(2011) Embodying Moralities: Toward the Possibility of Togetherness in Anthropological Relationships. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Anthropology of Morality, 2020
Anthropologists frequently make reference to the moral aspects of the institutions, groups or societies they study. However, while the economy, religion, politics and so on have been constituted as subfields within anthropology (even if it is understood that these are not in the end clearly bounded domains), it is much less common to talk about the anthropology of morality. This essay is an attempt to contribute to the relatively small body of literature which aims to establish such a field through a comparative examination of two ethnographic sketches, one taken from Uzbekistan and the other from Romania. It does not set out to give a definitive answer to the question of what morality is, nor to draw exclusive boundaries around a field of morality. Such an exercise would be as futile in the case of morality as it has proved to be for the fields of politics, kinship, religion and the economy. At the same time, however, if we want to develop analytical tools for the study of morality...
Moral breakdown and the ethical demand: A theoretical framework for an anthropology of moralities
Anthropological Theory, 2007
Recently social scientists in general and anthropologists in particular have invoked the concept of morality in their studies. The use of this concept is seen by many as a way to bypass the complexities and contradictions of such traditional social scientific concepts as culture, society and power. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly evident that in many of these studies morality is used in a way that may be more reminiscent of the moral understanding of the social scientist than that of their subjects. Therefore, a well-founded anthropology of moralities must break from this assumption and rethink the ways in which the moral can be explicitly studied. By engaging in a dialogue with 20th-century continental philosophies of sociality and ethics, this article articulates a theory and model by which an explicit anthropology of moralities becomes possible. Two ethnographic examples, utilizing very different methodological techniques and focusing on two very different societies, are used to illustrate the strength of this theory as a framework for a proper anthropological study of local moralities.
A Companion to Moral Anthropology edited by Didier Fassin
The Blackwell Companions to Anthropology offers a series of comprehensive syntheses of the traditional subdisciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry for the field. Taken together, the series represents both a contemporary survey of anthropology and a cutting edge guide to the emerging research and intellectual trends in the field as a whole.
Current debates and critiques on moral anthropology
Anthropology Journal, 2020
Cultural anthropology shows a significant interest in the study of morality and ethics with its aim to understand the local contexts and human narratives. Actions and practices pertaining to the domain of morality create not only questions for cultural anthropologists to take into consideration but also immensely construct the social worlds in which the individual subjects for our anthropological inquiry are shaped. Considering how distinct cultural localities result in various ways in which morality is manifested and experienced, this article is concerned with current debates and critiques of moral anthropology as well as the essential function of cultural values within the anthropological study of morality.
It seems that nowadays everybody is talking about morality, using words and images relating to it. Didier Fassin and Samuel Lézé provide their readers with the opportunity to dwell on the topic of moral anthropology with their anthology ranging from works dating to previous centuries and up to very recent papers. In this reader, anthropological and philosophical engagements with morality are combined, in which philosophy is crucial as a discipline that has long been reflecting on the topic and which has inspired many anthropological works. With their anthology, Fassin and Lézé attempt a critique of moral anthropology while simultaneously demonstrating how intensively morality emerges in the field of anthropology. Despite targeting a mainly scientific audience, the book is also relevant to a general audience interested in moral or ethical questions.
Moral psychology: an anthropological perspective
Moral psychology: a multidisciplinary guide, 2018
It is in many ways the traditional task of anthropology to point out exceptions to rules. Provide us with a generalisation about human behaviour and we will describe to you a far corner of the world in which it does not hold. This has to a large extent been true of our dealings with moral psychology, as I detail below, and it will come as no surprise to many readers that relativism, or at least rhetorical invocations of it, has long been a staple of anthropological approaches to morality. But as this chapter will describe, recent developments in the anthropological study of ethics have led many anthropologists interested in the subject to reconfigure their understandings of the universal and the particular in relation to morality. It remains a matter of empirical fact that people across the world think differently about what constitutes right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice, and anthropologists continue to document that variety. But it is equally a matter of empirical fact that people across the world do indeed think about such things -that they exercise judgement and reflection about courses of action, ways of attributing responsibility, consequences, behavioural norms, and the like. As I outline below, for us to be able to account seriously and scrupulously for the differences between how people think about ethics, many anthropologists have come to believe that we must possess a coherent vision of what ethics actually means, and an explanation for how it is that people do all seem to think about how they ought to live, even though they do so differently.
Towards a Critical Moral Anthropology
La Lettre De L Ecole Des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales, 2012
To deal usefully with the relationship between morality and the social sciences one must first realize that modern social science arose to a considerable extent in the process of emancipating itself from the traditional moral teachings. Albert Hirschman, "Morality and the Social Sciences", 1980 If the moral domain corresponds to what people treat as the ultimate terms of their existence, of their lives together, of their fates, then moral concerns are concerns with the integrity of cultural life, with the nature, significance, potential, and viability of the life that culture makes possible and makes necessary. Steven Parish, Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City, 1994 The attempt to coin the expression "moral anthropology" seems immediately and irremediably doomed from the start by its Kantian paternity. Indeed, it is often considered that the author of the Metaphysics of Morals invented this phrase to define his project of "applied moral philosophy", as an empirical counterpoint to his theoretical metaphysica pura (Louden 2003). "Moral anthropology, he writes, is morality applied to human beings". Although he never formulated a comprehensive description of this part of his practical philosophy-"the second part of morals", as he designates it-one can understand, through the lectures he gave, that it is definitely a normative enterprise which aims at contributing to the fulfillment of the moral laws he has characterized. In this sense, anthropology is a tool for the implementation of morals regarding human beings. But it deals not with individuals or cultures, as one would expect: it concerns the "human species" as a whole and its accomplishment through moral progress. It is universalistic in essence. Understood in this way, Kant's anthropology has little to do with Boas' relativist anthropology, and one can assume that very few of those who think of themselves as anthropologists would view their practice in the filiation of the master of Koenisgberg. Yet, dismissing the moral dimension of anthropology in its Kantian sense might be less facile to do, since from Mead's Coming of Age to Lévi-Strauss' Race et Histoire, to recent public
New Directions in the Anthropology of Morality
2014
In this article we seek to develop a common theoretical language and stake out particular positions on key issues in the growing debates about the anthropological study of morality. First, we advocate for a pluralistic stance in approaches to moral variation – one that maintains the possibility of moral realism and at times even argues explicitly for it. Second, we work to define the domain of morality in more detail, especially in its relation to other domains of experience, including personhood, emotion, and life course. Third, we argue for a new approach to the issues of freedom and moral action. Together, these arguments articulate key conceptual areas of concern for anthropologists interested in morality, and we suggest some theoretical stances on each of them.
In a programmatic article, published in late 2008 in Anthropological Theory, the French anthropologist Didier Fassin explores the vexed question whether anthropology should be moral or not. Observing a general discomfort with the question of morality in the discipline of anthropology, Fassin argues that such a discomfort might actually serve a valuable heuristic function for the development of a moral anthropology in the near future. What Fassin means by moral anthropology is essentially a form of empirical inquiry that investigates how social agents articulate and negotiate moral claims in local contexts. In this response to Fassin's article, I address a crucial challenge at the heart of moral anthropology, or the anthropology of ethics, as I prefer to call it. The challenge is to bring the anthropology of ethics into a productive relationship with the ethics of anthropology. Building on Fassin's argument, I suggest that the discomfort with ethics indeed serves a valuable heuristic function because it is the spontaneous articulation of an ethics of discomfort.