Jarrett Zigon | University of Virginia (original) (raw)
Books by Jarrett Zigon
How is it Between Us?: Relational Ethics and Care for the World, 2024
Jarrett Zigon’s groundbreaking How Is It Between Us? puts anthropology and phenomenological herme... more Jarrett Zigon’s groundbreaking How Is It Between Us? puts anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation to develop a new theory of relational ethics. This ethics takes place in the between, the interaction not just between people, but all existents. Importantly, this theory is utilized as a framework for considering some of today’s most pressing ethical concerns – for example, living in a condition of post-truth and in worlds increasingly driven by algorithms and data extraction, various and competing calls for justice, and the ethical demands of the climate crisis. Written by one of the preeminent contributors to the anthropology of ethics, this book proposes a robust and systematic ethical theory to better address contemporary ethical problems.
Endorsements:
“How Is It Between Us? provides a vital intervention into the limits of existing ethical theories through a careful rethinking of the conditions that have radically transformed our possibilities for existing in the contemporary world. This is without a doubt one of the most important books on ethics to have been published in the last decade or more.”
— C. Jason Throop, author of Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap
“How is it between us? Not great, as Zigon reminds us. But in an era of climate disaster, data mining, and algorithmic policing, this book offers a series of thoughtful reflections on the meaning and practice of relational ethics, shifting our attention from the moral status of individual subjects to the worldly texture of the between.”
— Lisa Guenther, author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives and The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction
“Over the past two decades Jarrett Zigon has been developing an influential approach to the study of ethics grounded in anthropological and phenomenological thought. Many scholars working at the intersection of the social sciences and philosophy have called for a relational ethics. In this book we finally have one that is genuinely original, grounded in rigorous argument, and elegantly presented. Those who have been following Zigon’s work will want to read this, and for those who are new to it, this is now the place to start.”
— Joel Robbins, author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society
If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we... more If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity? A War on People takes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors: users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active and former. The result is a groundbreaking book on how anti–drug war political activity offers transformative processes that are termed worldbuilding and enacts nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key concepts as community, freedom, and care.
Increasingly, anthropologists, political theorists and philosophers are calling for imaginative a... more Increasingly, anthropologists, political theorists and philosophers are calling for imaginative and creative analyses and theories that might help us think and bring about an otherwise. Disappointment responds to this call by showing how collaboration between an anthropologist and a political movement of marginalized peoples can disclose new possibilities for being and acting politically. Drawing from nearly a decade of research with the global anti-drug war movement, Jarrett Zigon puts ethnography in dialogue with both political theory and continental philosophy to rethink some of the most fundamental ontological, political and ethical concepts. The result is to show that ontological starting points have real political implications, and thus, how an alternative ontological starting point can lead to new possibilities for building worlds more ethically attuned to their inhabitants.
HIV is God’s blessing examines the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) role in combating the HIV and ... more HIV is God’s blessing examines the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) role in combating the HIV and drug use epidemics in contemporary Russia. Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork with a ROC rehabilitation and HIV prevention and care program in St. Petersburg, this book is the first anthropological analysis of these epidemics in Russia. Beginning from the perspective of the anthropology of moralities, the book considers such critical issues as therapeutics as self-transformation, religious approaches to the relief of social suffering, HIV and injected drug use in the context of globalization and social change, and rehabilitation as moral training and the cultivation of self-governance and responsibility. Ultimately, it is argued that while the ROC publicly condemns the influences of globalization and the West on post-Soviet Russia, the unintended consequences of the rehabilitation process in the Church-run program is the cultivation of new moral persons better equipped to succeed in the same neoliberal environment the Church blames for the HIV and drug use epidemics in the first place. Thus, by working on the bare life of rehabilitants the program may help individuals overcome drug addiction, but at the same time is cultivating responsibilized citizen-subjects better attuned to a world the Church ultimately opposes.
Book Chapters by Jarrett Zigon
How Is It Between Us? Relational Ethics and Care for the World, 2024
How Is It Between Us? Relational Ethics and Care for the World, 2024
This is chapter 5 of my book How is it between us?, in which I explicate how we can take nonhuman... more This is chapter 5 of my book How is it between us?, in which I explicate how we can take nonhuman entities seriously as ethical beings. In doing so, I consider both life (e.g., nonhuman animals) and nonlife (e.g., climate) as ethical beings.
How is it between us? Relational Ethics and Care for the World, 2024
This is chapter 4 of How is it between us? in which I consider data ethics and AI ethics in terms... more This is chapter 4 of How is it between us? in which I consider data ethics and AI ethics in terms of relational ethics, with a specific focus on the question of privacy.
Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding, 2018
This is the introduction to Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding
A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community, 2019
This is the Introduction to my book A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Commu... more This is the Introduction to my book A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community
This is chapter 3 from my book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. ... more This is chapter 3 from my book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. In this chapter I conceptualize worlds, situations and worldbuilding, and engage other thinkers of these concepts.
Narrative is an emerging concept and analytical focus within the anthropological study of moralit... more Narrative is an emerging concept and analytical focus within the anthropological study of moralities. This is so because narratives are widely seen as a way in which persons make, remake, articulate, interpret, and come to understand meaning in their lives, and as such the analysis of narratives has become central to many anthropological attempts to understand social life in general and moral life in particular. Although narrative analysis began with a focus on stories, since the 1980s what has come to count as narrative has increasingly broadened. Thus, for example, Paul Ricoeur (1992) has argued that identity itself is produced through narrativizing, Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) has argued that " the good " can be realized only within the narrative of one ' s own life as it is lived within the greater narrative of a particular tradition, and Jerome Bruner (1990) has argued that narratives provide a way for creating meaning in what might otherwise be discordant and chaotic experiences. Thus, narrative as an analytical concept, and particularly so in anthropological analyses, often goes beyond a mere story and encompasses all sorts of verbal and nonverbal interactions. Although I consider narratives essential to anthropological analyses of moral and ethical assemblages, and have used them extensively in my own work, I have become skeptical of some of the capacities attributed to narrative. In particular, I have come to seriously question the way in which meaning, mutual understanding, and at times coherence are often highlighted as the most significant outcome of narrative articulations and analysis. Although in my past work I have tried to emphasize the incoherence of narrative " logic " by paying particular attention to the assumptions, contradictions, and veiled references of the narratives of my interlocutors, I have also been attracted to the analytic assumption of the meaning-endowing capacity of narrative (e.g., Zigon 2009 , 2010). In this essay I reconsider this assumption and hope to show that narratives and their analysis can bear the most fruit for the study of moralities when we move away from reading them as meaning-making articulations – and particularly as providing mutual understanding
Articles by Jarrett Zigon
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology , 2024
Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2022
Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2022
International Journal of Drug Policy, 2022
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2021
Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century an... more Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and has significantly shaped contemporary anthropological and social theory. This entry shows the various ways in which phenomenology has contributed to contemporary anthropology. In so doing, it also shows that a better understanding of the phenomenological tradition and what it offers social and historical analysis could further contribute to the development of anthropology as a discipline increasingly concerned with the relational interconnection between humans, nonhumans, and the worlds they variously share. This is done by focusing on phenomenology’s emphasis on ‘conditions of experience,’ and how such conditions shape what and how it is to be human in any situated context. In particular, the entry emphasizes the conditions of being-in-the-world, embodiment, and radical otherness, and shows how each of these have been utilized by phenomenological anthropologists in their analyses of socio-cultural life. Furthermore, the entry stresses that phenomenology has always been a critical endeavor. Historically, this was so in terms of the rethinking of the some of the most fundamental concepts of the so-called Western tradition. More recently, this critical aspect has focused on the ways in which such conditions of experience as race, class, gender, among others, significantly shape the range of possibilities for any experience whatsoever.
How is it Between Us?: Relational Ethics and Care for the World, 2024
Jarrett Zigon’s groundbreaking How Is It Between Us? puts anthropology and phenomenological herme... more Jarrett Zigon’s groundbreaking How Is It Between Us? puts anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation to develop a new theory of relational ethics. This ethics takes place in the between, the interaction not just between people, but all existents. Importantly, this theory is utilized as a framework for considering some of today’s most pressing ethical concerns – for example, living in a condition of post-truth and in worlds increasingly driven by algorithms and data extraction, various and competing calls for justice, and the ethical demands of the climate crisis. Written by one of the preeminent contributors to the anthropology of ethics, this book proposes a robust and systematic ethical theory to better address contemporary ethical problems.
Endorsements:
“How Is It Between Us? provides a vital intervention into the limits of existing ethical theories through a careful rethinking of the conditions that have radically transformed our possibilities for existing in the contemporary world. This is without a doubt one of the most important books on ethics to have been published in the last decade or more.”
— C. Jason Throop, author of Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap
“How is it between us? Not great, as Zigon reminds us. But in an era of climate disaster, data mining, and algorithmic policing, this book offers a series of thoughtful reflections on the meaning and practice of relational ethics, shifting our attention from the moral status of individual subjects to the worldly texture of the between.”
— Lisa Guenther, author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives and The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction
“Over the past two decades Jarrett Zigon has been developing an influential approach to the study of ethics grounded in anthropological and phenomenological thought. Many scholars working at the intersection of the social sciences and philosophy have called for a relational ethics. In this book we finally have one that is genuinely original, grounded in rigorous argument, and elegantly presented. Those who have been following Zigon’s work will want to read this, and for those who are new to it, this is now the place to start.”
— Joel Robbins, author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society
If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we... more If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity? A War on People takes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors: users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active and former. The result is a groundbreaking book on how anti–drug war political activity offers transformative processes that are termed worldbuilding and enacts nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key concepts as community, freedom, and care.
Increasingly, anthropologists, political theorists and philosophers are calling for imaginative a... more Increasingly, anthropologists, political theorists and philosophers are calling for imaginative and creative analyses and theories that might help us think and bring about an otherwise. Disappointment responds to this call by showing how collaboration between an anthropologist and a political movement of marginalized peoples can disclose new possibilities for being and acting politically. Drawing from nearly a decade of research with the global anti-drug war movement, Jarrett Zigon puts ethnography in dialogue with both political theory and continental philosophy to rethink some of the most fundamental ontological, political and ethical concepts. The result is to show that ontological starting points have real political implications, and thus, how an alternative ontological starting point can lead to new possibilities for building worlds more ethically attuned to their inhabitants.
HIV is God’s blessing examines the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) role in combating the HIV and ... more HIV is God’s blessing examines the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) role in combating the HIV and drug use epidemics in contemporary Russia. Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork with a ROC rehabilitation and HIV prevention and care program in St. Petersburg, this book is the first anthropological analysis of these epidemics in Russia. Beginning from the perspective of the anthropology of moralities, the book considers such critical issues as therapeutics as self-transformation, religious approaches to the relief of social suffering, HIV and injected drug use in the context of globalization and social change, and rehabilitation as moral training and the cultivation of self-governance and responsibility. Ultimately, it is argued that while the ROC publicly condemns the influences of globalization and the West on post-Soviet Russia, the unintended consequences of the rehabilitation process in the Church-run program is the cultivation of new moral persons better equipped to succeed in the same neoliberal environment the Church blames for the HIV and drug use epidemics in the first place. Thus, by working on the bare life of rehabilitants the program may help individuals overcome drug addiction, but at the same time is cultivating responsibilized citizen-subjects better attuned to a world the Church ultimately opposes.
How Is It Between Us? Relational Ethics and Care for the World, 2024
How Is It Between Us? Relational Ethics and Care for the World, 2024
This is chapter 5 of my book How is it between us?, in which I explicate how we can take nonhuman... more This is chapter 5 of my book How is it between us?, in which I explicate how we can take nonhuman entities seriously as ethical beings. In doing so, I consider both life (e.g., nonhuman animals) and nonlife (e.g., climate) as ethical beings.
How is it between us? Relational Ethics and Care for the World, 2024
This is chapter 4 of How is it between us? in which I consider data ethics and AI ethics in terms... more This is chapter 4 of How is it between us? in which I consider data ethics and AI ethics in terms of relational ethics, with a specific focus on the question of privacy.
Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding, 2018
This is the introduction to Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding
A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community, 2019
This is the Introduction to my book A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Commu... more This is the Introduction to my book A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community
This is chapter 3 from my book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. ... more This is chapter 3 from my book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. In this chapter I conceptualize worlds, situations and worldbuilding, and engage other thinkers of these concepts.
Narrative is an emerging concept and analytical focus within the anthropological study of moralit... more Narrative is an emerging concept and analytical focus within the anthropological study of moralities. This is so because narratives are widely seen as a way in which persons make, remake, articulate, interpret, and come to understand meaning in their lives, and as such the analysis of narratives has become central to many anthropological attempts to understand social life in general and moral life in particular. Although narrative analysis began with a focus on stories, since the 1980s what has come to count as narrative has increasingly broadened. Thus, for example, Paul Ricoeur (1992) has argued that identity itself is produced through narrativizing, Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) has argued that " the good " can be realized only within the narrative of one ' s own life as it is lived within the greater narrative of a particular tradition, and Jerome Bruner (1990) has argued that narratives provide a way for creating meaning in what might otherwise be discordant and chaotic experiences. Thus, narrative as an analytical concept, and particularly so in anthropological analyses, often goes beyond a mere story and encompasses all sorts of verbal and nonverbal interactions. Although I consider narratives essential to anthropological analyses of moral and ethical assemblages, and have used them extensively in my own work, I have become skeptical of some of the capacities attributed to narrative. In particular, I have come to seriously question the way in which meaning, mutual understanding, and at times coherence are often highlighted as the most significant outcome of narrative articulations and analysis. Although in my past work I have tried to emphasize the incoherence of narrative " logic " by paying particular attention to the assumptions, contradictions, and veiled references of the narratives of my interlocutors, I have also been attracted to the analytic assumption of the meaning-endowing capacity of narrative (e.g., Zigon 2009 , 2010). In this essay I reconsider this assumption and hope to show that narratives and their analysis can bear the most fruit for the study of moralities when we move away from reading them as meaning-making articulations – and particularly as providing mutual understanding
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology , 2024
Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2022
Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2022
International Journal of Drug Policy, 2022
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2021
Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century an... more Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and has significantly shaped contemporary anthropological and social theory. This entry shows the various ways in which phenomenology has contributed to contemporary anthropology. In so doing, it also shows that a better understanding of the phenomenological tradition and what it offers social and historical analysis could further contribute to the development of anthropology as a discipline increasingly concerned with the relational interconnection between humans, nonhumans, and the worlds they variously share. This is done by focusing on phenomenology’s emphasis on ‘conditions of experience,’ and how such conditions shape what and how it is to be human in any situated context. In particular, the entry emphasizes the conditions of being-in-the-world, embodiment, and radical otherness, and shows how each of these have been utilized by phenomenological anthropologists in their analyses of socio-cultural life. Furthermore, the entry stresses that phenomenology has always been a critical endeavor. Historically, this was so in terms of the rethinking of the some of the most fundamental concepts of the so-called Western tradition. More recently, this critical aspect has focused on the ways in which such conditions of experience as race, class, gender, among others, significantly shape the range of possibilities for any experience whatsoever.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021
In this article, I engage the recent debate on transcendence/the transcendental within the anthro... more In this article, I engage the recent debate on transcendence/the transcendental within the anthropology of ethics with the claim that 'How is it between us?' is the most fundamental of all ethical questions. In doing so, I contrast relational ethics with ordinary ethics to show that ethics begins with a demand that emerges from a situation within which one finds oneself with others; a demand that pulls one out of oneself to respond in a modality of concern and care for the between where we dwell together. This attuned response is both an ethical and a political one; a response that opens possibilities for being-together-otherwise. Such possibilities, I argue throughout, can only begin with a relational ethics. I illustrate this with an ethnographic example from harm reduction practice and anti-drug war political activity in both New York City and Vancouver, Canada.
Social Research: An International Quarterly, 2019
Ethics is a growing concern in the realm of data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and data-... more Ethics is a growing concern in the realm of data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and data-centric technologies in general. There are good reasons for this. We are all familiar with concerns over such issues as data privacy, data-driven surveillance, and the increased intertwining of the data industry with the finance industry and the so-called defense industry. We are all familiar with the fact that data-extracting and data-driven algorithms increasingly regulate the temporal , affective, and intersubjective modalities of everyday life. And we are all familiar with how this regulation-along with the sometimes over-the-top, but sometimes legitimate, concerns of how AI may change the very definition of the human, as well as life itself-is increasingly of not only ethical but also existential concern. Indeed, there are good reasons we are experiencing what I would call an ethical demand made by the data-centric situation in which we now find ourselves. In this essay, I will discuss the dominant ways in which ethics is talked about vis-à-vis data-centric practices and technologies today. I will then turn to a more adequate ethical response to the demand of our current data-centric situation: this is what I call relational ethics.
In this essay I offer a new conception of situation through a delineation of the situation named ... more In this essay I offer a new conception of situation through a delineation of the situation named drug war and the politics that have emerged out of it. I explore how what I have learned from the anti-drug war movement in terms of what they see themselves addressing, how they address it, and how they organize may help anthropologists rethink their own objects of study. I hope to show that the concept of situation significantly adds to anthropological knowledge because it allows us to consider that which is widely diffused across different global scales as a non-totalizable assemblage, but yet in its occasional and temporary local manifestation allows us to understand how persons and objects that are geographically, socio-economically, and “culturally” distributed get caught up in the shared conditions that emerge from the situation. Furthermore, this conception is offered in response to recent concerns within and outside of anthropology that new and creative attempts must be made in the analysis of and engagement with the worlds we study. I argue that by being attuned to hidden potential in the worlds we research, and creatively and speculatively conceptualizing such potential, we can offer a uniquely anthropological contribution and engagement in social and political projects of becoming otherwise.
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2014
Cultural Anthropology, 2013
American Ethnologist, 2013
Anthropological Theory, 2007
Current Anthropology, 2021
This is a review of my book A War on People by Matthew McCoy
Ethnos, 2019
This is Fiona Wright's review of my book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldb... more This is Fiona Wright's review of my book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding
American Ethnologist, 2019
This is Joshua Burraway's review of my book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Wor... more This is Joshua Burraway's review of my book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding
Cheryl Mattingly's review of my book "HIV is God's Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neolibera... more Cheryl Mattingly's review of my book "HIV is God's Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia."
The American Journal of Bioethics, 2021
Decameron Relived - Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2020
This is a very short story written as part of the Decameron Relived project. It imagines life aft... more This is a very short story written as part of the Decameron Relived project. It imagines life after the Virus when AI has been in charge of the recovery.
Recently, political anthropologists and theorists have attempted to address two interrelated conc... more Recently, political anthropologists and theorists have attempted to address two interrelated concerns. The first is a seemingly widespread lack of motivation for participating in political activity. The second is a political and intellectual focus on critique, rather than on offering alternatives for possible futures. Addressing these two problematics is increasingly urgent in a time characterized by disappointment, anxiety, and precarity . . .
Anthropology Today, 2010
Based on a three-year project entitled ‘Religion and morality in European Russia’ (2006-2009), th... more Based on a three-year project entitled ‘Religion and morality in European Russia’ (2006-2009), the authors focus on contemporary Russian Orthodoxy. Ath this time, they were based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle Germany, Department for Socialist and Postsocialist Eurasia’ (see www.eth.mpg.de).