What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

Abstract

A focus on ordinary or everyday ethics has become perhaps the dominant concern in the rapidly developing anthropology of ethics. In this article, I argue that this focus tends to marginalize the study of the ways in which religion contributes to people's moral lives. After defining religion and transcendence in terms that make them less uncongenial to the study of ethics than many proponents of ordinary ethics suggest, I examine values as one sometimes transcendent cultural form that often informs ethical life. I draw on Victor Turner (along with Durkheim) to develop an account of how rituals often both present people with and allow them to perform transcendent versions of values. These encounters, in turn, shape people's ethical sensibilities, including those they bring to bear in everyday life, in ways we cannot understand unless we accord religion a more central role in the anthropology of ethics than it has played to this point. I illustrate my arguments with material drawn both from Turner's Ndembu ethnography and from my own research on Christianity in Papua New Guinea.

Community fashioning

“…It also sparked important theoretical conversations across different branches of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology (Faubion, 2011; Keane, 2016; Lambek, 2010; Mattingly, 2014; Throop, 2014). Together, these conversations help lay the groundwork for what some have begun to call the new anthropology of ethics (Clarke, 2018a; Robbins, 2016).…”

The ethics and obligations of long‐term ethnographic relationships: revelatory moments and the concept of solidarity

“…Ethics in anthropology can refer both to the ethics of research and to research on ethical systems. In recent years, there has been a wealth of material published debating the nature of ethics as a field of evaluation and judgement (Mattingly 2014) based in everyday life (Keane 2014; Lambek 2010) and in religious systems of morality (Robbins 2016). Models of ethical practice which uphold particular versions of correct conduct, sometimes referred to as morality, have been codified into rules (sometimes called deontological ethics), with this form of ethics linked back to Kant and to contemporary ethical codes of practice (Mattingly & Throop 2018).…”

Over the ruins of subjects: A critique of subjectivism in anthropological discourse

“…Some anthropologists working on ethics and morality have already accounted for this complexity. While some have specifically pointed out the problems with ethical and moral accounts grounded on the figure of the individual, its freedom and subjectivity (Dyring, 2018; Fassin, 2012: 8; 2014; Keane, 2014), others have offered a more nuanced account of ethics which rejects the rigid dichotomy between ‘freedom’ and ‘convention’ (Lambek, 2015; Robbins, 2007, 2016); which looks into ethics in ‘ordinary’ instances of life where such dichotomy is yet to become a theoretical issue (Das, 2015; Lambek, 2010); or which captures the moral breakdowns involved in the ethical domain (Zigon, 2007).…”