Value moves in multiple ways: Ethical values, the anthropology of Christianity, and an example of women and movement

Abstract

How can anthropologists describe ethical values—that is, what emerges as important—in the social, material worlds of Christianity? This article considers the question by working along interfaces. The first part of the article discusses two diverging approaches to values in the anthropology of Christianity (realizing values and producing values) and situates these in relation to three groupings in the anthropology of ethics and morality (deontological ethics, first-person virtue ethics, and poststructuralist virtue ethics). The second part of the article follows one value—the value of movement—in a historical example: the writings of a group of Christian women in 1880s and 1890s Norway. I argue that ethical values move in multiple ways through this social world: people realize values, people produce values and people work on values.

Moving materialities: Oceanic epistemologies and embodied knowledge production in Pentecostal women's health mentorship in Samoa

“…88There are a variety of ways anthropologists have examined movement in Christian practice. Haynes (2017, 37) demonstrates in her analysis of Pentecostal life in the Zambian Copperbelt that “moving is a value, an animate idea that reverberates through symbols and social structures.” Hovland (2021, 6) in her historical ethnography of women missionaries describes how “movement itself” became a “sign of Christianity.” Handman (2019, 68) argues this focus on movement has been largely obscured as the anthropology of religion has largely focused on the interactions of Christianity with local cultures.…”

The Religious Feminist Subject as Material-Discursive Circuit

“…It seems to me that Dons was reading about the creation of women, and was herself being a woman, as iteration: in her reading she was continuously "being created woman" by something else. The religious feminist subject that emerges here might be called a series of "woman-word operations" in which a body and words operated together as a collective ethical agent, not so much working from or toward ethical values in the vein of virtue ethics, as working on ethical values in an iterative process of valuing (Hovland 2022). I argue that this ethical stance is not fully captured by the frame of self-cultivation or selfmaking, but that the feminist subject in this case could instead be seen as an intra-active material-discursive circuit.…”