relationship through which people navigate their own understanding of what it means to live a good life. A consequence of this is that all exemplars are, to some extent, arguments for what ought to be rendered in hopeful statements about what is. At times, when the exemplar is clearly a mythic figure who is different in kind from the people who imitate it, this tension is obvious and untroubling. In other situations it can be productive of more profound conflicts within people’s ethical lives. This is certainly the case, for example, in the modern culture of everyday exemplarity, in which the paradoxical nature of the exemplar is hidden from view beneath a common assumption that demotic everyday exemplars are somehow more real than the mythic elite heroes they replaced. At heart, the ethnographic study of exemplars is not the study of individual figures, but rather the study of how people relate to virtue as it is embedded within the world in which they live. It is, in short, a question of where value is understood to reside in the social, and the proper relationship that people think they should have to that value.

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Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia’, in Signe Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge: 25–47. Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. The Anthropology of Christianity 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. Khan, Adil Hussain. 2015. From Sufism to Ahmadiyya: A Muslim Minority Movement in South Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2000. ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4): 617–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00036. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2): 311–32. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2000. ‘The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy’. Current Anthropology, 41(3): 309–20. 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. Edited by Michael Lambek. New York: Fordham University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 1988. Aristotle: The Desire to Understand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Lynteris, Christos. 2016. ‘The Epidemiologist as Culture Hero: Visualizing Humanity in the Age of “the Next Pandemic”’. Visual Anthropology, 29 (1): 36–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2016.1108823. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2013. ‘Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?’, in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (eds.), Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press: 58–94. Mar, Maksymilian Del. 2016. ‘Book Review of Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature and Law, Edited by Miche`le Lowrie and Susanne Lu¨demann’. Legal Studies, 36 (3): 535–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/lest.12136. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2014. ‘The Moral Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother’. Ethos, 42(1): 119–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12042. McKearney, Patrick. 2018. ‘Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability: Recognizing Agency in the Limits of the Rational Subject’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 36(1): 40–60. https://doi.org/10.3167 /cja.2018.360104. Mittermaier, Amira. 2012. ‘Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(2): 247–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01742.x.

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2002. ‘Cancer Heroics: A Study of News Reports with Particular Reference to Gender’. Sociology, 36(1): 107–26. https://doi.org/10.1177 /0038038502036001006. Segal, Lotte Buch. 2015. ‘The Burden of Being Exemplary: National Sentiments, Awkward Witnessing, and Womanhood in Occupied Palestine’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 30–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12164. Sheridan, Mary. 1968. ‘The Emulation of Heroes’. The China Quarterly, 33 (March): 47–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741000003763. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1984. The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets: A Study in Charisma, Hagiography, Sectarianism, and Millennial Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taneja, Anand Vivek. 2017. Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. South Asia in Motion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. Translated by E. Fischoff. Berkeley: University of California Press. Werbner, Pnina. 1995. ‘Powerful Knowledge in a Global Sufi Cult: Reflections on the Poetics of Travelling Theories’, in Wendy James (ed.), The Pursuit of Certainty: Religious and Cultural Formulations. The Uses of Knowledge. London: Routledge: 134–60. 2003. Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult. London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. 2016. ‘Between Ethnography and Hagiography: Allegorical Truths and Representational Dilemmas in Narratives of South Asian Muslim Saints’. History and Anthropology, 27(2): 135–53. https://doi.org/10.1080 /02757206.2015.1055329. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’. Anthropological Theory, 7(2): 131–50. https://doi.org/10.1177 /1463499607077295. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

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18 Ritual Letha Victor and Michael Lambek

A definitive statement on the relation between ritual and ethics is impossible for the reason that both ritual and ethics are complex words and the concepts to which they refer are not self-evident. There are many ways one can use each term and hence many ways to conceptualize the relationship between the ritual and the ethical.1 Where Barbara Cassin (2014) speaks of untranslatables as words that keep on getting translated, ‘ritual’ and ‘ethics’ are words that keep on getting defined.2 It may be a mistake to attempt to define them at all; as Quentin Skinner has put it, after Nietzsche, such concepts have histories, not definitions (see Le´vy and Tricoire 2007). One could add, after Wittgenstein, that the histories are histories of use and, after Cora Diamond (1988), that the uses to which they are put are not always ones of classification. In any case, the respective histories of use are extensive and not ones we can cover in a short entry. Given the plurality of uses to which these terms and concepts are put, we will turn directly to one tradition of thought about ethics and about ritual. After elaborating this position in the first half of the essay, we will juxtapose it with an ethnographic description of life in northern Uganda. The ethnography serves both to support aspects of the formal argument but also to show that conditions ‘on the ground’ readily escape any formal model. Ethical life is always challenged by circumstances beyond what any given ritual order or theoretical apparatus can provide. As Seligman et al. (2008), among others, have noted, there has been a prevalent ideology in modernity, not unconnected to the Protestant Reformation, that assumes that what is true and authentic – hence, in effect, ethical – stems from an inner self (Keane 2006; Trilling 1971). 1

On ethics, Lambek (2015b) has suggested the term can be used at many levels of inclusion and abstraction. In the literature it is sometimes opposed to or contrasted with morality, but never in the same way twice and sometimes with inverse meanings to the two terms. Ethics and morality are words that entered English from Greek and Latin, respectively, and they form what Koselleck (2004) calls the ‘contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous’. This means also that the terms themselves are incommensurable with one another and cannot be measured according to a single scale or set of criteria. As for ritual, the term is applied to a whole family of concepts, each sharing with some others but not necessarily with all.

2

They may be exemplifications of what W. B. Gallie (1955–6) once called essentially contested concepts.

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This can be summarized as a ‘sincerity’ doctrine. It is highly individualistic and, in that sense, a kind of antithesis to the Durkheimian model that locates the moral in obligatory social form. To the sincerity advocates, the features central to ritual – its formality, repetitive nature, and collective manifestation – preclude an ethical quality. Ritual is seen as show rather than substance, insincere, conformist, empty (‘mere ritual’), unprogressive, and pre-modern. We take this to be a provincial view, though no doubt it recurs throughout history and across social scales. It certainly bears witness to the contemporary evacuation of the social, subsumed as it is by the distinctly amoral (or even immoral) quality of capitalism. In contrast to the dismissal or denigration of ritual, we will argue for a close, even intrinsic, connection between what is ritual and what is ethical (in our usage). We do so on two grounds. In the first half of the chapter we present an argument based on the analysis of ritual in the abstract; in the second half we demonstrate the ethical salience of ritual in a specific ethnographic context. The two halves do not map precisely on to one another but they serve to illustrate the ways in which theoretical models simultaneously enlighten our understanding of lived experience and are insufficient to it.

Illocutionary Force and Criteria To begin, we try to avoid objectifying ethics and hence prefer to talk about the ethical rather than ethics per se. We see the ethical as grammatically adverbial, attending to how we act, or as adjectival, pertaining to states, conditions, concerns, or persons. For Lambek (2015a), acts are intrinsically subject to criteria of evaluation/judgement; this situation forms the core of ‘ethical’ life and indeed could be considered a feature of the human condition. From this position on the ethical, one line of approach to ritual stands out as most relevant and hence is the one we take. Following Rappaport (1999), two distinctive features of ritual are that it is performed (enacted) and that it is relatively formal or formalized. Ritual can be considered a modality of action (and sometimes as acts of a certain kind) that highlights or puts into play criteria that apply to the persons who are performing or undergoing the act, to the kind of act it is, and to the outcome of the act. The enactment of ritual puts persons or circumstances under descriptions that have specific criteria of evaluation.3 Thus, for example, a wedding ritual puts two people and their relationship under a new description and (in many traditions) establishes fidelity as a criterion for subsequent acts that follows from the initial act of marriage. The central point is that rather than producing obedience or fully predictable 3

‘Putting under description’ is a phrase we take from Anscombe (1963).

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behaviour (akin to what Bernard Williams (1985) calls the “Morality System”), ritual produces the criteria by which subsequent (and sometimes past) behaviour can be evaluated. Our lived experience as human beings is subject to being placed under descriptions according to criteria established in performances (rituals) we have enacted or that have been enacted over us. In their modality as ritual, acts are subject to criteria with respect to whether they are carried out felicitously (correctly, completely, with the requisite authority, etc.) (Austin 1965). Very interestingly, in their modality qua ritual, such acts are not subject to the criteria of evaluation that are normally considered to fall under the ‘ethical’ (virtuous or vicious, right or wrong, good or bad, wise or unwise, courageous or pusillanimous, etc.). Thus, while a given decision to marry may be unwise, selfish, weak, and so on, these judgements do not apply to the act qua ritual; that is, in its mode as ritual. It is not the ritual that is ethically evaluated so much as the decision to enact it. What the ritual act itself does is shape how subsequent action and practice are evaluated. That action in its modality as ritual is not subject to ethical evaluation or judgement in the same way that applies to action in its other modalities we take to be a novel observation on our part (though it builds on ideas of Humphrey and Laidlaw and of Rappaport discussed later). In other modalities, or when described from outside rather than within, the same set of actions (e.g. cutting the throat of an animal, cremation, marriage itself) are subject to evaluation. The picture of ritual as action, with felicity conditions and the instantiation of criteria for evaluating subsequent action, develops directly from J. L. Austin’s account of illocutionary force in How to Do Things with Words (1965), and has been elaborated by philosophers – notably, for our purposes, Stanley Cavell – and by anthropologists – notably S. J. Tambiah, Maurice Bloch, and Roy Rappaport (Bloch 1974, 1989; Tambiah 1985; Rappaport 1999). For Austin, once an authoritative act of naming occurs, it is incorrect to call the person so named by another name. Once a promise is made, it is wrong not to keep it. In his original work, Austin famously shifts from discerning specific acts that he names ‘performatives’ (like uttering a promise or bestowing a knighthood) to noting that there is an illocutionary dimension to most if not all utterances. That is to say, virtually any utterance makes a claim or brings something into being, if only to say ‘what I have uttered is a statement of fact, or a question, and so on’. As Cavell (1995, 2005) develops this, the pronouncement or implication of the first-person ‘I’ entails that the speaker stands behind her words (‘I give you my word’) and the second-person ‘you’ acknowledges the person of the addressee (‘I acknowledge my vulnerability to your reception of what I say’). In the acts we distinguish as ritual, commitment to one’s words and acts is made evident. However, at the same time, the egocentricity emphasized by Cavell can be somewhat displaced insofar as the words and acts have

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existed prior to me and are outside me. My act, as Maurice Bloch (2005) notes, is one of deference to them. The illocutionary force is framed or marked and highlighted and the primary addressees are the actors themselves, other congregants, and witnesses, as well as what Sahlins (2017) calls meta-humans (saints, gods, spirits, etc.). Thus, an ordinary promise becomes an oath, a naming becomes a baptism, and so forth. While the illocutionary force is primary, the central act is often surrounded and reinforced by means of perlocutionary (persuasive) elements – the elaboration of symbols, music, rhetoric, sensorial excess or deprivation. These features are designed to attract, to shape experience, and to convince; hence, in a perspective distinct from (but not antithetical to) the one taken here, some anthropologists have taken these features as primary.4 One of Austin’s profound insights was that the conditions of truth and falsity that apply to the locutionary dimension of utterances do not apply to the illocutionary. As Rappaport (1999) develops this, the relation between the utterance and what it speaks about is inverted. If I say it is raining when it is not, I speak falsely. But once a rain ritual has taken place, it is the rain that is at fault if it does not appear. In other words, through its illocutionary force ritual establishes the criteria under which we see the world and under which people, events, and circumstances are subject to discernment, evaluation, or judgement.5 In this sense one could say that ritual produces the condition by which persons, relationships, and circumstances are subject to ethical discernment. However, the relationship of the ritual and ethical also takes place the other way round, such that it may be ethical considerations or concerns, for example the response to a drought or a newborn infant, that give rise to the enactment of specific rituals in the first place.6 The second half of this essay offers significant illustrations of this process. A promise is a paradigmatic instance of an illocutionary act. It can be a matter of ethical judgement to utter a promise at a certain moment of interaction but the effect of the promise is to produce an ethical condition that projects into the future, with criteria according to which subsequent practice or action is to be evaluated (whether or not the promise is fulfilled and hence whether I am the kind of person who keeps a promise). Rappaport goes a good deal further: ritual does not merely establish particular moral or ethical relations and situations; it lays the ground for morality more generally. As he summarizes a much larger and complex argument, ‘In enunciating, accepting, and making conventions moral, ritual contains within itself not simply a symbolic representation of social 4

For an overview that emphasizes ‘persuasion through representation’ and ‘poetically dense figuration’, see Stasch (2011). In fact, while Rappaport and Tambiah each emphasize the illocutionary and indexical features of ritual, they incorporate the perlocutionary and symbolic dimensions as well.

5

The word ‘judgement’ is used here in the sense of the exercise of good or bad judgement rather than what occurs

6

This is akin to Wittgenstein’s apprehension of ritual as a response to wonder (da Col and Palmié 2018).

formally in a court of law (Lambek 2015b).

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contract, but tacit social contract itself. As such, ritual, which also establishes, guards, and bridges social boundaries between public systems and private processes, is the basic social act’ (1999: 138, italics in original).7

Ritual as a Modality of Action The subject of ritual has a long and distinguished history in anthropology starting with van Gennep and Durkheim as well as Durkheim’s students Hertz, Hubert, and Mauss early in the twentieth century.8 Some of their ideas were pulled together in a major development by Victor Turner (1967, 1969) in the 1960s. Turner elaborated on the social functions of ritual but, more importantly, he focussed on ritual as a process and he examined how those who went through a ritual were transformed by the experience, as might be the social relations of the community in which the ritual took place. Ritual is thus both intrinsic to the broader social process of which it is a part and internally is itself processual. Turner emphasized the creative power of symbols, marshalled in what could be called poetic ways, to shape experience. The paradigmatic case for Turner was initiation, whether into adulthood, motherhood, chieftaincy, or a cult of illness and healing. Explicit moral instruction was sometimes part of the Central African initiation rituals studied by Turner and others, notably Audrey Richards (1956). Turner also focussed on the liminal phase of such rituals in which ordinary social conventions, hence morality, were inverted or superseded (cf. Bakhtin 1986; Stallybrass and White 1986). But while the ethical dimension of subjects’ transformation was relevant, more significant for Turner was the aesthetic dimension as it contributed to the experience – and the transformation of experience – itself. One part of Turner’s method was to seek exegesis from ritual experts and this was complemented by structural analysis of the deployment of the symbols, hence structure and meaning were central to his understanding of ritual. Turner’s work was ethnographically extremely rich and evocative. His associates further developed his ideas and mode of analysis in a series of powerful works by scholars such as Don Handelman, Bruce Kapferer, and Richard Werbner from the ‘Manchester School’, and in the United States 7

Rappaport is best read in the original. However, for a more comprehensive account see Lambek (2001) and for further application of Rappaport to the understanding of ethical life, Lambek (2015a).

8

Van Gennep (2010); Durkheim (1995); Hertz (1960); Hubert and Mauss (1964). This is not the place to go into Durkheim’s views or the forms of analysis they have led to (e.g. Hausner and Parkin 2019). Some writers emphasize the functionalist aspects of Durkheim’s view, while others, notably Laidlaw and Humphrey (2006), distinguish the communicative and symbolic interpretation of ritual that derives from Durkheim from understanding ritual as action, which, they argue, does not derive from him. Their view is influenced by Leach (Hugh-Jones and Laidlaw 2000), who argued that ritual should be considered the communicative dimension of action, thereby separating it from action itself. Our perspective is drawn from Rappaport, whom we consider to be within in the Durkheimian tradition, broadly speaking, and for whom the communicative aspect is not divorced from action, not least because communication entails indexical and iconic as well as symbolic properties.

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by Barbara Babcock and Barbara Myerhoff, among others (Babcock 1978; Handelman and Lindquist 2005; Kapferer 1991, 1997; Myerhoff 1974; Werbner 1989). The subject of ritual flourished in Turner’s wake only to recede as the study of Protestant and charismatic forms of Christianity became central to the anthropology of religion; here, belief and experience have been more central concepts than ritual (e.g. Csordas 1997; Robbins 2004; Luhrmann 2012). However, ritual is critical to the practice and study of religion in East and South Asia as well as to the Abrahamic streams of Judaism, Islam, and Roman Catholicism and it continued to demand further elucidation. We address several major attempts to think analytically about ritual that derive from experience with one or more of these traditions. A breakthrough of a kind came when scholars started thinking more analytically about ritual, considering its formal properties rather than sticking to the elucidation of specific religious traditions or its function in social life. Each of these works begins with the insight that ritual is in the first instance action and then tries to elucidate its properties, sometimes by distinguishing the kind of action that ritual is from action that one could call unmarked. In these studies, attention shifts from the unpacking of symbols and meanings, as one might do with myth, to delineating the mode or modality of action and its force or consequentiality. In so doing, questions of the relation of ritual to ethics inevitably come to the fore, both because the ethical is intrinsically related to action and conversely because at first blush, from the ideology of modernity, as noted earlier, ritual action appears outside the scope of the ethical, as something merely repetitive, obligatory, or formal. The analyses in question show how far this is from being the case. Seligman et al. (2008) underscore the subjectivist bias that sees ritual as, at best, an external marker of internal and ‘sincere’ processes. In doing a ritual the whole issue of our internal states is often irrelevant. What you are is what you are in the doing, which is of course an external act. This is very different from modernist concerns with sincerity and authenticity . . .. Getting it right is not a matter of making outer acts conform to inner beliefs. Getting it right is doing it again and again and again – it is an act of world construction. (2008: 24) However, insofar as Seligman et al. contrast ritual and sincerity as distinct ‘orientations to action’ (2008: 6), they overplay the differences. The contrast itself is the product of the Protestant argumentation that they wish to depart from. Sincerity need not be an intrinsic component of ritual but it is not precluded from ritual action either.9 In other words, the significant 9

Seligman et al. make a number of other interesting assertions, albeit ones that are not always consistent with one another. They argue that ‘Ritual and ritualistic behavior are not so much events as ways of negotiating our very existence

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distinction is not between ritual and sincerity but between those who think they must be opposed or mutually exclusive and those who show they are not. These issues are well elucidated in the work of Saba Mahmood, who argues that for pious Muslims ritual discipline is not primarily an expression of something inside the practitioner, but a means to shape their subjectivity. For these Muslims, ritual is central to ethical cultivation. Sincerity is an elusive product rather than a reliable source. However, her subjects’ understanding of a ritual such as prayer belie ‘the neat separation of spontaneous emotions from disciplined behavior that anthropologists have taken for granted’ (Mahmood 2012: 231).10 For these women, ‘ritual (that is, conventional, formal action) is understood as the space par excellence for making their desires act spontaneously in accord with pious Islamic conventions’ (232). Hence, ritual acts of worship are the sole and ineluctable means of forming pious dispositions. A central aspect of ritual prayer . . . is that it serves both as a means to pious conduct and an end. In this logic, ritual prayer is an end in that Muslims believe God requires them to pray, and a means insofar as it transforms daily action, which in turn creates or reinforces the desire for worship. Thus, the desired goal (pious worship) is also one of the means by which that desire is cultivated and gradually made realizable. Moreover, in this world view, neither consummate worship nor the acquisition of piety are possible without the performance of prayer in the prescribed (that is, codified) manner and attitude. As such, outward bodily gestures and acts (such as salat or wearing the veil) are indispensable aspects of the pious self in two senses: first, in the sense that the self can acquire its particular form only through the performance of the precise bodily enactments; and, second, in the sense that the prescribed bodily forms are necessary attributes of the self. (232) Similarly, Seligman et al. argue that, for both Confucians and (orthodox) Jews, ‘sagehood is the goal, but it is a goal that is to be achieved through a submission to ritual, not through a rejection of it. The inner comes to reflect the outer, and not the other way around’ (2008: 36). One of the issues raised in all this work concerns the range of local interpretations regarding the relationship of ritual to ethics, from those of ordinary and specifically pious individual practitioners to priests or in the world’ (8). They see one of the distinguishing features of ritual as producing subjunctivity, modes of ‘as if’ in contrast to sincerity’s unambiguous assertion of things as they are (hence assimilating ritual with play). And they draw on Orsi (2005) to read ritual in a tragic register; for Orsi, ritual can be wounding, while for them it attempts to repair or idealize a world that continues to be less than whole or ideal. In these attempts, ritual is tragically doomed: humans attempt to build an ethical way of life through ritual but know that the task is never finished; the goal always escapes us. 10

As James Laidlaw points out (pers. comm.), many anthropologists have not taken this separation for granted.

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theological scholars, hierarchical institutions like the Catholic Church, and mass movements like those of Salafism or charismatic Christianity. Unfortunately, we cannot discuss these here, nor can we consider the ways in which discussion of ritual has been assimilated to that of Foucauldian discipline (see Asad 1993; Foucault 1988; Laidlaw 2014; Mahmood 2005). Seligman et al. largely agree with the earlier powerful argument of Humphrey and Laidlaw (1994) in which ritual is not a discrete kind of action but a distinctive stance to, or mode of, action (88, 267), a distinctive way of performing any kind of action. Hence they speak of ritualized and non-ritualized action, in which the difference is a matter of the quality of the action, or rather the relation of the actor to the action, not the function (3). Although Humphrey and Laidlaw say that Jain ritual is performed with sincerity (vii), their central point is that Ritualized acts in liturgical traditions are socially prescribed and present themselves to individual actors as ‘given’ and external to themselves. Because ritualized acts are stipulated in this way, a new situation arises: instead of, as is normally [sic] the case in everyday life, a person’s act being given meaning by his or her intentions, with ritual action the act itself appears as already formed, almost like an object . . .. In this transformed situation the intentions and thoughts of the actor make no difference to the identity of the act performed. You have still done it, whatever you were dreaming of. (1994: 5) Hence, ‘The peculiar fascination of ritual lies in the fact that here, as in few other human activities, the actors both are, and are not, the authors of their acts’ (5). For Humphrey and Laidlaw: ‘Action may be said to be ritualized when the actor has taken up what we shall call the “ritual commitment”, a particular stance with respect to his or her own action’ (1994: 88). They distinguish four aspects they consider logically interdependent. First, they argue that ‘ritualized action is non-intentional, in the sense that while people performing ritual acts do have intentions (thus the actions are not unintentional), the identity of a ritualized act does not depend, as is the case with normal action, on the agent’s intention in acting’. Second, ritualized action is stipulated rather than simply emerging in the flow of interaction. Ritual requires . . . that the action in question be enacted with an intention that means it will be in the above sense non-intentional. This may seem paradoxical, but it is of the first importance. Acting ritually is not a mistake or a consequence of inattention. The person performing ritual ‘aims’ at the realization of a pre-existing ritual act. Celebrants’ acts appear, even to themselves, as ‘external’, as not of their own making. (89)

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Third, these acts ‘are perceived as discrete, named entities, with their own characters and histories’ and hence, fourth, ‘they are always available for a further reassimilation to the actors’ intentions, attitudes, and beliefs’ (89). It is a matter of local ethical stances to what degree this apprehension is understood to be critical and hence whether matters like sincerity are brought in after the fact, as it were. Thus for Muslims, the quality of one’s intention in performing ritual is important, but it is a goal to work towards rather than a prerequisite for ritual action.11 For Humphrey and Laidlaw, the critical point about ritual as a modality of action is the severance of action and intention. One might consider this therefore as having nothing to do with ethics or even as being unethical, but that is not so. Ethics is not and cannot be simply a matter of individual intention (or sincerity). To exercise judgement, one must have socially established criteria, or sometimes explicit norms, values, or rules. How these are established and how an actor’s commitment to them (acknowledging the fact that they could be plural, incommensurable, or even incompatible with one another in the abstract) is achieved in practice is precisely a matter of ritual action. This is at issue, as we will see, in northern Uganda. Issues raised by Humphrey and Laidlaw and by Seligman et al. are partly resolved or at least elucidated by Rappaport, who offers the most comprehensive account of the relation between ritual and the ethical, not least because the communicative functions are fully integrated with the model of action.12 Rappaport’s defines ritual succinctly as ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’ (1999: 24). But as he notes, such performances have two dimensions: what he calls the canonical and the indexical. The canonical is akin to Humphrey and Laidlaw’s account of the given and objective aspects of ritual; Rappaport describes the canonical as not encoded by the performers themselves; for example, the text of a prayer that is handed down and the order and manner in which it should be performed. The indexical is a consequence of the fact that rituals are performed, each time uniquely, under new circumstances, by a new set of persons, on a new day, and so on. It is I who is taking communion, offering a puja, undergoing circumcision, and so on, not you or someone else, and doing it now, not last year. In this respect, performers are intrinsically and originally connected to their acts. Ritual acts are part of traditions 11

For a rich description of intention in Muslim prayer, see Haeri (2021).

12

The influence of Rappaport and Humphrey and Laidlaw on one another is complex. Humphrey and Laidlaw (1994) draw on Rappaport’s key essay published first in 1974 and reprinted in 1979 and note the similarity of their view of commitment to Rappaport’s of acceptance (54). They are also critical of parts of his argument. Rappaport’s extensive final version (1999) does not refer to their book, possibly because his manuscript was basically completed a few years earlier and was then rushed to press on his impending death. Seligman et al. adopt Rappaport’s definition of ritual and account of meaning.

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but they are also events. All acts may be described as indexical in Rappaport’s sense, but they are more or less canonical (previously scripted, laid down). It is the conjunction of the more fully canonical with the indexical that is critical for understanding the ethical import of ritual. The canonical is ‘non-intentional’ in Humphrey and Laidlaw’s sense, but the indexical is intentional before and after the fact: there is the rite of communion, there is me deciding to take it, here and now, and there is me taking and having taken it. In performing it, I commit to it and to what it commits me to; it becomes part of who I am and I become part of what it is.13 In line with Bloch (1974), Humphrey and Laidlaw deny that ritual acts contain given meanings or communicate any more than non-ritualized acts (and possibly mean and communicate less). Nevertheless, the conjunction of the canonical and indexical renders each act deeply significant for participants and witnesses. Humphrey and Laidlaw may be right that we do not need to seek for hidden meanings or interpret metaphors and the like in order to grasp the import (in any given instance), but there is great import in the very fact that the ritual takes place. Thus Lambek (2015c) has argued with respect to sacrifice that whatever ideas underlie it in any given tradition about gifts, exchange, purification, and so on, the act of killing something or giving something up indicates an irreversible (indexical) move, hence a new beginning and a definitive commitment on the part of the sacrificer. Rituals accomplish things and these accomplishments are meaningful. Ritual, Seligman et al. argue, ‘is about doing more than about saying something’. However, if speech act theory has pointed out how saying something is doing something, we can turn this around to explore the way in which doing something is also saying something. What is ‘said’ is generally not obscure; ritual is first and foremost an act, hence statement, of acknowledgement, or, in Rappaport’s words, of acceptance of the liturgical order of which it is a part. This is the case for Rappaport even if the participant overtly denies it. You cannot submit to the rite of marriage only to say subsequently that you did not mean it or you do not believe in marriage. Participation in ritual is thus a powerful means to establish commitment to one’s actions, as well as acknowledgement of the authority and power of the ritual to produce such enactments. As noted earlier, ritual does not generate obedience or fully predictable behaviour but rather the criteria by which ensuing behaviour is to be evaluated. In other words, ritual does not simply establish, let alone determine, ethical behaviour in a positive sense but rather it establishes the criteria by which ethical distinctions can be made in the first place. It is in this fundamental sense that ritual and the ethical are deeply interconnected; new ethical criteria or states for which criteria apply are the intrinsic outcome of 13

Rappaport (1999); see especially chapter 4. On the salience of Christian communion, see Orsi (2016).

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ritual, just as the judgement whether to hold a specific ritual or to participate in it comes ultimately from ethical concerns to do what is right, good, or expected according to previously established criteria (Lambek 2015d).14 Another way to address the ostensible paradox that Humphrey and Laidlaw raise concerning the non-intentional is by means of Goffman’s discussion of participant roles where, for any utterance, he distinguishes between the animator, the author, and the principal. With respect to rituals, in most instances the animators (actors) are not the authors but they are the principals, the ones on whose account the action happens, those ‘whose position is established by the words that are spoken . . . whose beliefs have been told . . . who [are] committed to what the words say’ (Goffman 1981: 144; cf. Goffman 1986: 516–23; Sidnell 2014: 141ff.). The animator could also be the priest, while the principal is the person given communion and so on. The distinction between author and principal is not always so clear-cut. Humphrey and Laidlaw usefully draw on a distinction developed by Jane Atkinson (1989) between liturgical-centred and performance-centred ritual. The latter term is somewhat misleading as a central feature of all ritual is that it is performed. The distinction is rather than in the latter case the emphasis is on individual performers like shamans, prophets, or people temporarily possessed by spirits who depart from script, draw on their own subjectivity and creativity, and respond to immediate concerns, whether individual (as when a Catholic priest listens to confession rather than when they say mass) or collective. Contemporary weddings are another illustration as bride and groom often add to the liturgical core. This kind of ritual blends into the theatrical and can be frightening or comic or conducive of other emotions. In effect, the perlocutionary (persuasive) elements can be as significant as the illocutionary force, as in the mode of analysis developed by Turner, Kapferer, et al. The ethical affordances of such performances need not be very different from those enjoyed by theatre-goers, clients of therapy, and the like. That is, ritual performances afford a kind of reflexivity that can be highly charged and ethically provocative, if not directly transformative. Through performances, like those of spirit possession in Mayotte (Lambek 1981), demon exorcism in Sri Lanka (Kapferer 1991), or the chasing away of vengeance ghosts in Acholi (Victor and Porter 2017), participants can gain new perspectives on their lives and circumstances. A particularly thorny set of questions concern the relation of the concept of ritual and its ethical entailments to that of religion and related concepts like those of secular ritual, civic religion, or practices of selfdiscipline. A related question is the relationship or distinction between highly marked ritual events that are large in scale and scope, lengthy in duration, or weighty in import, and those that are very short and simple 14

Ritual establishes the descriptions under which things lie and the criteria that apply to them; where the social categories by means of which one description is distinguished from another originate is a different matter.

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gestures or utterances, like performing the sign of the cross, uttering the b’ismillah, or entirely non-religious utterances like formulaic greetings. Rappaport acknowledges a range of formality of acts with respect to how much of their content is canonical or given, thereby distinguishing, say, the performance of a mass, which is largely unchanging, from a courtroom procedure that is highly regimented but whose contents are variable and outcome not fully predictable, and from informal conversations among friends that include certain conventions of address and response but are otherwise open. But more significantly, Rappaport also places such acts in a hierarchy of contingency such that the most formal, consistent, and perduring acts help to authorize and inform the less formal and more flexible acts, as when swearing on a Bible authorizes testimony in the courtroom. Rappaport speaks of this as a hierarchy of sanctification. He defines the sacred as ‘the quality of unquestionableness imputed by congregations to postulates in their nature objectively unverifiable and absolutely unfalsifiable’ (1999: 371). Invulnerable to empirical falsification or logical attack, sacred postulates (like ‘there is no God but God’) anchor the acts in which ethical conditions and criteria are established, producing degrees of certainty. Thus, the divine right of kings was contingent on a postulate asserting the existence of God and a ritual of coronation was contingent on the mass. While acknowledging the pathologies to which such hierarchies are subject, especially as the sacred postulates become over-specified (such that specific rules become over-sanctified) and hence ideological, or what he calls idolatry (1999: chapter 14), Rappaport sees ritual as constitutive of, and fundamental to, a fully human and social life. Whereas Rappaport develops his ideas in a manner that is congruent with Durkheim’s insights concerning the positive foundations of society, Bloch (1989), by contrast, sees the illocutionary force generated through ritual as a means to produce social hierarchy and as a mystification of power. This happens by limiting what can be said within ritual (1974), by establishing and enacting deference (2005), and by generating a transcendent order that conceals or inverts ordinary common sense (2008) and attempts to supersede the everyday. In these ways ritual can actually produce forms of domination that an outsider might consider, in a certain sense, unethical.15 One way to mediate this debate is to attend to what ritual says about itself, its meta-messages or meta-effects, as it were, in relation to its messages and effects. Michael Puett (2014) has discussed ancestral ritual in ancient China as exhibiting the discrepancy between what it proposes the world could or should be like and the way it is, arguing that the discordance is central to ritual itself. His point is similar to one Lambek drew concerning spirit possession in Mayotte in which ‘what is 15

Bloch has shifted somewhat from thinking that ordinary life can get by very well without ritual to arguing that some form of transcendence, as instantiated by ritual, is necessary (2013).

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established . . . is not morality, and what is represented is not simply amorality. Rather, the possession drama is a kind of reflection upon morality and social responsibility . . .The richness of possession is derived precisely from the paradox that it faces courageously and does not pretend can be resolved . . . imperfection is inevitable’ (Lambek 1981: 170–1). Such ethical insight may be intrinsic to ritual’s form. As Puett remarks, ‘the ritual enactment is haunted at every level by the implications of the roleplaying, wherein all the various transformations are both non-enduring and highly ambivalent’ (2014: 229).16 In any case, for both Bloch and Rappaport, the relation between ritual and ethics concerns the manner in which ritual acts are ordered and the kinds of order they produce. Order and certainty are central to Rappaport’s account of ritual. But order and certainty are not found everywhere; ritual acts are not always embedded in liturgical orders or governed by agreed upon forms of sanctification. In the face of multiple, competing, or partial and fragmented liturgical orders, the criteria produced by specific ritual acts may not be accepted by all, or completely and consistently, thereby reproducing disorder and uncertainty (which might be seen as creative or destructive, from different points of view) rather than order. The next section of this essay explores a context that may be described as one of liturgical disorder and ethical disquiet, thereby forming a complementary picture to our model.

Liturgical Plurality and Ethical Disquiet We turn now to an ethnographic illustration of the meta-messages and meta-effects of ritual, as they are subject to ethical evaluation, within the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda. As the infamous epicentre of war between Ugandan government forces and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) between 1987 and 2006,17 over the last decade Acholi people have worked to mitigate the spiritual ill-effects of the conflict along with legal and socioeconomic ones. These challenges are myriad and include socially integrating tens of thousands of returned LRA abductees (young men and women, and children born in captivity), responding to the presence of known perpetrators who have received legal amnesty, addressing problems understood to be caused by avenging ghosts or angered spirits, properly interring human remains and caring for the

16

On ritual’s meta-messages, see also Tambiah (1985) and the work by linguistic and semiotic anthropologists such as Michael Silverstein and Richard Parmentier, as reviewed in Stasch (2011).

17

The date range, as well as the name ‘LRA’, has been simplified here for the sake of space. A series of rebel movements and shifting alliances contributed to different waves of conflict in the area from the mid-1980s onward, while joint-state military operations against the LRA continued after 2006 outside of Uganda, in the border regions between the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan.

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shadows of the deceased, and achieving consensus about what forms justice might take.18 To add further complication, the intergenerational transmission of the indigenous canon of ritual was severely hampered by the years-long forced displacement of a majority of the civilian population. As residents of Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDP) camps, most Acholi were unable to access their patrilocalities in order to bury deceased family members and attend to ancestral and meta-human shrines. At the same time, extended families were separated between camps and within them, both as a result of circumstance and as a strategy against LRA attacks and abductions (lest all members of the same family be killed or kidnapped at once, for example). Nightly campfire sessions called wang oo, during which elders tell didactic tales and proverbs to children and youth, were severely restricted by security and fire concerns (Baines 2005). Among the generation of youth raised in the camps, it is common to hear men and women complain that they are ignorant of their ‘culture’ – understood to be an artefact of a knowable past. However, it is also not unusual for Acholi people to vocally reject certain elements of this cultural corpus. Although the reified stuff of culture (dances, songs, food, dress, etc.) is regarded as a source of collective pride, ritual acts are considered less than anodyne. Like the term culture, in vernacular Acholi English the discourse of ‘ritual’ refers to the practices of tic Acholi (Acholi ‘work’) instantiated in canonical acts of ancestor propitiation, the ceremonial purification of bodies and spaces, animal sacrifices (tum) to human and non-human spirit forces, and a number of esoteric practices performed by knowledgeable elders and spirit medium healers called ajwaki (sing. ajwaka). In vernacular Acholi English, the history of ‘ritual’ is one of use: it is that which has distinguished ‘local tradition’ from Muslim and Christian worship. That ordinary Acholi people have a less capacious understanding of ‘ritual’ than how we have described it here (as a modality of action) is beside the point. Rather, we consider how tic Acholi (‘ritual’) is but one instantiation of Rappaport’s hierarchy of sanctification; one that crystallized in self-conscious differentiation from ‘religion’. Here, ritual excludes the acts entailed in Christian and Muslim prayer, worship, and devotional practices, which belong to the silo of religion proper (dini, from the Arabic). Equally effaced in this terminology are the legal rituals of local and national courts, and the International Criminal Court,19 which represent the British colonial legacy and ongoing modernist projects. In ordinary conversation, ritual, religion, and law are understood to be different kinds of experience: ones delineated by either ethnic fortitude, or by histories of 18 19

This section takes its evidence from the fieldwork of Victor, who has conducted research in Acholi since 2008. After its creation, the International Criminal Court conducted its first investigations in northern Uganda. Though five LRA commanders were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, at the time of writing only Ongwen Dominic has been taken into custody in The Hague. In 2021 the ICC convicted Ongwen of 61 crimes and sentenced him to prison for 25 years. In December 2022 the Appeals Chamber confirmed both the verdict and sentence.

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colonial domination and foreign interventionism. This linguistic distinction is emblematic of the way in which contemporary Acholi often consider these domains to entail incommensurable ethical projects. In Acholi, the conjunction of the canonical with the indexical, critical as it is for understanding the ethical import of ritual, must also be understood in light of canonical plurality. Next we offer a historical glimpse of how in Acholi, the decisions to enact (or reject) certain rituals (broadly construed), rather than the rituals themselves, have been ethically evaluated. In the following section we turn to a contemporary case to illustrate how this history bears upon present circumstances in post-war Acholi.

Ritual Authority in Acholi Invocations known as lam (blessings and curses), and rumours thereof, contributed significantly to popular and militant opinion over whether or not the war, and the LRA’s brutality, was socially and spiritually sanctioned. In the civil war that followed the 1979 ousting of Ugandan President Idi Amin by General Tito Okello, the Acholi-dominated Uganda National Liberation Army killed over 30,000 people in the Luwero triangle of central Uganda. While other Ugandans have held the Acholi collectively responsible for these deaths (Doom and Vlassenroot 1999: 9), Acholi commentators have remarked that, aside from the fact that none of the responsible commanders were Acholi, Acholi elders did not bless the war parties and were thus not accountable for the slaughter (Finnstro¨m 2008: 83). Traditionally, after clan elders had reached a consensus on the legitimacy of a war, they would gather the war party at the ancestral shrine and give the lead fighter lapii (sticks used for making fire, symbolizing authority), bless the whole party with laa (spittle or water), and give them branches of the oboke olwedo tree (a general kind of blessing). The enemy was equally cursed by these acts (Finnstro¨m 2006: 208). As several scholars have previously stated, the ritual legitimacy of the subsequent war launched by the LRA rested on the contention of whether or not Acholi elders had blessed the rebellion against the Ugandan state (Dolan 2009: 87; Finnstro¨m 2008: 211–14). LRA leader Joseph Kony claimed that he had received the requisite blessing from elders, while others argue that he was given oboke olwedo and anointed with laa, but did not receive the lapii (fire-sticks). One LRA field commander side-stepped the issue by declaring, ‘Our lapii is God’ (as quoted in Finnstro¨m 2006: 209). Like the LRA leadership as a whole, he rejected the authority of Acholi elders in favour of the authority of the Christian and Islamic God. This dismissal of the elders’ ritual authority points to the ethical importance of ritual with respect to how subsequent acts and practices are evaluated. As Sverker Finnstro¨m recounts, for his young interlocutors in the early 2000s (who were still suffering through the war and witnessed

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the repeated failure of peace talks), the issue of ritual blessing was less important than their frustration with what they saw to be the recusal of elders from political struggle (2006: 214). Elders, as the arbiters of cultural and political matters in Acholi, blamed the brutality of the war on the waywardness of disaffected youth. While popular support for the rebellion had come from young and old Acholi in the early years, as the LRA’s tactics became increasingly violent and directed at children and youth, this support waned. A prominent elder was rumoured to have ritually displayed his penis (an abomination or kiir) while condemning the rebels, an act that turned the purported war blessing into a curse (Dolan 2009: 110; Finnstro¨m 2006: 210, 2008: 211–14; see also p’Bitek 1971: 146). Challenges to the ritual authority of male elders contributed significantly to the social climate that fomented the LRA rebellion and its predecessors. The heart of the ritual dispute predated the formation of the LRA, when Acholi soldiers retreating north from the civil war20 were perceived by civilians as ritually polluted by the killings but unwilling to subject themselves to the authority of clan elders. This crisis of ‘internal strangers’, a term Heike Behrend borrows from Richard Werbner, centred around the problem of cen: the vengeful ghosts who returned with the wayward soldiers (1999a: 28). Cen is a social contagion that proliferates misfortune, illness, madness, nightmares, and death. Though cen can result from a whole host of accidental, violent, or otherwise ritually polluting deaths, in the context of warfare its presence may be mitigated by a series of propitiative acts. In precolonial warfare, Acholi soldiers attempted to bring back the heads of their victims so that the deceased’s shadows or spirits (tipu) could be sent away by the ritual interventions of an ajwaka (spirit medium/healer). The soldiers themselves were placed in a state of seclusion until the angered spirit had been appeased and returned to its home area (Behrend 1999a: 28; cf. Grove 1919: 164). Those persons who served in the King’s African Rifles (the British Empire’s East Africa force) improvised by returning to Acholi with what personal effects they could gather from their deceased opponents (such as clothing and buttons). However, for no documented reason, the young soldiers who came home from the 1986 battles of Luwero took no such actions (Behrend 1999a: 28). These young men, who refused to acquiesce to the ritual cleansing acts performed by male elders, were blamed for bringing the cen that caused the new AIDS crisis, as well as a whole host of social problems attributable to a generalized curse on the Acholi social body. Having grown used to soldiering, disaffected young men chafed against the gerontocratic structure of village life, and internal conflicts between elders and the returned soldiers proliferated under the discourse of witchcraft. At the same time, northerners had lost state power to the new central government of Yoweri 20

The National Resistance Movement/Army, led by General Yoweri K. Museveni, claimed victory in 1986. As of 2023, Museveni remains the president of Uganda.

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Museveni, and they were subjected to reprisal attacks aimed at both Acholi civilians and soldiers. Faced with intolerable internal and external crisis, a new authority emerged to meet the social, political, and ritual impasse (Behrend 1999b). Commanded by a spirit called Lakwena to deliver Acholi society from the scourge of witchcraft and recapture state power, a woman named Alice Auma was tasked with amassing soldiers into the Holy Spirit Movement/Mobile Forces (HSMF) rebel movement.21 Before the movement was defeated in 1987 in a battle near Jinja (approaching Kampala), Lakwena’s mission was to defeat Museveni’s government and usher in a new Ugandan society that was Christian and free of witchcraft. Lakwena identified himself as a deceased Italian general; he was a ‘free jok’ – a relatively new spirit force untethered to clan shrines and geographical features in the Acholi landscape (waters, rivers, rocks, trees, hills, etc.). A jok (pl. jogi) was once solely tied to the aforementioned spaces, and it took possession of a small range of human bodies (keepers of the shrine and mediums called ajwaki). Free jogi, who entered Acholi as its populace encountered the radical differences of Arab and European explorers and interlopers, brought new types of affliction and engendered new possession cults. By the 1950s these free jogi particularly (though not exclusively) fell upon women. Whereas female ajwaki were normally considered outside the purview of traditional ritual authority (being consulted primarily in cases of sorcery), their influence and skill in addressing free jogi garnered them increasing ritual power compared to male elders (Allen 1991). Though the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces were roundly defeated, Lakwena was not. A young man called Joseph Kony claimed to be newly possessed by Lakwena and a whole host of other holy spirits, and for the next twenty years he directed an insurgency that rendered Acholi village life (and its accompanying social structure) logistically impossible. Civilians were displaced into camps and town centres now dominated by the authorities of government soldiers, international non-governmental organizations, and intervenors bearing humanitarian aid.

A Confusing Ritual Repertoire Over the course of the twentieth century, ritual power – to address the well-being of families and communities – was effectively dispersed by the intervening forces of the Ugandan Protectorate (in its juridical impositions), by the free jogi that descended onto ordinary Acholi, and by Roman Catholic and Anglican missions. Once accorded the legitimate right to identify and punish witchcraft, the power of male elders in 21

For reasons of space, we cannot get into the more extensive history of political and economic grievances, often cleaved upon a geographic north/south division, that have fuelled the militarization of politics since Uganda gained independence from Britain in 1962. For greater depth, see, for example, Branch (2011), Lomo and Hovil (2004), and Laruni (2015).

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Acholi was curtailed by British-derived witchcraft ordinances, the newfound ritual specialities of ajwaki, and the seminary-educated clergy who in turn condemned indigenous rituals as Satanic or approached ritual pollution as a curious psychological problem. The vacuum of authority caused by colonial and missionary intervention, and expanded by post-colonial struggles for power, thus proliferated competing ritual practices that have further multiplied in the post-LRA era. For ordinary people facing common physical, social, and spiritual ailments, the diverse availability of ritual responses to such problems is the source of constant ethical evaluation. The question of which ritual form(s) to pursue, and in what order or priority, preoccupy many private and public conversations in contemporary Acholi. The concerns expressed are both pragmatic (will it work?) and moral (is it the right thing to do?). Thirty-two-year-old Nancy, for example, has suffered periodically from spirit-induced sickness since she was a teenager. Born in a community characterized by divided political and religious loyalties, she was raised a Catholic. As a child, circumstances of war, parental illness, and poverty forced her to move throughout Uganda, and her formal education was delayed and then frequently interrupted. Before the age of ten she had been sent to two different relatives’ homes to work looking after children, until she was sent back home to begin primary school around the age of twelve. On their way home from school one day, Nancy and two of her sisters were abducted by rebels passing through the area, seeking salt, cash, and recruits. Nancy and her younger sister were released after three days, as they had been deemed too small to join the group. It would be over a decade before their sister, forced to soldier and bear children in captivity, would escape. Shortly after the abduction, Nancy’s favourite uncle was murdered by the LRA for having committed the crime of riding a bicycle.22 Although former abductees like Nancy’s sister are often accused of harbouring cen and other contagious ‘dirty things’ that followed them home from the bush, it was Nancy who began to experience the illeffects of unhappy spirits in the family. Nancy experienced her first ‘attack’ while she was enrolled as a secondary school student. She was unable to see well or to listen to the teachers speaking in class. She lost significant weight and was incapable of staying in places full of noise or other people, including classrooms. Nancy wished to be examined at a hospital, where four years before she had been successfully treated for a gunshot wound (after having been shot by the LRA), but her mother insisted that she go for ‘traditional ways of healing’. She resisted, and argued with her mother that ‘witchdoctors behave badly’ and that if she was to pray, she would no longer be attacked. 22

One edict made by the high command of the LRA was that no one was permitted to ride bicycles, as they suspected vehicles were used to inform government soldiers of rebel movements.

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Nancy felt that church was the only way to address the problem, and prayed: ‘God, it’s only you who can save me. Let this thing go away, out of me. Because you are the only one who can heal people.’ Yet she was unable to keep still upon physically entering a church, and the only way she could sit was by bending her head low and not raising her eyes to the altar. As the only member of her family with what she describes as ‘strong faith’, she was convinced that it was their belief in ajwaki that prevented her from being healed by God. While she never worried that her people were engaging in tweno lega (‘tying prayers’), an act of witchcraft that intentionally diverts away the ‘direction’ of prayers, she felt nonetheless impotent by their lack of Christian faith. So she relented and twice allowed her mother to take her to an ajwaka. When she was brought to the ajwaka, the jogi began to speak through Nancy’s mouth. The spirits complained that her parents were able to raise the money to pay for her school fees, and yet they could not afford to feed the jogi. So they said they wished to spoil Nancy’s education so that they could be fed. Although her parents could not afford the demands of the jogi – offerings of goats and chickens and sheep were too much to make while they were still living in camps – they compromised with the jogi. The spirits allowed themselves to be temporarily ‘tied down’ so that Nancy could continue with her studies. Although the problem resurfaced the next year, Nancy was brought once more to the ajwaka, who treated her successfully with herbal medicine. For Nancy, the details of the ajwaka’s work were insignificant compared to the decision to submit to her mother’s wishes, against her own ethical objections. But her parents’ wishes were soon forgotten as they died within a year of one another, of AIDS-related illness (her mother) and unknown circumstances (her father). In order to continue with school, from 2005 to 2008 she relied on scholarships and later a boyfriend. The jogi became untied once more within her, and she became sick and failed her exams. Her brothers and sisters withdrew her from school when they received news from the teachers that she was speaking in strange voices, taking her clothes off in the classroom, breaking things, and throwing herself down to play in the mud like a child. Nancy, who is conversant exclusively in Acholi Luo and English, began speaking in the languages of other tribes in Uganda, such as Luganda and Madi. Her sister brought her to the hospital, where she was tested for malaria, typhoid, and HIV, and was found to be negative for all three. ‘I could even take a week minus talking, minus eating, minus drinking’, she said. She reflected on her earlier resistance to visiting the ajwaka. ‘I had that feeling that when you pray, you get saved, and those things won’t attack you. But later I realized that it was something I inherited from people back home.’ While hereditary spirits almost always come from the father’s clan, in this situation the jogi had been unusually traced to Nancy’s maternal side, to her beloved uncle who had been killed by the

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LRA. He had been an ajwaka, and the jogi declared through Nancy that they would continue to bother her until she herself became an ajwaka. In 2008 she accepted to be ‘worked on’. Nancy’s step-father, who was still living in an IDP camp in 2008, was called upon by Nancy’s siblings to provide the sheep, goats, and cash needed for the ajwaka. He had no money, and her sister complained that with no father or elders to lead, it was hard to find any solution. As Victor and Porter (2017) have written elsewhere, Acholi youth who have returned from LRA captivity have sometimes complained that their elders had unfairly recused themselves from their ritual responsibilities, or imposed unwanted ‘cultural practices’ onto youth. Many ex-LRA were welcomed home in mass-cleansing ceremonies called nyono tong gweno (stepping on the egg), which were organized and presided over by the Paramount Chief (Rwot) of Acholi and his cabinet of elderly men. For some, these rituals amounted to acts that should have been only the beginning of Acholi cleansing work, whereas many neo-Pentecostal individuals rejected the rituals as evil. Despite the diversity of opinion on the suitability of particular rituals, people continue to regard elders as holding the responsibility to do something, even if ‘only prayers’ (as many refer to them). But for people like Nancy, who is not unusual in having been bereft of most of her elders during the war, ritual discernment and preparation must go on regardless. In Nancy’s case, her brothers and sisters pooled their money and raised further funds from neighbours and friends. The jogi accepted the livestock they offered, and the ajwaka worked on Nancy. At the time of writing, Nancy was still periodically troubled by these jogi. Despite her continued identification with Roman Catholicism, after her second child was born she decided to become a Born-Again Christian, in order to deal with the problem in a different way: Born-Again churches are regarded by many Acholi as having prayers that are more powerful against difficult spirits than the words of Catholic or Anglican liturgies. ‘You know, I am a Catholic girl’, Nancy says. ‘But for now, I am Born-Again. Later, I will go back to being Catholic.’ Among other things, this illustrates that commitment to particular rituals is not conceived as mutually exclusive; ethical judgement occurs with respect to incommensurable alternatives. Ethics is a matter of practical judgement in the circumstances.

Conclusion Much of the theoretical literature on ritual, if not directly functionalist, presupposes some kind of link between ritual and stability and ritual and order. This is explicit in Rappaport’s case where the ethical weight and import of specific ritual acts is connected to the place of the rituals within the broader liturgical order.

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The Acholi case offers quite a different context, one in which there has been little stability and one in which there is little order. Not only are there multiple incommensurable and sometimes competing ritual orders (ancestral, Muslim, Catholic, Charismatic, etc.), but with respect at least to the ancestral rituals, the liturgical order itself is in some disarray. The hierarchical connections among different kinds of ritual acts have been broken, as has the social transmission between generations. This does not leave an ethical vacuum but it does leave a sense of confusion, one in which decisions to hold specific ritual acts are a kind of ethical experimentation, somewhat in the sense described, in a very different context, by Mattingly (2014; compare Robbins 2004). It is ethically significant to seek ritual redress for oneself and one’s relatives but not evident which forms of ritual action to take up or whether such acts will have the kinds of stable re-descriptive effects and ethical consequentiality we described earlier. In Acholi, for now, the indexical and perlocutionary significance of ritual action would seem to outweigh the canonical and illocutionary. Perhaps one of the lessons is that while there is always a relationship between ritual in both its canonical and indexical dimensions and the ethical, that relationship is not fixed and can take multiple forms, according to both the stability of the liturgical orders of which the rituals form a part and according to the plurality of rituals and liturgical orders present in a given social field. Another lesson of the Acholi case is that in a situation of great ethical turmoil and suspense, the enactment of ritual forms a highly significant and perhaps even necessary mode of response, both to address immediate personal concerns and to pave the way for a more stable and orderly form of life in the future. We might add that ritual offers an alternative to the need for the transcendent or a personalized god as ascertained by Charles Taylor or Martha Nussbaum (as reported in Chapter 4 of this volume by Laidlaw and McKearney). Ritual provides a formal means for grounding certain aspects of ethical life, one that underlies, and may even render unnecessary (though of course it need not), the postulation of a personalized god or gods, thereby obviating the question of belief.

Acknowledgements Our thanks to James Laidlaw for an extremely insightful reading, as well as to Jack Sidnell and three careful reviewers.

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19 Values Julian Sommerschuh and Joel Robbins

Introduction In parallel to the emergence of an anthropology of ethics and morality over the past fifteen years, there has also been a smaller but growing interest in the study of values. The concept of values – defined as cultural conceptions of the good or desirable – once occupied a central place in anthropology and neighbouring social sciences (Kluckhohn 1951; Firth 1953; Albert and Vogt 1966; Barth 1966). But interest waned during the final decades of the twentieth century and was upheld in anthropology only by a small group of scholars centred around Louis Dumont in Paris, and Nancy Munn and Terence Turner in Chicago (Dumont 1980; Munn 1986; Turner 1979). Since the early 2000s, however, the concept has gained renewed attention and there is now emerging a self-conscious anthropology of values (Graeber 2001, 2013; Robbins 1994, 2004, 2012, 2018a, 2018b; Otto and Willerslev 2013a, 2013b; Iteanu and Moya 2015; Hickel and Haynes 2018; see Robbins and Sommerschuh 2016 for an overview). What is the relation between the anthropology of values and the anthropology of ethics? One thing that renders their relationship close is that the two fields are commonly understood as parts of a broader intellectual movement which takes issue with many other anthropologists’ almost exclusive focus on the ‘harsh sides of social life’ (Ortner 2016). Suggesting that there is more to human experience than struggles over power, domination, and suffering, those interested in values and ethics have been important voices in the development of an ‘anthropology of the good’ (Robbins 2013a). And yet, despite this similarity and other clear affinities and overlaps, the anthropologies of ethics and values are not coterminous. On the side of the study of values, many of those interested in this approach have not understood their work as being primarily concerned with ethics. Studies here have examined topics such as politics (Haynes 2018; Iteanu 2013; Robbins 2013c), economics (Graeber 2001; Haynes 2017; Sommerschuh 2022), and social organization

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(Smedal 2016), without foregrounding the ethical dimension of these phenomena. The anthropology of values, then, even as it has one foot firmly planted in the anthropology of ethics, also has a life that extends beyond the confines of this currently influential field. And on the side of the anthropology of ethics, even a quick glance at its now large body of literature quickly reveals that the study of values has only been one frame among others – and a rather minor and undeveloped one when compared to approaches derived from virtue ethics (Mahmood 2005; Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2014), ordinary language philosophy (Lambek 2010; Das 2012), and Heideggerian thought (Zigon 2007), which dominate the field. Indeed, some have even questioned whether the concept of values is of any use for those studying ethics (e.g. Das 2012: 134). Those who describe their approach as being about ‘everyday’ or ‘ordinary’ ethics, in particular, have argued that ethical life proceeds without reference to overarching conceptions of value or the good, and that, as Hayder Al-Mohammad (in Venkatesan 2015: 446) puts it, ‘not much hinges on “the GOOD” in terms of helping us get closer to the struggles for life, wellbeing, and voice, which we would like to consider as being “ethical” in some form or another’. Those interested in virtues and self-formation have been much less dismissive of values, taking them as that ‘in the light’ of which people shape themselves (Laidlaw 2017: 179). But while many ethnographies from this camp make reference to values and use the term as part of their ‘descriptive prose’ (Barth 1993: 31), the topic is seldom the focus of sustained theoretical elaboration (though see Laidlaw 2014, and from outside the virtue-ethical tradition, Keane 2016, for partial exceptions to the general neglect of value-ethical approaches). Against this background, those working on the anthropology of values who are also interested in ethics are faced with the choice between clarifying how and with what analytical gain the concept of values could be integrated into other existing frames for studying ethics, or instead pushing forward with the development of a distinctly value-theoretical approach to ethics. In this chapter we would like to contribute to the latter task. We do so because we think that approaching ethics through the frame of value is a promising way to deal with a key problematic in the anthropology of ethics. James Laidlaw has recently articulated this problematic clearly when he noted that an anthropology of ethics, if it is to be of any interest whatsoever, necessarily requires a conception of the ethical that recognizes the historical and cultural variety of forms of ethical life, and recognizes also the variety of ideals and values and conceptions of human flourishing that have animated them. And for this, it is surely necessary that we do not assume that we already know what ethics looks like, or that only values we share and forms of life we approve are ‘ethical’. (Laidlaw 2017: 180)

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In other words, what Laidlaw calls for here is a conceptualization of the ethical which can be applied cross-culturally. Laidlaw suggests that some of the extant approaches in the anthropology of ethics are less well suited to this than others. He worries, for example, that what he reads as Jarrett Zigon’s (2014) definition of ethics as being concerned with maintaining or restoring a state of existential comfort is deficient since it is built around a substantive notion of the good life, which is unlikely to be shared by people everywhere (a reading that Zigon contests (2018: 147)). Conversely, Laidlaw argues that ‘a focus on processes of reflection and self-formation’ does not ‘pre-emptively commit us exclusively to our already-favoured vision of the good life’, since ‘these processes might be deployed in diverse ways and towards . . . divergent ends’ (Laidlaw 2017: 180). There can be no doubt that Laidlaw’s conceptualization of the ethical allows for the compelling analysis of ethical life in diverse places – as is testified by numerous ethnographies inspired by the kind of approach he advocates. Yet, there have also been voices urging recognition that reflection and self-formation may not everywhere be equally important facets of ethical practice. For example, Piliavsky and Sbriccoli (2016), writing about the ‘rule of toughs’ in northern India, have pointed to a relative absence of concern with virtue and self-formation among them. What matters to those they work with, and what forms the basis of their ethical judgements, is not how morally ‘good’ an act or a person is or aspires to be but how effective they are in achieving a given end. Similarly, writing about the Tubu of northern Chad, Judith Scheele (2015: 35) notes that Tubu ‘are not given to much soul-searching or personal discipline’, and that in their case moral judgement rather concerns how well people manage to defy cultural norms in clever, original, and humorous ways. The observation that in some places reflection and ethical self-formation may be less important to ethical life than in others obviously does not invalidate an approach that focusses on these phenomena. Indeed, proponents of this approach might well claim that some measure of reflection and self-formation must also be involved where people strive for effectiveness or the clever defiance of cultural norms. But voices like those of Scheele or Piliavsky and Sbriccoli at least invite us to keep looking for further possibilities of conceptualizing the ethical in a way that comprehends as diverse a range of societies as possible. If we think that the concept of values is well suited to this end, it is because we take values to be a universal phenomenon – all people have conceptions of what is good, important, and desirable in life – while at the same time these conceptions are subject to tremendous variation in content and structure in relation to one another. Hence, if we find a way of thinking about ethics by way of values, we would likely have an approach that could be very broadly applied across cultures. What might a value-theoretical conceptualization of ethics look like? In this chapter we suggest two possible ways of answering this question.

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The first draws on a distinction between moral values, on the one hand, and other types of values, such as aesthetic, intellectual, or economic values, on the other. Offering what could be called a ‘narrow’ conception of ethics, the first approach defines ethics as having to do with (realizing or violating, questioning or affirming) moral values. The second approach offers a broader conceptualization of the ethical as having to do with people’s efforts at relating in appropriate ways to the different kinds of values, both moral and non-moral, that they recognize. Valuing things appropriately, we suggest, is always an ethical matter – and hence one way of defining the matter of ethics. In what follows, we introduce these two approaches in turn and offer examples of the sorts of ethnographic analyses that each of them makes possible.

Some Background on Values The concept of value originated in eighteenth-century economics to refer to the worth of items traded in the market economy. Late-nineteenthcentury German philosophers arguing for the importance of a more than simply scientific materialist understanding of the world expanded the term to group together all the forms of relative importance and significance human beings experience in the world. It was this expanded form of the now pluralized notion of ‘values’ that founding social theorists such as Weber (1946) and Durkheim (1974) engaged, and through their work and that of others it entered the twentieth-century social sciences (Schna¨delbach 1984: 161–91; Joas 2000: 20; Robbins 2015a). For anthropology, Clyde Kluckhohn (1951) provided an important definition of the notion of values which remains influential to this day. According to this definition, values are conceptions of the ‘desirable’. The notion of the desirable refers to the fact that while people have all kinds of desires, they also have the ability to evaluate these desires in a second-order way, and when they do, they find that only some of their desires are ones they think it is good to have and good to act on (Frankfurt 1999). It is these second-order desires – the things they want to want – that people treat as desirable and that we will, following Kluckhohn, call values. A moment’s reflection is enough to recognize the diversity of human values. While in many parts of Africa people value hierarchical relationships (Hickel and Haynes 2018), in many Western societies equality is an important value and hierarchy is regarded as an evil (Iteanu 2013). While for some Christians prosperity and worldly success is a high-level value (Maxwell 1998), others regard wealth with suspicion and instead value humility (Cherry 2011). In some places, people see it as desirable that individuals be granted as much autonomy as possible and also be allowed to keep to themselves (Stasch 2009), but elsewhere being on one’s own is a disvalue and positive value is placed on constantly engaging others in

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interaction (Freeman 2015: 161). Of course, the existence of multiple values is not only true cross-culturally. Any given culture or social group also recognizes a variety of values. Along with their multiplicity in any given social formation and across cultures, a second key point about values concerns their hierarchical arrangement. Someone may value friendship and family relations, professional success, being a good colleague, playing the piano, protecting the environment, and giving to charity – but this does not mean that all of these things are equally important to them. They may, for instance, value friendship more highly than professional success, and this may motivate them to decline a job offer which they think would endanger existing friendships. In other words, and as Robbins has laid out in detail elsewhere, values tend to be ranked ‘into hierarchies of better and worse or more and less desirable’ (2012: 120). And not only are values themselves ranked hierarchically, but so are the practices linked to their realization. For example, in the field of charity, direct handouts to the needy were for some time seen as less good than supposedly more ‘sustainable’ forms of help (Scherz 2017). This was based on the view that the value of improving other people’s lives is better realized by, as the slogan has it, teaching people to catch fish rather than giving them any. This is now changing again, and there is considerable support for the idea of unconditional cash transfers, with a number of governments in Africa and elsewhere having introduced ‘give a man a fish’ systems (Ferguson 2015). Practices linked to realizing a given value, then, are ranked vis-a`-vis one another depending on the extent to which they are thought to contribute to realizing that value. And this ranking may change over time, as the effectiveness of different practices is reassessed (Sommerschuh 2022). Thanks to the work of Louis Dumont (1980, 1986, 1994) and those coming after him, the anthropology of values today features sophisticated methods for discerning and comparing different cultures’ value hierarchies. We will not review these methods here (for summaries, see Robbins and Siikala 2014: 123–7; Rio and Smedal 2009), but will only mention one key finding that has turned out to be relevant for discussing the relation between values and ethics, and to which we shall occasionally return in the course of this chapter. This is the finding that values are sometimes related harmoniously and sometimes in a way that leads to irreconcilable conflicts between them. These two configurations may be known as ‘monism’ and ‘pluralism’, respectively (Robbins 2013b; Chang 1997; Stocker 1990). Monism can either be a matter of the ranks between values being clear such that no two values are ever considered of equal importance in the same context, or of values working together, such that realizing one value helps to realize another, usually a higher one, or at least does not conflict with the project of realizing higher values. So you can strive to be healthy and to live a long life, or to become an excellent football player and

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to gain fame, or to be charitable and to be saved by God – and in each case there is no necessary conflict or tension between these pursuits. However, if you found it equally desirable to become a famous football player and to lead a healthy, long life, you might face a value conflict, since achieving the former may require sacrificing the latter. Robbins (2007) has argued that whether values are arranged in a pluralist or monist way within a given social formation or domain influences the form that ethical life takes for its members. Where people are unsure which of two conflicting values to prioritize, as in the pluralist case, ethical life is marked by constant reflection and deliberation and a sense of having to make hard choices. Contrarily, where a social domain is pervasively structured by a single value, as in the monist case, ethical life takes a more habitual, routinized form. This is not to say that there will be no reflection at all in monist contexts: people may still reflect on the best ways of realizing the value at stake, or may reflectively evaluate their own conduct in relation to it. Overall, however, there will be less of an absolute ethical requirement for reflection and deliberation, as people are clear about which value they wish to realize, and as doing so does not come at the expense of realizing other values they care about. Affording the opportunity to attend to how different types of value relations entail different modes of ethical life is one example of the kind of contribution value theory can make to the study of ethics. It may well be that there are other types of value relations, beyond the monism/pluralism distinction, which could usefully be studied in terms of their ethics-related consequences (e.g., an ethical reading of Dumont’s (1980) notion of encompassment would be an interesting project for another occasion). Here, however, we take a different tack. Observing that axiology, or the philosophical study of value, has long distinguished not only different types of value relations but also different types of values, the next section asks what this might mean for talking about the relation between values and ethics.

Values, Moral and Non-Moral Philosophers interested in values have commonly suggested that not all values are moral ones. Susan Wolf offers one influential articulation of this point. In her well-known 1982 article ‘Moral Saints’ (collected in her 2015 book The Variety of Values), Wolf proposes a distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘non-moral’ values. Acknowledging that just how to draw the dividing line between these two kinds of values is difficult to determine (2015: 2), Wolf offers the following tentative definition of moral values: I take morality to be centrally concerned with a commitment to treating all people (or, on alternative views, all sentient or all rational

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beings) as deserving of concern and respect. Justice and benevolence are paradigm moral values; honesty, generosity, and kindness are paradigm moral virtues. In contrast, I take aesthetic and intellectual values, as well as the value to an individual of a particular relationship or person to whom she bears a personal kind of love, to be nonmoral values. (2015: 2) In Wolf’s terms, then, some of the values that we mentioned in passing in the previous section would count as moral values (e.g. charitableness or respecting other people’s right to be alone), while others would count as non-moral (e.g. musical excellence or economic success). Now, definitions of the term ‘moral’ are a notoriously difficult subject, in philosophy no less than in anthropology (cf. Wong 2014; Laidlaw 2014: 110–14; Keane 2016: 17f.). But if one wants to distinguish moral from non-moral values, as we are arguing it is useful to do from the point of view of anthropological theory and ethnographic analysis, one needs to work with some definition of moral values. We have found Wolf’s definition helpful for laying out our argument for the usefulness of this distinction in what follows. But our purpose here is not to promote this definition over others. Our goal is to indicate the usefulness of distinguishing between moral and non-moral values along whatever lines it might make sense to do so. This is our way of saying we hope readers will not get too stuck on the validity of this definition of moral values and will instead keep reading through the argument about value ethics we are using it to construct. Before mobilizing Wolf’s distinction between moral and non-moral values for ethnographic analysis, two further aspects of it are worth pointing out. First, the distinction between moral and non-moral values is descriptive, not normative; that is, philosophically or anthropologically speaking, no value judgement is attached to saying that charitableness is a moral value and economic success is not (though as we will see, they can be ranked differently vis-a`-vis one another in various cultural formations). Second, from an anthropological point of view it is clear that there is crosscultural variation in what counts as treating others ‘as deserving of concern and respect’. To take up the above example, while in some places granting others as much space to themselves as possible is understood as respectful, elsewhere this counts as neglect and respecting others takes the form of constantly engaging them in interaction. Nothing in Wolf’s account suggests that she would disagree with this point. Indeed, one could go a step further and suggest that ‘with concern and respect’ is just one culturally specific, substantive answer to the general question of how people ought to treat each other. The formal core of Wolf’s definition would then be that moral values concern proper ways of relating to other people, whereas non-moral values concern our relation to other

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good, true, or beautiful things in the world. It is with this formal reading of Wolf’s definition that we would like to work in the following. These points in place, if we think of moral values as those conceptions of the desirable that are concerned with the ways people ought to treat each other, then we have a definition that can be applied cross-culturally because, thus defined, moral values exist everywhere. This follows from our constitution as social beings which means that we can never entirely do without other people, so that other-orientated values will exist in every society, even though they may be subordinate to individualist or other values in some place or contexts (cf. Dumont 1994: 8–15; Robbins 2015b: 173f.). Putting this distinction between moral and non-moral values to use in our project of conceptualizing ethics through the lens of values, we can begin by suggesting that from this point of view, one is dealing with ethics in a narrow sense wherever people are relating positively or negatively to moral values – be that through reflection, on the basis of cultivated dispositions, or in some other way. This does not mean that this is all there is to ethics. Claiming this would go against the grain of much work in the anthropology of ethics, which has precisely sought to broaden our understanding of the ethical (cf. Laidlaw 2014: 114). Next we will therefore offer a broader conceptualization of the ethical to complement the narrower one we are using here. But we wish to stay with the narrower one for a moment because, in the context of our discussion of moral values as only one among a number of kinds of values, it opens up a line of anthropological inquiry concerning the place that moral values – and the ethical concern relating to them – occupy in the value hierarchies of different societies.1

The Position of Moral Values Wolf’s aim in distinguishing moral and non-moral values was to argue against the view (advocated on her reading by deontological and consequentialist schools of moral philosophy) that moral values should always be given precedence over non-moral ones (for a related view, see Williams 2011 [1985]). There is more to life than morality, Wolf argues, and there is no compelling reason why taking an interest in fine cuisine or practising the cello should be less worthy pursuits than giving to charity or participating in a protest march (2015). Looked at ethnographically, Wolf can be seen as pointing to a question all societies face: what place should moral 1

As a further reason why it might be useful to retain a narrower conception of ethics or morality, one may note that among philosophers interested in engaging with the anthropology of ethics there has lately been concern over too broad definitions of ‘morality’. Thus, Michael Klenk notes that the ‘ethical turn’s approach to defining morality’ is ‘very broad’, and he suggests that anthropologists’ definitions ‘may err on the side of being too inclusive, as they do not readily allow a distinction between moral considerations and other normative considerations such as prudential, epistemic, or aesthetic ones’ (Klenk 2019: 12; see also Wong 2014: 344).

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values be accorded in their value hierarchies? It turns out that answers to this question differ significantly between societies and over time. An interesting place to start is Judith Scheele’s (2015) discussion of the Tubu of northern Chad, already mentioned earlier. This is a case in which non-moral values are at the top of a people’s value hierarchy. The Tubu have long been described in terms of disorder, total ruthlessness, extreme individualism, and a general disrespect for social norms. Such descriptions were advanced by early travellers and the French colonial authorities. But they have also been endorsed in academic literature; indeed, Tubu themselves proudly identify as immoral (33–5). And far from being a mere discourse, Scheele makes clear that life in the Tubu town of Faya, where she carried out her research, in fact has a very anarchic and disordered feel – this is a place where, to offer but a few examples, kin steal from each other, divorce is common, 99 per cent of taxes go unpaid, and children ‘dig holes in the street at night, so that unwary drivers crash into them in the morning – and all this “under their parents’ complicit eye”’ (39). While both colonial authorities and earlier anthropologists attributed Tubu ‘anarchy’ to the absence of strong political structures, Scheele makes clear that at least today this can hardly be the main explanation, since the Chadian government is now very present in the town of Faya. Against this background, she suggests that Tubu anarchy is better understood as being a realization of high-ranked Tubu values; that is, as something Tubu find good and desirable, rather than it being simply an effect of particular material or political conditions. According to Scheele, the two central Tubu values are disorder and autonomy (or anarchy) (35). Crucially for the purpose of our discussion, Scheele’s account reveals that, next to these non-moral values Tubu also recognize moral values, such as showing hospitality to guests, not stealing by stealth, or, for women, modesty and subservience to husbands. The existence of such moral values is revealed, among other ways, by the fact that when discussing local events Tubu often make judgements based on these values. So, of a man who breaks through the roof of his sister’s house to steal from her it is said that ‘this is not the way a brother ought to behave’ (38). With regard to a woman given to drink and frequently changing ‘boyfriends’, people say that a woman drinking publicly is ‘very bad’ (40). Similarly, concerning a wife whose refusal to cook means that her husband needs to eat at a restaurant every day, people agree that her conduct is not right and not to be emulated (39). Yet even as people make such moral evaluations, they are not what really matters locally. This is evidenced by the fact that when commenting on a particular case, people often begin in moral terms but then quickly move on to highlighting the hilarious or creative sides of a certain offence, or how daringly or cleverly someone acted. This reveals an underlying value hierarchy in which moral values are subordinated to non-moral values, and where actions are primarily evaluated in terms of

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how successfully they realize the value of disorder or how strongly they manage to express a person’s capacity to defy cultural norms. At the opposite extreme of the scale we find cases where moral values are paramount, pushing for the subordination of all other values. Here, we may think of the piety movements that have been described so vividly in recent contributions to the anthropology of ethics. Thus, the women studied by Saba Mahmood (2005) strive to become, in Wolf’s (2015) terms, ‘moral saints’, trying as frequently as possible to embody moral virtues of modesty, humility, chastity, charity, and so forth. In these movements, all other possible values, such as worldly enjoyments, are denigrated and there is a veritable mortification of the flesh. We may also think of Omri Elisha’s (2011) work on moral ambition among US Evangelicals. He describes how some people he worked with felt that their churches should engage in greater social outreach, which they saw as an antidote to consumerism and an exclusive focus on the values of work and family. These people were making reference to Christian moral values of unconditional benevolence, helping the poor, and so on. In these cases moral values subordinate other values. The position of moral vis-a`-vis other values is not fixed but can change over time. Shifting relations between moral and aesthetic values offer a good example. Writing on this topic, Max Weber (1946: 341–3) sketched a shift from earlier times when art was intimately connected with and subservient to religious morality, to the ‘modern’ situation where moral and aesthetic values oppose each other. The increasing rationalization of life, Weber suggests, made of art ‘a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right’ (1946: 342). In this situation, artists and those who appreciate art perceive ‘the ethical norm as such . . . as a coercion of their genuine creativeness and innermost selves’ (1946: 342) – a perception which, of course, has been given rich expression in the lives and works of many artists. Indeed, aesthetic values can not only become independent of and draw level with moral ones. Weber also points to the possibility that they can push for the subordination of moral values: the refusal of modern men to assume responsibility for moral judgments tends to transform judgments of moral intent into judgments of taste (‘in poor taste’ instead of ‘reprehensible’). The inaccessibility of appeal from esthetic judgments excludes discussion. This shift from the moral to the esthetic evaluation of conduct is a common characteristic of intellectualist epochs; it results partly from subjectivist needs and partly from the fear of appearing narrow-minded in a traditionalist and Philistine way. (1946: 342) If Weber here suggests the rise of aesthetic values over moral ones, recent years have been marked by a move in the opposite direction.

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We are all familiar with current debates concerning the extent to which an artist’s moral character and/or the moral content of their art ought to be taken into account when assessing and relating to their work. Although the debate is multivocal, there seems to be a strong current moving away from earlier generations’ assumptions about the moral impunity of art and the legitimacy of being a bad person if one is a great artist – or, indeed, the moral obligation for bad people to become great artists in order to compensate humanity for the evil they would do, as Hemingway’s third wife, Martha Gellhorn, suggested (cf. Dederer 2017 and Williams 1981: ch. 2, on Gauguin). If Wolf wrote several years ago that what matters in the assessment of a novel is not the moral message it might contain but its aesthetic quality (2015: 2), there now appears to be a rising sense that the more important question is whether the artist, the means of production, the subject, the message, or the possible consequences on the audience of a work of art are morally reproachable or not (see also Stecker 2005: 139–44). What could be described as an increasing moralization of the aesthetic sphere can also be observed in other domains of life, for instance in that of consumption. Similarly, as Julian Bourg (2007) suggests for the case of France (and as also seems to apply for other Western societies), the past few decades have been marked by a rise of ‘ethics’ and a decline of ‘politics’, meaning that collective issues that would have formerly been addressed on a structural level are now framed as matters of – and matters to be dealt with through – individual morality. In this section we have argued that not all values are moral values, and we have noted that the place that moral values occupy in the value hierarchies of different societies varies. In some places moral values occupy a high position and shape people’s activities extensively and in various domains of life (see also Laidlaw 2002: 319). Elsewhere, moral considerations play a more minor role and are easily supplanted by other considerations and pursuits. This finding opens up space for further ethnographic inquiry into the position moral values occupy in different value hierarchies and how and for what reasons their relative positions change over time.

A Broader View: The Ethics of Valuing Things Appropriately In this section we argue that even as not all values are moral values, valuing any kind of thing or state of affairs appropriately, such that one does not promote a lower-valued thing or state of affairs above a more highly valued one in contexts where both are relevant, is always an ethical matter – irrespective of the type of values involved. This claim opens on to a broader conceptualization of the ethical than we deployed earlier. It suggests that we are dealing with ethical matters not only when people

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are relating to moral values but also whenever they are relating to any sort of value. In this section we will first lay out what motivates this conceptualization of the ethical and what exactly is meant by it, and then we will offer examples of some of the kinds of ethnographic analyses that can be carried out on its basis.

Philosophical Foundations From its inception, the anthropology of ethics has been in close dialogue with moral philosophy. While some strands of moral philosophy, notably deontological and consequentialist approaches, have been found less congenial to the anthropological project, others, such as virtue ethics, have offered rich inspiration for ethnographic research and theoretical analysis (cf. Laidlaw 2014: 48). One branch of moral philosophy that has hardly been considered so far, however, is that of ‘value ethics’. If we wish to devise a value-centred approach to ethics, this is a rich theoretical seam to mine. In the twentieth century, the most prominent exponent of a value-ethical approach was the phenomenologist Max Scheler. Scheler conceived his theory primarily as a rejection of Kantianism and of deontological approaches more generally, while sharing with Kant the rejection of utilitarianism (Joas 2000: 92). Contra such ‘formal’ and ‘imperativistic’ ethics – that is, ethics concerned with rationally deriving obligations from abstract principles – Scheler posited a ‘material value-ethics’ (Scheler 1973; see also Spader 2002; Joas 2000: ch. 6), in which our emotional responses to what we perceive as good and bad play a central role. At the heart of Scheler’s approach are two assumptions. One concerns human perception and suggests that to perceive things is to perceive them as having a specific value (Scheler (1973: 197) speaks of ‘value-ception’). To perceive a tree or a painting, for instance, is not simply to see something green or of such and such composition – but is to see something beautiful or ugly. ‘We “see” the beauty of a painting just as we “see” its colors. The grasping of value is our most original and primordial relation to the world’ (Davis and Steinbock 2019). And not only do we grasp value; we also grasp rankings between values, such that some things appear to us as more beautiful or noble or good than others. Scheler’s second assumption is that values and the rank ordering among them are objective phenomena. For instance, he suggests that values associated with the holy objectively rank above values associated with utility or pleasure (Davis and Steinbock 2019). Taken together, these two assumptions yield an approach to ethics in which the perception of values and the ranking between them is the source of ethical obligation: ‘Claiming that there is an objective order of values . . . necessarily entails that the higher values “ought” to be preferred to the lower. We ought to act in such a manner that promotes the higher or

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positive values’ (Davis and Steinbock 2019). Conversely, it would be ethically wrong to perceive a rank ordering between two values and to nonetheless give precedence to the lower-ranking one – to eat ice cream rather than to care for one’s health is to wrongly promote values of pleasure over those of what Scheler calls ‘vitality’; to destroy an historical building to build a shopping mall is to wrongly promote utility or pecuniary values over cultural ones. In Scheler, then, we find a conception of the ethical as being a matter of valuing things appropriately (Blosser 1987). To be sure, there are aspects of Scheler’s approach which anthropologists will find hard to digest, notably his conception of an objective ordering of value. (Although it should be noted that Scheler openly acknowledges cultural diversity, conceiving of differences in the value systems of different societies as based on the different vantage points from which they view the really existing set of ranked objective values (Scheler 1973; Joas 2000: 95).)2 What matters for our concerns in this chapter, however, is the perspective on ethical life that Scheler’s ideas open up and the ways they can be transformed into an ethnographic research programme. With Scheler, one would study ethics by looking at people’s evaluative experiences and the acts that follow from these: one would ask which values people recognize and how they rank these; one would study their attempts to give due weight to different values depending on their rank; and one would consider how people judge themselves and others in terms of their success or failure at valuing things appropriately. Importantly, such a view does not assume that people already know what the correct value hierarchy looks like and what valuing things appropriately would mean in any given case. While in some places or in some domains of social life this may well be the case – with valuing things appropriately taking the form of routine action based on ‘common sense’ – there are also situations in which people are engaged in attempts to figure out, personally or collectively, what the correct value hierarchy is or what it would mean to value a given thing appropriately (cf. Robbins 2007). Before offering examples of how to analyse ethnography from a valueethics perspective, it is helpful to consider an additional point made by a second philosopher who works in this tradition: Elizabeth Anderson.3 Valuing things appropriately, Anderson suggests, is not only a matter of giving proper weight to differently ranked values – that is, it is not only about how much one values something – but also about how one values it 2

As we read Scheler (1973) on this point, his claim is that regardless of what part of the value hierarchy a given culture leads people to attend to, morality will always rest on valuing the things one is led to understand as valuable in appropriate ways, which is to say in accord with their rank relative to other valued things. In this sense, the task of ethical life is similar everywhere, though Scheler does leave room to suggest that some cultures lead people to perceive higher reaches of the objective value hierarchy than are allowed by others, a project to which we do not subscribe.

3

Although not a phenomenologist, Anderson (1993: 5), like Scheler and his teacher Husserl, is influenced by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Franz Brentano (whose most important book on values is Brentano (1969)).

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(1993: xiii); it is about the right ‘mode of valuation’ (1993: 6). Taking issue with economistic theories that assume that pleasure or desire is the only (relevant) form in which people respond to things they value, Anderson points out that there are actually multiple ways of valuing something – such as love, admiration, respect, awe, affection, or use. Based on this observation, she advances the normative claim that different things ought to be valued differently. Specifically, she is concerned with the question of the ethical limits of market valuation, arguing that the environment or women’s reproductive powers are not properly valued according to a market logic, but demand to be valued differently (xiii). There is no need here to examine in detail how Anderson justifies her claim that different things need to be valued differently and that doing so is morally significant. The important thing to note is that she understands her theory not as a deductive one but as being grounded in how real people actually value things. She opposes philosophers who think that to ‘reach sound ethical judgments, we . . . require an entirely new mode of ethical justification, independent of the historical and social contingencies in which common-sense evaluative reasoning is mired’ (13). Instead, she seeks to ‘vindicate [the] pluralism of ordinary evaluative thought and to develop some of its practical and theoretical implications’ (1). This interest in diversity makes Anderson an apt dialogue partner for anthropologists. Turned into a programme for ethnographic research, her theory would invite us to study the different modes of valuation that matter for a given group of people, and their ideas about the things to which each of these different modes is properly applied. Similarly, Anderson makes clear that valuing things appropriately is never merely a matter of perception but always a matter of action, of giving expression to and thus communicating one’s regard for the object’s importance (1993: 11). This means that studying what are locally deemed appropriate ways of expressing different modes of valuation is another avenue for ethnographic research. Finally, echoing a point already made in our discussion of Scheler, it is important to note that Anderson does not assume that it is always clear to people what it would mean to value something appropriately. Rather, ‘[t]he respects in which anything is properly valued, and the ways and circumstances in which it makes sense to value it, remain problems’ (15); and one can therefore study how ‘people interpret and justify their valuations by exchanging reasons for them with the aim of reaching a common point of view from which others can achieve and reflectively endorse one another’s valuations’ (3).4

4

This perspective also provides a good way for studying ethical change. So, for example, among Aari people in southern Ethiopia, one important mode of valuation has traditionally been that of ‘fear’ (bashi), with a fearful attitude being shown towards particular places, things, and hierarchically superior people. In the course of conversion to Christianity, the importance of fear as a way of valuing things has been much restricted, being now largely limited to God. Conversely, ‘love’ (solma) has become a more important mode of valuation (Sommerschuh 2019: 71–81).

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Drawing on Scheler and Anderson, we have done two things: we have argued that it is possible to define the ethical in terms of people’s efforts to value things appropriately; and we have pointed to ways in which this perspective might be operationalized (namely, by looking both at people’s attempts to figure out value hierarchies and their attempts to figure out the right modes of valuation for different things). In the following section we go on to offer examples of the sorts of ethnographic analysis that could be carried out on this basis.

Ethnographic Examples Paul Bohannan’s (1955, 1959) classic work on spheres of exchange among the Tiv of central Nigeria provides an excellent example of how valuing things appropriately is, in people’s own perception, an ethical matter. Bohannan’s discussion picks up from the observation that Tiv ideology distinguishes three categories of items of exchange (1955: 60–2). The first category includes locally produced foodstuffs, household wares, and small-stock; the second one includes cattle, brass rods, white cotton cloth, and slaves; the third consists of rights over people (other than slaves), especially wives and children. Each of these categories of exchangeable items is associated with particular values, which Bohannan glosses as ‘subsistence’, ‘prestige’, and ‘kinship’. And these values and their associated goods, in turn, are ranked hierarchically, such that prestige ranks above subsistence and kinship ranks above prestige. Bohannan’s key observation is that while Tiv both exchange goods for other goods in the same category and exchange goods from one category for goods from another category, these two types of exchanges (Bohannan speaks of ‘conveyance’ and ‘conversion’) have different ‘moral’ (or, as we would say, ‘ethical’) qualities. While exchanges within a category are ‘morally neutral’ and ‘excite no moral judgment’, exchanges between categories ‘do excite a moral reaction’ (1959: 496). Bohannan offers a number of examples. A man who has accumulated a lot of wealth in the first category (say, grain) but fails to convert this into prestige goods (say, cattle) is met with reprobation and considered to have a deficient character (1959: 498). Conversely, someone who consistently manages to achieve upward conversions, transforming subsistence wealth into prestige goods, and then using prestige goods to obtain dependents is praised and highly respected. Third, someone being required to accept a downward conversion (for instance, giving away a brass rod to obtain food) will justify this act by making reference to higher-level values, like helping kinsmen (1959: 496), so as to avoid ethical critique. Bohannan’s case resonates with Scheler’s value ethics: Tiv perceive their world as a hierarchically structured universe, in which kinship is ranked

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higher than prestige and prestige is ranked higher than subsistence; and this rank ordering, in turn, is perceived to come with an ethical command to give precedence to a higher-ranking value whenever possible (1955: 64). In light of the definition provided in the previous discussion of the diversity of values, the values at stake here are non-moral values. But giving them their due weight is experienced as ethically significant, such that, for instance, transforming agricultural produce into cattle or brass rods is not simply an ‘economic’ act but an ethical one (see Munn 1986 for similar ideas in Gawa about the desirable nature of upward conversions of foodstuff into items that bring fame). If the Tiv case vindicates Scheler’s notion that the perception of value hierarchies entails an ethical ‘ought’, a second piece of West African ethnography helps support Anderson’s point that ethical concern attaches not only to giving different values their due weight but also to adopting the right ‘mode of valuation’ towards a given value. This is Girish Daswani’s (2016) recent work on how Pentecostal prophets and pastors in Accra, Ghana relate to the value of prosperity (see also Lauterbach 2017). Prosperity (yeadea) is a key value for Pentecostals in Accra. To be prosperous means both to accumulate financial riches and to ‘live well’, which includes having good health and a marriage and children. Prosperity in our terms, then, is a non-moral value. However, as Daswani notes, the way in which prophets relate to the value of prosperity is subject to intense ethical evaluation. One place where this becomes evident is in a distinction lay Pentecostals in Accra draw between the ‘rich’ (sikani) and the ‘wealthy’ (ahoyeni). One of Daswani’s interlocutors, a man called Prince, spells out the difference: Prince said that the sikani problematically derive personal satisfaction and enjoyment from public recognition and fame . . . Ahoyeni, on the other hand, are usually kind and charitable people who do not seek the public spotlight . . .. Truly wealthy people do not see themselves as the ‘owners’ of wealth, but rather as its ‘custodians’. (2016: 109) Daswani leaves no doubt that what is at issue here is not the value of wealth per se. Contrary to other Christians who do not recognize wealth as an end in itself but see it as being without intrinsic value or even as negatively valued, these Pentecostals do see prosperity as an unmitigated good. What is at issue for them is not the question whether prosperity is desirable. Instead, the issue here is that of valuing wealth appropriately; that is, of relating to this value in the right way. Now, to some extent, this is a matter of how much weight to give to this value in relation to other values. As becomes clear from Daswani’s analysis, parts of the critique that lay Pentecostals level against ‘rich’ pastors is that they fail to redistribute wealth among their followers in order thereby to realize the further value of care or patronage. But also subject to evaluation is the attitude

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with which pastors relate to the fact of being wealthy, and how they give expression to this attitude. As Prince puts it, one should not derive enjoyment from one’s wealth and the prestige that it affords. Or, in Anderson’s terms, the right mode of valuation here is not ‘pleasure’. Rather, to count as ethically good, the prosperous person needs to relate to their wealth with humility and a sense of detachment. Thus, even though the value at stake is not a moral value, one’s relation to it is ethically charged. A similar point can be made by returning to Scheele’s (2015) account of the Tubu. After noting how conformity to moral values was not the key concern of Tubu, and how other values like disorder and autonomy were more important, and how easily and frequently Tubu transgress social norms, Scheele moves on to suggest that this does not mean that there are no moral [or in our terms ‘ethical’] judgments. People mostly agree on what it means to be a good person . . . one ought to be strong, assertive, independent, fearless, versatile, have many social connections, be rich, generous, clever . . .. One ought to be different and memorable, and one way of doing this is precisely to break rather than follow any social ‘rule’ that one might abstract from the general gossip. (2015: 40) Crucially, however, there is also a wrong way of breaking rules; and this is met with laughter and leads to shame. Scheele offers as an example the case of a young, relatively inconspicuous man, who picked a fight with an exsoldier whom he used to hang out with. The young man was wounded and had to be taken to hospital. While there initially was a sense that he had acted in a brave and praise-worthy manner, local commentators (including his kin) soon rather emphasized his stupidity in hanging out with the wrong people and laughed about him. As Scheele comments, ‘Where laughter is the strongest social sanction, this means that people tread a thin line: outrageous actions might spark admiration, but they might also be simply defined as ludicrous . . . it is not given to everybody to offend social etiquette in just the right way, fitting in with the local sense of aesthetics’ (2015: 40). As a consequence, ‘[m]uch effort goes into being “anarchic”, in just the right way’ (2015: 34). In other words, what is ethically at stake here is relating to the values of disorder and autonomy in the right way. There is ethical judgement, but it concerns not whether people realize or violate moral values but whether they give proper expression to non-moral ones.

Conclusion Our aim in this chapter has been to sketch some aspects of what a valuetheoretical approach to the study of ethics might look like. Such an approach could potentially stand side by side with other approaches,

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such as the one derived from conversations with virtue ethics, the work of the late Foucault, ordinary language philosophy, or Heidegger. In sketching a values approach to the study of ethics, we have worked with an understanding of values as cultural conceptions of the good. We have explained how such values structure cultures and provide people with a sense of what is worth striving towards. Within such a framework, the ethical can be located in a two-fold way. In what we have called the ‘narrow’ conception, ethics is to do with moral values. For the purposes of this chapter, we have defined those values as ‘moral’ which concern proper ways of relating to other people. Such values include, for example, respect, compassion, justice, kindness, and care. Which particular moral values are recognized and emphasized differs across cultures and can thus be studied comparatively; their common denominator is that they all concern the right ways of relating to others. At the same time, moral values in general can be ranked as more or less important in relation to nonmoral values, and variation in such ranking and its effect on social life is another important topic of cross-cultural investigation. Secondly, offering a broader conception of the ethical, we have suggested that there is an ethical dimension to any kind of values-orientated action. We have explained that valuing things appropriately – both in taking the right evaluative stance towards specific goods and giving the right weight to different values by recognizing the correct hierarchy between them – is a matter of ethical evaluation. Employed on their own or in combination, the narrow and the broad conception of ethics afford a genuine valuetheoretical approach to studying human efforts at living in light of the good. We hope that the value-theoretical approach to the anthropology of ethics that we have begun to lay out here might be appealing on its own terms on the basis of the kinds of ethnographic analyses it affords. At the same time, we would like to close by noting that the two-fold way in which we have considered the relations of values and ethics provides for a novel approach to one of the trickier issues in the contemporary anthropology of ethics. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the ethical is an aspect of all social action (e.g. Lambek 2010). On the other, there are those who in various ways think that some situations and actions are ethically or morally marked in ways that set them off from others, such that at the very least there is more than one kind of experience that falls within the ambit of the anthropology of ethics (e.g. in different ways, Robbins 2007; Zigon 2007). The presently unsettled state of the anthropology of ethics around this matter suggests that perhaps both capture some element of reality. Our conceptualization of a value-centred anthropology of ethics supports this kind of claim. It does so by suggesting both that there are specifically moral values, the engagement of which leads to a kind of ethical experience that is different from that which attends the engagement with nonmoral values, and that engagements with any kinds of values raise

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omnipresent ethical issues about valuing them appropriately and in the right way. By allowing for the recognition of these two facets of ethical experience – one constant, the other marked – a value-centric anthropology of ethics is able to relate to many of the diverse developments that characterize the anthropology of ethics today.

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Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils (eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 388–433. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2): 311–32. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. New Departures in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017. ‘Fault Lines in the Anthropology of Ethics’, in Cheryl Mattingly (ed.), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. Wyse Series in Social Anthropology 5. New York: Berghahn Books: 174–93. Lambek, Michael. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. 1st ed. New York: Fordham University Press: 1–36. Lauterbach, Karen. 2017. Christianity, Wealth, and Spiritual Power in Ghana. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maxwell, David. 1998. ‘“Delivered from the Spirit of Poverty?”: Pentecostalism, Prosperity and Modernity in Zimbabwe’. Journal of Religion in Africa, 28(3): 350–73. Munn, Nancy D. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures 1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. ‘Dark Anthropology and Its Others’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1): 47–73. Otto, Ton and Rane Willerslev. 2013a. ‘Introduction: “Value as Theory” – Comparison, Cultural Critique, and Guerrilla Ethnographic Theory’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(1): 1–20. 2013b. ‘Prologue: Value as Theory – Value, Action, and Critique’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(2): 1–10. Piliavsky, Anastasia and Tommaso Sbriccoli. 2016. ‘The Ethics of Efficacy in North India’s Goonda Raj (Rule of Toughs)’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22(2): 373–91. Rio, Knut M. and Olaf H. Smedal, eds. 2009. Hierarchy: Persistence and Transformation in Social Formations. New York: Berghahn Books. Robbins, Joel. 1994. ‘Equality as a Value: Ideology in Dumont, Melanesia and the West’. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 36: 21–70. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity 4. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72(3): 293–314.

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2012. ‘Cultural Values’, in Didier Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Blackwell Companions to Anthropology 20. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell: 117–32. 2013a. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3): 447–62. 2013b. ‘Monism, Pluralism, and the Structure of Value Relations: A Dumontian Contribution to the Contemporary Study of Value’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(1): 99–115. 2013c. ‘Why Is There No Political Theology among the Urapmin? On Diarchy, Sects As Big as Society, and the Diversity of Pentecostal Politics’, in Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall (eds.), Christian Politics in Oceania. ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology 2. New York: Berghahn Books: 199–210. 2015a. ‘On Happiness, Values, and Time: The Long and the Short of It’. hau, 5(3): 215–33. 2015b. ‘Dumont’s Hierarchical Dynamism: Christianity and Individualism Revisited’. hau, 5(1): 173. 2018a. ‘Anthropology between Europe and the Pacific: Values and the Prospects for a Relationship beyond Relativism’. Pacific Studies, 41(1): 1–20. 2018b. ‘Where in the World Are Values?’ in James Laidlaw, Barbara Bodenhorn, and Martin Holbraad (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject: Freedom, Creativity, and Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 174–92. Robbins, Joel and Jukka Siikala. 2014. ‘Hierarchy and Hybridity: Toward a Dumontian Approach to Contemporary Cultural Change’. Anthropological Theory, 14(2): 121–32. Robbins, Joel and Julian Sommerschuh. 2016. ‘Values’, in Felix Stein, Sian Lazar, Matei Candea, Hildegard Diemberger, Joel Robbins, Andrew Sanchez, and Rupert Stasch (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://doi.org/10.29164/16values. Scheele, Judith. 2015. ‘The Values of “Anarchy”: Moral Autonomy among Tubu-Speakers in Northern Chad’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(1): 32–48. Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scherz, China. 2017. ‘Persistent Forms: Catholic Charity Homes and the Limits of Neoliberal Morality’, in Daromir Rudnyckyj and Filippo Osella (eds.), Religion and the Morality of the Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 177–95. Schna¨delbach, Herbert. 1984. German Philosophy, 1831–1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Smedal, Olaf. H. 2016. ‘Demotion as Value: Rank Infraction among the Ngadha in Flores, Indonesia’. Social Analysis, 60(4): 114–33. Sommerschuh, Julian. 2019. Whatever Happened to Respect? Values and Change in a Southwest Ethiopian (Aari) Community. Doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge. 2022. ‘From Feasting to Accumulation: Modes of Value Realisation and Radical Cultural Change in Southern Ethiopia’. Ethnos, 87(5): 893–913. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1828971. Spader, Peter H. 2002. Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise. New York: Fordham University Press. Stasch, Rupert. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stecker, Robert. 2005. ‘The Interaction of Ethical and Aesthetic Value’. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 45(2): 138–50. Stocker, Michael. 1990. Plural and Conflicting Values. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Turner, Terence S. 1979. ‘The Geˆ and Bororo Societies as Dialectical Systems: A General Model’, in David Maybury-Lewis (ed.), Dialectical Societies. Harvard Studies in Cultural Anthropology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 147–78. Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2015. ‘There Is No Such Thing As the Good: The 2013 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’. Critique of Anthropology, 35(4): 430–80. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1981. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011 [1985]. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Wolf, Susan. 1982. ‘Moral Saints’. Journal of Philosophy, 79(8): 419–39. 2015. The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wong, David B. 2014. ‘Integrating Philosophy with Anthropology in an Approach to Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 14(3): 336–55. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’. Anthropological Theory, 7(2): 131–50. 2014. ‘An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20(4): 746–64. 2018. Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. 1st ed. New York: Fordham University Press.

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20 Rules Morgan Clarke

Moses: Blasphemers! Idolaters! For this you shall drink bitter waters! God has set before you this day his laws of life and good, and death and evil. Those who will not live by the law . . . shall die by the law!! [Throws the Ten Commandment tablets at the Golden Calf ] The Ten Commandments (1956), dir. Cecil B. DeMille

The Ten Commandments represent an enduringly powerful image of the essence of ethics and morality in the post-Christian West and far beyond (even if many might struggle to name the commandments themselves). Rules more generally are a ubiquitous normative form across the human experience, as the Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us all. Rules of social distancing have been a truly global phenomenon. Nevertheless, an account of morality and ethics based on rules alone would be inadequate, for any place or time, as the other chapters of the present volume demonstrate (see, e.g., Chapter 9 by Keane and Lempert, Chapter 16 by Cook, Chapter 17 by Evans, Chapter 18 by Victor and Lambek, Chapter 19 by Sommerschuh and Robbins, and Chapter 21 by Faubion). That consideration has led many of those anthropologists interested in ethics and morality to look elsewhere, in part to redress what they perceiv as a myopic focus on rules in the past. As a result, however, the interest and significance of moral and ethical rules have now perhaps been underplayed (see too Laidlaw 2017). This relative lack of interest in rules does admittedly fit with what I perceive as a wider distaste for ruletalk across current anthropology. But it seems unsustainable for a serious consideration of the full range of human moral projects and techniques. ‘Ruliness’ (Clarke 2015) is a striking feature of many prominent ethical traditions, and one that it would be perverse, as much as unhelpful, to ignore. In this chapter, I thus make the case for a serious reconsideration of rules within the anthropology of ethics and morality and present some suggestions for how it might be conducted.1 I begin by addressing some of the reasons 1

I am of course not the only person to have been thinking recently about rules within anthropology. More citations follow, but at the outset I could mention Sidnell (2003) and Dresch and Scheele (2015b).

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why anthropologists might be sceptical as to giving rules such attention. Some relate to general questions of social order. Is the language of rules a helpful way of describing the social generally? Here I point to the need to distinguish between different sorts of rules and the various levels of explanation and understanding at which they might be invoked. Some anthropological concerns over rule-talk might well be valid, but more at the level of the analysis of the implicit norms of sociality than at that of explicit moral and ethical prescriptions and prohibitions, to which the anthropology of ethics and morality can hardly avoid attending. With regard to the latter, however, other themes, not least the cultivation of virtue, have taken priority. In this, anthropologists have in part been following those philosophers who have thought modern Western approaches to morality centring on law-like morality reductive and historically peculiar (contra, e.g., Keane 2015: 134). But I suspect that at root, whether they think of rules as peculiar or otherwise, anthropologists ultimately find them uninteresting – one-dimensional, and thus straightforward to understand and unexciting to theorize. The rest of the chapter is thus devoted to an attempt to show the contrary, first through a brief presentation of some of my own research on Muslim practice of the everyday religious rules of sharia (often translated, somewhat misleadingly, as ‘Islamic law’). Rule-use here is a complex phenomenon. In particular, rules are not necessarily ‘rigid’ or ‘strict’, as is a common stereotype, although they can certainly be interpreted in such ways. In trying to describe these complexities, I have found anthropology’s theoretical vocabulary wanting. There is a need for more sophisticated conceptual resources than those currently available to anthropologists interested in such matters. The necessary constraints of a book chapter, as well as the emergent nature of the field, entail that the suggestions I present here will have to be indicative rather than definitive. But I describe some of the ways in which I have drawn inspiration from philosophy, law, and theology to shape my own ethnographic approach to moral rules. Consideration of theology also allows me to tease out what I see as one of the underlying sources of anthropological antinomianism (to borrow a theological term) or rule-scepticism (a jurisprudential one). Like so many other aspects of our theoretical vocabulary, our attitude to rules arguably has roots in Christian thought, and in particular the theological debates of the Reformation. That points me finally to the world-historical dimensions of the study of ‘ruly ethics’ and the diversity of cultural attitudes to rules, eminently anthropological themes.

Rules and the Social Anthropologists have long had something of an ambivalent attitude towards talk of rules. While for Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Culture . . . obviously consists of a set of rules of behavior’ (1957 [1948]: 99), for Malinowski (1978 [1926]: 127), ‘The

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true problem is not to study how human life submits to rules – it simply does not.’2 Where Le´vi-Strauss (1969 [1949]: 8) could claim that, ‘Wherever there are rules we know for certain that the cultural stage has been reached’, Bourdieu (1977: 22) poured scorn on the ‘fallacies of the rule’ as a mode of representation of the social. In broad terms, Bourdieu’s ‘practice theory’ has become the dominant approach within the discipline. On the one hand, it seems self-evident to anthropologists today that a representation of culture just in terms of ‘a set of rules of behaviour’ would be inadequate. At the very least, one wants to know what people do with the rules: the ways in which they break them, ignore them, or renegotiate them. No more do we want to see (if we ever did) ‘the anthropologist’s dummy who slavishly follows custom and automatically obeys every regulation’ (Malinowski 1978: 30). On the other hand, there is a more profound scepticism as to rules that underpins Bourdieu’s position, and that I suspect seems congenial to many anthropologists. That is, how plausible is it to think of human action generally as a matter of ‘following a rule’ at all? Here Bourdieu (1977: 29) rightly pointed to the ambiguity of the ways in which the idea of rules might be invoked – among other things, to express a statistical regularity (‘as a rule . . .’), or an explicitly stated and consciously acknowledged normative requirement, or an implicit, even unconsciously followed social norm. Although Bourdieu’s immediate target was Le´viStrauss’s structuralism, which he alleges collapses these three different dimensions, a similar criticism could be made of Radcliffe-Brown, who showed little interest in distinguishing between statistical and normative (or, otherwise put, descriptive and prescriptive) regularities (Kuper 1977: 4). Considerable confusion resulted in the theoretically prestigious field of kinship studies, as has been widely discussed (see, e.g., Schneider 1965; Good 1981). Bourdieu’s attack centres on the way in which anthropologists ‘objectify’ culture and society in the form of rules. Although, again, the point is addressed at structuralism, it is worth remembering that even Malinowski (1978 [1922]: 11–12), who stands now as exemplary ethnographer and arch rule-sceptic, trumpeted this as the very essence of ethnographic investigation in his most famous work: ‘The Ethnographer has in the field . . . the duty before him [sic] of drawing up all the rules and regularities of tribal life.’ ‘But’, he continues, ‘these things, though crystallised and set, are nowhere formulated. There is no written or explicitly expressed code of laws, and their whole tribal tradition, the whole structure of their society, are embodied in the most elusive of all materials; the human being.’ And so, important to note, the rules whose elucidation Malinowski sees here as a crucial part of the ethnographic endeavour are representations of the 2

The quotation continues, ‘The real problem, is how rules become adapted to life.’ For later advocacy of the RadcliffeBrown position, see Fortes (1983).

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implicit norms of social life rather than faithfully recorded explicit rules. It is the anthropologist’s job to grasp these implicit rules and then render them explicit, along with the underlying logic that supposedly relates them. Ethnographic fashions change, and the duty to draw up ‘all the [implicit] rules and regularities’ of social life sounds distinctly old-fashioned, although the trope persists at a more popular level – see, for instance, Kate Fox’s (2004) best-selling account of the ‘hidden rules of English behaviour’, Watching the English. But Bourdieu really hammers on such objectification as inadequate for a satisfying account of the complexities of social interaction and the practical mastery of it that we seemingly effortlessly display. This point we can take. And yet Bourdieu goes further in implying we would thus better leave talk of rules out of our account altogether, at least in the sort of contexts that Malinowski is referring to (‘homogeneous societies’ in Bourdieu’s terms), where explicit rules are rare – and where encountered are ‘never more than a second-best intended to make good the occasional misfirings of the collective enterprise of inculcation’ (1977: 17). In points that have been widely taken up as far more generally applicable, Bourdieu argues that we should thus replace the notion of rule with that of strategy (surely incoherently – strategies assume ‘the rules of the game’ rather than substitute for them), and see that the driving force of action is not a set of rules at all but various sorts of practical ‘sense’ or ‘disposition’, which he analytically privileges under the label of ‘habitus’ (1977: 9, 15, 17; contra, e.g., Just 2005 and, without the focus on Bourdieu, Edgerton 1985). It seems important to note here that, while it is one thing to question anthropologists’ use of rules as a way of describing practices not explicitly framed in such terms, it is surely quite another to dismiss people’s own talk of rules. And we might note too that to collapse the use of explicit rules into a notionally lumpen set of attempts at ‘inculcation’ of practical mastery is far too crude, a theme to which I will return. Bourdieu’s focus on the unreflective practical mastery of social life that most humans display has also been the focus of criticism within, and indeed an important motivation for, recent anthropological work on ethics. Ethical life is on the contrary very often a matter of dilemma, self-questioning, and conscious aspiration (see, e.g., Lambek 2000; Mahmood 2005; Zigon 2007; Laidlaw 2014). But unreflective action, as itself being saturated with ethical assumptions, has not thereby been forgotten, influentially framed by some as ‘ordinary ethics’, in part in reference to the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ inspired by the later work of Wittgenstein (cf. Clarke 2014). While this latter body of anthropological work clearly seeks something other than Bourdieu’s account, it does at points echo his dissatisfaction with rule-talk (e.g. Lambek 2010a: 2, 2010b: 55; Das 2010: 377, 2012: 140). Wittgenstein’s (1958) remarks on rules in the Philosophical Investigations, which Bourdieu (1977: 29) himself cites, have indeed been taken by many, most famously Kripke (1982), as opening up a potentially

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devastating scepticism as to whether the idea of following a rule makes sense at all (on which see Humphrey 1997: 27–8; Das 1998; Sidnell 2003). Given that we could make a rule to cover almost any set of cases, how can we know what rule, if any, someone is following in any given utterance or action? ‘This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 81, §201). The challenge has been seen as significant, and has led to a vast, fierce, and somewhat impenetrable set of philosophical debates, still ongoing (see, e.g., Miller and Wright 2002; Kutsch 2006), which no doubt should give us pause for thought. We need to remember here the intended thrust of such sceptical challenges: more to unsettle the sorts of models and approaches we unthinkingly work with as analysts than to deny the existence of the phenomena in question. Some distinguished commentators (e.g. Baker 1981; Baker and Hacker 1984) have thus seen Wittgenstein’s comments more in line with his warnings about the pitfalls of philosophical analysis generally. To look beyond our ordinary, untroubled use of the notion of following a rule, for some underlying mechanism that would ground and explain it, would be to fall into toils of our own devising. That would include the sort of ‘intellectualism’ that Bourdieu is presumably arguing against: imagining action as though one looks up some internal representation of the rules of society before acting (Bourdieu 1977: 11; Taylor 1993). It might also include some of our other assumptions about how rules work. In discussing rules, Wittgenstein privileges mathematical examples, arguably because he sees the sort of deterministic and systematic understanding of what it means to follow a rule that a mathematical formula implies as the dominant one for philosophers. This is to imagine rules as a ‘machine’, or ‘rails invisibly laid to infinity’. ‘I no longer have any choice. The rule traces the lines along which it is to be followed’ (1958: 77–8, 85; §193, 218, 219). But he then undermines this through other analogies, such as measuring rules and signs: ‘A rule stands there like a signpost. Does the signpost leave no doubt open about the way I have to go?’ (39, §85; see further Baker 1981). One suspects that for many anthropologists talk of rules does indeed suggest something deterministic or unrealistically systematic. But, it needs stressing, it need not. It is also worth knowing that others have understood Wittgenstein’s argument completely differently. His recurrent invocation of the notion of rules, in combination with that of ‘language games’, for them points rather to the importance of grasping the normative dimensions of human social life, its shared expectations and assumptions, inescapably framed through language and thus resistant to the explanatory modes of the natural sciences. Peter Winch’s (1958) The Idea of a Social Science, very influential in its time, comes to mind (see Dresch and Scheele 2015b: 3–5).3 Winch saw the idea of rules, 3

See also, for example, Searle’s (1996) ideas on the ‘construction of social reality’ through, among other things, constitutive rules.

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implicit as much as explicit, as indispensable for understanding the social: ‘the analysis of meaningful behaviour must allot a central role to the notion of a rule . . . all behaviour which is meaningful (therefore all specifically human behaviour) is ipso facto rule-governed’. That is because the possibility of shared understanding presupposes predictability, and the possibility of successfully performing meaningful utterances and actions presupposes the possibility equally of making a mistake (1958: 24–66, quotation at 51–2). This is not the way in which Radcliffe-Brown or Le´vi-Strauss invoke the notion of rules. This use of rules could be seen instead as fundamental to the interpretative approach which more or less superseded their structuralism (see, e.g., the invocation of Winch by Holy and Stuchlick 1983: 68). In sum, while anthropologists of earlier eras readily used the language of rules to describe social life, they did so in ways that did not distinguish clearly between very different sorts of phenomena and perspectives. In Wittgensteinian terms, the notion of rules has a number of different uses that share certain family resemblances (Sidnell 2003: 430). In particular, the use of rules to describe the social generally, in ways that ran together an objectified ‘social structure’ and the implicit norms of everyday life, ran into real philosophical difficulties and heavy criticism. The legacy of those debates no doubt underpins much current anthropological suspicion of rules. But the difficulties are not insurmountable, even with regard to implicit, ‘ordinary’ ethics. Charles Taylor (1993: 54) was thus surely right to suggest in response to Bourdieu that anthropology cannot do without some notion of rule. More than that, we need a plurality of notions of rule, and to be careful about how we invoke them.

Rules and Ethics Having discussed the potential pitfalls of talk of rules in the context of discussions of social structure and the implicit norms of sociality, I can now turn to the explicit, prescriptive rules that are such an obvious feature of many of the world’s great ethical traditions (Clarke and Corran 2021a). There is hardly the same call for scepticism here. I started this chapter with the Ten Commandments as a strikingly prominent example. And Christianity has shown a far broader, if varying interest in moral rules over its long history. We can immediately stretch the point to include the other Abrahamic traditions. The Islamic sharia (‘Islamic law’) and Jewish halakha (‘Jewish law’) are notably ‘ruly’ approaches to the good that can rival Christian canon law in their complexity and detail (Brundage 1995; Hallaq 2009; Saiman 2018). These religious approaches to moral life are also extraordinarily widespread, between them now including more than half the global population, over 4 billion people.4 4

www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape.

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It would be a mistake, however, to think that such ruliness is Abrahamic alone. Dharmasastra (‘Hindu law’) also constitutes a vast and rich tradition, with its own scholarly experts, indigenous and academic (Davis 2010). Buddhist ethics includes a number of sets of precepts, most detailed when concerning the special duties and etiquette of the monk and nun (Wijayaratna 1990). Jainism has its own sets of rules, ‘the most aggressively impractical set of injunctions which any large number of diverse families and communities have ever tried to live by’ (Laidlaw 1995: 7). Were we to include Confucianism and its emphasis on ritual etiquette (Olberding 2016), then we might even be tempted to think this an ‘Axial-age’ phenomenon (Eisenstadt 1982). There are profound differences between these ethical traditions, of course. But the use of rules is not one of them. (The manner of their use may be – but that is a separate issue.) Rules need not be a religious phenomenon either. Norbert Elias (2000) erected his narrative of a ‘civilizing process’ towards modernity on the basis of the popularity in early modern Europe of handbooks of rules of secular civility, such as table manners. A multitude of diets and self-help programmes can stand as contemporary examples of such obviously ruly (and ordinary) ways of shaping a desired self (Clarke 2015; and see Yeung 2010 on nineteenthcentury American manuals of etiquette). There is a school of thought that would say that such ‘legalistic’ approaches to the good life are characteristic of Western modernity, even if prefigured before it (e.g. Shklar 1986). Some indeed argue that such ethical legalism has spread across the wider modern world through Western colonialism (on the juridical cast of modern Islam, see Ahmed 2015: 117–29, esp. 125). The creeping rise of bureaucratic legal rationality – ‘the iron cage’ – is of course a prominent feature of Weber’s grand narrative of modernity. What David Graeber (2015) ironically referred to as the ‘utopia of rules’ is now surely a universal horizon. And yet the suspicion of sclerotic bureaucracy often maps onto a contrary historical narrative – such hide-bound ruliness is ‘Byzantine’, something that non-Western others still have but that moderns might escape. Conversely, while the bureaucratic ethos can seem inhuman, insensitive to difference and particularity, there is also a sense in which an ethic of upholding the rules and refusing to allow favour might seem core liberal values (du Gay 2000). All this speaks to a modern Western ambivalence over rules: something ‘we’ have and ‘they’ do not; but also something they have too much of and that we are escaping – whether that be religious obligations or the constraints of bourgeois sexual morality. In a manner reminiscent of a similar ambivalence over money and the market (Mauss 1990; Parry 1986; inextricably related Axial themes according to Graeber 2011), this maps also onto a distinction between different domains of life where rules might be more or less appropriate: the realm of work and public life versus that of friends and family, for instance. This ambivalence over rules is far more widespread: the ruly religious traditions cited earlier have all also given

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rise to determinedly unruly, ‘antinomian’ mystical traditions. Respect for rules and their rejection are, it seems, two sides of the same coin. Ruliness inspires its own negation. This separation of spheres of appropriateness for rules, and concern over their blurring, speaks also to the rhetorical importance of the distinction between law and morality to liberal thought (e.g. Hart 1958): law determinedly ruly and systematic; morality vaguer and more inchoate. To an anthropologist, this sharp distinction must look more ideological than realistic, and certainly parochial. For other traditions, such distinctions work in different ways, if they do at all (Clarke and Corran 2021b). But, so far at least, the anthropology of ethics seems largely to have respected them. Conversation with the anthropology of law has been minimal (but see Clarke 2012, 2018). What might make law distinctive is notoriously difficult to pin down. But one suspects that Dresch (2012) is right that anthropologists, like others, now generally equate law with (state) power, not to say coercion – laws are rules with external sanctions. This has no doubt further contributed to anthropological suspicion of ruletalk. Rules sound not just deterministic, but coercive. But the reduction of law to coercion is both philosophically and ethnographically unsustainable (Lamond 2001; Dresch and Skoda 2012: passim). That is not to say that rules are not very often used as a mode of domination. They are – and that goes as much for ‘ethics’ as it does for ‘law’. When rules are backed by punishments (or rewards), then that no doubt changes the way that people relate to them. But they are not necessarily so. Another important strand of philosophical thought, which has significantly influenced anthropologists of ethics, has argued that the predicament of modernity has in other ways left our understanding of morality impoverished (and unrealistic). This line of argument is directed primarily – but not exclusively – at the state of modern moral philosophy, seen as overly based on questions of law-like obligation and an obsession with systembuilding. Kant and his notion of the categorical imperative, as well as ‘deontological’ approaches more generally, are a frequent target. Bernard Williams (1985) thus found ethics, construed as answers to the Socratic question, ‘How should I live?’, as a far broader and more varied category than Western law-like ‘morality’, a suggestion taken up by James Laidlaw (2002). Alasdair MacIntyre blamed what he saw as the moral fragmentation of modernity in part on Kant’s legacy, in which ‘the notion that morality is anything other than obedience to rules has almost . . . disappeared from sight’ (1981: 291, cited and rebutted by O’Neill 1983: 391). MacIntyre’s advocacy of a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in response has been especially influential (see Laidlaw 2014: 47–91 for a review). This widening of attention to other forms of ethics than rules was of course salutary. But I think it worth noting that where anthropologists have seized upon virtue ethics and the Aristotelian tradition that underpins it as an alternative perspective on ethics, they have often done so as though it were opposed or contrary to talk

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of ethical rules (e.g. Widlok 2004: 59–60; Mattingly 2012: 164). But this would not be wholly fair to Aristotle (Curzer 2016). Nor would it do justice to the Thomist Catholic tradition that draws upon that Aristotelian heritage and is an equally important part of MacIntyre’s inspiration (and which I return to later). Rules and virtues are complementary rather than contradictory. This point seems implicit in another key theoretical reference point for the new anthropology of ethics, the later work of Michel Foucault. As has been rehearsed many times now, Foucault (1992: 25–32) held that every form of morality consists of both ‘moral codes’ and ‘forms of subjectivation’ in relation to them. And yet he clearly found the latter much the more interesting. While he admitted that moral codes were not unimportant, he found that ‘they ultimately revolve around a rather small number of rather simple principles’, not especially inventive when compared with ‘the rich and complex field of historicity in the way the individual is summoned to recognize himself as an ethical subject’ (1992: 32). This is an assumption, and a demonstrably false one. But as a consequence, he rarely bothered to focus much on the detail of the systems of rules in question (Clarke 2015: 247). It is this sense that rules are limited, straightforward, and fundamentally dull that I especially want to overcome here.

An Example: Religious Rules in Islam With this aim in mind, I now turn to some examples from my own research on sharia-mindedness among Muslims in Lebanon, and latterly in the UK.5 The sharia (‘Islamic law’), or God’s right path through life legalistically imagined, is of great importance to many (but far from all) Muslims as a means to living righteously – alongside other forms of devotion and moral teachings. What is and is not halal (permissible) to eat? What form should modest dress for women (hijab) take? What constitutes proper interaction between the sexes? While the divine sharia – or at least the human attempts to capture it in the Islamic science called fiqh – contains much that might be thought of in secular liberal terms as ‘law proper’ (contracts and criminal punishments), it also contains much that might be thought of in those terms as personal ethics (proper modes of greeting, conduct between family members, dress). It thus cuts across the modern Western distinction between law and morality that I referred to earlier. Indeed, the sharia is, in Brinkley Messick’s phrase (1993: 3), a ‘total discourse’, potentially covering all of life. Sharia discourse represents one of the most comprehensive attempts imaginable to make explicit the rules of right social and devotional performance, from matters of public policy through to the most intimate concerns of bodily hygiene (for an authoritative overview, see Hallaq 2009). 5

I draw on a previous article (Clarke 2015) in doing so.

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While elements of such discourse have been enforced as state law, in different ways in different places, much never has been or was even intended to be (Hallaq 2013). Its elaboration has been the work of religious scholars largely independent of the state; and its authority turns on the sanction of God, rather than that of human rulers. Indeed, the modern landscape of nation states and civil law across much of the Muslim world has in many ways led to a greater emphasis on sharia’s ethical, as opposed to legal, implications (Messick 1996; Hefner 2016). Of course, these normative expectations are not necessarily the subject of continuous formulation as explicit rules in everyday life. Most often, they might go without saying. But such ruliness can sometimes become very apparent. Lara Deeb (2006: 106–10) gives the example of the pious practice of not shaking hands with someone of the opposite sex in the context of the Shi‘i Muslim communities of Beirut’s southern suburbs, where I have also worked. ‘As is often true of unspoken social “rules”’, she says, ‘the unexpected power of (not) handshaking was most frequently seen in two situations.’ The first was when the other party to the interaction was assumed to be unfamiliar with the rule, at which point, given Lebanon’s religiously diverse population, it presented an opportunity to explain the nature of the non-shaker’s religious commitment. The second was ‘when the “rule” was violated’, when tacit assumptions became apparent and a moment of embarrassment ensued. Such a violation might be an accident, or it could be a deliberate statement of opposition to the practice. We might note Deeb’s repeated placing of ‘rule’ within quotation marks, which is consonant with anthropology’s general rule-scepticism and which she ties to the notion of implicit social norms. And yet the setting is, as she well describes, one where many people are very consciously engaging with religious discourse in order to ‘authenticate’ their nominally previously unthought practice. And as far as that religious discourse is concerned, there certainly are rules – no quotation marks are required. Deeb cites the response of one famous (Shi‘i) scholar of the sharia, Lebanon’s own Ayatollah Fadlallah (d. 2010), to a question on this point: Q: Is it allowed to shake the hands of women in European countries when one has business or interests with them? Especially when they do not much understand the reason for not shaking their hands and are extending their hands to be shaken? And when there could be some difficulty or embarrassment in some cases were one not to shake hands? A: That is not allowed except in a case of extreme difficulty that could lead to material or spiritual damage, or to embarrassment of a level that would normally be considered unbearable according to the generally prevailing social norms. Note also that one should not

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intentionally go to places that might require this of one except in cases of either individual or general necessity. (Fadlallah 2005: vol. 2, 414, cited in Deeb 2006: 108) Such statements of opinion (fatwas), in response to questions covering the range of religious observance, are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary and historical Islamic practice, now relayed through smartphone apps and dedicated websites as much as through television shows or printed media. One might encounter them in isolation. But they are also available in compilations, like the two-volume edition of Fadlallah’s opinions cited here, which has been through many printings. More than that, every pretender to Grand Ayatollah status in the Shi‘i tradition must produce a comprehensive ‘practical treatise’ (risala ‘amaliyya), a multi-volume guide to sharia observance in the round, thematically organized into numbered sections (1,106 of them in the case of Fadlallah’s version). Ethical rules are often spoken of as coming in the form of a package, a ‘code of conduct’ like the Ten Commandments (e.g. Faubion 2001: 83–4). This seems a prime example. But it is also, let it be said, just one genre of sharia discourse and a particular form of organization, one associated with modernity and the influence of European civil law rather than with pre-modern sharia discourse, which had logics of its own (Messick 1993). And non-specialist knowledge and citation of such rules is of course much less systematic. No one, except perhaps the editors of these volumes, would be able to cite the rules by number. It would be interesting if they did, as it would imply a different relationship to sharia from much of what one finds at present or did in the past. The rise of new media, such as smartphone apps, may entail something different again. And whether we are being invited to think of codification in a strict sense or a looser one, systematic presentation does not necessarily imply systematic observance. That is not to say that there are not those whose approach to religious practice is systematic – perhaps even ‘by the book’ (although these are not the sort of books one works through from cover to cover). It is to say that people’s relationship to rules within this tradition, as within others, is more diverse than that. This tradition is not just ‘ruly’ in the sense of having a lot of rules. It also has rules about rules; about how rules can be made and by whom. It entails a class of scholarly experts in the rules, who may – and frequently do – differ in their interpretations. Such scholars compete for followers, and hence for resources. One means to stand out is through one’s distinctive opinions as to the rules. Being able to cite an authority such as Ayatollah Fadlallah can then be an important resource for non-expert, ‘ordinary Muslims’: in making up one’s own mind, or in justifying one’s decision to others. Fadlallah was known as relatively progressive; there are others who could be thought of as more ‘traditional’. The very existence of this enormously rich array of discursive institutions, roles, and practices challenges the notion of ‘mere’ rules, either ignored or

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‘blindly’ followed. The rules matter to people – not all people, but certainly many, and in different ways and contexts. That there is a rule that one follows as part of being a Muslim can constitute a reason or justification for action in itself, to some extent independently of the content of the rule. So too, once there is an explicit rule, related to a specific form of authority (the Ayatollah’s fatwa, for example), then ignoring or breaking it takes on new meaning. The recent anthropology of ethics has often foregrounded one sort of observance, that of the ethical virtuoso. Saba Mahmood’s (2005) recasting of Muslim women’s commitment to practices of modest dress (hijab) and prayer as means to the cultivation of virtues like sincerity and humility, and directed towards approaching God, rather than as a function of patriarchal oppression, say, was highly energizing to the field. As against Bourdieu, Mahmood (2005: 138–9) sees these practices – which would including rule-following – as conscious attempts at acquiring practical mastery. Viewed in this light, rules are a powerful technology of the self, to put it in Foucault’s terms (Clarke 2015). But for Mahmood, once internalized, ‘embodied’, the rules disappear: the disposition becomes automatic. But not all rule-following is like that. Rules, and especially conflict between them, also provoke dilemma, doubt, and complexity (Laidlaw 2014: 75). Take the rule cited earlier about not shaking hands with the opposite sex, for example. Together with my colleague Ali-Reza Bhojani, I have recently interviewed scores of Shi‘i Muslims in the UK about their attitude towards sharia rules. One lady, for example, who characterized her upbringing as ‘very fundamental in the rules’, ‘very strict’, told us about her work as a dental hygienist: I see everybody, men and ladies, although we have rules about touching men and stuff like that, who are not, who are not our, we say mahram, who are not within our family. But I wear gloves so I don’t technically touch them. We can note the legalism of her approach here. She continued: And I wouldn’t touch them like that [i.e. with any erotic suggestion]. Sometimes they shake my hand. That is a rule that we shouldn’t. But there’s also a rule that you have to be a good human being, and a nice person and not to offend people. So I would, if they put out their hand, I would shake their hand. Men. But as a rule, I wouldn’t go and offer my hand. Here we see something else: the way that the rules can sometimes conflict with other moral principles and sensibilities. This dilemma over handshaking came up again and again in our interviews, and there were almost as many different ways of rationalizing it as we had interlocutors (see also Fadil 2009). Some people had developed their own practices to manage it within what they imagined as the rule’s purpose – limp, fleeting,

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determinedly non-sexual handshakes, for example. Others saw this as an occasion where ‘common sense’ simply overrode the sharia rule: handshaking is not an erotic practice in the UK. Others, like this lady, reimagined more general moral teachings and values (being a nice person) as ‘rules’ of equal or greater standing that could override the no hand-shaking rule. Rules in this context are thus not well thought of as ‘rigid’. That needs saying if only because the popular image of sharia outside of Muslim circles (and sometimes within them) is as uncompromising, if not harsh. Sharia (and indeed religious rules more generally) is, we are told again and again, ‘strict’. An example, taken almost at random – here, a liberal voice trying to explain the attraction of Islam for British converts: Western culture of the 21st century lauds variety, choice, experimentation. A Westerner who converts to Islam is making a self-conscious move in a diametrically opposite direction: accepting non-negotiable rules in respect of diet, dress, sexual and social behaviour. Perhaps the prolixity of mainstream culture makes the uncompromising strictness of Islamic rules more attractive to a minority. (‘Why some Brits choose Islamic prayer over partying’, The Economist, 12 February 2012) Now, strictness may indeed be attractive to many – and rules are a very effective form for those interested in it. But equally, religious rules are not necessarily ‘non-negotiable’ and ‘uncompromising’ (see also Mayblin and Malara 2018). It is not just that there is a diversity of opinions as to what the rules are. Note also, in Fadlallah’s opinion on hand-shaking earlier, the room for discretion, if material interests might be harmed or even if the social embarrassment entailed is unbearable. General rules inevitably entail conversations about exceptions. There are rules about how to break the rules (Edgerton 1985). And, viewed positively rather than negatively, much of the scholarly activity within this dynamic tradition is directed towards facilitating people’s projects rather than frustrating them. I have described in detail elsewhere how scholars such as Fadlallah developed opinions to give people moral confidence in undertaking desperately hoped for projects involving new medical technologies, in this case fertility treatment (Clarke 2009). If challenged as to the propriety of one’s actions, one can cite the rule that licenses them. Too often, one suspects, rules are being viewed analytically through the prisms of determinism, constraint, and sanction, rather than as potentially enabling.

Approaches to Rules Some fundamental points should now be apparent. Rules are important, both to many people pursuing a moral life and to our understanding of the comparative study of ethics and morality. Rules do not have to be codified or

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systematic, or the subject of a professionalized discursive tradition, although they often are – and whether or not they are makes a difference. Rules can seem ‘strict’. But, against such stereotypes, ‘ruliness’ can also be flexible or even permissive. There are different stances one might take towards rules, different modes of their interpretation and instantiation, that we might want to distinguish. This is a very different way of thinking of rules from that of Radcliffe-Brown, or even Bourdieu, with their concerns with modelling social order, a shift in perspective no doubt facilitated by the broader changes in the ways in which anthropologists have come to reimagine ethics. But our theoretical vocabulary for discussing rules has lagged behind. What we need as anthropologists, then, are some suitable conceptual resources for making such distinctions – both at the ethnographic and the broader comparative level. For that, we can borrow from other disciplines, as well as revisit our own. The new anthropology of ethics has seen itself as in dialogue with philosophy, and in particular, for obvious reasons, moral philosophy. With regard to rules, however, this might leave it short-changed by the peculiar Western division between ‘law and morality’ that I referred to earlier. The philosophy and practical science of law can provide an effective complement and powerful tools for thinking through the uses and consequences of rules, alongside other strands of analytical philosophy such as the Wittgensteinian ones already cited. One might for one thing want to be able to distinguish between different sorts of rules. The most basic distinction anthropologists of ethics need is that between descriptive rules (‘as a rule, Xs do Y’) and prescriptive rules (‘Xs should do Y’). Dresch and Scheele (2015b: 3) cite on this point H. L. A. Hart’s (1961) famous discussion in The Concept of Law (see also Dresch 2012: 6). Where descriptive rules attempt a statistical account of what people actually do, prescriptive rules state what they ought to do – even if no one ever actually does it. The fact that there are prescriptive rules that hardly anyone follows does not entail their irrelevance. Prescriptive rules can themselves be of different types. Positive prescriptions could be seen to result in different emphases from negative prohibitions, for instance (Lambek 1992). Hart (1961) distinguishes between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ prescriptive rules, the latter being rules about how rules are to be made and changed (‘rules of recognition’) – the rules about rules that I highlighted earlier. In another sort of distinction prefigured by Rawls (1955), Searle (1996) contrasted ‘regulative rules’ that regulate behaviour under existing institutions with the ‘constitutive rules’ that instantiate those institutions in the first place (see also Dresch and Scheele 2015b: 9–11, and Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994: 117–21 for an anthropological use). Even if rules can be of very different types, they could nevertheless be seen to have some important things in common (see too Humphrey 1997: 34). Let me enlarge on one such point, which I have made use of in my own

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ethnographic writing. Rules, in the sense of ‘general norm[s] mandating or guiding conduct or action in a given type of situation’ (Twining and Miers 1999: 123), have a certain logical form. They are general. But life is particular. No rule can subsume all possible cases within what might be thought its underlying justification. Frederick Schauer calls this the ‘necessary suboptimality’ of rules (1991: 100). Confronted with the necessary fact that every rule will throw up instances that are consonant with the rule’s underlying justification but not the terms of the rule itself, we often allow some flexibility, perhaps by creating a formal exception. When responding to an emergency, ambulance drivers are allowed to exceed the speed limit, which is designed in part to limit death and injury, for example. Schauer calls this the ‘conversational’ mode with regard to rules. But sometimes such conversation is ruled out. The status of a rule as such is sufficient reason to obey it. Schauer calls this ‘entrenchment’ (1991: 38–52). That is, an entrenched rule is one whose existence as a rule in itself constitutes the justification for following it. One can deal, then, with the problematically general nature of rules in two ways: by opening up a conversation when a particular case reveals a rule not to be fit for purpose; or by sticking to the rule because it is the rule. The latter is, for Schauer, the characteristic mode of law, and by arguing in terms of the rules themselves, rather than their underlying justifications, one starts ‘thinking like a lawyer’ (2009: 7–8). It is also of course part of what non-lawyers often dislike about law – the sense of its having become divorced from apparently common-sense notions of justice – and part too perhaps of the suspicion of a ‘legalistic’ approach to morality. I have, however, found this notion of entrenchment useful beyond the law as well (Clarke 2015). If we turn to some of the ‘projects of the self’ that many anthropologists of ethics have been interested in, then it is clear that rules are an important and common technology for pursuing them. And it can be the case that just being the rules I have set myself as part of such a project constitutes reason enough to follow them, even when following the rule seems divorced from its original justification, as when one sticks doggedly to a diet that is not working, even though there is no question of there being external sanction for breaking it. As in the case of the law, but for different reasons, this sort of personal legalism can seem perverse. To quote a favourite example, in the context of his discussion of dietetics in ancient Greece, Foucault (1992: 104, 106) wanted to stress the ‘conversational’ nature of this technology of the self: ‘Regimen should not be understood as a corpus of universal and uniform rules’, but ‘more in the nature of a manual for reacting to situations in which one might find oneself.’ But he also tells us about Herodicus the trainer, whose regimen clearly became entrenched: ‘entirely taken up in the effort to avoid breaking the least rule of the regimen he had imposed on himself, he “trained” away for years, while living the life of a dying man’. For Herodicus, abiding

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by the rules of his regimen became an end in itself – not as Kantian categorical imperative, or in support of the shared good of a legal system, but as a matter of self-respect (or pathological self-love, for his critics). What needs to be added to Schauer’s account for personal ethical cases is thus a consideration of the moral value of entrenchment, of sticking to the rules for its own sake (as well as its negative counterpart, the problem of weakness of will). It should be no surprise that Herodicus the trainer, for whom the discipline of adhering to a regimen was presumably fundamental to his way of life, so valued adhering to his own. This sentiment of the importance of sticking to the rules one sets oneself is, it seems to me, the ethical corollary of legalistic entrenchment. Following the rules can become a value in itself, one intrinsic to a vision of the self, and thus ‘ethical’ in the terms that recent anthropology has pursued. This sort of ascetic value is one that rules make possible through their logical form of rules per se. We need not confine ourselves to philosophy. Any number of disciplines have interesting things to say about rules. Here I want just to suggest one further possible resource, simply because it may not be the first to spring to mind – moral theology (see also Banner, Chapter 8 of this volume). Anthropologists do not often think of themselves as drawing on the intellectual resources of theology, even if many of the concepts they employ could be given such a (Christian) genealogy, as has been pointed out (e.g. Asad 1993; Cannell 2005; Milbank 2006; Robbins 2006). With regard to moral rules, however, the Christian tradition has had a great deal to say. And here too some of those debates echo through to our own anthropological assumptions today. I want to focus in particular on that genre of Christian practical ethics known as casuistry, which has become almost a byword for the perils of moral legalism (see Jonsen and Toulmin 1988 for an accessible account, and Corran 2018 for a recent study). In a general, neutral sense, casuistry refers to reasoning by means of cases. So, where we are thinking in terms of rules, the force of those rules is discussed through examples where they might apply. Law is an obvious case. But the term ‘casuistry’ is especially associated with the use of such reasoning in Christian moral theology, and notably its vigorous efflorescence in early modern Catholic Europe. What became a discipline in its own right served as a practical guide for confessors faced with ‘cases of conscience’, most often instances where people were torn between conflicting obligations: to tell the truth versus to remain a Catholic in Protestant lands, for example. Works of casuistry multiplied in number and detail to now proverbial levels of sophistication. Infamously, however, the discipline then fell into severe disrepute as being over-subtle and orientated towards evading the strictures of religious precepts: ‘the art of quibbling with God’ (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988: 12). The casuistic method ought to be congenial to anthropologists, a matter of analysing moral thought through exploration of real-life cases (as well as some cleverly constructed fictional ones, in the Christian case). And it is,

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as Jonsen and Toulmin point out (1988: 23ff.), closely allied to Aristotle’s practical approach to ethics, rather than the more theoretical stance of much modern philosophy. Many anthropologists of ethics would put themselves on the same side (e.g. Lambek 2000). But I want to make some further, more specific points. First, it is worth noting that, in the case of Catholic casuistry, far from being associated with strictness, ethical ruliness was a byword for ‘laxism’. Again, rules are far from necessarily strict (see too Mayblin 2017). They can give us cover, a justification for doing something we want to do, as much as reasons not to do something. It was that charge of laxism that led the Catholic Church to proscribe certain casuistic positions (such as the most extreme forms of ‘mental reservation’, allowing one to say one thing while meaning another). The overarching doctrine under suspicion was that of ‘probabilism’. As put by its originator, the Spanish theologian Bartolome´ de Medina (d. 1580), ‘if an opinion is probable, it is licit to follow it, even though the opposite opinion is more probable’ (cited in Jonsen and Toulmin 1988: 164). Here ‘probable’ has a technical, or historically specific, meaning, referring to an opinion supported by (intrinsic) reasons or (extrinsic) authority (so, more ‘provable’ than ‘likely’). The accusation of probabilism’s critics was thus that, so long as one could find some authority to back a desired course of action – and there were a great many scholarly authorities available – one could pursue it. The accusation could be said to be unfair insofar as it involved a misperception, or distortion, of the casuistic literature’s intended purpose and audience, which was for the use of the clergy in confession rather than for the instruction of a lay audience. Casuistry was about coming to terms with the moral dilemmas that life in the world inevitably puts in our way, as a way of assisting those in spiritual need. In real life, where obligations conflict, there is often no one obviously right path. In such circumstances, the concern was to relieve what might otherwise seem an impossible burden. Here we have to understand what the alternatives were. The dominant pre-existing approach was that of ‘tutiorism’, or following the ‘safer’ (Latin, tutior) path. Where a number of options presented themselves, and it was uncertain which was the right one, one should play safe, rather than risk sinning. But in reality, such ‘rigorism’ has its own dangers.6 As the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel (d. 1728) had it, thinking of the sin of usury and the realities of commerce, this would be to ‘damn all the world’ (cited in Sampson 1988: 79). Religious rules are not just part of ascetic projects of virtuoso piety. They also underpin everyday concerns regarding salvation – the good enough as well as the none more holy – and much more besides. While the categories of ‘rigorism’ and ‘laxism’ might be more polemical than analytical, the concepts of ‘tutiorism’ and ‘probabilism’ strike me as 6

Rigorism was also a charge laid against Kant (O’Neill 1983: 391).

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potentially helpful ones for describing different attitudes to rules in other contexts as well (for further elaboration and an Islamic comparison, see Clarke 2021). But the debates over Christian casuistry can also help in understanding our own anthropological stereotypes of rules. The rejection of this moral legalism, especially within Protestant thought, has been associated with the development of new ways of thinking about conscience, sincerity, and autonomy, which have in turn become bound up with ideas central to what we think of as modernity (on the latter point, see, e.g., Keane 2002 and more broadly Taylor 1989).7 According to Edmund Leites (1988: 120), casuistry ‘came to be rejected because of the rise to prominence of two ideas: the conviction that a chief property of a truly moral will was its rationality and the belief that no one, however proper his intentions, could claim rationality for his will if he was governed by external authority’. For John Locke, for instance, Catholics were deemed to lack a conscience altogether, since ‘they owe blind obedience to any infallible pope who hath the keys of their consciences tied to his girdle’ (cited in Andrew 2001: 87). Luther’s emphasis on the priority of personal conscience over the authority of the Church and its ‘endless laws’ (Andrew 2001: 20–1) prefigures Kant’s autonomous moral individual, deeply serious about the rules that reason enjoins, but also that strand of modern individualism deeply suspicious of rules as imposed constraint. Protestant critique of the adequacy of external observance, of the rules of Catholic ritual for instance, underpins the anthropological (and wider) impulse to see past rules to something more authentic beyond them (Asad 1993: 55–79; see also Douglas 1970). Easy talk of ‘blind obedience’ to ‘mere rules’ is thus a historical reflex, more prejudice than analysis.

The Reasons for Rules That then leads us finally to a different sort of anthropological question, that of accounting for the diversity of attitudes to rules that one finds across the ethnographic and historical record. Why do some contexts have more rules than others? Why have rules at all? On the latter score, rules have most often been seen as solutions to issues of social coordination and cooperation, whether backed by sanctions or otherwise (e.g. Bicchieri 2006). A well-worn example is the rules of the road. The rules of social distancing imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic will no doubt prove a classic case study. But rules can do much more. They are also an obvious way in which shared identities can be formed and maintained, often as distinct from those of others: they eat pork, we do not; they drink alcohol, 7

Notwithstanding the antinomian streak in Protestant thought, much anthropological and sociological work on contemporary Protestant movements reflects an enduring interest in rules. See, for example, Robbins (2004) on Papua New Guinea and Lehmann (1996) on Brazil.

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we do not (e.g. Brennan et al. 2013: 161–74). At the individual level, I suggested earlier how the particular affordances of rules might make them helpful as a technology of the self. Consider also John Elster’s (1979, 2000) notion of ‘Ulysses contracts’, where we commit ourselves in advance to a course of action (I will not eat puddings after lunch) in order to realize a desired outcome (being healthier). Such vows, which are often a matter of setting rules for oneself, are an important part of many ethical traditions (see, e.g., Corran 2021). Economists and others have examined the ways in which ‘rules of thumb’ may help us navigate complex decisions (most famously Simon 1997). The new discipline of moral psychology has similarly seen ruly, ‘deontological’ approaches to morality as a sort of shortcut to making hard moral choices (Greene 2013). In similar vein, Joel Robbins (2010), following Faisal Devji (2005: 3–4), argues that the current enthusiasm for uncompromising and ruly ethics of duty such as those of Pentecostal Christianity or Salafi Islam has its roots in the impossibility of predicting the consequences of one’s actions in today’s chaotic world. These are instrumental, ‘functionalist’ approaches to rules. They have undoubted explanatory power in many instances. But we would not want to limit ourselves to them. We can remember Mary Douglas’s (1966) celebrated recasting of dietary prohibitions in the frame of classification, part of the turn to meaning and language that Wittgenstein in part inspired (see, e.g., Douglas 1973). We do not eat pork, not because of hygienic concerns, but because pigs are anomalous animals: they split the hoof, like cows, sheep, and goats, but they do not chew the cud. It is in this tradition that Paul Dresch and colleagues have argued for a rethinking of how anthropologists and historians think about law. Instead of seeing law as a mode, or instrument of state power, Dresch suggests we think instead in terms of ‘legalism’: ‘an appeal to rules that are distinct from practice, the explicit use of generalizing concepts, and a disposition to address in such terms the conduct of human life’, directing us ‘towards classification more than towards power’ (Dresch 2012: 1; and see Dresch and Skoda 2012; Pirie 2013; Pirie and Scheele 2014; Dresch and Scheele 2015a). General rules and categories suggest a social world beyond the particularity of one’s immediate relatives or neighbours. They provide the forms of thought and institutions through which actions in that world are shaped: as vendor and purchaser, clansman or stranger. This seems obviously applicable to ethics as much as law – and indeed might help break down the distinction. In this regard, while the term ‘legalism’ fits Dresch et al.’s interest in law, I wonder if that might distract from its potential relevance to the study of ethics. Further, the term has some negative connotations (e.g. ‘pettifogging’) that Dresch is keen to avert (2012: 1) but which might be both hard to avoid and useful to keep in view. And as Twining and Miers (1999: 177) note, behaviour, attitudes, individuals, styles of judgement, legal systems, and even whole cultures could all

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reasonably be described as ‘legalistic’. In its most basic sense, such legalism might indeed suggest the presence of lots of, or very detailed, explicit rules – what jurisprudence knows as ‘rule density’ (1999: 142–3, 240–2). But beyond the quantity or detail of the rules, there is the question of the attitude one takes to them that I have been exploring. Twining and Miers pick out three primary such ways of being ‘legalistic’: ‘liking to have lots of rules or complex formal procedures; insisting on adhering closely to existing rules . . . and interpreting rules in a literal, strict or rigid way’ (1999: 177). I thus prefer to use the neutral (but admittedly slightly awkward) term ‘ruliness’ for the most general sense of a given context foregrounding lots of rules, and reserve the term ‘legalism’ for more particular points about forms of complexity or modes of argumentation. In its most basic form of a propensity for the use of general rules and categories, one might almost expect to find legalism in Dresch’s sense anywhere, although Dresch (2012: 26–7) follows Fallers (1969), from whom he borrows the term, in thinking it manifest to varying degrees (and see Dresch and Scheele 2015b: 1, 12). Dresch (2012) does note a contrast between simple and complex legalism, the latter where the rules and discussion of their implications is elaborated as a specialist discourse by a class of experts. But he is, no doubt sensibly, reluctant to venture much more in terms of a broader narrative of the history and reasons for such variation. Were we to take that risk, and if we think in functionalist terms of rules as a solution to problems of coordination and cooperation, then we might expect a rise in the number of rules with increasing social scale, complexity, and interdependence. That could indeed be viewed as a core message of Max Weber’s grand narrative of rationalization, or indeed Elias’s (2000) notion of the ‘civilizing process’ referred to earlier. The rise in manuals of civility was for Elias symptomatic of the increasing economic interdependence of early modern society, which entailed the coming together of hitherto distinct social classes and thus a need to make explicit the norms of association. Jonsen and Toulmin (1988: 158) make similar points about the rise of Christian casuistry as a response to social change – the commercial and evangelical challenges of the New World, but also the conflict of the Reformation and Wars of Religion. Emerging economic interdependence could also have driven the sharia’s proliferation in the years of the early Islamic empire (Johansen 1995), as it perhaps does too in the current era of mass migration (see Ayatollah Fadlallah’s advice on Muslim hand-shaking in non-Muslim Europe cited earlier). Nevertheless, one might be wary of a linear narrative of increasing ruliness unfolding over world history. Witness the intensity of various forms of ‘taboo’ among many ‘simple’ societies, for instance, as well as the varying attitudes towards rules across many ‘complex’ ones alluded to earlier. Another approach has thus been to explain such variation as a response to relative difficulty, situations of danger or crisis where

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cooperation and coordination are at a relatively greater premium. Crosscultural psychologist Michelle Gelfand, for instance, finds the key to cultural difference in Pelto’s (1968) notion of degrees of cultural ‘tightness’ and ‘looseness’. ‘Tight cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive. The former are rule makers; the latter, rule breakers’ (Gelfand 2018: 3, emphasis in original). Tightness is then explained as a means to survive testing circumstances – such as the pandemic (Van Bavel et al. 2020). While, again, I see no reason to dismiss functionalist explanations out of hand, in the light of what I have argued here this conflation of the relative density of rules, the mode of their interpretation and the manner of their enforcement should seem problematic.8 We need to pick apart not just rules, interpretation, and sanctions but also different types of rules and their varying uses, as I have tried to do. If one wanted an alternative, anthropological inspiration, then one could go back to Mary Douglas (1970). Having reinterpreted the prohibitions of Leviticus in the light of the symbolic boundaries that all societies must somehow draw, she had to deal with the fact that some societies are nevertheless more interested in ‘taboo’ than others (see also Valeri 2000). Seeing that, notwithstanding the prejudices of modernity, there was no straightforward correlation between degree of ‘ritualism’ and socioeconomic development, she proposed instead a two-dimensional scheme, plotting ‘grid’ as against ‘group’, which could cope with the variation that one finds between hunter-gatherer societies as much as industrialized nation states. Group is the experience of a bounded social unit; grid the rules which relate people to one another. Some societies are strong in one dimension but weak in another; some are strong or weak in both. Predictions as to the nature of relations in those societies and their cosmologies follow. Douglas is admittedly not really concerned with rules per se – at least not in the way I am proposing – and her whole scheme is in any case nominally directed towards the varying symbolism of the body. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm with which it has been taken up beyond anthropology (see, e.g., Rayner 1992) suggests at the very least a point at which a non-lineal narrative of ruliness might usefully start.

Conclusion Rules are an important and fascinating dimension of normativity ranging across the cultural and historical record. In this chapter, I have argued that they have nevertheless been unduly neglected within the recent wave of 8

It does have some odd results. In a survey of contemporary nations, the United States comes out as one of the loosest of societies of all (Gelfand 2018: 24–5). That is no doubt due to its relaxed social mores, but despite, one might say, its formidable body of tax law and the world’s highest rate of incarceration.

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anthropological writing on ethics. I first tried to identify the reasons why that might be. Those include some confusion concerning the different levels at which one might think of rules as operating and a set of prejudices inherited from the Reformation – perhaps even a certain streak of Romanticism. Having made the opposing case, for taking rules seriously, I then presented some ideas as to the sorts of conceptual and analytical resources that might be available for those anthropologists who wish to do so, both as a means to sharper ethnography and as a trope of cross-cultural analysis. What I could offer here was a far from comprehensive survey, in part because of the vast potential scope of such a project, but also because of the embryonic state of the theorization of rule-use within anthropology. I have argued before that the anthropology of ethics will need a new anthropology of rules to place alongside it (Clarke 2012: 117). Much still remains to be done.

Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the close reading and perceptive comments of the editor and three anonymous reviewers: I owe several of the points I make here to their suggestions. I also owe much to Paul Dresch, including many of the references I draw on here. And I must thank Ali-Reza Bhojani for allowing me to draw on the fruits of our recent fieldwork together, and the Leverhulme Trust for a fellowship giving me time to reflect on the themes of this chapter.

References Ahmed, Shahab. 2015. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Andrew, Edward. 2001. Conscience and Its Critics: Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason and Modern Subjectivity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baker, Gordon. 1981. ‘Following Wittgenstein: Some Signposts for Philosophical Investigations §§143–242’, in Steven Holtzman and Christopher Leich (eds.), Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule. London: Routledge: 31–71. Baker, Gordon and Peter Hacker. 1984. Scepticism, Rules and Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bicchieri, Cristina. 2006. The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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21 On Ethical Pedagogies James D. Faubion

Philosophy as a modern academic discipline survives institutionally only through the constant production and reproduction of differences of opinion. The undertaking named moral philosophy or ethics (see Banner 2014) is simply one of its many subsidiaries. The absence of any philosophical consensus to which the latter might appeal is thus (literally) academic, and it is not even remotely unique. No: among the humanistic and post-humanistic disciplines as among the other social sciences, anthropology itself depends for its intellectual and institutional survival on differences of opinion. A fortiori, so, too, does the anthropology of what I prefer to call ‘ethics’. Here as previously (see Faubion 2011), I use ‘ethics’ as a semantic and conceptual umbrella. It covers codes and rules of conduct, values and evaluations, all that might have to do – more enduringly or less enduringly – with the legitimacy and legitimation of the good or righteous subject, the good or righteous life, the good or righteous collective. It is always meant to be read in the plural. The ‘ethical’ in the title of this chapter and throughout is the adjectival form of that umbrella. Any fond fantasy of resolving philosophical or anthropological disagreements once and for all is sociologically naive. A sociologically wise anthropology of ethical pedagogies must take another path, of two initial steps. The first step has to make a track for themes that are generative of research and constructive conversation. The second step must make a track for reaching a heuristic resolution of what research and conversation reveal. Any such resolution can never be more than provisional. Because the anthropology of ethical pedagogies sensu stricto is still nascent, it must have resort as much to sidelong glances and research proposals as to already wrought ethnographic monographs. At present, it can thus at best be suggestive, with one crucial proviso. The anthropology of ethics and, within it, the anthropology of ethical pedagogies has little room either for ontological or for methodological individualism. William Ernest Henley’s declaration in his Invictus – ‘I am the master of my fate, the captain of my destiny’ – is moving. Anthropologically, it is suspect.

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In the final analysis, ethical pedagogies are pedagogies of the ultimate, of ends and commitments worthy in and of themselves. They may be in accord with David Hume’s proscription of any legitimate derivation of the ought from the is. They may deny the Humean proscription and inculcate the opposite. They may be more, may be less consistent. They may be exemplified. They may be preached. Those who exemplify or preach them might not be up to the task. Those who preach them might not practise what they preach. They are all wittingly or unwittingly premised on the supposition that the ethical actor might come to have the capacity to partake of freedom – if only the freedom to do or die. Sorry, dissenters: if all of our actions are determined in advance, then ethics is chimerical (Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2014). Some ethical pedagogies may, however, disparage or condemn freedom. Freedom as an ontological prerequisite of ethics and freedom valorized or condemned should not be conflated. All ethical pedagogies have as their distinctive but not exclusive target the mindful body (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). That body may, however, be personal or corporate; it should not be reduced either to the person or even to the self, which not a few prima facie ethical pedagogies deem illusory. Add to this that not a few pedagogues mandate and inculcate a disgust with the bodily or the mindful or both. Ethical pedagogies may be universalist. They may be localist. They may be constricted in their purview to the human or even a subsection of the human. They may extend their vision to the animal world, the whole of the organic world, even the whole of the cosmos. They may be coercive. They may be seductive. They may terrify. They may comfort’. In what they share as well as in their divergences, in their abstract as in their everyday manifestations, they are for any anthropology entirely legitimate objects of anthropological exploration. They do not fully conform to what has come to be known in the anthropology of ethics as ‘ordinary ethics’, for two reasons. The first is that the anthropology of ordinary ethics (at least among its most prominent advocates) has given little or no place to the directives, the coercions, the advice, the nurturing, the hand-holding, the practical apprenticeship, or the lessons of exemplars that are crucial elements of the training of ethical subjects. However conceptually and interpretatively rich, the anthropology of ordinary ethics seems so far to have little analytical or empirical taste for focussing on children and their pedagogical mentors – coddling or draconian as the case may be. The second reason is that it tends to reduce the reflective (typically adult) engagement with questions of the good and the right as an interim towards the return to an unreflective resettlement of being-in-the-world or one or another form of life (Das 2012; Zigon 2007). Ethical pedagogy may drift in such a direction but may also do the opposite. It may be restorationist but it also might be militantly and relentlessly revisionary (see, e.g., Dave 2012). The anthropology of ordinary ethics is

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weak in its comprehension of the latter possibility – and may categorically mistake its enterprise in the process.

Anthropologizing Ethical Pedagogies In the empirical exploration of ethical pedagogies, a quartet of themes are especially salient. The classic debate – first and foremost – about the relative weighting of nature over nurture is inescapable. A second concerns the extent to which any given repertoire of norms, values, exemplars, and ideals are written in socio-cultural stone versus the extent to which they are malleable, fluid, of unstable valence, liable to elimination or supplementation. A third concerns the degree to which, in any given case, the techniques of the ethical pedagogue are informal or formal, sotto voce or of strident pronouncement. A fourth and correlative theme concerns the place, in any given case and at any given phase of pedagogy, that ethical students occupy within the continuum of what Pierre Bourdieu has somewhat oddly construed as the poles of the ‘dialectic’ of bodily incorporation and representational objectification (1977: 72). Pace Bourdieu, the continuum bodes no (dialectical) synthesis but instead is much more typically an irresolutely dualistic flow between one or another of the two poles, rarely if ever definitively resolved. The one pole has its consummation in the spontaneity of the embodied and unreflective habitus. The other has its consummation in the reflective and militant ethical provocateur. Much lies between the two. No anthropology of ethical pedagogies can dismiss nature – human or other. Several anthropologists of ethics have sought to intervene into the debate over the measures and weights it should be accorded. Reviewing recent psychological experiments and speculations and as part of a synthetic attempt to spell out those innate attributes in which any theorization of ethics must rest, Webb Keane constructs what might be thought of as the ethical subconscious, ‘capacities and propensities’ of which all but psychologists are unaware and over which even psychologists have little control (Keane 2016: 262). More interested in the phenomenology of ‘moral experience’, Jason Throop partially reoccupies the footsteps of such proto-utilitarian philosophers of moral sentiment as Adam Smith (1985) in his ethnographic visitations of the presumptively innate attitudinal and affective capacities essential to caring about and caring for others (Throop 2010, 2012). Patrick McKearney countervailingly urges us to recognize those psychic incapacities that leave some human beings ‘anethical’ (see Faubion 2011 for the coinage of the term), neither cognitively nor affectively equipped to be fully fledged or even partially fledged ethical (or unethical) subjects (McKearney 2018). Though not directly addressing ethical pedagogy, Didier Fassin draws our attention to the impositions of norms and the valorizations of goods that arise from

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On Ethical Pedagogies

resentment and (following Nietzsche) ressentiment (Fassin 2013). Keane’s, Throop’s, McKearney’s, and Fassin’s scholarly intercessions are of signal importance. None of them, however, delivers any precise calibration of the measure or weight that should be assigned to nature in facilitating, much less in determining ethical, anethical, or (whatever it means) unethical subjectivity. Perhaps the scale will be calibrated one fair or cloudy day. The day is not yet here. Suffice it to say that, as they now stand, most anthropologies of ethics vote for the nurturist campaign. At the very least, they insist and must insist on keeping it as a heuristic. Anthropologists of ethical pedagogies must be all the more biased; nothing to teach, nothing to learn – then ethical pedagogy would be a null set. They can of course call on philosophical and sociological authorities on their behalf. Aristotle’s argument in The Nicomachean Ethics that the ethical subject can come to its virtuous fruition only with and through practical training is congenial to the nurturist (Aristotle 1934). Straddling the divide between philosophy and sociology, John Dewey’s pragmatics of moral education is similarly congenial (Dewey 1997a, 1997b). It is a linchpin of the interest among American anthropologists of the ‘Golden Age’ in the cultural determination of personality or character (Mead and Bunzel 1960). They generally accept Dewey’s pragmatics of the pedagogical fostering of an educated citizenry. They are generally in accord that their own research into ‘cultural laboratories’ (see Mead 1928) of allegedly simple cultural constitution (see Benedict 2005) reinforces Dewey in edifying us that only those of us lucky enough to be members of a society of a sufficiently democratic constitution and of a sufficiently rich and diverse trove of ethical points of reference are able to pick and choose in the pursuit of our personal and collective actualization. Further lucky enough to inhabit an environment of norms, values, exemplars, and ideals by no means written in stone, ‘We’ can have a participatory impact in our individual and collective futures (or so Deweyan optimism would have it). Living within cultural laboratories, ‘They’ cannot. But then again, ‘They’ might. Mead in particular was happy to adopt the role of a Deweyan missionary, bringing the Good Secular Word that one might opt out of one’s enslavement to an entrenched tradition to benighted natives, some of those natives her fellow Americans (Mead 2001; Shankman 2018). Among classical social theorists and across the pond, Durkheim schematizes in his numerous essays on moral education a formidable project in social engineering rather more mechanical than its equally progressivist American parallel. French children are its raw material, the school its factory (see Pickering 2005). Bruno Karsenti seems to believe that the essays depart from Durkheim’s scholastic definition of the autopoietic society as a tissue of quasi-transcendent norms that impose themselves on the mindful bodies that constitute it (Karsenti 2012). If so, he is to my mind mistaken. Durkheim’s project is instead a project of the engineering of the conversion of the normative

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into the desirable, the ought into the good. The project is a supplement to his definition. It is not a retraction.

On the Invisible Hand of Morals (aka Ethics) The anthropologists of the American Golden Age as much as the Durkheim of the essays on moral education (among other Durkheims) are troubled antecedents for any anthropology of ethics. Critiques of the role that Durkheim’s influence on social theory and social anthropology in the UK (and elsewhere) likely had in stifling any programmatic coalescence of an anthropology of ethics are many and by now well known. They could be extended to those of Mary Douglas’s most devotedly Durkheimian efforts to demonstrate that different social-structural modalities were the determinants of different cosmological visions and ethical orientations (Douglas 1970). The Americans of the Golden Age were, in contrast, no Durkheimians. Early on, Durkheim was an often misunderstood and misprised beˆte noire among them (see, e.g., Kroeber 1935). Even after the ascendance of the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago, where the somewhat errant Durkheimian Alfred RadcliffeBrown taught between 1931 and 1937, Durkheim remained a minor spectre, haunting little if at all the dogged American penchant to give pride of conceptual place to culture over society. The long divide between the traditions of social anthropology in the UK and cultural anthropology in the USA remained intact as a consequence. The divide did not, however, lean in favour of an American anthropology of ethics any more systematically generative than its Durkheimian counterpoint. Americans had a theoretical place for ethics, built into the very definition of culture. The definition comprised three facets. One was, precisely, ‘ethics’ – any more or less explicit catalogue of rules and values. Another was ethos – from one culture to the next or one sub-cultural context to the next the differentially licensed attitudes, moods, dispositions, motivations, and sensitivities that the esteemed actor might exhibit in their quotidian affairs. The third was worldview – inherited from the German historiology of Weltanschauungen (worldviews). From Ruth Benedict and Mead forward to John Whiting, Irving Child, and their collaborators, American cultural anthropology rivalled Durkheimians in their intrigue with external forces and their internalized outcomes. What culture determined above all for the Americans was ethos – precisely what they more specifically conceived as personality or character (Benedict 1946; DuBois 1944) – and anthropologists of ordinary ethics are, in this precise respect, wittingly or unwittingly, their heirs. For the Americans, practices of child-rearing were the proof of the pudding. Americans may not have sought to discover the invariable laws that the Durkheimian tradition held out as a crown of its full scientific

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redemption. They were, however, every bit as sure as the Durkheimians were of the manipulations of a largely invisible hand, brought to light only with culturological palmistry. What Clifford Geertz derided as ‘laws-andcauses social physics’ was probably fingering the Durkheimians (Geertz 1983: 3). Mutatis mutandis, it probably was also fingering many of his American predecessors and contemporaries. In retrospect, the Durkheimians look to have been one side of the coin of which Americans were the other. To mix metaphors: Durkheim’s sociological determinism had American cultural determinism as its genetic allele. If American and Durkheimian precursors remain relevant to an anthropology of ethical pedagogies, they do so because they remind us of the obligation of being attuned to the continuum between the bodily and mindful incorporation of principles and attitudes and dispositions and the objectification of just such principles, attitudes, and dispositions (Bourdieu avant l’heure). This is the work of ethical pedagogy, whether directed to children or directed to adults. On the side of the ethical trainee, they remind us that the incorporation of ends and commitments, moods and motivations might amount to an entirely one-sided pedagogy of rote inculcation permitting no reflection, much less of any doctrinaire protest. Young children as ethical trainees are surely closer to this pole than to the other, often adult pole. Anthropologists have rarely encountered either pole at its extreme. Gilbert Herdt (1981) and other anthropological specialists of the New Guinea highlands might have come close to documenting the former pole – and in reporting young boys’ obligatory fellation of their elders, to have disturbed some of us in the publication of their findings (see Strathern 1988). Erving Goffman offers a more abstract, more ideal-typical construal of such extremes in his sociological visit to mental and other ‘total institutions’ in The Asylum (1961). Michel Foucault offers us a concordant construal in visiting prisons, barracks, and boarding and reform schools in Discipline and Punish (1977). Neither construal results – or doesn’t quite – in the portraiture of the automaton. They result instead in the portraiture of what, in American terms, might be understood as the ambition to inculcate an ethos that, perfected, would be spontaneous in its enactment (see also Mahmood 2005). It would abide as habitus. Other ethical pedagogies share such ambitions, but sometimes do not succeed in achieving or even offering to their typical students the common prospect of achieving them (see Laidlaw 1995, 2005; Laidlaw and Mair 2019). This is no trivial semantic hair-splitting. The Golden-Age distinction between ethics and ethos encourages us to consider the extent to which some of what has recently fallen under the rubric of anthropological research into ethics could with greater conceptual precision be understood as research into the pedagogical transformation of ethics into ethos (and its discontents). Jarrett Zigon’s conceptualization of morality (2007) and Veena Das’s ongoing expansion of the polythetic class of ‘ordinary ethics’ (2015) are susceptible to just this classificatory challenge. Saba

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Mahmood’s and Charles Hirschkind’s compelling accounts of the ardour of Islamic pietists to realize themselves in the imitatio Mohammedi are susceptible to the same challenge (see Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006). So, too, would be any analytical attempt to render as ethical the end of the realization of the self in the Christian imitatio Christi or the imitation of or becoming the Buddha.

From Ethology to Ethical Pedagogy In the USA, the reputation of the anthropology of childhood suffered from the extravagance in which some of its adherents indulged in their portraitures of ‘national character’ in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Geoffrey Gorer should not alone be blamed for its decline. Still, his now forgotten People of Great Russia (1949), which advanced the hypothesis that the swaddling of infants was among the sources of a Russian disposition to bow to superiority even while resenting it, did nothing to further its cause (see Faubion 2018). The anthropology of childhood resurfaced in the USA in the later 1970s as the anthropology of education. Eyes and ears were reattuned. National character went off the ethnographic screen. The better or worse performance of minorities in the American classroom was at the cutting edge instead. More recently, it has stepped squarely into the terrain of the anthropology of morality and ethics, bringing the best of the Golden Age along with it and leaving the worst behind. Two scholars deserve honourable mention. One is Elinor Ochs. With frequent collaborators, Ochs has rigorously woven together a sustained investigation into the pedagogical expansion of ethical subjectivity across socio-cultural divides. One of her sites is Samoa (Ochs 1982; Ochs and Scheiffelin 1984; Ochs 1988). It is not the same Samoa as the Samoa of Mead’s ground-breaking if controversial foray (again see Mead 1928; find a critique in Freeman 1986). Samoa is now a ‘Christian state’ by official proclamation. Denominational affiliations vary. What appears to have remained constant are ethical pedagogies of notable instructive consistency. Ochs (personal communication) underscores that Samoan children are no mere passive recipients of their caregivers’ ministrations and, in doing so, distances herself from the analytics of enculturation of which the anthropologists of the Golden Age were so epistemologically fond. Dialogic, give-and-take, Samoan pedagogies seem still to result not merely in an outward-looking recognition and accommodation of the needs, desires, vulnerabilities, and strengths of the other. They result also in the consecration of seeing just that recognition and accommodation through to communal ends and commitments. The other chief site of Ochs’s investigation is a subsection of American middle-class ‘post-industrial families’ (Ochs 2015). Within them, she finds clatter and inconsistency, manifest daily in the tension between responsibility towards others and the

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assertion of what might be thought of as individualist sovereignty as an end in itself. Ochs records the social dramas that crop up between children and parents but also among parents (and other ethical pedagogues) themselves. It is not a pretty picture, but no member of the American middle class in any way inclined to ethnographic reflection can doubt its accuracy. The other scholar is Cheryl Mattingly’. In a monograph subsequent to her Paradox of Hope (2010), Mattingly delves into ‘moral laboratories’ (not to be confused with the cultural laboratories of the Golden Age; see also Mattingly 2014). Especially compelling contributions to the anthropology of ethical pedagogies are Mattingly’s agonizing and inescapably poignant records of the labours that parents undertake in inventing and coming to cherish the ethical recognition of, care for, and care of children whose afflictions undermine their mobility, or their longevity, or even their ability to participate as ethical subjects as such. These are children who have been severely burned. Or they suffer from sickle-cell anaemia. Or they suffer from and die of cancer. Mattingly primarily dwells on and with parents, and cogently so; their children are often so afflicted that the ethnographer would breach professional (and supra-professional) propriety in bothering them. Her analytical framework is a virtue ethics wrought in the first person. It is a framework through which she aims to preserve the singularity of the moral transformations and moral resolutions at which parents (and other caregivers) arrive in their ethical estimation of their own as well as their children’s ethical stature. Of course (and as always, sooner or later), the approach has its critics. Das has questioned whether Mattingly’s methodological confinement to the first person might exclude other grammatically pinpointed or concrete, mindfully embodied second persons from the figuration of the ends, the commitments, and the sensibilities that her interlocutors articulate and enact. Das further questions whether Mattingly’s concentration on self-narration might overestimate the unity of the course of her interlocutors’ actual journeys, actual lives (Das 2015: 96–7). The former question is strained at best. The first-person narratives that Mattingly records always have a second person as their ethical compass – a child. They thus always imply a bond between an I and a Thou, in which neither party exercises nor can exercise the unmitigated inscription of the being of the one or the other. The two stand to each other in a mutual relation, mutually constitutive. Das’s latter question suggests that Das herself simply does not defer to Mattingly’s own considered defence of narratology. The defence in no way hinges on narrative as a technology of formulaic-cum-ethicopsychological unity. It hinges instead on narrative as the plotting of ‘suspense’ (Mattingly 2014: 123). I leave to other readers to align themselves with or distance themselves from my defence of Mattingly’s enterprise. Whatever their decision, this reader can find little justification of the charge that Mattingly fails to recognize that the voice and the mindful body of the ethical first person is always already infiltrated by the voices of

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both second and third persons – grammatical or concrete. If each in her own way and if with many ethnographical and anthropological qualifications, Ochs and Mattingly both methodologically endorse Arthur Rimbaud’s maxim: the I is another. But the point that Ochs and Mattingly further make is not so self-centred. The point that both of them make is that self and other are pedagogically imbricated, from the child to the adult and vice versa. The best model for proceeding in the anthropological analysis of ethical pedagogy is an analysis that takes as seriously the impact of the child on the adult as much as the impact of the adult on the child. The dynamic is not universal – but it must be included within the anthropological purview. Recent British scholarship also deserves honourable mention. Heather Montgomery, a leading contributor to the ‘social studies of childhood’ that emerged in British social anthropology in the 1980s (see Montgomery 2001, 2009), has guided me through the ins and outs of its still burgeoning and already copious scholarship. It is a fact of natural life: we all begin our ethical careers as infants. It is a fact of social life: the dividing lines between infancy, childhood, and other stages of the course of life on to adulthood have been and continue to be diversely drawn – sometimes rigidly and ritualistically, sometimes vaguely and nonchalantly (Arie`s 1965; Faubion and Melton 1979; James 2001; Lancy 2015). With ample evidence to muster, contributors to the social studies of childhood proceed from the conviction that childhood is more a social fact than a natural fact. Second, they accent that childhood should not be conceived merely as a transitional syncopation in the vector towards adulthood but also as a situation, a state of being irreducibly its own. Peer groups stand out as ethnographic and analytically generative collectives in support of the presumption (e.g. Corsaro 1985, an important American source). Third, the corpus diminishes the conventional dominance accorded to adults or elders in embracing children as useful informants and participants in research in their own right. Fourth, correlatively, and in accord with the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), it imagines children as individuals with rights and the potential for independent action, not as mere appendages to their family or the passive recipients of socialization (see Boyden 2015). Fifth, it posits that children might be ethical actors who change those around them as much as they are changed’. In all of these respects, such studies could hardly be more germane to any future anthropology of ethical pedagogies. Their weakness lies in their importing a distinctly Western and classically liberal philosophy of the individual into the mix of their critical vision of children as teachers as much as taught. This said, we all know that children can confront us with our own ethical myopia and failings. They are inevitably taught, but they can teach as well. Among their many lessons is the reminder that we all belong to a species that plays: Homo ludens. Johan Huizinga’s now hoary work of

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that title (Huizinga 1949) has yet to stimulate anthropologists of ethics to entertain play – diversionary or, a` la Jeremy Bentham, deep (or, often, both) – as an analytical capstone (but see Salen and Zimmerman 2003). The lacuna is more serious than it might seem at first sight. Even if we demur from Huizinga’s argument that play is generative of culture as such, we must still be cognizant of it as a fulcrum of ethical formation. Clifford Geertz’s ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ (1973: 435–74) revolves around the sub rosa reproduction of battles over social status; ethics is absent from its analytical lexicon. Miguel Sicart’s Ethics of Computer Games (2007) could serve as a better guide, though it is more speculative than the ethnographer might wish that it would be. The anthropology of sports provides greater ethnographic depth (see Besnier, Brownell, and Carter 2017), but suffers from a lack of disciplinary enthusiasm (and funding). Anthropologists of ethics should join together in bolstering its stature. Cutthroat competition is anethical. The rules that govern and the values that are embedded in a great many games are, in contrast, latently or manifestly, rules and values of virtuous conduct. English schoolboys are far from alone in being pressed to heed the advice: be fair; cherish the team; don’t be a bad winner or sore loser. The juggernaut of ‘values education’ is carrying a similar message to schoolboys and schoolgirls in the global North as in the global South. Whether and how the message might be translated into behaviour is – as value educators are acutely aware – another, and fundamental to the design of the curricula that they continue to adjudicate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Values education). Anthropologists of ethics should scrutinize such curricula carefully. They hold the analytical promise of distilling the still unresolved but increasingly vigorous and well-financed ethical evangelism of planetary ambit. Let’s see how far they can or cannot go (and why or why not).

Adult Education Children are not alone in being students of ethics. Adults can play as well – though they might not have a lot of fun in doing so. The ethics of what Michel Foucault called le souci de soi (1988; see also 1997b) – the care of the self or concern for the self – are in no way unique in imposing the requirement that adults consult would-be or collectively recognized ethical masters. Ethics centred on the care of the other do so as well. Masters on both sides (and everywhere in between) are legion. They include the many refractions of spiritual virtuosi in the Abrahamic religions. They include the many refractions of the Zen sage (rarely ethicists of the care of the self, but instead the ethicists and ontologists of its dissolution: see Faubion 2013). They include the elders that so many peoples used to venerate as founts of ethical and ontological wisdom’. In our fast-paced present, they include the secular ethicists who respond to the ethically

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fraught in their columns for such publications as the Sunday magazine of The New York Times. Yes: credentials matter. (New York University philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah presides at this writing as advisor-in-chief over the column in the Sunday magazine of The New York Times.) They include humanist therapists of self-actualization and the vocationally certified new breed of ‘life coaches’. Purveying curricula designed to produce less cutthroat, less individualist, more cooperative managers and employees, professionalized consultants have been offering their expertise the corporate sector since at least the mid-1970s. Dorrine Kondo’s Crafting Selves affords a first ethnographic disquisition. Kondo paints a colourful picture of her participation in a corporate-financed retreat at The Ethics School, whose curricular principles emanate from philosopher Maruyama Toshio’s disgust with a postwar Japan in which ‘you could do anything, so long as you had the money’ (Kondo 1990: 78). Not so, according to The Ethical School: strict accordance to the daily hygienic routine is de rigueur. The collective is primary. Submitting to orders and feeling at once their force and the pleasure that obedience can bring is their curricular pie`ce de resistance (1990: 83–115). Emily Martin’s description of the ‘high-ropes course’ in which she participated as a novice in a ‘Total Quality Management’ retreat is of the same ilk. One unit in its syllabus appoints to its students these assignments: climb forty-foot high towers and leap off them into space on a zip line, climb forty-foot high walls and rappel down again, climb a twenty-fivefoot high telephone pole, which wobbled, stand up on a twelve-inch platform at the top, which swiveled, turn around 180 degrees, and again leap off into space. (Martin 1994: 212) With its exquisitely terrifying devices, the unit was constructed to lead to ethical revelation, in three steps. Step one: managers and subalterns, men and women, revealed themselves to one another as often being as afraid as courageous, as often needy as self-reliant. Step two: the corporate recruits discovered that they could valorize their dependency, each on the other, as the ethical badge of their employability and the enhancement of their productivity. Step three: the recruits further discovered (or were further supposed to discover) that their situational ‘flexibility’ – now the commander, now the subaltern – was the most cardinal of the virtues on which their employability and advancement would be to the best benefit of the corporation as a whole. In his study of ESQ (Emotional and Spiritual Quotient) in Indonesia, a programme intended to bring about the reconciliation of ‘work ethics’ with the ethics of (one expression of) Islam, Daromir Rudnyckyj (2011) could have evoked Kondo’s Ethics School or Martin’s documentation of her trials in Total Quality Management as comparative foils. He does not. The curriculum of ESQ may flow under a more religious banner than the curricula of Kondo’s and (especially)

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Martin’s retreats do. All are nevertheless emblematic of a piecework or patchwork of recent efforts to reconcile the cutthroat with the cooperative in our modern (or post-modern) capitalistic manners of subsistence and supra-subsistence. Once again, anthropologists of ethics should stay tuned.

Teaching Oneself Kondo’s, Martin’s, and Rudnyckyj’s schools mandate joint endeavours, but anyone who has trained for any sort of accomplishment whatsoever does not need to be told that many of the games we might play and toys and tools we might deploy are games and tools and toys that we might play and deploy en solitaire. As elements of the ‘techniques of the self’ of the ancient and early Christian ethics of the care of the self, to which Foucault turns in the last stage of his career, they are a sine qua non of subjectivation, of the active intervention of the self into itself in its own ethical development – its realization as a subject worthy of the esteem of its ethically esteemed others. Of the four parameters of the ethical that Foucault proposes in the second volume of The History of Sexuality (1985; see also Foucault 1997a; and see Heywood (Chapter 5) and Candea (Chapter 33), both this volume), techniques of the self – games of truth and of practice – include a wide array of mental and physical attunements, mental and physical gymnastics, indulgences and deprivations, delights and tortures to which subjects subject themselves in fashioning their virtues. Among the Greeks and Romans, they are instruments aimed towards the self’s psychosomatic governance of itself. In the ‘liberal’ sphere of modern governance, they are similarly ‘arts of governance’ that do not coerce the ethical subject but instead urge or entice it to adapt to and embrace the expediencies, imperatives, and enhancements of the regnant politico-economic regime. Good luck to the regime: precisely because of their liberality, their arts may founder or fall short on the very thresholds of the divide between the collective and the individual that they themselves foster and mandate. In illiberal as well as liberal configurations of governmentality, what Foucault has conceived as techniques of the self are linguistically in the middle voice (Tyler 1998; Faubion 2001). They are pragmatically in the middle mode of practice as art and art as practice. Linguistically and pragmatically, their actors are actors who are at once subjects and objects of their actions. On the continuum between incorporation and objectification, most such techniques draw those who deploy them nearer the latter than the former pole, at least in the pursuit of an inaugural diploma. In that pursuit, they have the benefit of many established tools of the ethical trade’. In Greek and Roman antiquity, we can easily unearth many such tools. They consist of the psychosomatic instruments – swords, spears, shields, horses, footraces and marathons, lutes and harps, sacred or quasi-sacred texts, wrestling, symposia – that

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Greeks of the classical period touted as enhancing their martial, intellectual, and civic eminence. Among the Hellenistic Greeks and the Romans – philosophical or more run of the ethical mill – they include the hypomne¯mata, chapbooks of literary phrases, adages and aphorisms, and the often cryptic pronouncements of the sages (Foucault 1997a). Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans (1992) offers exemplars good and bad of ethical lessons, contributing to the tradition’. In the Common Era, we might add to Foucault’s attention to Christian confession and self-examination (Foucault 2018; see also Clemens 2020) the hoes and shovels, the nurturing of flowers and vegetables and eradication of weeds of monastic labour. The anthropological and extraanthropological corpus identifies many other tools and the aske¯seis in which they are put to use. They include the yogic asanas (https://kripalu .org/resources/yoga-s-ethical-guide-living-yamas-and-niyamas); the sitar (Rahaim 2012); the huts and bowls and leaves of the Japanese tea ceremony and the flora assembled in the composition of an ikebana bouquet (Handa 2013); animals in their capacity to suffer, in their companionship and their husbandry (Haraway 2003; cf. Jones McVey, Chapter 27 of this volume); the earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis); even the cosmos (Olson 2018).

Pedagogical Exemplars: Ethical Teaching, Ethical Being Masters and tools: in the intersection between the two, conceptually and pragmatically, are parties of interest integral to many ethical pedagogies, and they are of two sorts. Caroline Humphrey’s ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Morality in Mongolia’ (1997) aids us in locating moral exemplars at just that intersection. Strivings to imitate Mohammed or the Christ or the Buddha or others anointed are strivings to imitate exemplars, and they are typically neither more nor less. The striving towards imitation is an esteemed ambition. The striving towards or claims to be a literal reinstantiation of the divinely or cosmologically anointed are collectively far more suspect. Although I am no specialist in either the great or the minor religious traditions in Asia, I presume that the generalization is sound across devotions, Abrahamic or Asian, major or minor, religious or secular, and for good sociological and culturological reason. The social and cultural powers that be in any given constellation of collective order are overwhelmingly likely to be averse to the toleration of what is effectively an assertion of an unadulterated charismatic authority in radical militancy against the established ethical order. The Christ and Mohammed may be limit cases. At least for those who would imitate them, they approach being hypostases of rules or codes of conduct unconditionally to be. Humphrey suggests that among the

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Mongols and more broadly, the ‘ethics of exemplars’ has three salient and more typical hallmarks. In paraphrase: it constructs a particular kind of individuality, or culturally specific concept of the person; it contributes to the crystallization of a variety of different ‘ways of life’, which acknowledges rather than denies social conflict; and it requires the subject do some ‘work’, that is, ponder the meaning of the exemplar for himself or herself. Just so ‘exemplars as moral discourse are open-ended and unfinished’ (Humphrey 1997: 34). Humphrey cites Foucault in introducing her argument’. In The Use of Pleasure and with his eye on classical Greece, he makes the distinction between code-orientated and ‘ethics-orientated’ moralities (not Foucault’s precise term or in accord with my own usage, but so it goes). The latter emphasize ‘the forms of relation with the self, the methods . . . by which [the subject] works them out, the exercises by which he [sic] makes of himself an object to be known, and the practices that enable him to transform his own mode of being’ (1985: 29; see Humphrey, 1997: 26). Classical Greeks were (a` la Foucault) much less code-orientated than ethicsorientated. After Humphrey, we should not be surprised that their ethics is saturated with exemplars, from worthy erastai (lovers) to the Aristotelian good man to the panorama of heroes and ideal-types that the poets were so fond of representing and putting into narrative or lyrical action. We might wish to distinguish between exemplars proper and the hypothetical or mythical personages of epic and lyric. The distinction should indeed remain in the anthropological toolkit. It should remain all the more so if we are inclined to endorse Joel Robbins’s postulate that those exemplars with whom we actually come face to face have greater ethical effect than mythic or historically legendary figurae (Robbins 2018). Carry the postulate too far, however, and it might obscure that, as Humphrey rightly has it, exemplars are denizens of discourse – indexical icons sometimes, icons tout court at others. In Mongolia (Humphrey 1997: 25), as elsewhere (see, e.g., Dave 2012; Pandian 2009; Robbins 2018; Sykes 2012; Evans, Chapter 17 of this volume), they are instruments of deliberation. Just so, they are also markers of ethical complexity – of competing and incompatible norms, competing and incompatible values, competing and incompatible commitments of smaller or larger scope. The inevitability of deliberation within a complex ethical ecology is by most anthropological accounts far more prevalent. Despite its many empirical confirmations, such complexity may nevertheless theoretically be regarded more as an ethical glitch than as our inevitable ethical condition (yet more fodder for debate). Das seems to regard it as such. So does the early Zigon. The devotee of Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein thus converges with the devotee of a version – or inversion – of the Heidegger of Being and Time. Das joins the early Zigon in giving a nod towards ethical complexity. Perhaps in spite of themselves, they both proffer a teleological conception of the end, the

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consummation, of our ethical being in the world. Even when faced with complexity, disturbed (often deeply disturbed) by the novelty or inconsistency of the ethical environment, the subjects that Das portrays in her many gorgeous vignettes seem uniformly to seek to recover, eventually, a less turbulent, more unified, and more doxic, even if only ‘eventual’, day to day (Das 2012). The early Zigon similarly portrays the subjects he engages as seeking to recover from their ‘moral breakdowns’ in a reabsorption into an untroubled and doxically harmonious placidity. Das and Zigon are immensely gifted ethnographers. The anthropologist might, however, be entitled to worry whether their counter-Spinozan teleologies of a conatus towards ethical simplicity overreach what the conservatives among us might think of as the constraint – however indeterminate – of the factual. Factually, ordinary ethics or the early Zigon’s morality might be more a deviation than the general standard (see again Keane 2016: 134–5). At least in Greece (classical and, I might add, modern) as well as in Humphrey’s Mongolia, ethical complexity is the factual order of the day’. In both sites (and elsewhere), a discordant repertoire of available exemplars comprise a personified mixture of codes and rules on the one hand, goodness and the ideal on the other. They thus impose contextual qualifications on the universality of codes and rules. They also impose supraindividual qualifications on the formulation of ‘individually chosen’ (Humphrey 1997: 25) commitments and ends. Even limit cases, the Christ and Mohammed, may be limits not in hypostasizing a programme of codes and rules but instead in hypostasizing a quintessential amalgam of those two sides. In more mortal and usual exemplars, real or hypothetical, the contest between deontology and consequentialism comes together into a discursive amalgam typically weighted towards one side or the other. Whatever weight might be on the scales, exemplars are often the switching-posts of two sorts of ethical debates. The crux of one of those debates puts on the table whose exemplar is more exemplary than whose. The crux of the other puts on the table whether any given exemplar is worthy of being regarded as exemplary at all. The two debates often merge empirically, but they are not the same. Logically, the one is intensive: it spins in a moralistic spiral of better and worse. Logically, the other is more existential: it spins in the problematizing spiral of the supra-humanistic or humanistic all, the humanistic some, or the nihilistic none. Ethical pedagogies may suppress or enhance the debate, but the ethics of exemplars approaches being more universal than, in her ethnographic modesty, Humphrey cares to assert. Even if it is not, exemplars are of special heuristic moment – for children and adults, for the ethical pedagogue and for the anthropology of ethical pedagogies’. In their amalgamative hypostases of the deontological and the consequentialist, they are representative of the hybridity and contextuality of ethical judgement. They are two-faced. They are thus representative of not putting all of

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one’s eggs into either the deontological or the consequentialist basket’. In my fieldwork and in the elicitations that I invite from the students enrolled in the course I teach on the anthropology of ethics, I never encountered anyone whose ethical basket is not mixed. Deontological now, consequentialist then; universalizing now, contextualizing then: whether or not one calls on exemplars in justifying one’s judgements, exemplars are at once the discursive and ontological incarnations of the grounds of vulgar ethical judgement. ‘Vulgar’ derives from the Latin vulgaris: common, usual, ordinary. I use the term here etymologically, and with critical intent. Pace Das and the early Zigon, the ethics of exemplars may capture far better than any analytics of unreflective submersion what ordinary ethics actually is (or plurally are). Exemplars often are extraordinary (Lempert 2013; Laidlaw and Mair 2019). The ethics they inform may or may not be extraordinary. Their Janus-faces are vulgar on both sides. Exemplars are further of special heuristic moment because they direct us to a widespread inclination of ethical reasoning to which Humphrey alludes in posing exemplars as equivalents to precedents (1997: 25). The inclination is towards casuistry (the term derives from the Latin causus; case, event, happening – see also Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume)’. In the Common Era, Jesuits were particularly inclined towards it. Today, the term is something of a philosophical dirty word, in some part because of the Jansenist Blaise Pascal’s rigorously deontological rebuke of Jesuit casuists for their moral laxity (see Pascal 1997). The philosophical baby should not, however, be thrown out with the anthropological bathwater. Casuistry might be abused (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988) – but then again, what form of reasoning cannot be? Whether or not discharged with due diligence, casuistry survives and indeed prospers. It is a vital component of ethical as of legal and other case-based, diagnostic modes of reasoning, diagnostic reasoning within anthropology included (Rabinow 2003: 131–3)’. Indexically iconic and iconic precedents are key to its modi operandi. As a vital component of ethical (and other) reasoning, lay or professional, it does not come easily. Humphrey’s Mongolian children are not alone in being ‘exposed to a great variety of moral stories and precepts’ that ‘he or she then develops as a personality to the point where a teacher or exemplar can be intentionally chosen’ (Humphrey 1997: 36–7). The precocious child is an anomaly. Adults are the usual adepts of ethical as of other casuistries.

Conclusion: Capacities and Restrictions Does the master of one’s fate, the captain of one’s destiny, thus re-enter through the back door? Humphrey’s Foucauldian emphasis on individually chosen teachers or exemplars may spark the rumour that she does allow him to re-enter, and charges of methodological individualism along

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with it. The rumour, however, is false and the charges misplaced. Such charismatic leaders as the Christ and Mohammed (and Chinggis Khaan: Humphrey 1997: 26) may set precedents – after all, one has to start with someone, somewhere. Yet even the Christ, even Mohammed, even Chinggis Khaan, even the Hindu avatars were and are constrained by precedent. Charismatic leaders in their Weberian purity are very rarely incarnate. The purest of them are denizens of discourse and they are not yet ethical actors (see Faubion 2011: 82–4). They espouse values, but (in their Weberian purity) values they conjure on their own. They are persons of exception and persons who demonstrate their exception in acting as laws unto themselves and then breaking them. They have no ethical regard of the other. One follows their ordinances. If not, one belongs to the condemned. Only once they grant others the privilege of being subjects (second person or third person) who might participate with them legislatively and in the adjudication of the ultimately estimable do they cross the line in the sand that separates the anethical or the antiethical from the ethical. Once they do, they have ipso facto ceded the plenitude of their reign. Only then can they set precedents that might function (in any voice) as ethical precedents, ethical case law. The methodological model that thus emerges is anything but individualist. The model instead is a model of capacitating restrictions, always limiting capacitations. The languages that we speak are partial and for the most part ethically neutral analogues. Competency in a language is restrictive and the restrictions are already in place before any validation of competency. The competent speaker or writer must bow to the dictates of a grammar that they have barely any chance of revising. Within its restrictions, however, the speaker or writer has a plethora of options: declamatory, descriptive or tropological, stylistic, idiomatic, idiolectic. The analogy between the ethical and the linguistic founders, however, on all four fronts relevant to the refinement of an anthropology of ethical pedagogies. Nature versus nurture: competency in a language, and all the more the competency in its tropological, stylistic and idiomatic command, requires a great deal of nurturing – from teachers, but also en solitaire. Still, in most linguists’ judgement, nature predominates. Ethical competency (and even its unethical counterpart) may be less natural than nurtured. Analogously, the semantics of any given language is malleable, but grammar much less so. The semantics of ethical adjudication is also malleable, but it (or they) have no fixed grammar. The ethical actor is more free (if, again, never fully free, and sometimes very little free) than the competent speaker or writer to contest and to revise the semantics and pragmatics of a given ethical order. Ethics has no fixed syntax. Rules may come first. Precedents may come first and emulations after, but what comes first and what comes after is always vulnerable to debate and replacement. The third front is the relative informality of pedagogy. Linguistic pedagogy and ethical pedagogy are both largely informal, but our teachers of language

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On Ethical Pedagogies

can instruct us formally in grammars that, again, ethics lacks. Fourth, the front of incorporation versus objectification: linguistic education, in its childhood as in its adult phases, tips far more towards the former pole than towards the latter – unless a grammarian happens to be present to rear his or her head. Ethical pedagogies have to be mapped on a scatter-graph. The model: it is of three-fold dimensions. The first consists of first-order cybernetic feedback loops, from the exemplary to the exemplified, from the precedent to the posterior, largely without reflective assessment. The second are second-order loops, in which debate about the differential worthiness and the validation and the invalidation of principles, goods, and the exemplariness of exemplars have their discursive and practical locus. We must add, third, to such loops Deleuzean lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987). Lines of flight are unanticipated, and they may even be ‘original’, but they will never gain ethical traction until they are incorporated within, even as they expand or subvert, the ethical status quo. Forget radical originality, and forget either ontological or methodological individualism. To repeat: the I of ethical pedagogies is always already another – fully or partially, as one or another pedagogy demands or allows. Anthropologists of ethics – and so of ethical pedagogies – are in the same boat.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Cheryl Mattingly, Heather Montgomery, Elinor Ochs, and Jason Throop for evaluating my representation of their work and especially to Drs Montgomery and Ochs for directing me to scholarly sources that were unfamiliar to me.

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Part IV

Intimate and Everyday Life

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22 Care Cheryl Mattingly and Patrick McKearney

Several decades ago, feminists put forward a bold claim: care is not merely one ethical concern or good among others but the ontological ground of ethics. Their primary justification was that we are, above all, not only relational beings but also dependent ones (Tronto 2009; Held 2006; Noddings 2013). Our very survival, as individuals and as a species, relies upon giving and receiving care. None of us escapes this fact. We are all ‘some mother’s child’ who have stayed alive long enough only thanks to the caring intervention of those who respond to our dependency throughout our infancy (Ruddick 1995; see also Kittay 1999b). Some of the early claims, for example by Noddings and Gilligan, may now sound a bit reductionist and idealized to the anthropological ear. However, they offer a useful starting place, highlighting the insufficiency of existing moral theory in addressing relational dependencies and vulnerability (Gilligan 1982; Kittay 1999b; Ruddick 1995; Held 2006; Tronto 2009). A focus on care draws attention to the ways forms of ethical selfcultivation, including ones that foreground moral autonomy, actually rely upon relationships of dependence and care. Foregrounding care in this way can challenge many of the ways we talk about ethics and morality in anthropology as well, even though we take relationality and dependence for granted. How might ‘care’ as a topic, and as engaged ethnographically, trouble some of the ways that ethical life has been conceived in the philosophical and anthropological literature? An enormous body of scholarship has emerged over the last decade that challenges and complicates considerations of care: a new anthropology of care. This work, richly grounded in ethnography, continues to raise thorny questions about the ethical issues entailed in care practices. It offers generative possibilities for exploring the limitations of dominant Eurocentric moral frameworks. But this potential is currently limited by the fact that ‘care’ is, in English, so polyvalent that it can be used with very different moral meanings. Jonathan Haidt, for instance, describes the liberal tradition of ethics as uniquely focussed on preventing harm – or what he terms ‘care’ (Haidt 2013). But ‘care’ can equally stand for the kind

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of attentive reciprocal respect that autonomous Kantian agents are meant to show each other’s dignity (Korsgaard 1996; Langton 1992). These are very different ethics from one another that can nonetheless both be described by the same word. And the slipperiness of the term also means that they can be elided into one another in contemporary bioethics to form a powerful rhetoric about care that emphasizes harm-prevention, consent, and independence as the primary (and sometimes only) values at stake. Without trying to offer a rival definition of care, we will attend to these important differences in order to analyse how ethical issues play out in this new and wide-ranging anthropological literature on care. We also connect this scholarship on care to work in the anthropology of ethics. Anthropology’s ethical turn draws heavily upon philosophy, especially virtue ethics and phenomenology (Mattingly and Throop 2018). This scholarship has the potential to provide conceptual vocabulary for interrogating some of the findings within the anthropology of care that have emerged ethnographically. Virtue ethics in the neo-Aristotelian vein highlights the situated uncertainties surrounding practices of care and the ethical vulnerabilities that can accompany efforts to meet the demands of care – the moral tragedies of care (Mattingly 2014; McKearney 2020, 2022). Foucauldian versions of virtue ethics especially illuminate the pedagogical dimensions of ethical cultivation, showcasing how moral dependence, asymmetrical relationality, and the cultivation of a reflective ethical self need to be thought together (see Faubion, Chapter 21 of this volume). Phenomenological traditions offer a fertile language for considering embodied forms of relationality and intersubjectivity that are bound up in practices of care. Phenomenology also directs attention to care’s ineffable and elusive ethical dimensions, to forms of ethical experience not readily captured by or reducible to codified moral vocabularies. But ethnographic attention to care also reveals some gaps in the anthropology of ethics. As feminists pointed out long ago, a focus on care asks us to make central the ethical stakes of asymmetrical relationality, dependence, and vulnerability. These remain undertheorized dimensions of ethical life in both anthropology and moral philosophy. They are key concerns of this chapter. In a quite personal way, the prominence of relational asymmetry emerged for each of us from our own individual ethnographic fieldwork. We have each attempted to develop a language to capture the ethics of relationships in which children and adults with significant physical and cognitive disabilities and illnesses receive support. When relational asymmetry spans a lifetime in which someone depends unequally on others for basic needs that they cannot fulfil on their own, what sorts of demands does this make on carers and on carerecipients? What sorts of ethical labour is involved, and what kinds of responses are required of both caregiver and recipient? We have also considered what sorts of unusual forms of moral interaction and intersubjectivities these caring relationships generate. How might care of this

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kind trouble some of the ways that ethical life has been conceived in the philosophical and anthropological literature? What ethical vocabulary do we need to develop to describe these uneven relationships?

Problematizing Care and Ethics: The Anthropology of Care If one follows the lead of early feminists of care, it might seem that care is an unqualified ethical good as well as a biological necessity for our species. But feminists themselves quickly began to challenge an overly rosy and essentialist picture. As they turned a political eye on care work, they also examined its social and economic dimensions. They pointed out that care work has historically been a highly gendered domain in many societies, a low-status domestic sphere which was the province of women (e.g. Kittay and Feder 2003; Hanigsberg and Ruddick 1999). The ethical centrality of care in human life has not been sufficiently recognized in Western moral philosophies precisely because women were left out of moral theory, as they were out of so much else in the public sphere (Gilligan 1982; Tronto 2009; Held 2006). Anthropologists have further troubled Eurocentric portraits of care, and their presumption of the relationship between care and femininity, even as they have built upon feminist challenges to dominant Western moral theories (Duclos and Criado 2020). The new anthropology of care is a recent synthesis of longer conversations across such diverse fields as medical, political, and psychological anthropology about kinship, governmentality, intimacy, subjectivity, and the body. There is thus no single meaning of care across these works, nor is producing one an aim of most scholars in this movement. And, despite the analytical depth of each work individually, and the fact that there are multiple overlapping themes across the literature, there are not yet clearly delineated debates about the nature of care in which authors stake out distinct positions and respond to one another. There is not yet an established theoretical debate about the ethics of care. But ethical questions are implicitly and explicitly central to this emerging field. Ethics has, for instance, long animated a still growing body of work that examines the exploitative nature of care work and especially its gendered dimensions (Diamond 1995; Glenn 2012; Parren˜as and Boris 2010; Stacey 2016; Gutierrez Garza 2019; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004). Anthropologists have also pointed out the problematic ethical assumptions surrounding practices of care, especially when these are folded into state or global practices and policies directed towards vulnerable populations. Indeed, problematizing the ethics surrounding care interventions has been a focal concern in the burgeoning anthropology of care. In this vein, scholars are now increasingly exploring questions not

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just about the moral costs of giving care but also about whether or how people manage to offer care that might itself be considered moral. Ethnographies document the way cruelty or neglect may be sanctioned in the name of care. This issue is prominently displayed in work that treats care as an ‘absent or tainted object’ (Cook and Trundle 2020: 180). To take one notable example, Joao Biehl’s (2005) ethnography of Vita, a Brazilian charitable institution, articulates a profound absence of care in asylums dedicated to care of the destitute. He shows how these spaces operate as zones of abandonment as he documents the profound neglect that characterizes the daily life and medical treatment of those confined in them, a society’s unwanted population. Scholars who focus on these kinds of absences typically work to identify the social forces that prevent a positive or ameliorative relationship of care from appearing. Anthropologists have not only exposed problematic care practices; they have also turned a critical eye to normative Western ideals of care and the ethics that inform them. The ethical concept of moral autonomy has been a special target of problematization. Many writers focus on the moral rhetoric of independence that animates market ideologies and contemporary bioethics (with its roots in Kantian and liberal understandings of autonomy and freedom). They argue that when this idolization of autonomy is introduced into caring relationship it distorts the provision of care by legitimating states, professionals, companies, and others to abandon their responsibilities to those in need (Lester 2009; Brodwin 2013; Taylor 2010; Biehl 2005; Mol 2008; Buch 2018; Davis 2012; Zigon 2010). A more specific variety of this approach addresses the confusing possibility that these damaging ethical practices might actually be referred to as ‘care’. Scholars such as Miriam Ticktin (2011) show us how these purportedly ‘caring’ moral ideologies can prevent more genuinely moral forms of care emerging – such as in France where compassionate and humanitarian rhetoric masks a more brutal reality (see also Stevenson 2014; Biehl 2012). But there is another strategy anthropologists have called upon to problematize dominant moral assumptions. Some have also documented the unexpected appearance of (ethically worthy) care in practices that seem morally dubious from the perspective of preserving moral autonomy or reducing harm (McKearney 2019a, 2020; McKearney and Amrith 2021). These authors find a powerful moral logic in such surprising places as not asking for consent before treatment (Mol 2008), replacing nurses with technology (Pols and Moser 2009), force-feeding those with dementia (Harbers, Mol, and Stollmeyer 2002), hitting mothers in labour precisely in order to make them agitated (Brown 2010), ‘forcing’ children to marry people they do not want to (Mody 2020), not telling patients about their diagnosis (Livingston 2012; Marrow and Luhrmann 2017), exposing vulnerable people with intellectual disabilities to sexual risk (Kulick and Rydstro¨m 2015), having a heroin-using relationship with one’s daughter (Garcia 2014), and kidnapping and coercing drug addicts (Garcia 2015).

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These works challenge many of our most familiar ways of evaluating and describing caring relationships, and look instead for ways to articulate alternative ethical logics and possibilities. They point us towards senses of care outside dominant moral frameworks and hegemonic practices. Taken together, this work offers a crucial supplement to an anthropology of ethics that also aims to avoid the reduction of ethics to dominant ways of talking about morality. But we are still left with questions: what is the ethical content of the unexpected kinds of ‘care’ these works draw our attention to? What is it that these authors regard as ‘ethical’ or ‘ethically worthy’ in these practices? The most common way for authors to address these questions is by exploring what care looks like when people abandon ideals of autonomy and pursue social logics that are more accommodating of dependence (Cook and Trundle 2020). In this vein, authors often consider mutual and equal ways of depending upon one another. This has been a particular concern of the ‘care in practice’ approach (e.g. Mol 2008; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Pols 2006; Pols, Althoff, and Bransen 2017; Driessen, van der Klift, and Krause 2017). Mol (2008), for instance, argues against a prioritization of individual choice in healthcare by outlining a ‘logic of care’ that protects and intervenes when people are in need – even if, or especially because, they are not in a state to decide upon their treatment. In such situations, the patient’s wishes are not excluded from the ‘collectivity’ of relationships that make up the care they receive – but their autonomous choice is not required for the care to proceed. Other authors have pursued an analogous argument by drawing attention to reciprocal forms of care that emerge in the wake, or in the margins, of dominant imaginations of autonomy. Clara Han (2012) describes how even in a neoliberal Chile that tries to make people individually responsible, complex caring logics of exchange and mutual support emerge as a way to survive in an economy of scarcity. When Janelle Taylor’s mother contracts dementia, others see it as rendering her relationally disabled but Taylor describes how her mother is nevertheless engaged in the reciprocity of caring for others (Taylor 2010; see also Zoanni 2018; Garcia 2014). Neely Myers also describes how individuals with mental illness in a peer-support network in the United States form intimate and mutual relationships with one another in ways that confound the logics of independence against which they are typically evaluated (Myers 2015; for other examples of care that challenge models of independence, see also Pols 2006; Nakamura 2013; Scherz 2013, 2018; Corwin 2020). In sum, many of our dominant moral frameworks equate ethics with respecting people’s individuality, independence, and freedom. But work in the anthropology of care argues that relationships can still be just and moral by promoting equality and dignity even when they depart from, or even violate, an ideal of autonomy. This work is vital in articulating a moral logic of caring reciprocity that moves beyond ideals of

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independence. But to remain with this logic of reciprocity alone can also restrict our understanding of the ethics of care. There are further forms of ethical care we need to consider in which independence can be replaced not only by reciprocity but also by other forms of caring relationality. To give an example, McKearney conducted research on an unusual nongovernmental organization in the UK that does not try to make the people with intellectual disabilities it supports independent, but instead tries to turn the caring encounter itself into a mutual relationship between carers and cared for (McKearney 2017). He found, however, that this aspiration for an egalitarian and symmetrical form of inter-dependence sits awkwardly with what carers feel they have to do in order to keep people alive: trick them into taking essential medication they otherwise refuse, speak assertively to them to get them to have a bath when they have not done so for several days, and hold onto them when they try to run into a dangerous street (McKearney 2019b, 2021, 2022). These uneven forms of care are not legitimated by the logic of independence the government promotes. But neither do they fit with the organization’s quite different aim to form reciprocal friendships. They are premised on a judgement of disparity and asymmetry in ability between the more capable carer and the person with disabilities, who in this moment is seen as unable to take decisions for themselves (Kittay 1999b). These moments involve hierarchy rather than reciprocity, trickery rather than discussion, coercion rather than consent. Carers find these asymmetrical forms of care uncomfortable. But they also see them as necessary. Mol, despite the language of reciprocity and egalitarianism she often deploys, provides ways to articulate the complexities and challenges of these forms of asymmetry. She points out that when you arrive panicked at the emergency room, you may well want others to take command of you and your body, and not wait to act until you have come to your senses enough to choose consciously (Mol 2008). It is according to this same asymmetrical logic that others have argued that forms of coercion and even violence might actually be caring responses to those who are in various ways imagined incapacitated (Garcia 2015; Brodwin 2013; Brown 2010). Other works show, also, the logic behind more subtly asymmetrical ways of avoiding taking the care-recipient’s own intentions entirely seriously. In what may look from the outside like immoral paternalism, cancer physicians in Botswana (Livingston 2012) and psychiatrists in India (Marrow and Luhrmann 2017) never reveal their diagnoses to their patients. Likewise, Chinese parents (Kuan 2015), support workers for people with intellectual disabilities in the UK (McKearney 2021, forthcoming-a), and carers for those with dementia in the Netherlands (Driessen 2018) work ‘behind the scenes’ in order to guide those they care for towards particularly desirable caring outcomes. In all these cases, carers pursue an ethical logic of care that has a complex, intimate, and intricate relationship to what we typically see as its opposites: paternalism,

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manipulation, coercion, and control (see also Pinto 2014; Mody 2020; McKearney 2020, 2022). The symmetrical logics of independence and reciprocity also presuppose two agents who appear as agents to one another and thus can be in an even and equal relationship (e.g. Rivas 2004). One of the striking things about some forms of care is that even this comes under question. Don Kulick and Jens Rydstro¨m (2015), for instance, describe how Danish carers work effectively to disappear as agents when helping people with significant disabilities to masturbate or to have sex with others. Just as a waiter often aims to be on hand without becoming another character at the dinner table, so the carer aims to avoid joining the sex itself and turning it into a threesome. The carer aims to restrict the kind of recognition they receive as an agent in order to transfer authorship of the act to the person with disabilities (see also Strathern 1990). A carer’s anonymity may at times be deeply morally troubling (Rivas 2004; Stevenson 2014). But Kulick and Rydstro¨m’s work resonates with other studies that suggest it may, at times, also contribute to the achievement of ethical forms of care (Pols and Moser 2009; McKearney 2019b, forthcoming-a; Kittay 1999b, 2007). This mode of relationality is difficult to articulate as either the symmetrical interaction of independent agents with one another or a reciprocity and mutuality of equal parties – precisely because, in it, one subject aims effectively to disappear from the interaction. As a result, these forms of care may look distinctly unethical or amoral: cold, impersonal, distant, or not like relationships at all (Pols and Moser 2009). But they may also have their own asymmetrical ethical logics that we need to articulate. Eva Kittay argues that these forms of uneven dependence may not always be contingent but might, rather, sometimes be ‘inevitable’ (Kittay 1999a). She agrees with a wide range of feminist care-ethicists that we all, in fact, depend on this kind of asymmetrical care in childhood and many of us continue to do so in adulthood too. And the recurrence of this unequal mode of dependence across ethnographies where everyone aims for it not to arise also suggests that it may not always be possible to transform it into the more comfortably symmetrical ethical logics of reciprocity or independence (Davis 2012; Brodwin 2013; McKearney 2021, 2022, forthcoming-b). Could it even be that it is precisely in situations when people require care the most that their capacity to enter this kind of mutual relationship is likely to be hampered? In this chapter we focus on such asymmetrical ethical relationships of care precisely because we have so much difficulty in even noticing, let alone analysing, them. When we do stay with them, we are challenged in ways that demand more astute and exciting ways of thinking about ethics. In what follows, we aim to build on this ethnographic work in the anthropology of care and the feminist focus on asymmetry we have been articulating here. We now turn to the anthropology of ethics to consider how

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this movement helps to illuminate this form of relationality, as well as what it might learn from ethnographic work that has focussed on relationships of dependence.

Problematizing Care (and Ethics): The Anthropology of Ethics Virtue Ethics and the Ethics of Care How might attention to care help us develop a broader perspective on the ethical self that the anthropology of ethics has been nurturing and which ethnographic studies of care encourage us to consider? What might a focus on asymmetrical dependence mean for a focus on reflective ethical selfhood? What challenges might it pose to our existing ways of thinking about self-cultivation? And how might taking on those challenges deepen and expand our understanding of how the ethical self develops? We ask these questions in conversation with anthropology’s exploration of virtue ethics (see Mair, Chapter 3 of this volume). Unlike Kantian or utilitarian schemes, which anthropologists of ethics have generally been reluctant to support or actively eschewed, virtue ethics has been embraced and developed by a number of scholars. In our own writings, we have each found it helpful to draw on virtue ethics frameworks and their spokespersons, in particular neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics (Mattingly 1998, 2012, 2014; McKearney 2020) and Foucauldian ethics (McKearney 2021, forthcoming-a). In this section, we treat these two traditions of scholarship together. Despite some considerable differences (Mattingly 2012, 2014), both traditions help us come to grips with what is at stake in caring relationships in some similar and fruitful ways. The neo-Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics has challenged the paucity of generalized moral rules to capture our relationship to ethical decisionmaking and responsibility in a world full of particularity, contingency, limitation, and luck (Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). It has recognized the tendency of any philosophy to err if its principal aim is to develop a schematic plan with which to regulate the complexity of ethical life rather than, at least in part, attend to it. And virtue ethics has been concerned (in its neo-Aristotelian incarnations) to handle a thicker moral psychology than modernity’s moral frameworks required or even permitted (Hursthouse 1999). Further, some scholars working within virtue ethics have critiqued modernity’s liberal frameworks for their reliance on third-person moral categories which they believe are unable to capture the immediacy, inescapability, richness, and centrality of first-person experience, agency, and character (Williams 1981; Cavell 2004; Nussbaum 1986, 2001; Taylor 1989). This critique of third-person categories has also been a primary focus of scholars influenced by existentialism and phenomenology. (We will return to this point in the phenomenology section later.)

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At one level it may be obvious why we see virtue ethics as so helpful for our project, given that it has been instrumental in challenging dominant moral traditions that stress moral autonomy as an ethical ideal. But at another level, support for virtue ethics might appear surprising since it has been critiqued both in feminist care-ethics (Tronto 2009; Noddings 2013; Held 2006) and in anthropology for its focus on the reflective self. Anthropologists have queried, for instance, how far this paradigm’s focus on self-cultivation enables it to incorporate the role of relations, dependence, and alterity in ethical life (Das 2014; Garcia 2014; Keane 2015: 136; Malara 2018; Mittermaier 2012). By attending to ethical cultivation and the shaping of moral sentiments, might certain relational possibilities of care be neglected? Might the significance of motive, intention, and the emotional valence surrounding practices of care be exaggerated?1 Aulino (2019), for example, asks us to attend to the ritual aspects of care. In her ethnography of Thai caregivers in which she demonstrates the ritualistic and habitual dimensions of their care practices, she aims to ‘disrupt a too-facile connection between caring and intention’ and an overemphasis on issues of ‘moral motivation’ (2019: 13). In even more sharply critical terms, some have argued that the anthropology of ethics as a whole leads us away from precisely the complex terrain of dependence (Englund 2008; Kapferer and Gold 2018). These various feminist and anthropological challenges to virtue ethics tend to imply that a choice must be made between focussing on relations of dependence or on self-fashioning. We do not dismiss such critiques out of hand. A focus on care does indeed challenge and demand that we rethink ethical frameworks precisely by pointing to forms of dependence that they have not yet reckoned with. But the stark choice that some of these critiques implicitly posit – care of the self or care of dependent others – is a false one. To take the neo-Aristotelian tradition, even Aristotle’s portrayal of ethical life recognizes the centrality of relationality, reliance, and sociality. We are, as Alasdair MacIntyre (2009) puts it, dependent rational animals. This characterization is further developed by numerous contemporary virtue ethicists (Williams 1993; Taylor 1985; Frankfurt 1971), as well as anthropologists drawing upon them (Kuan 2015; Mattingly 2014; Lambek 2000, 2015; Laidlaw 2013). Nussbaum, for instance, writes against Plato’s attempt to isolate and protect the self from the vagaries of relationship, and turns instead to Aristotle in order to argue that the self depends upon and is vulnerable to relations (Nussbaum 1986, 1990, 2009). Her work on emotions similarly opposes the Platonic idea that they stand in a zero-sum relation with our capacity to think – that is, that the more we are subsumed by the passions, the less we are rational. In its 1

We of course acknowledge that easy caricatures of the Kantian autonomous moral individual are often used as a foil in anthropological discussions of ethics, even though his considerations of morality, relationship to Aristotle, and the various receptions of his work are much more complex than we can do justice to in this space.

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place, Nussbaum develops a conception of emotions as a form of reflection precisely because they are the most appropriate way of cognizing one’s relation to, and dependence upon, others beyond oneself (Nussbaum 2001; see also Ruddick 1995; Abel and Nelson 1990). The self that neoAristotelian virtue ethics focusses on is not one opposed to dependent relationality. Indeed, this tradition aims to overcome thin and overly autonomous portraits of the moral agent precisely by drawing attention to the fact that we are only ever selves in relations. Mattingly (2014) calls upon Nussbaum’s distinction between Aristotle and Plato to consider moral tragedy and the cultivation of moral emotion from Nussbaum’s Aristotelian perspective. Mattingly considers the moral tragedy that arises when someone is faced with a situation where deeply held values are incommensurable, and in which every choice is the wrong one, ethically speaking. Mattingly describes an African American mother raising a daughter with life-threatening sickle-cell anaemia who cultivates the virtues of a warrior in advocating for her child with health professionals. She learns to become, as she puts it, ‘Rambo Mom’. But the very virtues (like courage) that allow her to successfully battle lax clinical professionals and negligent health systems are not the kinds of virtues (like compassion) and their attendant emotions (gentleness and affection, for example) that her daughter often wants of her. How can I be ready to do battle for my daughter, she asks, but also see when she just needs a hug from me? How can she cultivate two very different ethical selves? While this example might seem to be focussed on ethical self-cultivation, it is essential to recognize that it is completely entangled in the relational asymmetry of care for a vulnerable other (a very ill daughter). Moral peril also extends to her daughter, who is precluded from ordinary childhood activities and friendships that the mother believes are essential for proper ethical development. As a mother, she deems herself responsible for her daughter’s ethical cultivation. Here, too, she finds herself failing. Foucault’s corpus can also be read as an argument against the idea that there is a clearly separable self. In his later work he opposes a particular psychoanalytic image of the self as a secret core that is oppressed by the social relations in which one lives (2008), in order to trace an image of the self as acquiring its shape and reality in and through social relations (Foucault 1992, 1991). It is precisely this argument that anthropologists have drawn upon to resist an approach to the development of the ethical self that reduces it to an automatic process of socialization, or ignores it altogether (Mahmood 2003, 2001, 2012; Laidlaw 2002, 2013; Faubion 2001, 2011; Heywood 2015). Saba Mahmood’s (2012) influential study of Muslim women in Cairo offers an argument against a reductive view of the relationships of dependence these women have with Islamic authorities. One could see their submission as destructive of thought, agency, and interiority. But Mahmood contends, instead, that this moral striving generates new ethical capacities and reflective subjectivity. Far from sidelining

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relationships of dependence, scholars have taken up the idea of ‘selfcultivation’ precisely to show us that they are laden with, and productive of, ethical thought (see also, for instance, Cook 2014; Hirschkind 2006; Pandian 2009; Robbins 2004; Lester 2005). It is worth pointing out that many of these examples concern asymmetrical relations in which one party has significant authority over another. And they often involve forms of paternalism and coercion that, like those forms of care we drew attention to in the previous section, challenge ethical logics of both independence and reciprocity. Faubion (see also Chapter 21 of this volume) has concentrated our attention on the theoretical consequences of these sorts of uneven, hierarchical, and unequal encounters – whether between students and teachers (Faubion 2001), slaves and masters, warlords and followers (Faubion 2011), or mystics and the divine (Faubion 2013; see also McKearney 2018, forthcoming-a). What sort of ethical capacities, he asks, do these differently unequal modes of relationality produce (Faubion 2014)? This work demonstrates that virtue ethics, in its various philosophical and anthropological guises, draws attention to asymmetrical relationships of dependence and offers tools to grapple with them. This attention allows us to see what we might otherwise miss, and what a focus on care as the opposite of self-cultivation positively obscures: care may not only serve as a mode of relationality in which people’s dependence is accepted, valued, and responded to but may also be a means through which people’s very selves are shaped, and their dependence upon others transformed (MacIntyre 2009; McKearney forthcoming-a, b). Neo-Aristotelian and Foucauldian virtue ethics enable us to focus on and analyse what is often neglected in other work on care and dependence. This includes the crucial role care often plays in the development, preservation, and curtailment of forms of ethical reflection and selfhood in unexpected places. NeoAristotelian virtue ethics also offers an array of concepts to consider the ethical vulnerabilities that so often accompany practices of care. These include the role of phronesis, or practical wisdom, in guiding everyday judgements about care and the potential for moral tragedy in which incommensurable moral goods can mean that any moral choice is also a violation of deeply held values. However, the critique of virtue ethics still has some sting in its tail. Although a focus on care of the self does not exclude relationships of dependence, it is nevertheless true that the vast majority of ethnographic work focusses on competent adult subjects who can reflect in highly complex ways (McKearney and Zoanni 2018; McKearney forthcoming-a). This tradition rarely focusses on more demanding and unequal relationships of care and dependence in which someone’s survival and selfhood is at stake (for important exceptions, see Kuan 2015; MacIntyre 2009; Davis 2012; Lester 2009). This focus on competent adult subjects is quite striking given that the anthropology of ethics has forcefully challenged an

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assumption that humans are turned, through some automatic process of socialization, into socially acceptable subjects (Laidlaw 2013). If it is not mechanistic social reproduction that turns us into reflective agents, then the question of how ethical development does happen in childhood is of considerable importance (Briggs 1999; Ochs and Izquierdo 2009; Mezzenzana 2020). How do we become the kind of complex reflective subjects who can enter into all these diverse forms of self-cultivation in the first place? And new territory would be opened up, also, if we engaged more closely with work in psychological and medical anthropology on those whose mental impairments places their reflective selfhood in jeopardy, even as adults (McLean 2015; Lester 2009; Davis 2012; McKearney forthcoming-a), for instance, explores the role of reflection in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities who are given care precisely because they are taken to lack certain kinds of cognitive faculties. Far from focussing solely on keeping these dependent individuals alive, carers in the organization where he worked also become deeply involved in thinking about how these individuals’ ethical capacities might be developed and extended through care. To do this, they engage in a care that does not just respond to the other’s body but also the other’s self – in other words, a complex involvement with their interior subjectivity that virtue ethics expects people to have normally only with themselves. It is, in other words, a relational care that resists a binary opposition between cultivation and dependence, self and other, individuality and relationality. McKearney discovered that this engagement enabled individuals with significant intellectual disabilities to achieve forms of reflective independence and freedom in care that one would think closed to them because of their cognitive capacities. Attention to situations such as those McKearney has studied offer one way in which attention to the ethical complexities of care in more demanding ethnographic examples of dependence might disturb and deepen an anthropology of ethics (see also McKearney and Zoanni 2018; McKearney forthcoming-a).

A Phenomenological Ethics of Care: Problematization and the Alterity of Experience Another influential strand of scholarship has approached ethics from phenomenological directions (see Williams, Chapter 6 of this volume). The phenomenological tradition offers a distinctive genre of problematizing, one that goes beyond the particular objections we have highlighted thus far about the lacuna in addressing the ethical stakes in asymmetrical forms of dependence. The critical impulse behind phenomenology is not always obvious to anthropologists, so before turning to specific works on care, it is worth noting the critical programme of philosophical

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phenomenology. Far from being ‘mere description’ (as anthropologists sometimes suppose), philosophical phenomenology has always levelled critiques against taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world and offered avenues for destabilizing all concepts. Stated broadly, phenomenology insists that any concept is inadequate to the experiences that it refers to: experience always exceeds concepts. Experience is hard to pin down definitely; it ‘eludes concepts’, as Gadamer remarks (2003: 61). Close attention to lived experience has the power to put concepts into question, particularly those common-sense concepts that belong to what Husserl called the ‘natural attitude’ (Throop 2018). This might seem a mere commonplace observation, but in the hands of phenomenologists it has provoked a radical reconsideration of the concept of concept, generating a rich vocabulary and set of methods intended to destabilize the conceptual and re-imagine thinking as a structure of experience (Mattingly 2019). The act of thinking, Arendt claims in the Life of the Mind, can ‘undo, unfreeze, as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thoughtwords (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines)’ (1978: 174). She sees this defrosting capacity as a particularly necessary condition when conceptualizing the ethical: thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements of good and evil, in short, on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics. These frozen thoughts . . . come in so handily that you can use them in your sleep; but if the wind of thinking . . . has shaken you from your sleep and made you fully awake and alive, then you will see that you have nothing in your grasp but perplexities, and the best we can do with them is share them with each other. (1978: 175) Mattingly (2019) proposes an anthropological entry into this phenomenological approach to critique. She argues that some forms of ethnographic description provide fertile ground for destabilizing or ‘defrosting’ ethical concepts and foregrounding perplexities. She explores a lineage of anthropological effort, a poetics of description that aims to highlight perplexity and uncertainty as a vehicle for disturbing doxa surrounding authoritative concepts, including those anthropologists themselves hold. Some anthropologists have termed such poetics ‘imagistic’ (Stevenson 2014). When imagistic approaches to description are combined with phenomenological concepts, this can offer a powerful avenue for problematizing care as an ethical concern. Phenomenological lines of inquiry into the excessiveness of lived experience offer a rich array conceptual tools for considering care’s ineffable relational qualities, qualities that ethnographies may describe but which can easily be undertheorized. A phenomenological orientation alerts us to situations in which care emerges as elusive, shadowy, difficult to pin

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down. Phenomenological anthropology troubles the ‘forms of life’ idea that moral life is circumscribed by ‘language games’ that are culturally (or structurally) given (Rapport 2015: 257). Phenomenologically minded scholars have been especially keen to contest socialization models of ethical cultivation, arguing that this focus too easily reduces the experiential range of ethical life and fails to account for the indeterminacy, singularity, and creativity of ethical experience (Rapport 2015; Mattingly 2014). In a related vein, some have argued that moral life cannot be reduced to cultural construals of moral personhood (Rapport 2015: 257). In a particularly ambitious project that takes this on, Zigon looks to postHeideggerian phenomenology to reconceive the dominant ethical concepts surrounding moral personhood (rights, responsibility, and dignity) and to reconceive the figure of the ‘moral individual’ (2018: 3). Phenomenology’s consideration of lived experience has offered anthropologists an especially fruitful avenue for considering the relational complexities of care. While anthropologists sometimes suppose that phenomenology is merely about personal experience, this is not correct. It is true that the phenomenological project rests upon a prioritization of the first-person perspective, but this is often misunderstood (Mattingly and Throop 2018). As Gayle Salamon puts it: ‘First-person experience is the zero point of phenomenology, to which it constantly and repeatedly returns’ (2018: 16). This might seem to be a valorization of the experiencing individual, but as she goes on to remark, ‘Despite its first person vantage point . . . phenomenology is advocating neither subjectivism nor solipsism. There is no perception without a subject but there is no subject without a world’ (2018: 16). The phenomenological philosophers who have figured prominently in anthropology have been especially concerned with this self-world enmeshment, our complex inter-life with others, the ‘being-with’ that shapes human existence (Throop 2018; Jackson 1998). Phenomenologists have long considered the intercorporeal dimensions of intersubjective experience. Merleau-Ponty tells us that intercorporeality emerges even at the basic level of perception. ‘In perceiving the other, my body and his are coupled, resulting in a sort of action which pairs them’ (2012 [1945]: 118). Following upon Merleau-Ponty, Weiss points out: ‘the experience of being embodied is never a private affair but is always mediated by our continual interaction with other human and nonhuman beings’ (1999: 5). Thus, the first person of phenomenology might be better thought of in the plural – a first-person ‘we’ of beings (human and beyond) who are already enmeshed in the world and with one another. In one sense, the phenomenological challenge to cultural (or moral) determinism or to the equation of ethics with social convention might seem to merely accord with the entire force of the anthropology of ethics. After all, the ethical turn has offered a sustained provocation to reconsider anthropology’s ‘unfreedom’ construals of moral life (Laidlaw 2002). However, the provocation is

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accentuated and articulated distinctively within the phenomenological tradition in ways that open up exciting avenues for exploring an ethics of care. Phenomenology can also inform a critical anthropology of care that takes up the issue of political power and social injustice. As discussed earlier, anthropology has devoted considerable attention to the way that ‘care’ interventions may be problematically intertwined with state forms of violence. Phenomenological attention to experience offers its own avenues for attending to structural violence: indeed, this is one hallmark of feminist phenomenology. Feminists argue that by seeing things ‘anew’ through examining the experiences of concrete life as lived rather than through readymade concepts, theories, or explanations, critical phenomenology can offer tools for considering how structural power is embodied and inhabited by those it afflicts (Salamon 2018: 12). In anthropology, this kind of political critical inquiry is most apparent when elusive forms of care are juxtaposed against societal interventions that purport to deliver care but actually harm recipients. We have already noted that attention to state care-as-violence is a core and well-researched topic in the anthropology of care. However, when it is explored from a phenomenological direction, some anthropologists have supplemented critiques of state care with imagistic or explicitly phenomenological renderings of more ephemeral modes of care. These works reveal dimensions of care that can be evoked through ethnographic description but are less amenable to clear articulation. Stevenson (2014), for example, delivers a scathing rebuke of the biopolitics of anonymous state care in Canada’s interventions among the Inuit. But when she turns her attention to how her Inuit informants conceive the ethics of proper care (including care of ancestors and the recently dead), she discovers that her informants are confronted by an elusiveness that is unavoidable. A young man remarks that his sister has announced that his uncle has come back to life as a raven that lives behind their house. Stevenson asks if his sister still believes that. ‘I don’t know’, he replies, adding, ‘It’s still there.’ If this raven is, indeed, his dead uncle, it – or he – deserves special care and attention, or at least recognition. But her informant is not sure. Stevenson describes her ethnography as ‘a reflection on the relationship we make with the raven as a form of productive and even hopeful uncertainty, something that stubbornly remains (it’s still there) even as it refuses to be neatly resolved’ (2014: 1, italics in original). It is not surprising that Stevenson speaks of ‘imagining care’ and finds that to address this topic as her informants do, she herself must proceed via an imagistic method of uncertainty. To give another example, in her analysis of how an autism (ASD) diagnosis intersects with race in pernicious ways for African Americans, Mattingly (2017) explores how an African American mother cares for her son by ensuring that he avoids this diagnosis even while recognizing that

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without it, he is ineligible for therapy services that have been very beneficial to him. She echoes other Black parents who fear that receiving an ASD diagnosis will lead their children into the ‘school to prison pipeline’ that afflicts so many young Blacks, especially boys labelled with ‘special needs’ (Mattingly and Keeney Parks 2022). Categorization, which accompanies professional care, emerges as a crucial source of harm. But when examining what this mother recognizes as instances of good care, Mattingly sees that it is coupled with moments when her son surprises her, or the professionals he sees, especially when he demonstrates an unexpected command of language and expression. Such demonstrations are fleeting: they arise in ephemeral moments of interaction. But this mother puts great stock in them for this is when her son’s behaviour challenges dominant pre-understandings surrounding a ‘low-functioning ASD’ label. Calling on Gadamer’s phenomenology of understanding, Mattingly argues that ‘good care’ may be hard to articulate abstractly, but for this mother it is most evident in relational moments that provoke what Gadamer calls ‘an experience’; that is, situations that call into question pre-judgements and pre-understandings. These are moments that expose the way pre-understandings are also ‘misunderstandings’ in the sense that they do not neatly conform to prior categories and expectations. In such moments, her son’s actions become puzzling, exceeding or spilling out of the categories in which he has been placed. But for this mother, even this positive valence of proper care – care realized through bursts of puzzlement and surprise – does not offer any clear or trustworthy ethical guide. As her son grows older, she is continuously challenged about how to find him a school home in which he is not dismissed or marginalized by school personnel and other children, in which he does not, as she puts it, ‘become nothing’. ‘I feel like I have failed him’, she said at one point, after another bad school experience. In both these ethnographic cases, care involves an asymmetrical relationality: a young man and his deceased raven/uncle, a mother and a child. In the following example, puzzlement surrounding how one should best care is depicted as moral tragedy and put in conversation with virtue ethics. Maria Louw (2018) calls upon Derrida’s depiction of ‘ghostly presences’ as well as Nussbaum’s consideration of moral tragedy to consider how cultivating an ethical self among Sufis in Uzbekistan is not only rife with everyday uncertainties about what the right moral decisions should be but also a struggle with competing ethical values that cannot be simultaneously filled, especially between being pious enough to be a ‘real’ Sufi and taking care of family responsibilities. Louw illustrates how moral tragedy unfolds in the context of care. A mother suddenly finds herself responsible for care of her young adult son who has lost his job, returns home, and begins drinking heavily. The asymmetrical relationality of mothering and family care is intensified by the return of a now dependent adult son. She faces new ethical

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uncertainties about how best to help him with his financial woes and drinking problems. All her efforts seem to fail. She is left with a sense of doubt about how to be a good mother. This struggle is further complicated by the pressure of another kind of ethical demand – care of one’s spiritual life. She has also made a commitment to live as a pious Sufi, a life she cannot adequately realize alongside her many family tasks. Louw depicts this mother’s situation as evidence of an ever-present and unresolvable ethical struggle which is experienced through remorse and regret, the haunting presence of lives not lived, lives which one might have had if one had made other moral choices. This haunting presence of ‘lost persons’ speaks to the ethical choices one might have made but did not (because of other competing ethical goods) and creates a sense of fundamental doubt about one’s moral worth. Although the contexts are very different, there is a certain resonance between the Sufi Louw describes and Stevenson’s Inuit informants. In both cases, although manifest in very different ways, uncertainty and doubt necessarily characterize a community’s ethical ideals surrounding care and the good life (see also McKearney 2020). The three examples just offered, when taken together, also reveal how care can pose an excessive ethical demand, one that cannot be adequately fulfilled or even clearly perceived. Each instance presents a situation of asymmetry in which another demands care: a child with a socially dangerous diagnosis, a raven who (perhaps) should be recognized and attended to as a family member, an adult son who has become unable to care for himself. The necessity and the excessiveness of a demand for care is articulated in a particularly vivid way by Lotte Meinert (2018), who considers care of proximal others and care of community in post-war Uganda, calling upon Arendt’s considerations of forgiveness and natality. For Arendt, natality does not refer to a biological event but an ethical one. It is a kind of ethical interruption in which a predictable path of response is halted, allowing new kinds of actions to begin. Arendt is concerned with the possibility of disruptions that generate ‘second births’. Forgiveness is a case in point, an act with profound disruptive potential. Meinert shows how ‘for Arendt, new beginnings are made possible through forgiveness because the constant mutual release makes human beings free to start over. Forgiveness is what Arendt describes as the epitome of natality, because forgiveness is an action that makes something new possible, creating new promises’ (Meinert 2018: 111). Among the Acholi where Meinert has long worked, in the uncertain times that followed decades of civil war, and where rebel perpetrators resettled in villages alongside victims of rebel violence, care of a precarious peace demands ‘new beginnings’ of social community. The acts of forgiveness and promise that forged these fragile beginnings were not grand political gestures but the small, everyday acts of care. Quotidian forms of care were the register in which the heart was judged and the difficult process of forgiveness was crafted. However, the post-war

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situation transformed everyday care into something more unexpected and ethically demanding. Radical uncertainty accompanied the small ways care was offered and received. Caring, in this context, was often an excessive ethical demand and, in a radical way, could not be premised on an ethics of reciprocity. Could one extend care and generosity even to those who were once one’s torturers and were now one’s neighbours in need? Care becomes an excessive ethical demand, while at the same time it functions as an absolutely necessary foundation for a ‘new beginning’. Several of the works just described directly take up issues of structural violence, in keeping with a critical phenomenology. Hauntology has also inspired an explicitly critical phenomenology of care. Byron Good (2019), for example, has introduced a ‘hauntological ethics’ that builds upon Derrida’s phenomenology of hauntology to foreground the traumatic dimensions of historical violence in post-conflict societies where those dimensions remain hidden, forgotten, and spectral. A hauntological ethics engages with the appearances of ghosts and hauntings from the past, recognizing certain anthropological limitations such as its limited selfknowledge and problematic notions of rationality. While Good is challenging anthropologists to better attend to this spectrality, he and other anthropologists also turn to Derrida to consider how their informants care for the spectral and come to live with their own haunted pasts. In this hauntological vein, care also emerges as a response to something that is not easily discerned or acted upon. Philosophical phenomenology offers resources for considering ethical relationality and dependence, as well as problematizing the ethical ideal of moral autonomy. These exemplars reveal how phenomenological treatments of care often emphasize an otherness characterizing the care relationship. They introduce notions like alterity, singularity, alienness, hauntings, the uncanny, and other kinship terms. This vocabulary foregrounds forms of care in which neither the carer, the one cared for, nor the acts of giving and receiving care can be simply subsumed under typified categories. Perhaps no single phenomenologist has been so influential in forging this claim as Levinas. He offers something of particular significance to care ethics because of his insistence on an ethics based upon an asymmetry of relationality and responsibility: ‘Levinas asks us to turn away from assumptions regarding reciprocity to the asymmetrical, to a responsibility for the other that can not be understood in terms of principles or utilitarian calculus, and away from self-interest in the domain of the ethical’ (Bookman and Aboulafia 2000: 169). Furthermore, asymmetry comes to take on an entirely new cast from a Levinasian perspective. He makes a radical theoretical move by insisting on the authority of the one needing care. Levinas tells us that ethics involves a kind of encounter with an other to whom I am responsible, who poses a demand for care to which I am called to respond. Note that by investing the vulnerable partner with ethical authority, Levinas introduces

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a form of asymmetry in which the initiating agent is not the carer but the one whose very existence and presence issues an ethical demand, a call to respond. Raffoul describes this Levinasian move as a ‘reversal of responsibility’ (2010: 164). ‘I’ (the one called to care) becomes ‘me’ – the subject of an address issued from elsewhere. For Levinas, the one who needs care is a singular being who is irreducible to another me and cannot be subsumed into a ‘we’ of shared identity or experience. It would be a violation of proper care to reduce the recipient to a categorically situated subject, a familiar, socially designated someone (Mattingly and Throop 2018). The ethical question becomes: how do I respond to others in a way that preserves an alterity, that does not reduce them to a token or type? As already noted, the authority of the other is not linked to power, in the usual sense, but to vulnerability. An inversion of hierarchy is introduced in which the other commands precisely because they are vulnerable to our own potentially neglectful or violent response. Levinas has proved a fertile provocation in considering a range of historical situations characterized by dramatic inequities of social power, those in which entire groups of people are not only cast into marginalized categories but are dismissed as ethically unworthy or less than fully human. He has consequently been particularly important for feminist ethics (Guenther 2006, 2013; Butler 2005) and, increasingly, in Black studies (Gilroy 1993; Drabinski 2011). Scholars examining points of connection between feminist care ethics and phenomenology often call upon Levinas, articulating parallels between Levinas and seminal feminist careethicists such as Gilligan (Bookman and Aboulafia 2000), Noddings (Edgoose 1997), and Tronto (Diedrich et al. 2006). As Chloe Taylor points out, ‘Both Emmanuel Levinas and feminist theorists of an ethics of care have formulated compelling critiques of the notion of the self and of its (non-) relation to others . . . and have offered alternative understandings of an ethics that is concrete, non-generalizable, and that focuses upon the other and our responsibilities towards her’ (2005: 217). There is also strong resonance with the neo-Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics because it, too, privileges concrete encounters with singular others. Black studies scholar John Drabinski explores the fruitfulness of a Levinasian ethics that does not begin with egoism or the ‘I’ but instead ‘puts transformation of relation at the center of his concepts of subjectivity and the face-to-face’ in which both the ‘I’ and the other are ‘put into question’ (2011: 15). Anthropologists, trained to be wary of Eurocentric universals and the problematic normative assumptions embedded in Western moral philosophy, might reasonably ask: can such a wide-sweeping and normatively laden ethical vision as the one Levinas articulates be helpful? Scholarship in both feminist studies and Black studies suggests a way to address this. They have insisted that Levinas must be amended to be useful. His advocacy of a transcendental and universal ethics betrays a Eurocentric provincialism that must be challenged, even as he opens new avenues for ethical

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inquiry into the ethical situations characterized by radical vulnerability and othering that feminists and Black studies scholars are keen to consider. In anthropology, scholars like Gammeltoft also recognize these limitations even while defending that his ethics merits serious attention (2006: 602). Indeed, several anthropologists have called upon Levinas to develop their ethical positions (Kleinman 1999; Rapport 2015; Throop 2010; Gammeltoft 2006). He has been most fruitfully brought to bear in considerations of fieldwork as a form of moral experience that privileges the face-to-face encounter and a relationality that is defined (from a Levinasian perspective) as a form of asymmetrical care. Gammeltoft, for example, makes a compelling case that Levinas offers another entry into the anthropology of suffering, as she calls upon him to consider the stories of misery and loss told by young Vietnamese women about the circumstances surrounding their late-term abortions. On the one hand, she notes, these stories could be explained in terms of social forces that have placed the young women in untenable positions. Much can be understood in this way and Gammeltoft reflects on how much her earlier work stressed the structural constraints of their lives (2006: 599). She subsequently comes to realize that she was missing something vital, namely the way that hope and aspiration were present in even the most horrifying and tragic tales. She realizes how central the human imagination is and how, for her informants – as for all of us – ‘imagination allows us . . . to transcend the cultural conceptualizations that define us and the conditions under which we live, to imagine our selves and lives in other ways, and hence possibly to transform and re-create our worlds’ (2006: 600). Inspired by Levinas, Gammeltoft frames listening as a form of care in which her interlocutors’ imaginings of better, different lives issue an ethical demand to her, calling her to respond through perception and empathy. She describes this form of encounter as one where: ‘We do not comprehend others simply by making them the passive objects of our quest for knowledge . . . but through forms of interaction and conversation in which the other has priority’ (2006: 601–2). In other words, Levinas’s concept of care serves to amplify a form of anthropological listening that speaks to a ‘mode of knowing that is more closely linked to musicality and to presence’ rather than to something like interpellation in a subject position (Stevenson 2014: 166). This is especially important in the anthropology of suffering which so often evokes an ethics of denunciation (2014: 167). It is not hard to see how this same model of listening-as-care could be extended to an anthropologists’ informants and their own relations of care towards vulnerable others, and that it could help to articulate an aspect of care that they also find valuable. After all, even people who may feel burdened with tasks of care may also consider care the ethical centre of their lives. They experience the dependent others to whom they extend care as a crucial source of ethical learning, as ethical teachers (Taylor 2010;

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McKearney 2018; Kleinman 2019). In her most recent work, Mattingly (2022) calls upon Levinas to consider how parents of children with severe disabilities experience their child as a ‘gift’ which has profoundly changed them, where the vulnerable child becomes a source of ethical authority in family life (see also Landsman 1998; Ginsburg and Rapp 2011). Accepting this gift often involves learning how to respond in new and unexpected ways, not only to the suffering of their children but also to their children’s aspirations and dreams and imagining their children’s future lives in ways that disrupt categories of social difference and pathology.

Conclusion This chapter has offered an extended exercise in problematizing. The topic of care has been a space in which to reconsider key ethical assumptions around relationality. It opened with challenges initiated by feminists decades ago. Then it problematized some of their initial claims by turning to the anthropological literature on care. But it also troubled scholarship in the anthropology of care. Even the anthropology of care, we noted, has not yet fully reckoned with what is ethically brought into question in forms of asymmetrical dependence. Most of its energy has so far been directed to challenging the equation of morality with independence, rather than focussing on what about care might also challenge the equation of morality with equality, symmetry, and reciprocity. The anthropology of ethics has many tools with which to reckon with these challenges. But when considering it to see what it might contribute to a more fully developed anthropological ethics of care, we also noted blind spots in that scholarship. Here, too, it appears difficult to describe uneven relationships of dependence as fully ethical, especially those that endure throughout life or arise in adulthood. It is precisely because this kind of care so deeply troubles our ethical sensibilities that we should focus on it. It has the potential to push us, and the philosophical traditions we work with, beyond more intuitive ways of articulating ethics in symmetrical terms and into a more ethnographically subtle reckoning with uneven ethical interaction as it actually plays out on the ground. In turning to the phenomenological tradition, a distinctive critical approach becomes available. Phenomenology invites a version of problematizing through concept destabilization precisely because it insists upon the alterity and excessiveness of experience in relation to what Gadamer (2003) calls ‘mere concept’. Prompted by this line of thinking, we widened our argument beyond our focus on the inadequate attention to asymmetrical forms of dependence to consider how ethical alterities and the uncertainties surrounding care could generate new insights about ethical relationality.

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It will be obvious that we have not tried to settle on a single definition of care in this chapter, instead invoking a diversity of vantage points and voices. In sketching some of the major anthropological accomplishments in studies of care, we have suggested some directions for further exploration. A notable one is a lacuna in the anthropology of ethics which could do more work in articulating the ethical stakes of sustained relational asymmetry and dependence. A key ambition of the chapter has been to demonstrate the way a consideration of care can disturb some of the most basic assumptions about ethical life, about what it means to have a self or be in relation to others. Early feminists may have overreached when they argued that care is the ontological ground of ethics. But they were on to something. When the topic of care is brought into conversation with critical studies of biopower and structural inequity, with canonical Western moral philosophy, with virtue ethics and phenomenology, it energizes these conversations in ways that continue to bear fruit. An anthropological ethics of care awaits us that promises to move us beyond many of our current ideas about how both ethics and care work in practice.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments by several anonymous reviewers, as well as by James Laidlaw. Cheryl Mattingly also wants to gratefully acknowledge a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation that provided support for this writing. She would also like to thank Matthew McCoy, whose excellent assistance helped with the final stages of preparation.

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Pinto, Sarah. 2014. Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pols, Jeannette. 2006. ‘Washing the Citizen: Washing, Cleanliness, and Citizenship in Mental Health Care’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 30(1): 77–104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-006-9009-z. Pols, Jeannette and Ingunn Moser. 2009. ‘Cold Technologies versus Warm Care? On Affective and Social Relations with and through Care Technologies’. ALTER-European Journal of Disability Research/Revue Europe´enne de Recherche Sur Le Handicap, 3(2): 159–78. Pols, Jeannette, Brigitte Althoff, and Els Bransen. 2017. ‘The Limits of Autonomy: Ideals in Care for People with Learning Disabilities’. Medical Anthropology, 36(8): 772–85. Raffoul, Francois. 2010. The Origins of Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rapport, Nigel. 2015. ‘Anthropology through Levinas: Knowing the Uniqueness of Ego and the Mystery of Otherness’. Current Anthropology, 56: 256–76. Rivas, Lynn May. 2004. ‘Invisible Labors: Caring for the Independent Person’, in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds.), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. London: Granta Books: 70–84. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ruddick, Sara. 1995. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Salamon, Gayle. 2018. ‘What’s Critical about Critical Phenomenology?’ Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 1: 8–23. Scherz, China. 2013. ‘Let Us Make God Our Banker: Ethics, Temporality, and Agency in a Ugandan Charity Home’. American Ethnologist, 40: 624–36. 2018. ‘Enduring the Awkward Embrace: Personhood and Ethical Work in a Ugandan Convent’. American Anthropologist, 120: 102–12. Stacey, Clare L. 2016. The Caring Self: The Work Experiences of Home Care Aides. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/ 9780801449857.001.0001. Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1990. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, Charles. 1985. Philosophy and the Human Sciences, vol. 2. Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Chloe´. 2005. ‘Le´vinasian Ethics and a Feminist Ethics of Care’. Symposium, 9: 217–39.

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Taylor, Janelle. 2010. ‘On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia’, in Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols (eds.), Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag: 27–56. Ticktin, Miriam. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Throop, C. Jason. 2010. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2018. ‘Being Otherwise: On Regret, Morality and Mood’, in Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas S. Wentzer (eds.), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. Oxford: Berghahn: 61–82. Tronto, Joan C. 2009. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body Images: Embodiment As Intercorporeality. London: Routledge. Williams, Bernard. 1981. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2010. ‘HIV Is God’s Blessing’: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2018. Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. New York: Fordham University Press. Zoanni, Tyler. 2018. ‘The Possibilities of Failure: Personhood and Cognitive Disability in Urban Uganda’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 36(1): 61–79. https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2018.360105.

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23 Kinship and Love Perveez Mody

I was staying at the flat of one of my love-marriage informants Mira1 who lived outside Delhi across the river Yamuna in Uttar Pradesh. The thick cloth curtains were drawn and cast deep shade throughout the flat, save for a small kitchen window where the dry north Indian heat and bright light filtered through. Mira had been undergoing a painful divorce when I first got to know her but now, over fifteen years later, things had stabilized, she was separated from her husband, and was very ‘settled’2 – a ubiquitous term that is used to imply kinship and domestic and financial stability – renting a flat on a long-term basis in one of the new affordable peri-urban conurbations that had sprung up outside the capital. She was home from her long shift at a Hindi-language educational publisher, and we resumed the threads of conversations about her life and those of her loved ones and kin. It was then that she began telling me about events in her family that were causing her some concern. They were notably relevant to her as out of her four siblings, she was the only one to have rebelled and had an inter-caste love-marriage in her family, so the events she described concerning the next generation of kin bore a particular relevance to her own biography. The narrative concerned a favourite nephew, Anil. I had heard that he had been in love with a Tamil girl whom he met when they were working together in Bangalore and they had had a love-marriage against his parents’ wishes (he was of the Kayasth caste, and north Indian). Anil’s wife had reported to Mira that her marriage was struggling because of her motherin-law’s interference since her daughter-in-law shared none of the everyday linguistic, culinary, and culturally relevant background to ensure a good marital home for her only son. In her eyes, it was not even just the matter of Anil and his wife being of different castes but also that they came from different regions of India that created (for the mother-in-law) 1

In keeping with anthropological convention, all proper nouns and some identifying details have been changed to protect the identity of the informants.

2

To draw attention to the untranslated English words that have entered into common Hindi usage, I have italicized them to indicate transliteration (rather than translation). All the discussions cited in this chapter were conducted in Hindi.

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a whole range of insurmountable cultural obstacles to their continuing union. Eventually, the difficulties of the marriage proved too great and it broke up painfully. Anil left India to start afresh, and took a job abroad in Singapore. Divorced and single, he fell in love with a Filipino woman. His parents refused to accept this second relationship either, even though Mira says it was really obvious that the new girlfriend was very caring to Anil. Anil began to experience new taunts about the inappropriateness of his relationship. In despair, he began drinking heavily. His mother apparently kept at him with a daily harangue of phone calls trying to get him to agree to marry again (this time, a girl of her choosing). Eventually, he said ‘yes’ and agreed to an arranged marriage. When Mira heard this news on the family grapevine, she called him immediately and asked him why he was agreeing to an arranged match when he appeared to love his Filipino girlfriend. He said to her that he had now reached a point in his life where he felt that since they seemed so indifferent to his wishes, he wanted to say: ‘Go ahead and do whatever it is you want to do with my bloody life!’3 The marriage was speedily arranged via a matrimonial site to a girl of the same caste. During the entire subsequent wedding rites in India Anil sat silently and sullenly, bearing his lack of consent in his defeated demeanour while the extended family looked on in discomfort. Once back in Singapore, he got back at his parents and completely stopped going home to his new wife after work, saying he was now living in his office, only returning once to retrieve his passport when he was due to travel to India. When he came to India, his father (Mira’s brother) said to him: ‘Enough of the melodrama. When you get back, you had better go straight home!’ By this point, everyone in the wider family conceded that the couple were profoundly mismatched. Anil confirmed this when he said to Mira in Hindi – ‘There is no mental match between us. She is completely different from me.’ The stand-off in the marriage and in the family continues as Anil refuses to be intimate with his wife and she pines for a child from her marriage. Anil makes his unhappiness known to his parents by inflicting his own ‘punishment’ on them by eschewing his newlywed wife, an ‘innocent party’ caught up in the crisis between Anil and his family.

The Kinship Ethics of Romantic Love In ‘Kousi Oda Ponnu (Kousi’s Daughter)’, Deepa Reddy depicts kinship as a reflective and highly intersubjective process that emerges through the interpretations of everyday life and the mutual recognitions of participants who share common scripts. In her account we find the remarkable force of kinship as it goes about ascribing expectations and ways of being 3

In Hindi (and some English): ‘Kar lo sala, jo karna hai mere life ke sath.’

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upon people as well as opening up liminal spaces for the self to ‘fudge’ kinship (Faubion 2001: 1). With a prescient gesture to what was already emerging as ‘new kinship studies’ (see Carsten 2000), Reddy makes this challenge: [I]t is impossible to ignore that kinship asserts its presence as though it is part of the natural order of the world: it has within its own cultural constructedness, a certain taken-for-granted quality; it has, in spite of its own fluidity, levels of meaning that are assumed, relationships taken as given, configurations of intimacy that carry the confidence of the formulaic. It is impossible to understand kinship as a system of relationships that is always in flux, forever in the process of being constituted, without recognizing that there is also this element of the given, the already constituted and the already understood, at its very core. (2001: 126; emphasis in original) It is this dialectical tension between the given and the becoming that appears to be at the core of the ethical dilemmas of the love-marriage couples I have worked with. Anil, for example, concedes that his parents must be allowed to damage his life through a marriage he does not want, but he follows up on this selfless act with an outright refusal to live at home with his new wife despite threats from his father. Reddy characterizes this paradox as the means by which ‘our socially produced worlds come to be naturalized or experienced as real and given at particular moments and as complete fictions and facades at others’.4 Anil’s multivalent, conflicting ethical dilemmas cannot be neatly reconciled on account of either love or kinship but illustrate the extent to which they are heavily enmeshed in each other. As an anthropological object, love sits at a fulcrum where the personal and political meet (Mody 2022), providing a valuable lens through which to explore its varying social configurations and the concomitant moral and ethical parameters through which it is navigated. It allows us a ‘glimpse onto the complex interconnections between cultural, economic, interpersonal, and emotional realms of experience’ (Padilla et al. 2007: ix). Understanding how love matters involves examining the ways in which it might intersect with significant aspects of personhood, identity, and meaning-making in everyday life – from gender and sexuality right up the register to relations between humans and gods or between political entities such as nation states (see Mody 2008; Das 2007). Nevertheless, one of the striking features of love and its public relation to kinship in the north Indian case of love-marriage is the demand kin make that individuals account for themselves ethically and, moreover, sacrifice themselves and become self-less in relation to their families. 4

Reddy (2001: 126).

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In this chapter I am going to explore this ethical tension between kinship and love in the realm of self-chosen marriages or ‘lovemarriages’ in India. Central to the discussion are notions of personal autonomy as revealed in the deliberations of young people who must contend with normative ideas about acquiescing to ‘arrangement’ (by parents, elders, or kin) and who appear to eschew them by seeking to base their self-made kinship on love. In contrast, societal delineations of selfishness and selflessness play an unusually large part in narratives about love-marriages in North India and impose a measure of authenticity of self and of ethical distinctiveness between persons. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that romantic love is a process of significant personal ethical identification and transformation and to draw out the ways in which anthropological analysis may productively delineate love’s social reflexivity.

Bekhudiyat (‘Self-Forgetting’) Acting as an index of the ethical significance of romantic love in the context of kinship was the frequency with which discussions about lovemarriages raised to the fore questions about the selfishness or selflessness of those involved. On the surface it would appear that these were rhetorical moves that were profoundly contextual. The description of someone or something being selfish or selfless, or indeed the subjective assessment of imagining oneself as being such, was clearly related to the perspective and person to whom one was talking. It was often the case that the selfless acts of one person were the selfish acts of another. Parents could view the selfless love being declared as particularly selfish as it overwrote their authority in kin-making, a central value and veritable entitlement of South Asian parenthood. These two binaries exist symbiotically. Someone accused of thinking only about themselves in falling in love would recognize the threat to personal reputation precisely because they share the same kinship values. As a consequence, the accused might repudiate allegations of selfishness by dramatic acts or sentiments that could be socially recognized as selfless. For example, many of the lovemarriage couples I encountered insisted that their court-marriages were not weddings as much as expedient arrangements to secure themselves against one or the other being forced into a marriage elsewhere (i.e. a parentally forced arranged match of the sort Anil conceded to). Their marriage certificate was almost invariably a highly secretive ‘insurance policy’ against eventual separation, only to be produced in the event of extreme circumstances such as arrest by the police in the event that they were forced to elope. The certificate itself was widely recognized as being a symbol of the selfish disregard that they would be accused of and for this reason (along with the paperwork from the lawyers and the photographs

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of their union), all had to be carefully secreted away so that it did not fall into the wrong hands. This de-romanticizing of love-marriage by the lovers themselves often had wide-ranging consequences. The couple often returned to their own respective homes despite their marriage in the court, as if to mark in their own minds and hearts that the marriage could only exist if their parents and kin acknowledged the union. In many instances, the couple would spend the next year or so gently coaxing their parents into a state where they might be willing to accept their choice of spouse. In one instance, a couple I knew had spent six years apart after their marriage in such an endeavour. In another, it was only when the girl became visibly pregnant three years down the line that she was forced to disappear herself from her home, and even in this instance they preferred to stage an abduction rather than elope so as to protect their kin from the repercussions of public shaming that would accompany stories of an eloping daughter (I have discussed this case in considerable detail in Mody 2008: chapter 3). It is quite likely that many parents never discovered that their children had ever had a court-marriage. In most instances, they would eventually acquiesce and agree to arrange the love-choice and the children for their part would keep quiet about the legal precautions they had taken. As many of my informants who included love-marriage couples, court functionaries, and the wider general public in Delhi agreed, how could a ‘court-kachery’ or piece of paper make a ‘marriage’? A marriage was arranged by families, with religious rites and ceremonies and through their conjoining; it was witnessed not by a court, or a sub-divisional magistrate, but by kin and by God. In such a construction, the agentive force of marriage was seen to reside solely with parents; love in love-marriage – both as lustful lack of control and as presumptuous kin-making – was widely viewed as quintessentially anti-social and ‘selfish’; more precisely, as a denial of the social self. In common parlance, selfishness is described in Hindi by speaking about self-centred actions. Selfishness is often signalled as doing something only for the self (‘khud ke liye’) or by using the words ‘matlab’ (which means calculating) or ‘swarth’ (which encompasses calculating and utilitarian motives). To be ‘matlabi’ (and to a greater extent, to be ‘swarthy’) is to think only of oneself in a self-consciously self-serving and calculating fashion. Both are slightly different from the English term ‘selfishness’ and it is important that we recognize this, though I found many people describing self-serving behaviours by referring to the Urdu word for ‘self’/ ‘khud’ as in ‘voh khud ka jeevan jeena chahthe hain’ (literally: they want to lead their own lives). The term for self – ‘khud’ – is very interesting for my argument, because it is indisputably related to the Middle Persian word ‘khuda’ for God. Indeed, the word for being passionately in love is ‘bekhudi’ – a form of self-forgetting that literally means ‘losing the self’. In Urdu poetry it is frequently used to describe the intoxication of love, be this to

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an embodied beloved or a God. Interestingly, selflessness and selfishness (in English) do not have straightforwardly equivalent words in Hindi, but they continue to be useful analytics for thinking about my informants and their senses of agency and responsibility. What does exist (in Hindi) by way of analogue is ‘bekhudiyat’ (literally: losing the self) and we will see that this is a powerful idea for my informants, as well as those assessing the ethical content of their marriages. The example that follows is about an intercommunity love-marriage which was notably described to me as being comprehensible only in terms of ‘bekhudiyat’. I had been working in the busti5 for a couple of months and had asked Najma a couple of times whether there were any love-marriages in her gully. She thought and thought, but each time said there were none. Then one day, when I was visiting and drinking tea on her charpoy (wooden and jute bed) outside her door, one of the gully-children pointed Sarita out to me and said in Hindi, ‘she has had a love-marriage’. Sarita was Najma’s immediate neighbour, who was Hindu and had married a Muslim. The account that follows is Sarita’s narrative followed by Najma’s description of what she thought of the marriage of her neighbour. So, first Sarita: My marriage took place. At the most, I must have been 12 or 13 years old. I went to Alwar [a former princely state in what is now Rajasthan] from Delhi and was married there by my parents to a man who was 40–45 years old called Kishan. I wasn’t even big then [she hadn’t started menstruating]. After the wedding, I stayed with my parents for 4–5 years. Then I went to my husband, and the goana [consummation] happened. Two or three years later a daughter came, but while she was still in my belly, he [Kishan] left me. My in-laws didn’t feed me, and didn’t give me a place to sleep. I went from my in-laws; my mother took me back to my parents’ home in Delhi where my daughter was born. Four years passed and still he didn’t come to fetch me. He got married elsewhere. I lived in Dakshinpuri. I had been born in Delhi but I never liked school and didn’t attend regularly. After Preeti was born I began working in kothis [‘big homes’]. He did duty [work] in export, in GK2 [an area of Delhi]. When I went to work, he would look at me on the road. His friend was a relative of my bhabi [sister-in-law] and he used to come to our place. I said to my bhabi, why does that man stare at me like this. She replied, why, why are you bothered by it, let him look. I said to my bhabi, I want to meet him. She called him over to our house. I thought he was a Hindu. After meeting him, I discovered that he was Muslim. Then I said no to marriage. He said: ‘You will marry me.’ I said, I have 5

A busti is a shanty, but it is the word used for the many unauthorized and illegal settlement colonies inhabited by the poor in Delhi. Bustis often had no amenities such as covered sewage or clean and safe running water provided by civic authorities because of their unauthorized status. Each settlement often consisted of a very small brick room (a bit larger than a standard double bed) in which the whole family lived and slept – with older members sleeping on charpoys in the narrow gully outside. In older and more settled colonies the ground-floor room was often accompanied by one or two storeys of the same sized single room stacked above.

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a daughter, and I have been married before; I can’t do it. Even then, he continued to insist that we would marry. I told my mother that I wanted to marry. My mother said: ‘No, he is a Muslim, I won’t allow it.’ I said no to him yet again; I can’t marry you, you are a Muslim. Then he said: ‘I want to marry you, and only you.’ That is when my mother said yes. She said that she agreed to my wish to marry him. They asked to first meet him. My father said to him: the first one left her with a daughter; it should never happen again that the second one tricks her and abandons her too. Then we went to Nizamuddin and got married in the mosque. I never learnt to read so I couldn’t become a Muslim [by implication, because she couldn’t read the Koran]. He wanted me to, but I couldn’t. We can’t live in society even though we are married. People say – ‘they are not married. A marriage must always have a faith [in Hindi: shadi ki dharam honi chahiye].’ People are always saying – you are Hindu, but married to a Muslim? Whenever they ask, I always tell them. It is what it is. I never lie. Interestingly, Sarita’s neighbour Najma, who did not realize that I had followed up the child’s comment and met and spoken to Sarita already, described her to me a few weeks later in the following way: We say that men can be bekhudi [forget themselves in love]. But in all honesty, sometimes women can be bekhudi too. Sarita left her first husband! Here in the busti she and her Muslim partner live like husband and wife, but he hasn’t yet taken her to his parent’s home. You just ask her, have you ever been to your sasural [in-laws]? That’s when you will learn the truth! In the cheek-by-jowl world of the busti, this sort of toxic rumour based on a strong sense of moral condemnation of an inter-religious union carried with it the full force of social opprobrium, but what was interesting to me was the way in which the language used was actually quite revelatory. Sarita (and incidentally, her husband too) were accused of being bekhudi – of losing themselves completely in love, something that was explicable in terms of an inter-religious marriage where personal identity based on the markers of faith and kinship could only be imagined by others as ‘lost’ through such inappropriate mixing. Sarita’s loss of her ‘selfness’ was viewed absolutely, and it was the only language through which Sarita’s neighbours appeared to understand her actions. As she described it, despite her legal marriage, people discounted her union by saying ‘shadi ki dharam honi chahiye’ – a marriage must always have a faith. It was not simply that the couple were doing something selfish by falling in love; in fact, here the circuits of social comprehension of their self-choosing across the religious chasm that constitutes kinship relations between Hindus and Muslims in contemporary Delhi are only understandable in terms of personal annihilation. The normative argument goes that the marriage does

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not have a faith because he was Muslim and she Hindu, therefore no marriage could have taken place. Unless she lost herself completely, how else could a Hindu woman like Sarita have ever taken up with a Muslim man? Bekhudiyat, or self-losing – real or imagined – gives us an ethical case through which to examine allegations levelled at love-marriage couples. Couples are not deemed to be merely selfish but quite literally to be lost to themselves in love. The allegation is levelled because those who go through with such unions are seen to be incapable of holding on to their kinship identities, all being annulled through self-erasure caused by love. This presents an extravagantly romantic portrait of such marriages, whereas the reality is frequently far more prosaic. Mira’s nephew turns to alcohol and feels quite devastated when his parents refuse to accept his choices, annulling himself (he says rhetorically of his parents that they should ‘do whatever it is they wish to do with his bloody life’) because he surrenders his self to their insistent coercions. He permits a marital act to be ‘done to him’ (against his wishes) and then scorns it (and his new spouse) thoroughly in a withdrawal from any social contact or even cohabitation. Similarly, Sarita who was accused of bekhudiyat by her disapproving neighbour had hardly had a rampaging love affair with her Muslim husband, but instead depicts her marital union as a refuge from the rejection and social stigma suffered from a broken first marriage with an older man who then abandons her when she has a daughter. Even though her marriage appears to have taken place as a nikkah under Islamic law (she mentions the marriage taking place at a sufi pir’s site in Nizamuddin), she says she has not become Muslim because she cannot read the Koran, so cannot offer prayers. Far from losing herself in love, her identity as an abandoned Hindu mother seems remarkably intact, despite her love-marriage to a Muslim man.

Subhash A final case to explore bekhudiyat or self-losing in love comes from another of my informants, Subhash. I came to know Subhash because his closest friend heard me doing an interview on the street and came up to ask me who I was and what I was doing. He confessed that his questions were motivated; his best friend was really struggling with love and he wondered whether I wanted to meet him and hear about his life. We arranged to meet a few days later on the outskirts of Delhi where Subhash lived. Subhash6 says he first saw Indu, the object of his love, in college. She was walking through a corridor when her photo accidentally fell out of her book. Subhash jumped at the opportunity to be chivalrous. Photos, in the 6

A modified account of Subhash’s relationship is also described in Mody (2008: chapter 4).

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romantic courtship of the young, were precious things in Delhi; and being given a photo, particularly by a girl, was seen to be a clear symbol of love and possession. Girls, for their part, had to be vigilant that their photos never fell out of their books into the waiting hands of boys who could so easily blackmail them. Equally, a boyfriend who was trusted with a photo had to be a boy of good repute, otherwise, should things go wrong, there was always the danger that he could use the photo to terrorize the girl and seek to dishonour her to her parents. Subhash says: ‘I thought, girls should at the very least be careful with their photos! I returned it to her. She was very impressed. She said: “Other boys may have misused it.”’ Subhash says that ‘by-friend’ (as a friend) they used to talk in class, but that he had not found the courage yet to ‘propose’ to her. When he did, he gave her a note. It said: ‘I may or may not be right in this. It’s not that you aren’t worth loving.’ This sort of oblique ‘proposal’ follows a conventional pattern of male courtship in Delhi where professions of love are preferably ambiguous. The reason for this is that a declaration of love from a man was often assumed to automatically initiate the relationship, because ‘decent’ women (the sort whom men proposed to, of course) were commonly seen as the passive recipients of desire rather than capable of desiring or reciprocating love or intimacy themselves. Nevertheless, men increasingly needed to safeguard themselves from assertive women capable of rejecting their love. If a woman declined, the man could feel it incumbent upon himself to ignore this and safeguard his sense of pride in ensuring that she did not give her love to anyone else. The Hindi phrase often used to me to describe this sort of attachment for men in Delhi was ‘marenge lekin chhodenge nahin’ – which means ‘I would rather hurt/kill her than let her go’ – the man’s pride and masculinity are clearly invested in the declaration of love, such that it often carried with it the thinly veiled threat of violence if rejected. Subhash, on the other hand, waited patiently for Indu’s response. She gave him a small note on which she wrote that she liked him a lot. What did it say, I asked? ‘That she accepted.’ What did she accept? ‘She accepted my proposal. She started loving me. She said, “I-love-you.”’ The playfulness of their affair continued unabated for two years, with Subhash visiting Indu’s home when her parents were out, and Indu’s siblings learning of her romance. At this point, both of them initiated dialogues with their respective parents in an attempt to alert them to their intention to marry and get them to agree. Subhash’s father seemed amenable but Indu’s parents reacted angrily and grew intransigent. Subhash explained this with reference to her ‘living standard’ which he described as being considerably higher than his own. Indu felt confident that she would eventually convince her father, and that he would concede to the marriage ‘for the sake of the happiness’ of their future children. Furthermore, she always maintained that no matter what, they would not marry without her parents’ consent. It is clear in the case of Indu and Subhash that parental consent absolves them of all wrongdoing – so much

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so that the couple agree that they will not marry until this consent has been obtained. This, however, was not meant to be. Over two years later, Indu told Subhash about a rishta (marriage proposal) that had arrived in her home. She wanted Subhash to be aware of it. He explained the course of events to me: Following the exams, in July, it was her birthday. She told me that by January the next year we would have to get married. I was happy, because I thought if we leave it too late, we won’t be able to do it. Then she said, ‘Before January my father will come to your home with the rishta [proposal].’ See, the talk of her birthday which I liked so much was this: that before January, she would make her father agreeable and he would come to our house. She was still somehow determined that we would marry with their blessings. . . . After the exams, I spoke to my father. My daddy understood that I loved her a lot. . . . My daddy asked me only one thing: what is her caste? I said to him, ‘Daddy, what her caste is, I don’t know. All I know is that she isn’t of our caste.’ In fact, she never ever asked me my caste. Till today, I know her caste only through my friends. We never spoke of it because it wasn’t important. My father said: ‘Now see, you have grown up so much that even if I forbid you, it is possible you will still go ahead – and if I say yes, then how do I say yes?’ So he said: ‘We will marry you to her, but the only thing is that her people should be willing. Because, when we bring a girl of another home into our home, then at the very least, her immediate family should be willing, if not all her people. Because when a girl goes from one home, then it is a question of the honour of that home.’ So daddy was agree, and we both were very happy. We thought that if things were being settled so well, then the rest will also follow. On the 21st of November we met. It was a Friday. I met her at her home. Her parents were not there. . . . On that day she said that she had told them [her parents] that if they didn’t arrange our wedding by January, then she would marry me, and then they shouldn’t say that they hadn’t been warned. The 22nd was a Saturday, and the 23rd was a Sunday. We never used to phone each other on Sundays because on Sundays my daddy and brothers would be home and over there her daddy and brothers would be home, so we couldn’t speak. Only Sundays. On every other day we spoke to each other all day. Then on Monday the 24th November morning I got a call that she was engaged. As soon as she said this I put down the phone. After this on the 31st [of January] she was married . . . Clearly, with hindsight, Subhash and Indu should have known better than to trust her parents to agree to arrange her marriage with her love – a lowly

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electrician. Such was their confidence in getting their own way that even when they met to discuss the more traditional rishta (marriage proposal) that had arrived in Indu’s home, they did not take any preventative steps, such as safeguarding their relationship in law, through a secret court or temple marriage – a certificate of which could have pre-empted Indu being offered to suitors by proving an existing marriage. Subhash felt that their marriage could only be initiated through an appropriate exchange of honour between the two families, not through the legal overwriting of family honour through a court-marriage which would be, in the eyes of the world but crucially in his eyes too, disgraceful. Indu’s cajoling of both Subhash and her parents illustrates her dilemma. She makes Subhash ‘happy’ (on her birthday) with her reassurances that she will make her father come to his house with a marriage proposal in the properly deferential manner that a bride-giver must adopt towards the bride-takers. This subordination, of a rich man to Subhash’s poorer father, is pleasing to Subhash because it indicates the fullness with which the love-marriage will be domesticated as a ‘proper’ arranged marriage, and the completeness with which he is able to fulfil his own father’s conditions that the marriage must only take place with the girl’s parents’ approval. Subhash’s father draws an interesting boundary between the necessary ‘minimum conditions’ for an honourable union between his son and Indu, such that if her entire kinship group is not agreeable, but her parents are, he would be willing to ratify the marriage. This clearly illustrates the ways in which the nuclear family in the city may find it necessary (or inevitable) to dissociate from its larger kinship moorings in order to voice support or acquiesce to the love-marriage of a child. Implicit in this scenario is the symbolic inversion of status for Subhash’s poorer parents, and the powerful ability to enhance the status and izzat (honour) of Subhash’s family. Note also that in the language of bekhudiyat or self-forgetting that can be levelled at lovemarriage couples, Subhash’s love is firmly grounded in its very opposite. The conditions he sets up for them are all about maintaining the identity of the two selves involved through appropriate (and honourable) kinship exchanges via marriage. Indu was clearly more than just a ‘traditional Indian girl’ who confronted her parents with her desire to marry Subhash. Even though they were both from Brahmin families, they never considered themselves ‘same caste’ because castes from different regions are not ordinarily compatible, and certainly have no necessarily regularized marriage exchange. The differences between their families in class terms were perhaps more of a hurdle for the couple. Indu accepted the vast economic difference between her own wealthy status as the daughter of a businessman and Subhash’s meagre position as an electrician and the son of a lowly government servant. For her, honour came after love, and she was willing to challenge her parents through a court-marriage. Subhash, for his own part, ran his electric goods and repair shop in the front of the family quarters in

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the busti. If he challenged his parents by going ahead with his marriage to Indu, he might have lost his only source of income. Interestingly, he discounted this possibility (at least on the risk that his father might kick him out), arguing that his father never tried to teach his sons through harsh words or threats. Instead, he always supported them, and even when they did terrible things, he consoled them with words that were meant to give them courage and strength. Clearly, Subhash’s love for his parents was as meaningful and abiding as his love for Indu. In turn, Subhash’s father recognizes the morally precarious position his son’s love places him in, but rather than demand his son’s self-sacrifice (in giving up his love and maintaining the family’s honour), he negotiates a creative solution between putatively ‘selfish’ and ‘selfless’ polarities such that both are made subordinate to a ‘kinship solution’ through a love-cum-arranged marriage in which the desires of the young are accommodated by the arranging authority of the elders. The intimacy enjoyed by Subhash and Indu was one in which the quality of the relationship could be open-ended and almost nebulous in nature. They enjoyed a productive space in which possibility was maximized and social recognition was an irrelevance; indeed, very often, intimacy is an internal relation between people that is not public or even necessarily acknowledged (see Mody 2019). Subhash and Indu enjoyed an intimacy that was inter-subjectively experienced. Publicity of their intimacy brought with it a ‘competing sense of the self in relation to others’ (Srivastava 2007: 275). This understanding of intimacy as a convoluted state, with unknown and unimaginable effects, grips Subhash. He cannot secure a sense of continuity of the self because the self is now revealed to be in a convoluted state with other entities who stand as rivals in his bid for honour – her father and subsequently her husband challenge his love. Far from self-forgetting, ‘who Subhash is’ as a social identity appears to be utmost on his mind. The suddenness with which Indu’s parents arranged her engagement and threw their life into turmoil is familiar from the narratives of many of the couples I worked with. However, it is clear that the warning signs were there all along, and that they were perhaps wilfully misread. For instance, Subhash and Indu dismissed the rishta (marriage proposal) that came to Indu’s home, presumably on the basis that girls in urban India are commonly allowed the power of veto in arranged marriage. Capturing the initiative, Indu’s parents managed to destroy Subhash and Indu’s dreams. Subhash says he was absolutely ‘shocked’ by the news of Indu’s engagement. Indu kept calling him that day and pleading with Subhash to find them a way out of the mess. Subhash himself felt that he had no solution because the engagement had already happened. He described his conversations with Indu: She said: ‘Subhash, there were thirty people who came to do the engagement. Thirty people! If there had been two or three, or four or

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five then I wouldn’t have let the engagement happen. But there were thirty people.’ See, the thing was Shakti . . .. She had fought off all the threats and they knew that she would not concede, and that she never would. Then when those people arrived, her father said, ‘Beta [my child], these people . . .’ Emotionally they blackmailed her. That now, you can choose to dishonour your father or keep his honour. So then all she did was cry. What answer can you give to your father? Whatever clothes they gave her to wear her mother and sisters had to put on her. . . . That’s how she got engaged. She kept saying to me: ‘Find me a solution. There must be a way Subhash, so that we can be saved from this. I can’t marry him.’ At that time, I don’t know what had come over me. I kept saying, ‘No, there is no solution. Your engagement has already happened. From one house the matter has spread to another. Now what can I do? Perhaps even my family won’t accept this marriage, if I break things there and bring you here to my home.’ My mind was in such a terrible state that I didn’t even want there to be a solution. On the 25th and 26th we spoke. On the 27th my people sent me away to attend a marriage at my sister-in-law’s. When I went there I went crying. I was too upset. After 2 days I returned. I kept thinking, if there isn’t a solution, then what am I doing alive? Subhash’s rhetorical question is challenging. Who is he? Subhash’s selfhood seems to be dependent on him maintaining his own father’s honour, Indu’s family’s honour, and that of a third party betrothed to his beloved. To go ahead and marry Indu would be to dishonour everybody and, in so doing, to ruin his own sense of self. The sheer weight of impossible scenarios and socially suicidal ‘solutions’ makes the contemplation of self-annihilation a constant and recurrent theme for many love-marriage individuals and indeed couples. Both Indu and Subhash find themselves separated – not so much by external force as by the emotional bonds and appropriate behaviours demanded by the rules that they themselves in great part subscribe to. Indu could have denounced her father and dishonoured him before the ‘thirty people’ who came for the engagement, by refusing to go ahead with it. Such disgrace at the hands of a daughter could certainly have had the potential to prevent the arranged marriage. Equally, Subhash had two months between the engagement and the wedding to find a viable solution. His treatment of Indu’s engagement as a final and definitive act that transferred her honour from one home to another, considering their circumstances, is an extreme and unusually rigid capitulation. Engagements do break off, but usually with some amount of scandal in their wake. This was not a scenario that Subhash was willing to entertain. Tellingly, Subhash admits that after he heard of the engagement, he did not even want there to be a solution. Evidently, he sees dishonour as no solution, be this through a love-marriage in a court or in a love-marriage subsequent to a broken

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engagement with a ‘third’ family. In this way, their desires are thwarted, but this happens in part through their own reification of and fidelity to the norms that govern them which is a realization of ethical selfhood that betrays Subhash to himself.

Making Moral Relationships Subhash was initially unable to do anything but mourn. However, when he returned to Delhi from the family wedding, he had a more courageous sense of purpose and a plan. This was that he, or some male members of his family, would approach Indu’s father with his proposal to marry her. ‘I thought that I would threaten and coerce them saying I will bring disgrace to them [by revealing details of their affair]. Your own daughter won’t deny it, so how can you?’ This, straightforwardly, would be to politicize their relationship – to reveal, in Alfred Gell’s terms, the secrets that lovers keep between themselves in an intimate pact (2011 [1996]). However, by the time he came up with this, Indu had been sent away to Jammu by her parents, and when she got back to Delhi she seemed distant and resolute. Subhash tried to convince her but she replied that he should stop bothering her because she was doing all this for the happiness of her people. He urged her that they still had time, that the ‘wedding cards still hadn’t been printed’. She replied that her father had already booked a banquet, and had given one lakh (100,000) rupees to the groom’s family, as a sort of predowry. Subhash said to me: ‘She made it seem that she was under pressure, but also that she didn’t wish to resist it. I kept saying, “I have brought a solution” but she didn’t want to know what I had brought.’ They spoke to each other over the phone after this, but two weeks before the wedding, Subhash told her that he would never speak to her again or show her his face. He kept his word and on the day of my speaking with him, he said it had been 102 days since he had last spoken to her. Subhash’s only potential solution to their problems had consisted of him threatening Indu’s parents with the possibility of dishonour by proving that their daughter was having an affair with him. In seeking to make Indu his wife, he was not trying to prove himself worthy of her, but rather sought to prove that she was unworthy of any other man – having already given her heart to Subhash. In trying to win the woman he loved (from her family), he threatened to dishonour her through bringing shame upon their heads. This again was a common enough blackmail strategy adopted by love-marriage couples, where the man would threaten his girlfriends’ parents with public disclosures of the affair with their daughter. This was not a very attractive ‘solution’ for Indu, who may have hoped that Subhash would suggest a courtmarriage, or at least an elopement. But Subhash was in the final instance unable to justify to himself such a socially reprehensible and selfish act. In the terms of this chapter, which presents love-marriage couples as accused

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of selfishness or bekhudiyat, Subhash could not muster enough selfremembering to recognize their love and intimacy through a courtmarriage or a love-marriage and instead chose a path of self-sacrifice and surrender. He returned all signs of their love (letters, gifts, etc.) so that in a moment of weakness he would not be tempted to ruin her and her parents, and in so doing destroy her marital home. His actions were to protect her and to provide a guarantee of her future marital security by surrendering material proofs and tokens of their joint past. In a bitter twist of fate, however, Indu’s parents emerged as the biggest losers in their daughter’s marriage. In their enthusiasm to ensure the public face of marriage, they overlooked the rare possibility of the marriage failing to consummate itself. When I asked Subhash’s best friend Gopal how Indu was faring and whether he had spoken to her recently, he surprised me (and Subhash who was seated there) by saying he had met her the previous day in a temple, and that she had told him of her deep unhappiness. Gopal was nervous about speaking of Indu in Subhash’s presence (because of his fragile state of mind), but the fact that I was present somehow justified his astonishing revelation: She isn’t happy. Even her husband is of this type of nature that he says this marriage wasn’t with his consent. He wasn’t interested in marriage. He says he wanted to live his life free . . .. The people of his house said that it was their duty to marry him – then after that he could do what he wanted – live whatever life he wanted. Indu asked her in-laws: ‘If he wasn’t interested in this marriage, then why did you ruin my life?’ So they said: ‘See, we thought it is our duty to marry him. We thought that after he gets married he will reform, he will understand what its real-meaning is . . .’ But there was no change. In fact, people say that what happens on the first night, even that hasn’t happened. I think that what she is saying may even be true. Because, she says that even when lying together on the bed, we aren’t together. Even if we are together in a bedroom, we aren’t together. She says that her situation has become so bad that her people are now talking about divorce. They are saying, that hardly any time has passed since the marriage, and that they should take a divorce straight away. If she is not getting peace in that home, and if she is not getting what we sent her there for – then what did we do her marriage for . . . When the boy himself does not accept you, then what are you doing there? Are you there only to wash the dishes? Her in-laws are laying down the rules for her. They say, ‘Okay, if our son isn’t doing it, even then you should live with us, and for us.’ Indu says: ‘Why should I live without-husband here? No woman would live under these conditions.’ Clearly, Indu’s in-laws believed that their son’s intransigence towards marriage could be reversed when the marriage was consummated. The ‘realmeaning’ of marriage that they refer to is an ethical transformation – but one

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grounded manifestly in the act of sexual intercourse with the virginal wife. Here, the moral meanings of consummation are striking because not only is the boy assumed to be transformed (they use the Hindi words sudhar jana, which mean ‘to reform’) through the sexualization of his wife (and himself) but, equally, the lack of consummation is seen to have a disturbing effect on Indu’s peace of mind, and she is viewed as unfulfilled, and ‘not having got what she was sent there for’. Because Gopal and Subhash are well aware that Indu was married despite her abiding desire to be with Subhash, she is portrayed as a woman who has been ‘wronged’, and whose existence without-husband is a euphemism for a sexually unconsummated marriage. One perspective here is that an arranged marriage of such unseemly haste probably did not permit for the usual enquiries into the ‘background’ of the boy. Not that such enquiries would necessarily reveal the requisite details into their past, but at least people would feel satisfied that some attempt had been made to ensure the reputation of a boy to whom one arranged a marriage with one’s daughter. I often heard it said that in instances where swift marriages were arranged, the spouses that were made so immediately available were possibly the sorts of people who had some ‘faults’ where more detailed enquiries would reveal them as unsuitable. In those instances when the marriage does go wrong for reasons that might have been foreseeable (for instance, a revelation that the boy was in another relationship or was homosexual), the parents are held to be particularly culpable for having sacrificed their offspring’s happiness of a lifetime for the expediency and haste of a few weeks. In this instance, too, Indu’s parents would no doubt have been held responsible for having made such a ruinous alliance. The tragic outcome is cast in particularly sharp relief by the comparison with the romantic ambition of the thwarted lovers. From Gopal’s report of his conversation with Indu, her strategy to deal with this anomalous situation was remarkable. Having been forced into conjugality with a man she did not know or love, Indu now claimed a right to his sexuality that she was being denied. The illegitimacy of sexuality in a love affair was now juxtaposed with the moral strength of a married woman, wronged by being denied her husband’s attentions. Indu’s parents supported her because an unconsummated marriage is considered ‘unnatural’ as procreation can never be achieved. Indeed, the ‘weakness’ of the husband empowers the wife, just as the deceit of the bride-takers incentivizes the bride-givers to seek retribution. When a husband fails to consummate his marriage and domesticate his wife’s sexuality by reproduction, he renounces his rights to her productive capabilities too. The trade-off is clear – if he is unwilling to impregnate her, she is unwilling to act the coy bride and slave over his parents’ every whim and fancy. The allusions to Indu’s husband’s sexuality (he does not like her, she does not awaken any interest in him, the marriage was not with his consent) are left unanswered. Gopal observed that Indu once

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asked her husband if he was perhaps not ‘interested in girls’ at all, and instead of defending his ‘izzat’ or honour, he merely replied: ‘Please don’t discuss this topic with me.’ Clearly, then, izzat is not just about female modesty but also has a structural pairing that is only rarely challenged, and consequently is rarely made visible: male virility. Interestingly, we might speculate (as Gopal and Indu do) that Indu’s husband has also paid a heavy price and has surrendered himself selflessly to his parents’ desire to ensure that they place their son upon a socially recognizable path towards adulthood, and in so doing have foisted upon him heterosexual expectations over his sexuality.

Ethics and Love In the bustis of Delhi, many love-marriage couples are branded as being ‘bekhudi’ – self-forgetting, and selfish. Indeed, it is a feature of love generally that those who find themselves in it are known to be lost in it; but for love-marriage couples, the social judgement is that they have lost their sense of shame and cannot see the dishonour they bring upon themselves and all around them. Perhaps the distinction between Indu and Subhash and the many other couples I met emanates from Subhash’s conviction that he would lose himself if he dishonoured his parents (by running away with the woman he loves) or if he eloped with Indu. Indu has no such concerns as she dearly wishes not to have a forced marriage with a man she does not know or love. Subhash values his extant sense of self and kinship more than the prize and is willing to die for the decency of his love even if it means he will not satiate his thirst for his beloved. In Subhash and Indu’s story we find ample pause for reflection on the ethics of love and kinship. The ethnography illustrates Faubion’s call to treat kinship ethics as Foucault would have it – as a domain of the relation of the self to the self – not as morality which establishes right and wrong conduct, but rather as ‘the self’s assessment of its relation to such codes and rules, of their applicability and situational relevance’ (2001: 18). We see in Subhash and Indu’s case how critical this form of ethical enquiry is to both their kinship groups and to their love for each other. This is particularly poignant in the end when it emerges that Indu’s forced marriage is one in which her husband may well be uninterested in women, thus giving her a new cause to challenge her place as his wife and as a newly married daughter-in-law. Gopal’s revelation about the nature of Indu’s forced but now failed marriage raises a new avenue for Subhash to reflect on and generates another opportunity for him to consider a new course for love. Faubion urges kinship theorists to consider Foucault’s challenge that ‘technologies of the self’ may not simply serve to reinforce and reiterate

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what we have learned through childhood but may instead also serve as ‘instruments of revision’ (2001: 20). In this regard, the narrative of bekhudiyat (self-forgetting) appears as a peculiarly cruel taunt to love-marriage couples, because they are accused of such revisionary zeal even when the reality is far removed from such romantic conceptions. In my experience working on love-marriages in Delhi, kinship served as a firm bedrock to which being was tethered, sometimes to the exclusion of other possibilities that presented themselves by way of change and ‘becoming’. The experience of falling in love presented to many of my informants a possibility of self-revision and a re-charting of course, but in many of the narratives I encountered (Anil and Subhash’s extraordinary accounts were sadly far less extraordinary than they might seem), the ‘self’ was often surrendered despite itself – rather than reformulated, revised, or ‘forgotten’ in a haze of romance and love. As I have shown, Sarita, who was accused of bekhudiyat because she married a Muslim man, draws poignant attention in her account to me of her biography in explaining her husband’s acceptance of her first marriage and daughter and in drawing attention to the fact that she has been unable to become a Muslim and give her marriage a religion because of her poor education. The anthropology of romantic love in Delhi thus provides evidence of the ways in which the ethics of kinship and love play out in the actions and strategies of lovers who find ways to both challenge and deflect a range of possible ‘becomings’ that present themselves to the contemporary world. Far from self-forgetting, love-marriage frequently requires quite forcible forms of self-remembering.

References Carsten, Janet, ed. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Das, Veena. 2007. ‘The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen As Sexed’, in Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Faubion, James. 2001. ‘Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of the Ethics of Kinship’, in James Faubion (ed.), The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield: 1–28. Gell, Alfred. 2011 [1996]. ‘On Love’, in Anthropology of the Century. http:// aotcpress.com/articles/love. Hirsch, Jennifer. 2007. ‘“Love Makes a Family”: Globalisation, Companionate Marriage, and the Modernization of Gender Inequality’, in Mark B. Padilla et al. (eds.), Love and Globalisation: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Mody, Perveez. 2008. The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi. Delhi: Routledge.

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2019. ‘Contemporary Intimacies’, in Sanjay Srivastava, Yasmeen Arif, and Janaki Abraham (eds.), Critical Themes in Indian Sociology. New Delhi: Sage Publications: 257–66. 2022. ‘Intimacy and the Politics of Love’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 51: 271–88. Padilla, Mark B. et al. (eds.). 2007. Love and Globalisation: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Reddy, Deepa. 2001. ‘Kousi Oda Ponnu (Kousi’s Daughter)’, in James Faubion (ed.), The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield: 125–52. Srivastava, Sanjay. 2007. Passionate Modernity. Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India. Delhi: Routledge.

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24 Cooperation and Punishment Anni Kajanus and Charles Stafford

In this chapter, we discuss human cooperation from an anthropological point of view while also taking on board some lessons drawn from the interdisciplinary field of ‘cooperation studies’, broadly defined. To be more specific: we have found it very productive, as anthropologists, to think about a series of questions that psychologists and others have been asking in relation to punishment – which, so far as we know, is not something most anthropologists would naturally associate with cooperation. These questions about punishment can both enrich anthropological understandings of cooperation across cultures and help us to make systematic comparisons across cultures. In order to explain this, however, we need to set the scene a bit more in terms of disciplinary orientations and also clarify what all of this has to do with morality and ethics.

From Ethnography of Cooperation to Comparative Anthropology The existing ethnographic record is pervaded by accounts of cooperation and these, in turn, are pervaded by questions of morality and ethics. To cite one of many possible examples: Olivia Harris has told us about cooperative agricultural labour among the Laymi of Bolivia, focussing in particular on the values they attached to cooperative labour and to work more generally – work being central to their ideas of what it is to be human. In the Laymi view, as Harris reports, it was considered ‘unseemly to cultivate the fields alone’. They organized cooperative work parties instead, dressing up for the occasion and then relaxing ‘with a delicious meal, plenty to drink and music at the end of the day’ (Harris 2007: 145).

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If one looks at this case study in more detail, it contains features that anthropological readers would certainly consider important – but probably also unsurprising: • Laymi cooperation entails not only cultural particularities but also historical and political ones. For example, it turns out that the Bolivian Agrarian Reform of 1953 had significant consequences for the amount of work, cooperative or not, that local people were prepared to do. • Cooperation in one domain of Laymi life tends to spill over into other domains, as a consequence of which it must be analysed holistically. For example, work practices are closely tied up with patterns of courtship, marriage, family, and kinship. • Reciprocity, and the morality attaching to it, is a central organizing motif in Laymi cooperation – however, this plays itself out in complex ways. For example, Laymi give more than they probably should to townspeople, accepting little back in return, because ‘they feel sorry for them’ in light of their inability to do proper work. From their starting point in rich ethnographies of real-world cooperation, such as the one provided by Harris, anthropologists have shown little interest in the booming interdisciplinary field of ‘cooperation studies’. One reason for this is that many, if not most, of the scholars contributing to this field – game theorists, institutional economists, philosophers, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, and others – start with assumptions about rationality and human self-interest that most social and cultural anthropologists cannot accept; use methods (such as mathematical modelling or experimentation) that lack the holism, and thus richness, of ethnography; and focus on what are basically ‘universalist’ questions about the fundamentals of human cooperation: Why is it that humans cooperate at all; that is, as opposed to just being selfish? What are the core problems, such as free riding, that beset human attempts to cooperate? What are the underlying skills and dispositions – such as the capacity for sharing intentions with the people around us – that provide the building blocks of cooperation? Why did these skills and dispositions evolve in our species? From an anthropological point of view, to start in this way when studying cooperation, the forms of which vary dramatically both culturally and historically, seems highly reductionist. But there is arguably less distance between ‘universalist’ and ‘relativist’ views of, and questions about, human cooperation than might at first be assumed. It surely is the case that cooperation pervades human life, as the ethnographic record shows, and that this poses similar sets of questions for our species across space and time, even if these are framed in historically particular ways. This is precisely why Harris’s account of Laymi cooperation is interesting in its

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details but also in many respects totally unsurprising for anthropologists; for example, we would expect reciprocity to be a central motif in Laymi cooperation but also expect this to play itself out in complex ways. Meanwhile, a good deal of the interdisciplinary research on cooperation, far from being crudely universalist in outlook, focusses centrally on the relationship of cooperation to cultural artefacts and historical variation (see Henrich and Henrich 2007; Tomasello 2009). To step back and frame this at a more general level: our engagement with the psychology and evolutionary science of cooperation is motivated in part by recent calls for anthropologists to re-think the project of meaningful comparison (Astuti 2022; Candea 2018; Ite´anu and Moya 2015; van der Veer 2016). Assuming our goal is to understand the diverse ways in which humans cooperate, and also the meanings they give to cooperative activities in the flow of life, how can we engage in this comparative exercise – but without losing the ethnographic specificity of each case? Rita Astuti, in her 2019 Association of Social Anthropologists lecture, argues that one way to anchor the comparison of the historically specific is to do so in relation to the evolutionary history of our species (Astuti 2022; see also Bloch and Sperber 2002). We know, for example, that even very young infants are able to ‘read’ the intentions of carers and to provide various forms of help to other agents as a precursor to engaging in fullblown cooperative activity later on; with age, their motivations and capacities for cooperation continue to develop in complex ways (Warneken and Tomasello 2006, 2007). Since nothing for humans is ever only social, or only biological (i.e. since both history and evolution are always at play: Astuti 2022), what we know about the developmental psychology of cooperation can provide grounds for meaningful anthropological comparison (a point also made by Keane 2015). It allows us to ask questions such as: why are people more cooperative in some contexts than in others; what are the ethical and moral investments that people make in the course of cooperation; and what is understood by ‘cooperation’ and how does this vary in space and time? These are important questions that can and should be explored (however critically) via ethnography. Conversely, ethnographic evidence about real-world cooperation poses very important questions that can and should be informing the interdisciplinary debates – although, as the philosopher of science Francesco Guala observes, this potential has not always been taken up in practice (Guala 2012). In what follows, we want to initiate a modest step towards interdisciplinary dialogue by considering three inter-linked topics related to human cooperation – topics we have examined in our own field research: (1) the role that punishment plays in supporting cooperation; that is, when one person’s failure to cooperate appropriately is sanctioned in some way

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(2) how cooperation is linked to questions of learning in general and of child development in particular (3) the relationship between kin and non-kin cooperation.

The Evolution of Cooperation Before going any further, however, we should add a few more words about the interdisciplinary debates. In addition to the question of how to explain the – surprising, as some would see it – disposition of humans to behave altruistically, the scientific interest in cooperation is driven by another puzzle: what explains the success of our species, especially in comparison with other primates. In evolutionary terms, success can be measured as population size, which for humans started to increase dramatically only very recently, coinciding with the rise of agriculture and cities about 10,000 years ago. The current consensus is that cooperation, or more precisely the capacity and motivation to cooperate with non-genetically related conspecifics, has something to do with this success. How exactly human cooperation evolved, and the ultimate mechanisms that underpin its scale and complexity compared with that found in other species, are matters of ongoing debate. One influential theory is the Cultural Group Selection (CGS) hypothesis, which posits competition between groups as the main driver behind the evolution of cooperation, as groups that had altruistic tendencies were more successful than groups that did not (e.g. Henrich and Henrich 2007; Richerson and Boyd 2005; Richerson et al. 2016). Importantly, these tendencies were not transmitted genetically, but first passed on through cultural learning (Richerson et al. 2016). The main competing view is the interdependence hypothesis, which argues that many of the mechanisms of cooperation in humans evolved prior to group competition dynamics, and more specifically in the reciprocal relations between individuals who lived in small bands consisting mostly of kin (Tomasello et al. 2012). In the context of allo-parenting and hunting, humans had to come up with ways to coordinate goals, roles, and actions, share spoils, and so on. Cooperation at this point took place between individuals, was motivated by mutual benefit, and was controlled by mechanisms such as partner choice and reputation. The second step in the evolution of cooperation followed when populations increased in size, which led to the emergence of distinct cultural groups and competition between them. Cooperation was no longer governed by face-to-face interactions with partners on the basis of shared goals. Rather, it rested on shared culture and norm-based morality at a group level, internalized into emotions such as guilt and shame (Tomasello et al. 2012). Still others have emphasized that even though human cooperation is remarkable, it is the capacities that enable cooperation (as well as other

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things, such as tool use) that distinguish humans from other species at a more fundamental level. For example, Elizabeth Spelke (2012) has emphasized the role of language, which enables humans to make connections flexibly and rapidly between systems of core knowledge. The two core knowledge systems crucial to cooperation are the systems for representing and reasoning about (1) intentional agents and their goal-directed actions; and (2) social partners who engage in reciprocal relationships with the self. Experimental studies have provided evidence that many other species, such as chimpanzees, rhesus-monkeys, and even birds, have the same core systems of knowledge as are found in human infants, and also that these have similar limitations (Regolin and Vallortigara 1995; Santos, Hauser, and Spelke 2002). For human infants and these other species, the systems of core knowledge are fairly independent and separate from each other. It is when humans start to acquire language that they develop the ability to combine information from these systems in a way that is rapid, flexible, and productive. For example, human infants and several animal species can represent a single inanimate object, like a block, but they cannot represent a block tower or understand a block as part of a category for specific kinds of objects that have specific functions. This ability develops in humans after they start to learn names for objects, which is when culture becomes critically important (Spelke 2012). Different languages represent the world very differently, of course, and therefore have an influence on our cognitive development beyond the core systems. In his work, which comes from a different starting point, Michael Tomasello (2009) puts shared intentionality at the core of cooperation, and therefore human uniqueness. Shared intentionality involves, most basically, the ability to create with others joint intentions and joint commitments in cooperative endeavours. It is based on the triadic relationship of the self both to a social partner and to the objects of goal-directed actions. Spelke suggests, however, that it might not be shared intentionality per se that makes humans unique but rather the combinatorial capacity that comes via language that makes shared intentionality possible in the first place. Entire subfields of anthropology (and philosophy) have revolved around questioning the assumptions behind approaches of these kinds, such as the oppositions between other-regarding (altruistic) and selfish motivations; between living (human) agents and inanimate objects; and between the objective world and the mind that represents it. Nevertheless, and even to those who are less interested in the phylogeny of human uniqueness and more interested in cooperation as it unfolds in actual social behaviour, engaging with the evolutionary and developmental approaches can be fruitful, as we have already noted. After all, a view these approaches share is that culture, cooperation, and morality are deeply inter-linked: part of one package. Culture is a major driver behind genetic evolution (Boyd and Richerson 2009); it deeply influences cognitive development

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from early infancy (Spelke 2012); and it is essential to group-level cooperation of the kind found in human societies (Tomasello et al. 2012). Many classic fields of anthropological inquiry, notably the anthropology of exchange and of kinship, are directly relevant to the study of cooperation and can help illuminate its complexity as an everyday lived phenomenon. For example, one central strand of research by psychologists has focussed on the development of cooperative skills such as children’s altruistic acts of helping and sharing, and how the emergence of dispositions to help, share, and so on is influenced by group-level norms and social expectations. Experimental work seeks to systematically control the social context in which people’s cooperative behaviour is tested, for example helping kin versus helping strangers, or helping where there is no cost versus helping when it involves a cost (Warneken and Tomasello 2006), and so on. However, it is often unclear to what extent these experimental situations mirror the real-world contexts in which cooperation takes place and thus, to give one example, how particular research subjects understand the others with whom they are ‘cooperating’ in a given experimental task. Making critical connections between different aspects of human cooperation and the ways it unfolds in actual cultural-historical environments will be necessary if we are to achieve theoretical progress in this field.

Cooperation and Punishment in the Flow of Life Much of our own work has focussed on childhood and child development in China and Taiwan. Our starting point is that human infants are born with underlying cognitive capacities and psychological tendencies/biases that provide a foundation for the ontogenetic development of cooperative (and many other) behaviours, which in turn are profoundly shaped by language and life experience in broader social and cultural contexts. To return to the work of Tomasello and his colleagues: on the basis of a large body of experimental work, it is argued that from around their first birthday – when they begin to walk and talk – human children (irrespective of where they live) are already cooperative and helpful in many, though not all, situations. They do not learn this from adults; it comes naturally. However, later in ontogeny children’s relatively indiscriminate cooperativeness becomes mediated by such influences as their judgements of likely reciprocity, and their concern for how others in the group will judge them. At this point children begin to internalize many culturally specific norms about how one ought to do things if one is to be a member of a given group (Tomasello et al. 2009; see also Warneken 2015; Warneken and Tomasello 2007). In other words, they gain experience of, and knowledge about, the mechanisms that maintain real-world cooperation;

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that is, beyond the basic prosocial acts of helping, sharing, coordinating joint goals, and so on. Children acquire social norms and, importantly, learn about the sanctions against breaking these norms – that is, they start to learn about punishment (McAuliffe, Jordan, and Warneken 2014; Jordan, McAuliffe, and Warneken 2014). For anthropologists, it may not be immediately obvious why punishment per se should be such a central topic in the interdisciplinary field of cooperation studies (see Jensen 2010; Raihani et al. 2012). Perhaps this is because we think of cooperation, and of reciprocity-based cooperation in particular, as a broadly positive phenomenon – neglecting that, for example, people do cooperate in the service of such things as genocide. Many of the real-world examples in the ethnographic record, such as cooperative agricultural labour among the Laymi, appear (at least at first glance) to be entered into freely for joint benefit and are also culturally valued. But let us think of two different evolutionary stories, ones that are not mutually exclusive. In the first, humans have evolved to be good cooperators and as a crucial aspect of this to have the moral bearings that lead to this being so, for example the intuitive disposition to treat others fairly. In the second story, what has evolved in us is something different: not a disposition to be good per se, but rather a willingness to take on and punish those who are bad in some sense, for example the bully who demands more than his fair share of a joint resource such as food. Of course, in order for cooperation to be sustained we need both of these things: that is, both the disposition to act morally in our dealings with others and the disposition to push back against bad behaviour when we encounter it in the flow of life, even if doing so carries considerable risks. What does this look like in practice? As every anthropologist would expect, cooperation in everyday social encounters is a multifaceted phenomenon, something that involves not only evolving (sometimes clashing) cultural norms but also shifting group dynamics, the vagaries of individual personalities, and much else besides. For example, in the primary schools in Nanjing, China, where Kajanus has done fieldwork, classroom life is a constant flow of cooperative activities (Kajanus 2018). Children form partnerships, engage in joint activities, share, help each other, and so on. Much of this takes place without adult involvement or enforcement, for example when children let others sip from their bottle of hot water and share their pack of toilet paper, time their eating with friends so they finish at the same time and can leave together, or coordinate a quick game of tag during play-time. These children do indeed cooperate remarkably well, much of the time. In cooperation, however, there are always transgressions. Someone free rides and never brings a pack of toilet paper, cheats during tag, or plays too rough, leading to an injury. Perhaps most annoyingly, some transgress in ways that alert the attention of adults, and sometimes bring down punishment on the entire group. When the entire class gets criticized because a few of

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them are messing around during the flag-raising ceremony, this is acceptable. According to the norms of the children’s peer group, this degree of resistance to the adult norms in the school is expected, and the children take the minor collective punishment that follows in their stride. But other transgressions are less well tolerated and lead to punishment from other children, which can take the form of second- and/or third-party punishment (Jensen 2010). The former involves a transgressor being punished directly by their partner, for example when a child who gets pushed in tag pushes back. Experimental studies have also found this form of punishment in non-human species, for example in the mutualistic cooperative relationships between blue-streak wrasse and their reef-fish clients. The client fish punish mucus eating cleaners by chasing them off, which promotes cooperative behaviour from cleaner fish (Bshary and Grutter 2005). Third-party punishment, by contrast, seems to be somewhat unique to humans (Raihani et al. 2012). This refers to punishment of bad cooperators by those who are not the immediate victim of a given transgression. An example of this would be the group of children excluding the child who has pushed another player from the game of tag, despite not being hurt themselves. In the view of some theorists, it is this mechanism in particular – that is, the willingness to dispense punishments, and especially costly punishments to those who break our group-level moral expectations – that underpins the human ability to have complex cultures and institutions that can survive over time, and so is foundational for human sociality and everything we might recognize as history. Note that punishment, as defined in these literatures, is normally held to entail immediate cost and delayed benefits to the punisher (Jensen 2010; Raihani et al. 2012). For example, when a person decides to punish a bad cooperator, they may suffer a physical cost of getting into a fight with a cheater, a financial cost of losing money through severing business ties with a cheater, or the social cost of ostracizing a member of their intimate social circle. In the future, however, the punisher and/or the wider social group will at least in theory benefit from the act through the enforcement of cooperation and the social norms that sustain it. It is this dynamic of immediate cost and delayed benefits that distinguishes punishment from other forms of aggression, such as retaliation and harassment, and from other mechanisms that maintain cooperation, such as sanctioning through partner choice, in which bad partners are simply avoided rather than directly sanctioned (Jensen 2010). Punishment is always costly, as understood within this framework, but the degree varies from less costly forms such as gossip, verbal reprimands, ostracism, and centralized punishment (i.e. punishment that is outsourced to authority figures and institutions) to forms that are costlier for the punisher, such as direct physical aggression of the kind that might provoke a counterattack or lead to a concrete loss of the punisher’s resources (Wiessner 2005).

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In the following examples of punishment among schoolchildren in Nanjing, there are two points worth highlighting. The first is that punishment (with its attendant costs) can sometimes be understood as an investment in a cooperative relationship. By extension, looking at forms of punishment that pertain to particular transgressions can tell us a lot about the moral and ethical investments people are prepared to make in relationships that matter to them. The second point is that in order to understand how punishment-as-investment operates in actual real-world settings, we must take into account not only the surrounding cultural context but also the complex interpersonal relationships that exist between given punishers and transgressors – something that itself will always be socially, culturally, and historically framed. Miss Wu, the second-grade Moral Character teacher at one of the schools in Nanjing studied by Kajanus, was particularly gentle and mild-mannered. She often struggled to keep the classroom full of eight-year-olds under control and allowed them to watch Hollywood films during class. For the children, the Moral Character classes came as a welcome break from the endless drilling of math worksheets and the strict demeanour of their other teachers. On one afternoon, the children were being rowdy, playing, chatting with each other, and paying little attention to Miss Wu – as per normal. But for one reason or another, Miss Wu had an unusually low tolerance for noise on that day, and spent most of the class talking sternly into a microphone, trying to calm down the classroom and criticizing the children for their bad behaviour. In front of the classroom stood a board of smiley faces, which the teachers used to reward individuals for good behaviour by awarding smiley faces, and punishing them for bad behaviour by removing them. This had very limited impact on the noise level, and Miss Wu upped the punishment by making it collective. She singled out one boy, Li Wei, in particular, and blamed him for bringing down the group of four children who sat together. Miss Wu removed some smiley faces from the group, stating that because of Li Wei, the entire group was being marked down for bad behaviour. This elicited some vocal protest from the other kids in the group, who tried to defend themselves by saying that they should not be punished for Li Wei’s behaviour. But Miss Wu had had it, and she further escalated the punishment by ordering that the film of the day was to be cancelled for the entire class because of Li Wei’s behaviour. That day’s film being The Avengers, the children were enraged but gritted their teeth and remained quiet for the remainder of the class. When the bell rang for play-time, the children ran into the corridor and Miss Wu retreated to the teachers’ office for a nap. What ensued was a collective third-party punishment (see later) in a manner that was swift, aggressive, and highly costly. A group of boys attacked Li Wei and started pushing him around and kicking him. Li Wei is big, sturdy, and short-tempered, and the fight escalated quickly. By the time adults got to the boys to break things up, Li Wei was sitting on one of the attackers and

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hitting him on the head, while the other boys beat him. The fight was epic and so was the aftermath, involving crying boys, angry teachers, parents being called in, a visit to the emergency room, and all the rest. It was therefore quite astonishing to observe in the following days how quickly and seemingly easily Li Wei and the entire group moved forward from it. Li Wei chatted and played with his attackers in his usual exuberant manner but took more care, at least for a while, not to annoy the teachers. The fight – the punishment – appeared actually to have reaffirmed the children’s relationships, and to some extent reaffirmed the adult/teacher norms of classroom behaviour as well. In this case – noting that most lab experiments would not seek, or be able to capture, even a fraction of the complexity – it turns out that the character of the relationships between given punishers and transgressors is extremely important. Experimental protocols have to be kept simple, of course, and by definition aim to control variables rather than taking ‘everything’, such as individual personalities or shifting relationships, into account. As it happens, Li Wei is well liked by his classmates while less so by the teachers. He forgets homework and is noisy, short-tempered, and always the last one to line up. But he is also fun to be around, a happygo-lucky character who is almost always in a good mood, easy-going, and who comes on board and becomes excited about things. It is precisely because of these admirable qualities that the children in this particular case are willing to engage in such costly punishment with him, even if they know from the outset that there is a high risk of hurt and injury by him, and further punishment from teachers and parents. But the role that punishment plays in the maintenance of cooperative relationships (such as friendships, in this case) will be made clearer if we compare the fight with Li Wei to the ostracism of another boy, Jia Hao, in the same classroom. From the teachers’ perspective, Jia Hao has a similar disruptive presence in the classroom as Li Wei. He is forgetful, noisy, and often inattentive. In the children’s group, however, his position is very different from that of Li Wei. Li Wei’s main transgression was annoying the adults too much, otherwise he was fluent in the children’s moral code of being a good, fun friend. Jia Hao, by contrast, tries to engage with other children, but is sensitive and easily offended when not getting his way, often causing conflict. Bigger in size than most of his classmates, he also tries to dominate by force, bullying girls or some of the smaller boys in class. He is not well liked and most of the children simply avoid him. When Jia Hao causes trouble in games, rather than engaging in direct punishment, the children usually call for adults to remove him. Even though ostracism and avoidance are milder forms of punishment in terms of their cost to the punisher than fighting, in this case they actually have a more severe impact on the transgressor. In short, while fighting can be a way of maintaining cooperative ties, in this particular context avoidance and ostracism are ways of excluding someone from the group altogether.

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The fight with Li Wei also illustrates that, in real life, cooperation is nuanced and second- and third-party punishment can take place in the same event. The original transgression occurred in the relationship between the teacher and Li Wei, when Li Wei failed to follow the adult norms of the school. The fight that ensued could be seen as a third-party punishment by the group of children who observed this transgression. As is characteristic of third-party punishment, the fight worked to enforce the adult norms that maintain cooperation (i.e. good behaviour) in the school. However, the school environment is permeated by more than one moral code and set of social norms. The children’s own moral code values engaging in joint fun and excitement, in a manner that to an extent is incompatible with adult norms, but not if this means eliciting a serious punishment from adults. Li Wei broke this code when his actions resulted in the cancellation of The Avengers, and the fight that followed can thus also be understood as a direct second-party punishment for this. Meanwhile, in another Nanjing school studied by Kajanus, it seemed that children rarely called on teachers to mediate transgressions in the cooperative relationships between friends. In children’s peer groups, friends appeared to protect each other from the shame of public punishment by adults. But the playing out of this is often very complicated and may even involve a form of self-punishment, as is illustrated by the following example. Two boys, Yong Rui and Tian Lang, were sitting at their desks and using their stationery to engage in a battle. Getting too excited, Tian Lang accidentally pushed Yong Rui, which resulted in Yong Rui’s notebook being ripped in half, causing him to cry. At this point the teacher noticed the commotion and called Yong Rui to her desk to receive a scolding, which Yong Rui withstood in silence without pointing to Tian Lang’s involvement. He then returned to his seat but remained visibly upset, despite the comforting efforts of two girls who sat next to him. While the two girls were trying to cheer up Yong Rui, Tian Lang remained seemingly unapologetic, continuing to work on his math sheet. Suddenly he turned around, grabbed a handful of pages of the ripped notebook from Yong Rui’s desk, and stuffed them in his mouth. The three others giggled. Yong Rui’s face lit up, and he instructed Tian Lang to take all the papers to the bin at the back of the classroom. He and the girls laughed when Tian Lang made a big show of stuffing all the pages in his mouth, and then triumphantly proceeded to take them to the bin. As he was walking back, Yong Rui extended his leg and Tian Lang tripped over it. If he was hurt, he did not show it, and while Yong Rui and the girls giggled, he got up, took a few steps back, and with an exaggerated inattentiveness, stepped forward again. Yong Rui read the cue and extended his leg for the second time, bursting into silent giggles when Tian Lang tripped over again. This scene was repeated, each time more dramatically than the last, with the two girls joining in. By the time Tian Lang was lying on the floor, pulling the legs of the three others, the teacher had to intervene again.

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Notably, self-punishment is not covered in the interdisciplinary literature on cooperation, but this vignette provides an example of it – that is, Tian Lang basically makes himself ridiculous and, in the end, actually gets himself in trouble with the teacher. The whole thing is induced by his transgression in the course of cooperation with his friend (playing too roughly), it involves self-induced cost (getting in trouble when this could very easily have been avoided), and it involves delayed benefits (i.e. in the form of a maintained cooperative relationship with his friend). While Tian Lang’s actions could also be described, for example, as making amends or restoration, they therefore also fit the characteristics of a punishment, as defined in the cooperation literature. Part of what is interesting in this case is that the punishment is initiated by the transgressor himself, rather than the victim – who precisely had done his part to protect his friend from any blame whatever. The nature of the relationship and the moral code it entails are, again, important. For the children, being fun and loyal are central values, and Yong Rui and Tian Lang restore the status quo and the fun atmosphere in a creative and ethical manner.

The Culture and the Consequences of Punishment None of this takes place in an historical vacuum, needless to say. On the contrary, as anthropologists would expect, a wide range of cultural-historical artefacts – including, in this particular case, Chinese ideas and practices related to friendship, schooling, teachers, authority, humour, punishment, and so on – directly influence everyday experiences of cooperation. For example, in line with the broader cultural emphasis on exemplary behaviour as a form of social control (Bakken 2000), the Chinese criminal justice system has long encouraged defendants to confess to their wrongdoings so as to speed up the criminal justice process. A key feature of traditional law was the provision that an offender who voluntarily surrendered and confessed before discovery and who made full restitution was entitled to remission of punishment. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the slogan ‘leniency for confession and severity for resistance’ (tanbai congkuan kangju congyan) was made popular, and ideas linked to this still pervade the Chinese legal system and the consciousness of many ordinary people. Examining summary court documents in 1,009 criminal cases from the post-Mao reform era, Lu and Miethe (2003) found that those who confessed received more favourable case dispositions than those who did not confess, even after controlling for offender and offence characteristics. These ideas and practices surrounding confession are linked, in turn, to ideas and practices surrounding education and self-cultivation. In classical Chinese thought, selfhood was framed around the notion that the human mind is malleable, and that through an appropriate education that focusses on shaping attitudes, any person can become correctly dispositioned

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regardless of background. Public self-criticism, rather than simply apologizing or enduring a punishment, is one way to display attitude change (Munro 1977). Mao, for his part, made this a revolutionary priority, but it sat uncomfortably with a tradition that stressed ‘not losing face’. In the famous Rectification Movement of 1942, the Communists based at Yan’an were put to the task of studying twenty-two educational party texts and writing confessional and self-critical autobiographies. Moreover, these were to be read out at public meetings. According to Zhao Weili (2015), this was initially met with dismay by those trained in the Confucian tradition, to whom it would provoke a deep sense of shame because of the loss of face it necessarily entailed. However, this shame was discursively reframed by the Maoists as a glorious thing and as the moral responsibility of any member of the Chinese Communist Party. Public confessions thus became a central practice in many of the movements and campaigns of the decades that followed. Years later, these dynamics of shame, reform, exposure, and secrecy are visible in the disciplinary practices of the elementary schools studied by Kajanus in Nanjing – however transformed they may be as a result of intervening histories, including shifting priorities in the national educational project as a whole. The relevant practices include shaming in front of other students for bad performance, self-criticism, peer-criticism, verbal reprimands, and moral lecturing (Kajanus et al. 2019). From the school’s point of view, all of these are directed towards reforming attitudes, as opposed to correcting behaviours per se. In children’s peer groups, however, friends sometimes protect each other from the shame and reformative practice of the public punishment by adults. Tian Lang’s act of selfmockery might be viewed as reformative, on some level, but it is primarily directed at an intimate circle of friends, and in a way ‘matches’ the shame of mild public scolding his friend had endured through Tian Lang’s fault. Within the context of close friendship, protection from public punishment is used to maintain intimacy in children’s groups, while in more distant relationships other forms of punishment, such as public accountability, are used. The fact that self-punishment does not figure in the interdisciplinary debates about cooperation illustrates the potential importance of an anthropological perspective that pays attention to who is cooperating, and according to what culturally specific rules and norms, in a given setting. Moreover, as soon as we look at these real-world settings, such as the ones outlined earlier, we will see how our shared beliefs and practices (such as those related to traditional Chinese, and more recently Maoist, notions of moral development and public life) shape what punishment actually is and what it can really achieve. Finally, it is also the case that the punishment, when we look at this autobiographically in historical context, will be highly complex – for example, in cases where the reaction to punishment is very different from what was intended, because individuals reject the ‘moral’ basis on which punishments have been dispensed (Stafford 2010).

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Child Development and Kin versus Non-Kin Cooperation We noted near the outset that three inter-linked topics would be addressed in this chapter: the role that punishment plays in supporting cooperation; how cooperation relates to questions of learning and child development; and the relationship between kin and non-kin cooperation. The connection between the first two topics should be obvious by this point. If punishment is a way of enforcing social norms of cooperation, it can also be seen as an instructional practice in which we learn about cooperation – for example, we learn that failures in it may be sanctioned in some way, and that even one’s closest friends are capable of inflicting such sanctions. Learning of this kind, which will always be culturally and historically situated, could take place at any point in life. As the examples from Nanjing illustrate, however, it certainly takes place during childhood; that is, as we are acquiring the ‘primary habitus’ (Bourdieu’s phrase) that will inform our subsequent agency in the world (for other ethnographic illustrations, see Fechter 2014). This, in turn, brings us to the third topic (covered only briefly here for reasons of space). For if we study children’s early experiences of ‘cooperationrelated learning’ in a holistic manner, we will inevitably be led to ask questions about the connection between kin and non-kin cooperation. As explained earlier, the existing interdisciplinary work on cooperation focusses primarily on our capacity and motivation to cooperate with nongenetically related conspecifics; that is, it focusses primarily on cooperation with non-kin as this category would be defined in evolutionary science. The logic of this is straightforward. As predicted by the theory of inclusive fitness, kin-based cooperation is incredibly important in all societies: we should be expected to cooperate with, and if necessary sacrifice hugely for, those with whom we share a genetic destiny. By contrast, what is surprising about humans is that we cooperate so readily with non-kin and even, in many contexts, with total strangers. Much of the empirical and theoretical work in cooperation studies has thus focussed on this – relatively surprising – fact about humans, which cries out for an explanation. In itself, this is not problematic, but it does raise for us an empirical question: can one really distinguish so neatly between kin and non-kin cooperation? In fact, when it comes to real-world cultural practices and folk models, the boundary between kin and non-kin others is sometimes very porous (Carsten 2000), and cultural understandings of what it even means to ‘be kin’ (whether conceived biologically in some form or sociologically) vary widely. By extension, the distinction between kin and nonkin cooperation is also very porous – something that has direct consequences for many (and arguably all) forms of supposed ‘non-kin’ cooperation. Perhaps most crucially, children’s early cooperative interactions in the context of family life are certain to have both cognitive and behavioural

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consequences – helping shape the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they bring to subsequent experiences of cooperation in the course of life, such as with strangers. In a recent essay on kin and non-kin cooperation, Stafford illustrates some of these points with material from the Taiwanese community of Angang (Stafford 2018). In brief: this is a kin-saturated fishing community in which a high proportion of residents would claim kin connections to each other through agnatic or affinal connections. As a result, it is a place in which kin and non-kin cooperation overlaps significantly, for example local people will bump into and interact with relatives not only at home and in their (typically kin-defined) neighbourhoods, but also in schools, temples, markets, the local branch of the Fisherman’s Association, and so on. While living in Angang in the late 1980s, Stafford observed a very particular kind of training that could be seen in the flow of everyday life. In brief, infants and very young children were pinched or lightly slapped by their parents – as well as by other adults (who were either close kin, distant kin, or ‘kin-like friends’) – and then praised if they did not react to this with crying or irritation. The children quickly learned not to react. Stafford was told by some people that this was just a game (and it could indeed be quite funny to watch), but by others that it was a way of teaching local children to ‘take punishment’. In other words, it seemed that children were being toughened up – but why? And what consequences does this practice have? These are not simple questions to answer. However, in Angang at that time, and to some extent more broadly in Taiwan, one found both a desire to have good, obedient, even docile children and a desire to have children who were somewhat naughty, rambunctious, noisy, and tough. That is, it was seen as a good thing for children to be filial and ‘cute’ (in looks and behaviour) but there were also contrasting cultural models that, at least in certain contexts, took the ‘bad’ behaviour of children and youth as being admirable. Certainly, parents wanted their children to be resilient and to be able to withstand rough treatment as and when they encountered it in life, for example if they were bullied at school or when (for the boys) they went through mandatory military service. Above all, it was crucial for children to survive and, if possible, thrive so as to be able to contribute to the cooperative family projects such as the provision of elder support and the continuity of the family line (Stafford 1995). It may seem a stretch to say so, but teaching children to ‘take punishment’ might make a small contribution to these grand ends. As for the more immediate consequences of this training, it may have made local children a bit less responsive to being punished, for example by their schoolteachers or by their friends – and even by their own parents. After all, the extent to which punishment actually works to enforce cooperation must surely depend on how people respond to it. Interestingly, by nudging their children towards toughness, an indifference to punishment, parents in this community were perhaps making their children a bit harder to control – one might

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suggest a bit less cooperative, at least in certain contexts (e.g. when being disciplined by schoolteachers). However, by strengthening them against future challenges, they were arguably investing in the parent–child relationship and in the long-term survival of the kin group (in other words: it is costly to have an undisciplined child, but it may turn out to be worth it if the child is also resilient as a consequence). Stepping back for a moment to historicize things: of course, the Confucian ideal would be for Chinese children to be highly loyal/obedient to parents, teachers, and other elders, and to be very much under their strict control. But we should not say that this is unproblematically what ‘Chinese’ or ‘Taiwanese’ parents want – there are a lot of moral codes in play here, just as there are various moral codes at play in the cases from Nanjing described earlier. And there is history too: in Taiwan for some decades, for example, the Japanese-derived idea of ke’ai or cuteness has played a significant role in forming popular ideas about what children should be; while in mainland China, meanwhile, the anti-Confucianism and promotion of class conflict in the Maoist era had a significant impact on the popular morality of cooperation within and outside of families, including in relation to teachers and school-based moralities in particular. None of this is static. So, returning to the practice in Angang, what does it illustrate? First, that early experiences with kin (in this case, being taught to tolerate punishment) may have consequences for non-kin cooperation. Second, that these experiences are shaped not only by culture but also by history (in this case, Taiwanese/Chinese ideas about childhood and child behaviour have changed significantly over time). Third, as with the cases outlined earlier from Nanjing, that punishment-related practices (in the Angang example, over the very long term) may be viewed as an investment in a relationship, a way of helping it survive.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have looked at questions related to human cooperation, focussing in particular on punishment as a means of enforcing cooperation and taking child development processes as a domain in which to investigate this. Now, by way of conclusion, we return very briefly to the example with which we started: Olivia Harris’s account of cooperative agricultural labour among the Laymi. Nothing that we have said in this chapter would oblige us to change fundamentally what Harris and other anthropologists have taught us about human cooperation. It remains the case, as for the Laymi, that cooperation is not only a cultural phenomenon but also a historical and political one (this is true in relation to ideas about punishment and child development in the contexts we have studied); it remains the case that reciprocity is a key feature of human cooperation,

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but that the manifestations of this are highly variable and sometimes surprising (this is true in relation to parent–child reciprocity in China, which at points in history, including quite recently, has deviated sharply from the Confucian script during the Maoist campaigns against familism as the enemy of communism); it remains the case that cooperation in one domain of life spills over into other domains of life (notably often starting with kin-based experiences of cooperation, which are formative for us all). All of these points are important ones that scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of cooperation studies would do well to attend to. What we hope to have added to the standard anthropological accounts, meanwhile, is a set of questions regarding punishment and child development – some possibly unexpected (and thus productive) questions that might, in turn, help bring the anthropological study of cooperation into dialogue with some of the fascinating work being done by other scholars on this important topic. Moreover, as we hope to have shown, this approach helps us develop some important comparative questions: ones anchored in species-level understandings of what it is to be human and to engage in human cooperation.

References Astuti, Rita. 2022. ‘Psychological Essentialism: An Anchoring for Anthropological Comparison’, in David N. Gellner and Dolores P. Martinez (eds.), Re-Creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination. London: Routledge. Bakken, Børge. 2000. The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloch, Maurice and Dan Sperber. 2002. ‘Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions: The Mother’s Brother Controversy Reconsidered’. Current Anthropology, 43(4), 723–48. Boyd, Robert and Peter B. Richerson. 2009. ‘Culture and the Evolution of Human Cooperation’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, 364: 3281–8. Bshary, Redouan and Alexandra S. Grutter. 2005. ‘Punishment and Partner Switching Cause Cooperative Behaviour in a Cleaning Mutualism’. Biology Letters, 1: 396–9. Candea, Matei. 2018. Comparison in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsten, Janet, ed. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fechter, Anne-Meike. 2014. ‘“The Good Child”: Anthropological Perspectives on Morality and Childhood (Introduction to Special Issue)’. Journal of Moral Education, 43(2): 143–55.

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Guala, Francesco. 2012. ‘Reciprocity: Weak or Strong? What Punishment Experiments Do (And Do Not) Demonstrate’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(1): 1–59. Harris, Olivia. 2007. ‘What Makes People Work’, in Rita Astuti, Jonathan Parry, and Charles Stafford (eds.), Questions of Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, volume 76: 137–65. Henrich, Natalie and Joseph Henrich. 2007. Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation. New York: Oxford University Press. Ite´anu, A. and I. Moya. 2015. ‘Special Section: Comparison Made Radical – Dumont’s Anthropology of Value Today’. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(1): 113–250. Jensen, Keith. 2010. ‘Punishment and Spite, the Dark Side of Cooperation’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 365: 2635–50. Jordan, Jillian J., Katherine McAuliffe, and Felix Warneken. 2014. ‘Development of in-Group Favoritism in Children’s Third-Party Punishment of Selfishness’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(35): 12710–15. Kajanus, Anni. 2018. ‘Playing Ball: Cooperation and Competition in Two Chinese Primary Schools’, in Charles Stafford, Ellen R. Judd, and Eona Bell (eds.), Cooperation in Chinese Communities. Morality and Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kajanus, Anni, Katherine McAuliffe, Felix Warneken, and Peter R. Blake. 2019. ‘Children’s Fairness in Two Chinese Schools: A Combined Ethnographic and Experimental Study’. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 177: 282–96. Keane, Webb. 2015. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lu, Hong and Terance D. Miethe. 2003. ‘Confessions and Criminal Case Disposition in China’. Law & Society Review, 37: 549–78. McAuliffe, Katherine, Jillian J. Jordan, and Felix Warneken. 2014. ‘Costly Third-Party Punishment in Young Children’. Cognition, 134: 1–10. Munro, Donald. 1977. The Concept of Man in Contemporary China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies. Raihani, Nichola A., Alex Thornton, and Redouan Bshary. 2012. ‘Punishment and Cooperation in Nature’. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 27(5): 288–95. Richerson, Peter J. and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Richerson, Peter, Ryan Baldini, Adrian V. Bell, Kathryn Demps, Karl Frost, Vicken Hillis, Sarah Mathew, Emily K. Newton, Nicole Naar, Lesley Newson, Cody Ross, Paul E. Smaldino, Timothy M. Waring, and Matthew Zefferman. 2016. ‘Cultural Group Selection Plays an

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Essential Role in Explaining Human Cooperation: A Sketch of the Evidence’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39: e30. Santos, Laurie R., Marc D. Hauser, and Elizabeth S. Spelke. 2002. ‘DomainSpecific Knowledge in Human Children and Nonhuman Primates: Artifacts and Foods’, in Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon Burkhardt (eds.), The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 205–15. Spelke, Elizabeth. 2012. ‘Forum’, in Michael Tomasello (ed.), Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stafford, Charles. 1995. The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification in Angang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. ‘The Punishment of Ethical Behaviour’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 187–206. 2018. ‘Kin and Non-Kin Cooperation’, in Charles Stafford, Ellen Judd, and Eona Bell (eds.), Cooperation in Chinese Communities: Morality and Practice. London: Bloomsbury. Tomasello, Michael. 2009. Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tomasello, Michael, Alicia P. Melis, Claudio Tennie, Emily Wyman, and Esther Herrmann. 2012. ‘Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis’. Current Anthropology, 53(6): 673–92. Regolin, L. and G. Vallortigara. 1995. ‘Perception of Partly Occluded Objects by Young Chicks’. Perception & Psychophysics, 57: 971. van der Veer, Peter. 2016. The Value of Comparison. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Warneken, Felix. 2015. ‘Precocious Prosociality: Why Do Young Children Help?’ Child Development Perspectives, 9(1): 1–6. Warneken, Felix and Michael Tomasello. 2006. ‘Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees’. Nature, 311: 1301–2. 2007. ‘Helping and Cooperation at 14 Months of Age’. Infancy, 11(3): 217–94. Wiessner, Polly. 2005. ‘Norm Enforcement among the Ju’/hoansi Bushmen: A Case for Strong Reciprocity?’. Human Nature, 16: 115–45. Zhao, Weili. 2015. ‘Historicizing Chinese Self-Reflection As a Technology of Confession’, in Andreas Fejes and Katherine Nicoll (eds.), Foucault and a Politics of Confession in Education. London: Routledge: 175–88.

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25 Favours David Henig and Nicolette Makovicky

In his splendid book The Wherewithal of Life, which focusses on the moral experiences of contemporary migration, Michael Jackson tells the story of Deo, a young refugee from Burundi. Deo was fortunate to escape the 1993 genocide carried out by the Hutu militias against Tutsis in the country. While being on the run, and hoping to get over the border into Rwanda, Deo found himself in a banana grove where he was discovered by a group of women and children, totally exhausted and unable to move. Jackson writes: ‘Are you alive?’ one woman asked him. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘But please don’t kill me’. The woman, aged about forty-five or fifty, assured him that she wanted to help. She was a Hutu but declared, ‘But I’m a woman and I’m a mother’. That, she said, was her ubwoko, her ethnicity. The woman led Deo to the nearby Rwanda border. She told him that she knew what he was going through; many of her friends had been murdered, Tutsis for being the enemy within, Hutus – including her own son – for refusing the join the killing or because the militias wanted their land. She had once been married to a Tutsi, who had been accused of being a traitor and killed. As they came close to the militias guarding the border, the woman told Deo to pretend to be her son. She protected him, protesting when the militias suspected him of being a cockroach and threatened to take him away. (Jackson 2013: 97–8) This is a multi-layered and extraordinary story. Yet it is characteristic of countless human situations – extraordinary as well as ordinary – in which sheer serendipity or an act of goodwill can make the difference between life and death (Jackson 2013: 97). It can also make the difference between one’s existential immobility and movement, between action and inaction, or between getting things done and empty-handedness. More importantly, the story shows how not even the most distressing human situations are devoid of ethical sensibility, and allow for exercising freedom to act (Laidlaw 2014). What unfolds in the singularity of human situations, such as Deo’s, is a momentous act of kindness and gratuitousness without

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any expectation of immediate payback. In Jackson’s words, these are instances of ‘an ethics beyond the pale of any specific legal or moral code’ (2013: 98; also Keane 2016: 12–14). Indeed, for the woman, the decision to help Deo was the right thing to do in the given situation, and she might well have responded otherwise in different circumstances. Her decision to help was an act of doing a favour to which exhausted Deo could only reciprocate by saying ‘thank you’. The existing literature on favours has attended to the subject primarily as a matter of corruption, clientelism, and informal economic exchange, rather than as a matter of ethics. In this chapter, we take Deo’s story as a point of departure to consider the role that acts of favours and gratuitousness – as an ethics of the here and now – play in social life. Indeed, the story raises the important question of how to attend anthropologically to manifestations of spontaneity, free will, and sympathy; that is, manifestations of favour. Furthermore, it raises several important questions: what motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? For whom should one do a favour? Who should be excluded from one’s act of gratuity? And finally, how is the interplay between these qualities and the moral frames of conduct mediated? Acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life (Keane 2016; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2015a). Favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, and obligations. As we show in what follows, this argument was put forward by Julian Pitt-Rivers, an intellectual maverick of sociocultural anthropology and a largely forgotten anthropological theorist of favours. Pitt-Rivers offered an important corrective to the social theories of unfreedom on the one hand, and the theories of exchange and reciprocity on the other (see also Laidlaw 2000). One of the central themes of Julian PittRivers’s ground-breaking work relates to the question of how to attend to manifestations of grace in social life, and to the human propensity to gratuity in particular. Pitt-Rivers’s interest lay in examining the workings of mediating ideas, such as grace and favours, exactly because he saw in them the ways in which humans articulate ‘primary social values and deal with the structural contradictions these values resolve, create, and reflect’ (Shryock and Da Col 2017: xviii). Yet only a very little attention has been paid to such ubiquitous acts, and the role they play in establishing what kind of persons we become, and how we act in the flow of social life.

Favours: A Very Anthropological Problem Search for the terms ‘anthropology’ and ‘barter’, ‘exchange’ or ‘gift’ in any major research index, and you will find a rich back-catalogue of disciplinary debate stretching back over a century. Perform the same operation using the words ‘anthropology’ and ‘favour’, however, and you will be

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disappointed. This is not because the ethnographic record and our own everyday experiences are devoid of examples of gratuitous behaviour. Ethnographers interested in religious and ethical life have long documented the social importance of acts of charity and humanitarianism, as well as instances of personal and religious sacrifice (Bornstein 2012; Fassin 2012; Henig 2019; Mittermaier 2019). Few classic studies of rural communities and tribal societies come without an analysis of customary practices of ‘lending a hand’ (Pitt-Rivers 2017b), such as sharing labour, produce, and resources, and a lengthy reflection on the moral economies of mutual help which underpin local livelihoods (Hart 2007; Layton 2000). Indeed, some of the foundational texts of the discipline, most notably Marcel Mauss’s essay The Gift (1954), grappled precisely with the question of how to understand the function and meaning of apparently gratuitous action. Yet, despite this evident disciplinary interest in studying moments of social cooperation and sympathy, favours have until recently remained firmly outside the conceptual purview of anthropology. The single disciplinary figure to buck this trend was the Oxford-trained anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers. In his postscript to his edited volume Honour and Grace in Anthropology (1992), Pitt-Rivers noted that the anthropological canon had established reciprocity as ‘the basis of all sociation, in the form of systems of exchange, of women and of food, of labour and services, of hospitality and of violence’ (2017a: 71). And yet, he argued, social life was full of relations based not on notions of contract or material reciprocation but rather on the expressions of social favour between individuals (on other forms of non-reciprocal relations, see Mattingly and McKearney, Chapter 22 of this volume). From simple gestures of kindness, such as leaving a tip for a waitress, to exceptional acts of goodwill such as the rescue of a stranger in peril, such expressions were driven by the ‘values of the heart’ rather than social laws or the desire for material return (2017a: 76–7). They were best understood not as exchanges but rather as favours – that is, as acts of generosity and benefaction arising from positive sentiments. As such, they operated not according to the parameters of calculative transaction or the moral obligations of social contract, but rather according to the ‘principle of grace’: the irrational, incalculable, and unpredictable impulse to bestow favour ‘over and above what is due, economically, legally, or morally’ while asking nothing but an expression of gratitude in return (2017a: 88).1 Pitt-Rivers’s essay might well have remained a footnote in our disciplinary history were it not for its reissue in the journal Hau in 2011 and again in a collection of his writings – From Hospitality to Grace: The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus – in 1

As Joel Robbins (2013) has pointed out, anthropologists have been preoccupied with recognizing, analysing, and deconstructing negative expressions of gratuitous actions, such as collective violence and the forms of suffering these expressions engender (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997). While these are extremely important issues, Robbins aptly argues, this focus on only one side of gratuitous action has skewed anthropological engagement with its other, more positive forms in social life.

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2017 (Da Col and Shryock 2017). Running counter to the prevailing wisdom that social relations were (ultimately) conditional on material reciprocation, the essay challenged two fundamental axioms of anthropological theorizing: the Maussian notion that the principle of reciprocity is the basis for all sociality and the assumption that economic equivalence is the condition for all exchange, and thus social equity is therefore established through exchange itself (for other complementary critiques of the Maussian tradition, see Strathern 1992; Weiner 1992). In it, Pitt-Rivers shone a light on anthropology’s long-standing discomfort with the very notion of gratuity. Ever since Marcel Mauss’s characterization of the gift as ‘in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous’ but ‘in fact obligatory and interested’ (1954: 1), most anthropologists had considered gratuity as nothing more than a sociological delusion (see Douglas 1990). For those drawing on the Durkheimian tradition, social action was grounded in and regulated by rights, rules, and moral obligations, rending spontaneous and gratuitous action largely illusory. Wedded to an interest-driven model of social action, later proponents of practice theory were equally dismissive. Like Marcel Mauss before him, Pierre Bourdieu (1990) regarded gratuity and disinterested action as a fantasy, preferring to apply the economic logic of competition to human action (Laidlaw 2014: 4–10). In short, Pitt-Rivers found himself addressing an audience not (yet) equipped to deal with or ready to accept the sociological possibility of gratuitous action. Publishing widely on themes of circulation and exchange, gifts and commodities, and money and morality (Carrier 1994; Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992; Miller 1995; Parry and Bloch 1989; Weiner 1992), his contemporaries continued to retreat to the comfort zone of classical exchange theory, re-describing gratuitous behaviour as the fulfilment of social obligations, or as carrying a hidden element of calculated self-interest. Grasping for a satisfactory way to understand and represent human action, they tended to present different forms of economic activity as productive of different genres of sociability. Eager to demonstrate that ‘each form of transfer’ was ‘governed by its own morality and its own set of values’ (Widlok 2013: 13), they resorted to matching ‘types’ of economic activity with categories of relatedness, or ‘degrees’ of reciprocity with different ‘qualities’ of relations (Gregory 1982; Sahlins 1972). Indeed, relying on tropes of marketization and reciprocity, scholars tended to project the rationale of commodity exchange onto other forms of transfer or else to take refuge in notions of reciprocity and gift-giving (Sahlins 1972; Graeber 2011). As a result, they commonly redefined gratuitous acts as a ‘covert form of market behaviour or as ultimately governed by extended forms of reciprocity’ (Widlok 2013: 11). This recourse to tropes of exchange and reciprocity is evident in the single area of academic enquiry where the favour has enjoyed some limited intellectual traction: studies of corruption, clientelism, and informal economic exchange. Most often figuring merely as a euphemistic

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reference to practices of brokerage, nepotism, and patronage (Pardo and Prato 2017), the favour has at times been used to describe practices which appear to mix instrumental and affective relations, goal-orientated and gift exchanges, and ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ institutional ties. Thus, Alena Ledeneva (1998) coined the term ‘economies of favour’ to describe Soviet citizens’ use of personal relations to get hold of scarce goods and services in circumstances of shortage in a socialist economy. And, more recently, Cˇarna Brkovic´ (2017) has documented how favours operate as a modality of political power in Bosnia and Herzegovina, shedding light on the manner in which neoliberal governance may foster clientelism. These scholars employ the term not to describe gratuitous behaviour but rather to describe the manner in which people act in situations when contradictory – and perhaps incompatible – social, moral, and economic demands are made of them. Favours, they argue, flourish in situations where personal and institutional roles and responsibilities are ambiguous (Brkovic´ 2017). Indeed, they are themselves ambiguous or ambivalent by nature, sharing ‘features of free gift and self-serving exchange, of network-driven endowment and self-generated investment’ (Ledeneva 2016: 26).2 These works deliver powerful readings of the configuration of local moral and political economies. They illustrate the fact that while differentiating between informal practices and ‘true’ acts of gratuity may function on a theoretical level, economic and social gestures appear less than unequivocal in everyday life: not only do corruption and goodwill, duty and pleasure often go hand in hand, but the performance of informal (or obligatory) exchange may itself also constitute a show of favour on the part of the donor (Makovicky 2016; Reeves 2016). Yet, their theoretical mobilization of the term also brings about its partial re-definition. While these anthropologists’ interlocutors may present favours as exceptional benefactions freely given, the subsequent analysis of these favours reveals them to be part of routine exchange, governed by notions of reciprocity and driven as much by need and desire as by sentiment. Applied to the world of informal economics and governance, favours are seen as part of a social ‘misrecognition game’ (Ledeneva 1998) designed to make the selfinterested nature of exchange palatable to the participants. Thus, while illustrating how favours implicate both material exchange and social recognition, these scholars ultimately bestow greater explanatory importance on the former. In the following, in contrast, we argue that a more 2

Curiously, scholars of the related Chinese practice of guanxi have not adopted the language of favours (for an exception, see Yang 1994). Like students of post-communist Europe, they have shown the common habit of using social contacts to exchange goods, labour, money, or mutual help involves both affect and instrumentalism, sentiments and material debt (Kipnis 2002; Yan 1996). Guanxi, they note, occupies the same social space as friendship, creating not only tensions between self-interest and other feeling but also a situation where looking out for the welfare of others is a constituent part of the relationship (Smart 1999; Strickland 2010). Focussing on matters of sociality over matters of economy, such readings of guanxi share a certain theoretical kinship to our own understanding of favours. However, in contrast to this scholarship – and that examining European, post-communist ‘economies of favour’ – we do not regard favours as necessarily confined to a particular type or realm of exchange.

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productive way of understanding favours lies in paying more attention to the latter. Drawing on Pitt-Rivers’s extensive writings on the topic, we suggest that favours are better understood as a matter of ethics rather than a question of economics. Our point is not simply to recognize that many activities commonly regarded as ‘economic’ intersect with other fields of social life – such as kinship relations and religious practices. Rather, we seek to show how favours perform a particular kind of ethical labour in everyday life.

Towards an Anthropology of Gratuitous Action In the opening paragraph of his essay ‘The Place of Grace in Anthropology’, Julian Pitt-Rivers puzzled the anthropological uninterest in grace, declaring it his aim to ‘endow it with the recognition it deserves’ (2017a: 69). How was it, he asked, that the discipline had so long sought to explain systems of reciprocity without ever attending to the possibility of non-reciprocity; that is, gratuity (2017a: 71)? Like his disciplinary contemporaries, PittRivers concurred with the idea that exchange and reciprocity made up the essential building blocks of human sociality. And yet, he concluded that existing analytical models often lapsed into functionalist and mechanistic explanations based on the logic of obligation and interest, leaving little room for expressions of individual will and human freedom, including the impulse to gratuitousness (2017b: 78). Exchange and reciprocity were not, Pitt-Rivers argued, performed merely ‘from a sense of obligation’ but also from the will that ‘comes from the heart’ (2017b: 27). Probing the limits of contemporary exchange theory, he asked how anthropologists could attend to those situations and social transactions in which unaccountable and un-exchangeable value was transferred, granted, or given (Shryock and da Col 2017: xxv). Furthermore, Pitt-Rivers observed that any discussion about value must also include the question how values are felt. This analytical move led him to address a second problem, namely how to attend to those forms and moments of reciprocity which were reducible neither to rules, interests, and obligations nor to an exchange of economic equivalence. While exploring the essence of favours – grace and gratuitousness – PittRivers turned to semiotician E´mile Benveniste’s (1969) etymological archaeology of grace. Noting that ‘[e]verything that refers to economic notions is tied to much vaster representations which bring into play the totality of human relations with divinities’, Benveniste suggested that grace operated outside the calculative obligations of interested exchange (1969 in Pitt-Rivers 2017b: 79). He distinguished between two circles or cycles of reciprocity, a ‘normal circuit of exchange’ in which one gave in order to receive and a second circuit of ‘bounty and acknowledgement’ in which one participates ‘without any consideration of a return of that

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which is offered, as act of thanks’ (1969 in Pitt-Rivers 2017b: 79). As ‘service for nothing’, acts of grace and goodwill belong firmly to the latter category. In Benveniste’s ‘second circuit of exchange’, Pitt-Rivers found a space for theorizing grace and favours as a form gratuitous action. Like any other gesture, favours require a ‘return of grace . . . whether in the form of a material manifestation (regardless of the material value of that which is returned) or merely a verbal expression’ (2017a: 72). Yet, when it comes to favours, Pitt-Rivers wrote, ‘there is no need, as in contractual exchange, to determine in advance what the value of the return shall be, nor when it shall be made, since none is envisaged, even though it may be hopefully expected’ (2017a: 79). In other words, while both favours and contracts involved reciprocity, favours do not require contractual reciprocity but rather a ‘reciprocity of the heart’ (2017a: 99). For all its eloquence, Pitt-Rivers’s extensive body of work failed to establish grace as a category of anthropological interest. Rather, it was left to Caroline Humphrey to take the first step towards an anthropology of gratuitous action. In her seminal piece examining the illicit payments in higher education in Mongolia and Russia (2012; see also 2016), Humphrey proposed that favours are not ill-disguised transactions but rather a sui generis way of acting that deserves anthropological theorization on its own terms. Far from simply an exchange of goods and services governed by material needs or social obligation, favours are an ‘independent mode of acting that is initiatory, ‘extra’, ethical, and gratuitous’ (2016: 51). As such, they differ from other actions by their ethics, rather than their morphology: while an action may take the form of barter, a gift, or even a commercial transaction, performing this gesture as a favour ‘adds a “gratuitous” extra to any practical function it may have, and turns the act into something incalculable’ (2016: 51). Favours are therefore not primarily driven by need but arise in situations and moments in social life where individuals elicit the sympathy and lenience of others. Gaining social efficacy and moral value precisely by virtue of not being conceptualized as an exchange, Humphrey argues, favours are grounded in compassionate action and affective sentiment. Indeed, as we saw in Deo’s case, such an act can be motivated by a sentiment of care, of ‘being a woman and a mother’. This makes favours central to the production of social esteem, personal reputations, and ultimately moral personhood. In Humphrey’s words, a favour is a distinct ‘moral aesthetic of action that endows the actors with standing and a sense of self-worth’ (2016: 51). Humphrey’s argument serves to highlight the fact that the giving and receiving of favours is above all an ongoing, reflexive exercise in moral reasoning and action. This was the major insight elaborated in our book Economies of Favour after Socialism (Henig and Makovicky 2016). Seeking critically to re-interrogate the conceptual relations between the categories of ‘favour’ and ‘economics’, we argued that favours constitute neither

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a form of ‘masked’ exchange nor an expression of goodwill, but rather a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without unfolding in a regime of direct equivalence or being fully explicable in terms of transactional cost–benefit analysis (Henig and Makovicky 2016: 4). This makes them ethnographically and theoretically slippery; they resist both fixed interpretation in real life and our theoretical attempts to square them with transactional frameworks of exchange because their meanings and moral import remaining open-ended and ambiguous. With their unapologetic open-endedness, they are not simply altruistic, instrumental, or reciprocal by nature, but rather carry the potential to be one or all of these. Yet, rather than conceiving this ambivalence or ambiguity as a conceptual problem to be resolved through our analytical labour, we suggested that it is a normal, even productive outcome of everyday social interaction (e.g. Berliner et al. 2016). Building on these initial observations, we would like to push the argument further, suggesting that favours do not simply embody a particular moral aesthetic of action (see Humphrey 2016), but perform a particular kind of ethical labour: favours appear ‘ambiguous’ or ‘ambivalent’ not simply because they do not fit neatly into pre-conceived categories of human action and intention but rather because they help mediate between the value, expectations, and moral frames which underpin them. To understand how favours perform this labour, we turn to recent developments in the anthropology of ethics. In tackling the ambivalence of favours, we find Michael Lambek’s work on ethics and value in particular productive to engage with. In developing his argument about the ethical condition of human existence, Lambek (2015a) drew on Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom (phronesis) to distinguish between choice and judgement as two modes of action. Choice, he writes, is ‘a matter of calculation between commensurable goods’ (2015a: 15; see also 2015b [2008]). Judgement, on the other hand, is an act of ‘deliberation in the face of incommensurable values’ (2015a: 15). Of course, we all have to make choices in our lives and these choices might be determined by existing larger structures of power, as the proponents of practice theory would argue (e.g. Ortner 2006, 2016). Yet, social life and human existence cannot be reduced to clear-cut, ‘either/or’ choices only. As Lambek further writes, ‘there are always diverse calls upon our attention, competing criteria, obligations, values, desires, interests, relationships’ (2015a: 15). Similarly, Michael Jackson suggests that ‘all human action is conditioned by a plethora of often competing influences, interests, and persuasions’ (2008: 23). Exercising judgement is thus an act of balancing, mediating, and interweaving ‘both/and’ into one’s life (Jackson 2013: 208). Favours – that is, instances of gratuitous action – are thus deeply ethical, for they are the ways in which humans articulate and mediate between ‘primary social values and deal with the structural contradictions these values resolve, create, and reflect’ (Shryock and da

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Col 2017: xviii). It is to this kind of everyday ethical labour of mediation that we now turn.

Acts of Gratuitousness: Performing Good Deeds In order to understand how favours perform the ethical labour of mediation, we return to Pitt-Rivers’s argument that social life should be seen as grounded not only in enduring relationships of exchange and obligation but also partially in expressions of grace and gratuitousness. Grace, that second circuit of exchange, has had an enormous importance in Christian, Judaic, and Islamic traditions (Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers 1992). And, as Pitt-Rivers’s cross-cultural excursions to the Zande, Nuer, or the Ashanti ethnographies suggest, also beyond (2017a, 2017b). The theological concept of grace in the Abrahamic traditions is connected to the notions of abundance, beneficence, fortune, and a free gift of God that is bestowed on the beneficiary in return for acknowledgement and sentiment (Benveniste 1969). But grace, as Pitt-Rivers observed, can be generated and dispensed by humans as well, through expressions and acts of favour. Grace, in other words, is ‘a product of the arbitrary will, human or divine’ (2017b: 80). In turn, grace can be sought for salvation as much as for material benefits and prosperity. Although it would be easy to attend to such instances of gratuitous acts as completely separate, acts of gratuitousness and their ethics, as Pitt-Rivers observed, often operate simultaneously ‘on the social and theological plane’ (Pitt-Rivers 2017b: 80). This observation brings us to the point we make in this chapter, namely that favours perform the ethical labour of mediation between contradictory values, interests, and ethical sensibilities. Let us therefore first focus on how acts of gratuitousness operate simultaneously on the social and theological plane, and ethnographically elucidate what labour of mediation they perform. In explicating this point, we turn to Henig’s work on Muslim moral cosmologies and ethical sensibilities in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina (2016a, 2019, 2020). Henig carried out extensive fieldwork in impoverished rural areas that have been deeply affected by the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia, ensuing war, and subsequent post-socialist, post-war restructuring of economic opportunities and shrinking social redistribution (2016b). These developments left the great majority of villagers struggling with accessing jobs, education, and social security. The practices of accessing scarce resources have been widely described by scholars working in the region as constituting a grey zone of illicit economic practices and moralities where mediation or leverage of access to resources is negotiated (Brkovic´ 2017; Koutkova 2016). This is recognized by international policymakers operating in the country who designate it as an area of ‘soft corruption’ (UNDP Report 2009). Indeed, villagers, as Henig argued elsewhere (2016a), participate in

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an ambiguous sphere of various forms of informal brokerage, leverage and cultivating connections in accessing jobs, healthcare, permits, or education, as they are often the only ways to get by in the situation of protracted economic precarity. But it would be misleading to reduce villagers’ actions solely to the notions of corruption or illicit economic practices. These discourses lock people’s actions into the cost–benefit or transactional framework as a way of securing advantage and access for oneself or one’s own (Haller and Shore 2005: 2). Villagers’ understanding of the term ‘corruption’ is very much the same as that of policymakers or anthropologists, and villagers regard corruption as legally problematic and morally wrong. Indeed, what became soon apparent during Henig’s fieldwork was that partaking in such activities and exchanges creates for numerous villagers a moral conundrum. It is an ongoing process of walking a moral tightrope, stretched between the pressures to get by and to be a good Muslim. What is right and what is wrong in such situations? This is the moment at which the social and the theological planes intersect, and the acts of ‘ethical reflection, reasoning, dilemma, doubt, conflict, judgement, and decision’ are exercised (Laidlaw 2014: 23). In addressing the moral conundrum of how to get things done, villagers turned to favours, and their actions in the grey zones have become informed by and performed according to the social and Islamic etiquette of good deeds and merits, recognized and articulated as doing sevap. Sevap refers to a good deed performed for others that earns merit for one’s afterlife, but its benefit is realized by the community of fellow villagers here and now (see Henig 2019).3 This is a vernacular idiom of what PittRivers would recognize as grace. In turn, good deeds are the acts of gratuitousness that belong to the second circuit of exchange. Performing good deeds in the villages has thus become a way of addressing the issues of access to scarce material resources while maintaining a sense of moral selfworth as a Muslim. One of the spheres where doing good deeds takes place in situations of moral conundrum is when negotiating access to education. Accessing education in Bosnia and Herzegovina requires a degree of personal connections (veze/sˇtela), and this is vividly discussed and negotiated in rural as well as urban areas across the country. It happens in elementary schools as much as high schools and universities. The latter in particular have attracted attention in a number of local media and international reports. Over the years Henig often heard from numerous university students that to pursue a university degree has been for many students more than just a matter of having good personal connections. It also sometimes requires a considerable amount of money, depending on the subject studied, and 3

Anthropologists have documented how similar models of understanding agency are related to other spheres of life, such as charity, trade, and accountancy (Anderson 2018; Anderson and Marsden, Chapter 30 of this volume; Mittermaier 2019).

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one needs to calculate not only university fees but also additional money for ‘ensuring’ success in exams and the like. Everyone Henig talked to over the years had an experience of needing to mobilize their personal networks to get through the system. The lower stages of education are not an exception. Very often, however, the cases of leverage or providing access were neither classified nor understood as using personal connections but conceptualized and pursued as a good deed (sevap). This is also the case for Mujo who is simultaneously a village imam, a high-school teacher in the municipal town, and a neighbour with extended kinship networks in the village. These three layers of his personhood straddle particular moral registers, duties, and obligations: that of Islamic moral authority, civil servant, and kin, respectively. In day-to-day situations, Mujo has to negotiate often contradictory expectations emerging from these different strands and yet maintain his moral accountability and self-worth in order to be a good Muslim. In his everyday conduct, he puts emphasis on the notion of good deeds as a form of everyday ethics that enable him to balance such diverse and often contradictory expectations and obligations, and yet to strive to be a good Muslim. As a local imam and a high-school teacher, Mujo’s networks of access with regard to influencing things are dense and wide. It is no surprise that he is often approached after prayers in the mosque, as a moral authority, or over coffee, as kin, to ‘fix’ various issues. Mujo and Henig became close friends as they exchanged books and spent long hours discussing them. As he often confessed to Henig, people approach him with unrealistic expectations not only of what he can do but also of what he is willing to do. He makes it very explicit that he does not want to do anything that would be considered as veze/sˇtela as he was fed up with it, and with the fact that nothing seemed to work without it in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But this does not mean that Mujo would refuse to help his fellow villagers whom he meets in the mosque or his village fellows he meets on paths in the village. This was the case on one autumn day, when Mujo was approached by Nurfet, who is his neighbour and a distant relative. In fact, Mujo was walking home through neighbours’ gardens and Nurfet dragged him in for a coffee, as he wanted to ask him for help but not in public. While sitting in Nurfet’s living room, it took some time to get over the obligatory conversational themes. Only then was Mujo asked if he could help Nurfet’s daughter to enrol for the prestigious subject of economic management at the municipal high school where Mujo was a teacher. During this conversation, Nurfet tacitly pointed out to Mujo that the two of them were distant relatives and close neighbours. Moreover, Nurfet also carefully reminded Mujo of his socio-economic situation: that of being the only breadwinner in the house, yet with a small and irregular salary from the village sawmill, four children, and massive debts. There was no way for Nurfet to ensure that his daughter would get enrolled without any veze/sˇtela connections and assistance.

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Mujo was reluctant to help Nurfet as a distant relative, as much as Nurfet was reluctant to ask Mujo. This would imply to him exactly a case of veze/ sˇtela. Participating in veze/sˇtela matters would be for Mujo acting in a wrong and immoral (haram) way. At the same time, he knew about Nurfet’s difficult situation, and was thus concerned about the well-being of his family which was in need. Facing ‘competing criteria, obligations, values, desires, interests, relationships’ (Lambek 2015a: 15), Mujo needed to balance and mediate between them – to exercise a practical judgement – by performing good deeds. Indeed, Mujo eventually decided to intervene in the selection process, and Nurfet’s daughter was enrolled although her grades were slightly below the required average. Mujo later told me that he had to explain to the selection committee that her poor grades were due to her difficult family situation rather than her being just an average student. Nurfet and his relatives reciprocated with sentiment by thanking Mujo on many occasions, saying ‘May God bless you’. Mujo’s response was always, with reference to Islamic ethics and his sense of being a good Muslim, ‘halal to you’ (free of charge), meaning in this context that his help was morally acceptable, and, more importantly, it was a gratuitous act, free from obligation, and that Nurfet’s family did not owe him anything but acknowledgement (see Henig 2019). As Michael Lambek has pointed out, such utterances are performative because they establish the ‘seriousness of the ensuing values and acts that are at stake’ (2015b: 239). By uttering ‘free of charge’, Mujo made clear that his act of favour was performed out of the goodness of his heart, and belonged to the second circuit of exchange, that of ‘bounty and acknowledgement’ (Benveniste 1969). Although other villagers, as well as a number of teachers, knew about the enrolment process, none of them questioned what Mujo did or invoked this case as an instance of using connections for personal gain, as they did in the case of some other students. On the contrary, the overall situation was evaluated and recognized as an act of good deed, whereby the contradictory and competing demands, values, and obligations were brought together and mediated on one moral plane. The example of Mujo’s favour might give the impression that the mediating work of favours is done primarily at the level of performative acts (Lambek 2010), a reference to religious notions of grace transforming a gesture from a morally questionable use of connections to a gesture of goodwill. Yet, favours cannot simply be understood as verbal sleight of hand, but rather as a working out of competing and perhaps even incompatible values, interests, and ethical sensibilities ‘at the level of action’ (Pitt-Rivers 2017b: 72). As has been increasingly recognized by a number of anthropologists of Islam, people’s conceptions of Islam and efforts to live a good life are often contradictory, fragmented, and ambiguous, and entwined with other aspirations and moral values (Marsden and Retsikas 2013; Schielke 2010). Doing a favour, in other words, requires not simply an exercise of judgement about what is deemed correct, appropriate, or

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good at any given moment, but also an action which materially or socially substantiates this judgement. As such, a favour is a gesture which both exposes the individual to the judgement of others and, more importantly, implicates both those who dispense grace and those receiving it in wider relations of economic and political power. As we saw earlier in the case of Mujo, whom he chose to help and the medium of his aid were contingent not only on their relationship but also on his multiple roles as a teacher, a neighbour, and the religious head of the community. Indeed, his gesture had substantive material consequences for Nurfet and his daughter (and any student who would otherwise have been admitted in her place). Thus, because they operate simultaneously ‘on the social and theological plane’ (Pitt-Rivers 2017b: 80), favours rely not only on a verbal recognition of their gratuity but also on a certain play with social form. A good example of this is found in the work of Makovicky, who has conducted fieldwork with Polish artisans and commercial traders in the contemporary cottage industry making ‘folky’ crochet lace. Run predominantly on the unregistered labour of kin and community members, this cottage industry can be described as ‘informal’ in the classic sense – that is, as operating beyond the spaces and rules of the regulated market (Hart 1973). Artisans and traders collude to circumvent the letter of the law in order to earn their share of the small profit margins in the craft industry, often deploying gifts and granting favours in order to direct employment and trade their way. In this way, gratuitous action becomes articulated not only with commercial transactions but also with petty economic crime in the form of tax avoidance and benefit fraud. Such informalization accommodates small-time enterprise by extending market practice into community and kin relations. However, it also creates internal competition for employment, labour, and profit. Retailers and commercial gallery owners must deal with a workforce burdened with expectations of mutual assistance traditionally extended to kin and to neighbours. Lace makers, on the other hand, must show themselves to be reliable but flexible in order to receive work. As artisans and entrepreneurs stake out their positions in the political economy of the industry, in other words, several conflicting registers of contract and affect are set into play and the social meaning of gratuitous gestures becomes a point of contention. However, when favours and favouritism skirt not just the sphere of informality but also the realm of charity, they have the potential to produce humiliation as much as they can act as confirmation of the self-worth of the giver and the receiver. Much depends on exactly how such favours are performed: like acts of hospitality, gratuitous actions involve the construction of social intimacy and performance of social equity where there may not (yet) be any (Candea and da Col, 2012, da Col and Shryock 2017). Such performances are liable to fail (Shryock 2004, 2012). This point

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is nicely illustrated by an episode witnessed by Makovicky when she visited one of the village’s groceries for an afternoon cup of tea and a chat with the owner, Bogusia. Bogusia ran the shop with her husband, travelling to the local wholesale market in Bielsko-Biała five days a week for fresh fruits and vegetables. Despite the long hours and physical demands of running the business, she also did occasional piecework for a local lace trader, supplying him with a steady stream of cream-coloured doilies and colourful crocheted lace lingerie. Before she could expand on her craftwork, however, her conversation with Makovicky was interrupted when a young lady walked into the shop. She walked up to the counter with an uneven gait and laid a soiled doily on the flat surface. She had no money, she explained, would Bogusia be willing to take the doily as a payment? After a moment, Bogusia nodded, named a price, took the doily, and paid out the amount from her till. She then let the young woman fill her shopping bag with produce, and received the same cash back from her as ‘payment’. Bogusia later explained that the young lady had suffered a stroke after the birth of her third child, leaving her unable to work, and she felt it was her duty to help a village family fallen on hard times. Although it took the form of a commercial transaction, it was clear that Bogusia’s gesture was one of benevolence. With the doily largely unsalable, its exchange for a bag of produce remained symbolic, and Bogusia stood to lose out financially. And yet, she waived any debt she could legitimately have claimed. Indeed, Bogusia could have opened a tab in the woman’s name, or simply handed her a box of produce in an overt act of charity. Going through the motions of a commercial transaction, however, worked to mask any social discomfort between Bogusia and the young woman by appearing to put the equitable nature of the exchange beyond question. Thus, while Humphrey determines that ‘favours are a particular type of action that have moral value by virtue of not being conceptualized as exchanges’ (2016: 51), in this case the ‘warm glow’ of good grace was facilitated precisely by maintaining a veneer of correspondence and reciprocity. Here, commercial exchange and gratuitous action remained mutually constitutive in both a conceptual and practical sense; while the open social and commercial equity of the transaction were demonstratively foregrounded through the exchange of cash and produce, the fact that it relied on Bogusia’s goodwill was obscured along with the social implications of this dependency. Not only did her favour get its social efficacy by being mediated through what appeared to be quite another sort of gesture, her very choice to conduct it in the form of a transaction appeared to be directed at avoiding its possible interpretation as a condescending act of charity. Faced with contradictory values and interests, between commercial profit on the one hand, and being a good neighbour while avoiding charitable acts that would have sullied

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such a relationship on the other, Bogusia turned to the ethical labour of favours manifested ‘at the level of action’ (Pitt-Rivers 2017b: 72). What we can thus observe here, to use Benveniste’s and Pitt-Rivers’s conceptual vocabulary of two circuits of exchange, is how the (first) circuit of commercial exchange becomes a medium for delivering grace for a neighbour out of the goodness of her heart.

Conclusion In this chapter we offered a panoramic view on the role that acts of favours and gratuitousness play in social life. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a favour as ‘an act of kindness beyond what is due or usual’. A favour, according to this definition, is an exceptional act of benefaction arising from positive sentiments. It is, to use the words of Alena Ledeneva, an exception which proves the rule: a gesture which deviates from the ‘normal’ rules of obligation and reciprocity, while also sustaining these norms (2016: 25). As such, generations of anthropologists have generally shown little interest in favours, and gratuitous behaviour more generally. Reflecting the long-term dominance of the discipline by Durkheimian ideas of morality, ethnographers have concentrated instead on mapping the repeated, routine moments of cooperation and sympathy which make up communities, livelihoods, and social worlds. Commonly considering morality a matter of collective social and religious imperatives and obligations, and thus of unfreedom (Laidlaw 2014: 1–46), rather than inter-personal and relational action, and exercises of judgement, ethnographers have also given relatively little consideration to the possible ethical import of such gestures. Instead, favours have been largely approached as a problem of economy – or, more precisely, of exchange – and seen as embodying the tensions which characterize social and economic transactions: the push and pull of selfinterest and fellow-feeling, instrumentality and affect, and the weighing up of material needs and moral imperatives. They have been seen as the formally and morally unorthodox acts undertaken by people when contradictory and incompatible social, moral, and economic demands are made of them (Ledeneva 2016; Brkovic´ 2017). Favours, in short, have been considered a matter of ethics only insofar as they are implicated in larger moralities of exchange. Drawing on the work of Julian Pitt-Rivers, we have sought in this chapter to widen this remit. Building on Caroline Humphrey’s definition of the favour as a distinct ‘moral aesthetic of action that endows the actors with standing and a sense of self-worth’ (2016: 52), we have previously argued that favours constitute neither a form of ‘masked’ exchange nor an expression of goodwill, but rather a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without unfolding in a regime of direct equivalence or being fully

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explicable in terms of transactional cost–benefit analysis (2016: 4). Pushing the argument a step further, here we suggest that favours do not simply embody a particular moral aesthetic of action but perform a particular kind of ethical labour: favours help mediate between the often contradictory and incompatible values, expectations, and moral frames which underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake, they allow for exercising freedom to act, as we saw in the story of Deo. What all these instances of doing favours have in common, Pitt-Rivers contended, is that they all articulate ‘the arbitrary will’ to act (Pitt-Rivers 2017a: 80). This brings PittRivers and the concept of favours close to the current anthropological debates on ethics and freedom. If human sociality is grounded in exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to James Laidlaw, Daniel Sosna, and the reviewers for their comments, and to Andrew Shryock for our extended Pitt-Riversian conversations.

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Humphrey, Caroline and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds. 1992. Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Michael. 2008. Excursions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2013. The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Wellbeing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kipnis, Andrew. 2002. ‘Practices of Guanxi Production and Practices of Ganqing Avoidance’, in T. Gold, D. Guthrie, and D. Wank (eds.), Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 21–34. Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock, eds. 1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Koutkova, Karla. 2016. ‘“The King Is Naked”: Internationality, Informality and Ko Fol State-Building’, in S. Jansen, Cˇ. Brkovic´, and V. Cˇelebicˇic´ (eds.), Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements. London: Routledge: 109–21. Laidlaw, James. 2000. ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’. The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4): 617–34. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2): 311–32. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. 2015a. ‘The Ethical Condition’, in M. Lambek, The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press: 1–39. 2015b. ‘Value and Virtue’, in M. Lambek, The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press: 214–41. Layton, Robert. 2000. Anthropology and History in Franche-Comte´: A Critique of Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ledeneva, Alena. 1998. Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. ‘The Ambivalence of Favour: Paradoxes of Russia’s Economy of Favours’, in D. Henig and N. Makovicky (eds.), Economies of Favour after Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 21–49. Makovicky, Nicolette. 2016. ‘The “Shadows” of Informality in Rural Poland’, in D. Henig and N. Makovicky (eds.), Economies of Favour after Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 203–24. Marsden, Magnus 2005. Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Marsden, Magnus and Konstantinos Retsikas, eds. 2013. Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds. Dordrecht: Springer. Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The Gift. London: Cohen & West Ltd. Miller, Daniel, ed. 1995. Acknowledging Consumption. London: Routledge. Mittermaier, Amira. 2019. Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2016. ‘Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory since the Eighties’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1): 47–73. Pardo, Italo and Giuliana B. Prato. 2018. Legitimacy: Ethnographic and Theoretical Insights. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Parry, Jonathan, and Maurice Bloch. 1989. ‘Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange’, in M. Bloch and J. Parry (eds.), Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–32. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 2017a. ‘The Place of Grace in Anthropology’, in G. da Col and A. Shryock (eds.), From Hospitality to Grace: A Julian Pitt-Rivers Omnibus. Chicago, IL: Hau Books: 69–104. 2017b. ‘Lending a Hand: Neighborly Cooperation in Southwestern France’, in G. da Col and A. Shryock (eds.), From Hospitality to Grace: A Julian Pitt-Rivers Omnibus. Chicago, IL: Hau Books: 211–26. Peristiany, J. G. and Julian Pitt-Rivers, eds. 1992. Honor and Grace in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reeves, Madeleine. 2016. ‘Giving, Taking, and Getting By: Help and Indifference in Moscow’s Temporary Housing Market’, in D. Henig and N. Makovicky (eds.), Economies of Favour after Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 73–95. Robbins, Joel. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–62. 2015. ‘Ritual, Value, and Example: On the Perfection of Cultural Representations’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 18–29. Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock Publications. Schielke, Samuli. 2010. Second Thoughts about the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life. Berlin: Zentrum Moderner Orient Working Papers. Shryock, Andrew. 2004. ‘The New Jordanian Hospitality: House, Host, and Guest in the Culture and Public Display’. Comparative Studies in History and Society, 46(1): 35–62. 2012. ‘Breaking Hospitality Apart: Bad Hosts, Bad Guests, and the Problem of Sovereignty’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18 (S1): s20–s33. Shryock, Andrew and Giovanni da Col. 2017. ‘A Perfect Host: Julian PittRivers and the Anthropology of Grace’, in G. da Col and A. Shryock

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(eds.), From Hospitality to Grace: A Julian Pitt-Rivers Omnibus. Chicago, IL: Hau Books: xi–xxxvii. Smart, Andrew. 1999. ‘Expressions of Interest: Friendship and Guanxi in Chinese Societies’, in S. Bell and S. Coleman (eds.), The Anthropology of Friendship. Oxford: Berg: 119–36. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. ‘Qualified Value: The Perspective of Gift Exchange’, in C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones (eds.), Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 169–91. Strickland, Michael. 2010. ‘Aid and Affect in the Friendship of Young Chinese Men’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(1): 102–18. UNDP Report. 2009. The Ties That Bind: Social Capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo: United Nations Development Programme. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-WhileGiving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Widlok, Thomas. 2013. ‘Sharing: Allowing Others to Take What Is Valued’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(2): 11–31. Yan, Yunxiang. 1996. The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yang, Mayfair. 1994. Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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26 The Inimical Gaze Morality and the Reproduction of Sociality in Amazonia Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin

The Hook One day in 1997, while doing fieldwork with People of the Centre in the Medio Caqueta´, Colombian Amazon, a fishhook embedded itself deeply in my middle finger when I carelessly reached for some fishing gear under a beached canoe. A local health aide, my host’s son, had to freeze the tissue and cut the hook out. That night, my host, who was publicly responsible for my well-being, sat in the men’s coca circle in the patrilineage’s ceremonial house, licked tobacco paste in order to be enlightened, and came up with a diagnosis to explain the event. During the previous night’s ritual, in which my host and others had committed to plans for the next day and licked tobacco paste in order to seal them, that fishhook had not being warned appropriately that it, along with the rest of the fishing equipment, would be picked up and used the next day. Incensed, it had attacked me.1 People of the Centre’s semiotic ideology – that is, their assumptions about what things and events in the world could be signs expressive of some being’s intentions, and which may not (Keane 2003: 419) – populated the world richly with subjectivities and intentionalities, such that it was possible to imagine that fishhooks evaluated people’s engagements with them and could act on these evaluations. To frame this with the popcultural metonymy that I will be using here, even fishhooks could subject one to ‘the gaze’; my fishhook’s signifying expression of lacerating my finger conveyed quite painfully its sense that I had been a disrespectful miscreant who had wronged it.

1

‘People of the Centre’ encompasses peoples who speak, or whose ancestors spoke, Uitoto, Muinane, Nonuya, Andoke, Bora, Miraña, or Okaina languages in the region of the Middle Caquetá and Putumayo rivers. They distinguish themselves from neighbouring Tukanoan and Arawakan peoples in that they consume tobacco in paste form. They also build large ceremonial and (ideally) residential houses called malocas (see Hugh-Jones 1985) and ritually consume powdered toasted coca leaves in men-only coca circles.

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My task in this essay is to discuss societies in which relations of otherness (or of alterity) are understood to be definite and distinctive kinds of social relations, with particular ethical significance, and in which enemies are a constitutive feature of the social and moral landscape. My focus will be on Indigenous groups of lowland South America, among whom my own ethnographic experience and that of other ethnographers show relationships of alterity very often to be a matter of fundamental concern. Many of these peoples understand the thinking, feeling self to be relational; that is, rather than being a stand-alone and bounded entity that, as such, relates to other similar and autonomous entities, the self is intrinsically constituted by and in the process of relating to others. The constitutive relations in question often involve a panoply of figures of otherness that include, among many others, enemies. And fishhooks. I make the case that relations of alterity, which encompass but are not exhausted by enmity, are a feature of a widespread and enduring pattern – an ‘Amazonian package’ (see London˜o Sulkin 2017). More ambitiously but cautiously, I also make the case that morality – loosely, the proclivity of human beings to evaluate in terms of socially developed distinctions of worth what goes on in their world – plays a causal role in the package’s reproduction.

Relationality and the Gaze Feminist discussions of film in the mid-1970s, building on an earlier psychoanalytical concept, on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and on Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic, started to popularize the phrase ‘male gaze’ in their evaluations of how women were depicted in pop culture. They accused the male gaze of stripping women not only of clothing but also of their personality and agency. Film editors achieved this through techniques such as the famous ‘shot reverse shot’, in which a man would be shown looking at something, and the following shot would show a woman from the point of view of the previous shot and linger over the curvy bits of her body. By then, film viewers had learned to interpret such shots as straightforward indications that the object of the man’s gaze was the woman. The feminist argument at the time was that most films were made by men, and that their techniques over time taught film viewers to watch from the perspective of the male protagonist – a perspective that was desirous of women but, if not hostile as well, then easily not caring about women’s own best interests. Women were mainly there as part of the male protagonist’s story, serving as ‘the mirror in which the man’s morality, motives and emotions can be easily reflected’ (Bains 2019: 89). Most interesting for my purposes was the idea that cinematic portrayals of gazing men elicited certain attitudes from both men and women and helped reproduce certain constitutive understandings of what men and women were and should be like. Men were invited to be manly by joining

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other men in looking at women in a certain way – where it was also assumed that that way of looking at women was, indeed, an expression of manliness. Women were invited to embody the looks and behaviours that such men looked at, thereby accepting the implication that such features and behaviours defined admirable femininity. On top of that there was a recursivity, a play of gazes, with the gazers’ gaze itself being subjected to a formative gaze. The psychoanalytic idea is that others gaze at and otherwise engage with us – not just visually, but with the senses generally – with certain expectations and evaluative attitudes and standards. Their expressions – linguistic or otherwise – suggest to us how they perceive us and evaluate us. In the process of living our lives surrounded by others, from early childhood onwards, we come to take some of their expressions to be about us, and in so doing develop our sense of what kinds of beings we can be, are, and should be, our understandings of relationships with others, and our sense of what the world we live in is like. Understandings of the self are constitutive; to some extent, they make us who we are. For the gaze to have its effects, however, it must be interpreted. We creatively attribute evaluative attitudes to others on the basis of semiotic forms that they deploy or that we impute to them. By ‘semiotic forms’, I mean material forms that we and our consociates associate with other forms to make meaning. They include the tone of voice of direct verbal interpellations; excited interruptions or silences in responses to utterances; extended middle fingers, kisses, and rolling eyes; the value or price of gifts; burning crosses, facial veils, and happy-face icons; narratives and spoken injunctions, and innumerable other genres and forms. They include as well other sensible phenomena that people associate with other perceptible forms: places, objects, smells, tactile and proprioceptive sensations, and other icons and indexes that feature in our understandings and memories. While much Western scholarly and popular thought on the relations between persons and social groups has elided considerations of this ‘relational’ constitution of the self, much has not: Adam Smith’s account of moral sentiments, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist approaches such as Voloshinov’s (1993) and Althusser’s (1972), powerful ethnographies (Conklin and Morgan 1996; Lienhardt 1985; Overing 1985; Strathern 1988; Stasch 2009; Taylor and Viveiros de Castro 2006, to mention a tiny few), and the philosophies of Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, and George H. Mead have recognized that it is out of the ongoing conversations going on around us that we achieve our own selfhood (see Keane and Lempert, Chapter 9 of this volume). Work on gender in the urban West has provided some of the clearest examples in recent decades, with the suggestion that even before we were born and our biological sex was known or assigned, others most probably had the prior expectation that we would be either a boy or a girl, with no other alternatives being

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possible or likely (Butler 1993); as time went by, those others furthermore evaluated the gender appropriateness of our actions. Developing a sense of what and who we are – a man or a woman, a non-binary person, or an abject monster – is very much dependent on how and the extent to which we catch on to such expectations and evaluations, interpret them, and internalize them and make them our own, a process over which we as selves and as collectives do not have a clairvoyant purview. The same applies to every other aspect of our identity, which may include kinship, caste, class, and race, among myriad other categories. However, this process of internalization is imperfect, often featuring infelicities and the development of contrarian relationships to such expectations and evaluations.

Language and the Attribution of Minds to Others I suggest that the gaze always involves some linguistic articulations regarding its objects, and that language is a necessary, structuring element among the semiotic deployments that constitute us as persons (Taylor 1985: 272). But even if that strong claim does not garner full agreement, it should be clear that one linguistic resource readily available to most of humanity for the attribution of minds to others, and specifically of attitudes towards and evaluations of oneself, is the possibility of quoting (or purporting to quote) others and animating their voices in reconstructed dialogues. In many societies, people deploy such genres to portray the evaluative perceptions that diverse others have of them, where such others can be close consociates or spatially, temporally, or ontologically more distant gods, future descendants, authors or literary circles, pets, or an imagined public audience of like-minded vlog consumers on a media platform. In Amazonia, as I showed earlier, these may well include fishhooks; they are also likely to include an assortment of distant kin, in-laws, enemies, dead ancestors, animals and plants, meteorological phenomena, tools and songs, and a motley crew of spirits and deities. Attributions of states of mind, perceptions, and images of oneself to others are a part of a number of discourse genres in different Indigenous societies of the South American lowlands. Ethnographers have described many such genres as involving songs that express understandings of and relationships with human and non-human others as persons (e.g. Brabec de Mori and Seeger 2013 and Gutierrez Choquevilca 2016). Chernela (2012), for example, describes a poignant ceremonial song that an unhappily celibate woman among the Kotiria of the northwest Amazon sings to her sisters and the male cross-cousins who could have married her, and in which she strategically animates their voices as if they were talking about her. Through those others as mouthpieces, she recounts or alludes to past events and her own and others’ roles in and emotional evaluations of her

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misfortune of not having been chosen as a spouse. The strategy is complex: at times, her song animates another quoting her. Through these means, she comments on herself as an object of reflection. She anticipates others’ judgements and proposes a frame that defends her. The genre of the anent, found among Achuar and other Jivaroan peoples of Ecuador and Peru, similarly concerns the imagined or desired subjectivities and thoughts of others, with a more explicit orientation towards affecting these. Anent are invocations, variously sung out loud, played on a flute, or recited mentally, and addressed as interpellations to an absent addressee. Their purpose is to modulate or inflect the relational dispositions of the addressee towards the singer, without the addressee realizing that they are being subjected to such influence. The repertoire is enormous, and the kinds of addressees numerous: cultigens, game animals during the hunt, pets, certain kinsfolk, partners or lovers, the dead, different categories of spirits, many artefacts, and, interestingly, other anent (to make them remain in the singer’s memory and to be efficacious) (Taylor 2017: 5). Anne-Christine Taylor describes an anent in which an Achuar man addresses a woman whom he wishes to seduce. Through changes in the voice, from falsetto to throaty singing, and switches from first to second and third person, the song achieves a multi-vocal, dialogical form. It identifies the singer in first person as a setting sun, describes in third person the woman standing by the river gazing at the sunset, then animates her voice as she asks herself in the first person what the cause of her own sudden intense longing or desire might be. To this he responds in the first person, addressing her: ‘It is I who, like a setting sun, am causing you to swoon’ (2017: 12; my translation from French). Ideally, the effect of the man quietly singing or thinking his anent would be that the woman be suddenly overcome with love and desire for him, oblivious to the fact that he was acting upon her. Among Kayabi, mourning songs called jawosi animate the voices of the singer’s dead enemies, who speak about their killers (Oakdale 2005: 133). In one that struck me as particularly interesting, a shaman called Leg-Bone sings a song in which he animates the voice of an enemy whom he purportedly killed. The song voices in the first person, and from the perspective of the dead enemy, how he made food to give to Leg-Bone, but Leg-Bone did not partake, and how he tried to make Leg-Bone forget him, to no avail. The singer thereby portrays himself as resistant to the other’s attempts at changing his mind. Attributions to others of perceptions, attitudes, and formulations regarding oneself are couched in reiterated, impactful, culturally specific, and historically related semiotic forms. Conversely, it is necessary for people to have certain narratives or other linguistic resources at hand, for them to be able to be who they and others imagine them to be. Charles

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Taylor, making the case that being a full-fledged person is conditioned on the capacity to make moral evaluations, captures this nicely: If we are partly constituted by our self-understanding, and this in turn can be very different according to the various languages which articulate for us a background of distinctions of worth, then language does not only serve to depict ourselves and the world, it also helps constitute our lives. Certain ways of being, of feeling, of relating to each other are only possible given certain linguistic resources. Without a certain articulation of oneself and of the highest, it is neither possible to be a Christian ascetic, nor to feel that combination of one’s own lack of worth and high calling . . . nor to be part of, say, a monastic order. (1985: 9, 10) Without the vocabulary about enmity and genres such as the jawosi, it would not have been possible to be an admirable killer of the Kayabi kind. Linguistic and other semiotic resources may be used in self-conscious, strategic fashion, as in impression management (Goffman 1959); that is, people may reflexively attempt through their expressions to persuade others that they are a certain kind of person or that they feature certain characteristics. However, these strategies concern more fundamental beliefs about which most people are not strategic. Even if somebody´s efforts are unsuccessful and people question whether that person is indeed of the kind portrayed, they tend not to question that such a kind exists and that it features certain characteristics.

Morality and the Inimical Gaze among People of the Centre People of the Centre very often spoke about how others purportedly thought, felt, and spoke about them. My friends made explicit the love, appreciation, and frank admiration that they purported kin and ritual partners felt for them, and the fear, hate, and grudging admiration that animals and enemies had for them. A striking self-portrayal along these lines was that of Marcos, a Uitoto man. His had an interesting twist, though; the character who portrayed Marcos as knowledgeable, and whose voice he animated, was the spirit of a dead man, with whom Marcos said he had spoken in a yage´ vision. (Yage´, also known as ayahuasca, is a strong hallucinogenic (or entheogenic) substance extracted from the bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine.) When he told the story, Marcos was sitting with his Muinane brothersin-law and me, in the men-only coca circle in the brothers-in-law’s ceremonial house. He spoke of how he had discovered some years prior that it had been his classificatory uncle Octavio – who had actually already died when he was supposedly exposed by Marcos – who had ensorcelled and thereby killed many people in the region in previous years. Marcos

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recounted how at the time there had been many deaths and rampant disease, and Uitoto-speaking elders all over the place had been trying to discover the cause of this. Seeing that their efforts came to naught, Marcos had instructed his mother to prepare yage´ for him. Upon drinking it, he had had ugly, terrifying visions, but then had transcended them – a common requirement in the narrative frame of such experiences, and one that suggested courage and self-control – and had arrived at his uncle’s coca circle to find the old man surrounded by paraphernalia for sorcery. ‘It is you, uncle!’, Marcos reported he had said, a standard greeting that entailed an accusation in the context of walking in on him in a sorcery-revealing trance. He described how his uncle had looked at him and said, ‘I, who remained undiscovered by elders and men of knowledge, am now discovered by a mere orphan!’. Marcos did not directly describe his uncle’s emotions; rather, the way he quoted and animated his uncle’s speech suggested the latter’s frustration and near disbelief at having been discovered, and grudging acknowledgement of Marcos’s capabilities. The emotional qualities that Marcos expressed underscored for others a certain moral import of the circumstances: that Marcos was, despite appearances, admirably knowledgeable.2 People have some freedom to play with cultural resources to frame themselves and their situations as may suit their interest, or, in other words, to engage in impression management. I am persuaded that Marcos was doing just that, making a claim to esoteric perspicacity and superior knowledge. Marcos set up a scenario in which it was not himself but rather another – a very knowledgeable if evil old man – who suggested that Marcos was a daunting man of knowledge. Aristotle claimed that we believe good men more fully and readily, but Aronson showed that we (or at least his urban North American research subjects) can well believe known miscreants too, as long as it is clear that they have nothing to gain from persuading us (1972: 58–62), and when they are not trying to influence us (1972: 63). If there is some universality to this, then Marcos may have been tapping into that, having another – albeit another whose voice was being animated by Marcos himself – sing his praises. Other aspects of the story may also be read as suggestive of the strategic intent of Marcos’s story-telling. Two elements of background knowledge widely shared by those involved help make this point. One was that yage´ had the capability of revealing all hidden truths – especially the identity of sorcerers – to its drinkers; a second, in tension with the first, was that great sorcerers could escape the yage´-bestowed sight of those not endowed with great shamanic abilities. Only somebody well versed in the esoteric and with great knowledge – usually an old man – could ‘catch’ a reportedly able sorcerer like Octavio. However, Marcos recurred to a fairly commonly used 2

See Taylor (1985: 49–62) on import-attributing emotions; for partly convergent arguments on emotions as involving judgements on the quality of social acts or relations, see also Luhrmann (2006: 353) and Basso (1995: 295).

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image that subverted the emphasis on wisdom as linked to age: the orphan. Orphans, bereft of kin and unprotected, nonetheless appeared in myths and counsels as uniquely capable sages who became knowledgeable and competent while listening to others’ stories and doing their menial jobs, and surged from anonymity and low status by achieving great things. Marcos was not literally an orphan, since he had had a father who raised him. However, his father’s patriline’s elders had been murdered during the early twentieth-century rubber holocaust before he could learn from them, and so in that sense he had been orphaned of his patriline’s knowledge. By claiming to be an orphan, Marcos was modelling himself as somebody who would surprise others by acquiring skills and agency beyond what would be expected of him. I have made the case in the past (2005, 2010, 2012) that, like most people, individuals among People of the Centre were strategic in their self-presentations. Stasch’s description of the Korowai, who are ‘wary in advance [of] what others will infer or speculate about their own intentions, [and] take great pains to report their intentions aloud and head off particular inferences about their thoughts that others might form’ (2008: 451), could have been written about my own friends. So, Marcos was likely being strategic and attempting to convey the sense that Octavio had acknowledged his esoteric knowledge and perspicacity. But his narrative cannot be reduced to interest, competition, or game-playing. His story depended on certain metaphysical and moral premises that he and his listeners all more or less accepted: that theirs was a transformative universe, populated by spirits and sorcerers and other subjects endowed with intentions, that in that universe certain esoteric capacities were necessary and admirable, and that those capacities were not often things of youth. My sense is that he and other men among People of the Centre deeply and unquestioningly desired to be men of esoteric knowledge, or at least saw that that way of being was unquestionably admirable. They would have acquired and developed that desire or admiration over their lifetimes, through their participation in social interactions in which People of the Centre evaluated themselves and each other in this regard. But they did not, could not, radically choose their sense of the kind of beings they could be.

Relationality and the Amazonian Package One potential limitation of the kind of relational understanding of personhood and sociality I have been rehearsing here is that the concept of the gaze can still reproduce a problematic duality between the body and the mind. The gaze is taken to shape mental states, but not bodies themselves, which in much Western discourse appear to be the product of biological processes independent of social relations. Conklin and Morgan (1996) claim that in North America in particular people learn to see the body as

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biological raw material on which culture operates. They ‘recognize the social on the body (through ornamentation, for example, or the discipline of exercise), but they find it hard to see the social in the body, in the construction of the material, corporeal thing itself’ (Conklin and Morgan 1996: 659; see also Jones McVey, Chapter 27 of this volume). This contrasts with widespread, convergent understandings among Indigenous Amazonians to the effect that what and who a person is is very much a question of the body. It is not minds that are stingy, generous, stupid, wise, quick to anger, and so forth: it is bodies. And bodies are, in their very physicality, the mutable, processual product of ongoing social relations between persons – a claim most helpfully elaborated on by Conklin and Morgan (1996). The genesis, fabrication, transformation, beautification, and destruction of bodies feature centrally in many different Amazonian people’s myths, rituals, and practices of social organization. Eating, drinking, body painting, dressing, otherwise consuming substances that are extensions or analogues of the body, or talking about these matters are typically among the semiotic deployments through which individuals create, maintain, transform, manipulate, and end relationships with each other; in other words, through which they produce and reproduce a social life (London˜o Sulkin 2012 and 2017: 477). Ethnographies of Arawete´, Wari’, and other peoples refer to how babies are understood to be made not on the basis of a single moment of biological conception, but in incremental baby-forming insemination over the months of pregnancy, of nurturing relationships among kin with the child’s mother, and of a number of postpartum interactions between all involved. Idioms of shared bodily substances feature widely in these and other Amazonian people’s relational accounts of persons and sociality. Among Wari’, blood seems to be the key substance defining the ties between kin, spouses, and social groups; it is also a key idiom in their talk about growth, transitions from puberty to adulthood, and the development of physical and spiritual powers. Bodies are created, maintained, and transformed through interpersonal exchanges of blood and analogous fluids like semen and breastmilk (Conklin and Morgan 1996). Belaunde (1992) describes how Airo Pai women from the Ecuadorian Amazon would go around the village each night exchanging loaves of manioc bread with each other, and people pointed to this practice in their claims that all in the village were kin because their bodies were made up of the same manioc bread. Along similar lines, People of the Centre consistently claimed that the tobacco paste extracted from the plants of a particular lineage made up the very flesh of lineage members, and ‘spoke’ through that flesh, creating each person’s thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and penchants for action. They explicitly expected consubstantiality among kin and co-residents to ensure some similarity of thoughts/emotions. I witnessed people claim,

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in situations in which they disagreed with somebody else, that they were supposed to be ‘made out of the same tobacco’, and that therefore it was bizarre and suspicious that they were ‘speaking differently’ – that is, manifesting different moral outlooks on some matter. They also expressed concern that others were observing them and evaluating them in such terms. The same substantial constitution of persons, however, could also account for individual uniqueness and autonomy; my interlocutors protested at times that each person’s tobacco spoke to or through him or her in its own way, and that people should not take the injunctions that close kin received from their tobacco as addressing them too. Els Lagrou describes how among Cashinahua of Brazil, the state of people’s bodies, which includes their affects, is a manifestation of the kinds of relations they have. A healthy, full body that is generous and capable of hard work is taken to manifest the good relations of mutual care among competent, productive persons (2001). Her Cashinahua hosts were very concerned that she might become thin while living among them because the emaciation of a thin person was to some extent a consequence and reflection of failures in interpersonal relations. My own hosts among People of the Centre often demanded that I not let my consumption of hunger-dampening coca powder keep me from having full meals, for what would people from communities up or downriver say about them were I to appear haggard or unkempt? There, we were all very much the object of mutual gazes that evaluated our relationships, as indexed by our bodies. The complex causal relations between the states of minds, bodies, and relationships extended to people’s gardens, a fact similarly reflected in People of the Centre’s moral evaluations. Walking through a garden covered in weeds, a man told me to make note of it, and stated that this showed that the owner’s thoughts were similarly unkempt and confused, and that this was furthermore manifest in the disorderly state of his family. Without positing a universally shared, internally homogenous system of beliefs about personhood and sociality structuring social life in the Amazon, I do claim that many South American Indigenous peoples have reproduced an ‘Amazonian package’ (London˜o Sulkin 2009, 2010, 2012, 2017). The term ‘package’ here is meant to encapsulate a pattern of semiotic articulations widespread in the region and comprising three sets of claims and other formulations, to the effect, respectively, that: (1) Persons – and, most importantly, persons’ bodies – are fabricated in and through social relations, as described earlier and in other ways. In many Amazonian accounts, social groups are created by fashioning likebodied persons who are competently sociable, and by the same token social life largely concerns the creation of such like-bodied persons. (2) The process of making persons takes place in a cosmos in which each sentient being – which besides members of the human species may

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also include animals, plants, meteorological phenomena, tools, and other entities – perceives itself and others with bodies like its own as human, and bodies different from its own as animals or other nonhuman beings. (3) Persons need, in order to produce and reproduce their bodies and those of kin, relations with a panoply of others who differ from them in bodily constitution and operations. I will return to the latter two elements later. In Amazonian perspectival cosmologies, beings are easily subject to witting or unwitting bodily transformations. In some societies, this gives a certain existential urgency to the first element of the package, for it is bodies that determine who or what it is that one perceives as human, and who or what perceives one as human. The collective work of fabricating the bodies of kin and one’s own is thus also about ensuring a common perspective – often the most fundamental of moral tasks. Shamanism and sorcery often depend on the same principle that bodies are or determine perspectives; though the details differ, in many societies people claim that shamans can take on the bodies of other species, and in that guise see members of that species as they see themselves – that is, as humans. In that form they can be conversed with for the purposes of healing. A feature of native accounts of perspectivism is partly analogous to the formative capacity of the gaze as we theorize it, in that perspectives differ and sometimes clash, and a powerful being’s point of view, to the effect that it and not another is the human, can impose itself upon that other, causing the latter’s very nature to change. People of the Centre in particular evaluated their own and others’ capacity, or lack thereof, to overcome the transformative capacity of other beings’ perceptions – a case of gaze upon gaze! I use the controversial term ‘package’ because my claim is that it is likely that there are causal, historical connections among the understandings of Indigenous Amazonian and indeed American peoples. I suspect the case is made, pace Ramos’s (2012) concerns about politically problematic, homogenizing pictures of Indigenous peoples, that there are patterned resemblances and differences among the cosmologies, mythologies, and other sociological features of many Amerindian peoples. In this sense, the concept of the package is not particularly original. However, its spread and duration beg for causal explanations, and my own is novel for the region; I claim that many Indigenous American peoples have constructed over time motivating pictures of admirable personhood and of the good life scaffolded by accounts and understandings of relational and embodied personhood in perspectival cosmos suffused with alterity. Motivated by these pictures, people have gone about their lives behaving as humans do, evaluatively, and their evaluative deployments have more or less conservatively reproduced the elements of the package by more or less

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felicitously interpellating members of new generations (London˜o Sulkin 2012, 2017) in processes that are not, however, teleological. This package should not be thought of as an immutable, irresistible straitjacket determining Amazonians’ very thoughts and social lives, as a monolith present in the lives of Amazonians over the generations, or, worse still, as a homogenized moral system. It is widespread, but not found everywhere among Amerindians or even in lowland South America, and where it is to be found the elements differ somewhat from how they appear elsewhere. This is what is to be expected, if we accept the idea that consociates co-construct their social lives and the imaginative cosmos within which such lives occur, on the basis of patterned deployments of semiotic forms, and if we take such forms necessarily to be material, and thus subject to the vicissitudes of local histories and personal biographies.

On Necessary Alterity My proposed third element of the Amazonian package encapsulates the fact that people in many Amazonian societies maintain in some way or another that relations with beings that differ from them are necessary for their own personal and collective survival, well-being, and reproduction. These others lie along a continuum of alterity, from those whose bodies differ only slightly from one’s own, and thus perceive one as a human being, to those who belong to different cosmological realms and perhaps cannot see one as human. Among the key Others that Indigenous Amazonian individuals variously bring into their accounts are members of the opposite sex, affines (‘in-laws’), ritual and trade partners, enemy warriors, and white people, and in other cosmological realms, masters or spirit owners of animals, game animals themselves, plants, the dead, gods, and forest and river spirits, to list just a few. Relationships with these others are often conceptualized as predatory and involving esoterically or physically violent transformations. There was a vigorous academic debate in the late 1990s among Amazonianist scholars about the precise articulation of alterity, enmity, and difference in relation to the Amazonian social, and one that itself can profitably be portrayed in terms of evaluative gazes and their effects. On one side were scholars from mostly French and Brazilian institutions, and on the other scholars in the UK associated with Joanna Overing. AnneChristine Taylor, a Parisian Americanist, wrote admiringly about the great finesse and insight with which the ‘English school of Americanism’ described sociality in Amazonia as inherently affective memory, but went on to describe their accounts as ‘angelic’ and prone to underestimate hostility and vindictiveness as vital components of social relations (1996: 214n10). Tongue in cheek, she said the English were good at love, but the French were better at hate.

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Viveiros de Castro was trained in France, and his beautiful theory of perspectivism indeed gave pride of place to hate. He argued that in Amerindian ontologies, what is given and fundamental in the cosmos are the differences between beings situated in a cosmic food chain that perceive each other as either predators or game, eaters or eaten. These differences are the necessary basis and context for relations. In such a cosmos, the formation of any collective of any kind of beings – including the human species – depends on members of the kind relating to each other in ways that suspend the more fundamental relations of predation. Love and care are defined, in good structuralist fashion, as the active suspension of aggressive consumption, or enmity, or hate (Taylor and Viveiros de Castro 2006). Viveiros de Castro proposed a tripartite typology for social anthropological approaches to Amazonia, and classified Overing and her students as exponents of what he termed the ‘analytical approach [of] the moral economy of intimacy’ (1996: 189). He acknowledged that this approach produced stimulating work on social philosophy and practices of everyday sociability in Amazonia, emphasizing throughout the egalitarian complementarity between genders and the intimate character of native economies. However, he also criticized the approach for tending to privilege local groups’ internal relationships, defined for the most part by relationships of care, at the expense of analytical attention to inter-local relations characterized by a potential for reciprocal, predatory violence.3 The claim was that it equated the social to the domestic, ignoring the wider, often violent social relations that supposedly hold sway across kinship, spatial, and ontological boundaries (Viveiros de Castro 1996; Vilac¸a 2002: 349). This vexed members of the ‘British school’ profitably, leading them to push their own ethnographies and formulate their claims with greater detail. Overing and Passes’ synthetic riposte was that those relationships were not deemed to be properly ‘social’ in native accounts, but rather needed to be transformed into the social (2000: 5, 6). Part of their claim was that they were attempting to translate native conceptions rather than privilege Western analytical ones of structuralist and Durkheimian bent. Nevertheless, Overing and Passes went on to claim that, indeed, Amazonian sociality cannot be understood without the backdrop of the wider cosmic and intercommunity and intertribal relationships. The forces for conflict, violence, danger, cannibalism, warfare and predation do penetrate to the heart of the Amazonian social . . .. This in fact is the paradox facing many Amazonian people in their daily construction of the sociable, fertile conditions for sociality: it is not an unusual cosmogonic vision that all forces for life, fertility, creativity 3

For a convergent take on relations of otherness in West Papua, see Stasch’s (2009) rejection of the Gemeinschaft tradition in anthropology that portrays relations in tribal and small-scale societies as matters of unmediated unity of consciousness or shared experience. Otherness is constitutive of relations, their condition.

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within this world of the social have their origin in the dangerous, violent, potentially cannibalistic, exterior domains beyond the social. (2000: 6) Like most people elsewhere, Amazonians tend to consider that they need mates from groups other than their own, whether these be families, clans, villages, or language groups, because bearing children with their own close kin (however such closeness is defined) is unacceptable.4 People need affines who are sufficiently like themselves to be considered human, but sufficiently different for the relationship not to be incestuous. Since affines are different and thus potentially dangerous, they need to be transformed, made safely similar to the families into which they marry. Often this is done through peaceful processes of consubstantialization of bodies; in time, practices such as sharing food, exchanging bodily fluids during sex, and participating in rituals slowly turn affines into kin, or almost kin. But it is also common in Amazonia to frame those changes as predatory transformations, at an esoteric if not ordinarily manifest level (Overing 1993: 202). Further along Amazonian’s continua of alterity are game animals, who are vital in many of these hunting societies, not least as a necessary source of nourishing meat. Hunter–game relationships are often portrayed as relationships with in-laws, with whom there must variously be negotiation and seduction and expressions of respect. Such is the case among Desana people (Arhem 1996: 193–7). The relationship between whitelipped peccaries and the Wari’ is conceptualized in even more tender terms. Conklin (2001) explains that upon death, Wari’ spirits go to an underwater world of the dead where they are eaten by spirits and then revived down there as beautified, perfected versions of who they were in life. They retain a love for their living kin, however, and act on this love by taking on white-lipped peccary bodies. Thus re-embodied, they visit their kin above ground and proffer themselves to be killed by hunters and eaten, re-enacting the relations of nurturance that they had with kin while they lived. Each time, their spirits return to the underworld. The positive emotions associated with the providentialism of the animals and the dead contrast starkly with what People of the Centre experience. For them, killing animals is usually justified as either righteous revenge for or pre-emption against animals’ inimical impingements on human beings; there are occasional gestures of reciprocity on the part of people, but these are understood by People of the Centre to be a tricky fac¸ade to ambush game or pre-empt their retaliation (London˜o Sulkin 2004: 168).5 The Wari’ also provide other clear examples of native Amazonian understandings that situate alterity at the core of personhood and as sources 4

See Storrie (2006) for an exception.

5

Yukaghir hunters in Siberia (Willerslev 2007: 100–4) and the Ecuadorian Runa (Gutiérrez Choquevilca 2016: 24) converge with People of the Centre in understanding hunting to depend on tricky mimicry that seduces prey into giving itself up, against its own best interest.

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necessary for achieving good community life. Prior to the 1960s, for instance, killing an enemy and domesticating his spirit constituted a necessary injection of life into the community (Conklin 2001: 121). Wari’ men who had killed an enemy were understood to have absorbed the ‘blood-spirit’ of the dead enemy, and to be in grave danger from this inimical substance inside their bodies. Through a process of ritual seclusion in which they would consume massive amounts of a corn-based drink produced by the women, killer and blood-spirit would become consubstantial, and this new bodily similarity would cause the blood-spirit’s perspective and affects towards the killer to change. This would potentiate the killer, making him vigorous and fertile, capable of producing much food and thus of engaging generously with others in the give-and-take of nurturance that was an ideal of Wari’ social life. Most importantly, the killer’s newfound vigour and fertility would spread to others around him as he exchanged bodily fluids with them through work, sexual intercourse, and co-sleeping, among other activities. The Ecuadorian Shuar’s form of tapping into inimical sources involved, as late as a century ago, shrinking the heads of slain enemies to harness the power of their ‘avenging soul’; as with slain enemies’ blood-spirit among Wari’, this would increase the productivity of the head-taker and, through him, of his female relatives (Harner 1984: 147). Among Piaroa, the need for alterity and its dangerous character were different but particularly clear. In Overing’s acount, Piaroa understood shamans to take beautiful, powerful ‘forces of fertility’ from the crystal boxes of distant gods – a mad, cannibalistic, oversexed bunch – and carefully place them within youths’ bodies to endow them with competences for hunting, fishing, cooking, and having children that were necessary to live well and to reproduce (1993: 198–9). But this had to be done with great care, for those beautiful forces were endowed with predatory intentions and capabilities and could turn against the youths, the shaman, or the community, maddening them as they had maddened the gods and causing havoc and death. Pre-empting this danger depended on yet another kind of soul that Piaroa persons featured, which, when clothed in a human body, could judiciously keep those dangerous forces of fertility in line, channelling their capabilities towards the achievement of a peaceful, desirable social life. Once the person died, however, that soul no longer had a human body and it travelled to a clan home of the dead, where there was no alterity but also no fertility or proper sociality; the soul there was a beautiful, youthful version of the person, but it was stupid, unintelligible, envious, and unproductive. Meanwhile, the forces of fertility, freed from the ensouled body’s judicious control, threatened to remain around the community preying violently upon it. It was a key responsibility of the shaman to consign them once again in the crystal boxes of the gods.6 6

Again, versions of the package differ, and understandings of things such as souls as esoteric alters vary greatly in Amazonia: the concept of an animating soul is not shared universally, nor are its singularity and potential to become any kind of being (Oakdale 2005: 136).

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Morality and the Amazonian Package among People of the Centre Among People of the Centre, the elements of the Amazonian package provided motivating ideals of how people ought to live and be, and constituted the background against which such admirable ways of life made sense. Furthermore, as we shall see, analytical focus on this moral dimension of their social life suggests a causal explanation for the reproduction of the Amazonian package. The very possibility of being a thinking, feeling self among People of the Centre depended on the incarnation or embodiment of some form or another of tobacco paste – a substance that was simultaneously the creator deity’s sweat and semen, the fundamental and patrilineage-specific element of human bodies, and, when properly consigned in bodies and made part of their flesh through multiple practices and rituals, the main source of moral attitudes, thoughts/emotions, speech, and other behaviours. Many substances, but most especially tobacco, sounded or spoke in and through bodies, generating sensations, thoughts/emotions, attitudes, habits, and behaviours. As with Wari’ and Piaroa souls, the tobacco that animated persons was initially an outside Other – thus, a necessary figure of alterity – and it was furthermore a powerful predator. A remarkable exhortation to reflexivity in the Muinane language was ‘Difı´´ıko meekı-!’: ‘Look at your own body!’, used with intent comparable to Anglophones’ ‘Know thyself!’ but in situations of heightened ambivalence or anguish. The reflexive, critical gaze that was called for was itself supposed to be that of the tobacco out of which the person’s body was fashioned – a tobacco that was morally discerning and calm yet predatory, capable of identifying spurious foreign substances and thoughts/emotions within the self and expelling them with esoteric violence. The need for this ferocious inward gaze lay in what people took as given: that the participation of non-human beings in human (embodied) subjectivity was not only possible but indeed a condition of subjectivity. People explicitly evaluated thoughts/emotions as being either truly a person’s own and admirable because they stemmed from their embodied, lineage-specific tobacco, or else as spurious because they were generated by nasty false tobaccos and other substances that animals or sorcerers caused to speak through person’s bodies. They also made strong claims to having well-made, stable bodies unlikely to be transformed by foreign interferences, and questioned others’ stability in that regard – where such claims clearly made manifest, and could generate in listeners, important emotional responses. That animalistic tobaccos expressed themselves in people’s actions was a common theme in arguments, critical songs, counsels, gossip, and other genres, serving as causal explanations in framing actions as instances of miscreancy. The contrast was with claims that this or that person’s

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thoughts/emotions expressed their proper tobacco, which entailed that they were axiomatically morally good. These arguments posited an opacity doctrine of sorts, akin to those ethnographers have described for a number of Melanesian and other Pacific peoples (see Rumsey and Robbins 2008), where people make a variety of stronger or weaker claims to the difficulty or impossibility of knowing others’ thoughts or minds or intentions, and even one’s own. Much like the Papua New Guinean Korowai’s concern with the possibility of radical alienation from their own thoughts (Stasch 2009: 450, 451), People of the Centre were concerned about the likelihood of not being fully aware of the sources and nature of their own thoughts, let alone those of others.7 People of the Centre’s narratives about personal and social tribulations – including diseases but also emotional strife – involved a sense of an inseparably moral and ontological struggle between formative, indeed determining, gazes (or perspectives). One I heard about gut parasites was that these had been lied to by sorcerers and other animal spirits, who took the parasites towards people’s innards and told them that this was their food. In good perspectival fashion, whatever beings ate, they perceived as the food that humans ate, and, indeed, to intestinal worms human innards had the appearance and taste of manioc bread. Without a proper healing ritual – which involved informing those parasites in no uncertain terms that they had been lied to, and shaming them with rhetorical questions about how such filthy beings dared touch real people – human bodies effectively remained animals’ food, and they could die as a result. The ritual, in a sense, was a battle of the gazes; from the worm’s perspective, it was really human and human guts were really manioc bread, and it took tobacco paste to shame or kill that worm and impose the human person’s perspective. The tobacco-empowered speech (and condemning gaze) of the human being elicited the shame and self-recognition of a worm’s own tobacco as precisely that, an inhuman substance; it then backed down in shame and left or was killed. It was a question of which perspective would prove to be the true one, and ipso facto impose itself, ensuring the survival and continued humanity of its subject. As a whole, this story was one of the many discursive and nondiscursive semiotic deployments that together contributed to shaping people’s sense of what was human and inhuman, morally good and morally despicable – a sense and a sensitivity that was a part of their own evaluative gaze. People of the Centre’s versions of perspectivism were strong in the sense that they were intimately felt, but they were not radically perspectival: rather than a pronominal category of humanity, theirs was substantive and defined by its moral acumen (London˜o Sulkin 2017: 477, 498). Another illuminating narrative was a Speech of Apprising (a myth) that I have come to see as particularly rich in its articulation of People of the 7

On other non-Western understandings of the opacity of minds, see also Astuti (2012), Duranti (2014), and Luhrmann (2011).

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Centre’s understandings of moral personhood, and as an iteration of the elements of the Amazonian package. It narrated a cosmogonic episode about the ga´a´ka´ba, a garden herb that reportedly watched over the manioc in the garden, making stamping sounds that frightened passers-by and scared off the agoutis that would otherwise eat the manioc.8 The ga´a´ka´ba was often referred to in Speeches of Apprising and healing invocations as a grandmother who repaired evil, corrected mistakes, and cooled things down, healing people from ‘hot’ diseases, which included disruptive emotions that generated strife. In the Muinane elder Manuel’s version, there was once a small child whose mother would unwisely leave him at home on his own when she went to work in the garden. Animals of different kinds, seeing that he was alone and unwatched, would promptly come by. Some would give him sticks and instruct him to hit them with them; others would urge him to bite them and pinch them. They also wrapped him in their own itchy carrier cloths. His mother would come home to find him itchy, angry, and troublesome. She would try to lull him to sleep, to no avail. He cried all the time, hit others with his stick, and tried to bite. After some time, one of the grandmothers who were personifications of healing herbs, the Ga´a´ka´ba Woman, came to help. She told the child’s mother, ‘Your whole body is like thorns and itchy fuzz to him . . . I will paint you.’ She made an invocation upon some ka´tı-ho – body paint extracted from a plant of the Rubiaceae family – and painted the child’s mother with it, healing her and cooling her body down so that her contact with the child would bring him solace rather than irritation. When the child wanted to play with his stick, the grandmother took it from him and placed it in the rafters of the house, above the door. She told him, ‘I will take care of it for you till you are a grown man.’ (At this point in the narration, Manuel emphasized that one should never give children sticks to play with, because they then learn to hit and spear people with them.) The Ga´a´ka´ba Woman then cooled the child down and sweetened his heart by giving him a gourd of sweet manioc drink. She also covered him with ka´tı-ho and anthill cotton, thereby ridding him of the itchy carrier cloth in which the animals had wrapped him. The child and the mother then truly rested. As they do in the myths of many Indigenous American peoples, in this story animals and plants had a human appearance – a typical plot element in perspectival cosmogonies. In People of the Centre’s narratives in particular, animals tended to be characterized by immoral thoughts/emotions and behaviours; in fact, it was these that eventually lost them their original human appearance. Animals looked upon true human beings with envy and ill will, and attempted to sabotage human lives by generating animalistic, antisocial, morally reprehensible thoughts/emotions and behaviours in 8

People of the Centre, like many other Amazonian peoples, make their livelihoods through hunting, fishing, gathering, and slash-and-burn horticulture. Manioc (Manihot esculenta) is the main carbohydrate staple of their diet, and it is grown in gardens alongside tobacco, coca, chilies, herbs, and other cultigens.

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them. Proper upbringing was about making bodies that in their very constitution incarnated proper attitudes, thoughts/emotions, and behaviours. In this story, animals worked to transform the child in several ways. One was through their carrier cloths; these were totemic elements associated to the origins of particular lineages, and were understood to influence personal features and vulnerabilities of people; animals’ attempts were to subvert the shaping and identity-establishing effect of the true carrier cloth and to cause the child to become an ‘itchy’ person, where itchiness was metonymical shorthand for what we would consider an out-of-control obsession. They also tried to elicit violent antisocial behaviours from the child; if successful, this would shape the person that he would be, for, in their accounts, behaviours became ‘set’ in bodies, much as a clay pot’s features become set when it hardens. Other elements mentioned in this Speech of Apprising – the herbs, body paint, body paint, sticks, gourds, and sweet manioc juice – were all semiotic resources that people associated with myriad other stories and practices rich in qualitative distinctions of worth. The image in this story of how personalities were formed resonated with Althusser’s thesis that people first behave in certain fashions and only then develop the beliefs that go with them. In his reformulation of Blaise Pascal, Althusser (1972: 170) aphorizes the determinacy of material practices with the claim, ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ In People of the Centre’s version of materialism, attitudes and beliefs became part of the body itself. The body was, in Foucauldian terms, the ‘ethical substance’ par excellence: the part of the self that was the object of thought and work, in people’s efforts at fashioning themselves and others (Foucault 1990: 26). The same relational account, however, made persons vulnerable to the risk of inimical beings causing changes to their bodies and in consequence to their attitudes and behaviours. To reformulate the matter in terms of gazes: animals looked upon the child with malevolence and hate, and carried out with him a caricature of the acts of care that shape children. They did so in a way that elicited from the child a gaze, and attitudes and behaviours, like their own. In their accounts, they reproduced lineages and clans by forging bodies with the right constitution and affects. From my own analytical perspective, there was also the fact that children and adolescents witnessed and came to participate in situations in which people fretted over the constitution of kinspeople’s bodies, bragged about their own bodily and affective consistency, and condemned the poor make-up and flittingness of others.

Reproducing Bodies, Cosmologies, and Relations In Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s dense symbolic analysis of the sixteenthcentury Brazilian Tupinamba´’s relations with their enemies, Tupinamba´ society appears to have been strikingly amorphous, its global social

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structure lacking a subject or a centre; rather, it was constituted as an ongoing relationship to the enemy, a relationship that was anterior and superior to society’s relationship to itself. It situated the enemy at the centre of Tupinamba´ society (1992: 285, 301) and of personhood; ‘[o]ne is always, and before all else, the enemy of someone, and this is what defines the self’ (1992: 284). The intergenerational transmission of the Tupinamba´’s structuring dynamic hinged on enmity. Enemy captures and cannibalistic rituals were structured by understandings of kinship, marriage, and residence, and fed into their social organizational practices; captured enemies were in fact honoured and sometimes given women, and thereby transformed into affines, before being killed and cannibalized. In turn, killers hoped to die in just that fashion. An existential need for revenge preceded and motivated particular attacks. Each instance of predation upon an enemy, and each instance of an enemy’s attack, was but a step in a cycle of vengeance. Vengeance was so central to their existence that their society institutionalized homicide as a vital condition for a man to achieve full-fledged adulthood and status. Viveiros de Castro’s hypothesis is that what cannibals consumed and absorbed when they ate an enemy was first and foremost enmity itself – the perspective of an enemy. In other words, some people had to come to see as an Other in order to keep society going. Their history was one of predation among mutually constitutive, ever mutable, inimical counterparts, driven by the necessity of vengeance. This account of Tupinamba´ persuades me in part, but seems also to beg for one more step: as an account of vengefulness as an emotional motivation that played a causal role in historical processes, it calls for attention to the reproduction, in time, of the semiotic conditions of that motivation. There is profit in a brief examination of Tupinamba´ vengeance through the lens of Charles Taylor’s account of human beings as self-interpreting, evaluative animals, and his claim that emotions are ‘import-attributing’ (1985: 49–62; see Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). Rather than being purely gut reactions separate from cognition, emotions attribute to the situations that elicit them certain characteristics that pertain to the desires or purposes or aspirations of the self. For instance, feelings of indignation attribute to the situation in which they are experienced the quality of involving an iniquity or an affront. The deep embarrassment that one might feel about farting in public is likely tied to the sense that the situation suggests to others around one that one lacks bodily control or a firm grasp of etiquette. But to be embarrassed in this fashion depends on one aspiring to be a more or less dignified presence among others, where dignity includes a certain control over one’s body, and where one attributes to others sensitivity to dignity and to manifestations of lack of control. So a condition of such emotions is that one already have in place certain desires, purposes, or aspirations – all part of a certain sense

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of what it is to be a good or admirable person, and a rich set of qualitative distinctions of worth regarding the kinds of being one might be. I imagine that a young Tupinamba´ man whose kinsman had been captured in a retaliatory raid and eaten would likely have felt some combination of grief, anger, anxiety, and excitement. I hazard, on the basis of Viveiros de Castro’s citations of multiple studies, that these emotions would have attributed certain imports to the situation; namely, that it placed him in the position of losing honour (1992: 273) or substance (1992: 277) if he did not respond as he should, and also in the position to become a successful slayer and a full-fledged adult of proven courage if he did respond appropriately.9 The anger itself would have been inflected by that anguish and excitement, and likely by something like a sense of duty or of expectation. Such emotions would have been conditional on participants understanding the situation in terms of semiotic webs that articulated (and gave evaluative accents to) the nature and virtues of persons and the nature of death, kinship, relations with others, and much else. And it is the conservative reproduction of these semiotic webs that needs to be explained if we are to give credence to the claim that vengeance was an intergeneration driver of Tupinamba´ sociality. I would treat Tupinamba´ dealings with their enemies as versions of the third element of the Amazonian package, and therefore the same question regarding the conservative reproduction of semiotic webs applies generally to it. How to account for that conservatism (by which I mean something like Saussure’s (2000: 28) ‘immutability of signs’)? While living with People of the Centre, I often witnessed them citing the elements of the package in their moral self-portrayals, their critical gossip about each other, their myths and dance rituals, a genre of counsels for children, and their emotional outbursts. My interpretation was that such semiotic deployments interpellated persons, telling them what kinds of beings they were or could or should be, and motivating them to act in ways that reproduced these elements. I made note of numerous convergences with other Amazonian peoples, and hazarded the thesis that the package was widespread, that it was and is durable, and that its spread and durability were tied to its historically contingent but nonetheless constitutive role in shaping morally evaluative, motivating pictures of what it is to be a human being, and a good and admirable one at that. It seems likely to me that people have used its elements to articulate their visions of the good and the commitments and identification that have provided them with the frames with which to determine, as events have swum into view in their lives, what was good, valuable, ought to be done, or ought to be endorsed or opposed (London˜o Sulkin 2017: 484; Taylor 1989: 27). Amazonian people’s understandings of bodies, cosmological perspectives, and alterity feature in the qualitative distinctions of worth that 9

See Lear’s (2008) compelling reconstruction of a similar hunting/warrior ethic among the North American Crow.

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stand out in their horizons of concern, and that they deploy when they portray themselves, criticize others, argue, and so on in everyday life. For instance, the whole rigmarole of fabricating bodies is in many cases about making and having good bodies: bodies whose virtues are variously being strong, competent, healthy, cool, bitter, sweet, spicy, fertile, beautiful, dangerous, safe, controlled, and consistent, among others; the details differ between groups. In a perspectival cosmos, good bodies are also consubstantial with those that fabricate them through caring relations, where this consubstantiality entails similarity in perspectives. Sociality among Amazonians who imagine themselves to inhabit a perspectival cosmos often features an existential and moral preoccupation with things not being what they appear to be, including people, spaces, social situations, speeches, and even thoughts and emotions. For it is the kind and the quality of body that an individual has that determines whom and what it perceives as human beings, human spaces, and human food. Such a body is a relational product, created in an ongoing fashion variously through the sharing of food and drink, ritual substances, and bodily effluvia of different kinds, though with diversity among different Amazonian peoples regarding the physiology of these processes. When babies are fed, their bodies become consubstantial with those who eat the same kinds of foods. Bodily consubstantiality entails bodily similarity, and thus similarity of perspective; to raise a baby properly is to elicit in it a human perspective like one’s own. But different kinds of narrative among Amazonians often express the conviction that bodies are subject to transformations that are not always conspicuous – for example, through the absorption of bodily elements of other kinds of beings: enemy blood-spirit, jungle spirits’ tobaccos, or animals’ paint or weapons, to name but a few possibilities available in the ethnographic record. Consequently, perspectives may transform or be usurped, and what appears to be a good person, or a properly human course of action, or nourishing food for a human being, may actually be something else altogether, destructive of persons and of social life. People can question intimately whether their own or others’ thoughts and emotions are really human, or have been distorted or transformed by an inconspicuous bodily and perspectival transformation The flipside of the anguish regarding appearances and bodily transformations is a deep interest in processes that ‘fix’ subjects’ nature, and generate some security that one truly is who one appears to be to one’s fellows and to oneself. Practices that fix, harden, set, and otherwise perfect children’s bodies are very much a part of that, and are often charged emotionally and morally. In a number of societies, fixing identity is achieved through a process of becoming an invulnerable, competent predator (see Faubion, Chapter 21 of this volume, on ethical pedagogies). For example, in order to deal with the fragility or mutability of the self, Jivaroan peoples have institutionalized the painful search for extreme visions of ancestral

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spirits called arutam. The terrifying hallucinatory experience is understood to cause an arutam soul to become a part of the man who sees the arutam. This interiorized other shares with the man the certain knowledge of a future event in which the man will kill an enemy. Or to couch this in terms of the evaluative gaze: the man attributes to an interiorized, terrifying other an image of his future self as an effective killer – an image so definite that it obviates fragility (Taylor 1996: 208). People of the Centre claimed in multiple ways that their bodies were made out of tobacco, the very substance of the divinity and an infallible, invulnerable predator, but also the source of moral thoughts/emotions; these were claims to being consistently human in one’s constitution, fixed and with moral acumen. I witnessed a moment that seems to me a likely example of the kinds of events that, reiterated, reproduce the elements of the package. A Uitoto woman screamed at two little girls to stay away from their grandfather, who had hit her in a fit of anger. She loudly informed all of us that his grandfather’s tobacco had never spoken thus, and accused him of having a ‘bigtoothed one’, a jaguar, inside his body. She then tearfully informed the children that he had a jaguar inside him and could make them sick. They were very attached to their grandparents, and the situation confused and scared them. Hanging on to their grandmother with fear and concern manifest on their faces, they clearly felt that they were involved and in some danger. I can imagine that over time, these and similar events would lead them to see that, indeed, their own and their fellows’ thoughts and emotions could well not be their own but an animal’s subjectivity, that such an eventuality would be dangerous and despicable, and that it behoved them to work on the bodies involved in order to pre-empt such a possibility. By this account, discursive and non-discursive practices regarding the fabrication of bodies, the diversity of perspectives, and the need for others have arguably often been part of the scaffolding of many Amazonians’ aspirations and desires, and thus a causal force in their actions. At this point, it is important to pre-empt a reading of my account that imagines the process to be somehow driven by a purpose or a future state, and thus to be teleological. An Amazonian woman’s desire to work on her children’s bodies to make them good and beautiful, or a shaman’s to don the enemy’s clothing or body and thereby become like the enemy, does not directly lead to anybody else experiencing the same motivation in later years. The same is true of the motivation to reproduce one’s values and desires by teaching them to younger folks. The feeling of mattering itself, the phenomenology of it, is not what is ostensibly manifested – leave that in hearts or (opaque) minds. What is made ostensibly manifest, picked up by others, and reproduced is semiotic forms. These are often put out there in close association with others, and are often picked up as such – this patterning is what gives us cultural commonality. However, such forms are acquired by persons in the unique historical processes of their own lives, and this individual uniqueness leads to there being some slippages and differences, some Derridean

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diffe´rance, between the associations that people make between semiotic forms and which shape their meaning. Even the desire to have one’s children or other consociates experience the same desires as oneself is subject to symbolic mediation and diffe´rance, and is under nobody’s clairvoyant control. The process of reproduction of motivating pictures of selfhood is not teleological; human intentions and meaningful actions have historical effects, but in the long term these effects do not necessarily align with the logic of persons’ intentions. In other words, if we accept that the human will is itself in part semiotically constituted, then the reproduction over time in semiotic forms is what is in question, and it cannot be assumed that certain forms are reproduced in the long term because individuals will it so. So I am still vexed by the question of what else might have made certain semiotic forms and their associations less mutable than others in the long term. One answer, involving a pragmatic assumption related to one I have already made to the effect that people everywhere feature mental processes, thoughts, emotions, and sensations, is that bodies are, to an important extent, objects with certain characteristics and temporal patterns likely to be salient to people everywhere, given as well the similarities between people. Bodies have a certain number of appendages, organs, and layout, are born small and then grow, require care from others, are vulnerable to injury and disease but also capable of healing, can become fat or thin, and at some point cease to move and breathe, at which point they are prone to rotting. Each of these material features of bodies is available for further associations of its own. Some associations are historically unstable: take, for example, the great aesthetic appeal of fat bodies in some societies and periods, and its foreclosure in others. But certain complex material patterns of bodies that are arguably independent of particular human states of mind – such as babies’ bodies requiring the care and attention of others to survive – may more consistently impose themselves on human perception and cause the symbolism of bodies to be slower to shed associations than, say, a particular word or gesture. I find that some Saussurean insights into the immutability of signs apply here. In the case of the Amazonian package, perhaps its very over-complexity plays a role. Versions of it feature mutually imbricated discourses regarding interpersonal and inter-village relations, rituals, livelihood practices, food consumption, child-raising practices; these buttress each other, imperfectly deterring change. Furthermore, the elements of the package, like language as described by Saussure (2000 [1916]: 28–30), are continuously being used by people as they go about making sense of events in their lives, and any historical process that would inject wholesale changes would have to be traumatic indeed. Keane, indulging in a more natural scientific account of universality and citing research in psychology, claims that engaging in intention-seeking or mind-reading behaviour is an innate feature of children, and thus a human universal (2008: 474, 2016: 27–32). His work, an anthropological elucidation of the claim that humans are inevitably evaluative creatures, suggests

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that intention-seeking and other such features may be treated as affordances; that is, aspects of people’s experiences and perceptions that are universally available for them to pay great evaluative attention to and develop complex narratives about, but that do not determine that people do so. So-called opacity doctrines of mind of Melanesian, African, Nepalese, and Greek societies, to the effect that others’ thoughts and minds are unknowable, may not so much deny the possibility of fathoming others’ intentions as develop evaluative practices centred on the affordance of intention-seeking. Their tendency is to treat claims to knowing what others’ thoughts are as invasive and insulting (2016: 125, 126). Amazonian perspectival cosmologies and the existential doubts that they shape regarding the perspectives of self and of others, as morally charged in Amazonia as opacity doctrines are elsewhere, can profitably be thought of as historical semiotic developments of possibilities afforded by the tendency of human beings to attribute intentions to others. That innate tendency may constitute yet another causal influence on the relative consistency and conservatism of the Amazonian package.

Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Grant and by a University of Regina Dean of Arts Research Award. My gratitude to James Laidlaw, Philip Charrier, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments, and to the People of the Centre for their hospitality.

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27 Animals and More-ThanRepresentational Ethics Rosie Jones McVey

Non-human animals cannot talk. Or, at least, they cannot talk in the normally audible ways that most adult conspecifics can. Some individuals or groups converse with animals through specific technologies or procedures, for example through telepathy, in dreams, or in rituals. Yet, even in these instances, there is still something otherworldly, obscure, powerful, wonderful, or risky about speaking with animals. Animals certainly do not speak with words that everybody present can hear, at least not all the time. And so they cannot be reliably asked to give an account of their behaviour. In this essay, I will argue that human/animal studies can contribute to the anthropology of ethics through prompting a reconsideration of the role of representation within ethical life. This comes about because of the non-verbal nature of animals, coupled with their capacity for active, individually varied, and responsive behaviour. The responsiveness of animals means that people can make predictions about their likely behaviour, and estimations about their intentionality, such as to succeed in hunting, corralling, or training endeavours – but only ever with so much success. The non-verbal-ness of animals contributes to the sense in which relationships with animals can be surprising, confusing, and elusive – making animals worthy as adversaries, enigmatic as subjects of myth, and challenging but often rewarding as companions to live or work alongside. Animals can heighten our awareness of the non-speaking aspects of human lives, drawing our attention to the ethical importance of sensitive encounters that can occur without words. Yet, in this essay, I will show that attending to these embodied multispecies relationships is useful for focussing our attention on – rather than away from – human representational practices when studying ethics. This is because animals are spoken for and accounted for by humans as part of the latter’s ethical lives. Specific sorts of encounters with animals are advocated, excused, explained, taught, justified, and qualified, since human–animal relationships are always also human–human–animal relationships. What is more, we can

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learn about varied ethical evaluations of human representational capacities through observing human–animal interaction. Because animals lack normal speech, when people speak for or about animals, we can find that they are often also speaking about speaking (or not-speaking, or the difficulty in distinguishing between the two). The argument I will advance in this essay is that animals can prompt productive questions about how we ought to think about representation within studies of ethical life. Such inquiries can contribute insights relevant beyond the animal case, to aid understandings of human moral life more generally. In the first part of the essay I will ask why there has not been more dialogue between the ‘animal turn’ and the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology. Neither ‘turn’ is organized around investigating human representational practices per se. The animal turn is more interested in human relationships with animals than representations of them. And the ethical turn takes reflection/reflexivity and evaluation as central concepts, with representation taking something of a back seat. However, in the second section of the chapter, I will show how interesting questions about representation can arise when these two orientations are brought into dialogue with one another. I will suggest that more-than-representational aspects of ethical life can be studied through three lines of questioning (1) What are the material forms of human ethical representations? (2) What sorts of ‘non-representational’ behavioural responses or embodied experiences ought to be included within the category of ethics? (3) What sorts of value, or risk, do different groups ascribe specifically to the non-verbal character of relationships with animals? Ultimately, I will try to raise the question, ‘How does it matter to different people that humans can speak in ways that animals cannot?’ And, at the close of this chapter, I will try to answer the question, ‘Why should it matter to the anthropology of ethics that humans can speak in ways that animals cannot?’

Bringing the Animal In, Leaving the Ethical Out? The anthropological study of morality and anthropological interest in animals were once harmonious endeavours. Anthropologists throughout the twentieth century were influenced by the sorts of questions E´mile Durkheim posed about morality: how do people work together to make up cohesive societies that endure? What makes individuals behave in line with a moral order? Durkheim went about answering these questions by investigating the varied shared systems of meanings that compel people towards moral action. We can utilize Edmund Leach’s work on animal taboos (1964) as an exemplar of the way animals could feature within this

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sort of symbolic-moral analysis. Ultimately, animals worked as examples of the sorts of things that humans share symbolic thoughts about, and so symbolic thoughts about animals could help to organize social cohesion. For example, Leach shows that the English categorize animals into those that are pets, livestock, game, and wildlife. For Leach, such classifications are important because they metaphorically map onto other categorical systems, such as the way people might be categorized as siblings, cousins, friends, and strangers. These correlating categorical systems support and reinforce one another. Both sets of systems are morally important: they denote who may be a potential sexual partner, and which sorts of animals may be eaten, and how. Yet, Leach explains, the world is not easily split into such categories, and maintaining their apparent separateness requires special treatment of the overlaps. Animals that will not easily fit into one or another category risk unsettling or transgressing the shared systems of meanings that support moral behaviour. Leach argues that these are the animals who are considered especially powerful, sacred, disgusting, or dangerous. While this gives only the briefest glimpse of the myriad ways in which anthropologists have thought about animals as symbols, Leach provides a starting point from which to describe the divergence of contemporary interest in animals and in ethics. The animal and ethical turns have moved from this sort of model of symbolic moral order in different directions. While the contemporary ‘animal turn’ and ‘ethical turn’ ostensibly share an interest in questions of subjectivity and personhood, the sorts of questions they pose are radically different. I will suggest that a central difference in the orientation of these approaches is their relationship to the idea of representation. We will begin with the animal turn. Throughout the 1990s, anthropologists interested in animals provoked critical reflection on the epistemological presumptions that undergird accounts of animals-as-symbols. Barbara Noske is an early proponent for ‘bringing animals into’ anthropology (1989, 1997). She argues against the disciplinary distinctions that reinforce a dualistic model of understanding nature as separate from culture. Within that dualism, animals, thought of as part of the natural world, are considered the proper fodder for the natural sciences, while human culture, understood as the world of meanings, is bounded off for anthropological study. Therefore, she argues, animals had only been of interest to preceding anthropologists inasmuch as they were symbolically represented by the proper anthropological subject matter: different cultures. While it would be unfair to suggest that previous anthropologists took no interest in the embodied and practical elements of human/animal relatedness (e.g. see Tambiah 1969), it is fair to say the ‘animal turn’ is characterized by an explicit move towards deliberately attending to animals as they are lived with, rather than only thought about symbolically (Hurn 2012: 70–83; Knight 2005; Mullin 1999). Anthropologists contributing to the animal turn are more likely to include

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descriptions of animals themselves – such work has earned the label ‘multispecies ethnography’. These authors are also less likely to treat their human subjects’ understandings of animals as symbolic phenomena which require further interpretation or deduction in order to get at the real business of the societal-moral role those symbols fulfil (for two very different examples, see Milton 2005; Nadasdy 2007). This shift away from symbolism is commonly explicitly phrased as a rejection of what are described as modern, Cartesian, dualistic distinctions between humans and animals, mind and body, self and other (Hurn 2012: 30–1, 41–5; Hornborg 2006; Palsson and Descola 1996: 65–6, 76; Willerslev 2007: 13– 19). An explicit rejection of this ‘Cartesian Legacy’ (Willerslev 2007: 13) is emblematic (if not tropic) within the ‘animal turn’. Tim Ingold (2000: 90–8, 2006), for example, has been particularly emphatic in arguing that such dualistic distinctions are not only irrelevant to many of the non-Western peoples we study but also hamper a practical understanding of human relationships with animals in the West. Meanwhile, in the emerging field of the anthropology of ethics, anthropologists have no longer been satisfied by the Durkheimian model in which morality is located within systems of meaning, followed by unreflexive actors who constitute the system. Such scholars have been interested in re-awakening questions about intentionality, reflexivity, and subjectivity in their examination of ethics (Faubion 2001; Laidlaw 2002). The crises of representation no doubt played a role in drawing anthropologists’ attention towards heterogeneity within groups in terms of engagements with supposedly shared moral codes (Mattingly 2012: 165). Personal agency, creativity, and felt experience have all come to the fore, and ethnographies of ethics/morality are now much more likely to contain life stories that constitute ‘histories with a little h’, as Cheryl Mattingly (2016: 440) puts it (e.g. Faubion 2011). The contemporary anthropology of ethics has formed its own deployment of that ever-reimagined anthropological prerogative, to consider people on their own terms. The ethical version of that stalwart involves asking what matters to people. Anthropologists ask, ‘Upon which measures, and through which processes, do people evaluate their own lives, and those of others?’; ‘Do people consider themselves to be trying to be good?’; ‘If so, how do they go about this?’; ‘What variants of the “good” are there, and what obstacles to its attainment are grappled with?’ (Robbins 2013). In this line of inquiry, morality could no longer be considered as simply that which keeps society functioning, since the apparent ‘fact’ of societal functioning becomes yet another possible ‘good’ that may be variably understood, or not important at all, within different ethical engagements with the world. We have seen that the animal turn has moved explicitly away from a focus on representation. What, then, of representation in this new interest in ethics? It is interesting that the terms ‘reflection’ and ‘reflexivity’ seem to have garnered more direct attention than ‘representation’ in

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new ways of thinking about ethics. Yet these two idioms are closely related. When anthropologists have been interested in the way actors reflect on themselves and their worlds, they inherently take an interest in the way people represent their aims and predicaments. Michael Lambek (2010) provides the clearest example of this since he describes speech as the emblematic ethical act. This is because speech has the dual capacity for referring to the world and acting within the world: think of a promise, or a legal defence made from the dock (Butler 2005; Taylor 1985). To study speech as ethics means attending to the creative, idiosyncratic ways a speaker can present a personal and rhetorical account of themselves as ethical agents, through a shared vocabulary of meanings, values, and norms (Carrithers 2005). This is not about the capacity of language to instil moral order through shared representations of the world (as in Leach); this is about how individuals can articulate themselves in relation to the world. Speech events have often provided the ethnographic focus of the ethical turn: Joel Robbins examines confession (2008), Webb Keane attends to prayer (1997), Cheryl Mattingly investigates narratives (2008). However, even when representational practices are not the explicit focus of theory or ethnography, they are methodologically important. Contemporary ethnographers interested in ethics attend to speech but also other representational forms, such as scriptures, pedagogical methods, and so on, in order to ascertain how people think about their actions, or, better still, how they think they ought to think about whatever it is that they are doing or not doing. The importance of representational form for ethical pedagogy can be seen, for example, in James Faubion’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 21) – particularly in his discussion of exemplars, ‘objectification’, and play.

Conflicting, or Conflicted, Sorts of Persons? Just as the ethical turn has good reason to investigate the ways in which people represent themselves, and their world, as part of evaluative encounters with one another, the animal turn has moved away from the idea that human-held representations ought to be central within any account of the more-than-human world. This leaves the animal turn and the ethical turn at cross-purposes with one another. This can be seen particularly clearly if we consider conversations about animal personhood as indicative of the different orientations of these two fields of study. Some multispecies authors have sought to bring animals into social scientific study by describing animals as beings who have complex social subjectivities, agencies, or personhoods. This involves finding a method, and a language, for describing animal personhood anew – not only as it might be imagined by different groups of humans. In an early example of this sort of work, Janet and Stephen Alger describe the multispecies

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culture of a cat rescue centre in North America (1999). They include ethnographic observations of the cats themselves, as they engage with one another, and as they engage with human staff and volunteers. Cats acquire personhood in this study by dint of their individual natures (as seen through their differing choices in terms of what to eat, or whom to sleep near) but also because they actively contribute to the social, cultural, and moral life of the sanctuary. This is seen through their capacity to communicate with one another and with staff (in making the above individual tastes clear), as well as through their general preference towards the maintenance of shared codes of peacefulness and harmony. This treatment of more-than-human personhood is radical as a move beyond the study of animals as human-held symbols. Yet, from the perspective of the anthropology of ethics – which works to grasp the richness of notions of human personhood – this account of animal personhood can appear unexciting. This is because multispecies accounts of animal personhood often use descriptions of an animal’s behaviour as evidence of that animal’s intentions and attitudes. In the case just described, we can tell that cats want different things because they do different things. In another example, Piers Locke (2017) describes the elephant he rides during ethnographic research in Nepal as an intentional being, demonstrated by the way she cooperates in the riding process. The point is reinforced by assertions of her latent capacity to resist. Since elephants are big and strong enough to be able to resist human control, compliance is seen as evidence of wilful choice (2017: 363). Anthropologists would tend to be much more careful about inferring cooperation from compliance when observing human agents, on ethical grounds. Yet the presumption that animal agency is observable in animal behaviour is also a limiting notion of agency for the ethical turn on theoretical grounds. In designating lack of resistance as cooperation, behaviour is reduced to intention in relation to the human, as though intentionality can be counted in binary fashion, for or against. This harkens back to a Kantian ideal that contemporary anthropologists of ethics avoid, wherein agency is equated with autonomous intention. Since animals cannot talk, it is understandable that intentionality is observed in their responsive behaviour. In fact, this approach can be seen as methodologically progressive compared to the naturalistic idea that animal behaviour only demonstrates the evolved instincts of mechanistic beings. Yet, when behaviour is equated with intention, there is no consideration of the sorts of sticky questions that have occupied anthropologists in thinking about humans’ agency – is deliberately manipulated choice still intentional agency? What sort of co-dependent activities between partners ought to count as cooperative? What are the possible relationships and disjunctures between choice and action? And the potential ethical question is not addressed: (how) do the elephants (or cats, or others) evaluate their own actions, options, and relationships?

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But this is not the only way in which the concept of personhood is thinner in animal accounts than in ethical ones. Multispecies accounts also evidence personhood through describing the way the animal contributes to the harmony of the larger social system. A Durkheimian functionalist version of personhood looms. This is the case earlier in this chapter, where cats are persons inasmuch as they are part of the moral, cultural, and social system of the sanctuary. This is also the case when animals are seen as being persons insofar as they take part in reciprocal relationships with people, for example through hunting (Ingold 2002; Nadasdy 2007; Willerslev 2007; see Knight 2005) or cooperative labour (as in Locke 2017, earlier, or Brandt 2004). The thrust of these writers’ arguments is to emphasize that animals are active participants here, not passive objects of human thought as Descartes (and Leach) might have had it. Yet, the danger is that animal personhood becomes defined by the active role it plays in multispecies community life. In these cases, the account is, at best, an impoverished version of the ethical personhood that anthropologists of ethics look for in humans. When personhood is to be found in a creature’s contribution to a systematic order, we get little sense of animals grappling with difficult decisions, or moral tragedies, caught between opposing incommensurable values, reconsidering ‘best good’, or legitimizing or excusing their own actions in hindsight. I am not making a case that these phenomena are all within animals’ capabilities, and have been missed. Nor necessarily am I suggesting that these phenomena are the only possible constitution of whatever we might call ethics. Rather, I aim to highlight that these evaluative disjunctures between selves and systems are the forms of personhood of most interest to the contemporary anthropology of ethics. To summarize: the animal turn utilizes an ethically simplistic version of personhood in order to consolidate the assertion that animals are persons, with authors providing what they believe to be an account of personhood that conflicts with the Western norm. The ethical turn, on the contrary, asks, ‘How are human persons often conflicted about what a good person should be?’. Therefore, the animal turn’s argument, for all its radicalism, leaves the ethical turn’s characterization of human ethical personhood untouched. The animals-as-persons argument might still have been of interest to the ethical turn in a different sense, if that proposition was examined as an ethical event in itself. This is something like the sense in which James Laidlaw suggests animals might most easily be brought into the analysis of ethics, in terms of the place animals occupy as subjects of ethical concern for human people (e.g. Laidlaw 2010), since, he suggests, the case that they are subjects with ethical concern is yet to be convincingly made (2014: 503– 4, 2017: 176–7). In this way, if the assignment of ‘personhood’ were to be considered as an evaluative practice rather than an ontological observation, it would become interesting as an instance of human ethics. In this line of thought, we can see the varied instances in which people try to ascertain the differences that matter between humans and other

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animals. The types of knowledge that have been considered ‘anthropomorphic’ (i.e. projections of humanness onto non-human forms) have changed along with historically contingent notions regarding what is valued (or despised) about human distinction (Asquith 1986; Daston 2005). While there is a tendency in some animal turn scholarship to oversimplify ‘Western’ attitudes towards animals (see Hurn 2012: 41–5; e.g. Ingold 2006: 91)– debates about appropriate human/animal distinction are (as ever) active and ongoing in Western thought, as evidenced by primatologist Frans de Waal’s concerns about ‘anthropodenial’ (1999) and ethologists Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce on the question of animal morality (2009). Jessica Greenebaum’s ethnography of pets-as-quasichildren in New York (2004), Liana Chua’s of the online adoption of orangutans (2018), and Dafna Shir-Vertesh’s of the vulnerable state of petpersonhood in Israel (2012) each show animal personhood as a ‘live’ and contested matter, neither an ontological, consensual fact nor an unlived, imaginative fantasy. These sorts of problems with human distinctiveness are not only of import in the modern West. Even, and perhaps especially, for those people such as the Siberian Yukaghirs, who make seemingly radical claims about the continuities between human and animal personhood, the maintenance of human distinction is a risky, important affair (Willerslev 2007). In that case, hunting requires humans to become partanimal, yet hunters who do not manage their relations to animals skilfully risk offending spirit masters and losing hunting success or, worse, losing their human form and becoming transformed into the animal bodies they mimic. Across these varied cases, the question of relevance to the anthropology of ethics is: what sort of value does one accrue by being admitted to count as human (or person)? And so, what counts as human or person, and how does one become counted as human or person? The same can be asked of the opposite practice, that of de-humanizing people by treating them like animals (Raffles 2007; Biehl 2013). These differing takes on animal personhood exhibit broader differences in the orientation taken by the animal turn and the ethical turn. Considered from the multispecies perspective, attending to animal personhood (or any other idea about animality) only as and when it is claimed within human-held evaluative events risks reinstating the modern, speciesist, and ethnocentric bias that much of the animal turn evades as a raison d’eˆtre. It suggests animals are only of importance to human lives as and when they are deemed to be so. Conversely, from the anthropology of ethics perspective, the animal turn’s normative prescription that we ought to attend to animals as persons (or in any other particular way) risks obscuring interest in the evaluative processes at play when people grapple with how they ought to attend to animals in different historical contexts. The anthropologist of ethics could perhaps subsume the animal turn within its own investigation, counting that work as one example of ethical practice towards animals, to compare among others. In the same way, the

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multispecies author might hold the ethical turn up as a recent example of short-sighted humanism – a new way of cutting human distinctiveness and impoverishing accounts of more-than-human life as a result. We can see that the two are engaged in cross-talk, making contributions to parallel dialogues that appear invested in quite different stakes. In the next section, however, I would like to suggest that both traditions could benefit from dialogue with, rather than about, one another. We might consider representation as central to contemporary anthropological understandings of ethics, in essence, because evaluation is a referential practice – involving meaning about the world (or about the self, or about others). I do not think animal ethnographies are best used to attempt to oppose this representational version of ethics, but to supplement it. Multispecies ethnographies can enhance our understanding of ethical life through drawing our attention to three more-than-representational aspects. These are the form of ethical representations, the limits of any representational capacity to account for ethical life, and the varied ethical evaluations of representation itself.

Question One: What Form Do Ethical Representations Take? Multispecies studies encourage an attention to form, in part, thanks to the influence of science studies and feminist scholarship on the contemporary animal turn. For science studies, the relevant point is that knowledge is never a pure abstraction. Rather, it is produced and managed through particular and often surprising material conditions. In other words, knowledge has form and not only content. For example, Vinciane Despret observes the embodied, responsive relationships that exist between research animals and the scientists and technicians who attend to them (2004, 2013; see also Birke 2003). Despret shows that the idiom of ‘clean’ scientific knowledge means that such relatedness is under-acknowledged within scientific accounts. This is not just a matter of under-reporting. When scientists see responsive relationships with animals as illegitimate, they also limit the extent to which those relationships can develop. Knowledge has ‘form’ for limiting and changing relatedness, too. The feminist influence can be seen in the imperative to attend to bodies otherwise neglected within dominant accounts. In this case, this means not only attending to non-human bodies but also looking at human corporeality in new ways. Feminist scholarship has provided tools for multispecies authors to think particularly about embodied relationality as the omnipresent and under-acknowledged form for more-than-human life. Post-human feminists such as Karen Barad (2003) and Donna Haraway (2008) emphasize the way all beings exist only through relation with others. Donna Haraway calls this process ‘becoming-with’. She emphasizes the co-constructive relationships that undergird all existence, such that

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humans only ever exist along with other ‘companion species’: be they the microbes that inhabit each person’s skin or the species (like dogs) that shape human history. For Karen Barad, the key term is ‘intra-action’. This differs from the conventional ‘interaction’ because she insists that the interactants are not separate units who exist in a bounded sense before they meet (2003: 812). Rather, they are made through meeting; they exist always in reaction and response and never in an essential, isolated, or stable state. The anthropology of ethics needs little encouragement to consider relatedness or embodiment. We would already find, within that body of work, ample interest in a variety of ethical approaches towards the body (as discussed in contributions to this volume by Mack and Throop in relation to suffering (Chapter 14), and Mattingly and McKearney (Chapter 22) in relation to care). Many anthropologists have drawn on Aristotle to describe virtues as embodied practices and engaged judgements, rather than the achievements of a detached reasoning mind or pure soul (see Mattingly 2012; Laidlaw 2013: 52–92). And many have attended to the relationships in which ethics takes place, for example through observing dialogue (Rumsey 2010), pedagogy (Faubion, Chapter 21 this volume; Laidlaw and Mair 2019), or leadership (Faubion 2011: 80–90), or through examining the intersection between politics and ethics (Mahmood 2005; Dave 2012; Lazar, Chapter 31 of this volume). To some extent, then, we could see multispecies studies’ attention to form as reinvigorating and contributing to pre-existing lines of inquiry. Yet, there is something helpfully provocative about the orientation that multispecies scholarship encourages. Multispecies scholarship can prompt us particularly to ask about the sort of forms, materialities, or relatedness that are not the focal point of the ethical evaluations underway. Not what do people think about their bodies (or relationships) in this instance, but rather: what sorts of other bodies (or relationships) are engaged and involved in the way people think about themselves? For example, Matei Candea showed that scientists studying meerkats in the Kalahari desert were always in embodied engagement with the creatures they study. The meerkats responded to the scientists’ attempts to study them. Meerkats both influenced, and were influenced by, the research practices and methods underway (2010, 2013). These research practices included epistemological skills: how to think about the meerkats. Different registers of thought were helpful at different times, a more relational way of thinking about meerkats enabled tactile and tactful handling for weighing, and so on, while a more rationalistic register was deliberately cultivated and managed when collecting observational data. Even in the latter condition, though, ‘detachment’ describes a form of relation; the meerkats react to the thinking-bodies of the scientists (in this case, by becoming ‘habituated’ to them (2010: 245)). While the scientists considered themselves to be withholding emotional relationality in these

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moments, Candea shows that this is nonetheless a highly particular form of embodied and interactive relationality. Similarly, in my own ethnography of British horsewomen, when riders found themselves introspecting about their riding strategy, for example, questioning whether their use of punishment was fair, their horses responded to the changes in their thinking-moving bodies (2017). Doubt, guilt, fear, and ‘overthinking’ caused riders to freeze up, look down, curl their bodies forwards, and become stilted. Horses tended to respond badly, stopping in their tracks, becoming agitated or resistant. We could talk about what the riders are concerned with when they overthink (was I too tough? Am I being clear?), and, on the other hand, we could talk about the interactive form that this embodied concern takes (the stilting of bodies). The two matters are linked, but not the same. Since animals respond to the mindful bodies of humans, they can help to remind us that ethical practices are engaged with the world beyond their description of it. Multispecies studies can encourage an interest in the co-constructive form of self-evaluative events. Leslie Irvine’s ethnographic study of a dog rescue centre in North America points towards several possibilities (2004: 89–120). Irvine describes instances in which potential adopters visit the dogs, hoping to find a good match. Interacting with each dog, adopters have a chance to ‘try on’ the sort of person they would be, if they were the owner of this dog, with its particular body, needs, and behaviours. While Irvine does not engage in the concepts of contemporary ethical anthropology, we might use her material to ask: what sorts of self-evaluation does each dog afford? Webb Keane (2010) develops the term ‘ethical affordance’ (from Gibson’s ecological ‘affordance’) to describe the way the material properties of a thing can influence the sorts of ethical projects that can relate to it. Humans do not invent the world anew through their ethical imaginations; the material world conditions the possibilities. We can therefore investigate the way that projects of ethical selfhood unwittingly rely upon nonhuman others (though the point could be extended to underacknowledged human others too). For example, Kenneth Shapiro describes the lives of animal rights activists, who work like ‘sleuths’ to uncover situations in which animals are suffering (1994). Activists feel profoundly compelled to investigate, drawn towards instances in which animal suffering may be occurring, such that the quest to uncover animal suffering permeates throughout these activists’ whole sense of being. There is, in fact, a bittersweet exhilaration when suffering is discovered. Such witnessing confirms the activists’ life purpose and is seen as ‘getting a result’, which re-invigorates their ongoing efforts. Here, then, we might recognize that animal activists’ sense of ethical self-fulfilment relies upon the very suffering that they passionately oppose. The perspective required to observe such co-construction, form, or materiality also invites us to question the appropriateness of adopting a critical stance when describing people’s ethical lives. The question

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‘what form does this ethical perspective take?’ could easily become ‘what is really going on here?’ or ‘at whose expense does this form of ethics take place?’. This might lead us to ask about the resources required for particular ethical projects, or the costs and impacts they have on the more-thanhuman world. While some anthropologists argue that multispecies ethnographies ought to become more politically engaged (Hornborg 2017; Kopnina 2017), many contemporary studies of human/animal relationships take an explicitly critical stance towards the human treatment of animals. It is worth remarking that in doing so, they tend to discard any interest in the way such human conduct might be understood as alternative versions of ethical practice. For example, Teresa Lloro-Bidart and Constance Russell unveil the ‘hidden curriculum’ underway within the ostensibly conservation-minded educational programmes of North American aquariums and whale-watching trips (2017). Since the conservation learning is delivered through the deployment of coerced or confined animals, the authors argue that the real message communicated by these programs is that animals are legitimately available for human touch and gaze. The focus on the form of the educational encounters (e.g. the touching of sharks within an aquarium exhibit) enables the authors to critically comment on what is really going on here, but we learn little substantively about the ethical lives of the humans working in these programmes or visiting them. To be fair, Lloro-Bidart and Russell’s aim was not to give a thorough treatment of the ethical practices of the humans, just as ethical turn authors rarely set out to examine critically the non-human impacts of their interlocutors’ ethical projects. It seems difficult to balance a critical stance with a sincere enquiry into the ethical lives of others. This is partly because the theoretical orientation of the ethical turn is to be, in itself, an ethical orientation towards those being studied. There is a sense of specieswide solidarity in the way in which the ethical turn argues that people can self-describe and reflect on their own conduct, and there is a corresponding exhortation to ‘take people seriously’ in allowing them to do so (see Laidlaw 2014; Robbins 2013). In contrast, if anthropologists set out to attend to the real, material forms and relationships of ethical projects from an ‘outside’, broader, more inclusive, more sensitive, or more neutral perspective than the human interlocutors ‘inside’ those ethical perspectives, the anthropologist is given the moral high ground and the interlocutors’ ethical reflections are always found wanting – as not quite reflective enough, perhaps. This is not to suggest that ethical and critical perspectives are necessarily immiscible, as some authors have attended to the ethical lives of human participants while simultaneously describing the political or material forms that undergird those projects. For example, Rheanna Parren˜as describes the ‘custodial labour’ that tourist-volunteers undertake when looking after orangutans at a Malaysian sanctuary (2012). She is able

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to communicate the dedication with which volunteers endure physically demanding work to care for orangutans. Parren˜as also eloquently describes the thrilling, terrifying, and touching moments in which volunteers actually encounter wild orangutans face to face. Yet she also attends to the material relations that underlie these care experiences, since she describes the uneven risks each party faces in these encounters. The risk of physical harm to volunteers is part of the experience of rawness and wildness that they seek, yet much greater risks of physical harm, as well as economic stability, are faced by local staff members who mediate between volunteers and orangutans and keep the sanctuary functioning. Greater still is the dependency and vulnerability of the orangutans, who are entirely reliant on the success of these encounters for the continuation of their existence. They risk death should these encounters be deemed too dangerous and should the stream of tourist money dry up. Ethnographies of human/animal interaction provide good resource for reconsidering the material form that ethical representations take. This is because the non-verbal responsiveness of animals can remind us that human/animal encounters are not contained within the things that any particular humans say about those encounters. That is, embodied relationships with animals are underway both despite and because of whatever ethical sentiments the humans involved might self-describe. We are reminded that there is an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ to these accounts, and that any particular viewpoint has a perspective (say, the way a rider thinks about a horse) and a form (say, that this thinking-practice is embodied aboard a horse). These two foci are deeply intertwined and co-constitutive, but conceptually, if not empirically, separable. How to handle the question of form, from which position, and to what extent is not an entirely novel concern for the anthropology of ethics, nor is it one that multispecies studies can resolve. Yet multispecies anthropology is helpful in reinvigorating these sorts of concerns: what, or who, affords each particular form of reflexive evaluation? Which embodied, material, or co-constructive forms does this sort of reflexive practice take? Are there interactions, infrastructures, or conditions, that are essential to this form of ethical practice, and yet not the focus of it? And what does self-evaluating in this way do – to, for, and with others in the more-than-human environment?

Question Two: How Should We Attend to the Aspects of Ethical Life That Are Hard to Represent? The previous section attended to forms of relatedness that are not necessarily accounted for within ethical practices. In this section, I would like to consider aspects of ethical relatedness that are visceral, sensual, emotional, or intuitive – those experiences and interactions that people might struggle to put into words, or measures, or codes. It is uncontentious

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to suggest that embodied sensitivities are an important part of ethical life; many of those writing in the contemporary ethical turn would attest to such. However, there is an interesting question to be discussed in terms of how these elements are brought into our studies. This becomes particularly clear if we consider the possible contrast between the somatic aspects of ethical life and the idiom of considered self-reflection often evoked in ethical anthropology through the following words of Foucault (see Heywood’s (Chapter 5) and Cook’s (Chapter 16) contributions to this volume): Thought is . . . what allows one to step back from [a certain] way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem. (Foucault 1997: 117) The most straightforward method to reconcile the apparent discord between visceral response and considered reflection is to look at the ways in which emotional or embodied experiences can be the subject of such considered, self-evaluative thought. That is, we can examine the ways in which people might think about their own embodied sensitivities and aim to improve or curtail them. Yet this might suggest that there is nothing essentially ethical about embodied encounters with others, over and above any other subject of ethical concern. After all, people might show ethical, self-evaluative concern for any number of things – their sporting performance, their capacity to follow a grandmother’s recipe, their lawn maintenance. Yet, it seems pertinent to question whether embodied relationality can feature not only as the subject of ethical concern but also as an alternate means of ethical reckoning (see also Kuan, Chapter 12 of this volume). Could there be grounds for considering what might be particularly ‘ethical’ about the way we respond to responsive beings, over and above the way we might or might not reflect on that responsiveness? After all, many of our ethical responses, gut feelings, and emotions such as guilt, sympathy, and so on seem to defy conscientious reflection or verbal representation. Ann Game’s auto-ethnography of horse–human relatedness in the USA provides an example of a model of ethics which is based on tactile relatedness (2001). She describes her own relationship with K.C., a mare whose physical recovery after partial paralysis was aided by the attunement of her body to her rider’s, a rhythmic ‘rapture’ akin to embodying the idea of a centaur. Game did not aim to over-identify with K.C. but rather to complement her, such that a therapeutic rhythmic balance could be found in a form of cooperation that was not available to either partner on their own. For Game, the training involved ‘is the bringing to life of the relation between horse and rider, involving a mutual calling up of horse

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and rider in each other’ (2001: 5). Crucially, this was a trial-and-error sort of ethics, found in the development of tactile responsiveness. In this account, it appears as though Game’s reflexive mind was not the instigator of the responsive relationship she developed with K.C. – but rather, it followed some distance behind, trying to catch up with a way to think about the ethical shifts already occurring in the tone of touch between the pair. While she does not reference affect theorists, Game’s account can be seen in some ways to pre-empt the interest in affect theory that would emerge in anthropology, and anthropological accounts of animals, in the 2000s. Drawing on neurological studies of pre-linguistic modes of attention and response, affect theorists aim to capture felt bodily intensities that precede conscious recognition or self-reflective thought (Massumi 1995; Thrift 2008). Affect theory has proved influential for authors from a number of disciplines (though notably geography, science and technology studies, and anthropology) who wish to find a framework for recording interactions in more-than-human terms (e.g. Despret 2004, 2016; Lorimer 2013; Parren˜as 2012; Song 2011; Whatmore 1997). Affect theory has inspired some anthropologists to locate ethics in the way bodies are moved to respond to one another. Nairsargi Dave’s (2014) ethnographic study of animal rights activists in India demonstrates the affective impact of witnessing animal suffering. For activists, witnessing became a disciplined commitment to recognizing suffering and not turning away, but rather moving towards the suffering Other, as though inherently ‘implicated and culpable’ in its suffering (2014: 440). Dave is aware that these events could be given a humanist reading. This would come if we were to consider the activists’ witnessing of the animals as a form of self-recognition that comes from knowing oneself as that which looks upon another. But Dave posits that witnessing is more radically interactive than this reading would suggest. Witnessing involves recognizing the way the animal responds to our interest. Dave argues that humanist logics are disrupted by the mutuality of that response, and any sense of a bounded, integral, or autonomous self is dissolved by the feeling that each being exists in answer to the other. The ethical component of such witnessing is not that it causes one to reflect upon the right way to live; it is about being urgently and imperatively compelled to respond, quite possibly in ways that do not make sense, even to the person being so moved. Donna Haraway uses the term ‘response-ability’ (2008: 71, rather than the more familiar ‘responsibility’) to describe just such a corporeal form of ethics – situated in the way more-than-human beings can respond to one another, acknowledging responses in return. Haraway’s human readers are encouraged to recognize and enable such response-able relationships in order to reduce harm and work towards flourishing. While this seems like it might provide the grounds for building a critique against the ethical turn’s focus on reflective thought, in fact it is fairer to recognize that the ethical turn already provides the stage for

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debating and discussing the relationships between embodied sensitivities and considered, formalized, or encoded representations. This includes, for example, investigating the dynamics that occur between the ‘incorporation’ of ethics within the mindful body and the ‘objectification’ of ethics within formal codes, instructions, or accounts (see Faubion, Chapter 21 of this volume). It would certainly not be right, therefore, to misread the relationship between these two spheres of work as though multispecies studies stands for embodied responsiveness while the anthropology of ethics stands for introspective and abstract reflection. However, studies of embodied, multispecies responsiveness such as those outlined earlier can contribute to this dialogue through prompting the question: just how self-reflexive does something have to be in order to be included in our comparative study of ethics? For example, are the moments of witnessing suffering that Dave describes ethical in and of themselves, or only once they have caused the interlocutors to reflect on how they ought to live (as more clearly demonstrated in Shapiro’s example)? Could those initial moments of witnessing be seen as some sort of self-evaluative moment? How clear, considered, codified, verbalized, or formalized does a phenomenon need to be in order to be recognized as self-evaluative? Perhaps in Dave’s case the distinction is largely academic – after all, we only hear about the witnessing moments as they appear in the hindsight of the now-committed activists, and as they are woven into the anthropologist’s own ethico-theoretical endeavours. It may seem like splitting hairs to ask exactly which bits of this ethical conglomerate of intentions, reflections, and experiences count as ethical. Yet, there is something to be said for testing the boundaries and integrity of the category. In a parallel vein, those anthropologists collected under the umbrella term of ‘ordinary ethics’ could be seen as expanding the boundaries of the category of ‘ethics’ in a similar way. Lambek’s introduction to the seminal collected volume Ordinary Ethics (2010) articulates a concern to look beyond the formal aspects of ethics (the described and describable rules and codes), and beyond the exceptional events, or the individuals who seem particularly ‘ethical’ in character (like the ascetics and pedagogues). Rather, ordinary ethics, inspired by the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and some of his followers, takes an interest in the ethical dimensions of all human life – even in its most mundane and everyday moments. This sort of call to avoid the ‘domaining’ of ethics may well find support from multispecies studies. Take, for example, Vinciane Despret’s observations (introduced earlier in this piece) of the responsiveness of scientist and animal bodies (2004, 2013). From Despret’s work, we can see that ethics are not only located within a laboratory research project’s ‘ethical’ panels, official codes of conduct, or formal accounts of scientists, but that they can also be found in the way bodies are responsive to one another during daily interactions – events which may otherwise fly under the radar of official ethical recognition. While of course no ethnography of

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scientists’ practices would be likely to see formal representations of ethical codes as sufficient descriptions of scientists’ ethical lives, Despret’s observations hold particular traction when they are considered as part of a critical engagement with those scientific worlds that she comments on. The move, as in ordinary ethics, is to emphasize that ethics might be going on elsewhere, in places that might be missed if we attend only to those things ostensibly self-identifying as especially ‘ethical’ in character. A focus on embodied responsiveness can counter such ‘domaining’. After all, in studying how beings respond to one another, we may argue that we are able to study how beings matter to one another. That is to say, the distinction between a response and an evaluation is hard to draw. Equally illusive is the degree or form of self-referentiality that might be present in such relational responses. One problem with this boundary-testing work is the potential expansiveness of the category. If (some? Or all?) embodied responses might be considered ethical, then what, if anything, would not fall within the parameters of ethics? Does the category become so large as to be meaningless? Yet, on the other hand, what, when, or who (infants, cognitively impaired, or non-verbal humans) are we excluding with the more cognitively elite model of a certain level of deliberative evaluation? This is not only a matter of inclusion for inclusion’s sake. These questions are of theoretical importance. This is because multispecies studies can not only provoke anthropologists of ethics to consider where they set the bar as to what is to count as self-evaluative (enough) practice – they can also prompt a healthy re-assessment of the yardstick against which ethics is measured: what is the archetype here? Who are the implicit exemplars of whatever we call ethical behaviour? One way to figure the topic is to look only for those instances in which the person in question feels a sense of ‘ought’ – as in, ‘I ought to respond to this suffering creature’ or ‘I ought to move more in harmony with this horse’s needs’. Ought-to feelings are not always easily understood by those who feel them, and so the concept may capture incidents that are guttural, compelling, or spontaneous, while still requiring an essence of reflexivity and a degree of ethical freedom: one ‘ought to’ precisely when one does not ‘have to’. And yet, the suggestion that we may be able to study non-verbal, visceral ‘oughts’ presents further problems, since such feelings are not easily or uncontentiously observable until they are reflected upon within verbal accounts. This methodological challenge can be illustrated, for example, in the differences of opinion generated by scientists’ and dog owners’ attempts to conclude whether or not ‘guilty’ dog behaviour really shows the dogs experience guilt (e.g. Horowitz 2009). Without the capacity to give an account of their behaviour, the self-evaluative aspect of it is hard to grasp. Similarly, we only have clear access to people’s experiences of feeling that they ought to do something when they reflect on, or instigate, or excuse those feelings through representation.

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In summary, then, studies of multispecies, non-verbal responsiveness can cause us to ask what sorts of responses we want to include, or exclude, in order to enrich our understanding of ethics. This question remains very much alive. Furthermore, multispecies studies reminds us that the category of what counts as ethics is an exclusive and evaluative category in and of itself, and that it is hard to make any distinction between human and animal that does not also end up cutting away part of human experience – or certain human individuals – as too animalistic to count. Any definition of ethics has the potential to work as an evaluative schema for ranking more or less ‘ethical’ moments, beings, or practices. The categorization of ‘ethics’ can itself be studied ethnographically, and ethnographies containing animals provide good thinking grounds here (as do those containing infants, cognitively impaired people, otherworldly non-human beings, and artificial intelligence). Studying the treatment of these people and beings creates opportunities for observing whether or not various groups or individuals consider all humans, or certain sorts of nonhumans, or certain sorts of moments, to demonstrate ethics or morality. This is not just about how others think about animals (or infants, etc.); this is also a chance to be open to acknowledging competing understandings of the constitution of ethics. Finally, through emphasizing non-verbal registers of relatedness, multispecies studies can help to keep the anthropology of ethics restless: what is it that people can’t represent about their ethical lives? In displacing the centrality of verbality, multispecies studies can help to remind us that ethical experiences often go beyond what can be said about them. It is difficult methodologically to capture these aspects of ethical experiences, but we must remain alive to the possibility that the category of ‘ethics as we can study it’ may not be the same as the category of ‘all that feels ethical’ to our interlocutors. Yet, what appears as a methodological challenge here can also be a theoretical insight – drawing us to attend to the way interlocutors recognize and manage disjunctures between ethical experiences and accounts of those experiences. We can ask: how do the people being studied, and the anthropologists doing the studying, cope with these unwordy aspects of ethical life? This line of questioning is intimately tied to the next question.

Question Three: What Varieties of Ethical Treatments of Representation Can Be Seen in Human/Animal Relationships? The ethics of encounters and responses described in the previous section might be seen to provide an alternative to representational models of ethics. Geographers Greenhough and Roe (2010) go so far as to describe Haraway’s notion of response-ability as a ‘non-representational ethics’,

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located in the harmonization of bodies rather than the managed disjuncture between codes and realities. Yet while I find this literature helpful in drawing our attention towards non-verbal relatedness, I believe it also unwittingly emphasizes the extent to which representation is intrinsic to ethical life. First and foremost, this is because these multispecies accounts are themselves ethically pedagogical accounts, designed, in part, to cultivate readers’ attitudes towards their own embodied responses. For example, Vinciane Despret describes the possibility that human and non-human bodies can develop sensitive harmonization with one another as ‘the miracle of attunement’ (2004: 125). She is not only telling her reader something about embodied relatedness; she is also recommending and enjoining on her reader a better way of attending to it. Similarly, ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose (2013) draws on the ‘philosophical animism’ of ecofeminist Val Plumwood (2005) in order to recommend a sensitive responsiveness towards the lively environment, while Thom Van Dooren and colleagues suggest that the humanities ought to cultivate ‘arts of attentiveness’ towards the more-than-human world (2016). These writings set out to transform the way readers both notice and value the non-human environment. The readers’ attention is drawn, shaped, and curated through representational practices. This shows that even visceral experiences of ‘withness’ are imbued with historically and personally particular representational and evaluative meanings. This problematizes any suggestion that accounts of somatic relatedness are somehow located within a more authentic, mutual, and intersubjective state than the more apparently dispassionate processes of theorizing, reflection, and representation. Such a suggestion can be seen, for example, in Piers Locke’s account of his discovery of elephant personhood: In questioning the parameters of personhood, I did so without concern for authoritative legal judgement or scientific opinion, and . . . I did so through my ethnographic willingness to surrender my being and open myself to new modes of experience. Only later did I focus my attention on local logics of personhood, and furnish my direct experience of engaging with elephants as persons with theoretical justifications. It was the primacy of experience that enabled me to initiate a process of mutual becoming (Haraway 2008) through which Sitasma [the elephant] and I attuned our bodies and our selves. (2017: 358) While there may be philosophico-ethical reasons for emphasizing a profound intersubjectivity that precedes and exceeds our conceptions of it (on which more shortly), ethnographic attempts to capture and communicate non-theoretical or pre-representational experiences have been subject to critique (on ‘ethnographic theory’, see Heywood 2017; on pre-linguistic affects, see Navaro-Yashin 2009). Emily Martin, for example,

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is sceptical of attempts to utilize affect theory to reach ‘a particular kind of potentiality: a hidden force emanating from fruitful darkness . . . located within primitive parts of the brain . . . an unlimited realm that is before and unfettered by meaning’ (2013: S150). Her concern is that in ‘stripping away subjectivity’ such accounts risk universalizing the meaningful aspects of human perception which are in fact ‘social all the way down’ (2013: S157). One sort of learning that I draw from affect/intersubjectivity literature is that even when one is immersed in what feels like raw and moving encounters with others, we do not necessarily find ourselves (different species, different people) all in common in sharing the same experience of being together. As Haraway asserts, becoming-with does not mean communication of a ventriloquism or body-snatching sort (2008: 226). In this line of thought, it becomes clear that being ‘more’ attentive is not, on its own, a distinctive enough concept to differentiate between the varied evaluative schemas which might orientate that attention. The emerging ethnographic record tells us that it matters to people, ethically, what something is recognized as, why and how it is noticed, and if something is misrecognized or subject to the wrong sorts of attention. It is not enough, by most ethical reckoning, to notice that various beings are response-able; it matters what counts as a good response. To illustrate, Garry Marvin and Veronica de San Mateo (2015) study Spanish bullfighting and its opponents. They describe the bullfighters’ ethical orientations and practices as well as the perspectives of animal rights activists. Those from both groups concentrate a great deal of attention, interest, and sensitivity on the bull, and we could argue (while the authors do not quite describe it this way) that both groups cultivate a co-constructed sense of ethical self that is dependent upon the bull. The bullfighters claim authenticity in their version, since they know the bulls intimately, profoundly; they can read their minds and predict their movements, they know their attitudes and their bodies. With this skilled, embodied, and feeling connection, they recognize a wildness, fierceness (bravura), and nobility in the bull that is not able to flourish outside of the bullfighting arena (2015: 97). It is the bullfighting that makes the bull as much as the bull that makes the bullfighting. This account, assessed on the bullfighters’ terms, is rich in relatedness, respect, and embodied sensitivity – yet it is a perversity of those same ideas from the perspective of anti-bullfighting activists (2015: 94, 104). While accounts of ethics are richer for the inclusion of embodied feelings that are often challenging to put into words, the concepts of ‘attentiveness’, ‘embodied affect’, and ‘responsiveness’ alone do little to help us in distinguishing one way of noticing-valuing from another. Returning to Haraway and Despret’s wording, on the one hand, we have the condition of ‘becoming-with’, evident in the co-construction of humans along with animal others (such that human-with-bull makes something of humans and bulls that they would never be alone). But this is quite a different matter from the highly specific sorts of ‘withness’ that different people recognize

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and desire in their relationships with animals (such that bullfighters and animal rights activists can argue over the very meaning of ‘with’). I would suggest that ethics, as far as we can study it, is always a matter of representation – because ethics is not only about what one notices, feels, or desires but also about what one should notice, feel, and desire. It is not helpful to think that the ‘should’ part only comes after each intersubjective moment (as can happen in some readings of the ‘pre-linguistic’ aspect of affect theory). That is the implicit underside to suggestions that attuned somatic responsiveness is more authentically open to intersubjective encounters, while deliberative reflection is more detached. Reflection and intersubjectivity relate to one another both consecutively (such that one can think about previous or future encounters) and concurrently (such that reflection is always, at the same time, also intersubjective interaction – the horses responded to the riders’ bodies as they reflected). We have to remember all of the ‘shoulds’ that have pre-dated and so educated and cultivated each apparently ‘raw’ enigmatic encounter too. My argument is that even visceral experiences and encounters are not non-representational or raw; they are educated through representations, they have ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ as different perspectives on the world (of which actors are aware), and they are certainly not non-representational by the time they are put into normatively persuasive published writing. Yet this emphasis on the intrinsic import of representation to ethics does not mean that ethical experiences are easily represented, or that ethics can be encompassed entirely by what people can say about it. The points raised in the previous question are still pressing. Often, what we discover when looking at ethical utterances (such as excuses, pedagogies, confessions) is the trouble people have in putting words to the depth and complexity of their ethical relationships. People struggle to represent the ethical import of life (in courts of law, domestic rows, councils and committees), and they often disagree over the ethical appropriateness of one another’s representations of what has occurred. Just as it is a struggle to put experiences and intentions into words, it may be just as much a struggle to put words and ideas into practice – to follow the oath, as it were, or to accept the apology. But to recognize the ethical importance of the disjuncture between words and experiences is not to suggest that it is ever possible to quarantine these two from one another. For humans who do use words, I can find no evidence for a genre of ethical life that fully escapes that condition of language-using animal.

The Ethics of Representation To illustrate: in Marvin and San Mateo’s account of bullfighting earlier, we see conflicting ideas of what it means to be ethically ‘with’ the bull. However, we could also surmise that there is a shared ethical concern with the representation of the bull. Both sides are invested in the problem of who gets to speak

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for the bull, and whose version counts as the most authentic. The most explicit and focal ethical concerns are about whether freedom or ‘the good’ for the bull can come through fighting or not. But there are underlying representational concerns about epistemology and legitimacy – how one knows the bull, and how one should work out the meaning of freedom. We might consider these representational concerns to be meta-ethical matters – about how one ought to conduct ethical endeavours. In this line of thought, the concepts of response-ability and mutual attentiveness can be seen to demonstrate just such an example of a meta-ethic. That is, they promote a conduct of conducts, a way to go about working out which particular goods are legitimate ones within each relational context. Many of these multispecies studies contribute to a philosophical discourse that makes arguments about how we (readers, academics, humans in the world) ought to practise ethical epistemology, given the inescapable interconnectedness of being. Inasmuch as these accounts are often explicitly pitched as oppositions to Cartesian dualistic thinking, we might do better to consider them as examples of anti-representational ethics rather than the ‘nonrepresentational’ ethics, that Greenhough and Roe (2010) suggest. In this respect, we might contend that they are comprehensively about representation, since they are preoccupied with problems identified with what they call ‘representationalism’, and proposals for alternatives to it. Tim Ingold, for example, advocates ‘animating thought’ through adopting Heideggerian techniques of perception that are, he claims, sensitive to the lively, moving relatedness of all of the environment (2006). The sort of ‘wonder’ that this entails and enables is in stark contrast with the ‘logic of inversion’ he sees in Cartesianism, wherein bounded individuals look upon a ‘sterile’ landscape of distinctly name-able things. Because they do not speak, animals provide particularly apt resources for observing the variety of ways people use representations within ethical life, but also the variety of ways people think ethically about representation. This latter point closely resembles Webb Keane’s call for studies that investigate differing ‘semiotic ideologies’ (2018). He argues that we have much to learn about varieties of agency by studying the ways in which different groups think about communication. Multispecies studies seem ideally positioned to answer that call. For example, animals seem to afford the opportunity for some people to experience a profound connectedness that is felt to be deeper and more authentic than any relationship mediated by verbal representation. Yet my supposition is that these experiences are valued through implicit or explicit comparison with speech-based dialogue, not as a true escape from it. Animals also provide opportunities for the elaboration and amplification of the ethical importance of ‘voice’. This can be seen in the different sorts of risks pertaining to the matter of who ought to speak for, to, or about animals, and what they ought to say. Don Kulick (2017) overviews multidisciplinary research on human–animal communication (a sometimes ‘kooky’ group of work, he says, so ‘disparate’ that it is not a field).

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Kulick distils the sorts of interest, anxiety, and intrigue that possibilities of human–animal comprehensibility evoke, from animal telepathists to equestrian trainers; from elephant psychologists to the study of ‘baby talk’ directed at pets. Kulick suggests that this research (and those who complete it) ought to be of interest to anthropologists because in observing the way people attempt to achieve or recognize human–animal communication, we can observe those people’s theories of, and attitudes towards, language, mind, voice, intention, intuition, and so on. In observing human/animal interactions, anthropologists of ethics can ask about the range of different problems and opportunities that arise because humans can represent themselves in ways that animals cannot. In doing so, they can aim to understand better the way people feel about the roles representation plays within ethical life.

Conclusion Animals can test the boundaries of our category of ethics in multiple ways. This productive testing goes beyond the question of whether or not animals ought to be included in our methodologies as ethical beings themselves. I believe we would do better to use our ethnographies to study the ways different peoples are occupied with the ongoing questioning of human/animal distinctiveness, rather than to try to answer or dispel those questions ourselves. Multispecies studies can be best utilized within the anthropology of ethics in posing a different set of questions about the role of representation in ethical life. I have argued against the utility of the concept of non-representational ethics, but I have posed three lines of questioning that might be considered contributors to a more-thanrepresentational study of ethics. First, I asked about the form that ethical evaluations take. This opens questions about the affordances for, and impacts of, any ethical perspective on the world. It enables us to ask about the embodiment of evaluative practice (rather than only the evaluation of embodiment). It also invites us to consider the under-acknowledged relationships that undergird and enable ethical endeavours. Second, I asked about the ethical experiences that exist beyond the scope of verbal or other representation, those visceral encounters, emotions, and sensitivities that cannot be put into words or codes, or at least not easily, completely, or authentically. I questioned how we recognize and qualify ethical phenomena, and suggested that this is an exclusive, evaluative process. And finally, I asked about the ethics of representation. I considered the ‘meta-ethical’ ways in which concerns about representation underpin other evaluative processes. I suggested that even anti-representational practices are always about representation, and I invited studies of the varieties of semiotic ideology that might be observable through human–animal interaction. These three lines of

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questioning relate to one another in productively antagonistic ways. Taken together, they suggest that while representational capacities are intrinsic to ethical practice, at the same time we ought to attend to ethical life as though it exceeds any attempt to account for it. Ethical life somehow goes beyond words, although it is never entirely without them. The non-verbal responsiveness of animals provokes opportunities to ask these questions of representation anew, yet this endeavour would complement, rather than upturn, discourses in the anthropology of ethics, which suggest we can find ethics in the potential for disjuncture between representations and their outsides (see Lambek 2010). For example, we find ethics in ideals that are not yet lived, in excuses that do not wash, in rules that do not quite apply, in promises still to be enacted, in misinformed deeds that cause inadvertent harm, in others’ experiences that exist beyond what we can make of them. This is not at all to suggest that all ethics can be found within human representations. Quite the opposite. Ethics could, in fact, be presented as a perennial problem with representation. The immanent ethical problem is that our engagement in the world may exceed our ethical perspective on it. It is by no means impossible that animals have some ethical capacity. But this question is itself a representational problem (how would we know?) and an ethical one too (how should we know?). If we observe the way this question matters (or does not) to different groups of humans, I believe it will always matter in relation to the fact that the humans cannot ask animals to give their own account. In studying how animals matter, we can study how speaking matters too. Whatever we each choose to count as ethical, multispecies studies can remind us that our descriptions of ethics are also ethical accounts – they are evaluative, relational events that are also engaged in the world in ways that surpass our representations of it.

Acknowledgements Thanks are due, first and foremost, to Matei Candea, who was my PhD supervisor. It was during our lively discussions that many of the ideas presented in this essay were ruminated. Thanks also to James Laidlaw and the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their careful reading and constructive comments. Any faults in the text are entirely my own.

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J. Tippins, and Arthur J. Stewart (eds.), Animals and Science Education. New York: Springer: 41–50. Locke, Piers. 2017. ‘Elephants As Persons, Affective Apprenticeship, and Fieldwork with Nonhuman Informants in Nepal’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(1): 353–76. Lorimer, Jamie. 2013. ‘More-Than-Human Visual Analysis: Witnessing and Evoking Affect in Human-Nonhuman Interactions’, in Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose (eds.), Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 61–78. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martin, Emily. 2013. ‘The Potentiality of Ethnography and the Limits of Affect Theory’. Current Anthropology, 54(S7): S149–S158. Massumi, Brian. 1995. ‘The Autonomy of Affect’. Cultural Critique, 31: 83–109. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2008. ‘Reading Minds and Telling Tales in a Cultural Borderland’. Ethos, 36(1): 136–54. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12(2): 161–84. 2016. ‘Accounting for Oneself and Other Ethical Acts: Big Picture Ethics with a Small Picture Focus’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1): 433–47. Milton, Kay. 2005. ‘Anthropomorphism or Egomorphism? The Perception of Non-Human Persons by Human Ones’, in J. Knight (ed.), Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacy. Oxford: Berg: 255–71. Mullin, Molly H. 1999. ‘Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28(1): 201–24. Nadasdy, Paul. 2007. ‘The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human–Animal Sociality. American Ethnologist, 34(1): 25–43. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. ‘Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(1): 1–18. Noske, Barbara. 1989. Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. 1997. ‘Speciesism, Anthropocentrism, and Non-Western Cultures’. Anthrozoo¨s, 10(4): 183–90. Parren˜as, Rheana ‘Juno’ Salazar. 2012. ‘Producing Affect: Transnational Volunteerism in a Malaysian Orangutan Rehabilitation Center’. American Ethnologist, 39(4): 673–87. Plumwood, Val. 2005. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Raffles, Hugh. 2007. ‘Jews, Lice, and History’. Public Culture, 19(3): 521–66. Robbins, Joel. 2008. ‘On Not Knowing Other Minds: Confession, Intention, and Linguistic Exchange in a Papua New Guinea Community’. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(2): 421–9.

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2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3): 447–62. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2013. ‘Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World’. Environmental Humanities, 3(1): 93–109. Rumsey, Alan. 2010. ‘Ethics, Language, and Human Sociality’, in M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 105–22. Sagan, Dorion. 2013. ‘Introduction: Umwelt after Uexku¨ll’, in Jakob Von Uexku¨ll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1–35. Shapiro, Kenneth J. 1994. ‘The Caring Sleuth: Portrait of an Animal Rights Activist’. Society & Animals, 2(2): 145–65. Shir-Vertesh, Dafna. 2012. ‘“Flexible Personhood”: Loving Animals As Family Members in Israel’. American Anthropologist, 114(3): 420–32. Song, Hoon. 2011. Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a Deindustrialized America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sykes, Karen M. 2014. ‘Moral Reasoning’, in D. Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons: 169–86. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1969. ‘Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit’. Ethnology, 8(4): 423–59. Taylor, Charles. 1985. Philosophical Papers 1: Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Throop, C. Jason. 2010. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press. Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Mu¨nster. 2016. ‘Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness’. Environmental Humanities, 8 (1): 1–23. Whatmore, Sarah. 1997. ‘Dissecting the Autonomous Self: Hybrid Cartographies for a Relational Ethics’. Environment and planning D: Society and Space, 15(1): 37–53. Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds. (George Eliot (Adam Bede))

I was raised in a Unitarian church, in an era of progressive politics. People marched in protest in pursuit of a more inclusive community and a more pacific era. A sense of possibility hung in the air like the scent of spring. As Unitarians we believed that God was like the Indian parable in which six blind men encircled an elephant and described what they felt with their hands. They were all around the same elephant: but the man at its trunk felt a rope; the man at its leg, a tree; the man at its side, a wall; and so on. In the parable, the men fight because each takes the other men to be lying. To Unitarians, the point of the story is that the quarrelling men share the same reality despite their different interpretations. We believed that God was understood in different cultures in different ways, but that these differences were superficial. The values of Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims – the values of all people of faith – were fundamentally the same. We were scarcely alone. America in the 1960s was heir to what Gary Wills (2019) calls the new piety of the 1950s. In 1947, polls found that the most-respected leaders were ministers, priests, and rabbis (Wills 2019). Billy Graham became a pastor to presidents and a kind of rock star. Americans began to describe their spiritual tradition as ‘Judeo-Christian’. Aldous Huxley had popularized the concept of the ‘perennial philosophy’, the idea that all religions sprang out of the same source and the same experience, a mystical union with the ‘one’. By the 1960s there was great excitement about the common paths of different faiths. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton sold over 600,000 copies of a book about choosing his vocation, and then went on to write admiring books about Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, extolling their practices and recommending them to his readers (1948, 1965, 1968). In 1965 Vatican II decided that Catholics should develop relationships with people of other faiths. In 1970, the first World Council of Churches met in Kyoto, Japan to

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discuss ‘deeply held and widely shared’ concerns. It was as if all religions were part of a global kumbaya. I no longer believe that cultural differences are window dressing when it comes to the true nature of a god. That is not what I see, and not what history has taught us. If anything, the lesson of the last few decades is how fundamentally different people in different religions become. It is not just the fall of the twin towers. Societies around the world have been consumed in what have often been called the ‘culture wars’ but are better described as religious conflicts: the more conservative against the less conservative, liberal Christians against evangelicals, non-orthodox against orthodox, permissive against restrictive, the secular against the believing, in the United States, in Israel, in the Middle East, in Europe, in Africa, and elsewhere. To be clear, in university settings we imagine these as fights over identity politics. That sympathy for authentic identity is a secular liberal perspective often seen, outside of the university, as a rejection of conservative religion. These are not arguments over cognitive propositions and abstract values. They are intense emotional fights over what it is to be a decent human being and what leading a moral life demands from us. We are not so much arguing over what we believe, but about who we are. My goal in this chapter is to show that coming to experience God as real changes people’s moral views because it places them into a relationship – and that relationship changes the way they think and act. That is, I do not think that Christian evangelicals (for example) are necessarily choosing to disavow abortion, gun control, health insurance, or other possible moral positions. It is more that they learn to experience themselves as being in relationship with god in particular ways – and from that follows their moral orientation. This can be an uncomfortable perspective. In a time of great division in American life, some commitments just seem wrong to those who think differently. It can nevertheless be helpful to work to understand a different point of view about how those commitments emerge because it invites us to imagine a moral orientation driven not by beliefs per se, but by practices. This should have implications for the way anthropologists think about their mission as well. In 2012, I published a book titled When God Talks Back. It was an observer’s account of the process of learning to hear God’s voice. I am a psychologically trained anthropologist. Much of the book described my ethnographic observations about how a gently charismatic evangelical church teaches congregants to identify God in the clutter of their thoughts, to trust that identification, and to learn to experience God as interactive. My goal was to show that learning takes place, and to describe what is required for that learning – that people need to understand their minds differently, that they need to practise, that the practice is not always easy, and that the practice changes them. The book also describes an experiment I ran in which I assigned some people to pray interactively,

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using their imagination, and assigned others to listen to lectures on the Gospels. The experiment demonstrated that those in the prayer condition experienced their mental images more vividly; that they were more likely to have sensory experiences of God; that they experienced God more as a person; that God became more real to them. The book goes on to argue that this emphasis on the experience of God is not a primitive throwback but, instead, a modern response to a secular society and that it helps people confronted with doubt to experience God as alive. I want to point out here that these real-making practices make the invisible being specific – not into an elephant, but into a rope or wall or tree. That is the effect of small, intimate, and incremental shifts in the way one attends. These real-making practices involve precise detail – countless small interactions with that god through ritual, practice, and prayer – countless small failures and happy accomplishments, and invitations to begin again, innumerable expectations about how to recognize this god and how to interact. These are not abstract beliefs about God’s goodness or mercy or justice. They are particular histories of feelings and encounters. They are relationships. The point is simple, likely more startling for anthropologists than for people of faith. When humans feel that they interact with (helpful) gods and spirits, they want to be who they should be in such a relationship. They fall short, of course, as we all do in human relationships, but they do strive to do their part. What I have seen is that these relationships can be as transformative as a marriage. It is so tempting – particularly for secular liberals scornful of the enterprise – to see people as creating the invisible other they want, like an invisible friend that serves some internal need. And that characterization is not completely false. But our choice of who the invisible god is also determines who we are, far more than the invisible friend, because an inner god representation – a god image – is formed not only out of a person’s inner need but also through the way other people talk about that god, in sermons, in prayer groups, and in books, and through their own experience of god and spirit in the various rituals associated with the faith. The relationship is indeed, in some ways, like a marriage. Even if we choose exactly the spouse we want, because of the person that we are, we become someone different through the relationship. The back and forth has changed us. That change is not always obvious to the one who is changing because humans so deeply feel themselves to be one self. But the change is often apparent to others. These observations come directly out of what I saw in the evangelical church. It was what fascinated me about the church – that church was not really about belief at all. That is, I saw that while in some general sense, people ‘believed’ in God, they struggled mightily to make that God feel real, present, and available. I saw that they consistently complained about how hard it was to keep God in mind: to be loving and gracious instead of grumpy and irritated. I saw how hard it could be for people to remember to

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pray. I saw that people dove into the stories of the faith to help them (and others) grasp the nature of God, and to help them imagine how they could talk to God and to recognize when God responded. They spoke about skill and talent in praying. They sought skill, and they envied those with talent. The way they thought about their minds inhibited them. They doubted their own experiences (‘you’ll think I am crazy’ was something people said often about their vivid experiences of God, not only to me but in housegroups, in prayer circles, in sermons). When they experienced what they took to be God with their senses, it made a big difference to them, because it helped to make God feel more real to them. When it all came together, they talked about being ‘alive’. They talked about the emotional experience of being in relationship with God as being ‘alive’. They would describe prayer as ‘alive’ when they felt that God answered back, and they would describe their emotional life as ‘alive’ when they felt that they were responding to a real external presence. Here is one woman’s struggle to explain what she meant by the word: It’s hard to describe. I just feel more alive. It’s like the words on the page come alive. During the week when I feel so constrained by time, I really feel like I’m closed off to that experience. It doesn’t ever happen during the week. On the weekend when I’m free and I don’t have to watch the clock and I don’t have to think about what I have to do the rest of the day, it’s like my mind is more open. and it’s like rather than reading, okay, um, David did this and then he wrote this, it’s like I’m not reading the story it’s like the story is coming alive and I’m being moved. My emotions kind of – it, it hits me more, the Word hits me more. It’s like he’s drawing me close. It’s always a very positive thing, never condemning. During the week I’m so busy and I don’t have that time just to be still before God and let him come and talk to me. All the other voices crowd in, you know. On the weekend – it sounds so stupid, but when you have that freedom to not worry about time and to be open and relaxed – it’s like I feel soothed, and God comes and he’s like ‘you’re fine just the way you are, I love you’. You know. ‘Alive’ seemed to mix together interaction, openness, mutual emotional responsiveness, relationship, and love. Above all, it represented the relationship as feeling real. The human is responding to something external, the invisible other is responding to the human, and the back and forth felt natural, unforced, and real. But note also how particular it is – how the relationship, in this case, is shaped by the biblical texts this woman reads, the ways she reads them, the things other people have said, her own experience of human relationships, and her specific history of interacting with this invisible spirit. She has a sense of who this spirit is and whom she wants to be in relationship with it.

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I want to suggest that the moral commitments we associate with faith are best understood as the consequence of being in this relationship, rather than as propositional commitments assessed as true or false in themselves. Secular liberals sometimes look at a politically conservative evangelical Christian and do not see a moral view. They see a cognitive mistake. It is a question I hear again and again when I speak to secular audiences in universities. My listeners do not understand how someone who follows Jesus could deny the compassionate care for poor people they see at the heart of government care. To my way of thinking, that is the wrong question. * The radical innovation of the evangelical Christianity that emerged after the tumult of the 1960s lies in the claim that Jesus is a person – not only historically, but now – and that he has a personal relationship with you in particular. This Jesus thinks, he feels, he loves, he weeps, and he gets angry, just the way he did in Palestine. You can ask him what shirt you should wear and what shampoo to buy. He’s alive, and he wants to have the kind of friendship with you that you have with your best friend, only better. These days this is the way most evangelical Christians talk about God (the word ‘God’ is often used interchangeably with ‘Jesus’ in this context); they have done so particularly since the new more charismatic evangelical Christianity emerged after 1965. This way of thinking about God profoundly changes the way the believer believes. If God is a person, what some priest or pastor says about God does not really matter. You can ask him yourself. Churches, priests, even apostles become somewhat superfluous. As one pastor told me, this living, breathing Jesus is ‘a compelling figure. He pisses me off. I don’t agree with him. His teaching on divorce and marriage seems excessively strict. But he’s messy. Complicated. He was a person. He was not flat‘. That raises as many questions as answers. In the Gospels, Jesus says, ‘Follow me’. But he does not say how. The Gospels are a patchwork of anecdote and sayings, retold in different ways by authors who seem to have been writing to different audiences. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells those who recognize him not to tell anyone. In the Gospel of John, they are to proclaim him. He protects a prostitute from being stoned but then curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit, even though it is not the season, and the poor tree withers and dies. His parables often make little sense and his followers understand them even less often. At one point, his parents even behave as if he has lost his mind. Again and again, Jesus seems to look out of the text directly at the reader and ask: ‘who do you say I am?’. This is, arguably, the central question of Christianity. When someone discovers Jesus in an evangelical church, that person comes to him in the wake of 2,000 years of interpretation and exegesis. It would be naı¨ve to imagine that new converts truly grasp Jesus in a fresh and immediate

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way – and discover, by means of prayer and immersion in the scripture, who he is. But that seems to be what it feels like for many newcomers to charismatic evangelical Christian churches – and even for those who grow up in the church and discover Jesus all over on their own, sometimes again and again. When the evangelicals I came to know talk about Jesus (or God), they explain how hard it was in the beginning, when they could barely recognize what God was saying to them. Eventually they came to view him as like an imaginary friend who was also real. They took God to be represented in human imagination as shaped through their reading of the Bible and their interactions with the church and with each other. They assumed that God was beyond human representation, but that God wanted to interact with them through the way their limited minds could understand him. They always had a sophisticated awareness that what they were imputing to God might not be God after all, but their own fickle thoughts. This has become the way almost all modern evangelicals talk about faith – as a discovery process in which you are always trying to understand who God is, and what He wants from you in particular. This is the language of faith that I heard from person after person, in book after book, in the ten years I spent researching evangelical Christianity. I did my work in the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which I take to exemplify the shift in American Christianity in the post-1960s era. There are of course many different kinds of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. Some emphasize specific behaviours – rules – more than others. But the talk of a personal relationship with Jesus and a personal walk with God is exceedingly common and found in a very wide variety of literatures, churches, and sermons, and that relationship imposes the need to figure out who you are in the relationship. This is the fundamental attitude of this faith in its many permutations. As a result, evangelical Christians are always imagining themselves as who God wants them to be, rather than who they are. Faith becomes a matter of aspiration, not acceptance. The person you can be and should be is always emerging from the person that you are. It is a very different perspective than the one which emerges out of secular identity politics, where people are assumed to have traits (race, gender, sexual orientation) that define who they are. That is why to many evangelicals, then, left-leaning politics feel whiney and weak. They seem too tolerant of human limitations. I remember a woman we can call Betsy, a sixty-something-year-old middle-class woman in Orange County, California, who in her teens became a leftist hippie protester and then a hippie Christian during the Vietnam war and, soon after that, a middle-class evangelical church-goer. Once she settled into her church, what mainly troubled her about Democrats was their sense that people needed help from the government because they could not make it on their own. ‘God intends us to work’, she told me. What she once thought of as rights – food, shelter, medical care – she now

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considered handouts. And she chastised the countercultural moocher she had been. ‘Back in the hippie days, we were all entitled. We all felt that. I think we all grow out of that. Hopefully.’ You could call this naı¨ve individualism. You could also tell the story differently – young people swept to the political right by conservative pastors who took control. But it is important to recognize that from Betsy’s perspective, it is a commitment to living a life in which the person you can be and should be is always emerging from the person that you are. Evangelicals call this ‘growing in God’. They talk not so much about believing in God as if God were a yes/no proposition, but about walking with God. They ask each other where they are ‘on their walk’, by which they mean: are you becoming more confident about what God wants of you and are you becoming more like the person he wants you to be? To people like Betsy, what really matters in this relationship with God is responsibility – and in this view of the world, the prototype for sin is addiction. That is not new. Augustine thought that addiction was the prototype of sin, too. But Augustine was describing the human condition of frailty, and the difficulty of doing what we know we should: ‘I was held back not by the fetters put on me by someone else, but by the iron bondage of my own will’ (1963: 158). In contemporary American evangelicalism, sin is modelled much more directly on substance abuse. ‘We are all addicts!’ roared a leader at a conference I attended. He strode back and forth on the stage, pummelling the air with his fist, insisting that we turned to addiction to fill the emptiness inside, to deal with the loneliness, to cope with our disappointing jobs and marriages. For Betsy, then, ‘dependence’ is an alarming word. ‘I am all for those kinds of government programs that help people in the interim’, she said. ‘It’s when we become dependent on them – that’s where we cross the line.’ Betsy believes in social justice. She believes that maturing in faith means accepting human limitations and acknowledging our need. But she has a near-visceral flinch at the idea of people depending upon help, like a drug. And the culprits – the pushers, you might say – are government, unions, Democrats, all of them dispensing the kind of aid that ultimately, in her view, destroys the recipient. ‘I think welfare was good when it started’, she tells me. ‘I think unions were good when they started. But I think they have just gone crazy. And now, we’ve created monsters. And I feel like the Democrats would just keep feeding these monsters.’ I understand that many readers will feel a visceral flinch of their own at these words, but an anthropological approach to morality cannot start with the assumption that secular liberals hold the only correct moral positions. ‘As we take handouts’, Betsy explained to me, ‘We’re stunting someone’s growth. And that keeps them from progressing forward, being what they can be, what they want to be, what they were meant to be.’

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When evangelicals vote, they think about what kind of person they are trying to become in the future. They subscribe to at least a vague notion of human perfectibility, as long as the effort is undertaken with God’s help. From this perspective, the problem with government is that it steps in when people fall short, and stops them from being the people God wants them to be. The government does not expect from them that they can change – drop the addiction, get an education, hold a job. To someone like Betsy, life is all about the struggle to change. ‘I still battle with wanting to do it my way’, she tells me. ‘That’s a daily struggle. You know? I always think I have a better idea than God.’ * This is scarcely the only way to be in relationship with God, but that people are in such a relationship emerges repeatedly from the work of those who write about God from a background of faith. In that ethnographic work, one sees again and again that what counts for people is not so much abstract belief but the feeling of relating to that God. Robert Orsi sets out a theory of presence which is meant to remind Protestant readers that their emphasis on belief is a sectarian obsession. Now an eminent professor of religious studies at Northwestern, Orsi spent his childhood in the Italian American Catholic working-class north Bronx. In college he discovered the sober academic arguments that explained the way religion arose from social needs and constructed the way people saw the world. He found these arguments to be revelatory, but untrue to his past. In his childhood, Jesus and Mary and the saints were real – and to be a Catholic was to relate to them. When people got mad at St Jude for not answering their prayers, they threw him into the back of the car so he could think about what he had done. ‘There is the numinous, upside down on the floor of an old Chevy!’ (2016: 98). To Orsi, the reality of God is a feeling, not a belief. He insists, again and again, that presence is simply there: that to understand the ‘abundant life’ of a Catholic, you must understand how the more-than-ordinary is simply present in some objects and some people. And yet what he describes are relationships. People do not attribute presence to just anything. Presence comes from a particular source – the sacred water, the holy dirt. Presence does not inhabit an arbitrary old tin can. The pilgrims who went to see the Marian apparitions in Knock, County Mayo, Ireland went not only to be in their presence but also to see that presence interacting. ‘These men and women went to observe the relationship between the Blessed Mother and the ones seeing and listening to her and responding’ (Orsi 2016: 49). The woman dying of leukaemia wants the holy dirt in her hand, or at least in her line of sight, as the doctors do the bone marrow transplant. For Catholics, real presence involves material stuff – not the ‘empty simulacrum of the Protestant holy’. Catholic visitors to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem prostrate themselves on the marble slab on which Jesus’s body was

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supposedly washed, emptying out on it their Holy Land icons so that these can be blessed by the stone. The church is covered with gold-plated icons, silver-plated statues, colonies of shiny metal lamps, and flickering candles. Protestants have found the dark church displeasing. In the nineteenth century General Gordon decided that Jesus would have been buried in a light and airy garden outside the city (Frantzman and Kark 2008). In a faith in which God becomes real in his material presence, the relationship may be corporate and public. Jesus in Their Wombs is an account of young postulants at a Mexican convent (postulants are nuns before their vows). Rebecca Lester argues that those who successfully become nuns learn to create and continually recreate a sense of self in relationship with God, and to carry God internally as a self-object who loves, cares, and attends always. They enact these changes in public acts of penance. It is a Catholic story: God is more judgemental, sin is more important, the corporate Church is more emphasized than in the evangelical setting. The postulants come to the convent restless and unsettled. The community around them teaches them to pay attention to the presence of God in their lives, to think of him always, and to evaluate themselves in response to God. Their bodies become what Lester calls the portal of recognition, the instruments through which the postulant experiences God experiencing her. These postulants are seeking out the ways in which they feel ‘broken’ – ways in which they are unhappy, ineffective, inattentive, or, as they put it, distant from God. Then they pray and seek to be aware of God and, gradually, God comes to feel present to them once again. They experience that in deep identification with the convent group. Lester argues that this process also makes them feel Mexican: that the sheer fact of remaking self in relation to a corporate understanding of what God wants shapes their sense of citizenship. They are not consciously, deliberately choosing to be nationalists. It is more that the way they grow in relationship with God leads them to experience their social world that way. ‘They learn to recognize themselves as authentically “Mexican” in a process parallel to (and indeed inseparable from) that of recognizing themselves as women called to God’ (2005: 272). That the relationship with the spirit guides the sense of who the human should be is of course at the heart of shamanic and possession practices. Often in these practices there are no grand ethical ambitions. At least, such ambitions are not at the centre of the ethnographies, which tend to be focussed more on how humans recognize the presence of spirits, become confident that the spirit is there, and then shape themselves into the person with whom the spirit wants to interact. The ethnographies do make it clear that the relationship with the spirit alters the purpose of the human’s life: what the human sees as wrong, what needs fixing, what the human should do to create the change – and that this in turn shapes who the spirit becomes. Michael Lambek’s first book, Human Spirits, makes clear that these human–spirit relationships shape an ethics, although ethics would not emerge as an articulated concern for Lambek until later

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in his career (Lambek 2015; Victor and Lambek, Chapter 18 of this volume). Human Spirits is an account of spirit possession practices in Mayotte, an island off the coast of Madagascar. The bulk of the book is about how spirits are recognized, how the relationship with the spirit is established and maintained, and what that relationship enables the human to do. The spirit is often badly behaved, embarrassing its human host. But the human must placate the spirit, learn to communicate, and carry out the spirit’s demands – and when it works, the spirit becomes a master or teacher. At the same time, the amorality of the spirit places the responsibility on the human to explain what right behaviour is. ‘The spirit’s behavior forces the close kin to take a stand, to demonstrate the virtues of solidarity’ (1981: 105). This brute fact expresses and shapes the fundamental sense of the moral in that social world – that the spirits are not inherently good. The best humans can do is to manage their relationships in public. ‘Because of self-interest, the people with whom one engages in social relationships can never be trusted absolutely, yet, without regular and well-established relationships, they could never be trusted at all’ (1981: 106). The Yanomani shaman David Kopenawa gives an account of spirits as more reliable in The Falling Sky, the product of his collaboration with the ethnographer Bruce Albert. Kopenawa is clear that even though the spirits are not invisible in quite the same way as spirit is invisible in Judaism or Christianity, the shaman must still learn to see to them. ‘To see them, we must drink the yakoana for a long time and have the elders open their paths for us’ (2013: 56). It is not possible to believe in spirits automatically, he says. ‘As children, we gradually start to think straight. We realize that the xapiri [spirits] really exist and that the elders’ words are true. Little by little, we understand that the shamans do not behave as ghosts [nonhumans] without a reason’ (2013: 45). Kopenawa describes becoming a shaman as ‘becoming other’ and animals as human-like, laughing at the humans they see in the forest. The animals seem like humans and to the animals, the humans can seem other. ‘Though we eat animals, we also know that they are ancestors turned game. They are inhabitants of the forest as much as we are!’ (2013: 61). But Kopenawa does treat the human experience of this shift as a state of mind: This is how it goes. The young people start by losing consciousness because they have been tracking game in the forest for so long. They feel very weak and little by little they become ghosts. The animals they approach stare at them and start laughing like human beings. Those they arrow whimper in pain. The trees call to them and the leaves touch them like hands. Then the women of the waters, taking advantage of their weakness, call them and take their image away to their home and keep them there a long time. These girls keep them stretched out in their hammocks. They wrap their arms around their

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shoulders to make them oblivious. They laugh at them when they ask them questions and never answer. Later, when the young men finally succeed in leaving them to go home, the girls will follow them to their own houses. They will hide at the back of the hearth and remain behind them a little longer. Then, after a while, the young men will ask their elders to make them drink the yakoana. (2013: 47–8) The experiences are identified as real but dream-like. They take place in private experiential space. That space is clearly exquisitely structured by social expectation – but it is private nonetheless (2013: 61, 47–8). Kopenawa decided to become a shaman because of his early ability to see the spirits. Since I was a little boy, I never stopped seeing the xapiri, even without knowing who they were. It is only much later, once I had become an adult, that I presented my nose to the elders so they could give me their spirits. I came to want that all by myself. I thought it would be beautiful to really see things as shamans do and so, little by little, I fell in love with the xapiri. (2013: 48) He reports that he has odd experiences when hunting which he interprets as an attack by the spirits of white-lipped peccaries. He is hunting for peccaries; they run towards him and he flees, but falls, and miraculously, they jump over him without hurting him. ‘I think it was then that their images attacked me. Yet I did not notice anything at the time’ (2013: 48). When he eats their meat, he falls ill. He wakes at night to vomit – and things look different. ‘Then I thought, “The peccaries are real ancestors!”’ (2013: 48). His account of his own initiation is an account of events that no one else can see and relationships which are his alone. For sure, his stepfather – and perhaps others – seem to talk him through his experience as he drinks his first yakoana, which he does for days on end, shaking in his hammock. But the stories he tells are his own, which no one else can see: of his body dying and being reborn, of the spirits caring for him and carrying him to the back of the sky, of not being able to see them at first, even with the hallucinogens, and of his joy when, finally, he does. These inner representations shape the person he wants to be, the world he wants to live in. He cannot sustain their reality without practice, and he does not always live up to the person the xapiri want him to be. The spirits make him bold. Kopenawa becomes one of the most effective speakers of his community. He remembers the lives lost when the white people first came and spread disease among his people. He began to travel, first in Brazil, then in Europe, and finally in the United States, to denounce the assaults on his people and the destruction of the rainforest. He was shy

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when he began. He spoke because he felt that the spirits spoke through him, although he was not possessed. He says what they want him to say. ‘It is these spirits’ words that I heard. It is not just my own thought’ (2013: 314). The spirits make him practise how to speak to political opponents. Late at night, he has these conversations. Then he speaks words he wants to be heard. All these words have accumulated in me since I have known the white people. Yet today I am no longer satisfied with keeping them deep inside my chest, as I did when I was younger. I want them to be heard in their cites, everywhere they can be. Then maybe they will finally tell themselves: ‘It is true! Our great men have no wisdom! Let’s not allow them to destroy the forest!’. (2013: 315) In modern urban Western magic, there is yet a different moral story. When I studied modern practitioners of witchcraft and magic (often described as neo-paganism) in London in the 1980s, I noticed that their god relationships are plural (Luhrmann 1989). There is, notionally, an idea of a common spirit-substrate – an elephant, as it were, beneath the many gods and goddesses who appear in this loose federation of spiritual practices. People talk about the ‘Great Goddess’, a term they use more or less the way the Jungian scholar Erich Neumann (1955) used it. The Great Goddess was nature as alive, personified in different ways that served different emotional needs. Her reality was complex. She appeared as the fat female of Willendorf, the masculine huntress of Artemis, the bloodthirsty Cerridwen with a cauldron of human bones. She was found in stories and symbols, but she did not really exist outside of them, and her diversity in representation meant that there were no moral rules that the faith demanded. Indeed, the magical creed that people recited from time to time (and was, I believe, written by Aleister Crowley) was this: do what thou wilt is the whole of the law. I used to be puzzled by the way such a loose-limbed understanding of god could be the foundation for an ethics. What I saw is that people would conduct themselves in relationship to what they decided that the goddess or god wanted from them – and because no one ever chose to become close to a god they detested, they developed a recognizable ethics. I was struck by how explicitly psychotherapeutic these relationships could be and how deliberately they used their imagination to alter their own emotional lives. In 1983–4, when I lived in London in order to participate in various groups whose members described themselves as practising magic, what I noticed most about these groups was their intense practice with the imagination. Every week people would meet together, close their eyes, and seek to imagine, with all the inner sensory vividness they could muster, narratives given to them by that evening’s leader. Here is one

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such exercise, taken from a book, The Spiral Dance (Starhawk 1979), that everyone in these circles read. Visualize a silver crescent moon, curving to the right. She is the power of beginning, of growth and generation. She is wild and untamed, like ideas and plans before they are tempered by reality. She is the blank page, the unplowed field. Feel your own hidden possibilities and latent potentials; your power to begin and grow. See her as a silver-haired girl running freely through the forest under the slim moon. She is Virgin, eternally unpenetrated, belonging to no one but herself. Call her name ‘Nimue!’ and feel her power within you . . .. Visualize a round full moon. She is the mother, the power of fruition. She nourishes what the New Moon has begun. See her open arms, her full breasts, her womb burgeoning with life. Feel your own power to nurture, to give, to make manifest what is possible. She is the sexual woman: her pleasure in union is the moving force which sustains all life. Feel the power in your own pleasure, in orgasm. Her color is the red of blood, which is life. Call her name ‘Mari!’ and feel your own ability to love. Visualize a waning crescent curving to the left, surrounded by a dark sky. She is the Old Woman, the Crone who has passed menopause, the power of ending, of death. All things must end to fulfill their beginnings. The grain that was planted must be cut down. The blank page must be destroyed, for the work to be written. Life feeds on death – death leads on to life, and in that knowledge lies wisdom. The Crone is the Wise Woman, infinitely old. Feel your own age, the wisdom of evolution stored in every cell of your body. Know your own power to end, to lose as well as gain, to destroy what is stagnant and decayed. See the crone cloaked in black under the waning moon: call her name ‘Anu!’ and feel her power in your own death. (Starhawk 1979: 78–9) These practices were explicitly orientated towards working through. They were structured to help practitioners to come to terms with the parts of their lives that were most difficult, and to come to experience them as a source of creativity. They did this through practices in which practitioners re-enacted their relationships with gods and spirits in imagination again and again and again. It seemed to me that the women I met who were involved with Goddess spirituality were very involved with the third aspect of the Goddess, with Anu, the Goddess as death, underworld, and destruction. And indeed much of the literature that focusses on one aspect of the Goddess chooses that particular aspect. The hag is the aspect of the Goddess about which people spoke with the greatest awe. They spoke of being initiated through her, of reaching the ‘deepest’, ‘truest’ aspect of themselves through her; they spoke with scorn of people who thought of the Goddess as ‘sweetness and light’. The dark Goddess, the Crone, eats and destroys. She is the

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madness of the raging tiger, the mother bear’s fury, Kali child-eater and Clytemnestra man-slayer, Medea, the Furies and the witches on their blasted heath. She is darkness and despair. When I was in London a dogeared book on the Goddess was passed from woman to woman within this network. Called Descent to the Goddess (Perera 1981), influenced by Jung and by feminism, it focussed on the most ancient of Persephone tales, the Sumerian myth of Ereshkigaal and Inanna written on clay tablets in the third millennium BC. In the Sumerian poem Inanna decides to go into the underworld. Ereshkigaal, Queen of the Great Below, becomes furious. She insists that the upper-world goddess be brought ‘naked and bowed low’, as the Sumerians were laid in the grave. Ereshkigaal then kills Inanna and hangs her corpse on a peg, where it turns green and rots. Inanna will return, but her ordeal has been intense. The women I knew in these groups loved this story. They spoke to me about the myth as the experience of being torn apart; they spoke of the experience of feeling the good girl within them – the Inanna-self – destroyed by their own Ereshkigaal-like raging anger and lust. They explained the experience of the myth as the experience of menstrual cramps so bad they could not think, of suicidal despair, of abortions, of madness, of losing jobs and lovers, of discovering their hatred of their mothers, their culture, their selves. They explained that they acted out the myth in their lives and that when they did so, their lives changed. One woman told me that she found herself counting rice grains on the kitchen table, losing her jewellery, rotting like meat – all stories from the myth – and that when this happened, she became pregnant, when previously she had failed. I met Frances in one of these groups. She had come to magic in a kind of feminist awakening in her twenties. She had a medievalist’s dream job in manuscript restoration, but she was frustrated with herself. She thought herself too unassertive, too compliant, and she chafed at the person she felt she had become in a world dominated by men. As an adolescent she had been intensely religious. She left Christianity, she said, because she could not tolerate a divine that made her own sexuality seem ‘filthy’. Years later she began to read about feminist spirituality and eventually found her way to the circles of people who called themselves magicians and witches. She sought the divine, but she also sought transformation. She wanted to be different. We spoke one evening of the dark Goddess: I think that the Inanna-Ereshkigaal thing is very important. It’s a sort of shamanistic experience that each woman undergoes. If you look at it in psychoanalytical terms she sheds all her ego defenses, takes all of those trappings and, you know, peels the onion down to the core. And in the core one encounters a sort of dark mirror, which is like a dark sister, and this image of Inanna hanging on a peg, and rotting, is a peeling off of the outer trapping, that we have been conditioned to accept. If you rot like meat you lose everything. And it’s so shamanistic, isn’t it?

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You’re sitting inside your own skeleton, your flesh rotting, everything. You have a core experience. And after that there’s rebirth, and you go up. And you’re given everything back, your clothes, your jewels, and then you go up, and she becomes Queen of Heaven. You must rot like meat and peel the onion to the core. We live in a world, Frances argued, in which women learn to mask their essential natures. Women learn to be nice, to be good: not to show despair or lust or anger. Yet these feelings are real, she said, and we hide them below layers of social trappings. The dark Goddess brings up pain, Frances said, but it is the pain of encountering yourself, not the world; or at least encountering that which the world has done to you. It is, Adrienne Rich-like, a diving into the deep of your internal self. And that is what she did. Frances had set aside one of the two rooms of her flat as a shrine (her term) to the Goddess. Some sixty Goddess statuettes and pictures ranged the walls, each wall designated for a season and for the Goddess of that time: Nepthys, Hecate, Persephone for winter, Isis and Aphrodite for summer. Tall, hand-painted murals of Egyptian deities dominated the room. Frances would perform rituals in the room, and meditate in it. She chose to live among images of the Goddess because, she said, they enabled her to reach out for and remember certain ways of experiencing. We don’t have words for it, and we fumble along trying to articulate it, and it comes out sounding weird . . .. [The images are] a language, a language for feeling, and a way of working through the feeling with a landscape that’s got physical marking points in it if you like, signposts, of the Goddess, that have different feeling states and emotional tones to them. When I knew her, the goddess she loved most was Sekhmet, the lion-headed Egyptian goddess associated with fire. Once I was present at a ritual she wrote about Sekhmet. She led participants (in their imaginations) through a hall of fire to face a terrifying but beautiful lion surrounded by flames. In her own practice she did this again, and again, and again. * When we focus on religion as something people do, rather than on what they believe, we think about ethics differently. Ethics becomes a way of being in the world with others, a commitment to a kind of life, rather than a list of abstract moral principles. I take this to be the implication of James Laidlaw’s (2014) reflections on the way that anthropological understanding – our awareness of cultural variation – teaches us to think about ethics. From his perspective, ethics becomes the way freedom unfolds within a specific social world, in relation to a context and within its constraints. This is not a story of moral principles. At least, his theory lays out no account like (for example) Nussbaum’s list of the ten basic human rights

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(Nussbaum 2011; see Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). Instead, we see a story of who people aim to be when the Yukaghir hunt in Siberia and the Wari’ eat their dead in the Amazon. Laidlaw insists that anthropologists seek to understand the experience of freedom from within. That is what gives the text its almost religious quality: The claim here instead is that anthropological thought, in particular the exercise of the ethnographic imagination, can be a mode of reflective self-formation, a form of spiritual exercise. Yet there is no god, no ritual, no prescription: Since [anthropological thought] necessarily involves not only ironic detachment tempering whatever degree of understanding ‘from the inside’ we are able to achieve, but also necessarily a certain suspension of and detachment from one’s own knowledge and standpoint, it is an intrinsically skeptical one. (2014: 224) The insistence that anthropology teaches us not about principles but about how to look at people in relationship to the principles they choose resonates with the account I have given here of faith. Small acts of attending create a world with which we are in relationship, and acting in that relationship changes us in turn. This emphasis on a relationship with god and spirit, rather than on belief in gods and spirits, should shift the way anthropologists think about god. Let me step back. Anthropology has always been about radical otherness. The discipline is about difference: we study what are not our customs, not our morals, not our beliefs. The field was born in the discovery that the expectations we took to be universal were merely local. As Ruth Benedict (1934) so compellingly put it, ‘normal’ is never absolute but always relative to some group’s understanding of what is good. Back in the beginning, anthropologists set out to find societies that upended their own expectations about marrying, parenting, inheriting, acquiring, judging, ruling, and believing. Behind those goals was always – at least in the beginning – the idea that understanding these differences might lead us to a better appreciation of our own expectations, and possibly give us the ability to change them. Benedict’s explicit aim in her famous essay on normal and abnormal was to redeem those deemed unregenerate in her own middleclass American world. ‘It does not matter what kind of “abnormality” we choose for illustration’, she wrote, ‘those which indicate extreme instability, or those which are more in the nature of character traits like sadism or delusions of grandeur or of persecution; there are well-described cultures in which these abnormals function at ease and with honor, and apparently without danger or difficulty to the society’ (1934: 60). Of course, it was never really the case that anthropologists took what they learned about the gods of others back home to change their own societies, even though many of the most successful anthropologists of

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religion – E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner – were people of faith, as Timothy Larsen points out in his remarkable book The Slain God (2014). Most of these anthropologists did not become Catholics (as all of them were) because of their time in the field. Even EvansPritchard’s conversion has an uneasy relationship to his experience of the supernatural in the field, and if his encounters with the witchcraft-sensitive Azande and cucumber-sacrificing Nuer motivated his turn towards faith, the faith he chose was a conventional one back home. While different mores about marriage and medicine and money seem to have led anthropologists to argue for new and unconventional ways of proceeding in their home world (think of Benedict’s and Mead’s arguments about sex and gender, Victor Turner’s discovery of the use of theatre in healing, Marshall Sahlins’s account of abundance in egalitarianism), very few anthropologists have argued (in print) that their experience in the field led them to imagine the supernatural at home in new ways. (Edith Turner (1994) and Paul Stoller (Stoller and Olkes 1989) are famous counterexamples; Janet McIntosh’s (2004) essay on coming close to the brink and stepping back captures the more common experience, although in her case exceptionally well.) In fact, most anthropologists have insisted that God, or the gods, cannot be understood anthropologically except through an explicit decision to disavow the idea that such beliefs are true. Meyer Fortes captures this well: Being in part actors in their own religious systems, theologians must believe. Whereas anthropologists . . . cannot but be agnostic if they want to achieve objectivity . . . and objectivity . . . is, surely, a sine qua non for all anthropological scholarship. (1980: vii) While all anthropologists study some society’s norms of marrying, parenting, buying, ruling, and so forth, from within a subject position they already occupy – from within a largely heteronormative, binarily gendered, democratic, neoliberal social world – they often insist, like Fortes, that they cannot study religion from a subject position of faith. They acknowledge and seek to transcend the limits of heteronormativity, gender binarism, and democratic neoliberalism, and often write from normviolating roles themselves. Anthropologists who write about gender often hope to change what their home audience thinks about gender – to make their home society more accepting of a divergent point of view. But many anthropologists think one cannot study Tallensi faith (for example) as a deeply religious American Christian. They rarely write about a Tallensi experience of God with the idea that they will make their home audience more like the Tallensi, although to be sure some interesting contributions to a post-secular anthropology are emerging (e.g. Furani 2019; Yang 2020). We call this methodological atheism, and we more or less demand it. Yet god is the most radically other of radical otherness. One might think that exploring this otherness might be the greatest challenge any

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anthropologist could bring to the everyday expectations of the world back home. I think anthropologists have not done so because they are so caught up in questions about belief, despite the various critiques of the concept (e.g. Needham 1972). The bulk of anthropological attention to god has focussed on why people believe. That question was at the heart of the rationality debate in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Wilson 1970; Hollis and Lukes 1982). It has also been central, more recently, to what has been called the ‘ontological turn’. The ontological turn might seem to be the place anthropologists have risen to this challenge of grasping radical otherness. The early ontological writings certainly seemed as if they would. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), Morten Pedersen (2011), and Martin Holbraad (2012) wrote fiery texts about the ways that most anthropologists examined the belief commitments of people like those in Amazonia, Siberia, and Cuba. These ontologists argued that most anthropologists treated such beliefs with scorn. They argued that most anthropological observers presumed that such beliefs must be wrong, or that we needed to provide an account of why people held false understandings – and that view, the ontologists argued, was driven by deep-seated colonialist impulses or a kind of scientific imperialism. The point of the ontological turn was to insist that we should abandon these presumptions and decolonize anthropological thought. Here is Viveiros de Castro: ‘Anthropologists must allow that “visions” are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively; not world views, but worlds of vision’ (2011: 133). But these ontological anthropologists did not shift the field from its obsession with why people believe. That one doubted that Viveiros de Castro himself believed that women can become jaguars (to borrow the famous example) only made the puzzle of belief more central. Neither Martin Holbraad nor Morten Pedersen has argued for an ontological understanding of his own world that seems different from the ones they held before setting out to do fieldwork. Instead, in the recent (and admirably clear) summary of their position, they both appear to have pulled back from the claim that these other beliefs are veridical accounts of reality. To the extent that Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) accept these non-European belief commitments (the woman became a jaguar), they simply insist that these beliefs are veridical to others – and that, as James Laidlaw (2012) so articulately points out, leads us not into ontological confrontation but into epistemological relativism, the position that anthropologists have always held. Belief remains the crucial issue. In ‘Is There a Place for Faith in Anthropology?’, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr (2018) make a different intellectual move. They focus on moments that are intellectually inexplicable from within an anthropologist’s secular worldview, and yet common in the lives of many fieldworkers. These are moments often described as dramatic spiritual experiences. Willerslev and Suhr draw from these moments a disciplinary epistemology of uncertainty and openness. They take the lesson that these events are the

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way that anthropological insights are made – that it is the shock of such moments that leads people trained into a certain worldview to break open into a different way of seeing. Anthropology grows, they say, with the ability to doubt what one knows, and through doubt, to change what one imagines. ‘This personal commitment to existential transformation of the self is as essential to the anthropological project as it was to Socrates’ (2018: 73). Here Willerslev and Suhr stop. They draw our attention to Le´vi-Strauss’s decidedly peculiar assertion (Le´vi-Strauss 1970: 12) that the myths he described wrote themselves through him and insist that anthropological knowledge arises through what Kirsten Hastrup (2010) called ‘raw moments’ – events that break through cognitive barriers of culturally trained expectation with explosive force. I think we should be making an even stronger claim. To my mind, the powerful insight that arises out of the encounter with an alien god – alien to the anthropologist, that is – is that people come to relate differently to those representations. We secular observers focus on the concept of ‘god’ as a claim to a kind of stuffness – a real immateriality, a nature beyond ordinary nature (a supernature); perhaps, as George Eliot put it, the sound on the other side of silence. A mistaken belief. We often miss the important social fact that those of faith also take god to be radically other, too, and as a result are often more committed to moral purpose than to supernatural reality. They want to become different kinds of agents. As an observer of the faithful, I want to point out that the most fundamental observation about faith is not that divine stuff exists, but that moral purpose in the face of uncertainty will change the world as we know it. The question is what direction we anthropologists might take from the observation. Faith is not really about belief. Faith is about holding certain commitments front and centre in one’s understanding of reality even when the empirical facts seem to contradict them. That is why faith takes effort and why faith changes the faithful. The effort one makes to maintain the frame is a constant reminder of who one wants to become, the change one seeks to make. It is not belief as a proposition that counts. It is not adding a new piece of mental furniture to one’s mind. It is about making the commitment to participate in the frame in which the god is real, and acting in relationship to that god as someone in that frame should act. That is why it matters that people come to experience gods as responding, and why it should matter to anthropologists how people learn to experience that response. All the ways that gods and spirits become real – the use of narrative mechanisms, proclivity and practice, prayer and ritual, spiritual experience – they matter as ways of keeping one in the frame, as the person one is in relationship to the gods. What I see when I observe the efforts people go to in order to experience their god as real are efforts to be the kind of person who would

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appropriately be with such a god – the person they should be if they really were responding to that god. As people hold their Shabbat dinner, or listen to the myths of the great heroes, or read their Bible in search of the ways that God is talking to them, what they are seeking is to be the person who acts as a good Jew, a good Greek, and a good Christian. As they do these things, they are practising what it is to be such a person again and again in response to such a god. That is the true force of calling faith a frame, and comparing it to play, albeit serious play. People of faith commit themselves to play within the frame. And just as the frame is not the world as it is, those who enter the frame as players seek to be better than the people they are on the outside. Roy Shafer (1983) wrote of therapists as having ‘second selves’. The therapist at home may be a selfish, whining bore. But in the therapeutic frame, that person becomes better than they are: selfabnegating, self-constrained, focussed on the other person who has come to seek their help. Whether or not god and spirits are real – whatever we mean by that – those who seek to make them real are practising to hold on to the role they assume when they act as if those gods and spirits are indeed real and are responding to them. Real-making changes the person, whatever it does to gods and spirits. This is why the relationship with the radical otherness of divinity should be central to anthropology, because it encourages the anthropologist to imagine the possibility of a renewed ethics. I take this to be the main argument that Joel Robbins makes in his answer to the question of what anthropology can learn from theology (Robbins 2006, 2020). There are two standard answers to that question, he tells us. One is to explore the role of theological concepts in our basic anthropological assumptions, as Webb Keane (2013) has done by analysing the role of Protestant ideas in anthropological ideas about agency. The other is to explore possible links between theological ideas that are embedded in various Christian traditions and the emergence of Christian concepts out of the societies that gave rise to them, the way Susan Harding (2000) points out that fundamentalism only makes sense within a particular view of language. The third and more powerful way Robbins thinks that anthropology can learn from theology is through envisioning a way to use cultural difference to make meaningful change in the anthropologist’s own world. These days, he suggests, we are remarkably cynical about learning from others about how to lead our lives. We tend not to truly value other ways of being. ‘The tropics as we portray them, wherever they happen to be, have never been so triste and devoid of ontological otherness as they are right now.’ We are remarkably morose in our diagnoses of the essential problems in human lives. ‘We have more and more resigned ourselves simply to serve as witnesses to the horror of the world’ (2006: 292). At the minimum, in anthropology, we should study how humans make their god feel real to them. What do we do with that? One invitation is to use our understanding of these processes to explore how we might relate to

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a transcendent good, whatever that means, and to help others to reimagine their moral purpose. That is an ambitious goal. Another is to offer what we can see about the way that small choices change those who perform them. James Laidlaw compares anthropological understanding to a kind of spiritual practice. Anthropology is an observing of how people do things and how the doing changes them – and as anthropologists we make our own choices about how to act in small ways in the world. At the heart of the idea of a god – any important god, in any tradition – lies the human experience of hope. At the centre of any faith are small practices – rituals, if you will – that change people step by step, so that the world they desire feels more real. Anthropology offers its readers the opportunity to understand how the little things we do together can change us positively. We do not always have to witness the injustices of the world, as important as they are. The anthropological problem with god is that we treat the belief in the supernatural stuff as the heart of the matter. It is not. Far more central is the concept of a relationship with radical otherness and the sense that moral purpose can change the world as it is into the world as it should be. I am not suggesting that we become people of faith. I am suggesting that if anthropologists took our own uncertainty about what is real seriously – as Willerslev and Suhr (2018) suggest that we must – our confrontation with radical otherness would alter our understanding of the possible, our sense of moral purpose, and our capacity to offer hope. That is the real ontological challenge.

References Augustine. 1963. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. New York: Penguin. Benedict, Ruth. 1934. ‘Anthropology and the Abnormal’. The Journal of General Psychology, 10(1): 59–82. Fortes, Meyer. 1980. ‘Preface: Anthropologists and Theologians – Common Interests and Divergent Approaches’, in M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes (eds.), Sacrifice. London: Academic Press for the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland: v–xix. Frantzman, Seth and Ruth Kark. 2008. ‘General Gordon, the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Origins of “Gordon’s Calvary” in the Holy Land’. Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 140: 1–18. Furani, Khaled. 2019. Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harding, Susan 2000. The Book of Jerry Falwell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hastrup, Kirsten. 2010. ‘Emotional Topographies: The Sense of Place in the North’, in James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer (eds.), Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 191–211.

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Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollis, Martin and Steven Lukes, eds. 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Keane, Webb. 2013. ‘Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropological Knowledge’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45: 222–48. Kopenawa, David. 2013. The Human Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2012. ‘Ontologically Challenged’. Anthropology of This Century, 4. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 1981. Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Larsen, Thomas. 2014. The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lester, Rebecca J. 2005. Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent. Berkeley: University of California Press. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude. 1970 [1964]. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume 1. London: Jonathan Cape. Luhrmann, T. M. 1989. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Knopf. McIntosh, Janet. 2004. ‘Maxwell’s Demons’. Anthropology and Humanism, 29 (1): 63–77. Merton, Thomas 1965. The Way of Chuang Tzu. New York: Unwin Books. 1968. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. New York: New Directions Publishing. 1999 [1948]. The Seven Storey Mountain. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. Neumann, Erich. 1955. The Great Mother. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2011. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Orsi, Robert. 2016. A History of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pedersen, M. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Perera, Sylvia Brinton. 1981. Descent to Goddess. New York: Inner City Books.

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Robbins, Joel. 2006. ‘Anthropology and Theology: An Awkward Relationship?’ Anthropology Quarterly, 79(2): 285–94. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Slot: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–62. 2020. Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shafer, Roy. 1983. The Analytic Attitude. London: Routledge. Soller, Paul and Cheryl Olkes. 1989. In Sorcery’s Shadow. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Starhalk. 1979. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco, CA: Harper Row. Turner, Edith. 1994. ‘A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia’, in David Young and Jean-Guy Goulet (eds.), Being Changed. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview: 71–98. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4: 469–88. 2011. ‘Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths’. Common Knowledge, 17(1): 128–45. Willerslev, Rane and Christian Suhr. 2018. ‘Is There a Place for Faith in Anthropology? Religion, Reason, and the Ethnographer’s Divine Revelation’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8(1/2): 65–78. Wills, Gary. 2019. ‘Shallow Calls to Shallow: Review of Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton’. Harpers, April. Wilson, Brian, ed. 1970. Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell. Yang, Mayfair. 2020. Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Part V

Institutional Life

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29 Modern Capitalism and Ethical Plurality Robert W. Hefner

Since it first appeared on the Western landscape more than two centuries ago, modern capitalism has given rise to a commonplace mythology that, unlike its predecessors, this socio-economic order is so all-powerful that it can either function without a supporting ethical discourse or simply create one in its own image. Modern capitalism’s transformative command is of such a magnitude, it is similarly claimed, that it abolishes the intermediary institutions through which people in prior times organized their ethical lives. ‘Amid global differences in culture, wealth, and privilege’, we hear, ‘there is a shared social evolution toward a capitalist reality that is increasingly total in its external and internal reach. Marketization is transcending its former limits as an economic system and cementing itself as the sole basis for organizing contemporary existence’ (Bloom 2017: 1). In this view, and especially under the variety of capitalist governance known as neoliberalism, ‘The political sphere, along with every other dimension of contemporary existence, is submitted to an economic rationality . . . not only is the human being configured exhaustively as homo oeconomicus, all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality’ (Brown 2003). If these prognoses are correct, to the degree that any ethical disposition survives, it will be one subservient to the disciplines and powers of the capitalist marketplace. In this essay, I suggest not just that this end-of-ethics talk is premature and hyperbolic but also that its influence has obscured three key realities that must be at the heart of any anthropological effort to understand modern capitalism and ethics. First, this perspective overlooks the fact that capitalism is and never was of a single social stripe but has always been varied in its social organizations, relation to the state, and animating ethical assemblages. Certainly, there are functional commonalities and family resemblances across the varied socio-economic orders we call capitalist, but there is also great variation, not least with regard to ethical matters. Capitalism is not a product of a unitary knowledge–power

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discourse, but is always deeply contingent and path-dependent in its politics, social organization, and associated ethical assemblages. Second, as a theoretical corrective to certain totalizing accounts, it is important to recognize that capitalism has assumed varied forms because it is everywhere ‘embedded’ in the broader socio-political and discursive fields in which it finds itself (Granovetter 1985; Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997). Capitalism’s embedding operates in two dimensions: first, in the ways through which it is integrated into the networks and rationalities of diverse states and societies; and, second, in the ways in which its values and concerns show the influence of non-market values and practices that ‘carry over’ (Simon 2014; Mittermaier 2013) from other value spheres into capitalist ethics and practice. The latter create the possibility for ‘transvaluation across divergent value domains’, like that David Henig has described with regard to the ‘Muslim moral imagination and acts of halal exchange . . . in post-war Bosnia–Herzegovina’ (Henig 2019: 225). It goes without saying that the conditioning influence moves the other way as well, from capitalism to spheres of value and practice like religion, but the inverse influence (non-market on market values) is the one that many analysts minimize or neglect. Third, and last, rather than capitalism or neoliberalism everywhere creating a homogeneous ethical landscape by bulldozing intermediary institutions and subordinating all other ‘value spheres’ (Weber 1946) to a paramount market rationality, capitalist societies have shown a remarkable tendency to generate an agonistic plurality of associations and ethico-political imaginaries. In so doing, they have at times unwittingly compounded processes of ethical reflexivity rightly seen as integral to projects of non-market flourishing and, not least of all, modern human freedom (Laidlaw 2014; cf. Cook 2016; Rogan 2017). None of this is to deny, of course, that, however varied its local forms, modern capitalism is a powerful institution. As Michel Foucault noted more than a generation ago (Foucault 2008: 242), the promoters of capitalism in its late-modern neoliberal forms do often speak of the necessity of ‘extending the economic model of supply and demand and of investmentcosts-profit so as to make it a model of social relations and of existence itself’. A key ethical consequence of such processes of economistic rationalization has been the formulation of ethical ‘assemblages’ (Ong and Collier 2005) that make market rationalities more socially effective by articulating them through various prosperity theologies and lifecoaching technologies, like those associated with certain strands of contemporary Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam (Coleman 1995, 2000; Haenni 2005; Rudnyckyj 2010; Scott 2009). However, for anthropologists interested in the study of capitalism and ethics, it is vitally important not to confuse these market-commensurable parts for the ethical whole. As Marx and Weber both recognized, the history of modern capitalism contrasts with that of its socio-economic

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predecessors in that it greatly accelerates the pace and breadth of social and ethical change; it is ceaselessly self-transforming and ethically agonistic. In different ways, too, both Marx and Weber recognized that, in their continuous upending of established tastes, status-group identities, and class hierarchies, capitalisms and the modern social orders in which they are embedded generate not merely ethical subjectivation to market rationalities, but a torrent of reflexive and critical engagement with those same socio-economic realities. This is all the more the case in today’s latemodern and neoliberal capitalisms. The latter are not just matters of bricks and mortar, or computers and information technologies; they build on an ever-evolving variety of cultural capitals and technologies of the self that, in the course of their elaboration, generate epistemological and ethical effects of a deeply unintended and capitalism-incommensurable nature. All this is to say, then, that the history of modern capitalist ethics is not a Fukuyama-like ‘end to history’ vis-a`-vis an all-powerful marketplace (Fukuyama 1992). It is a story of still highly varied organizations, value spheres, and ethical subjectivations. While some among the latter may aspire to be commensurate with the ethics and disciplines of an ostensibly individualized capitalist market, others may be less totalizing in their social ambitions or subjective effects, giving rise to ‘subjectivation practices [that] may hold multiple and/or diverse meanings’ (Cook 2016: 149). The latter may include senses of self-identity and solidarity more expansive and ethically ‘encumbered’ (Sandel 1994) than those recognized in hyper-individualized characterizations of capitalist ethics. In fact, some among this agonistic plurality of moral registers may aim to transform capitalism itself by bringing ethical ideals from domains other than the marketplace or firm into the very heart of the latter’s operations. In so doing, these heteroglossic initiatives remind us that the ethical dynamic unleashed by late-modern capitalism is not just that of material inequality or hyper-individualized rationality but new forms of association and moral argumentation about ‘deeper questions of liberty and solidarity’ (Rogan 2017: 1).

Capitalism as Ethically and Organizationally Plural Specialists of modern social theory have long understood that, however much the end-of-history view of capitalism and ethics may have captured the imagination of some analysts, this has always been just one opinion among many. Although one reading of Marx would have it that he too subscribed to this model, a more careful reading of volume I of Capital reveals that the telos that Marx saw as guiding capitalist history had as its end point, not just a fight-to-the-finish between labour and the owners of capital, but the achievement of an ethical order grounded on an Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing. Central to the latter

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achievement was household self-sufficiency and, consistent with Marx’s much-lambasted labour theory of value, workers’ self-sufficiency through full ownership of the fruits of their labour. In fact, of all of modern social theory’s early analysts of capitalism, Marx was the most ethically Aristotelian. As the Christian socialist and renowned economic historian R. H. Tawney observed (Tawney 1974: 48), Marx inherited Aristotle’s suspicion of profit-orientated exchange from Thomas Aquinas, the single most influential Christian theologian of late-medieval Europe. As Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1989: 3) have similarly observed, Marx then deepened the Aristotelian-cum-Thomasian conviction that profit-orientated exchange (as opposed to barter between households) is ‘unnatural’ and adds nothing to the value of goods. In his Marxist youth, an ethical philosopher familiar to many of today’s anthropologists of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre, sought to restore and deepen these Aristotelian currents in Marx’s economic ethics. To do so, however, MacIntyre felt compelled to put aside Marx’s pseudo-scientific philosophy of history, with its predictions of mass immiseration and capitalist collapse, and put in its place the humanist Aristotelianism of the young Marx’s philosophical writings (Blackledge and Davidson 2008; Knight 2007). Although the ghost of Marx still looms over much social theory dealing with capitalism and ethics, it is Max Weber’s work more than any other that has provided a toolbox of theoretical instruments for analysing capitalism and ethics in a cross-cultural manner. Unfortunately, however, on matters of capitalism and ethics, there have always been several Webers, the tensions among whom have sometimes been overlooked in anthropological scholarship. For analysts coming of age during America’s global ascendance in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Weber thought useful for analysing capitalism and ethics was that derived from Talcott Parsons’s structural-functionalist reading of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (see Ghosh 1994). What Parsons got right was that Weber did not claim that a Calvinist ethic of Christian predestination and worldly wealth accumulation had caused the emergence of capitalism in northwestern Europe. Instead, Weber argued, there was an ‘elective affinity’ between that religious ethic and early modern capitalism’s need for economic discipline, deferred gratification, and self-affirmation through wealth accumulation. Although he cannot be accused of cultural reductionism with regard to modern Western capitalism’s origins, then, Weber did imply that the absence of any functional equivalent to a Calvinist ethics was part of the reason that modern capitalism had not yet emerged in other parts of the modern world. Not all scholars in the post-war Weberian tradition shared this Westernexceptionalist view. Neo-Weberians like the young Robert Bellah (1957) and the equally young Clifford Geertz (1963, 1965) agreed that ethicoreligious values and subjectivation can play a pivotal role in the genesis of capitalist orders. However, distancing themselves from Weber’s

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Western-exceptionalist view, both Bellah and Geertz rejected the notion that such ethico-economic affinities were unique to the Protestant West. In his Peddlers and Princes, Geertz (1963) showed that many of the habits of hard work, deferred gratification, and capital investment that Weber bundled with the Protestant ethic were also present in the habitus of Javanese Muslim traders and Balinese Hindu merchants in Indonesia. In an uncharacteristically bold political-economic statement, Geertz went on to point out that the main reason these ethico-religious affinities had not been scaled up into sustained capitalist growth had to do with political obstacles put in place by the predatory colonial state and its post-colonial successor (cf. Geertz 1965). Robert Bellah’s (1957) analysis of the role of religious ethics and the state in Tokugawa Japan showed an even more intriguingly qualified engagement with Weber’s views on capitalism and ethics. On the one hand, like Geertz, Bellah was convinced that habits acquired in the course of actors’ ethical socialization are of great economic consequence. More intriguingly, however, Bellah emphasized that the disciplinary ethic that had supported capitalism’s emergence in Japan worked, not just by encouraging individual habits of hard work, deferred gratification, and capital accumulation but also by way of the subjectivation of a sense of collective identification with nation-making and state-led development in the face of, first, domestic dynastic struggles and, later, the looming threat of Western imperialism. The ethic operative in Meiji capitalism, then, was less singularly centred on individualistic subjectivation than it was communitarian identification with a state leading the nation forward to a prosperous and proud future. In a different Asian setting, the anthropologist Charles F. Keyes (1987) has shown that capitalism in modern Thailand has shown a similarly entangled ethical dynamic. In twentieth-century Thailand, too, state elites, citizen-making, and national pride have been as pivotal to the production of modern Thai capitalism – and a modern Thai Buddhism (Scott 2009) – as has a capitalaccumulating bourgeoisie. There is evidence of an equally mixed array of rationalities and motives at work in state capitalism in today’s China, where capitalism ‘serves state-driven goals of achieving national wealth and power (fuqiang) and rejuvenation (fuxing), goals of Chinese intellectuals, reformers, and political leaders since the late nineteenth century’ (Osburg 2013: 822). The Japanese, Thai, and contemporary Chinese examples offer basic but still useful lessons for anthropologists working on capitalism and ethics today. The most important is that real-and-existing capitalisms have varied entanglements with the state and political elites, and the ethics on which they draw may include sociocentric and national imaginaries in addition to a capital-accumulating individualism. These and other examples should also make us wary of any claim that capitalism is characterized by a unitary acquisitive ethics, one premised on (to quote Joel Robbins 2009:

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46, who invokes the image to challenge it) ‘the portrait of humans as selfishly struggling for their individual survival and aggrandizement’.

Embeddings in Two Dimensions Whereas in The Protestant Ethic Weber directed his readers’ gaze to the role of ethical subjectivity and habituation in Western capitalism’s formation, in his posthumously published Economy and Society (1978, orig. 1922) Weber placed less emphasis on the role of Calvinist Christianity than he did on an ethics of law and state protection of property rights. Although, in historical retrospect, it is clear that Weber greatly exaggerated the degree to which any ‘rational’ legal edifice was lacking in Asia, the Middle East, or other areas of the world, there is some truth to the idea that, in East Asia in particular, merchants and traders in early modern times often confronted native or colonial elites more interested in expropriating capital than in defending owners’ investments through the establishment of a marketfriendly legal system. Recent ethnographic and historical research has confirmed that, as among overseas Chinese, indigenous capitalists in many national settings have been unable to look to the state to reliably defend their property rights or enforce contracts. As a result, in building their enterprises, business owners came to rely not on state law but on family and network-based relationships of exchange and trust, like those celebrated in late-twentieth-century studies of guanxi (reciprocal social bonds) and xinyong (trust) among overseas Chinese capitalists in Southeast Asia (Gomez and Hsiao 2001; Hamilton 2006; Kipnis 1997; Skoggard 1996; Yang 1994). In these and other respects, capitalism among overseas Chinese offers a striking contrast with the social ethics and organization of capitalism in northwestern Europe. As was also the case among merchants in the Indian-ocean ecumene (Chaudhuri 1990; Risso 1995), a middle-range (rather than industrial) variety of capitalism was up and running among Chinese in Southeast Asia well before the arrival of Europeans. However, with the establishment of colonial regimes in the late nineteenth century, the pace of capitalist development quickened, albeit now within a thoroughly colonial framework. From the first, overseas Chinese enterprise differed from its northwestern European counterpart in that it was a societally based network capitalism (see Yanagisako 2002 for network capitalism in northern Italy). In other words, it was built from the ground up, not on the basis of legal contracts drawn up by corporate lawyers and enforced by the state, but on particularistic and multi-stranded networks of family and exchange-mediated trust (cf. Brook and Luong 1999; Hamilton 2006; Weller 1999). The networks at the heart of this overseas variety of Chinese capitalism were of two basic types. The first built on the affectivities and ethics of the family, both in its core nucleate and extended

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patrilineal forms. The second was the system of lateral and reciprocal relationships established through extended relationships of gift-giving and cooperative sociability known as guanxi. Although some researchers have claimed that capitalism among overseas Chinese is based on ‘family firms’, the effective operation of these firms actually depends as much on the distant and (relatively more) egalitarian ties of guanxi as on patriarchal familism. This latter fact acknowledged, it is important to recognize that for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the family was the ethical and organizational foundation for overseas Chinese businesses. Not a voluntary association of co-equals, the Chinese family was patrilineal, patrilocal, and thoroughly patriarchal. Family relationships were governed by filial norms, with children especially, but wives too, subject to the patriarchal authority of the father. This authority had specific economic entailments, not least inasmuch as the patriarch could lay claim to the labour power and wages of working-age children. The ideal that underlay this expectation was a norm ‘carried over’ (Simon 2014) from the kinship realm more than it was singularly capitalist in its origins and meanings: patriarchs could draw on the labour and loyalty of their children because the latter are said to be repaying the debt to their parents for their upbringing (Stafford 2000). In the case of girls, who married out and thus, from the patriarch’s perspective, were ‘lost’ to the patrilineage, the expectation was that they would hand over a large portion of their pay in work performed prior to marriage. Although some Western analysts might be tempted to describe it as ‘Asian’, the patriarchal familism at the heart of overseas Chinese capitalism was not shared by most ethnic groups indigenous to Southeast Asia, with the partial exception of groups like the Vietnamese or Sino-Thai families in Thailand (Brook and Luong 1999; Hamilton 2006; see Rudner 1994 on the role of the family in Chettiar enterprise in colonial India). By comparison with their Chinese counterparts, youth from Malay, Javanese, Filipino, and other native ethnic backgrounds were and are still today reluctant to submit to patriarchal authority to a comparable degree, especially when it has to do with surrendering the fruits of youthful labours. This reluctance is seen most vividly in the fact that, when they first begin to work, adolescents (especially males) do not readily pool their incomes to meet family goals, or contribute unpaid labour to family enterprises. For them, and again quite unlike overseas Chinese, family enterprise is not a shared corporate undertaking but the independent responsibility of the parents. In some cases, as among the Javanese, even husbands and wives regard at least some of their partner’s activities as a separate concern (cf. Dewey 1962; Hefner 1991). The result is that Malays, Javanese, and many other Indigenous Southeast Asians cannot, as Tania Li (1989) once put it, ‘rely upon the nuclear family as a business resource’.

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Although the family is a source of strength for overseas Chinese business, it also has its limits. While an elder patriarch might at first depend on the loyalty and unpaid labour of family subordinates, he eventually grows old and dies. Having begun by making all decisions, then, a patriarch gradually brings his sons (and today occasionally his daughters) into the business and grooms them for his eventual retirement and death. It is here that the peculiar ethical logic of the Chinese descent system exerts its most decisive influence, in a pattern that shows once again a ‘carrying over’ (Simon 2014) of kinship ethics to business enterprise. By convention, sons are expected to be given equal shares in their father’s estate. Some families do this, but a management coordination problem emerges because no brother can claim the authority the father-patriarch once enjoyed. As a result, the now-independent fraternal firms may go their separate ways. Brothers in the same field of enterprise are also prone to jealousy and disagreements that make their relationship unstable. In the face of these tensions, a common strategy among successful Chinese business owners was to assign each son different spheres of influence in the business or, better yet (if one is especially successful), an entirely separate business. The consequence of this kinship-inflected ethic of authority and inheritance for growth cycles in Chinese business is striking. Historically, business success was marked not by the creation of an ever-larger and vertically integrated corporation, as in South Korea and Japan (or ‘latesocialist’ China; there, however, under the watchful eye of state officials – see Osburg 2018), but by a mother company’s establishment of independent firms loosely linked in a multi-firm business group. Individual firms may specialize in the manufacture of a product related to or even identical with that of the mother firm, or they may be in a different line of business entirely. As the sociologist Gary Hamilton (2006) has observed, sometimes the result is a hybrid of these two options: a core number of firms specializing in a related product line, and characterized by a measure of vertical integration, but, alongside them, another set of firms in business networks unrelated to the mother firm’s product line. In Hamilton’s phrase, ‘opportunistic diversification’, not vertical integration, is the operative business ethic. It is only recently, and in part as a result of overseas Chinese collaboration with Western conglomerates, that the patriarchs of a few large business groups have taken steps to coordinate management across business holdings (Hamilton 2006: 230). Elsewhere, as Aihwa Ong has demonstrated in her study of statesponsored capitalism in Singapore, ‘Seemingly overnight, a new official discourse stresses the defunct value of local Chinese economic networks and competitiveness . . .. The Chinese merchant who mobilizes kinshipor ethnic-based personal relationships (guanxi) is not an appropriate actor for forging transnational relations based on cutting-edge research and knowledge creation’ (Ong 2005: 344).

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If family networks among overseas Chinese are hierarchical and characterized by short spans of authority, the lateral relationships known as guanxi tend to sustain an ethic that is (relatively) egalitarian, reciprocal, and broader in social reach. Premised as they are on ties of reciprocity, guanxi relations build not on ‘non-economic’ values of filial duty but on a trust regularly enacted and re-evaluated over the course of an ongoing exchange relationship. The relationship involves a steady flow of gifts and dinners as well as capital, so that, where the trust is judged credible, the business tie becomes a multi-stranded social one (Kipnis 1997; Yang 1994). Guanxi ties are drawn into a variety of economic tasks, including the organization of production and the distribution of finished products. Given the central importance of capital in modern enterprise, however, the most distinctive of guanxi’s features is the way social bonds are used to mobilize capital for investment. In both Southeast Asia and Taiwan, it is only over the past fifty years that stock markets have become a major conduit for investment capital. Of greater importance historically was the exchange and reinvestment of profits flowing through guanxi networks of relatives, friends, and associates. In the highly competitive world of overseas Chinese capitalism, this private capital allows entrepreneurs to respond more quickly to new business opportunities than would be the case were they obliged to apply for bank loans or sell shares on stock markets. From a comparative capitalisms perspective, however, the really remarkable feature of guanxi-based accumulation is the fact that it is based on a personalized ethic of trust rather than impersonal contract and state enforcement (Hamilton 2006; Kipnis 1997). In all these respects, capitalism and its ethics among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia differ from the North Atlantic variety foregrounded in many anthropological discussions of capitalism. With globalization, the rise of People’s Republic of China (PRC)-based businesses, and joint ventures with Western firms, this capitalism has today lost some of its ethical and organizational distinctiveness, having been linked to other global assemblages (Ong and Nonini 1997). In cities and towns across Southeast Asia, however, enough survives to remind analysts that in their social organization, relation to the state, and animating ethical values not all capitalisms conform to a North Atlantic norm (cf. Osburg 2013).

Islamizing Capitalism? Capitalism in the Muslim-majority world offers another example of this modern economic system’s varied and encumbered entanglements with ethics, social networks, and the state. From the start, however, it is important to underscore that the history of Muslim ethical engagement with capitalism differs from its overseas Chinese counterpart in one notable way. Although not quite an ‘ordinary ethics’ in Michael Lambek’s (2010)

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sense of the term, capitalism and its ethics among overseas Chinese was so thoroughly embedded in familism and guanxi sociability that it did not generate a fully separate and ‘discursivized’ ethics; much of it remained embedded in or borrowed from other social fields and affectivities. In Gregory Simon’s (2014) sense of the phrase, everything worked by ‘carrying over’ existing ethical discourses from non-economic realms into business organization; the resulting heteroglossic assemblage was not in any simple way derivative of the Atlantic-liberal model. The relatively low degree of explicit discursive systematization, and the reluctance to identify capitalist enterprise as a distinct value sphere in Weber’s sense, were compounded by the fact that for much of its history, overseas Chinese capitalism was not drawn up into or reinforced by a state legal system, since, again, the state’s relationship with Chinese business was at best neutral and more often predatory. In Muslim lands, by contrast, this pattern of, so to speak, remaining embedded and ‘ordinary’ rather than organizationally and discursively elaborated was not a realistic option if capitalism and a modern capitalist ethics were to take root. One reason this is so has to do with the distinctive organization of ethical life in Muslim-majority societies. Although its organizational presence and practical power have varied across time and space, at the heart of public ethical discourse in classical Muslim civilization was an assemblage of ethical knowledge, values, and subjectivation associated with divine law or shariah. In theoretical principle the shariah is God’s comprehensive guidance for a proper way of life, a divine counsel conveyed in the Qur’an and traditions (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad (Clarke 2018; Daniels 2017; Hallaq 2013; Hefner 2016). However, on many aspects of social life the shariah is in reality rather ideal and generalized; most among its rules and regulations are not fixed and finished but derived through methodologies associated with the science of jurisprudence known as fiqh. The latter intellectual technologies are anything but ‘ordinary’ in the Lambekian sense; they neither emerge from nor hover low over the language and speech habits of a particular community. Instead, they are linked to an economy of religious knowledge that is intellectually demanding, specialized in its technologies, and dependent on an elaborate institutional mechanism for its production and reproduction over time (see Hefner 2016; Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume). As is well known, until well into the modern era, the primary institutional foundation for the shariah’s distinctive noetic economy was the college for the Islamic sciences known as the madrasa. Madrasas were under the careful stewardship of ulama, the much-revered scholars of the Islamic sciences (Berkey 1992; Hefner and Zaman 2007). In most Muslim lands today, madrasas still play a central role in the production and reproduction of shariah learning (Zaman 2002). However, in the aftermath of the rise of the nation state and the great pluralization of religious and social authority it ushered in (see later), madrasas and ulama no longer enjoy the

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monopoly or the prestige in matters of religious learning and ethical guidance they once did (see Eickelman 1985; Hallaq 2013; but cf. Clarke 2018; Deeb and Harb 2013). Notwithstanding the seemingly paramount status of the shariah as the source of ethical values in classical times, the broader economy of ethical knowledge in Muslim societies was always complex and marked by a plurality of ethical registers. Contrary to the claims of some modernday Islamist ideologues, the shariah and fiqh were never the sole source of ethical guidance for all areas of social life (Ahmed 2015; Daniels 2017; Deeb and Harb 2013; Hefner 2016; Moosa 2001). All Muslim societies had and still today have multiple ethical currents flowing through them, some of which (like popular Sufism) were deemed ‘religious’ but others of which drew on social traditions of a more diffuse nature, including popular literature, family honour, tribal custom, or courtly arts (Ahmed 2015). Even on such vital matters as state organization (Zubaida 2003), the shariah and fiqh left much of the detail of a properly Muslim way of life to nonulama authorities referencing other ethical currents, as was so strikingly the case in what was deemed (revealingly enough) ‘ruler’s law’ (Imber 1997: 24). In other words, and entirely contrary to Ernest Gellner’s (1983) famous characterization of the shariah as an all-encompassing ‘blueprint’ (cf. Zubaida 2003), the idealized status of the shariah in society worked to generate a diffuse sensibility more than it did a consensus on specific and settled rules (see Ahmed 2015) – a pervasive ethical ‘concern’, in Fredrik Barth’s (1993) sense of the latter term (again, see Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume). The concern was reflected in the widely shared conviction – not always realized in practice – that any institution of importance in Muslim society must at some point be assessed by scholars competent in shariah traditions so as to assess the institution’s compatibility with God’s law. It was for this latter reason, finally, that, when it arrived in Muslim lands in the nineteenth century, capitalism’s ethical rationality could not possibly be ‘ordinary’ but was bound to both inspire and require sustained and selfconscious ethical reflection. There was another matter complicating capitalism and ethics in the modern Muslim world. Long prior to modern capitalism’s arrival, and much like its Hindu counterpart in the South Asian region (Chaudhuri 1985; Parry 1989; Rudner 1994), Muslim civilization already had in place a rich and comprehensive body of ethico-legal knowledge on economic matters. The Qur’an and sunna, along with the fiqh commentaries derived from them, are among the most market-friendly of world scriptural traditions. In contrast to New Testament images of a market-thrashing Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad and his first wife were merchants, and the Qur’an and sunna abound with references to commerce and wealth-making as an ethical good. The Qur’an also enjoins believers to engage in trade in a spirit of goodwill (4:29), faithfully abide by contractual obligations (5:1; 16:91), and behave in a manner that recognizes the morality of private property

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and importance of fair exchange. By the tenth century CE, Muslim merchants and jurists had developed credit and investment institutions that were among the most advanced in all of Eurasia. Although the late Middle Ages (1250–1500 CE) saw a slackening of economic dynamism in the Muslim Middle East (Kuru 2019), the same period saw a commercial boom in the Muslim-dominated Indian ocean, one which continued until Western imperialism destroyed most of its economic and political foundations (Chaudhuri 1985; Reid 1993; Risso 1995). Although there were ethical and organizational supports for a vast system of production and commerce, then, the Muslim world did not make the organizational ‘breakthrough’ most economic historians associate with modern capitalism’s emergence. In particular, Muslim lands did not witness the rise of an economic system marked by continuous investment in and knowledge-based refinement of the means of production. One of the world’s leading scholars of Islamic economic history, Timur Kuran (2012), has placed much of the blame for this ‘failure’ on the fact that, unlike Roman and later European law, Islamic jurisprudence never recognized a legal status equivalent to that of the Western corporation, a category central to northwestern Europe’s capital movements and sustained industrial expansion (cf. Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2005). Analysts such as Ahmet Kuru (2019) and John A. Hall (1985), following Adam Smith and Max Weber, have assigned greater responsibility for the Muslim world’s comparative disadvantage in this regard not to the absence of this legal category but to western Europe’s being divided into plural, mutually competing jurisdictions, rather than consolidated into a single empire with market-smothering claims to universal legitimacy. Over time, and with many reversals and ruptures, the latter circumstance allowed the urban bourgeoisie in a few regions (England and the Netherlands at first, but eventually France and Germany) to negotiate arrangements with rulers favourable to the defence of capital and thus supportive of an ethic and practice of sustained accumulation and reinvestment (cf. Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997). Whatever the precise causes of this economic divergence, when capitalism in its modern form arrived in Muslim lands in the nineteenth century it was rightly seen by Muslim merchants, rulers, and scholars as a decidedly European affair. After all, the new economic order came not in the company of an Indigenous urban bourgeoisie freeing itself of feudal shackles, but Western armies and imperialism. The commanding heights of the colonial economy were to varying degrees in turn reserved for those who shared the same racial and imperial identities as the colonial masters. With the exception of the Ottoman empire and (to a lesser degree) Egypt and Iran, programmes of Muslim-directed capitalist development would only again be possible with national independence in the aftermath of World War II.

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Quite unlike the only lightly discursivized context of overseas Chinese capitalism, then, the modern Muslim engagement with capitalism was forged in the context of fierce nationalist struggles, post-colonial state consolidation, and a civilizational habitus that urged fiqh-minded believers to make certain that any new institution of social prominence is compatible with the aims (maqasid) of God’s law. In circumstances like these, any effort to forge a capitalist economic ethic had to be explicitly discursivized rather than matter-of-fact or ‘ordinary’. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, just what a proper Muslim economic ethics might entail was a matter on which there was fierce public debate, but still little scholarly or public consensus. There were to be several competing views of what a proper Muslim ethical engagement with capitalism should comprise. During the early to mid-middle decades of the twentieth century, one of the most popular perspectives was Islamic socialism (Tripp 2006: 76–102). First elaborated by the great Islamic reformist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Keddie 1968: 65– 70), early discourses on Islamic socialism begin by recognizing the poverty and backwardness of Muslim lands relative to the industrialized and imperialist West, circumstances to which they then respond by calling for rapid programmes of state-led development. Although its starting point is this distinctive and painful Muslim experience, and although it made occasional references to distinctive moral concerns like female modesty, in its basic formulation Islamic socialism differs little from its socialist counterparts in other areas of the world (on which see Yan, Chapter 34 of this volume). Islamic socialism calls for a state-directed rather than bourgeoisie-driven programme of industrialization. It supports in turn state programmes in the fields of education, health, and social welfare so as to raise the impoverished masses to a dignified standard of living. Through the late 1960s, and in ethical imbrication with varieties of political nationalism, it was this discourse rather than any more scriptural or legalistic vision that underlay the most popular moraleconomic imaginary in the Muslim world. Notwithstanding its once hegemonic status, Islamic socialism began to lose its allure in the late 1960s and 1970s. The decline was in part the result of Cold War collaborations between the Western powers and Saudi Arabian and Gulf conservatives (see Hadiz 2016). But it was also the result of the perceived degradation of socialist ideals at the hands of authoritarian rulers in eastern Europe, as well as among their Arab-socialist counterparts in places like Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. The undermining of an Islamic socialist ethics was compounded by another, less political-economic development, one which was to shape the ethical terms of the next Muslim engagement with capitalism: a farreaching resurgence in Islamic observance across broad expanses of the Muslim-majority world. As with the first waves of Pentecostal advance in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific (Hefner 2013; Martin 2002; Robbins

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2004), the Islamic resurgence took place against a backdrop of unprecedented urban migration, unregulated settlement growth, and a widespread and anxious search for moral security in a turbulent age. After their parents moved to urban neighbourhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, the younger generation of Muslims also became the target of statedirected campaigns of citizen-making, which erased ‘much of the traditional centuries-old synthesis of the Muslim religion in its relation to the state’ (Brown 2000: 47). Meanwhile, programmes of state-sponsored mass education also brought literacy to much of the newly mobile population (Eickelman 1992; Hefner and Zaman 2007; Mandaville 2007). Many among the newly educated used their learning not just for secular pursuits but to develop a personal perspective on the core principles of their rekindled faith. Their efforts were aided by the growth of a print-capitalist market in inexpensively produced Islamic books and pamphlets, as well as, shortly thereafter, the arrival of new electronic media and the internet (Eickelman and Anderson 2003). The confluence of events at the heart of the Islamic resurgence also reconfigured the patterns of religious authority that classically trained religious scholars, the ulama, had long enjoyed relative to unlettered Muslims (Brown 2000, 137; Eickelman 1985; cf. Zaman 2002). In the span of just several years, television preachers, online fiqh scholars, and secularly educated new Muslim intellectuals (Hirschkind 2006; Hoesterey 2016; Mandaville 2007) competed with classically trained religious scholars for authority in matters of Muslim learning and ethics. Although in some settings it weakened the authority of ulama, the new plurality of religious authority also generalized and strengthened the public awareness that a proper Islamic ethics must be grounded in God’s guidance as expressed in the shariah (Eickelman and Piscatori 1996: 43; Zaman 2002). A telling sign of the times, this same ethical standard was applied to capitalism and economic life. It was in this context of a fading Islamic socialism, a pluralization of religious authority, and a resurgence-fuelled quest for a reinvigorated Islamic ethics, then, that two new ethical options on capitalism emerged on the global Muslim scene. The two alternatives were, first, a fiqhorientated and rather ‘ruly’ (Clarke 2018 and Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume) ‘Islamic economics’, and, second, a less legalistic and more prosperity-orientated ‘market Islam’. Although on certain matters the two approaches overlap, they differ on the Islamic sources they foreground, the religious authorities they honour, and their ethical views on global trends in everything from business management to middle-class consumerism (Deeb and Harb 2013; Rudnyckyj 2010). Notwithstanding these differences, both approaches illustrate that, by comparison with other civilizational traditions, the Muslim engagement with capitalism has not given rise to an economic ethics commonsensical and ‘ordinary’ but deliberate and self-consciously rationalized.

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The first of these two ethical options, Islamic economics, is not a classical intellectual tradition but a thoroughly modern invention that emerged in response to the rival Western systems of capitalism and socialism. Western capitalism, it is said, has been capable of great dynamism and expansiveness, but its achievements have been premised on gross inequality and the exploitation of workers by capitalists. By contrast, Islamic economics avers, socialist economies have placed greater emphasis on equity and social justice, virtues also highlighted in Islamic economics. But socialists, the Islamic economist laments, have highlighted these values while also suppressing commercial traditions of which Islam approves. In principle, then, Islamic economics presents itself as a salutary third way: avoiding the unethical excesses of modern capitalism, but unleashing the energies of entrepreneurs at once energetic and pious (Maurer 2005; Osella and Osella 2009; Tobin 2016). From a comparative capitalisms perspective, the two most striking features of Islamic economics are its highly intellectualized rather than embedded nature and its unquestionable modernity. Calls for the development of an Islamic economics became loud and strong only in the 1970s, and showed the distinct imprint of the two developments mentioned earlier: Islamic socialism’s sudden loss of credibility and the late twentieth century’s Islamic resurgence. But the other index of the modernity of Islamic economics is that the field was promoted as part of a larger, rather academic campaign to promote an ‘Islamization of knowledge’ in the natural, social, and economic sciences. The latter initiative had emerged on a global scale only in the aftermath of the First International Conference on Islamic Education in Mecca in 1977. Although they disagreed on several points, the two most ardent proponents of the Islamization of knowledge, the ArabMalay S. M. Naquib al-Attas and the US-based, Palestinian American, Ismail R. al-Faruqi, agreed in arguing that modern ‘Western’ science is grounded in an Enlightenment-based secularism, and it is only by bringing God’s revelation into the very heart of science that it can be made compatible with Islam (Hashim and Rossidi 2000). Notwithstanding their hyper-rationalized, rule-orientated (Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume), and seemingly stratospheric ambition, the revisions recommended by most Islamic economists are neither farreaching nor radical vis-a`-vis the global capitalist norm. On the contrary, in fact, their most striking characteristic is the degree to which they retain most of the theoretical and organizational premises of mainstream economics. On a few key points, however, differences remain. These centre on two institutions, both regarded as central to any Islamic economics: Islamic finance and the religious alms and charitable gifts associated with Islamic traditions of zakat and sadaqah (Clark 2004; Mittermaier 2013; Singer 2008). My remarks in this essay will focus on Islamic finance rather than charity, but the lessons derived from this brief review are equally applicable to both domains (see Taylor 2015).

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As is well known, the single biggest difference between conventional and Islamic finance is the latter’s prohibition of interest on capital (Hefner 1996; Henry and Wilson 2004; Maurer 2005; Rudnyckyj 2018; Warde 2000). So as to abide by this paramount concern, Islamic financial institutions have developed several novel lending arrangements, the most important of which are based on profit-and-loss sharing rather than interest on capital. The two most commonly used instruments are known as mudaraba and musharaka, economic partnerships already recognized but not yet given pride of place in classical Islamic law. Under the terms of mudaraba, a bank or group of investors provides capital to a producer or merchant, who invests the money in an enterprise and then repays the bank with a previously agreed share of the profits, along with the principal. If the enterprise fails, the bank or investors bear the loss. Musharaka works in a similar fashion, except that the merchant or producer also risks some of their own capital in the enterprise, thereby earning a higher share of the profits than under mudaraba. Deposits in Islamic banks are premised on a similar profit-and-loss sharing principle. Under one type of deposit, depositors earn no return on their capital but the deposit is risk free. A second category of deposit, the investment deposit, exposes the depositor to the risk of capital loss, but the arrangement also provides the depositor with a share of the bank’s earnings. As this brief overview illustrates, the principles underlying Islamic finance are technical, rule-based or ‘ruly’ (Clarke 2018 and Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume), and self-consciously discursivized rather than ethically ‘ordinary’. They do not emerge spontaneously from everyday speech and interaction; nor do they carry over existing ethics, affectivities, or organizations from other social fields, as has been the case with capitalism among overseas Chinese. Their rather self-conscious technicality aside, however, the instruments at the heart of Islamic finance are not otherwise foreign to Western finance. In fact, they bear a striking resemblance to the venture capital arrangements that have bankrolled some of the American economy’s high-tech sectors. As with venture capitalism, Islamic financial managers often get more deeply involved in assessing the profitability of the entrepreneur’s project than is the case with conventional banks, since the terms of the financial contract depend on the scale of the risk assumed by the bank-investor. Islamic financial officers may at times even provide extensive advice on business operations, a service they provide on the grounds that their relationship is one of partnership rather than mere credit. With good reason, proponents of Islamic finance often cite the greater involvement of Islamic financial managers in project execution as proof of the greater fairness of Islamic finance by comparison with conventional banking (Hefner 1996; Maurer 2005; Tobin 2016). As also with venture capital finance in the United States, it is true that Islamic financial institutions often provide useful managerial guidance to their client-partners. But the practice is economically effective only

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inasmuch as bank staff have the time and expertise to provide sound business counsel. Although proponents of Islamic banking often write as if these conditions are automatically realized, this is not by any means always the case. Business expertise is not a free good but, like any other service, incurs costs in the course of its acquisition and deployment. Costs to the Islamic financial institution also increase in proportion to the variety of fields of enterprise in which the financial institution chooses to become involved. Where an Islamic bank has many business partners and those partners operate in different economic sectors, the bank will have to devote additional staff resources to learning the rules of each business game. The lender’s management costs will rise accordingly, with the result that many Islamic financial institutions feel pressed to restrict their involvement in their partners’ business affairs, or give preference to those partners that require less practical assistance. The more idealistic proponents of Islamic finance are often disappointed to realize that, as these examples show, the enterprise is subject to most of the same economic constraints as conventional banks. Although, particularly in their early years, Islamic financial institutions in countries like Indonesia and Pakistan made a well-intentioned effort to provide capital to small-scale businesses, the high cost of doing so across diverse economic fields has meant that succeeding generations of bankers have sometimes opted to commit much of their capital to relatively established business partners (but see Tobin 2016). Notwithstanding these realities, and as several recent anthropological studies have demonstrated (Maurer 2005; Rudnyckyj 2018), Islamic finance is today an institution of impressive global prominence. Even if it has not fulfilled the expectations of more idealistic proponents, and even if it is not as ethically distinct from conventional banking as sometimes imagined, it has achieved a remarkable measure of institutional consolidation; its future in global finance looks secure (Warde 2000). Islamic finance is but one of the two major currents flowing through Muslim societies drawn into capitalism’s global circuits. The other current is also piety-minded, but draws more extensively on global trends in business management and life-coaching than it does fiqh-minded legalism. The Swiss political scientist Patrick Haenni and a French historian, Gwenael Njoto-Feillard, have coined a phrase that captures the spirit of this new economic ethic rather nicely: ‘Islam de marche´’ – ‘market Islam’ (Haenni 2005; Njoto-Feillard 2010). Analysts sometimes describe this second Muslim capitalist ethic as more market-minded and individualistic than Islamic economics; many also compare it to the prosperity theologies so prominent in other religious traditions, including evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity (Coleman 1995, 2000) and Theravada Buddhism (Scott 2009). Certainly, the proponents of market Islam differ from the proponents of Islamic socialism and Islamic economics in that, rather than challenging structural inequalities,

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their initial ambition is to help the pious acquire the market acumen for money-making success. For Haenni, this is clear proof that market Islam is ‘post-Islamist’ in the sense that it has ‘let go of the great collective projects [of yesteryear] in favor of personal objectives in which what is dominant is self-realization and the quest for individual well-being’ (Haenni 2005: 10). But not all varieties of market Islam are uncritically marketaccommodating or, still less, hyper-individualized. Indeed, when one listens more carefully to what they have to say about lifestyle and consumption, many proponents of market Islam sound highly critical of what they call ‘Western’ trends, not least those that have to do with entertainments, alcohol, dress, and sexuality. It is no coincidence that, in robustly capitalist environments like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Egypt, the spread of market Islam has largely coincided with the ascent of ardent critiques of ‘liberalism’, where liberalism in particular is associated with an ‘anything goes’ attitude in matters of personal freedoms and lifestyle (Hefner 2016). For these and other reasons, those who have claimed that market Islam is but one more example of a neoliberal capitalism colonizing global lifeworlds and creating hyper-individualized subjectivities almost certainly overstate the case. Studies like Patricia Sloane-White’s (2017) in Malaysia, Gwenael Njoto-Feillard’s (2010) in Indonesia, and Filippo and Caroline Osella’s (2009) in Kerala all bear witness to a more socially entangled and ethically heteroglossic entity (cf. Mittermaier 2013: 275). The Osellas have provided one of the most vivid portraits of the bundle of ethical values at its heart: ‘Entrepreneurship – combining material success with moral connectedness – is coming to be seen as the exemplary contemporary way of being a modern, moral Muslim’ (Osella and Osella 2009: s204). The exemplarity bespeaks an identification and entanglement with a community and self-identity broader than that of the stereotypical neoliberal (cf. Tobin 2016). James Hoesterey’s (2016) study of the pop televangelist preacher and businessperson known as AA Gymnastiar in Indonesia sheds further light on the ways in which the enterprising subjectivities of market Muslims can be considerably more ethically complex than some scholars’ idealized neoliberal monad. Hoesterey examined one of Indonesia’s most popular Islamic management programmes from the 1990s and early 2000s that associated with Gynmastiar, known as the ‘Qolbu Management Corporation’ (Manajemen Qolbu Corporation). From the Indonesianized form of the Arabic term for ‘heart’ (Ar., qalb), qolbu is a concept widely used in classical Sufi exercises for spiritual purification. Hoesterey shows that exercises at the heart of Qolbu management are not narrowly selfregarding but premised on the idea that the ‘cultivation of a pure heart (qolbun salim) is an integral part of the ethical pursuit to purify the self (tazkiyah al-nafs), ideally culminating in a tranquil inner self devoted to God (nafs al-mutma‘inna)’ (Hoesterey 2016: 4). As these and other examples remind us, even when modern agents dive deep into the capitalist stream,

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they may do so while still carrying over a subjectivity more ethically encumbered than the Homo economicus of, least of all, the Western neoliberal fiction (cf. Cook 2016 on Buddhism, neoliberalism, and mindfulness).

The Limits of the Unencumbered Self The example of Islam and capitalism in the contemporary world underscores an issue relevant well beyond Muslim lands. It is that the globalization of capitalist rationalities has not everywhere ushered in the hyperindividualized subjectivity breathlessly proclaimed in some recent scholarship on capitalism and neoliberalism (Brown 2003; Ortner 2016). One reason this is so is that no society ever organizes itself according to a single moral register; all preserve some significant measure of ethical plurality in relation to what Weber years ago called ‘value spheres’ (Weber 1946; cf. Deeb and Harb 2013; Schielke 2009, 2015). Equally important, rather than those value spheres moving like ships passing in the night, their presence in society compels actors negotiating their pathways to reflexively engage and to some degree integrate the values each sphere presupposes, in a manner akin to that James Laidlaw (2014) has seen as intrinsic to ethical life generally (cf. Marsden 2005; Simon 2014). This lesson is relevant of course well beyond the life-worlds of Muslims and overseas Chinese. It by now a truism of studies of contemporary capitalism and ethics that one of the greatest transformations of religious ethics in late-modern times has been the global diffusion of a reinvigorated variety of prosperity theology in Pentecostal, Evangelical, and Christian charismatic circles. Certainly, as Simon Coleman and Joel Robbins have both shown, a theology of prosperity is by no means new in Christian ethics: elements were already visible in early Christianity and preChristian Judaism (Coleman 1995; Robbins 2004). However, in modern times the prosperity message has been given both greater currency and moral urgency through its coincident evolution with modern capitalist globalization. The emergence of this new Christian theology has not by any means been a linear evolutionary process. Earlier, in the first years of the twentieth century, the evangelical message of millennial hope, scriptural inerrancy, and baptism by the Holy Spirit was borrowed by African American preachers, who spiced it with ecstatic weeping, healing, dancing, and speaking in tongues (Martin 1993: 28; Maxwell 2006; Robbins 2004). But this first wave in modern charismatic Christianity was not particularly capitalism-friendly. More often than not, it took ethical exception to the casual consumption and lifestyle trends sweeping urban America in the aftermath of World War I. In the late 1960s, however, the charismatic stream underwent a dramatic permutation. A new pastoral leadership

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shifted its message away from the fire-and-brimstone theology of an earlier era, and emphasized a softer and friendlier market doctrine (Coleman 1995). The message highlighted was that, contrary to what some might imagine based on a casual reading of the Sermon on the Mount, God does not want his followers to be poor. On the contrary, health and wealth await all who abide by his commandments and seek out the gifts of the Holy Spirit. By the 1990s, the prosperity message was being welcomed among a new generation of Pentecostals and Evangelicals from Caracas and Bogota´ to Singapore and Surabaya (Robbins 2004; Hefner 2013). Prosperity theology has also made impressive inroads into charismatic varieties of Catholicism. Its progress there, however, again shows that the co-imbrication of capitalism and religious ethics is never totalizing or unreflexively economistic. In her Investing in Miracles (2005), the anthropologist Katharine Wiegele has provided a subtle analysis of this variety of charismatic Catholicism in a Philippines context, as exemplified in a movement known as El Shaddai. Unlike some of its charismatic rivals elsewhere in Southeast Asia, El Shaddai has a predominantly lower-class membership, with just under 10 million followers (Wiegele 2005: 3). In the Philippines and most other lands, most of the mainstream Catholic hierarchy have little sympathy for this and other varieties of prosperity theology, seeing the latter’s preoccupation with economic success as a lightly Christianized cargo cult. As with David Maxwell’s study of Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe (Maxwell 2006), Wiegele demonstrates that the cargo-cult characterization misrecognizes the agency at work in actors’ religious lives. She concedes that the tithing in which El Shaddai members engage has elements of a spiritualized transactionalism, premised on the idea that one can ‘obligate God’ into delivering material favours. She also observes that the El Shaddai leadership steers clear of any effort to problematize ‘structural, societal, or historical understandings of inequality’ (2005: 103; cf. Freston 2013). The ethical message seems to be that if you are struggling economically, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the calls for social justice and structural reform voiced by clerical proponents of Catholic liberation theology. Although the economic system may be unchangeable, prayer and tithing guarantee the miraculous. But it is right here, at the heart of this seemingly transactionalized ethical claim, that charismatic engagements with prosperity theology prove more ethically interesting than often portrayed. Sociologically speaking, there is something miraculous to El Shaddai. But it has as much to do with the creation of a sense of spiritual empowerment and social recognition as it does simple material prosperity. The mass prayer meetings and Holy Spirit encounters in which practitioners engage bring ‘ritual space into the home and self’, allowing ‘ordinary people to heal and to mediate with God’ (Wiegele 2005: 171). This tangibly self-empowering spirit is vividly expressed in the slogan chanted by hundreds of thousands of mostly poor people at El Shaddai rallies: ‘I am rich! I am strong!

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Something good is going to happen to me!’ (Wiegele 2005: 173). The ‘good’ in question here has as much to do with self-regard and social recognition (Honneth and Margailit 2001) as it does material riches. From the broader perspective of eastern Asian capitalism, the El Shaddai story is by no means exceptional. A similarly mixed message is heard among Buddhists, Hindus, and many new religious movements around the world. In a study done a generation ago, the anthropologist Robert Weller (1994, 1999) was among the first to note that in Taiwan and China the newly revitalized religious scene was rife with prosperity-orientated religious movements. Importantly, however, Weller noted that even these showed considerable variation in their ethical vision and disciplines. Those whom Weller associated with ‘ghost cults’ were primarily preoccupied with health-and-wealth matters and largely ignored ethical subject formation. Not unlike certain characterizations of contemporary neoliberalism, ghost cults are premised on the transactionalist logic of a selfinterested actor making a quick-and-easy deal with a gift-giving ghost. In other words, this new variety of spiritual interaction seemed based on ‘individualism instead of community, utilitarianism instead of family or community good, and an unpredictable, amoral market instead of a clear set of shared morals’ (Weller 1994: 162; cf. Weller 1999). However, Weller went on to point out that the broader social landscape in Taiwan and China was rife with much larger new religious movements dedicated to a far-reaching ethicalization of personal and public life. A similar pattern appears in other settings. As with the Compassionate Relief movement studied by C. Julia Huang (2009) in Taiwan (cf. Madsen 2007), and the Santi Asok Buddhist community set up by an anticonsumerist monk in Thailand (Scott 2009: 40), many of today’s new religious movements see no contradiction in promoting a religious ethics dedicated to the poor and the marginal as well as the middle class and mobile.

Conclusion: No End to Ethical History These examples highlight a general fact of ethical life, then, in our latemodern capitalist age. The global spread of capitalism has created its armies of crass consumers and twitter-typing transactionalists. But the new capitalism’s ascent has not by any means put an end to public ethical ferment, or transformed all economic actors into unthinking neoliberal monads. Notwithstanding their interest in Western self-help literature and management theory, most market Muslims still decry what they regard as the immorality of Western styles of consumption and entertainment and also ‘liberal’ self-expression, especially sexual. No less striking, even as neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility have made their way into management and life-coaching courses (Hoesterey 2016; Rudnyckyj 2010)

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in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Egypt, these have not diminished the hope among many in popular society that as the nation becomes wealthier, the state will increase its investments in the provision of health, educational, and other welfare services. In this regard, and notwithstanding exaggerated forecasts to the contrary, modern Muslims, like economic actors in Western capitalist economics, seem to see no ethical inconsistency in applying one set of ethical expectations in one domain while invoking others in other fields (Marsden 2005; Schielke 2015). Often they seem intent on doing something even more ambitious: drawing the calculative reason of the capitalist market place into heteroglossic dialogue with values and aspirations from the religious sphere, destabilizing and pluralizing both (cf. Cook 2016; Henig 2019; Mittermaier 2013). The story of capitalism and ethics in much of the modern world, then, is not that of public ethics everywhere neoliberalized and disencumbered in a hyper-individualistic manner (cf. Mair et al. 2015). Certainly, some new ethico-religious currents seem preoccupied with health and wealth and getting rich quick. But others also promote new practices of sociality and community, or even an ethic concerned with the poor and marginalized as well as the upwardly mobile. As in East and Southeast Asia, or western Europe and the United States, nations in which some of the most sustained capitalist growth has occurred are not infrequently places that have also witnessed the emergence of some of the strongest movements for gender equity, sexual plurality, environmental sustainability, and racial justice in our times. For more than a century, Western theorists have predicted that modern capitalism is unleashing forces deeply corrosive of all social solidarities and non-economistic ethical imaginaries. But capitalism even in a neoliberal age has not everywhere abolished the relationships, associations, or ethical imaginaries through which people recognize themselves as socially connected and morally ‘encumbered’ (Sandel 1984). As Weber observed a century ago and as Samuli Schielke (2015) and James Laidlaw (2013) have more recently reminded us, even so-called capitalist societies abound with a plurality of value spheres and moral registers, the logic of which is irreducible to market accumulation alone. If, as Joel Robbins (2009: 47) has argued, people in what he calls commodity economies ‘come together without forming enduring relationships to exchange alienable goods in order to acquire things’, this generalization about market exchange never applies to economy and society as a whole. Even where capitalist production, exchange, and consumption are the dominant modes of economic life, a capitalist logic of a hyper-individualized, transactionalist sort is never the only moral logic at hand or in heart (cf. Mair et al. 2015; Maurer 2005). In sum, late modernity has witnessed not the reduction of social life to an all-powerful and singular capitalist ethics but an agonistic efflorescence of relationships, associations, and ethical imaginings. Notwithstanding late

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capitalism’s inequalities, new social media, and global market power, we are not at the end of history, ethically or existentially speaking, but in the presence of a history ever-emergent and new. Even while adapting (as they must) to a more mobile and mediated capitalist economy, most moderns still engage in market exchange not in monadic isolation but through ethically encumbered acts of association and self-identification (Leiss et al. 1986). This is to say that, even amidst its stark inequalities and ostensible hegemonies, we do with the capitalist market what people have always done in and through economic life: not merely consume ‘material’ objects in Homo economicus isolation, but encounter and deepen a sense of who we are, how we wish to live, and with whom we most long to share our passing days (cf. Rogan 2017; Sen 1990).

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30 The Ethics of Commerce and Trade Paul Anderson and Magnus Marsden

Introduction Karim – an Afghan merchant who runs a wholesale business in bags and wallets that he imports from China to the famed Seventh-Kilometre market on the peripheries of the Ukrainian city of Odessa – remarked that some days ago he had been visited by his close friend (Amin) who also runs a wholesale business in the market, selling Chinese-made ready-made clothing. Having finished a refreshing glass of Vietnamese tea in Karim’s shop, Amin stood up and readied himself to return to his business, remarking to his friend, ‘well, I suppose I’d better get back to work and rip somebody off’ (jaan bezanim). Taken aback by the comment, Karim asked Amin what on earth he was saying: ‘this is our profession [qasp], we don’t just rip people off but make a respectable living through trade’. Few domains of history and culture afford better insights into the relationship between ethics and everyday life than the study of mercantile communities and activities. Historians and philosophers have for long emphasized the importance of merchants in the expansion and development of ethical and faith systems, very often at a worldwide scale and over long distances (Ho 2006; Lydon 2009; Sood 2011). Scholarship has also demonstrably tied the institutional development of world religions to the activities of merchants (e.g. Rodinson 2007; Singer 2008). Against this long-term focus on the intersections between ethics and commerce in the study of the world’s great religions, it is notable that, until relatively recently, ethnographic studies have taken a dimmer view of the ethical dimensions of being a merchant. Conventional anthropology has for long struggled with the notion that the desire to accumulate wealth might be based on ethical principles rather than arise out of more innate human instincts. The influence of such narrow understandings of the relationship between ethics and commerce continues to be visible in ethnographic

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work on merchants and mercantile communities by anthropologists. Merchants who make a profit by acting as middlemen are regularly depicted as deploying religion in order to ethically offset the immoral earnings they make from exploiting both producers and consumers (Hardiman 1996; Pottier 1999). The temptation to represent merchants and commercial activity as constituting the antithesis of ethics is also discernible in scholarship on violence. The term ‘war economy’ has regularly been used to identify a constellation of characteristics visible in the economic dynamics of societies contending with violent conflict. In studies of ‘war economy’, merchants are regularly depicted as ‘profiteers’ who earn profits immorally by benefiting from the breakdown of law and government, acting as the cronies of violent people of power and authority, and deploying their capital to fuel the forms of instability on which their ability to make a profit depends (e.g. Pugh, Cooper, and Goodhand 2004). This reading of trading skills has been one of the wellsprings of antiSemitism, as well as popular hostility to Jains and other Baniyas in India and to the Chinese of Southeast Asia (e.g. Chirot and Reid 1997). This preoccupation with the inherent immorality of merchant life reflects conventional readings of Enlightenment thought, most especially the notion of Homo economicus. As Albert Hirschman argued, however, for many Enlightenment thinkers, the emergence of pure forms of the market heralded the possibility of forging two domains of human activity: one which was driven by ‘interests’ and another informed by ‘moral sentiments’. By distinguishing between these two domains, ‘commercial society’ arose alongside the development of new types of social relationships that were purged of the incessant presence of personal interests they had hitherto been corrupted by (Silver 1990). Similarly, Max Weber’s analysis of the role played by religious ideas in the development of capitalism, as well as his recognition of the distinctive economic positions occupied by ‘pariah peoples’ that distinguished themselves from broader societies through ritual observation, also laid the ground for detailed ethnographic studies of the relationship between religion and commerce. Such nuanced approaches have widened the contemporary theoretical scope for anthropological discussions of the relationship between ethics and commerce. This chapter builds on such work and explores the insights that ethnography offers into understanding the interface between commerce and ethics. It first outlines the wider intellectual context that has shaped the study of trade and morality, and argues that the anthropology of exchange, in which commerce is seen as a distinctive sphere of transaction, risks truncating our understanding of the relationship between commerce and ethics. The second section then highlights the political contexts for mercantile notions of ethics, exploring the relationships between trade, violence, and state power, and noting that merchants often articulate ethical ideals as they negotiate these relationships. The third section outlines the

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contributions of scholarship on long-distance trading networks to understanding the interface between commerce and ethics. It suggests that while these studies often highlight the problem of trust, the category of ethics is most helpful when it is used to describe not the basis of trust but the ways in which merchants manage and confront mistrust: for example, how they conceive of tensions between sentiment and self-interest, and conduct business relationships by negotiating moral norms such as etiquette and expectations regarding the exchange of favours. The final section identifies four theoretical directions that have been stimulated by attention to the ethical dimensions of commerce: the diverse notions of reputation and personhood that animate the conduct of trade; the ways in which merchants conceive of the relationship between commerce and systems of morality and negotiate moral dilemmas; the way that commerce is informed by vernacular notions of value, abundance, and prosperity; and the forms of self-making that traders pursue through commerce. Throughout, our focus is on the tensions that occupy the heart of the relationship between commerce and ethics. It is our contention that the category of ‘ethics’ is most valuable when it brings these tensions out. In the conclusion, we ask what might be the limits of the ‘ethical turn’ in capturing the dynamics of merchants’ social worlds. As the introductory vignette illustrated, the Afghan and Syrian merchants of Muslim background with whom we have worked themselves recognize how far their lives are underpinned by two poles of experience: one that emphasizes how their mode of making a living is dependent on the constant enactment of ethical conduct, the other that emphasizes the ability to deploy the intellect in a clever and cunning manner, even if doing so might be regarded as morally questionable from the perspective of the religious traditions with which they identify. The evaluations that these merchants make about their success or otherwise in the commercial activities in which they are engaged rarely rely solely on an understanding of this as reflecting their ethical practices alone: they regard luck and serendipity, as much as good fortune arising directly from the ethical lives they seek to lead, as central to the outcomes of their mercantile activities.

Intellectual Contexts: The Anthropology of Trade and Morality Historians and anthropologists have long observed the diverse ways in which ‘commerce’ has been morally evaluated in different societies and historical periods. In these evaluations, commerce has sometimes been construed in a narrow sense, as a distinct domain of social practice associated with ‘the market’, and sometimes in a wider sense as a human propensity, capacity, or skill at interaction which is not defined in relation to any bounded domain but is rather held up as a model of the broader nature and

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potential of human life. In the narrower sense of a sphere of transaction or mode of exchange associated with the market, commerce has often been cast in morally negative terms. As Bloch and Parry (1989) observe, thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Aquinas to Marx have denounced it as unnatural, unproductive, and corrosive of solidary social bonds. In other times and places, commerce has been construed more positively, as a model of ordered sociality, a civilizing influence, and a modernizing force. Scholars have noted that in Asia’s great traditions, trade has often been cast as morally benign or positive, with the merchant offered to wider society as a model of virtue (Bayly 2007; Laidlaw 1995; Marsden 2016). In these more positive evaluations, we suggest, ‘trade’ and ‘the merchant’ often condense a wider set of associations than are conveyed by the market as the domain of commodity exchange and calculative rationality. The distinction between narrower and broader conceptions of commerce can also be seen in the gap between Adam Smith’s writings and their subsequent popular reception. Smith is often understood as a champion of the free market who endorsed trade and the pursuit of monetary gain by reference to an apparently utilitarian calculus in which an ‘invisible hand’ ensures that the sum of private vices equals public benefit. Yet Smith’s invisible hand referred to Providence, and not a reified conception of ‘the market’ (Lubasz 1992). He recommended commerce not because of its utilitarian effects in the domain of the market but because he saw it as intrinsically civilizing, softening the morals and manners of men. In this he was expressing a longer tradition of thought in which trade had come to be accepted among intellectual circles in Europe on the grounds that commercial ‘interests’ were capable of taming more destructive passions (Hirschman 1997). Indeed, in echoes of Stefano Guazzo’s The Art of Conversation written some 200 years earlier (1574), Smith could use commerce and conversation as metaphors for one another. Like Guazzo, he did not construe commerce narrowly in relation to ‘the market’ or justify it through the calculus of utilitarian morality, but understood it more broadly, as a general human ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange’ (Smith 1986 [1776]: 117). The Wealth of Nations was written within a tradition in which the reciprocities of conversation and trade had come to be regarded as analogous forms of civility that honed the human potential – the desire and social sense – to gratify one’s exchange partners (cf. Rothschild 2002). Both older (Barth 1967; Bohannan 1959) and more recent anthropological models (Bloch and Parry 1989; Gudeman 2016; Sahlins 1972) have, however, adopted a narrower understanding of commerce. Because many of these have sought to theorize trade in relation to other forms of exchange, they have construed commerce as a distinct domain of social practice and transaction, as that which takes place within the sphere of the market, whether understood as a physical or virtual space or as an arena characterized by competitive relations and calculative rationality (Gregory 1982). Productive as these models have been, we argue that the moral

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dimensions of commerce will only come fully into view when we move beyond the paradigm of the market, which treats trade as a discrete transactional sphere or domain of social life, bounded either in its physical sense or in its characteristic rationalities, and adopt a perspective which is broader in scope. Ethnographic studies of traders have shown that not only does the business of commerce often happen beyond the confines of a physical marketplace but also that traders often understand the forms of work and relation in which they specialize to go beyond purely competitive and calculative interactions, to include, for example, the more ambiguous domains of ‘friendship’ and ‘hospitality’. Merchants who must transport themselves and their goods across political borders in particular often regard the ability to develop effective relations with the state and its officials as a critical part of their distinctive repertoire of professional skills. Even those traders who rarely move across international borders often regard trade as a form of life that transcends any bounded notion of ‘the market’. The terms they employ to describe their principal activities as traders, and which they offer as synonyms for ‘trade’, can be translated narrowly as ‘business’. But they often have a wider range of meanings, such as ‘interaction’, ‘dealing’, ‘civility’, ‘diplomacy’, ‘give-and-take’, ‘continuity’, and so on (Anderson 2019). Much like the older senses of the English terms ‘commerce’ (as polite sociability) and ‘commoditie’ (as favour), these are terms whose moral loadings are inseparable from the fact that they transcend any notion of the market, and resonate equally with values and capacities more often associated with domains of politics and the family (cf. Langford 1998). Anthropological models that have adopted the market paradigm and treated trade as a distinct sphere or mode of exchange have afforded considerable insight into the different ways that objects circulate within distinct transactional orders, and the different meanings, values, and restrictions that can be associated with them. Yet while affording insights into the moral valences of objects and their circulation, the market paradigm also paradoxically truncates our understanding of trade as a moral practice. This is because models which have theorized commerce as constituting a distinct transactional sphere have tended to cast trade as intrinsically amoral. They have argued that many societies consist of domains in which individualistic, acquisitive behaviour such as trade is legitimate, and which exist alongside – and in some kind of articulation with – other domains of exchange. Bloch and Parry’s edited collection Money and the Morality of Exchange (1989) identifies a pattern across a variety of societies in which market exchange is understood as part of a domain of short-term transactions which interacts in highly circumscribed ways with a domain of morally significant transactions which reproduce the social and cosmological order. Gudeman’s Anthropology and Economy (2016), similarly, locates market exchange within a wider system of five transactional orders. These start with the sphere of household economy, which aims for self-sufficiency and ‘nurtures social

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relationships’ (2016: 2), and extend into a ‘community sphere’ of economy characterized by the sharing of resources. The third sphere of market exchange, and associated domains of finance and meta-finance, are, by contrast, ‘made up of separate actors focused on gain’ (2016: 3). Such models have been theoretically productive, challenging popular notions of ‘the market’ as being central to the economy, and of the socially disembedded market as being a primarily Western institution. But in the process they have cast the market as a predominantly amoral domain. While Gudeman acknowledges that all the transactional spheres he identifies are riven by a tension between mutuality (‘connecting to others’) and self-interest (‘turning inward to personal ends and calculating one’s relations’) (2016: 12), markets are characterized in his model by a higher degree of self-interest and lower degree of mutuality, sharing, and ‘nurturing’ of social relationships than the household and community spheres. While individual chapters in Money and the Morality of Exchange (especially Parry 1989) offer different interpretations, Bloch and Parry’s overall model of interlocking short-term and long-term transactional orders also constructs market exchange as predominantly amoral in contrast to more richly meaningful domains of long-term transactions, such as the household and religious gift-giving (Bloch and Parry 1989). Carsten’s (1989) contribution to the volume notes that, among Malay fishing families, commerce provides a model of community characterized by ‘tense and competitive exchange relations’ among men; by cooking the fish, women transform the money it brings in, ‘overcome the competitive and disruptive relations of the market’, and sustain a model of community based on the household and the unity of kin (1989: 138–9). Parry reports that money acquired by ‘devious means’ by Indian merchants must be purified through donations to Brahmins (Bloch and Parry 1989: 25). In sum, these influential models of differentiated spheres of exchange have tended to construct commerce as a morally neutral pursuit that is in articulation with more richly social and moral domains of household, community, and religious exchange. Yet to construe trade as only market exchange, and market exchange as a domain that is free of moral content and evaluation, risks a double reductionism. In what follows, we outline an emerging body of ethnographic work on traders that has resisted both these reductions, documenting instances in which traders have approached their own practices not simply as opportunistic profit-making but as practices that are creative of sociality, meaning, and morality (Marsden 2016).

Political Contexts for Mercantile Notions of Ethics While drawing attention to these aspects of trade, we do not wish to use the category of morality to romanticize commerce. While there has been a tendency for merchants to be thought of as peaceable in comparison to

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other social groups that have sought to fulfil roles relating to the political domain – ranging from warriors to princes and political leaders (Babb 2004; cf. Vidal, Tarabout, and Mayer 2003) – there is in many societies and settings a close if not symbiotic relationship between merchants and the social deployment of violence, which reveals the complexity of the ethical aspects of commerce (Boyd 2006). The relationship between commerce and violence takes many different permutations in different cultural and historical circumstances, yet nevertheless is a constant aspect of social organization. It arises in relationship to the need for merchants not merely to sell the goods in which they deal but also to transport them. For merchants involved in long-distance trade, securing the protection of goods being transported is an especially acute concern, not least because through much of human history this has involved moving goods through territories that are either not formally part of any sovereign political entity or under the control of different individuals and groups than the setting from which the merchant hails. In both circumstances, merchants have been required to take steps to secure the protection of the goods they transport. In some circumstances, they have sought to do so through building close relationships – often nurtured through means of the payment of taxes and tribute – to those with power and influence in the territories across which they and/or their goods must travel (Mines 1974). In other circumstances, merchants have themselves been pivotal in raising and organizing the personnel necessary to protect the goods in which they deal. Historians have for long been concerned by the extent to which there is an evolutionary aspect to such arrangements. They have balanced in their accounts the emergence of state formations in settings in which merchants played a leading role in ensuring the security and protection of goods and people, and others in which merchant revenue has been central in the social and territorial extension of power, control, and sovereignty (Giustozzi 2010). A further critical issue explored in the historical literature concerns the impact of imperial structures on such arrangements, especially in cases such as that of the British empire in India in which a commercial body (the East India Company) sought to combine the protection of goods and merchants with the establishment of political control. More generally, historians have also brought attention to the extent to which the history of the modern nation state requires an understanding not merely of the emergence of conceptions of homogeneous culture and identity but also of the ways in which the deployment of violence to protect economic interests was central to the emergence of state structures (Tilly 1993). Anthropologists have contributed in recent years to debates about the relationships of merchants to the state by going beyond an older tendency to distinguish between state and non-state actors and legal and illegal practices and enquire instead into the nuanced and frequently far more

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porous ways in which merchants position themselves in relationship to the state, and the ethical ideals and arguments through which they articulate these positions. Among contemporary Syrian traders in China, diverse arguments can be heard in support of the non-payment of taxes and customs dues. These appeal variously to non-fulfilment of the social contract (‘the state does not offer us citizenship rights so can make no moral claims on us’), to the sham quality of ‘the state’ (‘if you declare the goods honestly, the official will cheat you and take it for himself’), to the morally benign nature of the goods being illicitly traded (‘the smuggled goods are “not bad goods”’), and to market competition and the argument from necessity (‘you will be priced out of the market if you don’t’). The fact that Syrian merchants in China debate the merits of these various arguments indicates that these traders are not amoral profiteers but invest their activities with considerable moral significance. Trade leads them to reflect in nuanced ways on the morality and legitimacy of the state and its officials. Indeed, mercantile encounters with state-centric regimes of legality can elicit moral evaluations which easily morph into political comment and critique. Some work has considered the conditions under which merchants give voice to political critique. Anderson (2023) argues that in Aleppo, a historical system of waqfs or religious endowments, funded by merchants, had grounded notions of moral economy, authority, and accountability – ideals which older merchant families in the city continued to remember and rehearse. These older notions of moral economy and accountability conflicted with the modernizing state’s regimes of legality, and when merchants were confronted with importunate demands by state officials, their claims about the morality of trade could gain a political charge. They deployed portrayals of trade as a pursuit resting on trustworthy or genuine forms of accountability and discipline in order to allege the contrastingly sham nature of the state and the illegitimacy of interventions undertaken in its name. Thus, traders’ relationships to the state, and the relationship between mercantile and state-centric notions of accountability, can become the site of moral discourses, evaluations, and protests. This is especially pronounced in post-colonial settings such as Syria and Egypt where a ‘weak’ bureaucratic state overlays and is in tension with older notions of moral community based on merchant networks, where modernizing states have dismantled historic mercantile forms of redistributive moral economy such as waqf endowments, and where states employ morally charged language and symbols to stigmatize market practices – for example, listing certain imports as ‘provocative’ in relation to policies of import substitution. In such settings, merchants can assert the infringement of these forms of legality, such as non-payment of formal taxes and customs dues, as legitimate forms of ‘cleverness’, critiquing state-centric forms of accountability as illegitimate and corrupt. In doing so, merchants also

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render practices regarded as being illegal by the state to those that are either licit or illicit depending on social understandings of moral concerns (van Schendel and Abraham 2005). Merchants can also subject the relations they develop with state officials to diverse modes of moral evaluation. In Syria, these include doing things the ‘official’ (nizami) way; bribery and ‘buying’ relations; and conducting relations through a capacity for ‘friendship’ or through one’s ‘personality’ and ‘charisma’. This latter mode of relation is often understood in a positive light, not as a form of corruption but – as in studies of economies of favour – as a ‘moral aesthetic of action that endows the actors with standing’ (Humphrey 2017: 51; cf. Henig and Makovicky 2017, also Chapter 25 of this volume). Historians and anthropologists have also noted that the cultivation of relations with the state can be a site of moral ambivalence and contestation among merchants because of the forms of consumption that it requires. Laidlaw (1995) and Bayly (1983) note that Indian merchants have cultivated different ideals of consumption – from a life of frugality to one of generous and lavish expenditure. While they have recognized the necessity of developing relations with political power, this has been viewed ambivalently because the constant giving and receiving necessary to maintain these relations is expensive, and the lavish consumption required can conflict with the frugality seen as critical to financial and social credit. Bayly describes the spatialization of such ambivalence: merchants in Banaras often kept one house in which they entertained persons of power and authority, and another with which they were associated by other merchant families. An analogous issue that can provoke moral ambivalence and contestation is the subject of profit margins. Among Syrian merchants, discourses of moral evaluation can intersect with the formation of urban identity. Traders hailing from the capital Damascus as the seat of modernizing political elites defended high profit margins by appealing to a moral register of modernity (‘we Damascenes innovate to add value, unlike the traditionalists in Aleppo’). Conversely, some merchants in Aleppo moralized a low-margin, high-volume approach to trade on the grounds that it had transformed their city’s markets into a wholesale hub of transnational reach and significance (‘wholesale is beautiful . . . we made Aleppo the little China’). Since these merchants understood Aleppo to have been neglected by Damascus, their city’s growing transregional significance bolstered its political importance and bargaining power within the Syrian polity. These moral evaluations of profit margins were imbricated with discourses of urban identity and their meanings shaped by their relation to political power. Similar understandings are also important for Afghan traders, though more often than not they regard the Afghan preference for high-volume, low-margin trade as reflecting both their inability to innovate and their weak levels of inter-Afghan cohesion. Both of these positions were visible before the re-conquest of the country by the Taliban

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in 2021 in the discourses of both the modernizing Afghan state and the many international development actors active in the country.

Long-Distance Trading Networks and the Problem of Trust Many anthropologists and historians studying commerce have done so through detailed empirical work on long-distance trading networks. Because such networks frequently involve an important degree of exchange across cultural boundaries, they reveal acute data concerning the modes of communication developed by traders, and the types of social and moral spaces important to these.1 Furthermore, a great deal of ethnographic work on trading networks has focussed on the critical importance of trust to commercial exchange, not least because such networks either operate in territories where formal legal institutions are weak or across geographical expanses covered by multiple and varying legal regimes. As such, ethnographic literature on trading networks has made broad contributions to anthropological work on ethics by means of detailed considerations of the meaning and form taken by trust in different cultural contexts, as well as of conceptions of trust which facilitate interactions between people inhabiting different cultural and symbolic orders. As explored later, however, there is growing recognition by scholars of the dangers of taking trust’s central importance to such commercial structures for granted. Recent studies, indeed, have shown that far from such forms of trade reflecting the seamless working of trust in the context of interpersonal relationships – such as friendship and commercial partnerships – actually it is often the ability of traders to work in contexts characterized by a pervasive degree of mistrust that ensures the longterm success of individuals and the durable nature of the trading networks they collectively form. In the context of such analytical recognition of the need to focus on mistrust as much as trust in attempts to understand the working of trading networks, more and more anthropologists are now seeking to understand the range of institutions that play a central role in the activities of trading networks. Much of the literature in anthropology concerning the forms of trust important to long-distance trading networks builds on ethnographic work that addresses the ethical underpinnings of social relationships that are fashioned at once in terms of instrumental goals as well as moral and emotional sentiments. In an important study of the embodied enactment of politeness in China Mayfair Yang, argues that the Chinese term guanxixue refers to the conduct of ‘deferential acts, comportment of generosity, and modest speech’ in a manner that involves both ‘ethics’ and the strategic 1

An extensive body of anthropology literature exists on cross-border exchange; see, for example, Rothman (2010) and Reeves (2014).

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deployment of an ‘arsenal of tactics’ (Yang 1994). As Yang demonstrated and subsequent scholarship has also argued, guangxixue is central to the construction and maintenance of business relationships in China. In similar terms, in a study of the social relationships that informed a great deal of economic and political life in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Ledeneva (1999) explores the ways in which blat – the exchange of favours – entailed a critical ethical aspect in terms of the emphasis on reciprocity and its being performed in relationship to widely accepted criteria. A further area of recent research in anthropology is concerned with the interactions between such ‘economies of favour’ (Henig and Makovicky 2017), for example in terms of the practices and activities of Russian merchants in China and vice versa. A central issue in the study of trading networks concerns how best to conceptualize their origins and development over time. If some scholars have argued that such networks tend to arise as the result of a forced dispersal of a community as a result of political or environmental events (Curtin 1983), then other work has placed commercial motives more centrally in the analysis of the emergence of such groups. More recently, scholarship has contested such rigid distinctions between forced dispersal and economic motives and brought recognition to the complex interplay of forces visible in shaping the workings and development of trading networks (Aslanian 2014). In a sense, then, the historical analysis of trading networks has mirrored wider debates in anthropology about the extent to which the economy is or is not an ‘embedded’ feature of wider social life and whether or not commerce constitutes a bounded field of social action and behaviour or one that is interpenetrated with many other aspects of human life. Given that the forced dispersion of communities is itself a process connected in powerful and important ways to attempts to nurture and sustain particular ethical standpoints and values, trading networks form a privileged site for exploring the intersections between ethical, political, and economic agency. Aslanian, for example, analyses the ways in which the decline in significance of the node of New Julfa in Iran for Armenian trading networks resulted in a shift in the political and ethical projects of Julfans. While rooted in New Julfa, these merchants had acted as ‘transimperial cosmopolitans’ able to straddle religious, political, and linguistic boundaries (Aslanian 2014: 66); after their dispersal from the city, however, they largely reinvented themselves as members of the larger Armenian ‘nation’ (Aslanian 2014: 213–14). One field of study in which this dynamic tension between ethical and economic agency is visibly at play is the study of ‘trade diasporas’ (Baghdiantz-McCabe and Pepalasis Minoglou 2007). Beyond the issues of definition briefly discussed earlier, empirical material on commercial communities that emphasizes the importance of attachment to a past homeland to their collective identities and activities has revealed multiple layers of ethics’ relationship to commerce, because such communities

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often combine simultaneously the search for profit with the goal of realizing a political ambition deeply inflected with ethical issues that arise from an initial moment of forced displacement. Historical work has tracked the changing nature of such ambitions over time. In his study of Armenian trading networks rooted in the city of New Julfa in present-day Iran, for example, Aslanian (2014) charts the manner in which, having witnessed the collapse of their central trading node in Iran in the wake of its capture by Nadir Shah, Armenian traders reorientated their collective goals to the establishment of an Armenian nation state. As many others have shown, such avowedly political projects are deeply ethical in the sense that they bring forth particular types of selfhood: in the case of trade diasporas, these often revolve around maintaining during the course of everyday life a complex ambiguity between longing for the imagined homeland and profiting from the particular context in which such diasporic communities are based. Several anthropological studies (e.g. Falzon 2004) have explored the ethical practices and inner tensions that such an ambiguity produces: be these a collective emphasis on charitable giving and institution-building or exaggerated ethical importance given to the ability to travel, sojourn, and concurrently adapt to multiple cultural and political realms. As noted earlier, the valuation of the ability to explore far-off contexts in the search for profit can also arise in the emergence of particular forms of ethical selfhood, the focus of a latter section of the chapter. The search for profit among such communities, in short, is often powerfully tied to particular moral values and connected to practices of ethical self-making: a consideration of these ties reveals the specific ways in which the domains of ethics and commerce are co-created. An expanding and connected body of anthropological literature also exists on so-called marginal groups that fill economic niches associated by wider cultural formations with low, degrading, and polluting forms of work and livelihoods (Day et al. 1999). Ethnographic studies of such communities, however, have consistently emphasized that to see such communities simply as being economically marginalized ignores the ways in which filling such economic niches frequently allows marginal groups to realize specific ethical goals which they accord a high degree of value. Given that such groups do not necessarily identify with a shared history relating to the dispersal from a ‘homeland’, it is also unhelpful to think of them as ‘trade diasporas’ per se. In general terms, for example, a wide range of ethnographic studies of groups that Slezkine (2004) collectively identifies as being ‘service nomads’ – ranging from gypsy communities to scrap collectors – points towards the importance of attachment to ethical ideals of personal autonomy as a central ethical ambition of such groups. Indeed, not only is it the case in many contexts that performing such forms of work and commerce affords the possibility of personal and collective autonomy from wider society and social relationships, but so too do many ‘service nomads’ place a high degree of emphasis on the

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construction of moral boundaries between themselves and ‘mainstream’ societies. Such boundaries often reverse wider social constructions surrounding gender and cleanliness, for example; they may also be manifested in the development of linguistic forms that foreclose the possibility of mutual linguistic intelligibility. The institutional aspects of the forms of trust and mistrust important to the activities of long-distance trading networks remain rather poorly studied by anthropologists. Obvious areas of exploration include the analysis of institutions important for resolving legal disputes and ratifying documents. Such institutions have often arisen historically from religious traditions, as in the case of Afghanistan’s sharia courts (Ghani 1978) and the importance of priests for facilitating dispute resolution in Armenian trading networks (Aslanian 2014: 212). Perhaps more interesting, however, is the important role that merchants play themselves in the making of institutions that play a critical role in the pooling of knowledge and reputation. Recent studies thus have shown how in the trading nodes of the twenty-first century, restaurants regularly form the type of institution in which merchants ‘foster durable networks’ because they facilitate the pooling of reputation, dispute resolution, and the building of shared sensibilities and familiarity (Marsden and Anderson 2020; Anderson 2020; Iban˜ez Tirado 2018). The manner in which traders confront and manage interlacing forms of trust and suspicion is connected in complex ways to the forms of mobility and sedentariness which characterize their working lives. At one level, the mobility which trade often involves can create suspicion among sedentary populations, both in home and host societies. While, as mentioned earlier, the merchant has often been seen as a figure of exemplary self-control in Muslim settings, in tribal and rural contexts in Muslim Asia traders have also been cast as figures of unmanly greed and lust, and lacking in self-control (Marsden 2019). Analysts have connected such characterizations among other things to the fact that the livelihood of traders depends on their mobility, and thus their capacity to evade social control. Nationalist discourses and identities too can render social and political environments hostile to mobile populations such as sojourning traders. In such settings, some mobile merchants such as contemporary Syrian traders in the Chinese city of Yiwu have articulated an ethics of mobility, seeing it as a mode of venturing which enacts a valued ‘plucky’ form of self, capable of confronting uncertainty and existential risk. They have also foregrounded their energetic and mobile bodies in order to articulate an ethics of work and self-reliance, seeing bodily vigour and motility as proof of their capacity to bolster rather than drain the resources of their host state. Such ethics of mobility are often expressed in idioms of masculinity such as having a physically strong body, being physically courageous, and being able to provide for families. Similarly, Afghan traders in Yiwu contrast their lives of activity and movement with those of expatriate communities of Afghans in Europe who are represented

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as ‘sitting at home’ and eating the ‘free money’ provided by its social security systems. The fact of being mobile can raise moral issues and debates not just among receiving societies; among home populations, too, it can be associated with moral peril, temptation, and secrecy. In his historical study of nineteenthcentury north Indian merchants, Bayly (1983: 468) notes that travel was ‘an essential part of merchants’ lives and tended to make them suspect in the eyes of the most orthodox’. Laidlaw (1995) comments that travel is associated with moral peril among Jain merchants because morals are assumed to be laxer in the countries which they visit. In his study of Hadhrami merchants from Yemen, Enseng Ho (2002) likewise notes that the ‘spatial distance’ created by mobility ‘allows’ ‘contradictory assertions to be made simultaneously without being brought into confrontation’, and is, therefore, also regarded as presenting the temptation of deceitfulness. What we have come to recognize, however, is that the ambiguities that arise out of mobility are an active source of reflection by many traders. Young Syrian men who travel to China in the present day to work in trading enterprises certainly comment on the moral question of frequenting nightclubs and drinking alcohol now that they are comparatively free from the oversight of their families and from the disciplining effects of reputational chatter. Yet they debate the extent to which such activities do in fact impair their ability to act with integrity as traders. For those who reject such associations as ‘traditional’, mobility can provide a critical vantage point from which to discuss distinctions between ‘morality’, culture, and social respectability – questions which have also animated the anthropology of ethics (see, e.g., Robbins 2007; Zigon 2007). Such reflexivity can be critical to the fashioning of trust relations. To the extent that travel is seen as presenting temptations which threaten a trader’s public reputation, it can provide an opportunity for merchants who travel together to discover what their companions are ‘really like’, and thus to cultivate a domain of shared secrecy. In this way it can become part of the continual work needed to cultivate trust relations between business associates, as Marsden (2016) has argued about mobile Afghan traders.

Emerging Debates In the final section, we identify four distinct theoretical directions that revolve around the ethical tensions of merchant life and can be discerned as powerful if nascent themes within the emerging body of anthropological scholarship on traders and merchants. First, this work has drawn on the anthropology of value, with its attention to diverse notions of prosperity, exchange, and personhood, to enrich our understanding of the constructs underpinning conceptions of commerce as an intrinsically meaningful pursuit. Rather than casting trade as intrinsically amoral or

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individualistic, it has drawn attention to contexts and conditions in which traders have understood themselves as providing models of and for ordered sociality, social and moral merit, and reputable or accountable personhood. Second, in contrast to transactional spheres approaches which sought to place commerce within a discrete and largely amoral domain of exchange, recent work on traders has adopted the perspective of everyday ethics, understanding the ethical not as a discrete sphere of action but potentially as an aspect of all quotidian activity. This work has focussed on the way that merchants strive for excellence, and navigate contrasting ideals, in the course of their trading lives. Third, emergent scholarship has sought to highlight the contingent and contested nature of the morality of commercial transactions, not appealing to fixed codes or static models of the morality of exchange but focussing attention on the discursive and performative work that merchants and others employ to label particular actions as belonging to particular categories of moral action, and the reputational stakes involved.2 Fourth, recent work has drawn on Foucauldian notions of ethics as self-formation, and their interaction with shifting configurations of political economy, to highlight the forms of discipline and subjectivity cultivated by market actors and which have come to constitute certain forms of commercial life at particular historical junctures.

(A) Reputation and Personhood Rather than casting trade as intrinsically amoral or individualistic, an important body of scholarship has drawn attention to contexts and conditions in which traders understand and represent themselves as providing models for ordered sociality, social and moral merit, and reputable or accountable personhood. In Muslim societies from Aceh to Morocco, the trader has been seen as a figure of exemplary self-control, a virtue seen as the basis of a trustworthy reputation, since it implies the ability to resist greed and the temptation to cheat (Siegel 1969; Geertz 1978). In such societies, merchants are held to embody self-control, which is coded as masculine rationality (‘aql or akl) in opposition to the passionate, emotional self (nafs or nafsu) (cf. Peletz 1994; Marsden 2019). In other societies and settings, trade is carried out by women and different constructions of reliability and reputation are developed and enacted; the intersection between gender relations and constructions of commerce has been a critical theme, particularly in studies of small-scale traders (Mangan 2005; Yukseker 2004; Gotkowitz 2003; Seligmann 2001; Babb 1990). In settings where trade is dominated by wealthy and powerful social actors, commerce has been presented as a model of ordered sociality. Among Jain 2

On the performative work required to bring ethics into the frame more generally, see Lempert (2013) and Keane and Lempert, Chapter 9 of this volume.

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merchants in Jaipur, trade is held up as a model of society, with ‘the wealthy merchant family seen as the embodiment of moral rectitude: religion, charity and public life all depend on them’ (Laidlaw 1995). And among the Jains studied by Laidlaw and many other merchant communities (e.g. Marsden 2016), the perceived independence of a merchant life is regarded as morally superior to the dependence and subordination of paid employment. In Aleppo too, male merchants asserted their own profession as a paragon of Islamic virtue (Anderson 2023). They claimed to understand Islam better than others because their professional practice made them conscious of the ultimate Account; they knew best what it meant to be held to account, to have one’s moral credits and debts remembered. These merchants regarded trade as a model of ordered sociality in which persons were subject to social discipline, as they entered into relations in which other merchants held their reputation, their social and financial credit, to account. Most civic offences in Aleppo were said to be committed by those outside this grid of discipline. Account books were central symbols in this model of sociality and personhood. In shops they were a visible focus for diverse processes by which fathers sought to discipline their sons; displayed above these books, an image of the business’s founder was often a focus for rituals in which merchants remembered their deceased fathers – men whose agency in founding and running the business was said to be registered in the commercial ledgers below. By teaching their sons to hold themselves and others to account, and to remember the merits of their fathers, merchants transmitted a model of personhood in which a person existed through being remembered and accounted – by creditors and debtors, by relatives, and by God. Critically, the significance of these forms of personhood and discipline was said to extend beyond the market. The trader was offered as the model of a successful human being, or what Humphrey (1997) has referred to as a ‘moral exemplar’, a person in relationship to whom people might seek to mould their ethical conduct. The trader would be reliable in keeping social appointments and obligations, honest and disinterested in conducting community arbitrations, and generally law-abiding (Humphrey 1997). These studies of powerful male traders have shown how merchants have understood commerce broadly, not simply as market exchange but as sets of relations that offer a model of or for human society and morality. The significance of broader conceptions of commerce has been highlighted in particular by studies of mercantile credit and reputation. Some of this work has been written by historians, but informed by an anthropological sensitivity towards the diverse notions of personhood and value that can shape the conduct of trade. In a study of north Indian merchants in the 1800s, Christopher Bayly (1983) has argued that merchant families were often driven by concerns other than the maximization of profit, narrowly understood. Rather, the goal of exchange was to sustain, through time, the

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family’s credit. This was understood as a multidimensional form of value that was at once social, moral, and economic: as well as financial creditworthiness, it also meant the family’s position within marriage groups and other kinds of social hierarchy. Laidlaw’s study of Jain merchants in Rajasthan notes that the moral judgements informing such multidimensional notions of credit necessarily extended beyond a narrow conception of the market. Since credit ‘is at once an economic and an ethical notion’, ‘the determination of reputation . . . depend[s] on factors other than narrowly business ones’ – including social factors such as piety and respectability, achieved through assuming community leadership roles and the asceticism of the family’s women (Laidlaw 1995: 354). Such studies have also emphasized the centrality of credit to traders’ understandings of personhood, stressing that credit or reputation was not a residual category, as in Western accounting notions of ‘goodwill’, but the essence of the merchant – their being in the market – since without it, it was impossible to trade at all or call on arbitration, or indeed to marry or reproduce the firm through time, or ensure the continuity of the mercantile family (Bayly 1983). Such conceptions of value and personhood are not only relevant to the economic domain but also call into being wider imaginaries of society. In the settings described by Laidlaw and Bayly, ‘the market’ is the moral community within which these forms of credit and continuity, constitutive of mercantile personhood, count and are accounted for. For merchants for whom ‘credit’ or ‘reputation’ is equivalent to personhood, the market becomes society as a whole, an imaginary totality or ‘arena for the realisation of value’ – the audience that counts in the pursuit of a particular form of value (Graeber 2013: 226). These ethnographies of established mercantile families and their notions of credit point up the relevance of broader conceptions of commerce, since the business of trade for these actors invariably went beyond profit-making and implied managing the ‘constellation of relationships through which honour was acquired and conferred’ (Bayly 1983: 456). A common feature of these accounts is a focus on merchant families who had established their reputations over generations and who were invested in the continuity of their family credit over time. For similarly positioned merchants in Aleppo, family credit was bound up with the display of symbols of continuity, such as icons of the deceased founders of the business, and the social visibility of accounting practices which demonstrated the family’s location within a wide circle of creditors and debtors established over generations. Yet other merchants, first- or secondgeneration entrants who had grown wealthy through securing state patronage, were less invested in an ideology of origins and displays of continuity and accountability, and sought to achieve social personhood instead through hospitality and displays of generosity and ‘popularity’ (Anderson 2023).

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This suggests the need to consider the relations between shifting configurations of political economy and mercantile notions of value, personhood, and sociality. Scholars have considered the historical conditions under which merchants become invested in notions of social purity and limit their marriage circles as a basis for their claim to social credit. Bayly suggests that these concerns emerge where merchants become landowners, and in a context of growing urban population. In Aleppo under Syria’s Baathist regime, established trading families expressed similar concerns of social purity vis-a`-vis emerging political and economic rivals of rural background, also in a context of rapidly growing urban population. Leading merchant families identified politically influential ruraltribal incomers as differing fundamentally in their moral personhood, and commercial and judicial practices and sensibilities, from urban traders, making it impossible to enter into either commercial or marital ‘dealing’ with them. Such newly rigid emphases on boundaries can be understood as a means by which merchants assert claims to social precedence by foregrounding their own purity and thus socio-moral credit. Yet Bayly also notes that established merchant families in north India in the 1800s encountered a dilemma when emerging commercial opportunities required closer relations with the state. They faced a trade-off between openness and the pragmatic formation of partnerships and the maintenance of closed networks, social purity, and prestige. Some contemporary merchants in Aleppo have faced a similar quandary. This tension could cause ethical discourses to emerge, asserting ‘our correctness’ and ‘their corruption’. Such language was deployed not only to defend the boundaries on which credit depends, but also to legitimize acts of boundary-crossing – for example, by claiming to manage relations with the state through the morally approved idiom of ‘friendship’ through one’s ‘personality’ rather than by seeking to ‘purchase favours’. Much of the literature on mercantile notions of credit and personhood has located moralizing discourses in the context of the tension between newer and older social groups involved in trade. But shifting configurations of political economy, and changing modes of accumulating profit, have also introduced new categories such as ‘businessmen’ and ‘entrepreneur’, and associated moral values of ‘innovation’ and ‘dynamism’ (Marsden and Anderson 2020). Some studies have argued that rather than reinforcing sharp distinctions between new and old merchants, these conditions have led those involved in trade to situate themselves in relation to such categories and values in contingent and shifting ways (Marsden 2016). Recent work on commerce in Asian settings has pointed to the ways in which such traders inhabit and negotiate multidimensional moral worlds in which newer notions of entrepreneurialism run alongside older models of trade as the maintenance of honourable and reputable forms of life within relatively closed networks of mercantile credit and

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accountability. Its focus has been on the shifting ways in which these diverse values inform individual life-worlds, rather than the ways in which they divide the social world between newer and older groups of traders (Marsden 2017). Other work too has emphasized the contingent and shifting relations that merchants fashion towards discourses of social and moral purity. Traders have maintained diverse formulations of the proper relationship between trade and sectarian religion. If the Jain merchants studied by Laidlaw (1995) took trouble to maintain religious boundaries as underpinning the integrity of their moral community, contemporary Syrian merchants have distanced themselves from exclusivist notions of religion as contravening their mercantile ethic of curiosity and openness towards foreigners, and ignorance of confessional differences. Such assertions of cosmopolitan sensibility can be deployed to defend collective reputation in a context where pervasive discourses of ‘war on terror’ have consigned individuals identifiable with ‘the Islamic world’ to a low position in global hierarchies of suspicion (Marsden 2016; Anderson 2020).

(B) Negotiating and Reflecting on Moral Conflicts A second trend in the emerging anthropology of trade and traders highlights the ways in which traders invest their own activities with moral significance and reflect on the ethical conflicts that they can entail. If transactional spheres approaches tended to place commerce within a discrete domain of exchange coded as amoral, recent work on traders has understood the ethical not as a discrete domain of action but potentially as a quality of all mundane interaction. Influenced by perspectives of ‘everyday ethics’, this work has highlighted two related senses of the ethical. Rather than highlighting the ways that merchants ‘purify wealth’, for example by paying alms or giving charity, or by making pilgrimages, it has focussed on the ways in which merchants’ daily activities are guided by a continual striving according to standards of excellence (Marsden 2016). Second, rather than seeing ethics as the application of fixed and reified codes in relation to particular questions and dilemmas, it has assumed the multidimensionality of moral life, focussing on the ways that merchants navigate and reflect on contrasting and incommensurable ideals in the course of their trading lives. Instead of casting commerce as a domain of amorality, this perspective sees traders as exemplifying in a particularly focussed way a more general human predicament of needing to negotiate incompatible values. Thus, Laidlaw’s study of Jain merchants approaches the relationship between riches and Jain ideals of renunciation from the perspective that living in the light of unrealizable ideals, living with incommensurable values, is a ubiquitous human problem (1995: 7). He notes that Jain merchants need to fashion lives amidst conflicting ideals, which are a feature of human life

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and cultural systems everywhere. Marsden (2016) argues that mobile Afghan merchants exemplify a general aspect of the human condition in needing to negotiate moral tensions and to be resilient and creative in the face of them. They exemplify this predicament particularly sharply because the nature of their work obliges them to maintain diverse social networks, and therefore to negotiate a range of normative concerns and behaviours. These works have deployed the perspective of everyday ethics in particular to challenge simplistic accounts of the relationship between religion and commerce. They have done so by highlighting the multidimensionality of lived moral worlds. Laidlaw’s account of Jain merchants notes that alongside ascetic renunciation, wealthy Jain trading families are often involved in other ethical ideals, such as ‘family duty, caste loyalty, and social leadership’ (1995: 363). Marsden (2016, 2017b, 2018; Marsden and Henig 2019), while recognizing the significance of Islamic normative concerns to mobile Afghan traders, also rejects onedimensional notions of the relationship between religion and trade. The moral agency of the merchants he studied lay not just in a commitment to Islamic norms, such as purifying wealth through zakat and sadaqa, or making money according to religious principles such as avoiding usury. Some performed personal integrity through Islamic idioms such as public prayer, pilgrimage, and sponsorship of religious institutions, while others, less concerned to ‘do things the Islamic way’, demonstrated commercial acumen and commitment to moral networks in other ways such as by hosting friends and sponsoring other public institutions. Their mercantile ethics were informed by a range of values, from Islamic notions of charity, to Persianate notions of the high social status of the trader and socialist notions of the morally ambiguous nature of trading (2016: 196). Under more recent and so-called neoliberal forms of political economy, new classes and status groups have emerged for whom ‘entrepreneurship’ rather than older notions of trade as a moral practice and as the maintenance of reputable forms of merchant life have replaced older values of respectability and piety. This indicates that the moral worlds of religious traders are multidimensional and not reducible to one-dimensional concerns of piety and honour. This emphasis on the multidimensionality of moral worlds has enabled scholars to illuminate the ways in which individuals encounter and negotiate moral dilemmas and tensions. Trade has been seen as a particularly fertile terrain on which to do so, not simply because of ‘the market’s’ twin imperatives of reputability and profit but also because of a range of tensions and ideals which animate broader conceptions of trade and trading selves. Marsden notes that mobile Afghan merchants negotiated a range of ethical principles from male autonomy and initiative to filial loyalty and family honour, and from honesty and personal integrity to a mastery of wit, guile, and cunning. They navigated these diverse values in fluid ways that shifted

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with context: they might value sincerity in one setting, but in another scorn the honesty of a simpleton who lacked the decisive quality that made ethical action possible (2016: 178). The ethnographic question was therefore not which moral codes the traders lived by but how they made continual embodied judgements – for example, where they drew the line between acceptable and unacceptable cunning, between ‘diplomacy’ and ‘hypocrisy’. Reflections on the possibilities and meanings of hypocrisy appear as a recurrent theme in ethnographies of merchants’ ethical lives. Merchants, who often depend on their reputation for integrity, inevitably need to perform and evaluate various forms of moral display. Bayly (1983: 467) notes that merchants who wished to participate in the moral community of Jain merchants needed to display ‘at least an outward reverence for religious values’. Ethnographic work has stressed that merchants, who frequently encounter the problem of the opacity of human minds in their work (Robbins and Rumsey 2008), value a sensitivity towards the potential for discrepancy between inner intentions and outer performances. Reflections on the possibility of this discrepancy appear to bear heightened cultural significance in contexts where commerce is construed broadly and displays of traders’ virtue are governed by rigid social norms. In such contexts, merchants may question whether conformity to rigid social mores is not so much ethical as purely instrumental (Bayly 1983). Merchants not only invest in forms of moral display but also reflect on the forms of hypocrisy that such displays can involve. Such reflections can involve considerable nuance, as traders comment on the ways in which instrumentality and apparent selflessness combine in various forms of social action, and acknowledge the social competence that is required to balance calculativeness and affection within trading relationships (Marsden 2016). These observations indicate that the relationship between trade, religion, and morality is not as simple as suggested either by romanticizing notions of the pious or reputable merchant or by reductionist notions of merchants as cynical profiteers.

(C) Value, Abundance, and Prosperity Anthropological models of commerce as a transactional sphere have argued that market exchanges are characterized by short-term, individualistic acquisitiveness in contrast to more richly meaningful domains of long-term transactions, such as the household and religious gift-giving. Yet other ethnographic work has demonstrated that market transactions can range across an evaluative spectrum from opportunism and the selfinterested exploitation of advantage to intense other-orientated mutuality. Julia Elyachar (2005), for example, has shown that workshop masters in Cairo might charge commissions when passing customers to relative strangers in the market, but send customers away to neighbouring traders without asking for commission as part of an ethics of ‘generosity’ and community orientation. In still other cases, the same individuals would

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engage in sharp practice to maximize their profits with one-off customers. This shows that commerce is neither a uniformly amoral domain nor is it moralized simply by being subjected to ethical and religious codes which prohibit, for example, lying, transacting in illicit substances, or lending money at interest. As Foucault (1997) argued, rather than uniform codes, the ethics of commerce can depend on situated assessments of moral proximity. Vernacular notions of solidarity and exploitation often provide a more potent register of evaluation than rules explicitly formulated by legal and moral authorities. Anderson (2023) reports that in Aleppo’s bazaar prior to the Syrian conflict, traders moralized their sales by distancing them from the register of exploitation. Through their etiquette of the sale, they inscribed transactions in flows of blessing and provision between God, customer, and trader, as opposed to the extraction of profit at the expense of the buyer. They cast their selling within a triadic economy based on abundance, rather than as a dyadic exchange characterized by exploitation and zero-sum advantage. Notions of abundance and blessing have been the subject of an emerging body of anthropological work which – under rubrics of cosmoeconomics, divine economies, and economic theologies – has explored how individuals conceive of and seek to manage the sources of ‘life’ – vitality, prosperity, and plenitude (Mittermaier 2013, 2019; da Col 2012). These studies have widened our understanding of the ways in which mundane transactions can become morally significant. Henig (2017: 185) has argued that, among Muslim villagers in the highlands of Bosnia, a morally good life does not consist simply in law-abidingness or following the prescriptions of Islamic sharia, but rather in participating in ‘a perpetual cycle of “vital exchange” of good deeds, merits, and prayers – for blessing, prosperity, and fortune – between the living, the dead, and the Almighty’. This focus on conceptions of prosperity and the modes of accessing it clearly has potential for understanding how commerce can become invested with moral significance in diverse settings. Yet studies of cosmoeconomics and divine economies have tended to focus on charitable activity, and on the ways in which individuals manage the sources of divine abundance. Merchants, by contrast, remind us that prosperity may not be primarily what is at stake where cosmoeconomic notions such as ‘divine provision’ are invoked. Calling for such provision for the customer at the moment of sale may be a form of politeness, or – as Anderson argues – a way of morally casting the exchange as one of mutuality rather than exploitative advantage. Reputation, rather than divine abundance, may be what is at stake for merchants who invoke ideas of blessing and provision. While apparently similar notions of divine provision (rizq, rezek) and generosity (khayr, hayir) have been invoked by traders in a variety of Muslim contexts, from Bosnia and Syria to Afghanistan, the meanings of these terms depend on local forms of political economy and other ideological inheritances. In the Bosnian highlands, villagers impoverished by

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post-socialist restructuring and the loss of state provision associate such notions with acts of charity and in opposition to ‘the calculative logic of profit and accumulation’ that underpinned monetized transactions (Henig 2018: 223; see also Hart 2013). In Syria, the political regime since the 1970s had sought to accommodate merchant classes. Traders operated in a context shaped by Baathist notions of social solidarity, but not defined by an opposition between ‘commerce’ and ‘solidarity’. In such settings, market transactions could more easily be cast in an idiom of ‘generosity’ and ‘provision’, rather than in opposition to the domain of ethics. In Aleppo’s bazaar, selling well could also require an aesthetic of gratuity. Merchants recognized the value of selling with ‘good cinnamon’; in other words, without envy or reluctance but with good grace towards the customer. The positive affect of ‘good cinnamon’ was said to result in the customer benefiting in some unforeseen way from the commodity that they were purchasing. It was associated with a capacity for ‘civil interaction’ and ‘pleasant speech’ (kalam hilu) such as the transactional etiquette referred to earlier, and it was one way in which a trader’s reputation could be publicly evaluated. Rather than reduce this transactional etiquette to the calculative tactic of seeking to win the customer’s loyalty, we can see these forms of interaction as an inherently valued ‘moral aesthetics’ (Henig 2017) through which merchants enacted the forms of grace requisite to their conceptions of selling well. Humphrey (2017) makes a similar argument for seeing favours as non-calculative exchanges. In Aleppo’s bazaar, the aesthetics of the sale were critical to the construction of the transaction as a morally significant connection. One gloss offered on ‘good cinnamon’ was that merchant and customer were bound in an ongoing affective sympathy. ‘Pleasant speech’ could take the form of a brief prayer at the point of sale for divine provision for the customer, or an entreaty to the customer to remember the merchant in the commodity. Such expressions of goodwill or gratuity asserted idioms of relatedness (Pitt-Rivers 1954; Henig 2018; Henig and Makovicky, Chapter 25 of this volume). Through them, merchants sought to manage their reputation by construing relations established by commercial transactions as imbued with moral proximity and solidarity. By reciprocating the etiquette, their customers also participated in construing commerce in this way. This challenges characterizations of market exchange as short-term, amoral, or the domain of ‘impersonal and transient’ (Gregory 1982; Carrier 1995) commodity relations.

(D) Trading As Self-Formation: ‘The Market’ As a Field of Discipline Fourth, anthropologists have documented the projects of self-formation that traders and market actors have pursued in the name of, or in respect to, ‘the market’ and its exigencies. Work has focussed on forms of discipline used to inculcate ideals associated with capitalist and entrepreneurial

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subjectivities (Osella and Rudnyckyj 2017). Much of this work has employed Foucauldian approaches, calling attention to the ethical ideals that subjects pursue, the disciplines through which they seek to attain them, the discourses which authorize this work, and the relation of these to broader configurations of power and political economy. Zaloom (2006) discusses the forms of ascetic virtue that emerge from and enable the circulation of financial stocks within institutions that have become functionally and symbolically central to systems of financialized capitalism. Her study of traders in Chicago’s stock exchanges highlights the ways in which the market is seen by traders as an ‘arbiter of moral worth’ which rewards the formation and application of a disciplined self. Traders use ascetic practices to fashion a self that is humble and alert enough to perceive and respond to the market. They seek to pare back their egos and give up their wider desires in order to attend fully to the movements of the market. Through these ethical processes they form a self that is able to thrive in global capitalist markets. Anthropologists have identified other kinds of convergence between processes and ideals of ethical selfformation and participation in ‘the market’. Stein (2017) documents the forms of self-improvement that German management consultants practised in order to generate a sense of achievement in contexts where the outputs of their work are often intangible and ephemeral. By ‘constituting the self as the legitimate end of work activity’ (2017: 120), they sought to sustain their motivation, particularly in the face of the alienating effects of being treated explicitly as ‘commodities’ in the labour markets in which they operate – a feature of management consultancy also noted by Chong (2018: 63). Osella and Osella (2009) and Rudnyckyj (2010) have focussed on postcolonial Muslim contexts – south India, the Gulf, and Indonesia – in which modernizing elites have promoted the figure of the entrepreneur as an ideal ethical and religious subjectivity, casting market rationality as a model for modern morality and religion. These scholars have argued that the cult of the entrepreneur represents a convergence of religious and capitalist or ‘neoliberal’ projects of reform which require self-reliant subjects attuned to compete in national and international markets. Sloane (1999) reports on similar dynamics in the emergence of new forms of political economy in Malaysia. She reports that among modernist Malay Muslims, Muslim entrepreneurialism emerged as an ideal in the 1990s in opposition to ‘old-fashioned’ fatalism in which Malays were said to have passively depended on systems of patronage for their livelihoods. For these Malays, the entrepreneur became the archetype of Muslim modernity. It was not enough just to be a good Muslim; ‘one needed to be a good Muslim businessman to fully serve Allah and society’ (1999: 60). In all these accounts of socially minded entrepreneurialism, socialmindedness is not simply an ethical qualifier, which adds qualities of morality or ethics to the profit-driven concerns of businessmen by

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directing their activities to the common good. Rather, entrepreneurialism is itself conceived of as an ethical mode of action, consisting of being rational, punctual, purposeful, energetic, effective, responsible, nonwasteful, accountable, and dedicated to the advancement of the (individual and collective) self. These studies highlight how ethical ideals and disciplines have, across a range of settings, come to be construed as critical aspects of a self that is geared to act in the market. Some have drawn, implicitly or explicitly, on Foucauldian notions of ethics as self-formation in order to study these processes, and we think that such models fit the empirical data well. Yet it may be that processes of self-formation discipline not just the self but also the social domain in respect of which the self is to be formed. Individuals enlisted in projects of self-formation tend to reproduce notions of a discrete social field (‘the market’, ‘worship’, ‘the national economy’) in which their self is being honed to act. Traders and would-be entrepreneurs who devote themselves to specific regimes of discipline in order to hone their skills also reify the market as a bounded and discrete entity, in which their self-consciously cultivated skills have a recognizable value, and within which the success of their project can be measured. While Foucault’s model of ethics has often been approached as a universal model of ethics, this suggests such approaches may not be appropriate in all contexts. If projects of disciplining the self also tend to discipline the boundaries between social domains in respect of which the self is conceived as an ethical subject, then such conceptions of ethics may not find traction where individuals do not understand themselves to operate within bounded fields. For example, while Zaloom’s subjects were conscious of ‘the market’ as a field in and for which they were seeking to cultivate ascetic selves, we are struck by how little Afghan and Syrian traders in other contexts order their activities or develop their ethical reflections solely in reference to notions of ‘the market’. In these settings, ‘the market’ does not always have the centrality in models of commerce that it does in capitalist economics. As we noted earlier, in the contexts with which we are familiar, terms translated as ‘business’ often have broader meanings of ‘interaction’, ‘civility’, ‘diplomacy’, ‘give-and-take’, and so on. In Aleppo, the word ‘business’ simplifies the term ‘ta’amul’ (‘dealing’), which comprised interacting in honest and civil ways with customers; in generous and socially proper ways as a host; tolerantly as a creditor and reliably as a debtor; in community-orientated ways as an arbitrator, intermediary, and neighbour; and in socially respectable ways as a marriage partner. Where ethical selves are not fashioned in respect of conceptually bounded domains, we are wary of foreclosing the question of what kinds of activities constitute ‘commerce’ or are liable to elicit moral evaluations relevant to trading lives.

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Conclusion Despite the rather fraught relationship between anthropology and the study of commerce, anthropologists are now bringing to attention new ways of exploring the ethical dimensions of trade and mercantile life. They are, moreover, doing so in a wide range of contexts – as our discussion of ethnographic work on traditional mercantile communities and on management consultants in Germany and China illustrates – and in relationship to a diversity of themes, ranging from gender, cosmoeconomics, and the study of everyday ethics to the broad field of the state, favours, and legality. The insights that anthropologists are bringing to the ethical dimensions of commerce are already leading scholarship more broadly to rethink many basic assumptions that pervade social thought more generally, be these about the value of the notion of ‘corruption’ to understanding processes of state-building or mono-dimensional understandings of the role played by ‘trust’ in the functioning of trading networks. At the same time, however, we also think that it is worth ending with a cautionary note about the centrality of ethics to much recent anthropological work on commerce. As we have noted ethnographically, traders often value their ability to enact skills and sensibilities, whether they regard these as ethical or otherwise. Similarly, responsiveness to the contingencies and fluctuations of the dynamics of the wider economic and political contexts they inhabit is often regarded by traders as being as important an aspect of their activities as is striving to achieve ethical goals. In this sense, anthropologists may soon also be called upon to develop new conceptual categories that are subsumed neither by the current concern with ethics nor by the older preoccupation with distinguishing between moral and amoral spheres of exchange.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 669 132 – TRODITIES, ‘Yiwu Trust, Global Traders and Commodities in a Chinese International City’. We would also like to thank James Laidlaw and two anonymous reviews for insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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Mittermaier, Amira. 2013. ‘Trading with God: Islam, Calculation, Excess’, in Michael Lambek and Janice Boddy (eds.), Companion to the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell: 274–94. 2019. Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times. Berkeley: University of California Press. Osella, Filippo and Caroline Osella. 2009. ‘Muslim Entrepreneurs in Public Life between India and the Gulf: Making Good and Doing Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(s1): 202–21. Osella, Filippo and Daromir Rudnyckyj, eds. 2017. Religion and the Morality of the Market: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parry, Jonathan. 1989. ‘On the Moral Perils of Exchange’, in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds.), Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 64–93. Peletz, Michael. 1994. ‘Neither Reasonable nor Responsible: Contrasting Representations of Masculinity in a Malay Society’. Cultural Anthropology, 9(2): 135–78. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1954. People of the Sierra. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2011[1992]. ‘The Place of Grace in Anthropology’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 1(1): 423–50. Pottier, Johan. 1999. The Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics of Food Security. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pugh, Michael C., Neil Cooper, and J. Goodhand, eds. 2004. War Economies in a Regional Context: Challenges for Transformation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Reeves, Madelaine. 2014. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Robbins, Joel, 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72: 293–314. Robbins, Joel and Alan Rumsey. 2008. ‘Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds’. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(2): 407–20. Rodinson, Maxime. 2007. Islam and Capitalism. London: Saqi Books. Rothman, E. Natalie. 2010. ‘Genealogies of Mediation: “Culture Broker” and Imperial Governmentality’, in Edward Murphy and David William Cohen (eds.), Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 67–79. Rothschild, Emma. 2002. Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2010. Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago, IL: Aldine-Atherton. Seligmann, Linda J. 2001. Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Siegal, James T. 1969. Rope of God. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silver, Allan. 1990. ‘Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology’. American Journal of Sociology, 95: 1474–504. Singer, Amy. 2008. Charity in Islamic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slezkine, Yuri. 2004. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sloane, Patricia. 1999. Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Adam. 1986 [1776]. The Wealth of Nations. London: Penguin Books. Sood, Gagan D. S. 2011. ‘An Islamicate Eurasia: Vernacular Perspectives on the Early Modern World’, in Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat and Michael Ezekiel Gasper (eds.), Is There a Middle East: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 152–69. Stein, Felix. 2017. Work, Sleep, Repeat: The Abstract Labour of German Management Consultants. London: Bloomsbury. Tilly, Charles. 1993. Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D.990–1990. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Van Schedel, Willem and Itty Abraham. 2005. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vidal, Denis, Gilles Tarabout, and Eric Mayer, eds. 2003. Violence/NonViolence: Some Hindu Perspectives. New Delhi: Manohar. Yang, Mei-Hui-Mayfair. 1994. Gifts, Favors and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yukseker, Deniz. 2004. ‘Trust and Gender in a Transnational Market: The Public Culture of Laleli, Istanbul’. Public Culture, 16: 47–65. Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’. Anthropological Theory, 7: 131–50.

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31 Activism and Political Organization Sian Lazar

Activism has a real significance in social life, in the family, and in values, which should never be forgotten. (La militancia tiene un gran significado en la parte social, en la familia, los valores, que nunca debe dejar de lado.) These words were spoken by a long-time Peronist activist1 in a video made by unionists in metropolitan Buenos Aires and shown at their union’s celebration of the Peronist Day of the Activist in November 2012. They remind us of the importance of social life for political action, and the relationship between those two and ethical values. This chapter discusses the ways that anthropologists have explored these questions through ethnographies of activist movements’ moral critiques of the present and their utopian imaginaries for the future, as well as the creation of new political subjects and ways of being. Anthropological discussion of social movements has ranged widely, covering movements for human rights, alter-globalization movements, LGBTQ activism, feminism, Indigenous movements, environmentalism, local urban activism, and more.2 Labour movements have been less fashionable objects of study within anthropology, but nonetheless provide good examples of the relation between ethics and politics in social 1

Oraldo Britos, director of the Escuela Político Sindical (Political Unionist School) of UATRE (Unión Argentina de Trabajadores Rurales y Estibadores, Argentine Union of Rural Workers and Stevedores). He has been a Peronist activist since 1947. Peronism is the movement of followers of Juan Domingo Perón, who became secretary of labour and social welfare in 1943, and president during 1946–55 and 1973–4. It has been central to Argentine politics (and, indeed, culture) since Perón first emerged on the political stage. The associated political party is the Partido Justicialista, but Peronism is much more than that, and Peronists nowadays often speak of it as a way of life. Trade unions were central to Peronism from its beginnings and frequently described as its ‘spinal column’; but the relationship has become more complicated since the 1990s. It is not possible to characterize Peronism along a conventional left–right political axis. Perón himself attracted followers from an extremely wide political spectrum, from leftist Marxist guerrillas to anticommunist death squads; and that capaciousness is one of the characteristics of Peronism today.

2

The literature on social movements is extensive, but for overviews see Osterweil (2014), Juris (2014), and Nash (2005); and from outside of anthropology, Tilly and Wood (2012) and Alvarez et al. (1998).

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movements. Argentine trade unions are especially strong: many of them can mobilize large numbers of workers, and they have achieved longevity in the face of repression and adverse economic change. Sustaining union activism in contemporary conditions is enormously challenging, as unionists are exposed to public hostility and suspicion in addition to structural and political forces that work against them on a global scale. So, what explains their resilience in the face of such challenges? My argument is that it depends upon the union’s ability to sustain projects of collective ethical-political self-construction among its activists. These projects take place in the everyday work of unionism no less than the more spectacular actions of those highly creative movements that seek to define something new for the world. This chapter explores those projects in the light of other anthropological studies of activist ethics and through a discussion of two main themes: political subjectivation and what kind of telos activists imagine. My emphasis is on the practices by which activists come to these and the nature of reflection in those practices. I suggest that political organization should be seen as more or less consciously constructed collective subjectivation. I use the term ‘subjectivation’ in its sense as the translation of assujettissement, a concept that appears in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, volume 2 (1992 [1984]). Foucault deliberately used assujetissement ambiguously, and some earlier texts translated it as ‘subjection’ or ‘subjugation’ rather than subjectivation. The tension lies between an understanding of what Foucault called the mode d’assujettissement as either subjugation to a moral code or set of power relations, or a more active process of the individual building subjecthood in relation to that code (see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume). For Foucault, the key distinction within morality was that between ‘codes of behaviour and forms of subjectivation [sic]’ (1992 [1984]: 29). He argued that for an action to be ‘moral’ it must not be reducible to an act or a series of acts conforming to a rule, a law, or a value. Of course all moral action involves a relationship with the reality in which it is carried out, and a relationship with the self. The latter is not simply ‘selfawareness’ but self-formation as an ‘ethical subject’, a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve and transform himself. There is no specific moral action that does not refer to a unified moral conduct; no moral conduct that does not call for the forming of oneself as an ethical subject; and no forming of the ethical subject without ‘modes of subjectivation’ [sic] and an ‘ascetics’ or ‘practices of the self’ that support them. (1992 [1984]: 28)

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I take the actions of ‘self-formation as an “ethical subject”’ to be variable and amenable to ethnographic description, and bring to the foreground the ways that subjectivation is collective and interactional as well as individual. In the ethical systems Foucault explored in volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality, individual self-formation took place in relation to others, both in the sense that it often happened through relations (e.g. with a teacher, or in the confessional, or with a future self to whom one would write letters) and in the sense that the subject produced would be one that would care for others, both in the household and in the polis (Faubion 2001b, 2011; Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume). Thus, for Foucault, self-cultivation was not a purely solipsistic endeavour even if much of the work of the self was aimed at the individual. As Heywood outlines in his contribution to this volume (Chapter 5), there has been some discussion about how Foucault’s earlier work on power can relate to later work on ethics, government, and truth-telling. This has an impact on how we understand the relationship between ethics and politics, as scholars have tended to look for the collective in (Foucault’s writing on) politics more than ethics (Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume; Faubion 2001b). Within most discussions of Foucauldian ethics, the collective has been conceptualized as a group of individuals, perhaps because this is the case for those ethical systems he studied and on which he built his theory. James Faubion’s work is a notable exception, as he has proposed a theory of the composite ethical subject (2011). In his case, this is a dyad of him and the subject of his book Shadows and Lights of Waco (Faubion 2001a), Amo Paul Bishop Roden. This dyad is constituted through the experience of fieldwork. The dyadic structure retains something of the dialogical nature of ethical self-cultivation that we find in Foucault’s work (e.g. in Socratic pedagogy, the confessional), although Faubion is very clear that the composite subject that emerged from their interactions is a third party, not the two individuals, and even perhaps ‘rather less than its parts’ (2011: 206). He claims that ‘the ethical subject can be a composite subject of an indefinite number of players and places’ (2011: 16). I want to build on this idea and argue that activist groups can become composite ethical subjects through the practice of collective technologies of the self as much as in interactions between the individuals that make up the group. Thus, I would suggest that some activist groups become other (but, like the Faubion-Roden subject, not necessarily more) than the sum of their parts and should be seen not just as collections of people but as composite subjects in themselves. As the chapters in this volume show, ethics is ‘a function of life with others’ (Keane 2010: 82) and not merely a response to societal norms. Thus, an anthropology that takes ethics into account must not simply aim to identify systems of social values but look to interactions between people.

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One ethnographic strategy for such a relational enterprise has been to draw on linguistic anthropology and look at speech – and sometimes listening – as ethical interaction (e.g. Hirschkind 2006). Within the anthropology of activism, Naisargi Dave (2012) has explored the tensions that arise among a group of activists (LGBTQ activists in Delhi) as they differ on how to define themselves and each other, complain about others, fracture into groups, exclude, and also come together; critiquing the contemporary world, arguing about what to do about it, building friendships and experiencing betrayal, and so on. Another strategy is to look at how legal frameworks and interactions with the state (both violent and non-violent) interact with people’s own experiences and desires to create particular kinds of subjects. For example, Andrea Muehlebach (2012) describes how the state’s emphasis on voluntarism in social care programmes in northern Italy interacts with religious notions of charity and leftist notions of solidarity in the creation of volunteers who see themselves and their activism in these two distinct ways. Maple Rasza (2015) argues that anticapitalist activists in Croatia experience the violence of state repression on their bodies – as they are arrested or assaulted while participating in demonstrations – as a form of subject-making. He tells us that they ‘feel the state on their own skin’, and in their encounters with the police, ‘emotional lessons were written onto the bodies of participants through a violence that substantiates both the enmity of the state and a lived sense of contributing to a militant political movement’ (2015: 146). My approach is to focus on practices and events as moments of interaction and common construction of values that incorporate elements of repetition and innovation in different combinations. For the case of the union activists with whom I have worked, this amounts to the cultivation of a collective ethical subject, which is understood through a mix of three aspects of ethics: (i) an essential being or character (essence) that is not necessarily open to reflection without prompting but that can nonetheless (ii) be cultivated to create particular dispositions (hexis), the point of which is (iii) action on the world to change the world (praxis). Put differently, who you are relates to who you become which relates to what you do. In this chapter I will identify some of the processes of cultivation that connect these three distinct ethical conditions together, through the circulation of a set of common ethical values in general life as well as in specifically pedagogical contexts. I then suggest that understanding union activism as a necessary combination of different kinds of ethical-political action requires us to acknowledge the importance of organization to social movement action and success, depending of course on how success is defined. By interpreting practices of organization as ethical practices, we recognize the relational aspect of politics and the importance of affective processes of collective self-cultivation alongside rational and material imperatives to engage in political struggle.

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Ethics and Political Action – Subjectivation Activism is an ethical practice, at both individual and collective levels, which combines subject creation or cultivation with action on the world. One of the most important ways that activists have done so is through the development of utopian imaginaries: the cultivation of ‘political hope’, in Maple Razsa’s terms (2015). This is summed up in the slogan of the World Social Forum and its offshoots: ‘Another world is possible’. Globally, activists in the recent radical movements animated by environmentalism, anarchism, and anti-capitalism attempt to imagine a world from outside of the framework of Eurocentric and capitalist modernity (Escobar 2010). Marxist-Leninists imagined the revolution, or the rule of the proletariat; the Chartists wanted a political system where every man could vote, no matter whether he owned property or not; human rights activists draw on United Nations (UN) declarations to guide their vision of the future, and so on. All of these utopian imaginations are grounded in a critique of the present, but the more anarchist contemporary radical movements are distinctive in how they leave the future indeterminate. Instead of imagining a different world, they attempt to instantiate it in small actions, an ethics of practice with an unknown telos. Stine Krøijer (2015) calls this a ‘figuration of the future’ and illustrates this in the practices of activists in Copenhagen who collect and eat discarded food from supermarkets. Razsa (2015) describes an attempt by activists to set up a ‘free store’ in a neighbourhood of Zagreb, Croatia. They squatted in a derelict printing factory and opened it for local residents to bring items for exchange, subverting capitalist logics of buying and selling. Marianne Maeckelbergh (2009) shows how members of the European Social Forum paid extremely close attention to the practices of decision-making in their meetings, avoiding what they saw as old logics of representative democracy and top-down consensus-building and attempting to prefigure the kind of democratic process they wished for the world. Indeed, prefiguration is by now a well-articulated theory of democratic and anticapitalist ethical practice (Graeber 2009; Osterweil 2014; Shukaitis et al. 2007). The utopia or future proposed cannot be known as a moral code but instead is constructed through multiple small actions. Unlike the revolution, there is no programme; there is only a broad agreement on what needs to change. Getting to this future requires subjective transformations as much as structural ones. As Razsa puts it, prefiguration is not just about ‘being the change’ but ‘becoming other’ (2015). Social and political movements of all sorts require the constructions of particular subjectivities among their adherents (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006): activists need to be able to imagine other possible worlds, behaviours, ethical stances (Dave 2012), ways of living together (Razsa 2015), and even difference itself (Heywood

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2018). Hannah Arendt’s formulation of the need of the marginalized to become political subjects ‘with the right to have rights’ (Arendt 1998 [1958]) has been enormously influential in how we understand the goals of social movements like feminism and Indigenous rights movements, and it is clearly a statement about a particular kind of political subjectivation. We can also see this in the slogan of the feminist movement around the 1993 UN Human Rights conference in Vienna – ‘Women’s rights are Human Rights’. Victoria Goddard and Sophie Day (2010) described how marginal subjects moved to the centre of political concern in the case of the mothers of children disappeared by the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976–83. They needed both to come to think of themselves as having the right to know what had happened to their children and to act politically to that end, and to be recognized as such by society and the state. Dave (2012) details the importance of assuming a lesbian identity for some women in India, where others felt that they were more truthfully described as women who love women; the debate between the two coalesced in part around whether ‘lesbian’ was a Western and colonizing category. Further, much of the work of activism pays attention to the collective aspect of collective subjectivities, in different ways. The feminist movement has found it challenging to build a sense of ‘woman’ as a political subject common to all women, responding to the critique of the exclusions that were often enacted in practice (on grounds of ethnicity, class, colonial relations, sexuality, etc.) by developing strategies of coming together on specific questions, such as abortion rights or gender violence. The focus of anti-capitalist activists on prefiguration requires action together, in assemblies, occupations, free stores, and squats. Social movements are then inherently collective. As Dave argues, activism combines three important ethical practices or ‘affective exercises’: ‘the problematization of social norms, the invention of alternatives to those norms, and the creative practice of these newly invented possibilities’ (2012: 3), later specifying that these are ‘creative relational practices’ (2012: 95, my emphasis). Activists therefore make themselves into particular kinds of political subjects. This is important not only at the point of deciding to engage in activism but also when they continue in the face of adversity, such as attack by the police, or the loss of a job or relationship linked to their political activity, or exhaustion on account of the demands placed upon them, stigmatization by the media and at times their family, or even just the tendency of other life events to distract them from their political work. The temporalities of activism vary widely, from afternoons on street demonstrations to weekends in cultural-political activities, a few weeks in a square, or a whole working life as a leader, in one or several organizations. Andrea Muehlebach (2012) describes the ethical commitments of volunteers from an association for social care that was founded by the

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pensioners’ union of the ex-communist Italian General Confederation of Labour. They saw their current work in caring for the elderly as a continuation of their previous political struggles in the local factories, ‘simply the latest reformulation of a “political passion” that all of them carried within them through long years of struggle for justice and solidarity’ (2012: 180). This is similar for many Peronists who link their experiences in and commitments to trade unionism to activism in neighbourhood associations, many of which are organized around care for the elderly. For them, political and social activism are part of a longterm political commitment to a struggle for justice. Activism is experienced then on different temporal scales – as part of a historical struggle that goes back to before they were born in some instances, or to their experiences as a young woman or man; but also as a day-to-day question of reactive problem-solving (Lazar 2014). The ability of activists to keep going over the longer term – both in terms of their own lives and as a longer historical struggle – is linked closely to forms of ethical-political subjectivation that are the foundation for political activity. Razsa sums this up by suggesting that ‘activist practices implied a subjective turn, in which they sought to intervene in their selfunderstandings and in the constitution of their very desires . . . if the Marxist and anticolonial movements of the twentieth century centered on seizing the state – and with it the means of production – my collaborators struggled to seize the means of producing themselves as subjects’ (2015: 11– 12). Dave’s emphasis on new creative practices is similarly about creating oneself differently, which she calls a ‘work of becoming’ (2012). Paolo Heywood’s ethnography of LGBTQ activism in Bologna traces the ways that activists consciously contravene classical moral norms both in the way they organize themselves as a political collective and in their personal and sexual relationships (2018). And yet, while prefigurative political practice, or ‘living differently’, is one way to create radical new political forms of being and subjecthood, it is not the only mode of subjectivation available to activists. Some seek to conform better to dominant norms, such as the Catholic activists described by Andrea Muehlebach (2012), or the members of the female Islamic piety movement studied by Saba Mahmood (2005). The unionists I worked with sat somewhere in between conformity to established norms and radical becoming. They often cultivated their individual selves as activists (whether Peronist, unionist, or Trotskyite) through an understanding of militancia. La militancia names the practices of activism as well as being a group noun that describes the collective of political activists. By studying militancia, we may identify how individuals create and understand themselves and others as political actors located in a particular time, place, and family and consisting of a particular set of values, dispositions, and orientations. For my interlocutors, those values included having a vocation for political action, anger against injustice, commitment to the collectivity, and love for people and politics. They

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understood political action as membership of the labour movement, and placed it in a historical narrative of anarcho-syndicalism (for some) or Peronism (for most), resistance to military dictatorship, and mobilization against structural adjustment and neoliberalism. They considered their common values to be essential elements of individual character, almost biological. Yet they were also dispositions that could be cultivated by individuals, passed down the generations within families, and called forth or made stronger in pedagogical contexts. This cultivation or calling forth of values happened through collective processes, which I describe using the concept of contencio´n. Contencio´n means ‘containment’, of both a psychotherapeutic and political kind. My interlocutors quite often described the union as an entity that ‘contains’ them, and for them ‘feeling contained’ was a very positive emotion. Quite often I was told that part of the job of a delegate was to ‘contain’ (contener) the affiliate, or that ‘there’s a lot of containment’ (hay mucha contencio´n) in their work. People also used the term contencio´n in passing, when referring for example to delegates’ abilities to deal with affiliates’ problems, using phrases such as capacidad de contencio´n, or by calling the union a ‘place of containment’. Containment has various dimensions (see Lazar 2013) but appears to come in part from the concept of therapeutic containment in the work of Wilfred Bion, a British Kleinian psychoanalyst. That refers to the ability of the therapist to take on the emotions of the other and process them without being overwhelmed by them (Bion 1959; Douglas 2007: 33). More broadly, containment can be thought of as a mode by which the group encompasses the individual, through individual therapeutic relations but also collective activities of care, and political activities of discussion and collective action. Containment is an ethical process of encompassment and the creation of a collective self – the union – committed to action for the transformation of society for the better. The two unions I worked with understood the precise content of that action differently, and as a result engaged in different acts of containment. These often boiled down to organization, but in contrasting ways. Unio´n del Personal Civil de la Nacio´n (Union of National Civil Servants, UPCN), which was a more traditional union,3 placed great weight on organizational strength and discipline, and the ability to negotiate with their employers; the Asociacio´n de Trabajadores del Estado (Association of State Workers, ATE) constructed its collective self as a political project of alternative unionism, summarized through its emphasis on horizontality and autonomy from governing party politics, and tapping in to trends of horizontal political organization prominent in Argentina in recent decades (e.g. see Dinerstein 2014; Sitrin 2006). 3

I worked with the two major unions of state employees in Argentina: ATE and UPCN. The two unions represent distinct political orientations within the labour movement and towards Peronism. UPCN is predominantly – although not exclusively – Peronist, while ATE sees itself as autonomous and not aligned to a political party, although this stance has been a source of disagreement in recent years.

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Cultivation of Selves – Individual and Collective There is a complex relationship between will, cultivation, and essence in the political subjectivation of the activists with whom I worked. For many, militancy (militancia) was a life experience, mapped out along different pathways of union, neighbourhood, and party activism. In research interviews and pedagogical contexts they produced narratives of commitment, passion, and love about their militancy, which they frequently explained through biological metaphors, describing their activism as a virus or an addiction, for example. However, mostly they saw it as a natural outcome of their personality, and so the way that they saw themselves was often articulated in terms of aspects of a (pre-existing) essential being. One ATE secretary general told me quite simply that ‘well, if you’re a man of action, you can’t just let injustice go unchallenged’. Others attributed their activism to their natural tendency to rage against injustice, or to care for others. Only rarely did people narrate their activism as a choice made after rational calculation of interest, nor was it something that they felt needed particularly active or conscious work on their part. Yet the narrative of inevitability (essence) does not tell the whole story. For they were also acutely aware of the difficulties of activism, in their personal lives or with respect to the stigma attached to unionists in the eyes of the general public, even including their families; but they continued nonetheless. Furthermore, the daily life of activism is actually in practice something that demands considerable commitment, effort, and time, and at different points in history has been physically very dangerous; and yet they continued, often taking considerable pride in this. By describing their activism as militancia, they were also knowingly evoking a whole series of historical resonances, of 1970s activism or Peronist heritage and resistance; and even exemplary figures such as Eva or Juan Pero´n, or for ATE Germa´n Abdala, a politician from the union who introduced the law of collective bargaining for the public sector in the 1990s before his death from cancer. Finally, the values and personality traits held to be part of their essential being could also be elicited from activists through schooling. So, an activist disposition could clearly be generated, and was not an automatic outcome of being born with a particular character. The transmission of values was achieved through circulation and repetition more than an especially top-down pedagogy, even in spaces such as the Unionist Training School run by UPCN, or workshops for new delegates run by ATE, meaning that those in training events often came already disposed to express and learn a specific set of qualities. Many of the same tropes appear repeatedly in my research notes of interviews and participation in different union events, especially those of vocation, service (including collaboration and help), and conviction. They were also repeatedly enacted in spoken and unspoken ways in political action both quotidian

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and on special occasions. In training sessions, ethical values circulated along with food, song, joy, and laughter. Anthropologists have shown how the circulation of substance builds kin (Carsten 2013), and similarly in moments like these the circulation of values and affects builds political community. A crucial aspect of those activities which constituted activist subjectivities was their collective nature: activists understood themselves as individuals in very particular collective contexts, and they were convinced of the need for collective solutions to perceived political problems. These convictions, which had the status of unquestioned and often unarticulated truths, were achieved in part through highly social mechanisms of containment. For example, some of the most important day-to-day work of the Ministry UPCN delegation I accompanied consisted in socializing around the table in the back room – sharing food, circulating the mate gourd, jokes, political discussions, gossip, goading fellow delegates when their football team had just lost, and so on. Dave (2012) recounts something similar in her descriptions of long evenings of friendship, conversation, political argument, and being together; the affective side of her research and of the ‘creative relational practices’ of activism itself. In Argentina, the relationships, power, and expertise built through these activities were crucial for the kinds of problem-solving negotiations the unionists had to undertake to defend their affiliates. Occasionally, the delegation would organize more formal events, such as a ceremony to pay homage to former president Ne´stor Kirchner on the anniversary of his death, or to celebrate the Day of the Militant, someone’s birthday, or the end of the year. ATE in particular holds many street protests, assemblies, and rallies, and under the right-wing president Mauricio Macri (2015–19) UPCN resorted to these politicized tactics more frequently than before. For example, in early September 2018, after bailout discussions with the International Monetary Fund, ten government ministries were downgraded to secretariats. The inclusion of the iconic ministries of labour and of health in this list led many to interpret the action as a symbolic attack on the Peronist conception of the active state. In response, the unions in the ex-ministry of health held a symbolic ‘embrace’ of the building, encircling it to register their opposition to the loss of status and potential effects on public health.4 Unusually, both UPCN and ATE participated, along with other professional and union organizations. Events such as these are social practices of containment in the sense of providing a political context for individuals. But they also involve speeches, chants, discussions, and so on, in which the common values and orientations circulate more explicitly. Another form of collective cultivation through containment was a kind of structured care for each other. Members of the union delegation care for 4

www.pagina12.com.ar/140226-un-abrazo-a-la-salud.

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each other and for ordinary affiliates through the sociability mentioned earlier, but also through more formalized practices like the provision of childcare for the summer months of January and February, and, very importantly, the union health insurance. Administering both these schemes is a large chunk of the delegation’s activities during the year, and, especially in the case of the health insurance, they are one of the main attractions of the union for ordinary members. With respect to the latter, the delegation may administer the union discount scheme on prescription medication; they may also advise affiliates on precisely which kind of health insurance to take out; arrange to receive test results; or organize emergency medical transport, compassionate leave to care for a sick child, and so on. Delegations also organize health check-ups at the workplace and educational events about preventative health. More socially, both unions have a couple of recreational areas that members can use; they also provide gifts and discounted goods at particular lifecycle moments like marriage and bereavement. Thus care and containment stretch beyond employment conditions into life itself. Elsewhere (Lazar 2018) I have analysed these as practices of ‘kinning’ (Howell 2006), achieved through the circulation of substances such as food and drink, but also values, like collectivity itself. ATE and UPCN undertake practices of kinning as a means of bringing their political community into being through ritual, shared cultural activities, therapeutic relationships, educational spaces, and political action. In so doing, they create political communities founded in large part in kinship or kin-like relations. I would suggest that those political communities are also ethical subjects, which construct themselves through collective technologies of the self. This might well make them unusual within the anthropology of activism, which has often emphasized the ways that individuals come together in particular moments and for particular objectives. The groups of Occupy are a good example of this kind of activism: much happened in the squares and plazas when people came together. They built themselves as communities through common political action and sociality, and then – often as a result of state repression – they left the squares, and moved into different political spaces in neighbourhoods, universities, and so on (Corsı´n Jime´nez and Estalella 2013; Juris 2012). Jeff Juris (2012) has shown how this ebb and flow was enabled through social media, especially Facebook’s ‘logics of aggregation’ that brought people together around a particular issue at the time. However, once together, people need other mechanisms to keep them there, even if they continue to use social media to make their claims and influence public opinion. Dave (2012) describes how over two decades lesbian activists in Delhi came together and stayed together, developing deep affective ties with one another. The anarchist activists of Zagreb similarly maintained friendships and alliances over time that went beyond their participation in the local version of Occupy in 2011 (Rasza 2015; Razsa and Kurnik 2012). Perhaps what makes the Argentine unions

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distinct is that they pay a lot of attention to their self-construction as a special kind of collective and put considerable effort into keeping that going.

Essence and Hexis However, union activists mostly understand the social processes of collective self-cultivation as an outcome of essential being or character. This was so even in contexts shaped by the explicit pedagogical aim to train delegates in the correct disposition and attitudes. Teachers in the UPCN union school often elicited personality traits or deeply held values through exhortation: by saying ‘you have this commitment, vocation for unionism or social justice, you are this kind of person’. Much of the training relied upon the students having come already equipped with the understanding of the kinds of values they should express. People at the training sessions run by both unions knew already what that union stood for, and so, for example, stressed the importance for them of collective bargaining (for UPCN delegates) or the assembly (for ATE activists). The training sessions consisted at least in part in calling forth those values which were understood to already exist within activists’ being: a commitment to the other, to democracy, to the collective, or to Peronism itself. This contrasts with other activist educational practices of consciousness-raising or revolutionary education (e.g. see Keane 2016) where the prime aim is to create political subjects of a certain type. Although I would argue that such a creation was a desired outcome of the training sessions, unionists understood the sessions as much more pragmatic. They learned aspects of unionism such as political strategies, legislative context, tactics for encouraging new members, knowledge of the structure of the state and the provisions for collective bargaining, and so on, and saw the sessions as means to get to know people from other parts of the union and build a collective identity beyond their own immediate sub-group (the shop-floor delegation). The sessions did involve some activities of self-knowledge – askesis, in Foucauldian terms – such as an exercise where participants had to outline their own strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats they faced. There were also sessions in skills such as public speaking and negotiation with employers, but on the whole courses emphasized the acquisition of knowledge, while those basic ethical values that were considered to be core to activists remained largely unquestioned. This is of course how hegemony operates in this context, but the unionists tended to make a real distinction between the action of the organization and those essential personal characteristics that made them into activists, and those two distinct areas bore quite a different relation to reflection. The question of essence also came through in understandings of how activist disposition is transmitted across generations and through kinship. One of the most common phrases I heard was that a Peronist ‘se nace no se

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hace’ – is born and not made. Of course, people I knew had come to Peronism via multiple trajectories, and many of them had indeed ‘made’ themselves and continued to do so, but many of the Peronists I know viewed it as something beyond choice: a way of life, of feeling. They often told me that Peronism is something ‘of the blood’ or ‘from the cradle’, taking the biological metaphor of activism to the point where it becomes almost genetic: the predisposition to activism can, it seems, be inherited from one’s mother or father and is therefore part of one’s inner essence. One general secretary of a delegation, a rising star in UPCN, said in an interview: One is a Peronist from the cradle. My father was general secretary of the Leatherworkers’ Union, of the Argentine Federation of Leatherworkers, and, well, you carry that. I always say, I played the drums in a union before I said mama´! You carry it in your blood. . . . I think you absorb it from the home [creo que lo mama desde la casa]. ‘Mamar’ actually means ‘to breastfeed’, and baby bottles are called ‘mamaderas’. The use of the verb here suggests that Peronism can also be transmitted from early infancy and – metaphorically – in the mother’s breast milk. This points to the crucial fact that it is also inherited through experience, as does the mention of playing the drums in a union in this quote.5 And so people told of parents, uncles and aunts, or grandparents telling stories about Evita, teaching political values, or taking their children along to demonstrations and other political events from an early age. People’s children ‘grow up in the midst of the chaos’, as one UPCN delegate said in a group discussion, as she was describing how she took her own children along to union activities, including street demonstrations and other meetings. Family members can be exemplary figures of a kind as well, teaching an activist disposition to members of the next generation through their own behaviour as well as through the stories they tell and political discussions they engage in. Yet activism is also about will, since not all children or nieces and nephews will have the same response to an older generation’s activism, with many choosing a non-political pathway. The inclination to activism is something that both ‘just is’ and is mutable, described as part of an inner essence even when it was a choice. Thus, unionists cultivated a series of virtues, bearings, and dispositions as activists both as individuals and collectively and out of what they understood to be essential, even biological characteristics. This cultivated disposition should be understood as a specific kind of hexis in Aristotelian terms, which Joseph Malikail (2003) summarizes as ‘a compound product of nature, habit and reason, achieved by an appropriate disposing of personal inclinations and qualities’. Although translated into Latin as habitus, hexis is 5

The drums, called ‘bombos’, are strongly associated with Peronist protest, especially unionism. See Adamovsky and Buch (2016); also the podcast ‘Sounds of Protest’, episode 6, at www.camthropod.org.

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more active than anthropologists understand habituation or habit to be (Laidlaw 2014). It is both conscious and unspoken, but is also inculcated through pedagogical action, unlike the Bourdieuian notion of habitus (see Mahmood 2005: 136–9). As I have indicated, much of my interlocutors’ talk about their subjectivation was articulated in terms that downplayed the role of reflection while focussing instead on essential aspects of their being or character. Somewhat paradoxically, they often did so in a context that was eminently reflective, namely an interview with a researcher who had asked them to reflect on their activism. James Laidlaw argues that ‘active processes of reflective self-formation’ are intrinsic to subjectivation (2014: 101). Webb Keane also makes the connection between ethics and evaluation or judgement, where important ethical processes revolve around bringing the taking for granted into question. To some extent, ethics might ‘depend on the freedom that is made possible by reflection’, although not exclusively so, as ethical life is also constituted by ‘those emotions, intuitive responses, and habits that elude consciousness’ (Keane 2016: 182). The aspect of reflection, which Michael Lambek (2010) also describes as evaluation or judgement, is central to anthropological discussions of ethics for two main reasons: first, their Foucauldian intellectual heritage (cf. Faubion 2011) and, second, in the implications this has for theories of freedom and subjection to societal norms (Laidlaw 2002; Laidlaw 2014), a point to which I will return. Yet, for my interlocutors, their cultivation of self was only partially amenable to reflection, in specific and usually retrospective contexts such as a research interview or discussion, or formal workshop exercise. In my experience the values they were cultivating were not in themselves a daily topic of conversation outside of those contexts, not even when people were considered to be not measuring up. My research suggests that reflection on values may not even occur at all under normal circumstances, constituting instead what Jarret Zigon (2008) describes as morality, namely dispositions that orientate moral life. This can be remarkably unreflective, even when in practice these kinds of dispositions demand very strong commitment, as in the case of labour movement activists. Thus, it is possible that the ethical nature of any given action or set of actions might only become evident in the sense of becoming appropriate for ethical reflection because of the intervention of the researcher. By explicitly asking people to reflect on their modes of subjectivation, I was prompting the exercise of techniques of subjectivation. Undoubtedly, I presented my work in such a way to influence some of my informants’ ethical understandings of what they did. Containment is a good example of this process. In contrast to militancy, which as a concept is more consciously reflected upon in daily life, containment was more like a turn of phrase that I noticed recurring in conversations and interviews but that was not reflected upon explicitly until I began to ask people about it. Eventually I started to present my work as a study of ‘militancy and containment’ because it seemed to chime so well with how

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my interlocutors understood their political lives. In a workshop explicitly designed to present my research to UPCN activists, they confirmed to me that they thought it was a good analytical strategy to choose. It made sense to them. So, ethical-political values do circulate and are cultivated both collectively and individually, but at a fundamental level tend to be part of a hegemonic understanding of the kind of person activists want to be; that is to say, they remain largely unquestioned. This stands in contrast to other much more reflexive contemporary activists in other ethnographies of ethics and activism (e.g. Dave 2012; Razsa 2015). Between ATE and UPCN there are both similarities and differences in the sets of values that are emphasized, depending on which union that person belongs to, which is one of the reasons I would like to propose the cultivation of a collective self. Where activists do reflect and critique is in what they think the organization should do, and how their organization fares according to the criteria they value and in contrast to others. So, UPCN activists value discipline and efficiency and argue that the verticalism of their organization makes it better and more effective, while ATE activists value horizontality and critique, and argue that this makes them more democratic and therefore more effective in the way they define efficacy. Both groups have discussions about precise strategic questions: should the organization negotiate with a government that is not favourable to workers? Should they accept a salary increase that is smaller than the members need but that is at least something? Is it unrealistic to raise workers’ expectations of the kind of salary increase that they could demand? In an election year, should the union participate in general strikes and street demonstrations or fight the regime by helping members to campaign for opposition candidates? Which candidates? And so on. Like the Italian LGBTQ activists arguing about where a Pride parade should be held and whether they should set up their own Pride parade to counter the one they see as overly commercialized (Heywood 2018), or Lebanese solidarity activists debating whether they should go south to the border with Israel to take humanitarian relief to communities there (Hermez 2011), or lesbian activists in India discussing whether it is better to set up a supportive headline, seek funding from international donors, or take a legal case to court (Dave 2012), or Croatian anarchists discussing whether to abandon their squat in the face of police threats (Razsa 2015), strategy is where we find much of the judgement and evaluation engaged in by activists.

Ethics and Political Action – Praxis An important aspect of Foucauldian thought on subjectivation is the consideration of the telos of self-cultivation. However, in contrast to the selves of late Foucauldian thought (1988; 1990 [1984]) and a number of

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subjects of the contemporary anthropology of ethics, unionists’ practices of self-cultivation were not aimed primarily at improving themselves as persons or even especially living in accordance with conceptions of the good, although both do apply. They were aimed more at the organization itself and were viewed ultimately as a means to alter society, like the utopian imaginaries of direct action or human rights groups. Although ATE and UPCN disagree about the mechanisms to promote desirable change, and even perhaps the extent of change necessary, they both seek to transform their worlds for the better, or in some historical moments, as during the most neoliberal governments of the 1990s and 2015–19, to ameliorate change for the worse. And in fact there is a range of opinion across both unions about what change might be desirable and possible. Nonetheless, both unions see themselves as acting for the betterment of their members and for workers more broadly; and to do so they put considerable effort into self-making, especially collective self-making. Through this focus on the collectivity, self-cultivation combines with action on society, hexis with praxis. James Faubion has developed Foucault’s work on self-cultivation through the concept of autopoiesis, which combines systems theory, Foucault, and Aristotelian ethics (the latter two are linked via the Stoics) to build on Aristotle’s notion of poiesis, usually translated as making or fabrication (Faubion 2001b). Aristotle also introduced the idea of praxis, usually translated as doing. The discussion of making and doing in book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle 1988) forms part of a description of a series of intellectual virtues, all related to different kinds of activity. For example, sophia, or wisdom, maps to theoria, theory, while techne, which means skill or art, maps to poeisis; and phronesis, translated by J. A. K. Thomson as ‘prudence’, maps to praxis. For Aristotle, wisdom, skill, and prudence are all virtues that should be developed within the person in order to result in the different modes of action (theory, making, and doing). They combine to form the desired hexis or cultivated moral state of the person. For Aristotle, prudence is eminently political, since the prudent man [sic] is able to deliberate upon what is good not only for himself but also for the good life generally; the quality of prudence ‘belongs to those who understand the management of households or states’ (Aristotle 1988: 209). Thus prudence was especially associated with the realm of citizenship, which in the ancient Greek polis excluded legislation but included deliberation and judgement (Arendt 1998 [1958]; Aristotle 1988: 214, 1992). This is ethics as cultivation for the governance of others (Faubion 2001b). Arendt was particularly inspired by this, and developed a notion of action that is very much about how to live with others, to participate in the web of human relations particularly through speech (Arendt 1998 [1958]). This characterizes political life in Argentina as it did for Arendt and for the unions I studied can be seen in practices as varied as workplace assemblies, ceremonial events, speeches at street demonstrations and political rallies,

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negotiations with functionaries, discussions of national politics, and so on. Those who rise to leadership positions in the unions are almost always very good public speakers – knowledgeable, inspiring, and charismatic. One of the most popular training sessions in the early years of the UPCN school was the course on oratory. In order to understand Argentine unionists’ action and activism, it is important then to reinstate the explicitly political aspects of Aristotelian and Arendtian thought on ethics and intellectual virtues: to recover prudence/phronesis and, especially, praxis. The philosophical tradition most associated with the term praxis is of course Marxism, which Gramsci, following Labriola, called the ‘philosophy of praxis’ in his Prison Notebooks. The point that philosophy should not merely deal in abstract subjects but real subjects in historical and cultural context is a very anthropological one and recalls Ingold’s neat statement that anthropology is ‘philosophy with the people in’ (Ingold 1992). It has two implications specifically for anthropology of ethical life in the context of activism: first, the importance of subjecthood in political action, and second, the relationship between action and reflection. From its beginning, Marxism as philosophy of praxis has held extraordinary political and social power in addition to its philosophical charge, encapsulated in the famous 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ One of the implications of this recognition of the importance of social and political action for philosophy was the entry into Marxist political thought of what we might understand as processes of subjectivation. Marxists as different as Che Guevara (1965), Ho Chi Minh (Keane 2016), and Herbert Marcuse (1969) acknowledged at least to some extent the role of self-making in the construction of desired political subjects. Che Guevara’s ‘New Man’ of socialism was an individual shaped by social relations but also with the autonomy to choose the correct course of action, and revolutionary consciousness was an inherently educational and moral project (Martinez-Saenz 2004). The Cuban revolution and Che Guevara were important sources of inspiration for leftist movements across Latin America, some of whom also drew on Maoist ideas and ‘re-education’ techniques. Similarly, Keane (2016) describes how the moral and ethical programmes of twentieth-century Vietnamese revolutionaries drew on methods of indoctrination to inculcate ‘revolutionary ethics’ and were very similar to religious movements. Herbert Marcuse (1969) was especially excited about the prospect of the New Left of the 1960s for creating a ‘new sensibility’ based on art, imagination, and the Great Refusal (of dominant systems of thought, including capitalism). Paulo Freire, more directly embedded than Marcuse in practical political and social action, linked revolutionary praxis to subjectivity via pedagogy (1996 [1970]: 141), saying: I interpret the revolutionary process as dialogical cultural action which is prolonged in ‘cultural revolution’ once power is taken. In

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both stages a serious and profound effort at conscientizao [conscientization] – by means of which the people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects – is necessary. Freire defined praxis as ‘the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it’ and thought that it could be brought into being through conscientization, namely radical education that enabled people to perceive their own position in a given social structure. Such an education had to be dialogical between teacher and student, drawing on the student’s own experience and critical reflection rather than expecting the student merely to absorb content transmitted by the teacher (what he scathingly called the ‘banking model of education’). This pedagogical approach has had an enormous influence globally, but especially in Latin America, through the popular education programmes of leftist organizations, non-governmental organizations, and Christian Base Communities, as well as community organizations like theatre groups. It certainly informed both unions’ training programmes. For Freire, praxis was crucially both action and reflection; action without reflection is just ‘activism’ and reflection without action is ‘verbalism’: ‘When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah”’ (1996 [1970]: 125). Freire’s use of the term ‘activism’ (in Portuguese, ativismo) is not the way I use the term in this chapter, which is instead as a translation of the Argentine term militancia rather than activismo. But Freire’s discussion does raise a potential problem for my argument. I have suggested that the subject creation of unionist activists was not necessarily reflective all the time, even if amenable to reflection when prompted. Was it then merely activism in Freire’s meaning of the term? Yet their praxis was much more consciously reflected upon than their processes of self-cultivation. The unionists I knew constantly discussed what they should do and what were the problems – smallscale and societal – that they were solving; and they had a very highly developed theory of organization. They thought a lot about how best to do it, and what they should aim at. These deliberations took place in day-today arguments or conversations about tactics and were taught in training sessions. The discussion of the problem and associated political strategies and tactics was very much reflected upon in the everyday work of activism; those values that were thought to orientate action less so. The relationship between action and reflection is, then, a dynamic one that plays out differently in each ethnographic context. Freire’s focus on revolutionary praxis also obscures the more mundane forms of praxis that are nonetheless transformational, even if those transformations are relatively small. I want to recover the importance of the multiple examples of non-revolutionary praxis in the work of the activists

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I have spent time with; actions which are ethical processes insofar as they are moments of interaction and common construction and circulation of values. For example, street protests are a series of creative moments of common construction of meaning, located in the political history of the labour movement itself and in the city as space. With other rituals, such as those paying homage to particular important figures, or celebrating important dates, they are moments of collective affirmation and circulation of common values and interpretations of politics as well as social experiences of effervescence, commensality, emotion, and communitas (Durkheim 1965 [1915]; Turner 1969). They state and restate a political agenda and contribute to building it in the present moment, through bringing protagonists together and making collective strength evident by means of sonorous and physical presence (drums, shouting, banners, and bands). Similarly, Occupy activists took over squares across Europe and North America, holding assemblies, camping, and taking up space to state and enact their political agenda, direct action activists engaged police forces at G7 summits in Genoa, Seattle, and a European Union summit in Thessaloniki (Razsa 2015), and mothers whose children had been taken walked in silence around the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in the middle of a brutal military regime (Day and Goddard 2010). In Delhi, LGBTQ activists took to the streets in December 1998 in counter-protests against right-wing attacks on a theatre showing the film Fire about a love affair between two women. Lesbians claimed their existence in a direct challenge to the right-wing insistence that there were no lesbians in India, with one famous sign declaring ‘Indian and Lesbian’. The subsequent distribution of that photograph also had an important effect on societal perceptions and even some individuals’ sense of being interpellated into an identity (Dave 2012). Collective events like occupations, demonstrations, and parades have a complex relationship to politics in more institutional spaces, beyond a direct relationship between a demonstration and specific policy or legislative change. They bring advocates together and prove strength in numbers, which (depending on the ethnographic context) shapes what political elites think might be possible next time, and how their actions will be evaluated in elections. Some, like Pride parades, change public opinion before they affect institutional politics. Yet there is also a great deal of work that takes place beyond these spectacular moments. As Hugo Gorringe (2010: 116) points out, ‘while it is stirring speeches, courageous acts of defiance, large demonstrations or high-profile legal or social victories that inspire people to become activists, the backstory to each of these involves tedious meetings and endless encouragement, networking and legwork’. Unionists also engage in more quotidian moments of praxis, such as negotiations over individual employment contracts; making and displaying posters claiming particular political goals; engaging in acts of care through the provision of welfare and social rights such as childcare or healthcare; holding cultural

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competitions for poetry, essay-writing, or art; campaigning against workplace harassment and for equal opportunities; and so on. Finally, the two unions engage in pedagogical praxis, as they train their delegates in particular understandings of organization, political action (negotiation and contestation), history, professional bearing, and personal values.

Organization: The Politics of Ethical Action (and the Ethics of Political Action) Consideration of praxis brings an additional dimension to debates about ethical action within anthropology, which have to date often taken place as a debate between ethics as societal structure or social mores and ethics as action. Michael Lambek (2010) distinguishes very clearly between the two definitions of ethics. He says: By contrast to those who have seen the substance of ethics as either values or rules, or as the freedom to break away from the obligation of adhering to rules, I have argued that the ethical is intrinsic to human action, to meaning what one says and does and to living according to the criteria thereby established. (2010: 61)6 As Laidlaw (2014) has also argued, it makes for a potentially more sophisticated understanding of human agency if we can explore freedom and agency in terms not merely of resistance to norms or structure. Saba Mahmood’s work shows how agentive ethical action exists beyond just ‘enacting or subverting norms’ (2005: 29), including in a conscious inhabiting of dominant values. The link between action and reflection is important, but complicated, and we need space in our analysis for actions that ‘just are’, things that you do because that is who you are, without assuming that a narrative of this kind indicates only unreflective habitus. Among Argentine unionists, understandings of essential dispositions such as those based in character or family interact with reflection, pedagogy, choice, and values in places like the workplace delegation, the school, and the street. As ethical processes, they amount not only to self-cultivation but also to action as praxis, which takes place in the conjunction between shared values, historical experience, and political contingency. 6

The phrase ‘meaning what one says and does’ perhaps illustrates the influence of Hannah Arendt’s work on his thought. In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes between three fundamental kinds of human vita activa (active life, as opposed to the life of contemplation), namely labour, work, and action. The last is very much about how to live with others, to participate in the web of human relations through speech and action. The political life of deliberation and debate (but not legislation) may be thought to be action, but for Arendt action also consists of acts which set off processes that then develop in unexpected ways. She was thinking in particular of scientific actions like the making of Galileo’s telescope, space exploration, and the atomic bomb. The only way to have control over those processes is, first, forgiveness and, second, the (power of the) making and keeping of promises – in Lambek’s terms, ‘meaning what one says and does’.

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While the processes of collective subjectivation I have listed in this chapter are a repertoire shared by both unions, UPCN emphasize more the elements of care, service, and negotiation, and ATE emphasize explicitly politicized action such as assemblies and protest events. These distinctions are understood as consonant with a classic distinction in the Argentine labour movement between a kind of service unionism (bureaucratic unionism, officialism, even co-opted – ‘yellow’) and a more radical tradition influenced by social movements in the present moment, but with a history of anarcho-syndicalism from the early twentieth century, and radical rank-and-file unionism from the 1960s. This is the basic organizational ecology within which these ethical modes exist, one of the implications of which is that they come up against limitations such as the tension of pragmatism versus ideological purity. This can be seen especially in ATE’s critique of UPCN for being overly ready to negotiate, so much so that they are actually really on the side of the management, while UPCN activists consider ATE to be unnecessarily dogmatic and therefore harmful to those they are supposed to represent. But day-to-day political life is messy and limitations are as key to activism as are new possibilities. Activists face the political imperative to confine those new possibilities within normative language and modes of action (Dave 2012) and oscillate between selfcreation and campaigning for others. This might rub up against how activism feels, becoming a ‘sublimation of affect to moral calculus’. The example that Dave uses to illustrate this is the channelling of unruly forms of ‘lesbian’ sexualities and affect into a politically actionable identity. She argues that some may not want to engage in politics or the law but may simply wish to become other, and care for others. Often in practice these differences or, as Dave calls them, incommensurabilities get worked through theoretically and in people’s talk by means of quite specific questions about aspects of language or organizational strategy. The conflict about whether to use the term ‘lesbian’ in Delhi is one example; contemporary discussions of gender pronouns and misgendering might be another. In the case of the unions I worked with, the differences were made evident and politically salient mostly through a discussion of organizational philosophy. UPCN activists contrast the organicity, discipline, and verticality of their union with the anarchy and ineffectiveness of ATE, while ATE activists contrast their democratic horizontality with UPCN’s corrupt and co-opted authoritarianism (Lazar 2015). In making these contrasts, both groups defend organization as a value in and of itself. They just define its content differently. This is one explanation for the social labour involved in collective self-making as a union and probably one of the most common means by which both unions combine reflection and action. UPCN justify it by saying that an organization must negotiate from a position of power, and that is why you must focus on activities that bring people together in the union. They often quote Pero´n, who said ‘organization defeats time’ (la organizacio´n vence al tiempo); that is,

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organization outlasts most political actions. ATE activists want to constitute their union as a ‘pressure factor’ and so their actions focus on protest and campaigning activities, but also on assemblies. These especially are understood to be about constructing a horizontal politics and what ATE activists envisage as a truly democratic mode of existence within their organization. Here they fit well within an ethical trend among contemporary social movements: when enacted in assemblies, prefiguration is very much about how a movement should organize itself, just as much as it is about experiencing a new kind of democratic being in the world. The various different Occupy movements concerned themselves deeply with practical matters of organization, from how to provision the camp and how to communicate ideas to a wider public to how to ensure that speakers could be heard when no electronic microphone was possible, for example (Corsı´n Jime´nez and Estalella 2013; Taussig 2013; Graeber 2013). The focus on the union as institution can be problematic in that it can mean that both unions turn in on themselves to preserve themselves as movements and expend much of their energy on discussions and debates about how best to organize, especially in moments when the political environment is not favourable to them. As such, they run the risk of losing sight of a broader imagined goal beyond union strength itself. Yet it would be misguided to dismiss this by arguing that it is merely political ideology (ATE) or what one would expect from a bureaucratized and compromised labour movement (UPCN). Both criticisms rely on an assumption that the explanation for social movements need not really go very far ‘beyond grievance’ (Shah 2013); that is to say, beyond collective interest rationally assessed, clearly articulated and then (somehow automatically) deeply felt. Such a position requires little to no consideration of the means to act, and yet in fact organization itself is probably crucial to getting to the point where it is possible collectively to feel not only grievances but also positive values and desires for transformation. Only through organization can those grievances, values, and desires be experienced, articulated, and maintained in a praxis that has power and longevity. Put differently, without organization – which includes both individual and collective ethical projects of cultivation – political struggle cannot take place, no matter how deeply felt or rationally chosen a set of political opinions might be. Thus the social and ethical life of activism is central to its political impact. If only at the most basic level, it is more important that people continue to work at their activism than it is that they join the cause in the first place. For the unionists I have worked with, their union shapes their political action and linked ethical subjectivation in the way that it brings them together as a political community, or collective self. This is understood as the outcome of a continual relation between what I have called different ethical states: essence, or who you are; hexis, or who you become; and praxis, or what you do. Not all of those states are equally subject to

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reflection in the everyday, but people do theorize them if asked to. Reflection, action, and the ‘just is’ combine to create particular kinds of political subjects, both individual and collective.

References Adamovsky, Ezequiel and Esteban Buch, eds. 2016. La marchita, el escudo y el bombo. Una historia cultural de los emblemas del peronismo, de Pero`n a Cristina Kirchner. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Alvarez, Sonia E., Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds. 1998. Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1988. Ethics. London: Penguin. 1992. The Politics. London: Penguin. Bion, Wilfred. 1959. ‘Attacks on Linking’. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40: 308–15. Carsten, Janet. 2013. ‘Introduction: Blood Will Out’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: S1–S23. Corsı´n Jime´nez, Alberto and Adolfo Estalella. 2013. ‘The Atmospheric Person: Value, Experiment, and “Making Neighbors” in Madrid’s Popular Assemblies’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(2). Dave, Naisargi. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Day, Sophie and Victoria Goddard. 2010. ‘New Beginnings between Public and Private: Arendt and Ethnographies of Activism’. Cultural Dynamics, 22(2): 137–54. Dinerstein, Ana C. 2014. The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope. London: Palgrave. Douglas, Hazel. 2007. Containment and Reciprocity: Integrating Psychoanalytic Theory and Child Development Research for Work with Children. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E´mile. 1965 [1915]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. J. W. Swain, trans. London: Free Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2010. ‘Latin America at a Crossroads’. Cultural Studies, 24 (1): 1–65. Faubion, James D. 2001a. The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2001b. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis’. Representations, 74(1): 83–104. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feenberg, Andrew. 2014. The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Luka´cs, and the Frankfurt School. London: Verso.

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Foucault, Michel. 1988. ‘Technologies of the Self’, in L. Martin (ed.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock: 16–49. 1990 [1984]. ‘The Care of the Self’. The History of Sexuality: Volume Three. London: Penguin. 1992 [1984]. ‘The Use of Pleasure’. The History of Sexuality: Volume 2. R. Hurley, trans. London: Penguin. Freire, Paulo. 1996 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. Gorringe, Hugo. 2010. ‘Beyond “Dull and Sterile Routines”? Dalits Organizing for Social Change in Tamil Nadu’. Cultural Dynamics, 22(2): 105–19. Graeber, David. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh: AK Press. 2013. The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. London: Random House Publishing Group. Guevara, Che. 1965. ‘El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba’. www .marxists.org/espanol/guevara/65-socyh.htm. Hermez, Sami. 2011. ‘Activism As “Part-Time” Activity: Searching for Commitment and Solidarity in Lebanon’. Cultural Dynamics, 23(1): 41–55. Heywood, Paolo. 2018 After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Berghahn. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Howell, Signe. 2006. The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. Oxford: Berghahn. Ingold, Tim. 1992. ‘Editorial’. Man, 27(4): 693–6. Juris, Jeffrey S. 2012. ‘Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation’. American Ethnologistx, 39(2): 259–79. 2014. ‘Embodying Protest: Culture and Performance within Social Movements’, in B. Baumgarten, P. Daphi, and P. Ullrich (eds.), Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan: 227–49. Keane, Webb. 2010. ‘Minds, Surfaces, and Reasons in the Anthropology of Ethics’, in M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 64–83. 2016 Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Krøijer, Stine. 2015. ‘Revolution Is the Way You Eat: Exemplification among Left Radical Activists in Denmark and in Anthropology’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 78–95. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2): 311–32. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lambek, Michael. 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Lazar, Sian. 2013. ‘Citizenship, Political Agency and Technologies of the Self in Argentinean Trade Unions’. Critique of Anthropology, 33: 110–28. 2014. ‘Historical Narrative, Mundane Political Time, and Revolutionary Moments: Coexisting Temporalities in the Lived Experience of Social Movements’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20: 91–108. 2015. ‘Of Autocracy and Democracy, or Discipline and Anarchy: When Organizational Structure Meets Political Ideology in Argentinean Public Sector Trade Unions’. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 38: 279–99. 2018. ‘A “Kinship Anthropology of Politics”? Interest, the Collective Self, and Kinship in Argentine Unions’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 24(2): 256–74. Maeckelbergh, Marianne. 2009. The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement Is Changing the Face of Democracy. London: Pluto Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Malikail, Joseph. 2003. ‘Moral Character: Hexis, Habitus and “Habit”’. Minerva – An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 7: 1–22. Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Martinez-Saenz, Miguel. 2004. ‘Che Guevara’s New Man: Embodying a Communitarian Attitude’. Latin American Perspectives, 31(6): 15–30. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nash, June, ed. 2005. Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Osterweil, Michal. 2014. ‘Social Movements’, in D. Nonini (ed.), A Companion to Urban Anthropology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell: 470–85. Razsa, Maple. 2015. Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Razsa, Maple and Andrej Kurnik. 2012. ‘The Occupy Movement in Zˇizˇek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and a Politics of Becoming’. American Ethnologist, 39(2): 238–58. Robbins, Joel. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3): 447–62. Shukaitis, Stephen, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle, eds. 2007. Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations and Collective Theorization. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Shah, Alpa. 2013. ‘The Intimacy of Insurgency: Beyond Coercion, Greed, or Grievance in Maoist India’. Economy and Society, 42: 335–47. Sitrin, Marina, ed. 2006. Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

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Taussig, Michael. 2013. ‘I’m So Angry I Made a Sign’, in W. J. T. Mitchell, B. E. Harcourt, and M. Taussig (eds.), Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 3–43. Tilly, Charles and Lesley Wood. 2012. Social Movements, 1768–2012. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge. Zigon, Jarrett. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg.

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32 Philanthropy China Scherz

Introduction Suffering and ethics have come to the fore of our discipline in short succession over the past three decades. While these two developments might seem unrelated, the convergence is neither surprising nor coincidental. While the goals of witnessing to human suffering and writings about ethics have sometimes been presented as opposing alternatives (Robbins 2013), we can also think of them both as emerging from a common global, though by no means universal, movement towards a particular sort of concern with the ethical. In short, it is in the rise of humanitarianism as the primary form of reasoning about the good among a certain set of the global elite, to which many anthropologists belong, that we find a possible point of shared origin between them. Much of the scholarship produced by anthropologists over the past three decades suggests that they are living in a world shaped by the particular understanding of human suffering that has emerged from the ideals and practices of humanitarianism. Contained within this understanding of suffering is a sense of the universality of human experience and a heightened awareness of the necessity of choosing how one ought to respond to these forms of suffering. Reflecting the humanitarian practice of ‘witnessing’ suffering through the act of speaking and writing about it, one finds many anthropologists using their skills as ethnographers and speakers to document, attend, and bear witness to suffering. This position is perhaps laid out most explicitly by Nancy Scheper-Hughes in the arguments against moral relativism which she presented in her 1995 essay ‘The Primacy of the Ethical’. Here she drew on Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘notion of a “pre-cultural” moral repugnance towards unnecessary human suffering’ (1995: 409) to argue for an ‘ethically grounded’, ‘politically committed’, and ‘morally engaged’ anthropology. As noted by Robbins (2013), the generation of anthropologists that took up Scheper-Hughes’s call to attend

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to their ‘pre-cultural’ sentimental reactions to human suffering produced works that witnessed to human suffering in ways that resonated with the increasingly important role that moral sentiments were playing in contemporary politics and in the decisions that many people make about how to use their limited time and money in their everyday lives. For a different group of anthropologists who have been involved in crafting the anthropology of ethics, their scholarly work was focussed on attempting to define and redefine how anthropologists might use terms such as ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ as analytical concepts. As has been thoroughly elaborated in other chapters of this Handbook, over the past twenty years or so, scholars such as James Laidlaw, Paul Rabinow, Saba Mahmood, Jarrett Zigon, Joel Robbins, and Michael Lambek have developed a suite of related concepts for thinking about how people strive, in both highly demarcated and everyday ways, to live good, moral, and ethical lives. At first glance, this movement seems less clearly tied to the deployment of humanitarian sentiment than the works of those who call us to use our skills to witness and document human suffering. Indeed, other than the common use of the word ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ in the titles of numerous works describing humanitarian efforts and organizations, we might not immediately see the relationship between the rise of humanitarianism and the development of the anthropology of ethics. We might instead attribute the emergence of the anthropology of ethics primarily to the contributions made through the work of a few scholars who began reading, translating, and popularizing the works and interviews Foucault produced during the last years of his life. A preliminary engagement with Foucault’s writings on ethics lends no obvious clues that would point to a linkage between Foucault’s writings on ethics and the growing force of humanitarianism and other forms of philanthropic giving. Yet, while Foucault’s writings are often used to mount critiques of the biopolitics of humanitarian interventions (Redfield 2005), his own turn towards ethics took place during the same years during which he himself was becoming increasingly interested in the humanitarian work of organizations such as Medicins du Monde (Rabinow 1997). He is, in this way, not so unlike Didier Fassin, whose own interest in the anthropology of morality emerged as he was writing about, and serving on the board of, Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) (Fassin 2011). While an inquiry into the historical relation between humanitarianism and the rise of the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of suffering merits further study, it is the body of work which documents the practices and ideals of humanitarianism and other forms of philanthropy that is the subject of this review. While only some of this work explicitly engages with literature on the anthropology of ethics and morality, all of it describes a field of practice defined by a commitment to precisely these terms – the ethical, the moral, the good, and so on. In what follows, I begin by describing works which focus on the moral and practical content and

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effects of philanthropic giving. In the second section, I explore how anthropologists have thought about humanitarian and philanthropic practices as the grounds upon and through which people cultivate and enact forms of ethical subjectivity. In the final section, I return to consider anthropology’s relationship to the ideas of moral clarity, moral relativism, and judgement and the special relevance of these terms for anthropologists writing about, and participating in, projects orientated towards these various understandings of the good.

Convergence and Distinction In his reviews of the anthropology of charity, Jonathan Benthall (2012, 2017) has marked a fifty-year anthropological silence on the question of charity between R. R. Marett’s writings on charity in the 1930s (1939) and Jonathan Parry’s 1986 essay ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift, and the “Indian Gift”’. Nearly fifteen years after Parry, James Laidlaw was still able to mark a decided lack of anthropological interest in actual or putative ‘free gifts’ (Laidlaw 2000). Yet, today it would be hard to overstate the resurgence of interest in exploring sites in which charity and ‘free gifts’ are central.

Humanitarianism While the essays and books of scholars such as Parry and Laidlaw emerged from projects that had little, if any, direct connection to humanitarianism, much of the current surge of interest in charity, philanthropy, and the gift is likely due, in no small part, to the increasing importance of humanitarianism and other non-governmental forms of providing aid and social services. In the 1980s, there was a change in thinking about governance and economic growth that shifted focus away from public-service provision. While some governments took up this line of thinking voluntarily, others were forced to do so when they took loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to solve the problems created by the rise of fuel prices in the 1970s. By the end of the 1990s, the human cost of these programmes was becoming clear, but rather than move back towards the public provision of services, national and transnational governmental bodies turned towards models which rely on the voluntary work and the donations of private citizens (Mallaby 2004; Muehlebach 2012; Adams 2013; Scherz 2014). The ever-expanding role of these sorts of non-governmental institutions and efforts commanded anthropologists’ attention partly by virtue of the increasingly important role of such organizations in the places where anthropologists were working and partly because these organizations were so perfectly suited to an anthropology that increasingly defined its

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methods and field sites in ways that were well suited to the study of ‘global assemblages’ (Ong and Collier 2005). During this same period, humanitarianism was gaining traction as the primary way of thinking about a widening array of human problems. Humanitarianism is a movement that is focussed on the alleviation of physical and psychological suffering and trauma – images of which are often broadcast in carefully orchestrated forms to make arguments through the stirring of sentiment (Boltanski 1999). While contemporary instantiations of humanitarianism have their roots in Judeo-Christian forms of charity (Brown 2002, 2012, 2015), these practices and ideas underwent a series of substantial changes beginning in the sixteenth century that ultimately brought us to humanitarianism in its present form.1 Humanitarians ideally aim to extend this aid to all humans, regardless of any other commitments. As opposed to the mid-range future of development, or the eternal resonances of some forms of religiously inspired charity, its temporality is that of the emergency or crisis, and it is limited in its aim (Scherz 2014). It is, in the words of journalist David Rieff, ‘a hope for a disenchanted time’ (Rieff 2002) and, in the words of anthropologist Peter Redfield, a ‘minimalist biopolitics’ (Redfield 2005) aimed at bare survival. It does not hold out the promise of a world that can be saved through revolution, revelation, or capitalism, but rather seeks to save a few human lives through the provision of basic services which it is able to provide in part through a commitment to political impartiality. Despite the rationalized and bureaucratic form that humanitarianism often takes, humanitarianism’s primary authority comes from its success in establishing itself as a universal moral language (Rabinow 2003). This moral argument is largely made not through rational argumentation or an explicit appeal to a specific tradition, but rather through an appeal to sentiments, most notably compassion. As in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976), these feelings are thought to arise spontaneously in all people, thus motivating them towards good works without the need for further reasoning. It might come as a surprise to some that the philosopher that brought us the invisible hand would also bring us this theory of compassion and sentiment, but historians have clearly shown the linkages between Smith’s works (Hont and Ignatieff 1986; Griswold 1999). Andrea Muehlebach has further demonstrated how Smith’s seemingly unlikely pairing of arguments concerning self-interest and fellow feeling comes together as a unified whole in the work of elderly volunteers in neoliberal Italy (Muehlebach 2012). This whole, which combines both capitalist pursuit of profit and virtuous acts of voluntary giving, has come to fruition in the market-based, structurally adjusted world of the present. In this world, the state is not 1

A complete history of this present is beyond the scope of this essay and has already been discussed at length in several other excellent monographs (Fassin 2011; Rieff 2002).

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completely absent but works in large part through the elicitation and orchestration of the efforts of private citizens motivated by compassion, and private companies motivated by profit. As Vincanne Adams (2013) has shown in her writings on the humanitarian relief and recovery industry in post-Katrina New Orleans, these people and companies are often brought together in unlikely, and sometimes unacknowledged, partnerships, in which voluntary labour becomes a resource for the creation of profit. Anthropologists such as Didier Fassin (2011) and Miriam Ticktin (2011) have shown that there is much at stake in the rise of humanitarianism. Like other forms of moral reasoning, humanitarianism is a form of problematization (Foucault 1984; Rabinow 2003). In defining a problem in humanitarian terms, one shapes the ways in which one understands the problem to be addressed and the sorts of solutions that one might propose. In defining a problem as a humanitarian one, we move from thinking about inequality to thinking about exclusion, from domination to misfortune, from injustice to suffering and from violence to trauma. As a set, these moves serve several purposes. First, in defining problems as humanitarian ones, one takes what had, over the course of the nineteenth century, come to be defined as ‘social problems’ (Rabinow 1989) and redefines them on more individual terms. We are asked to respond to the suffering person, not to the forces which caused the suffering. In this way, we are also encouraged to reduce the focus given to finding culpable agents, assigning responsibility, and addressing root causes. Finally, we are led to think less about how problems might be solved through politics and more about the role of public and private acts of generosity and compassion (Fassin 2011; Ticktin 2011). For example, Miriam Ticktin’s ethnography of the illness clause in France offers an insightful argument into the problems that emerge when political efforts to solve problems related to immigration are undermined by a redefinition of these problems as ones requiring humanitarian solutions. In using standards based on bodily trauma or illness to define which immigrants were worthy of asylum, France transformed immigration from a political problem to a problem that could best be managed through sentimental practices of care and compassion. In so doing, Ticktin argues that the French state released itself from being held accountable for the problems that push people to emigrate from their home countries and pushed people to consider whether it is worth exchanging bodily integrity for the possibility of asylum (Ticktin 2011).

Distinction and Convergence While numerous forms of non-reciprocal giving have increasingly been drawn into relationship with humanitarianism or other forms of philanthropy, there are important distinctions to be attended to as well. To talk

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about the many varieties of humanitarianism (Fassin 2011; Redfield 2005, 2012, 2013; Bornstein and Redfield 2011; Calhoun 2010; Malkki 2015; Feldman 2007), solidarity work (Theodossopoulos 2016), charity (Scherz 2014; Allahyari 2000; Elisha 2011; Valenzuela-Garcia, Lubbers, and Rice 2019), zakat (Atia 2013; Benthall 1999; Osella and Widger 2018), tatawwu‘ (Mittermaier 2014), dan (Parry 1986; Laidlaw 2000; Copeman 2008; Bornstein 2012), and khon muang (Bowie 1998) in the same breath – not to mention development, activism, and human rights – can make for easy errors. These ways of thinking about giving differ in many ways, including the ways in which they conceptualize the reasons for giving, the qualities of the ideal recipient, and the results that might be expected to come from the gift. These variations include expectations concerning the possible transformation of the recipient (Elisha 2011; O’Neil 2013), the degree of specificity with which the obligation to give is detailed (Benthall 1999), the necessity of documenting or not documenting the gift and its effects (Halvorson 2018), and the expectations of return, divine or otherwise (Benthall 1999; Laidlaw 2000; Atia 2013; Scherz 2014). Thus, while many anthropologists studying forms of giving describe practices, such as cooking a meal in a soup kitchen or setting up a temporary medical clinic, which look superficially similar, the orientations and motivations of the givers, recipients, and others involved often differ substantially both within and across contexts and often represent similarly complex layering of ideas, values, and practice. These intersections and layers often produce situations in which there is both tension and congruence. For example, Erica Bornstein’s work on the intersections and tensions between dan and philanthropy highlights the distinctions between the instrumental rationality of philanthropy which evaluates the good of giving through its effects, and the forms of rationality which motivate dan which instead rely on understandings of affect, intrinsic value, and tradition. Yet, despite these distinctions, Bornstein, following Parry (1986), highlights the parallels between dan and philanthropy in terms of their mutual insistence on identifying worthy recipients (Bornstein 2009). Proponents and practitioners of these diverse, long-standing, and increasingly important ways of being ‘ethical’ in the world not only differ from one another but also highlight the ways in which they differ from one another in terms of how they think about their work, reflexively marking these significant distinctions in their own ‘ethical talk’ (Venkatesan 2016) about what they are doing and why. For example, in Amira Mittermaier’s writings on Resala, Egypt’s largest volunteer-driven charity organization, volunteers quite explicitly point to the importance of seeing the subtle practices of dividing and layering that exist between Islamic giving and more secular forms of humanitarian compassion. Rather than seeing their voluntary work as driven by a universal and spontaneous moral sentiment of compassion, a feeling which is seen as the driving force in secular humanitarianism, many of Resala’s members describe their voluntary service as emerging from their obedience to God (Mittermaier 2014). While

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the ethic of giving dutifully to God by giving to the poor in Islam is closer to many Christian understandings of charity than Mittermaier’s interlocutors imply (Scherz 2014), Mittermaier’s argument concerning the importance of this distinction between humanistic and non-humanistic forms of giving remains crucial in that this way of thinking about giving posits the giver not as an autonomous agent but as one already indebted or obliged to God. On the other hand, despite the importance of marking these distinctions, many charitable organizations draw on a common set of practices related to voluntary labour, accounting, distributing material resources, and forms of mediated publicity in their efforts to effect change in the world. Scholars such as Robert Weller, C. Julia Huang, Keping Wu, and Lizhu Fan point to the convergence of certain aspects of ‘doing good’ in the contemporary world (Weller et al. 2018: 2). Specifically, they highlight the convergence that takes place around what they term ‘industrialized philanthropy’. Practitioners of this form of philanthropy may come with complexly layered motivations and identities but, despite these differences, they tend to pursue a rather homogenous range of projects, such as the establishment of medical clinics, in ways that are ‘increasingly rationalized and bureaucratized’, and which are ‘disembedded from local social life and personal social connections’ (Weller et al. 2018: 2). The rise of this increasingly rationalized form of doing good, and the tensions and paradoxes associated with it, have been well described in relation to humanitarianism and global health (Adams 2016). The tensions surrounding this transformation are also central to Erica Bornstein’s discussions of the bureaucratization of giving in India (Bornstein 2012) and Britt Halvorson’s ethnography of this way of thinking among American Lutheran medical missionaries working in Madagascar (Halvorson 2018). While this way of pursuing ‘the good’ has at times been resisted and is by no means universal among practitioners of religiously inspired forms of giving, organizations which decide against it may find it difficult to compete for donors in a globalized arena that is increasingly shaped by the highly rationalized fields of development humanitarianism and global health (Scherz 2017). With this in mind, the ‘ethical labour’ involved in making ‘contingent, fractally recursive distinctions’ to morally position oneself in the contemporary requires that one draw distinctions and oppositions that not only allow one to align oneself with humanitarianism (Brada 2016) but also perhaps which allow one to identify oneself with practices that are deemed to be rational and effective.

The Gift That Wounds? Among the most frequent questions that emerge in these discussions of the convergences and distinctions between these different forms of giving is how differences in practice and in the ideas held by both givers and

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recipients shape the possible negative consequences of philanthropic giving. The social, and even spiritual dangers, of receiving a gift which cannot be reciprocated have been written about by numerous anthropologists. Most of these thinkers (Douglas 1990; Bourdieu 1977) took up readings of Marcel Mauss’s classic 1923 essay The Gift, which placed the emphasis on the agonistic aspects of gift exchange and the potential loss of status, honour, and social position that faced those who were unable to match gift with counter-gift (Mauss 1990). For many years, this position, which emphasizes the this-worldly costs of charitable giving, was taken as something of a universal fact and rarely questioned or explored empirically. It also aligned well with many European and American anthropologists’ own sense of the shame of receiving charity and with Marxian critiques of charity. As discussed by Theodossopoulos, variations on this critique have also been put forward by Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, all of whom have argued that the non-reciprocal given of charity ultimately serves to maintain conditions of injustice and exploitation by forestalling the outrage needed for true revolution (Theodossopoulos 2016). While some recent works on philanthropy have found ethnographic evidence for the popular circulation of this critique (Theodossopoulos 2016), Parry productively laid the groundwork for another anthropology of giving which was better prepared to attend to the subtle distinctions between and contingent effects of different forms of charitable, philanthropic, and humanitarian giving. Parry’s reading of Mauss diverges from the standard interpretation by reuniting interest and disinterest and by focussing more attention on the question of the possible, and potentially dangerous, spiritual effects of the gift itself (Parry 1986, 1989; Sanchez et al. 2017). Parry’s work charted a path that allowed later scholars to see givers giving without an expectation of direct this-worldly return. They were able to see that givers who claimed to be giving with the hope of accruing spiritual or even social benefits from giving were giving in a way that did not necessarily involve a contradiction or an act of bad faith, but as rather belonging to a different ethical and ontological regime than the Kantian one which rigidly separates self-interest and altruism. Following this insight and their own observations, scholars of Islam (Kochuyt 2009; Benthall 1999; Mittermaier 2014); Catholicism (Scherz 2014), Jainism (Laidlaw 1995, 2000), and Hinduism (Bornstein 2012) have all emphasized that in many traditions of religiously inspired giving, divine rather than human recipients figure as the primary partner in the exchange. Further, if harms may be accrued by recipients, these harms may be of a spiritual rather than a social nature (Parry 1986, 1989) and can be avoided by carefully following ritual prescriptions (Laidlaw 2000). Others, writing on the culturally specific lives of requests, gifts, and interdependence in Africa have noted that certain readings of Mauss’s work seem to presume equality and independence prior to both requests and exchanges. Writing on Botswana, Deborah Durham notes that it is

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through playful bantering requests that one first establishes one’s agency and autonomy (Durham 1995). Fred Klaits extends this point by exploring the aesthetics of well-being and forms of personhood achieved through multiple forms asking and giving (Klaits 2011). James Ferguson further asks us to think carefully about the moral valence of dependence and about what the effects of redistribution might be if it came in the form of Basic Income Grants as some have proposed in South Africa and Namibia (Ferguson 2015). While charity itself may not always be as wounding as it has been claimed to be, thinkers like Uzodinma Iweala have proposed that Europeans and Americans think of giving to Africa as an act of repatriation to compensate Africans for the stolen labour and material resources, instead of as an act of philanthropy. In so doing, Iweala goes further to create space for considering new ways of imagining the reasons for and practices of giving (Iweala 2017).

Philanthropy As an Ascetic Practice Among the earliest and best developed themes in the anthropology of ethics was a concern with the ways in which some people made use of ‘ascetic practices’ or ‘exercise[s] of the self on the self’ in an attempt to transform themselves into particular kinds of people, or, in Foucault’s words, ‘to develop and transform oneself, and to attain a certain mode of being’ (Foucault 1997: 282). At the inception of the present sustained anthropological dialogue about ethics that began at the turn of the millennium, these practices, and Foucault’s writings about them, were central (see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume). Many scholars sought to illuminate the ways in which people took up specific practices including waking up at specific times, engaging in exercises that called upon them to read, listen, and imagine in new ways, changing one’s mode of dressing, or engaging in certain forms of manual labour, in an effort to care for themselves and become new kinds of people (Asad 1993; Laidlaw 1995, 2014; Faubion 2001, 2011; Rabinow 2003; Mahmood 2004; Robbins 2004; Zigon 2011; Scherz 2013). As noted at the start of this essay, Foucault’s own thinking about ethics took place during a period of his life where he himself was thinking about the possibilities contained within humanitarianism, and early contributors to the anthropology of humanitarianism and charity occasionally took up fragments of these writings in making claims that acts of charity and humanitarianism constituted self-conscious practices for ‘moral selving’ (Allahyari 2000), ‘ethical labour’ (Feldman 2007), and negotiating belonging (Trundle 2014), aimed at reflexively becoming new sorts of people and founding new kinds of communities. The idea that charity could constitute a key form of ascetic practice was clearly the case for the East African Franciscan nuns whom I wrote about in

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Having People, Having Heart (Scherz 2014). For these nuns, mundane acts of washing, feeding, and even budgeting (Scherz 2013) constituted forms of ascetic practice through which they sought to copy the actions of their Irish foundress, St Francis, and Jesus, and thus become more like these moral exemplars. These acts complemented others including prayer, devotional reading, storytelling, and explicit classroom instruction in the novitiate, but were no less important to their understanding of how they might strive to become the sorts of women they hoped to be. These women’s complexly layered understandings of their own ethical development, and those of their fellow sisters, have also led me to consider other aspects of ethical formation that differ in important ways from the Foucauldian model of ascetic practice as it has been understood by many anthropologists. For while the sisters understand charitable practices of dressing wounds and feeding sick children to be ascetic ones, they also understand their efficacy to be reliant on God’s uncontrollable and unpredictable gift of divine grace (Scherz 2018). In some cases, instances of philanthropic ethical labour are aimed at altering both the subject and object of philanthropic action. This point is made by Chika Watanabe in her work on Japanese hitozukuri development, or the kind of development and philanthropic work aimed not only at ‘the transfer of skills but also the holistic cultivation of people’ (Watanabe 2017). Through her writings on the importance of achieving an ethic of ‘collective intimacy’ through the practice of ‘modelling’ at the residential training centres of a Japanese non-governmental organization, Watanabe shows how communal living and shared manual labour constitute ascetic practices aimed at transforming both the staffers and the trainees. In other instances, such as in Omri Elisha’s work on charitable giving among American evangelical Christians, the emphasis on transforming the other through the action of giving is so strong that the failure to achieve this transformation in the other produces crushing forms of disappointment and fatigue in the givers (Elisha 2011). The possibility of the moral or spiritual transformation of the recipient can also be seen in a different way in Islam where the receipt of zakat is thought to purify the recipient of their ‘jealousy and hatred of the well-off’ (Benthall 1999: 29). Others have written about the ways in which people use their humanitarian efforts to resolve their own fundamental needs. This point is made most poignantly by Liisa Malkki in The Need to Help which documents, among other things, the ways in which homely practices like making ‘aid bunnies’ and knitting Mother Teresa blankets constitute a form of vital ‘self-humanizing’ practice that allows elderly Finns to retain a hold on social existence in the face of devastating forms of isolation and loneliness (Malkki 2015). Forms of charitable engagement may also serve as a means for asserting the continuation of subjectivities under threat, as in Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki’s (2017) work on the importance of gender and motherhood in the lives of female volunteers in soup kitchens operating amidst the economic crisis in Greece.

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Philanthropic and humanitarian missions also provide a stage upon which many seek to act out their moral ambitions. The poverty, distance, and foreignness of the field circumscribed by some forms of humanitarian or charitable action may initially seem to provide an escape from the qualified, historically complex world of home. It may seem to provide a space for moral adventure and for the achievement of a kind of ‘moral clarity’ impossible at home. There is also, of course, the possibility of departure, of leaving without ongoing obligations, that may make some forms of giving seem easier than they would be if one were to get involved in one’s own community. And yet, moral dilemmas and murk immediately arise as soon as one is involved closely enough with any project. That this is the case is no surprise to those with long involvements in philanthropic and humanitarian work, and the self-reflexive discussion of such dilemmas is part and parcel of most sustained humanitarian work (Fassin 2007; Feldman 2007). Whether as sites for ethical cultivation, for grasping for continued recognition as a social person, or for enacting one’s moral ambitions, these scenes of philanthropic practice all push back on an understanding of self-interest and altruism as necessarily opposed – and on an understanding of what is to be gained as merely status or prestige.

Reflection and Action Early on in the anthropology of ethics and morality, the journal Anthropological Theory published a written version of a debate between Didier Fassin and Wiktor Stoczkowski. In this debate Stoczkowski and Fassin took up the question, ‘Should anthropology be moral?’ (Fassin 2008; Stoczkowski 2008). Neither took the position that Scheper-Hughes had in ‘The Primacy of the Ethical’ cited earlier, both arguing instead that anthropologists should not be advocates for particular moral positions but should study the morals of others (Fassin 2008), and reflexively examine how their own moral positions shape their work as researchers (Stoczkowski 2008). Given the place of both activism and critique within the anthropology of philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism, I want to close this essay by reflecting on how anthropologists writing in this area have framed the relationship between their practice as anthropologists, their value judgements, and their efforts to influence the judgements of others.2

Moral Clarity and Spectacular Compassion For some anthropologists, anthropology is a space for acting on prior moral judgements about how one ought to live in the world and for convincing 2

The relationship between anthropology and the development industry has also been discussed in great detail in several excellent works (Lewis 2005; Gardner and Lewis 2015; Venkatesan and Yarrow 2012).

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others of their positions. Paul Farmer’s work is a key site to begin thinking about this particular stance towards scholarship and action and the possible relationships between anthropology, philanthropy, and the making of normative claims. Since the early 1980s, Farmer and his colleagues have gradually built up an organization and a number of hospitals which seek to provide world-class medical treatments in resource-poor settings. Farmer saw the provision of treatments such as anti-retroviral medications used in the treatment of HIV as an ‘Area of Moral Clarity’ (AMC) long before this became a global consensus, and he used the strategic and highly public performance of this clarity to move this consensus forward (Farmer 2001; Kidder 2003). Clarity is not a stance generally favoured by anthropologists. More often than not, we seek to destabilize the clarity that our readers presumably experience by showing how complex a situation truly is. With this in mind, Farmer’s claims of clarity can seem naı¨ve. This feeling of a gap between clarity and reality is not only true for critical readers but can also be true for those most closely involved. Indeed, when I worked as a project manager at Partners in Health in the early 2000s, I found myself frustrated by the distance I felt between the moral clarity of Paul Farmer’s writings and the moral complexity of the problems we confronted each day in our work. While the moral principle that everyone deserved to receive the best healthcare possible was not in question, the complexity of people’s lives, and our relations to them, created situations that involved numerous moral dilemmas. That this would be the case will not come as a surprise to anyone with experience doing humanitarian and philanthropic work. As noted earlier, debates about these areas of moral complexity are front and centre in the internal ethical practice of many aid organizations, and this was certainly true at Partners in Health as well. Yet, these internal debates and experiences of uncertainty stand in sharp contrast to the public face of organizations like Partners in Health. Over the many years that have passed since I left Partners in Health, I have come to see these external projections of clarity not as disingenuous performances or as failures to see the true complexity of situations. Instead, I would suggest that they are self-conscious performances of moral clarity that are intended to serve as a form of argument. It is not that people like Paul Farmer cannot see the complexity of the life-worlds in which they intervene, but rather that they regard the public performance of clarity as politically, and perhaps personally, necessary. Given their commitment to the primacy of action and their willingness to claim the right to decide what ought to be done, the political necessity of clarity trumps whatever might be gained by a focus on nuance and complexity. The political efficacy of their focus on clarity is readily apparent if one looks at the effects of Partners in Health’s 2001 paper in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, ‘Community Based Treatment of Advanced HIV Disease: Introducing DOT-HAART’. At the time this paper was published,

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it was still possible to argue that treating HIV with anti-retroviral drugs, a strategy which had been successfully used in the USA and Europe since 1996, was simply impossible in resource-poor settings. Some claimed that the medical systems in poor countries were too weak to manage such complex regimes. Others thought these regimes inappropriately expensive for use in low-income countries. Others claimed that people in low-income countries could not tell the time and were unlikely to adhere faithfully to the prescribed medication schedule, thus fostering resistance. But this paper, which was based in part on an account of a spectacularly successful attempt to administer anti-retroviral drugs to a cohort of 150 patients in rural Haiti with direct observation by a community-based accompagnateur, showed that it was not in fact impossible to administer anti-retroviral drugs in resource-poor settings, only that, at that time, there was not the political will to try (Farmer et al. 2001). This attempt to treat HIV in Haiti, scraped together with bits of borrowed funds before there was real money available, and the publicity that surrounded it, helped to launch a global paradigm shift in terms of the way people thought about the moral necessity and practical possibility of treating AIDS in poor countries (Messac and Prabhu 2013). Through this effort Farmer and his colleagues made the performative point that this can be done and therefore it must somehow be paid for. The Harvard Consensus statement was published that same year and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria made its first disbursements in 2002. To make this argument work as it did, Farmer and his colleagues needed to focus their writing on the fundamental efficacy of their approach, and not on whatever forms of complexity an anthropologist writing a more standard ethnographic account of this effort might have found worthy of publication. Further, in this example, Farmer and his colleagues are not only making arguments through writing; they are also, and perhaps more importantly, making moral arguments through action. The efforts that resulted in the 2001 Bulletin of the World Health Organization paper were an attempt to shift what was considered possible or impossible through a spectacular display of compassion. In many ways, this parallels Peter Redfield’s writings about the ways in which MSF attempts to create highly visible demonstrations of the possible by implementing technically efficient projects. In so doing, he argues, MSF highlights the failures of political will on the part of those who say, ‘it can’t be done’ (Redfield 2005: 334). Farmer’s story also tells us something about how anthropology might relate to morality and ethics. In his story, anthropology performs different roles at different points. Anthropology first tells him something about why suffering exists by allowing him to see the linkages between inequalities and forms of structural violence and the distribution of health and disease in the world. Next, he uses ethnography to motivate his readers to respond in a particular way, to tell a story about the ethical necessity of responding

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to that suffering. Farmer’s efforts to use ethnography to sway public action rely on the crafting of arguments designed to stir the complex, and highly effective, combination of indignation, compassion, shame, and hope. In relying on this form of argumentation, Farmer attempts to tell us something about what we should value and tries to convince us of that through ethnography designed for maximal emotional appeal. While his works can also rely on a discourse of rights (Farmer 2003) or an engagement with Catholic Liberation Theology (Farmer and Gutierez 2013), it is the emotional appeal of his works which makes the real argument. While Leslie Butt has critiqued Partners in Health for the silencing and simplifying images and stories of those she terms ‘suffering strangers’ (Butt 2002), it is the capacity of the paired images of nearly dying and then healthy and smiling patients that Farmer often presents as demonstrations of the ‘Lazarus Effect’ of treating people dying from AIDS with anti-retroviral medications – ironically quipping, ‘It’s as if he had some treatable infectious disease’ (Farmer 2001: 156) – that evoke the triad of compassion, shame, and hope that is used to generate real charitable and political action. We are generally not told why we should value health and wellbeing, only that we should, and what we need to do to overcome the many obstacles to providing it.

Means and Ends Most anthropologists studying philanthropy operate less like Farmer and more like Max Weber. In his classic essay ‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy’, which was written upon the occasion of the editorship of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenshaft und Socialpolitik passing to a new editorial collective of which he was part, Max Weber considered the proper relationship between social science and normative discourse (Weber 1904; Rabinow 2003). Weber was emphatic that social science could tell us little about what our moral ends ought to be. While our values would inevitably shape the sorts of things we as social scientists choose to research, this research could tell us nothing about what these values should be. For Weber, ‘To judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith [emphasis in the original]’ (Weber 1904: 55). That said, Weber did think that social science could help us to see our ends more objectively by allowing us to empirically reflect upon their historical and social contexts. Furthermore, social science could also help us to see how any given set of means might relate to the ends that the reader has arrived at by other means. It is, to my mind, in the spirit of both of these aims that much of the anthropology of philanthropy participates. We can see this, for example, in Redfield’s work on MSF. Through his work, he aims to show how aims to achieve the end of providing effective and efficient healthcare under extreme conditions might undermine the

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dignity of those receiving such care (Redfield 2005: 333). Or alternatively, echoing the critiques of charity cited earlier in this essay, how efforts to ensure access to basic medical care and other life necessities might undermine political efforts to achieve more lasting forms of peace and justice. In taking up these questions, Redfield explores ‘how the maintenance of zoe’, the Greek term for bare animal life popularized by Giorgio Agamben, might sometimes constitute ‘a threat to bios’, the Greek term for qualified political life popularized by the same (Redfield 2005: 330). In thus exploring ‘the political limits of a medical sensibility’ (Redfield 2005: 329), Redfield aims to clarify the costs of this medical sensibility for those who value these more lasting political ends. Watanabe’s work, discussed earlier in relation to its relevance for considerations of philanthropy as a form of ascetic practice, similarly explores the tensions that exist between the ethic of shared ‘muddy labour’ among Japanese staffers of the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement (OISCA) training centre in Myanmar and the implicit and explicit aims of developing countries like Burma by making Burmese staffers more Japanese through their efforts to model Japanese values. Here ‘the aspirations for collective intimacy in hitozukuri aid appear eerily similar to colonial dreams of assimilation’ (Watanabe 2014: 663), thus advancing ‘particular politics and inequalities’ while paradoxically making an affective appeal to the solidarity of a transnational collectivity (Watanabe 2014: 666). In the Weberian spirit, both Redfield and Watanabe seek to teach the reader something about how specific humanitarian actions might conflict with the presumed politics and values of that same reader. They are unlike Paul Farmer in that they do not seek to change the moral ends of their readers in determinate ways. They are also unlike the authors I discuss in the next section in that they focus on how a given set of philanthropic actions aligns with the aims of the readers and not on how a given set of philanthropic actions aligns with the ends of the recipients.

Whose Ends? If Paul Farmer seeks to convert others to his ends through spectacular demonstrations of what is possible, and Redfield and Watanabe seek to show how certain forms of aid work relate to the ends of the aid workers themselves or to the ends of their readers, a small number of other scholars have considered how particular forms of giving might be judged according to the ends of the recipients of these gifts. This was, in fact, what Benthall called for in his 2012 review of anthropological writings on charity and morality (Benthall 2012). Unfortunately, as Osella and Widger (2018) also note, this approach still has not been taken up as often as one might hope. While anthropologists of development have

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often explored the lives and perspectives of those participating in development programmes, this has been much less true of anthropologists studying humanitarianism, philanthropy, and forms of religiously motivated giving. What might we learn by studying not only the complexly layered moralities of the givers of philanthropic and charitable aid but also the equally complexly layered moralities of the recipients of these gifts? If we take the basic cultural point that we are all as likely to be different as we are likely to be the same, then we must assume that many of our values will differ; that someone else involved in a given situation might come to quite a different conclusion about that situation than we would. While we anthropologists often do well enough remembering this in terms of considering the values of different givers, we more rarely consider the different perspectives that might be taken up by different recipients of charity, philanthropy, and other forms of almsgiving. How does their participation in these exchanges relate to their own projects of striving towards the good? In addition to Osella and Widger (2018) and myself (2014), Soumhya Venkatesan comes closest to taking this approach in her work on asking and giving among Muslim and Hindu householders in Tamil Nadu. Here she considers not only the ‘ethical talk’ of givers but also the ‘ethical talk’ among those who have considered becoming the recipients. Such conversations make clear that while receiving is not without its struggles and ambivalences, it can be a strategy for achieving morally valued ends and sometimes entails just as much intentionality and moral deliberation as giving (Venkatesan 2009, 2016).

Conclusion Giving to those in need is often a highly complex action, the evaluation of which may come from many divergent perspectives. While the gesture of writing a cheque, organizing an agricultural project, bandaging a wound, or serving a bowl of porridge may look very similar, the meanings, risks, and values contained within these gestures may vary considerably from case to case. Further, the ways in which givers, recipients, states, and bystanders might evaluate these actions may rely on different criteria and different understandings of the stakes of the situation. In addition, engaging in these moments of giving and receiving, and the processes of reflection and transformation that may precede and follow them, may not only be considered to be the results of a process of ethical formation but may be thought of as constituting a key part of that formation process itself. Finally, to return to the discussion of the anthropology of suffering and the anthropology of ethics which opened this essay, I want to close by saying that one of the possible contributions of the ‘anthropology of

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the good’ that Robbins proposes is that it might help anthropologists to find a way of becoming more attentive to spaces of possibility. These ‘other ways of living might teach us the limits of our own and might lead us to a vision of a world that was better than ours in ways we could not on our own imagine’ (Robbins 2013: 456). In taking up this approach to philanthropy, and focussing more attention on modes of generous giving that might be less familiar to some readers, we can find a path that takes us beyond both witness and critique, towards an anthropology that can help us to imagine other ways of responding to poverty, inequality, and suffering. If we can take seriously what these other models of the gift might have to teach, the anthropology of philanthropy might be able to show possibilities for an ‘otherwise’ (Laidlaw 2014; Povinelli 2011; Zigon 2018), for other ways of seeking the good and living with one another.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to James Laidlaw, Paul Scherz, Catherine Trundle, Soumhya Venkatesan, and Tyler Zoanni for their insightful comments on the early drafts of this chapter.

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Charity Associations’ (special issue). Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 8(1). Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2009. ‘Conversations about Need and Greed’, in K. Sykes (ed.), Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 67–89. 2016. ‘Giving and Taking without Reciprocity: Conversations in South India and the Anthropology of Ethics’. Social Analysis, 60(3): 36–56. Venkatesan, Soumhya and Thomas Yarrow, eds. 2012. Differentiating Development: Beyond an Anthropology of Critique. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Watanabe, Chika. 2014. ‘Muddy Labor: A Japanese Aid Ethic of Collective Intimacy in Myanmar’. Cultural Anthropology, 29(4): 648–71. 2017. ‘Development As Pedagogy: On Becoming Good Models in Japan and Myanmar’. American Ethnologist, 44(4): 591–602. Weber, Max. 1904. ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’, in E. Shils and H. Finch (eds.), The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, IL: Free Press: 49–112. Weller, Robert P., C. Julia Huang, Keping Wu, and Lizhu Fan. 2018. Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2011. ‘HIV Is God’s Blessing’: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2018. A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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33 Science The Anthropology of Science As an Anthropology of Ethics (and Vice Versa) Matei Candea

The first explicit call to approach the anthropology of science from the perspective of ethical self-formation and virtuous conduct (Rabinow 1996a) predated and anticipated the turn to the ethical in anthropology more broadly (Faubion 2001; Laidlaw 2002) – while in the history of science, the importance of what would later come to be called ‘moral economies’ and ‘epistemic virtues’ emerged as early as the 1980s (Daston 1995; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Yet it is fair to say that despite some important contributions (Fortun and Fortun 2005; Rabinow 1996b, 1999; Sharp 2018), the anthropology of science more broadly has not to date seen any systematic or sustained turn to the ethical. As the anthropology of ethics has matured as a field over the past decade and produced a number of increasingly focussed and incisive problematics, analytics, and debates of the kind exemplified in this volume, this chapter argues that anthropologists of science could benefit from taking a closer and more systematic look at the anthropology of ethics. Conversely, it suggests that anthropologists of ethics might gain from a closer consideration of some of the specificities of Euro-American science as an (internally and externally contested, multiple, and perhaps part-fictitious) ethical tradition. The first half of the chapter explores the (rather fitful) genealogy of an interest in the ethical in the history, sociology, and anthropology of science, and points to some of the elements from which the anthropology of science as an anthropology of ethics might be (re)built. The second half focusses on one extended instance of what such a (re)building might produce, and suggests some of the ways in which anthropology’s exploration of both science and ethics might benefit.

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A False Friend? Ethics, Research Ethics, and the Anethical Nature of Science As a starting point, it is important to disambiguate the kind of ‘ethics’ which are typically the focus for an anthropology of ethics from the way in which ‘ethics’ are invoked by scientists themselves and laypersons writing or speaking about science, as a separate sphere of concern or activity which must be integrated with or applied to science from the outside – most obviously, for instance, in talk of ethics committees, ethics procedures, ‘bioethics’ (Rabinow 2003: 20), and so forth. This vision of ethics – let us call it, for ease of recognition, ‘research ethics’ – often implies a series of procedural concerns and constraints, a blueprint of proper conduct amenable to bureaucratic regulation. Research ethics in this sense sound rather more like a species of what Michel Foucault or Bernard Williams have termed morality, by opposition to ethics in the sense of deliberative conduct and reflexive self-formation aimed at certain virtues (Laidlaw 2014: 110–19).1 One might thus be tempted to dismiss ‘research ethics’ as a faux ami – a topic to the side of the real subject of what an anthropologist of ethics might study in scientific practice. It is certainly true that formal assessments of ‘research ethics’ typically miss the bulk of what, as we shall see later, an anthropologist might recognize as ethics in the daily life and practice of scientists. Furthermore, a structural implication of research ethics is precisely that the rest of scientific practice is something other than ethical (Rabinow 2011: 175–6). This view of science as ‘anethical’ (Faubion 2011: 94) is directly inimical to the core insight of the anthropology of ethics as applied to science, which is precisely that scientific practices, like all other aspects of human life, are pervasively shot through with ethical considerations. To imagine science as ‘anethical’ because it is sometimes described as such, including by some practitioners, would be just as much of a category error as describing science as ‘ungendered’ for the same reason.2 And yet it would be short-sighted to dismiss research ethics from the frame altogether. After all, the anthropology of ethics has been animated by important debates surrounding the lived relation between ethical conduct and moral rules (Heywood 2015; Laidlaw 2014: 111–19; Zigon 2007). The fact that scientists encounter formalized ethical regimes raises a host of empirical questions: how do different scientists in different settings

1

Much depends here on what one takes Foucault in particular to have meant by ethics, and what genuine measure of freedom and reflexive action Foucault’s account is read as providing – a live debate within the anthropology of ethics (Laidlaw 2014; Mattingly 2012; see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume). Peter Pels, for instance, reading Foucault’s discussion of ethics as a critique of neoliberal emphases on self-management, finds in it an apt description of research ethics regimes also (Pels et al. 1999). It is probably fair to say that most research ethics regimes operate in practice across this tension between formulaic rules and expectations of self-examination (Strathern 2000).

2

On the comparison between anthropology’s attention to gender and anthropology’s attention to ethics, see Laidlaw (2014). The literature on science and gender is huge – some key references are included later.

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come to understand and live the relationship between, on the one hand, their own senses of the good, the disciplinary pedagogies they have undergone, and the various epistemic virtues they have learnt to orientate themselves towards, and, on the other hand, the formalized research ethics to which their practice is perforce subjected? Where and when are these ethical and moral planes in tension, and when are they mutually supporting? Consider, for instance, the following scene from my fieldwork with animal behaviour scientists in the late 2000s. As we visited the complex of bird cages in her research lab, a PhD researcher complained that the official ethical regulations concerning how birds should be kept, and how often they should be moved between collective and individual cages, had been drawn up based on what she saw as insufficiently fine-grained knowledge of different species’ social behaviour, such that to adhere to these rules precisely would actually create distress and discomfort among the particular birds she worked with and cared for. Here questions of scientific authority and ethical care were interwoven in complex ways. Ethical regulations of the kind she mentioned are often imagined as external constraints upon the putatively anethical desires of scientists whose main concerns are thus assumed to be for knowledge production at the animals’ expense.3 In return, this particular researcher challenged the epistemic basis from which the particular set of rules she encountered were drawn up, in the name of her own ethical concern for her research subjects. Indeed, the fact that research ethics seems to imply that science is in and of itself ‘anethical’ is perhaps what raises the most fascinating questions for an anthropology of ethics. How, to what extent, and with what effects have some practising scientists come to experience ‘ethics’ as an external set of rules objectively detachable from and outside – possibly even an impediment to – their ‘properly scientific’ practice? To ask this is, in effect, to ask how it comes to be the case that science itself came in some quarters to be understood as inherently value-free – and what it might mean to inhabit such a practice as a scientist. Stephen Shapin has addressed something like the former, historical, question in his magisterial account of the ways in which the moral ordinariness of scientists and the amorality of science rose to prominence as powerful discourses during the course of the twentieth century (Shapin 2008). Shapin argues that it was commonplace to assume, into the early twentieth century, that science was a calling which required of or bestowed upon its practitioners some extraordinary moral qualities: the contemplation of the works of God, or later of Nature, was widely understood to lend to the scientist a kind of moral grandeur, selflessness, and 3

Thus, for instance, an influential animal behaviour study manual introduces ethical concerns as a negative element in a calculus about whether a particular piece of research ought to be done at all (Martin and Bateson 2007).

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benevolence, a view shored up by, among other things, the unremunerative nature of scientific work (Shapin 2008: 21–46). By the mid- to late twentieth century, the ‘moral equivalence’ of the scientist – the thought that a career in science neither required nor bespoke any particular moral qualities – had become equally commonplace. To radically foreshorten Shapin’s complex historical narrative, one might point to philosophical shifts in understandings of the nature of truth, the increasing integration of the natural sciences into government and commercial apparatuses during World War II and the Cold War (Candea et al. 2015; see also Rabinow 2011: 102–5), and the invidious critiques levelled at natural scientists by commentators in the social sciences and humanities whose disciplines had not undergone similar transformations (Shapin 2008: 47– 92). By the end of the twentieth century, ‘[t]here were just no grounds in the nature of science . . . or in the make-up of the scientist . . . to expect expertise in the natural order to translate into virtue in the moral order’ (Shapin 2008: 13). Shapin’s account historicizes what might otherwise seem like a series of obvious banalities about the value-free nature of science and the merely technical and pragmatic nature of scientific practice. While he does not connect the rise of these discourses explicitly to the emergence of research ethics regimes, there is a clear correlation between the thought that scientists are no more nor less virtuous than other people and the suspicion that their conduct ought to be regulated externally. For Shapin, however, the main aim of this historical account is as a backdrop for a study of the ways in which, despite these commonplace assumptions and despite fundamental transformations in the practice of the natural sciences over the course of the twentieth century, practising scientists today are still as fundamentally invested in questions of personal virtue and character as they ever were. The story of a progressive demoralization of science in which virtuous individuals were replaced by impersonal, institutionalized processes is just that: a story, however influential. Shapin draws on a combination of historical and ethnographic sources and on his own interviews to examine the new types of character and forms of virtue which lie at the heart of the contemporary science–industry–government nexus. Research managers praise in each other qualities of persuasiveness, trustworthiness, and leadership; they pride themselves on recognizing and fostering ‘integrity’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘inspiration’ in the research workers they manage; venture capitalists look for ‘commitment’, ‘vision’, and a balance between prudence and passion in the scientific entrepreneurs they invest in, and describe themselves as embodying similar virtues (Shapin 2008: 289–303). Crucially, these roles are shifting and mobile, as people and virtues move across the increasingly fluid boundaries between science, industry, and government. And yet, Shapin argues, one element of the picture is stable: today, as in the eighteenth century, the production of authoritative knowledge is inseparable from an

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economy of personal relations, trust, and assumptions about virtue and character. The much-trumpeted move from personal virtues to institutionalized, impersonal norms has never happened. Shapin’s corrective is important and his book is among the clearest manifestos for the study of the ethical in science – even though it does raise some questions concerning the demarcation of epistemic virtues from other virtues, to which I return in the conclusion. For now, the point is that Shapin’s account gives a clear sense of why the ethical in his (or Foucault or Laidlaw’s) sense is a category which bears little to no relation to the ‘research ethics’ we began from in this section – and also of why the former version of the ethical may have been overlooked in popular accounts of science in the twentieth century. It might be interesting, however, as I suggested earlier, to look more closely than Shapin does at invocations of the category of the ethical among practising scientists – ethics committees, ethics forms, ethics procedures, and so on – which contribute to the vision of science as an inherently ‘anethical’ practice to which ‘ethics’ has to be added as an external constraint.

After Science: Mertonian Norms and Their Critics The pervasive twentieth-century discourses documented by Shapin about the relationship between science and ethics shared one assumption, namely that science could broadly be treated as a unitary object. Debates raged over what would happen to the ethics of scientists as ‘science’ became entangled with industry and government, about the effects of changing university structures on ‘science’, and the like. Shapin’s own arguments, by contrast, chime in with the broad consensus in contemporary science studies according to which little can be usefully said on this scale of generality about ‘science’. The thought that science might be a unitary enterprise in ethical terms now seems as unconvincing, in the light of this literature, as the thought that science might be reducible to a single set of epistemic principles or a single transposable method. Few contemporary social students of science would disagree with Thomas Kuhn’s forceful claim that ‘[i]nstructed to examine electrical or chemical phenomena, the man who is ignorant of these fields but who knows what it is to be scientific may reach any number of incompatible conclusions’ (Kuhn 1970). Whether one is interested in ethics or in epistemology, the action, contemporary science studies suggests, is in the study of particular disciplinary and sub-disciplinary settings in particular periods. This is a sound methodological principle, although it suggests a caveat analogous to the one I raised earlier for ‘research ethics’. The unity of science as an enterprise may have fallen away as an analytical presupposition, but it remains an important source of ethical commitment for some practitioners, and should thus remain in the ethnographic frame. From

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that perspective it might be worth briefly looking back to a time when the sociology of science imagined the normativity of science in the singular, and tracing how and why this way of asking the question then fell away. Taking his cue from Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge, as well as from Weber’s writings on science as a vocation, sociologist of science Robert K. Merton investigated science as a functionally integrated social institution whose role was ‘the extension of certified knowledge’ (Merton 1973). This institution operated through the production of a ‘complex of values and norms which is held to be binding on the man of science’ (Merton 1973). Merton identified five key norms, niftily summarized as CUDOS: Communism (the substantive findings of science belonged to all, not to their discoverers); Universalism (the need for knowledge to be validated through impersonal means, i.e. without reference to the authority of particular individuals or social groups); Disinterestedness (scientists had to disengage their personal interests from the reporting of results); and Organized Scepticism (new claims were to be systematically challenged). In a classic functionalist vein, Merton’s account of science explicitly focussed on the relationship between this particular institution and the broader social structure. He noted especially that the institution of science is part of a larger social structure with which it is not always integrated. When the larger culture opposes universalism, the ethos of science is subjected to serious strain. . . . Particularly in times of international conflict, when the dominant definition of the situation is such as to emphasize national loyalties, the man of science is subjected to the conflicting imperatives of scientific universalism and of ethnocentric particularism. (Merton 1973 [1942]: 270) An obvious example of this for Merton, a Jewish American writing in the 1930s and 1940s, was the perversion of ‘Aryan science’ in Nazi Germany. Ultimately, Merton’s sociology of science made a strong claim that a democratic, liberal political structure represents the best (perhaps the only) context for the proper development of science as an institution. It thus simultaneously relativized science by treating it as just another social institution, and yet ultimately retained both the sense of science as a single, integrated project, and its special status as the prerogative of the liberal West. A number of sociologists later took issue with Merton’s early account of norms. For one thing, as Merton himself acknowledged in later work, scientists in their daily work also clearly valued goods which seemed to be in direct conflict with the five ‘norms’ he had identified. Thus Ian Mitroff (1974), based on interviews with Apollo moon scientists, argued that while, in their assessments of their colleagues, they often recognized and upheld many of the norms outlined by Merton, they also seemed, at other times, to praise behaviour which ran directly counter to such norms,

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such as a single-minded attachment to a particular hypothesis in the face of opposition, a steadfast pursuit of personal fame, or a reliance upon, rather than undue scepticism about, established findings. Mitroff sought to extend rather than challenge Merton’s functionalist paradigm by positing the existence of what he termed ‘counter-norms’ such as ‘selfinterestedness’, ‘emotional commitment’, and ‘dogmatism’, which stood in a productive tension with the Mertonian norms. Each set, Mitroff suggested, played a functional role depending on the particular kinds of problems scientists were dealing with: ‘Whereas the conventional norms of science are dominant for well-structured problems, the counter-norms proposed here appear to be dominant for ill-structured problems’ (1974: 594). More profoundly, what many later sociologists of science found lacking in Merton was the explicit way in which he cordoned off his account of the structure and norms of science from the positive content of science – its actual facts and findings (Bloor 1999: 82; Shapin 1992). Sociology might explain failures or perversions of scientific knowledge (as in the Nazi case, or that of Lysenko in the USSR), and might give clues to the general conduct that would permit such perversions to be avoided. But, as far as Merton was concerned, it had little to say about the successes of science – its established facts and currently powerful theories. Paradoxically, while Merton’s account does suggest that the effective pursuit of scientific knowledge requires particular social and cultural factors, the nature of his ‘norms’ means that in most cases, what this structure requires is precisely that the interference of historical, sociological, and personal factors be eliminated. In this sense Merton’s picture chimed extremely well with Popper’s attempt to frame the distinctiveness of science as a matter of good method (e.g. Popper 1959). Ultimately, we are left with a picture in which, as in classic histories of science and in accounts of scientific practice by many scientists themselves, socio-cultural, historical, and personal factors could explain the context of science, always, but its content only in the case of scientific error. As for scientific success, it remained, presumably, a sign of the fact that scientists had managed to get in touch with reality and that extraneous social, cultural, and personal factors had been kept at bay. Merton simply highlighted the idea that such keeping at bay was itself a social and cultural process – a thought to which later historians and anthropologists would return. By the 1970s, however, the social study of science had moved decisively against this way of framing the problem. The so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge was built on an attack against what they termed ‘asymmetrical’ approaches to scientific knowledge: approaches which sought to explain correct findings in relation to nature and incorrect ones in relation to social factors, such as ideology or personal interest. For scholars writing in this vein, the task of sociology was to treat knowledge production ‘symmetrically’ by showing the interweaving of social factors in any kind of scientific knowledge practice – in the ‘correct’

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theories of Mendel as much as in the ‘false’ theories of Lysenko (Bloor 1999). This approach chimed with the broader turn to Marxist, Feminist, and (early) Foucauldian-inspired critical investigation into the social and cultural construction of scientific facts.4 Much of the early anthropological attention to science shared in these sensibilities and concerns. The optic shifted from attempts to characterize the moral structure of (good) science, imagined as a ‘system’, towards an attention to the ways in which particular scientific endeavours, practices, and findings were continuous with and perhaps occasioned by, as well as feeding into, ‘naturalizing’, broader sociological realities, such as gender, race, and class (Haraway 1989; Martin 1991, 1994; see, for instance, Traweek 1988). These critical accounts shifted attention away from (when they did not represent a direct attack on) the kind of ethico-epistemic generalities about ‘Science’ which Mertonian sociology had foregrounded. Mertonian sociology had assumed that science was epistemologically unique, and sought to explain this uniqueness in terms of its moral and institutional structure (Collins 1982). Social constructionist, relativist, and other critical theories started by bracketing this assumption of uniqueness, producing instead ‘diverse studies of the local practices of science [which] have sought (with some success) to lower-case the abstractions of Science, Reason, Truth and Society’ (Rabinow 1992: 7). Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the great contestant of these social constructionist approaches, which also coalesced during the 1980s, drew attention away from Mertonian norms in a radically different way, by foregrounding the importance of non-human actants in explaining the distinctive power of scientific knowledge-making (e.g. Latour 1987). Despite the increasingly clear differences which developed between ANT and critical social constructionist accounts (Bloor 1999; for some of the contentions and tensions, see Latour 1990; Martin 1998), they shared one important feature: neither had a particular ethnographic interest in norms or ethics (Candea 2018a; Rabinow 1996b). The critical social constructionist literature – particularly the strand which, partly recombined with insights drawn from ANT, came to be known as ‘feminist technoscience’ – was itself of course intensely normative, actively invested not only in critiquing the shortcomings of classic forms of scientism but also in proposing alternative ‘ethical’ repertoires for doing science, which would be more in tune with the commitments of ‘antiracist, feminist, multicultural, and radical science movements’ (Barad 2007; Despret 2004; Haraway 1997: 267; Latour 2004; see also Stengers 2000). While these explorations led to occasional strategic alliances with the ethical visions of some individual scientists who espoused similar concerns, they were in the main aiming to challenge and transform the ethics which inform the conduct of the majority of practising scientists, 4

Latour and Woolgar’s celebrated Laboratory Life (1979) was arguably an instance of this approach, despite Latour’s later critiques of Strong Programme Sociology (see later).

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rather than to document them in the way anthropologists typically seek to document the commitments and perspectives of the people they study (Candea 2013a, 2017).

Ethnographies of Science and Histories of Epistemic Virtue: The Elements of an Anthropology of Science As Anthropology of Ethics While they drew attention away from the study of scientific norms, these developments did lay the grounds for an anthropology of ethics approach in one important sense, by forcefully shifting the optic from generalities about Science to an attention to the particular modes of operation of particular scientific disciplines and controversies in scientific settings. The sociology, history, and anthropology of science in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was increasingly populated with accounts of the practices of physicists, biologists, primatologists, immunologists, computer scientists, and the like. The increasingly fine-grained documentation of the sheer diversity of practices, material settings, epistemic commitments, and effects of scientific endeavours provided a canvas upon which an account that went beyond Durkheimian visions of functional norms might begin to be articulated. In order to do this, however, something of the spirit of Merton’s initial agenda had to be rescued from the critical consensus. Paul Rabinow articulated this point forcefully in the introduction to his book Making PCR (1996). Reviewing the state of science studies at that moment, Rabinow noted that while a wealth of critical insight and close description of scientific work was now on offer, the loss of the old Mertonian questions had led to an important kind of ethnographic deficit: Although each component of Merton’s picture of science has been subjected to historical, sociological and philosophical reevaluation, it is fair to say that many scientists believe that these norms guide their practice. Hence, a major gap has developed today between scientists’ self-representation and the representations of scientists by those who study them. (Rabinow 1996b: 17) By asking the question of how practising scientists themselves envisaged the goods to which their practices tended, Rabinow anticipated some of the ways in which anthropologists of ethics would later point to the high-handedness of critical accounts that thought fit to leave out people’s own sense of why they did what they did, and explain their actions instead by reference to other forces and factors (e.g. Laidlaw 2002, 2014). In essays published the same year (1996a), Rabinow explicitly invoked Foucault’s four-part scheme for the study of ethics, suggesting that a reconfiguration

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of Merton’s problematics today would actually ask about the ontology, deontology, ascetics, and teleology of particular scientific practices. It is perhaps not surprising that Rabinow, one of anthropology’s most prominent Foucault commentators, called for what was effectively an anthropology of ethics some years before this was proposed as such by others.5 Yet Rabinow’s own instantiation of his programme did not look much like the rich ethnographic accounts of ethical self-formation and pedagogy which the anthropology of ethics would later produce. Rather, Rabinow’s work took the form of close and rather densely written accounts of the career of particular scientific projects, techniques and individuals (Rabinow 1996b, 1999, 2012) in which the question of the ethical was threaded throughout more than it was systematically teased out. A number of insightful and illuminating observations were made along the way, albeit often – as is the case of much good history and ethnography – without a very easy summative take-home point. Partly, the difficulty and also the richness of this work comes from Rabinow’s consistently reflexive commitment to keeping anthropology’s own knowledge practices in view alongside the practices he uses anthropology to account for, an increasingly prominent theme in his later writing. Thus some of the clearest instances of what his proposed anthropology of science as anthropology of ethics might look like come from systematic comparisons between his own ethical orientations and those of one of his key scientific interlocutors (Rabinow 1996a: 162–87) or between his and Bourdieu’s respective ‘ethical styles’ (Rabinow 1996a: 16–25). It is perhaps fair to say that, as a result, the influence of Rabinow’s calls for a study of the ethical on the anthropology of science has been diffuse, rather than focussed. The ethnography of science, still described as an ‘emergent’ field a decade later (Fortun and Fortun 2005), did not experience anything like a full-scale turn to the ethical, being more directly influenced by the theoretical echoes of feminist technoscience and ANT.6 Historians of science, on the other hand, engaged with these questions earlier and in a more sustained way. In an important article written a year before Rabinow’s book, Lorraine Daston had already reviewed a range of works in the history of science which had been tending towards an account of what she proposed to term the ‘moral economies’ integral to science, ‘to its sources of inspiration, its choice of subject matter and procedures, its sifting of evidence, and its standards of explanation’ (Daston 1995: 6). The rise of quantification, for instance, was interwoven with appeals to particular ‘mathematical virtues’ such as impartiality, precision, and communicability, which also drew on and helped to consolidate particular kinds of scientific collectivities (Daston 1995: 8–12; Porter 1992); empiricism made epistemic virtues of the trust, civility, and 5

Rabinow was also drawing on work in the history of science (e.g. Shapin 1994), to which I return later.

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However, see recent work by Nicholas Langlitz (2020)

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curiosity embedded in seventeenth-century gentlemanly culture (Daston 1995: 12–18; Shapin 1994; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). As for objectivity – a moral economy in its own right – Daston began in this article to detail its diverse incarnations, a project she expanded upon systematically with Peter Galison in Objectivity (2007), a book that traces the historical transformations of this epistemic virtue – whose various forms included trained judgement, mechanical distantiation, and a yearning for a perspective of no perspective – and the changing ways in which scientific selves came to be shaped around it.7 In the meantime, while anthropological ethnographies of science did not, pace Rabinow, take up the ethical as a core concern, what they did do is accumulate increasingly rich accounts of scientific practices in which some of the later concerns of the anthropology of ethics were prefigured. Tellingly, in one of the few papers on the anthropology of science in which the ethical is elevated to title status, Fortun and Fortun (2005), while they mention Rabinow, trace the roots of their interest in self-formation (alongside Foucault) to an earlier ethnography: Sharon Traweek’s comparative ethnography of American and Japanese particle physicists in Beamtimes and Lifetimes (1988). While Traweek did not herself mention the ethical as a focus for analysis, and while her book has been cast, not without reason, as exemplary of the critical social constructionist genre (Bloor 1999), Fortun and Fortun rightly note that her focus on subject formation, pedagogy, and mentoring prefigured some key concerns of the ethical turn.8 Particularly productive in this regard is Traweek’s attention to subtle differences and varieties in the way epistemic goods are conceived.9 For instance, Traweek explored the ways in which the different architecture of detectors built by particle physicists came to embody what one might term in retrospect different epistemic virtues: LASS is spare and elegant, meant for refining accepted but little understood knowledge. SPEAR is ingenious architecture, meant for reconstruction and deconstruction. The ESA is fat and overbuilt, meant to be reliable. (Traweek 1988: 72) Traweek also noted the differences in these technically mediated epistemic orientations introduced by different ways of organizing careers and scientific labour in the USA and Japan, respectively: whereas the American 7

In Daston’s 1995 article, Foucault’s work on self-discipline in Discipline and Punish (1979) gets a passing mention. A decade later, Daston and Galison’s Objectivity, like Shapin’s The Scientific Life, came to draw explicitly on Foucault’s late writings about ethics, virtue, and self-formation – and in the case of the latter, on Rabinow’s work.

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However, somewhat surprisingly given this praise, their own piece gives little of that kind of ethnographic description, remaining rather more focussed on broad discursive shifts in understandings of toxicology and its role as a civic science, which recall rather the mode of exposition and arguments of historians such as Shapin.

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A subtlety which goes beyond or lies beneath her often rather blanket arguments about the way these scientists project their gendered assumptions onto Nature – the sorts of arguments which led Latour, for instance, to dismiss her work as mere Durkheimian social constructionism.

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researchers tended to work at a number of short-lived detectors during their careers, and build up a competitive community in which experimenting with diverse architectures is part of a shared sense of ‘how to do good physics’, the Japanese researchers had mostly worked at one detector for their entire careers and passed these long-lived detectors on to new generations sharing a commitment to strong stable research groups (Traweek 1988: 72–3). There is much to be gained in mining older ethnographies of science with this retrospective attention for the ethical. For instance, Hugh Gusterson’s ethnography of US nuclear weapons scientists and anti-nuclear activists does not foreground ethics in the Foucauldian sense as a category of analysis – where the term appears, it is used in the ordinary sense in which the subjects of the study themselves might invoke ‘the ethics’ – the rights and wrongs – of nuclear weapons research (Gusterson 1998: 49–59). Yet, like Traweek, Gusterson actually provides a powerful account of processes of self-formation (cf. Cook, Chapter 16 of this volume) and pedagogy (cf. Faubion, Chapter 21 of this volume). He describes the ways in which nuclear weapons scientists’ training fosters particular practices of detachment and distantiation from the vulnerability and subjectivity of their own bodies and those of others – from jokes and pervasive mechanistic metaphors of the body through to specific techniques of visualization and numerical accounting for mass deaths. Gusterson contrasts these techniques with the various ways in which anti-nuclear protesters learn, on the contrary, to make their own bodies and those of others visible and palpable. While there is an explicit element of Geertzian culturalism to Gusterson’s approach, and while he himself occasionally casts the processes above in terms of socialization (Gusterson 1998: 4–5), the book is fundamentally motivated by a question about the pursuit of incommensurable goods (a long-standing concern in the anthropology of ethics; see, for instance, Laidlaw 1995; Robbins 2013). This research began, Gusterson writes, when, as an antinuclear activist in 1980s San Francisco Bay, he encountered for the first time a nuclear weapons scientist who, he realized, ‘believed passionately that his work, far from being dangerous, was important and honorable’ (Gusterson 1998: xi). In seeking to understand the various ways in which that orientation makes sense to weapons scientists, and with what caveats and contradictions, the account prefigures some of what anthropologists of ethics would later write about the pursuit of particular forms of virtue in difficult and uncertain circumstances (see, for instance, Mahmood 2005; Marsden 2005; Pandian 2009; Robbins 2004). Perhaps the most thoroughgoing ethnographic exploration of the diversity of epistemic virtues in scientific practices, however, comes from a sociologist rather than an anthropologist of science. Karin KnorrCetina’s comparison of what she terms the ‘epistemic cultures’ of highenergy physicists and molecular biologists (1999) contrasts the practices, languages, material technologies, and social organization of each

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discipline. The resulting comparison highlights the deep heterogeneity of the types of epistemic virtues associated with each disciplinary setting. High-energy physicists encounter natural objects briefly and intermittently, in rare experiments, in which empirical reality is heavily mediated by complex machinery. Most of their time is spent focussing inwards on the design and redesign of experiments, and the checking, cross-checking, and cleaning of the resulting data to hunt down interference and error.10 By contrast, molecular biologists have a seemingly unending supply of empirical materials at their disposal in the mass-produced animals and biological samples they manipulate at the bench every day. Rather than invest their time and effort in the meticulous understanding and documentation of what happened in any particular encounter with biological materials, they multiply and repeat experiments and vary procedures and protocols through a process of blind variation until something works. Where physicists turn inwards towards a ‘negative knowledge’ about the limits of their knowledge, molecular biologists tinker and accumulate wisdom about pragmatic procedures. Whereas physicists work with signs painstakingly produced by machines and ‘encircled [these] by more signs, which were used to interpret the former and to specify their range of variation and effects’ (1999: 101), molecular biologists privilege ‘[t]he body as a silent archive of experience, competence, sensory information processing’ (1999: 100). In sum, despite some isolated calls (Fortun and Fortun 2005; e.g. Rabinow 1996b, 1999), an anthropology of science as anthropology of ethics has not yet got off the ground as a systematic project. But anthropologists of science interested in the ethical, and anthropologists of ethics interested in the subject of science, can look back over the past three decades to a number of elements which together form something like the building blocks of such an approach: explicit theorizations of the importance of the ethical, historical investigations into epistemic virtues, and rich ethnographic descriptions of scientists at work trying to realize and reconcile specific, diverse values. The next section gives an instance of how these different elements might be recombined in one particular case, and draws some conclusions about what the anthropology of science might distinctively bring to the anthropology of ethics, and vice versa.

People of the Why: Becoming Behavioural Biologists My own ethnography of behavioural biologists, to which I briefly referred earlier, was concerned from the start with questions of epistemic virtue and ethical self-formation – particularly the complex ways in which 10

This is an orientation which Knorr-Cetina describes as a ‘care of the self’, by reference to Foucault – although the ‘self’ here is the experiment, rather than the self of the individual scientist.

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researchers balanced engagement with and detachment from the animals they studied (Candea 2010). However, this focus was initially approached in a rather piecemeal way, and only slowly crystallized into a more sustained engagement with the literature and problematics of the anthropology of ethics as work progressed (see, for instance, Candea 2018b, 2018c). In this section, I will draw together some of the key strands of these various arguments into a more systematic outline of the ethical practices of selfformation in this setting. One core focus of this description is a long-term behavioural ecology research project based at a field station in the South African Kalahari desert, where researchers and volunteers observe groups of wild meerkats which they have habituated to human presence. The description also draws on time spent with the members of the research group run by Tim Clutton-Brock at Cambridge which runs the Kalahari Meerkat Project (KMP), at behavioural ecology conferences, as well as on documentary and historical work on the development of behavioural ecology. Much of the description that follows, however, focusses on one particular set of actors within this extended setting: the volunteers. The KMP project relied on a constantly renewed team of twenty or so volunteers, typically recent graduates in biology from the UK, who had elected to spend a year at the isolated farmhouse in the Kalahari desert collecting data and tending to the ongoing habituation of the meerkats – each was also encouraged to undertake a small research project based on the project’s data, mainly as a training exercise. For some of the volunteers, their time at this prestigious research site represented the first step towards a career in behavioural biology. Others saw this as a path to a career near to but not directly in science – from work in conservation or applied zoology, through to science writing or documentary film-making. For most, however, their time at the KMP was precisely an open-ended experiment – an opportunity to get extended first-hand experience of scientific research, after their undergraduate training in biology, in order to decide whether to take further their commitment to ‘the life scientific’. The volunteers are thus in one sense ‘marginal’ actors from the perspective of an account of behavioural biology, and yet precisely for that reason, they provide an ideal subject for an understanding of what becoming a scientist entails, and why one might choose to do so – or not. These subjects’ distinctive position in the hierarchy of scientific knowledge production also raises interesting questions about the scale and the nature of the ethical form of life which they were engaged in. Some of their pronouncements about the nature of science and what it requires of a person might sound naive to professional scientists and their sociologists, who might hold, with the Apollo moon scientists interviewed by Mitroff, that the only people who took the idea of the purely objective, emotionally disinterested scientist literally and seriously were the general public

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or beginning science students. Certainly no working scientist, in the words of the overwhelming majority, “believed in that simple-minded nonsense”. (Mitroff 1974: 588) As we saw earlier, the bulk of science studies seems to have sided with this rather dismissive assumption that ethico-epistemic generalities about ‘science’ are just simpleminded nonsense, good for neophytes (or philosophers), and that accounts of epistemic virtues need to be sought in a more fine-grained study of particular practices. But, aside from the usual anthropological commitment to taking one’s informants seriously, which should make one pause before dismissing their views, what is of particular interest to me in volunteers’ invocations of ‘science’ is precisely the complex way in which generalities about being or becoming ‘a scientist’ were experienced and encountered by these actors through the more specific form of being or becoming a ‘behavioural ecologist’ – and yet, these generalities were never entirely eclipsed by the particular form, contrary to what some work in science studies might lead one to assume. One question this material therefore poses, as we shall see later, is precisely that of the coherence of science (both internally and externally) as an object for the anthropology of ethics. As a starting point for this account, I will borrow a device from Rabinow (1996a: 16–25) which is to provide a condensed ‘miniature’ of an ethical form of life by parsing an otherwise broad and disparate set of observations through Foucault’s four-part typology – ethical substance, askesis, mode of subjectivation, and telos. For a sustained account of these four terms as heuristics for an anthropology of ethics, see, for instance, Faubion (2011) and Heywood (Chapter 5 of this volume) – I am using it here merely as a convenient jumping-off point to draw out a number of observations, while fully aware of course that this hardly exhausts what can be said about the ethical in any given setting.

Ethical Substance: ‘What is the aspect of myself or my behaviour which is concerned with moral conduct?’ (Foucault 1994, as quoted in Rabinow 1996a: 16) The most obvious and immediate ethical substance in this case was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the mind, envisaged as a centre of perception, reasoning, and emotion. Some fairly precise meta-cognitive reflection (cf. Mair 2012) went into the identification of particular virtuous mental states. The broadly ‘scientific’ attitude of sceptic detachment from immediate experience, for instance (Sloterdijk 2012), was specifically instantiated here in a set of proper mental attitudes concerning animals, often indexed by ways of speaking about them and an ability to maintain the propriety of distinct registers. Being able to speak and think ‘scientifically’ (1)

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in this context often meant learning to describe behaviour in ways which minimized attributions of intentionality and maintaining a vigilance about one’s own ‘anthropomorphic’ assumptions (Candea 2013b; cf. Daston and Mitman 2005). The emotional make-up of the good scientist, here as elsewhere, was depicted in the light of contrasting yet complementary virtues of detachment and distance on the one hand, enthusiasm and passion on the other. In practice, however, and contrary to some banalities about the mind– body dualism of Euro-American persons, the mind here was fundamentally and pervasively an embodied mind. For instance, learning to become a scientist as a behavioural ecologist was crucially about learning to see – from the fundamental shift in optic of learning to see action as behaviour (to which I return later), to the mundane skills of being able to discern individual animals (Candea 2018b). Injunctions about maintaining a proper balance of engagement and detachment in relation to one’s research subjects were as much about practical control of one’s bodily movements around meerkats as they were about emotional mastery; being ‘a scientist’ also entailed a particular embodied relation to one’s emotions, for instance the un-squeamishness of eating lunch while watching an animal being dissected (Candea 2018b). This particular example points also to a striking and persistent aspect of this setting, to which I return later under the heading of modes of subjectivation: being ‘a scientist’ or being ‘scientific’ was frequently described as one part of what a (good) whole person is. Thus two volunteers, talking about the dissection they had just witnessed, commented using what was a broadly understood local vernacular about parts and wholes of persons: Ally: ‘I guess at the end of the day we all are scientists, and that’s probably what drew people here, I guess, maybe? And that science part of [you] is like “ooh, dissection!”’ Sue: ‘. . . but that’s just part of you . . .’ Ally: ‘and then the part of you that’s more personal and emotional or whatever might be like, “oh, I knew that meerkat”’. (Candea 2018b: 152) It is worth pausing briefly on the emotional complexity of this example: the contrast is not straightforwardly or only between a detached, cold scientist who can tolerate the death of an animal and the emotional layperson who cannot (cf. White 2005), although volunteers themselves sometimes cast things in this way when they denigrate outsiders to their scientific community such as the viewers of the documentary Meerkat Manor (Candea 2010). Rather, the contrast evokes emotions, passions, and enthusiasms on both sides, but these are differently orientated: if the ‘emotional’ part mourns the passing of a known non-human person, the ‘scientific’ part is manifested precisely by a contrasting set of emotions: excitement and passionate curiosity about the discovery of a previously opaque natural process (ooh, dissection!). One could read the point

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backwards: the ‘personal, emotional’ part of the self is distanced and detached from the fascinating workings of meerkat biology by their emotional attachment to living meerkat individuals. The broader point here, however, is that the ethical substance upon which scientific virtues were understood to operate was not the whole self, or the whole embodied mind but rather an aspect of it. I return later to what this might tell us about behavioural ecology, ‘Science’ writ large, and the question of partible personhood. Another distinctive aspect of this setting was the role of non-human entities. Building on the strong tradition in the anthropology of science of paying attention to the way knowledge-making is distributed across human persons and their technical apparatus, this case suggests that one might imagine the ethical substance stretched out beyond individual persons and their conduct to take in various material elements of the research environment. Thus we would miss something essential about the substance of some locally key epistemic virtues such as reliability, thoroughness, and systematicity in data collection if we sought to attribute them entirely to the embodied minds of individual researchers. Just as certain forms of objectivity are only understandable as the effect of a relation between scientists and photographic equipment (Daston and Galison 2007), these key virtues emerged and were instantiated in the interaction between careful researchers and well-maintained machines: from the carefully programmed hand-held devices that guided observers as they ‘collected’ units of behaviour in the field (Candea 2013c) to the painstakingly curated project database files, millions of lines of data, each painstakingly entered by hand on the project computers and crosschecked by a data manager. What Fortun and Fortun (2005) have described as ‘care for the data’ was very much in evidence here, and it required also a care for the equipment, which in turn scaffolded individual observers’ ability to be reliable. To say this is not to render insignificant questions of human freedom and responsibility, as in Laidlaw’s slightly severe reading of ANT (Laidlaw 2014: 183–8). It is only to suggest that in this case, as in other ethnographic accounts of scientific practice, the feedback loops between persons’ careful maintenance of technical apparatuses and the reliability of these apparatuses which in turn scaffolds and upholds that of the persons who maintain them might usefully be treated as a complex assemblage of ethical substance. The pervasiveness of these kinds of human–nonhuman assemblages in scientific practices might make science particularly good to think with for anthropologists of ethics in this respect.11 11

Of course, one key particularity of this case resides in the fact that some of these non-humans were live, interactive, and indeed social animals. This raises the possibility that the meerkats in this context might be seen as something more than what the account has suggested so far, namely as actual ethical actors in their own right. In particular, Donna Haraway’s discussions of ‘response-ability’ (Haraway 2008) has sought to bridge the human exceptionalism of discussions of ethics and a kind of vitalist eco-etho-ethical perspective in which ethical action is an emergent property

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Askesis: ‘The work that one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring one’s conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one’s behaviour’ (Foucault 1994, as quoted in Rabinow 1996a: 17) Aside from the actual practice of volunteers and other researchers, to which I turn in a moment, there is a particular body of literature surrounding behavioural biology that yields valuable insights about askesis: the methodology manuals aimed at introducing students to field methods and the measurement of behaviour (Candea 2018b; Dawkins 2007; Lehner 1996; Martin and Bateson 2007). These works outline, and in their form dramatize, the kinds of work on the self that are required to progress as what I have called a ‘nascent-observer’. As I argued at greater length elsewhere (2018b), these manuals do not simply give readers the pragmatic tools to become meticulous, careful, and imaginative researchers – although they certainly aim to do that too. But more profoundly, they invite their readers to learn to see action differently – both that of animals but also their own. This can take the form of an awakening from the idle reverie of life to notice that an animal’s activity is in fact mysterious (Dawkins 2007), a careful examination of the grounds of one’s unconscious intuitions about an animal’s motivations (Tinbergen 1960), or a direct challenge to these intuitive assumptions (Martin and Bateson 2007). In all of these cases, the ‘nascent-observer’ is simultaneously being asked to observe themself; ‘to be conscious’, as Ruth Benedict once put it, ‘of the eyes through which one looks’ (2005: 22). Congruently with what I argued earlier, these manuals often invite nascent-observers not only to see otherwise but also to ‘see double’: to see animals as both intentional actors and mechanistic behavioural engines; to see themselves as both active, learning scientists and as ‘instruments for measuring behaviour in much the same way that say, a thermometer is used to measure temperature’ (Martin and Bateson 2007: 74). I argue in that piece (2018b) that the achievement of such double visions relies on a pedagogy of ‘double binds’ (Bateson 1972). In characterizing and re-characterizing animal action in various ways, these manuals repeat the action of showing something to be true on one level yet also not true (a mere metaphor or heuristic) on another. It thus becomes ultimately unclear which, of seeing an animal (or a person) as an intentional actor or as a machine-like device, is a literal description and which a merely convenient thought experiment. Here we find again the imbrication of the general and the particular. The effect of these perspectival games is, in one sense, very specific to the discipline of behavioural ecology – it could be read as a contingent historical accretion of very different ways of seeing derived from naturalism, (2)

of interspecies assemblages. This raises complex questions which do not pertain directly to the topic of this chapter, which is scientific practice – I refer readers to Rosie Jones McVey’s Chapter 27 in this volume.

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behaviourism, and sociobiology (Crist 1999). Yet on another scale, the effect of these manuals is also to instil epistemic virtues often associated with ‘Science’ writ large: a sceptical attitude of de-familiarization towards immediate experience (Candea 2013b), and an inquisitive interest in what lies beneath or beyond appearances. Moving on to the ethnographic observation of what volunteers actually did in practice at the KMP field station raises a particularly interesting analytical challenge surrounding the notion of askesis and self-cultivation: how can one distinguish the regular performance of a task or conduct which exhibits or requires certain virtuous dispositions, through which performance a subject progressively gets better at this task or conduct, from genuine self-cultivation in the sense of a purposeful ‘attempt to transform oneself in to the ethical subject of one’s behaviour’? Thus, in light of the points made earlier, it is tempting to describe a number of the daily activities of volunteers as forms of askesis: the daily discipline of waking up before dawn to collect one’s equipment, partake of a swift breakfast and ship out to various parts of the reserve; the painstaking, silent trudge behind one meerkat group for hour after hour under the increasingly hot sun, carefully keeping up one’s concentration in order to be able to tell apart one dusty meerkat body from another; the occasional scramble to enter lines of behavioural code into one’s hand-held device as a group of meerkats suddenly flew into a flurry of activity; the dedicated, patient input of lines of data after one’s field session; and so forth. Volunteers themselves frequently described their time at the project in terms of progress in these and other abilities: they were getting better at seeing behaviour, at recognizing individuals swiftly and accurately, at detecting and correcting anomalies in data, at managing their interactions with meerkats; as they undertook their own individual research projects, at understanding what counts as an interesting research question, a solid piece of evidence, a good hypothesis. Yet there is an element of sleight of hand in describing all of these practices as instances of self-cultivation, which comes clearly into view once one remembers that only some of these volunteers were actively and single-mindedly in the process of ‘becoming scientists’. For absolute beginners, for many of whom the field station was an experimental clearing house of future plans, and even more so for experienced volunteers who, at some point during their stay, had decided that the life scientific was not for them, these practices would surely be better described simply as ‘conduct in compliance with a rule’. The peculiarity of this situation should not hide the broader epistemic difficulty: if the characterization of a practice as askesis (by contrast to mere compliance) relies on the practising subject’s commitment to the particular transformative goal of that practice, there will be many cases in which the difference is ethnographically unknowable, slight, or fundamentally fluctuating. In this setting as in others, decisions about one’s path in life are often taken slowly,

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hesitantly and rethought, reconsidered and reversed. It is reasonable to suppose that the same volunteers at various points in their stay, maybe in various moods, perhaps at various times of day, may have switched between an engagement with these practices as valuable and purposive self-transformation and experiencing them as tedious rule-following. This opens up onto much broader questions concerning the internalism or externalism of anthropological accounts of ethical self-cultivation. Given the common, albeit distant, roots of anthropologists’ and behavioural scientists’ respective epistemic traditions, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that this descriptive problem sounds a little bit like the descriptive oscillations I described earlier in behavioural ecology manuals. This rejoins the suggestion, made by some anthropologists of ethics, that we might wish to cultivate the ability to see our interlocutors’ action twice – as both ethical self-cultivation and rule-following (Clarke 2015; Cook 2010; see also Mahmood 2005).

Modes of Subjectivation: ‘The Way in Which the Individual established His eelation to the rule and acknowledges oneself to Be a member of the group that accepts it, declares adherence to it out loud, and silently preserves it as custom’ (Foucault 1994) This is a particularly thorny question, which takes us back to the difficulties surrounding the notion of ‘Science’ as a unitary ethical form of life. In describing the complex of actions and virtues I outlined earlier, volunteers themselves frequently invoked ‘Science’ as the practice to which these belonged, and referred to themselves as ‘scientists’ insofar as they pursued these forms of conduct. Yet the previous section highlights the extent to which their practice was a historically and materially specific one – not simply ‘science’ but ‘field behavioural biology’. Field behavioural biologists are scientists who work with mostly whole, live animals. Volunteers were learning not only to be ‘scientists’ but more specifically to be the particular kind of scientists who must cultivate precise, contextual knowledge of a group of individually named wild animals – a knowledge necessarily scaffolded by affective engagement with these animals – while also learning to disaggregate their behaviour into elements of a data stream for statistical analysis, and to explain their actions in terms of genetic and environmental forces that have nothing to do with the intentions and purposes which they might read off the individual animals themselves. In other words, field behavioural ecology is, like so many contemporary scientific disciplines, itself a composite: it recombines practices and epistemic virtues drawn from fields as diverse as ethology, primatology, behavioural psychology, and population ecology. Yet it provides a distinctive mode of subjectivation in relation to widely shared epistemic virtues. (3)

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In Paolo Heywood’s helpfully clear formulation, given a broadly shared code, ‘a mode of subjectivation is the way in which an individual subscribes to such a code . . . the manner in which they are “invited or incited to recognise” (Foucault, 2000: 264) that moral obligation’ (Heywood 2015: 211). Take, for example, ‘detachment’, which might be invoked as a ‘rule’ of sorts for many if not all scientists. To be even more precise, let us consider three types of biological scientists who work with animals, and subscribe, as a moral obligation, to a kind of detachment from them. Disciplinary and sub-disciplinary differences affect the way in which one might establish a relation to such a rule. For molecular biologists, for instance, detachment might involve learning to remain unaffected while summarily killing laboratory mice because this is a pragmatic necessity in order to access important physiological data. A number of students of animal cognition I spoke to, by contrast, were unambiguous about being personally opposed to – and feeling that they would be unable to countenance undertaking – invasive work on the animals they studied, and did not feel that this impugned in any way their credentials as scientists. For them, detachment still featured as a rule, but it emerged in the context of learning to distance oneself from one’s immediate assumptions about what an animal might be thinking or intending, in order not to contaminate one’s reading of the results of experiments in which the animal’s cognitive abilities were being tested (Candea 2013b). In that respect, they were just as emphatic as any ‘wet biologist’ might be in contrasting their own superior capacities for detachment with those of their lay friends or family members. For the bulk of the work undertaken at the KMP, by contrast again, questions of the intentional state of meerkats were fairly marginal, and meerkats provided data while alive rather than dead. There, the main way in which detachment – still an important rule – featured scientifically was in relation to non-interference into the natural lifecycle of the animals. Habituation, for instance, was a procedure calibrated to enable closeness to the animals while – ideally at least – having little or no effect on how much the meerkats ate, for instance, or how likely they were to be predated by other animals (Candea 2013a). Detachment was mainly a rule ensuring that the animals remained what they crucially needed to be for the project to have value – wild. These three cases show the diversity of modes of subjectivation that might attach to the superficially similar code or rule, here detachment from animals. Yet we also saw earlier that all three of these modes of subjectivation were in fact in evidence among volunteers at the KMP. They occasionally expressed concern at removing attributions of intentionality from their language, in ways akin to those of cognitive scientists; they occasionally took pride in their lack of squeamishness, as a laboratory biologist might. But the maintenance of properly distanced interspecies relations in the habituation-wildness sense described earlier was a much more sustained, fundamental, and all-encompassing aspect of their

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practice. This speaks to the fact that these volunteers were not just on the margins of the professional scientific community – those of them who aimed to pursue a career in science were in the process of turning from ‘natural scientists’, or perhaps ‘biologists’ in an undergraduate sense, into ‘field behavioural biologists’. In the process, their generalities about the epistemic virtues of science were in the process of being whittled down and sharpened into more precise sense of the epistemic virtues of field behavioural biology. Their mode of subjectivation was in the process of shifting from a broader concern with relating to ‘detachment’ as a scientist to the more specific recognition of a particular kind of detachment which is epistemically virtuous for a field behavioural ecologist. To see this process in action opens up a comparative question, again, for anthropological accounts of ethical ‘traditions’ in other settings. While much has been written about internal diversity and (in)coherence (Pandian 2008) and about historical changes (Asad 2003; Marsden 2005; Robbins 2004; Yan 2009) in ethical traditions, this case suggests that it might be worth asking also about the ways in which particular persons’ trajectory through an ethical tradition might become specialized (and not simply, say, ‘intensified’ or progressively more skilled), or conversely, how what is on one scale a tradition might simultaneously contain other traditions within itself. Just as thought-provoking is the fact that, if behavioural biology is only a part of science, science itself was only a part of what these volunteers saw themselves as cultivating. I noted earlier that volunteers occasionally referred to distinct scientific and non-scientific ‘parts’ of themselves. This was a vernacular I encountered with various modifications, among other professional animal behaviour scientists. I suggested earlier how this sense of ‘double vision’ might be rooted in the methodological and conceptual particularities of field behavioural biology. This particular, precise disciplinary dualism gives form and substance to the broader and perhaps ‘naive-sounding’ dualisms the volunteers invoked between being a scientist and being emotional. Yet one should not, I think, rush to dismiss those broader formulations. For, on the other hand, the figure of the double person, who is both a scientist and an ‘emotional person’ (another informant – a post-doc, rather than a volunteer – described the latter as ‘the animal-hugging part of me’), has a broader significance beyond the specific disciplinary context it is rooted in. It suggests an internalization of the widespread discourses about the anethical nature of science described in the first section of this chapter. The volunteers were drawing on broad stereotypical depictions of science as cold, detached, unemotional, and amoral even in its enthusiasms, in order to make sense of their experiences as budding field behavioural ecologists. In so doing, they found that while these depictions capture something, they can hardly describe the totality of their person, which therefore emerges as divided or split between different contrasting parts: science on one side, emotions on

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the other. To put it otherwise, since being ‘a scientist’ is popularly cast as something slightly less than being a total person, actual scientists come to understand ‘being a scientist’, recursively, as being part scientist, part (lay) person. This opens up interesting comparative questions for anthropological accounts of self-formation more broadly. Mark Mosko, in a provocative article, suggested that Christian individuality might be re-analysed as a species of partible personhood such that the seeming ‘individuality’ of Christian persons consists merely in singular moments of overarching processes of elicitive detachment, gift-transfer, incorporation, and reciprocation whereby the constituent parts of total or overall dividual persons are transacted (Mosko 2015). Might one make a similar claim about scientific individuality in a world in which ‘being a scientist’ is conceived of as something that persons are while only ever being a part of who they are? If so, this case stands as evidence that partible personhood and ethical self-formation are in no way mutually exclusive (cf. Humphrey 2008; Laidlaw 2017). One might, of course, counter that less theoretically contrived accounts of such cases as simply instances of ‘value pluralism’ might fit the bill just as well. There is certainly much to be said about the pursuit of different values and conflicting virtues in this setting, as in many other contemporary scientific settings (Shapin 2008). But asking, additionally, about the subdivision of the self into partial ethical substances, each with a different mode of subjectivation, does open up some distinctive questions which resonate in this case and might provide food for thought to anthropological accounts of ethics in other settings: how are the different parts of the person worked on in different ways, put in tension, reconciled, or, as Mosko puts it, ‘transacted’ both within oneself and with others? In sum, what does self-formation look like in settings in which the self in question is understood as partible?

Telos: ‘That activity in which one finds the self’ (Foucault 1994, as quoted in Rabinow 1996a: 22) Understanding the telos of the practices undertaken at the KMP is in a sense the capstone of this description. This requires a detour through the history of biological theory. This slightly arid discussion repays the effort, however, as it leads up to an intriguing observation: the key telos of this scientific form of life lies precisely in discovering the telos of animal life. Behavioural ecologists are the particular kinds of scientists who find meaning and purpose in finding meaning and purpose in the actions of animals, in a very specific way. Niko Tinbergen, one of the founding fathers of the biology of behaviour, famously wrote – loosely and implicitly echoing Aristotle’s thoughts on the nature of explanation and causality (Tinbergen 2005) – that four main (4)

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questions can be asked of any animal behaviour: one can ask about the physiological mechanisms which underpin it (‘causation’), about the evolutionary history which led to the development of this behaviour (‘phylogeny’), about the way it develops during the life course of the animal (‘ontogeny’), and finally about the role it plays in the animal’s adaptation to its environment and the survival of the species (‘function’). The rise of behavioural ecology profoundly transformed the biology of behaviour by foregrounding Timbergen’s final question – that of function – almost to the exclusion of the other four (Barrett et al. 2013). While there are many interesting things to be said about animal behaviour in terms of mechanism, phylogeny, and ontogeny, behavioural ecologists have tended to hold that to explain animal behaviour is primarily to answer the question of ‘function’: a behaviour is explained when one has shown in what sense this behaviour is adaptive; which is to say, how it contributes to the individual animal’s ‘reproductive success’ – its ability not simply to survive but to maximally spread its genes into the next generation. When behavioural ecologists ask ‘why’ an animal performs a particular behaviour, this is the question they are asking. This theoretical outlook gave its initial impetus and purpose to field sites such as the KMP. The KMP is one of a number of long-term field sites in which the behaviour of a large number of known individual animals is observed over generations. This particular set-up is intended to allow for the framing and ideally quantitative testing of the sorts of ‘functional’ questions described earlier: tracing how interindividual differences in behaviour impact upon animals’ differential ability to reproduce successfully. Or, in other words, asking ‘why’ they do it. Much has been written in biology, philosophy, and even anthropology about this theoretical shift, which is often criticized as a form of reductionism – anthropologists will be most familiar with this approach as an explanation of specifically social behaviours, under the name of ‘sociobiology’ (Hrdy et al. 1996; Wilson 1975), even though contemporary biological anthropologists who take this theoretical line tend to call themselves ‘human behavioural ecologists’. This was also the core focus of the KMP, which was set up to ask sociobiological questions about ‘the evolution of cooperation’ (Clutton-Brock et al. 2002). My ethnographic interest, however, is in the way this ‘functional’ approach produces a particular kind of telos for the study of animal behaviour which relies on identifying the telos of that behaviour itself. The following extended quote dramatizes this relationship. It comes from my interview with a behavioural ecologist who, as a junior researcher working with Tim Clutton-Brock in the 1990s, was instrumental in setting up some of the research protocols and practical arrangements of the KMP. Here he is describing both the rise of behavioural ecology as a discipline after the

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1970s and the way he himself discovered it, as a young man passionate about the observation of nature: Before that you had . . . everyone knew what ecology was, it was kind of ‘go out and describe plants and animals you see and stuff’. Animal behaviour was like ‘put a dog in a lab and do some experiments on it’. . . . Animal behaviour in the field was . . . the naturalist watching his birds, kind of thing. And behavioural ecology was really about . . . I guess to my mind it was two things. One was the theoretical underpinning to allow you to ask interesting questions in terms of the evolutionary implications of this behaviour. So that was really key. And obviously the quantification. . . . I’m not just merely going to watch this group of [for instance] sandpipers and note that they’re seen to be pecking around and they fly off when a bird comes over, I’m going to, you know, systematically record how many of them are scanning, how many of them have got their beaks in the ground, and the group size, so that I can test theories about whether individual sandpipers are at a greater risk of predation in . . . bigger groups. So it’s that kind of making it more rigorous that turned it into a field as far as I can see. And that’s certainly what I encountered that really excited me because you know it took the stuff I loved, you know, and made it something that was worth doing. The final sentence echoes a sentiment broadly shared among behavioural ecologists who reflected upon their entry into the discipline, or what they enjoyed about it. A number of those I spoke to described themselves as young people who already loved watching animals, and found in behavioural ecology a way to understand why they behaved in this way. Behavioural ecology, one might say, injects purpose into a contemplative encounter with animals, by identifying a particular kind of (evolutionary) purposefulness as the hidden mystery behind animal behaviour (Dawkins 2007: 1–4). Once again, we find the way in which generalities are refracted through disciplinary particularities. The vision of a discipline that ‘takes the stuff you love and makes it worth doing’ adds another layer to the pervasive dualisms I have been describing between the ‘emotional person’ and the ‘scientist’. These broad contrasts provide a kind of loose frame for talking about and recognizing the more precise awakening that might occur as some of the volunteers discover that they are espousing behavioural ecology, and become people enthused by a particular teleological ‘why?’. In that process, what were just forms of rule-following or even drudgery become askesis, the ethical substance and the mode of subjectivation to which it corresponds become more precise and specific, and something like an epistemic-ethical form of life is espoused.

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Conclusion Historians, and to a lesser extent anthropologists of science, have for a number of decades explored the ways in which scientific practices rely upon and entail certain kinds of ethical self-formation and virtuous conduct. Some aspects of these explorations predate the emergence of a selfconscious ‘anthropology of ethics’. However, the clarity, depth, and range of discussions of the ethical generated within this new field (and reflected in the other chapters of the present book, for instance) have yet to be reflected systematically in the study of science. Anthropologists of science have much to gain from engaging with the anthropology of ethics in a sustained way, as I have tried to suggest through the example earlier. Conversely, this extended example was also intended to suggest some of the ways in which in doing so, they might produce some useful comparative questions and perturbations for the anthropology of ethics to reflect upon. One particularly productive conversation between these two anthropologies might concern the question of units (cf. Candea 2019). Debates within the anthropology of ethics about the nature and coherence of ethical ‘traditions’ and debates within science studies about the unity and diversity of ‘science’ would both gain from being put into more sustained conversation. I have tried to show in one case how seemingly naive generalities about the normative orientations of ‘Science’ writ large, on the one hand, and on the other the precise epistemic virtues, askesis, and telos associated with particular disciplines, might actually be mutually sustaining, particularly from the perspective of those in the process of becoming scientists, which is to say, necessarily but not merely, scientists of a particular kind. For anthropologists of science, this might help foreground a difficult problem: at what point do virtues cease to be distinctively epistemic? Thus, Shapin’s account of contemporary scientists as, in part, virtuous managers or fearless and passionate entrepreneurs occasionally begs the question of what, if anything, these virtues (widely shared beyond scientific settings) still have to say to the specific question of knowledge production or truth-speaking. Meerkat project volunteers and more advanced field biologists also cultivate an outdoorsy resilience and resourcefulness, a particular kind of easy-going attitude that enables them to avoid conflict while cooped up with a small group of people in a research station, and other virtuous dispositions which I have not mentioned. Are these also epistemic virtues? Ethnographically speaking, these are not things that volunteers would often identify as part of being ‘scientists’, even though they or more advanced researchers might identify them as marking off, say, ‘field scientists’ from others such as ‘statisticians’ or ‘theorists’.

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Daston wrote that: Although moral economies in science draw routinely and liberally upon the values and affects of ambient culture, the reworking that results usually becomes the peculiar property of scientists. Traces of the original cultural models – for example, the simplicity, dedication, and humility of Christian saints or the unworldly innocence of the pastoral idyll – lie ready to hand, and can be evoked by the spokesmen of science to win public approval and support. But the ultimate forms that moral economies assume within science, and the functions that they serve, are science’s own. (Daston 1995: 7) Describing the contours of that process of appropriation that makes virtues into epistemic virtues requires a particularly fine brush – but it also requires an at least heuristic demarcationism about what the epistemic is to begin with. This in turn requires some sense of how the specific forms of science seek to speak to a broader general form – the Mertonian question which Rabinow rightly noted scientists still care about even when their sociologists and historians no longer do. For anthropologists of ethics, this example might prompt comparative questions about the ways in which other ethical traditions are sub-divided and branch internally. It might also raise the converse question of the one earlier: might there be anything distinctive about those virtues and forms of self-cultivation which aim at the epistemic, beyond the usual ethnographic stomping-grounds of Euro-American technoscience – such as when Inuit parents seek to foster in their children an ‘experimental way of living’ (Briggs 1991)? In this and in other respects – the place of non-human actants in the distribution of ethical conduct, the partibility of ethical persons, the role of claims about the anethical within ethical forms of life, the epistemic difficulties surrounding the identification of askesis – the study of science as ethical practice(s) still has much to offer to anthropology’s understanding of both science and ethics.

Acknowledgements My first thanks, as ever, go to the researchers and volunteers associated with the Kalahari Meerkat Project for allowing me to share their scientific world for a number of years now. This chapter has benefited from the close reading of James Faubion, Paolo Heywood, James Laidlaw, and an anonymous reviewer, whose comments and critiques have been invaluable. Any remaining infelicities and errors are my own.

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34 Communist Morality under Socialism Yunxiang Yan

My aim in this chapter is to examine the discourses and practices of the communist morality officially promulgated under state-socialist regimes such as the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Vietnam.1 Communist morality is an extreme form of collectivist ethic created by revolutionary leaders and thinkers in the early twentieth century to serve the greater goal of building communism in the entire world. It was then officially inculcated and reinforced though the state apparatuses in everyday life to all levels of the society in a top-down fashion, especially through the social engineering project known as creating the socialist ‘New Man’.2 Unlike other moral systems that gradually grew out of religious or secular practices at the societal level, communist morality is by nature a statist ethical system that always prioritizes the interests of the state above everything else and, ultimately, relies on state ownership of the means of production and the command/planned economy to enforce its moral principles. Both the end of communist morality and the means of practising it are epically ambitious and unprecedented in human history. During the heyday of the international communist movement, communist morality successfully changed the mentality and behavioural patterns of millions of ordinary people as well as the intelligentsia in socialist countries; then it degenerated into cynicism during the 1970s to 1980s and left the believers and devotees feeling deceived and disillusioned, which in turn contributed to the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastern European bloc countries in the early 1990s. Outside the state-socialist countries, communist morality inspired 1

Community-based moralities widely existed in human history that prioritize collectivist and cooperative ethics, some of which provide the foundational ideas to the kind of state-sponsored communist morality. They are not, however, to be included in the present chapter.

2

Despite the communist project of women’s liberation, the imagery of ‘Man’ is used widely to represent both women and men in the Soviet system and then in other state-socialist countries. Hereafter I will use the word ‘person’, except in places where the gender-biased term ‘man’ cannot be replaced, such as in an original document.

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a number of Western capitalist intellectuals who visited the socialist states during different periods of the twentieth century and who were convinced, for brief or longer times, that the Enlightenment idealism of remoulding the human soul for the common good could be realized by practising communist morality. Communist morality was therefore regarded by both the communists and the Western left-wing as antithetical to the corrupt morality of capitalist societies (see Hollander 1981, 2016; Lovell 2019; Wolin 2010). None of the state-socialist countries ruled by a Communist Party during the Cold-War era could claim to have realized communism. When the Soviet Union declared that it had successfully attained the stage of a ‘state of the whole people’ and thus was much closer to communism, China and several other countries outside of the eastern European bloc strongly disagreed, cementing the split in the world communist camp. If one upholds the Marxist principle that social existence determines social consciousness, it would be impossible to have communist morality in a socialist country. Yet the creation of communist morality, and under its guidance the socialist ‘New Person’, was invariably used as an important instrument to build socialism with the aim of eventually realizing communism in all socialist countries. The title of this chapter reflects this paradoxical state of affairs and also speaks to the uniqueness of communist morality.3 It is therefore imperative to examine the official discourses on communist morality and the party-state’s efforts to build it through institutional means and social engineering projects. Equally important is the participation of individuals in their self-cultivation as communist moral subjects. In the following pages, I start with the moral interiority of socialist subjects in two case studies, focussing on the transformative impact of communist morality on individuals and their motivations to accept or prescribe the newly imposed ethics by the state. Then I switch to the official discourse of communist morality by taking a close look at the 1961 ‘Moral Code of the Builders of Communism’ in the former Soviet Union, which arguably is the most authoritative and systematic articulation of communist morality, and an equally representative text of public discourse on communist morality in China – a collection of the voices of a number of model citizens. In the third section, I analyse the institutional construction of communist morality at the level of social actions by exploring the social engineering project of creating the socialist ‘New Person’ in the former Soviet Union and China. I conclude this essay with discussions on the principles of communist morality, and the current state of communist morality, arguing that the emphasis on collective identity and the centrality of 3

Cuban leaders justified this by the underdeveloped conditions in their country. Both Castro and Che Guevara argued that it was urgent to create a revolutionary consciousness and a ‘New Person’ in Cuba so that the moral dimension would dominate the production process (Medin 1990: 18).

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institutional sociality still determine the relevance of communist morality in the world today.

Inside the Minds of Socialist Moral Subjects During the Cold-War era, the lack of reliable information about the subjective experiences of the people in the socialist states contributed to the emphasis among Western scholars on top-down and institutional changes initiated by the party-state. What remains elusive and understudied are the subjective experiences of people who sought to remould themselves or who resisted being remoulded. The availability of archival data after the collapse of the Soviet Union changed this situation to a great extent. In this regard, Jochen Hellbeck’s (2006) close reading and penetrating analysis of the diaries of several Soviet citizens stands out as an excellent example (see also Halfin 2003). Hellbeck’s study scrutinizes four diarists, including a female teacher who represents the remnants of the tsarist-era bourgeois intelligentsia; a rich peasant (kulak)’s son who disguises his identity in order to become politically and morally integrated into the system; a high-ranking communist cadre with perfect proletarian origins; and a playwright who represents the Soviet intelligentsia and is one of Stalin’s so-called engineers of the souls. Although they all sought to become a truly qualified ‘Soviet Man [person]’, these individuals engaged in different strategies of selfcultivation that in turn reflected their different class origins, but eventually they all were absorbed into the omnipotent imagery of the moral collective. The female teacher had to struggle to overcome her inner morals of bourgeois individualism, but she finally transformed herself when she truly believed that she was merely a drop of water in the sea and she accepted the primacy of the enormous sea rather than that of a vanishing drop of water (Hellbeck 2006: 157). Throughout his book, Hellbeck convincingly and repeatedly shows how a communist ideology, including its moral teachings, was voluntarily practised by individuals, as reflected in the diarists’ accounts of selfcultivation. These Soviet citizens, like millions of others under Stalinism, seemed to be under the spell of the cult of the bright future of communism, and they all proactively submitted themselves through various efforts to remake their souls (or, alternatively, their moral selves) to contribute to the great cause of building communism. Therefore, speaking about oneself was, in fact, a widespread practice under Stalin, and in certain forms it was even encouraged by the party-state (2006: 37–52). An important appeal of communist morality is the promise to save the individual from the felt crises of alienation and isolation that are common in modern times. According to Hellbeck, the search for inclusion in the revolutionary universe and the fear of exclusion from the revolutionary

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universe are two sides of the same moral incentive that encouraged individuals to transform themselves into Soviet subjects under Stalinism: Studies of subjectivity in the Stalin era remain incomplete if they fail to consider the crippling and anesthetizing effects on individuals who were expelled from the nurturing collective, a punishment that could be incurred by as little as a series of idiosyncratic private thoughts. Rather than heroic liberal agents, doubting Stalinist subjects more often appear as atomized selves in crisis, longing to overcome their painful separation from the collective body of the Soviet people. (2006: 114; see also Humphrey 2007) This fear of being excluded from the collectivity pushed the Soviet subjects to follow the party line as closely as possible, drawing an uncompromising line between the revolutionary ‘us’ and the counter-revolutionary ‘them’ and developing a new morality that had zero tolerance for anyone who was cast as an enemy of the people by the party-state. For example, one of the diarists condemns Nikolai Bukharin as a traitor after he was purged by Stalin in 1938, despite the fact that the diarist knows he was not a traitor and knows that her husband was also wrongly accused and arrested. Another diarist suffers unfairness and discrimination because he is the son of a rich peasant, yet he shows no sympathy towards the peasants in Ukraine who were victims of the great famine: ‘Let them die. If they can’t defend themselves against death from starvation, it means that they are weak-willed, and what can they give to society?’ (Hellbeck 2006: 357–8). These Soviet individuals’ lack of empathy, one of the most important virtues in modern moralities, is chilling, but it is justified and encouraged in the moral codes of communist morality. Stalin gave a generic name to the newly created socialist subjects – ‘cogs’. During a Kremlin reception in honour of the Victory Parade participants on 25 June 1945, Stalin toasted the tens of millions of new socialist subjects: ‘I drink to the simple people, ordinary and modest, to the “cogs” who keep our great state machine in motion in all the branches of science, the economy and the military.’ This image of cogs could also be applied to the high-ranking party officials and army generals at the reception who at Stalin’s whim could be transferred or replaced. Red Army Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, who was among the participant at the receptions, for example, understood Stalin’s message through his own experience (Sokolov 2015: 431–2). He was wrongly accused and arrested in 1937 and then reinstated as an army commander when the party-state needed him (and other experienced yet similarly purged generals) to lead the antiNazi war; he just accepted the change of fate as a perfect cog would do. Switching to the China case, our study (Li and Yan 2019) on 679 personal letters in a family dated from 1961 to 1986 also demonstrates that communist morality might not be working at all if it were not appropriated by individuals. All of the known institutional means of remoulding the

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human soul in state-socialist countries or creating the socialist ‘New Person’ (more on this later) are literally recorded in these personal letters where husband Lu, wife Jiang, and their siblings describe their attendance at various political activities and their daily work routines (see Zhang and Yan 2018). They discuss studying Mao’s writings as well as revolutionary literature and films (many of which were from the Soviet Union), their experiences of emulating role models, and their participation in political campaigns. Moreover, the letters reveal how these individuals sincerely tried to reform their own thoughts through self-criticisms and mutual criticisms as well as through their own proactive efforts to uplift other family members to a higher level of political consciousness and communist morality. The efforts in the 1960s to suppress self-interest and material desires were ubiquitous in all of their letters. Lu, Jiang, and their younger siblings repeatedly commit to reshaping themselves into the officially defined socialist ‘New Person’ by pursuing political progress and controlling personal desires and interests. In most of the letters written in the 1960s and the early 1970s, there is at least one paragraph on political content, and in some cases such discussions dominate the exchange of letters. Overall, we estimate that about 15 to 20 per cent of the content of their letters during this period is related to self-cultivation of the socialist ‘New Person’. Because of space limitations, I cannot go into detail here, but it will suffice to cite one paragraph from Lu’s second love letter to Jiang as an example of the way the party’s moral language pervades their correspondence: As for why I love you, it is very simple and clear. We have studied together for five years, which is the foundation of mutual understanding and trust. We both trust the Party, devote ourselves to work for the Party, and are willing to improve ourselves under the Party’s education (we all had made impressive progress in these years, but this is first and foremost the result of the Party’s education). This is our shared foundation of thought. Although you have shortcomings, and so do I, these are precisely the foundation for us to help each other and progress together. (Letter dated 27–28 June 1961, in Zhang and Yan 2018: 6) What is most interesting is that, unlike in political campaigns or formal study sessions at workplaces, in the private setting of family letters among relatives the discourse and practice of gender equality and marriage based on an equal partnership, an important part of communist morality, are foregrounded as the most important way to reshape one’s moral self. In particular, the private and affective site of the family provides a more nurturing environment for women to proactively use the discourse of women’s liberation and gender equality to cultivate their new moral self, while at the same time replicating the official discourse of class

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consciousness and class struggle. The discourse of class consciousness and the discourse of gender equality work in tandem to win the political loyalty of Lu, Jiang, and Jiang’s sisters, and motivate them to engage in further actions of thought reform and in remaking their moral selves. Notably, too, the gendered aspect of the new socialist subjectivity borrowed from the traditional family culture by placing the party and Mao in the position of loving parents, while rebuilding the concept of the family as an affective medium and extension of the party organization and, to a certain extent, also softening and humanizing the much harsher discourse of class struggle. Another important finding from our case study is that over time the new socialist subjectivity collapsed from within, mainly because by the late 1970s family concerns and materiality had replaced political progress in the psychological world of Lu, Jiang, and, in this respect, arguably the absolute majority of the Chinese population. These letters reveal that in the 1960s Lu and Jiang tried their best to suppress various personal desires and interests in order to concentrate on the pursuit of political progress. They even took pains to teach themselves that family concerns, such as childrearing, should always be secondary to political activities and work for the party. They were constantly short of money and had to rely on mutual aid to purchase basic consumer goods. To deal with such material hardships, they lived very plain lifestyles, trying to conserve even with respect to the smallest expenditures, such as using hot water or the purchase of a toothbrush (Zhang and Yan 2018: 299, 328). These strict and sometimes harsh efforts to control self-interest and personal emotions reached a peak during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution from mid-1966 to 1967. The Maoist ideology and the discourse of class struggle were pushed to a point of extreme and irrationality; thereafter they gradually waned. The political failure of radical Maoism and the consequent widespread disillusionment broke the spell of communist asceticism among Lu, Jiang, and their relatives. Starting from the early 1970s, their letters gradually become apolitical, and their attention shifted away from political subjects to an entirely new dialogue on how to buy much-needed, yet scarce, consumer goods through backdoor connections, how to improve one’s knowledge and skills and apply them to their work, how to make money by moonlighting, and how to guide young children in their education and college-entrance examinations. All of a sudden, they realized that their daily lives under Maoism had been barren, poor, and uninteresting, and now they wanted to catch up with what they had missed, which was expressed in their letters as an urgent and strong materialism (Li and Yan 2019: 109–10). Maoist asceticism had formerly been an integral part of the official ideology of the socialist ‘New Person’ and at the same time an important means of practising selfcultivation. The collapse of the official ideology stripped away the sanctity

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of Maoist asceticism, and the constant shortages of material goods awakened both the elite and the rank and file to the fact that socialism had actually failed, which in turn undermined the communist morality from within (see Fehe´rva´ry 2009; Ledeneva 2008; Li and Yan 2019; Yan 2021). In retrospect, it is obvious that many of the devout communist believers indeed exercised what James Laidlaw (2014) calls the ‘reflective freedom’ to a great extent in the soul-searching process of making themselves into socialist moral subjects. By studying communist canons and engaging in self-inspection, self-criticism, diary writing, confession writing, and mutual criticism with their peers, they reflect and re-evaluate their desires and thoughts and then take ethical actions accordingly, eventually transforming themselves into agency-less cogs of the revolution machine (Halfin 2003; Hellbeck 2006; Li and Yan 2019). This irony resonates well with James Laidlaw’s point that reflective freedom is a precondition for ethical life in general, but whether or not it leads to the negative freedom in Western political liberalism depends on other contingent factors. If the individual’s agency of reflective freedom is guided and reduced to submission and obedience to a higher authority, the end result could well be antifreedom (see Laidlaw 2014: 138–78). Both the diaries of Soviet individuals and the personal letters of Chinese couples reveal the importance of temporality in our understanding of communist morality. Anna Krylova cautions that the Soviets’ radical attempt to create the socialist ‘New Man’ by and large had failed by the 1930s and was replaced by a more modest version. By the time the Soviets promulgated the authoritative ‘Moral Code of the Builder of Communism’ in 1961, much of its content could no longer be applied to real social practice in Soviet society, yet the official discourse remained influential at the ideological level (Krylova 2017; Hellbeck 2006; Heller 1988). By the 1980s, communist morality in the Soviet Union was upheld merely as empty yet necessary discourse in public life because the socialist subjects had transformed themselves into cynical pragmatists who could pursue self-interest and personal happiness in action, while remaining socialist altruists in discourse (Yurchak 2005). Similar changes occurred much earlier in Yugoslavia and were regarded as being the result of an Americanization of the local culture (Vucˇetic´ 2017). In a similar vein, the Maoist version of communist morality reached a peak during the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–70) and then began to slide, as illustrated in the personal letters between a Chinese couple (Li and Yan 2019). By the early 1980s, the party-state was extremely concerned about the declining belief and confidence in the communist cause and officially declared it a moral crisis, which was, intriguingly, welcomed by the liberal-minded reformers as the emergence of a new moral horizon (Ci 1994; Liu 2002; Xu 2002; Yan 2011, 2021). It is important, therefore, to keep in mind both the junction and disjunction between the

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official discourse and practice of communist morality and their actual effectiveness among people in socialist countries when we turn to the macro level of institutional behaviours.

Communist Morality in Official Discourse At the Twenty-First Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party and premier of the Soviet Union, summarized the essence of communist morality as ‘devotion to Communism and implacability toward its enemies, consciousness of societal duty, active participation in labor for the benefit of society, voluntary observance of the rules of human common living, comradely mutual aid, honesty and truthfulness, [and] intolerance toward the destroyers of social order’ (Field 2007: 11). Two years later, at the 1961 TwentySecond Party Congress, Khrushchev announced to the world that the Soviet Union had completed its transition from proletarian dictatorship to the ‘state of the whole people’, which was ‘an all-important milestone on the road from socialist statehood to communist public self-government’ (CPSU 1961: 249). To reach this ultimate goal, Khrushchev posited that the task of instilling communist morality into the minds of the Soviet people and moulding the Soviet ‘New Person’ was more urgent and important than ever (CPSU 1961: 565–6). The Twenty-Second Party Congress promulgated the ‘Moral Code of the Builders of Communism’, which includes the following twelve principles (CPSU 1961: 566–7; there are no numerical indicators in the original text): (1) Devotion to the communist cause; love of the socialist motherland and of the other socialist countries; (2) Conscientious labor for the good of society – he who does not work, neither shall he eat; (3) Concern on the part of everyone for the preservation and growth of public wealth; (4) A high sense of public duty; intolerance of actions harmful to the public interest; (5) Collectivism and comradely mutual assistance: one for all and all for one; (6) Humane relations and mutual respect between individuals – man is to man a friend, comrade and brother; (7) Honesty and truthfulness, moral purity, modesty, and unpretentiousness in social and private life; (8) Mutual respect in the family, and concern for the upbringing of children; (9) An uncompromising attitude to injustice, parasitism, dishonesty, careerism and money-grubbing;

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(10) Friendship and brotherhood among all peoples of the U.S.S.R.; intolerance of national and racial hatred; (11) An uncompromising attitude to the enemies of communism, peace and the freedom of nations; (12) Fraternal solidarity with the working people of all countries, and with all peoples. In modern times, it is rather unusual to have a set of explicitly moral principles formulated and propagated by a political party and then carried out by the state through various administrative means. It is also interesting that devotion to a particular political cause – communism – was established in this institutional morality as the number-one principle, resembling the first of the Ten Commandments (‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’). In Marxist-Leninist ethics, communist morality is both the noblest form of human morality and the means to reach communism. Communism is the highest moral good; therefore, what leads to communism is moral and what obstructs the way to communism is immoral. The socialist motherland (together with the other socialist countries) is the primary and most important foundation on which to build communism, and therefore it demands the unconditional love and loyalty of its citizens – which is the second part of the first moral principle in the ‘Moral Code’. Here we can see how the union of the moral and the political redirects citizens’ moral commitment to the Communist Party and the Soviet state, which in turn subordinates the moral to the political. In other words, encapsulated in the very first principle of the ‘Moral Code of the Builders of Communism’ is a statist model of institutional morality. Precisely from such a statist perspective, work or labour for society is the second most important moral principle because it is the means to reach the goal of communism, and the need for ever-increasing productivity provides legitimacy for the party-state as the ultimate owner-organizermanager. Moreover, it is not individual work that is regarded as moral but socially productive labour whereby one works to produce material goods for the purpose of building communism. It is also necessary to demonstrate the correct attitudes to socially productive labour, such as love of one’s work, care for state property in work, and willingness to work overtime for the good of society. The next three moral codes together promote a new morality in which one must prioritize the interests of the collective, the public, and ultimately the party-state. They also emphasize the moral duty to be intolerant of any actions that are harmful to the public interest. Implicitly, they also require citizens to curb the private self, individual autonomy, and the pursuit of personal happiness in the name of collectivism and add a sense of asceticism to communist morality. All of these are to be reified through the promotion of socialist heroes/heroines who sacrifice individual

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interests to preserve or to promote collective interests, including even sacrificing one’s own life (see later). To illustrate the essence of collectivism and the relationship between the individual and the all-powerful Soviet state, revolutionary-turneddissident Yevgeny Zamyatin asks his reader to picture a pair of scales: Take two trays of a weighing scale: put a gram on one and on the other, put a ton. On one side is the ‘I,’ on the other is the ‘WE,’ the One State. Isn’t it clear? Assuming that the ‘I’ has the same rights compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a gram can counterbalance a ton. Here is the distribution: a ton has rights, a gram has duties. And this is the natural path from insignificance to greatness: forget that you are a gram, and feel as though you are a millionth part of the ton. (Zamyatin 2006 [1924]: 102) The ninth, eleventh, and part of the fourth principle constitute the negative-sanctions aspects of communist morality and they elaborate on the basic principle of ‘implacability toward its enemies’, as stated by Khrushchev in 1959. The ninth principle groups together injustice, dishonesty, parasitism, careerism, and money-grubbing because MarxistLeninist ethics define the latter three as the vices of individualism and capitalism that poison people’s souls. Particularly noteworthy are terms such as ‘uncompromising’, ‘intolerance’, and ‘implacability’, which derive from the Marxist idea that morality is shaped by class antagonism, the motor of historical changes. Communist morality cannot be constructed unless its predecessors and competitors – capitalist and other kinds of morality – have been destroyed. This class-based antagonistic perspective on morality deeply shaped the other principles of the Moral Code, which on the surface may appear to be anodynes or even universally recognized virtues, such as honesty, truthfulness, family duties, and friendship among the people. It is, however, entirely up to the party-state to decide whether the enactment of any such characteristic in a given context is to be understood as communist and thus is good, or capitalist and thus is evil. For example, the precept of ‘man is to man a friend, comrade, and brother’ applies only to those individuals recognized by the party-state as part of the Soviet people. The appropriate principle to be applied to everyone else is ‘implacability toward its enemies’. Making such distinctions and obeying the party-state in applying them is recognized as a high level of class consciousness – which is a core feature of communist morality. Unlike the eastern European bloc countries which by and large were compelled to adopt and follow the Soviet model of communist morality, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the party-state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) modified the Soviet model and contributed some new features to the construction of communist morality. Initially, such

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a divergence was negligible when, on 29 September 1949, one day before the establishment of the PRC state, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which was tasked with proclaiming the establishment of the PRC and organizing the central government, promulgated the Common Program which encapsulated the basic moral norms for the new state. In Article 41 of the Common Program, the CPPCC declared that the primary task in ideology and cultural development would be ‘the training of personnel for national construction work; liquidation of feudal, comprador, and fascist ideology; and development of an ideology of service to the people’. Article 42 spelled out the five basic moral norms: ‘Love for the motherland and the people, love of labor, love of science, and love and protection of public property shall be promoted as the public spirit of all nationals of the People’s Republic of China’ (CPPCC 1949). These are known as the ‘five loves’ in moral education in China; the fifth was changed to ‘love of socialism’ in the 1982 Chinese Constitution (Article 24). The sequence and hence the value-ranking of the five loves resembles the Soviet model, with the motherland at the top, the people second, and labour or work third. The Chinese list, however, is distinctive in declaring love of science as a moral duty for Chinese citizens. This is because both Chinese leaders and the cultural elite believed that whereas labour was the means to build socialism and communism, science was the key to China’s accelerated pursuit of modernization to achieve a strong nation state. This view originated at the turn of the twentieth century when imperial China was defeated by the Western powers. During the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement of the 1920s, science was expected to sweep away the superstitions and backward thoughts in the traditional culture and to transform the weak Chinese individual into a modern citizen (see, e.g., Goossaert and Palmer 2012, especially chapter 6; Schwarcz 1986). In the early years of the PRC, there was considerable faith that the communist utopia would be practically feasible through science and, more importantly, Marxism was promoted as ‘the science of all sciences’ (Ci 1994: 117). In the new society, ethical norms and moral behaviour would all be measured for the purpose of building a strong nation state and eventually achieving a communist society. The end defines and justifies the means. Therefore, ‘to evaluate whether a person’s behavior toward society and toward other persons conforms to the principles of communist morality, it must be determined whether this behavior in all respects conforms to the interests of creating, consolidating, and completing the great cause of socialism and communism’ (Wu 1955). Zhou Yuanbing, one of the officially recognized leading ethicists since the 1950s, asserts that collectivism is the overarching principle of communist morality and that it differs from the various forms of collectivism in the non-socialist societies, such as the collectivism of kinship

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organizations or of local communities in traditional China. Collectivism in communist morality regards the whole Chinese society as the collectivity represented by the party-state. This being the case, communist collectivism requires that individuals always prioritize the collective interests over their own, willingly fulfil their obligations to the collective, and unconditionally sacrifice their own interests, including their lives if necessary, for the sake of protecting the collective interests (Zhou 1986: 466–77; see also Jin 1983). After the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, the Chinese version of communist morality began to diverge sharply from its Soviet counterpart in at least three main respects. First, China criticized the Soviet Union’s use of material incentives to promote productivity and economic growth and it insisted that only moral incentives are communist and thus good. In this connection, China and Cuba seemed to form a strong alliance as the latter also sharply rejected the use of material incentives and was proud that it built communism by way of moral stimulation (Bernardo 1971). The ethical debate eventually evolved into a ‘socialist cold war’ between the affluent socialist countries of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on the one side and underdeveloped China and Cuba on the other (Clecak 1969: 101–35; see also Medin 1990: 18–24). Second, China strongly refuted Khrushchev’s view of the ‘state of the whole people’ in which class struggle ceased to be a defining feature of the social structure. Mao Zedong, chairman of the CCP, called on the entire country to ‘never forget class struggle’ and declared that China existed in a ‘continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship’. Third, in a radical departure from the Soviet practice of relying on trained professionals, such as scholars of ethics, to construct a well-formulated moral code and to inculcate it in a top-down approach, the CCP first recast the Soviet model of communist morality in terms of Chairman Mao’s writings, and then promulgated exemplary role models to encapsulate the Maoist version of communist morality, which was then constantly reiterated in mass campaigns, eventually mobilizing the entire population to internalize the Maoist ideas of communist morality (for a detailed account of this practice, see Bakken 2000). A good example of this is the publication of a special collection entitled ‘Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Speaking on Communist Morality’ by the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the CCP, on 17 March 1966. The editors carefully selected various quotes to ensure that what the ordinary people articulated corresponded exactly to Maoist orthodoxy. For example, to illustrate Mao’s idea of ‘serving the people’, Shi Chuanxiang, a wellknown socialist labour hero who was a collector of manure, said: ‘Our work is indeed dirty and tiring, but if we do a good job, the people will be clean and will not be bothered by the smell of the manure. . . . So the dirtier and more tiring our work, the more glorious we feel about ourselves.’ Speaking about class consciousness, Liu Kun, a senior manufacturing worker, reflected: ‘We are working-class people, we cannot forget “class”

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when we speak and act; we do not speak without “class”, do not do anything without “class”.’ ‘I am an all-purpose screw, and can be screwed onto a rifle, a farming tool, a truck, a machine, or a stove. As long as it works for the party, I always function as a small screw’, said Zhang Hongche, a model worker. Lei Feng, the most famous role model whom Mao called on the whole country to emulate, wrote in his diary: ‘[We] must be ruthless to the enemies, as brutal as the coldest winter; must be loyal to the party and the people, and be a docile tool of the party.’ Guo Xingfu, a low-ranking army officer, drove home the point of implacability towards class enemies: ‘In order to be brutal toward the enemy, we must arouse class hatred. No hatred, no ruthlessness; more hatred, more mercilessness’ (all quotes from People’s Daily, 1966). It was, however, the editorial notes that pieced these individual voices together and ultimately constructed a systematic communist morality as propagated by the CCP. There is no space here to examine the rather elaborate editorial notes; suffice it to highlight the key points. The editorial notes begin with a clear statement: ‘The proletariat’s departure point to evaluate suffering and joy, life and death, and [the proletariat’s] criterion for distinguishing right from wrong and good from evil are the only interests and goals of the party, the people, and communism, and the proletariat’s spirit of “giving every weight to the interests of others and none to the interests of oneself”.’ Following this guiding principle, the leading theme of communist morality, according to the editorial notes, is ‘how to make oneself a human being and why to live one’s life’, followed by the themes of ‘proactively work, selflessly work’ and ‘revolutionary collectivism’. The notes emphasize that these themes are expressed in the vivid and easy-to-understand voices of the model workers, peasants, and soldiers. For example, the moral duties of patriotism and international communism were captured by a popular expression ‘the motherland in my heart, the whole world in my vision’, and the theme of class antagonism was formulated as ‘hate the enemy, love the people’. To highlight the moral duty of complete altruism, the editors use two popular quotes from the role models: ‘being the first to take up hard labor and the last to enjoy comfort’ and ‘born for the revolution and dying for the revolution’ (People’s Daily, 1966). To appeal to ordinary people, these topics were carefully arranged to reflect the Chinese characteristics of communist morality, and, at the same time, they also strategically invoked some key elements of traditional Chinese culture. The first topic, ‘how to make oneself a human being’, or zuoren in Chinese (literally ‘doing personhood’), derived from Confucian ethics, is a much-discussed issue in everyday life among ordinary people (see Yan 2017). But the editorial notes point out that the only moral guidance for zuoren in socialist China is the thought of Mao Zedong. Introducing the final section of the piece, the editorial notes first quote Mao’s famous line on meaningful death versus meaningless death, and

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then declares: ‘To be born for the revolution and to die for the revolution is the highest expression of communist morality.’ In contrast to the Soviet model, which emphasized the code of conduct, such as devotion to work and being honest and truthful to one’s comrades, the Chinese model went further to instil a communist morality into reflections on how to make oneself a human being and how to end one’s life with a meaningful death. In this way, communist morality is constructed as a code of beliefs for governing one’s soul as well as a code of conduct for regulating one’s behaviour. It is noteworthy that during the 1950s and 1960s the CCP launched concurrent mass political campaigns to attack Confucian ethics, ancestor worship, and kinship organizations, all of which were the foundation of the meaning of life in traditional Chinese culture and thus had to be eliminated so that communist morality could take root in the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. Having done this, the Chinese formulation of communist morality went further than its Soviet counterpart by making it an ethical project that opened up more space for the active participation of individuals as moral subjects. Admittedly, this difference was in degree instead of in kind when the discourses were put into institutional practices of communist morality.

Creating the ‘New Man’: Institutional Constructions of Communist Morality As historian Yinghong Cheng points out, behind the radical social transformations brought about by the international communist movement, there was an even more ambitious and comprehensive goal: ‘To remold the mind, psychology, and even character of individuals by means of various party and state policies designed for a “new man” and, through this “new man”, to make history and perpetuate revolution’ (Cheng 2009: 1).4 This state-sponsored social engineering project of remoulding human nature and institutionalizing communist morality was carried out in all socialist countries. Although the Soviet Union (Krevsky 2012; Krylova 2017), China (Chen 1969; Cheng 2009; Strauss 2006), and Cuba (Bernardo 1971; Medin 1990) are regarded as the most striking examples and have thus attracted the most scholarly attention, a number of studies also explore how the same process by the communist party-state sought to shape the behavioural norms of the people through the construction of socialist subjectivity and the inculcation of communist morality in the 4

Cheng’s 2009 book is by far the most interesting and inspiring analysis of the making of the communist ‘New Person’. Cheng treats this important social phenomenon as part of the international communist movement and an experiment of the Enlightenment idea held in the European tradition. Chen also examines the actual practices in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba from a comparative perspective. See also Heller (1988); Medin (1990); Ridley, Godwin, and Doolin (1971).

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arts, literature, and propaganda in other socialist countries in the former eastern European bloc, such as East Germany (Do¨lling 2001), Hungary (Fodor 2002), Poland (Jasin´ska and Siemien´ska 1983), and Romania (Kelemen and Bunzel 2008). Particularly noteworthy was the use of children’s books, art, and other educational means to cultivate socialist subjectivity among children (e.g. Ball 1993; Krevsky 2012; see also Ridley, Godwin, and Doolin 1971). The leaders of the Russian October Revolution planned the creation of the ‘New Person’ long before they seized national power, and they theorized that by no means could the great goal of communism be achieved without a new kind of human being. As early as 1902, Lenin posited in his book What Is to Be Done? that educating the workers and replacing spontaneity with class consciousness was the primary task of the revolutionary. Mikhail Suslov, chief party ideologue until his death in 1982, announced: ‘The Communist Party of the Soviet Union proceeds, and has always proceeded, from the premise that the formation of the New Man is the most important component of the entire task of Communist construction’ (quoted in Heller 1988: 20). Nikolai Bukharin, one of the leading Bolshevik theorists and politicians, openly proclaimed in 1917 that the Bolsheviks were determined to create the ‘New Person’ by whatever means necessary: ‘Proletarian coercion in all its forms, beginning with the firing squad is . . . the way of fashioning the communist man out of the human material of the capitalist era’ (quoted in Heller 1988: 3). Obviously, a firing squad cannot create a ‘New Person’ out of a person who is shot dead. Here Bukharin’s point is more about the use of violence to threaten and to motivate others to conform to the party’s ‘New Person’ model. In practice, the moulding of the Soviet ‘New Person’ was carried out primarily through the power of persuasion and mobilization wherein well-formulated communist morality provided both ideological guidance and the actual content of political socialization. This ambitious and radical mass social engineering project began with party members and then was extended to other groups in society. The Bolshevik government in the new Russia established the party school system in which intensive programmes of ideological indoctrination and character-building were used to cultivate and train cadres for political, administrative, and managerial positions in the new socialist state and, more importantly, to personify the ideal type of the ‘New Person’. The party school system was later adopted by communist parties in other socialist states and in the twenty-first century it still continues to perform these key functions in the remaining socialist states. In China, the Central Party School, which is under the leadership of the general secretary of the CCP, is responsible for training high-ranking officials at the national level, but the system of party schools extends to the provincial and municipal levels across the country and plays a key role in the production of the communist elite (see Pieke 2009).

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The second mechanism for instilling communist morality and building the socialist ‘New Person’ was political socialization through education, ranging from formal schooling to various forms of political study meetings at the workplace and through party-sponsored associations. Although political socialization of citizens takes place in all modern societies, the communist model goes to an excessive breadth and depth to instil its ideological, political, and moral doctrines in all citizens. Loyalty to the party and the party leaders, often a paramount leader such as Stalin or Mao, is the most important element in political education and, as shown in the moral principles discussed in the preceding section, it is also the most important moral duty (see Diko¨tter 2019). Another important feature of communist morality is to make participation in politics and in statesponsored public activities a citizen’s duty, a measurement of political loyalty, and again an indicator of moral advancement. The promotion of class consciousness stands out as the third key feature of political socialization through education. Here the emphasis is placed on the antagonism between the exploiting and the exploited classes. One’s level of moral purity is to be checked by one’s class consciousness, which in turn is often reflected in how ruthlessly one acts against class enemies. A good example can be found in the official unified teaching curriculum in Chinese primary schools, where teachers must instil a set of specific values, knowledge, and political commitment corresponding to the students’ specific grade. For example, a sixth-grader should know his motherland is the PRC, should love and respect the leaders of the Chinese people (i.e. Mao and the other top leaders), and should know the birthdays of the party and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and what they do for the people. The goal of instilling this knowledge into primary-school students is to foster their enthusiasm to serve the people, to hate the reactionaries and American imperialism, to love the new China, the Soviet Union, and the other socialist countries, and to love the party and the army. In other words, sixth-graders should be inculcated with the ‘five loves’ and with hatred of the enemy (see Ridley, Godwin, and Doolin 1971: 35–42). Emulation of model individuals is a major means by which to propagandize communist morality and to create the communist ‘New Person’ (Bulag 1999; Humphrey 1997; Sheridan 1968). Cheng observes that the obituaries and eulogies published in Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), portray the ideal socialist citizen again and again, chief among his or her characteristics being devotion to the party and sacrifice of one’s self-interest for the great cause of communism (Cheng 2009: 33). The most famous model of the Soviet ‘New Person’ is the fictional hero Pavel Korchagin in Nikolai Ostrovsky’s autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Largely drawing on his personal experience as a civil war veteran, Ostrovsky portrays Pavel Korchagin as a perfect model soldier who overcomes all obstacles and devotes himself wholeheartedly to the revolution. Thus, he

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is prepared to give his life for the communist cause at any time (Krylova 2017). The book inspired millions of people in the communist world; for instance, Fidel Castro enthusiastically cherished the book as a ‘red classic’ for educating revolutionary soldiers. Even though Ostrovsky’s book was also promoted in China, the CCP’s own copycat autobiography came with a more straightforward title, Devoting Everything to the Party. China placed an emphasis on self-denial and rejection of a normal life to such an extent that none of the revolutionary protagonists in the eight officially selected model operas/dramas has a spouse or a family life.5 In China, the institutional making of the socialist ‘New Person’ began during the 1942 Yan’an Rectification Campaign, when the undesirable qualities of human nature in each member of the revolutionary forces in the communist base area were identified and purified through ritualized meetings, consisting of studying party documents, self-criticism, and public soul-searching. This was known as ‘thought reform’, a distinctive Chinese invention for remoulding human nature (Cheng 2009: 65–70). In 1950, shortly after the founding of the PRC, the Yan’an model was carried out nationwide through the Thought Reform Campaign that targeted intellectuals and well-educated professionals. Thereafter, ‘Thought Reform’, as an effective tool, was continuously used by the party-state to remake the subjectivity of the Chinese people. Prolonged study sessions of party documents and of Mao’s writings, soul-searching meetings of guiltsharing and self-criticism, intensive mutual criticisms in small groups, rituals of attacking individuals’ personal character and dignity, and organized activities to emulate the official models were the main techniques to make the socialist ‘New Person’. These have been well documented by existing studies (Chen 1969; Chan 1985; Cheng 2009; Madsen 1984; Strauss 2006). Equally important is the moral centrality of physical labour in the making of the ‘New Person’. The most radical attempts took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) when the formal school system was condemned and the traditional curriculum was replaced by physical labour for the purpose of transforming human nature and building the socialist ‘New Person’. Ironically, labour was also used as a punishment for class enemies, as evidenced by the widespread institution of labour camps in the socialist countries, which in China are referred to, up to the present, as ‘reeducation camps’. As indicated in the first section, making oneself a cog of the revolutionary machine is the highest ethical goal in communist morality. The moral image of cog was changed to that of a ‘rust-less screw’ in the Chinese 5

These eight model dramas were the only ones performed on stage for the entire population during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ordinary people were called upon to learn from the protagonists, even though they were all fictional heroes.

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discourse in an effort to further emphasize the submission of the individual to the party-state (Cheng 2009). Indeed, the submission of the individual (the screw) was so deep and vast that the individual not only was to selflessly work tirelessly but also to be ready to sacrifice his/her life for the revolutionary machine (the party-state) whenever necessary (see Jin 1983; Zhou 1986). For example, in 1969 the urban youth Jin Xunhua lost his life in a running river when he tried to save two logs that had been carried away by a flood. Thereafter, he was made into a national hero because of his high level of communist morality; that is, he regarded the property of the state as more valuable than his own life (Baidu 2019). A similar but much larger-scale tragedy is the Niutianyan incident that occurred in the same year. Niutianyan is the name of an area of land that had been reclaimed from the sea and then on which was constructed as a state farm. When the farm was flooded, workers, students, and PLA soldiers lined up in the water to form a dam of human bodies, trying to save the crops. In the end, 553 individuals died during this extremely altruistic action. Most of them (except those who were born into bad-class families) were recognized by the party-state as martyrs (Chen 1999). In these two and many other cases (see Bulag 1999; Sheridan 1968), the party-state mobilized its propaganda and education apparatuses to promote the heroism of sacrificing one’s own life to protect state-owned property, clearly showing the actual value of the socialist subjects; that is, as screws or cogs in the eyes of the party-state. It would be a mistake to assume that communist morality is simply harsh, oppressive, and inhumane. As an ethical system, communist morality in modern times contains shining idealism and progressive ideas, such as equality, fraternity, and the total liberation of humankind.6 In the actual process of moral inculcation that is carried out from kindergarten to the level of government officials, the individual is taught to fight against the drive of self-interest for the great mission of building a communist world wherein everyone’s interest, freedom, and happiness will be realized. By totally identifying with and devoting oneself to such an epochal mission, including the sacrifice of one’s life, the individual is to be merged with the noble collectivity (i.e. the Communist Party), transcending the alienated and secular self of modern times and thus gaining fuller meaning in one’s life. This is why communist morality has been embraced first by educated elite, progressive youth, and the previously marginalized. This is also why millions of individuals willingly answered the party-state’s call and made tremendous efforts to transform themselves into cogs or screws. In the process, these individuals, provided they were not purged in party politics, were rewarded with protection and provisions from the great collectivity, and, more importantly, they obtained the spiritual 6

These ideals have all also been espoused by other political and religious traditions but rarely exacted the costs communism did in pursuit of them.

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satisfaction of being part of the great historical force that was destined to liberate the entire human race from the chains of capitalist exploitation and bring the history of class conflict to an end. In a way, this indoctrination of communist morality does not differ much from many religious traditions, but it has additional appeal and power derived from the state ownership of the means of production, the establishment of a command or planned economy, and the ubiquity of a Leninist party organization that monopolizes virtually all aspects of life in a socialist country. The party-state controls its people and society through redistribution not only of daily necessities but also life aspirations and opportunities for mobility, resulting in what Andrew Walder (1986) calls the ‘organized dependence’ of the people on the party-state. Therefore, the requirement of complete altruism seemingly makes a lot of sense since, from the receiving end of the individuals, the party-state is taking good care of everyone and everything; there is not only no way out but also no motivation to want a way out. So much so that even the harshest critic of communist morality from inside the Soviet Union, Mikhail Heller, had to admit its actual success and worried about its eventual global triumph (1988: 259–63).

Final Remarks To conclude, communist morality is an extreme form of collectivist ethics that was created by leaders and ideologues of the communist revolutions to remould human nature for the purpose of building communism. In retrospect, we can clearly see that, regardless of the country-specific differences in practice, communist morality in all state-socialist states – past and present – shares five basic common principles. First, love of and absolute loyalty to the Communist Party, the socialist state, and the motherland constitute the highest and most important principle of communist morality. Second, according to the principle of revolutionary collectivism, the moral person must always put the interests of the collective above their individual interests. Third, work or labour for the socialist state and public interests is raised to the level of moral sacredness and thus demands that individuals are devoted to working tirelessly for the construction of socialism and communism. The glorification of physical labour demonstrates the moral superiority of communism due to its historical mission to end class exploitation by those who do not participate in physical labour.7 Fourth, positioning itself as the noblest and purest of all moralities, communist morality is openly exclusive and negates all previously existing ethical and moral systems. To supersede inferior and unhealthy kinds of morality, communist morality does not tolerate any 7

This feature is less pronounced in Vietnam than in China (see Bayly 2009).

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enemies and regards hatred of adversaries as both a virtue and a moral duty. Last but not least, the above-mentioned principles of communist morality must be applied to the private-life sphere because moral conduct in relation to sex, marriage, family, and interpersonal relations might influence one’s work performance and political activities in public life (Field 2007: 12; Yan 2003).8 Although having lost its historical momentum and ideological hegemony, communist morality is alive in the twenty-first century. It remains the official ethic in those surviving state-socialist countries such as China, Cuba, and Vietnam and has shown signs of resilience in coping with the post-Cold-War challenges. For example, Cuba launched a new ‘battle of ideas’ in the 1990s to reinvigorate the project of building the socialist ‘New Person’, still insisting on the centrality of moralism in the economic reforms but at the same time also accepting materiality, work efficiency, and profit-making (Kapcia 2005; Herna´ndez 2012). The Vietnamese authority seemingly adopted a more open approach, allowing different value systems to compete in social life, especially the traditional ethics of Confucianism and Buddhism (Nguyen 2016; Nguyen 2018). In China, after the perceived moral crisis of the 1980s and 1990s (Liu 2002; Xu 2002; Yan 2011, 2014), the official discourse of communist morality has been making a strong comeback in the twenty-first century (Yan 2021). Xi Jinping, the current party boss, asserted in a 2014 speech: ‘We need to energetically foster and promote core socialist values; promptly establish a value system that fully reflects Chinese characteristics, our national identity, and the features of the times; and strive to occupy the leading position on this issue’ (quoted in Gow 2017: 97–8). While insisting on Marxist-Maoist principles, the Chinese party-state has appropriated values from both Confucian and neoliberal ethics, and has recalibrated communist morality as a set of ‘socialist core values’ that are part of the soft power that China intends to contribute to the contemporary world (Madsen 2014; X. Yan 2018). The core of the ‘socialist core values’ or any other presentation of the official ethics, however, remains unchanged; that is, the central leadership of the Communist Party and the superiority of state collectivism (Gow 2017). Equally noteworthy is that the party-states of the surviving statesocialist countries have all recalibrated nationalism to be the core of communist morality so as to mobilize their citizens (Yan 2021). This is not surprising because nationalism has long been equated with patriotism and patriotism in turn has been interpreted as love of and loyalty to the party-state as the embodiment of the motherland. After the radical version 8

For an official account of basic principles in communist morality by Russian scholars, see Arkhangelskyk, Kvasov, and Lorentson (1980); for a more comprehensive account of Soviet ethics in the 1960s, see De George (1969); for an understanding from the Christian perspective, see Barton (1966). Yuanbing Zhou’s book (1986) represents an officially approved standard account of communist morality by a Chinese scholar and details the development of the Chinese version of communist morality from the 1950s to the early 1980s.

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of communist morality (the cogs, the self-sacrifice, and the absolute impartiality) waned because of the impact of market reforms and the globalization of neoliberal ethics, almost by default the party-states of the surviving socialist countries all invoked nationalism to strengthen their citizens’ sense of belonging and solicit their continuous loyalty, while also not permitting bottom-up popular nationalism to threaten political stability (Bui 2017; Link 2015). Cloaking communist morality in nationalism seems to work more effectively with Chinese youth who have grown up during China’s global ascendance and who are enthusiastic to vent their nationalism on social media and other online platforms, thus creating a wave of digital nationalism (Schneider 2018), although they also proactively participate in the market economy and globalization. In many post-socialist countries, communist morality survives in an entirely different form – it has become an ethical source of resistance for the ordinary people. Admittedly, part of the communist nostalgia in these countries is due to the market-driven and tourist-orientated cultural industry. But, as many studies have shown, it is also a real social-ethical phenomenon among working-class people who used to be labelled the revolutionary backbone of a socialist country but who have been left behind in the post-socialist era. Through communist nostalgia, they lament a sense of belonging and pride, safety and protection, and friendship and sociability, all of which were promoted through communist morality and, to a great extent, were realized through the statesponsored collectivist institutions. But all of these were lost to the rapid development of neoliberal ethics and the market practices of global capitalism, creating strong feelings of alienation and a moral crisis among ordinary people (Shevchenko 2009; Velikonja 2009). In these situations, however, communist morality only exists as a weak alternative for resistance by ordinary people (Satybaldieva 2018). From the perspective of ordinary people, it is the communist sociality, including but not limited to community belongingness, governmentsponsored social stability and safety net, and the moral imagination of making a contribution to the great cause of building a brave new world, that is truly missed by those who lived through communist morality and feel the loss of something precious in the post-socialist milieu. To a lesser degree, younger generations in the surviving socialist countries also imagine and idealize communist morality as the antithesis of the prevailing neoliberal ethics of global capitalism that is indeed undermining the social. In my opinion, the social occupies a sacred place in the moral everywhere in the world, regardless of the nature of political regimes. Although certain basic and universal principles in modern societies, such as individual rights, freedom, and dignity, have redefined morality and ethics, the social remains the most important reference point (Yan 2014: 482–6). The state-socialist regimes, former and surviving ones alike, seem to purposely

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promote a particular kind of the social to their advantage by way of cultivating communist morality. It follows that, although no one any longer wants to be a cog in the revolutionary wheel, and arguably in the twenty-first century no political authority can force people to be such a cog, numerous individuals still revisit certain ideas or the idealism of communist morality and imagine the alternative in their yearning for and pursuit of a better kind of the social. Therefore, communist morality is likely to have an enduring afterlife in our world today.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to James Laidlaw and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on early versions of this chapter and owe additional thanks to James Laidlaw for his untiring support and editorial help. I also owe special thanks to Dr Li Tian of Anhui University, China for his assistance in documentary research.

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Index

abortion, 580, 707, 719, 796 Acholi (Uganda), 472–9, 577 Achuar (Ecuador and Peru), 653 activism, 24, 25, 27, 244, 252, 270, 290, 325, 426, 492, 752, 791–813, 827. See anti-capitalism, anarchism, libertarianism, environmentalism, feminism, animal rights activism collective and individual subjectivation, 792–802 containment, 798, 800, 801, 804 hexis and essence, 802–5 institutions and organization, 810–12 kinning practice, 801 praxis and political action, 805–10 prefiguration, 795, 796, 812 self-cultivation and pedagogy, 799–802 training and generational transmission, 802–5 Actor-Network Theory, 286, 846, 848, 855 Adams, Vincanne, 821 addiction, 316, 323, 564 activism as, 799 sin as, 712 adoption, 221, 395, 684, 687 adulthood, 464, 544, 657, 668 affect, 1, 13, 172, 233, 234, 309–29, 336, 337, 342, 348, 352, 369, 371, 394, 538, 633, 641, 643, 658, 663, 667, 696, 736, 782, 794, 796, 800, 811, 822, 858, 865. See affect theory, emotion anthropology of, 319–26 affect theory, 14, 234, 240, 319, 320, 367, 691, 696, 697 affordances, 1, 13, 233, 235, 236, 237, 244, 246, 470, 526, 673, 687, 699 Afghanistan, 772, 779, 781 Afghans, 760, 762, 768, 772, 773, 779, 784 Africa, 394, 488, 489, 673, 707, 824, 825 Central, 464 West, 500 Agamben, Giorgio, 143, 146, 340, 831 agency, 4, 12, 16, 18, 20, 36, 42, 48, 100, 104, 112, 118, 140, 148, 183, 192, 220, 253, 281, 282,

284, 285, 286, 288, 297, 337, 341, 343, 433, 436, 567, 725, 810, 825, 877 animal, 682 distributed, 12 human different from animal, 682 subsumed, 284 Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, 446 Ahmed, Sara, 322, 339, 347 Airo Pai (Ecuador), 657 Ajax, 87 Albert, Bruce, 715 Alcibiades, 140, 141 Alder Hey scandal, 209, 224 Alexandrova, Anna, 353 Alger, Janet, 681 Alger, Stephen, 681 Allahyari, Rebecca Anne, 825 Allen, Amy, 148, 149 Al-Mohammad, Hayder, 68, 82, 274, 486 alterity, 22, 160, 363, 372, 405, 569, 721, 723, 724, 726 as morally necessary, 649–73 intimate other, 350 Althusser, Louis, 131, 133, 134, 651, 667 altruism, 7, 21, 25, 82, 180, 185, 326, 328, 613, 614, 615, 636, 824, 827, 877, 883, 888, 889 Amazonia, 22, 179, 187, 192–6, 345, 649–73, 723 ambiguity and difference, 15, 389–405 as features of human condition, 389, 390 notation as response, 390, 391–5. See legalism ritual as response, 390, 395, 396–402 shared experience as response, 390, 391, 396, 402–5 Ames, Roger, 90 Amrith, Megha, 564 Amuyunzu, Mary, 297 anarchism, 795, 805 anarcho-syndicalism, 798, 811 anarchy, 493, 501, 811 Anderson, Amanda, 98 Anderson, Elizabeth, 98, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501 Anderson, Paul, 25, 764, 767, 772, 775, 776, 781 anger, 110, 111, 120, 245, 315, 317, 318, 319, 472, 657, 669, 671, 719, 720, 797

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898

INDEX

animal rights activism, 687, 691, 696, 697 animals, 22, 23, 84, 111, 243, 442, 526, 548, 614, 652, 653, 654, 659, 660, 662, 666, 667, 677–700, 715, 841, 853, 855, 856 animal turn and ethical turn diverge, 678–81 as persons, 681–5 ethics of representation, 697, 698, 699 representation in human–animal relations, 694–7 studies of embodied relationality, 685–9 studies of the non-verbal, 689–94 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 7, 40, 66, 73, 74, 97, 139, 461 anthropology and religious faith, 720–6 as spiritual practice, 721, 726 post-secular, 722 anthropology of ethics and anthropology of values, 485 and value theory, 485–8, 501–3 criticism of, 67–9, 82, 144, 412, 569 history of, 1–9, 75, 146, 234, 263–6, 411, 436, 485, 818, 827, 848 anti-capitalism, 269, 795, 796 Appadurai, Arjun, 336, 346, 347 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 13, 49, 98, 237, 546 Aquinas, St Thomas, 52, 205, 219, 734, 763 Arawete´ (Amazonia), 657 Arendt, Hannah, 48, 292, 293, 294, 295, 299, 302, 303, 304, 361, 362, 435, 573, 577, 796, 806, 810 Argentina, 325, 328 trade unions, 791–813 Aristotelianism, 71, 72, 76, 97, 110, 111, 112, 139, 234, 313, 318, 337, 338, 349, 350, 411, 419, 515, 549, 562, 568, 570, 571, 579, 733, 734, 803, 806, 807 Aristotle, 35, 36, 44, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 101, 106, 108, 111, 118, 119, 177, 310, 311, 312, 313, 337, 344, 353, 366, 376, 379, 441, 444, 516, 524, 539, 569, 655, 686, 734, 763, 861 hexis, 76, 803, 806 megalopsuchos, 84, 85 on emotions, 110 phronesis, 636, 806 poiesis, 806 praxis, 806, 807 Armenians, 770, 771, 772 arts and artists, 5, 104, 106, 263, 494, 495, 547, 741, 810, 885 Asad, Talal, 7, 49, 76, 82, 206, 413, 433, 525, 860 asceticism, 5, 7, 81, 102, 137, 138, 140, 349, 413, 418, 434, 439, 523, 524, 654, 776, 779, 783, 792, 825–7, 831, 876, 879 Ashanti (Ghana), 637 Aslanian, Sebouh, 770, 771, 772 aspiration, 15, 27, 41, 347, 350, 711 Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART), 36, 54, 215, 221. See surrogacy Astuti, Rita, 177, 178, 191, 192, 612, 665 Atkinson, Jane, 470

attunement, 362, 365, 371, 374, 547, 690, 695. See suffering: pathos and attunement, pathos Augustine, Saint, 205, 219, 283, 712 Aulino, Felicity, 569 Austin, J. L., 97, 243, 402, 462, 463 Australia, 114, 299, 300, 369 authenticity, 77, 157, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 240, 263, 316, 397, 398, 436, 465, 594, 696 autism, 575 autonomy, 13, 17, 20, 48, 54, 105, 112, 184, 189, 192, 251, 253, 255, 260, 270, 273, 275, 289, 290, 291, 296, 310, 493, 501, 525, 564, 565, 569, 578, 594, 658, 691, 771, 779, 798, 807, 823, 825, 842, 879 Axial age, 514 Azande (Central Africa), 77, 394, 637, 722 Babcock, Barbara, 465 Bai, Fatima, 391 Bandak, Andreas, 352, 433, 435, 443 Banner, Michael, 12, 47, 53, 208, 221, 536 baptism, 216, 463, 749 Barad, Karen, 685 Barnes, Barry, 285 Barth, Fredrik, 485, 486, 741, 763 Barth, Karl, 205 Bartlett, Robert, 222 Bartolome´ de Medina, 524 Bateson, Gregory, 320, 392, 856 Bauman, Zygmunt, 261, 273 Bayly, C. A., 768, 773, 775, 776, 777, 780 Bayly, Susan, 763, 889 Behrend, Heike, 475 Bekoff, Marc, 684 belief, 23, 40, 52, 76, 77, 105, 110, 206, 220, 263, 397, 398, 439, 465, 468, 470, 478, 480, 622, 654, 658, 667, 707, 708, 713, 721, 723, 724, 877, 884 false belief task, 235 Bellah, Robert, 734, 735 Benedict, Ruth, 232, 233, 539, 540, 721, 722, 856 Benthall, Jonathan, 819, 822, 824, 826, 831 Bentham, Jeremy, 39, 74, 134, 240, 545 Benveniste, Emile, 634, 640, 643 Bergson, Henri, 158 Berlant, Lauren, 327, 328 Berlin, Isaiah, 15, 48, 55, 100, 103, 114, 115, 116, 257, 258, 260, 265 Bhojani, Ali-Reza, 519 Biehl, Joao, 341, 564, 684 Bielo, James, 207, 208 big men, 441, 442 bioethics, 208, 209, 210, 211, 216, 224, 564, 840 of care, 562 Bion, Wilfred, 798 birth, 210, 211, 222, 251, 359 Black Studies, 579 blame, 12, 74, 107, 193, 285, 288, 299, 300, 303, 618, 621 blasphemy, 438, 439 Bloch, Maurice, 178, 184, 462, 463, 469, 471, 612, 632, 734, 763, 764

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

blood brotherhood, 394 Bloom, Paul, 184 Bloom, Peter, 731 Boas, Franz, 234, 255, 261, 433 bodies / the body, 65, 66, 75, 76, 81, 82, 85, 109, 134, 136, 209, 214, 234, 252, 266, 268, 272, 290, 292, 319, 321, 322, 327, 346, 378, 414, 416, 418, 425, 473, 476, 528, 537, 539, 543, 563, 566, 572, 574, 650, 656, 657, 658, 659, 660, 662, 663, 664, 666, 667, 668, 670, 671, 672, 680, 684, 685, 686, 687, 691, 692, 695, 696, 697, 713, 714, 716, 772, 794, 850, 851, 854 Boellstorff, Tom, 55 Bohannan, Paul, 499, 763 Borneman, John, 360, 377 Bornstein, Erica, 631, 822, 823, 824 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 633, 637, 638, 639, 732, 781 Botswana, 566, 824 Bourdieu, Pierre, 45, 76, 77, 148, 436, 510, 511, 512, 513, 519, 521, 538, 541, 623, 632, 804, 824, 848 Bourg, Julian, 136, 495 Boyd, Richard, 766 Boyd, Robert, 180, 181, 613, 614 Brazil, 187, 288, 324, 525, 564, 658, 660, 667, 669, 716 Brentano, Franz, 156, 172, 497 bribery. See corruption Briggs, Jean, 245, 363, 380, 572, 865 Brkovic´, Cˇarna, 633, 637, 643 Brodwin, Paul, 281, 292, 363, 564, 566, 567 Brouwer, Rene´, 366 Brown, Peter, 139, 820 Brown, Wendy, 731, 749 Bubandt, Nils, 372, 373, 374, 379 Buddha, 72, 85, 359, 542, 548 Buddha (Amitabha), 391 Buddhism, 71, 72, 78, 80, 81, 84, 90, 251, 394, 424, 514, 732, 751 bodhisattva, 84, 85 Chinese, 79, 391, 392 Fo Guang Shan, 82 Mahayana, 84, 86 Thai, 425, 735, 751 Theravada, 747 Vietnamese, 890 Zen, 706 Buddhists, 81 Buitron, Natalia, 12, 196 Bukharin, Nikolai, 874, 885 bullfighting, 696, 697 Burma, 831 Burundi, 629 Butler, Judith, 112, 239, 242, 243, 579, 652, 681 Butt, Leslie, 830 Cambodia, 26 Camus, Albert, 131 Canada, 113, 114, 290, 575 Candea, Matei, 26, 148, 327, 612, 641, 686, 687, 842, 846, 847, 852, 854, 855, 857, 859, 864 Canela (Brazil), 187

cannibalism, 22, 51, 661, 663, 668, 721 capitalism, 4, 5, 24, 68, 221, 299, 345, 461, 547, 731–53, 761, 795, 880 embedded, 732, 736–9 in Muslim lands, 739–49 maritime Chinese, 24, 736, 737, 738, 739 prosperity religions, 732, 749–51 value pluralism of, 732, 733, 739–53 varieties of, 731, 733–6 care, 15, 20, 158, 186, 188, 195, 251, 254, 274, 276, 276, 296, 297, 299, 317, 348, 561–82, 635, 658, 661, 689, 797, 800 anthropology of, 563–8 in apparently harmful practices, 564 phenomenology of, 572–81 virtue ethics of, 568–72 Carlyle, Thomas, 448 Carsten, Janet, 211, 593, 623, 765, 800 Cartesianism, 680, 698 Cashinahua (Brazilian Amazon), 658 Cassin, Barbara, 460 Castro, Fidel, 872, 887 casuistry, 523, 524, 525, 527, 551 Cavell, Stanley, 109, 169, 170, 462, 549, 568 Chad, 487, 493 character, 12, 26, 36, 42, 44, 68, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 86, 87, 237, 239, 242, 243, 304, 312, 342, 389, 419, 420, 423, 436, 438, 441, 442, 447, 450, 495, 499, 539, 540, 542, 568, 618, 721, 794, 798, 799, 802, 804, 810, 842, 843, 884, 885, 887 charisma, 18, 245, 296, 433, 434, 436, 442, 548, 552, 768, 807 charity, 46, 290, 295, 295, 370, 489, 492, 494, 631, 641, 642, 745, 771, 775, 778, 779, 781, 782, 794, 819, 820, 822, 824, 831. See philanthropy, humanitarianism Che Guevara, 807, 872 Cheng Yinghong, 884, 886, 887, 888 Chernela, Janet, 652 Child, Irving, 540 childhood, 77, 111, 544, 567, 570, 572, 608, 615, 623, 625, 651 anthropology of, 542 children, 50, 111, 235, 243, 288, 290, 298, 299, 313, 324, 424, 537, 541, 542, 543, 544, 550, 562, 576, 610–26, 666, 671, 737, 803, 885 Chile, 325, 565 China, 18, 21, 26, 27, 69, 77, 113, 271, 273, 316, 318, 324, 326, 328, 391, 393, 395, 400, 424, 438, 471, 566, 615, 621, 626, 633, 735, 738, 751, 760, 767, 769, 772, 785, 871–92 Cultural Revolution, 400, 621 Inner Mongolia, 81 Nanjing, 615–21 Chinggis Khaan, 552 Chong, Kimberly, 783 Christianity, 7, 49, 73, 76, 80, 81, 102, 116, 137, 186, 206, 207, 210, 211, 216, 217, 222, 275, 284, 369, 370, 389, 394, 424, 474, 478, 508, 513, 542, 637, 715, 732, 861, 865 anthropology of, 218, 222 Calvinist, 734, 736 Catholic Eucharist, 397

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

899

900

INDEX

Christianity (cont.) Charismatic, 465, 467, 749 early, 70, 79, 82, 137, 142, 146 Evangelical, 494, 708, 710 Jesuit, 551 Lutheran, 219 on rules, 523 Orthodox, 71, 218 Pentecostal, 500, 526, 750 prosperity theologies, 488, 500, 747, 749, 750. See prosperity Protestant, 465, 525, 713, 725 Roman Catholic, 222, 424, 465, 467, 470, 477, 479, 516, 523, 525, 706, 713, 714, 750, 824, 826 Roman Catholic (Liberation Theology), 750 understandings of charity, 820, 823 Unitarian, 706 Vineyard Christian Fellowship, 711 Christians, 23, 73, 81, 706, 707, 710, 711 Evangelical, 826 Chua, Liana, 684 citizenship, 283, 285, 296, 312, 370, 714, 735, 767, 806, 881 Clarke, Morgan, 19, 54, 426, 427, 433, 438, 508, 511, 514, 516, 519, 520, 522, 525, 740, 746, 858 class, 2, 85, 135, 234, 258, 290, 293, 295, 316, 338, 346, 445, 518, 527, 542, 601, 625, 652, 711, 733, 750, 751, 779, 796, 846, 873, 876, 880, 882, 883, 886, 888, 889 clientelism, 21, 630, 632, 633 Clutton-Brock, Tim, 852, 862 coercion, 20, 256, 296, 494, 515, 537, 566, 567, 571, 598 cognitive science, 12, 35, 111, 177–97, 234, 436, 611, 859 Cohen, Hermann, 389 Coleman, Simon, 437, 732, 747, 749, 750 Collier, Stephen J., 732, 820 Collu, Samuele, 328 colonialism, 135, 245, 366, 368, 369, 370, 473, 474, 477, 493, 514, 723, 735, 736, 737, 742, 766, 796, 831 Comaroff, Jean and John, 5 commerce and trade, 24, 25, 212, 299, 514, 524, 642, 741, 760–85 conflicts of values, 778–80 long-distance networks, 769–73 mobility and marginality, 769–73 political contexts, 765–9 prosperity as value, 741, 762, 773, 780–2 self-cultivation and discipline, 782–4 sociality of, 774–8 transactional spheres approaches, 762–5 communist morality under socialism, 871–92 cogs in the machine, 874, 887, 888 collectivism and fear of exclusion, 873, 874 glorification of labour, 878, 879, 882, 887, 889 heroes of labour, 882, 883 intimate relations, 875, 876, 890 official ideology and discourse, 878–84 popular disillusionment, 876, 877 self-cultivation as a New Person, 873–8 social engineering projects, 872, 884–9

compassion, 12, 82, 88, 184, 195, 289, 295, 315, 365, 368, 369, 564, 570, 635, 710, 820, 821, 822, 829, 830 competition, 21, 25, 181, 182, 283, 424, 545, 547, 613, 632, 641, 656, 738, 739, 763, 765, 767, 810, 850 confession, 18, 83, 137, 138, 145, 242, 419, 470, 523, 524, 548, 621, 622, 681, 697, 793, 877 conflict, 301, 304, 549, 619, 661, 844, 864. See values, conflicts of class, 2, 445, 625, 889 family, 328 military, 351, 472, 761, 781 political, 13, 372 religious, 707 Confucianism, 14, 71, 78, 84, 88, 90, 91, 326, 393, 394, 397, 466, 514, 622, 625, 626, 706, 883, 884, 890 junzi, 84 Confucius, 69, 85, 397 Conklin, Beth, 651, 656, 657, 662 consciousness, 156, 157, 162, 168, 233, 240, 661, 715, 804 class, 876, 880, 882, 885, 886 collective, 75 false, 133, 415 moral, 116 reflective, 420, 421 revolutionary, 135, 807, 872, 875 social, 872 consciousness-raising, 18, 27, 28, 245, 246, 802 consequentialism, 10, 38–40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 74, 96, 97, 101, 209, 240, 492, 496, 550, 551. See utilitarianism Contractualist Deontology, 41–2, 43, 45 conversation analysis, 12, 238, 239, 244 Cook, Joanna, 17, 72, 80, 81, 138, 260, 267, 317, 327, 415, 418, 425, 427, 441, 454, 564, 565, 571, 732, 733, 749, 752, 858 Cooley, Charles, 448 cooperation, 20, 181, 184, 192, 525, 528, 547, 610–26, 682, 683, 690 child development, 613, 615–21 evolution of, 613–15, 862 kin and non-kin, 623–5 punishment and learning, 621–2 Copeman, Jacob, 433, 443, 444, 822 corruption, 21, 630, 632, 633, 637, 638, 761, 768, 777, 785, 811 Corsı´n Jime´nez, Alberto, 344, 345, 351, 801, 812 cosmopolitanism, 24, 25, 45–9, 339, 347, 351, 770, 778 courage, 12, 84, 85, 90, 419, 472, 570, 599, 602, 604, 655, 669, 772, 809 Cowan, Jane, 83 Crapanzano, Vincent, 350 credit, 746, 768, 775, 776, 777 Croatia, 794, 795, 801, 805 Crowley, Aleister, 717 cruelty, 5, 114, 134, 375, 564, 608 Csordas, Thomas, 363, 465, 574 Cuba, 26, 723, 807, 871, 872, 882, 884, 890 Cudd, Ann, 343

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

Cultural Group Selection (CGS) hypothesis, 613 culture concepts of, 3, 17, 18, 66, 108, 264, 426, 427, 433, 440, 473, 509, 510, 540, 679, 766, 773 Curry, Oliver Scott, 21, 184 Cyprus, 321, 322 da Col, Giovanni, 463, 630, 632, 634, 637, 641, 781 Dalferth, Ingolf U., 220 Daniel, Gabriel, 524 Danish cartoon controversy, 438 Dante, Alighieri, 111 Daoism, 394, 401, 706 dark anthropology, 4–6, 11, 24, 223, 341, 347, 364, 485 Darwall, Stephen, 236, 237 Das, Veena, 47, 49, 68, 169, 170, 238, 241, 274, 314, 321, 421, 427, 486, 512, 537, 541, 543, 549, 550, 551, 569, 593, 631 Daston, Lorraine, 684, 839, 848, 849, 855, 865 Daswani, Girish, 500 Dave, Naisargi, 147, 271, 426, 537, 549, 686, 691, 692, 794, 795, 796, 797, 800, 801, 805, 809, 811 Davis, Elizabeth Anne, 296, 564, 567, 571, 572 Day, Sophie, 796 de San Mateo, Veronica, 696 de Waal, Frans, 684 death, 52, 211, 288, 313, 349, 352, 850 Deeb, Lara, 350, 517, 518, 741, 744 deity/deities. See God/gods Deleuze, Gilles, 132, 136, 161, 320, 321, 322, 324, 325, 329, 367, 553 deliberation, 36, 66, 142, 168, 420, 422, 424, 425, 428, 436, 437, 490, 549, 636, 806, 832 dementia, 564, 565, 566 Denmark, 567, 795 deontology, 40, 73, 86, 96, 97, 139, 209, 233, 236, 240, 492, 496, 515, 550. See Contractualist Deontology dependence, 120, 291, 297, 299, 546, 561, 562, 567, 569, 570, 578, 642, 689, 712, 775, 825 Derrida, Jacques, 54, 166, 171, 576, 578, 671 Desana (Amazonia), 662 Descartes, Rene´, 106, 284, 683 Deshoullie´re, Gre´gory, 192 desire, 75, 76, 82, 110, 138, 246, 296, 322, 339, 347, 349, 350, 418, 420, 434, 466, 498, 599, 601, 633 desires, 39, 40, 75, 110, 139, 217, 236, 311, 339, 352, 415, 420, 466, 542, 602, 604, 624 and freedom, 259 Plato on, 106 second-order, 103, 488 sexual, 137, 146 Despret, Vinciane, 685, 692, 695, 696, 846 detachment, 14, 26, 37, 283, 295, 310, 327, 328, 425, 501, 686, 721, 850, 852, 853, 854, 859, 860, 861 determinism, 147, 283, 411, 421, 428, 436, 520 cultural, 541, 574 social, 236, 411, 415, 417, 541

Dewey, John, 539 Dharmasastra (‘Hindu law’), 514 Diamond, Cora, 460 dignity, 24, 237, 240, 245, 284, 318, 346, 562, 565, 574, 668, 831, 887, 891 dilemmas (ethical/moral), 25, 54, 74, 168, 185, 186, 187, 193, 194, 195, 271, 272, 281, 293, 297, 302, 305, 351, 381, 453, 511, 519, 524, 593, 601, 638, 762, 777, 778, 779, 827, 828 disability, 27, 112, 290, 434, 562, 567, 572 discipline, 17, 69, 134, 135, 146, 217, 223, 267, 284, 339, 413, 418, 420, 425, 447, 466, 467, 470, 487, 523, 625, 657, 691, 733, 734, 751, 767, 774, 775, 782, 798, 805, 811, 857. See commerce and trade: self-cultivation and discipline disgust, 111, 236, 242, 368, 537 disorder, 472, 493, 494, 501 domination, 2, 5, 6, 11, 144, 260, 415, 474, 485, 821 rules as mode of, 515 technologies of, 131, 136, 415 Douglas, Mary, 206, 281, 284, 390, 525, 526, 528, 540, 632, 722, 824 Douzina-Bakalaki, Phaedra, 826 Dover, Kenneth, 139 Drabinski, John, 579 dreams, 423, 677, 716 Dresch, Paul, 508, 512, 515, 521, 526, 527 Dreyfus, Hubert, 103, 132, 165, 166, 168 Driessen, Annelieke, 566 du Boulay, Juliet, 218 Dumont, Louis, 19, 45, 103, 264, 434, 485, 489, 490, 492 Duranti, Alessandro, 189, 190, 287, 376, 573, 665 Durham, Deborah, 824 Durkheim, E´mile, 3, 15, 16, 41, 75, 76, 103, 184, 232, 238, 262, 263, 311, 327, 390, 397, 433, 464, 471, 488, 539, 540, 541, 678, 809, 844 Durkheimianism, 75, 76, 144, 234, 238, 264, 343, 436, 437, 461, 464, 540, 541, 632, 643, 661, 680, 683, 847, 849 duty, 36, 41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 73, 74, 75, 80, 102, 186, 245, 258, 275, 283, 296, 297, 304, 311, 417, 425, 453, 510, 514, 526, 596, 605, 633, 639, 642, 669, 739, 779, 878, 879, 880, 883, 886 Dworkin, Ronald, 37, 53 Easterlin, Richard, 339 egalitarianism, 8, 25, 45, 46, 47, 97, 112, 182, 242, 255, 273, 295, 345, 366, 450, 488, 566, 661, 722, 737, 739, 888 Egypt, 420, 423, 742, 743, 748, 752, 767, 780, 822 ancient, 389, 397, 720 Cairo, 13, 253, 260 Eichmann, Adolf, 304 Elias, Norbert, 514, 527 Eliot, George, 706, 724 Eliot, T. S., 322 Elisha, Omri, 424, 494, 822, 826 Elster, Jon, 526 Elyachar, Julia, 780

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

901

902

INDEX

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 114 emotion/emotions, 5, 12, 14, 37, 81, 83, 99, 107, 112, 120, 172, 178, 179, 185, 186, 195, 209, 217, 233, 235, 236, 245, 276, 286, 288, 309–29, 337, 338, 342, 343, 348, 368, 416, 418, 466, 470, 496, 546, 569, 570, 593, 603, 613, 650, 652, 655, 657, 662, 664, 665, 666, 668, 669, 670, 671, 672, 686, 689–94, 707, 709, 717, 720, 769, 774, 794, 798, 830, 853, 854, 860, 863, 876. See affect anthropology of, 314–19 as form of reflection, 570, 668, 690 central to ethical life, 310–14 Nussbaum on, 311–14, 570 relationality and detachment, 326–8 empathy, 15, 158, 180, 184, 185, 236, 326, 328, 348, 360, 361, 364, 370–5, 377, 379, 397, 400, 580, 874 enculturation, 542. See indoctrination/ inculcation Engelke, Matthew, 348, 349, 424, 444 Englund, Harri, 6, 144, 266, 569 enlightenment, 72, 84, 86, 418, 419 Enlightenment, the, 73, 105, 116, 119, 349, 367, 368, 371, 372, 379, 745, 761, 872, 884 enmity, 22, 650, 654, 660, 794 entrepreneurship, 69, 289, 748, 777, 779, 783, 864 environmentalism, 244, 299, 305, 489, 752, 791, 795 equality, 39, 45–9, 102, 105, 114, 115, 179, 245, 565, 738, 810, 824 gender, 875, 876 ethical subject competing models in philosophy, 41–3 contractual model, 41 historically variable and internally conflicted, 96–121 malleable, 65–6 relational, distributed, composite, 25, 234–5, 241–2, 417–21, 650, 651, 793 ethicalization, 13, 18, 231–46 etiquette, 238, 396, 501, 514, 638, 668, 762, 781, 782 Evans, Nicholas H. A., 18, 418, 424, 439, 444, 446, 447, 449 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 3, 77, 206, 394, 722 evolution of morality, 179–86 exchange, 469, 499, 615, 630, 632, 634 exemplars, 17, 18, 85, 88, 222, 433–54, 548, 549, 621, 693, 775, 882 in heroic polities, 444–8 recognition of, 441–4 theoretical significance, 434, 435–41 under communism, 879, 882, 886, 887, 888. See communist moralist under socialism under suspicion, 448–53 exorcism, 298, 470 exploitation, 5, 24, 67, 68, 113, 268, 341, 563, 745, 761, 780, 781, 824, 886, 889 Fadlallah (Ayatollah), 517, 518, 520, 527

fairness, 115, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186–8, 192, 195, 196, 295, 346, 746. See justice faith, 23, 77, 116, 217, 392, 478, 597, 598, 706, 710, 711, 722, 724, 744, 760, 830, 881 as discovery process, 711 Farmer, Paul, 828, 829 Fassin, Didier, 37, 44, 45, 47, 116, 138, 211, 366, 369, 378, 538, 631, 818, 821, 827 fasting, 18, 138, 418, 419 Faubion, James D., 19, 69, 73, 82, 147, 167, 210, 282, 411, 418, 424, 434, 518, 545, 570, 571, 593, 607, 680, 681, 686, 692, 793, 806, 839, 840, 853 favours, 21, 22, 629–44, 768, 770, 777, 782 anthropological treatment of, 630–4 as gratuitous action, 634–7 mediate conflicting values, 637–43 Feldman, Ilana, 822, 825, 827 femininity, 425, 563, 651 feminism, 9, 26, 27, 55, 112, 245, 253, 260, 272, 273, 275, 314, 319, 452, 561, 563, 567, 569, 575, 579, 685, 719, 752, 791, 796, 846 concept of ‘male gaze’, 650–2 feminist technoscience, 846, 848 Fennel, Catherine, 367 Ferguson, James, 135, 489, 825 Ferrara, Alessandro, 435, 436, 440, 447 Fiji, 350, 445, 446 Finnstro¨m, Sverker, 474 Firth, Raymond, 3, 485 Fischer, Edward F., 14, 342, 346, 354 Focillon, Henri, 400 Foot, Philippa, 42, 70, 82, 90 forgiveness, 286, 577 Fortes, Meyer, 510, 722 Fortun, Kim, 848, 849, 855 Fortun, Mike, 848, 849, 855 Foucault, Michel, 7, 11, 42, 90, 130–49, 177, 310, 411, 422, 502, 516, 541, 545, 607, 650, 651, 732, 781, 840, 848, 849, 851, 859 and Heidegger, 11, 170–1 and Marxism, 133–5, 136 and Nietzsche, 132, 134 and psychoanalysis, 133, 570 as virtue ethicist, 67, 70, 74, 138–9 askesis, 83, 138, 139, 260, 417, 418, 547, 856 early and mid-period writings, 131–7 ethical substance, 81–3, 138, 142, 416, 418, 667 four-fold analysis of ethics, 79, 81, 847, 853 freedom, 11, 91, 131, 140, 146, 147, 170, 246, 263, 343, 415, 416 governmentality, 135, 136, 289, 291, 413, 415, 547, 563 interpreted as continuous, 145–7 interpreted as discontinuous, 143–5 interpreted as having complementary emphases, 147–9 later writings, 137–42, 818 misreadings of, 4, 11, 110, 148, 170, 347, 415 mode of subjectivation, 79–81, 138, 142, 170, 171, 416, 418, 792, 858 on ethics in classical antiquity, 68, 80, 82, 138–42, 522, 547, 549

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

power (sovereign, disciplinary, and bio), 133–6 problematization, 239, 821 reflection, 11, 17, 91, 170, 292, 417, 690 relationality of ethics, 241, 242, 417 self-cultivation, 17, 91, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 291, 412, 413–17, 441, 783, 825 subjectivation, 134, 145, 146, 416, 792, 793 target of phenomenologists’ critique, 170 techniques/technologies of the self. See Foucault, Michel: askesis telos, 83–6, 138, 142, 417, 418, 805, 861 Fox, Kate, 511 France, 155, 495, 564, 742, 821 Frankfurt, Harry G., 55, 103, 311, 316, 488, 569 free speech, 269, 438, 439 Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS), 268, 269, 271 freedom, 11, 12, 13, 14, 24, 27, 39, 44, 46, 68, 74, 102, 159, 160, 171, 183, 192, 234, 235, 246, 251–76, 281, 283, 285, 286, 288, 310, 316, 414, 434, 537, 629, 634, 698, 721, 804, 855 and care, 254, 274–6 and responsibility, 285–9 anthropological approaches, 263–6 anthropological difficulties with, 261–3 as analytic, 270–4, 275 as development goal, 339, 344 as ethnographic object, 266–70 as relational/situated, 251, 254, 260, 263, 275, 343, 349, 411, 416, 420, 720, 810 early anthropological approaches, 254–7 in communism, 888 in egalitarian societies, 255 in Marxism, 113 Indian concepts, 251, 252, 261, 266 liberal concepts, 114, 115, 252, 253, 564, 565 ontological or natural, 252, 261 positive and negative, 257–61, 263, 877 reflective, 17, 572, 877 Russian concepts, 253, 258 soteriological, 251, 260 transcendental, 42, 170 freeganism and dumpster-divers, 267, 269, 271, 795 Freire, Paolo, 807, 808 Freud, Sigmund, 55, 133, 234, 315, 322 friendship, 394, 768, 769, 777 Frisk, Kristian, 450 Fukuyama, Francis, 733 functionalism, 16, 19, 135, 434, 441, 442, 479, 526, 527, 528, 634, 683, 734, 844, 845, 847, 862 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 573, 576, 581 Galison, Peter, 849, 855 gambling, 242 game theory, 436, 611 Game, Ann, 690 games, 17, 76, 77, 97, 136, 177, 186, 187, 196, 236, 242, 243, 511, 545, 547, 574, 616, 617, 619, 624, 633, 656, 747, 856 Gammeltoft, Tine, 378, 580 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 69 Garcia, Angela, 322, 323, 564, 565, 566, 569

Garfinkel, Harold, 240, 380 Gawa (PNG), 500 Geertz, Clifford, 18, 38, 42, 51, 121, 206, 373, 375, 433, 443, 541, 545, 734, 735, 774, 850 Gelfand, Michelle, 528 Gell, Alfred, 18, 433, 604 Gellhorn, Martha, 495 Gellner, Ernest, 741 gender, 9, 27, 36, 50, 141, 260, 424, 425, 563, 593, 651, 652, 661, 711, 722, 752, 772, 774, 785, 796, 811, 826, 840, 846, 849, 871, 876 gene–culture coevolution, 180, 186 generosity, 44, 84, 85, 121, 215, 274, 419, 491, 501, 578, 631, 657, 658, 663, 768, 769, 776, 780, 781, 782, 784, 821, 833 genocide, 14, 51, 292, 300, 301, 302, 303, 616, 629 George, Kathryn Paxton, 272, 273 Germany, 155, 171, 293, 346, 371, 488, 540, 742, 783, 785, 844, 885 gerontocracy, 475 Gershon, Ilana, 243 Geuss, Raymond, 37, 41, 46, 48, 96 Ghana, 500 Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis, 360, 377 ghosts, 470, 472, 475, 576, 578, 715, 751 gifts, 180, 206, 212, 213, 214, 216, 219, 220, 241, 268, 348, 469, 581, 605, 630, 632, 633, 637, 641, 651, 737, 739, 745, 750, 751, 765, 780, 801, 819, 822, 824, 826, 832, 861 dan contrasted with philanthropy, 822 Islamic giving contrasted with humanitarianism, 822 Gilbert, Daniel, 337 Gilligan, Carol, 185, 561, 563, 579 Gilroy, Paul, 579 globalization, 5, 24, 346, 739, 749, 791, 823, 891 Gluckman, Max, 3, 281, 284 God/gods, 23, 24, 73, 74, 80, 98, 104, 105, 116, 164, 183, 207, 217, 219, 220, 221, 265, 266, 284, 389, 394, 397, 400, 401, 402, 419, 424, 447, 448, 463, 466, 471, 474, 478, 480, 490, 498, 508, 516, 517, 519, 523, 593, 595, 596, 637, 640, 652, 660, 663, 664, 706–26, 740, 741, 743, 744, 745, 748, 750, 775, 781, 822, 823, 826, 841, 879. See metahumans Goddard, Victoria, 796 Goddess spirituality, 718, 719, 720 god-parenthood, 216 Goffman, Erving, 237, 238, 239, 242, 413, 470, 541, 654 Gold, Marina, 68, 131, 144, 569 Good, Byron, 578 Goodwin, Marjorie, 243 Goody, Esther, 178 Goody, Jack, 449 Gorer, Geoffrey, 542 Gorringe, Hugo, 809 gossip, 181, 237, 242, 243, 246, 426, 501, 617, 664, 669, 800 grace, 22, 206, 219, 630, 631, 634, 635, 637, 638, 640, 641, 642, 643, 644, 782, 826 Graeber, David, 182, 342, 352, 447, 485, 514, 632, 776, 795, 812

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

903

904

INDEX

Graham, Billy, 706 Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 807 Gray, John, 49, 55, 100, 114, 115 Greece, 673 ancient, 8, 70, 77, 79, 80, 87, 118, 137, 138, 141, 142, 389, 394, 522, 547, 549, 550 modern, 218, 296, 550, 826 Greenebaum, Jessica, 684 Greenhough, Beth, 694, 698 Gregory, C. A., 632, 763, 782 grief, 109, 288, 315, 359, 375, 376, 669 Guala, Francesco, 612 guanxi, 633, 736, 737, 739, 740, 769 Guatemala, 335, 346 Guattari, Fe´lix, 132, 161, 321, 324, 553 Guazzo, Stefano, 763 Gudeman, Stephen, 763, 764, 765 Guenther, Lisa, 319, 321, 323, 575, 579 guilt, 80, 81, 106, 107, 165, 169, 181, 184, 284, 288, 299, 301, 304, 325, 613, 687, 690, 693, 887 Guinea Bissau, 351 Gusterson, Hugh, 850 habit, 13, 76, 165, 169, 232, 233, 234, 235, 240, 241, 243, 246, 293, 303, 379, 380, 416, 427, 490, 569, 664, 735, 740, 803, 804 habituation, 284, 419, 686, 736, 804, 852 habitus, 65, 76, 77, 234, 244, 511, 538, 541, 623, 735, 743, 803, 810. See hexis Hacking, Ian, 245, 452 Hadot, Pierre, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145 Haenni, Patrick, 747, 748 Haidt, Jonathan, 36, 42, 178, 185, 186, 236, 240, 246, 337, 561 Haiti, 829 halakha (‘Jewish law’), 513 Hall, John A., 742 Hallaq, Wael, 513, 517, 740, 741 Halvorson, Britt, 822, 823 Hamilton, Gary, 736, 737, 738, 739 Han, Clara, 325, 565 Handelman, Don, 464 hand-shaking, 517, 519, 520, 527 Hankins, Joseph, 369, 370, 379 happiness, 12, 14, 44, 86, 87, 99, 257, 258, 292, 318, 335–54, 415 anthropological frameworks for comparison, 343–7 approaches via value and virtue, 341–3 interdisciplinary well-being studies, 337–41 recent ethnographic approaches, 348–51 Haraway, Donna, 548, 685, 691, 694, 695, 696, 846, 855 Harding, Susan, 725 Harris, Olivia, 610, 611, 625 Hart, H. L. A., 515, 521 Haskell, Thomas, 299 Hastrup, Kirsten, 724 hatred, 160, 654, 661, 667, 719, 826, 879, 883, 886, 890 Hatzfeld, Jean, 301, 302 Hayek, F. A., 114

Haynes, Naomi, 206, 485, 488 headhunting, 316 healthcare, 290, 292, 296, 298, 450, 477, 565, 570, 638, 743, 752, 800, 801, 818, 830. See ritual: healing treatment of HIV, 828, 829, 830 Hefner, Robert W., 24, 517, 737, 740, 743, 748 Hegel, G. W. F., 36, 48, 103, 135, 156, 158, 159, 168 Heidegger, Martin, 11, 48, 103, 106, 155, 157, 161–7, 171, 172, 173, 372, 376, 377, 486, 502, 549, 574, 698 and Foucault, 170–1 in the anthropology of ethics, 167–71 Held, Virginia, 276 Hellbeck, Jochen, 873, 874, 877 Hemingway, Ernest, 495 Henig, David, 21, 631, 635, 637, 638, 639, 640, 732, 752, 768, 770, 779, 781, 782 Henley, William Ernest, 536 Henrich, Joseph, 186, 189, 195, 612, 613 Henrich, Natalie, 612, 613 Herdt, Gilbert, 541 Herodicus, 522 heroes, 18, 84, 86, 238, 294, 433, 452, 549, 725, 879, 882, 886, 888 heroic societies, 18, 80, 444–8 in post-heroic conditions, 448–53 Hertz, Robert, 464 hexis, 244, 794, 803, 806, 812. See habitus Heywood, Paolo, 6, 11, 18, 146, 418, 426, 427, 570, 695, 793, 796, 797, 805, 840, 859 Hickel, Jason, 485, 488 hierarchy, 20, 50, 105, 145, 172, 186, 245, 252, 259, 264, 265, 270, 284, 425, 467, 471, 473, 480, 488, 489, 492, 493, 495, 497, 499, 500, 502, 566, 571, 579, 739, 750, 776, 778, 852 Hinduism, 251, 252, 261, 265, 266, 272, 275, 424, 514, 552, 732, 824 Hindus, 596, 597, 706, 735, 741, 751, 832 Hirschkind, Charles, 147, 424, 542, 571, 744, 794, 795 Hirschman, Albert, 761, 763 Hitler, Adolf, 166, 255, 293 HIV/AIDS, 478, 829, 830. See healthcare: treatment of HIV Ho Chi Minh, 807 Ho, Enseng, 773 Hobbes, Thomas, 41, 114, 180 Hoesterey, James, 433, 744, 748, 751 Højer, Lars, 433, 435, 443 Holbraad, Martin, 6, 52, 71, 723 Hollan, Douglas, 372, 373, 374, 379, 380 Homo economicus, 749, 753, 761 honour, 22, 274, 389, 600, 601, 602, 603, 604, 607, 631, 668, 669, 721, 741, 776, 777, 779, 824, 850 hope, 15, 116, 217, 324, 335, 341, 347, 348, 350, 351, 353, 370, 403, 420, 422, 424, 580, 726, 749, 795, 820, 830 Howard, John, 299 Hrdy, Sarah, 185, 862 Huang, C. Julia, 751, 823 Hubert, Henri, 464

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 464, 632, 649 Huizinga, Johan, 544 human rights, 24, 25, 36, 49, 86, 102, 283, 364, 720, 791, 795, 796, 806, 822 humanitarianism, 24, 25, 221, 299, 351, 364, 366, 369, 564, 631, 805, 819–21. See philanthropy Hume, David, 14, 35, 36, 38, 55, 70, 73, 106, 114, 368, 369, 370, 371, 435, 436, 537 humiliation, 300, 641 humility, 14, 82, 83, 285, 488, 494, 501, 519, 865 Humphrey, Caroline, 17, 21, 43, 47, 85, 253, 258, 259, 433, 437, 438, 462, 464, 467, 468, 469, 470, 512, 521, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 632, 635, 636, 642, 643, 768, 775, 782, 861, 874, 886 Hungary, 885 hunger strikes, 287 hunting, 185, 613, 653, 662, 669, 683, 684, 716, 721 Hurn, Samantha, 679, 680, 684 Husserl, Edmund, 12, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 172, 372, 376, 573 Huxley, Aldous, 706 hypocrisy, 780 identity, 24, 146, 393, 404, 579, 593, 602, 652, 766, 768, 809 Charles Taylor on, 294, 452 collective, 733, 748, 802, 811, 872 national, 349, 890 personal, 101, 109, 111, 143, 284, 597, 598 sexual, 137, 796, 811 identity politics, 707, 711 Ifaluk, 315 Ikeda, Janice, 290 Illouz, Eva, 315, 316 independence, 42, 88, 101, 412, 417, 423, 517, 562, 564, 565, 566, 567, 571, 572, 581, 775, 824. See autonomy India, 112, 260, 269, 349, 369, 434, 446, 566, 691, 706, 737, 761, 765, 766, 768, 773, 775, 777, 823 Delhi, 20, 444, 591–608, 794, 796, 801, 805, 809 Kerala, 244, 748, 783 Qadian, 446, 447, 453 Rajasthan, 487, 775, 779 Tamilnadu, 265, 272, 273, 832 individualism, 102, 103, 104, 116, 144, 192, 234, 254, 276, 345, 461, 492, 493, 525, 712, 733, 735, 747, 749, 751, 764, 780, 861, 873, 880 Anglophone philosophical, 48, 165 metaphysical, 103 methodological, 10, 12, 41, 45, 47, 235, 236, 341, 411, 427, 536, 551, 552, 553 ontological, 536, 553 indoctrination/inculcation, 26, 28, 511, 537, 541, 782, 804, 807, 871, 882, 884, 885, 886, 888, 889. See socialization, enculturation Indonesia, 747, 748, 752, 783 Bali, 318, 545, 735 Java, 245, 372, 546, 735 Sumba, 245

inequality, 68, 289, 295, 298, 346, 415, 733, 745, 747, 750, 753, 821, 829, 831, 833 Ingold, Tim, 320, 680, 683, 684, 698, 807 initiation, 391, 464, 716, 718 injustice, 5, 68, 245, 289, 299, 346, 450, 575, 726, 797, 799, 821, 824, 878, 880 integrity, 101, 102, 111, 314, 773, 779, 780, 842 intentionality, 143, 157, 162, 163, 281, 285, 286, 288, 423, 614, 649, 680, 682, 832 animals’, 677 attributions of, 188–92, 193, 854, 859 collective, 182, 183 emotional, 172 in ascription of responsibility, 117, 287 in ritual, 398, 469 joint, 182 shared, 235, 614 intentions, 12, 28, 132, 237, 286, 287, 304, 415, 566, 656, 663, 672, 692, 780 animals’, 682 attribution, 373, 612, 649, 665, 673 in ritual, 467, 468 joint, 614 shared, 611 interaction, 709 as locus of ethics, 12, 13, 23, 27, 28, 231–46, 286, 778, 793, 809 civil, 782 human–animal, 677–700 in care relations, 296, 562, 567, 580 inter-cultural, 769 non-verbal, 678 interdependence, 181, 182, 184, 281, 291, 299, 312, 527, 824 Interdependence hypothesis, 613 Inuit, 245, 575, 577, 865 Iran, 742, 770, 771 Iraq, 274, 743 Ireland, 287, 713 Irvine, Leslie, 687 Islam, 424, 438, 446, 465, 466, 474, 513, 514, 525, 546, 570, 598, 637, 638, 639, 640, 732, 775, 778, 779, 797, 824, 826 and capitalism, 739–49 early empire, 527 in Lebanon, 516–20 Islamic economics, 744, 745, 746, 747 market Islam, 744, 747, 748, 751 resurgence of, 743, 744 Salafi, 467, 526 Shi’ite, 397 Sufi, 310, 576 Israel, 215, 304, 366, 684, 707, 805 Biblical, 389 Italy, 370, 736, 794, 797, 820 Bologna, 797, 805 Florence, 294 Ite´anu, Andre´, 488, 612 Ivanhoe, Philip J., 326, 327, 328 Iweala, Uzodinma, 825 Izquierdo, Carolina, 345, 348, 572

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

905

906

INDEX

Jackson, Michael, 36, 348, 351, 352, 426, 574, 629, 636 Jainism, 146, 251, 261, 349, 424, 439, 467, 514, 824 samadi maran (fasting to death), 418 Jains, 260, 264, 352, 418, 761, 773, 776, 778, 779, 780 James, William, 311, 326 Japan, 324, 349, 350, 370, 546, 548, 625, 706, 735, 738, 826, 831, 849 Jensen, Keith, 616, 617 Jesuits, 524, 551 Jesus Christ, 81, 85, 210, 217, 389, 444, 542, 548, 550, 552, 710, 711, 713, 741, 826 Jews, 23, 73, 293, 397, 466, 706, 725, 844 in China, 404 Jivaro (Ecuador and Peru), 653, 670 Johnson, Samuel, 398 Jones McVey, Rosie, 22 Jonsen, Albert, 523, 524, 527, 551 Joyce, James, 111, 314, 320 Joyce, Richard, 36, 50, 98 Judaism, 116, 389, 397, 465, 637, 715, 749 Jung, Carl, 48, 719 Juris, Jeff, 801 justice, 45–9, 68, 78, 110, 179, 180, 186, 196, 283, 344, 369, 473, 491, 522, 712, 745, 750, 752, 797 Amazonian concepts of, 192 distributive, 45, 47, 187 global, 37, 46, 49, 115, 339 in Sierra Leone, 284 procedural, 24 sense of, 185, 243, 436 Kajanus, Anni, 21, 616, 618, 620, 622 Kalahari Meerkat Project (KMP), 851–63 Kalb, Don, 144 Kant, Immanuel, 36, 40, 42, 48, 49, 55, 73, 75, 87, 101, 102, 106, 114, 156, 157, 159, 171, 172, 236, 293, 311, 435, 496, 515, 524, 525 Kantianism, 10, 45, 75, 76, 82, 86, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 104, 109, 118, 156, 158, 172, 209, 232, 240, 311, 496, 523, 562, 564, 568, 569, 682, 824 Kapferer, Bruce, 39, 68, 131, 144, 220, 464, 470, 569 karma, 68, 241, 418 Karsenti, Bruno, 539 Kavedzˇija, Iza, 347, 350 Kayabi (Brazil), 653, 654 Keane, Webb, 8, 13, 18, 26, 27, 37, 43, 44, 68, 178, 186, 188, 189, 234, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 245, 274, 275, 282, 342, 427, 439, 460, 486, 491, 509, 525, 538, 550, 569, 612, 630, 649, 672, 681, 687, 698, 725, 793, 802, 804, 807 Kelty, Christopher, 254, 266, 268, 269, 282, 284 Kenya, 297 Keown, Damien, 71, 72 Keyes, Charles F., 735 Khare, R. S., 274 Khrushchev, Nikita, 878, 880, 882 Kierkegaard, Søren, 155, 164 kindness, 184, 491, 629, 631, 643

kingship, 18, 445, 447 kinship, 15, 20, 192, 193, 196, 209, 211, 216, 323, 328, 394, 426, 499, 510, 563, 591–608, 611, 615, 634, 639, 652, 661, 668, 669, 736, 737, 738, 800, 801, 802, 876, 881, 884 Kipnis, Andrew, 69, 317, 633, 736, 739 Kirtsoglou, Elizabeth, 370, 371, 372, 379 Kittay, Eva, 112, 561, 563, 566, 567 Klaits, Fred, 825 Kleinman, Arthur, 36, 309, 315, 359, 360, 363, 580, 581, 631 Kleinman, Joan, 309, 315, 359, 360 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 3, 485, 488 Knobe effect, 188, 190, 191, 193 Knobe, Joshua, 188, 190, 288. See Knobe effect Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 850, 851 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 185 Kohut, Heinz, 375 Kondo, Dorrine, 546 Kopenawa, David, 715, 716 Korea, 738 Korowai (West Papua), 189, 255, 656, 661, 665 Korsgaard, Christine, 55, 562 Kotiria (Northwest Amazon), 652 Kripke, Saul, 511 Kroeber, Alfred, 540 Krøijer, Stine, 795 Krylova, Anna, 877, 884, 887 Kuan, Teresa, 14, 312, 314, 318, 320, 324, 328, 424, 566, 569, 571 Kuhn, Thomas, 843 Kulick, Don, 141, 564, 567, 698 Kuran, Timur, 742 Kuranko (Sierra Leone), 349 Kurdi, Aylan, 360 Kuru, Ahmet, 742 labour, 135, 252, 284, 298, 317, 320, 335, 447, 451, 543, 548, 562, 610, 616, 625, 631, 634, 636, 637, 641, 643, 644, 683, 688, 733, 734, 737, 738, 783, 811, 821, 823, 825, 826, 831, 849, 878, 879, 881, 882, 883, 887, 889 Lacan, Jacques, 131, 651 Lagrou, Els, 658 Laidlaw, James, 6, 8, 17, 36, 42, 44, 48, 55, 74, 75, 144, 146, 147, 170, 171, 183, 184, 192, 234, 235, 238, 240, 241, 244, 246, 260, 261, 263, 264, 270, 282, 285, 297, 298, 343, 344, 347, 349, 352, 411, 417, 419, 420, 427, 439, 462, 464, 467, 468, 469, 470, 486, 514, 515, 521, 572, 632, 643, 683, 686, 720, 721, 723, 726, 749, 752, 768, 773, 775, 776, 778, 779, 810, 819, 839, 855, 861, 877 Lambek, Michael, 18, 36, 42, 44, 70, 75, 76, 83, 210, 238, 239, 273, 282, 344, 348, 361, 378, 411, 412, 417, 419, 423, 427, 436, 460, 461, 463, 464, 469, 470, 471, 472, 486, 502, 511, 521, 524, 569, 630, 636, 640, 681, 692, 700, 714, 739, 804, 810, 818 language, 17, 235, 236, 238, 319, 615, 672 acquisition, 235, 237, 552, 614 and ethical competency, 552 and mind attribution, 652–4 animals, 23, 677

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Index

categories, 681 competency, 552 as focus of ordinary ethics, 273 fundamentalist view, 725 in human condition, 103, 104, 235, 392, 403, 512, 573, 614, 654, 697 limits, 282 reflexivity, 243, 245, 654, 740 language games, 512, 574 Laos, 242 Larsen, Timothy, 722 Latour, Bruno, 48, 107, 286, 341, 846, 849 law, 393, 394, 473, 515, 516, 517, 521, 522, 523, 526, 736, 741, 772. See sharia, halakha, Dharmashastra and coercion, 515 and freedom, 171, 256, 261, 283 as model for ethics, 78, 80, 263, 509 Chinese, 621 Christian canon, 513 divine, 73, 508, 740, 741, 743 as embodiment of nation state, 300 as embodiment of virtue, 83 equity, 402 fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), 516, 740 in Abrahamic traditions, 513 Islamic, 598, 746, 781 legal fiction, 395 military, 304 moral, 73 natural, 283 non-recognition of corporation in Muslim lands, 742 Roman, 395, 742 Laymi (Bolivia), 610, 612, 616 Lazar, Sian, 25, 797, 798, 801, 811 Leach, Edmund, 390, 464, 678, 679, 681, 683 Lear, Jonathan, 35, 72, 98, 669 Lebanon, 516–20, 805 Ledeneva, Alena, 633, 643, 770 legalism, 19, 514, 519, 522, 523, 525, 526, 527, 747 Leites, Edmund, 525 Lempert, Michael, 13, 18, 233, 239, 241, 242, 244, 274, 551 Lenin, V. I., 885 Lester, Rebecca, 424, 425, 426, 564, 571, 572, 714 Levinas, Emmanuel, 49, 155, 157, 161, 372, 373, 578, 579, 580, 581, 817 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 45, 76, 131, 206, 390, 442, 510, 513, 724 Levy, Robert, 315, 317 Li Tian, 874 Li, Tania, 737 liberalism, 20, 24, 89, 97, 107, 111–17, 120, 136, 186, 256, 257, 296, 514, 515, 544, 547, 561, 564, 568, 748, 844, 877. See neoliberalism, freedom: liberal concepts libertarianism, 13, 252, 257, 259, 269, 271, 275 Liebenberg, Linda, 290, 291 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 651, 722 Lillehammer, Hallvard, 10, 49 Lipps, Theodor, 371, 372, 374 Livingston, Julie, 564, 566

Lloro-Bidart, Teresa, 688 Lock, Margaret, 537, 631 Locke, John, 41, 114, 284, 525 Locke, Piers, 682, 683, 695 logical positivism, 96, 158 London˜o Sulkin, Carlos D., 650, 657, 658, 659, 662, 665, 669 Louw, Maria, 310, 576, 577 love, 8, 20, 27, 101, 109, 111, 160, 164, 195, 265, 286, 311, 312, 314, 315, 328, 337, 365, 368, 369, 370, 394, 420, 491, 498, 591–608, 653, 654, 661, 662, 709, 710, 718, 796, 799, 875, 878, 879, 881, 883, 886, 889, 890 luck, 68, 86–9, 99, 312, 568. See Williams, Bernard:moral luck moral, 314, 423 Luhrmann, Tanya, 23, 192, 424, 465, 564, 566, 655, 665, 717 Lukes, Steven, 55, 723 lust, 595, 719, 720, 772 Luther, Martin, 205, 219, 525 Lutz, Catherine, 315, 317, 319 Lynteris, Christos, 69, 450, 451 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 7, 42, 43, 66, 70, 71, 73, 74, 90, 105, 116, 119, 139, 155, 209, 238, 343, 349, 350, 362, 445, 515, 569, 571, 734 Mack, Abby, 15 MacKinnon, Catherine, 120 Madagascar, 286, 715, 823 Maeckelbergh, Marianne, 795 magic, 318, 445, 717, 719 Mahler, Gustav, 111, 313 Mahmood, Saba, 5, 13, 43, 69, 147, 253, 260, 267, 286, 424, 438, 439, 466, 467, 486, 494, 511, 519, 541, 542, 570, 686, 795, 797, 804, 810, 818, 850, 858 Maimonides, 397 Maine, Henry Sumner, 394, 395 Mair, Jonathan, 10, 40, 42, 69, 72, 82, 83, 424, 541, 551, 686, 752, 853 Makovicky, Nicolette, 21, 633, 635, 641, 642 Malara, Diego, 520, 569 Malaysia, 245, 688, 748, 752, 765, 783 Malikail, Joseph, 803 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 255, 256, 258, 261, 262, 263, 275, 345, 373, 509, 510, 511 Malkki, Liisa, 822, 826 Mao Zedong, 69, 622, 875, 876, 882, 883, 886, 887 Maoism, 26, 27, 69, 622, 625, 626, 807, 871–92 Marcus Aurelius, 83 Marcuse, Herbert, 807 Marett, Robert Ranulph, 3, 819 marriage, 20, 23, 27, 245, 284, 338, 394, 398, 461, 462, 469, 500, 591–608, 611, 668, 708, 710, 712, 721, 722, 737, 776, 777, 784, 801, 875, 890 Marrow, Jocelyn, 564, 566 Marsden, Magnus, 25, 420, 424, 640, 749, 752, 763, 765, 772, 773, 774, 777, 778, 779, 780, 850, 860 Martin, Emily, 319, 546, 695 Marvin, Garry, 696, 697

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

907

908

INDEX

Marx, Karl, 103, 133, 135, 158, 732, 733, 734, 763, 824 Marxism, 4, 26, 103, 113, 132, 133, 135, 234, 347, 436, 445, 651, 795, 797, 824, 846. See communist morality under socialism praxis, 807 masculinity, 141, 420, 599, 650, 772, 774 Mathews, Gordon, 345, 349 Mathias, John, 13, 244 Mattingly, Cheryl, 11, 20, 69, 74, 140, 167, 168, 169, 170, 234, 254, 276, 281, 282, 286, 292, 297, 298, 310, 314, 318, 343, 350, 352, 353, 361, 363, 378, 379, 422, 423, 427, 452, 453, 480, 515, 543, 544, 562, 568, 569, 570, 573, 574, 575, 576, 579, 581, 680, 681, 686 Matza, Tomas, 316 Mauss, Marcel, 76, 180, 219, 220, 390, 464, 514, 631, 632, 824 Maxwell, David, 488, 749, 750 Mayblin, Maya, 520, 524 Mayotte, 470, 471, 715 McIntosh, Janet, 722 McKearney, Patrick, 10, 17, 20, 108, 112, 116, 207, 208, 223, 276, 296, 351, 434, 538, 564, 566, 567, 568, 571, 572, 580 McKeon, Richard, 283 McLuhan, Marshall, 402 Mead, George Herbert, 234, 236, 651 Mead, Margaret, 51, 344, 539, 540, 542, 722 meditation, 80, 81, 141, 349, 419, 425, 720 Meinert, Lotte, 310, 577 Melanesia, 83, 192, 665, 673 Mencius, 82, 84, 88 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 155, 157, 160, 574 Merton, Robert K., 844, 845, 847 Merton, Thomas, 706 Messick, Brinkley, 516, 517, 518 meta-humans, 447, 463, 473. See God/gods Mexico, 424, 426, 714 Mezzenzana, Francesca, 572 Miers, David, 522, 526, 527 Mill, John Stuart, 39, 74, 114, 254 mind-attribution, 652–4. See theory of mind misfortune, 87, 109, 117, 426, 475, 653, 821 Mitroff, Ian, 844, 852 Mittermaier, Amira, 423, 443, 444, 569, 631, 638, 732, 745, 748, 752, 781, 822, 824 Miyazaki, Hirokazu, 350 Mody, Perveez, 20, 564, 566, 593, 595, 602 Mohammed, The Prophet, 438, 439, 446, 542, 548, 550, 552, 740, 741 Mol, Annemarie, 564, 565, 566 monasticism, 15, 71, 82, 266, 284, 391, 424, 425, 426, 548, 654, 714 Mongolia, 17, 85, 351, 437, 438, 548, 549, 550, 551, 635 Montaigne, Michel de, 114 Montgomery, Heather, 544 moods, 14, 15, 162, 164, 168, 310, 322–3, 347, 360, 374, 376–8, 379, 433, 540, 541, 858 Moore, G. E., 38, 435, 436 moral economy, 631, 661, 767, 839, 848, 849, 865

moral saints, 8, 490, 494 moral sentiments, 14, 172, 538, 569, 635, 651, 761, 762, 769, 818, 820, 822 morality distinguished from ethics, 1, 7, 18, 22, 101–2, 138, 263 evolutionary explanations, 179–86, 196 Morality System, 7, 8, 9, 10, 22, 36, 41, 74, 75, 78, 79, 86, 89, 101–2, 105, 107, 264, 462. See morality, distinguished from ethics, Williams, Bernard Morgan, Lynn, 651, 656, 657 Morocco, 360 Mosko, Mark, 861 motherhood, 212, 325, 426, 453, 464, 826. See parenthood Moya, Ismael, 485, 612 Muehlebach, Andrea, 370, 794, 796, 797, 819, 820 multiculturalism, 49, 113, 369 multispecies studies, 320, 677–700 Munn, Nancy, 485, 500 Muslims, 23, 393, 404, 420, 438, 439, 446, 466, 468, 509, 516–20, 542, 597, 706, 732, 739–49, 752, 783, 832 Ahmadi, 446, 453 mutuality, 14, 181, 281, 295, 297, 565, 567, 691, 765, 780, 781 Myerhoff, Barbara, 465 Myers, Neely, 565 mysticism, 5, 158, 159, 434, 515, 571, 706 myth, 17, 433, 442, 445, 448, 452, 454, 465, 549, 656, 657, 659, 665, 666, 669, 677, 719, 724, 725 Nadasdy, Paul, 680, 683 Nagel, Thomas, 106, 339 Namibia, 825 narrative, 14, 16, 84, 85, 284, 313, 324, 337, 350, 433, 543, 594, 653, 655, 673, 681, 724 nationalism, 735, 743, 766, 772, 844, 890, 891 Navaro, Yael, 321, 322, 323, 695 Nazism, 161, 166, 171, 255, 256, 292, 304, 375, 844, 845 Needham, Rodney, 206, 433, 443, 723 neoliberalism, 4, 5, 6, 36, 68, 69, 135, 144, 285, 289, 291, 316, 320, 325, 345, 364, 370, 565, 633, 731, 732, 748, 749, 751, 752, 779, 783, 798, 806, 840, 890, 891. See liberalism Nepal, 673, 682 Netherlands, 566, 742 Neumann, Erich, 717 Newman, John Henry, 392 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 35, 40, 55, 70, 72, 75, 96, 99, 102, 106, 116, 132, 134, 158, 177, 261, 341, 460, 539 Njoto-Feillard, Gwenael, 747, 748 Noddings, Nel, 561, 569, 579 non-representational ethics, 689–94, 698, 699 North America (Canada and United States), 655, 656, 682, 687, 688. See Canada, United States of America North America (indigenous), 442, 669 Noske, Barbara, 679

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

Nozick, Robert, 45, 46, 49, 106, 252 Nuer (Sudan), 637, 722 Nussbaum, Martha, 10, 15, 66, 70, 87, 89, 96–121, 310, 568, 576 and religion, 116, 480 liberalism, 112, 114–15 on Bernard Williams, 117, 120 on capabilities as well-being, 112, 337, 339, 720 on emotion, 108–11, 310, 311–14, 317, 325, 570 on ethical inquiry, 118–20 on Foucault, 110, 140, 143 on literature as moral philosophy, 109, 314, 320, 325, 329 on moral reform, 111, 117, 120 on Plato, 311 on virtue ethics, 110, 119 on vulnerability, 78, 87, 88, 98, 99, 109, 326, 362, 569 O’Neill, Onora, 44, 75, 515 Oakdale, Suzanne, 653 objectivity, 66, 96, 97, 110, 118, 119, 159, 165, 172, 183, 185, 188, 236, 283, 342, 353, 497, 722, 723, 830, 841, 849, 855 obligation, 36, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 89, 100, 102, 106, 171, 180, 181, 184, 193, 219, 220, 234, 238, 263, 274, 275, 283, 287, 291, 295, 296, 297, 299, 305, 351, 352, 389, 394, 413, 416, 425, 441, 453, 495, 496, 514, 515, 523, 524, 630, 631, 632, 634, 637, 639, 643, 810, 822, 859 Ochs, Elinor, 542, 543, 544, 572 Oedipus, 87 Ong, Aihwa, 732, 738, 739 ontological turn, 6–7, 52, 723, 724 opacity of mind, 189, 191, 656, 665, 671, 673, 780 ordinary ethics, 13, 24, 49, 68, 169, 238, 241, 273, 274, 413, 427, 486, 511, 513, 537, 540, 541, 550, 551, 692, 693, 739 ordinary language philosophy, 96, 110, 120, 169, 172, 486, 502, 511, 526, 692 organ donation, 209 Orsi, Robert, 217, 424, 713 Ortner, Sherry B., 4, 5, 11, 36, 37, 144, 223, 285, 335, 341, 347, 364, 485, 636 Osburg, John, 735, 738, 739 Osella, Caroline, 745, 748, 783 Osella, Filippo, 745, 748, 783, 822, 831, 832 Overing, Joanna, 651, 660, 661, 663 Paine, Thomas, 252 Pakistan, 420, 747 Palestine, 366, 710 Pandian, Anand, 43, 418, 426, 436, 549, 571, 850, 860 Papua New Guinea, 265, 369, 440, 525, 541 parenthood, 185, 211, 221, 290, 313, 424, 543, 570, 576, 594, 595, 613, 721, 876 Parfit, Derek, 40, 45 Parren˜as, Rheanna, 688, 689 Parry, Jonathan, 180, 434, 514, 632, 734, 741, 763, 764, 765, 819, 822, 824 Parsons, Talcott, 734

Pascal, Blaise, 133, 551, 667 passion, 315, 329, 394, 420, 797, 799, 842, 854, 863 passions, 20, 82, 115, 321, 325, 368, 569, 763, 854 paternalism, 40, 566, 571 pathos and pathic response, 15, 361, 365, 375–8, 379, 380 Paul the Evangelist, 219 pedagogy, 19, 26, 69, 141, 145, 146, 147, 259, 264, 270, 275, 413, 427, 536–53, 562, 571, 681, 686, 697, 793, 802, 807, 841, 848, 849, 850, 856. See activism: self-cultivation and pedagogy, communist morality under socialism: social engineering projects of adults, 545–7 of children, 316, 424, 542–5 of self, 547–8 through exemplars, 548–51 Pedersen, Morten Axel, 6, 267, 351, 723 People of the Centre (Amazonia), 649–73 personhood, 285, 296, 297, 305, 593, 639, 683, 774, 825 animal, 681, 682, 683, 684, 695 in commerce and trade, 774–8 partible, 855, 861 relational and embodied, 649–73 phenomenology, 11, 20, 103, 106, 155–73, 234, 240, 361, 365, 372–5, 379, 496, 538, 562, 568, 581, 582 Heidegger and his influence, 161–6 Heidegger and the anthropology of ethics, 167–71 intentional analysis, 158–60, 162, 164, 172 of care, 572–81 origins and general character, 155–61 philanthropy, 24, 25, 817–33 anthropological judgements of, 827–32 as ascetic practice, 825–7 dangers of receiving, 823–5 varied forms of giving, 819–23 Philippines, 750 phronesis, 419, 571, 636, 806, 807 Piaroa (Amazonia), 663, 664 Pierce, Chester, 245 Pierce, Jessica, 684 piety, 43, 420, 466, 524, 706, 747, 776, 779 filial, 84 Sufi, 310 piety movements, 13, 26, 253, 260, 494, 797 pilgrimage, 713, 778, 779 Piliavsky, Anastasia, 487 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 22, 630–2, 634, 635, 637, 638, 640, 643, 644, 782 Plato, 36, 37, 44, 50, 55, 80, 87, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106, 109, 110, 119, 283, 293, 311, 366, 414, 569 play, 236, 243, 397, 399, 400, 405, 472, 478, 544, 545, 547, 616, 618, 641, 651, 656, 666, 725 Plumwood, Val, 695 pluralism (ethical), 10, 15–16, 51, 55, 90, 96–121, 185, 265, 347, 389–405, 420, 421, 427, 428, 436, 489–90, 498, 549, 733–6, 739–53, 861 Plutarch, 548 Pocock, David, 3

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

909

910

INDEX

Poland, 285, 641, 885 Pols, Jeannette, 565 Polynesia, 317 Popper, Karl, 845 Porter, Holly, 470, 479 poverty, 288, 289, 302, 336, 337, 339, 340, 341, 351, 477, 743, 833 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 369, 833 power, 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 24, 48, 67, 68, 69, 76, 110, 130, 131–7, 138, 139, 140, 143–9, 232, 234, 253, 254, 256, 260, 265, 268, 285, 296, 297, 317, 318, 327, 343, 347, 348, 352, 366, 370, 412, 413, 415, 419, 437, 446, 447, 471, 485, 526, 575, 579, 633, 636, 641, 731, 735, 753, 766, 768, 783, 792, 793, 807, 889, 890 practice theory, 4, 76, 285, 436, 510, 632, 636 praxis, 794, 807, 809, 812 prayer, 18, 43, 81, 83, 210, 396, 397, 466, 468, 473, 478, 478, 479, 519, 598, 667, 681, 707, 709, 711, 713, 714, 724, 750, 779, 782, 826 predation, 22, 660, 661, 663, 668, 670. See hunting pregnancy, 657. See surrogacy prophets, 433, 442, 448, 470, 500 prosperity, 256, 270. See commerce and trade: prosperity as value, Christianity: prosperity theologies, capitalism: prosperity religions prosperity religions, 749–51, 780–2 psychiatry, 292, 296 psychoanalysis, 110, 111, 133, 135, 171, 315, 375, 570, 651, 719, 798 psychology, 13, 14, 20, 21, 121, 135, 157, 177, 191, 313, 318, 328, 341, 345, 414, 612, 672 behavioural, 858 cognitive, 111, 165. See cognitive science developmental, 111, 119, 185, 235, 612 experimental, 12, 189, 326 moral, 35, 72, 74, 106, 118, 177, 179, 180, 181, 185, 188, 233, 235, 246, 526, 568 of happiness, 337 phenomenological, 350 social, 42, 336 psychotherapy, 328 Puett, Michael, 471, 472 punishment, 12, 21, 54, 181, 188, 191, 283, 419, 515, 516, 592, 610–26, 687, 874, 887 self-, 620, 621, 622 Rabinow, Paul, 49, 132, 135, 551, 818, 820, 821, 830, 839, 840, 842, 846, 847, 848, 849, 851, 853, 856, 861, 865 race, 258, 295, 360, 542, 575, 652, 711, 752, 846 racism, 245, 290, 293, 301, 438, 844 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 509, 510, 513, 521, 540 Ragone´, Helena, 213, 214, 215 Ramos, Alcida Rita, 659 rape, 27, 49, 245 Rappaport, Roy, 18, 396, 461, 462, 463, 464, 468, 469, 471, 472, 473, 479 rationality, 23, 42, 80, 109, 283, 284, 419, 438, 514, 525, 578, 611, 723, 733, 741, 763, 774 instrumental, 822 market, 731, 732, 783

Rawls, John, 37, 40, 45, 46, 47, 49, 97, 102, 106, 110, 112, 114, 115, 180, 181, 232, 236, 344, 521 Raz, Joseph, 41, 98 Razsa, Maple, 794, 795, 797 Read, Kenneth E., 3 Reagan, Ronald, 289 reason, 74, 75, 76, 81, 87, 98, 101, 102, 110, 120, 142, 159, 172, 184, 185, 234, 309, 349, 369, 420, 525, 752, 803, 846 reciprocity, 180, 181, 235, 238, 394, 565, 566, 567, 571, 578, 581, 611, 612, 614, 615, 616, 625, 630, 631, 632, 633, 634, 635, 642, 662, 739, 770, 861 recognition, 109, 114, 115, 158, 281, 297, 297, 351, 369, 448, 543, 567, 575, 592, 602, 633, 641, 691, 692, 714, 751, 827. See exemplars: recognition of Reddy, Deepa, 592, 593 Redfield, Peter, 818, 820, 821, 829, 830, 831 reductionism, 3, 4, 12, 21, 22, 231, 234, 378, 561, 611, 734, 765, 780, 862 reflection, 17, 27, 65, 67, 83, 101, 109, 110, 161, 162, 168, 169, 233, 234, 235, 240, 241, 242, 292, 293, 294, 413, 417, 421, 427, 436, 487, 537, 541, 568, 570, 678, 680, 689, 690, 692, 697, 804, 808, 877 reflexivity, 184, 216, 239, 240, 241, 243, 246, 281, 284, 293, 678, 680, 732, 749, 773. See reflection Reformation, 71, 114, 116, 222, 284, 460, 509, 527, 529 regret, 101, 107, 310, 312, 577 relationality, 285, 327, 561, 562, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572, 576, 578, 580, 581, 614, 650–2, 685, 687. See ethical subject: relational, distributed, or composite, Foucault, Michel: relationality of ethics non-verbal, 689–94 relativism, 37, 50–6, 97, 108, 232, 723, 817, 819 religion, 7, 23, 43, 44, 80, 104–5, 205–24, 393, 401, 420, 424, 433, 438, 439, 460–80, 706–26, 749–51, 760, 761, 778, 779, 780, 783 representation, 677–700 ethics of, 697–9 of ethics, 685–9 reputation, 775, 776, 780, 781, 782 resistance, 5, 130, 135, 144, 253, 267, 276, 285, 286, 617, 621, 682, 798, 799, 810, 891 respect, 55, 236, 237, 240, 245, 491, 498, 523, 562, 662, 696, 878, 886 response-ability, 691, 694, 698, 855 responsibility, 12, 13, 14, 48, 68, 105, 106, 118, 159, 160, 181, 184, 188–92, 233, 281–305, 574, 578, 691, 712, 821, 855 and freedom, 285–9 and reflection/reflexivity, 292–5 as relational, 295–8 collective, 298–304 responsibilization, 289–95 responsiveness, 160, 238, 242, 246, 281, 297, 362, 365, 677, 690, 691, 692, 693, 694, 696, 709 non-verbal, 700

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

Retsikas, Konstantinos, 640 Richards, Audrey, 464 Richerson, Peter J., 181, 613, 614 Rieff, David, 820 rights, 24, 27, 46, 48, 97, 114, 115, 118, 186, 257, 271, 272, 290, 499, 544, 574, 632, 711, 736, 767, 796, 809, 830, 880, 891. See human rights Rimbaud, Arthur, 544 ritual, 18, 76, 242, 266, 328, 405, 440, 460–80, 514, 525, 528, 569, 649, 657, 662, 668, 669, 677, 708, 720, 724, 726, 750, 761, 775, 801, 809, 824, 887 healing, 298, 464, 477, 659, 665, 666, 722, 749 as response to ambiguity, 390, 396–402 Robbins, Joel, 5, 18, 36, 44, 55, 116, 147, 171, 183, 186, 189, 206, 210, 211, 218, 219, 220, 223, 238, 240, 241, 264, 335, 341, 346, 347, 348, 354, 363, 364, 380, 414, 427, 438, 440, 441, 442, 443, 480, 485, 488, 489, 490, 497, 502, 526, 549, 571, 631, 665, 680, 681, 725, 735, 744, 749, 752, 780, 817, 818, 833, 850, 860 Robbins-Ruszkowski, Jessica, 285 Roe, Emma, 694, 698 Rogan, Tim, 732, 733 Romania, 885 Romanticism, 104, 256, 529 Rome (ancient), 70, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87, 137, 141, 142, 395, 547 Rosaldo, Michelle, 183, 315, 318, 321, 328 Rose, Deborah Bird, 695 Rose, Nikolas, 290, 414 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41, 49, 113, 180, 252, 261 Rudd, Kevin, 300, 300 Rudnyckyj, Daromir, 324, 546, 547, 732, 744, 746, 747, 752, 783 rules, 16, 17, 19, 184, 236, 437, 508–29, 550, 632, 857, 858 as form of cultivation, 83 concepts and forms of, 520–5 diverse attitudes to, 525–8 in ethics, 513–16 in Islam in Lebanon, 516–20 in social theory, 509–13 ruliness, 438, 508, 514, 515, 517, 521, 524, 527, 528, 744, 746 Rumsey, Alan, 189, 665, 686, 780 Runa (Ecuador), 662 Russell, Constance, 688 Russia, 26, 253, 316, 317, 542, 635, 770, 885, 890. See Soviet Union Rutherford, Danilyn, 319, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369 Rwanda, 14, 301, 302, 303, 304, 629 Rydstro¨m, Jens, 564, 567 Sacks, Harvey, 237, 238, 242 sacrifice (ritual), 51, 265, 391, 397, 444, 462, 469, 473, 631 Sahlins, Marshall, 5, 18, 130, 135, 144, 147, 445, 447, 463, 632, 722, 763

saints, 211, 216–18, 222, 463, 713, 865. See moral saints Salamon, Gayle, 574, 575 Samoa, 190, 191, 287, 344, 542 Sandel, Michael, 47, 733, 752 Santos-Granero, Fernando, 344, 345, 348, 351, 352 Sapir, Edward, 235 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 54, 131, 133, 155, 157, 160, 411, 650 Saussure, Fernand de, 669, 672 Sayer, Andrew, 341, 342, 349, 353 Sbriccoli, Tommaso, 487 Scanlon, T. M., 41, 52 Schaffer, Simon, 839, 849 Schauer, Frederick, 522, 523 Scheele, Judith, 17, 487, 493, 501, 508, 512, 521, 527 Scheler, Max, 12, 19, 173, 372, 376, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 223, 288, 318, 537, 817, 827 Scherz, China, 25, 370, 489, 565, 819, 820, 822, 823, 824, 826 Schielke, Samuli, 420, 424, 640, 749, 752 Schneider, David, 216, 510 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 158 Schutz, Alfred, 362 Schwartz, Barry, 449, 450 science, 24, 26, 117, 121, 133, 205, 327, 426, 512, 679, 685, 686, 692, 745, 839–65, 874. See cognitive science and affect theory, 319, 320 as value free, 281–305 askesis, 856–8 Chinese communist faith in, 881 contrasting and complementary virtues, 854 ethical diversity of, 847–51 ethical substance, 853–5 evolutionary, 20, 21, 612, 623 functionalist and constructionist accounts of, 843–7 Islamic, 740 Islamization of, 745 Kalahari Meerkat Project (KMP), 851–63 Marxism as ‘science of all sciences’, 881 Merton’s norms, 844, 845 mode of subjectivation, 858–61 research ethics, 840–3 telos, 861–3 scripture, 72, 681, 711 Searle, John R., 45, 182, 402, 512, 521 secularism, 220, 439, 745 secularization, 7, 102, 105. See Taylor, Charles seduction, 22, 653, 662 Seeman, Don, 218, 222 self-conception. See self-understanding self-consciousness, 11, 13, 170, 171, 237, 238, 240, 241, 243, 286, 310, 344, 416, 741 self-control. See self-mastery self-cultivation, 17, 18, 25, 26, 36, 43, 44, 67, 68, 69, 70, 77, 183, 244, 253, 271, 316, 336, 337, 343, 350, 352, 437, 487, 561, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572, 621, 720, 725, 748, 774, 782–4,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

911

912

INDEX

799–802, 805, 806, 808, 839, 840, 848, 850, 851, 857, 858, 861, 865. See Foucault, Michel: self-cultivation, communist morality under socialism: self-cultivation as a New Person not necessarily individualistic, 417–21 not separate from ordinary life, 421–6. See ordinary ethics self-fashioning. See self-cultivation self-formation. See self-cultivation self-interest, 3, 7, 15, 20, 21, 24, 25, 69, 117, 180, 328, 352, 418, 578, 611, 632, 633, 643, 715, 751, 762, 765, 780, 820, 824, 827, 845, 875, 876, 877, 886, 888 self-interpreting animals. See Taylor, Charles selfishness, 21, 82, 140, 186, 327, 594, 595, 602, 605, 607, 736 self-knowledge. See self-understanding selflessness, 594, 596, 602, 780, 841, 883 self-mastery, 139, 140, 141, 284, 656, 772, 774 self-realization. See self-cultivation self-reliance, 289, 452, 546, 764, 772 self-sacrifice, 20, 26, 46, 254, 269, 275, 328, 344, 350, 352, 593, 602, 605, 623, 631, 880, 882, 886, 888, 891 self-transformation. See self-cultivation self-understanding, 27, 40, 42, 55, 104, 105, 121, 131, 146, 149, 222, 243, 419, 420, 578, 651, 654, 687, 688, 689, 690, 797, 802 Seligman, Adam B., 15, 396, 397, 460, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469 Sen, Amartya, 337, 339, 340, 344, 349 Seneca, 87 sex, 27, 36, 80, 82, 83, 85, 135, 139, 141, 394, 412, 567, 651, 662, 663, 722, 748, 751, 797, 890 sexual harassment, 120, 245 sexual morality, 80, 141, 514 sexuality, 68, 74, 135, 137, 141, 394, 593, 606, 607, 711, 719, 752 Shafer, Roy, 725 shamans and shamanism, 6, 470, 653, 655, 659, 663, 671, 714, 715, 716, 719 shame, 106, 107, 111, 300, 501, 604, 613, 622, 665 Shapin, Stephen, 839, 841, 842, 843, 849, 861, 864 Shapiro, Kenneth, 687, 692 sharia, 509, 513, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520, 527, 740, 741, 744, 781. See law sharing, 187, 615, 631, 662, 670, 746, 765, 800 Sharp, Lesley, 209 Shaw, Rosalind, 284 Shir-Vertesh, Dafna, 684 Shklar, Judith, 114, 115, 514 Shryock, Andrew, 630, 632, 634, 636, 641 Shuar (Ecuador), 192, 193, 195, 663 Shweder, Richard, 35, 186, 244, 318, 363 Sicart, Miguel, 545 Sidgwick, Henry, 39, 45, 106 Sidnell, Jack, 242, 243, 244, 470, 508, 512, 513 Sierra Leone, 284, 348 Sikhism, 251 Simon, Gregory, 732, 737, 738, 740, 749

sin, 113, 141, 272, 418, 524, 712, 714 sincerity, 116, 238, 398, 399, 461, 465, 466, 467, 468, 519, 525, 780 Singapore, 592, 738 Singer, Peter, 37, 46, 47, 49, 100 Skinner, Quentin, 115, 460 slavery, 102, 321, 368 abolitionism, 299 Slezkine, Yuri, 771 Sloane-White, Patricia, 748, 783 Smith, Adam, 14, 70, 242, 368, 369, 538, 651, 742, 763, 820 socialism, 6, 21, 26, 36, 451, 779, 807. See communist morality under socialism Islamic, 743, 744, 747 socialization, 43, 65, 77, 544, 570, 572, 574, 735, 850, 885, 886. See enculturation, indoctrination/inculcation Socrates, 87, 88, 98, 101, 140, 141, 293, 724 song, 301, 652, 653, 664, 800 South Africa, 825, 852 Soviet Union, 633, 845, 871–92 Spain, 696 Spelke, Elizabeth, 614, 615 Sperber, Dan, 181, 187, 242, 612 spheres of exchange, 499 Spinoza, Baruch, 320, 367, 368, 369, 550 spirit possession, 470, 476, 477, 714 spirits, 472, 652, 653, 662, 714, 715, 716, 717, 718, 724. See metahumans spirituality, 23, 105, 719, 724 sport, 276, 490, 545, 690 Sri Lanka, 470 Srivastava, Vinay Kumar, 256, 263 Stafford, Charles, 8, 21, 54, 622, 624, 737 Stalin, Joseph, 873, 874, 886 Stalinism, 26, 136, 871–92 Starhawk, 718 Stasch, Rupert, 183, 189, 255, 267, 350, 463, 472, 488, 651, 656, 661, 665 Stein, Felix, 783 Stevenson, Lisa, 564, 575 Stewart, Kathleen, 320 Stivers, Tanya, 238, 239 Stoczkowski, Wiktor, 827 Stoicism, 44, 80, 87, 88, 110, 111, 139, 142, 313, 366, 367, 369, 806 Stoller, Paul, 722 Strathern, Marilyn, 183, 262, 541, 567, 632, 651, 840 Strawson, P. F., 48, 286 structuralism, 16, 19, 76, 131, 132, 133, 143, 155, 165, 172, 390, 422, 442, 510, 513, 661 structure social, 2, 3, 4, 18, 46, 48, 148, 189, 255, 285, 301, 421, 434, 436, 445, 476, 510, 513, 668, 808, 810, 844 Sudan, 359 suffering, 5, 12, 15, 68, 211, 223, 288, 314, 317, 346, 347, 359–81, 580, 687, 691, 817, 821. See pathos and pathic response anthropology of suffering and ethics, 363–5 empathy, 370–5 in human condition, 361, 362, 363

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Index

pathos and attunement, 375–8 sympathy, 366–71 Suhr, Christian, 723 suicide, 87, 719 surrogacy, 211–16 sympathy, 15, 188, 361, 366–71, 377, 630, 635, 690 Syria, 743, 767, 768, 777, 781 Syrians, 360, 762, 767, 768, 772, 773, 776, 777, 778, 784 taboo, 24, 236, 286, 395, 437, 440, 447, 451, 527, 528, 678 Tahiti, 315 Taiwan, 615, 624, 625, 739, 751 Tallensi (Ghana), 722 Tambiah, Stanley, 18, 454, 462, 463, 472, 679 Tawney, R. H., 734 Taylor, Anne-Christine, 651, 653, 660, 669, 671 Taylor, Charles, 10, 15, 40, 41, 70, 73, 90, 96–121, 131, 140, 168, 283, 284, 294, 369, 452, 480, 513, 525, 568, 569, 651, 652, 654, 655, 681 and Catholicism, 99, 104, 116 Christianity and secularization, 104–5 on ethical inquiry, 120 on modern Morality System, 102 politics, 113–15 self-interpreting animals, 103, 104, 114, 121, 343, 668 strong evaluation, 103, 104 Taylor, Janelle, 565 Thailand, 425, 569, 735, 737, 751 Thatcher, Margaret, 289 Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios, 370, 372, 379, 822, 824 theology, 12, 205–24, 350, 509, 523, 725. See Christianity: prosperity theologies, Christianity: Roman Catholic (Liberation Theology) theory of mind, 189, 235, 672 therapy, 427, 546, 725, 798, 801. See psychotherapy couples’, 328 systemic, 328 thick ethical concepts, 107, 342 Thin, Neil, 341 Throop, C. Jason, 15, 310, 322, 353, 360, 363, 364, 372, 373, 374, 376, 379, 380, 538, 562, 573, 574, 686 Ticktin, Miriam, 360, 564, 821 Tinbergen, Niko, 856, 861 Titchener, Edward, 372 Tiv (Nigeria), 499 Tomasello, Michael, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 235, 239, 612, 613, 614, 615 Toulmin, Stephen, 523, 527, 551 trade. See commerce and trade tragedy, 15, 87, 88, 91, 99, 109, 116, 117, 312, 313, 314, 335, 360, 381, 394, 422, 424, 453, 562, 570, 571, 576, 683 trauma, 351, 363, 364, 578, 820, 821 Traweek, Sharon, 849 tricksters, 442 Trilling, Lionel, 399, 460

Trnka, Susanna, 291, 317 trolley problems, 43, 180, 239 Tronto, Joan, 561, 563, 569, 579 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 347, 363 Trundle, Catherine, 14, 291, 294, 317, 565, 825 trust and mistrust, 25, 180, 181, 215, 403, 405, 715, 736, 739, 762, 769–73, 774, 785, 843, 848, 875 Tubu (Chad), 487, 501 Tupinamba´ (Brazil), 667, 668, 669 Turkey, 287 Turner, Edith, 722 Turner, Terence, 485 Turner, Victor, 464, 722, 809 Twining, William, 526 Uganda, 370, 460, 468, 472–9, 577 Uitoto (Amazonia), 654 Ukraine, 760, 874 unemployment, 318 Ungar, Michael, 290 United Kingdom, 287, 289, 349, 434, 519, 566 England, 252, 742 Liverpool, 209 London, 717 United States of America, 26, 209, 213, 243, 245, 269, 377, 528, 565, 690, 706, 707, 746, 749, 826, 849, 850 California, 711 Chicago, 367, 783 child-rearing in, 542 Los Angeles, 310, 350, 452, 570, 575 New Mexico, 323 New Orleans, 821 New York, 684 Urapmin (PNG), 265, 440 Urarina (Peru), 192, 193 usury, 524, 779 utilitarianism, 38–40, 104, 109, 233, 240, 311, 339, 496, 568, 763 utopianism, 5, 15, 16, 116, 399, 415, 447, 791, 795, 806 Uzbekistan, 576 Valdez, Natai, 290 values, 1, 8, 12, 15, 18, 19, 236, 264, 336, 342, 347, 348, 440, 453, 485–503, 545, 552, 634, 830 ‘carry over’ between spheres, 732 and exemplars, 439–41 conflicts of, 15, 25, 193, 264, 420, 427, 442, 549, 570, 576, 630, 636, 637, 640, 644, 683, 778–80. See favours:mediate conflicting values differential valuing of, 497–501 in activism, 797 moral and non-moral, 7, 18, 490–5. See morality: distinguished from ethics phenomenology of, 158–60, 172, 496–7 spheres of, 732, 733, 740, 749, 752 value pluralism. See pluralism value theory and anthropology of ethics, 485–8, 501–3

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913

914

INDEX

van der Veer, Peter, 612 Van Dooren, Thom, 695 van Gennep, Arnold, 464 Vanuatu, 190 vegetarianism, 264, 272, 273, 275 vengeance, 190, 470, 668, 669 Venkatesan, Soumhya, 13, 14, 42, 48, 253, 257, 260, 261, 265, 266, 272, 286, 348, 418, 486, 822, 827, 832 Veyne, Paul, 139, 148 Vezo (Madagascar), 191 Victor, Letha, 18, 470, 479 Victor, Sam, 14 Vietnam, 26, 316, 378, 580, 807, 871, 889, 890 Vigh, Henrik, 350, 351 Vineyard Christian Fellowship, 711 violence, 49, 133, 134, 169, 190, 245, 256, 264, 288, 290, 301, 303, 304, 347, 349, 418, 566, 575, 577, 578, 599, 631, 653, 660, 661, 667, 761, 766, 794, 796, 821, 885 structural, 829 symbolic, 67, 77 virtue ethics, 10, 20, 36, 40, 42–4, 65–91, 97, 119, 172, 233, 234, 236, 240, 336, 343, 349, 350, 411, 419, 441, 486, 496, 543, 562, 568, 571, 576 as comparative category, 70–3 criticisms of, 67–9, 140 ethical malleability, 65–6 not individualist, 82 of care, 568–72 virtue/virtues, 36, 40, 42–4, 66, 67, 337, 686, 807. See happiness and luck, 86–9 and rules, 516, 519 craft metaphor, 79, 139 cultivation, 68, 74, 75, 83, 141, 350, 419, 424, 427, 437, 509, 547, 803, 806 embodied in exemplars. See exemplars epistemic, 839–65 lists, 84, 85, 112, 119, 246, 806 of Amazonian bodies, 670 pedagogy, 79, 83 question of unity of, 106, 570, 854 relational, 281 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 6, 52, 651, 661, 667, 668, 669, 723 Voloshinov, Valentin Nikolaevich, 651 von Uexku¨ll, Jakob, 320, 321 vulnerability, 99, 310, 313, 376, 423, 561, 562, 569, 570, 579, 689, 850. See Nussbaum, Martha:on vulnerability Waldenfels, Bernhard, 375, 376 Walder, Andrew, 889 Walker, Harry, 12, 347, 348 Walsh, Andrew, 286, 295 Wang Yangming, 88 war, 577, 637, 661, 761 Wari’ (Amazonia), 657, 662, 663, 721 Watanabe, Chika, 826, 831 weakness of will, 523

Weber, Max, 43, 55, 234, 264, 433, 434, 442, 488, 494, 514, 527, 552, 732, 734, 735, 736, 740, 742, 749, 752, 761, 830, 831, 844 Wee, Lionel, 287 Weiner, Annette, 632 WEIRD, 189 Weiss, Erica, 365, 379 welfare, 289, 291, 367, 370, 489, 564, 712, 794, 796 well-being, 14, 289, 291, 825. See happiness Weller, Robert P., 15, 391, 736, 751, 823 Werbner, Richard, 298, 464, 465, 475 Westermarck, Edvard, 3, 35, 37 Whiting, John, 540 Widger, Tom, 822, 831, 832 Widlok, Thomas, 515, 632 Wiegele, Katharine, 750 Wikan, Unni, 317, 322, 363 Wilde, Oscar, 824 Willerslev, Rane, 116, 372, 373, 374, 379, 485, 662, 680, 683, 684, 723 Williams, Bernard, 7, 10, 15, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 48, 50, 53, 54, 66, 74, 80, 87, 88, 90, 91, 96–121, 263, 311, 419, 492, 568, 569, 651, 840 ethical inquiry, 117–19 liberalism, 113, 114–15, 116, 117 moral luck, 86, 87, 100, 312 Morality System, 101–2. See Morality System moralized psychology, 106, 111, 113 responsibility, 282 thick ethical concepts, 107 Williams, Delores, 217 Williams, Gareth, 297 Williams, Samuel, 11 Wills, Gary, 706 Wilson, Janet, 300 Winch, Peter, 35, 512, 513 witchcraft/sorcery, 77, 190, 476, 477, 478, 655, 717, 719, 722 witnessing, 691, 817 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 96, 97, 106, 110, 158, 164, 169, 460, 463, 511, 512, 549, 692 Wolf, Susan, 8, 490, 491, 494, 495 Wolfram, Sybil, 3 Wong, David, 37, 54, 98, 184, 491, 492 Woodburn, James, 255 Xi Jinping, 890 Yan, Yunxiang, 877 Yanagisako, Sylvia, 736 Yang Jie, 318, 319 Yang, Mayfair, 116, 722, 736, 739, 769 Yanomani (Amazonia), 715 Yap, 323 Yemen, 773 yoga, 548 Yugoslavia, 877 Yukaghirs (Siberia), 372, 662, 684, 721, 723

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

Zahavi, Dan, 371, 372, 374, 377, 379 Zaloom, Caitlin, 783, 784 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 880 Zigon, Jarrett, 68, 71, 138, 147, 167, 168, 169, 170, 183, 240, 316, 350, 361, 362, 378, 436,

437, 486, 487, 511, 537, 541, 549, 550, 551, 574, 773, 804, 818, 840 Zimbabwe, 750 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 824 Zoanni, Tyler, 565, 571, 572 Zuckerman, Charles, 242

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press

915

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.035 Published online by Cambridge University Press