Theory as ethics

Abstract

To theorize is to make an argument, to make sense of the world, to name and create. It is to stake a claim in and about the world. This can be an ethical act. But it has not always been one. Thinking of theory as ethics, rather than solely as intellectual practice, requires a rethinking of the purpose and not just the content of theory. This is not a prescription for theory but an acknowledgment of a shift underway across the disciplines. In anthropology, one key move is our recognition of ethnography as theory as well as method. As we reassess theory as a form of ethnographic knowledge, how and when do ethics enter the conversation? What are our responsibilities to speak not only truth to power, but also ethics to theory? [ethnography, theory, ethics, anthropology, fieldwork, refusal, relations, storytelling]

Patchwork ethnography

“…Anthropologists often point out that we “are not merely conducting research, but are connected to the places where we work through familial ties, diasporic relationships, and investments in political struggles, all of which hold us accountable even after our departure” (Berry et al., 2017, p. 540; see also Annavarapu, 2021; Saluk, 2017). The anthropologist is not (and perhaps never was) an autonomous outsider who can enter and leave a field site without relational entanglements (McGranahan, 2022), especially as many now do fieldwork in their countries and towns of origin. Furthermore, as one of the reviewers noted, in this globalized and digitized world, researchers maintain contact with interlocutors via communication technologies even outside of fieldwork periods 4.…”

Privileged observers and colonial continuities

“…Although our ways of working now accommodate incorporation into interdisciplinary teams and are open to models of practice beyond the lone fieldworker (Holmes & Marcus, 2008), the products of this scholarship are seldom accorded the reputational credibility attributed to single‐authored disciplinary texts. Struggles to reformat anthropological practice, like much of our authorship and ethnographic fieldwork, remain largely personal, premised on the self as primary research instrument and analyst (McGranahan, 2022; Shah, 2017). Within this paradigm, revolutionizing anthropological praxis rests on the agency of the individual ethnographer rather than on our collective efforts to significantly change the relations through which someone acquires expert status as a producer of anthropological knowledge.…”

Anthropology at sea

“…In a recent essay, Carole McGranahan (2022) examines the interweaving of the ethical and theoretical in a call to think "theory as ethics." Emphasizing, powerfully, how this form of theory making is intimate, collaborative, and, importantly, grounded in ethnography, McGranahan calls on researchers to take seriously the kinds of worlds and responsibilities that come with anthropological theorizing.…”

“…In a recent essay, Carole McGranahan (2022) examines the interweaving of the ethical and theoretical in a call to think “theory as ethics.” Emphasizing, powerfully, how this form of theory making is intimate, collaborative, and, importantly, grounded in ethnography, McGranahan calls on researchers to take seriously the kinds of worlds and responsibilities that come with anthropological theorizing. From modes of “ex‐centric theorizing” that foreground questions of what theory is and who produces it (Harrison, 1991) to the “return of ethnographic theory” (Graeber & Da Col, 2011), which underscores ethnography as a form and location of producing knowledge, ethnography has been more than mere method for anthropology.…”