For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom

Abstract

There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest -hitherto largely absent from anthropology -in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethnographically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism.The argument I present here begins from the observation that despite the interest shown in the matter by some of the very greatest anthropologists our discipline has not developed a body of theoretical reflection on the nature of ethics. I shall assume that this is a deficiency, and that it would therefore be an advance if it could be rectified. And my claim will be that in order to do so we shall need a way of describing the possibilities of human freedom: of describing, that is, how freedom is exercised in different social contexts and cultural traditions. However, freedom is a concept about which anthropology has had strikingly little to say. Malinowski was an honourable exception here -both in his insistence, in Crime and custom (1926), that the Trobriander in particular and the 'savage' in general is not an unthinking slave of custom but a free agent exercising his own judgement and choice; and also in his posthumously published book, Freedom and civilisation (1947), where he considers the social conditions of political freedom. As Ernest Gellner remarked (1998: 141), the case of Malinowski illustrates that it is possible to be a believer in freedom -in its existence and in its value -without necessarily subscribing to an atomistic social ontology, and without denying the importance of the social or cultural in human flourishing.

Introduction to “Moral (and Other) Laboratories”

“…In the last 15 years or so, morality and ethics have emerged as a distinct theoretical problem. In essays that have quickly become canonical, various scholars have tried to explain why a discipline specializing in social relationships took so long to theorize ethics, identifying Durkheim's conflation of morality with ''the social'' as historically consequential (Laidlaw 2002;Robbins 2012a;Zigon 2008). Although one could argue anthropologists have been studying morality and ethics all along, by pointing out that economic exchange, political indoctrination, gender socialization and virtually everything else that involves the regulation of human conduct in the interest of a larger collective constitutes morality, anthropologists of morality would still insist on the absence of theorization itself.…”

“…Although anthropologists studying religion are noticeably at the forefront of the ethical turn, advancing theoretical development in relation to ethnographic work on Jain ascetic practices (Laidlaw 2002), perfecting piety in Egypt (Mahmood 2005), and Christianity in Papua New Guinea (Robbins 2004, Robbins 2012b to name just a few examples, medical anthropologists have been and continue to be in a unique position to theorize morality. The two sub-fields have a lot in common to be sure, having overlapping areas of inquiry.…”

The moral life of epinephrine in the United States

“…A study of moral experience according to them is a study of 'our experiences of the world and how we might struggle to transform these experiences, to rethink them, to interpret them, to reinhabit them, and to reposition ourselves variously as sufferers or actors on the differing scenes that in part constitute our social existence' (Zigon and Throop 2014, 8). James Laidlaw (2014), by contrast, seeks a middle ground between ethnographic concern for the practices of embodied life and the work of moral philosophy. He argues that one challenge before anthropologists is to bring together the practice-oriented dimension of morality suggested by Pierre Bourdieu's (1977) notion of habitus -the idea that what is morally correct is what one learns to do as part of one's culture-and class-specific, embodied training about how to live -with moral philosophical interest in discovering what counts as virtue and the good.…”

Counterparts: Clothing, Value and the Sites of Otherness in Panapompom Ethnographic Encounters

“…The notion of being a counterpart leads me to engage with efforts on the part of PNG people to become the same as or similar to colonial others. This article therefore represents a parallel argument, running the other way; I am concerned with indigenous attempts to achieve similarity to (post-)colonial others, seen as an ethical project of development (Foucault 1997;Laidlaw 2002). My critical targets are not these studies of clothing as such, but anthropological strategies that depend on this difference, represented here, albeit crudely, as the New Melanesian Ethnography.…”