The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics (Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology) 1108482805, 9781108482806

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The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant developments in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established and emerging leaders in the field and makes the results of this fast-growing body of diverse research available in one volume. Topics covered include: the philosophical and other intellectual sources of the ethical turn; inter-disciplinary dialogues; emerging conceptualizations of core aspects of ethical agency such as freedom, responsibility, and affect; and the diverse ways in which ethical thought and practice are institutionalized in social life, both intimate and institutional. Authoritative and cutting-edge, it is essential reading for researchers and students in anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and theology and will set the agenda for future research in the field. is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King’s College. He is the author of The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (with Caroline Humphrey,1994), Riches and Renunciation (1995), and The Subject of Virtue (2014), and the editor of The Essential Edmund Leach (with Stephen Hugh-Jones, 2000), Ritual and Memory (with Harvey Whitehouse, 2004), Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science (with Harvey Whitehouse, 2007), and Recovering the Human Subject (with Barbara Bodenhorn and Martin Holbraad, 2018). JAMES LAIDLAW

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cambridge handbooks in anthropology

Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a subdiscipline or major topic of anthropological study and research. Grouped into broad thematic areas, the chapters in each volume encompass the most important issues and themes within each subject, offering a coherent picture of the latest theories and findings. Together, the volumes will build into an integrated overview of the discipline in its entirety.

Published Titles The Cambridge Handbook of Kinship, edited by Sandra Bamford The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Luann De Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber

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The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics Edited by James Laidlaw University of Cambridge

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108482806 DOI: 10.1017/9781108591249 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-108-48280-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Contributors 1 Introduction

page vii

James Laidlaw

1

Part I Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements 2 Moral and Political Philosophy Hallvard Lillehammer 3 Virtue Ethics Jonathan Mair 4 Agonistic Pluralists: Three Philosophers of Value Conflict James Laidlaw and Patrick McKearney 5 The Two Faces of Michel Foucault Paolo Heywood 6 Phenomenology Samuel Williams 7 Cognitive Science Natalia Buitron and Harry Walker 8 Theology Michael Banner Part II Aspects of Ethical Agency 9 Making the Ethical in Social Interaction 10 11 12 13 14 15

35 65 96 130 155 177 205 229

Webb Keane and

Michael Lempert Freedom Soumhya Venkatesan Responsibility Catherine Trundle Emotion and Affect Teresa Kuan Happiness and Well-Being Edward F. Fischer and Sam Victor Suffering and Sympathy Abby Mack and C. Jason Throop Ambiguity and Difference: Notation, Ritual, and Shared Experience in Constructing Pluralism Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller

Part III Media and Modes of Ethical Practice 16 Self-Cultivation Joanna Cook 17 Exemplars Nicholas H. A. Evans 18 Ritual Letha Victor and Michael Lambek 19 Values Julian Sommerschuh and Joel Robbins

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231 251 281 309 335 359

389 409 411 433 460 485

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20 Rules Morgan Clarke 21 On Ethical Pedagogies

James D. Faubion

Part IV Intimate and Everyday Life 22 Care Cheryl Mattingly and Patrick McKearney 23 Kinship and Love Perveez Mody 24 Cooperation and Punishment Anni Kajanus and Charles Stafford 25 Favours David Henig and Nicolette Makovicky 26 The Inimical Gaze: Morality and the Reproduction of Sociality in Amazonia Carlos D. London˜o Sulkin 27 Animals and More-Than-Representational Ethics Rosie Jones

McVey 28 God

T. M. Luhrmann

508 536 559 561 591 610 629

649 677 706

Part V Institutional Life 729 29 Modern Capitalism and Ethical Plurality Robert W. Hefner 731 30 The Ethics of Commerce and Trade Paul Anderson and Magnus 31 32 33 34

Marsden Activism and Political Organization Sian Lazar Philanthropy China Scherz Science: The Anthropology of Science As an Anthropology of Ethics (and Vice Versa) Matei Candea Communist Morality under Socialism Yunxiang Yan

Index

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760 791 817 839 871 897

Contributors

Paul Anderson is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Acting Director of the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, and is the author of Exchange Ideologies: Commerce, Language, and Patriarchy in Preconflict Aleppo (2023). Michael Banner is Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His publications include Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (1999), Christian Ethics (2009), and The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human (2014). Natalia Buitron is Jessica Sainsbury Assistant Professor in the Anthropology of Amazonia at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College. Her current research connects Indigenous politics and political theory to explore the plurality of Indigenous sovereignties emerging from Amazonia. Matei Candea is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King’s College. His publications on anthropological epistemology and the anthropology of science include Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method (2018), ‘I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat’, American Ethnologist (2010), and ‘Suspending Belief: Epoche´ in Animal Behaviour Science’, American Anthropologist (2013). Morgan Clarke is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Keble College. His publications include Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from Anthropology and History (2021). Joanna Cook is Reader in Anthropology at University College London and the author of Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life (2010) and Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty-First Century (2023).

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Nicholas H. A. Evans is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the author of Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian (2020), and a co-editor of Against Better Judgment: Akrasia in Anthropological Perspective (2023). James D. Faubion is Radoslav Tsanoff Chair and Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and the author of An Anthropology of Ethics (2011). Edward F. Fischer is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing Initiative at Vanderbilt University; he is the author of The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing (2014). Robert W. Hefner is Professor of Anthropology and Global Affairs at the Pardee School of Global Affairs at Boston University. He has authored or edited twenty-two books and organized eighteen international conferences, drawing on specialists from political science, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, and law. With Zainal Abidin Bagir of Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia), between 2019 and 2022 he co-produced five documentary films on ‘Indonesian Pluralities: Religious Diversity and Citizen Belonging’. David Henig is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, a co-editor of Economies of Favour After Socialism (2016) and Where Is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy (2022), and the author of Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (2020). Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Durham. Prior to this he was Junior Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees. He is the author of After Difference (2018) and a number of contributions to debates over anthropology’s ‘ontological turn’. Rosie Jones McVey is Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, with research interests in human–animal relationships, ethics, and mental health. Her publications include ‘Responsible Doubt and Embodied Conviction: Infrastructure of Embodied Horse/Human Partnership’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2017), ‘An Ethnographic Account of the British Equestrian Virtue of Bravery, and Its Implications for Equine Welfare’, Animals (2021), and Human-Horse Relations and the Ethics of Knowing (2023). Anni Kajanus is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. Her publications include ‘Children’s Understanding of Dominance and Prestige in China and the UK’, Evolution and Human Behavior (2020) and ‘Mutualistic vs Zero-Sum Modes of Competition: A Comparative Study of Children’s Competitive

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List of Contributors

Motivations and Behaviours in China’, Social Anthropology (2019). Her current research is on irritation in connection to morality and cooperation. Webb Keane is George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in Anthropology, University of Michigan, and the author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (2016), Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (2007), Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (1997), and Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives (2015, with Michael Lambek, Veena Das, and Didier Fassin). Teresa Kuan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the author of Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Childrearing in Contemporary China (2015). Michael Lambek is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where he also held a Canada Research Chair. His publications include The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Madagascar (2002), Ordinary Ethics: Language, Anthropology, and Action (ed., 2010), A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion (ed., 2013), The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value (2016), Island in the Stream (2018), and Concepts and Persons (2021). Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College. Her publications include El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (2008), The Anthropology of Citizenship: A Reader (2013), The Social Life of Politics: Ethics, Kinship, and Union Activism in Argentina (2017), and How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour (2023). Michael Lempert is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, the author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (2012), a co-author of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message and the American Presidency (2012, with Michael Silverstein), and a co-editor of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life (2016, with E. Summerson Carr). Hallvard Lillehammer is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Social Sciences, History, and Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His publications include ‘Consequentialism and Global Ethics’ in M. Boylan (ed.), The Morality and Global Justice Reader (2011), ‘Ethics, Evolution and the A Priori: Ross on Spencer and the French Sociologists’ in R. Richards and M. Ruse (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics (2017), and ‘The Nature and Ethics of Indifference’, Journal of Ethics (2017). Carlos D. London˜o Sulkin is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Regina and the author of People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon (2012).

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T. M. Luhrmann is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and the author of (among other books) Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989), When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012), and How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020). Abby Mack is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Weber State University. Jonathan Mair has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Manchester, and Kent and is now a visiting researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid. His publications include ‘The Anthropology of Buddhism’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion (2023) and he is the editor of The Anthropology of Ignorance (2012) and the special edition, ‘Ethics across Borders: Difference, Affinity, and Incommensurability’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2015). Nicolette Makovicky is Lecturer in Russian and East European Studies, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She is the editor of Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies (2014) and a co-editor of Economies of Favour after Socialism (2016) and Slogans: Subjection, Subversion, and the Politics of Neoliberalism (2018). Magnus Marsden is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sussex and the author of Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience on Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier (2005), Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers (2016), and Beyond the Silk Roads: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics across Eurasia (2021). Cheryl Mattingly is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy at Aarhus University. Her book publications include Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (1998), The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland (2010), Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (2014), Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (2018), and Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Perilous World (2022). Patrick McKearney is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. He is a co-editor of several books and journal articles, including Against Better Judgment: Akrasia in Anthropological Perspective (2023) and ‘For an Anthropology of Cognitive Disability’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2018). His recent publications include ‘The Limits of Knowing Other Minds: Intellectual Disability and the Challenge of Opacity’, Social Analysis (2021) and ‘Disabling Violence:

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Intellectual Disability and the Limits of Ethical Engagement’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2022). Perveez Mody is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King’s College. Her publications include The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi (2008), Marriage: Rites and Rights (2015), and Spaces of Care (2020). Joel Robbins is Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College. His publications include Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (2004) and Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (2020). China Scherz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia and the author of Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda (2014). Adam B. Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University. Winner of the Leopold Lucas Prize in 2020, he has a long history of writing about and struggling to achieve pluralism. His books include The Idea of Civil Society (1992), The Problem of Trust (1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (2000), and Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (2015). His long-standing collaboration with Robert Weller has resulted in multiple joint publications including three co-authored books: Ritual and Its Consequences (2008), Rethinking Pluralism (2012), and How Things Count as the Same (2019). Julian Sommerschuh is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hamburg His publications include ‘From Feasting to Accumulation: Modes of Value Realization and Radical Cultural Change in Southern Ethiopia’, Ethnos (2020) and ‘Respectable Conviviality: Solving Value Conflicts through Orthodox Christianity’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2021). Charles Stafford is Professor of Anthropology and Pro Director, Faculty Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the editor of Ordinary Ethics in China (2013), a co-editor of Cooperation in Chinese Communities (2018), and the author of Economic Life in the Real World: Logic, Emotion and Ethics (2020). C. Jason Throop is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of California–Los Angeles. He is the author of Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (2010) and editor of The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies (2011). Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the Department of Public Health, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia. She is the

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author of Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion and Belonging (2015) and a co-editor of Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking (2015) and Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life (2017). Soumhya Venkatesan is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her publications include Craft Matters: Artisans, Development, and the Indian Nation (2009), ‘Giving and Taking without Reciprocity: Conversations in South India and the Anthropology of Ethics’, Social Analysis (2016), and ‘Putting Together the Anthropology of Tax and the Anthropology of Ethics’, Social Analysis (2020). Her current research is on libertarian activists in the UK. Letha Victor has taught anthropology and religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in publications such as Anthropological Theory (2019), the Journal of Eastern African Studies (2017), and most recently Bruce-Lockhart et al.’s Decolonising State and Society in Uganda (2022). Sam Victor is a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University’s School for Religious Studies and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal (CIRM). His research examines the intersections of ethics and knowledge in the context of religious pluralism. Harry Walker is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His current research seeks to build a dialogue between anthropology, philosophy, and psychology in order better to understand the changing moral and political landscape in Amazonia. Robert P. Weller is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan (2001) and Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan (2006), and a coauthor of Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies (2018). His long-standing collaboration with Adam Seligman has resulted in multiple joint publications including three co-authored books: Ritual and Its Consequences (2008), Rethinking Pluralism (2012), and How Things Count as the Same (2019). Samuel Williams is a research fellow in the Department of Anthropology of Economic Experimentation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork on contemporary commerce in a number of historic marketplaces in Istanbul, and his current research focusses on the intellectual history of post-World War II US anthropology. Yunxiang Yan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California–Los Angeles. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and

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Social Networks in a Chinese Village (1996), Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999 (2003), and The Individualization of Chinese Society (2009) and the editor of Chinese Families Upside Down: Intergenerational Dynamics and Neo-Familism in the Early 21st Century (2021). His research interests include family and kinship, social change, the individual and individualization, and moral transformation in China.

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1 Introduction James Laidlaw

Two apparently contradictory things are both true about the anthropology of ethics. It is true that the academic discipline of anthropology has been concerned with ethics and morality throughout its whole history. It is also true that until the last couple of decades there was nothing that could reasonably be called the anthropology of ethics. Its advent has been felt to be such a distinct development that we are routinely said to have undergone an ‘ethical turn’, yet people also feel moved, equally routinely, to point out that anthropologists have been writing about morality all along, and they are indeed correct in saying this. So, what exactly is new? As the chapters in this book demonstrate, there is no single theoretical orientation that defines or dominates the anthropology of ethics. Approaches are diverse and by no means straightforwardly reconcilable. There is not even agreed nomenclature. The title of this volume uses ‘the anthropology of ethics’ as a broad encompassing term for several overlapping styles of enquiry. I shall also use ‘morality’ both as a rough synonym for ethics, in line with normal English-language usage, and in a slightly technical sense for a subset of the wider phenomenon, as described later. Some anthropologists (including some contributors to this volume) prefer to talk of the anthropology of moralities, or the good, or values, or ‘moral anthropology’. Significant differences lie behind some of these choices. The field is united only by a very general proposition: that enough of the time to make a difference, people act in accordance with evaluations they make, including affective responses they have to their own and others’ conduct, and they do this in light of ideas, ideals, and values that they hold. Explicitly and implicitly, consistently and inconsistently, concertedly and by-the-way as they go about their everyday lives, they act in ways that constitute at least partial answers to the questions of how one ought to live and what kind of life is a good life. This pervasive evaluative dimension of human social life, whose conditions, forms, affordances, and variations we have hardly begun to delineate, is the subject of the anthropology of ethics. The ideas, ideals, and values involved in these processes are of course social phenomena, as are the relationships, practices, and

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institutions in which they are embodied and expressed, and so the implication of this proposition, for anthropologists, is that studying human social life necessarily involves the study of ethics, and equally, to study ethics is to study forms of social life. This last point is one reason why the anthropology of ethics has important implications beyond anthropology. Given the very general nature of this underlying proposition, it is unsurprising and indeed productive that the anthropology it has motivated has taken diverse forms. But the diversity is not without limit. Although little else may be agreed upon, any form of the anthropology of ethics must, I think, constitutionally oppose two positions that are quite widely held, though often unconsciously, and not only by anthropologists. It must deny that the ethical is unimportant or illusory. And it must deny that we already know what it fundamentally is. Understanding why these denials need to be asserted, and why they are related, helps to clarify what is new about the anthropology of ethics as it has developed in recent decades. That said, it must be added that the interpretation that follows of these two precepts is mine alone: once again, the anthropology of ethics is a vibrantly diverse field characterized by lively disagreements and debates. Contributors to this volume are not committed as such to any, still less to all, of what follows in this introductory chapter. The idea that the ethical is unimportant or illusory is not incompatible with acknowledging that moral rules and values vary between societies, or with ethnographic description, even quite rich and detailed description, of this variation. It is possible, and for a long time in anthropology it was fairly routine practice, to describe the varying rules and values found in diverse societies, to see and acknowledge that human social life is shot through with ethical language, reflection, affect, response, and interaction, but for this not to give rise to sustained theoretical reflection on this ethical dimension of human life or on what its implications might be for how we understand social relations. Anthropological theorizing focussed very little on trying to understand ethics. In what kinds and aspects of interactions, practices, and institutions is it manifest, and how do these differ across space and time? What implications does it have for what we can know about human sociality? Not asking such questions was possible because and insofar as it was thought, or implicitly assumed, that all this is relatively unimportant or epiphenomenal in relation to more determinant structures or forces. Social life might, on the surface, be full of talk and action that seems to refer to ethical values and ideals, but it might nevertheless be that underneath, something harder is determining what really happens, which makes it possible to explain prevalent moral rules and values and their variation, and how people abide by them or not, as the effects of causal forces such as biological and social evolution, stages in technological development, systems of production, class conflict, or the interplay of forces of power and domination. Moral ideas and values might be edifying,

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Introduction

and people might genuinely believe in them and think they are motivated by them, but because these ideals and values are detached from and contrary to the underlying realities of life, they have only a superficial impact on how things are really organized and who does what and to whom. Really, whatever people may think or say, social life is driven, in the most influential versions of this reductionism, by the realities of power and the pursuit of self-interest. Beneath the surface, it is a zero-sum game of power and domination and maximization of advantage in wealth and status. Everything else is ideology: insubstantial illusion, strategic disguise, or self-deception. Probably few anthropologists have ever really thought this consistently, especially about the people whose lives they have shared in extended participant-observation (or indeed in their own lives). And good ethnographic description always makes clear that there is much more than this to any given form of social life. For these reasons, the tendency to take an explicitly dismissive and eliminative approach to ethics has been rarer, and more often protested against, among anthropologists than in most other social-science disciplines. Throughout its history, beginning with figures now recognized as immediate precursors to modern social and cultural anthropology such as Marett (1902) and Westermarck (1906–8) as well as Durkheim (1973 [1914]), through mid-century figures such as Evans-Pritchard (1950), there were eloquent recognitions that anthropology is a ‘science of moral life’ and concerned with ‘moral facts’, and that this made the discipline distinctive among approaches to the study of humanity. But although there were repeated attempts to give this conviction sustained expression in the formulation of social theory, and to conceive of a form of anthropological theory for the study of morality (examples include Firth 1951; Kluckhohn 1951; Read 1955; Edel and Edel 1968 [1959]; Gluckman 1972; Wolfram 1982; Pocock 1986), none prevailed against the persistent and mostly unarticulated tendency to think that explanation requires the critical reduction of the phenomena of ethical life to a purportedly underlying reality. Metaphors of appearance and substance, or base and superstructure; imagery of ‘structure’ as a reality that lies deeper than experience, or of ‘ideology’ as inversion, mask, or disguise; and ideas of culture as a local idiom in which universal global dynamics are expressed all make possible – though, of course, they never require – the explaining away of what people understand to be their motivations, values, ideals, and aspirations as no more than the effects of postulated entities, structures, or forces, imagined as existing on a larger scale or at a deeper level or in a different temporal realm to the people whose conduct they are said to cause. For much of the history of social theory, many have assumed that performing a reduction of this kind is just what it is to practise (or commit) a social science. Given this inheritance, it takes a concerted effort to resist these reductionist tendencies, to subject the phenomena of ethical life – so routine and pervasive as to be

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easily taken for granted – to reflective focus and analytical attention, as realities in their own right and irreducible, essential facets of human social life. I think that part of the explanation for why this concerted effort began to be made in anthropology around the turn of the millennium was that at that time its negation was being asserted so uncompromisingly. But one needs to begin slightly further back. In 1984, Sherry Ortner published an influential survey of anthropological theory since the 1960s (Ortner 1984), in which she proposed that the central theoretical problem social theory should concern itself with was the relation between structure and agency: how to theorize the determination of social life by larger structures in such a way as to make it compatible with the agency of individuals. This was the agenda for what became known as ‘practice theory’. From the point of view of the anthropology of ethics, it has obvious drawbacks, not least the imagination of social order as part–whole relations between ‘the individual’ and ‘larger’ entities. But it was at least an attempt to moderate the reductive ambitions of theories of structural determination, interpellation, and so on, and to acknowledge some obvious aspects of what human life is like. In 2016, Ortner published a sequel to that paper, updating her narrative of the major trends in anthropological theory to cover the period roughly from the mid-1990s to the time of writing. In this latter paper, although Ortner does not comment on the fact explicitly, the structure–agency problematic is not mentioned at all, which confirms that in its own terms the ‘practice theory’ project had failed. The proponents of the kind of anthropology Ortner rightly presents as preponderant in the later period – what she calls ‘dark anthropology’ (Ortner 2016) – had lost interest in maintaining the balancing act it required. The relevance of this here is that the cluster of meta-narratives and explanatory moves characteristic of what Ortner identifies as dark anthropology have in common the implication that the ethical can only ever be epiphenomenal at best. No place exists for it to have any kind of substantial role in human life as understood in that paradigm. The mission of dark anthropology, as Ortner puts it, was to emphasize ‘the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience, and the structural and historical conditions that produce them’ (2016: 49), in circumstances in which ‘a new and more brutal form of capitalism was expanding rapidly over the globe’ (2016: 48). And crucially, it was and remains a key tenet of dark anthropology that we already possess not only an understanding of the fundamental underlying ‘harsh and brutal’ nature of human life, and a narrative that identifies the only really important thing – neoliberalism, however defined – that is currently happening to the world but also the theoretical concepts we need to describe and explain all its local manifestations. ‘Dark theory’, a selective melange of Marxist political economy, the Gramscian concept of hegemony, and some ideas derived from a partial reading of Foucault (see Chapter 4), ‘asks us to see the world almost

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Introduction

entirely in terms of power, exploitation, and chronic pervasive inequality’ in which ‘there is no outside to power’ (Ortner 2016: 50). A seemingly unlimited range of widely dispersed and apparently diverse phenomena – revival of established practices, startling innovations, intensified conflicts, and changing aspirations and concerns – all demanded to be understood as ‘local’ responses to the globalization of modernity and neoliberalism, so that the anthropological challenge became to re-translate ‘local vocabularies of cause and effect’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1998) back into critical social theory’s concepts of capitalism and exploitation, power and resistance, and to assign them their place in the paradigm’s meta-narrative. The mission of bringing to light the many and widespread forms of cruelty, systematic domination, exploitation, injustice, and suffering in the contemporary world is undoubtedly an important and urgent one, and anthropologists who can do so in a manner that conveys the intimate experience of individuals and communities in emotionally affecting ways make a distinctive contribution (Robbins 2013). Fine works have been produced within this paradigm. But the value and impact of such works are blunted rather than otherwise by a partiality and one-sidedness that is, in Ortner’s own account, all but explicitly avowed, and by routine repetition. Early in the development of this paradigm, Marshall Sahlins (1993) observed and ridiculed its unimaginative predictability and gloom. But more dispiriting than the unremitting miserabilism of this anthropology has been its theoretical aridity. Presenting what she calls, following Joel Robbins, ‘anthropologies of the good’ as a complement to dark anthropology, Ortner describes the relation between the two as a matter of difference of mood and tone, and as if the former’s value were as a sort of therapeutic remedy for the emotional effects of the latter. They are ‘a positive and humane counterweight’ and ‘a refreshing and uplifting counterpoint’ (2016: 60). But there is no reason why the anthropology of ethics should be necessarily cheerful, and its glasses ought not to be rose-tinted. It would be no more defensible for it to exclude brute and difficult truths than is dark anthropology’s exclusive focus on them. Importantly, it must include the study of forms of ethical life whose contemplation will not necessarily make most academic anthropologists feel good. Not coincidentally, some of the most influential formative ethnographies (notably Mahmood 2005) have been attempts to take seriously, precisely as forms of ethical life, religious movements that are rebarbative to Western ‘progressive’ opinion and sensibility. Identifying an instance of the ethical does not imply approving of it. And contemplating some of the ways in which people have pursued what they have conceived to be human excellence (extreme asceticism, mysticism, utopianism, artistic vision, military prowess), including the costs they and others have paid for their quest, can and should be sobering in many instances rather than necessarily ‘refreshing’. After all, can we be sure that more harshness and brutality have not been exercised in the

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furtherance of attempts to make the world perfect and the people in it pure or heroic than from the shamefaced pursuit of personal wealth and advantage? The important objection to dark anthropology is theoretical rather than being a matter of emotional colour, or even accuracy in representation of the world. The reason dark anthropology is a dismal kind of ‘normal science’ for anthropology is that theoretically it leaves no room for ‘local vocabularies of cause and effect’ to be anything other than grist to its dark satanic mill, to tell us anything we didn’t already know about the world, or to contribute to the conceptual repertoire we have for thinking about it. We might pile up examples and provide ever more personal, emotive, and outraged descriptions of them, and we might show ingenuity in adding to the existing catalogue of institutions or situations whose deformities are explained by the dark workings of power and domination; we might take more interest than heretofore in different vectors of oppression and different categories of victim; but the narrative and explanatory frameworks are essentially complete. There is no invitation for ethnography to contribute new insights or concepts of general applicability that might enable or require us to think differently. The anthropology of ethics was not the only new departure in the discipline founded, in at least partial reaction to dark anthropology, on the ambition that the ethnographic study of diverse forms of life might fuel more radical revisions to our conceptual vocabulary and to our understanding of the world. The roughly contemporaneous ‘ontological turn’ (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Henare et al. 2006; Costa and Fausto 2010; Holbraad 2012; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Heywood 2017), different in many respects, has in common with the anthropology of ethics a rejection of the ‘analytical high-handedness’ (Englund and Leach 2000) of this style of anthropology, as for instance in Morten Axel Pedersen’s (2011) rich account of the not-quite-revival of shamanism in northern Mongolia (see also Laidlaw 2012). Pedersen carefully shows how much would be missed by understanding Mongolian shamanism in the aftermath of the collapse of state socialism as an ‘occult economy’: the ‘local’ expression on a symbolic ‘level’ of the real ‘structural’ forces of advancing neoliberalism. One way in which proponents of the ontological turn expressed their central concerns was as an attempt to ‘take seriously’ the terms in which their ethnographic interlocutors communicate their interests and aspirations and their understandings of the world. This involves actively seeking to make it the case that the forms of life we study can tell us something about how things are that we do not already know. This means holding that not everything about them is necessarily comprehended by existing social theory, considering that our understanding of human sociality might require substantial correction if it is to be able to account for the full range of human social experience, and aspiring to learn not only about but also from the people and forms of life we study. Notwithstanding their well-rehearsed differences, these shared ambitions,

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Introduction

requiring as they do a rejection of the hegemony of dark anthropology, are a substantial matter of convergence between the recent ontological and ethical turns in anthropology. The caricature of human life as a bleak zero-sum game of power gains a degree of plausibility from the idea that the only alternative to the narrow set of motivations it recognizes is an idealization of ‘morality’ as a set of precepts and principles that is fundamentally at variance with – perhaps even a symmetrical inversion of – the hard realities of life thus conceived: ‘altruism’ as opposed to ‘self-interest’; the ‘moral point of view’ as a singular perspective on the world excluding any but its own pure principles as sources of motivation; an abstract, de-personalized, universalizing view from nowhere in particular; the impartial benevolence of the ‘point of view of the universe’. It is a necessary precondition for an anthropology of ethics to problematize this concept of morality because ethical life can take many other forms. This concept of morality is not an artefact of academic philosophy only. It has considerable currency in public and general discourse, but this has not always been so. In broad comparative and historical terms, it is singular. Philosophers as different as Friedrich Nietzsche (1994 [1887]), Elizabeth Anscombe (1958), Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), and Bernard Williams (1985), and also in slightly different terms Michel Foucault (1986 [1984]), have suggested that it is the result of a contraction in Western moral thought that has occurred in the modern era: a formalization, conceptual impoverishment, and narrowing of what is recognized as morality. Although their views about the nature and causes of the change have differed, they have all argued that morality is not a timeless, trans-historical concept but requires to be understood genealogically, in the way that anthropologists have learned to understand the category of ‘religion’ (Asad 1993). Williams (1985), following Nietzsche (1994 [1887]), sees what he calls this peculiarly modern ‘morality system’ as representing in important respects a secularization of Christian asceticism, but also as scientistic in form and adapted to the needs of the bureaucratic state, and although it has become powerfully institutionalized and influential on how we think we ought to think, it has not yet wholly colonized everyday life and judgement. He also shows that it suffers from a number of unresolvable internal contradictions. These might mean that it would be impossible to live by it consistently, which might in turn explain why its dominance in everyday life remains incomplete. However that may be, it is clear that, anthropologically, this ‘morality’ is just one form of ethical thought and an anthropology of ethics needs resolutely to free itself from many of its peculiar and parochial presuppositions. For much of human history and in many parts of the world – and even in societies in which the morality system is discursively dominant – when people more or less reflectively consider what kind of life they wish to lead, they have reference to values other than those the ‘morality system’

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considers to be good. And still more perhaps as they go about their everyday lives, responding to situations as they arise, their conduct is informed by values other than those. Noting this, and following many of Williams’s arguments, the philosopher Susan Wolf (2015) observes that a society composed entirely of what she calls ‘moral saints’ would be highly dysfunctional, and that such people are by no means wholly admirable. A life lived by the light only of ‘moral values’ is a narrow one, and she makes a persuasive case for the importance of non-moral values, including especially personal love. This is helpful in many ways, but because Wolf takes a purely analytical rather than a genealogical or comparative approach, she takes for granted that there is, in the abstract, a universally relevant question to which morality is the answer, that question being to what extent and in what ways people should ‘constrain and guide their choices for the sake of others (or the common good)’ (2015: 4). The abstractness of the ‘others’ in this formulation, and the casual identification of them with an imagined social whole, places this formulation squarely within a modernist social imaginary, as does the egalitarianism which Wolf takes for granted must be a central element of morality. It is a formulation that presupposes a specific sociology: addressed implicitly to formally equal citizens of a modern polity, unencumbered by unchosen social relations. That indeed is why Wolf thinks this set of values must be supplemented by and to some degree subordinated to others in the living of a worthwhile life. But the de-socialized nature of her understanding of the question of morality means that Wolf takes it as a given that philosophical reasoning alone might be able to arrive at a determinate, universally applicable answer to it. Williams takes a significantly different approach. He distinguishes philosophy conducted within the terms of the morality system – ‘moral philosophy’ – from the very much wider range of ways of reflecting on the question of how one ought to live, which he calls ‘ethics’. Broadening the object of study from ‘morality’ to ‘ethics’ helps to free us from ethnocentric and historically parochial assumptions that hinder our ability to recognize forms of life that do not conform to our unreflective expectations of the morally good. Williams noted that for this an ethnographic sensibility is required, and in that spirit he attempted to carry out a historicalanthropological reconstruction of the ethical life of classical Greece (Williams 1992). And a number of anthropologists have, at least for some purposes, adapted Williams’s terminology in preferring ‘ethics’ and ‘ethical life’ to designate the very broadly conceived object of our enquiries, while also noting the possibility of institutionalized forms of ethical life that share some of the features Williams identifies as distinctive of the morality system, and which might not be confined to the modern West (e.g. Laidlaw 2002; Stafford 2013; Keane 2016). But adopting this terminology is not of course the only way to achieve the important objective, which is to avoid pre-emptively assuming that everywhere and always

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Introduction

ethical life must take forms we already recognize from the morality system: hence the terminological diversity noted earlier. If what is new in the anthropology of ethics is therefore systematic reflection on the forms and variation of the ethical dimension of social life, this does not give rise to a new sub-discipline within anthropology, defined by a subject matter separate from that of the rest of the discipline. It is very important not to imagine that the anthropology of ethics implies the study of a distinct domain of social life that might be supposed to be separate from (or to overlap with) other domains, such as politics. Instead, it consists of a way of looking at the subject matter of the whole discipline, which is new insofar as it is motivated by attention to a pervasive and constitutive aspect of that whole subject matter that had not been properly attended to before. It involves recognition that there is an ethical dimension to all human social life, and a conscious effort to reckon with that. This turns out to require revision to much of our conceptual vocabulary, rethinking some long-established key concepts, bringing others to a new prominence, and casting some very venerable anthropological topics in a new light. It requires, in other words, work towards something of a conceptual retooling for social analysis. The structure of this book and the themes of the parts into which it is divided are designed to facilitate this re-tooling. In the past (Laidlaw 2014: 2), I have compared the ethical turn to the anthropology of gender in the 1980s. What previously had seen itself as a specialism of one kind or another – the ‘anthropology of women’ and then ‘feminist anthropology’ – gave way to a recognition that the gendering of persons, practices, and processes is a pervasive aspect of all social life, and an aspect of what needs to be discussed, whether one is studying the state, new media, religious movements, or whatever, as much as kinship or labour. This meant that over time, the sense that there was a distinct ‘anthropology of gender’ dissipated somewhat as it became expected that some attention to matters of gender would be integral to any anthropological study, whatever else it was about. Although this no doubt meant a loss of camaraderie among those who had pioneered the movement, and perhaps disappointment as the spotlight of academic fashion moved on, it was an index of success. The anthropology of ethics, which requires a still more thorough refocussing of attention and revision of analytical habit, cannot yet lay claim to that level of success. This volume may be seen as a large collective effort towards that end.

Part I: Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements The development of the anthropology of ethics has been built upon, and has in turn fuelled, renewed dialogue between anthropology and neighbouring disciplines that are also concerned with understanding the nature and dynamics of ethical life. The most obvious of these is philosophy, and

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Hallvard Lillehammer in Chapter 2 provides a wide-ranging guide to moral and political philosophy in the Anglophone analytical tradition, which brings out the many substantive points of contact with the anthropology of ethics. On a number of fronts, as Lillehammer shows, engagement with anthropology contributes to debates within philosophy, including those which challenge venerable assumptions that both ethical life and ethical theory are adequate only if characterized by universality and internal consistency. As this dialogue develops, philosophers are coming to see that anthropology provides them not only with material for exotic thought experiments (designed according to methodologically individualist principles that tend to entrench those rationalist assumptions) but also with the conceptual resources to develop an altogether richer understanding of the intrinsic sociality of ethical life. We then have two chapters that deal with two overlapping bodies of writing within Anglophone philosophy that are of special interest for anthropology. ‘Virtue ethics’ is a problematic category, as Lillehammer notes. Some of its proponents present it as a species of ‘ethical theory’ to rival consequentialism and Kantianism, while others maintain that its value lies precisely in its not being a ‘theory’ of like kind as them. Whom to number among its proponents is also not agreed. The three authors discussed in Chapter 4 are often treated as virtue ethicists, but this is not how any of them have represented themselves. So despite its undoubted far-reaching influence in the development of the anthropology of ethics, it remains unclear just what kind of beast virtue ethics is. Rather than attempting an anatomy of this chameleon in Chapter 3, Jonathan Mair focusses on the feature that has most attracted anthropologists – the potential to enable us to think outside the assumptions of the modern ‘morality system’ and establish a much wider comparative framework for understanding the full diversity of human ethical thought and practice. Mair notes that despite good intentions, the historical and ethnographic imaginations of most virtue ethicists have remained somewhat parochially Euro-American, and he argues that attempts to incorporate non-European ethical traditions have not generally been well formed. He sets out an agenda for remedying these deficiencies. In Chapter 4, Patrick McKearney and I compare and contrast the thought of three philosophers, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum, who have all been influential in the development of the anthropology of ethics, as references to them in chapters throughout this volume demonstrate. This chapter makes the case that it follows from the pluralism of which they are in different ways exponents that moral philosophy needs to depart radically from its traditional de-contextualizing and universalizing tendencies, and needs in fact to re-constitute itself as something like a form of anthropology, a concerted practice of theoretically reflective comparative social description.

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The thinker with the single greatest influence on the development of the anthropology of ethics was probably Michel Foucault, who is also sometimes treated, just to confirm how complicated designations are in these matters, as himself a virtue ethicist (Mattingly 2012). In Chapter 5, Paolo Heywood gives an account of the basis of his influence and addresses the vexed interpretative question of the relation between Foucault’s later works, which have most directly inspired anthropologists of ethics, and the earlier writings routinely cited as authority for Ortner’s dark anthropology. Foucault was never a system-building thinker, and to some extent revelled in paradox, inconsistency, and changing his mind (including with respect to some conspicuously rash misjudgements), but, as Heywood shows, in the relevant respects there is no radical discontinuity of the kind some commentators have detected. In particular, he was not shifting from a study of power to a study of ethics, as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives, because his conception of power does not exclude but is instead a precondition for ethics. So, in his later work he was not recanting on a view he did not admit to having held. As he wrote in 1984, ‘the idea that power is a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot be attributed to me’ (2000: 293). Heywood’s analysis helps us to understand why this misreading of his thought should have been so oddly tenacious. The term ‘phenomenology’ covers a rich and diverse set of philosophical traditions, which anthropologists have drawn on in a range of ways. A number of chapters in this volume (including those by Kuan; Mack and Throop; and Mattingly and McKearney) draw extensively on phenomenological thought. Samuel Williams, in surveying the emerging phenomenological current in the anthropology of ethics in Chapter 6, notes the in many respects puzzling prominence of the figure of Martin Heidegger. Not only did Heidegger write only very disparaging things about ethics as a branch of philosophical thought, but the personal and political conduct that indicates an ethical sensibility well outside the contemporary academic Overton window is also hard to detach from a philosophy that aspired strenuously to systematic consistency (Wolin 1993, 2016; Faye 2009). So any hope of finding in that philosophy insight into ethical life might seem unlikely. Williams’s chapter helps us to see some partial answers to this puzzle, and to see beyond it. In addition to observing the distinctly divergent directions in which different anthropologists have interpreted Heidegger in developing their own thinking about ethics, Williams suggests that Heidegger may serve, consciously or unconsciously, as a counter-weight against Foucault, and that this is so in at least two ways: as support for a sceptical reaction to Foucault’s emphasis on self-conscious reflection in his characterization of ethics, and as a spectral return of Foucault’s own highly ambivalent and mysterious engagement with Heidegger. And Williams ends by pointing to a different strand of thought about ethics in the phenomenological

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corpus – running from Husserl through Scheler and concerned with values – which contains further resources that are beginning to be drawn upon by anthropologists. Chapter 7, by Natalia Buitron and Harry Walker and Chapter 8, by Michael Banner, survey the dialogues that have been developing, as an aspect of the development of the anthropology of ethics, with cognitive science and moral theology. They both see considerable potential mutual benefit in the further development of these dialogues, but also highlight the obstacles, both theoretical and practical, that are likely to continue to make these dialogues demanding for both sides.

Part II: Aspects of Ethical Agency Much of Western moral philosophy, together with political philosophy and legal theory and practice, is resolutely individualist in its basic presuppositions. Individuals are held accountable for their actions; and an individual’s mental states – motivation, intention, emotional state, the presence or absence of mental illness – are counted as being key to assigning judgement, praise, blame, reward, and punishment. Ethical agency is conceived as a quality internal to the subject, and key terms in the description of moral life – freedom, responsibility, character traits such as courage or compassion – are widely understood to be something that individuals themselves do or do not possess, as internal attributes. And the same is true of morally significant states such as happiness and suffering; they too are typically understood as internal states of individuals. A good deal of the anthropology of ethics has joined a small but significant minority of philosophers and legal theorists in seeking to ‘socialize’ our understanding of these crucial components of ethical agency, in the sense not necessarily or for the most part in seeking to reassign them from individuals to collectivities (the idea of collective agents is an important one, but not the heart of the matter), but rather in seeing them as being features that come to be and have their existence within social interaction itself; in other words, as intrinsically relational states of affairs. In this sort of view ethical agency is not so much collectivized as seen to be distributed among parties to interaction. Here, the anthropology of ethics overlaps with and draws ideas from linguistic anthropology, including the often rather technical field of conversation analysis. It is also one of the other ways in which critical dialogue with experimental psychology (described by Buitron and Walker in Chapter 7) is being pursued. How do we take account of relevant research in experimental psychology, correcting for the reductionism that characterizes much of that research? A good deal of groundwork is required to adapt the tools developed in these neighbouring disciplines so that they may serve for describing how specifically ethical dimensions get elicited

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within particular social situations. Webb Keane’s idea (2014, 2016) that species-wide cognitive and affective features of human psychology may be seen as affordances that make the ethical possible, rather than determinately causing it, brings into view as a focus for ethnographic study what he and Michael Lempert, in Chapter 9, call ‘ethicalization’: the processes whereby ethical concepts and criteria get invoked, introduced, applied, challenged, or affirmed in the course of interaction. A friendly exchange of pleasantries turns tense, when an implicit note of criticism is introduced, in a way that seems to require self-justification; a neutral discussion of options changes register entirely when it is suggested that one of those options is ethically reprehensible in a way that the others are not. Keane and Lempert suggest that understanding how this happens – in the course of a short conversation or a fleeting interaction – can help us understand parallel macro-level processes of ethicalization, as when formerly neutral or unquestioned habits and practices come to be seen as matters for ethical concern and valuation, and thereby become politically contested. Mathias (2020) provides an illuminating analysis of an example of just this kind of interactional event. Appiah (2011) provides a different kind of analysis of several historical episodes when something of this kind occurred. Ethics, on this view, is an emergent quality of interaction, although this does not prevent interaction in turn becoming the object of ethical evaluation. The challenge is to make it possible to make sense at the same time, and within the same theoretical framework, with the ways in which ethics is woven into everyday life and gives rise to some highly marked and self-conscious practice and motivates significant and sometimes radical historical change, without having to think of these as competing conceptions of the ethical, still less as different kinds of (e.g. ordinary as opposed to some other kind of) ethics. Seen in this light, apparently rather grand, abstract concepts such as freedom and responsibility from the vocabulary of moral philosophy, and the vocabulary also of moral and political contest and conflict, may become amenable to ethnographic investigation. So, as Soumhya Venkatesan shows in Chapter 10, freedom is best conceived not as an absence of sociality but as a range of conditions that are variously enabled by social relations and cultural forms, including notably relations of care, and even when these take the form of a renunciation of personal autonomy. Saba Mahmood’s now classic study (2005) shows participants in the Cairene women’s piety movement can find something they want to call freedom (at least some of the time) in the willed submission to authority and to norms of pious conduct. Venkatesan’s own study of libertarian political activists in the UK charts the ways in which they invoke a range of contextual and pragmatic criteria in reaching judgements about where to see freedom being enhanced or threatened in policy proposals, and how they seek to balance or resolve apparent conflicts with other goods they also value. Seeing that ‘freedom’ has a lively and diverse life as an

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ethnographic category has obvious benefits for anthropology. The harder question, as Venkatesan also explores, is how to develop our own analytical vocabulary for discussing freedom that might enable us to describe how different forms of freedom are made possible or precluded for the people we study in different social and historical situations, and what kinds of commitments they might have in relation to those possibilities. That requires a degree of detachment from our own contests and concerns, and the humility to work to articulate concerns and values we may not share. Similarly, in Chapter 11, Catherine Trundle illustrates how concepts of responsibility are rarely applied unidirectionally (they tend generally to involve some degree of mutuality) and are always a framework for action. Analysing how these concepts work – what states of affairs different agents may be imagined to be responsible for and the kinds of claims that can be made to stick – shows how responsibility is emergent from reflexive social processes. Equally, a social process is the way a state or community retrospectively works through the aftermath of baffling or horrific events, such as the Rwandan genocide, testing the application of notions of individual and collective responsibility in order to achieve some pattern of accountability out of the murky mass of entangled narratives and remembered events. Such processes are never matters entirely of detached and disinterested ratiocination. Emotions are, as Teresa Kuan shows in Chapter 12, powerful engines of ethicalization and essential to an understanding of moral motivation. Kuan illustrates the connection between emotion and narrative – one of the reasons literature so powerfully captures moral reasoning – and the aspects of ethical experience that respond to particulars rather than general or abstract principles. She explores the question of what kinds of theoretical language best enable ethnographers to capture the part played in ethical life by feelings, sentiments, emotions, and moods, aspects that philosophers since David Hume and Adam Smith at least have recognized as central to ethical life, and she looks beyond the established literature in the anthropology of emotion and affect theory to resources in neo-Confucian philosophy. We then have a pair of chapters, notably different in theoretical orientation and tone, that address respectively the positive and negative emotional dimensions of ethical life. Edward F. Fischer and Sam Victor’s chapter, ‘Happiness and Well-Being’ (Chapter 13), engages with the expansive sets of literature on happiness, ranging from psychology to welfare economics. They argue for the value of distinctively ethnographic ways of paying attention to the good in people’s lives and their different ways of conceiving it, when so much policy-orientated research on such matters proceeds on the assumption that we already know what good lives look like, of what the good in them consists, and how to measure it. They propose investigating the diverse ways in which people conceptualize

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Introduction

and seek to pursue the realization of values, care for others, and aspirations and hopes, none of which are reducible to ‘self-interest’, let alone to a maximization of power or wealth. Abby Mack and C. Jason Throop in their chapter, ‘Suffering and Sympathy’ (Chapter 14), draw on a very different range of philosophical and other intellectual sources. Their entry point to the anthropological study of ethics is through people’s responses to suffering. They argue for distinguishing sympathy and empathy as two overlapping but different forms of pathic response, grounded in basic features of human being in the world. An ethnography of pathic responses to suffering provides a way, they suggest, of understanding the entanglements of ethics, politics, and the ontological conditions of life, and of capturing those aspects of responses to suffering that exceed the individual subject, in phenomena such as shifting public moods. In Chapter 15, Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller reflect on the implications for ethical life of the fact that difference and ambiguity are ubiquitous aspects of human experience, and therefore that the human condition is necessarily one of ethical pluralism. In an essay of striking breadth and interpretative brio, they suggest that there are, historically and cross-culturally, three broad ways in which ambiguity and difference have been ordered and structured and therefore in which ethical pluralism has been constructed, which they call notation, ritual, and shared experience. This essay, together with the arguments for ethical pluralism from Berlin, Williams, Taylor, and Nussbaum summarized in Chapter 4, prompts a reflection about what follows if we take seriously the suggestion that a situation comprising plural and conflicting values, and therefore the requirement of living with irresolvable conflicts and tragic choices, is inescapably the human condition. The utterly harmonious ‘traditional’ society of seamless moral consensus – whether Durkheim’s ‘mechanical solidarity’ or the many other formulations – may not even be a coherent idea and in any case has always been a nostalgic fantasy. Anthropologists have known this almost from the beginning. The intriguing question is why the idea that somewhere there is a society that lives in ethical harmony refuses to die, however often and decisively it is disproven as a description of any actual societies, and however reliably attempts to create one have resulted in moral calamity in the real world. The answer lies partly in the fact that living by a unified, consistent, and conflict-free moral code has been throughout human history a recurrent aspiration for some – usually a rather small minority of people, but often a vocal one. Whether by escaping to the desert, the forest, or the mountains, or enclosing themselves in monastic fastness or otherwise cutting all ties of kinship that impose conflicting claims, or setting out to be the vanguard of a utopian future in which all conflicts will be resolved and all interests harmonized, groups of people seeking to realize a condition of moral

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certainty and unanimity have been a strikingly recurrent feature of the moral landscape. So, they certainly merit serious anthropological attention (see Lazar’s chapter on activism (Chapter 31) and Yan’s on socialism (Chapter 34) in this volume). But in providing such attention, it is perhaps not best for anthropologists to include such people’s improbable presuppositions or aspirations among their own theoretical assumptions. But it is also notable that throughout history, the force of such millennial projects has been felt disproportionately by clerisy and intellectuals. The possibility of a condition in which all that is required to achieve unimpeachable virtue is following a clear and consistent moral code with rigorous logical consistency and vigour, such that one’s virtue is entirely invulnerable to time and chance – in which one is ‘in the right’, whatever unpredictable circumstances might occur and whatever the actual outcome of events – has gripped the imagination of a strikingly large majority of influential philosophers. And who should wonder? Who, if not intellectuals, should be attracted to the idea that all you need in order to be good is logical rigour and rational consistency, and to the idea that a world that makes this possible might be out there somewhere or imminently achievable? It would be remarkable if anthropologists were entirely invulnerable to the force of that kind of vision of ‘the good’. Indeed, there is reason to believe that youthful fantasies of Shangri-La are part of what attracted a nonnegligible number of us (I do not exclude myself) to studying the discipline in the first place. But it is quite important that such utopian aspirations should not structure the ways in which we approach studying the world as it is, or dominate the conceptual vocabulary with which we do so. For almost everyone, almost all of the time, there are real hard choices and trade-offs to be faced, and disappointments and regrets to be lived with, and our conception of ethical agency has to put this at its centre. I hope that the chapters collected in this Part of the book provide resources to help anthropology to do that.

Part III: Media and Modes of Ethical Practice The chapters in Part III survey some of the work that is being done on the basic modes and media of ethical thought and action. How are ethical ideas and values instantiated, organized, transmitted, and mobilized in social life? The chapters included here do not pretend to be exhaustive. If the list could be extended, it would obviously include entries on narrative, visual representation, and roles, the latter of which has also attracted recent attention among philosophers (Ames 2011; Dare and Swanton 2020). Initially, a fairly prominent aspect of the anthropology of ethics was a reaction against the longstanding tendency in the discipline to think of morality as largely taking the form of rules. This tendency, strongly present in Durkheim and in structural-functionalist and structuralist

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Introduction

approaches that developed drawing on his legacy, as well as in various conceptions of culture that drew on metaphors of language and games for their concepts, was of course part of a general propensity among social scientists to think of rules as the fundamental way in which society is organized. This way of conceptualizing ‘social order’, together with the tendency that often went with it to equate morality with society (the individual is intrinsically amoral or even immoral, and is rendered moral by being disciplined within ‘society’), imported into the heart of social theory a very specific and historically particular conception of morality and an unhelpfully juridical model for ethical life in general (Laidlaw 2002). So, the search was on for ways other than rules in which the ethical is instantiated in social life. As Joanna Cook describes in Chapter 16, Foucault’s framework for the analysis of projects of ethical self-cultivation has been the starting point for a range of ethnographic studies, and not only of relatively formally scripted and institutionalized religious and political projects. The trope of self-cultivation, she shows, can be illuminating in relation also to how people cope with contingencies in everyday life, where their reflections and conduct are not guided by anything like a definite project, and where the self in self-cultivation does not resemble an ‘autonomous’ subject. Some have seen an objection to the idea of self-cultivation in the obvious fact that no one is consciously reflective and detached in relation to their conduct all of the time, and that many people are so only very rarely or hardly at all (e.g. Scheele 2015), but these facts support at best qualifications and complements rather than objections. In saying, with Foucault, that the capacity for reflective freedom is fundamental to ethics, no one ever imagined that this means we all are – still less that it would be good if we were – tortured soul-searching introverts. The capacity for reflection and self-cultivation marks out human ethical life and makes the forms of interaction and conduct it sustains distinctive, even where that capacity is exercised only intermittently, and even where it is exercised by others on behalf of those who are unable to do so themselves (McKearney 2021, in press). Caroline Humphrey’s classic paper, ‘Exemplars and Rules’ (1997), which pointed to the way in which Mongols take certain specific individuals – sometimes living, sometimes historical, sometimes mythic – as lodestars for their ethical thinking, set in train another productive line of thought about how ethics is instantiated in social life: that the interpretation and emulation of exemplars is a different and separate source from rules in giving guidance for people on how to behave and make choices, and is a distinctive non-rule-like way in which ethical ideals and values make themselves manifest in social life. Humphrey suggests that moral worlds organized around exemplars appear to be able to accommodate greater degrees of plurality and much looser consensus than is possible in those that strive for ideological unanimity, with people sharing

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exemplars but relating to them in different ways. As Nicholas H. A. Evans explains in Chapter 17, those who have followed up on this insight have been able to draw on a long history of studies of charisma and charismatic authority, of heroes and heroic political systems (Sahlins’s work on kingship), of the agency of representations (Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency), and of state forms that differ from Western bureaucracies (Tambiah on galactic polities and Geertz on ‘exemplary centres’) in elucidating the forms that exemplars take and how people relate to them. These exemplary forms include rituals, which may be seen as forms in which participants experience, if fleetingly, the full and perfect realization of values and ideals. And Evans shows how some recent work supplements all of this – which had mostly to do with very high-status and remarkable exemplars – with studies of how the exemplary mode of moral authority persists in modified form in modern political systems, both in authoritarian ones such as socialist China and in liberal democracies, where we see a plethora of apparently paradoxically ‘everyday exemplars’ (see also Heywood 2022). The idea of rituals as instances of the exemplary is not the only account anthropologists of ethics have given of why ritual is an important part of how ethics is socially organized and made manifest. Letha Victor and Michael Lambek (Chapter 18) explicate a set of approaches to ritual, conceived as a mode of action, that bring out the importance of ritual to ethical life. Such approaches might also go some way towards explaining why conscious and directed projects of ethical self-cultivation consist to such an extent of highly ritualized practices, whether confession, prayer, or fasting in religious selfcultivation, or meetings, demonstrations, or consciousness-raising or re-education sessions among political or sexual activists. As Victor and Lambek argue, following Rappaport (1999), ritual creates and imposes criteria against which subsequent conduct is accountable and evaluated and therefore is a highly pervasive social technology for what Keane and Lempert call ethicalization. On a number of occasions before in the history of the discipline, when anthropologists have sought alternatives to rules as a way of conceptualizing the regularities in social life, and especially its ethical dimension, they have explored the possibility that values might be thought of as abstract or immaterial entities that stand in some kind of structured relation to each other, and that theorization of how these structured relations work might preserve some of the virtues, without the disadvantages, of conceptions of social structures or ‘cultures’. In Chapter 19, Julian Sommerschuh and Joel Robbins set out the case for the recent revival of this project for developing an anthropological theory of values, which they see as overlapping with the anthropology of ethics, but as having a different scope because it encompasses what they distinguish as non-moral as well as moral values. Since the anthropology of ethics also sees its scope as wider than that of ‘morality’, thus

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Introduction

defined, this may be more of a terminological than a substantive difference, but however this may be, the project is certainly of the first interest. As Sommerschuh and Robbins show, the new incarnation of this enterprise draws somewhat on the structuralist legacy of Louis Dumont and others, but also increasingly on the tradition of thought within the phenomenological tradition identified in Chapter 6 by Williams and exemplified in the writings of Max Scheler. So, during the last couple of decades we have seen systematic exploration of a range of forms, other than rules, in which the ethical is socially instantiated and organized, including projects of self-cultivation, exemplars, ritual, and values. But it has also become clear that the initial reaction against rules in the anthropology of ethics may have been unduly peremptory. As Morgan Clarke argues in Chapter 20, when imagined not as the beginning and end of morality but as one among a range of media in which ethical thought may take place, rules become more interesting. Some ethical traditions seem to favour codification in rules more than others. Why might that be? What are the specific features and affordances of rules, as, among other things, a technology of the self? Why, as Clarke so persuasively puts it, are some ethical traditions ‘ruly’, while others are comparatively unruly? And on examination, ethical rules turn out to be more different among themselves than we had originally thought (although we should not in the first place have forgotten so much of the thinking that went on in structuralfunctionalist and structuralist anthropology about different kinds of rules). They come in a variety of forms. And just what it is to follow a rule is construed differently in different traditions too. These questions appear perhaps especially acute in the Abrahamic religions, in all of which, though to different degrees, ethical reasoning has often been couched in explicitly legalistic form. Broadening the imagination of anthropologists about ethical life probably did require a dedicated effort to think outside the assumptions of those traditions and to search for forms of ethical thought other than rules, but, having done that, as Clarke shows, we now have the opportunity to find ethical legalism newly interesting. We cannot understand how people exercise their ethical capacities, or how ethics is instantiated in social life, whether in any of the media surveyed in these chapters or otherwise, without understanding how these matters are learned and taught. Only ideas and practices that can be learned and retained can structure ethical life. The study of ethical pedagogy therefore is both a necessary dimension of understanding how these modes of ethical life function and gives insight into how they comport with each other in specific contexts. James D. Faubion’s chapter on ethical pedagogies (Chapter 21) is therefore in its way a synoptic overview, from a distinctive point of view, of this aspect of the whole field.

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Part IV: Intimate and Everyday Life Turning now from questions of how we conceive moral agency and how we find it instantiated in social practice, what difference does it make, if we take the fact of the ethical dimension of social life to be central, to how we might approach the description and understanding of everyday life, social institutions, and historical processes? If kinship, economics, politics, and religion remain the bread-and-butter diet of anthropological analysis, what new items appear on the menu? What new treatments of staple fare become possible? We consider these questions in this group of chapters, first in relation to intimate and everyday life (in part because the category of the ‘everyday’ has had a certain currency in early debates in the anthropology of ethics), before turning to the study of ethical life in the context of formal institutions. The topic of care has been the focus of a great deal of interest in anthropology in the last few decades. As Cheryl Mattingly and Patrick McKearney point out in Chapter 22, however, a good deal of this interest has been fuelled by a sentimental idealization of care as warm and relational, set against the supposedly cold formality of liberal ideals of autonomy. Mattingly and McKearney take us beyond the comfort afforded by framing the study of care in this way, and insist on the importance of confronting the hierarchical and coercive aspects of caring relationships, to give us a richer picture of their inescapable asymmetry and ethical complexity. They explore the nature of care, drawing on two different sets of conceptual and analytical resources, from virtue ethics and phenomenology, to build up a composite picture without attempting to meld these resources into a single framework, but instead retaining a sense of the tensions between their different sets of concepts and the themes they help bring to the fore. The coercion in care is also very vividly evident in Chapter 23, where Perveez Mody’s discussion of ‘Kinship and Love’ based on her research in Delhi on ‘love marriages’ – marriages contracted without parental arrangement or approval between lovers from different castes or religious communities – movingly describes the cruel double-binds these lovers find themselves faced with as they try to reconcile the demands of their natal families with those imposed on them by their love. Accused on one side of self-centredness, but also of losing their true selves to their ungoverned passions, they speak of themselves as experiencing loss of self both in their love and in the self-sacrifice demanded by kinship. An opposition between morality and self-interest fails completely to have a purchase on their heart-rending experience of conflicting loyalties that cannot be reconciled and fundamental fracturing of sense of self. Another focus has been cooperation, a topic that brings anthropology unavoidably into dialogue with psychology and even evolutionary science.

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Introduction

Within the latter, there is a peculiar fascination with cooperation. Because it often begins from the assumption that evolution involves processes of competition between axiomatically ‘selfish’ units of selection, the very possibility of cooperation presents itself as a key explanatory puzzle. And the question of how to understand ethical life gets radically narrowed and reduced to the question of explaining how cooperation between these exhypothesi ruthlessly self-interested agents might be possible. On this view, morality is first defined as any mechanism that enables these presupposed self-interested agents to achieve cooperation. The test is to show that apparently altruistic conduct is ‘really’ self-interested after all, by showing that it confers a selective advantage on those who engage in it. This can lead triumphantly to the circular conclusion that ‘morality’ (assumed to be exhaustively encompassed by altruistic behaviour) may be ‘explained’ as ‘fundamentally’ a mechanism for securing the evolutionary benefits of cooperation (Curry 2016; Curry et al. 2019; Gellner et al. 2020). In their chapter, ‘Cooperation and Punishment’ (Chapter 24), Anni Kajanus and Charles Stafford take a different approach, although they do seek to draw on insights from psychology and evolutionary science, but in this case from a conception of human evolution that sees it as inextricably both biological and social. They argue that it is possible to aim at meaningful large-scale comparison, informed by studies of evolved cognitive capacities and propensities, without resort to just-so stories and without losing ethnographic specificity, and they show that the technical concept of ‘punishment’ derived from evolutionary studies helps in the interpretation of rich ethnographic data on child development conducted in schools in Nanjing, China. Another area of interest has been the giving and receiving of favours. In relation to this, David Henig and Nicolette Makovicky in Chapter 25 pursue an exactly opposite analytical strategy to that which seeks to explain cooperation by showing that it is ‘really’ self-interest. Pervasive ‘economies of favour’ under socialism, which under conditions of chronic scarcity, misallocation of resources, and corruption were the only way people who were not well placed in party hierarchies could secure access to resources, and the persistence and even growth of such practices under post-socialist conditions, were initially explained in generally reductive, economistic terms. While not denying partial validity to such accounts, Henig and Makovicky follow Humphrey (2012) in pointing out that these economistic approaches miss the distinctive ethical qualities of the practices involved. For although corruption, clientelism, and informal economic exchange may well be substantially driven, for at least some participants, by economic motivations and by the pursuit of power, it is materially important that typically that is not how they are experienced, or how actions within such systems are performed. This is not just the point that bribes and so on often need to be carried out as a favour or gesture of friendship, lest they be rejected. There is also the much deeper

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point that acts of gratuity, spontaneity, and disinterested favour do occur. And in some socio-economic systems, such as these, they are structurally central and often key to people’s survival. How might we attend anthropologically to manifestations of spontaneity, free will, and favour? What forms do such expressions take? What are their social consequences? What are the appropriate ways to respond to them? And how do they relate to prevailing ethical ideas, values, and norms? In addressing these questions, Henig and Makovicky draw creatively on Julian Pitt-Rivers’s writings on honour and grace. This is a pattern of classic studies being seen in a new light and taking on new significance that is visible in a number of fields within the anthropology of ethics. If this interpretation of acts of gratuity thus seeks to rescue them from reductive interpretation in terms of a cynical maximizing logic, it must not be thought that the anthropology of ethics is all about seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles. I have already mentioned a number of instances in which it requires recognizing as ethical practices and forms of life with which anthropological writers and readers may find it extremely hard to empathize, let alone approve of them or even view them wholly dispassionately. Grasping the radical alterity of some forms of ethical life presents anthropologists with an ethical as well as an analytical challenge, insofar as it requires real effort of the moral imagination. This is obviously true, for example, of those Amazonian societies in which enemies are a constitutive feature of the ethical landscape and where enmity is a key ethical relation, where seduction is figured as a form of predation, and where both predatory and mortuary cannibalism often are part of the picture too. As Carlos D. London˜o Sulkin shows in ‘The Inimical Gaze’ (Chapter 26), relations of alterity and enmity constitute the central features of a distinctive ethical world. It can be appreciated that this is a form of ethical life at all only insofar as one frees oneself from the assumptions of the morality system, which expects to find it orientated to values that are already recognized in modern liberal societies as ‘morally good’. The intellectual challenge of grasping what some like to see as the ontological otherness of these moral worlds is difficult enough; appreciating that they are ethical worlds, in all their alterity, requires from us a normative as well as an intellectual openness. In those moral worlds, as is well known, people have highly consequential and morally charged relations with non-human others: not only spirits but also living animals (or animal species), trees, and even the forest itself. There are tricky interpretative questions to be asked about these ethical relations as to whether (and if so, in what ways) the nonhuman entities may be thought to be ethical subjects themselves, or whether it is instead humans that relate ethically to them. In Chapter 27, Rosie Jones McVey turns this question around: what can studies of human–animal relations bring to the fore about ethics that might be less salient and more difficult to discern in human–human

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Introduction

relations? She suggests that precisely because animals do not (at least in the way humans do) use language, these studies draw our attention to aspects of ethical interaction and response that are non-representational. But equally, they bring home to us how different these interactions are from so much of what is central to human ethical life. Thus these studies are productive in helping us to test the boundaries and integrity of what we think we know as ‘the ethical’ by drawing to our attention the fact that there is a necessarily representational dimension to human sociality, and ethics in particular, even as those studies also give us tools for studying the other-than-representational aspects of ethical life. If studies of ethical life organized around enmity and studies of human– animal relations present creative challenges for anthropology in thinking about ethics, Tanya Luhrmann suggests that the venerable topic of religion still presents perhaps the most testing challenge of all. In her chapter, ‘God’ (Chapter 28), Luhrmann argues that even in these days when some have begun to congratulate themselves on having become ‘post-secular’ (e.g. Furani 2019), the most demanding interpretative and ethical challenge is taking seriously not ontologically exotic worlds in Amazonia and elsewhere, or relations between humans and other species, but the spiritual lives and moral values of religious people who may live around the corner or down the road, such as evangelical Christians, devout Jews, or pious Muslims, who not only seek to live by God’s word but also form an intimate relationship with Him. The point Luhrmann makes, and which was missed by generations in the anthropology of religion that focussed on questions of belief, cognition, and the rationality of religious belief and practice, is that those to whom God ‘talks back’ are changed very intimately in that relationship, in how they see themselves, the kind of person they want to be in the relationship, and what they come to value: changed morally, that is, as deeply and intimately as in a marriage. ‘Faith’ for such believers, she points out, tends not to take the form of cognitive certainty so much as moral purpose and commitment in the face of uncertainty. ‘That is why faith takes effort’, she says, ‘and why faith changes the faithful.’ On this view the moral commitments that come with religious life are not best understood as assent to propositions or obedience to institutions, though they may include those. They are first of all consequences of being in a relationship with God: yet another illustration of the fundamental relationality of ethical life.

Part V: Institutional Life Luhrmann’s chapter on religious spirituality is placed under the heading of ‘intimate’ rather than ‘institutional’ life not because either Luhrmann or I are unaware that religion lives in institutions, but rather because the dimension of the study of religion that has so far been most conspicuously

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enriched by our heightened interest in the ethical has been in understanding the sense of intimacy religious people can have with God (or the gods). But it is also because the main theme that has emerged so far from ethicsinspired anthropological study of institutional life, as we see from the chapters in Part V of this volume, is much less relevant in relation to religion than it is to the institutions of the modern state, national and global markets, and the activities of globalized, cosmopolitan agencies and networks. That is the fact that in conditions of contemporary modernity (post-modernity, late modernity – choose your own preferred terminology here) such institutions are often seen and represented, by their optimistic advocates and also by their detractors who prefer to see things as ‘dark’, as being in some way removed from the ethical, even inherently amoral. Trade and commerce in capitalist markets, we are told, involve the pursuit of raw economic self-interest and the relentless pursuit of profit, and the moral subject is thinned out to the point where everyone is merely a self-exploiting entrepreneur. Others express the same observations differently: because anyone’s money is as good as anyone else’s, the market is a realm of freedom, unfettered by inherited status, irrational taboos, and social prejudice. Both sides agree that for good or ill, the market has no morality. Politics in the modern state, say the pessimists, is a realm of raison d’e´tat and contest for power, whereas for its proponents the liberal state that guarantees rights and procedural justice is neutral between communities and their clashing visions of the good life and morality. It stands outside and above the fray of identity and morality. Global philanthropy, humanitarianism, and human rights activism are revealed by sceptical analysis, under the surface, to be no more than politics by other means, and rest on dehumanizing reduction of the moral dignity of those who come within their purview. Is it the case that science is or at least should be ‘value free’ in the disinterested pursuit of truth; or is it dangerously amoral in its pursuit of merely instrumental control of the natural world? Normatively opposite conclusions may be drawn from the same postulate of amorality. Perhaps the most important and far-reaching lesson, and just for that reason the most difficult for even most anthropological readers to take on board, is that this notion of the condition of modernity as one from which ethics has been extracted is pervasively misleading. Robert W. Hefner’s wide-ranging comparative survey on the ethical dimensions of capitalism (Chapter 29) shows that capitalism is not a single moral (or amoral) order, but governed instead by markedly different ethical imperatives, and embedded in different moral relations, in different parts of the world. He contrasts, for instance, the socially embedded ‘ordinary’ ethics of commerce in maritime Chinese capitalism with the highly specialized and explicit discourse on the ethics of commerce in the Muslim world. He notes also that one distinctive feature of capitalism in liberal democracies is its propensity to generate (and for the state to

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Introduction

fund) notably diverse and entrepreneurial agencies critical on moral grounds of the basic premises of the system. This endows it with a remarkably vocal (if not necessarily especially cogent) public realm of moral debate. Paul Anderson and Magnus Marsden’s chapter (Chapter 30) moves us from global comparison of capitalist economic systems to the more bottom-up perspective of ethnographic study of the ethics of specific communities of traders, both long-distance and those operating in diverse societies. Such traders’ business activity is not just a matter of participation in ‘the market’, so that anthropological approaches built intellectually on concepts of exchange are insufficient. Such traders are also constrained by the necessity of dealing with state and other potentially violent agencies, and must practise diplomacy, manage problems of mistrust, and build and maintain relationships across cultural differences. Anderson and Marsden show that in order to describe the ethical lives of such traders, attention is required to a range of dynamics of ethical interaction, including conflicting values, ethical dilemmas, and forms of selfmaking. An extraordinarily rich efflorescence during the last couple of decades of studies of political activism has made clear the extent to which their politics rests on concerted ethical self-cultivation, both individual and collective. As Sian Lazar notes in Chapter 31, the concept of selfcultivation helps us to understand aspects of politics which ‘political’ analysis finds it hard to bring into focus because they elude analysis in terms of material interests or power competition. This includes the extent to which activist political agents constitute themselves as composite ethical subjects. China Scherz, in her survey of the recent anthropology of philanthropy (Chapter 32), notes the critique that has been directed in recent decades against global humanitarian and human rights organizations. But while much of the literature seems to attribute their faults to structural determination or political self-interest, perhaps hypocritically misrepresented as ethical concern, Scherz makes the important point that much is in fact due to the moral values that inform them: to precisely the cosmopolitan, globalist, humanist, and egalitarian moral doctrines and values that motivate the global elites who oversee these processes, values that are in large part shared by many anthropologists, including those who have so vigorously exposed the weaknesses of humanitarian organizations. Grasping the complexity of how these processes work requires questioning the distinction between the moral and the political, and between altruism and self-interest. In addition to questions of the effects of humanitarianism and philanthropy, Scherz considers them also as grounds upon which people cultivate forms of ethical subjectivity, and anthropology’s own complex relation to projects understood to be promoting some conception of the good.

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In his chapter, ‘Science’ (Chapter 33), Matei Candea shows how recent studies have brought to light the extent to which vocational detachment is not predicated on an absence of ethical value but is itself a distinctive ethical stance, and the subject of elaborate pedagogy. Candea also observes that the category of ‘science’, which when viewed through the lens of other forms of analysis appears to be an unproblematically unified category, from the point of view of the anthropology of ethics appears as designating a rather heterogeneous entity (and the same might be said of ‘politics’, ‘philanthropy’, and ‘commerce’). One final area within the anthropology of the ethics of institutional life, which stands out as somewhat distinctive in relation to the fields I have just briefly mentioned, is the study of socialism, both the historicalanthropological study of ‘really existing socialism’ in its heyday and the study of enduring socialist systems today. This stands out because although there was a strain of Marxist theory that denounced morality and moralism as bourgeois self-indulgences, in power, Marxist socialism was an extraordinarily overt, ambitious, and thorough attempt to remake the moral character of the citizens who lived under it. The communist parties who governed the socialist states of Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Castroist Cuba, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia carried out what were probably the most ambitious experiments in top-down ethical reform ever undertaken in human history, and the extent to which they inspired absolute devotion and sustained self-sacrifice (as well, of course, as requiring the sacrifice of others) is probably also unprecedented in scale. As Yunxiang Yan shows in our final chapter, there is much to be learned from re-analysing what happened under those regimes, with a view to what we can learn about the fundamental dynamics of the ethical dimension of human life, not only for general interest but also in relation to understanding the trajectory of states such the People’s Republic of China today, which has recently renewed and redoubled its ambition of creating moral subjects in its own image, even if various other aspects of its socialist inheritance have been to a greater or lesser degree side-lined. In light of this, and finally, it is perhaps interesting to consider briefly a general question that arises in relation to projects of ethical selfcultivation that are part of campaigns for political change. In a seminar at which I was present, Webb Keane presented material from his book, Ethical Life (2016), on a range of instances where projects of ethical selfcultivation were part of political movements, including consciousnessraising in American feminism, religious piety movements, and Vietnamese communism. The question was asked if it is possible or desirable to draw a distinction between cases which it makes sense to see as ethical movements on the one hand, and those that might better be regarded as indoctrination or forced ‘engineering of souls’ on the other. If the latter are not really ‘ethics’, how do we distinguish them from the former? Ethical projects are virtually never just dreamed up by individuals

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Introduction

for themselves. They have histories, are institutionalized, codified, and taught, and they come to most individuals as to some extent already formed and external to them: one ‘takes on’ a project devised and constructed by others. So, is there some form or degree of freedom that participants enjoy in relation to ethical projects that distinguishes them from political indoctrination? Or is ‘indoctrination’ just a name given to projects of ethical change of whose political objectives one disapproves? I think it is possible to draw a useful analytical distinction, and the case of feminist consciousness-raising helps in delineating it. As Keane describes, feminist consciousness-raising was introduced at a women’s liberation conference in 1969 by a group of radical feminists, who hoped that it would prove to be a tool for revolutionary mass mobilization. It was a new method, put together drawing on a number of sources and precedents, of inducing ethical reflection through organized interaction. In small groups, women exchanged accounts of their personal experience and engaged in collective re-examination of those experiences, reevaluating previously taken-for-granted aspects of their love affairs and marriages, domestic and family life, work, and experience of associational life, including political activism. As participants shared and compared what they discovered to be common experiences and emotions, they formulated new objectified categories that could become the basis for selfunderstanding and ethical judgement: ‘thick’ ethicized categories (on which see Chapter 5) such as ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘date rape’ that combined description and evaluation. These processes facilitated the shifting of responsibility for feelings of unhappiness away from the self to newly constituted structural entities such as ‘patriarchal society’. This technique was explosively successful in the wider women’s movement, and resulted in conceptual innovations that have become part of everyday language with powerful long-term effects on how sex and gender are lived and debated. It was successful also well beyond the radical feminist circles in which it originated, spreading rapidly and adopted in less radical women’s circles as well as gay rights and illness and disability groups and well beyond. Very soon, the practice became ‘part of the equipment of the general American therapeutic culture’ (Keane 2016: 190). People in a range of walks of life deployed the technique to pursue ends that were very different from those envisaged by its creators, and their participation led them to develop ideas, aspirations, and self-understandings that could be quite at variance with those the originators had hoped to foster. This was a cause of regret and disillusionment for some of its originating activists, but it is a critical point in relation to our question here. Although published accounts of Maoist struggle sessions were one set of sources drawn upon by its inventors, those inventors would not have been able, even had they wished, to replicate the coercive social relations that constituted those practices in Chinese communism and ensure that the outcomes of struggle sessions there stuck faithfully to Party doctrine. As

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consciousness-raising developed in the USA and then elsewhere, by contrast, the social relations in which it took place turned out, as many of the chapters in this volume would lead us to expect, to be essential to how the practice worked. It slipped its moorings, and rather than remaining an instrument for directing participants towards already-determined conclusions, it became a site of creativity and innovation, and enabled participants to develop in an increasingly wide range of unanticipated directions. Crucially, the fact of the matter of the specific experiences that participants brought with them powerfully affected the dynamics of interaction and therefore the conclusions generated in different contexts. As increasingly diverse groups of people, with increasingly diverse interests and concerns, adopted and adapted the techniques, consciousness-raising developed in ways that far exceeded and even in many cases ran counter to its progenitors’ intentions. And we might say that the difference between the instrument of political indoctrination that was at least part of its origins, and the polymorphous and promiscuously multi-purpose technique of ethical cultivation that it has become, lies precisely in the degree to which its outcomes cannot be known in advance. This points, I think, to something general and important about the ethical dimension of social life, and about the human condition.

References Ames, Roger T. 2011. Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Anscombe, G. E. M. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Philosophy, 33: 1–19. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2011. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: Norton. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 1998. ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes on the South African Postcolony’. American Ethnologist, 26: 279–303. Costa, Luiz and Carlos Fausto. 2010. ‘The Return of the Animists: Recent Studies of Amazonian Ontologies’. Religion and Society: Advances in Research, 1: 89–109. Curry, Oliver Scott. 2016. ‘Morality as Co-operation: A Problem-Centred Approach’, in Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen (eds.), The Evolution of Morality. Cham: Springer: 27–52. Curry, Oliver Scott, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse. 2019. ‘Is It Good to Co-operate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies’. Current Anthropology, 60: 47–69. Dare, Tim and Christine Swanton (eds.). 2020. Perspectives in Role Ethics: Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation. London: Routledge.

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Durkheim, Emile. 1973 [1914]. ‘The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Conditions’, in Robert N. Bellah (ed.), On Morality and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 149–63. Edel, May and Abraham Edel. 1968 [1959]. Anthropology and Ethics: The Quest for Moral Understanding. 2nd ed. Cleveland, OH: Case Western. Englund, Harri and James Leach. 2000. ‘Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity’. Current Anthropology, 41: 225–48. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1950. ‘Social Anthropology: Past and Present – The Marett Lecture’. Man, 50: 118–24. Faye, Emmanuel. 2009. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Firth, Raymond. 1951. ‘Moral Standards and Social Organization’, in Elements of Social Organization. London: Athlone: 183–214. Foucault, Michel. 1986 [1984]. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2. London: Viking. 2000. Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984 – Volume 3. New York: New Press. Furani, Khaled. 2019. Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gellner, David N., Oliver Scott Curry, Joanna Cook, Mark Alfano, and Soumhya Venkatesan. 2020. ‘Morality Is Fundamentally an Evolved Solution to Problems of Social Co-operation’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 26: 415–27. Gluckman, Max (ed.). 1972. The Allocation of Responsibility. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Henare, Amira, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.). 2006. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Heywood, Paolo. 2017. ‘The Ontological Turn’. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ontological-turn. 2022. ‘Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating “the Everyday” in the Birthplace of Fascism’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64: 91–121. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia’, in Signe Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge: 25–47. 2012. ‘Favors and “Normal Heroes”: The Case of Postsocialist Higher Education’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2: 22–41. Keane, Webb. 2014. ‘Affordances and Reflexivity in Ethical Life: An Ethnographic Stance’. Anthropological Theory, 14: 3–26. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1951. ‘Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification’, in Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (eds.), Towards a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 388–433. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311–32. 2012. ‘Ontologically Challenged’. Anthropology of This Century, 4. http:// aotcpress.com/articles/ontologically-challenged. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marett, Robert Ranulph. 1902. ‘Origin and Validity of Ethics’, in Henry Sturt (ed.), Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford. London: Macmillan: 221–87. Mathias, John. 2020. ‘Sticky Ethics: Environmental Activism and the Limits of Ethical Freedom in Kerala, India’. Anthropological Theory, 20: 253–76. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12: 161–84. McKearney, Patrick. 2021. ‘What Escapes Persuasion: Why Intellectual Disability Troubles “Dependence” in Liberal Societies’. Medical Anthropology 40: 155–68. in press. ‘At the Margins of Liberal Care: Ethics Between Dependence and Freedom’. Current Anthropology. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1994 [1887]. On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. ‘Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26: 126–66. 2016. ‘Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6: 47–73. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pocock, David. 1986. ‘The Ethnography of Morals’. International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, 1: 3–20. Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read, Kenneth E. 1955. ‘Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama’. Oceania, 25: 233–82. Robbins, Joel. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–62. 2015. ‘Ritual, Value, and Example: On the Perfection of Cultural Representations’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 18–29.

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2018. ‘Where in the World Are Values? Exemplarity, Morality, and Social Process’, in James Laidlaw, Barbara Bodenhorn, and Martin Holbraad (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject: Freedom, Creativity and Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 174–92. Sahlins, Marshall. 1993. Waiting for Foucault. Chicago, IL: Prickly Pear Press. Scheele, Judith. 2015. ‘The Values of “Anarchy”: Moral Autonomy among Tubu-Speakers in Northern Chad’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21: 32–48. Stafford, Charles (ed.). 2013. Ordinary Ethics in China. London: Athlone. Swanton, Christine. 2003. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralist View. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4: 469–88. Westermarck, Edward. 1906–8. The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas. 2 volumes. London: Macmillan. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Collins. 1992. Shame and Necessity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolf, Susan. 2015. The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfram, Sybil. 1982. ‘Anthropology and Morality’. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 13: 262–74. Wolin, Richard. 1993. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2016. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Part I

Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements

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2 Moral and Political Philosophy Hallvard Lillehammer

Anthropology and Philosophy A contemporary student could reasonably be forgiven for thinking that anthropology and philosophy are completely separate areas of study. To some extent, this impression is borne out by how these disciplines are presented in the specialist literature. Yet this hides a more interesting and complicated story. Prior to the institutional emergence of the social sciences, philosophers would not generally have considered anthropological questions as beyond the limits of their ‘subject area’ (see, e.g., Aristotle 350 BC/1988; Hume 1739/1978; Nietzsche 1887/1967). Until recently, anthropological thought was generally considered continuous with philosophical thought, in the sense that ethnographic and historical facts were recognizable to philosophers as part of what they ought to know about. Also, after the emergence of anthropology as a separate ‘discipline’, anthropologists and philosophers continued to make use of arguments and theories from the other discipline, even if this is not always explicitly recognized or reflected on (see, e.g., Westermarck 1906, 1932; Macbeath 1952; Brandt 1954, 1979; Ladd 1957; Winch 1958; Shweder 1991; MoodyAdams 1997; Lear 2006). In this chapter, I describe some of the areas of interaction and overlap as these are reflected in contemporary moral and political philosophy. In doing so, I shall set aside the history of how discussions in anthropology and philosophy have intersected over time (see, e.g., Hylland Eriksen and Sivert Nilsen 2001). I shall also be extremely selective in the choice of topics to illustrate the interface between anthropology and philosophy, taking as my examples a small number of issues that have recently preoccupied both disciplines. For example, I shall have little to say in this chapter about the philosophical reception of recent empirical work in moral psychology. (For a discussion of moral psychology and cognitive science, see Chapter 7 by Natalia Buitron and Harry Walker in this volume; see also Blackburn 1998; Doris 2002; Nichols 2004; Joyce

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2005; Prinz 2007; Haidt 2012.) Finally, I shall approach these issues almost exclusively through the lens of recent work in Anglophone philosophy. This is obviously not the only way to exhibit the links between these disciplines (cf. Das et al. 2014; Cahill et al. 2017). It is, however, one effective way of doing so.

Ethics, Morality, and the Political In accordance with recent convention, it is natural to divide moral philosophy into three intersecting branches, the integration of which would constitute a ‘system’ of philosophy in the sense of the systems produced by Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, or Hume, Kant, and Hegel in the modern. The first of these branches, sometimes called ‘moral theory’, investigates the nature and connections between basic concepts of ethical interpretation and criticism, including ‘the good’ (e.g. value or utility); ‘the right’ (e.g. duty or obligation); and ‘the virtuous’ (e.g. character or selfcultivation). The connection between moral theory and anthropology is revealed once we ask which of these concepts to employ as the central units in the interpretation of human behaviour. Thus, it has recently been argued that an anthropology focussed exclusively on rule-based concepts, such as duty or obligation (or what Bernard Williams (1985) called ‘the Morality System’), fails to make sense of the contextually situated agency and deliberation of ethical subjects and should therefore be supplemented by an anthropology of ‘virtue’, or ‘the good’ (see, e.g., Lambek 2008; Robbins 2013; Laidlaw 2013). At the same time, the idea of virtue, understood as a stable character trait, has been criticized by philosophers who are sceptical of appeals to character traits in the interpretation of human action (see, e.g., Harman 1999; Doris 2002). I explore these connections between anthropology and philosophy in the section titled ‘The Good, the Right, and the Virtuous’ later in this chapter. The second branch of moral philosophy, sometimes called ‘applied ethics’, investigates ethical problems that individuals, groups, or institutions face in the real world. Thus understood, applied ethics is a branch of social criticism, and is often focussed on complex and divisive issues such as assisted reproduction, the ethics of sex and gender, human rights, or other topics at the forefront of public debate (see, e.g., Frey 2005). The point of contact between applied ethics and anthropology extends beyond the fact that anthropology itself has an ethically ambiguous history when it comes to some of the issues it investigates, such as questions of legitimacy in a ‘post-colonial’ world (see, e.g., Mbembe 2005; Goodale 2017). Anthropologists also need to reflect on the terms they apply to describe the topics investigated, such as ‘regime’, ‘socialism’, and ‘neoliberal’ (see, e.g., Ortner 2016); and they need to do so with as much critical scrutiny as they apply to the main targets of their

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interpretation or criticism. The case for ‘applied ethics’ taking account of work in anthropology is equally overwhelming and arises partly from the danger of thinking that the main task of social criticism is to take a moral theory formulated in the abstract and then apply it without being sensitive to context (see, e.g., Singer 2011; Keane 2016). I explore this issue further in the section titled ‘Equality, Justice, and the Cosmopolitan Ideal’ later in this chapter. The third branch of moral philosophy, sometimes called ‘metaethics’, investigates the nature of ethical claims, including their cognitive status (‘Are ethical statements expressions of emotion?’); their epistemological aspirations (‘What is moral knowledge?’); and their metaphysical foundations (‘Is there a single true morality?’). The close connection between metaethics and anthropology is revealed once we ask how to interpret different social practices or groups (including our own), and how this question relates to the plausibility of ethical relativism (see, e.g., Plato 380 BC/1997; Westermarck 1932; Williams 1985; Rorty 1991; MoodyAdams 1997; Harman 2000; Prinz 2007; Wong 2006). For example, the extent to which we should expect to discover ‘sameness in difference’ or ‘difference in sameness’ is a question to which both the conceptual tools of the philosopher and the interpretative data of the anthropologist are equally relevant (cf. Keane 2016: 3–12, 260–2). I explore this theme in the section titled ‘But Isn’t It All Relative?’ later in this chapter. So far I have said very little about what is known as ‘political’ philosophy as opposed to ‘moral’ philosophy or ‘ethics’. This omission is indicative of a deep controversy within philosophy itself. On the one hand, political philosophy is often thought of as a branch of applied ethics, namely the branch that applies moral theory to public and other social institutions, such as the state (see, e.g., Rawls 1971; Dworkin 2011). This view of political philosophy has deep roots in modern philosophy, and in some parts of the Anglophone sphere it has, until recently, been largely dominant. On the other hand, the idea of regarding political philosophy as a form of applied ethics has been criticized by those who claim that the ‘moralism’ embodied in this notion involves a mistaken detachment of philosophical thought about politics from the real world, a detachment that results in a set of theoretical abstractions that fail to capture how the social world actually works (see, e.g., Badiou 2002; Williams 2007). According to this criticism, the correct place to locate political philosophy is ‘outside’ ethics as conventionally understood (see, e.g., Geuss 2005, 2010). I shall make no attempt to adjudicate this controversy here. (For a parallel controversy about the anthropology of ethics versus the anthropology of politics, see, e.g., Fassin 2015; Ortner 2016.) What I shall do instead is take as the focus of my discussion a set of issues from the recent literature on international justice that vividly bring out what this disagreement between ‘moralist’ and ‘realist’ approaches to political philosophy is about.

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The Good, the Right, and the Virtuous Moral theories provide conceptual tools for the interpretation of attitudes, actions, or states of affairs. As normally conceived, they are ‘normative’, as opposed to ‘descriptive’, theories of human behaviour. There is a vast literature that warns us against confusing ‘descriptive’ claims with ‘normative’ claims; inferring an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; or committing what has come to be known as the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’ (Hume 1738/1978; Moore 1903; Sinclair 2019). Yet in practice, descriptive and normative claims are always likely to be somewhat entangled, and anthropology is one of the areas of social thought where the presence of such entanglement is at its most poignant (see, e.g., Geertz 1973: 3–30, 140–1; Williams 1985). It is therefore worth considering what relevance (if any) a substantially normative moral theory might have for the anthropology of ethics and morality. One answer is that much work in anthropology itself has a substantially normative agenda, the concepts and assumptions of which can in principle be mapped onto one, or more, of the moral theories that have been articulated by philosophers. I shall return to this possibility shortly. A second answer is that normative assumptions can sometimes enter into description, explanation, or interpretation because what we are doing is ‘describing’ something as an approximation to (or ‘in the light of’) some normative standard, or ‘ideal’ (see, e.g., Hurley 1989; MoodyAdams 1997; Davidson 2004). There are at least three reasons why a project of interpretation could employ substantially moral assumptions along these lines. First, by making what is a simplifying assumption about the beliefs and attitudes of the people they are trying to understand, a theorist may succeed in improving their ability to predict or explain what those people are up to. Second, by making such an assumption, a theorist may succeed in making the behaviour of the people in question look less unfamiliar and more ‘like their own’. Third, by making such an assumption, a theorist may succeed in making the people in question come across as reasonable or good, and therefore less exotic or offensive, to an initially sceptical or biased outsider. In each case, the moral theories developed by philosophers can be of use in working out what the substantially normative assumptions in question might be. According to one way of interpreting the current state of moral theory, it is a contest between consequentialism and ‘the rest’ (see, e.g., Scheffler 1998). The issue in contention is what kind of ethical ideas (such as thoughts about ‘the good’) we should regard as basic in the interpretation of ethical thought, and whether we can interpret all other ethical ideas in those terms. Contemporary consequentialism is maximally ambitious in this respect as it seeks a foundation for all ethical thought in terms of one single idea, namely the idea of a good, or desirable, state of affairs (such as the reader of this chapter experiencing pleasure). Stripped of their bells

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and whistles, consequentialist theories can be thought of as having two parts (see, e.g., Pettit 1991): (i) a theory of desirable states of affairs (its ‘theory of the good’) and (ii) a theory about how these states of affairs should be realized (its ‘theory of the right’). On a consequentialist account, what is right is always a function – however complex – of the good. And a good consequentialist, it is natural to assume, is a person who (in some way or other) acts for the best. The idea that a theory as reductively simple as consequentialism is philosophically standard might strike contemporary anthropologists with a combination of horror and surprise (but see, e.g., Barth 1966; Kapferer 1976; Popkin 1979; Bailey 1996). Yet in other parts of the human sciences, from decision theory to economics, the interpretation of people in broadly consequentialist terms is frequently considered a default option for anyone seeking to interpret human action in terms of the rational pursuit of desires in light of beliefs. It is important to bear in mind, therefore, that in its purely schematic form the consequentialist framework is in principle consistent with the good consisting of virtually anything whatsoever, one content-neutral label for which is ‘utility’. (Hence its alternative name, ‘utilitarianism’.) Indeed, ever since the original rise to prominence of utilitarianism in the works of Bentham, Mill, and others, much attention has been devoted to the question of how to understand the consequentialist notion of ‘the good’; in particular, whether to restrict this idea narrowly to features of mental states such as agreeable experiences, or to include a wider range of desirable states of affairs as well, such as physical health, human perfection, social equality, individual freedom, or natural beauty (see, e.g., Feldman 2004). Understood as a normative theory, consequentialism is not a descriptive account of how people actually behave. It is a theory of how they ought to behave, or of that towards which they ought to aspire. Yet one of the most important features of consequentialism is that it does not automatically tell people to think like consequentialists. Indeed, in one of its most influential manifestations (associated with another one of its early champions, Henry Sidgwick), it does not even tell people to believe in consequentialism (Sidgwick 1907). This feature of the view derives from its schematic structure, from which it follows that what agents ought to do is think, feel, believe, or act in such a way that more good will be produced, whatever it takes. Another way of putting the point is to say that you cannot directly infer from a consequentialist criterion of right actions a decision procedure for how to guide your behaviour in the course of ethical thought. It all depends on what will, in fact, produce more good; and that could (at least in principle) be most effectively achieved by way of many, or even most people, rejecting consequentialism in favour of traditional moral codes, such as local religious precepts. Bernard Williams’s label for this idea, ‘Government House Utilitarianism’, is one that has stuck because of the

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way it brings out the paternalistic implications of a view that lets the average member of the ‘polis’ carry on as normal within structural constraints imposed by a class of ‘enlightened’ consequentialist rulers (Williams 1995: 153–71). In any case, consequentialism is consistent with a view of ethical thought according to which ethical insight is esoteric. It is an interesting question at the interface of anthropology and philosophy to what extent these and comparable ideas of ethical insight as esoteric have been similarly embodied in the self-understanding of ethical subjects in different times and places, and in the context of different cosmologies and systems of religious belief (cf. High, Kelly, and Mair 2012). Much of the philosophical controversy over consequentialism concerns its theory of ‘the right’, according to which (in some way or other) it always turns out that the ends justify the means. A potentially more interesting source of controversy from an anthropological perspective is the fact that in its schematic form consequentialism treats all goods as malleable (or in principle possible to aggregate) across time, place, persons, or institutions. To oversimplify somewhat, as long as there is more good in the world, it does not matter where that good resides, or with whom. Critics therefore complain that consequentialism fails to respect ‘the separateness of persons’ (see, e.g., Rawls 1971). The fact that this is thought of as a serious problem brings out that both consequentialists and their critics have tended to assume that persons really are ‘separate’ in the required sense, and that the fundamental locus of ethical value is the individual human being (or ‘soul’), understood independently of its relation to other individuals or a greater whole. (See, e.g., Parfit 1984 for an interesting exception.) I shall return to this issue, and its relevance for anthropology, in the next section. If moral theory is a dispute between consequentialism and ‘the rest’, then who are ‘the rest’? It is common to identify two separate strands of ‘non-consequentialist’ moral theory, widely known under the labels ‘deontology’ and ‘virtue theory’, respectively (see, e.g., Miller 2011). Where consequentialism takes the idea of ‘the good’ as basic, deontology takes the idea of ‘the right’ as being prior to (or at least as basic as) ‘the good’, thereby potentially inverting the interpretative schema employed by consequentialism and giving an account of moral goodness and virtue that makes essential reference to the idea of right action, or action according to the right principles (see, e.g., Kant 1785/1998). Although it is in principle neutral about the exact origin or source of these principles (but see Nietzsche 1887/1967; Anscombe 1958), arguably the most influential form of deontology in contemporary philosophy is a family of secular (or partially secular; cf. Taylor 2007) views focussed on the idea of hypothetical agreements made between rational individuals for the regulation of society in accordance with their independently specifiable desires or interests (cf. Gauthier 1986). According to one of the currently most influential versions of this idea, morality is a system of shared principles that no one

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already motivated to find such principles could reasonably reject (see, e.g., Scanlon 1998). The idea that morality constrains the behaviour of ethical subjects by prescribing a set of moral principles, at least some of which may be thought of as exceptionless or ‘absolute’, is arguably as old as ethical thought itself (cf. Durkheim 1912/2008; Irwin 2007). Yet, as critics have pointed out, the idea that a ‘morality system’ is derivable from some rational agreement or ‘contract’ is an historically quite specific manifestation of ethical thought, and one that finds its most important roots in the philosophical theories developed in Europe during the ‘early modern’ period (Williams 1985; Geuss 2001; see also Hobbes 1651/1994; Locke 1689/1988; Rousseau 1762/1997). Moreover, in its contemporary manifestations, this kind of contractualist deontology has a number of striking limitations that have led many critics to look elsewhere. At least three limitations of contractualist deontology are worth noting in the context of a discussion of the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. First, a contractualist deontology has comparatively little to say about the place in ethical thought of vulnerable persons or nonhuman beings who are not candidates for playing the role of contracting parties to rational agreements. One important area of ethical thought is therefore left ‘off stage’ by contractualist deontology (see, e.g., Held 2005). Second, although by focusing primarily on the question of what contracting parties cannot reasonably reject contractualist deontology might offer a viable account of what is morally permissible or impermissible (where what is impermissible is thereby obligatory to avoid), it does not offer an account of what, among permissible ways of carrying on, is good, better, or best. Thus, it has been argued that a deontological morality focussed exclusively on the notion of duty and permissibility will struggle to make sense of the fact that some things people admire or aspire to are so favoured precisely because they are beyond the call of duty, ‘supererogatory’, or otherwise excellent (see, e.g., Heyd 1982; Raz 1986). Third, the model of the ethical subject as an independent and rationally calculating individual whose commitment to other ethical subjects is conditional on their acceptance of principles agreed to as a matter of contract is not obviously suited to make sense of how individuals actually identify themselves as ethical subjects whose ethical lives are structured by special ties and particular histories, where the ties in question are often regarded as historically ‘given’, and are therefore not in any interesting sense ‘contracted’ into at all (see, e.g., Taylor 1989). This gap between model and reality gives rise to two further challenges for contractualist deontology. The first is that insofar as the model of the ethical subject as morally committed ‘subject to contract’ fails to describe a self-conception that is reflectively available to that subject, there is an aspect of intrapersonal ethical understanding that the model fails to capture (cf. Skinner 1969). The second problem is that insofar as the model of the ethical subject as morally committed

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‘subject to contract’ is meant to provide some critical leverage on the selfconception available to that subject, it puts the interpreter in a position where the conceptual tools employed are potentially at odds with those accepted by the people they are trying to understand. It is an interesting question whether some aspect of this problem is present in all anthropological fieldwork, even at the absolute limit where the ‘fieldwork’ in question is conducted on oneself (cf. Geertz 1973; Moody-Adams 1997). However that may be, the risk of ‘missing the point’ is always a real one where the model of the ethical subject employed by an interpreter diverges from that accepted by the subjects being studied, or (assuming that we can get our head around that notion) from what they are ‘really’ like. Thus, it is a frequent complaint about the deontological moral theory attributed to Immanuel Kant, for example, that it attributes to human beings a kind of ‘transcendental’ freedom, independence, and rationality that human beings do not actually have (see, e.g., Williams 1985; Kant 1785/1998). Whatever else one might think of it, contractualist deontology has the advantage of placing the concept of agency at the centre of attention, where entering a contract or accepting a principle is something that agents are assumed to be able to choose or decide freely, or for themselves. A different model of the ethical subject that equally puts the concept of agency centrestage is that of the ethical subject as a ‘subject of virtue’ (see, e.g., Lambek 2008; Laidlaw 2013; cf. Foucault 1997). This model of analysis, which in philosophy goes by the name of ‘virtue ethics’, takes as its primary focus the idea of an admirable disposition or character trait, the aspiration, cultivation, or manifestation of which is regarded as a basic factor in ethical interpretation (see, e.g., Hursthouse 1999; MacIntyre 1984; Foot 2001). The introduction in recent anthropology of the model of the ethical subject as a subject of virtue raises a number of questions that strike right at the heart of virtue ethics considered as a ‘third way’ in moral theory. Two of these questions are of particular interest here. The first is whether talk about admirable character traits attributes to people a set of stable dispositions they do not actually have. The second is how virtue ethics relates to consequentialism or deontology, and whether it is helpful to think of virtue ethics as a distinctive kind of moral theory at all. (The anthropology of virtue is treated at greater length in Jonathan Mair’s Chapter 3 in this volume. The anthropology of freedom is treated at greater length in Soumhya Venkatesan’s Chapter 10. For the relationship between virtue and freedom, see, e.g., Laidlaw 2013: 47ff.) The first question arises from studies in social psychology that claim to establish that the manifestation of ethical behaviour by human beings is highly situation specific and sensitive to contextual cues that are frequently not apparent to the subjects who display them and that are, in any case, often of dubious ethical significance (Doris 2002; Haidt 2012). Among well-known studies of the kind are the infamous Milgram

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experiments, where apparently normal people were enticed to inflict serious pain on others during the course of their professional activities (Milgram 1974), but also more recent experiments where responses have been elicited to actual or imaginary scenarios involving arbitrary subjects being hit and sometimes killed by lethal trolleys and the like (Greene 2013; cf. Keane 2016: 6ff.). The problem is that an ethics of virtue seems to presuppose the existence of character traits that experiments like these reveal either not to exist or to be ethically misguided. Recent work in anthropology not only speaks to but also contains an important critical perspective on arguments against virtue ethics based on scepticism about character traits. There are at least two reasons for this. First, as described in recent ethnographies of self-cultivation, it is a common assumption that virtue can be extremely difficult to achieve, or perhaps is not even fully achievable at all, for most human beings (cf. Humphrey 1997; Pandian 2009). It is no objection to virtue thus understood that ordinary people can be easily enticed to act contrary to virtue in a wide range of circumstances. Indeed, the fact that they are so easily enticed is arguably embodied at the very heart of much organized religion (see, e.g., Mahmood 2004; Hirshkind 2006). There might be very good reason for someone to pray five times a day, for example, if the aim is not to stray from a narrowly prescribed path of pious action, thought, or feeling. Second, another common assumption is that virtue is irreducibly social, and so – in many cases – not achievable by one person in isolation. Thus, Webb Keane has argued that social practices function as ‘exoskeletons’ that make our character traits more robust than they would be if they were to depend entirely on what is ‘within’ us alone (Keane 2016: 97). It is no objection to virtue ethics thus understood that individuals are easily enticed to act contrary to virtue in a wide range of ethically inhospitable scenarios. Indeed, the fact that people are easily so enticed is implicitly recognized in the idea that the achievement of virtue is only likely against a background of shared practices of socialization in which such enticements are either absent or explicitly proscribed (cf. MacIntyre 1984). And even if attributing stable character traits to real human beings does involve an element of idealization, this is hardly a compelling argument on its critics’ behalf (cf. Weber 1970). After all, it is not as if competing models of the ethical subject as a ‘utility-generator’ (consequentialism) or a ‘rational contractor’ (contractualist deontology) do not equally involve some degree of idealization. The second question concerns the classification of virtue ethics as a distinctive way, or ‘third way’, in moral theory. There is a good case for thinking it is not. First, both consequentialist and deontological theories have historically included a ‘theory of virtue’ that interprets the idea of self-cultivation on their own distinctive terms. Thus, consequentialists are likely to interpret virtuous self-cultivation in terms of someone striving to ‘act for the best’ (cf. Adams 1976). Deontologists are likely to interpret

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virtuous self-cultivation in terms of someone striving to live as ‘a person of principle’ (cf. O’Neill 1996). Second, the very idea of virtue is one that involves the idea of some good (namely a good way for people to be) towards which individuals, groups, and institutions are meant to aspire. To this extent, virtue ethics shares with consequentialism its teleological structure and can therefore be thought of as a species of the genus ‘ethics of the good’. This ambiguous feature of virtue ethics has direct implications for the anthropology of ethics and morality, where the label ‘anthropology of the good’ has recently been used to describe a model of interpretation that includes both consequentialist and virtue-theoretic elements (see, e.g., Robbins 2013), and which could therefore benefit from conceptual disambiguation. The case for disambiguation arises partly from a problem that is as old as philosophical discussion of virtue and the good itself (see, e.g., Irwin 2007). This problem can be summarized in the question: ‘What is virtue for?’, one that could be variously answered by saying that some virtue (such as generosity) is: (i) ‘its own reward’; (ii) a ‘means’ to the achievement of good things (such as happiness); or (iii) only present when the subject of virtue is in fact both displaying her virtuous character and reaping the rewards (such as being both generous and happy). Once we have these distinctions to hand, we can see that there is a sense in which the paths of different kinds of virtue ethics are importantly distinct. (See, e.g., Kraut 1989; Annas 1993; Irwin 2007.) On the one hand, there is an interpretation of virtue ethics that understands the value of character traits as being essentially a matter of their conduciveness to the promotion of independently specified (or ‘good’) states of affairs. On some interpretations of Aristotle, for example, virtue is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for living a ‘good life’. A virtue ethics of this kind is arguably indistinguishable (except in emphasis) from some versions of consequentialism. On the other hand, there is a kind of virtue ethics that understands the value of character traits as being a basic feature of ethical appraisal that does not need to be independently explained or justified in consequentialist terms. On some interpretations of Plato and the Stoics, for example, virtue is both necessary and sufficient for living a ‘good life’. A virtue ethics of this kind is clearly distinguishable from most versions of consequentialism. (It might also be the kind of virtue ethics that has the better claim to be an ‘ethics of freedom’; cf. Laidlaw 2013.) Either way, the task of accurately describing and evaluating such virtues (and vices) as have actually been thought to exist is one that any plausible moral theory will benefit from. An anthropology of the good can contribute to this task, whether it is focussed on virtue as interpreted in terms of some religious framework or along more secular lines (see, e.g., Faubion 2011; Lambek 2010; Lambek et al. 2015). One theme emerging from this discussion of moral theory is that of different theories approximating each other by explaining or incorporating the insights of the others. This is not an accident. The utilitarian Henry

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Sidgwick, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century, argued that when properly thought through the morality of ‘common sense’ will emerge as a version of consequentialism (Sidgwick 1874/1907). Derek Parfit, one of the most influential Anglophone moral philosophers writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, argued that when properly thought through consequentialism and contractualist deontology describe complementary ways of ‘climbing the same mountain’. (Parfit counted Kantian deontology as another attempt at the same summit, and therefore named his result the ‘Triple Theory’: Parfit 2011, 2017.) Yet if different moral theories shade into each other this way, what’s the point of having all of them? One response is to point out that moral theories provide alternative models of interpretation, the different versions of which may be variously suitable to capture the ethical experience of historically located ethical subjects on terms that they themselves would understand. The fact that there are alternative ways of doing so is no indictment if the different ways of conceptualizing ethical thought end up endorsing broadly the same forms of life. A second response is that they don’t shade into each other at all, or at least not perfectly so. In order to make it look otherwise, philosophers have arguably had to ignore crucial aspects of ‘common sense’ (in some times and places), or have had to twist the interpretation of ethical experience to cover up remaining issues of deep disagreement (cf. Huddleston 2016). Consider, for example, the various ways in which people have historically understood the allegedly selfevident claim that ‘All men are created equal’ (USA 1776; my italics). Recent work in anthropology has much to contribute to the evaluation of this response insofar as it is likely to put pressure on our ‘shared’ understanding of: (i) whom to include in ‘everyone’; (ii) whom to count among the ‘men’; (iii) what to understand by being ‘created’; and (iv) what to understand by the term ‘equality’.

Equality, Justice, and the Cosmopolitan Ideal In contrast to influential currents of European thought during the latter parts of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Dumont 1967/1980; Le´vi-Strauss 1974; Bourdieu 1977; but see also Fassin 2014), much of Anglophone philosophy during this period was narrowly individualistic, with the systematic study of the nature of collective and institutional agents, such as business corporations or ‘group minds’, only having gained prominence towards the end of the century (see, e.g., French 1984; List and Pettit 2011; Searle 2010). In the Anglophone tradition, the study of collective, corporate, or institutional entities has traditionally been the preserve of political philosophy, with particular focus on the nation state and its duties of primarily ‘distributive’ justice (Rawls 1971; Nozick 1974). This primary focus of political philosophy is currently a source of much controversy.

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Part of the controversy concerns whether the focus of interpretation is better confined to individual ethical subjects, or whether it is more helpful to focus on the structures, institutions, or collectives within which these ethical subjects are embodied as vehicles, incubators, or victims of power or constraint (see, e.g., James 1984; Young 2011). Another part of the controversy is focussed on the idea that political philosophy is a branch of moral philosophy; namely, the moral philosophy of large institutions, the nation state being the paradigm example of these (see, e.g., Geuss 2005). On this topic, there is a furious debate between those who subscribe to a so-called realist as opposed to a so-called ideal-theory interpretation of political thought (see, e.g., Galston 2010). To see what these debates are about, and to illustrate their significance for issues at the interface of anthropology and philosophy, it will help to have a concrete example to hand. There is no better example of the kind than the topic of social (including global) justice. Two paradigm examples of the dominant methodology in Anglophone philosophy can be traced to a particular moment in recent history, when the professional literature took a ‘practical turn’ in response to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. In his 1971 monograph A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls introduced a thought experiment in which the basic distributive principles of a reasonably ‘well-ordered’ society were to be arrived at by imagining mutually disinterested persons choosing such principles behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ in which they don’t know how well off they will be once the principles chosen are applied. (The reader may recognize this model as a version of contractualist deontology discussed in the previous section.) Rawls argued that the individuals in question would prefer a ‘risk-averse’ solution that guarantees that inequalities are only permitted if they benefit the worst off. In his 1974 monograph Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick objected that Rawls’s egalitarian solution is incompatible with the freedom of individuals to responsibly exercise their natural rights to control themselves and their property through continuous voluntary exchange. In effect, Nozick accused Rawls of licensing a form of ‘theft’ when the state appropriates the legitimately acquired benefits of the best off and redistributes them to the worst off. At roughly the same time, in his 1972 paper ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Peter Singer introduced the ‘Shallow Pond’ thought experiment. In this thought experiment, you are to imagine walking past a pond in which another person is drowning who can easily be saved at little or no cost to yourself. The question is whether you have a duty to do so. The expected reaction is to think that you should obviously save the drowning person, from which Singer argues – by parity of reasoning – that you should equally save any other person in dire straits, whether they are nearby or far away; drowning or dying of starvation, and so on, for example by making such moderate sacrifices as giving money to charity or supporting worthy causes in other ways. Later commentators have argued that with respect to vast numbers

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of afflicted people across the globe, the relationship of the average citizen in the affluent West is more like that of someone faced with a person drowning who either they, or some member of their community, have previously pushed into the pond in the first place. Some of these commentators have gone further and combined the conclusions of Singer’s and Rawls’s thought experiments into a single theory that interprets the duties of distributive justice on a global scale along the same egalitarian terms that Rawls proposed for individual states (see, e.g., Pogge 1989, 2008). The result is a comprehensive system of prescriptions for moral and political thought that applies equally across the world, conceived of as one gigantic and increasingly connected ‘global village’. What matters for present purposes are not the details of these and other similar philosophical thought experiments (cf. Kamm 2007; McMahan 2009). What matters here is to understand how these arguments are supposed to work, namely by deriving practical recommendations for individual and institutional behaviour in highly complex circumstances from schematic hypothetical scenarios interpreted in moral terms. There are at least three controversial features of this methodology, each of which is directly connected to questions of interpretation and criticism at the intersection of anthropology and philosophy (cf. Banner 2014). The first is that all else is never equal (cf. Fassin 2012). When people find themselves in a situation that is structurally similar to Shallow Pond, they will do so at the end of very different histories; with very different beliefs and expectations; with very different ways of describing the wider context; and with very different degrees of knowledge and confidence in their ability to make the right kind of difference by acting in one way or another. The anthropological study of particular situations where similar issues have arisen (e.g. of the way that actual historical persons have conceptualized their place in events of varying degrees of extremity) arguably offers some hope of protecting people from the distortions that can result when interpreting current and historical events in terms of abstract, schematic, and moralized templates like Rawls’s Original Position or Singer’s Shallow Pond (cf. Das 2007; Humphrey 2008). The second controversial feature is the generally individualistic way in which the dominant methodology has tended to cast the agents involved in its schematically described thought experiments. (It is an ironic fact that the subjects in Rawls’s original thought experiment were imagined to be ‘heads of households’.) This feature has the unfortunate potential to obscure from view that ethical subjects face moral and political decisions not only as arbitrary individuals but also as people who identify as participants in collective histories, religious communities, or ethnic groups, where relative to each of these different ‘social identities’ the question of who should decide, and on what basis, will often vary across conflicting but simultaneously embodied identities in the same situation (cf. Kymlicka 1991; Sandel 1998). As already noted, the philosophical

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literature on joint, collective, and corporate agency and responsibility in Anglophone philosophy has expanded considerably in recent years (see, e.g., French 1984, 1992; List and Pettit 2011; Bratman 2013; Gilbert 2014). Having said that, there are few signs of Anglophone philosophers abandoning their basic individualistic instincts; and even less of them seriously contemplating the idea of treating entities like information systems or other ontologically heterogeneous ‘networks’ as ethical subjects in their own right (cf. Latour 2005). One explanation for this might be the politically unfortunate entanglements with totalitarian ideologies that philosophical systems appealing to collective social entities like ‘spirit’, ‘Dasein’, or ‘the collective unconscious’ got themselves into during the twentieth century (see, e.g., Hegel 1821/1992; Heidegger 1927/1978; Jung 1969; Berlin 1952/2014). More relevant for present purposes is a concern about the legitimacy of power; in particular, the power accorded to collective or corporate agents in virtue of assigning them the status of ethical subjects. If we are really to assign institutional systems (such as multinational corporations) moral duties towards the individuals their activities affect, then what – if anything – are we thereby committed to assign them by way of moral rights against those individuals? (As ‘legal persons’, corporations are granted both legal rights and duties in many jurisdictions.) A third explanation is the widely held view that individual subjects can be morally responsible not only for what they do but also for what they participate in (see, e.g., Arendt 2003; Kutz 2000). The issue here is that in moving our focus from individuals to collectives or structures we shall only succeed in ‘throwing the ethical baby out with the bathwater’ by letting ethically responsible individuals ‘off the hook’. In the background of this and similar concerns is a deeply rooted assumption in modern moral philosophy that concepts such as right, duty, and responsibility only make sense if interpreted in terms of goings-on that are somehow internal to individual human beings who are – at least potentially – rational, in control of themselves, mutually independent, and otherwise free from external constraint (see, e.g., Kant 1785/1988). There is currently a growing literature in moral philosophy that explores the potentially distorting defects of this view, and how it has tended to underplay the social dimensions of moral agency and responsibility (see, e.g., Strawson 1962; Williams 1992; Hutchison, MacKenzie, and Oshana 2018; see also Laidlaw 2013 and Venkatesan’s Chapter 10 in this volume). A third controversial feature of the dominant methodology is that far from merely ‘abstracting’ from context, it also tends to idealize the relationships between individuals by describing them in normatively tendentious terms, for example as mutually independent rational individuals ethically constrained (only) by the voluntary exercise of natural rights over self and property. This is an assumption that, in Raymond Geuss’s provocative formulation, is then left ‘flapping and gasping for breath like a large moribund fish on the deck of a trawler, with no

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further analysis or discussion’ (Geuss 2010: 64; see also Gray 1989, 2000. Geuss’s complaint was directed at Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia). The point is that by interpreting the relationship between real historical actors in these idealized terms, the theoretical schema fails to do justice to how, at any given time and in any given place, all social thought is practically embodied in a complex psychosocial ecology, the precise contours of which are rarely visible from the philosopher’s armchair. The recent anthropology of ‘ordinary ethics’ vividly illustrates this point. Thus, when in Life and Words Veena Das describes how women are especially vulnerable to rape and murder in conditions where they have to leave the comparative safety of their dwellings in order to defecate, the issue is not so much that an abstract theory of justice is in principle incapable of addressing the issue (of course it could) as that from the perspective of abstract idealization the significance of something so ordinary as the passing of bodily waste is unlikely to be given much of a hearing among theorists whose primary interest is in how to ‘divide the cake’, or similar questions of traditional concern in recent political philosophy (Das 2007; cf. Levinas 2005). The trade-off between abstraction and context cuts both ways, however. This point is readily observable in recent anthropological discussions of multiculturalism, global justice, human rights, and the interpretation and criticism of the ‘post-colonial world order’ (see, e.g., Asad 2003; Goodale 2017). Much as one has to strongly agree with the compelling diagnoses contained therein of the blinkered prejudice, hypocrisy, internal inconsistency, and covert oppression embodied in various manifestations of this ‘world order’ (see, e.g., Rabinow 1996; Mbembe 2001; Zˇizˇek 2014), the ethical terms in which these diagnoses are standardly articulated are often the very same terms in which the distinctively modern, Western (and sometimes Christian) culture that is held responsible for this ‘world order’ has historically articulated its universalistic, or cosmopolitan, ethical aspirations (see, e.g., Appiah 2007; Lillehammer 2014a, 2014b). These are ethical aspirations the articulation of which owes more than a trivial amount to the kind of philosophy that finds its expression in thought experiments like Rawls’s veil of ignorance and Singer’s Shallow Pond (cf. Rousseau 1762/1997; Kant 1793/1996). Exactly what to make of this in practice, such as when interpreting appeals to human rights from groups who explicitly reject the assumptions that have given human rights discourse its wide social currency in the first place, is a notoriously difficult question to answer (see, e.g., Kuper 1994). Whatever one makes of it, there is no doubt that while a conceptually perspicuous anthropology has the potential to contribute to progress in moral philosophy in virtue of correcting for a range of common distortions or omissions, an empirically tractable moral philosophy has the potential to contribute to progress in anthropology in virtue of being conceptually perspicuous.

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But Isn’t It All Relative? Is there a single true morality? The ethnographic and historical data might be thought to speak for themselves. The ubiquity of ethical difference and disagreement presents a formidable obstacle to the view that if only we get straight about what we really (dis)approve of, we will realize that at bottom we really (dis)approve of the same things. Whether it be the ethics of what we kill and eat (e.g. in vegetable, animal, or human form); how we manage and reproduce our families (e.g. gender norms; the number and kinds of partners we have; what counts as ‘our own’ children); or how different social groups relate to each other (e.g. as ‘equals’, hierarchically, or as little as possible), the claim that there is a single and unified object of thought called ‘morality’ is one that stretches the limits of empirical plausibility. Moreover, the fact that people often tend to approve of a certain kind of life because they happen to live that life as opposed to living that life because they approve of it is evidence that whatever people get up to in cultivating an ethical sensibility, this is not a matter of grasping some single and unified body of truth called ‘morality’ that exists independently of our contingently evolved psychology and social practices (Mackie 1977; Joyce 2005). Short of drawing the sceptical conclusion that there is no such thing as getting it right or wrong in ethical thought at all, the most reasonable view might seem to be some form of relativism, such as the claim that actions are right or wrong (or people good or bad) only in relation to the norms that are approved of within a given group, society, or culture (Harman 2000; Prinz 2007; Velleman 2015). The problem of relativism is one of philosophy’s interminable puzzles which arguably goes back as far as the subject itself, as witnessed by Plato’s discussion of Protagoras’s claim in the Theaetetus that ‘man is the measure of all things’. Yet even if there is no prospect of conclusively resolving this puzzle, there are other important questions nearby on which progress can be made, and to which both anthropology and philosophy can speak in illuminating ways. To illustrate this, it may help to draw some simple distinctions that are easily missed in discussions of ethical difference and disagreement in both disciplines, sometimes to deleterious effect. The first distinction is that between relativism as a ‘metaethical’ claim and relativism as a ‘normative’ claim. Metaethical relativism says that there is no single true morality. Normative relativism says that it is wrong or inadvisable to judge people by standards that they, or their culture, would not accept. (We can imagine the latter claim being made by someone who defends the value of intercultural accommodation.) The importance of drawing this distinction is that accepting one of these claims does not logically force you to accept the other (cf. Williams 1972). Thus, I might propound a culture of accommodation whereby no one is judged by norms rejected by their own culture because intercultural

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accommodation is an attitude required by ‘the single true morality’ (cf. Mead 1928). In other words, I may accept normative relativism but reject metaethical relativism. Moving the other way, I might think that there is no single true morality while simultaneously rejecting an attitude of intercultural accommodation, instead judging all people according to the norms of my own culture. This would be consistent if the norms of my own culture forbid me from judging people from other cultures with conflicting ethical norms by the norms of their own culture. In other words, I may accept metaethical relativism but reject normative relativism. It is hard to overstate the significance of this distinction when thinking about interpreting ethical thought. First, the truth or otherwise of metaethical relativism does not in itself tell you what attitude you (e.g. a practising ethnographer) should take towards the ethical norms of the people you are trying to understand. In practice, you have no alternative but to employ your own judgement in deciding what to think (e.g. whether to judge others by your own standards; play along; suspend disbelief; or ignore the issue as far as possible). Moreover, this exercise of judgement is one that will inform your actions whether you think about it or not. In the choice of what groups to study (e.g. perpetrators of genocide); how to study them (e.g. observing their killings without interfering); how to describe what they are doing (e.g. the slurs with which they describe their victims); what to make of it all (e.g. as an alternative, or revolutionary, ‘lifestyle’); and how to disseminate the results (e.g. online or in a popular science bestseller), ethical questions arise, whether recognized or not, both during fieldwork and beyond. While answering these questions does not depend on first having an answer to the interminable puzzle of relativism, it does involve an exercise of ethical thought (e.g. concerning at what point a ‘participant’ stance is no longer ethically advisable to adopt in practice; see, e.g., Li 2008), or what distance to adopt between the vocabulary employed in interpretation and the vocabulary employed by the people interpreted (see, e.g., Geertz 1973: 3–32, 126–41, 193–233; 2001). Metaethical relativists sometimes appeal to the fact of moral difference and disagreement as data in support of the argument that ethical systems or practices are irreducibly plural and distinct (see, e.g., Prinz 2007). Yet this only raises the question of how it is possible for observers external to those practices to understand them in the first place (see, e.g., MoodyAdams 1997). Ethnographic data frequently bring to light surprising similarities and analogies that permit an external observer to make at least minimal sense of the norms and values studied on their own terms. This may happen, for example, in the context of studying a practice of eating human flesh, where this practice is heavily ritualized and understood to involve some kind of sacrifice (and not only by the person eaten (see, e.g., Conclin 2001; Laidlaw 2013)). Once we bear in mind that the intelligent ethnographer does not need to endorse every aspect of the practice

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observed in order to interpret it (no more than I need to endorse every aspect of my colleague’s hostility in order to understand what she’s up to when she blanks me in the corridor), the path is clear for an ethnographically informed challenge to the relativist claim that human moralities are irreducibly plural and distinct. Moreover, insofar as this latter claim has traditionally been supported with reference to the persistence of ethical difference and disagreement as depicted against a background of ‘descriptive or ‘natural’ facts about humans that are somehow assumed to be independently known, a direct engagement with anthropology can help to identify at least some ways of moving beyond the interminable puzzle of relativism in its traditional form, even if this engagement stops short of embracing what anthropologists know as ‘the ontological turn’, and according to which the idea of a single world on which different ethical beliefs provide different perspectives is itself put in question (see, e.g., Viveiros de Castro 1998; Holbraad 2009). On this, as on so many issues at the intersection of the two disciplines, both anthropologists and philosophers can find inspiration from some surprising quarters (see, e.g., Quine 1969; Goodman 1978; Putnam 1982). A second important distinction is that between relativity and context dependence. Let’s understand relativism as the claim that there is no single true morality, only irreducibly plural and distinct ones. Context dependence is the claim that the norms and values that apply to people (and how those norms and values apply) are dependent on, and so ‘relative to’, the particularities of social and historical context. Context dependence does not imply relativism as that view was just defined. Failure to attend to this fact is a potential cause of much confusion. Some element of context dependence is an invariant fact about all norms and values, the interesting question being how context dependent those norms and values are. For example, the Decalogue tells us not to kill, but philosophers and theologians have been working to specify the range of acceptable exceptions to this (such as when it is permissible to kill in self-defence) virtually since its reception (see, e.g., Aquinas 1265–74/1989). Even a high degree of context dependence is consistent with the claim that ultimately (possibly at some very high level of abstraction) there is a ‘single true morality’ that applies equally in all circumstances, but differentially so. Thus, on the ‘parametric universalist’ view propounded by T. M. Scanlon, all moral claims concerning right and wrong are ultimately explicable in terms of a basic set of principles that no one seriously interested in coming up with a system of principles for how to live together could reasonably reject (Scanlon 1998). Suppose that everyone so motivated would agree to a principle that prescribes the reduction of avoidable pain during the final stages of life. What this would actually involve in any given situation would obviously have to be very different in a high-tech urban society with sophisticated systems of palliative care than in a low-tech society of nomadic existence. It does not follow that the two practices of end-of-life care are in serious

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disagreement. Nor does it follow that the extent of agreement between the two practices will be obvious to the untrained eye. Moreover, while the truth of parametric universalism would provide a fool-proof guarantee that any apparently residual disagreement is ultimately resolvable in principle, the ethnographic task of working out what any case of apparent disagreement amounts to does not depend on being able to decide on the truth or falsity of parametric universalism in advance. The task of deciding the latter question is a project so abstract and esoteric as to be likely to play at best a marginal role in the interpretation of actual social practices. What the distinction between relativity and context dependence teaches us is that whether or not to stop applying ‘universalist’ pressure at some point of apparent difference or disagreement always involves a decision; a decision that will sometimes have to be sensitive to ethical considerations, such as what to make of the way in which the practice under consideration conceives of itself. For example, we might ask whether the practice in question can be plausibly interpreted as including any universalistic aspirations on its own behalf, or whether the task of adopting a conflicting ethical perspective is something its participants could undertake without engaging in wilful ignorance or self-deception, or otherwise losing their ‘grip on reality’. If the answer to either question is negative, it might be argued that continued insistence on pursuing the question of ‘who is right’ would be expressive of an ill-informed, narrowminded, provincial, or otherwise inadvisable attitude that would be better abandoned in favour of the suspension of judgement, or of what Bernard Williams called a ‘relativism of distance’ (Williams 1985; for a contrary view, see Moody-Adams 1997). A third distinction is that between relativism and indeterminacy. Whereas ethical claims are relative if they can correctly be made only relative to the norms of a given system or practice, ethical claims are indeterminate if there is no fact of the matter whether they are correct or not. There are at least three facts to bear in mind about the possibility that some ethical claims are indeterminate. The first is that indeterminacy is not peculiar to ethical claims but is observable wherever human thought is subject to vagueness. Consider, for example, how the different colours shade into each other on the colour spectrum, with some shades not normally being counted as being one determinate colour or another (Williamson 1994). The second is that the presence of indeterminacy in ethical thought (such as in hard cases) does not imply that there are no determinate answers to be had – much less that there are no better and worse answers anywhere (cf. Banner 2014). In some cases, the issues in question are so complex and difficult that the most reasonable attitude to take is one of uncertainty about what to think, as opposed to certainty that there is nothing to think (Dworkin 2011). The third fact to bear in mind is that indeterminacy can obtain both within and across different ethical systems or practices. In the first case, there might be no

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determinate fact internal to the norms accepted by a given society whether assisted reproduction involving mitochondrial donation is permissible. Maybe no one in the relevant society has ever thought about human reproduction involving three ‘biological parents’, and existing practice fails to set a precedent either way. Even so, when the possibility presents itself, the people involved will have to decide what their reproductive norms are going to be, as countries across the globe were actually in the process of doing at the time of writing (see, e.g., Clarke 2009). In the second case, there could be no determinate fact about which, among two or more conflicting sets of ethical norms, is preferable or correct. This possibility is arguably easiest to contemplate in cases where the systems or societies in question are located at a great distance from each other, whether conceptually or in space and time (see, e.g., Sreenivasan 2001). As Bernard Williams argued, in the context of the world as we currently have it the ethical systems and practices we actually observe are generally so interconnected that the issue of relativism should rarely arise, or, if it does (as when confronting a so-called hyper-traditional society), it is arguably ‘too late’ (Williams 1985: 158–9). Be that as it may, it would still be the case in any such situation that people have to decide what to think, say, or do, and that in some cases the answer to this question could be (within some suitable range) indeterminate. Similar questions arise when we compare the conflicting demands experienced by individuals and groups who embody the norms of more than one ethical system or practice within a given society, such as fellow citizens who recognize their affiliation both to a secular ideal of individual autonomy and a potentially conflicting ideal of communal authority, and who are therefore faced by what David Wong has called a ‘fact of ambivalence’ (Wong 2006). According to Wong, this ‘fact’ is symptomatic of a situation in which the ethical subject will experience the pull of competing ethical claims that may each be correct relative to some basically acceptable ethical framework, but where the choice between these frameworks is itself indeterminate. Regardless of the overall plausibility of this view, Wong’s moderate relativism arguably goes a long way towards capturing one important feature of the sense of vertigo that some people have felt in the face of serious ethical dilemmas that seem to be without a uniquely overriding answer (cf. Sartre 1946/2007; Derrida 2005). It may also go some way towards explaining the apparently paradoxical experience, sometimes felt in response to social sanction or punishment, that although what someone did was obviously morally inappropriate or transgressive, it was nevertheless neither bad nor (possibly) wrong (cf. Stafford 2010). Wong is one of the few contemporary Anglophone philosophers to have seriously theorized the idea of ambivalence, or the fact that as ethical subjects we are prone to be plural or divided against ourselves as we move between different social roles (e.g. sibling versus

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professional); social expectations (e.g. legal redress versus claims of personal pride); or foundational worldviews (e.g. being a citizen of secular society and a pious believer in religious truth (cf. Weber 1970; Gray 2000; Berlin 2002). Recent work in anthropology contains valuable resources for improving our understanding of this aspect of ethical experience, in particular as it relates to the reflective self-understanding of the ethical subjects involved (see, e.g., Robbins 2004; Laidlaw 2005; Rogers 2009). There is some evidence that the underlying lessons of this work are independently recognized in some parts of ‘mainstream’ philosophy as well (see, e.g., Applbaum 1999; Coates 2017). Traditionally, however, the Anglophone philosophical canon has tended to regard it as an aspiration, if not a requirement, that people strive to iron out ambivalence or conflict in their ethical selves (cf. Seligman and Weller’s Chapter 15 in this volume; see also Plato 380 BC/1997; Kant 1785/1988; Frankfurt 2004; Lukes 2008). In its most extreme version, the claim is that a commitment to consistency and coherence is part of what constitutes a fully developed human morality, and is therefore in a sense what makes us what we are (Korsgaard 2009). In spite of some valiant attempts to temper the most coercive ambitions of this tendency (see, e.g., Hume 1739/1978; Nietzsche 1887/1967; Freud 1995; Berlin 2002), its underlying commitment to unity and coherence continues to exercise a formidable pull in moral philosophy. The increasing body of ethnographic work that reveals not only the existence of but also the potential virtues embodied in ethical lives that neither achieve nor seriously aspire to this kind of coherent unity presents a noteworthy challenge to this philosophical tendency (see, e.g., Boellstorff 2005, 2008). In the end, it may sensibly be asked who it is that gets to speak about all of this, and what actually gets heard when they do. The question is partly epistemological: why should we assume that external observers are able to fully understand the experiences they purport to describe (e.g. cultural ambivalence, prejudice, discrimination, or oppression) if they have never been subject to those experiences themselves, or (as in the case of ‘participant observation’) have not been subject to them as much, as often, or in the same way as the people studied? The question is also ethical and political: why should we accept that external observers are well placed (or have the right) to give an account of other people’s experiences, especially where this account is assumed to take the place of the first-personal accounts of the persons described? In each of these forms, the question presents a challenge to anthropologists and philosophers alike, insofar as original voices are vulnerable to being ignored, misunderstood, marginalized, trivialized, silenced, or otherwise treated with insufficient respect. (For feminist critiques along these lines, see, e.g., Smith 1974; Harding 1991; Fricker 2007; for criticism, see, e.g., Bar On 1993; Longino 1992; see also Luka´cs 1971; Kuper 1994.) At the same time, it is an inescapable assumption of any serious

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study of social life that human beings are in principle able to say something sensible about how things are with others, in spite of the social distance or asymmetric power relations that may separate them. The alternative is a form of interpretative solipsism that is likely to be both intellectually incoherent and practically self-defeating.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the editor and three anthropological readers for their helpful comments on a draft version of this chapter.

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3 Virtue Ethics Jonathan Mair

Introduction Anthropologists have often marvelled in print – one could even say they have evangelized – about the malleability of the human being and the power of socialization to transform the human organism into myriad forms. Bodies, their abilities, the use of the senses, the direction of attention, the use of the memory, tastes, values, sex, and sleep, not to mention the life course and its relation to instituted social roles: all these human characteristics and many others besides are, we know well, subject to dramatic variation. Despite broadcasting this observation far and wide, as if it were very surprising (granted, it is, to some of us), we anthropologists have acted as if the people we study were ignorant of the fact. We explain how they take things for granted as part of their habitus, and so on. The premise of my argument in this chapter is that this assumption is an enormous and consequential mistake. It is clear from ethnographic work as well as literary traditions that people across time and from diverse cultures are far from ignorant about human variation. On the contrary, many traditions incorporate explicit reflection on the possibilities and challenges that the variation and malleability of the human organism bring to everyone, everywhere. Since the malleability of human being depends to some extent on human action and can lead to different results, the mere existence of the possibility invites judgements about which actions to take (to promote transformation in one direction or another) or about which results are to be celebrated and which to be regretted. This makes it an ethical issue. These two elements make up my working definition of virtue ethics: (1) the recognition of the malleability of human beings, and (2) the idea that some outcomes of this process are good (happy, virtuous) and others regrettable (vices).

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Let us call this ‘virtue ethics as such’ to distinguish it from any particular, historical version of virtue ethics. My aim here is not to argue for a single correct definition that will displace all others. A pragmatic definition, which serves the purpose of revealing something anthropologists have been slow to see, is all that is required. The combination of malleability and judgement is so hard to escape, so fundamental to the human condition, that it would take rather special conditions to allow people to convince themselves virtue ethics in this sense is not an important aspect of life. Yet anthropology for most of its existence practically ignored virtue-ethical concerns, and in fact some of the discipline’s core theories about culture, the body, and morality made virtue ethics almost impossible to notice. I touch on the story of how that came about later. As anthropologists of ethics have observed, a similar and related fate had overtaken moral philosophy until the development of the study of virtue ethics by figures such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, and others in the second part of the twentieth century. I argue, as others have done, that drawing on that literature has been, and will continue to be, useful precisely because it is engaged in trying to throw off certain prejudices that are, or were, shared by modern philosophy and modern social sciences. On the other hand, there are some dangers inherent in relying on modern philosophical literature, which I also outline. That might be thought to leave us facing a choice. On the one hand, we might choose to rely on the categories provided by the modern philosophical literature on virtue ethics at the cost of tacitly adopting its ethnocentrisms. On the other hand, we might choose to reject it altogether, sticking close to the emic categories that emerge ethnographically in whichever setting we happen to be studying, preserving local conceptual integrity, perhaps at the cost of leaving our theoretical prejudices unexamined. I propose a way of steering a course between these two unsatisfactory options, and in the second part of the chapter I provide some examples of how it might work. In short, I propose that a comparative anthropology of virtue ethics as such can be built as a catalogue of problems that face anyone who engages in evaluative deliberation about human malleability. The problems I have in mind are not substantive questions about the universal nature of the virtues (What is courage? What is wisdom?) so much as the formal ones (What is the relation between different virtues? How does virtue correspond to, or crosscut, categories of personhood and community?). To my mind, the substantive questions will only really be posed satisfactorily, let alone answered, to the extent that we have addressed some of the formal questions. In her ‘Non-Relative Virtues’, Martha Nussbaum (1988: 39) proposes ‘a sketch for an objective human morality based upon the idea of virtuous action’ inspired by Aristotle’s own comparative study of ethics in different societies in the Politics. Nussbaum argues that Aristotle’s ‘analysis of

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the Virtues gives him an appropriate framework for these comparisons’. If I may be so bold as to gainsay both Aristotle and Nussbaum, that seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse. If our aim is to understand multiple societies, our framework, or parts of it, will probably have to be the product of comparison rather than the basis of it. Or rather: it is my argument in this chapter that this is the case, as a matter of fact. For these reasons I take my inspiration here more from Michel Foucault’s work on ethics than from the modern Anglophone virtue ethicists. Foucault proposed a list of four aspects that any project of ethical formation must address, aspects that I think can usefully be thought of as formal rather than substantive. I begin by addressing those four aspects. However, I aim to show how they might be extended, in both number and depth, by admitting to the discussion comparative cases drawn from a wider range of societies than those on which Foucault’s discussion is based.

Is Virtue Ethics Even Ethical? Before going further, it seems important to address a question that will certainly arise for some readers – whether virtue ethics is ethical at all. The anthropology of ethics has given rise to a number of critiques, from within as well as without, and they generally address issues that are connected with virtue ethics, in the broad sense that I have given it here. It is precisely the concern in the anthropology of ethics with people’s reflection on and evaluation of forms of life, and the idea that they can make responsible choices in relation to the lives they live and the values they live by, that has riled detractors. It has been argued variously that these concerns are not ethical, in the sense that they are outside of the scope of ethics, that they are unethical, and even that anthropologists who focus attention on these things are immoral. There are a number of grounds for these arguments. One strand of reasoning is that ethical cultivation is a concern only of elites of one kind or another and is a distraction from the real substance of ethics, which is about caring for the suffering, something that happens among and between the oppressed, where power relations are not a factor. Reflection on elevated values and aesthetically refined forms of life is something only available to those who enjoy the luxury of leisure. It is selfregarding and self-centred, the opposite of the ethical. Ethical cultivation is, on this view, at best a vain pursuit of a minority that has nothing to do with ethical life. At worst it is a way for self-righteous bearers of cultural capital to lord it over the time-poor masses, symbolic violence through which exploitative power relations are expressed. Anthropologists who treat self-cultivation as an important object of study and dignify it as ‘ethics’, the conclusion goes, inflict a double injury on the humble,

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downplaying the importance of the spontaneous, unreflective ethics of care, and implying that they are less than ethical because they don’t have the resources to aspire to virtue. (For a good example of some of these arguments, see the contributions by Veena Das and Hayder Al-Mohammad to the 2013 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (Al-Mohammad et al. 2015).) Taking a different tack, other critics allege that holding oneself responsible for one’s own character is something that is uniquely characteristic of the ‘neoliberal era’ (e.g. Song 2009; Hoffman 2010; Zigon 2011). Either way – whether self-formation is seen as the preserve of religious, moneyed, gendered elites or as a product of contemporary capitalism – critics have argued that the upshot of taking it seriously as a field of ethical action is to side with power and divert attention from what really matters: injustice, inequality, exploitation, and power. It has even been alleged, in a recent polemical pamphlet, that the anthropology of ethics functions as an ‘anti-politics machine’ – its practitioners the stooges of neoliberal capitalism – because it focuses on the responsibility of the individual to reflect freely on abstract values, supposedly independently of social, economic, and political context (Kapferer and Gold 2018; Friedman 2018). One question lurking in the background here is the definition of ‘ethics’. But more importantly, all these arguments are based on assumptions about ethical formation (and by implication virtue ethics) that it seems to me are easily disposed of For one thing, the claim that either the anthropology of virtue ethics in the broad sense outlined earlier, or the kinds of ethical practices it studies, aim at the erasure of political context simply does not stack up. Anthropologists of ethics have explicitly, and from the beginning, argued against any such de-politicization (see, e.g., Keane’s (2021) recent re-statement). Even Aristotle, whose ethical teachings as they have come down to us are relatively abstracted from social context, emphasizes that successful cultivation of the virtues depends on the privilege of freedom and leisure. Indic religious traditions, various forms of which have been the subject of studies in the anthropology of ethics, frequently emphasize the importance of karma in defining and constraining personal and group opportunities for development, including social status. Nor does a concern with individual character necessarily preclude taking note of the importance of power or justice. Foucault’s study of ancient sexuality shows that it was precisely virtue-ethical concerns that made the power imbalance intrinsic to pederasty a source of anxiety. At the same time, the fact that virtue ethics sometimes sees an important role for wealth, power, and even luck in facilitating ethical progress does not mean that those who are in the midst of diverse kinds of suffering cannot still find resources within themselves to invest in the goal of selfcultivation, as Keum Young Chung Pang’s medical anthropological

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monograph on the travails of elderly Korean migrants in the USA demonstrates, to take one example (Pang 2000). A casual survey of the work of anthropologists who have taken virtue ethics seriously shows that a concern with character can be central to political movements of all kinds (e.g. Mattingly 2012: 163; Wright 2016; Muehlebach 2012; Dave 2012). The claim that ethical discourse and practice in general can be ways to keep people in line clearly has something in it, and obedience is sometimes an explicit aim (e.g. Mahmood 2001). Indeed, many ethical regimes are self-consciously described by their subjects, powerful and powerless, in precisely this way. In particular, attempts to cultivate character are often based on disciplinary techniques either self-imposed or imposed through pedagogical relationships, which must be, at least temporarily and provisionally, unequal (Faubion 2013). But it would be a mistake to think that discipline is necessarily politically or personally conservative or that it is always simply an elite concern. In many cases, the aim is radical transformation and liberation – conceived spiritually and eschatologically, as in many religious traditions, or socially and politically as in, for example, Maoist attempts to effect revolution by creating new kinds of humans (Lynteris 2012; Munro 1982, 1971; see also Yan, Chapter 34 in this volume). Meanwhile, one can agree that widespread transformations in patterns of employment in recent decades have resulted in more people in many places having to be entrepreneurs and to think of themselves as a product that they are always preparing for evaluation by the market. But it would not be reasonable to conclude from this that critical attention to one’s own character in general is historically novel or necessarily ‘neoliberal’. Andrew Kipnis (2008) makes this point well in his stinging critique of anthropologists’ claims that pressures on contemporary Chinese workers to audit the self are evidence of neoliberalism at work. The workers themselves are more likely to see these practices as ‘Socialist’ – a reversion to the kind of self-work that characterized the Maoist period, and in general ‘[s]elf-discipline and self-cultivation, for example, are easily read out of Confucius, Mao Zedong, and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as “neoliberal” thinkers’ (282). It is worth noting that the grounds for criticism of the students of virtue ethics I have described are related to precisely the assumptions about ethics that anthropologists of ethics and others have argued the study of virtue ethics can help us to avoid. If, for instance, power and selfinterest are assumed to be opposed to ethics as a matter of definition, rather than being a part of it, then it follows that analysing character formation as an ethical project must be to ignore the politics of it, as critics allege (see Mair 2015). I will have more to say about these assumptions and the attempts of modern philosophical virtue ethics to overcome them later.

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Ancient Virtue Ethics, Modern Philosophical Virtue Ethics, and Virtue Ethics as Such Although the term ‘virtue ethics’ itself has not been used all that frequently in the literature of the anthropology of ethics, many contributors have dwelt at length on aspects of what I have called virtue ethics as such. To do this, they have drawn on three kinds of sources: (1) Probably the most influential source has been the work of a single author; or rather, part of the oeuvre of a single author: the ‘late’ Foucault and his work on the ethics of self-cultivation, especially in relation to ancient Graeco-Roman and early Christian cultures. Foucault often speaks of ‘selfcultivation’, and this term has become widespread in the anthropology of ethics. I prefer ‘virtue ethics’ (which Foucault does not routinely use) or ‘ethical formation’ (which he does) because ‘self-cultivation’ gives a misleadingly egoistic impression of a process which, even in Foucault’s ‘art of living’ moments, is thoroughly social and dialogical (see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume; Cook, Chapter 16 of this volume). (2) The second category of source is the work of certain modern academic philosophers in the Anglophone tradition who have been reacting against established assumptions in their field. Since the 1980s, they have either designated their subject matter as ‘virtue ethics’ or it has been so designated by others. They include writers such as Philippa Foot (1978), Martha Nussbaum (1986), Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), and Catherine Swanton (2003), who have all taken Aristotle as their starting point (though Swanton went on to write about the virtue ethics of Nietzsche and Hume (2015)), and Michael Slote (2001) who, in more recent work, has relied instead on Hume and Adam Smith (2010) and then taken an interest in Chinese philosophy (2013, 2020). More idiosyncratic within the field of modern philosophical virtue ethics, but by far the most influential among anthropologists, are Bernard Williams (1985), Charles Taylor (1989), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) (see Laidlaw 2014, ch. 2; Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). (3) The final category comprises those ancient authors on which the modern philosophical virtue ethicists have mostly based their work. Anthropologists of ethics have sometimes had direct recourse to such thinkers, especially to Aristotle (most notably, Michael Lambek 2015). While all three of these categories contain some fascinating material, there is an obvious problem in relying heavily on them to build an anthropology of virtue ethics as such: they are all drawn from a narrow, overwhelmingly European or Euro-American genealogy. Once we recognize the extent to which existing thought about virtue ethics has emerged from a very specific history, those of us interested in understanding ethics in different societies, or in understanding it in a comparative frame, face a question. Can the

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concept be applied beyond the cultures from which it emerged? Are traditions outside of the Aristotelian-Thomist-Reformation-Modern trajectory traced by some of the modern philosophical virtue ethicists to be admitted to a broader category of virtue ethics or should they be regarded as sui generis? For example, strands of Buddhism and Confucianism clearly have much in common with Aristotle – are they varieties of virtue ethics? There are at least three possible responses to these questions. The first is to conclude that virtue ethics is too embedded in local and historically specific assumptions to be viable as a basis for comparison and analysis cross culturally. Jarrett Zigon (2014: 17) has made this argument about ethics in general, perhaps surprisingly given his other work. Martin Holbraad (2018) has recently come to much the same conclusion about virtue ethics in particular, as has Alice Forbess (2015) in the context of her work on Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She argues that while anthropologists have tended to think of virtue ethics as being fundamentally Aristotelian in form, that is not true even of Christianity; Orthodox monastics draw on sources with subtly but consequentially different assumptions. To avoid confusion, she argues, we should cleave tightly to the ethnography, working with and explaining the emic categories rather than introducing new ones from outside. The second response would be to argue that philosophical virtue ethics represents a working-out of a coherent orientation that other, non-Western religions or wisdom traditions may or may not share. Following this approach, we would first have to work out what the essential core of virtue ethics in the Western tradition is, and what is purely contingent on the cultures in which it happened to emerge. Then we would be in a position to compare other traditions in order to establish whether they meet the criteria. There have been a number of attempts to do this, especially for Confucianism (e.g. van Norden 2007; Loy 2014). This could be more than a simple classificatory exercise – if we believe that virtue ethics has a certain internal coherence and we have positively identified a given culture as being an instance of it, then we might expect to be able to draw inferences about that culture on the basis of what Aristotle, or MacIntyre, say, tells us. This strategy seems wrongheaded to me for two reasons (putting aside for a moment the fact that it is an unequal comparison in which the Western tradition is always the giver, not the taker of the categories of analysis; see Liangjian 2013). First, it depends on identifying a common core of the putative ‘Western’ tradition in order to establish a measuring stick by which other traditions can be rated as virtue ethical or not. This must overlook the disputatious and varied nature of ideas about character from the time of Homer, through the Socratics, the Stoics, and down to modern virtue ethicists. Second, it treats virtue ethics as a natural kind in which all its characteristics are always associated, but there is no reason to think that ethics works in that way. Take Damien Keown’s The Nature of Buddhist Ethics (1992), an accomplished and erudite example of this approach. Keown begins by identifying

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an unresolved area of debate in Buddhist studies. The Buddhist path includes ethical strictures such as avoiding doing harm to other beings. The path as a whole is explicitly described in Buddhist scriptures as a vehicle or raft that can take a person from the shore of suffering to the shore of enlightenment. The question is whether the path and its ethical precepts are only this – are Buddhist ethics purely instrumental? If so, are the enlightened liberated not only from suffering but also from the requirement to be moral? Are they ‘beyond good and evil’, as Nietzsche put it? Or, on the contrary, do the practices taught by Buddhism have intrinsic value beyond their utility? Scholars have found support in Buddhist scripture for both answers. Keown’s approach is to argue that Buddhist ethics is a virtue ethics because it shares characteristics with Aristotle’s ethics. For instance, Buddhist and Aristotelian moral psychology have many comparable points. Aristotle’s understanding of virtue as found in the Nicomachean Ethics can then, he appears to think, be used as a guide to what the Buddha meant when he taught. Aristotle taught that the happy life was one of exercising virtues perfected through practice, so it would make no sense to complete the Buddhist path and not continue to walk it, as it were. But in doing this, Keown neglects the variety that characterizes virtue ethics in the philosophical sense, and even in Aristotle himself – the final section of Nicomachean Ethics appears to contradict the rest of the book on exactly the question of whether active practice is constitutive of the good life or not (Lear 2000). More importantly, while there are striking similarities between the teachings of Aristotle and the Buddha, that is no justification for using Aristotle as an ‘illuminating guide to an understanding of the Buddhist moral system’ in order to settle questions on which Buddhist sources are silent or ambiguous (Keown 1992: 21). The third approach, which I propose here, would be to recognize virtueethical issues not as characteristic of one mode of ethics among a number of mutually exclusive alternatives, but as recurrent problems to which all humans find themselves having to attend. Comparison would then serve the function of highlighting and elucidating the problems and scope for variation by capturing contrast, rather than assuming homogeneity within cultural borders that are, in this case, impossible to define (for a general form of this argument, see Cook, Laidlaw, and Mair 2009; and in relation to Buddhism, Mair 2023). This approach would allow us to put different traditions on the same analytical level rather than having the ‘West’ provide the analytical mill and the ‘rest’ provide its ethnographic grist. Relieved of the task of establishing the definitive characteristics of the Western tradition (which is only a tradition when read backwards from some endpoint, and then forwards again, teleologically), we can disentangle the subject matter from its sources, understanding the latter as contributions to arguments made at different times with overlapping concerns and contrasting assumptions.

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Having said all that, although I think the goal of an anthropology of virtue ethics as such should ultimately be to get beyond the local specificities of the sources it has relied on to date, the modern philosophical literature on virtue ethics is not just another contribution to human thought about virtue and moral cultivation. It contains lessons that have to do with the rejection of a set of prejudices about the nature of ethics that are widely shared in the societies from which modern academic philosophy and the social sciences both emerged: precisely the prejudices that characterize the critics of virtue ethics discussed earlier. This is why the interest in philosophical virtue ethics should not be dismissed as another example of anthropologists’ deference to philosophy in general. The writings involved are of special interest to anthropologists not because they have special authority in describing all other societies, but because they give special insight into some of the ethnocentric peculiarities that have been bequeathed to anthropology and which we must overcome. I am not the first to make this argument – see, for example, James Faubion’s (2011: 15) introduction to An Anthropology of Ethics.

The Emergence of ‘Virtue Ethics’ as a Concern of Modern Academic Philosophy Briefly, then, what are the lessons anthropologists of ethics have taken from philosophical virtue ethics so far? To answer this question, it will be necessary to explain something of the aims of its originating authors. The term ‘virtue ethics’ came into use in the 1980s and 1990s to describe a development in philosophy that had begun several decades earlier. Its genesis is usually traced to Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1958) article, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Anscombe argued that academic moral philosophy, since at least as early as Hume and Kant, had become narrowly and unhelpfully concerned with questions of duty or obligation. In her view, this process had begun with Christianity, which had adopted a legalistic model of ethics from the Torah. To Jews or Christians, a legalistic model made sense, since, by their lights, there was a God, and living in obedience to God’s law was what it meant to be a good person. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers had sought to ground ethics in nature, independent of God, and this had left them searching in vain for an alternative source of moral law (similar interpretations are given at much greater length in MacIntyre 1981; Taylor 1989). They continued to believe that being good was a matter of understanding and complying with obligations or duties but struggled to explain what that would mean in the absence of a divine lawgiver. The attempt to answer this conundrum came to take the form of a battle between two contrary approaches. One – deontology, typified by Immanuel Kant – claimed good acts were those in conformity with moral

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law, now no longer guaranteed by God but a product of reason. The other – consequentialism, epitomized by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill – claimed that the right way to act in any situation was that which would bring about good consequences, defined in various ways. In an attempt to resolve the standoff between these two approaches, moral philosophers came to focus on ‘hard cases’ – usually imaginary, abstract, and rather extreme moral dilemmas, designed to reveal intuitive knowledge about ethical reasoning. But this focus on what people ought to do as a matter of moral obligation ignored other considerations such as what they ought to do in order to flourish (Anscombe 1958: 7). Aspects of our characters, distinct forms of life, and whole lifetimes can, like acts, be judged good and bad, and those judgements may be as important as judgements about particular acts, or even more so. Understanding virtue in these senses requires an appreciation of moral psychology – the structure of thinking and feeling that permits the cultivation of virtue – and of the life course, and of the various instituted forms of life within which humans grow, live, and die. Bernard Williams went further in spelling out the peculiar assumptions of this modern approach to ethics, which he called the ‘Morality System’ (1985: especially ch. 10; Laidlaw 2002, 2014: 44; see also Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). These include the assumption that ethics is fundamentally about judging voluntary acts in the light of obligations and assigning blame. The obligations with which the Morality System is concerned are of a special kind; they trump all others and are inescapable, unlike the obligations one can put oneself under voluntarily (but one may have a general moral obligation to honour such commitments). As the problem was posed in this historical, narrative form, it made sense that the remedy recommended by all these writers, in one way or another, was to take inspiration from the past, to try to turn back the clock to the time before the Morality System had come into being. In most cases, that meant going back to classical thinkers and especially to Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics presents a systematic account of what it means to lead a flourishing life. Foucault’s work on ethics, especially in his series on the history of sexuality (1978, 1985, 1986) and associated interviews and essays (many of which are collected in Foucault 1997), deals with many of the same issues as the Anglophone philosophical virtue ethicists. Some have noted differences (notably Mattingly 2012, 2014), and there are indeed differences on some important issues. For instance, freedom, which is so important in Foucault’s conception of a relationship to the self, plays a more ambiguous role in the ethics of MacIntyre and Williams. However, the basic features of the narrative are shared (see Levy 2004 for a detailed comparison). Whereas Williams and the others speak of moral obligation and duties, Foucault speaks of codes, but he too finds that there are

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societies in which codes proliferate and others in which practices of selfcultivation dominate, and that it is because the culture of most modern historians and philosophers is of the former type that they find it difficult to understand examples of the latter (see, e.g., Foucault 1985: 29). Foucault too draws his source material for understanding the ethics of character formation from the ancient Mediterranean. What the anthropologists of ethics who have harnessed this material have realized is that the criticisms these thinkers levelled against history and philosophy apply strongly to anthropology too. This case is made most clearly in one of the literature’s founding texts, James Laidlaw’s 2001 Malinowski Lecture, ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’ (Laidlaw 2002). Laidlaw draws on both Williams and Foucault in an analysis of the Durkheimian underpinnings of anthropology (Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals is also an important part of the argument but there will not be space to go into that here). The Durkheim of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1976), he pointed out, located the moral in the social, so that ethics amounted to a series of ‘moral facts’, including lists of obligations and prohibitions that properly socialized individuals would find automatically compelling. Durkheim’s work (especially beyond Elementary Forms) may leave room for other interpretations (Lambek 2010: 12), but his distinctive account of moral facts as an irresistible code installed in collective consciousness through ritual is his enduring legacy for anthropology. As Laidlaw (2002: 315) argues, ‘it is impossible, if this is your vision of human life, to see how specifically ethical considerations might be distinguishable from the other causal factors that make the bits of the system – the people – function as they do’. Laidlaw’s main point here relates to the automaticity and collectivism of Durkheim’s moral facts, which means that the individual has no need to, indeed cannot, understand or reflect on ethical matters. This is a fatal problem for an understanding of any kind of ethics, including varieties of the Morality System such as Kantian ethics, as Laidlaw points out. However, it is also worth noting that it raises a specific problem in relation to the ethics of character. Durkheim may have challenged Kant by locating the source of morality in a pre-reflective, collective consciousness rather than in the individual rational agent. However, his model reproduces a dichotomy fundamental to Kant, or at least to many of Kant’s followers, namely the distinction between desires and the body on the one hand, and reason and morality on the other. (Though note: it has been argued that Kant had a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between virtue, reason, and duty than he has been credited for by many of his interpreters and detractors; O’Neill 1983, 1996.) Morality for the Durkheim of The Elementary Forms must always be a matter of socially sanctioned reason, experienced as the ‘superorganic’ overcoming individually embodied desire. Most accounts of virtue ethics, by contrast, do not oppose reason and desire in this way. On the contrary, virtue is achieved through the cultivation of both, through practice that combines both.

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Talal Asad makes this point strongly in his Genealogies of Religion, arguing that in mediaeval Christianity ritual was not merely a symbolic rendering of socially accepted truth, but was the means and expression of ‘the proper organization of the soul – of understanding and feeling, desire and will’ (1993: 138), and the means through which truth was achieved. Asad argues that the Durkheimian separation of reason and desire led anthropologists to treat religious practice as merely symbolic, as representative, a disembodied text that could be read and interpreted (an approach that reached its logical conclusion in Le´vi-Strauss’s structuralism). As a result, Asad alleges that anthropology has missed the disciplinary or pedagogical function of religious practice. He claims that Mauss understood this problem and tried to escape from it in his essay on ‘Techniques of the Body’, which introduces Aristotelian concepts such as hexis (habit), but that his efforts were misunderstood by later anthropologists in thrall to Durkheim. Mauss was attempting to define an anthropology of practical reason – not in the Kantian sense of universalizable ethical rules, but in that of historically constituted practical knowledge, which articulates an individual’s learned capacities. . . . [T]he human body was to be viewed as the developable means for achieving a range of human objects, from styles of physical movements (e.g., walking), through most of emotional being (e.g., composure), to kinds of spiritual experience (e.g., spiritual states). (1993: 76) Asad goes on to praise Pierre Bourdieu for picking up where Mauss left off in his work on habitus, arguing that Bourdieu’s practice theory promises to overcome the body/mind dualism characteristic of modernism (for similar endorsements of Bourdieu, see Faubion 2001: 26; Lambek 2010: 21). Bourdieu of course takes full account of the virtue-ethical truism that dispositions, including forms of belief and reason, are products of practice. According to Bourdieu, accumulated practice generates a habitus – a set of dispositions to act in a certain way. A habitus is associated with a social field, which is a shared context for practice and evaluation. An individual may be a member of many social fields. Mastery of a field is achieved by acquisition of a habitus, and this gives one a ‘feel for the game’ and the power to make authoritative determinations within that field, and thus power over others (Bourdieu 1990: 66). So far, Bourdieu’s model shares a great deal with accounts of virtue ethics, such as Aristotle’s, but there is a crucial difference (this is part of the objection to Bourdieu in Lambek 2000; on the contrast between Foucault’s ethics and the ‘habitus’, see Laidlaw 2002: 324; 2014: ch. 1). For Bourdieu, what makes the habitus (and the actions, beliefs, and evaluations that stem from it) persuasive is that it appears natural. A crucial part of belonging to a social field is the set of unquestioned beliefs that make it

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meaningful, ‘Doxa’, ‘the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense’ (Bourdieu 1990: 68). The capacity of the human organism to embody standards and express them in a creative and apparently spontaneous manner hides, he thinks, the process of socialization and the symbolic violence it perpetuates. Thus, he claims that the most effective habitus is acquired during childhood at a time when its acquisition can easily be forgotten. Bourdieu is adamant that embodied belief cannot be achieved by an act of will. A game is defined by its arbitrariness and artificiality. In contrast, recognizing that the subjective doxa shared by members of a field is a product of practice objectifies it and precludes its embodiment as subjective knowledge. That is why Bourdieu believes that anthropologists who try to live the belief systems of others, like Evans-Pritchard who lived by Zande witchcraft beliefs and famously found them ‘as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of’ (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 270), succeed only in making ‘arbitrary faith a continuous creation of bad faith’ (Bourdieu 1990: 68). The most accomplished feel for a game will be attained by those with the most naı¨ve view of the social field – the view of a native. Bourdieu does acknowledge that the practical sense corresponding to a given social field may be acquired later in life, but in any case it seems to be a condition of successful acquisition that the process of learning is forgotten, since it is through ‘unawareness of the unthought presuppositions that the game produces and endlessly reproduces, [that the game] reproduces the conditions of its own perpetuation’ (1990: 67). This emphasis on the importance of authenticity, naturalness, nativeness, and hence on ignorance of the process of formation seems to me to be an odd, and perhaps a distinctively Anglo-French, prejudice, reflecting a fear of inauthenticity and self-regard that is far from universal. Perhaps the idea of the unreflectiveness of embodied culture is also intrinsically attractive to anthropologists – if mastering a practice really meant being oblivious to the process of mastery, then outsiders such as anthropologists really would be offering a distinctive kind of insight. But being a good person, and being recognized as such, does not always require erasure of the process through which one acquired one’s good character. ‘Faking it to make it’ is a widely accepted way of going about things, and epic, selfconsciously willed feats of self-transformation are often seen as grounds of legitimacy, not as exercises in bad faith. To summarize my argument so far, I have noted that anthropologists interested in the issues surrounding virtue ethics have drawn on sources from a narrow range of traditions. I have suggested that this may be a problem if we want to understand virtue ethics as such, because it risks introducing ethnographic assumptions that apply in, say, ancient Greece but not in, say, China. I have now defended the idea that, nonetheless,

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these sources have something special to teach us because they deal with prejudices of philosophers that are also shared by anthropologists, as products of a discipline steeped in the post-Christian Morality System. In order to complete the argument, I want to suggest that, having identified these prejudices in a way that would have been difficult without the help of modern philosophy, we are in a position to extend our exploration of the possibilities of virtue ethics using this as a framework for broadening the comparative scope. There are endless ways in which this might be achieved. In the next section I give two brief examples. The second starts from observations principally in the work of Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum about the fragility of goodness under virtue ethics. But I begin by addressing the four questions that Foucault proposed must be faced by any ethical project based on a relationship to the self. In both cases, the comparative material I shall add to the discussion is drawn from Chinese Buddhist and Confucian examples, since these are the traditions I am familiar with.

Firing the Pots, Smelting the Pans: Issues Arising in Virtue Ethics as Such Having defined virtue ethics as such and distinguished it from other kinds of virtue ethics, the path is clear for us to develop an understanding of the issues it raises. If my argument is right, this will be a significant and ongoing undertaking, certainly not something that could be addressed in a comprehensive way here, so what follows in this section is intended to provide an idea of what kinds of consideration might be relevant and interesting in further research. Part of the reason understanding virtue ethics as such will be an ongoing job is that virtue ethics does not limit the range of considerations that can be taken into account in ethical reasoning in the way the Morality System does. Under the Morality System as Williams described it, thinking about ethics is like being a lawyer or a judge: to decide what is moral, to praise or condemn, one simply needs to identify the act and any relevant obligations. Justice is blind and the extent to which any other considerations can properly be taken into account is limited. Thinking about virtue ethics is more like being a manufacturer in that it is proper to take into account a much wider range of variables. One needs to understand the raw materials at one’s disposal, the range of operations – refining, forging, casting, polishing, and so on – that one can subject the material to. One needs to have an idea of the products that can be made out of the materials that are available, and which are preferable, and one might have thoughts about why one is producing them that are germane to the way one goes about the process. For instance, is one producing in order to make money by meeting the conditions of an existing contract, or

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to sell on the open market? Or perhaps money is not the only or most important consideration – perhaps the thing is to be an artisan, or to serve a public need, or perhaps the social routine of the factory that is organized around production is the true purpose of all the activity. If human nature is malleable, then the same kinds of considerations will need to be taken into account. It is not surprising that manufacturing or craft metaphors are common in traditions of ethical formation. The title of this section is a translation of an idiom used by Chinese Buddhists to describe the process of training virtue. What is the raw material of human being, after all? What techniques are available for working it into something new? What kinds of human product – second natures – can be brought about by those techniques? Will everyone turn out the same or are there a limited number of alternative outcomes, and, if so, which is best? Or perhaps the range of human products is unlimited. And just as the factory manager must have in mind the ultimate reason for production, so anyone thinking about ethical formation may ask: ‘why bother in the first place?’ These are questions that are likely to arise in any project of ethical cultivation. Perhaps some of them are unavoidable. Foucault proposes four such questions, which relate to what he regards as the four aspects that must make up any reflective relationship with the self: (1) ethical substance, (2) mode of subjectivation, (3) work, or ascesis, and (4) telos, or the final goal at which cultivation aims (1985, 1986, 1997). Each of these issues is raised by modern virtue ethicists as we might expect, but Foucault’s formulation is a useful place to start because of its intrinsically comparative and open approach. Of the four, what Foucault calls the mode of subjectivation is perhaps the hardest to grasp, and the most likely to lead to misunderstandings if one is used to thinking about things from the point of view of the Morality System. There has, unfortunately, been some muddying of the waters as a result of the looseness with which the term ‘subjectivity’ is often used in anthropological and other writing. Foucault defined the mode of subjectivation as the way ‘in which an individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obligated to put it into practice’ (1985: 27). In other words, it is an answer to the question: under what kind of obligations do I find myself as a result of being the kind of thing I am? The interesting point about subjectivation for anthropologists is that the mode of subjectivation can vary through discursive, historically, and culturally specific processes that may be self-conscious and contested. As Foucault shows, the practices such as rules for the regulation of pleasure that were central to classical Greek, Pagan Roman, and then early Christian ethics were remarkably stable. What changed dramatically was the way in which those involved felt themselves to be called to comply with those practices – because, for example, the practices were

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anathematized or because they were considered unconducive to the virtues of an adult man. To make this more concrete, take the idea that men should be faithful to their wives and not be sexually involved with boys. These themes remained remarkably constant in ancient Greece and Rome, Foucault concluded, but they were taken up in response to different modes of subjectivation at different times. Foucault identifies three broad stages in this development. First, an aesthetic mode. In this stage, no one was obliged to comply with sexual rules, though they may choose to do so for the sake of a glorious or beautiful life. This was an optional and conditional rule that would only even be a live possibility for those who felt they were in a position to achieve a beautiful life in the first place. Later, Stoics came to argue that these practices were not something one might take or leave, but something that any person with a clear understanding of the conditions of human life would be compelled to pursue for reasons of rationality. Finally, Christianity performs what Foucault calls ‘an internal juridification of religious law’ – observation of the rules came to be seen as binding on every human qua creature of God (1997: 266). This is a schematic summary, and Foucault’s descriptions are more nuanced when he gets into the detail, but the general principle is clear and is echoed by others studying the history of virtue ethics, and not only in relation to the ethics of sexual pleasure. For example, Bernard Williams identifies a general transition away from the aesthetic and elective approach of heroic ethics towards a rational grounding in Greek thought and attributes it to Plato (Williams 1985: 34). These kinds of transformations may seem abstruse and far removed from the issues anthropologists usually deal with, but, in fact, recognizing this type of variation can be of real ethnographic significance. This can be especially true in situations where practices have travelled between two settings in which people generally understand their relation to rules in different ways. For example, it has been fairly common for around a century for people who have grown up in societies that have traditionally been dominated by Christianity to become interested in Buddhist philosophy and practices and sometimes to ‘convert’ to Buddhism. One of the practices that has proved most compelling to such people is meditation, though historically, in the lands where Buddhism has long been established, meditation was usually an elite practice (Cook 2010). For those who have been brought up to expect religion to be about recognizing and complying with a moral code that imposes law-like obligations, it can be difficult not to see meditation as a duty. But as it turns out that sustaining a meditation practice is difficult and that practitioners go through more or less successful phases, these acolytes are routinely racked with guilt and their gurus have to spend a good deal of their time telling them that Buddhist practice is not a moral obligation, so there’s no need to feel guilty for missing a session; and that on the contrary, feeling guilty is to

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misunderstand the whole project – to misunderstand, I suggest, the mode of subjectivation. Conversely, friends in Inner Mongolia China in the early 2000s told me of a village where a missionary had delivered the Christian Gospel some years earlier and with it the practice of prayer. The religion, thus introduced, had developed into two distinct sects. One, known as ‘the religion of Jesus Christ’ (yesu jidu jiao), seemed unremarkable and like other forms of Protestantism found in the region. The other, known as ‘the religion of Christ Jesus’ (jidu yesu jiao), had come to focus on prayer as a feat of endurance. Practitioners would sit outdoors with a wet towel on their heads for long periods – a dangerous proposition given the climate – and were rewarded, it was said, by the increase of their livestock. In a neighbouring village, I met someone who was rumoured to be a member of the Christ Jesus sect and was keen to speak to her to learn more about it. I began by confirming with her that she was a Christian. ‘No, no’, she told me, ‘I’m too busy at the moment, but I’m planning to be a Christian in the winter when I have more time.’ This response would be utterly baffling to many Christians, because, like the convert Buddhists, they see disciples of religions as being subjects of an obligatory moral code; once the code is recognized as legitimate, the only proper response to noncompliance is guilt . . . not scheduling! But the woman’s response makes sense when interpreted under different modes of subjectivation, for instance if one sees oneself as a potential master of a wide repertoire of transformative religious and medical techniques, each of which is rather demanding in terms of time and other resources (for an example that could perhaps be interpreted along similar lines, see Kirsch 2004). Returning to the rest of Foucault’s four questions, let us consider the first: ethical substance. If something about human being can be transformed, what is it? Of all the things that can be altered, which are the proper object of ethical formation? Which are irrelevant distractions? Ethical formation is about changing human persons, but, as anthropologists well know, the boundaries of persons are complex. Whether we are talking about the human body, the mind, or the self, boundaries are porous and open to interpretation. Like the question of modes of subjectivation, this can lead to differences of approach to ethical formation within as well as between traditions. For example, Buddhist traditions often distinguish between a heart/ mind that is the seat of emotion and reason on the one hand, and the body on the other. Is the thing to be transformed in the course of ethical formation the mind, the body, or both? In the Thai monastery in which Joanna Cook carried out fieldwork, the answer was clear – the task was to cut attachment (of the mind) to the body. One way to bring about this change was meditation on corpses. Another was a ban on all physical exercise (Cook 2010: 23f.). In some ways, this approach is similar to the disdain for the body found in some Christian asceticism (Faubion 2001:

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128), but how different is it from the attitude common in Chinese Buddhist monasticism, in which elegant or athletic ways of training the body, such as kung fu, are tied up in complex ways with training the mind (Laidlaw and Mair 2019; Shahar 2008)? As Master Hsing Yun, leader of Fo Guang Shan, a modern Chinese Buddhist movement, has written, Keeping both the mind and body healthy is important, for the body is the vehicle that we use to practice the Dharma. Like all things, the mind and the body are interdependent; the health of the mind influences the health of the body and the health of the body influences the health of the mind. Using the healthy body as a tool, we can cultivate a compassionate heart and a clear mind. With a cultivated mind, we are able to examine ourselves, clearly see the nature of our problems, and work to resolve them. We will then approach the path to true health. (2007: 1f.) Recognizing the interdependence of mind and body in this way does not preclude treating the mind as being, ultimately, more important, and prioritizing its care when resources are limited. Matthew Walker (2013) has argued that this was Mencius’s approach. So a project of ethical formation might single out for particular attention this or that part within the perimeter, so to speak, of the individual – ‘carnal pleasures’, the passions, or the will, say. Nor, contrary to claims that virtue ethics is fundamentally individualist (see, e.g., Held et al. 2006), is there any reason why the ethical substance on which transformation is to be effected cannot be bigger than an individual. It is true that virtue ethics is not altruistic by definition in the way that Kantian deontology is. It is also true that one could see the modern virtue ethics of, say, Williams, or Foot, as a rejection of the twentieth-century philosophical assumption that one’s obligations to others are the sum total of ethics. However, none of that means that ethical substance in projects of subject formation must be coextensive with an individual human person (as if such a thing had easily identifiable boundaries anyway!). As Foucault (1997: 175–84) shows, before Christian monastics were turning their attention inwards, to their souls, to do battle with their own, individual libido, their late Roman, Pagan forebears were concerned with sex as an expression of social relations, such that thinking about it in terms of an isolated individual would have been meaningless. Asad (1993: 111f.) argues that even the early Christian work on desire that Foucault discusses was at the same time fundamentally about the cultivation of pedagogical relationships based on humility. For this reason, the criticism levelled at the anthropology of ethics that it is intrinsically about individuals (see, e.g., Al-Mohammad and Peluso 2012) – and therefore selfish – is ill-founded. James Faubion (2011: 119), for example, insists that ‘neither methodologically nor ontologically does

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an anthropology of ethics have its ground in the individual’. Anthropologists of ethics have argued that the object of subject formation need not be an atomic individual, but might be a ‘dividual’ in, for example, the Melanesian style (Faubion 2001: 128; Lambek 2010: 16), or even a complex cyborgic corporation that may or may not incorporate human beings among other elements (Faubion 2011: 119). Perhaps a good example of the latter would be nation states which, Jane Cowan (2021) has recently argued, are judged to act with or without virtue in their interactions in international institutions, mediated by the behaviour of their diplomats. The next of Foucault’s questions concerns ‘ethical work’; that is, the practices that are employed to bring about the transformation of the subject. Common forms of ethical work include restrictions on diet or sexual activity, and regimes of daily activity. It is clear that certain practices cause transformations: abstaining from alcohol has an effect on the mind and emotions, as does a fixed routine of prayer. One recurrent theme in theoretical and ethnographic work on the cultivation of virtue is the importance of reflection, or what Foucault called the ‘hermeneutics of the self’. This may involve introspection, or it may be a case of producing an externalized account of one’s current state in the form of a journal or confession, such as Marcus Aurelius gives us in his Meditations. However, ethical work could refer to almost any action or abstention from action that is thought to effect transformation of the human being. Despite this intrinsic variety, there are issues of general interest when taking a comparative perspective. One is the relationship between the work that will bring about an ethical transformation and the goal it is designed to bring about. Modern virtue ethicists tend to follow Aristotle’s principle that virtue is to be perfected through the practice of virtue. That means that there is no real distinction between what one does in order to become excellent and the manifestation of that excellence. Though Aristotle does recognize the important pedagogical function of good laws, one must conclude that the laws are a kind of embodiment of the principles of virtue (notwithstanding the problems of non-codifiability; see later). However, in many ethical traditions, submission to rules serves as a form of training in its own right, independent, to a greater or lesser extent, of the content of those rules (see Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume). Submission might be seen as a way to develop a relationship to a specific master, or of cultivating humility in general. Taking vows to undergo forms of hardship, in particular, can be a way of training resolve and forbearance, which may be ends in themselves, or may be required for pursuing other, more advanced goals later on (on the importance of vows for ethical formation, see Laidlaw 1995: 151–229; 2002: 326; Laidlaw and Mair 2019). When it comes to telos, the final of the four questions, Foucault has in mind the kind of person that the cultivator decides to be, but that goal can

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be specified in a number of different ways and the differences can be consequential. To be part of a practical project, it must be specified in some concrete form and that can be done in a number of ways, which need not be mutually exclusive, and each of which adds its own flavour to the recipe. Most modern virtue ethicists (but not all; notable exceptions include Slote 2001; Zagzebski 2010) endorse Aristotle’s idea that any kind of living thing has a unique tendency and that the good is about fulfilling that potential to the utmost. This is often described, using an agricultural or horticultural metaphor, as ‘flourishing’. Conceived in this way, an important part of an ethical project will be a kind of natural history of the human animal that seeks to understand what its potential is, but there is a prior question. Is flourishing about fulfilling all human potentials, including those we share with other animals (having a glossy coat and a bushy tail)? Or is it about maximizing our unique or distinguishing tendencies (for self-awareness or creativity, say), perhaps at the cost of other goods? In either case, compared to the manufacturing metaphor, the agricultural metaphor expresses a less creative approach: though there’s room for pruning and training, the tendencies of the plant are there in the seed ready to be brought out. We are still working at a high level of abstraction – an ethical telos can be specified with a greater degree of concreteness. One way is to try to describe the goal of ethical formation in terms of the characteristics of the flourishing human; that is, as a list of virtues (or, by way of contrast, of vices). Aristotle did this in the Nicomachean Ethics, listing virtues such as courage and honesty, and his list is the basis of many modern discussions. Other traditions do this too. Buddhist sources enumerate various lists of perfections, or pa¯ramita¯s, that include virtues such as generosity, patience, and resolution (Apple 2017). Mencius, an important sage in the Confucian tradition, distinguished three main virtuous attributes – benevolence, propriety/righteousness, and wisdom – and seven secondary virtues including filial piety and love of learning (Loy 2014). Understanding flourishing in terms of lists in this way raises the potential problem that the various virtues come into conflict. Tact and frankness can both be considered virtues, for example, but they will often be in tension (Slote 2013). Wisdom, in the sense of the capacity to resolve conflicts between competing considerations, seems to have a special place in all three traditions. Lists of virtues may be made more concrete still in the form of a category of person who embodies virtue, such as Aristotle’s megalopsuchos or greatsouled man, the junzi or gentleman of Confucianism, or the bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, a being who has determined to achieve enlightenment in order to rescue all other beings from suffering. Or the goal may be expressed in more concrete terms yet, in the form of narratives about the lives and deeds of specific moral heroes (Evans, Chapter 17 of this volume). The transition from abstract virtues to specific categories of person, or

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specific persons, is a very significant one because whereas virtues can be considered independently of other characteristics of a person, a category of person and, even more so, any specific person must be imagined with all of those characteristics in play. Unlike a categorical model (the bodhisattva, the junzi), a specific person (the Buddha, Confucius), real or imaginary, has a biography made up of different stages of the life cycle (perhaps multiple life cycles). They will have a body, usually sexed, and will have relationships, including kin relations, with a range of other people. They will belong to something like a social class or status group. All of this has a number of consequences. We will need to decide which of the exemplar’s characteristics are mere by-products of contingent circumstance and which were essential to their virtue. These questions do not arise in the same way in relation to an abstract category, still less to abstract lists of virtues. Surely anyone can try to be generous, courageous, and wise. A category such as megalopsuchos already brings specificities: is it essential to be a male? To be free and not enslaved? A biography in time and space is even more specific and brings the potential for endless interpretation. Follow Christ? – fine, but when he rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, did that mean that those who follow him should not oppose government in general or that they should not oppose the Roman Empire specifically? The Buddha, like Christ, left his family behind to travel and teach. Should their followers leave their families behind too? Or on the other hand, perhaps an exemplar conceived of as a concrete person, who must come with relatives and other specific personal relationships, gives rise to a greater emphasis on the particularistic (rather than universalistic) mode of morality, in which obligations always attach to particular relationships rather than to an abstract stranger (Read 1955; Loy 2014: 288). Ethical reasoning that takes the emulation of exemplars as its goal also imposes a requirement for a distinctive kind of ability, which might be considered a virtue in itself: narrative interpretation according to the specificities of one’s own probably very different circumstances. Mongolians in the Soviet and post-Soviet period who sought to emulate Chinggis found themselves in a world where the rules were quite different from those under which the Great Khan operated, so while one might memorize and learn from narratives, adapting the lessons for the present required an imaginative leap of interpretation (Humphrey 1997). One final consideration in relation to the telos of ethical cultivation is the degree to which the goal is in plain sight at earlier stages of the process. This is an aspect that has received little attention in the modern virtue ethics literature, which is perhaps not surprising given the assumptions of transparency of discourse on which academic philosophy depends. However, in cases in which ethical transformation is thought to act on intellectual capacities such as wisdom and insight as well as the will, it will not be surprising if beginners are not always thought to be capable of

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understanding the destination of the journey they have embarked on under the guidance of more advanced minds. Working under guidance in this way does not erase the will of the tutee, which is why subterfuge may sometimes be necessary. A famous case is found in the Lotus Sutra, one of the key texts of Mahayana Buddhism: a father returns home to find his house on fire, and his three children playing with their toys inside, oblivious to the danger. He tries to call out to them to explain their predicament, but they pay him no heed, unable to appreciate the urgency as they are absorbed in their amusement. He then tempts each of them in turn, each with a description of a different toy that awaits outside. When the children arrive outside, they find that what awaits them is much grander than they could have imagined. This story is taken as justification for adapting teachings in whatever way will be acceptable and useful for potential cultivators, at whichever stage of the path they happen to be on, substituting the final goal of enlightenment and Buddhahood with intermediate and inferior goals if that is the best way of providing motivation.

The Fragility of Goodness When considering the right way to act in a given situation under deontological theories, we are considering an act that exists at a particular moment, under fixed conditions and with the current extent of knowledge and ignorance of the parties involved. This juridical approach is also, as we have seen, characteristic of what Bernard Williams called the Morality System. Consider the case of a judge who orders that a detainee should be set free on human rights grounds. Imagine that the prisoner goes on to commit an entirely unanticipated act of heroism that saves the lives of many people. That outcome in no way makes the judge’s decision a better or more just decision, judged in terms of human rights. It continues to be as just or unjust as it was when it was handed down. Ancient virtue ethics sources, because they locate value in character and happiness as well as in acts, complicate this picture. If acts are considerations mainly to the extent that they contribute to the goal of cultivating a good life, however that telos is conceived, their goodness is not guaranteed in the same way. Unexpected events can cast them in a new light, progress can be lost, meanings can be reversed. This aspect of virtue ethics, for which Bernard Williams coined the term ‘moral luck’, is likely to strike adherents of his modern Morality System as particularly shocking. For it contravenes a central axiom of that system: that people are not to be judged as morally deficient or praiseworthy on the basis of events or conditions beyond their control. In Kantian terms, morality, the kingdom of ends, is not dependent on the realm of nature; morality is the area of life in which anyone can distinguish themselves by their good will regardless

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of their external conditions (Nussbaum 1986). If some varieties of classical virtue ethics seem scandalous to modern sensibilities because they flout this principle, others seek, in a way that would be recognizable to, say, Kant, to isolate morality from luck. In fact, whether it was possible to do this was one of the major fields of difference among systems of ethical thought in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. On the one hand, there is a strand of classical thought that teaches that virtue is the only good and that good and bad fortune are irrelevant to real happiness and should be met with indifference. A clear expression of this principle is found in Plato’s Apology. There, Socrates, condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens, accepts his fate with equanimity, asserting that no harm can be done to a good man – in other words, goodness and happiness are found in virtue and virtue alone. Later, Stoic authors would echo this approach. Seneca, for instance, famously taught that there is ‘nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so’. On the other hand, Greek literature from Homer onwards was dominated by accounts of the moral consequences of bad luck in the form of tragedy, where characters had been placed in morally disastrous situations as a result of events beyond their voluntary acts. Bernard Williams, in a book-length treatment of the issue, argues that the ancient poets had an appreciation for a universal truth that modern moral philosophers had come to deny: ‘All conceptions of responsibility’, he claimed, ‘make some discriminations . . . between what is voluntary in this sense and what is not; at the same time, no conception of responsibility confines response entirely to the voluntary’ (1993: 66). Consider a paradigm case. Oedipus kills King Laius and later, without realizing that she was Laius’s widow, marries the queen, Jocasta. Eventually he discovers that Jocasta and Laius are his mother and father and that he is an unwitting incestuous parricide. His actions in respect of these crimes were unintentional. Yet, as Williams points out, the ancient dramatists who wrote about the legend recognized that he was nonetheless responsible for them. He may not have intended his father’s death, but he was its cause, and he carried the pollution of homicide, miasma. As Williams writes, even putting ideas about spiritual pollution aside, tragic characters such as Oedipus and Ajax had to face up to the challenge of holding the values they did while simply being the person who had done what they had done. In many cases, they found that the simultaneous experience of these two conditions was unbearable and they committed suicide. The lesson that Williams takes from all this is that the poets had insight into a truth that the philosophers vainly denied: that reason is incapable of protecting us against the moral effects of misfortune. Another modern virtue ethicist has drawn a different conclusion. In The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum argues that reason can be defended in the face of the vulnerability of the good life. In fact, she explains, there is a range of

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positions on this question, not just two. Human life is beset by chaos, and reason sets out to isolate us from this. The question is: what is the right degree of isolation? If we open ourselves up to too much vulnerability, then our life will not be sufficiently stable to be a happy one, but if we care about nothing, then we are excluding much of what makes life worth living at all. In particular, she is thinking about caring relationships. The Stoics, for example, rejected reliance on human relationships to the extent of condemning compassion as moral weakness (Roberts 2017). What is the significance of all this for the anthropology of ethics? Nussbaum and Williams are both engaged in a discussion about what is the right position to take on these matters, in a philosophical idiom that seems to draw on our shared, unacknowledged, but pre-existing intuitions about what makes a good life (an approach that is bound to seem ethnocentric from an anthropological perspective). However, the questions that the ancient authors they both draw on were contending with are bound to arise in any account of ethical formation, and it is important for anthropologists to be able to see and understand them. Greek tragedy dealt in bad luck. And although Socrates and the Stoics thought that the sage was capable of withstanding any external disaster through inner strength, they too were oblivious to the good fortune that provided the conditions for becoming a paragon in the first place. Williams (1976) calls this luck that produces the sage ‘constitutive luck’. Perhaps this is one area in which a comparative approach would help to shed light on the full range of possible ethical thought. The Confucian tradition is particularly rich in this respect, perhaps because, like Aristotle, its thinkers have tended to hold that virtue is strongly associated with contemplation and the independent state of the mind, but also that it issues in action. This can lead to a nuanced position. For example, according to Mencius, the gain or loss of wealth is an external factor that does not make an automatic difference to our nature, but it can have effects. On the one hand, wealth can insulate us from the sort of worries that prompt us to cultivate the mind in the first place; on the other, it can provide the sort of stability and leisure that are necessary for sustained cultivation (Walker 2013). Wang Yangming, author of an important Ming Dynasty Confucian text, Instructions for Practical Living, considered the issue of luck not in relation to ordinary people or victims of tragedy but in the case of sages (the following discussion is based on Huff 2013). This issue arises in Confucianism because it emphasizes sages as moral exemplars. A sage is one who has succeeded in completely identifying the mind with the principle of nature, so that they are omniscient and have complete equanimity. According to the Confucian classic The Great Learning, on which much of Wang’s text is a commentary, the sage abides in the good in order to deliberate, and then manifests goodness – in other words, the sage combines contemplation with action.

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Wang asks whether all sages can be considered equal. His response falls somewhere between the positions that Williams identifies, but is also different from Nussbaum’s compromise. He concludes that there are two characteristics by which sages can be judged: traits and achievements. In terms of traits, since the defining characteristic of a sage is to have completely unified the mind with nature, all are equal. But achievements depend on the opportunity to perform great deeds, and in this respect, sages differ. Wang likens these two axes to the way in which we evaluate gold: we consider its purity, and in those terms one example of pure gold is the same as any other, but we also consider its quantity, which may differ independently of its purity.

Conclusion In this chapter I have explored some of the issues that arise in virtue ethics as such and shown how a variety of sources can provide inspiration for thinking about them. I have defined virtue ethics in a very broad sense as those issues that arise as a consequence of the fact that human beings are malleable creatures who are capable to some extent of moulding their own characteristics, and that the characteristics they acquire can be subject to evaluation. If Bernard Williams is right, this process is a universal experience, but it is hidden by the doctrines of the Morality System, according to which there is a special species of obligation and evaluation from which many relevant considerations are excluded in principle. Modern writers on virtue ethics such as Williams, Foucault, and the rest have worked to free themselves from these assumptions by returning for inspiration to ethical thinkers who operated at a time before the Morality System developed. As anthropology emerged with many of the same assumptions, this means that their approach is uniquely valuable for us as a starting point in recognizing some problems in our own theoretical assumptions. However, I have also argued that, if we start with modern virtue ethicists, we should not stop with them. Not only do they draw on a culturally narrow range of thinkers, with overwhelming emphasis placed on a single work – Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics – but their purposes are different from anthropologists’ too. In most cases, they aim to reduce ancient virtue ethics to abstract enough principles that it can be transposed to modern liberal society, conforming to modern liberal intuitions. In doing so, they risk stripping the ancient sources of the context that Williams recognized is so important, and at the same time imposing, through selection and adaptation, concerns that derive from their own times. So while these writers are invaluable for the questions they raise, we should be chary about treating any of their prescriptions for how they think virtue ethics ought to look as definitive accounts of how either any

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particular variety of virtue ethics or virtue ethics as such actually works. That clearly applies to those writers who limit themselves to Aristotle, but it also applies to those who take a more comparative approach, such as Foucault, MacIntyre, Williams, and Taylor – these authors were also grinding axes in order to defend a favoured version of virtue ethics. As I mentioned at the outset, there is already a genre of comparative work on virtue ethics, one that I have not spent space on here, namely work that takes as its purpose establishing whether a given non-European tradition is an instance of virtue ethics or not. Some of this work provides interesting and valuable discussions, but I find the whole approach to be misguided. It depends on a circular path of reasoning that begins by defining which characteristics of the Western tradition (usually Aristotle) are essential and definitive of virtue ethics, then testing some other tradition against that list, then declaring it to be virtue ethical or not. For instance, in his work on Confucianism, Roger Ames (2011, 2020) argues that Confucianism cannot be considered a virtue ethics because the goal is expressed in terms of roles – a good father, a good son, and so on – rather than in terms of virtues such as courage. The contrast is indeed an illuminating one, but I cannot see the interest from an anthropological point of view in defending or rejecting the proposition that the category of virtue ethics should be made to turn on the presence of a list of virtues rather than, say, of the notion of the good life. Some other questions of definition that have exercised modern virtue ethicists also seem to me to be of little interest for anthropological purposes. For instance, there has been considerable debate over whether the category of virtue ethics includes only those cases in which virtue is the only criterion of the good (Baron 1985; Hursthouse 1999), or whether virtues can be understood as a condition of a higher-level good that includes more than just the virtues (Foot 1978). Other modern philosophical debates on virtue ethics that I have not been able to address here do suggest interesting comparative questions for anthropologists and may, in turn, be clarified by ethnographic evidence. One is the role of practical judgement or wisdom, its sensitivity to the particularity of a given situation, and its sometimes antagonistic relationship with codification. Another related and complex question is the issue of plurality of values in the light of virtue ethics. Both of these issues – particularism and value pluralism – are of pre-eminent concern to anthropologists and it is not surprising that anthropologists of ethics have already drawn on virtue-ethical sources to elucidate them. There is already a danger, I think, of treating the sources as if they provide an answer to the ways in which these things work in general, rather than ways of glimpsing a fraction of the possible variety. Further discussion of these topics is, regrettably, not possible in this chapter. In the areas I have discussed I have limited myself to discussing possible comparison with traditions about which I know a little – mainly Buddhism

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and Confucianism. It might be argued that this is misleading. Chinese traditions clearly prioritize elaborate techniques of the self. Perhaps the same could be said of Indic traditions. But could it be said equally well of ethical traditions that have emerged in other regions? Could it be applied to the Amazon, for instance, or in Africa? Foucault suggests that some societies are dominated by codes of rules in a way that squeezes out room for the reflection and freedom he thinks are essential to self-cultivation. Williams, by contrast, seems to suggest that the Morality System is more a question of aspiration and self-description – even self-deception – than an accurate account of ethical experience under modernity, and that the issues elaborated so eloquently in tragedy by ancient poets remain common to all. The question of which is right seems to me to be an eminently anthropological question.

Acknowledgements This chapter was completed while I was a visiting researcher at the Departamento de Ciencias de la Comunicacio´n Aplicada at the Complutense University, Madrid, though sadly the pandemic meant that my visit has been more virtual than I had hoped. I am grateful to Nuria Villagra Garcı´a and Patricia Nu´n˜ez Go´mez for their invitation. I thank three anonymous readers as well as my former students Tom Bell, Haiying Ni, Barbara Denuelle, Laura Burke, and Marko Barisic for penetrating comments and the editor for embodying the pa¯ramita¯s of wisdom and patience.

References Adkins, Arthur W. H. 1960. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Al-Mohammad, Hayder and Daniela Peluso. 2012. ‘Ethics and the “Rough Ground” of the Everyday: The Overlappings of Life in Postinvasion Iraq’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2): 42–58. Al-Mohammad, Hayder, Veena Das, Jonathan Mair, Joel Robbins, Charles Stafford, and Soumhya Venkatesan. 2015. ‘There Is No Such Thing as the Good: The 2013 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’. Critique of Anthropology, 35(4): 430–80. Ames, Roger T. 2011. Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. 2020. Human Becomings: Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Anscombe, G. E. M. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Philosophy, 33: 1–19. Apple, J. B. 2017. ‘Pa¯ramita¯’, in K. T. S. Sarao and J. D. Long (eds.), Buddhism and Jainism: Encyclopedia of Indian Religions. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baron, Marcia. 1985. ‘Varieties of Ethics of Virtue’. American Philosophical Quarterly, 22(1): 47–53. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Cook, Joanna. 2010. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Joanna, James Laidlaw, and Jonathan Mair. 2009. ‘What If There Is No Elephant? Towards a Conception of an Un-Sited Field’, in MarkAnthony Falzon (ed.), Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research. London: Routledge: 47–72. Cowan, Jane K. 2021. ‘Modes of Acting Virtuously at the Universal Periodic Review’, in Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilac¸a and Maria Varaki (eds.), Ethical Leadership in International Organizations: Concepts, Narratives, Judgment and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 176–202. Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. ‘Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology’. Ethos, 18(1): 5–47. Dave, Naisargi. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1976 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Routledge. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Faubion, James D. 2001. The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. ‘The Subject That Is Not One: On the Ethics of Mysticism’. Anthropological Theory, 13(4): 287–307. Foot, Philippa. 1978. Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Forbess, Alice. 2015. ‘Paradoxical Paradigms: Moral Reasoning, Inspiration, and Problems of Knowing among Orthodox Christian Monastics’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 113–28. Foucault, Michel. 1978 [1976]. The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. 1985 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. 1986 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Three: The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon. 1997. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume One. Edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Allen Lane. Friedman, Jonathan. 2018. ‘Situating Morality’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 182–98.

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Held, Virginia et al. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoffman, Lisa M. 2010. Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Holbraad, Martin. 2018. ‘Steps Away from Moralism’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 27–48. Huff, Benjamin I. 2013. ‘The Target of Life in Aristotle and Wang Yangming’, in Stephen Angle and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 119–29. Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia’, in Signe Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge. Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kapferer, Bruce and Marina Gold. 2018. ‘Introduction: Reconceptualizing the Discipline’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. London: Berghahn Books: 1–26. Keane, Webb. 2021. ‘From Ethics to Politics. Comment on Grohmann, Steph. 2020. The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 11(2): 813–17. Keown, Damien. 1992. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kipnis, Andrew B. 2008. ‘Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Governing?’ American Ethnologist, 35(2): 275–89. Kirsch, Thomas G. 2004. ‘Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief’. American Anthropologist, 106(4): 11. Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2): 311–32. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laidlaw, James and Jonathan Mair. 2019. ‘Imperfect Accomplishment: The Fo Guang Shan Short-Term Monastic Retreat and Ethical Pedagogy in Humanistic Buddhism’. Cultural Anthropology, 34(3): 328–58. Lambek, Michael. 2000. ‘The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy’. Current Anthropology, 41(3): 309–20. 2010. ‘Introduction’. In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 1–38. 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Lear, Jonathan. 2000. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levy, Neil. 2004. ‘Foucault as Virtue Ethicist’. Foucault Studies, 1: 20–31. Liangjian, Liu. 2013. ‘Virtue Ethics and Confucianism: A Methodological Reflection’, in Stephen Angle and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 82–9. Loy, Hui-chieh. 2014. ‘Classical Confucianism as Virtue Ethics’, in Stan van Hooft (ed.), The Handbook of Virtue Ethics. New York: Acumen Publishing: 285–93. Lynteris, Christos. 2012. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Berlin: Springer. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth Books. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’. Cultural Anthropology, 16(2): 202–36. Mair, Jonathan. 2015. ’Proposing the Motion: The Concept of Neoliberalism as a Moral Schema’, in Soumhya Venkatesan (ed.), ‘Debate: The Concept of Neoliberalism has Become an Obstacle to the Anthropological Understanding of the Twenty-First Century’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21: 911–23. 2023. ‘The Anthropology of Buddhism’, in Simon Coleman and Joel Robbins (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12(2): 161–84. 2014. ‘The Moral Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother’. Ethos, 42(1): 119–38. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Munro, Donald J. 1971. ‘The Malleability of Man in Chinese Marxism’. The China Quarterly, 48: 609–40. 1982. The Concept of Man in Contemporary China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988. ‘Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 13: 32–53. O’Neill, Onora. 1983. ‘I. Kant after Virtue’. Inquiry, 26 4): 387–405. 1996. ‘Kant’s Virtues’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live: Essays on the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 77–99. Pang, Keum Young Chung. 2000. Virtuous Transcendence: Holistic SelfCultivation and Self-Healing in Elderly Korean Immigrants. London: Routledge. Read, Kenneth E., 1955. ‘Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama’. Oceania, 25(4): 233–82.

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Roberts, Robert C. 2017. ‘Varieties of Virtue Ethics’, in David Carr, James Arthur, and Kristja´n Kristja´nsson (eds.), Varieties of Virtue Ethics. Berlin: Springer: 17–34. Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shahar, Meir. 2008. The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Slote, Michael A. 2001. Morals from Motives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. Moral Sentimentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013. ‘The Impossibility of Perfection’, in Stephen Angle and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 99–109. 2020. Between Psychology and Philosophy: East-West Themes and Beyond. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Song, Jesook. 2009. ‘Between Flexible Life and Flexible Labor: The Inadvertent Convergence of Socialism and Neoliberalism in South Korea’. Critique of Anthropology, 29(2): 139–59. Swanton, Catherine. 2003. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. Chichester: John Wiley. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. van Norden, Bryan. 2007. Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Matthew D. 2013. ‘Structured Inclusivism about Human Flourishing: A Mengzian Formulation’, in Stephen Angle and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism. London: Routledge: 110–18. Williams, Bernard. 1976. ‘Moral Luck’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 50: 115–51. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press. 1993. Shame and Necessity. London: Taylor & Francis. Wright, Fiona. 2016. ‘Palestine, My Love: The Ethico-Politics of Love and Mourning in Jewish Israeli Solidarity Activism’. American Ethnologist, 43 (1): 130–43. Yun, Hsing. 2007. Buddhism, Medicine and Health. Hacienda Heights, CA: Buddha’s Light Publishing. Zagzebski, Linda. 2010. ‘Exemplarist Virtue Theory’. Metaphilosophy, 41(1– 2): 41–57. Zigon, Jarrett. 2011. ‘A Moral and Ethical Assemblage in Russian Orthodox Drug Rehabilitation’. Ethos, 39(1): 30–50. 2014. ‘Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions for Morally Being-in-the-World.’ Ethos, 42(1): 16–30.

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4 Agonistic Pluralists Three Philosophers of Value Conflict James Laidlaw and Patrick McKearney

The collapse of faith in the possibility of objective and timeless moral truth that occurred across European civilization, beginning towards the end of the nineteenth century, had many causes and many authors, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) often being credited with some of its most influential early articulations (2001 [1882], 1994 [1887]). Much of the history of both philosophy and the social sciences in the twentieth century and since has been, as Geuss (2014), among many others, has observed, the story of responses and counter-responses to that collapse. In the Anglophone world, the process was comparatively gradual, and in the middle of the twentieth century the schools of thought that dominated moral philosophy – utilitarian consequentialism and Kantian deontology – still shared an aspiration to ground moral knowledge in foundational principles unassailable by doubt, applicable to moral agents conceived in resolutely individualistic terms and also abstractly, in the sense that they would be essentially the same whenever, wherever, and however they lived. These moral principles, it was assumed, could therefore be arrived at without the need for empirical study by any actual social forms of ethical life, historical or contemporary. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was a pivotal figure in effecting change. His later teachings and posthumous writings (1953, 1969) marked a decisive break from logical positivism – an early twentieth-century attempt in analytical philosophy to shore up and police the boundaries of objectivity – and, for many who have come after him, he accomplished decisively ‘the demolition of all attempts to understand the human mind in isolation from the social practices through which it finds expression’ (Scruton 1995: 291). His influence was decisive in bringing the broader collapse of faith in timeless objective truth to moral philosophy. The ‘ordinary-language philosophy’ that developed among some of Wittgenstein’s followers made it possible to investigate ethics through attention to the minutiae of linguistic practice, such as John Austin’s

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(1957) much-cited anatomy of excuses. But while such moves might easily have encompassed an interest – perhaps logically ought to have encompassed an interest – in social and historical variation in forms of ethical life, this did not in fact occur (Williams 1985: 120–31). Meanwhile, some of Wittgenstein’s closest students, led by Elizabeth Anscombe (1958), initiated the development of a broadly Aristotelian virtue ethics that became the principal rival in Anglophone moral philosophy to consequentialism and deontology. This movement absorbed Wittgenstein’s insistence that ethics can exist only as part of a form of social life, but has not yet succeeded in taking what anthropologists know of cultural diversity seriously into account (see Mair, Chapter 3 of this volume). And change was not always in one direction. John Rawls, in the 1950s, was also strongly influenced by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in his view of morality as an inherent part of a ‘form of life’ (Forrester 2019: 8–9), but his thinking slowly developed in an increasingly ahistorical, abstract, and technocratic direction, with ideas drawn from cybernetics, game theory, and welfare economics, and it crystallized into a distinctive contractarian Kantian structure that purported to provide a universalist basis for liberal egalitarianism. So, as finally published, his A Theory of Justice (1971), surely the most influential single work of Anglophone moral and political philosophy of its era, represented a decisive reassertion of faith in universal, objective moral knowledge. The systematic account it provided of the foundations for a universal set of rules and rights set the agenda for much of the most globally influential legal, moral, and political thought, as well as much far-reaching policy formulation in the succeeding half-century. In this chapter, we consider three Anglophone philosophers – Bernard Williams (1929–2003), Charles Taylor (1931–), and Martha Nussbaum (1947–) – who came to prominence during that period, and are generally regarded, with considerable cause, as exponents of virtue ethics and as influential intellectual dissidents from Rawlsian rights-based orthodoxy. The position is slightly more complicated than that, however. Although highly influential on the development of virtue ethics, these authors also stand slightly apart from it, declining to use the label for themselves and even denying that it designates a coherent category (e.g. Williams 1994; Nussbaum 1999b). And Nussbaum, as we shall see later, has become increasingly sympathetic to Rawls in many respects. Nevertheless, they all also articulate a conception of philosophy strikingly at variance with his. None of them are ‘relativists’ in anything like the sense in which that slippery term is generally used by philosophers, or anthropologists, or in everyday parlance. Nevertheless, they all dissent from the conception of the philosophical enterprise, exemplified by Rawls but going back as far as Plato, that aims at universal and objective moral truth. They have each declared such ambitions not only impossible to realize in practice but also positively harmful to pursue. The reason for this is that they are all, though not in identical ways, value pluralists. Fundamental facets of the human

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condition – the fact that life takes place only in history, in social institutions, and in personal relationships; that meaning and value exist only within the social practices that make up a form of life; that the goods of any such form of life are fragile, plural, and incommensurable, and may be in irreducible conflict – mean that Socrates’s confidence that ‘the good man cannot be harmed’ has never been justified, unless that ‘man’ is defined as something other than the beings we actually are. The importance of our three authors for the anthropology of ethics thus lies in the fact that their work points towards a conception of ethical enquiry that takes us beyond the idea that our discipline requires a satisfactory dialogue with moral philosophy. Insofar as their most fundamental claims are accepted, the difference between moral philosophy and the anthropology of ethics will tend to dissolve, requiring at least as much change in philosophy as in anthropology. The logical consequence of their views, we shall suggest, is that ethical inquiry needs to be an empirical and comparative study of the ethical dimension of lived forms of social life. On the philosophical side, one can see the beginnings of such a change already, in the varied recent work of a number of moral philosophers in which empirical study of forms of social life is at least an essential part (e.g. Amanda Anderson 2016, 2018; Elizabeth Anderson 1993; Appiah 2005, 2008, 2010; Chappell 2014; Dan-Cohen 2016; Joyce 2006; Lear 2006; Pettit 2018; Prinz 2007; Raz 1986, 2005; Snow 2015; Swanton 2003; Tully 2008; Velleman 2015; Wong 2006). Our argument here is that informed critical appreciation of the work of Williams, Taylor, and Nussbaum will advance the anthropological side in this development. We shall begin by describing their shared dissent from contemporary moral and political philosophy conceived on the Platonic model, and their shared conviction that ethical enquiry should be concerned with ethical selves that are always located in the particulars of social relations and historical context, rather than as abstractly conceived rational agents. We shall then proceed to explore the different ways in which they develop this general position, in different interdisciplinary engagements and in the themes they develop in their major writings. We then examine the relationship between their philosophical convictions and their political and religious commitments, and the extent to which these incline them towards making normative prescriptions. Finally, because they represent different possibilities for the anthropology of ethics as much as for moral philosophy, we shall explore the overlapping but different conceptions of the nature of ethical enquiry exemplified by their respective oeuvres.

Modern Moral Philosophy: Footnotes to Plato In her first major work, The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Nussbaum describes ancient Greek tradition as locating humans between the animal world, from which we are distinguished by reason, and the gods, from whom we

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are distinguished by our materially dependent and vulnerable animality. That tradition recognized that ‘a lot about us is messy, needy, uncontrolled, rooted in the dirt and standing helplessly in the rain’ (2). The tragic poets powerfully represented our consequent vulnerability to three pervasive causes of luck and circumstance: personal relationships and attachments, conflicts between the things we value, and our non-rational appetites, feelings, and emotions. Plato, Nussbaum argues, represented the most ambitious philosophical attempt to rescue us from this condition by denying its ultimate reality (see also Lloyd 2005). She reads his middle-period dialogues as a ‘heroic attempt’ to save us from the tragic view of the world. For Plato, ‘no tragic poem . . . could be a good teacher of ethical wisdom’, for it aims to arouse pity and fear in relation to what can happen to us (1986: 129). According to Plato, philosophy (including in the parables of the line and the cave) shows us that our common ways of perceiving the world are radically misleading, and that the reality lying beyond sensory experience is that we are rationally self-sufficient and invulnerable. Having access to the reality of the singular nature of the good, ‘which can render all alternatives commensurable’ (110), dispels the dangerous illusion that conflicting values make irreconcilable claims upon us. The Republic provides instead a blueprint for a social order so systematic that Plato imagines it will realize an ethical state in which there are no real value conflicts to be faced (136–64). Taylor and Williams do not agree with everything in Nussbaum’s analysis of Plato or in her championing of Aristotle as the alternative: Taylor (1988b) has more sympathy, as a Roman Catholic and for essentially religious reasons, with Plato’s aspiration to the transcendent; Williams (2006a: 339) thinks Nussbaum finds in Aristotle ‘a rather more openminded and exploratory humanism’ than is in fact there. But while all three of them express immense admiration for the power of Plato’s dialogues, they also share the view (first adumbrated at length by Nietzsche) that his magnificently systematic project is ultimately incoherent and deeply misguided, and that it has shaped modern moral philosophy for the worse (see Taylor 1988b; Williams 2006a: 148–86). This shared position is rooted in value pluralism and what they see as the realities of human existence. They all think the tragic poets were right that value conflicts are real: that the goods of human life are many, often rivalrous, and present us with genuinely tragic choices. They also think the poets correctly portray our happiness as vulnerable, such that goodness alone cannot protect us. If this is so, then Plato’s enterprise is fundamentally misconceived, and modern moral philosophy, insofar as it inherits Plato’s rationalism, his assumption of ultimate commensurability, and his denial of the reality of tragedy, inherits this incoherence. If tragic choice is an ineradicable aspect of the human condition, then Plato’s project of freeing us from what he regarded as the mere appearance of conflict and harm amounts to a futile attempt to solve human problems by imagining

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us as other than human. It seeks, as if it were a higher and better life for us, what is really the life of an altogether different sort of being (Nussbaum 1986: 379). The real meaning of Plato’s ascent from the cave to the sunlight is, as Williams (2006a: 169) puts it, ‘a departure from human concerns altogether’. Our three authors each insist on the trans-historical and cross-cultural reality of value conflict (e.g. Williams 1981: 71–82; Taylor 1985b: 230–47; Nussbaum 1990: 106–24). Williams and Taylor are indebted for this view to their teacher at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin (1969, 1978, 1979, 1990; see Gray 1993: 64–9; 1995), and Nussbaum is influenced in turn by Williams. Williams summarizes Berlin’s position thus: Berlin warns us against the deep error of supposing that all goods, all virtues, all ideals are compatible . . .. This is not the platitude that in an imperfect world not all the things we recognise as good are in practice compatible. It is rather that we have no coherent conception of a world without loss, that goods conflict by their very nature, and that there can be no incontestable scheme for harmonizing them. (1978b: xvi) In an early paper, ‘Ethical Consistency’, Williams identifies as a pervasive problem in mainstream moral philosophy the assumption that beneath all apparent ethical conflict there is always only one genuine obligation, and insists on the contrary that ‘moral conflicts are neither systematically avoidable, nor all soluble without remainder’ (1973a: 179). For Taylor (1985a: 15–44), the ontological plurality of goods means that moral agency consists of reflective choice between incommensurables. For this reason, utilitarianism, with its attempt to recast all ethical decisions as a weighing up of a single good, is doomed. Nussbaum (1986: 112, 117, 121) finds in utilitarianism a vulgarized rendition of Plato’s experiment, in the Protagoras, with pleasure as the single good – one that frequently forgets its origins as a deliberate break from common sense, and mistakes its normative injunctions for descriptions of how we really think (e.g. Singer 2010: 344; see also Williams 1985: 16). Modern Kantianism’s insistence that there is a distinct domain of moral value that is both overwhelmingly more important than anything else and entirely immune from luck recapitulates Plato’s aspiration to rational invulnerability (Nussbaum 1986: 4–5, 186–7). One of Williams’s most influential papers, ‘Moral Luck’ (1981: 20–39), was designed to disprove just this idea of the invulnerability of the moral will to the assaults of fortune. So, on this basis our three authors reject what they see as some widespread features of mainstream analytical moral and political philosophy. They deprecate its scientism, both the aspiration to emulate scientific styles of presentation (Williams 1985: 106; Nussbaum 1990: 3–19, 36) and the attempt to adopt a detached point of view external to ethical life (Williams 1981: 101–14; 1995: 153–71; Taylor 1985a: 45–76; Nussbaum

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1990: 187); its reductionism, in the search for ‘some one reason for everything’ (Williams 1985: 114) or a ‘single principle of morality’ (Taylor 1994b: 250); its universalism, which involves abstracting from and ignoring particularity and historical and cultural variation (Williams 2006b: 193–4); and its spendthrift attitude to the ethical knowledge embedded in everyday custom and practice, such as in our love of particular people and places (Nussbaum 1986: 191, 260; 1990: 167). Philosophy from Plato through Kant to Rawls and others has conceived of the moral self as an independent and essentially ‘characterless’ abstract entity, each identical to every other, and able through reason to adopt a stance outside itself (Williams 1993: 158–9). Systematizing moral theory of this kind, says Williams (1985: 117), ‘typically uses the assumption that we probably have too many ethical ideas, some of which may well turn out to be prejudices’, which includes any that cannot be shown to be derived in rationalist fashion from abstract principle or expressed as universal rules. ‘Our major problem now is actually that we have not too many [ethical ideas] but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can.’ This underlies another significant commonality among our three authors: a turn away from deduction to engagement with descriptive sources to inform ethical reflection that takes place within, rather than outside of, human life. How has it come to be that modern moral philosophy tends, as our three thinkers believe it does, to impoverish rather than enrich our ethical life? Williams offers a historical argument with his notion of the ‘Morality System’. His early essays (see 1973a and 1981) carefully exposed several paradoxical and untenable aspects of ‘morality’ as conventionally understood: it allows for no credible notion of personal identity, it requires people to become alienated from their deepest commitments and personal relationships, it can make no sense of salient features of moral experience such as regret and personal integrity. Something profound, he cumulatively suggests, is wrong with our concept of morality. Then, in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), he historicizes this diagnosis with the suggestion that these confusions and incoherencies are features not of ethical thought as such, but of a highly specific variant of ethics that has come to dominate modern Western societies. This ‘Morality System’ is a historically unusual and narrow conception of what counts as answering the Socratic question, ‘How should one live?’. It is a version of ethics that has roots in Platonic rationalism but has taken a specific form and has come to have an unprecedented dominance in modern societies. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were arguing against a dominant culture that made different presuppositions, but modern Kantian and consequentialist philosophers, while they are happy enough to dismiss common-sense moral intuitions where they conflict with their theories, are arguing for ideas that have become powerfully institutionalized and ideologically dominant in conditions of modernity. The immense success of both utilitarianism

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and theories such as Rawls’s in influencing public debate, legal thought, and state policy are expressions of this ideological dominance. They are adapted to the needs of state bureaucracy, and their radically individualizing notion of obligation conceals the vital social dimensions of ethical life (1985: 174–96). Williams refers to this modern Morality System as ‘the peculiar institution’. This expression was a euphemism for slavery in the antebellum South (Jenkins 2006: 69), which is to say a system that was in some people’s interests at the expense of others, undoubtedly, but also dehumanizing for everyone involved. Implicitly, it is also a reference to Nietzsche’s idea of ‘slave morality’ (Nietzsche 1994 [1887]). And like Nietzsche, with whose ideas he became increasingly engaged, Williams thought that a secularization of Christian ascetic values accounted for a good deal of the content of the Morality System. While he credited Kant with its most formative and influential systematization, much of Williams’s critical attention was directed to the work of utilitarians and contemporary Kantian contractarians such as Rawls who, by continuing to refine the system, shore up its inconsistencies, and weave it into the legitimation of modern institutions such as democracy and human rights, are inadvertently making matters worse. Their efforts further exclude and marginalize, and make it harder even to recognize as ethical at all, ideas and practices that do not conform to the system, such as concern with one’s own integrity as an agent, or more generally in resisting the demand that one’s life be transformed into little more than a cypher for the fulfilment of duties that present themselves as categorical and absolute but which are in fact anything but (1973a, 1973b, 1981). Taylor largely agrees with Williams on the general character of the Morality System, and its radical inadequacy for our needs (1989a: 53–90; 1995b). He offers an alternative historical story about its origins that traces its deficiencies to scientific naturalism and its associated atomism and universalism, rather than Christianity. Indeed, for Taylor, the goods valued in modern society – freedom, equality, reason, individualism, benevolence – have their origins in Christianity (1989a: 36–40, 495–8; 2007), and it is part of the weakness of modern philosophical thinking that it cannot recognize this. Nussbaum’s early work (1986, 1994) has close affinities to Williams’s attempts (especially 1993), in ethnographic mode, to recover overlooked or disparaged ethical ideas from the ancient world, to enlarge our collective ethical imagination by making available to us concepts and insights of which the Morality System tends to deprive us (Nussbaum 1986: 4–5). But she offers no equivalent of either Williams’s or Taylor’s critical, historical accounts of the moral culture of modernity, perhaps because her later work on flourishing and human development brings her increasingly close to the perspectives and concerns of states and international bodies, which Williams and Taylor regard as constitutive of the Morality System.

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Taken together, these authors offer a distinctive set of arguments about the inadequacy of modern moral philosophy as a way of pursuing ethical enquiry. We move now to describing how, by turning to different sources beyond the analytical tradition, they each develop more relational conceptions of the ethical agent, more sociologically informed versions of ethical knowledge, and a more descriptive kind of ethical enquiry.

Descriptive Moral Philosophy: Three Versions Charles Taylor Taylor’s DPhil at Oxford was completed under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin, and Berlin’s influence becomes evident again in Taylor’s later writings. But his early career took a divergent direction. An enthusiasm for Marxism, and especially for Marx’s early writings, led to an interest in Hegel, and for some time Taylor was the leading exponent among Anglophone analytical philosophers of both Marx (1966, 1974, 1978) and Hegel (1975). And from Hegel, his interests extended to Heidegger and other continental phenomenologists (1985a: 248–92; 1995a: 61–78, 100– 26; 2011: 56–77; Dreyfus and Taylor 2015). Although based in predominantly Anglophone institutions – Oxford, McGill, and Northwestern – he is bilingual in French from his upbringing in Quebec, closest of our three authors to mid-twentieth-century European social theory, and the most holistic in his conception of the social. So, his accounts of modern individualism can sound a lot like Durkheim or Dumont. ‘The free individual of the West is only what he is by virtue of the whole society and civilization which brought him to be and which nourishes him’ (1985b: 206). Like Durkheim, Taylor argues that it is possible to accept the modern world’s moral evaluation of the individual without accepting the ‘atomistic’ metaphysical individualism that typically justifies it. Although his views on many matters evolve over time, Taylor never repudiates the holistic and teleological inheritance of this Hegelianism. The structure of Taylor’s social theory of morality is evident in his 1989 book Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, which begins with an analysis of what he regards as the ‘permanent structures’ or ‘ontological features’ of moral life (1989a: 25–52). These arise from the fact that we are reflective, language-using, and, as Taylor puts it, ‘self-interpreting animals’ (1985a: 45–76). This centrally includes the fact that we engage in what he calls ‘strong evaluation’, which is ‘something like a human universal, present in all but what we would clearly judge as very damaged human beings’ (Taylor 1994b: 249). The idea is derived from Harry Frankfurt’s (1971) notion of second-order desires. As language-users, and as conscious and reflective beings, we chronically subject our own conduct (including our thoughts and feelings) to interpretative description. We have stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing, and we cannot carry on without

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such narratives. An important dimension of this is self-evaluation: we approve, embrace, and identify with some but not all aspects of how things are with us. Some of our desires are desires we desire to have; others are very much otherwise. And these evaluative self-interpretations are ‘constitutive’ in the sense that, as they are formulated, they can alter the state of affairs they describe so that changes in the terms in which we understand our experiences are also changes in our experience (1989a: 101). Furthermore, these self-interpretations are not merely internal or private. They are dialogical. Our selfhood necessarily takes place relationally (25– 42). Indeed, especially in his later writings (Taylor 2016), there are suggestions that strong evaluation takes place in part in the language itself, in the background, as it were, of people’s conscious activity (see Abbey 2000: 19– 20). For all these reasons, only a creature with language can engage in the strong evaluation without which it is not possible to be a moral agent in Taylor’s terms (1985a: 263). Having put in place this general description of the social nature of moral agency (much of which is roughly shared by Nussbaum and Williams), Taylor then makes the distinctive move in his account, which is his claim that not only is strong evaluation central to our moral experience, such that ‘we cannot do without some orientation to the good’ (1989a: 33), but also that this fact allows us to infer, as the best description we can conceive of the ‘transcendental conditions’ of human life as we experience it, the existence of the good towards which we are thus orientated. As Williams remarks, this is to move from what he agrees is a brilliant and compelling phenomenological account of moral experience ‘very rapidly uphill, metaphysically speaking’. The good to which Taylor thinks we are inescapably orientated, and whose existence we may therefore infer, is of course a depersonalized God, or, as Williams puts it, ‘the pale Galilean, in some generic, Platonic form’ (2006: 309). This is one of several respects, especially in the second half of Taylor’s long career, in which his Roman Catholicism makes itself apparent in his account of moral life. Taylor’s conception of the moral self as reflexively constituted through processes of self-understanding suggests that to comprehend moral life in the present, we must develop an account of how it has been shaped historically. Accordingly, Sources then describes at length the various ways in which moral value has come to be vested, in the modern world, in inwardness (1989a: 111–98), in ordinary life (211–302), and in nature (305–90). These discussions of individualism, puritanism, deism, utilitarianism, romanticism, and artistic expressivism are characterized by two pervasive features. First, the tone is affirmatory. It is a story, on the whole, of the enlargement of our moral sensibilities. Even bad philosophies, such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, which cannot articulate the bases of their own appeal or their own deepest commitments, nevertheless give expression to values – such as benevolence and impartiality – which are in Taylor’s view cumulative achievements of modernity. He sees his task as

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enabling us to acquire a more articulate understanding of this precious inheritance than these theories themselves can afford us. His book is, as he puts it, a work of ‘retrieval’ (520). Second, these achievements are in turn shown to have grown out of religion, which indeed remains the hidden source of their ‘spiritual power’ (203). Once we have understood their religious sources better, we shall be able more discriminatingly to embrace these modern values. For instance, if we can overcome the difficulty the modern individual finds in grasping that its individuality is itself not a natural given but constituted dialogically in its relations with others, it will be easier to realize its ideals of autonomy and self-responsibility (1985c: 278). Secularization means that for moderns, belief in God has gone from being virtually unchallengeable to only one (rather embattled) option among others (Taylor 2007). Taylor argues against the common understanding of this process – he calls it the ‘subtraction thesis’ – as consisting simply of throwing off old illusions and superstitions. Instead, he describes a more complex process which has left modern selves with three general orientations towards the good. The first, the most direct product of secularization, is a humanism that is ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘exclusive’ in that it is entirely this-worldly and thinks that it requires no hierarchical mediation to reach the good. But even this, with its distinctive features such as equality among citizens, has its roots in Christian impulses. The second is a counter-Enlightenment reaction, which appears to be Taylor’s rendition of Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981, 1988, 1990) proposed return to Thomist tradition. This, Taylor says, does not convince because it reads modernity only through ‘its least impressive and trivializing offshoots’ (1989a: 511). The third, his own, he refers to as a ‘capacious theism’, which embraces much of the moral legacy of the Enlightenment as well as non-Christian forms of spirituality but not its metaphysical premises, and acknowledges, which selfsufficient humanism cannot, that humans simply have an ‘ineradicable’ yearning for transcendent meaning. No moral framework that fails to respond to that yearning can be wholly satisfying to human subjects, as Taylor conceives them. Secularization has tended to disguise this from us and thus encouraged the impoverishment of self-understanding Taylor finds in the Morality System, but cannot change the underlying fact.

Bernard Williams Williams, trained in classics and philosophy at Oxford, taught successively in Oxford, London, Cambridge (where he became Provost of King’s College), and Berkeley, before returning to Oxford in 1990. He drew on a broad range of intellectual resources. His understanding of the ancient

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world shows the impress of anthropology, including anthropologically informed classicists. He engaged in print with the work of the classical Greek philosophers, but also such diverse modern figures as Descartes (1978a), Hume, Kant, Sidgwick, Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Nozick, Rorty, and Nagel (1985, 1995a, 2006a, 2014). He also engaged with literature and the arts, especially opera (2006). He was not undiscriminatingly eclectic, however, and unlike Taylor expressed only contempt for Heidegger: ‘the only world-famous philosopher of the 20th century about whom it can seriously be argued that he was a charlatan’ (2014: 183; see also 2005: 44). The most important modern philosopher for Williams, from outside the Anglophone analytical tradition, was Nietzsche. For Williams, as for Taylor, understanding the sociality and historicity of ethical life needs to be underpinned by a rich phenomenology of ethical experience, ‘of what we believe, feel, take for granted; the ways in which we confront obligations and recognize responsibility; the sentiments of guilt and shame’ (Williams 1985: 93). This phenomenology must be clearsighted and unsentimental (hence his pointed inclusion of guilt and shame). Williams persistently complained that his colleagues, especially optimistic contractarians such as Rawls, smuggled overly optimistic assumptions into their descriptive vocabulary, imagining humanity rather too much in the image of mild and well-meaning philosophy professors. They needed a much more realistic (which is not to say ‘value-free’) moral psychology (1995a: 65–76; 1995b: 202–5). When Williams speaks of philosophy’s unhelpfully ‘moralized’ psychology, he means not ‘value-laden’ language as such, but the use of concepts that are informed not by honest description and analysis of the not always pretty ways in which actual people think and conduct themselves, but by the wish-fulfilling requirements of ethical theory. He traces the practice to Plato (1993: 42–3), and his tripartite division of the soul, which re-describes our experience of conflicting desires, whose reality Plato wanted not to have to acknowledge, as being a matter of our having allegedly different kinds of desires, located in different parts of the psyche. But this is a cheat: these purported differences and their putative locations have their origin entirely in their function of providing Plato with a morally agreeable dissolution of the conflicts. Nothing, other than their function in making painful conflict seem more comfortingly tractable, suggests that these different ‘parts of the psyche’ exist. Aristotle’s assertion of the unity of the virtues is another instance, for Williams, of this idealization of ethical life. One of the spurs for his interest in Nietzsche was the immunization the latter’s bracing genealogical analyses of morality provide (Nietzsche 1994 [1887]; 2001 [1882]), in particular against believing things about humans simply on the basis that it would be nice if they were true (Williams 1995: 65–76; 2001). Williams argues that ‘ethical understanding needs a dimension of social explanation’ (1985a: 131), and the adoption of an ‘ethnographic stance’

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(1986: 203–4). His own sustained exercise of this kind is his reconstruction, in Shame and Necessity (1993), of ancient Greek ethical life. In that book, he argued against the established view that the Greeks ‘lacked’ some allegedly important ethical ideas, such as the ‘moral will’. This concept, Williams argued, was a moralized invention of bad philosophy (36), motivated by the Morality System’s requirement that blame be reserved for actions that are in a deep sense intentional. And it brings with it a host of philosophical pseudo-problems. The ancient Greeks had managed without any such entity, and we too would be better off without it. ‘If we can liberate the Greeks from patronizing misunderstandings of them, then that same process may help free us of misunderstandings of ourselves’ (11). In fact, the Greeks shared with us a range of concerns and emotions that the Morality System cannot accommodate: our loyalties, the most important of which we will not have chosen; the projects and commitments we strive to fulfil because they are ours (and not because we have dispassionately evaluated them ‘from the point of view of the universe’ or from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’); moral emotions such as regret, guilt, and shame; and our ultimate vulnerability to necessity and chance. Myopia about all of this, combined with its prejudicially moralized psychology, endows most of our moral and political philosophy with a deep dishonesty. It presents the world as if it were ‘safe for well-disposed people’, which it is not (2006a: 59). Nowhere does Williams attempt a detailed historical account of the origins and development of the Morality System comparable to Taylor’s rich narratives in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. His sociological observations are mostly fragmentary, such as that the requirement for ethical thinking to mirror bureaucratic procedure – ‘transparency’ and so on – tends to undermine and de-legitimize our richest ethical concepts. What Williams called ‘thick’ ethical concepts, such as ‘courageous’ or ‘rude’, unite description and evaluation, judgement and emotion, and therefore violate that totem of modernist purification (Latour 1993), the fact–value dichotomy (Williams 1985: 140–5, 217–18; 1995b: 205–10; 2005: 47–8; see Goldie 2009; Kirchin 2013). They are both ‘world-guided’ and evaluative at the same time, such that we can talk about their truth or falsity as judgements. And retaining these concepts requires us to confront the aspects of human emotion and motivation, such as envy and shame, which too much liberal moral and political philosophy has preferred to wish away. Rather than being conventionally explanatory, Williams’s historical writings are genealogical, and while critique of the Morality System is a common theme, these exercises in genealogy are distinctive (and in this respect like Taylor’s) in being largely recuperative. Shame and Necessity aims to recover for us ethical knowledge of which our modern theories tend to deprive us. And Truth and Truthfulness is designed to rescue our devotion to truthfulness from the demoralizing effects of the

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fashionable ‘deconstructive vortex’ (2002: 3). By telling a ‘vindicatory’ genealogical story of how our concern for truth might have developed from a state of nature, he makes the case for the ‘virtues of truth’ in the hope of persuading those whom he refers to as ‘the deniers’ that ‘to the extent that we lose a sense of the value of truth, we shall certainly lose something and may well lose everything’ (2002: 7; see also 2014: 405–12). Williams’s emphasis on the historical and social constitution of ethical subjects thus does not lead him to anything like a repudiation of ethical knowledge (even if he also thought that such knowledge is not all we need) or of the idea of truth, and it does not lead him to relativism. What he called ‘standard relativism’ is, he insisted, simply idle: a response to a predicament that does not exist. ‘Cultures’ are not and virtually never have been hermetically sealed worlds, and so the problem-situation relativism is designed to solve is not a real or live one (2005: 29–39; cf. also 1972). This is sometimes misunderstood because he did espouse an idea he called ‘the relativism of distance’, which involves noting that there are circumstances in which it becomes invalid to apply contemporary moral categories or criteria to the past (1981: 132–43). But this is not itself a relativist claim. On the contrary, it is premised on the possibility of coming to understand the past in a rich and detailed way, through a kind of historical ethnography. An ‘insightful but not totally identified observer’ (1985: 142; see also 1986) is able to learn to understand and use other people’s evaluative concepts in ways that do not simply require agreement with them, but equally do not preclude discovering truth in what they say (1985: 145; 1995b: 206). This is what makes it possible, on the model of ethical enquiry Williams promoted, not only to learn by means of historical or ethnographic analysis about other forms of ethical life but also to learn from them, as Williams claimed we can from the ancient Greeks. And this provides one possible basis for the practice of anthropology to be a form of ethical cultivation, such that we might see the reading or writing of ethnography as a spiritual exercise (e.g. Laidlaw 2014: ch. 6; McKearney 2016; see also Luhrmann, Chapter 28 of this volume).

Martha Nussbaum Educated in theatre studies as well as classics, and having spent some time in professional theatre, Nussbaum gained her PhD in ancient philosophy from Harvard. After being the first woman to be elected to a Harvard Junior Fellowship, she has taught successively at Harvard, Brown, and since 1994 at Chicago. For Nussbaum, the social dimension of the ethical self is a matter of the relational processes that make us into particular individuals. Her exploration of these processes begins, in The Fragility of Goodness (1986), with her account of Aristotle’s view of the emotions as ‘identical with the

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acceptance of a proposition that is both evaluative and eudaimonistic’ (2001a: 41). This ‘acceptance’ abolishes the Platonic distinction between emotions and reflection. Emotions register changes in things beyond the self’s control in a visceral, rather than detached, way precisely because this information is about our flourishing, our dependence on the body and its relationship to the world, and thus our vulnerability to contingency (2004: 6). Nussbaum reads Greek tragedies as offering philosophical insights compatible with Aristotle’s into the various forms this vulnerability can take, as well as what a proper recognition of it would entail. She gives the example, from Euripides’s The Trojan Women, of the overwhelming grief Hecuba expresses following the destruction of her family in the fall of Troy, and her own enslavement (1986: 312–17). She contrasts a Platonic view of this emotion as an uncontrolled physical impulse that generates moral misperception, because these misfortunes do not really harm Hecuba’s soul, with her own view, following Aristotle, that the overwhelming nature of the emotion constitutes a direct and accurate perception of the loss of irreplaceable individuals and circumstances on which Hecuba’s flourishing and identity really did foundationally depend. The real, full recognition of that terrible event . . . is the upheaval . . . the very act of assent is itself a tearing of my self-sufficient condition. Knowing can be violent, given the truths that are there to be known. (2001a: 45; original emphasis) Throughout Fragility, Nussbaum refers to the damagingly Platonic tendencies in both utilitarianism and Kantianism. In Love’s Knowledge (1990) she decries the concentration, in moral philosophy generally, on universalizing rules as the mark of rationality, arguing that perception of the particular is the highest form of reasoning, thus dissolving the boundaries between ethical reflection, emotional reaction, and interpersonal recognition. She turns to modern novels which, she argues, confront the generalizations of ethical theory with attention to the rich individuality of characters and relationships. They demonstrate, in their very form, the storied nature of the self: neither characterless nor immune to chance. Novels, like tragedies, embody an anti-Platonic conception of the agent because they display things happening to people. In particular, they demonstrate the ways in which people who take up utilitarian and Kantian moral doctrines, hoping thereby to gain immunity from such contingencies, end up having to confront the tragic nature of a world of particularity, plurality, and vulnerability (1986: 199, 382; 1990: 4, 17; for an analogous project of which Nussbaum approved, see also Cavell 1987). By the end of Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum’s divergence from Plato and Kantianism is at its most pronounced, as she wonders whether erotic and romantic love of a particular person might be more important than ethics altogether.

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In The Therapy of Desire (1994), she elaborates these anti-Platonic arguments about the necessary rooting of ethical reflection within the human condition through a medical analogy: Plato is like a doctor who develops a conception of health ‘without any knowledge of the feelings, needs, pleasures, and pains of actual living creatures’ (1994: 19). By contrast, we need to define health in relation to human embodiment and concerns. She turns to Epicurean, Skeptic, and especially Stoic philosophers to help her develop Aristotle’s cognitive account of emotions, by drawing upon their discoveries of unconscious beliefs, desires, and motivations, which have been re-discovered only recently by psychoanalysis (26, 490) and are still inadequately appreciated in modern philosophy (507–8). And she suggests that if the interdependence of emotion and reason is acknowledged, philosophy can be more than merely descriptive. Philosophical analysis can serve, as it did in the ancient world, as a therapy of desire, enabling us to overcome universal experiences arising from our vulnerabilities, such as anger, anxiety, and despair. In this context, she acknowledges an exception to the recent philosophical neglect of Hellenistic thought in Foucault’s Care of the Self (1988 [1984]). But she objects to his treating philosophical techniques du soi alongside ‘religious and magical/superstitious movements of various types in their culture’. Because of Foucault’s (alleged: see Heywood, Chapter 5 of this volume) view that ‘knowledge and argument are themselves tools of power’, he was unable to acknowledge how philosophy differs from superstition (1994: 5–6). Here, it is worth noting that alongside her opposition to Platonic transcendental objectivity, another set of opponents feature increasingly in Nussbaum’s writings. These are philosophical viewpoints, including some forms of ordinary-language philosophy, virtue ethics, and postmodernism, that articulate and affirm the ways we currently get along in the world and with each other, and abjure the possibility of thoroughgoing critique and reform of existing social arrangements carried out in the name of reason. In a way that was less obvious in her earlier writings, Nussbaum from this point on increasingly seeks to make (not transcendentally but empirically) objective claims about human nature and what it is we value as humans. If we remain accountable to the particularities of the human condition, she contends, then just as we can with health, we can make broader claims about moral flourishing. This sets Nussbaum on something like the trajectory earlier followed by Rawls in the development of his ideas, from a somewhat pluralist position influenced by Wittgenstein towards a more universalist Kantian conception of general moral principles and universal requirements of justice. Accordingly, although she does not follow Rawls all the way, her references to his work become markedly more positive. In Upheavals of Thought (2001a), Nussbaum develops Aristotelian and Stoic insights into a comprehensive theory of the emotions as cognitiveevaluative instruments of moral reasoning. She corrects the Stoic theory

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of emotion (itself a correction of Aristotle’s) by considering evidence from animal-behaviour studies, anthropology, and developmental psychology. The Stoics were mistaken in assuming that because animals and infants are not fully rational, they do not experience emotions. Also, they did not realize that emotions might be subject to cultural variation. Nussbaum rejects theories (in psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology) that treat emotional life ‘as universal in all salient respects’ (2001a: 143). But cultural and historical difference is not fundamental to her understanding of ethical selfhood in the way it is for Taylor and Williams. She sees too strong a view of social construction, and an excessively holistic sociology, both of which she finds in much anthropology of emotions (143–4), as obscuring both individual differences between people and commonalities between cultures (154–5): The human personality has a structure that is at least to some extent independent of culture, powerfully though culture shapes it at every stage. (2000a: 155) So more important than cultural variation is variation between individuals, including within any given culture. The Stoics did not appreciate how profoundly emotional life is shaped by the contingencies of one’s personal story: infantile experience and the tragic fortunes of childhood, friendship, and love. Upheavals goes on to explore the implications of her account of the emotions for political life and morality, drawing her readers into a transhistorical conversation about the nature of ethical selfhood that includes, for instance, Aristotle, Dante, Mahler, and Joyce, and proposes an ideal of interpersonal love as the ethical pinnacle and purpose of human life. This does not mean that human emotions may safely be taken as they are. The long period of infantile helplessness in humans, for example, leaves us with a primordial experience of ungovernable fear. We have a ‘problematic relationship’ with our neediness and mortality. Exploiting these weaknesses, retrograde social systems evoke emotions such as shame, disgust, and anger that disfigure and distort social relations and politics (2004, 2006, 2013, 2016, 2018). So, a healthy democracy needs the therapy of philosophy as much as did the ancient world, and Nussbaum proposes an Aristotelian programme of moral education – including latterly even three years of compulsory non-military national service (2018: 241–3) – through which citizens might learn to become truly reflective and control these dangerous emotions.

Agonistic Liberals: Divergent Political and Religious Convictions In the mid-1980s our three authors appeared close to each other philosophically: anti-rationalistic, interested in human frailty, emotion, personal commitments, and questions of identity and integrity in

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understanding ethics. They were reading each other and reacting largely positively, and pursuing philosophical projects that were distinctive for being grounded in the description of lived human life. But over time they diverged philosophically. This included divergence in the degree to which their philosophy was explicitly normative, although they all came to describe their politics, either for the first time or more insistently than before, as ‘liberal’. Nussbaum describes herself as liberal all along, latterly also as ‘on the left’ (2018: 219). A controversialist, she has written famously blistering reviews of authors on both the right, such as Allan Bloom (2012: 36–52), and the left, such as Judith Butler (2012: 198–222). Her experience beyond academic philosophy brought out the universalizing and normative potentialities in her thought. In the late 1980s she began working for the World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) and for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This included empirical research in several developing countries, especially India, and collaboration with the economist Amartya Sen, and resulted in proposals for the measurement of well-being that have influenced UN policy. This experience appears to have been decisive in motivating her to link her philosophical convictions about vulnerability to interventions beyond the academy. The ‘capabilities approach’ began with an Aristotelian account of ‘non-relative virtues’ (1988) and matured into a list (changing slightly in different versions) of essentially human capabilities which it is the responsibility of governments to ensure for all their citizens (Nussbaum and Sen 1993; Nussbaum and Glover 1995; Nussbaum 1993, 1999a, 2000a, 2006, 2011, 2018). Nussbaum thus promotes her account of human ethical development and emotional maturity into a universal standard. In 1993, she served as an expert witness in a court case in Colorado on legal protection for gay people. The case ended in the US Supreme Court and generated much publicity. By its conclusion, she had become a high-profile public progressive intellectual and has since published in a much more prescriptive fashion than in her earlier work on an ever-widening array of policy debates, including affirmative action, human cloning, disability rights, sex-work, ageing, nationality, and populism. In The Frontiers of Justice (2006), Nussbaum identifies in terms of practical politics closely with the liberal egalitarianism of Rawls and his followers, but seeks to rectify what she sees as the most important limitations of the contractarian foundations of that position: its postulation of autonomous agency and its neglect of our vulnerable and dependent nature. This places her neatly between liberal egalitarianism and its feminist critics: criticizing Rawls on feminist grounds (see also 2000a: 241–97) and differing from feminist critics of Rawls (e.g. Kittay 1999, 2003) on liberal grounds (2000a, 2000c, 2006; see also McKearney 2018, 2021b, forthcoming; Mattingly and McKearney, Chapter 22 of this volume).

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Williams was politically well connected but never a party-political man (Hawthorn 2005: xvii). His first wife, Shirley Williams, was one of only three front-rank female politicians in the UK in the early 1970s, and when she (by then his ex-wife) left the Labour Party to found the Social Democrats in the early 1980s, he was sympathetic. By that point, he was himself well known for having chaired a Royal Commission (ad-hoc ‘greatand-good’, non-party-political public enquiry) on the regulation of pornography in the UK. Although never fully enacted in legislation, the report (1979; published as Williams 2015) was nevertheless consequential in holding back demands, from both right and left, for more effective censorship. His early academic writings, however, were largely non-political and when he did come later to write about politics systematically (see the essays in 2005), it was in analytical rather than normative mode. He consistently represented his position, along with the societies whose politics he sought to understand, as liberal. The overall thrust was antiutopian, and the prevalent theme was diagnosis of the frailties of political moralism: the expression, in the realm of politics, of the kind of wishfulfilment he deplored as ‘moralized psychology’ in his writings on moral philosophy. Taylor has made the longest journey politically. A student activist at Oxford, a founder of both the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and what became the New Left Review, and, after returning to his native Canada, several-times parliamentary candidate for the New Democratic Party, Taylor’s early writings include explicitly Marxist pieces advocating a planned economy (1960, 1969, 1974). As late as 1973 he was wondering if the answer to how humanity might create a non-exploitative society would come from Communist China (1985a: 137; cf. also 1975: 541). But Taylor’s conviction that self-sufficient humanism was an inadequate response to fundamental human impulses was an important factor in his subsequent break with Marxism. At a conference in 1987 commemorating the creation of the New Left Review, he identified what he had come to see as the intellectual flaws at its core. One was its conception of social order and freedom, inherited ultimately from Rousseau, which allowed a vanguard minority to claim to embody (and therefore impose) the true will of the people; the other was its ‘militant atheistic materialism’, which meant that it had ‘nothing to say about death, finitude, our relation to nature, and only shallow things to say about human distance or sin or moral transformation’. Consequently, Marxism ‘manages to live only where Marxist regimes are not’, and as a philosophy ‘from the Elbe to the Mekong Delta it is dead behind the eyes’ (1989b: 67–70). By the late 1980s he was describing his own style of political and moral philosophy as ‘civic humanist’ and ‘Tocquevillean’ (1989b: 64, 76). This change of stance foreshadowed a new set of political themes in Taylor’s philosophical writings from the 1990s. He became an important exponent of multiculturalism (1993, 1994a), both as a framework for Quebec to remain peacefully within his native Canada

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and generally as a model for successful cultural pluralism within liberal, democratic states. His contention that liberal democracy requires ‘a politics of recognition’ was one of the most influential formative articulations of the case for what developed as state-sponsored multiculturalism. By soon after 1990, his self-description too had become ‘liberal’. This apparent convergence on liberalism makes sense, however, only if we bear in mind how radically internally diverse is the category ‘liberal’. It encompasses not just diverse positions on balancing equality and freedom and in relation to the power of the state, such as are registered by the different locations on the political spectrum of those who call themselves liberals across Western democracies (the ‘Liberal Party’ is left-of-centre in Canada but right-of-centre in Australia, etc.). Roughly speaking, Nussbaum uses the word as part of an American, Williams as part of a British, and Taylor as part of a European political lexicon. There are also deeper differences. John Gray (2000) helpfully distinguishes between the monist liberal tradition, represented by Locke, Kant, Hayek, and Rawls, that strives for the creation of a rationally justified, universal socio-political order, and the pluralist tradition that aims rather for peaceful coexistence between deeply different dispensations, represented by Hobbes, Hume, Oakeshott, and Berlin. Judith Shklar (1989), cutting the cake somewhat differently because she construed liberalism as a political doctrine rather than a more encompassing philosophical orientation, distinguished the liberalism of rights (Locke, Jefferson, Kant) from the liberalism of selfdevelopment (Montaigne, Mill, Emerson), and these in turn from the variant she herself espoused, the liberalism of fear. This latter form of liberalism, forged in reaction to the religious conflicts of post-Reformation Europe and in horror at the cruelty those conflicts engendered, is primarily an insistence on the toleration of differences in values and a warning that the first and necessary step of any successful liberal politics is the prevention of cruelty. These are just a few categories which we draw quickly here to indicate the divergent sorts of liberalism our three authors come to espouse. Williams and Taylor are unambiguously on the pluralist side of Gray’s monist–pluralist distinction. And in terms of Shklar’s political doctrines, Williams (2005: 52–61) explicitly subscribed to the liberalism of fear. He thought that political liberalism has a very robust justification but a historically specific and conditional rather than metaphysical one: it is just the best way to run societies of a specific historical kind, with no grander claim to universality (9, 29–39). He rejected Rawls’s prescription for a just liberal order precisely because he thought it did not leave room for genuinely various conceptions of human beings and of ways of life within it (2014: 326–32). For Taylor, the minimalism of the liberalism of fear, with its focus on damage limitation and ‘non-aggression pacts’ between diverse versions of the good life, has never been quite sufficient. As self-interpreting animals,

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we require recognition by others, and for that and other reasons liberal freedom requires political participation (1994a). Taylor is therefore attracted to the revival of classical Republicanism (1995: 181–203, 204– 24; Taylor, Nanz, and Taylor 2020) espoused by Quentin Skinner and others (Skinner 1998, 2008; Pettit 1997, 2012). Williams was sceptical about that (2005: 9–10, 75–96) and sensitive to the authoritarian potentialities Berlin (1969, 2002) had identified in positive conceptions of liberty. So he was withering about any dalliance with the idea that people might need to be forced to be free (2005: 81–5, 115–27). Taylor, while perhaps increasingly mindful of this danger in later life, has been eloquent on the other hand on the insufficiency of negative liberty (1985b: 211–29). This puts Taylor much closer to Shklar’s liberalism of self-development. And he gives qualified approval, which Nussbaum (1997a, 2002) generally does not, to values of patriotism and loyalty to one’s political community, because they are necessary to sustain a degree of solidarity that a procedural liberalism of rights alone is not capable of securing (1995a: 204–24, 225–56; 2002). Nussbaum is closer to the monist than the pluralist liberal tradition, in Gray’s terms. She acknowledges some importance to historical and cultural difference, and the existence of clashing interests, passions, and motivations in human life. But she also claims this is uniformly so for humanity as such: the same goods are always and everywhere in the same relations of conflict, and this means that in her later writings she confidently proposes which values need to be realized by all political orders everywhere. Like Rawls, she leaves open the possibility in theory of different means of doing so and of different forms of life within a political system (2000a: 167–240; 2000b: 59, 96). But in practice cultural differences are typically regarded as obstacles to be overcome, in achieving the global convergence at which she aims, rather than as sources of value in themselves or as varied sites in which ethical life must be differently lived. For her, unlike Williams and Taylor, there is nothing fundamentally illconceived about aspiring to global justice, secured by a single political and social order for the whole of humanity. Because we are dependent animals and not just rational agents, the state must provide and direct the allocation of the material, emotional, and educational resources people need to develop into subjects equally capable of participation in liberal democracy (2000c, 2006, 2013, 2018; see also McKearney forthcoming). There is a strong strand of Shklar’s liberalism of development here, and of rights too. While capabilities are distinguished from rights, they occupy similarly universalizing and normative ground (2000b: 97, 100–1; 2004), entail the same prioritization of equality and fairness, and mandate a more positive than fearful stance in relation to state power (2000a: 56). These differences in the kinds of liberalism their philosophical views informed are connected with their differing religious commitments. And these in turn are differences that speak to contemporary debates on the

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possibilities and perils of ‘post-secular’, ‘theologically informed’, and/or ‘moral’ anthropology (Banner, Chapter 8 of this volume; Luhrmann, Chapter 28 of this volume; Fassin 2008, 2012; Fountain 2013; Furani 2019; Lamb and Williams 2019; Larsen 2014; Lemons 2018; McKearney 2016, 2019, 2021a; Robbins 2020; Willerslev and Suhr 2018; Yang 2020). Nussbaum, a convert from an Episcopalian upbringing to Conservative and then to Reform Judaism, describes her reforming zeal as supported by a highly conditional but avowedly messianic faith that individual wellbeing and the common good can ultimately be harmonized under the wise government of an impersonal God (2003b): another expression of the limits to her pluralism. Taylor’s liberal pluralism, which applies not only to goods and values but also to forms of life and visions of the good, informs a more cautious politics than Nussbaum’s, and one that is also more tentatively uplifted by religious hope. As Isaiah Berlin (1995) pointed out, in a comment on the differences between Taylor and himself, Taylor’s Hegelianism and Christianity give him an openness to teleology that Berlin himself could not share. In response, Taylor admits to a distant hope of a social and political order that might reconcile the goods of modernity with those that have been lost in the process (1995b: 224). Williams was the only one of the three without religious faith and also the least inclined to political utopianism. For him, the ancient Greek tragic vision is important precisely because it ‘refuses to present human beings [as] ideally in harmony with their world’ and ‘has no room for a world that, if it were understood well enough, could instruct us on how to live in harmony with it’ (1993: 164; cf. 2014: 310–11). In contrast to the differently faithful optimisms of Nussbaum and Taylor, Williams’s more pessimistic version of liberalism followed Nietzsche’s injunction to accept that God is dead, which requires rethinking our values in light of that fact. Williams was not only not religious but also specifically a sceptic about Christianity. Comparing his views with those of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, both Roman Catholics, Williams once remarked, All three of us, I could say, accept the significant role of Christianity in understanding modern moral consciousness, and adopt the three possible views about how to move in relation to that: backward in it, forward in it, and out of it. (2005: 53–4) MacIntyre’s illiberal preference is to undo the Enlightenment along with the Reformation and re-establish an authoritative moral order on Thomist principles; Taylor’s preference is to deepen our appreciation of the values modernity has inherited from Christianity – individualism, sincerity, and so on – including by articulating their Christian pedigree, to make possible a modernity more at peace with its Christian past. By referring to his own preference as ‘out of it’, Williams signals his Nietzschean view that subterranean Christian ideas – the idea that

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morality should be opposed to self-interest, the idea of the moral will, and an overemphasis on intention in our thinking about responsibility – are among the more disabling features of modern morality. Despite their shared appreciation of tragedy, Nussbaum found Williams’s interpretation of the tragic vision problematic for its neglect of the ‘essential practical function’ (1997b: 528) of ethical enquiry. Observing that she had never seen Williams angry, Nussbaum interprets his approval of the ancient Greek tragic vision of misfortune as ‘resignation’: ‘it means that there is nobody to blame and nothing more to do. We can sit back and resign ourselves to the world as it is’ (2003a, 2009b). Instead, she urges ‘an intensification of moral or political effort’ (2009b: 220). When confronting misfortune, we need to ask, ‘is the cause immutable necessity, or is it malice or folly?’. Williams is likely to have replied that there is danger in assuming that this must always be the choice. He counselled also against philosophy or cultural criticism in which the desire to do good (or ‘being helpful’) takes precedence over ‘getting it right’ (2014: 363–70). Philosophers who make that choice are likely, he believed, to do neither.

Conclusion: The Social Nature of Ethical Enquiry Our three authors were all influential pioneers in arguing, in their different ways, that the ethical self is not a timeless entity but powerfully shaped by its relational context, and therefore that moral philosophy, as conventionally conceived, needed to be expanded into a more socially and culturally descriptive kind of ethical enquiry. But they never agreed on precisely in what ways the self is relational, or therefore on what kind of knowledge moral enquiry might hope to achieve. Over time, these differences deepened, including through the ways in which they responded to each other’s writings. Here, we describe the different views they developed on the nature and limits of ethical enquiry. Insofar as these options point towards a merging of moral philosophy and the anthropology of ethics, the differences between them illustrate some of the choices that are open to anthropologists in how best to pursue the study of ethical life. Williams (1985: 153) insists that there is nothing we can know about human needs and motivations conceived somehow before or outside of a social world. So, it makes no sense to ask what the human social world would best be like. There is no such thing, for Williams, as a ‘general’ ethical subject and therefore no morally optimal social order. As a result, ethical understanding of necessarily diverse ethical agents is inseparable from social explanation. This means ethics is ‘radically contingent’ in a way that science is not. Whereas science can at least coherently hope to move, in any line of enquiry, towards convergence on an answer that represents in some

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sense ‘how things are’, in ethics there is no such coherent hope (1985: 136). ‘An ethical system should not try to have the same virtues as a scientific theory’ (106; cf. 2014: 367–8). At the same time, however, ethical enquiry is in some respects constrained by science. Our understanding of moral psychology – whatever sense we make of the notion of free will, for example – must be compatible with the naturalistic account of processes of thought and decision we currently hold (1995a: 3–21). But science is not going to tell us what that understanding of moral psychology itself should be. Ethnographic imagination enables us to recognize commonalities – and to overcome the limitations of our ethical theories – across historical and cultural difference. So, we can enrich our ethical thought by learning not only about but also from other social forms of ethical life. Ethical enquiry is a practice that takes place within human life, and that means from within the socially and historically particular life we have, the ‘we’ of ethical discourse not normally for practical purposes being as broad as humanity itself. Famously, Williams rejects what he calls ‘ethical theory’. By this, he does not mean any generalizations or logical arguments or discussion of conceptual matters. He undertakes plenty of those himself. What he means to exclude as ‘ethical theory’ are systems that claim to give us formal and ideally universal decision procedures, such as the utilitarian calculus of the greatest good, a Kantian categorical imperative, or a doctrine of universal rights. The search for ‘theory’ of this kind has not only dominated mainstream moral philosophy but also has a powerful hold on our public and political imagination. But equally, a system that claimed on theoretical grounds that there could in principle be no such tests – as many deconstructive or relativistic doctrines do – would also be an ‘ethical theory’ on Williams’s account. What he proposes instead is a stance that would not take finding universal tests to be anything like its principal aim, because it would not assume that satisfactory ethical knowledge must take this form, or necessarily be knowledge of ‘the universal’. ‘It is an outlook that embodies scepticism about philosophical ethics, but a scepticism that is more about philosophy than it is about ethics’ (1985: 74). Moral enquiry can still reflect on issues of theoretical depth, such as the relationship between agency and responsibility, without being ‘ethical theory’ in this sense: instead, for instance, articulating the specific ways in which these relations were imagined and conducted in ancient Greece in ways importantly different from and richer than contemporary moral philosophy imagines. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams briefly considers one possible way – not unlike Aristotle’s, but shorn of its Socratic requirement of providing grounds requiring any rational individual to accept it – of aiming at objective ethical knowledge (1985: 152–5). ‘Granted that human beings need to share a social world’, what might they have in common in

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terms of their needs and basic motivations? Is there anything sufficiently substantive that we can know about ‘human nature’ that would enable us to say what kind of social system might maximize human flourishing? Interestingly, this describes rather exactly the distinctive kind of ‘ethical theory’ Nussbaum seeks to construct in the following decades, including both her work on the emotions and that on capabilities. Williams made clear in his book, avant la lettre, that he thought such a project could not succeed. We need only compare Aristotle’s catalogue of the virtues with any that might be produced now, he remarked, to see that our nature does not timelessly demand a life of any particular kind. The results of such enquiry would have to be either too indeterminate to be much practical help or would involve an undesirable constriction of human possibilities. There are no signs that Nussbaum’s subsequent work ever overturned this opinion, but he had described this potential project as not sharing the fundamental incoherence of most ethical theory (high praise for Williams), and indeed as ‘the only intelligible form of ethical objectivity at the reflective level’. Nussbaum finds in Aristotle precisely what Williams denies: the basis for a philosophical method that differs from Plato’s in being ‘based on and responsible to actual human experience’ (Nussbaum 1990: 173), yet can deliver objective and universal moral truth about ‘the human’. Although she acknowledges history and cultural difference, they play no formative role in her conception of the ethical self, because: There is no . . . pure access to . . . human nature as it is in and of itself. There is just human life as it is lived. But in life as it is lived, we do find a family of experiences . . . which can provide reasonable starting points for cross-cultural reflection. (1988: 49) She therefore turns to developmental psychology and literature as sources to excavate cross-cultural continuities. This is one of the features of her work that makes it less obviously anthropological than Williams’s. But at least some anthropologists might see this as an experiment in articulating ethical categories broad enough to enable ethnographic comparison, and thus raising those questions that Williams doubts have any meaningful answer: what, if anything, might be said in universal terms about ‘the human’, if one were to take the diversity of the ethnographic record more fully into account than Nussbaum herself does? In Fragility and Love’s Knowledge the accent falls on the particularity of individual lived experience (1986: 243; 1990: 54–106). But this focus was never meant to preclude ethical enquiry from yielding objective ‘transcontextual truths’ (1994: 9, 23). So, Nussbaum was unhappy to find Fragility being read as a work of virtue ethics and as making a case, alongside MacIntyre and others, against the Enlightenment and in favour of custom,

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tradition, and emotion over reason as sources of moral knowledge. These views she repudiated as obscurantist and politically reactionary (2012: 53– 68; 1999b, 2000b, 2001b). She made plain that she had never intended a rejection of Enlightenment reason, but on the contrary aimed to recruit ancient Greek thought for ‘an expanded version of Enlightenment liberalism’ (2001b: xvi). She also observed that proponents of irrationalism often took her to share their own opposition to systematic theorizing in ethics, and she rejected this imputation. This question of the status of ‘theory’ she returned to repeatedly, often specifically in relation to Williams’s views (1995, 1997b, 1999b, 2000b, 2001b, 2003, 2009, 2014). Her early work was influenced by him, and she often expressed admiration. Indeed, in the disarmingly disclosive manner she sometimes adopts, she has described having developed a sort of crush on him on first meeting (recalling vividly the pink mini-dress she was wearing at the time) and subsequently having to manage the anger occasioned by these feelings (2003a; see also 2014). She and Williams developed a mutually supportive professional relationship, commenting generally positively on each other’s writings, but on this matter they were apparently at odds, and Nussbaum sought to defend her commitment to theory and urged Williams to clarify or shift his position. Williams did not reply extensively in print (but see 1995b: 194–202), although he does seem to have done so in personal correspondence (Nussbaum 2000b: 80, ft. 10; 2001b: xxxiv, ft. 60). Nussbaum never thought Williams guilty of the irrationalism she saw in many virtue ethicists as well as ordinary-language philosophers and post-modernists, and went so far as to dedicate to him the preface to the second edition of Fragility, in which she set out to refute irrationalist, virtue-ethical readings of her book (2001b: xiii, ft. 1). But she also perceived a tension between his sceptical views on the ‘limits of philosophy’ and her ambitions for philosophical theory as an instrument of personal therapy and political reform. A favourite example is Catherine MacKinnon’s ‘theory’, as Nussbaum calls it, of sexual harassment. It may lack nuance, she concedes, but only such ‘simplicity and systematizing power’ can prevail against entrenched dogmas, and so effect societal change (1997b: 528). These writings by Nussbaum are not always helpful because many of the merits she claims for ‘theory’ – internal consistency in argument, open debate, and so on – suggest that what she wants to defend is not what Williams was against. Her rhetorical flights also tend to exaggerate the distance between them. But there is undoubtedly an underlying divergence of view. For Taylor (1989a), historical and social differences much more profoundly shape what ethical subjects are like than they do for Nussbaum. But if this places him closer to Williams, Taylor differs from the latter too. Even in very different ethical worlds humans share a condition of dependency, a need for sociality, and – here is where the difference between them arises – an orientation towards the transcendent. Taylor is a more

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thoroughgoing sceptic than Williams about science as a mode of understanding human conduct (see Geertz 1994). He is more hostile to scientific psychology (1964; 1985a: 117–212), and this standpoint rests not only on the observation that humans are self-interpreting in a way that nothing else in nature is, but also, ultimately, on a faith that there is something transcendent in the human. For Taylor, like Williams, the main work of moral philosophy is not abstract theory but ‘articulation’, trying to spell out what we normally only implicitly suppose (1989a: 26). This may sound unambitious compared with ‘theory’, but because we are self-interpreting, articulating our presuppositions in this way changes us. It promotes a richer self-understanding and this in turn increases our chances of rational debate and appreciation of the moral bases of each other’s positions. So, for example, while a thoroughly consistent utilitarian ‘would be an impossibly shallow character’ (1985a: 26), Taylor thinks the utilitarian subscribes to certain ‘constitutive goods’, which the theory itself cannot recognize, and bringing this out through ‘articulation’ has the potential to enlarge the utilitarian’s moral sensibility (1985b: 266; 1989a: 31–2, 88, 332– 40). His conception of ethical enquiry includes striving, as generously as possible, to articulate the underlying appeal of even one’s opponents’ ethical visions (see Williams’s approving discussion of this; 2006a: 303). Taylor’s historical account of the development of modern moral sensibilities thus has a similar general structure to Williams’s ‘vindicatory’ genealogical exercises, and a great deal in common with the predominant interpretative ethic in all but the most suspiciously ‘critical’ anthropology. Taken together, these authors present a forceful challenge to philosophical approaches that seek to abstract from the embodied, social character of human ethical life to universalizing theory. They therefore help us to construe the anthropological study of ethics not as a competitor or even as a complement to the real work of moral philosophy, but as its fulfilment. Taken separately, they offer different ways of conceiving what an anthropologically descriptive ethical enquiry might amount to: what it might need to presuppose, how descriptively close or normatively detached it could be from the ethical knowledge embedded in social practice, and therefore what kinds of things it might enable us to say.

Acknowledgements For helpful comment and advice on earlier drafts of this chapter, the authors would like to express their warmest gratitude to the following: Joanna Cook, Cecile Erikson, Paolo Heywood, Teresa Kuan, Hallvard Lillehammer, Carlos London˜o Sulkin, Jonathan Mair, Cheryl Mattingly, and Paul Sagar. Errors and omissions remain, of course, the responsibility of the authors.

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1969. ‘Either We Plan Our Economy, or We Become a Branch-Plant Satellite’. Maclean’s Magazine, 83 (December): 77. 1974. ‘Socialism and Weltanschauung’, in Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire (eds.), The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal. London: Quartet Books: 45–58. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978. ‘Marxist Philosophy’, in Bryan Magee (ed.), Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy. London: British Broadcasting Corporation: 42–59. 1985a. Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985b. Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985c. ‘The Person’, in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (eds.), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 257–81. 1986. ‘Human Rights: The Legal Culture’, in Paul Ricoeur (ed.), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights. Paris: UNESCO. 1988a. ‘The Moral Topography of the Self’, in Stanley Messer, Louis Sass, and Robert Woolyolk (eds.), Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 1988b. ‘The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, by Martha Nussbaum’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18: 805–14. 1989a. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989b. ‘Marxism and Socialist Humanism’, in Robin Archer et al. (eds.), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On. London: Verso: 59–78. 1993. Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 1994a. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. With K. Anthony Appiah, Ju¨rgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1994b. ‘Reply and Re-articulation: Charles Taylor Replies’, in James Tully (ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 213–57. 1995a. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1995b. ‘A Most Peculiar Institution’, in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 132–55. 1999. A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture. Edited by James L. Heft. New York: Oxford University Press.

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2002 [1996]. ‘Why Democracy Needs Patriotism’, in Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country? Edited by Joshua Cohen. Boston, MA: Beacon Press: 119–21. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles, Patricia Nanz, and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor. 2020. Reconstructing Democracy: How Citizens Are Building from the Group Up. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tully, James. 2008. Public Philosophy in a New Key. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Velleman, J. David. 2015. Foundations of Moral Relativism. Second expanded edition. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Weber, Max. 1948 [1919]. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge. Willerslev, Rane and Christian Suhr. 2018. ‘Is There a Place for Faith in Anthropology? Religion, Reason, and the Ethnographer’s Revelation’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8: 65–78. Williams, Bernard. 1972. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. New York: Harper & Row. 1973a. Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1973b. ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978a. Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1978b. ‘Introduction’, in Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories. Edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1981. Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. 1986. ‘Reply to Simon Blackburn’. Philosophical Books, 27: 203–5. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994. ‘Ethics’, in A. C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 545–82. 1995a. Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers 1982–1993. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995b. ‘Replies’, in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006a. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy. Edited and with an introduction by Myles Burnyeat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006b. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Selected, edited, and with an introduction by A. W. Moore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006c. On Opera. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2014. Essays and Reviews 1959–2002. Foreword by Michael Wood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2015 [1979]. Obscenity and Film Censorship. Originally published by HMSO (Cmnd 7772) as the Report of the Committee on Film Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. 1969. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. Wong, David. 2006. Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yang, Mayfair. 2020. Re-Enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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5 The Two Faces of Michel Foucault Paolo Heywood

What, do you think that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing . . . if I were not preparing – with a somewhat shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture . . . in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. Michel Foucault (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge: 17

Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear. Michel Foucault (1980), ‘The Masked Philosopher’: 321

Foucault’s Labyrinth In an after-dinner speech to a meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, published as Waiting for Foucault (1993), Marshall Sahlins remarked on the strangeness of taking utterly seriously one particular set of texts written by Michel Foucault, the ‘man of a thousand faces’ (1993: 40). This was in 1993, and the set of texts in question were those concerned with power (for instance, going by Sahlins’s brief summaries: Abu-Lughod 1990; Jacquemet 1992; Limo´n 1989). Sahlins’s speech neatly skewered an attitude in anthropology of the period he summed up as ‘Power, power everywhere, and nothing else to think’ (1993: 20), listing just a few of the phenomena (nicknames in Naples and scatological horse-play among Mexican-American workingclass men, for example) that ethnographers had explained as instances of ‘power’ or ‘resistance’.

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Two and a half decades later, we have something else to think: ethics. The anthropology of ethics has furnished the discipline with new terminology, new objects, and arguably a new way of understanding its own purpose, as this volume describes. It has moved, in some respects, from a notion of ‘subject’ as in ‘one subject to power’ to a ‘subject’ tied to their own practical experience and self-knowledge (Foucault 1982a: 781); from ‘technologies of domination’ to ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1982b: 19); and from a search for the strategies and mechanisms of power to one for ‘practices of freedom’ (Foucault 1984a: 3). Yet these transformations also originate, at least in part, in Foucault’s labyrinth. What, then, is the relationship between these two faces of Foucault, both of which have had such a significant impact on anthropology and beyond? This chapter will aim to describe some of the content of Foucault’s work on ethics and its impact on anthropology. But the question of how that work relates to his earlier, and equally influential, work on power is more than a footnote in intellectual history, let alone in the biography of a particular thinker. One can ask it in those forms, but its relevance to understanding the anthropology of ethics and its relationship to the discipline as a whole lies also in the fact that the question scales up: debates about the relative importance of different parts of Foucault’s oeuvre (see, e.g., Allen 2000; Burkitt 2002; Flynn 1985; Harrer 2005; Hofmeyr 2006; Menke 2003; Paras 2006) replicate debates about the relative importance of politics and ethics in late twentieth-century philosophy more generally (see the case made in Bourg 2007 and Rancie`re 2006), which in turn replicate debates about the proper focus of social and cultural anthropology (for instance, Laidlaw 2002, 2013; Kapferer and Gold 2018). As a consequence, the main body of the chapter will summarize some important aspects of Foucault’s intellectual biography before moving to discuss some debates surrounding how to interpret the legacy of his work, in anthropology and beyond. I will not attempt to resolve the question of how his two ‘faces’ relate, in part because I will argue that there may be a lesson to be learnt from Foucault’s own apparent unwillingness to resolve this question.

A Passion for System Before his turn to ethics, Foucault’s work was united by what some (e.g. Habermas 1987; Honneth 1991; Taylor 1984) have read as a fundamental rejection of the centrality of the subject in philosophical thought. His early works – Madness and Civilisation (in English, 1964 – based on the longer Folie et De´raison, 1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) – were heavily influenced by the vogue for structuralism then sweeping French intellectual life. In this period Le´vi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser were replacing Sartre and Camus as

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the dominant figures in philosophical circles, and a formalist concern for language and the internal relationships between its component parts seemed poised to triumph over existentialism and earlier incarnations of Marxism, together with their interests in humanism and history. The Order of Things in particular caused some sensation, claiming as it did that ‘Man’ was an invention of the modern discursive formation, a product of the end of the eighteenth century, the development of the ‘human sciences’, and the problem of how to classify into ‘the order of things’ the subject of classification itself (points further developed anthropologically in Rabinow 1989). Even more radically, Foucault concluded the book with the wager that soon ‘Man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ (1970: 422). This period of his work was dominated by a method he called ‘archaeological’ and set out at some length in The Archaeology of Knowledge. The basic thrust of this procedure is the premise that discursive formations or systems of thought – as they were described in the title he chose for his chair at the Colle`ge de France – are underwritten by a set of rules or regulative principles that determine their conceptual possibilities and can be excavated, and their contingency thus grasped. These rules are structural principles and have nothing to do with individuals, their intentions, or the meanings they seek to convey, and in The Archaeology of Knowledge they appear not even to be linked to particular political and economic situations. On the subject of morality Foucault is almost entirely silent at this time, with the exception of claiming, in The Order of Things, that ‘no morality is possible’ for modernity (1970: 357). However, as early as his inaugural lecture at the Colle`ge de France, delivered in 1970 and subsequently published as ‘The Order of Discourse’, there were signs that he was beginning to shift his focus away from purely epistemic considerations and towards politics. He outlined his intent to direct a course on ‘the will to know’, introduced the concept of ‘genealogy’, and attributed far more importance to nondiscursive influences on systems of thought than he had done previously (1971; see also Paras 2006: 54–7). This first ‘turn’ is definitively visible in the essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1978a), which Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) argue demonstrates the enormous impact that Nietzsche’s understanding of power as a productive force in history had on him. His friend and colleague Gilles Deleuze’s book Anti-Oedipus (1972), co-authored with Fe´lix Guattari, with its vision of power as a dispersed arrangement of connected ‘machines’ was also an influence (see, e.g., Paras 2006: 64–7; Eribon 1989: 408–9). Perhaps more fundamentally, changes in the climate of French intellectual life, as well as in Foucault’s own personal experiences, meant that a turn to ‘power’ must have seemed like a natural transition rather than the ‘break’ it has appeared to some in retrospect. May 1968 and its afterlife jolted Foucault and a number of others out of the fascination with

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structuralism, and he participated in some of the 1969 protests at Vincennes, even sharing a stage with Sartre, his erstwhile opponent (Eribon 1989: 375). In 1971, together with his partner Daniel Defert, he formed the Group for Information on Prisons, and it is in relation to penal institutions that his sustained interest in power developed, though ‘power’ and ‘politics’ do appear in The Archaeology of Knowledge as qualifiers of the struggle over discourse (1972: 120). Coupled with knowledge, the subject of his earlier work, and developed over the course of several lecture series at the Colle`ge de France and two books, Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), it would become a concept that would have a revolutionary effect on anthropology and the humanities and social sciences more broadly. The most obvious explanatory contrast to draw is with Marxism, though Foucault himself also contrasted his concept of power with Freudian psychoanalysis and other such ‘juridical’ models. One of Foucault’s teachers at the E´cole Normale Supe´rieure had been Louis Althusser, a structural Marxist who had influenced Foucault’s early anti-humanism. His essay on ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1971), written at precisely the time at which Foucault was beginning to think about power, neatly illustrates the tipping point between Marx and Foucault. Orthodox Marxist accounts of the functioning of power, in addition to describing the ways in which the bourgeoisie might use overt force and violence in order to retain control of the means of production, would often also refer to the notion of ‘ideology’. By this they usually intended an untrue or misleading set of ideas imposed upon people to sustain their ‘false consciousness’. Althusser refers to the distinction between force and ideology as being between ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ and ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, but his real focus is the latter. He has two theses on ideology: the first (‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’) is a fairly straightforward rendering of ideology as a misleading, ‘unreal’, ‘imaginary’ depiction of actual conditions, opposable to ‘science’. The second, though, brings us almost to Foucault’s revolution: ‘Ideology has a material existence.’ By this he roughly intends a sort of political version of Pascal’s gambit: ideology is what we believe, but what we believe is really made manifest (and ‘real’) by what we do (1971). We are what we do, and we do what we are told. The two theses are also obviously contradictory (how can ‘ideology’ be both ‘material’ and ‘imaginary’?) and the claim that ‘ideology has a material existence’ is on the face of it oxymoronic. There is little direct evidence to suggest that Foucault was influenced by Althusser’s argument (though see Montag 1995). But that second thesis on the material existence of certain sorts of knowledge, divorced from the first, and shorn of abiding reliance on a ‘truth’ in opposition to ideology and on the state as the main fount of authority, comes very close to summing up Foucault’s position: ‘power’ (or at least modern, ‘disciplinary power’) does not operate upon

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subjects from the outside, constraining them to do or think things that are against their nature. Power is exactly what makes a subject into a subject (hence his evolving use of the term ‘subjectivation’ or ‘assujettissement’; see later). There is no ‘free’ remainder of the subject left over to act against it, and it does not mask a real ‘truth’ beneath its operation. In fact, often it works most effectively in the form of scientific knowledge or a politics of liberation. Moreover, it does not emanate from a central authority, like a state or a sovereign, in opposition to individuals, but is ‘capillary’, developing and abiding in the micro-contexts of everyday life. Foucault illustrates these ideas in his examinations of the penal system. Discipline and Punish famously begins with a gruesome description of the execution of an attempted regicide. Juxtaposed to this drama is the precisely timetabled set of activities of a reformatory eighty years later, in which time is allotted for work, education, hygiene, food, and prayers. The difference between the two is striking, and the temptation is obviously to read the first as a barbarous act of cruelty and see the second as the consequence of the dawning of a more enlightened and humanitarian age. Foucault’s point instead is that they exemplify two different styles of power: the first is spectacular and discontinuous, and its purpose is to restore a political order put out of joint by doing public violence to the body of the violator. The second, on the other hand, is uninterrupted and ubiquitous, and it operates not on the body but on the soul by exhaustively organizing, distributing, and surveilling subjects (1977a: 3–11). Bentham’s panopticon is the epitome of this second form of power in the context of the carceral system, a central observation tower from which all cells could be observed, but the interior of which was invisible to the cells themselves. Unable to be sure of whether or not they were being observed at any given moment, prisoners would effectively govern their own behaviour in the panopticon without the need for any form of external intervention. They would police themselves. In the spectacular, sovereign form of power the only relevant ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ is of the culpability of the criminal. In the second, the whole being of the criminal and the criminal act is produced, made visible, and interrogated. Just as Foucault had already described in the case of the birth of ‘man’ through the human sciences, this form of power creates subjects (the criminal, the lunatic, the pervert) rather than simply operating on them post-hoc. Althusser’s claim that ideology has a material existence is here taken to its logical conclusion, and the influence of Nietzsche’s pragmatism is clearly evident: knowledge is power because its product is real, material truth. This historical shift was not set in motion by any particular individual or group, and disciplinary power is not at the service of any specific section of society. It emerges piecemeal and in haphazard fashion, crystallizing in institutions such as prisons, asylums, and clinics, and through the practices and techniques of those at the heart of such institutions, as well as in

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the human sciences of which Foucault had already written. But for Foucault this transformation is definitive of modernity more broadly, and his first volume of The History of Sexuality would set out this theoretical vision at its clearest. It further extended the analysis to cover ways in which this form of productive power was employed in the government not just of individuals but of whole populations, a phenomenon he called ‘bio-power’. Sexuality sits precisely at the intersection of these two forms of modern power, and both Foucault and his successors would go on to make productive use of these insights in studies of the ‘governmentality’ of welfare, colonial, and neoliberal states (see in particular Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991 and the review of this literature in Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006). Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality has been called the ‘bible’ of modern queer activist movements (Halperin 1995) because of its central thesis that sexuality – indeed, sex itself – is nothing more than a ‘fictitious unity’ (Foucault 1978b: 154), a nexus for the medical, legal, therapeutic, and punitive interrogation of subjectivity in the modern age. This book also makes even more explicit the revolutionary nature of Foucault’s conception of power. For if it is the case that power operates not by means of repression, negation, or deduction but by production, incitement, and cajoling, then this has radical implications for discourses of liberation in politics and psychology. If power operates by obliging us to produce truth about ourselves, then psychoanalytic notions of freeing an ‘inner self’ repressed by a Victorian morality are not opposed to power but rather a perfect example of how it functions. The same is true of revolutionary political movements which pose the problem of governance in terms of the liberation of a true consciousness of human essence, or of the transgression of illegitimate norms. Foucault’s work on power has had a substantial impact on anthropological studies of politics, the state, colonialism, and anthropology’s own practice (for instance, Ferguson and Gupta 2008; Mitchell 1988; Rabinow 2003; Scott 1995; Stoler 1995). It gave birth to that extensive corpus of anthropological literature on power that Sahlins sought to skewer in Waiting for Foucault as a ‘neo-functionalism’, in which everything could be explained as an instance of power (or resistance). Yet even as its results were being published, his ideas were undergoing further transformation. By 1975, for instance, his brief post-’68 de´tente with the Marxist left appeared to be over (Paras 2006: 79–81). Discipline and Punish contains some ideas sympathetic to Marxism, such as the notion that techniques of discipline were incorporated into the broader capitalist economy, but it fundamentally rejects the thesis that the purpose and origin of such techniques are economic or about serving the interests of a specific class. The History of Sexuality, volume 1 is clearly in part a critique of Marxism’s inherited Hegelian notions of ‘labour as the essence of man’ (Foucault 1978c: 13) and its juridical and ideological conception of power. The

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French intellectual climate was also changing: the events of 1968 were receding into memory, and the mid-1970s saw the rise of the nouveaux philosophes such as Bernard-Henri Le´vy and Andre´ Glucksmann, who were bitterly critical of what they saw as a complicity with Stalinism on the part of sections of the French left (Bourg 2007: 227–302). Foucault positively reviewed Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers (1980), noting in its spirit that ‘the decisive test for the philosophers of Antiquity was their capacity to produce sages . . . in the modern era, it is their aptitude to make sense of massacres. The first helped men to support their own death, the second, to accept that of others’ (1977b). By 1977 his friendship with Deleuze – who despised the nouveaux philosophes – seemed also to be over, after a disagreement over Deleuze’s positive position on the Baader-Meinhof gang (Eribon 1989: 411–13). In terms of this chapter’s focus, we have now reached the crucial juncture in Foucault’s intellectual biography. The exact timing of his ‘ethical turn’ is something of an open question, and if one takes the position that there is thoroughgoing continuity across his various phases, then one may not wish to see any kind of turn at all. But there is undoubtedly a change of some description that takes place around this time. Foucault himself described an ‘abrupt’ abandonment of his former style around 1975–6 (Harrer 2005: 77); his 1977 course at the Colle`ge de France, ‘Security, Territory, Population’, introduced the terms ‘government’ and ‘governmentality’ in the place of ‘power’ as a way of speaking about ‘conduct’, as both a transitive verb (to lead others) and a noun, an ‘open field’ of possible behaviours (1982a: 789); the 1978 course, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, opened an interest in liberalism and the individual; and when the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality finally appeared in 1984, they looked nothing like the books he had projected writing when he began the first volume (see, e.g., 1978b: 21). Yet there is also evidence of significant continuities. Though Foucault has a well-known tendency to read his earlier work retrospectively in the light of whatever he happened to be writing at the time (Flynn 1985: 532), in 1982 he himself made a coherent case for seeing his entire corpus of work as an examination of ‘games of truth’ in relation to the techniques human beings use to understand themselves (1982b). Of these techniques, some are techniques of power and domination, ‘which determine the conduct of individuals’, and on which he had hitherto primarily focussed. Some, on the other hand, are ‘technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’. He would set out a very similar schema in the introduction to volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, suggesting that his work had always been about ‘games of truth’, whether in relation to knowledge, power, or, as it would now become, the self (1985: 4–5).

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What is certain is that Foucault’s interest in the prehistory of modern subjectivity and its roots in Christian confessional practices and the production of truth led him further back in time than he had imagined, and to a topic he had not yet had cause to treat: ethics.

‘The Return of the Subject’ The French subtitle to the first volume of The History of Sexuality is ‘The Will to Knowledge’, and we have already seen how central the concerns of truth and knowledge were to Foucault’s work. In the project of The History of Sexuality this took a particular form: while it began as a project about how telling the truth about one’s sexual identity and desires was central to the modern understanding of subjectivity, it became a project about the roots of that concern with subjectivity and truth itself. From the beginnings of the project, Foucault knew that it would take him further back in history than he had hitherto ventured, into Christian confessional practices formalized at the Lateran Council of 1215. Already in the first volume, however, he was distinguishing between what he called an ars erotica and a scientia sexualis: the latter corresponded roughly with our modern concern for producing ‘truth’ about sexual identity, while the former he characterized – clearly with more sympathy – as an ‘Eastern’ interest in the cultivation of pleasure. As he pursued his research into early Christian asceticism further and further back into history, he found a much more concrete instantiation of an ars erotica in GraecoRoman antiquity. This discovery would allow him to pursue the project of a genealogy of the Christian attitude to subjectivity by demonstrating both its roots and its contingency. The ‘will to knowledge’ that Foucault identifies as the basis of our modern understanding of selfhood emerged slowly and gradually out of a different way of relating to the self, an ancient ‘arts of existence’. Though a fourth volume of The History of Sexuality, devoted to Christian confessional practices, was published posthumously (against Foucault’s express wishes in his will) in 2018, most of its content was written before the second and third volumes, and these would focus squarely on classical Greece and republican and imperial Rome. The distinction between pagan and Christian subjectivity is by no means meant to be absolute, and neither does Foucault present the two categories as in any way homogenous: the third volume of The History of Sexuality charts the transition and interpenetration of imperial Roman and early Christian understandings of the self, and the pre-Raphaelites and Baudelaire are cited by Foucault as at least two examples of a modern version of an aesthetics of existence (see also Faubion 2014). But the differences between pagan and Christian attitudes to sexuality illustrate the way in which this genealogical project led Foucault to an interest in ethics.

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In pursuing his history of sexuality, Foucault found that the rules and codes governing sexual behaviour actually changed remarkably little over time (1985: 15–22). Infidelity, for instance, or homosexuality, were as much problems for the Greeks and the Romans as they were for early (and of course later) Christians. But the manner in which they appeared as moral problems was quite dramatically different. This is the root of a basic distinction often adopted by anthropologists (though not always in the same fashion – e.g. Laidlaw 2002; Fassin 2015; Zigon 2008): morality, on the one hand, is composed of the set of prescriptive norms and values that determine appropriate behaviour in any given context; ethics, on the other, is the practical and reflective way in which one conducts oneself in relation to such norms and values (although Foucault himself speaks of ‘moralities’ in the broadest sense as encompassing both codes of behaviour and forms of subjectivation – 1985: 29). It is the way in which one constitutes oneself as a (moral or ethical) subject. In a manner reminiscent of his early critiques of ‘juridical’ models of power, Foucault thinks that though certain contexts may lend themselves more to the codification of morality than others and that this might merit some attention, it is the dynamic variation in ethics that is fundamental to the formation of subjectivity (Foucault 1985: 23–5, 30). To this basic distinction, between ‘moral codes’ and ‘ethics’, Foucault adds four further analytical sub-categories to the latter: ‘practices or techniques of self’; ‘mode of subjectivation’, or how one brings oneself to subscribe to a particular moral code; ‘telos’, or the proper ends of ethical action; and ‘ethical substance’, the ‘prime material’ of moral conduct (1985: 26–8). In the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes how the primary object of ethical concern in ancient Greece was not ‘desire’, as in the modern West, or ‘flesh’, as it was for early Christians, but pleasure, or aphrodisia. This, in turn, entails an entirely different set of techniques or practices of the self to our own. Practices or technologies of the self are in some ways the most obviously anthropologically relevant of Foucault’s analytics of ethics, given that they consist of practical, observable activities that may be extreme in their asceticism (e.g. fasting to death, as in Laidlaw 2005; see also Cook 2010 and Chapter 16 in this volume) but may also be fairly quotidian: paying attention to one’s diet, doing certain forms of exercise, or keeping a diary are all examples. Such practices are work one performs upon oneself as part of forming oneself as an ethical subject. Immediately striking about all of this is how far we seem to have travelled from Discipline and Punish: here, rather than ‘subjectivation’ referring to the production of subjectivity by mechanisms of power, it is now chiefly the work the subject performs upon itself to make itself a subject. A concrete version of this shift is visible in Foucault’s own descriptions of historical changes in technologies of the self. For instance, Christian confessional practices and our own therapeutic society are dominated by

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a ‘hermeneutics of the self’, in which what is important is to produce the truth about oneself and one’s desires, whereas what is important in classical Greek ethics is the cultivation of a certain attitude of self-mastery in relation to pleasure. In spheres such as dietetics and erotics the crucial issue was to develop the general capacity for judgement about when, how, and in what way one might take exercise, eat, or have sexual relations, rather than to know what specific sorts of activities are permitted or illicit. The point was not to investigate the nature of the acts of pleasure, or of one’s desire for them, but to make proper, temperate, and austere ‘use’ of them (the title of the second volume is ‘The Use of Pleasure’). So, the particular techniques of the self that Foucault investigates in antiquity are not devoted to the production of an authentic, true self but to the continuous fashioning of a subjectivity in control of its relationship to pleasure, giving form and style to its existence. A subject, in other words, capable of exercising power over itself in order to create a good and beautiful existence (cf. Faubion 2014). This notion of ethics or virtue as a matter of craft, technique, and the cultivation of self is a central tenet of Socratic, Aristotelian, and Stoic moral philosophy, one other moral thinkers have also developed (see, e.g., Anscombe 1958; MacIntyre 1981; Mair, Chapter 3 in this volume), and Foucault drew on the work of classical scholars such as Kenneth Dover (1978), Peter Brown (1978), and his friend Paul Veyne (see Foucault 1985: 8). In contrast to deontological models of morality and ethics, in which ‘doing good’ is a matter of following rules and prescriptions, the notion of virtue as a craft or techne, and the virtuous life as ‘crafting oneself’, or ‘taking care of oneself’ (techne tou biou), means taking one’s own life and existence as an object of continuous work. This is important to the broader implications of Foucault’s work because it involves a distinctly non-modern articulation of the relationship between self and other. By now it should be clear that it is at least possible to read this work as a radical departure from Foucault’s earlier interests, as some scholars have (see later). In contrast to his ‘early’ period, in which the subject appears as a blip in the grand history of systems of thought, and in very marked contrast to his ‘middle’ period, in which the subject is not the premise or the fount but the outcome and product of power relations, here the object of concern for Foucault is the subject’s relationship to itself. As one critic of this later work has put it, ‘the obvious paradox of a reflexive account of self-construction is that the self must already exist in order to construct itself’ (Dews 1989: 40), and admirers of ‘late’ Foucault often make exactly the same point in criticism of his work on power: ‘once some kind of subject was acknowledged to precede [power] . . . then the notion that the subject was “produced” at all lost a great deal of its force’ (Paras 2006: 126). These questions are at the heart of this chapter and it will treat them more fully as we proceed. But it is worth dealing now with one particular contention regarding Foucault’s work on ethics, both because it will help

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in coming to grips with what is entailed by that work and because it is often reproduced as a criticism of anthropological writing that draws on Foucault’s claims about ethics. This is the claim – articulated forcefully by Peter Dews and Martha Nussbaum, for instance, among others (Dews 1989; Nussbaum 1985) – that this later work is deficient in paying too much attention to the self and not enough or none at all to the self in its relation to others and in its social or political context. It is true, as Timothy O’Leary (2002) points out, that Foucault places a good deal of rhetorical weight on the aesthetic dimension of selfcultivation at times, a fact which has led to charges of dandyism from some, such as Pierre Hadot (1995). What Foucault is describing, so this critique goes, is a process of fashioning the self as a work of art, and that this is fundamentally an amoral and apolitical project. This is effectively the inverse of earlier critiques of Foucault’s work on power which charged him with leaving no space whatsoever for ‘freedom’ or ‘agency’ (see, e.g., Alcoff 1990; Fraser 1981; Habermas 1987; Taylor 1984; Walzer 1986). Both criticisms are rooted in an opposition which Foucault himself diagnoses in a lecture he gave in 1982, since published as Technologies of the Self. In it he points out two characteristic and related features of modern perspectives on the self: the first is the idea that there is something egoistic, selfish, and inappropriate about the idea of ‘taking care of the self’, and that doing so is ‘an immorality . . . a means of escape from all possible rules’, an attitude due in part to the Christian ascetic tradition of self-renunciation (see also his discussions of exomologesis and exagoreusis – for instance, 1982b); the second is the related idea that morality consists of an external set of rules imposed upon the individual. However, precisely the point of his description of classical ethics – those found in particular in volume 2 of The History of Sexuality – is that this distinction between ‘morality’, or relations with others, and ‘taking care of the self’ does not apply in that context. In other words, Foucault’s descriptions of classical ethics are – in some part – descriptions of a world in which ‘the government of the self and others’ (as his 1982 lecture course was titled) are related enterprises. ‘Taking care of the self’ and ‘taking care of others’ were to some extent part and parcel of the same project. ‘Ethical’ action – understood in Foucault’s sense of the word – and ‘political’ action could be one and the same thing (see Williams, Chapter 6 in this volume; Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 in this volume; and for the most sustained phenomenologically inflected critique of Foucault’s understanding of self, see Mattingly 2012 and 2014). This is clear in Foucault’s descriptions themselves, as David Halperin (1990), among others, has noted. His analysis of the Alcibiades I, for instance, makes clear what Timothy O’Leary calls ‘the isomorphism between self-mastery and the mastery of the other’ (2002: 62). In it, Alcibiades and Socrates discuss the former’s political ambitions. Socrates demonstrates that none of the wealth, prestige, and power Alcibiades

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possesses are sufficient to distinguish him from his political rivals (1982b). It is ‘technique’, or ‘care of the self’, contemplation and meditation on the soul, instead, which will ensure Alcibiades’s path to success, because it is only by cultivating virtue in himself that he will become capable of exercising it in the governance of others. Several things are notable about this description. The first is the very explicitly political nature of the ends of self-cultivation in this context. Alcibiades must ‘take care of himself’ in order to be capable of ‘taking care of others’. The second is that this practice of self-care happens in relation to another – in this case Socrates – not in isolation: the soul must be contemplated through its reflection in another, and Socrates’s pedagogy is an instance of this relation (see 1982b: 25; Faubion 2001 and Chapter 21 in this volume). Thirdly, this set of relations explains the persistent importance of temperance and austerity in classical ethics, despite the lack of Christian notions of sin: it is not that certain acts are bad or sinful by nature, it is that over-indulgence in them, or indulgence in them of the wrong form, demonstrates a lack of self-government, one that is incompatible with a capacity to govern others. This is also famously visible in the classical and Hellenistic problematization of homosexual relations. Greek and Graeco-Roman ethics were fully and unashamedly masculine (as Foucault notes; see, e.g., 1985: 83). But, as in ethnographic descriptions of comparable attitudes (see, e.g., Kulick 1997), what made one a man was not the gender of one’s sexual partner but the dynamic of one’s sexual relationships. Men were dominant, active, penetrating partners, while only those unfit for command – women, boys, slaves, improper men – were submissive and penetrated. Self-mastery, in other words, was linked to political mastery directly by the masterful attitude one adopted in one’s sexual practices. This also helps explain the dynamic attitude to ethics and self-cultivation: the risk of losing one’s self-mastery, or of losing one’s dominant position over one’s sexual partner, was constantly present and had to be constantly guarded against by those who sought the highest offices (hence the serious moral problem of sexual relations between men who were dominant and boys who were submissive, but who would or should nevertheless grow up to be dominant men). Hadot’s critique of Foucault for ‘dandyism’ is levelled at volume 3 of The History of Sexuality (‘The Care of the Self’) in particular, but this very particularity tells us something: in this volume, as in the others, what Foucault is describing is itself a particular context. By this point he has shifted focus from classical, Socratic ethics to Hellenistic and imperial Stoic ethics, and unsurprisingly the nature of those ethics has changed. ‘Taking care of oneself’, which for Alcibiades and Socrates was the proper pursuit of a specific group of men inclined to the leadership of the polis, has now become a generalized activity that is in some respects good in and of itself. This is what Foucault refers to as the Roman ‘cultivation of self’

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(1986: 39), rooted in the universalist Stoic principles of reason and nature. If we recall Foucault’s quadripartite analytic of ethics, many of the practices of the self remain the same, and it is still ‘pleasure’ that is the central focus; but now it is ‘reason’ that demands that people take up these practices (as the mode of subjectivation), and it is to the enjoyment of a virtuous and happy life, rather than to political success, that they are directed (as telos). It is this model, furthermore, which lends itself to uptake and further transformation in Christian ethics, in which believers – whether a small group of spiritual virtuosi in early Christianity or the whole flock, as in Calvinism – will be expected to subject themselves to a continuous and increasingly codified process of self-examination and self-decipherment, the goal of which is self-renunciation. So, there is a sense in which Hadot and others are correct: Stoic ethics is not – at least in Foucault’s description – directly concerned with political action in the same way as was classical ethics. But at the same time, that change is part of the much broader historical transformation that leads us back to volume 1 of The History of Sexuality: ‘[a]s the ethical system becomes more generalised in its application it becomes more ruthless in its individualising; the emphasis in the process of ethical subjectivation shifts away from the subject as centre of deliberation and activity and towards the subject as “subjected”’ (O’Leary 2002: 84). In other words, Foucault is telling us a story about transformations in the relation between the injunctions to care for the self and to care for others, transformations that are affected by wider historical processes. We should not expect that relationship to remain exactly the same between (comparatively) democratic classical Athens and imperial Rome, or between the Victorian age and our own.

Janus, or ‘The Masked Philosopher’ Foucault’s work has inspired and continues to inspire countless interpretations and exegeses, many of which focus on the difficult question of whether or not ‘Foucault’s work’ has any kind of continuity to it. I have already noted his own perhaps characteristically inconsistent responses to this question: on the one hand, he describes himself as constructing a labyrinth into which he can disappear and re-appear at different points, forcing his critics to play philosophical whack-a-mole; on the other hand, he has a notable tendency to read whatever his present concerns are back into previous work, briefly giving us a glimpse of potentially solid philosophical ground before diving back into the detail of whatever bit of history he was examining. A complete overview of all of these exegeses of Foucault’s work on power and ethics is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead I will briefly outline two basic types of position one might take on the relationship

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between these two ‘faces’ of Foucault, and their attendant implications for anthropological work on the subject, before going on to sketch out a third such position in my conclusion.

Janus We have already encountered some versions of the first position one might take on the relationship between conceptions of power and ethics in Foucault, namely that they are incompatible and entirely distinct. This position emerges in polemical form in the work of those – such as Hadot or Nussbaum, but see also Dews (1989), Privitera (1995), Hiley (1984), and Best and Kellner (1991) – who attack Foucault’s late work on ethics for its ‘dandyism’ and a perceived over-emphasis on the aesthetic purposes of selfcultivation. But it is also present in work such as Eric Paras’s (2006) Foucault 2.0, in which the same inconstancy is noted but now lauded as rescuing Foucault from the totalizing optics of power in which he had previously been caught. A similar point is made less dramatically by Thomas Flynn (1985), who argues that Foucault’s late work ‘fills a gap’ in an otherwise largely structuralist project by supplying an ‘individual, responsible, agent’. Giorgio Agamben similarly declared Foucault’s late work to have focussed on the one hand on ‘the study of political techniques’ and on the other on ‘technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivation bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity . . . and, at the same time, to an external power’ (1998; cited in Faubion 2001). This sort of position is put most starkly by Thomas McCarthy, a critic of both ‘faces’ of Foucault: [in Foucault’s early period] everything was a function of context, of impersonal forces and fields, from which there was no escape – the end of man. Now the focus is on ‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct but also seek to transform themselves . . . and to make their life into an oeuvre’ – with too little regard for social, political, and economic context. (1991: 74; cited in Allen 2000) Put so polemically, it is hard to see much value in Foucault for an anthropologist if this sort of position is an accurate depiction of his work. Depending upon whether one’s bent is for the ‘early’ or the ‘late’ version, a ‘Foucauldian’ account would either be entirely determinist in its depiction of ‘impersonal forces’ or it would be a strange and isolated description of ‘voluntary actions’ unmoored from their contexts. It is hard to credit this reading of Foucault for a number of reasons, some of which we have already examined, and some of which we will look at in the following section. Yet this sort of position is worth attending to for the manner in which it is replicated in some of the ways in which anthropologists talk to one another about the way they make use of him.

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We have already met Marshall Sahlins’s acerbic description of the ‘power, power, everywhere’ school of Foucauldian anthropology. Twenty-five years later we find this characterization echoed in Sherry Ortner’s description of some of Foucault’s work as ‘a virtually totalizing theory of a world in which power is in every crevice of life, and in which there is no outside to power’ (Ortner 2016: 50). In somewhat similar fashion, and citing Sahlins, James Laidlaw noted in his 2001 Malinowski Lecture that Foucault might have seemed an unlikely ally to muster in support of an ‘anthropology of ethics and freedom’, since he was widely read at the time as ‘an advocate of a bleakly totalizing vision of societies as systems of power/knowledge, where domination and resistance are necessary, pervasive, and mutually implicating aspects of all social relations’ (2002: 322). Laidlaw also notes, as I have, that Foucault himself was ambiguous about this reading of him, but that from the very moment Discipline and Punish was delivered to its publisher, Foucault was ‘thinking himself out of that conception’ (322). Ortner too concedes that some of Foucault’s later work ‘moves way from the relentless power problematic’ (2016: 51). Conversely, Harri Englund articulates in careful fashion a not uncommon feeling of discomfort with the Foucauldian project of the anthropology of ethics when he points to the ways in which a focus on ethics as opposed to morality can over-privilege ideas about ‘personal choices’ and, when ‘cast in pathological terms’, lead to the notion of ‘the separate person’ as the basic unit of human action (2008: 45). Yunxiang Yan is equally concerned by the anti-Durkheimian, anti-‘social’ bent of the new anthropology of ethics, arguing in contrast that ‘morality does not exist in an isolated individual’ (2011). In somewhat less careful fashion, the editors of Moral Anthropology: A Critique claim that ‘[m]uch of the debate in anthropology is revolving around individualist assumptions, a concentration on the dynamics of choice, a subjectivist orientation (that in certain respects has arisen in new guise in the new anthropology of morality)’ (Kapferer and Gold 2018: 9); the anthropology of ethics, at least in its lateFoucauldian versions, is accused of failing to recognize that ethics is ‘conditioned by the political and economic forces of history’ (13). In the same volume, Don Kalb condemns the Foucauldian anthropology of ethics as an ‘aggressively antisociological celebration of fundamental human freedom. It tends to lift the capacity to envision and live ethical designs entirely out of its wider social texture . . . that fundamental freedom, inevitably, also implies that any effort at social explanation must end up as futile or even ill-willed’ (69). In a further parallel, this sort of accusation is also sometimes coupled with the assertion that the reasons behind this imputed ‘individualism’ lie in a conscious or unconscious sympathy for ‘neoliberal’ politics, something of which Foucault has also recently been accused (see, for instance, Behrent and Zamora 2015; Behrent 2010; Zamora 2014).

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For a range of reasons, some of which I will treat next, I think it is very hard to sustain McCarthy’s characterization of either of Foucault’s ‘faces’. But anthropologists drawing on both of those aspects of his work have been accused of virtually the same sins: of entirely neglecting either context or the subject. It seems unlikely, though possible, that such accusations have any more purchase when levelled at Foucault’s anthropological heirs than at the man himself, as I will set out in what follows in the case of the anthropology of ethics. Yet the fact that such accusations persist, and are unlikely to cease in the near future, does at least indicate that the ‘Janus’ position has some weight of numbers behind it, and I will return in my conclusion to the question of why this might be the case.

‘The Masked Philosopher’ A number of Foucault’s philosophical interpreters have made the case for seeing continuity, rather than discontinuity, in his work. In many ways, as far as the intellectual biography of Foucault is concerned, this case feels considerably more plausible than the ‘Janus’ reading, certainly in the latter’s extreme, polemical forms. I have already noted, for instance, one way in which Foucault’s genealogy of subjectivity can be read as a continuous project, in response to Hadot’s critique of ‘dandyism’. It is on the face of it simply incorrect to claim that Foucault ceased to be concerned with ‘politics’, ‘relations with others’, or ‘context’ in his later work. Not only did he repeatedly argue that models of self-cultivation ‘are proposed, suggested, imposed . . . by . . . culture . . . society, and . . . social group’ (1984a: 291), he also specifically focussed on practices of self-cultivation by those responsible for ‘the government of others’, and on the importance of pedagogy – that is, the often hierarchical relationship between a teacher and student – to such practices (e.g. 1982, 1984a; also Faubion 2001 and Chapter 21 in this volume). This is not even to mention the work he was doing when he died on parrhesia, or truth-telling practices, and their political importance in the classical world and their function in confession and the penal system (e.g. 2011, 2012, 2014). This continuity is furthermore reflected in Foucault’s use of the same word (‘assujettissement’) to describe both the phenomena he was concerned with in Discipline and Punish and those in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality. The notion that subjectivation is the same process, whether it takes place in the panopticon or by means of a set of philosophical exercises, is perfectly consistent with his famous claim that there is no ‘outside’ to power’s productive capacities. The two kinds of practice are, as Christoph Menke puts it, ‘so close that [one] often seems to be nothing other than [the other] illuminated and evaluated in another light . . . the two faces of one Janus head’ (2003: 200). Likewise, the notion of ‘surveillance’ found in Discipline and Punish, as Sebastian Harrer points out, sounds

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remarkably like the practices of ‘spiritual guidance’ found in ethical pedagogy, and he notes that Epictetus even exhorted his disciples to live as if he was constantly watching them; as if, indeed, they were in the panopticon (2005: 80). Furthermore, of course, the whole point of the panopticon was self-discipline, so Agamben’s distinction between one’s ‘identity’ and ‘external power’ seems decidedly anti-Foucauldian. Turning to anthropology: as I suggested at the outset of this chapter, it is hard to overstate the influence of Foucault’s late work on the development of the anthropology of ethics. Two ground-breaking essays in that field, published nearly simultaneously, both make extensive use of ‘late Foucault’ in setting out an agenda for what would become the anthropology of ethics. The first is Laidlaw’s Malinowski Lecture, which I have already mentioned. In the remainder of that piece Laidlaw sets out Foucault’s vision of ethics more or less as I have here, pointing to the centrality of ‘freedom’ to projects of self-cultivation. Freedom here is not a thing that one can possess but rather something that one exercises, the very practice of ‘subjectivation’, of making oneself a subject, ‘choosing the kind of self one wishes to be’ (2002: 324). It does not take place in a vacuum, or in opposition to power or constraint, but through the models and values that the subject finds around itself (see also Heywood 2015). All of this is very much in evidence in Laidlaw’s ethnographic descriptions of Jain practices of selfrenunciation (see also his 1995), which he directly analogizes with Foucault’s discussions of early Christianity. In both cases, self-revelation and arriving at certain truths about oneself is an important pre-condition to self-renunciation. But in the Jain case, the proper object of such techniques is not sexual desire but the harm one has necessarily caused to other living beings in the course of simple activities such as breathing and walking, and so the ‘work’ that one performs upon oneself consists of directing infinitely careful attention to one’s every action and movement. Though the remark about Foucault’s earlier ‘bleakly totalizing vision’ might suggest that a version of the ‘Janus’ argument is being made here, that is in fact not the case. Laidlaw’s position on the matter is stated clearly elsewhere: The apparent divergence between two different ways in which Foucault’s ideas have been adopted and adapted by anthropologists owes more to the interests the latter have had in reading him, and to the other intellectual traditions they have been engaging with as they did so, than to any profound discontinuity in Foucault’s own thought, that proceeded in general by incremental steps, taking up new problems and questions as they came into view, correcting what he thought were overemphases and blind-spots in earlier studies, and broadening the historical and cultural range of his enquiries, to address, ever more searchingly, ever more fundamental questions. (2018: 182)

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This is perfectly consistent with the repeated emphasis throughout the Malinowski Lecture and other programmatic work on ethics (e.g. Laidlaw 2013) that the concept of ‘freedom’, drawn from Foucault, ‘is of a definite, historically produced kind. There is no other kind’ (2002: 323). In the same year in which Laidlaw delivered his Malinowski Lecture, James Faubion published a similarly agenda-setting essay titled ‘Towards an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis’ (2001). Setting out the fundamentals of Foucault’s work on ethics and its potential for anthropology, Faubion is also quite clear about where he sits in the ‘continuity’ argument: ‘that antagonists on both sides of [the decisionism versus determinism] quarrel have claimed Foucault as an ally is, I think, indicative less of his ambiguity than of his belonging no more to one side than the other’ (2001: 94). Or even more explicitly, in describing the centrality of pedagogy to ethical practice: ‘[h]ence . . . Foucault’s insistence that the self in its relation to others is “the very stuff” of ethics’, and later definitively: ‘There is no thinking of ethics without thinking of power’ (96– 7, original emphasis). Foucault has appeared in a similar guise in a range of subsequent anthropological work on ethics in diverse areas of life (e.g. Dave 2012; Faubion 2011; Hirschkind 2006; Laidlaw 2013; Mahmood 2004; Robbins 2004; Zigon 2011). I would guess that none of these anthropologists believe that Foucault’s later work can be understood entirely in isolation from that which preceded it, and I think that trying to find a claim or assertion or even an implication in any of this work to the effect that ethical practices take place without reference to power, politics, or context would be a near-impossible task. Yet, as I suggested at the end of the previous section, the idea persists, in both studies of Foucault and anthropological arguments more broadly, that there is something unsatisfactorily one-sided about studying ethics in Foucault’s sense of the word. We are no longer ‘waiting for (late) Foucault’, to paraphrase Sahlins, but his arrival seems to have simply changed the way in which some people object to the use of his work rather than done away with the objections altogether. There are probably not many anthropologists who, like McCarthy, disapprove of both faces of Foucault, but there remain plenty who disapprove of one or the other, and many who, despite all arguments to the contrary, cannot reconcile the one they like with the one they do not.

‘Philosophy without a Happy End’ Despite its brevity, I hope that the sketch I have provided of some of the debates surrounding both Foucault’s intellectual biography and his uptake in the anthropology of ethics makes two things clear: that in the case of the former, an argument for continuity is plausible (to say the least); and that in the case of the latter, a minimally charitable reading would struggle to

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characterize this work as blind to the importance of context, politics, or power. Yet arguments persist on both counts. Why might this be? Is there anything to be gained from ‘taking caesurism seriously’ in the case of Foucault and ethics (cf. Candea 2018: 174)? One potential answer to the problem of why these debates persist is suggested by Faubion’s point that Foucault belongs to neither side, and by Foucault’s own remarks on the relationship between ‘care of the self’ and ‘relations with others’ in our modern context: that the ‘Janus’ reading is a product of that same opposition, the contingency of which he sought to demonstrate. The persistence of these debates is not, then, really about one side or the other (hence the frequent mischaracterizations of either side by the other) but about the power of the distinction itself: it is, at some fundamental level, difficult for us to see both of Foucault’s faces at once. This may also help to explain why metaphors of ‘focus’, ‘illumination’, ‘emphasis’, and ‘blind-spots’ are so prevalent in the exegetical literature on ‘continuity’. Even when we attempt to speak about Foucault’s two faces at the same time, we tend to fall back on a language of difference, albeit a heuristic difference of method or perspective. This is brought out most clearly and elegantly in a piece by Amy Allen called ‘The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis’, in which she makes a convincing case for identifying this methodological difference in Foucault’s own work: his analyses of power/knowledge ‘are devoid of references to the concept of subjectivity because they have to be’, she argues. ‘[T]hey have to be devoid of such references because precisely the point of these works is to shift subjectivity from the position of that which explains to the position of that which must be explained, from explanans to explanandum’ (2000: 120–1). Ex hypothesi the same could be said of the (comparatively) limited number of references to power in the later work. This reading is also supported by an obvious but important fact about Foucault’s work: for the most part, he obliges his readers to do the work of connecting power and ethics themselves, where possible. He does not coin neologisms, and he does not expect to resolve the problem in a single text (both of which Bourdieu, dealing with the problem of ‘structure and agency’, does, for example). The works of Foucault in question span nearly two decades, and range enormously in empirical focus. At no point does he snap his fingers and declare the dichotomy dissolved. What we get instead are long, slow, detailed, empirical analyses of what might appear to be entirely divergent issues, but which to a closer reading may (or may still not) appear related. Given that even this manner of dealing with the relationship between power and ethics has failed to convince many a reader, it should perhaps not surprise us too much that it is hard for Foucault’s successors to do so in the space of, say, a single article. His friend Paul Veyne called his philosophy ‘the rarest of phenomena . . . philosophy without a happy end’, in its refusal to ‘convert our finitude into the basis

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for new certainties’ (1993: 5). So, it may be that he was quite content with the notion that the relationship between power and ethics was not a problem it was his job to resolve. Perhaps one consequent lesson to be drawn from debates in intellectual history surrounding Foucault’s legacy is that even if it is true, for methodological reasons, that it is fundamentally difficult as an enterprise to consider both ‘power’ and ‘ethics’ simultaneously, it is at least possible to consider them separately in such a way that they do not directly compete with one another. Despite his playful remarks about changing his mind, Foucault himself gives us no serious reason to believe that he suffered some world-altering intellectual rupture somewhere between 1975 and 1980, and it would seem somewhat psychologically implausible to assume that he did. In his own mind, at least, it seems to have been a matter of different emphasis, as Allen’s argument and those of numerous other commentators suggest. Different emphases in different arguments need not contradict or compete with one another, and it would be absurd to imagine that Foucault really did have ‘two faces’, each engaged in an ongoing battle with the other. If there are differences in his work, it surely makes more psychological sense and is more faithful to his own self-understanding to see them as different, but complementary, rather than contradictory. Whether or not it is possible to see debates in anthropology surrounding the current focus on ethics in a similar light is a question beyond the scope of this chapter, but perhaps one worth exploring further.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, and James Laidlaw for their careful reading and advice on this chapter. I am also very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’. American Ethnologist, 17: 41–55. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alcoff, Linda. 1990. ‘Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration’, in A. Dallery and C. Scott (eds.), Crises in Continental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Allen, Amy. 2000. ‘The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject’. The Philosophical Forum, 31: 113–30.

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Althusser, Louis. 1971 [1970]. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anscombe, Elizabeth. 1958. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. Philosophy, 33: 1–16. Behrent, Michael. 2010. ‘Accidents Happen: Franc¸ois Ewald, the “Antirevolutionary” Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State’. The Journal of Modern History, 82: 585–624. Behrent, Michael and Daniel Zamora. 2015. Foucault and Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity. Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. London: Palgrave. Bourg, Julian. 2007. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Brown, Peter. 1978. The Making of Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burkitt, Ian. 2002. ‘Technologies of the Self: Habitus and Capacities’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 32: 219–37. Candea, Matei. 2018. Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Joanna. 2010. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dave, Naisargi. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Giles and Felix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus. London: Viking Press. Dews, Peter. 1989. ‘The Return of the Subject in Late Foucault’. Radical Philosophy, 51: 37–41. Dover, Kenneth. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. London: Duckworth. Dreyfus, Hubert and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Englund, Harri. 2008. ‘Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations: Beyond Morality in the Anthropology of Africa?’ Social Analysis, 52: 33–50. Eribon, Didier. 1989. Michel Foucault. Paris: Flammarion. Fassin, Didier. 2015. ‘Troubled Waters: At the Confluence of Ethics and Politics’, in M. Lambek, V. Das, D. Fassin, and W. Keane (eds.), Four Lectures on Ethics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Faubion, James. 2001. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis’. Representations, 74: 83–104. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. ‘Constantine Cavafy: A Parrhesiast for the Cynic of the Future’, in J. Faubion (ed.), Foucault Now: Current Perspectives in Foucault Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Ferguson, James and Akhil Gupta. 2008. ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’. American Ethnologist, 29: 981–1002. Flynn, Thomas. 1985. ‘Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault’. The Journal of Philosophy, 82: 531–40. Foucault, Michel. 1967 [1964]. Madness and Civilisation. London: Tavistock. 1970 [1966]. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. 1971. ‘Orders of Discourse’. Social Science Information, 10: 7–30. 1972 [1969]. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. 1973 [1963]. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Tavistock. 1977a [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon. 1977b. Les Maıˆtres Penseurs. Le Nouvel Observateur. 9 May 1977. 1978a [1971]. ‘Nietzsche, Geneaology, History’, in J. Richardson and B. Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978b [1976]. The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. 1978c. ‘Dialogue on Power’, in Simeon Wade (ed.), Chez Foucault. Los Angeles, CA: Circabook. 1980. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. Interview given to Le Monde, republished in 1994 in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984: Volume One, Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. Paul Rabinow (ed.). Paris: Editions Gallimard. 1982a. ‘The Subject and Power’. Critical Inquiry, 8: 777–95. 1982b. ‘Technologies of the Self’, in L. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Press. 1984a. ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984’, in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds.), The Final Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1985 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. 1986 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Three: The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon. 2006 [1961]. History of Madness. London: Routledge. 2011. The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1982–1983. London: Palgrave. 2012. The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1983–1984. London: Palgrave. 2014. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1981. ‘Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions’. Praxis International, 3: 272–87.

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Glucksmann, Andre´. 1980 [1977]. The Master Thinkers. New York: Harper & Row. Habermas, Jurgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hadot, Pierre. 1995 [1989]. ‘Reflections on the Idea of the “Cultivation of the Self”’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life. Cambridge: Blackwell. Halperin, David. 1990. ‘Two Views of Greek Love: Harold Patzer and Michel Foucault’, in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrer, Sebastian. 2005. ‘The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault’s Lecture Series L’Herme´neutique du Sujet’. Foucault Studies, 2: 75–96. Heywood, Paolo. 2015. ‘Freedom in the Code: The Anthropology of (Double) Morality’. Anthropological Theory 15: 200–17. Hiley, David. 1984. ‘Foucault and the Analysis of Power: Political Engagement without Liberal Hope or Comfort’. Praxis International, 4: 192–207. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hofmeyr, Benda. 2006. ‘The Power Not to Be (What We Are): The Politics and Ethics of Self-Creation in Foucault’. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 3: 215–30. Honneth, Axel. 1991. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jacquemet, Marco. 1992. ‘Namechasers’. American Ethnologist, 19: 733–48. Kalb, Don. 2018. ‘Why I Will Not Make It as a “Moral Anthropologist”’, in B. Kapferer and M. Gold (eds.), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. Oxford: Berghahn. Kapferer, Bruce and Marina Gold (eds.). 2018. Moral Anthropology: A Critique. Oxford: Berghahn. Kulick, Don. 1997. ‘The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes’. American Anthropologist, 99: 574–85. Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Economy and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311–32. 2005. ‘A Life Worth Leaving: Fasting to Death as Telos of a Jain Religious Life’. Economy and Society, 34: 178–99. 2013. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018. ‘The Anthropological Lives of Michel Foucault’, in M. Candea (ed.), Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory. London: Routledge. Limo´n, Jose´. 1989. ‘Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian Batos, Disorder, and Narrative Discourses’. American Ethnologist, 16: 471–86.

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MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Mahmood, Saba. 2004. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12: 161–84. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. McCarthy, Thomas. 1991. ‘The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School’, in Ideals and Illusions: On Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Menke, Cristoph. 2003. ‘Two Kinds of Practice: On the Relation between Social Discipline and the Aesthetics of Existence’. Constellations, 10: 199–210. Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Montag, Warren. 1995. ‘“The Soul Is the Prison of the Body”: Althusser and Foucault, 1970–1975’. Yale French Studies, 88: 53–77. Nussbaum, Martha. 1985. ‘Affections of the Greeks’. New York Times Book Review, 10 November 1985. O’Leary, Timothy. 2002. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum. Ortner, Sherry. 2016. ‘Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6: 47–73. Paras, Eric. 2006. Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge. New York: Other Press. Privitera, Walter. 1995. Problems of Style: Michel Foucault’s Epistemology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rancie`re, Jacques. 2006. ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’. Critical Horizons, 7: 1–20. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde. 2006. ‘Governmentality’. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2: 83–104. Sahlins, Marshall. 1993. Waiting for Foucault. Chicago, IL: Prickly Pear Press. Scott, David. 1995. ‘Colonial Governmentality’. Social Text, 43: 191–220. Stoler, Ann. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1984. ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’. Political Theory, 12: 152–83. Veyne, Paul. 1993. ‘The Final Foucault and His Ethics’. Critical Enquiry, 20: 1–9.

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Walzer, Michael. 1986. ‘The Politics of Michel Foucault’, in David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Yan, Yunxiang. 2011. ‘How Far Away Can We Move from Durkheim? Reflections on the New Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropology of This Century 2. http://aotcpress.com/articles/move-durkheimreflections-anthropology-morality. Zamora, Daniel. 2014. ‘Foucault’s Responsibility’. Jacobin Magazine, 15 December 2014. Zigon, Jarrett. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg. 2011. ‘HIV Is God’s Blessing’: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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6 Phenomenology Samuel Williams

Existence is surely a debate Kierkegaard (2014 [1844])

A Haunted Tradition Phenomenology is one of the formative traditions of twentieth-century philosophy. Founded by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), it counts among its principal exponents such influential thinkers as Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95). Historically, it developed in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, and flourished particularly in France at the cusp of the Third and Fourth Republics. During the second half of the twentieth century, phenomenology came to play a prominent role in the mainstream teaching of philosophy in both these countries, and many subsequent movements of German and French thought, including Frankfurt School social theory and French structuralism, can be understood in part as reactions against or developments of phenomenology. Indeed, one occasionally encounters the term ‘phenomenology’ used in English as a byword for post-World War II French and German thought tout court (e.g. MacIntyre 1981: 2–3). Thus, in addition to its own intrinsic interest, some understanding of phenomenology is helpful for navigating the wider intellectual terrain of what is more regularly glossed in English as continental philosophy, typically in opposition to analytic philosophy, a tradition which came to dominate the teaching of philosophy in Great Britain and the United States where phenomenology never achieved a comparable institutional prominence. Over recent decades, however, as an increasing number of Anglophone philosophers have explicitly engaged with aspects of twentieth-century French and German thought,

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classic work in the phenomenological tradition has emerged as perhaps the most frequent point of contact. Hence a familiarity with the scholarly landmarks of phenomenology now sometimes provides a useful compass for exploring contemporary debates in English-language philosophy too, especially in philosophy of mind, if more rarely in ethics and moral philosophy. What is phenomenology? Coined as early as 1736 by the Lutheran theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (Bokhove 1992), the word means literally the study of phenomena, from the Greek phaino´menon or appearance; the study of how things appear, as distinct – one might think – from how things really are. In anthropology, chatting around the water cooler, one most commonly encounters the term today used in this rather literal, rough-and-ready sense to refer to any approach to an aspect of social and cultural life that focusses primarily on the experience of ‘what it’s like’ for people to live that way, and as with various other ‘-ologies’ (including ‘psychology’, with which it is sometimes conflated in the discipline), phenomenology is readily used by extension to refer not only to an approach that analyses some pattern of experience but also to the pattern of experience itself. But why would a philosopher or anthropologist be concerned with people’s experiences of how something appears, especially if such experiences are distinct from what the thing one’s actually interested in really is? Although phenomenology entered philosophical discourse in the 1760s with the negative connotation of the study of false appearances (Lambert 1990 [1764]), early philosophers who conceptually operationalized the term – including Kant, Fichte, and Hegel – virtually always did so because they believed a well-worn distinction between appearance and reality in some philosophical domain was ill-conceived and hence a systematic analysis of how experience of that domain was structured had some positive, usually epistemological, significance (Rockmore 2011; Waibel et al. 2010; Ferrarin et al. 2017). Although one occasionally encounters a twentiethcentury philosopher (such as Lukacs and Cassirer) using the word ‘phenomenology’ explicitly to develop one or other of these early approaches, the phenomenological tradition established by Edmund Husserl is built on a quite specific claim about experience that diverges from the recognized tenets of both Kantian critical philosophy and continental idealism. Concerned in the first instance particularly with conscious experience, Husserl (1970 [1900/1901]) argued that what distinguishes consciousness is its capacity to reach beyond itself – to be conscious is to be conscious of something. I am not consciously aware of a mind-dependent appearance separate from any mind-independent reality, nor is all reality in some way mind-dependent, but I am aware of a thing itself, some thing or other as it really is given to me in experience. Adapting a mediaeval scholastic term that had been reworked recently by the Roman Catholic priest and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838–1917; see Brentano 1995), Husserl dubbed

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this characteristic reaching of conscious experience beyond itself ’intentionality’, and among those who first followed Husserl in calling themselves phenomenologists, phenomenology was initially understood as the entwined study of consciousness and its objects: if psychology was fundamentally concerned with consciousness itself as a dimension of the human psyche, phenomenology was concerned with consciousness as a route to grasping fundamentally what we are conscious of. Indeed, the early catchcry of the phenomenological movement was ‘to the things themselves!’, and to a large extent one can understand the subsequent development of the phenomenological tradition as a series of interventions about how this germinal Husserlian approach to consciousness and its objects needed to be extended or radically transformed to reach the world in all its diversity as it really is given to us in experience, conscious or otherwise. That said, the phenomenological tradition proved most influential during the twentieth century for approaching subjects broadly associated with philosophy of mind, and a reader may perhaps question what, if any, contribution it has made to the study of ethics and moral philosophy, subjects that on the continent are often still called – after Kant – practical philosophy. Browsing through graduate-level ethics textbooks, one rarely finds reference to a major philosopher from the phenomenological tradition, let alone a chapter on phenomenology, while in basic introductions to phenomenology or even monographic surveys of the tradition, ethics is largely absent. This neglect is not without its reasons. Three of the five key figures mentioned at the outset – Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty – published little to nothing explicitly on ethics during their lifetimes. Indeed, in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1978 [1946]: 141–83), Heidegger came infamously to dismiss ethical theorizing about how one should or shouldn’t live as akin to the production of ‘-isms’ for a ‘market of public opinion that continually demands new ones’ with so-called thinkers ‘always prepared to supply the demand’ for dogmatic directives that do not even merit description as genuine thought. The two remaining thinkers – at least one of whom Heidegger had in mind penning those remarks – certainly did write on ethics, copiously so, but each poses his own peculiar problem. Sartre wrote so copiously, forever promising a definitive work that would fully unpack the ethical implications of some new turn in his thought, that it is something of a challenge to find where in all the hundred visions and revisions of his finished and unfinished texts ‘Sartre’s ethics’ actually is. Levinas wrote less copiously, yet came to identify all his mature philosophical work as ethics; however, as his conception of ethics is so idiosyncratic, the challenge is rather to find where in ‘Levinas’s ethics’ the actual ethics is. Thus, although most readers – casting their minds over their own ethical vocabularies – will find words they use that were coined by a writer in the phenomenological tradition (existential angst, authenticity, bad faith) or words whose ethical usage is shaped by the writing of some phenomenologist or other

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(empathy, care, recognition), the suspicion may remain that this is all pretty piecemeal and when it comes to a well-defined phenomenological tradition of ethical or moral thought, like Oakland, there is no there there. If not exactly a tradition, a wasteland is certainly one guiding image for the wider intellectual terrain across which one can trace the crisscrossing paths these writers took in their sometimes fraught engagements with ethics; a sparse realist landscape which follows the rough contours of finde-sie`cle debates about the meaning of human existence, stripped bare by the catastrophic experience of two world wars, down to its most abstract, jagged features. Particularly among those primarily interested in social and cultural theory, the course of late nineteenth-century continental philosophy after Hegel is frequently characterized as an idealistic if staunchly antiidealist trajectory via Marx to Nietzsche, animated by the hopes of an age of political revolution and aspirations for social and cultural renewal (Lo¨with 1964). At least when it comes to contemporaneous debates bearing on ethics and moral philosophy, a rather more profound pessimism looms in the background, epitomized by Schopenhauer’s stark claim (1990 [1818]) that life is meaningless and not worth living, as philosophers responded to a pervasive unease about the meaning and value of human existence amid the collapse of earlier theological frameworks, alternatively seeking to affirm some deep metaphysical significance in life itself or to set the study of values on firm epistemological foundations (Beiser 2016). If in 1914 Schopenhauer was the most widely referenced, late nineteenth-century philosopher in continental Europe, Henri Bergson’s life philosophy (2003 [1907]) had come to dominate French thought in parallel to a neo-Kantian turn to values in German practical philosophy. Yet in the wake of World War I, these belle e´poque ventures in moral philosophy sounded passing faint bells. One response, forcefully articulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the closing pages of the Tractatus (1961 [1921]), was to argue that there is simply no human experience which could be solid empirical ground for the ways people have historically talked about good and evil, right and wrong – it is a dimension of life that cannot be put into words, that lies beyond sense – leading to his famous last words, ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. For Wittgenstein in his personal life this was ever an opening towards a certain mysticism when it came to ethics, although he consistently eschewed writing about anything so ineffable well into his late philosophical work. This argument, however, became the basis for his early readers’ logical positivist dismissal of any talk of ethics as experientially unverifiable nonsense – pseudo-statements ripe for demagogues – an attitude which, once transplanted from Austria first to Britain and then the United States, hardened by mid-century into the common sense of analytic philosophy common rooms and was the background against which a post-World War II generation of Anglophone philosophers who wished to talk about ethics had meta-ethically to justify

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themselves (see Ayer 1936, 1959). On the continent, however, the budding phenomenological movement around Husserl promised an alternative. What if a truly rigorous approach to human experience could demonstrate there really are values we are aware of suffusing the world? Rather than a simple-minded positivist approach to experience as so many bits of sense-data which threatened a moral descent into mysticism or nihilism (akin to Kant’s critique of British empiricism), and rather than rework the legacy of Kant’s appeal beyond experience to universal claims of reason which seemed destined to collapse into an empty formalism explaining away any felt tension between values as a relic of faulty reasoning (akin to Hegel’s critique of Kant), what if a close intentional analysis of consciousness and its objects could really lead us to values themselves in all their diversity, could let us grasp the world not as a moral wasteland but as riven between different real values, where philosophy might offer some practical help in a Europe in the years after World War I, for realizing what actually matters when one is torn in a conflict over particular goods, or indeed particular evils? If, building on Husserl’s early unpublished lectures on ethics, a distinctive approach to the study of values began to crystallize around World War I in the so-called realist phenomenological movement among his first students, one of the reasons it is difficult to speak about the subsequent development of a singular phenomenological tradition of ethics is that later debate about these issues did not follow the trajectory so familiar in other domains of phenomenological thought. In the pivotal years leading up to World War II, what emerged as the pressing question was not whether this germinal approach to the intentional analysis of moral experience needed to be extended or radically transformed objectively to reach values in all their diversity, but whether or not reckoning with competing values is what thorough intentional analysis revealed moral experience to be fundamentally about. Still to this day, on the (rare) occasions that historical surveys of phenomenology actually deal with ethical thought, there are often not one but two chapters, evoking two paths that seemed to have diverged by mid-century; one concerned with values, another resolutely not. If there is a single chapter, it tends to tell a jarringly bifurcated story, where a conversation about what matters for a person who feels rent between different objective values found itself transfigured amid the ruin of World War II into a conversation about the nature of freedom and responsibility, about what it truly means to be ethical. Rather than the eerie image of two paths diverging in a wasteland, it is perhaps more helpful to picture how these years haunt phenomenological thought by imagining writers trying to find their bearings from what remained of the scholarly landmarks of pre-World War II phenomenology, some dramatically more battle-scarred than others, scouring the rubble of war-torn experience for what had made a practical difference. Was it that

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some people had heeded what they really felt in their hearts? That despite the most brute conditions, some had dared to choose otherwise than circumstances urged? That instead of looking out for number one, some had responded to the plight of others? To answer yes to one alternative doesn’t entail answering no to the other two, and most phenomenologists have wrestled with ways each of these three aspects of experience matter in how the ethical appears at stake in our lives; because we feel, because we choose, because we are responsive. Yet if such feelings, choices, and responses have struck phenomenologists as what we are grasping for words to fathom when we talk of ethics, each of these aspects of experience when analysed intentionally – as experiences reaching beyond oneself of something really at stake – leads to a different reckoning of what these stakes actually are, of what we are fundamentally concerned about in the ethical dimension of our lives. Not simply beings who perceive objects and know this or that, if it is through feelings that we find ourselves in a world where things actually matter – now attracted, now repulsed by things that ought to be and ought not to be – then isn’t ethics fundamentally a call to weigh the different and potentially competing values we feel animating a world so fraught with ought: is the ethical dimension of life thus reckoning an ordre du coeur, acts of evaluation whereby a person strives to love what really is good and hate what truly is evil? Yet if a person reckons with feelings rather than being driven by them, isn’t that because such a person is actually reckoning with something much more fundamental about who one really is, facing up to the reality that values matter precisely because one finds oneself with a choice in some matter: isn’t the ethical dimension of life rather owning up to the significance of this capacity to choose, reflectively acknowledging the real stakes of one’s freedom in a situation? But if feeling after values seems pretty blind without a reflective subject called to choose, doesn’t grounding ethics in a subjective recognition of one’s own freedom seem a bit empty? Isn’t what matters not my ability to choose but precisely how I find my choice limited by a demand that comes from beyond myself, when I find myself faced not with a choice but face to face with another person, reckoning with someone other than myself: rather than owning up to our freedom, isn’t the ethical dimension of life actually owning up to our responsibilities, where what’s really at stake is what we owe to others? Held together and apart by the moral force of these questions, there are three formative orientations to the ethical that phenomenologists have drawn from the (poorly known) ethical writings of the (well-known) figures mentioned at the outset: a personalistic ethics of value that builds directly on Husserl (2013 [1931]); an existentialist ethics of freedom, which found a champion in young Sartre (2018 [1943]) and a sympathetic critic in Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]); and an ethics of alterity and responsibility, which shudders through Levinas’s life-long project to re-ground all philosophy in ethics as ‘first philosophy’ (1987 [1947], 1999 [1995], 2000

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[1993]). With the exception of Levinas, however, the range of ways each of these key figures struggled with such questions across their life’s work is not readily encompassed by any of these three orientations. That none bar one of these philosophers was ever able to settle on an ethics adequate to their experience of these defining decades of European history is doubtless the reason phenomenology never developed a well-defined tradition of ethical thought. Rather, the legacy these thinkers bequeathed was a philosophical tradition unsettled to its very core by these years – not a phenomenological tradition of ethics but a phenomenological tradition haunted by ethics. Certainly, compared to the other intellectual traditions surveyed in this volume, there is something harrowed to phenomenology, and the starkness of the underlying philosophical anthropologies may well seem gaunt to empirical anthropologists; in fact, hard to stomach. Yet to appreciate the intriguing work phenomenology does today in anthropology of ethics, and also more broadly in the discipline, the riddle is why anthropologists may find themselves at once peculiarly drawn to such a ravaged tradition, yet drawn so often to shave the corners off what is most distinctive in its jagged modernist portrait of being human, airbrushing Picasso. In anthropology of ethics, one clue to this riddle is that anthropologists have rarely found themselves drawn to phenomenology writ large but to one phenomenologist in particular; the one defining figure whose thought cannot easily be located amid the constellation just described, but is rather the moral dark sun, the ethical black hole, around which these questions first came to gravitate. For if phenomenology is a haunted tradition, phenomenologists have come to be uniquely haunted by the ethical stakes of their varying intellectual commitments to the landmark work of this philosopher; and somewhat surprisingly for a discipline as skittish about the personal and the political as ours, anthropologists are drawn not to the ethical reflection of the old philosopher denounced by the Nazis, or the young gentile intellectual involved in the Resistance, or the French soldier imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp, but the man who spent these defining years as a member of the National Socialist Party and came to dismiss ethical reflection as barely even thinking.

The Spectre of Heidegger As a couple of wags once quipped, ‘It’s not always easy being Heideggerian’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 108). This rather raises the question: why begin philosophizing with Heidegger in the first place (Critchley 1992: 9)? When it comes to philosophizing about ethics (Golob 2017), the question is – for three reasons – especially pointed. First: although his Collected Writings would someday stretch to 102 thick leather tomes, Heidegger seldom published or wrote privately about any of the staple

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issues of his day in ethics and moral philosophy. Second: on the rare occasions he did engage with a classic work of moral philosophy, he was typically interested in some aspect of it that he did not think of as moral, and was not only personally uninterested in debates about ethics or morality but, frankly, dismissive of those interested in such matters. Third: given his personal and institutional commitments to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly how he justified these at the time in his own philosophy, there is ongoing controversy over whether such commitments do indeed follow from his philosophy, a debate which is not helped by the fact that Heidegger never publicly addressed this issue after the war and made little reference to it privately (see Wolin 1993). If Heidegger did not count himself very interested in ethics, what was he so interested in that scholars might think to begin philosophizing, or indeed anthropologizing, about ethics from this signally fraught oeuvre? As Heidegger came to see it, his life’s work was devoted to one question and one question only – the meaning of being – or, as he phrased it in the closing words of his inaugural address on succeeding to Husserl’s chair in 1929, ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’ This doesn’t, on the face of it, seem a particularly phenomenological question – what experience can one analyse intentionally to answer that?! – in fact, it sounds decidedly metaphysical, and the emergence of being rather than consciousness as Heidegger’s fundamental concern is probably the most famous instance of the tradition’s defining movement, radically transforming an earlier phenomenological approach to experience really to get ‘to the things themselves!’. During the early 1920s, initially as Husserl’s charismatic teaching assistant, Heidegger became convinced that we can only become reflectively conscious of something because we are already pre-reflectively aware of it. If intentional analysis was to reach the world as it really is given to us in experience, intentionality had to be approached in the first instance not as what theoretically structures our consciousness of the world but what practically structures our activity as a being in the world. Heidegger’s preferred term for a human being, Dasein, literally means being there, which he glosses as thrown projection [geworfener Entwurf] – at once thrown yet able projectively to throw off this thrownness – and his basic contention in Division One of Being and Time is that something can stand out as a matter for conscious reflection only because we already find ourselves somewhere, pre-reflectively delivered over through our moods and appetites in the thick of everyday concerns, yet somewhere we also pre-reflectively understand as a place of possibility, where understanding in the first instance is not so much contemplation but a practical activity, seizing hold of concrete possibilities that present themselves to further these quotidian cares. This is the task Heidegger embarked upon in Division One of Being and Time, the book he published unfinished in 1927 to secure his professorship, but analysing how the world is pre-reflectively given to us in

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experience still seems rather remote from riddling why there is something rather than nothing. In fact, what interested Heidegger about human beings, as he reveals halfway through the book, is that we are the one kind of being who has the capacity to question the meaning of our own being – to ask: what is the point of my existence? – and in Division Two, Heidegger set forth to analyse what someone who chooses reflectively to face up to this question discovers through the experience: that what it means to be human lies in reckoning with time, finding significance in life through living with the awareness that one shall cease to be. If by the end of Division Two Heidegger believed he had begun to make some headway on the meaning of being human, where exactly had that got him with the meaning of being writ large, why there are beings at all: as Husserl apocryphally remarked upon closing the book, ‘is this not anthropology?’ As Heidegger left the podium in 1929 with his final question hanging in the air, it was unclear how he would deliver what he had promised to begin in Division Three, as yet unwritten. Division Three, ‘Time and Being’, would never be written, and in the turn [Kehre] of his thought from being human to being in general – which had begun by the 1930s and would orient the rest of his work – Heidegger sought to show how the meaning of being, although it seems a metaphysical question, involves the overcoming of metaphysics in a history of being: what can really be and what really cannot – including possibilities and limits of human being – are at once revealed and concealed [unverborgen] through the shifting metaphysical horizons of passing world-historical epochs. While Heidegger always insisted on the overarching coherence of his socalled Denkweg – the path of his thought – those influenced by his work have rarely been so convinced, but it shapes why Heidegger personally never counted himself very interested in ethics: any ethical question about how a human should live seemed decidedly secondary to the ontological question of what a human is. A classic work of moral philosophy may occasionally offer insight into the question of what it means to be human, especially if posed as a special instance of the broader question of what it means to be; however, if Heidegger was not just uninterested in but increasingly dismissive of ethics, it was because the answers moral philosophers gave tended to assume some or other metaphysical picture of the world – typically with an essentialist account of being human slap bang in the centre – and were thus too limited to apprehend the history of being, where what it can really mean to be human emerges only in the broader unwinding of what the world unconceals of itself from one epoch to another. Yet despite Heidegger’s own framing, it is not hard to see why, especially for those working in the phenomenological tradition, the publication of Being and Time was seen to have significant import for philosophizing about ethics, both critical and constructive. If intentionality in the first instance is not a structure of consciousness but a structure of being in the world, rather than privileging theoretical knowledge over praxis and

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searching for the ground of ethics, after Husserl, in a deeply felt awareness of values, Division Two could easily be read as opening a new path; grounding ethics in the search for a particular way of being in the world that practically faces up to the question of the meaning of one’s existence, striving – in Heidegger’s terminology – for authenticity. Although not a widely cited reference in anthropology of ethics, the first three chapters of Division Two are thus the classic place to begin to look for any Heideggerian contribution to ethical thought. If it seemed unlikely that there was any experience one could analyse intentionally to solve the riddle of the meaning of being, in fact Heidegger ends his analysis in Division One of how the world is pre-reflectively given to us by singling out just one such experience – anxiety [Angst]. While one fears something or other, anxiety appears strikingly different because the mood is all-encompassing; a dreadful sense that everything – the entire world as we ordinarily encounter it in everyday life – is meaningless, and Division Two sets out intentionally to analyse what it is one is anxious about. In later works, Heidegger analyses a variety of similarly all-consuming moods – the joy of love, profound boredom – but anxiety comes with a particular nineteenth-century provenance that informs Division Two. It was Søren Kierkegaard (2014 [1844]) who first diagnosed anxiety as having such existential import, and he argued that to be so troubled by the meaning of one’s existence involves a capacity to appreciate one’s life as a whole, and this is only possible through apprehension of something which lies entirely outside one’s life. What can this be, Kierkegaard ventured, but a transcendent deity, and he proposed that one can only truly find meaning in a religious mode of life, searching for what really matters at any moment in relation to the overarching significance of one’s existence as a finite whole apprehended with respect to God’s infinite goodness. But there is something else that stands entirely outside one’s life, Heidegger contends, and in the face of which one experiences such all-encompassing anxiety – death. As Wittgenstein remarked towards the end of the Tractatus (1961 [1921]), ‘death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death’, yet while none of us live to experience our death, Heidegger insists that a person lives at any instant with an apprehension of being towards death [Sein zum Tode]. Indeed, rather than lying beyond the bounds of sense, Heidegger ventures it is a uniquely human capacity to appreciate the significance of mortality, which enables any of us to seek what really matters in life as a temporally finite whole, apprehending death as the ultimate horizon. Critically, for death to have this singular, allencompassing significance, what matters is appreciating the unique significance of one’s own [eigen] death. While in Division One, Heidegger had stressed that our ordinary pre-reflective awareness of ourselves is being just like anyone [Das Man], discovering what really [eigentlich] matters at any moment in life involves facing up to this

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unique owned-ness or real-ness [Eigentlichkeit], conventionally translated as authenticity. From the vantage of Division Two, Division One’s analysis of how the world is pre-reflectively given to us in everyday experience is life lived inauthentically, and Division Two re-analyses what it is to live such a life authentically – summoned into the moment by an individual call of conscience, owning up to any singular guilt or indebtedness for how one finds oneself through resolutely resolving to do what one is uniquely called to do, discovering what matters from moment to moment thanks to the overarching significance afforded by the anticipation of one’s own death, realizing there is no ultimate metaphysical meaning of being beyond time. When historical surveys of phenomenological approaches to ethics cleave in two, the fork in the road is Division Two of Being and Time – older conversations about objective values seemed eclipsed and new conversations about what it means to be an ethical subject developed. Indeed, it was through these passages on anxiety, death, and authenticity that Heidegger by mid-century first became well known beyond academic philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic, not least in the United States where Heidegger was often read initially as the evangelist of a secular theology, and a pop interpretation of authenticity appealed at once to a certain can-do strain of American individualism but also intellectuals seeking a foil against which to critique such cultural values (Woessner 2011). Yet as the century drew to its close, academic philosophers, especially those working outside the phenomenological tradition, rarely identified these hundred-odd pages as where Heidegger’s enduring philosophical significance was to be found. Among analytic philosophers – when mid-century preoccupations with philosophy of language were overtaken by concerns in philosophy of mind – Division One of Being and Time emerged as a reference of some interest for those seeking alternately to ground or (more often) critique dominant subject/object models of mind in cognitive psychology, which hold that subjects apprehend objects via cognitive representations. This new-found Anglophone interest frequently resulted in analytic clarifications of Heidegger’s arguments that were in some tension with how Division One had come to be understood both by continental phenomenologists and their critics; in particular, Hubert Dreyfus emerged as Heidegger’s most vocal champion stateside, propounding an anti-representationalist account of pre-reflective perceptual experience of a thing unmediated by mental conceptualization as something or other and generalizing this pragmatist reading of Division One into a theory of mind where reflective subjective awareness is but a ‘derivative and intermittent condition’ for beings habitually engaged in ‘skilful absorbed coping’ with the familiar everyday world around them (Dreyfus 1991). In continental philosophy, however, it was Heidegger’s later writings that exerted a profound influence, particularly in the development of French structuralism among those referred to in English as

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post-structuralists. In critical conversation with Jacques Derrida who rose to fame initially as a virtuoso Heidegger scholar (see the lectures from the 1960s published as Derrida 2016), these writers often understood their thought – in explicit opposition to continental phenomenology – as the true intellectual heir to Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics, where any traditional privilege accorded a conscious human subject as the fons et origo of meaning had to be de-centred through historically informed analysis of what unconsciously structures possibilities of meaning from one epoch to another. If late twentieth-century analytic interpretations of Heidegger can seem rather metaphysical to continental readers, grounded in essentialist claims about what it is to be human, continental interpretations easily appear constructionist to analytic eyes, threatening historically determinist anthropologies. The one thing these late twentieth-century readers tended to agree on (albeit for different reasons) was that Heidegger’s abiding significance lay in turning philosophical attention away from the subject – note, the reverse of continental philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition who had typically identified the historical significance of Being and Time for ethical thought with catalysing a turn to the subject in response to his conception of authenticity. In fact, although by the close of the century no influential reading of Heidegger either side of the Atlantic any longer identified (or dared to) what still mattered most in his work as its positive significance for philosophizing about ethics, there was often a sharp moral edge as to why it mattered that a rival reading of Heidegger was not just wrong but wrong. Looming in the background was the spectre of a second address that Heidegger gave soon after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, stepping to the podium now to assume his own elected position as rector of the university and publicly associating his philosophy with National Socialism. It was an argument that hinged on an appeal to authenticity, extrapolating from how an individual can choose to face up to the meaning of one’s own existence to how a community can own up to its unique historical destiny by resolving to yield to the will of a single Fu¨hrer: not only could one be an authentic Nazi, Heidegger seemed to suggest, but authenticity demanded for his audience at that historical juncture a commitment to Nazism. Safely ensconced in Division One, analytic philosophers of mind such as Dreyfus might feel at some remove from Heidegger’s later fumbling turn from time to history with which continental philosophers dangerously tangled. Meanwhile, securely grounded in the historical notion of truth as unconcealment and world disclosure central to his mature thought, continental philosophers might consider themselves immune to any unresolved metaphysical tendencies in Being and Time that led a less mature Heidegger to go so astray in the ‘Promethean willing’ (Lo¨with 1995: 34) and ‘massive voluntarism’ (Derrida 1989 [1987]: 37) of his rectoral address.

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This portrayal of Heidegger reception by the end of the twentieth century is naturally broad brushstroke. However, it throws into relief a striking feature of anthropological scholarship on ethics and morality that has developed over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. If it is surprising that phenomenology would emerge at all as an influential philosophical source for largely British and North American anthropologists when it is (still) so marginal to Anglophone moral philosophy and ethics, what is even more surprising is that the phenomenologist anthropologists have overwhelmingly turned to Heidegger, whose work even his most fullthroated proponents either side of the Atlantic rarely vouchsafe as a helpful place to begin philosophizing about ethics. Yet among those anthropologists of ethics who avowedly ‘take Heidegger seriously’ (Zigon 2009: 286), the Heidegger one meets through their work is strikingly dissimilar to any conventional portrait of Heidegger’s ethics of authenticity. That said, what is unfamiliar also varies strikingly between serious Heideggerians. If a sympathetic reader may detect more than one Heidegger at work in anthropology of ethics (Mattingly 2014a: xvi), a less sympathetic reader might well remark in some exasperation that what anthropologists are doing involves ‘turning . . . Heidegger on his head’ (Faubion 2011: 85). More strikingly still, when a reader does discern the contour of an authentically Heideggerian move in anthropology of ethics, the argument is frequently traced back to a different philosopher entirely, generally one of two key thinkers at some distance from the phenomenological tradition. Indeed, not only is the connection to Heidegger’s thought disavowed but sometimes it is explicitly denied, even branded anti-Heideggerian. Certainly, amid this work of avowal, disavowal, and forthright denial, anthropology of ethics is peculiarly galvanized by odd readings of Heidegger, both for the defence and the prosecution. But just because readings are seriously odd, that doesn’t mean they aren’t serious, and one can perhaps appreciate what many of these anthropologists are up to with Heidegger as searching, if not for an ethics of inauthenticity, at least for ways to take inauthenticity far more seriously than conventional readings of Heidegger are wont. To chart the range of ways anthropologists defamiliarize Heidegger in their work on ethics, the three divisions of Being and Time offer in rough outline a sort of mental map or guide for further reading. For anyone seeking to take inauthenticity seriously, the most obvious place to look is the beginning of Being and Time where Heidegger analyses how the world is pre-reflectively given to us in everyday experience, and anthropologists who positively identify their approach to ethics with Heidegger tend to ground their work firmly in Division One. Their interpretations, however, pull Division One in two rather different directions, emphasizing now one profile, now the other, of Heidegger’s initial Janus-faced portrait of being human as thrown projection. With the accent on thrown projection, Jarrett Zigon’s writings (2007, 2008,

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2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2014a, 2014b, 2018) offer a sustained empirical test-case for just how much people navigate what matters in their lives without much self-conscious reflection at all. Informed by a Dreyfusard reading of thrown projection as skilful absorbed coping, Zigon in his earliest work finds in Heidegger’s treatment of the way we ordinarily perceive things such as hammers a dramatic analogy for the claim that ethical reflection depends on the existence of moral expectations and dispositions which are ‘normally unquestioned, unreflected upon, and simply done’. More contentiously, he seeks to demonstrate that self-conscious deliberation plays only a minor role in how people actually work through what matters in their lives, largely limited to situations of ‘moral breakdown’ when ‘dilemmas, difficult times, and troubles . . . arise from time to time’. If Zigon locates the moral dimension of our lives in how we find ourselves delivered over through our moods and appetites, more or less skilfully coping with everyday concerns, Cheryl Mattingly (2012, 2013, 2014a, 2014b; Mattingly et al. 2018) hears in Division One a call to investigate how we subjectively understand the situations in which we find ourselves as ‘spaces of possibility’, foregrounding what she terms a ‘first-person perspective’. Putting the stress on thrown projection, Mattingly contends that such subjective understanding is not so much a contemplative stepping back for ‘personal introspection and reflection’ as a practical working through of possibilities akin to ‘experimenting’, and she locates the moral dimension of our lives in how we more or less carefully attend to the potential significance of ordinary situations as ‘moral laboratories’, reaching to ‘create experiences that are also experiments in how life might or should be lived’ (2014a). If Zigon’s notion of breakdown originates in Dreyfus, Mattingly’s laboratories recall Charles Taylor’s (1995) adaptation of Heidegger’s concept of world disclosure after Hegel to analyse spheres of ethical life [Sittlichkeit] in terms of ‘spaces of disclosure’, although Mattingly’s soccer fields and hospital waiting rooms are conspicuously pedestrian compared to the spaces that tend to interest Taylor, such as high mass for a devout Catholic, perhaps, and its transcendent glimpse of the eternal mystery of the incarnation in the daily miracle of transubstantiation. Whatever tensions there may be between their sources in Anglophone philosophy of mind and social theory, however, as a matter of Heidegger interpretation, these original anthropological analytics of moral breakdown and moral laboratories each face challenges as readings of Division One; on the one hand, Heidegger’s insistence that pre-reflective awareness of things such as hammers is fundamentally different from pre-reflective awareness of oneself carefully relating to such things, and on the other hand, his adamance that any subjective awareness of oneself at play in the mundane cares of daily life is of oneself being just like anyone else, Das Man, ‘The They’.

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Whether habitual coping or experimental becoming, what is common to these attempts to take inauthenticity seriously is that they locate the moral dimension of life in the thick of some positive reconstruction of Heidegger’s account of the pre-reflective structures of everyday life at the beginning of Being and Time, largely eliding the book’s subsequent analysis of self-conscious reflection on the meaning of one’s own existence and stripping any treatment of later themes such as temporality from the nuts and bolts of Heidegger’s argument about death, conscience, and guilt. Another approach, however, begins not from affirming some reading of Division One but critically interrogating Division Two, identifying a constitutive role for inauthenticity in the very process of authentically resolving how to live and locating the ethical dimension of our lives in this reflective movement. In ‘implicit contrast’ to authenticity envisaged as a heroic overcoming of everyday inauthenticity, Veena Das’s anthropological approach to ethics as a ‘descent into the ordinary’ (2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2015, 2020) locates the moral dimension of our lives in the down-beat of reflection – not so much a stepping away as a descent or falling back – a ‘mode of being in the world’ that recovers what really matters in the ordinary (2015: 54). Although framed as anti-Heideggerian, Das’s argument echoes the mainline of post-World War II Heidegger criticism on the continent (Lo¨with), which as a corrective to the can-do-ism of pop interpretations of authenticity and a diagnosis of where Heidegger himself erred in his rectoral address emphasized a double movement in Division Two – stepping away reflectively only ever to fall back – and while cardcarrying Heideggerians resist attaching any ethical valence to this movement, the philosopher Stanley Cavell (1979, 1990) drew on this as an interpretative key to read late Wittgenstein’s ordinary-language philosophy not as an intellectual caustic dissolving philosophical pretensions to pontificate about morality but an ethical call to transform how we ordinarily inhabit the world, to face up to what the ordinary really is. Das’s harrowing vision of what the ordinary really is, however, differs markedly from Cavell’s inclination to Harvard Yard screwball (1981): privileging the vantage of South Asian survivors of traumatic violence and the ‘poisonous knowledge’ of the past they bring to the present, Das identifies in ordinary life neither a homely domain of routine and repetition nor inexorable becoming, but an ‘everyday . . . taut with moments of world-making and world-annihilating encounters that could unfold in a few seconds or over the course of a lifetime’. Neither Zigon’s pre-reflective coping nor Mattingly’s experimenting are for Das quite up to the challenge of navigating ordinary life, where what really matters is this chilling insight into its liability to burst apart at the seams, but rather for Das probing the ethical dimension of life involves following a situated movement of reflection – her preferred conceit is ‘knitting pair by pair’ – where there is ‘no real distance’

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between analysing how her slum-dwelling interlocutors strive reflectively to hold their lives together and the philosophical work of a thinker like Cavell ‘in every word he has ever written’ (2007: 221). Avowed or disavowed, if certain Heideggerian tendencies recoil through anthropology of ethics, one clue for the reason is to be found in the explanation these writers themselves offer for their motivation and, for each of the three anthropologists surveyed, one prominently stated intellectual target is the same – Foucault (Zigon 2007: 133; Mattingly 2012, 2014a: xvii; Das 2015: 55, 103–14). Indeed, an intellectual hallmark of anthropological debates about ethics over the last two decades has been the formative role of rigorous engagement with Foucault’s writings from the years immediately prior to his death in 1984; in particular, contentions over the foundational claim that anthropologists have tended to theorize normative dimensions of social life virtually as a ‘science of unfreedom’ in which any ‘experience of freedom is deemed illusory’, and the merits of adapting Foucault’s mode of subjectivation analytic to investigate the ethical dimension of life as ways ‘everyday conduct is constitutively pervaded by reflective evaluation’ (Laidlaw 2014: 44). Such Foucauldian approaches emphasize, as it were, the upbeat of reflection – the stepping back, ‘the motion by which one detaches oneself [from what one does], establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem’ (Foucault 1997 [1984]: 117) – and one straightforward explanation of what’s going on with Heidegger in anthropology of ethics is that there is an intellectual temptation to interpret any approach to ethics which foregrounds experiences of freedom in self-conscious reflection as an ethics of authenticity. On this hypothesis, anthropologists have responded to this opening gambit by exploring a range of paths of resistance to popular interpretations of authenticity, mapped out with peculiar gusto during the last half of the twentieth century by philosophers seeking to read Heidegger against such (mis)conceptions and demonstrate how he takes inauthenticity seriously, anthropologically identifying either some ethical significance in Division One’s account of everyday inauthenticity or specifying a constitutive role for inauthenticity in an ethically charged interrogation of Division Two’s account of self-conscious reflection. An alternative hypothesis is that these dynamics are not based on a (mis)reading of Foucauldian approaches as an ethics of authenticity, but are the not entirely conscious working-out of a play of avowal and disavowal vis-a`-vis Heidegger that emerges from any serious scholarly engagement with what Foucault was up to in his final years. Framed explicitly against ‘soaring’ conceptions of freedom, if Foucauldians do privilege the conceit of stepping back, what they champion in Foucault’s mode of subjectivation analytic is precisely its interpretative purchase for tracing how any ‘reflective motion of stepping back’ not only involves ‘standing somewhere in particular to begin with’ but also stepping back

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somewhere in a particular fashion (Laidlaw 2014: 103), enabling an anthropologist to compare how any experience of freedom is ‘constructed out of the role given to choice in various cultures and in various domains within specific cultures’ (Robbins 2007: 295). Although remote from Heidegger’s everyman account of self-conscious reflection in the face of death in Division Two, key moves that these anthropologists esteem in Foucault’s later writings resonate with characteristics of the much-vaunted turn in Heidegger’s own thought, when, having reanalysed the everyday from the vantage of temporality in Division Two, he struggled with how to reanalyse temporality from the vantage of history in Division Three, an unfinished project which began with a specific focus on the constitutive relation between freedom and normative obligation: Obligation and being governed by law in themselves presuppose freedom as the basis for their own possibility. Only what exists as free could be bound by obligatory lawfulness. Freedom alone can be the source of obligation. (Heidegger 1984a [1928]: 25) With a deep legacy in German philosophy (Kant 2012 [1785]: part 2), if Heidegger’s opening move presages the significance anthropologists have found in late Foucault to critique social theory as a science of unfreedom (Laidlaw 2014), the precise mechanics of Foucault’s mode of subjectivation analytic – moving from a historically framed ontological question, by way of a marked emphasis on deontology and the constitutive role of a certain freedom in striving to realize some obligation, to the ultimate question of what is revealed and concealed in that epoch as fundamentally mattering in the world – resemble a schema of how Heidegger came historically to approach freedom and obligation at times during his later National Socialist years (1979/1982/1984/1987, 1984b) as he turned away from writing Division Three. One tentative suggestion pending further research is that Foucault’s late turn through normativity to freedom is profoundly, if tacitly, shaped by a back-to-front reading of Heidegger’s own turn during the 1930s and 1940s through freedom to normativity, as Foucault reckoned with the significance of his own life’s work as a whole; now avowing (the 1984 US preface to volume 2 of The History of Sexuality (1985)) now disavowing (the French preface, 1983) any resonance between his earliest concerns in the 1950s informed by existential psychoanalysis and his final project, and ultimately revisiting the rather brutal dismissal of his first turn in the 1960s by Derrida for its crude reading of Heidegger (2010, 2011), the thinker he finally, ambivalently acknowledged in his last interview (Foucault 2000 [1984]: 240–1; see Rayner 2007) had been throughout his life ‘the essential philosopher’, an author ‘with whom one thinks, with whom one works, but about whom one does not write’ (my italics). That said, he had to confess, ‘I hardly know Being and Time’.

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Exorcising the Wasteland If, through a glass darkly, a phenomenological spectre is haunting some recent debates in anthropology of ethics that dimly resembles the little magician from Messkirch, it is not the sort of revenant that only appears when summoned by name, rattling the furniture of self-styled phenomenological approaches. Certainly, compared to the range of sources that inform phenomenological approaches to other dimensions of social and cultural life in anthropology, recent phenomenological approaches to ethics in the discipline are distinguished by a remarkably close engagement with Heidegger. Yet, equally striking is the fact that anthropologists of ethics drawing on distinct philosophical traditions well beyond phenomenology in virtue ethics, ordinary-language philosophy, and late structuralism may on occasion find that what feels so exquisitely at issue between them can be analysed in part as ricocheting along the fault-lines of Heidegger’s Denkweg, a spectral grip guiding the planchette round the Ouija as they seek to spell out these intellectual stakes. Whatever the explanation for this Heidegger v Heidegger v Heidegger dynamic – two alternate hypotheses have been hazarded – wider engagement with approaches to ethics and morality in the phenomenological tradition may have a peculiar salience for anthropology of ethics, especially if one understands phenomenology as the tradition of continental philosophy most intimately troubled with what it means ethically to find oneself variously committed to aspects of Heidegger’s work. Framed against the threats of blind subjectivism in moral sentiment theories (identified by Kant) and empty formalism in Kantian claims of reason (critiqued by continental idealists), Edmund Husserl’s life-long conviction was that the ethical dimension of life is substantively grounded in personal acts of feeling and willing but that this does not undermine either the objectivity of values or general validity of ethical reasoning (see Woodruff Smith 2013: 339–82). It was a claim he first articulated in his early lectures on ethics where, building on Brentano, he sought to develop a phenomenological approach to ethics foregrounding acts of affective valuation and reflective evaluation. Distinct from approaches to value developed by phenomenologically informed philosophers elsewhere in Europe (Ortega y Gasset, Gabriel Marcel), Husserl’s value ethics comprised an axiology or study of value that intentionally analysed how objective values and disvalues are apprehended in emotional experiences of valuefeeling [Wertnehmen] and a theory of praxis that analysed how values are ranked, including an account of how a person deals with conflict between values that cannot be clearly hierarchized by choosing to devote one’s whole life to a particular class of values as paramount for one’s personal ethical calling or vocation [Berufung]. By the end of World War I, a threefold commitment to objectivity of values, emotional intentionality, and

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ethical personalism had come to characterize the dominant phenomenological approach to ethics in German philosophy, most famously in the work of Max Scheler (1973). As indicated in Chapter 19 in this volume by Sommerschuh and Robbins, this other phenomenological approach to ethics is beginning to attract the attention of anthropologists, as an alternative and/or complement to those roads taken by way of Heidegger.

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2016. Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Faubion, James D. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferrarin, Alfredo, Dermot Moran, Elisa Magri, and Danilo Manca (eds.). 2017. Hegel and Phenomenology. Berlin: Springer. Foucault, Michel. 1983. ‘Usages de plaisirs et techniques de soi’. Le De´bat, 27: 46–72. 1985 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. 1997 Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954– 1984. Volume 1. New York: New Press. 2000 [1984]. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. Volume 3. New York: New Press: 239–97. 2010. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982– 1983. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2011. The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the College de France 1983–1984. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Golob, Sacha. 2017. ‘Heidegger’, in Sacha Golob and Jens Timmermann (eds.), The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 623–35. Heidegger, Martin. 1962 [1929]. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. 1978 [1946]. Basic Writings. London: Routledge. 1979/1982/1984/1987 [1961]. Nietzsche. 4 vols. New York: Harper & Row. 1984a [1928]. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1984b [1936]. Shelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970 [1900/1901]. Logical Investigations. 2 vols. London: Routledge. 2013 [1931]. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. 2012 [1785]. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 2014 [1844]. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin. New York: Liveright Publishing. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambert, Johan Heinrich. 1990 [1764]. Neues Organon. Berlin: AkademieVerlag. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987 [1947]. Time and the Other. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

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1999 [1995]. Alterity and Transcendence. New York: Columbia University Press. 2000 [1993]. Entre-Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Lo¨with, Karl. 1964. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston. 1995. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. New York: Columbia University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12: 161–84. 2013. ‘Moral Selves and Moral Scenes; Narrative Experiments in Everyday Life’. Ethnos, 78: 301–27. 2014a. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2014b. ‘Moral Deliberation and the Agentive Self in Laidlaw’s Ethics’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4: 473–86. 2016. ‘Accounting for Oneself and Other Ethical Acts: Big Picture Ethics with a Small Picture Focus’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6: 433–47. Mattingly, Cheryl, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (eds.). 2018. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. Oxford: Berghahn. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Rayner, Timothy. 2007. Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience. London: Continuum. Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72: 293–314. Rockmore, Tom. 2011. Kant and Phenomenology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2018 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge. Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1990 [1818]. The World as Will and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waibel, Violetta L., J. Daniel Breazeale, and Tom Rockmore (eds.). 2010. Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961 [1921]. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge.

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Woessner, Martin V. 2011. Heidegger in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolin, Richard. 1993. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Woodruff Smith, David. 2013. Husserl. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’. Anthropological Theory, 7: 131–50. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg. 2009. ‘Phenomenological Anthropology and Morality: A Reply to Robbins’. Ethnos, 74: 282–8. 2010a. Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow. Leiden: Brill. 2010b. ‘Moral and Ethical Assemblages: A Response to Fassin and Stoczkowski’. Anthropological Theory, 10: 3–15. 2011. ‘HIV Is God’s Blessing’: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2014a. ‘Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions for Morally Being-in-the-World’. Ethos, 42: 16–30. 2014b. ‘An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20: 746–64. 2018. Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. New York: Fordham University Press.

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7 Cognitive Science Natalia Buitron and Harry Walker

Introduction Having enjoyed a rapid rise to prominence, the anthropology of ethics and morality remains diverse and vibrant. If still somewhat lacking in systematic intellectual organization – as has been pointed out on more than one occasion (Faubion 2001: 83; Laidlaw 2002: 311; Robbins 2012a: 1) – its very eclecticism can also be read as a sign of vitality. Yet if philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Foucault have been warmly embraced by anthropologists, the latter have also, with just a very few exceptions, largely given the cold shoulder to a vast range of powerful and relevant empirical findings in psychology, economics, and experimental philosophy. As such, anthropologists remain relatively disconnected from some lively cross-disciplinary discussions and debates. The anthropological literature is often ignored by these other disciplines, and its divergent methodologies and theoretical eclecticism can make the task of integration and comparison difficult. This is not to say that anthropologists should adopt the methods, agendas, or theoretical frameworks of the (other) cognitive sciences: far from it. One of our aims in this chapter is to show how anthropology might better strengthen and elucidate, as well as critique, key findings in the scientific study of morality and ethics, and how all sides might be enriched as a result of dialogue conducted on an equal footing. Psychologists might well always complain about the lack of rigour in anthropology’s methods and the lack of transparency in its theoretical process (cf. e.g. Quinn and Strauss 2006: 273), while anthropologists will continue to object that the experiments of psychologists are artificial and disconnected from everyday life (Astuti 2007). Moral psychological and other experimental research characteristically relies on questionnaires, experiments, or games, rather than ethnography, and these all carry with them their own advantages and disadvantages. While often yielding valuable data, the vast majority of such research has of course also been conducted in

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Western educational and post-industrial settings, limiting the applicability of conclusions that are sometimes assumed to be universally valid; and even where cross-cultural research has been carried out, interpretations of unusual findings are often limited by the relatively narrow quality of data obtainable through such approaches. Various cases have already been made for deeper anthropological engagement with cognitive science generally, as have calls for caution and scepticism (see, inter alia, Bloch 2012; Astuti and Bloch 2012; Jenkins 2014; Laidlaw 2016b; Shweder 2012). Wherever one stands on these debates, there are some good reasons why anthropologists and cognitive scientists with an interest in morality and ethics might collaborate in developing a shared research agenda. Whether focussed on evolutionary origins, brain mechanisms, or the cognitive processes informing moral judgements, emotions, and actions, most cognitive scientists agree that our species’ uniquely social and moral capacities have been selected far less by the physical environment than by the complex social environments humans have created over time: what Esther Goody (1995) referred to as ‘social intelligence’. Morality and group living go hand in hand. While insisting that evolutionary processes place constraints on the kind of morality individuals can entertain, most can agree that morality only develops in social context, and that we need to account for how children develop both ‘the morality that is particular to their culture and the morality that is particular to themselves’ (Haidt and Bjorklund 2008: 206). The vast cognitive science agenda spans the evolution of the human species as well as the specific moral and ethical lives of individuals, leaving plenty of room for social and cultural considerations, including, say, the role played by values or the human capacity to shape one’s own moral self, as well as that of others. Intellectual overlap notwithstanding, the effective implementation of a programme of inter-disciplinary research capable of integrating considerations of both cognition and culture has proven a very challenging undertaking. As Astuti and Bloch (2012: 453) point out, cooperation and dialogue are possible, even necessary, but ‘must proceed from the recognition of anthropology’s unique epistemology and methodology’. In a recent attempt to integrate what he refers to as natural and social histories in the study of ethical life, Webb Keane (2016: 5) has also lamented that scholars in each field ‘rarely take advantage of what they could learn from one another’s research. Indeed, they often have principled criticisms of other styles of research, which can reinforce the idea that their findings contradict each other’. Keane rightly emphasizes that neither approach alone can provide a satisfactory account. His book is impressive in its scope and ambition, although the part of the book dedicated to psychological research comprises just one chapter and remains only loosely integrated with those that follow. In her commentary, Astuti (2016) observed that the very idea of ‘dialogue’ between two ‘histories’ raises certain problems of its own: ‘when all is said and done, natural and social histories continue to feature . . . as separate

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processes, which make contact with one another in various ways but which are not constitutive of each other’ (2016: 450). Thus, the cognitive and emotional abilities of infants represent the natural history of ethical life, as natural capacities, but are not part of social history per se: ‘Making them so would mean acknowledging – and finding methodological and conceptual ways of analysing – the dynamic way in which human psychology enables, constrains, and is transformed by the historical process’ (2016: 451). In other words, our aim should be to reveal how human psychology and social history are not two parallel processes to be brought into dialogue, but two windows into one and the same process; the psychological foundations of ethical life are shaped by the historical process and are a constitutive part of it. The challenges involved in achieving such a synthesis should not be underestimated. We reflect on some of the theoretical and methodological obstacles in what follows, as they arose in our own recent journey, as relative outsiders, into a few specific areas of the vast moral terrain mapped out by the various cognitive sciences. Needless to say, we do not attempt here anything like a comprehensive overview. Moreover, our explorations – partial as they are – have very much been shaped by the specific themes and concerns of an ongoing collaborative research project, about which we say more later, focussing on notions of justice and injustice with specific reference to the indigenous peoples of western Amazonia.1 One goal of the project is to strengthen inter-disciplinary collaboration between anthropology and neighbouring disciplines in seeking to understand better the social, cultural, and cognitive bases of people’s judgements around what is right or just. We have been especially interested in how norms of fairness and equality are established, both socially and developmentally, and how judgements of responsibility and wrongdoing are shaped by cultural and institutional factors. As such, these are themes we have prioritized in this chapter. We hope to make clear that, despite the challenges and obstacles, there are myriad ways in which anthropology can profit from deeper engagement with the cognitive science of morality and ethics – and vice versa – on both conceptual and methodological levels. We draw this out firstly with reference to discussions around the evolution of cooperation and its relationship to fairness (see also Kajanus and Stafford, Chapter 24 of this volume), before proceeding to some important recent developments in the moral psychology of wrongdoing.

The Evolution of Morality Contemporary psychological theories of human morality tend to fall into three broad overlapping groups: evolutionary ethics; gene–culture coevolution; and moral psychology (see Tomasello 2016: 137–43). The first two 1

See www.lse.ac.uk/amazonia.

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broadly seek to explain how natural selection might have shaped human morality, focussing specifically on theoretical principles of cooperation as they might apply to the human case (for a useful review, see James 2011). While a number of scholars work at the intersection of both groups, exponents of theories of gene–culture coevolution explicitly highlight the role of cultural selection in evolutionary contexts, proposing that natural selection operates, through culture, at the level of the group, as well as at the more conventional level of individual traits.2 Moral psychology, meanwhile, focusses less on evolutionary processes and more on proximate psychological mechanisms, even if these are still generally assumed (whether explicitly or implicitly) to have evolved as adaptations to ancestral selection pressures. The focus of this latter approach is often on people’s judgements of harm, and a very typical methodology has been to pose explicit questions to participants: about runaway trolley cars, for instance, or incest scenarios (e.g. Cushman, Young, and Hauser 2006; Graham et al. 2011). In recent years, one of the more vibrant topics of research within evolutionary ethics and gene–culture coevolution has been the evolution of fairness. Several theorists have proposed an understanding of human morality as a combination of something like ‘sympathy’ (or ‘empathy’) and ‘reciprocity’ (or ‘fairness’). If the former is foundational when humans cooperate with kin and close friends, a different set of predispositions is typically deemed necessary to support more binding and extensive agreements between strangers. A shared sense of fairness (or justice), in particular, is seen as a prerequisite for large-scale cooperation with non-kin and the creation of reciprocal relations of mutual benefit beyond altruism or self-interest. While the majority of proponents couch their models in terms of evolutionary processes, it is striking to us how often they draw inspiration, whether explicitly or implicitly, from the Western philosophical tradition. The spectre of the social contract lurks behind much work in the genre, as formulated by thinkers ranging from Hobbes and Rousseau through to Rawls. This tradition also reverberates, of course, through a century of anthropological thinking about sociality; it is well known, for instance, that evolutionary concerns underpinned Mauss’s treatise on the gift, and that his preoccupation with the obligation to return reflects a similar concern with the origins of the modern contract, with its capacity to overcome mistrust and the Hobbesian ‘Warre of all against all’ (see Parry 1986: 457; Sanchez et al. 2017). Evolutionary psychologists commonly echo this Maussian emphasis on the obligation to return, but locate its origins in evolved adaptations to ancestral environments rather than in social institutions. Baumard et al. 2

Anthropologists might be interested in Richerson and Boyd (2005); Henrich (2017); Boyd (2018). For useful reviews, see Joe Henrich’s webpage (https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/publications/research-topics-new/cultural-groupselection) and Price (2012); see also West et al. (2007) for a critique.

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(2013), for instance, reformulate the concept of reciprocity in terms of a ‘mutualistic’ theory that humans have evolved a moral disposition to value fairness in mutual relations. This would effectively offer the evolutionary ‘building blocks’ of John Rawls’s theory of justice: a moral sense of fairness motivates people to act ‘as if’ they had agreed on a contract with others. These authors position themselves against the so-called costly punishment approach, which suggests that it is instead a determination to punish uncooperative free-riders, even if it comes at a cost, that best explains the stability of cooperation (see e.g. Fehr and Ga¨chter 2002; Boyd and Richerson 2005). This willingness to punish manifests itself not only when people are themselves subject to cheating or unfairness but also as third parties in anonymous situations (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004).3 Yet according to Baumard et al. (2013), avoidance and social selection are more effective than punishment in sustaining cooperation. That is, co-operators simply desert cheaters and seek out more cooperative partners, and informal sanctions such as gossip and reputation select for a psychological disposition towards fairness. Competition to be chosen as a cooperative partner over millennia made it essential to be seen as reliable and trustworthy, and as willing to share the benefits of joint activities in an impartial, mutually advantageous, or ‘fair’ way (Baumard, Andre´, and Sperber 2013: 63, 68). Those who contribute more should receive more; when someone deserves punishment, this should be proportional to the crime; and so on. For this scenario to work out, individuals must be on the lookout for free-riders or inauthentic co-operators. The authors thus propose that the most cost-effective way to secure a good reputation is to behave as a ‘genuinely moral person’ (2013: 65), though they essentially reduce this to mean someone who behaves fairly towards others. This is a debate where anthropologists could make important contributions by fleshing out the culturally variant meanings of fairness (a project we return to briefly in the final section), or by expanding the possibilities of ‘being moral’ in ways that complement, contrast with, or even exceed the idea that morality equals fairness. Tomasello’s (2016: 139) alternative, mutualistic account of the evolution of morality (which combines elements from each of the three approaches just mentioned) argues that reciprocity simply cannot account for the manifold aspects of human moral psychology, from self-regulating feelings of responsibility, guilt, and obligation to the making of promises and the enforcement of social norms. He emphasizes the role of interdependency rather than reciprocity in mutualistic cooperation: a sense that ‘I depend on others, just as they depend on me’, which in evolutionary terms paves the way for a fundamental sense of group belonging or ‘we-ness’. Caring about the welfare of others, or helping them, are natural parts of 3

See Henrich et al. (2006) for a discussion of substantial cross-cultural variation in willingness to punish and Guala (2012) for ethnographic and ‘in-the-wild’ evidence that contradicts the costly punishment account.

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life and there is no need for actors to weigh up objective costs and benefits. His theory essentially seeks to account for the evolution of human morality in two key stages: in the first, ecological changes some 400,000 years ago forced humans to forage together with others to avoid starvation. This new form of interdependence meant that early humans had to extend their feelings of sympathy for kin and friends – something chimpanzees and bonobos also experience – to other, more distant collaborative partners. But this meant developing new cognitive skills for coordinating and communicating effectively in order to form a joint goal, or what Tomasello (drawing on philosophical accounts by Gilbert, Searle, Tuomela, and others) terms ‘joint intentionality’. Over time, partners in face-to-face joint projects develop shared normative standards and a concern with how they are evaluated by others. They begin to treat one another not merely with sympathy, but with an emerging sense of fairness, motivated by the idea that while two or more parties are necessary for success, any partner could, in principle, play either role. In short, the social outcome of more collaborative foraging was a kind of ‘second-personal morality’ based on a genuine attempt to behave virtuously, in accordance with joint commitments, rather than simply on the strategic avoidance of punishment or reputational attacks (Tomasello 2016, 2018). The second stage in the evolution of morality occurred some 150,000 years ago, according to Tomasello, when groups became larger and more complex and competition between them intensified. At this point, the challenge for modern humans was to scale up from a life of interdependent collaboration with well-known partners to life in a larger cultural group with all kinds of interdependent groupmates (Tomasello 2016: 85). At this point, sympathy towards known partners expanded into a more general form of group loyalty. The cognitive skills that underpinned joint intentionality meanwhile transformed into ‘collective intentionality’, which enabled the creation of conventional cultural practices, roles, and norms, which are detached from individuals. Human morality shifts from being essentially local and face to face to being group-minded and ‘objective’, in the sense of being orientated towards more general, normative ideals of right and wrong (2016: 87). While accounts such as these can be compelling on their own terms, we would like to draw attention to the strong teleological dimension: an abiding sense that morality has evolved in a clear and linear direction to take the form of ever more abstract, general, and impartial moral norms. Also left largely un-interrogated, in what can sometimes take the form of ‘just-so’ scenarios, are assumptions that early human groupings were egalitarian and that social and moral complexity are functions of increased scale and hierarchy.4 The tendency to associate progressive ‘stages’ of 4

For a critical perspective of this narrative of social evolution informed by anthropological and archaeological findings, see Graeber and Wengrow (2021).

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morality with an increasing capacity for abstraction and impartiality is particularly evident in Tomasello’s narrative, according to which the evolution of fairness in the human species largely mirrors its ontogenetic development at the level of the individual. Thus, young children only begin to show ‘group-mindedness’ and ‘collective intentionality’, and the propensity to enforce social norms on others, after around three years of age, which is well after they become capable of forming simple joint goals with others (Tomasello et al. 2012: 685). Toddlers first display a tendency to collaborate and act pro-socially towards other specific individuals (‘secondpersonal morality’), and only gradually (especially during their school years) begin to develop a full-blown concept of fairness, or an impersonal, ‘norm-based’ morality (Tomasello and Vaish 2013). The latter transcends particulars, insofar as children’s judgements increasingly articulate objective standards of behaviour. What matters now is less the opinions of individuals and their specific relationships and more the opinion of the group, or some other, larger entity (such as the group’s gods). When children begin to understand that norms apply to everyone in the group, they enforce them from a third-party stance, even when they themselves are not directly involved or affected by the norm violation (see also Fehr et al. 2008; Robbins and Rochat 2017). It is illuminating to consider these arguments in light of recent developments in the anthropology of ethics and morality. A key contribution of this literature has been to foreground questions of freedom and agency; it has been proposed that moral action can only take place when actors are free reflectively to adopt and cultivate a moral stance. It is precisely this self-reflective process of decision-making, whether in critical moments of everyday self-cultivation or situations where actors willingly reproduce conventional moral norms, which distinguishes the ethical domain from group morality (Laidlaw 2002, 2014). This has led to a re-evaluation of the significance of agentive moral reproduction, as well as moral doubt, moments of breakdown, and inconsistency in moral experience (Robbins 2007; Zigon 2007; Cassaniti and Hickman 2014). These developments pose some problems for the accounts of moral development discussed earlier, and their assumption of a species-specific shift towards ever more objectivity and impartiality. This is particularly the case insofar as these accounts conflate the moral with the collective, thereby removing ethics from the picture. ‘Morality’ tends to figure primarily as an instrument of social control for encouraging cooperation and ensuring the group’s survival. A closely related abiding assumption of much of the cognitive science literature is that social groups tend to be stable, homogenous, and cohesive. And yet a very significant contribution of anthropologists over the past fifty years has been to move beyond this tendency to reify social groups, and the assumption that pre-modern, small-scale societies are collectivistic wholes (see e.g. Collier and Rosaldo 1981; Strathern 1988; Rapport and Overing 2000: 334; Stasch 2009). A charitable reading of

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Tomasello would see his theory as helping to explain precisely how such stable roles and collectives, or what Bloch (2012) calls ‘essentialised groups’, might come to be imagined; and yet, being able to imagine and even identify with the group need not entail group loyalty of the kind presupposed. Unfortunately, Tomasello’s engagement with social anthropology is very limited: despite the recent flourishing of anthropological theorizing, he resorts quite explicitly to Durkheim’s views on morality and religion in order to explain how humans sacralize cultural institutions and values (see e.g. 2016: 105, 131). Accordingly, his analysis of morality relies heavily on concepts of conformity, social control, and moral codes – all of which betray a certain reduction of human moral life to the study of moral rules. A similar propensity may be discerned in other recent work. Curry et al. (2019) present evidence that seven forms of cooperative behaviour – specifically, helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession – are seen as morally good virtually everywhere one might care to look. Yet these authors show little interest in moral phenomena that do not fulfil and may even clash with cooperative goals: values of autonomy or purity, say, or ideals of a worthwhile life that prescribe aesthetic practices, without fulfilling any apparent social function (Wong 2019; see also Gellner et al. 2020). On the other hand, to define the ‘morally good’, the authors sometimes appear to conflate the virtuous and the obligatory, or values and rules. As Faubion (2001: 83–4), among others, has pointed out, such an analytical strategy dissolves value into obligation and the desirable into the normative. The danger here is that the rich stuff of ethics which Tomasello seeks to explain on an individual, psychological level – responsibility, virtuosity, and feelings of obligation, resentment, and guilt and the like – is lost in the abstract language of imperatives: in a vision of human life lacking in ethical complexity, decision, and doubt (see Laidlaw 2002: 315). That is to say, the reflexivity characteristic of ethics, along with fundamental questions about how one should live (rather than simply what one should do next), is collapsed into highly normative moral systems. Evolutionary theories often appear to provide a rational ground for the progressive evolution of morality. People’s interdependence on one another, for instance, makes it rational for individuals to be concerned about their groupmates’ welfare (Tomasello 2018: 662). Other psychologists even propose normative accounts which defend the pre-eminence of reason in human morality: Bloom, for example, argues that what makes us distinctively human is our capacity to strive beyond empathy, which can actually lead to bad decisions and outcomes, through the use of reason and cost–benefit analysis and by drawing instead on ‘a more distanced compassion and kindness’ (Bloom 2016: 39, 239; see also Greene 2013). Of course, in this case, human reason works against the evolved dispositions

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rather than being the foundation of morality. Yet in envisaging more advanced moral stages in terms of a shift towards more objectivity and reason, such theories do risk unwittingly importing what we might well describe as a rationalist (and probably also ethnocentric) bias (see also Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). In the context of developmental psychology, the assumption that impartiality reflects a more advanced form of moral reasoning was critiqued forcefully by Gilligan (1982) in her foundational work for what became known as the ethics of care. Gilligan was responding to Kohlberg’s (1981) influential paradigm of moral development, which was principally concerned with the emergence of a sense of justice: in the first, ‘preconventional’ level, children are solely concerned with the self, as they have not yet internalized social conventions; only by the third, ‘postconventional’ level do ever more principled individuals gradually come to perceive themselves as separate entities from society. They are capable of exercising abstract reasoning in order to evaluate social rules and laws and may choose to diverge from the latter to follow their individual conscience, or respect universal principles such as liberty and justice. Gilligan observed that her female subjects in particular, however, were often more concerned with the maintenance of social relationships than with enforcing general moral principles. The elevation of the latter to a later stage of development, in her view, was the product of male bias, and highly problematic (see also Mattingly and McKearney, Chapter 22 of this volume).5 Some recent work in moral psychology does, to some extent, offer a corrective to the stage-like, rationalist emphasis of evolutionary accounts of morality. Jonathan Haidt, in particular, has developed a compelling case that intuitions come first and reasoning second: that an individual’s moral judgements are best understood as deriving from the sudden insights or gut reactions they experience when confronted with moral dilemmas. The elaborate reasoning people might offer in response to questioning is ultimately a justification of their intuitions. Reasoning is not entirely discounted but has a distinctly social rather than individual character, playing a causal role ‘only when it runs through other people’ (Haidt and Bjorklund 2008: 193), when a person engages in moral discourse in response to others. Even when people reflect privately, they benefit from imaginary role-taking, putting themselves in others’ shoes to generate an emotional response. That this proposal supports a kind of moral pluralism increases its appeal for anthropologists. People everywhere may recognize the pull of 5

It is worth noting that Sarah Hrdy (2009) offers a female-centric riposte to (implicitly masculine) theories of cooperative hunting or foraging, privileging instead the pressures of alloparenting: the need to draw on the help of grandmothers, older siblings, and others to raise offspring made humans better at monitoring the mental states of others and selected for greater cooperation and altruism. The broader question still remains, though, how cooperation and empathy were extended beyond the local (alloparenting) group.

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a plethora of moral truths, even though only some are fully activated or institutionalized locally. The value of justice, for instance, may be recognized in some form by everyone, even though some people may place greater importance on other values – care, say, or duty – which they can appeal to in sophisticated and original ways to resolve moral dilemmas (Shweder et al. 1997; Shweder and Haidt 1999: 363). This points to the relevance of studying the dynamics of everyday social interaction as well as the forms of ethical objectification, an area where anthropological research can make significant contributions (see Keane and Lempert, Chapter 9 of this volume; Keane 2016). This approach also resonates with a number of anthropological accounts of ethical life that study hierarchies of value, or differences between monist and pluralist societies (Sommerschuh and Robbins, Chapter 19 of this volume; Robbins 2012b), as well as those that connect moral variation to cross-culturally conflicting conceptions of personhood and the moralization of emotion (Cassaniti and Hickman 2014).

Experiments in Fairness The development of culturally or historically specific moral dispositions has been a focus of theories that emphasize the role of social institutions over evolved psychological dispositions. Proponents of gene–culture coevolution, concerned more with the selective pressures facing different social groups, have sought to uncover the particular institutions or cultural norms that give rise to a concern with fairness: participation in large communities but also world religions, penal institutions, and market integration (e.g. Henrich et al. 2000). These approaches support the claim that the preoccupation with fairness and associated concepts based around rights, justice, and the avoidance of harm all reflect a distinctly Western, liberal form of morality (see also Haidt 2012 and Shweder et al. 1997). They also resonate closely with anthropological evidence that world religions such as Christianity help people to envisage and sustain large, anonymous communities (e.g. Whitehouse 1998). In support of this theory, Henrich and his collaborators turn not to ethnography but to economic experiments, such as the Dictator and Ultimatum Games, which reveal how individuals behave when asked to distribute money with a partner following a given set of rules (for a critical overview of the field, see Guala 2012). One general finding of such experiments is that participants – in Euro-American contexts – are mostly surprisingly ‘cooperative’, willing to give resources to others even when the rules of a particular game allow them to be as selfish as they like; and often appear to value fairness for its own sake, to the extent that they would rather forgo monetary gain than be treated unfairly, or even see someone else treated unfairly. When Henrich et al. (2010) carried out these

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experimental games among small-scale, forager-horticulturalist populations, however, they observed some quite different patterns: in contrast with the ‘fair-minded’ behaviour found among members of industrialized societies, for instance, many Amazonian players displayed little willingness to provide an equal share, a low expectation to be treated fairly, and almost no desire to punish unequal divisions (see also Gurven and Winking 2008: 185–6). In short, they appeared to display a radically different sense of fairness to that found in the industrialized West, but one also – it should be pointed out – squarely at odds with the ‘ethic of sharing’ so often assumed to characterize such subsistence-orientated societies. Especially in the absence of more detailed ethnographic data, it can be difficult for anthropologists to know how to interpret these kinds of results. We can readily surmise that participants asked (and usually paid) to participate in such experiences may face decisions and scenarios, not to mention forms of social interaction, that are unfamiliar to them and which do not really replicate the options and strategies available in reallife cooperative dilemmas (see Baumard and Sperber 2010; Guala 2012). Different cultural conventions or ethical commitments around ownership, work, and merit, for instance, could presumably influence people’s judgements during experimental trials, but their importance could only be drawn out if the interpretation of experimental results is accompanied by relevant ethnography. One productive way forward might be to pay more careful attention to the different spheres of social life in which distribution actually takes place, and to use these kinds of experiments in a more naturalistic way, as a methodological tool that augments but does not replace ethnographic study.6 Games might offer new insights into non-game behaviour, while existing ethnographic evidence should be used to probe psychological findings, and perhaps to refine and relativize the concepts of fairness deployed in experimental contexts. Consider, by way of illustration, the account of distributive justice that emerges in the following episode, as recounted by Crocker for the Brazilian Canela: Another aspect of caring among the Canela is the leaders’ concern that everybody receive a fair portion in any distribution. The apparent sense of fairness and justice is supported by feelings of concern for the person who does not obtain her or his portion or who does not receive anything at all. For example, it is easy to cut and apportion meat and to divide rice or manioc flour into as many piles as necessary for each individual or family to receive its due. However, some shared items are not so easily apportioned. When I was trading with iron implements, it was not possible to divide a machete or an axe 6

An interesting option, though one that could raise ethical questions, would be to conduct what Harrison and List (2004) call ‘natural field experiments’; in these researchers manipulate one variable of interest in an environment that is otherwise left intact so that participants remain unaware that they are participating in an experiment.

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among several people who might want it. There could not be an iron tool for everybody, only one or two for each family, as was agreed to in a tribal council meeting. However, I was considered unfeeling if I did not have items of this sort for certain individuals who felt they must have them, even if this exceeded their family’s quota as I had set it. If Canela individuals presented themselves to me and wanted an item strongly enough, fairness was not of primary importance; concern and feeling for other people came first. Rules previously agreedupon between the council of elders and myself had to be broken because iron items could not be supplied to everybody; the degree in intensity of the requester’s feelings would require that he be given the axe he wanted. (Crocker 1990: 185) In this particular ethnographic context, we might propose that although a morality of fairness does appear to exist, it is counterbalanced (or perhaps even encompassed) by something like a morality of sympathy, or an ethics of care. Latent here too is a respect for other principles of distribution beyond fairness or merit, such as need. To the extent that considerations of fairness underlie distributive decisions, they may still be based on radically different value systems. Rather than striving towards impartiality or a concern with merit on objective grounds, fairness in Amazonia might operate as one component of people’s concern for others: one can be fair, we might say, only by keeping sympathy close to heart.

Wrongdoing: Intentionality and Responsibility Shifting gear now to moral psychology, the relationship between moral evaluations and ascriptions of intentionality is one important field of enquiry in which extrapolation from studies carried out in Western cultural settings has proven challenging, but also laced with some intriguing possibilities for dialogue with ethnography. How intentionality is ascribed in a given cultural context, as Keane (2016: 117) points out, tends to affect whether an action is considered morally significant, who bears responsibility, and to whom it is relevant. Psychological research has shown that, generally speaking, intentional harms – those done on purpose – are judged more harshly than unintentional harms and as more deserving of punishment (e.g. Cushman 2008; Young et al. 2006). Rather counterintuitively, however, it has also been shown that the line of influence also runs in the other direction: it is not simply the case that people attribute moral responsibility for an act and its consequences – and thus whether (or the extent to which) it is deserving of blame or praise – based on a prior assessment of intentions. Research on the so-called Knobe effect (described further later) has shown that bad outcomes are more likely than good

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outcomes to be judged as brought about intentionally (e.g. Knobe 2003). The very concept of intentional action that ordinary people hold is not neutral, as philosophers have long held, but fundamentally moral in nature. Findings such as these are sometimes linked to ideas of a universal and biologically based human morality, or ‘universal moral grammar’ (e.g. Mikhail 2007). Unsurprisingly, however, most research has been carried out among those peoples memorably if contentiously characterized as ‘WEIRD’ (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; cf. Henrich et al. 2010), leaving open questions about the extent to which such findings will hold across a more diverse range of cultural settings. Western philosophical reflection on the nature of meaning and action has tended to place great emphasis on intentionality while assuming this to be a property of the individual actor, to be found within the self; anthropologists, by contrast, have been more sceptical of the idea that individual intentionality plays the same role everywhere, if indeed it plays any role at all (Keane 2016: 118; see also Duranti 2015; Trundle, Chapter 11 of this volume). This has been a theme in recent anthropological discussions of the tendency prevalent in many Oceanic societies, but also elsewhere, to downplay knowledge of the mental states of others: what has been referred to as the ‘doctrine of the opacity of other minds’ (e.g. Robbins and Rumsey 2008). There are suggestions that this too may connect with considerations of morality and ethics: Stasch (2008), for instance, has argued that West Papuan Korowai people’s public disavowal of knowledge of what others might be thinking stems from a moral and political concern not to impinge on their personal autonomy. Studies in experimental psychology have begun to explore more systematically the role of intentions in moral evaluations. One recent crosscultural study found that while intentions appear to play a significant role in people’s moral judgements in some places, they appear to play little or no role elsewhere (Barrett et al. 2016). While the perceived intentions or motivations of agents did affect peoples’ moral judgements in all ten societies studied, the degree to which such factors were viewed as excusing varied significantly, as did the types of norm violation for which these were relevant (Barrett et al. 2016: 4692). These authors suggest that while theory of mind is universally available as a resource for moral judgements, it is not always used in the same way, if it is used at all, in each population or even in each domain of action within a given social setting. They have little to say, however, about possible reasons for the societallevel variation they observed, hoping simply that ‘future research might reveal a relationship between the scale and structure of human societies and their norms of moral judgement’ (Barrett et al. 2016: 4693). Of potential relevance, they speculated, might be such factors as whether disputes are adjudicated by third parties on the basis of explicit standards of evidence – which might lead to an elaboration of norms involving reasons for

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action, the presence or absence of witchcraft (where ‘the overactive attribution of malevolent feeling . . . can lead to cycles of violence and revenge’), or notions of corporate responsibility in which members of a group – say, a kin group – are held responsible for the wrongdoings of individual members.7 Another recent study (Robbins et al. 2017) sought to test the crosscultural purchase of the Knobe effect, mentioned earlier: the finding that people are more likely to construe the foreseen side-effect of an action as having been brought about intentionally when that side-effect is morally bad rather than good.8 In Knobe’s original studies, participants were presented with one of two almost identical scenarios, each involving a board chairman who makes a decision to press ahead with a project that will increase company profits, while emphatically claiming to have no interest in its entirely predictable and foreseen consequences: ‘harming’ the environment, in the first scenario, or ‘helping’ it in the other. Knobe found that a sizeable majority of participants, when presented with the ‘harm’ scenario, felt that the chairman caused that harm intentionally, while only a small minority, when presented with the ‘help’ scenario, felt he had helped it intentionally. Adapting and translating these scenarios into a range of different cultural and linguistic settings, Robbins et al. (2017) found that this intriguing finding of asymmetry in intentional action attributions was in fact supported in most of the eight populations they studied. However, it appeared inverted in Samoa (and, to a lesser extent, in Vanuatu), where participants were asked to judge the actions of a village high chief who decides to plant a new crop that will make money but have either a positive or negative effect on the environment. Here, the chief’s actions were more often seen as intentional when they helped, rather than harmed, the environment. The authors of the study took this to imply that participants in the South Pacific tend to ascribe intentionality in very different ways to those in other parts of the world. In seeking to interpret their findings, the authors noted that the meanings of high-ranking status may be quite different in this cultural context, as would be the consequences of blaming a high-status individual.9 In particular, it may not be the prerogative of a commoner to accuse a highranking chief of wrongdoing. The example clearly shows how ethnography is really needed to support the interpretation of such experimental findings. Work by Duranti (2015), for instance, on how intentionality attributions vary with factors such as the discursive context and social status would appear very helpful, not just in order to develop a fuller 7

See Laidlaw (2014: 179–212) for discussion of very similar themes.

8

For an overview of the considerable literature on the Knobe effect, and the various competing explanations, see Cova (2016).

9

James Laidlaw (personal communication) has suggested too that villagers might well see high chiefs in a different ethical light to the way board chairmen are seen among US undergraduates; and it would be interesting to re-run the experiment in the United States with the chairman replaced with a ‘community organizer’.

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explanation of these findings but also to probe the areas where further, more targeted research would be most promising and interesting. Studies such as these also bring to light an important methodological question concerning the extent to which participants – in particular, those in relatively ‘exotic’ locations, where such experiments are highly unusual – can be relied upon to interpret the questions as intended by the experimenter, and to offer answers guided purely by their moral intuitions. This is an issue taken up by Astuti (forthcoming) in a recent reflection on the prospects for combining the research methods of anthropology and psychology. When she tried to determine whether Vezo (Madagascar) adults would display the Knobe effect, using suitably modified stories, she found that people reasoned on the basis of their prior experiences and what they considered pragmatically appropriate in the circumstances, rather than on the more purely logical basis intended by the questioner. Much like the Samoans discussed earlier, Vezo people were reluctant to punish a wrongdoing farmer in one vignette, not because he was undeserving of punishment per se but because they knew that attempting to punish such a rich and powerful person would only get them into trouble. On the other hand, they attributed intentionality to an agent in the help condition – in this case, a trader who, in pursuit of his profits, improved the fish stock as a side-effect, even though in the story he claimed not to care about improving the fish stock.10 Vezo people reasoned that, regardless of what the story explicitly told them, such a trader would make more money by having more fish around to trade, and so would certainly want to cause the stock to increase. Astuti suggests that this kind of effect – which she refers to as the ‘incursion of the social’ into the experimental setting – is ultimately inevitable and that researchers should embrace it rather than attempting to eradicate it. Many of the claims made by psychological cross-cultural research must be treated with caution, insofar as it is not always clear precisely what question is being answered in a given experimental setting. For instance, the intuitions of Samoans as to whether an agent acted intentionally may not differ much, in the end, from those of people elsewhere, though it may certainly be the case that concepts of intentionality are less salient generally, or less likely to figure in everyday discourse. The professed disinclination to mind-read apparently common in the region only highlights the need for further ethnographic research on how people learn to construe the nature of the mind in culturally specific ways. Conversely, experimental research can help to reveal how understandings of mind or intention also interplay with social considerations such as authority and status. 10

In Knobe’s original example, when the environment is helped only as a foreseen side-effect of the actions of a chairman pursuing profits, study participants tended not to see that helping as intentional.

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This all points to an interesting nexus of collaboration with recent anthropological theorizations of intentionality and responsibility. Luhrmann (2020) has proposed that one important dimension along which cultural models or ‘theories’ of the mind vary is the extent to which they are regarded as ‘bounded’ or ‘porous’. For instance, it appears that while in places like Amazonia and Melanesia, the minds of others are often considered ultimately unknowable, they are also thought of as porous, and as susceptible to external attack or capture. These premises sit in interesting tension with one another, as they give shape to a strong form of individualism that is at the same time hyper-relational, and which likely inflects how personal responsibility is understood in each region. While autonomy and freedom in action are highly valued, attributions of responsibility frequently draw attention to a chain of intentional agents that extend, blur, or distribute the locus of agency and authority beyond or within the individual (cf. e.g. Laidlaw 2014: ch. 5).

Pathways to Dialogue In this final section, we illustrate some of the preceding ideas with a brief reflection on some of the challenges we have faced in our own ongoing research into concepts of morality and justice in Amazonia. Over the past few decades, the native peoples of western Amazonia have experienced an extraordinary and rapid transition from a highly mobile lifestyle based in small, fluid, politically autonomous family groups to a relatively sedentary life in large, nucleated communities, whose members are no longer primarily related through kinship. This shift has occurred primarily in response to state intervention and expansion, and it has led to radical changes in redistribution and exchange practices, mechanisms for dealing with and resolving disputes and disagreements, ideas of responsibility and accountability, and a range of other facets of moral and political life. In requiring people to cooperate with non-kin in ever larger communities, we felt that in some ways these transformations appeared to restage hypothetical scenarios for the evolution of fairness as a function of increasing scales of cooperation, providing an exceptional opportunity for the empirical study of how morality and ethics are shaped by wider social conditions and constraints. Thus, we were interested in exploring how people’s moral judgements were affected by their degree of integration into markets and the state, and the logic of the ‘community’: how such integration might be prompting forms of moral reasoning based less on the logic of interpersonal relationships, for instance, and more on abstract principles such as fairness. In one recent study, designed and implemented in collaboration with Rita Astuti and Gre´gory Deshoulliere, native Shuar and Urarina participants (based in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon, respectively) were

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presented with three short vignettes, each describing a particular moral dilemma involving a basic conflict of interest or tension between the potentially conflicting values of ‘kinship’ on the one hand and ‘community’ on the other, which is to say the formal, legally recognized group which effectively stood in for formal rules, roles, and the logic of the state. The vignettes were structured around the themes of ‘shaming’, ‘helping’, and ‘cooperating’, respectively, and we assessed each participant’s degree of integration using a separate survey comprising a series of questions and a short life history. Rather than present results here, we wish to draw attention to some methodological considerations. Firstly, we will look at the design of the vignettes themselves. This proved a key challenge, but also central to what we saw as the need for ethnography in experimental design. We were dissatisfied with the way many cross-cultural studies have employed vignettes with little seeming relevance to, or grounding in, the cultural context. As already noted, a key issue for much cross-cultural experimental research, especially when assessed from the standpoint of anthropology, is its external validity. Rather than inventing artificial scenarios, then, we drew on our own extensive fieldwork experience to come up with vignettes based on actual moral dilemmas that we knew one or more of our interlocutors had had to negotiate. Because the vignettes were being presented in two different populations – among the Ecuadorian Shuar and the Peruvian Urarina – we had to ensure that they were intelligible in each context. This was harder than we initially expected: we found that what was eminently plausible in one context no longer made for a compelling narrative in the other. This certainly made us wonder about the studies in which a single vignette was told in societies from very different parts of the world. To ensure comparability across the field sites, then, we had to compromise a little on the ‘catchiness’ of the dilemma in each of the contexts, as we note later. Ensuring a reliable translation was also an interesting challenge, but quite revealing in its own right. We realized how many slight changes of meaning were virtually inevitable when translating to a language so different from English. For example, the question, ‘what should Juan do?’, when put in Urarina, could also be interpreted as ‘what could Juan do?’ or ‘what might Juan do?’. Expressing explicitly and concisely the quality of obligation inherent in the English ‘should’ did not seem possible in the Urarina language, which relies on the irrealis mood to express conditional possibilities. Incidentally, a similar kind of challenge confronted our earlier attempt to reproduce the Knobe effect, discussed earlier, insofar as there seemed to be no term or concept for ‘deliberately’ or ‘intentionally’ in Urarina, and no way to express concisely the idea of a difference between intended and foreseen harm. Despite these and other difficulties, however, the Knobe effect was, in the end, discernible in the results: somewhat to our surprise, Urarina did appear more predisposed to ascribe intentionality to acts they considered blameworthy than to those they

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considered praiseworthy. That said, the difference between intentional and accidental harm seemed overall less relevant to participants than whether a given action or norm violation could and should have been avoided. Further difficulties confronted our translations of other core concepts of the study, such as ‘the community’, or ‘the will of community members’: both entered the political vocabulary of the area only after the creation of state-recognized legal communities in the 1960s and 1980s. While commonly used today when people speak in Spanish, these terms do not have precise equivalents in the Indigenous languages. The Shuar word to denote community, irutkamu, nominalizes the verbal root irur-, which expresses the action of gathering and reuniting; it does not specify the number of people gathered, which can range from a small family group to a whole village. This minor detail highlights the risk of reifying group life or generalizing the justifications people provided about meeting social expectations to the whole community as an objective entity. Another acute challenge surrounded the recruitment of participants. While the sample sizes required for statistically significant results can be obtained relatively straightforwardly when one is based in a city, or where people can easily drop in and out of a lab, this is far from the case in a remote Amazonian village, where the population density is very low, and people are generally eager to get on with tasks that typically take them far from the village. Recruiting just twenty-four participants to sit and listen patiently to vignettes proved a logistical challenge for a lone fieldworker in a remote location, as well as a drain on our social capital; and yet this is considered an extremely small sample size by the standards of mainstream psychological research. It also means trends in people’s responses must be very pronounced if any statistically relevant effects are to be claimed. Moreover, taking part in the study itself – though only requiring around thirty minutes of people’s time – seemed to be quite onerous, even intimidating for some, especially those who had not attended school, and who found responding to questions one after another to be an extremely unusual and potentially threatening format of interaction. Add to this the difficulty of finding ways to work in isolation with just one person at a time, in order to avoid the ‘contamination’ of results. On occasion we had to devise ingenious ploys to distract curious husbands and wives from overhearing (and potentially intervening in) the discussions. We came close to exhausting our reservoirs of goodwill, and were it not for the fact that we had already established good rapport with all participants during prior fieldwork, we doubt we would have persuaded people to engage seriously and constructively with the task. The responses people gave to the vignettes turned out to be somewhat more homogenous than we had initially expected. We found during piloting that some moral dilemmas were consistently answered in a particular way – that they were perhaps not really ‘dilemmas’ as we had imagined,

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insofar as the answers seemed to be relatively obvious to a majority of respondents. This emphasized to us the need for a very lengthy piloting phase, as even with our considerable knowledge of the cultural context, getting the stories ‘just right’ so as to probe moral intuitions required extensive tweaking and refining. That said, however, even where people gave very similar responses to the main questions, their justifications varied much more widely. In a sense, at least for some parts of the study, people’s justifications – solicited outside the main experimental framework – turned out to be more interesting than the official experimental results themselves, for they revealed people’s thoughts about how various kinds of problems could or should be solved. In the ‘helping’ dilemma, for example, we asked people whether the treasurer of the village should steal community money designed to celebrate the anniversary of the community, in order to take his father to hospital after the latter was bitten by a snake. Most respondents said the treasurer should indeed take the money, because saving his father’s life was a matter of emergency. However, justifications differed widely, and often in accordance with state and market integration. For instance, when asked how villagers would respond once they found out that the treasurer had stolen the money, one elderly unschooled Shuar woman, who had scored low on our scale of state/market integration, replied that ‘villagers won’t say anything, they will understand because they help one another when illness strikes, and because they love each other’. By contrast, a middleaged male Shuar schoolteacher who had scored highly on integration replied that ‘villagers will be upset and demand that the treasurer repays the money’, emphasizing that the protagonist should first try every avenue to seek approval from the president of the community. When asked what to do if the treasurer did not have the money to repay his debt, he continued: ‘To avoid problems and live well, then he must work for the community to pay off his debt.’ On the face of it, this kind of difference between the older woman’s appeal to love and understanding and the younger man’s appeal to a principle of fair exchange would seem to bear out Henrich et al.’s hypothesis that higher participation in market and state institutions increases a concern with fairness. Upon closer inspection, however, respondents in both cases emphasized emotional states (love, upset) and a concern with maintaining social relationships (helping one another, living well). In fact, a common trend in this study was that compliance with general standards or rules was typically justified in terms of sustaining relations and avoiding disharmony. This returns us to our suggestion earlier that fairness in an Amazonian context might operate as one component of a more overarching ethics of care, or an ethics of keeping the peace, rather than as a more ‘advanced’ achievement of human morality. We return again to the need for studying moral dispositions like compassion and fairness ethnographically, alongside any formal experiments that

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might take place. We have not yet found evidence to support a stage-like, unilinear shift to communal ‘objective’ morality, as some theories would have predicted; what has emerged instead is evidence that people can and do move back and forth between different (and potentially competing) ethical frameworks and standards of moral judgement, as they do between kinship-based and ‘community-based’ forms of social living (Buitron 2016). Whether the older lady and the younger schoolteacher do in fact operate with different concepts of fairness is a question that experimental methods – such as economic games – might be strongly placed to shed light on.11 At the same time, precisely what kinds of behaviour or moral reasoning such labels as ‘care’ or ‘fairness’ refer to is above all a matter of ethnographic investigation.

Conclusion The trails we have traced here through the vast terrain inhabited by the cognitive science of morality and ethics hopefully illustrate the need for greater dialogue and collaboration. It is often easier for scholars to talk past one another than to engage critically and constructively with different ways of carrying out research. Anthropologists are often guilty here too of not making their ethnographic findings more accessible to nonspecialists. As it stands, most theories developed in cognitive science not only ignore recent trends in anthropology but also actively reproduce ideas or approaches that have already been subject to extensive critique. Psychologists do sometimes look to anthropologists to help them design more effective and appropriate protocols for cross-cultural research. Yet we cannot emphasize enough that creating a meaningful interdisciplinary agenda should involve using ethnography, not merely to better interpret or inform psychological hypotheses and experiments, but to critique and redefine the concepts themselves and for the generation of theory. Conversely, anthropologists could take stock of psychological theories to learn something new about their field sites. The use of experimental vignettes directed our attention to novel dimensions of everyday forms of justice, even though (and in some cases precisely because) we did not always obtain the expected results. Rather than taking psychological hypotheses and experiments as conceptual or methodological straightjackets, anthropologists might set about using them creatively, to interrogate their own ethnographic theories and to develop comparative perspectives that in turn facilitate their engagement with wider interdisciplinary debates. In some cases, the toolkits of cognitive scientists 11

Indeed, variation between individuals within the same group is an important yet understudied area in such studies (see Lamba and Mace 2013).

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could help to shed light on individual and cultural difference and diversity, as opposed to just similarity or moral universals, and further refine ethnographic theories that help to explain such difference. At times, this could mean working to ensure that ethnographic arguments remain plausible in light of the comparative empirical work produced by psychologists or experimental philosophers and others; at other times, it could mean working to problematize these theories and the assumptions on which they rest. This is essential if we are to avoid partially replicating a certain version of humanity – and human morality – everywhere we look.

Acknowledgements Our research has been made possible thanks to the willingness of our Urarina and Shuar friends and interlocutors to host us over many visits to their homes and to engage patiently and constructively with our work. Rita Astuti and Gre´gory Deshouliie`re played key roles in the design and implementation of the study we describe. In Urarina territory, we are grateful to Juana Lucı´a Cabrera Prieto for her help in carrying out the study, and to the staff of Clinica Tucunare´ and Colegio CRFA for logistical support. In Shuar territory, we are especially grateful to Manuel Maiche Tzapacu, Sunur Maiche Manchu, and the community of socios of Kuamar. We are thankful to James Laidlaw, Rita Astuti, Charles Stafford, Iza Kavedzˇija, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of earlier drafts and useful suggestions for improvement. This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 715725).

References Astuti, Rita. 2007. ‘Weaving Together Culture and Cognition: An Illustration from Madagascar’. Intellectica: revue de l’Association pour la Recherche Cognitive, 46/47: 173–89. 2016. ‘On Combining Natural and Social Histories into One and the Same Process. Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1): 449–54. forthcoming. Combining Methodologies. Talk given at Harvard University. Astuti, Rita and Maurice Bloch. 2012. ‘Anthropologists as Cognitive Scientists’. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4: 453–61.

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Barrett, H. Clark et al. 2016. ‘Small-Scale Societies Exhibit Fundamental Variation in the Role of Intentions in Moral Judgment’. PNAS, 113(17): 4688–93. Baumard, Nicolas. 2016. The Origins of Fairness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baumard, Nicolas and Dan Sperber. 2010. ‘Weird People, Yes, but also Weird Experiments. [Letter]’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 33(80–1). Baumard, Nicholas, Jean-Baptiste Andre´, and Dan Sperber. 2013. ‘A Mutualistic Approach to Morality: The Evolution of Fairness by Partner Choice’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 36(1): 59–78. Bloch, Maurice. 2012. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom, Paul. 2016. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyd, Robert. 2018. A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boyd, Robert and Peter J. Richerson 2005. The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buitron, Natalia. 2016. ‘The Attraction of Unity: Power, Knowledge and Community among the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia’. Doctoral Thesis. London School of Economics and Political Science. Cassaniti, Julia and Jacob Hickman. 2014. ‘New Directions in the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 14(2): 251–62. Chibnik, Michael. 2005. ‘Experimental Economics in Anthropology: A Critical Assessment’. American Ethnologist, 32(2): 198–209. 2011. Anthropology, Economics, and Choice. Austin: University of Texas Press. Collier, Jean and Michele Z. Rosaldo. 1981. ‘Politics and Gender in Simple Societies’, in Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds.), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 275–329. Cova, Florian. 2016. ‘The Folk Concept of Intentional Action: Empirical Approaches’, in Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. London: Wiley-Blackwell: 121–41. Crocker, William H. 1990. The Canela (Eastern Timbira), I: An Ethnographic Introduction. Washington, DC: Smithsonian. Curry, Oliver Scott. 2016. ‘Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach’, in Tod K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen (eds.), The Evolution of Morality. New York: Springer International Publishing: 27–51. Curry, Oliver Scott, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse. 2019. ‘Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-asCooperation in 60 Societies’. Current Anthropology, 60(1): 47–69.

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Roberts, Simon. 1994. ‘Law and Dispute Processes’, in Tim Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life. London: Routledge: 962–82. Sahlins, Marshall. 2011. ‘What Kinship Is (Part One)’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 17: 2–19. Sanchez, Andrew et al. 2017. ‘“The Indian Gift”: A Critical Debate’. History and Anthropology, 28(5): 553–83. Shweder, Richard. 2012. ‘Anthropology’s Disenchantment with the Cognitive Revolution’. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4: 354–61. Shweder, Richard and Jonathan Haidt. 1999. ‘Commentary to Feature Review. The Future of Moral Psychology: Truth, Intuition, and the Pluralist Way’. Psychological Science, 4(6): 360–5. Shweder, Richard A., Nancy C. Much, Lawrence Park, and Manamohan Mahapatra. 1997. ‘The “Big Three” of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the “Big Three” Explanations of Suffering’, in Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin (eds.), Morality and Health. New York: Routledge: 119–69. Stasch, Rupert. 2008. ‘Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology’. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(2): 443–53. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2016. A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2018. ‘Precis of a Natural History of Human Morality’. Philosophical Psychology, 31(5): 661–8. Tomasello, Michael and Amrisha Vaish. 2013. ‘Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality’. Annual Review of Psychology, 64: 231–55. Tomasello, Michael, Alicia P. Melis, Claudio Tennie, Emily Wyman, and Esther Herrmann. 2012. ‘Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation’. Current Anthropology, 53(6): 673–92. Walker, Harry. 2013. Under a Watchful Eye: Self, Power, and Intimacy in Amazonia. Berkeley: University of California Press. West, S. A., A. S. Griffin, and A. Gardner. 2007. ‘Social Semantics: Altruism, Cooperation, Mutualism, Strong Reciprocity and Group Selection’. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 20: 415–32. Whitehouse, Harvey. 1998. ‘From Mission to Movement: The Impact of Christianity on Patterns of Political Association in Papua New Guinea’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 4(1): 43–63. Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised. New York: Oxford University Press.

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8 Theology Michael Banner

Introduction Any question regarding the genuine novelty of the anthropology of morality is neatly finessed by talk of anthropology’s recent ‘ethical turn’. The phrase suggests a new emphasis or focus of attention without insisting that such attention is wholly unprecedented. It does seem safe to suggest, however, that the recent and emerging dialogue between anthropology and theology (meaning here Christian theology, a qualification and limitation to be noted later), though not itself absolutely unprecedented, may be more confidently deemed something of a novelty – and one which has been stimulated by the ethical turn’s overcoming of any occlusion of ethics from anthropological attention. In some ways this novelty should seem surprising, since theology and social anthropology have always had one another in their sights. Theology, for its part, has consistently identified anthropology – meaning here ‘the doctrine of man’ as it was traditionally termed – as one of its own proper themes. Of course, any theological account of what it was to be human was very definitely understood to be a matter of doctrine, which is to say that its relationship to empirical science, if any, was by no means straightforward. Theology’s anthropology provided an account of the human orientated chiefly by reference to the purported goodness of a created order which was severely dissipated or practically lost in the realities of a fallen world, and thus to the supposed gap between these two worlds. But if the anthropologies of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Barth were neither plainly nor simply empirical, they did not wholly eschew observed realities, even if such realities were read through doctrinal lenses. So it is at least somewhat surprising that since the emergence of anthropology in the modern sense, theology has generally avoided any very clear or consistent engagement with this ‘other’ anthropology, thinking on the whole, it seems, that the existence of this alternative endeavour is neither likely

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to be especially helpful nor for that matter especially troubling. Pannenburg (1985) is something of an exception, whereas Kelsey (2010) is a weighty example of theological anthropology in classic and purely theological mode. Of course, many theologians would have been able to name such anthropological celebrities as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, or Clifford Geertz. And within particular subfields of theology (most noticeably perhaps in biblical studies), practitioners have been keen, certainly from the 1970s on, to deploy anthropological assumptions and insights in investigating the cultural context of key texts and their ideas. See the diverse contributions to Lawrence and Aguilar (2004) and the more recent and sophisticated discussion in Barclay (2015), re-reading Pauline texts on grace with the aid of anthropological treatments of gift. But passing acquaintance with certain anthropologists, and even immensely serious use of anthropological approaches and ideas, seems not to have inspired any systematic reflection on the relationship between the disciplines as such – and scanning the dictionaries, handbooks, and encyclopaedias which indicate something of a subject’s general self-understanding suggests that theology has felt no pressing obligation to take any great interest in social anthropology or account for its proper relationship with it. Nor has social anthropology, in the past, taken much interest in specifically Christian thought and practice. In some ways this parallels the situation just described from the side of theology. Just as theology has claimed anthropology as one of its proper subjects, but has generally taken no systematic account of social anthropology, so anthropology, from its earliest beginnings, has very plainly attended to religious life and practice, while largely eschewing any close attention to Christianity in general or to its moral life in particular. The reasons for this chosen ignorance are rehearsed (but not accepted) in an article which is itself one of the signs of the beginning of a new era of openness: Christians have seemed unpromising subjects of disciplinary attention, either as insufficiently exotic (when being exotic mattered), as too exotic (specifically in the sense of being morally repugnant, which is to say conservative), or, where converts, as too superficial in their Christianity to provide anything of sufficient depth to be worthy of the anthropological gaze (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins 2008). In addition, of course, anthropologists have been so conscious of the influence of Christianity on their conceptions of, say, belief (Needham 1972) or religion itself (Asad 2003) that they have been inclined to think that rooting out Christian ideas is more pressing than attending to them more closely. Certainly since 2000, however, a new conversation (or better, conversations) between the two disciplines has emerged. Given anthropology’s ethical turn and the centrality of ethics to Christian life and thought, an important aspect of these conversation has been to do with ethical themes; though since moral theology or Christian ethics (the former term

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traditionally used in Roman Catholicism and the latter more commonly found among Protestants, but here used interchangeably) are themselves, in various ways, shaped by doctrinal assumptions, even a dialogue around ethics ends up ranging over a wider territory of topics. In any case, it is now well-nigh impossible to mark all the subjects and sites of engagement between theology and social anthropology, and in this chapter I will aim to provide only an indication of some of the pathways which the recent and emerging conversation between theology and social anthropology is taking, specifically as they relate to ethics. Since, however, and in the usual way of things, the character and course of conversations are generally affected by who begins them, it will be helpful, I think, to consider the conversations as starting out from two different sides – as being a matter of anthropologically engaged theology, or theologically engaged anthropology, as it has been put (Lemons 2018) – even if the two streams of dialogue are certainly not wholly separable or distinct. If the character of a conversation is partly a function of which one of the dialogue partners gets it going, it is equally obvious that who is chosen to represent each side, so to speak, will make a difference. But immediately it is put like that, it will be obvious that the bilateral relationship between two disciplines must, to be fully comprehensive, reflect a multiplicity of voices on either side. There can, plainly, be no single dialogue between the moral theologian and the anthropologist, only many dialogues between representatives with indefinite articles. That said, an attempt to introduce the conversations cannot imagine and represent all possible joinings, but only some – so what follows makes no pretence to a God’s-eye view of these dialogues, but is instead the view of an interested participant from the theological side of the conversation.

Moral Theology and Anthropology The history of the development of moral theology’s deeper interest in social anthropology might be said to have three stages. Brief surveys of this history – such as in Tranter and Torrance (2018), Bielo (2018), and McKearney (2019) – are agreed on finding various shoots in the first ten years of this century, and commonly cite Adams and Elliot (2000), Healy (2000), Swinton and Mowat (2006), Whitmore (2007), and Fulkerson (2007) as providing encouragement for what was to follow. The search for the roots which lie further down is trickier – certainly Don Browning (1990) had some influence, but it is perhaps more helpful to look, as Bielo does, to a more fundamental turn towards social and cultural theory of which Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine (1984) was an important and influential sign. More importantly, however, and I shall return to it presently, what might be termed the liberationist strand in Christianity has pressed theology to be more attentive to what, borrowing Hall’s (1997) term, is often

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referred to as ‘lived religion’, and which, as Hall and his collaborators put it, called for a history of practice. However these different strands may be thought of as nourishing the roots of the new conversation, the surveys are agreed on regarding the blossom as breaking out only in the first years of the second decade of the twenty-first century, when from whatever suggestive and scattered glimmerings there emerged some sort of settled engagement indicative of a general movement within the field. Two collections of essays, involving more than two dozen Christian theologians or ethicists, are generally regarded, then, as marking the fact that by the 2010s a proper conversation was underway (see Scharen and Vigen 2011; Ward 2012). The dominant theme of the two volumes is just that ethnographic research is a vital resource for Christian ethics and theology. One might question, however, whether what emerges here is really quite yet a conversation with social anthropology, rather than simply a conversation about it – or, more specifically, a conversation about ethnography, with both the conversation and the ethnography being very often conducted by and between theologians. The product of this work is sometimes labelled ‘ethnographic theology’, which is theology produced not through engagement with anthropology but through a borrowing of and reliance on some of its methods – even while (as certain contributors to the collections warn, such as Phillips (2012)) the enthusiasm for ‘ethnography’ does not always conform to what an anthropologist would mean by that term. Bielo (2018) reflects further on what ethnographic theology may yet need to learn from anthropology about research design, methodology, analysis, and presentation. McKearney (2019: 229) warns that in the early stages of such an interchange as this, scholars may be especially drawn to particular approaches in the other discipline that best serve their own ends, with the risk that notwithstanding ‘an aspiration for dialogue’ what may result is ‘just a monologue that uses the words of another’. This is not to say that these early ventures do not represent a turn towards anthropology, or at least ethnography, but just that not all are necessarily indicative of the full potential of a genuine conversation. My own contribution to the emerging discussions attempts to engage with social anthropology itself across a range of themes or subjects, and by doing so to indicate something of the promise of that conversation (Banner 2014). One commentator refers to it as ‘a kind of capstone to the past few decades’ methodological reflection in theological ethics’ (Mathewes 2019: 192), and it has garnered critical attention from anthropologists (e.g. Banner et al. 2015; McKearney 2016) and from theologians (e.g. Brock 2019; Tranter and Torrance 2018; Lamb and Williams 2019). Its sources and inspiration lie at something of a tangent to the previous discussions, and it is perhaps best to understand the book, its somewhat impatient tone with dominant strains in moral philosophy, bioethics, and moral theology,

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and its enthusiastic turn to social anthropology from its origins in a very particular problem. The Alder Hey scandal concerned the unconsented retention over many years by an NHS hospital in Liverpool, in the north of England, of postmortem material, especially from foetuses and young children. From 2005 I served as a member of the Human Tissue Authority, set up under the Human Tissue Act of 2004 and charged with developing regulations for handling human tissue after the situation at Alder Hey Hospital came to light. I was thereby familiar not only with the scandal itself but also with subsequent reflection on it – and what was most striking in this reflection was the willingness of the medical establishment and the ‘commentariat’ to declare the parental distress at the retention of bodily material to be simply emotional, irrational, and incomprehensible. Of course, to someone familiar with bioethics, such a dismissal of the parental attitudes might seem unremarkable. It is, after all, characteristic of the dominant consequentialist and Kantian strains within bioethics (see Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume) to declare ethical attitudes as coherent or incoherent just as they are in accordance or not with whichever is taken to be the favoured perspective – and even a philosopher such as MacIntyre who rejects the crude either/or of Kantianism versus consequentialism begins his influential After Virtue (1981) by declaring popular morality to be incoherent. Bioethics, then, schooled by such traditions, could make no contribution to the social comprehension of the parental interest in the return of their children’s bodies – it had forgotten, chosen to overlook, or deemed it irrelevant that morality may be viewed as a social practice, the meaning and rules of which may be immanent to that practice, and not something to be discerned a priori and used as a critical tool to improve – or simply to discount – practice. Lesley Sharp’s powerful treatment of the moral lives of the recipients of organs, especially in their relations with donor families, in her study Strange Harvest (2006) pointed me towards social anthropology as providing the ethicist, whether theologically minded or not, with better social intelligence. It was something of a dogma in the UK in discussions of whether recipients of donated organs should be allowed contact with donor families that such contact would be somehow dangerous, and was to be discouraged or prevented. Sharp’s work was especially telling for me in demonstrating that when, as in the United States, such contacts do occur (whether or not with official sanction), the participants in these relationships engage in serious moral labour by means of the construction of what Sharp terms ‘fictive kinship’ – whereby, for example, a deceased donor’s mother becomes ‘mom’ to the recipient, and he may become ‘son’ to her, receiving a birthday card on the day of the dead son’s birthday, for example. By means of structuring and imagining their relationship in these terms, the participants are enabled, so Sharp would suggest, to acknowledge and address such elements of their circumstances as the

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facts of sudden loss, unexpected new beginnings and connections, and tragically unresolved endings and ruptures. Sharp’s study, demonstrating the possibility of a social comprehension of which bioethics was plainly incapable, suggested the value of a wider engagement with what was then the emerging anthropology of morality, especially important for me being the work of Lambek (2000), Faubion (2001), Laidlaw (2002), and Robbins (2004), now more developed, of course, in Lambek (2010), Faubion (2011), Laidlaw (2014), and Robbins (2013). The crucial point which emerged from that engagement was just that anthropology had a better understanding of morality and moral practice, and of the principles of interpretation which would be required to make sense of that practice, than typically does moral philosophy – and better, of course, than moral theology too, since moral theology had very largely been inclined to take its bearings from moral philosophy. Moral theology, that is to say, has generally been content to be as purely prescriptive in its ethics as theology in its anthropology, with very little regard for, or even interest in, any descriptive enterprise. It has thus denied itself knowledge of the complexities and subtleties of Christian and non-Christian moral worlds – and indeed in its typical subject matter has disdained what might be called ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ ethical life. The Ethics of Everyday Life (2014) proposed, then, a new direction for moral theology, and one which makes systematic use of social anthropology. The book notices that the two subjects are, in fact, for all their recent mutual disregard, already implicitly engaged with one another, just in the sense that they share an interest in such major moments in the life course as, for example, conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial. Christianity has often approached these moments through extended and profound meditation on the course of Christ’s life, in which these moments are accorded particular significance (and specifically mentioned in the Creeds) – thus in academic theology, but more importantly through the drama of the liturgy and the liturgical year, in sermons, prayers, biblical commentary, exegesis, and contemplation, in art of all kinds, in devotional writings, mystery plays, poems, and other forms of literature, in hymns, oratorios, cantatas, spirituals, and every other type of musical work, Christ’s life has been imagined, represented, enacted, expounded, and interrogated. So imagined, this life has, of course, in complex ways, been held to be regulative in relation to ordinary human existence. This imagining and commending of a particular version of human life brings theology into connection with social anthropology, then, just insofar as social anthropology is itself concerned to describe other and quite different representations of the human. Thus moral theology and social anthropology find a quite natural and unforced conversation waiting to happen around these particular topics. And what does such a conversation promise? At least two things seem important, speaking from the side of moral theology. We might term them

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rather crudely as having to do with context and content, and one may be discussed by reference to surrogates, the other by reference to saints.

Context: The Meaning of Surrogacy First, Christian ethics, taking itself to be a normative intervention into contemporary moral life, may be expected to want to understand the context into which it speaks and especially those modes of life of which it is inclined to speak either critically or in commendation. It is only as it comprehends the world it addresses that Christian ethics, as proposing a conception of what it is to be human, can speak effectively, neither busily condemning merely imagined evils nor commending what we might call dreams of humanity. As Joel Robbins (2018) has put it, the best social anthropology is concerned to give an account of how people live which is ‘at once psychologically and socioculturally realistic’, and moral theology must reckon with such realities. This is not to say that moral theology will eschew other engagements, with history, sociology, and literature, for example, or that it will abandon its own norms of judgement. But in its own particular concern for the current moment of moral responsibility, it may be expected to take a lively interest in the social worlds which are made and lived here and now, and revealed through the lens of social anthropology. In The Ethics of Everyday Life (2014), I draw on the findings of a variety of social anthropologists writing about kinship and assisted reproductive technologies (e.g. Thompson 2005; Carsten 2004), birthing and parenting (Davis-Floyd 1992; Rapp 1999; Klassen 2001), suffering (Biehl 2005; Fassin 2012), old age (Cohen 1998; McLean 2007), dying (Hockey 1990), and burial practices and mourning (Danforth 1982; Francis et al. 2005) to conduct this conversation and reveal its promise across a broad sweep of topics of ethical concern. To illustrate that promise here, I take a slightly different example from any discussed in the book, namely surrogacy. Of the various means of addressing infertility which are grouped under the term ‘assisted reproductive technologies’ (hereafter ARTs), it is surrogacy which has, it seems, generally caused the most anxiety. Surrogacy refers to the bearing of a child on behalf of another, and in the most common contemporary cases the ‘other’ is typically a woman whose partner provides the sperm to inseminate an egg which grows to term in the surrogate. That egg, of course, could be the surrogate’s own (in what is sometimes called ‘full surrogacy’), or it could be provided by the intending mother (who for whatever reason cannot carry a child) or by a donor, in which cases there is what is often termed ‘gestational surrogacy’. The degree of suspicion which surrogacy attracts is sharply illustrated in the UK’s Warnock Report (1984), which was an early official ‘bioethical’

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review of the emerging technologies, and not only influential in shaping subsequent regulation in the UK but also widely regarded and noted as a model for addressing the issues and devising regulations. The Report’s prohibitive stance towards surrogacy is especially conspicuous just because it is so generally accepting of what were, when the Report was being written, some relatively new and controversial practices, such as the use of early embryos for experimental purposes and artificial insemination by donor. For while the Report rehearses familiar arguments both for and against surrogacy, it comes down hard against it, proposing such extremely stringent restrictions as would very likely have deterred it altogether had they been enacted – it recommends, for example, that medical professionals knowingly assisting in the establishment of a surrogate pregnancy should be guilty of a criminal offence, and that surrogacy agreements should be deemed illegal contracts and thus unenforceable in court. ARTs in general have raised a good deal of disquiet, but surrogacy seems to have been the focus of the most intense suspicion, criticism, and condemnation – as in the case of the Warnock Report. According to one commentator, ‘What emerges from any consideration of the ways in which surrogacy is dealt with in different jurisdictions is that a sense of profound anxiety and ambivalence has tended to pervade the thinking of professionals, policy-makers and legislators where surrogacy is concerned’ (Cook and Schlater 2003: 2). And according to another, ‘surveys investigating attitudes towards the practice in several countries have indicated that the majority of the public disapprove of the practice and perceive surrogacy as the least acceptable of the reproductive technologies’ (Teman 2010: 7). The anxieties which give rise to the general suspicion of surrogacy, and provoke the sometimes prohibitive or at least stringent regulation of it, often have to do, it seems, with its potential commercialization. It is just this potential which leads to familiar headlines about ‘selling babies’ and ‘wombs for rent’, which speak of the perceived threat this technology poses to certain cherished ideas about motherhood and children. To speak only of the latter, the commercial use of the technology is considered especially to risk rendering children commodities, when those who express such fears are likely to contend that children are properly to be regarded as gifts. A common view is captured in the comment that ‘the issue of commodification of the child remains an insurmountable objection to any financial reward over and above legitimate expenses’ in relation to any surrogacy arrangement (Blyth and Potter 2003: 237). What is striking about the debate here, touched on merely in outline, is just that its regular lines in the sand depend on some deep-seated assumptions about what effect technology, perhaps by itself, but certainly where it is accompanied by the apparatus of contracts and consideration, may have on the meaning of a child, specifically in rendering the child

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a commodity. This is exactly the sort of case, then, in which the moralist who is conscious of the ability of anthropology to disturb familiar lines of thought and expectation might wish to turn to ethnographic data and anthropological theory. Two studies are worthy of (albeit brief) mention. In her investigation in the United States of what she terms ‘traditional surrogacy’ (‘full surrogacy’ in the terminology I used earlier; that is, where the surrogate is inseminated with sperm from the male of the commissioning couple), Helena Ragone´ (1999: 74) reports that ‘the gift lens’ is used on both sides of the relationship to construct what is going on. On the side of the surrogates, their unease with the construction of the relationship as simply commercial is indicated by the fact that while they readily acknowledge that they are being remunerated for what they do, they reject the notion that they perform this service for the sake of the remuneration. According to Ragone´ (1999: 61), while surrogates admit ‘that remuneration was one of their initial considerations . . . they consistently deny that it was their primary motivation (and nearly all surrogates state – repeatedly – that the importance of remuneration decreased over time). When questioned about remuneration, surrogates consistently protest that no one would become a surrogate for the money alone because, they reason, it simply “isn’t enough”’. The following are ‘typical surrogate responses’ to the question as to how the prospect of payment influenced their decision to become surrogates: ‘It sounded so interesting and fun. The money wasn’t enough to be pregnant for nine months,’ and ‘I’m not doing it for the money. Take the money. That wouldn’t stop me. It wouldn’t stop the majority,’ and again, ‘what’s ten thousand bucks? You can’t even buy a car. . . . Money wasn’t important. I possibly would have done it just for expenses, especially for the people I did it for. My father would have given me the money not to do it’. (Ragone´ 1999: 69) As Ragone´ interprets this, surrogates’ ‘devaluation of payment’ allows them to assert, as has been acknowledged in effective advertisements for surrogates which invite them to ‘Give the Gift of Life’, that ‘their act is one that cannot be compensated for monetarily’. These advertisements frame ‘surrogacy in a poignant and life-affirming light, more clearly locating it in the gift economy’ (Ragone´ 1999: 71), and surrogates adopt a like framing. The power of such a way of thinking about surrogacy depends, it seems, not just on the burdens of surrogacy but also on the nature of the service or good provided – which is, of course, the ‘priceless’ child of late modernity.1 1

Referencing Viviana Zelizer. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

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This stress on the reality of the relationship as structured by gift rather than by payment goes to the heart of the dealings between the parties: Even though surrogates are discouraged from thinking of their relationship to the couple as a permanent one, surrogates recognize that they are creating a state of enduring solidarity between themselves and their couples. This belief complicates the severing of that relationship once the child has been born, even though the surrogate knows in advance that the surrogate-couple relationship is structured to be impermanent. . . . Surrogates’ framing of the equation as one in which a gift is given thus serves as a reminder to their couples that one of the symbolic functions of money, namely the ‘removal of the personal element from human relationships through its indifferent and objective nature’ (Simmel), may be insufficient to erase certain relationships, and that the relational element may continue to surface despite the monetary exchange. (Ragone´ 1999: 71) But recall that both parties, according to Ragone´, construe the encounter in these terms – it is not just the surrogates themselves but the receiving parents who also use the gift lens, and ‘by acknowledging that the surrogate child is a gift, the couple accepts a permanent state of indebtedness to their surrogate’ (Ragone´ 1999: 72). The tokens of this acceptance are found in the common phenomenon of the commissioning parents bestowing ‘additional gifts on their surrogates (as they do from the moment the pregnancy is confirmed to the moment the child is born and even after)’ (Ragone´ 1999: 73). This is to acknowledge that they are part of a gift economy – and ‘Gifts are given with such regularity and predictability by couples to their surrogate (and to her children as well) that such acts have become encouraged by surrogate programs’ (Ragone´ 1999: 73). Of course, the very problem here is just that by design the surrogate is typically meant to cease to have a part in the child’s life at the point of birth; but even this can remain within the ‘gift lens’, for ‘the actual birth of the child and the surrogate’s relinquishment of the child to the couple are viewed by all the participants as the embodiment of the ultimate act of giving/gifting’ (Ragone´ 1999: 73). Thus: It is . . . of interest that couples routinely bestow on their surrogates gifts of jewelry that feature the child’s birthstone. Much as in the case of pregnancy loss explored by Layne . . . the gift of jewelry simultaneously symbolizes the ‘preciousness’ of the child and the enduring relationship between mother and child even in the face of a lifelong physical separation . . .. Worn on the surrogate’s body, the jewelry symbolizes and validates the special intimate bodily connection between surrogate and child and represents an acknowledgment

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that gifts such as vacations are mere tokens of appreciation that cannot repay the extraordinary generosity of the surrogate. (Ragone´ 1999: 73) At the very site, then, where the risk of conceiving a child as a product is most remarked upon and worried about in discussions of surrogacy and IVF, the participants (in this study at least) work hard to construe their relationship to each other and to the child in different terms – terms quite contrary to what to some has seemed the natural construction of what they do. Of course, the interpretation of their efforts is itself a matter for discussion, since those very efforts suggest consciousness of the moral dissonance, so to speak, between what might seem to be happening and certain prevailing norms – and the question becomes whether those efforts are best understood as reconstructing what is going on or rather as a somewhat insistent (but unconvincing) bid to conceal it. There are arguments (which have appealed to theologians) that seem to attach a deterministic meaning to relationships mediated by technology, such that surrogacy, for example, entails the construction of the child as a product (O’Donovan 1984). A mistrust of the ‘cash nexus’ only heightens the worries about the risk of commodification. But the imposition of such an interpretation on the actions of participants in Ragone´’s study seems problematic in a number of ways. One might grant, for the sake of argument, that bringing the having of children within the scope of modern technology, as has occurred with the use of various means of assisted reproduction, carries the risk of converting ‘begetting’ to ‘making’, as this worry has been put – and further that the ‘making’ is capable of commercialization, and that that may enhance the risk. But does the technology and its commercialization not only risk a certain way of viewing children, but actually entail it? Can it not be dissociated from a mentality with which it might well be associated? The assumption that it cannot seems to discount the meanings which the actors studied by Ragone´ find in what they do, and more generally the plasticity of actions to social framing. One response to Ragone´’s study might be to think that perhaps gift language is more likely to be deployed in the case of full surrogacy – that is, where the surrogate provides the egg, as well as carrying the child. And Ragone´ indeed suggests that less ‘gift work’ is needed in the case of ‘mere’ gestational surrogacy (where the surrogate is implanted with either an embryo produced from the ovum of the intending mother or from a donor). Here ‘the gift rhetoric is much less common’ (Ragone´ 1999: 74). But it is by no means clear that this finding is at all generalizable, and Elly Teman’s (2010) important study of gestational surrogacy in Israel shows that the language of gift flourishes perfectly well even where there is no biogenetic kinship between foetus and surrogate. As surrogates and intending mothers form bonds between themselves, the surrogate

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dissociates herself from the developing child, and nurtures the relationship between the foetus and its intended mother. Again, on both sides, the language of gift is pervasive – and developed with nuances and inflections which reflect the particularities of the context. Of course, to an anthropologist, the ability of ethnographic study to unsettle the tired and rather stale assumptions of popular polemics is not itself newsworthy. But debates in bioethics very often follow just such tramlines, and in moral theology too. In making an anthropological turn which it is the purpose of my book to encourage, moral theology gains, then, not only social intelligence but also the encouragement and ability critically to examine its own cultural entanglements. There is perhaps none more significant in and around the discussion of ARTs than the one to which I give some attention in The Ethics of Everyday Life, namely the tendency of much moral theology to parrot what Schneider (1980) termed ‘the folk theory of kinship’ (i.e. Western conceptions of what kinship ‘really is’), notwithstanding thinking and practice within the theological tradition itself which are radically at odds with any such theory. These resources, rather neglected by moral theologians, lie in the traditions of spiritual kinship of which practices of god-parenthood are the most common expression. These practices, among others, radically qualify, question, and reconfigure claims of ‘natural kinship’ – think simply of the symbolism of godparents, not parents, naming a child in the rite of baptism. Here, then, social anthropology provides a lens through which Christian ethics may learn a greater reflexivity and connect with its very own tools of social critique.

Content: The Lives of the Saints The first point is, then, that Christian ethics needs to make a turn to social anthropology for the sake of understanding its context, in which diverse ways of living human lives are variously in contention, implicitly if not explicitly, with each other and with theology’s own normative anthropologies (in their own diversity). There is, however, a second and equally important point regarding moral theology’s engagement with social anthropology, and this lies behind the enthusiasm for ethnography previously mentioned. The point here is not about grasping moral theology’s context, but its content – for it could be claimed that Christian moral life and thought must be comprehended ethnographically just because, on some understandings of Christian ethics, they are constructed and revealed in embodied social forms. Of course, the construction of these social forms is itself governed by certain norms (typically derived from the Bible or from Church teaching or traditions) – but just as one would not know how American politics goes by reading the Constitution, so one might say that even as the form Christian life takes emerges just as the world is engaged on Christian terms, the form and character of that life is

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never solely knowledge of those norms. So, to go back to an example already mentioned, if ‘the imitation of Christ’ has been an important conception by which Christians have governed their lives, as indeed it has, then the actual form and character of the practical realization of that enterprise demands description. To put it in shorthand – knowledge of the Christian life is in part knowledge of the life of the saints (Banner 2016). More formally: Christian ethics is discovered in practice, and is known ethnographically through knowledge of this practice. This claim echoes a theme which has been important (if not always articulated in quite these terms) in a strain of theological reflection over the last fifty years developed especially in liberationist (Gutierrez 1973), Black (Cone 1975), womanist (Williams 2002; Cannon 1995; Coleman 2008), and Mujerista (Isasi-Dias 1993) theology.2 What is common, I think, to these different but related traditions is that they take the moral life which particular communities sustain in the face of grave adversity as a reality that needs to be accounted for. Thus Delores Williams, to take just one example, says that the ‘black community can celebrate the moral, intellectual, spiritual and emotional strength poor black women have exercised as they have withstood trouble and trials in a hostile world’ (Williams 2002: 108) – where ‘celebrate’ means to describe and comprehend the moral lives which Black women have created and sustained. The theological adage ‘Faith seeks understanding’ demands, for Williams, a turn to a descriptive, quasi-ethnographic enterprise – and one which answers the plea Orsi (2010: xxiii) makes for the comprehension of what he termed ‘lived religion’, again following Hall. Orsi, of course, prefers the phrase ‘lived religion’ to the alternative ‘popular religion’, since he thinks that the word ‘popular’ was used to mark off certain instances of religion from ‘religion as such’ – and those who took themselves to speak on behalf of religion without an adjective sat in judgement on its popular forms. The broad stream of theological reflection to which I have referred concerns itself exactly with the explication of the logics of lived religion. And this is very much an ethical project, since, as Orsi puts it: The study of lived religion explores how religion is shaped by and shapes the ways family life is organized, for instance; how the dead are buried, children disciplined, the past and future imagined, moral boundaries established and challenged, homes constructed, maintained, and destroyed, the gods and spirits worshipped and importuned, and so on. Religion is [thus] approached in its place within a more broadly conceived and described life-world, the domain of everyday existence, practical activity, and shared understandings, with all its crises, surprises, satisfactions, frustrations, joys, desires, hopes, fears, and limitations. (Orsi 2010: xxxii) 2

And it was a failure on my part not to appreciate the importance of this body of work when I wrote The Ethics of Everyday Life, as is gently and helpfully pointed out by Stephanie Mota Thurston in her contribution to Lamb and Williams (2019).

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Although it doesn’t belong to the stream of theological reflection just mentioned, but is the work of an anthropologist, Juliet du Boulay’s (2009) powerful and compelling study of a Greek village as its life is construed and constructed by the cosmology, liturgy, and traditions of Orthodoxy is perhaps the best example of what ‘ethnographic theology’ might properly be – the perspicuous presentation of the warp and weft of everyday life, as that life is shaped and formed by a religious imaginary with its rituals and routines, creating patterns of daily existence with their particular and characteristic modes of knowing, feeling, thinking, and acting (albeit that the critical reader may wonder whether the tale is somewhat idealized). So it is perhaps right to recognize – to go back to where we started – that theology’s turn to social anthropology is not wholly and utterly new, and in particular in the traditions of theological reflection just identified there has been, going back over fifty years, a concern to identify and describe everyday lives lived in particular communities as compelling expressions of moral wisdom. But that said, the conscious attempt to engage with social anthropology itself, as enabling moral theology the better to understand the dynamics of the Christian life and the context in which it is lived, does seem a new moment – and one which promises to strengthen and to challenge theological reflection.

Social Anthropology and Theology The conversation which is opened up by the thought that moral theology may be renewed by engagement with anthropology is complemented by a conversation which begins from the other side, and contends that anthropology may find resources through an engagement with theology. A spate of recent publications evidences the emergence of a lively interest in the possibility: Lemmons (2018), Meneses and Bronkema (2017), Mathews and Tomlinson (2018), Furani (2019), Tomlinson (2020), and Robbins (2020). This conversation should be distinguished from the anthropology of Christianity, even if some of the leading figures in the emergence of the anthropology of Christianity (such as Joel Robbins) are also found at the centre of the new discussions. Of course, if it was the case that what was proposed was simply that anthropologists of Christianity should look to theologians as a (rather particular) class of native informants, contributing to the ethnographic record, then even if this brings substantial insights, there is nothing especially new here. After all, as Seeman puts it, ‘Theological ways of thinking about and interacting with the world are . . . “social facts” like any other’ (Seeman 2018: 338). But Robbins’s proposal in Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (2020)

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is for an engagement between anthropology and theology which will amount to more than each mining the other for data. His hope is that the relationship between the two may be ‘transformative’, just insofar as we construe the relationship between theology and anthropology not as consisting of theology borrowing anthropology’s method and anthropology treating theological arguments as ethnographic data bearing on the nature of Christian thought, but as one that takes place between two equally theoretically ambitious disciplines with their own varied versions of systematic thinking about how the cosmos, and the human beings who inhabit it, come to be the way that they are and about what might be the best ways for human beings to realize the potentials inherent in the lives they lead. (Robbins 2020: 7) Thus Robbins proposes to treat ‘theology as a potentially cooperative donor of theoretical inspiration for anthropology’, exploring the possibility that theoretical concepts developed from within theology may contribute to general anthropological analysis. The chapters of Robbins’s book are organized in what he terms a gradient, beginning with topics from theology which have had little place in anthropology to date (such as that of interruption, as characteristic of God’s presence to the lives of believers) and moving on to ones which are already familiar (such as the gift) to ‘suggest that even fairly developed and quite general anthropological topics might be pushed in new directions by a consideration of the theoretical import of theological discussions that cover similar terrain’ (Robbins 2020: 27). Perhaps the most striking argument comes in chapter 5, when Robbins argues that the theological (more specifically Lutheran) notion of passivity could illuminate and enrich anthropological discussions of the gift – which is, of course, to take theological reflection to territory that anthropology has traditionally regarded as very much its own, and as rather well trodden. As Robbins notes, the theme of the gift has concerned theologians from the beginning and throughout the tradition, since God’s grace is typically conceived in terms of a gift – thus Luther reads Thomas who reads Augustine who reads Paul on the theme of the gift of grace. And it is in Lutheran theology that Robbins finds an understanding of the ‘role of passivity in the constitution of the gift’ which, he claims, may augment anthropological theory. Robbins notes that for Mauss, the gift is constituted by the three obligations to give, to receive, and to return – and that it is giving and returning which have received most attention from anthropologists. But according to Robbins, contemporary Lutheran theology (specifically Dalferth 2016) has paid close attention to the matter of the reception of the gift, and within that to the role of passivity.

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Dalferth’s ‘anthropologically unfamiliar argument’ contends, according to Robbins, that ‘a gift does not become a gift when someone acts to receive it. Rather, it becomes a gift when someone gives it to someone else and by virtue of their agency in doing so makes that person into a receiver. In this scheme, where it is the fact of being given to someone that makes something a gift, a person becomes a receiver passively’ (Robbins 2020: 148). And this amounts to an ‘improvement’ on Mauss, says Robbins, since Dalferth has revealed something about the gift that Mauss rendered invisible when he called the second obligation that makes the gift what it is the obligation to receive. It would be more accurate, and I think more ethnographically fruitful, to call this second obligation an obligation not to receive, but to respond to both the gift itself and to the position of receiver into which the gift has put one. Reception itself, as Dalferth demonstrates, happens more or less in passing, and in a passing way – it is not an obligation, but a fate. (Robbins 2020: 148) Furthermore, as Dalferth suggests, this reception of the gift amounts to an ‘interruption’ in a life – and in chapter 2 of his book, Robbins speaks of interruption as another theological concept which may prove ethnographically and anthropologically fruitful. Or as Robbins puts it: I think Dalferth has shown us a way in which we can learn something new about what anthropologists sometimes call gift economies and human agency more generally by doing justice to the moment of passivity that constitutes reception of the gift, and to the way that giftinduced interruptions that render us passive do in fact open up for people new ‘life-opportunities’ that they could not on their own fashion for themselves. (Robbins 2020: 149–50) Notwithstanding his hopes for a ‘transformative’ relationship between the disciplines, Robbins also reflects on the limits of the engagement between anthropology and theology, set, as he sees it, by the disciplinary presuppositions of each. Robbins quotes Kapferer’s adage that ‘anthropology is secularism’s doubt’ (Kapferer 2001) – and it is as secularism’s doubt that it seeks to ‘explicate . . . ways of understanding that are not the product of secular conditioning, and to show how successfully they can provide the basis for flourishing human lives’ (Robbins 2020: 179), including, of course, theological ways of understanding. Anthropology is nonetheless always secularism’s doubt and so does not abandon the fundamental premises of secularism, which include scepticism ‘in relation to the God question understood in terms of belief’, as Robbins puts it (2020: 179). Even a transformative dialogue between the disciplines will not lead to anthropology abandoning this disciplinary assumption (but see also Luhrmann,

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Chapter 28 of this volume) or to theology abandoning its ambition to speak truthfully of God. And yet, those limits acknowledged, Robbins thinks a transformative dialogue remains possible and fruitful, as his discussion suggests.

Conclusion Looking back, there is some irony in the drift of these two conversations, starting from two different places, with an anthropologically engaged theology looking increasingly towards lived religion, just as theologically engaged anthropology is discovering the higher reaches of theology. But that in no way sets the two at odds with one another or prevents their dialogue. Unlike meetings, however, conversations do not have an agenda – so one can have no great certainty about the future courses of these dialogues. But without trying to predict or plot their paths, one may reasonably express hopes for them. So, in conclusion, I identify three wishes which have been made for specific developments in the conversations now underway. My own proposals anticipate a widening of moral theology’s social understanding, and a deepening of its self-understanding, through a thorough-going turn to social anthropology. This turn promises both a better comprehension of diverse enactments of the human outside the sphere of Christian life and the possibility of a better narration of the Christian life itself just insofar as we learn to give more adequate accounts of the everyday life of lived religion. Of course, the scope of the first of those projects is vast – and my book merely ventures preliminary thoughts in relation to some particular moments in the life course. The particular moments are suggested by the special attention which has been given to them in the Christian tradition, specifically in virtue of the central place they have in the life of Christ as recounted in shorthand in the creeds. There is, then, very plainly, a case for the further development of this conversation in relation to those many topics and materials which were not even touched on in my book. Essays in the volume edited by Lamb and Williams (2019) turn to eating, education, the giving of humanitarian aid, life and work in the light of contemporary technology and the growth of flexible capitalism, and practices of lending and borrowing – with the aim of extending, or testing, the methodological approach recommended in my book. The potential for such engagement by moral theology with anthropological findings is virtually limitless – or at least in principle limited only by gaps in anthropology’s treatment of human life where the moral theologian may have an interest. For all that anthropology has overcome its focus on the exotic, it is still the case that it is easier to find ethnographies dealing with ARTs, gay parenthood, fostering and adoption, still birth, and the birth of disabled children than it is to

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discover studies which might help one understand the practices and meanings that surround the birth of the average child in the average hospital. The second aspect of the project – having to do with the better narration of lived religion – is also quite daunting, since the beginnings which have been made are just that. There are whole swathes of Christian life which have not been elucidated by Christian ethics, with its traditionally rather limited interest in, and its eschewing of much of the material which has shaped and expressed, lived religion. An example of a major theme in Christian life which has suffered neglect within moral theology would be the significance of saints (as argued in Banner 2016). The saints, alongside Christ, have provided one of the key sites where Christian anthropology (in its informal sense) has been crafted and expounded. The volume of material – itself signalling the importance of the saints in Christian self-understanding – is extensive. Bartlett’s (2013) magisterial account of the rise and role of the saints in Christian thought and practice up until the Reformation has forty-four pages of bibliography of primary printed sources, and, of course, his study does not consider the translation of sainthood into modern terms (encompassing Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela for sure, and probably Princess Diana) or the place of seemingly more traditional devotions in the contemporary Catholic imagination (on which see, e.g., Casten˜eda-Liles 2018). That the saints are exemplary is, of course, a commonplace. But the nature, form, and content of that exemplarity bears further elucidation by an anthropologically informed moral theology which aspires to capture the features of lived religion. (And see Evans, Chapter 17 of this volume.) That is a suggestion, then, about the future path of the conversation made from one side of the dialogue. There are two further suggestions coming from anthropologists, which nonetheless ought to be warmly welcomed by theologians. Seeman (2018: 351) wonders ‘how the current conversation about anthropological engagement with theology might move beyond its initial, quite natural preoccupation with Christian theology and the anthropology of Christianity’. As he rightly insists, Theology is not only an academic discipline situated in mostly Christian schools of divinity but a family of different kinds of expert discourse about religion, each differently situated with respect to the vernacular discourses that exist alongside them. . . . My point is not just that engagement between anthropology and theology needs to include and be open to non-Christian theologies but that this can only happen when we are willing to evince a methodological openness to the question of what counts as theology in the first place. (Seeman 2018: 353) The opening up of this question may, I suspect, be as liberating for Christian ethics as for anthropological engagement with theology (widely

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conceived), since a challenge to the narrowness of traditional conceptions of theology may not only invite other partners to the dialogue but actually unsettle some of the ideas of the Christians first invited to the table. Perhaps the most intriguing possibility for future engagement is one which Robbins entertains at the end of his work but does not explore. Moral theology’s recent interest in social anthropology can be understood as an interest on moral theology’s part in arriving at a better understanding of how its prescriptive vocation can be advanced, informed, and disciplined by description, and in particular by anthropological description. But turning that round, there is a question for social anthropology about its relationship to moral judgement (Banner 2015: 137). At the end of Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life, Robbins is led precisely to wonder whether the conversation between the two disciplines might move to this territory. As Robbins notes, anthropologists have traditionally not judged those they study. But the impulse not to judge ‘has begun to break down’, for a reason that ‘Ortner has recently noted’, namely that ‘much of anthropology is now “dark”, studying situations in which people are poor, suffering, ill, and/or oppressed. Those who work in these situations often want not just to describe them but also to name and judge the darkness that besets them’. But, says Robbins, for this possibility to be realized, anthropologists ‘will need to learn, as theologians learned long ago and continue to teach their students, how to work out explicit criteria for judgement, rather than judging only on the basis of our own inherited sensibilities about what good and bad lives look like’ (Robbins 2020: 182–3 and see also 95–104). Theologians may not recognize themselves possessing ‘explicit criteria for judgment’, depending quite what that implies, but certainly arguing to and for normative conclusions is central to Christian ethics. Discussions between anthropologists about normativity can, to an outsider, take on a surprisingly testy character. McKearney mentions the ‘fraught’ divide between what he terms ‘activist versus culturalist or intellectualist ways of tackling the question of normativity’, activists being those who think anthropology has a role in standing in solidarity with or even representing and advocating for the marginalized (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Biehl 2005), whereas intellectualists (Robbins 2013) ‘are more wary of direct normative engagement’ (McKearney 2019: 223). Plainly, given Robbins’s proposal, wariness is not to be read as meaning ‘opposition to’ but perhaps better as ‘awareness of some of the pitfalls of’. In any case, given my own sense of the need for theology to get better at what Robbins thinks theology may be doing well, there is surely room for a profitable conversation over this very ground. In particular, to return to where this essay started, the prospect of two disciplines challenged (and even chastened) by their encounter to do better in displaying the logic and forms of the moral life promises not only theoretical or intellectual but perhaps also practical gains. The Alder Hey parents, we might say, were doing better than we think – for

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the social incomprehension which they experienced had much to do with the inability of dominant understandings of morality, especially in bioethics and official thinking influenced by it, to grasp the character and meaning of their deeds. It may just be that the conversation between anthropology and moral theology will not only enrich these disciplines separately and together but may also enable them to contribute to a better level of social intelligence.

References Adams, Nicholas and Charles Elliot. 2000. ‘Ethnography Is Dogmatics: Making Description Central to Systematic Theology’. Scottish Journal of Theology, 53: 339–64. Aguilar, Mario I. and J. Louise Lawrence. 2004. Anthropology and Biblical Studies: Avenues of Approach. Leiden: Brill. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Banner, Michael. 2014. The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology and the Imagination of the Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. ‘On What We Lost When (or If) We Lost the Saints’, in B. Brock and M. Mawson (eds.), The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist: The Future of A Reformation Legacy. London: Bloomsbury 175–90. Banner, Michael, Lesley A. Sharp, Richard Madsen, John H. Evans, J. Derrik Lemons, and Thomas J. Csordas. 2015. ‘Anthropology and Moral Philosophy: A Symposium on Michael Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 33: 111–39. Barclay, John A. 2015. Paul and the Gift. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Erdmans. Bartlett, Robert. 2013. Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bialecki, John, Naomi Haynes, and Joel Robbins. 2008. ‘The Anthropology of Christianity’. Religion Compass, 2: 1139–58. Biehl, Joao. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bielo, James S. 2018. ‘An Anthropologist Is Listening: A Reply to Ethnographic Theology’, in J. Derrick Lemons, Theologically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 140–55. Blyth, Eric and Claire Potter. 2003. ‘Paying for it? Surrogacy, Market Forces and Assisted Conception’, in Cook and Day Sclater (2003), 227–42. Brock, Brian. 2019. ‘“I Exist in Believing”: Anthropology as a Theological and Emancipative Pursuit. A Response to Michael Banner’. Louvain Studies, 41: 238–48.

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Browning, Don S. 1990. A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Cannon, Katie Geneva. 1995. Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. London: Bloomsbury. Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casten˜eda-Liles, Marie de Socorro. 2018. Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadelupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Lawrence. 1998. No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Coleman, Monica A. 2008. Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Cone, James H. 1975. God of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Cook, Rachel and Shelley Day Sclater. 2003. Surrogate Motherhood: International Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalferth, Ingolf U. 2016. Creatures of Possibility: The Theological Basis of Human Freedom. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Danforth, Loring M. 1982. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. 1992. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. du Boulay, Juliet. 2009. Cosmos, Life and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village. Limni: Orthodox Logos. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Faubion, James D. 2001. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogics of Autopoesis’. Representations, 74: 83–104. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Francis, Doris, Leonie Kellaher, and Georgina Neophytou. 2005. The Secret Cemetery. Oxford: Berg. Fulkerson, Mary Mcklintock. 2007. Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Furani, Khaled. 2019. Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gutierrez, Gustavo. 1973. A Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Hall, David D., ed. 1997. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Healy, Nicholas M. 2000. Church, World and the Christian Life: PracticalProphetic Ecclesiology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hockey, Jenny. 1990. Experiences of Death. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Isasi-Diaz,Ada Maria. 1993. En La Lucha/In the Struggle: A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2001. ‘Anthropology: The Paradox of the Secular’. Social Anthropology, 9: 341–4.

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Kelsey, David H. 2010. Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology. Westminster: John Knox Press. Klassen, Pamela E. 2001. Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311–32. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, Michael and Brian A. Williams, ed. 2019. Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2000. ‘The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy’. Current Anthropology, 41: 133–57. ed. 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Lemons, J. Derrick. ed. 2018. Theologically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindbeck, George A. 1984. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Westminster: John Knox Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue. London: Duckworth. Mathewes, Charles. 2019. ‘Sacramental Ethics and the Future of Moral Theology’, in Lamb and Williams (2019), 192–210. Mathews, Jeanette and Matt Tomlinson. 2018. ‘Anthropology, Theology, and History in Conversation’. St Mark’s Review, 244. McKearney, Patrick. 2016. ‘The Genre of Judgment: Description and Difficulty in the Anthropology of Ethics’. Journal of Religious Ethics, 44: 544–73. 2019. ‘Everyday Ethics: A Bibliographic Essay’, in Lamb and Williams (2019,), 221–40. McLean, Athena. 2007. The Person in Dementia: A Study of Nursing Home Care in the US. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press. Meneses, Eloise and David Bronkema, eds. 2017. On Knowing Humanity: Insights from Theology for Anthropology. London: Routledge. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language and Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donovan, Oliver. 1984. Begotten or Made? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orsi, Robert A. 2010. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. 3rd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pannenburg, Wolfhart. 1985. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. Louisville, KY: Fortress Press. Philips, Elizabeth. 2012. ‘Charting the “Ethnographic Turn”: Theologians and the Study of Christian Congregations’, in Ward (2012). Ragone´, Helena. 1999. ‘The Gift of Life: Surrogate Motherhood, Gamete Donation, and Constructions of Altruism’, in Linda Layne (ed.), Transformative Motherhood. New York: New York University Press: 65–88. Rapp, Rayna. 1999. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge.

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Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–62. 2018. ‘Where in the World Are Values?’, in J. Laidlaw, B. Bodenhorn, and M. Holbraad (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scharen, Christian, and Aana Marie Vigen, eds. 2011. Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics. London: Continuum. Scheper-Hughes,Nancy. 1995. ‘The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology’. Current Anthropology, 36: 409–40. Schneider, David. 1980. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Seeman, Don. 2018. ‘Divinity Inhabits the Social: Ethnography in a Phenomenological Key’, in Lemons (2018), 336–54. Sharp, Lesley. 2006. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Swinton, John, and Harriet Mowat. 2006. Practical Theology and Qualitative Research. London: SCM Press. Teman, Elly. 2010. Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thompson, Charis. 2005. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thurston, Stephanie Mota. 2019. ‘Engaging the Everyday in Womanist Ethics and Mujerista Theology’, in Lamb and Williams (2019), 28–40. Tomlinson, Michael. 2020. God Is Samoan: Dialogues Between Culture and Theology in the Pacific. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Tranter, Samuel, and David Bartram Torrance. 2018. ‘Ethnography, Ecclesiology, and the Ethics of Everyday Life: A Conversation with the Work of Michael Banner’. Ecclesial Practices, 5: 157–71. Ward, Pete., ed. 2012. Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Erdmans. Warnock Report Warnock Report (Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology). London, 1984. Whitmore, Todd David. 2007. ‘Crossing the Road: The Role of Ethnographic Fieldwork in Christian Ethics’. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 27: 273–94. Williams, Delores S. 2002. Sisters in the Wilderness. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Zelizer, Viviana. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

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Part II

Aspects of Ethical Agency

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9 Making the Ethical in Social Interaction Webb Keane and Michael Lempert

Introduction Much of anthropology’s ‘ethical turn’ counters the tendency to explain away ethical life, for instance by reducing it to something else such as social conventions, political interests, or psychological forces. The ethical turn shifts the social from foreground to background, so that it serves people as a resource rather than as a primary determinant or explanation for what they do and how they understand one another. We define the ethical as that dimension of value judgements and goals that is not reducible in the first instance to some instrumental purpose (Keane 2016; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2010: 1–36; Mattingly 2012). But might this not risk hypostasizing the individual or depoliticizing the field of analysis? Focussing on the dynamics of ethicalization in social interaction, we argue that, quite the contrary, it can productively recast our understanding of persons and the political. We argue that other people are not mere objects of ethical concern: they play a productive role in fostering the very recognizability of actions as being ethical matters in the first place. Other people’s actions in turn contribute to the historical transformation of values, practices, and concepts, and the emergence of new ones. This chapter surveys some of the processes through which this transpires. It treats social interaction as a key site of processes we call ethicalization. As we will explain, that an action or a way of living is even a matter of ethical concern at all is not necessarily given in advance. Ethicalization refers to the emergent character of ethics in interaction, the role played by enactment and the motility of stance, and their contribution to historical transformations.

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This emergent character and its political consequentiality have been brought into sharp relief in recent years in the United States, where the authors are based. Although the # MeToo movement was sparked by acts of blatant sexual violation, it directs attention to a wide range of more subtle harms, and in doing so contributes to their ethicalization, which forms a springboard for the politics that follows. Likewise, the recognition of racial microaggressions (Pierce 1970) draws what were once unnoticed and apparently innocent details of interaction into the visible frame of ethical politics (Lempert n.d.; Love 2016). Much as feminist consciousnessraising did in the early 1970s, these transform the ethical landscape by giving names to its previously unremarked features (Keane 2016). As the feminist Gloria Steinem remarked long ago, ‘Now, we have terms like sexual harassment . . .. A few years ago, they were just called life’ (1995: 161). More generally, the politics of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, class, and caste often focus on pronouns and other features of everyday interaction precisely because of their ethical implications for how people stand towards one another (Alim, Rickford, and Ball 2016; Goebel 2010; Hillewaert 2020; Inoue 2006; Love 2016; Shohet 2021). This focus is not peculiar to any one society or historical moment – for instance, pronouns, terms of address, and other details of interaction were taken very seriously by early twentieth-century Indonesian nationalists (Errington 1998), mid-century Vietnamese revolutionaries (Luong 1988), and contemporary post-revolutionary Cambodians (Yin 2021). In this chapter, however, we attend to the more humdrum but ubiquitous dimensions of everyday life. Our working assumption is that we can best understand the ethics and politics of interaction by starting with their more unremarked but omnipresent forms. What makes ethics compelling for individuals? Does anthropology have an alternative to such common answers as the universal rationality of a Kantian categorical imperative or Rawlsian veil of ignorance, the doctrines of religious tradition, or the underlying functionalism presumed by evolutionary psychology? Echoing Durkheim’s substitution of social foundations for theological and philosophical ones, Ruth Benedict (1934) notoriously boiled down morality to that which is socially approved. But sociocentric approaches like hers seem to reduce ethics to conformism or habit. This reduction threatens to remove from ethics the distinctive qualities involving judgement, choices among alternatives, and, therefore, the attribution of responsibility to self-aware ethical agents. Another objection is that the social conformism model tends to assume too much consensus: what happens when (as is usually the case) society doesn’t provide a single set of ethical precepts, guidelines, or habits, but many, unevenly distributed or mutually contradictory – to say nothing of the inescapability of political contestation and structures of power that make these alternatives consequential? Arguments around #MeToo and racist microaggressions are so fraught in part because of deep disagreements

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about the ethics of the most ordinary aspects of daily life. People who in many respects share political positions may differ profoundly in where they will find the political. This is one reason to pay close ethnographic attention to the most mundane processes of face-to-face interaction.1 For anthropologists, the alternatives to Benedict’s position pose their own challenges. The rationalist traditions of moral philosophy’s deontological and utilitarian schools seem either empirically unrealistic or Eurocentric in their assumptions. Virtue ethics can seem to emphasize acceptance of existing, agreed-upon mores over invention, contradiction, dispute, or rebellion. Appeal to the universalism of moral psychology, in turn, seems problematic on several grounds. Empirically, the data derive almost entirely from educated populations in highly developed, largely urban societies, and the experiments often work with problematic conceptualizations of the ethical. They tend to replace ethical judgement proper with more or less involuntary cognitive, emotional, or other psychological mechanisms. To the extent that psychological explanations of ethical intuitions are deterministic, they seem to eliminate a crucial feature of ethics as usually understood, that, in any given instance, the actor could do otherwise. To the extent that the psychological processes they describe work below the agent’s consciousness, they seem to eliminate or minimize ethical self-awareness and reflection. In both instances, it is hard to attribute responsibility or judgement to such actors. And yet some findings of moral psychology seem robust. Proto- or quasi-ethical emotions such as repugnance and empathy, and cognitive resources like reciprocity of perspectives and third-person norm enforcement, seem to be ubiquitous, if not universal (Appiah 2008; Tomasello 1999). Surely anthropology would stand on firmer ground if it could demonstrate how ethnographic research articulates with the world described in other social sciences, rather than insisting on the exceptionalism of our sphere of knowledge (Keane 2016)? Ethics may not be reducible to either psychology or social pressure, but ethnographers of social interaction and linguistic anthropologists allow us to recognize points of connection between these two. They would argue that the dynamics of social interaction and the semiotic mediation of ethical awareness bridge the general claims of moral psychology and the social-historical specificities of ethics as it is actually lived. Like most of our colleagues, we are sceptical of the stronger universalizing claims often found in psychological explanations of social and cultural phenomena. We do, however, grant as indisputable that humans share certain basic cognitive and affective features. But we argue that rather than causing ethical judgements, actions, and habits, these features are affordances that can be 1

We treat ‘morality’ here under the encompassing rubric of ‘ethics’. For terminological discussion, see Keane (2016: 17– 22). As rough heuristics, we take as distinctive features of the ethical both judgements (as in deontology) and value orientations (as in virtue ethics) that cannot, from the perspective of the people involved, be understood as means towards some further end (Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2010: 1–36; Mattingly 2012).

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taken up within particular ethical projects, under particular historical circumstances. An affordance is a property of something that is potentially available to an agent, something to which people can respond, but that does not determine that they will do so, or in what way and to what end (Gibson 1977; Ingold 2000; Keane 2016, 2018; see also Mead 1967: 280ff.). What we find useful about the concept of affordance is that it acknowledges the constraints and causalities of human biology, patterns of interaction, discursive knowledge, and institutional structures without inviting reductionism or determinism. In this chapter, we trace some of the many ways in which these affordances are drawn on in social interaction as part of a process we call ethicalization.

Social Interaction Focussing on the productive and emergent quality of ethics, we recognize but do not privilege the role of prohibitions and obligations imposed on the individual by groups or institutions. We also recognize that communities are variegated and fissured rather than a source of a single, cohesive, overarching ethos or culture. The aim of the analysis is to establish the ethical on its own terms, the evaluative dimension of people’s lives together that is not wholly reducible to something else such as power, interests, or instinctual forces. Yet where does this anti-reductionism leave us? Due perhaps to an old and stubborn antinomy, the ethical turn may seem to steer us back towards the individual as we take leave of the social. When contemporary anthropologists have taken up virtue ethics, along with phenomenology and affect theory, they often stress bodies over minds, habit over reflection, and sensibility or affect over reason. Some approaches, emphasizing the role of human freedom in ethics, risk reproducing Western modernity’s ideologically loaded figure of the voluntaristic individual. Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop (2018) observe that anthropologists, unlike moral philosophers, ‘have been leery of attention to [the] biographical self, fearing that this approach commits them to some sort of individualism’ (Mattingly and Throop 2018: 481; see also Laidlaw 2014: 179). They recognize the need to defend their phenomenological approach against the charge that privileging of the first-person perspective ‘does not refer to some singular isolated individual and his or her inner experience’ (Mattingly and Throop 2018: 482). To those who insist that ethics is grounded in individual intuitions and actions, many anthropologists would counter that these actions and intuitions inevitably have a shared character and draw on public sources, saturated with historical contingency and power effects. In short, anthropologists of ethics broadly agree that the individual cannot be the explanatory source for ethical life any more than the social

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can. Individuals do not invent their ethics all by themselves, nor do they engage in ethics in isolation. While we may know that the ethical is not just a private matter, we do not always appreciate the manner in which and the extent to which ethical practices, from the life-long cultivation and enactment of virtue to momentary events of reflection and choice, involve other people and often require their active presence. Philosophical, sociological, religious, and historical approaches to ethics tend to focus on abstract concepts that circulate publicly, such as freedom, justice, mercy, and power, evil, betrayal, dishonesty, and so forth. Granting their importance, the anthropologist must still ask what, in practice, makes these abstractions inhabitable, recognizable, and consequential in concrete terms. We must also account for the relations between such explicit concepts and the unspoken and intuitive, the gutlevel quality of what Veena Das (2007), Michael Lambek (2010), and others call ‘ordinary ethics’. Social interactions are the primary locus for talk about and enactments of honour, dignity, respect, and shame (confining ourselves here just to the English lexicon). Attention to interactions also shows the limits of individualistic approaches that focus solely on habits, emotions, intuitions, decisions, and reasoning. They demonstrate how self and other are mutually involved in the production and practice of the ethical. And if ethics is realized in interaction, interaction itself can become subject to evaluation – that is, there is often a morality of interaction as well. But if ethics cannot be reduced either to individuals or collectivities, these cannot be dismissed either. Social interaction is the critical point of articulation between the world described by moral psychology and affect theory, on the one hand, and that encountered through history and ethnography, on the other. Although we focus on co-present social interaction among humans as the paradigmatic site for this articulation, ethicalization can in principle involve human interaction with agencies of any kind, be they spirits and divinities, animals and the environment, machines and media, as well as highly distributed agents like corporate shareholders and political constituencies.

Ethical Stance-Taking Developmental psychologists and linguists agree that the full-fledged ability to speak a language depends on cognitive capacities for role reversal and shared intentionality (Tomasello 1999). During language acquisition, children master shifters such as first- and second-person pronouns that require them to switch and track speaking parts. These cognitive capacities are conditions of possibility for ethics in several respects. They facilitate the motility of stance, and they endow semiotic form with affordances for value judgements. They account for the relative freedom and reflexive

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capacities of ethical agents without the individualism and voluntarism that many theories of ethical freedom presuppose. They help us describe the ubiquity of ethical responses without determinism. We consider these in turn. Motility of stance refers to the basic ability that any individual possesses for shifting between what we can call the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives on themselves, others, and the actions they are involved in (Keane 2016). By ‘first person’, we mean the emotions, intuitions, and thoughts that form a core sense of self. For example, the first-person stance may denote that part of ethical life that responds unreflexively and immediately to situations that provoke empathy or moral disgust (Haidt 2001). The ‘second person’, on analogy with speech addressed to another person, is dialogic in character. It posits an external point of view on the self as seen by another person who is situated (as opposed to a generic ‘other’), who can be addressed, and whose judgements matter to the self (Mead 1967). This is the domain of what Erving Goffman (1955) called face-work. It is only once one can shift between first and second person that one can enter into cooperative play. This is interaction that is valued for its own sake, rather than for an instrumental purpose (e.g. tossing a ball, as opposed to joining forces to carry a burden too heavy for one person). Cooperative play commonly involves rules or norms, which brings us to the ‘third-person stance’. In language, the third-person pronoun refers to someone or something that is outside the conversation in which it occurs (Benveniste 1971). As a more general perspective, it can refer to the normative perspective of ‘anyone at all’ as opposed to the ego-centric or interaction-centric perspective grounded in a context. Here we use it to refer to the position of the outside observer, who evaluates persons or actions with reference to socially recognizable, nameable, and even purportedly objective categories. The underlying cognitive condition for the third-person stance appears in what psychologists call ‘third-party norm enforcement’. We see this when young children object to a violation of rules in a game or to the unfair distribution of birthday cake, even when they do not directly suffer harm. In this respect, the third-person perspective is a cognitive affordance on which certain ethical theories draw. For example, deontology depends on the capacity for standing outside one’s own situation in order to make judgements with reference to some principle or norm that is taken to be independent of one’s own desires or interests. This capacity for decentring the self underwrites such ethical systems as Kant’s categorical imperative, Rawls’s veil of ignorance, and many religious systems of prescription, taboo, and proscription. The third-person stance is an especially clear expression of one defining feature of the ethical, namely evaluations of persons or actions that do not arise directly from technical considerations (for instance, better or worse ways to plant rice) or instrumental purposes (such as serving as means to sex, riches, or glory). However, in contrast to much of European moral

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philosophy, the anthropology of interaction does not privilege the thirdperson stance as the true locus of ethics. For one thing, much of everyday ethics is best described in terms of the first- and second-person stances, a point we develop further later. Moreover, it is hard to explain how people come to have strong ethical feelings and commitments without the intimacy of the first- and second-person stances. Knowing that something is wrong (from the third-person stance) does not necessarily mean I (in the first person) will care about it. This brings us to the second point: the affordances of semiotic form. Because the acquisition of language, and of semiotic capacities more generally, entails inferences about other persons’ intentions, and purposes, semiotic form affords judgements about things that are not directly observable. These can include not just other people’s thoughts and intentions but also, more generally, their values, normative orientations, and character – how, for instance, they will act in the future – which has been important in virtue ethics. Philosopher Stephen Darwall (2009) defines the second person not just as address but rather as a demand to be treated with respect for one’s dignity. The idea of dignity, a core ethical concept for him, is irreducibly interactive. It depends on a semiotics of behaviour: your respect for my dignity must be perceptible to me, and ideally to other people as well. In cannot remain an inner quality you alone possess, nor can I claim it for myself unassisted. This, again, demonstrates the distributed nature of ethical practice. People in many societies (but not all) are called on to draw inferences about one another’s unobservable character on the basis of observations in the present (Carr 2011, 2013; Reed and Bialecki 2018a, b). The role of others in one’s own sense of character is reflected in a remark by the conversation analyst Harvey Sacks (1972) that ‘Human history proper begins with the awareness by Adam and Eve that they are observables . . .. By the term “being an observable” I mean having, and being aware of having, an appearance that permits warrantable inferences about one’s moral character’ (281, 333 n.1). That is, the inner self is shaped by the experience of being an outer self for others, which is enabled by the ability to shift between first- and second-person perspectives. The most ubiquitous medium on which those perspectives draw is the semiotics of social interaction. Erving Goffman’s (1955) analysis of face-work showed the amount of conscious or unconscious effort that people make to accept and sustain the self-image that others, their interlocutors, try to project. To sustain, or refrain from challenging, another’s claims to having a certain kind of character and reputation can be both an imperative in its own right and a contribution to the ongoing ethical development of each participant in the interaction. The reinforcement provided by other people is part of the scaffolding for one’s character. As such, other people’s talk can be an especially sensitive register of ethical norms and medium for their transgression.

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Ethicalization in Interaction One benefit of the ‘ordinary ethics’ approach (Das 2007, 2012; Lambek 2010) is that it redirects attention away from highly self-conscious rational reflection and social institutions to more routine and less conspicuous moments of daily life. To this we would add that even tacit embodied actions take place in and through social interactions that, at some point, are likely to be mediated by language use. In his pioneering works on social interaction, Goffman wrote of human social encounters as moral through and through. In his somewhat Durkheimian perspective, morality meant tacit normativities that bind persons to each other, and that, when threatened, demand repair. We can see this in his treatment of the contagious nature of embarrassment: ‘When an individual finds himself in a situation which ought to make him blush, others present will usually blush with him and for him’ (Goffman 1956: 265). His essay on alienation, for instance, catalogued forms of ‘misinvolvement’ (Goffman 1957). Thus, one may suddenly become painfully self-conscious about how the interaction itself is going. Why show involvement at all, Goffman asks, and why should interlocutors instinctively rush to the rescue when embarrassment erupts or involvement flags? All this reciprocal attention and responsiveness stems not from concern over the plight of individuals per se but over the fate of interaction itself as a moral order. ‘Conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf’, Goffman famously wrote; ‘it is a little social system’, ‘a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains’ (1957: 47). Goffman (1955, 1959) depicted the delicate reciprocity of face-work, where people protect each other’s self-image and thereby strain to uphold something sacred: the self. Critics (e.g. MacIntyre 1984) have questioned whether this should be called morality at all rather than, say, etiquette, because Goffman liked to stress how face-work did not require sincerity (see Keane 2002) or, indeed, any specific mental state at all. His expression ‘merchants of morality’ epitomized this view, because, ‘qua performers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these [moral] standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized’ (Goffman 1959: 251). Goffman bracketed interior states in part to stress that the obligations of interaction do not stem from individual psychology but from normativities specific to human co-presence. In broad terms, Goffman’s microsociology is vulnerable to the same well-rehearsed critiques of Durkheim that helped incite the ethical turn. It risks reducing morality to the social (Laidlaw 2002, 2014; Robbins 2007). How might the details of interaction nonetheless shed light on everyday ethics? We note several aspects: its processualism; its careful attention to the

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discursive dimensions of ethical practice, including forms of reflexivity; and its redistribution of ethical subjecthood beyond the scope of the monadic individual. We address each of these in turn. Alive to the mercurial flow of discursive life, interactionists focus on process as they trace the way actions, relations, stances, and identities continuously change, how they twist and turn, form and fall apart. They bring a heightened sensitivity to contingency and precarity in social interaction as it unfolds over time. Observing that ‘[o]rdinary or mundane conversation is not of course pervasively about morality’ (1998: 296), Paul Drew makes clear that people have to do things communicatively to make morality surface. By contrast, to assume that ethics pervades every moment of interaction – as if ethics were always, everywhere ‘immanent’ (Lempert 2013, 2015; see also Lambek 2015; Sidnell, Meudec, and Lambek 2019) – risks rendering it ethnographically invisible, in the sense that it does not invite us to scrutinize when, how, and with what effects ethics manifests itself (Lempert 2015). This is why we find it necessary to seek out the semiotic work of ethicalization. It prompts us to ask: when and how does ethics become intersubjectively recognizable and pragmatically relevant? When and how do people register and communicate the ethical? When is this response tacit, when must it be made explicit? At what point does ethicalization become consequential enough to change the course of an event or prompt reflexivity and responses such as self-justification, apology, repair, accusation, and so forth? And when do people deny that an act or circumstance has any ethical implications at all – that, for instance, merely instrumental or practical considerations are relevant? Finally, how do such moments of interaction come to have broad, long-term social consequences?2 Studies of interaction provide fine-grained methods for addressing questions like those posed above and thereby contribute to our understanding of what we may broadly call ethical pragmatics. As we survey later, all facets of ethical life – from the cultivation and display of character to expressions of outrage, from modelling behaviour to moralizing sermons, from problematization (Foucault 1997; Laidlaw 2014) to explicitly accounting for oneself (Butler 2005) – can be approached as discursive practices that prototypically take place with others. Indeed, we would argue that even apparently solitary introspection stages an internal dialogue with a projected interlocutor (Tomasello 1999). What is more, interactants may not register a behaviour as relevant to morality until it is charged as being problematic. It is precisely the work of ethicalization, when it occurs, to ‘reveal’ the ethical dimensions of a norm, or at least attempt to do so (Lempert 2013). People’s conversational failures, disruptions, and conflicts are revealing not simply because they expose 2

For example, where some would argue for economic redistribution on the ethical grounds of fairness, neoliberalism might deny there are any ethical questions at all, only instrumental ones of efficiency (Keane 2019).

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what is taken for granted but because they are candidates for becoming ethical events in their own right – a process that is neither automatic nor one whose outcome is guaranteed. If nothing is guaranteed, neither is anything off limits, for close attention to interactions shows that anything can be ethicalized. Even seemingly trivial features of interaction can assume ethical weight, as Harold Garfinkel (1967) showed in one experiment. He directed his students to spend time at home acting as if they were in a boarding house. Towards small differences in behaviour, such as being extra polite, speaking only when spoken to, or asking permission to take food from the refrigerator, their parents were often offended, even outraged. Parents accused the children of arrogance, indifference, and a host of affronts to face, dignity, respect, and other ethical values. Features of interaction that serve as technical devices for facilitating communication can thus be subject to ethical evaluation under certain interactive circumstances and within certain historical contexts.

Beyond Habit and Reflection Attention to interaction highlights a contrast between habit and reflection. As noted earlier, anthropologists influenced by virtue ethics, phenomenology, or affect theory often discount the role of self-conscious awareness in ethical life. Yet it is a familiar experience that ‘sometimes we are in the midst of action’ and ‘sometimes we seem to stand apart from it’ (Keane 2010: 69; see also Keane 2014). This movement in and out of the flow of action has been subject to debate in the anthropology of ethics. Some identify morality with the flow of habitual normativity. From this perspective, reflexivity is an aberration due to moral breakdowns that disrupt that flow, to which the impulse is to recover and settle back into a state of unreflective normativity (Zigon 2009). Others suggest the difference between habit and reflexivity entails distinct kinds of morality, what Joel Robbins calls the unself-conscious ‘morality of reproduction’, on the one hand, and the self-aware ‘morality of choice’, on the other (Robbins 2007, 2009). To be sure, the rationalism of deontology or utilitarianism perches far above the messy, concrete realities of everyday ethics and those responses and intuitions that are simply unavailable to consciousness (Haidt 2001; Kahneman and Tversky 1979). But not all self-conscious reflection is austere, rationalistic, or elite – nor, we propose, is it necessarily a post-hoc or secondary rationalization. If deontological and consequentialist traditions propose unrealistic goals, we agree with Laidlaw (2014: 124–37) that privileging the habitual and unself-conscious smuggles in its own teleology of ‘authenticity’. As an alternative, we may envision a continuum on one end of which is the unself-aware immersion in the flow of everydayness, at the other the

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full-tilt moral breakdown in which everything screeches to a halt and people have to talk and reflect on how things should be. Studies of social interaction show that ethicalization comes in degrees and varies in explicitness. There is no simple divide between habit and reflection. Nor should we expect to find any one type of alternation among the more and less ‘reflective’ moments of ethical life. Reflection itself is such a fraught term. It is still too often understood to require rational self-consciousness and imagined as seated in the mind of a monadic subject. Given the metaphysical trappings this subject can involve, it is useful to speak instead of reflexivity. In linguistic and semiotic anthropology reflexivity refers to a variety of ways, implicit or explicit, in which signs can be used to refer to or frame other signs (Agha 2007; Keane 2010, 2014). Reflexivity is not limited to the special case of talk about talk.3 Tacit verbal and non-verbal responses, such as facial displays of discomfort, speech dysfluencies, and activities like gift giving, can be potently reflexive and ‘suffice to give a statement a moral tinge’ (Bergmann 1998: 281), in ways consistent with other discussions of ordinary ethics (e.g. Das 2007, 2010). Reflexivity comes in many forms, but, we propose, it always arises in response to some instigation, whether that be the demands of a philosophical vocation, say, or the probings of gossip. Although this reflexivity usually occurs within the flow of interaction – only rarely does it cause an interaction to stop – it can do quite a lot. It can induce an ethical reframing of that interaction by pointing to an alleged problem and subjecting it to evaluation. In response, interlocutors may adjust their stance towards one another, by apologizing, accounting for their behaviour with reasons, disputing the allegation, or making other efforts to redefine the situation.

The Distributed Subject This semiotic approach to reflexivity offers an alternative to some of the ethnocentric assumptions about the individual that psychologism can smuggle in. Attending to modes of communication shows what emerges through people’s engagement with one another, which is arguably where the idea of ethics really gains purchase. The claim that reflexivity is not something that an individual’s mind does brings us to the most instructive, if unsettling, lesson from the interactionist literature, which has to do with the scope of the ethical subject. Those relations need not be with living humans. Karma, for example, can extend the subject backward in time, beyond this life (Laidlaw 2014: 105−6). Sometimes this subject can be 3

The ability to put into words ‘what is going on here’ can be important, but reflexivity does not require denotational explicitness (see esp. Agha 2007). Linguistic and semiotic anthropologists have identified many forms and ‘degrees’ of reflexivity, some of which are highly implicit (cf. Siegel 2005: 19ff.).

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stretched synchronically so that they are co-extensive with, say, a kingroup. As a linguistic anthropologist writing of Vietnamese families puts it, ethics is never reduced to ‘care of the self’ (in Foucault’s words), since everyone is ‘always already entangled in multiple relations and obligations to others’ (Shohet 2021: 181). The ethical subject can be found across a range of spatial and temporal realizations. Close attention to social interaction reveals ways in which ethical subjectivity is distributed across actors. If we take seriously the idea that interaction is not just the coming together of discrete individuals but a joint achievement (which does not mean an egalitarian one), this can reveal aspects of ethical life that we might not otherwise notice. Ethical practice is not only sensitive and responsive to others’ presence; it also often requires others to play a critical role in its enactment. Moralizing gossip, for instance, goes nowhere without the collusion of others. Hints and innuendo about wrongdoing often protect the speaker’s character by inviting others to figure out what allusive remarks ‘really’ mean (Lempert 2012). In Foucault’s account of virtue ethics, even individual self-cultivation depends on social relations. He emphasized truthtelling practices that institutionalize the ethical role of others, such as the father confessor. As Summerson Carr (2013: 38) notes, he viewed confession as a ‘discursive event, whose efficacy relies on the ritual management of the confessant’s speech’ (e.g. Foucault et al. 2011: 5; see also Butler 2004). Such ethical practices distribute roles across participants (Carr 2013: 39). As research on distributed cognition and situated learning shows, even seemingly solitary actions like reasoning involve other people (e.g. Lave 1988; Mercier and Sperber 2019). This insight is all the more germane when we consider something as fundamentally interpersonal as ethics.

Action under a Description Thus far, we have viewed ethicalization from an event-centred perspective, where it refers to the semiotic means by which the ethical is made recognizable and consequential in analytically discrete moments of interaction. We have argued that conversational interaction is the natural home of ethical reflection.4 But treating ethics as ubiquitous and habitual can render its historicity hard to grasp. As we have suggested, if the concept of ethics is to be meaningful and empirically available, we should not expect to find it spread evenly throughout the flow of personal experience or social interaction. By tracing how ethics emerges in response to particular promptings and circumstances in people’s lives with one 4

This does not require that we view face-to-face interaction as if it were an intrinsically ‘small-scale’ domain of social life (Lempert 2016).

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another, we can gain insight into the transformation and social circulation of ethical norms, sensibilities, and systems. Even when interaction flows smoothly, ethics is not confined to unquestioned habit, intuition, or silent introspection. As people shift among first, second-, and third-person stances, so too they shift modes of reflexivity. A characteristic feature of social interaction is that people hold one another accountable for their behaviour. Sometimes this accountability manifests itself as reasons, excuses, or justifications, sometimes in more subtle ways, such as not responding at all when a response is expected. Accountability depends on explicit or tacit appeal to normative principles that all parties can recognize. But ethics is not merely the application of existing cultural, religious, or philosophical systems. The ongoing push and pull of interactive challenges and responses exerts pressure on the normative as well, contributing both to its momentary stabilization and historical transformations. When someone reflexively targets behaviour as ethically problematic, this can lead to explicit meta-communicative behaviour, even to sustained efforts at what Judith Butler (2005) calls ‘giving an account of oneself’. Ethicalization runs through quite mundane moments of selfcharacterization whose effects derive from being woven into the texture of interaction. In her studies of Black and Latina schoolgirls, Marjorie Goodwin finds that in negotiating the rules of their schoolyard games, ‘girls are extraordinarily adept and articulate in producing moves that explicate a sense of justice. Girls display intense engrossment in formulating logical proofs and demonstrations for their positions’ (Goodwin 2006: 246). In arguments, the girls often deploy a range of explicit ethical categories for actions and persons. ‘Indeed, within a single utterance a girl can invoke a coherent domain of action: a small culture, one that includes identities, actions and biographies for the participants within it, in addition to a relevant past that warrants the current accusation, and makes relevant specific types of next actions’ (Goodwin 2006: 7). Arguments like these involve explicit ethicalization, in which the takenfor-granted is reflexively foregrounded with the help of denotational language. Language spells out a practical norm with reference to an underlying ethical principle with the expectation that others will recognize it. During the quick flow of interaction the very definition of what is happening may take shape over time in part by means of people’s descriptions of action. In her study of romantic breakups among American college students, Ilana Gershon notes an incident in which one reports trouble with her boyfriend. The student says, ‘I got into an argument. I guess we got into a fight and I didn’t even know that we got into a fight, I thought we were just arguing . . .. I thought we were just having a discussion’ (Gershon 2010: 400). The competing descriptors – ‘argue’, ‘fight’, ‘discuss’ – illustrate how people can use language

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reflexively to define – and contest – ‘what kind of action are we engaged in?’ and their moral consequences.5 The characterization of actions and of the persons who enter into them is central to the ways in which explicit ethical categories enter the fabric of social life beyond individual intuitions.

Conclusion We should be wary of the drive to find the ‘basis’ or ‘source’ of ethics in specific capacities of the mind, emotions, conversational dynamics, cultural norms, philosophical reasoning, religious teachings, or social institutions. Ethics can draw on any or all of those capacities as affordances, because what makes something count as ethical depends on discursive behaviour, informed by social context and people’s background assumptions. Rather than trace ethics back to its supposed roots, which often means trying to anchor ethics in a disciplinarily defined object like ‘the social’ or ‘biology’, an appreciation for affordances redirects our attention towards its emergence in ethicalization processes. The concept of affordances invites us to trace out how the ethical is assembled from diverse and often far-flung materials rather than trying to locate the true basis of ethics in any one source. The ethnographic record quickly reveals enormous variety not just in ethical values and judgements but also in what even counts as ethically relevant at all – aspects of clothing, posture, dress, speech, food, the handling of money, and so forth that are neutral matters of taste or instrumental rationality in one context may be subject to powerful value judgements in another (Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller 1990). In his study of environmental activists in Kerala, India, John Mathias (2019) notes his surprise at the way in which, during a protest march, the offer of a softdrink and cookie, which hadn’t been ethically fraught, suddenly became so simply because someone raised an eyebrow. As he observes, activists were primed for this shift in stance towards details of their own behaviour by their general critique of the environmental costs of consumerism. The resulting ethical stance became contagious, prompting activists to heightened self-awareness and emergent modes of self-cultivation. Cases like this demonstrate the need to explain the processes through which and conditions under which something becomes ethical and stays so. To the extent that ethics is a meaningful and unified category, this results from social-semiotic processes that happen in interaction. The outcomes of these processes may be ephemeral. But they may also result 5

Explicit meta-pragmatic descriptors are neither necessary nor sufficient for determining what kind of action is occurring. Explicit descriptions cannot be taken at face value, as in the argumentative statement ‘I’m not arguing with you!’ For recent reflections on the pragmatics of explicit descriptions, see Enfield and Sidnell (2017); on timeless, ‘generic’ claims, see Zuckerman (2021).

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in objectifications that scale up and take on an enduring and widespread public life. Objectifications like the ethical lexicon facilitate the generalization and abstraction characteristic of the third-person perspective. The historicity of ethical vocabularies can be seen in the coinage of new terms like ‘nepotism’ in the seventeenth century, ‘racist’ in the nineteenth century, or ‘sexist’ in the twentieth, the demotion of older ones like ‘simony’ or ‘le`se-majeste´’, and the value reversal of yet others from positive to negative, like ‘condescension’, or negative to positive, like ‘democracy’. Once explicit categories like ‘liberated woman’ or ‘patriot’ enter the world of public discourse, they become affordances available for appropriation in the flow of interaction. Through what Ian Hacking (1995) has called ‘looping effects’, they can become new ways of being a person, being with others, and judging interactions, ways that are recognizable to others – even when serving as points of contention. Once formulated as explicit concepts, ethical categories enter a public realm where they can be invoked in daily interactions and public forums. When people invoke them, they expect that they will be recognizable descriptions of types of action and actor, and serve as legitimate, shared grounds for excuses, accusations, justifications, and so forth. They can be used reflexively, where they direct attention to communicative behaviour itself. English words like ‘dignity’ and Nuyorican ‘respect’ find their primary referents in social interaction and its intersubjective effects. So do key ethical terms elsewhere. The Chewong of Malaysia speak of pune´n, the dangerous consequences incurred by not inviting another to share one’s meal (Howell 1989). Inuit ihumaquqtuuq is the dark effects of relations gone bad (Briggs 1970); Sumbanese dewa characterizes the individual’s charismatic efficacy (Keane 1997), which can be damaged by insults and repaired by public signs of esteem. The production and invocation of such objectifications are not the content of ethics but, rather, are crucial moments in the ethicalization process. Their visibility facilitates the articulation of public discourses and intimate experiences, and renders them available for reflection, critique, and transformation. Much of the traditional ethnography of ethics and morality enters the social scene in which these descriptions and types are already in place. But consider the meta-pragmatic category ‘microaggression’, a term psychiatrist Chester Pierce (1970) introduced in the late 1960s to describe subtle forms of racialized violence and provocation directed at African Americans, as noted earlier. This term has come to circulate widely over the last decade, during which, as Heather Love recounts, its scope has been extended and used as a ‘key activist tool in combating racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bias, denigration, and exclusion’ (Love 2016: 423). As a reflexive analytic, the concept of microaggression has emerged as part of large-scale if contested efforts to ethicalize interaction in new ways.

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Viewed in empirical terms, then, we argue, the natural home of ethical life is neither the autonomous individual nor some encompassing social or cultural sphere, but social interaction. This holds for the full range of modalities in which we encounter the ethical, from highly discursive events of reasoning and justification to tacit enactments of embodied virtue. The capacity to see oneself from the perspective of another and the demand that one account for oneself, and in doing so the responsive shift into the third-person stance, are all interactional by definition. When these processes instigate ethicalization, they can result in the objectifications that endow ethics with its historical character and political consequentiality, things that endure beyond the momentary situation but that can also change beyond recognition. Thus even such publicly visible artefacts as moralizing tracts, sermons, catechisms, philosophical texts, professional guidelines, didactic handbooks, and lists of virtues should be understood interactively, since they always imply someone who is being addressed. The process of ethicalization depends on people’s fundamental capacity to move between the relatively unproblematic flow of habit and intuitive responses and that of heightened reflexivity – and back again. People are prone to shift back and forth between the habits and subjectivity of the first-person stance, address to others in the second person, and the relatively objectifying viewpoint of the third-person stance. This motility is crucial to how publicly circulating concepts enter into subjective life – sometimes becoming deeply felt intuitions that never enter into awareness, and, conversely, to how inchoate experience can give rise to fully articulated ethical positions. It is what enables individuals to actively affirm or to take a critical stance towards the implicit and explicit norms and virtues proposed by their social milieu. The capacities for ethical reflection, criticism, and purposeful action on which attributions of ethical responsibility so often turn depend on this motility. The semiotic mediation of ethical life shows how people find themselves accountable to one another, what resources they draw upon in order to provide such an accounting, and what the consequences are. This can be a process of self-discovery – people do not just pick up existing values and norms. Rather, through the processes of ethicalization they may come to be aware of their values, how norms do or do not apply to them, and as a result take a stance towards their own desires and actions – claiming or disclaiming them. For ideas about justice, generosity, responsibility, conscience, and so forth are not invented on the spot, nor are they universal ideals simply available to rational introspection. They are affordances available for ethicalization processes that are not predetermined by the resources they may take up. These processes transpire not in the privacy of inner reflection but in the company of, in response to, and sharing an ethical vocabulary with other people.

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Acknowledgements For astute comments on this chapter, we are grateful to Paolo Heywood, James Laidlaw, and Michael Lambek.

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Mead, George Herbert. 1967. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Vol. 1. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber. 2019. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pierce, Chester. 1970. ‘Offensive Mechanisms’, in Floyd B. Barbour (ed.), The Black Seventies. Boston, MA: Sargent: 265–82. Reed, Adam and Jon Bialecki. 2018a. ‘Special Section 1: Anthropology and Character’. Social Anthropology, 26(2). Reed, Adam and Jon Bialecki. 2018b. ‘Special Section 2: Anthropology and Character’. Social Anthropology, 26(3). Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72(3): 293–314. 2009. ‘Value, Structure, and the Range of Possibilities: A Response to Zigon’. Ethnos, 74(2): 277–85. Sacks, Harvey. 1972. ‘Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character’, in David N. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press: 280–93. Shohet, Merav. 2021. Silence and Sacrifice: Family Stories of Care and the Limits of Love in Vietnam. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Shweder, Richard A., Manamohan Mahapatra, and Joan G. Miller. 1990. ‘Culture and Moral Development’, in Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. New York: Cambridge University Press: 130–204. Sidnell, Jack, Marie Meudec, and Michael Lambek. 2019. ‘Ethical Immanence’. Special Issue of Anthropological Theory, 19(3). Siegel, Jerrold E. 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinem, Gloria. 1995. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: H. Holt. Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yin, Cheryl. 2021. Khmer Honorifics: Re-emergence and Change After the Khmer Rouge. PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan. Zigon, Jarrett. 2009. ‘Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in Social Life’. Ethnos, 74(2): 251–76. Zuckerman, Charles H. P., ed. 2021. ‘The Generic. Special Issue 4’. Language in Society, 50(4): 509–621.

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10 Freedom Soumhya Venkatesan

The concept of freedom has been relatively neglected in anthropology. I explore why this has been the case and argue that freedom, especially when placed in tandem with care, is crucial for an anthropology of ethics, which is not focussed on rule-based morality but rather on the ways in which people work out what constitutes a life worth living and how to lead it. I make this case both by drawing on emic invocations of freedom which often incorporate social critique and by analysing individual ethical choices via a family of concepts, which includes freedom, regard, care, and responsibility. In doing so I liberate ‘freedom’ from its associations with both individual autonomy and radical change, focussing much more on its relational dimensions.

Introduction Most people can agree that freedom is a good thing, but when we come to ask what is meant by it, the answers become increasingly difficult. This is partly due to the many cognate terms associated, and sometimes interchangeable, with freedom (e.g. liberty in English) but also because words with different implications can be translated into English as ‘freedom’. For example, in Hindi, moksha, swaraj, nirvana, mukti, and azaadi all refer to freedom, but of different kinds. Thus, swaraj (or self-rule) and azaadi (a Persian origin word) refer to freedom in the political register, while moksha and nirvana refer to freedom in the soteriological sense; that is, freedom from the cycle of births and rebirths. These terms are used in Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism, albeit in different ways. Mukti spans both the soteriological and sociological realms in lay usage. The ubiquity and variety of freedom-concepts is simultaneously productive and troubling. On the one hand, it is clear that concepts that are recognizably about something we can translate as freedom exist in very many different contexts around the world. In other words, freedom is not simply a ‘Western’ or even ‘modern’ concern. On the other hand, it is

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important to keep the different meanings separate without collapsing them into a baggy notion of ‘freedom’ or drawing on them to speak to a strawman-like notion of ‘Western liberal freedom’. Indeed, as a perusal of Freedom: A Philosophical Anthology (Carter et al. 2007) reveals, there is a multitude of ways in which liberal philosophers approach the concept of freedom, its definition, its boundaries, and its many aspects and dimensions. There is no single uncontested liberal conception of freedom. This is something Laidlaw points out too (2014: 142). What does this mean for anthropologists, who encounter invocations of freedom in the field, or who might want to draw on freedom as an analytical concept? I will address the second question later, but one way of approaching freedom ethnographically is to ask how the people we work with use the term. Even here, the answer is not straightforward, as I have found in my research with an English libertarian right-wing organization that puts freedom at the heart of its political activism. Members of this organization find it difficult to articulate exactly what they mean by freedom when specifically asked. Indeed, some told me that they hoped speaking with me might help them to clarify their own understanding of freedom, something they felt they simply took for granted. Many of our discussions ended up centring on markets free from state interference, thus placing freedom within the economic domain. All other individual freedoms were subsequently derived from the freedom of the markets. This, in turn, sets up a hierarchy of specific freedoms – to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labour, to live life as one sees fit, to raise one’s children according to one’s own values, and so on. In other words, freedom tended to vanish, replaced by specific freedoms that are ranked differently by different individuals. However, the inability to grasp freedom as a singular concept does not mean that many of my interlocutors do not hold what Crowe (2009: 78) refers to as a notion of ontological freedom. That is, many espouse a basic propositional belief that humans are born free: with a natural right to self-determination and actualization. They further espouse a normative understanding that this freedom should be preserved, especially as human freedom can be and is progressively restrained by various forces. Their political activism, then, comprises in reining in the restrictions to human freedom in ways that ensure or promote individual self-determination by addressing extant political, economic, and social arrangements. My interlocutors are heirs to a long intellectual tradition that takes ontological or natural freedom as a priori. Some of them refer to Rousseau, Paine, and Nozick. This assumption, of course, does not necessarily obtain elsewhere. For instance, Saivite Hindu cosmologies posit bondage as the fundamental human condition. The soul, contained within the body, is already fettered by its very presence in the body and becomes more so as the person acts in the world. Freedom here is not a condition that can be attained in this world. The soul has to break free, through the

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efforts of the person, from the cycle of rebirths (Venkatesan 2014). As anthropologists, we might ask how people come to hold the ideas of freedom that they do, and what efforts they expend to achieve such freedom(s). We might also ask how certain notions of freedom can affect the ways in which one group of people might understand the lives of others. This is what Mahmood (2001) does in her discussion of how certain feminist understandings of agency ignore the freedom of Egyptian women of the piety movement to choose ethical projects of selffashioning because these projects embrace rather than resist what, from particular liberal perspectives, appear as oppressive. In a similar crosscultural vein, Humphrey (2007) contrasts British and American politicians’ invocations of an intuitive liberal freedom with three freedom terms in Russian (svoboda, mir, and volya). She shows not only that each term has a very different valence and trajectory but also that ‘each contains its own Nemesis; that is, what can seem to be “good” about them in one context, or from one perspective, can seem dangerous and wrong from another’ (2007: 1–2). Through careful explorations of how these terms have played out in Soviet and post-Soviet imaginaries, Humphrey shows not only that freedom is not a universal value; even in the same place, what people understand by freedom does not remain stable. Both Mahmood and Humphrey perform what are classic moves in anthropology; that is, the disturbance of what are held to be universal values in one place (usually ‘the West’) by introducing views and practices from elsewhere. In Mahmood’s case, this is a certain liberal understanding of freedom and agency as resistance to power and authority; in Humphrey’s case, it comprises showing that far from valorizing freedom, Russians are conflicted about and even suspicious of it. In doing so, both authors challenge what might be termed intuitive understandings of freedom that obtain in the Anglosphere, whether pertaining to the condition of women or as espoused by politicians. Philosophers dispute the place of ‘commonsense intuitive’ understandings of freedom and similar concepts in their own explorations (see Nahmias et al. 2005); anthropologists ground such understandings in pedagogical projects, intellectual, religious and folk traditions, political and social contexts, and relational practices. In what follows, I will place different anthropologists’ work on freedom in conversation with each other, and also with related work by sociologists and philosophers: firstly, to discuss the relative neglect of the concept in anthropology, and secondly, to map out the terrain within which the anthropology of ethics has come to focus on freedom. I will show that while anthropologists have been alive to emic invocations of freedom, they nonetheless remain suspicious of its invocation. This is because freedom is too often conflated with individual autonomy, and thus putatively opposed to the kinds of things in which anthropologists are interested – the

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complicated caring, obligatory, or otherwise inescapable relations within which human lives are enmeshed. However, there is more to freedom than autonomous individualism, and I will argue that anthropologists should pay more attention to this concept, not only because people with whom we work invoke it, often as social critique, but also because it gives us a language to explore the complex choices, evaluations, and work people put into what they identify as the good or right. I thus couple freedom with another key term in the anthropology of ethics – care. In the old English usage, cares are ‘burdens of mind’, and caring demands ‘serious mental attention’. A somewhat later usage identifies care as an action or relation extended towards an ‘object or matter of concern’. These ways of understanding care – as something one thinks about and attempts to do something about – bring freedom into focus in two related ways. Firstly, it moves us away from rule-following morality (but see Clarke, Chapter 20 of this volume) and into exploring how people exercise their freedom to conceptualize a project of care, which they see as good and right. Secondly, we can enquire about whether and how individuals and collectives find the freedom to enact this caring purpose and what they might sacrifice in order to do so. It goes without saying that the first freedom does not mean that the second can be exercised, effectively or otherwise. Equally, it is important to note that one can reflect on one’s individual or the wider situation and decide that no unreasonable burden is imposed on oneself or others, leaving oneself free not to act or to continue acting in accordance with established mores. Care is an ongoing activity, but working out what to care about/for, how and why, and evaluating the effectiveness of care requires a reflexive stepping back from the flow of life. Such reflections help generate answers to the ethical questions: ‘how ought I to live?’ and ‘what ought I to enable?’ Freedom is a crucial aspect of the formation and enactment of ethical purposes that are reflexive and rooted in relations of care – for the individual self, for the ‘plural I’ as Mattingly (2014) puts it, or for unknown others. Its exercise is thoroughly enmeshed in religious, political, economic, and other social domains. A focus on freedom allows us to think through the relationship between individual and society in ways that take into account reflexivity, critique, and articulations and enactments of an ‘otherwise’.

Early Anthropological Approaches to Freedom In On Liberty, J. S. Mill discusses a vital question which, he says, has exercised mankind ‘from the remotest ages’ and concerns ‘the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’ (1932 (1859): 1). This ‘struggle between Liberty and Authority’ (1932 (1859): 1) has made freedom a central concept in political philosophy. However, despite its focus on collective social life, Kelty (2011)

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points out that anthropology has had little direct engagement with the concept of freedom.1 Indeed, early anthropologists such as Boas (1940) argued that freedom was a non-problem in ‘primitive societies’ where all individuals are in complete harmony with their culture. Such persons do not hanker after freedom from their culture. They have no need to. The desire for freedom arises when people feel conscious of the limitations of their culture or when alternatives to existing forms of life emerge and gain partial currency. This leaves some people desiring other kinds of lives than those permissible, leaving them feeling unfree. In short, Boas’s argument is that individuals in well-integrated societies do not display a concern with freedom; the more differentiation within a social group, the more freedom emerges as a problem and a motor for change. However, as Woodburn (1982) shows in a number of hunter-gatherer groups and Stasch (2008) discusses in relation to the Korowai, the most undifferentiated and egalitarian societies are intensely concerned with individual freedom and autonomy and deploy several strategies to enable and maintain freedom of association, movement, and self-determination. These studies reveal that individual freedom from others can be a key value even in the kinds of society that Boas was thinking about as ‘primitive’. This does not necessarily contradict Boas, because freedom is woven into the fabric of these cultures and thus supported; the desire for autonomy is not an oppositional one. Malinowski (1947: 78) suggests that Boas’s discussion of freedom is meaningful only in a subjective sense. This is because individuals feel free when they are in harmony with their culture and do not feel free when not in harmony. Such a subjective understanding of freedom, Malinowski argues, is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to observe subjective feelings of harmony. Secondly, it is possible to indoctrinate, as Hitler did with Nazism, people to feel in harmony with a particular culture no matter how oppressive it is, such that they feel free within it (1947: 62). Malinowski also rejects what he terms an ‘intuitive approach’ to freedom. Such an intuitive meaning as formulated by ‘the man in the street’ conceives of freedom as ‘the ability to do what one likes or to do nothing’ (1947: 45); that is, the intuitive core of freedom is the absence of all restraint. This intuitive understanding is thus ‘essentially negative and strictly individual’ (1947: 61). Rejecting that kind of understanding of freedom, Malinowski argues that we need to look at freedom in the realities of human action and in their cultural contexts. While he argues that the intuitive sense of freedom as lack of any restraint lies in the realm of the imagination, freedom can only be achieved through rules sanctioned by organized constraints. This is very often forgotten: by determinists who imagine that the existence of structures and constraints means there is no such thing as freedom, and by 1

https://savageminds.org/2011/07/06/the-anthropology-of-freedom-part-1.

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thinkers influenced by Romanticism, who imagine freedom as the absence of all constraint. For Malinowski, rather, freedom is only possible through rather than from culture (reflecting perhaps a powerful strain in liberal thought that sees freedom as possible only within the rule of law). Thus culture, which restrains human action, is also the enabler of human freedom. Indeed, as Srivastava points out, for Malinowski, freedom ‘originates with culture, and culture defines the content of freedom’ (1993: 182). This is because it is culture that provides the conceptual categories (including freedom) that direct human behaviour and define people’s aspirations. Behaviour, in this understanding, should be described both as a fact and a value; the latter in the sense that behaviours are attuned to values, and judged in terms of values. Srivastava identifies a productive dialectical tension between culture and freedom in Malinowski’s work. This is the twin identification of culture as an instrument of freedom (in terms of security and prosperity) and as an instrument of constraints (by regulating behaviour and circumscribing possibilities). This dual role of culture means that it is malleable and open to manipulation – culture can both be deployed to deny freedom and be a means to attain freedom. Investigating this leads to the question of power – how it can be concentrated in a few hands, distributed across a population, exercised or questioned in the name of tradition or rules or in terms of values (1993: 184–5). Institutions are important in Malinowski’s understanding of freedom and culture. As repositories and guardians of cultural knowledge and values, institutions provide patterns and directives for action. However, institutions rely on individuals, either singly or in groups, actually to act. This may be through education or other modes of producing consent, persuasion, or coercion. Such institutions include the state, which can promote freedom and hence human flourishing or deny freedom, usually through violence. To what extent institutions promote freedom depends on who controls them, how and for what purpose. This is an ethnographic question, but how that question gets posed does depend on the analyst’s idea of the content of freedom, rendering it somewhat problematic. Malinowski’s Freedom and Civilization, as its political prelude shows, was aimed at protecting freedom from totalitarianism. It is shot through with the spectre of Nazism. This makes it as much a political tract as a scholarly study. A reviewer from the time decries the book as neither analytically rigorous nor anthropologically convincing (Cook 1945). Notwithstanding this, Malinowski’s definition of freedom as ‘the conditions necessary and sufficient for the formation of a purpose, its translation into effective action through organized cultural instrumentalities, and the full enjoyment of the results of such activity’ (1947: 25) is translatable into anthropologically interesting questions about freedom. We can ask what purposes are deemed suitable and supported within

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a particular social formation, and also what freedoms exist to form and realize dissenting purposes.

Positive and Negative Freedoms The relationship between freedom, constraint, and purposes is one that has occupied other scholars too, including the political philosopher and liberal theorist Isaiah Berlin. Like Malinowski, Berlin was concerned with freedom in the long shadow cast both by World War II and the Cold War. Berlin argued that ‘almost every moralist in history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems to be able to resist’ (1969: 121). In his famous 1958 lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Berlin traces the ways in which liberal thought has developed two antithetical notions of liberty, each of which has profoundly different implications for the ways in which lives can be lived. To coerce a man is to deprive him of his freedom, Berlin says, but further asks, ‘freedom from what?’ His answer to this question delineates two senses of freedom – the positive and the negative. The negative sense of freedom is involved in the answer to the question: ‘what is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ (Berlin 1969: 121–2). Being free in this sense is not ‘being interfered with by others. The wider the area of noninterference the wider my freedom’ (Berlin 1969: 123). In terms of the role of the state in constraining individual liberty, Berlin suggests that the questions to ask are: ‘how far does government interfere with me?’ and ‘what am I free to do or be?’ (1969: 123). But, Berlin argues, some baseline conditions need to be met before negative freedoms can be thought of: ‘to offer political rights, or safeguards against intervention by the state, to men who are half-naked, illiterate, underfed and diseased is to mock their condition; they need medical help or education before they can understand, or make use of, an increase in their freedom’ (1969: 122). How these are to be assured, of course, is a matter of continuing debate, often with regard to taxation (Venkatesan 2020). Further, we might ask about how certain initiatives may be conceptualized as restrictions of a person’s negative freedoms and nevertheless be welcomed as promoting a larger good, or opposed as unwarranted. A contemporary example is the ban on smoking in enclosed public and workspaces. Supporters point to the freedom of non-smokers to inhabit these spaces without putting their health at risk; detractors, such as some of my libertarian interlocutors, see this as a threat to their freedom to enjoy the same public space and pre-emptively campaign to

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prevent a similar blanket ban on e-cigarettes. As anthropologists, we may ask how such initiatives are conceptualized as freedoms or the lack thereof, and form the grounds for political activism and policy. If negative freedom may be characterized as ‘freedom from’, positive freedom is characterized by ‘freedom to’. On the face of it, the freedom to be a particular kind of person, do particular kinds of things, and so on seems to engage with the individual as his/her own master. However, Berlin shows that this is not a simple case of reframing negative freedom or ‘freedom from’ more positively as ‘freedom to’. Indeed, it has darker connotations – even potentially leading to tyranny and authoritarianism. For Berlin, the difference between the two hinges on the way in which the self may be conceptualized. He suggests that positive conceptions of freedom posit a dual self – a higher and a lower self. In positive terms, the higher self is identified as the real self – that which acts in the individual’s best interests over time and which works or should be made to bring a baser less reasonable self under its control. Such a real self may be conceptualized as wider than the individual – as a social whole, perhaps the nation, a class, an ethnic or religious group, or a race. The collective will, in the name of this real self, may be imposed upon recalcitrant individuals to force them to realize their own higher freedom that accords with that of the wider collective. In Berlin’s words, Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness performance of duty, a just society, self-fulfilment) must be identical with his freedom – the free choice of his ‘true’, albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self. (1969: 133) Berlin suggests that this paradox has often been exposed – ‘we know what is good for X person even if he himself does not realize it now, although he will one day when his rational self comes to the fore’. Interestingly, this is the way in which Humphrey’s (2007) discussion of svoboda-mir freedom – that is, the freedom that comes from subordination of the individual to a collective ‘we’ defined by the Soviet state – appears. We can also place this in conversation with Malinowski’s discussion of freedom as the conditions that make it possible for people to realize and enact purposes within culture. When the purposes are dictated by ‘the culture’ with all the force of authority, tyranny may ensue. This is perhaps why Malinowski himself ends up subscribing to both the notion that freedom stems from a given cultural authority and a notion of individual liberty especially with regard to freedom of conscience (see Bidney 1968: 16).

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In an addendum to his 1958 lecture, Berlin turns his focus to the question of desire and freedom. ‘If’, he argues, ‘I could increase freedom as effectively by eliminating desires as by satisfying them, I could render men free by conditioning them into losing the original desires which I have decided not to satisfy. Instead of resisting or removing the pressures that bear down upon me, I can “internalize” them’ (in Carter et al. 2007: 122). Returning to Humphrey (2007), we can ask how the Soviet state sought to suppress desires for freedom in senses other than those it authorized. Such a question does not have to be restricted to totalitarian states or even to states. An ethnographic case will serve to ground this discussion. The self-described right-wingers among whom I am currently conducting research are clear that their political activism is geared towards the promotion of negative rather than positive freedoms. Indeed, negative freedom is an emic term – one that some of my interlocutors themselves use – which forms the base for a larger project (a smaller state, individual liberties, free markets, and lower taxes). This entire project is couched in ethical terms; that is, it seeks to answer the question of how we ought to be able to live as individuals in a larger polity. This involves, among other things, the reining in of what they see as ‘the nanny state’, which they argue illegitimately forces people to make choices deemed healthy (serving a higher or better self) through punitive taxation of tobacco, alcohol, and sugar. Their argument is that no one should force, directly or indirectly, someone to be healthy by constraining or directing their actions. It is up to individuals to restrain themselves for themselves if they want to do so. Here, freedom is closely tied to individual choice, and the assumption of responsibility for the choices made. However, some of my interlocutors question the legitimacy of some choices, usually those that go against free market principles. Thus a prominent free marketeer argued, to general support, that risk-averse persons who wanted the choice of an utterly safe state-run bank should be financially disincentivized by making such a bank, should it ever be permitted to come into existence, extremely expensive to use. In other words, choices that do not favour free markets should be rendered, ideally, undesirable or at least unfeasible. Leaving aside the apparent inconsistency of punitive charges being allowable in some cases and not in others, what this reveals is the hierarchical valuation of freedom, such that desired freedoms that do not impinge on the free market ideology are more acceptable than those that do. Ethnographically, we can enquire about the mechanisms by which wishes or desires in relation to freedom are shaped or, indeed, some desires eliminated; for example, how do people come to believe that free markets will guarantee their personal freedoms? Why is what some people describe as a ‘caring state’ described as a ‘nanny state’ by others? Questions such as these open up projects of pedagogy, of political activism, and of invitations and injunctions within the larger social setting that naturalize

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some desires and smother others. They also open up the complex relationship between negative and positive freedoms, and the ways in which concepts such as responsibility, autonomy, and the individual are configured in, particularly, ideological projects that seek to grow the negative sense of freedom. We could then ask how such projects intervene in the political sphere and manage or negotiate with dissenting understandings that, for instance, distribute responsibility within the body politic, focus on relational rather than autonomous individuals, and/or desire a more interventionist state. We may also place freedom in the positive and negative senses in conversation with republican freedom, which requires the absence of any structural dependence on arbitrary power or domination (Lovett 2018). What counts as arbitrary, and what as reasonable or even natural? And for whom? Sustained attention to these different approaches to freedom, and the political practices on the ground which seek to realize them through various forms of delimitation, persuasion, and pedagogy, complicates the rather strawman-like invocations of liberal Western freedom often found in anthropological writing, showing them to be multifaceted and the product of different intellectual and political traditions. Of course, the concept of freedom is not confined to the political domain. It is also raised in soteriological terms within various religious traditions. Berlin distinguishes spiritual freedom from the kind of freedom that may be denied or curtailed by an oppressor or tyrant (2007: 122). This is because spiritual freedom is a form of positive freedom that is neither granted nor withheld by another. Rather, it is achieved by, in Foucauldian terms (1988), technologies of the self. However, such positive projects of spiritual freedom are not devoid of relations with others. Laidlaw (1995), Cook (2010), and I (Venkatesan 2016) show how whole communities can be engaged in supporting individual projects of positive freedom. That is to say, one person’s project of realizing spiritual freedom can commit others who support such a project to constrain themselves or others from acting in certain ways even if they want to. This is particularly evident in Laidlaw’s description of lay Jains and their alms-giving practices to renouncers (2000). While all members of a given religious group may recognize and support someone’s attempt to achieve spiritual freedom, such projects may not be recognizable as such from other perspectives. Thus, from a certain feminist standpoint, the women’s piety movement in Egypt about which Saba Mahmood writes and which I have already discussed can be seen as oppressive rather than freeing. For rather different reasons, proponents of both negative and republican freedom may also find this movement problematic; the former because of the way it headlines a positive sense of freedom, the latter because of the gender subordination that is intrinsic to it. But Mahmood’s detailed descriptions and analyses not only open up

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anthropological discussions about freedom, they can also open up new directions in long-standing philosophical discussions about what freedom might look like outside the traditions within which these debates normally take place.

Unfreedom An issue that seems to arise persistently in relation to freedom is that of the ‘natural’ or pre-social freedom of individuals. Whence does this idea come? Both in Hindu Saivite ontologies (Venkatesan 2013) and in Jain thinking (Laidlaw 2002), the very understanding of the embodied soul as being unfree underpins the quest for spiritual freedom. Life, then, in Nietzsche’s vivid words, is treated as a wrong path that one has to walk along backwards (in Laidlaw 2002: 326). Conversely, in the Euro-American tradition, it is more common to find a ‘natural’ notion of freedom, which is progressively constrained as the individual grows into social life. Such a notion of natural freedom might comprise ontological freedom; that is, a propositional belief that individuals are born free; or it might refer to the uniqueness of individuals and the pressure to conform to social rules or laws, leading to loss of freedom. While most thinkers are agreed that some form of social life is necessary for human survival and flourishing, the political and philosophical interest lies in asking what is gained and lost when humans come together in lasting associations. The two disciplines that are most concerned with social life, anthropology and sociology, have approached this question of natural freedom differently, albeit in ways that, until recently, have neglected freedom itself as an object of study. Indeed, Bauman goes so far as to describe sociology as the ‘science of unfreedom’ (1988: 5). Bauman argues that sociology inherited from its inception a commonsense understanding of freedom; that is, the inherent and natural freedom and uniqueness of individuals. This putative natural freedom was understood as constrained and regulated by particular social arrangements. Sociology’s main concerns, then, became (a) to account for the regularities in human behaviour notwithstanding putative ‘natural’ freedom; and (b) in a more normative vein, to explore (or even put forward) the conditions required to prompt the actions of free individuals in a particular direction (1988: 5). While these concerns have yielded important insights, interesting questions about freedom as an ideal, an outcome, or an idea that drives lifeprojects fall by the wayside (1988: 5). In anthropology, the concerns about social order and direction that Bauman identifies for sociology remain, but anthropologists, in general, are less committed to a putative natural freedom. Thus Boas argues that the question of freedom does not arise in well-integrated ‘primitive’ cultures; Malinowski, explicitly repudiating Rousseau’s claim that man is

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born free, argues rather that man achieves freedom through and from culture, which gives him mastery over nature (1947: 33–4). Indeed, as Strathern (1985) points out, what has concerned anthropologists is social order and control – that is, the mechanisms by which individuals are regulated by the larger collective and regulate themselves in accordance with social rules and norms. An extreme version of this is the idea that what is right and good for society is right and good for the individual. This brings us to Durkheim. A founder of the discipline of sociology and profoundly influential in anthropology, Durkheim conflated morality and society so completely that: ‘It is impossible to desire a morality other than that endorsed by the condition of society at a given time. To desire a morality other than that implied by the nature of society is to deny the latter and, consequently, oneself’ (2010 (1953): 18). Here, morality begins with membership of a group – society, which is greater than the sum of the individuals who comprise it. Members’ understandings of themselves, their capacities for thought and action, and, thence, sense of right and wrong/good and bad come from society itself. This renders moot the person’s freedom to work out and enact the good or right. Rather, people garner praise for, or censure for not, performing moral acts. The moral act is aimed at the good of society and has a twofold nature – it is simultaneously obligatory and desirable; that is, individuals who are shaped through and through by society are both compelled by, and want to do, what society deems moral. Freedom, here conceptualized as the freedom of individuals to move outside themselves and above their nature, is achieved through society and not against society. In other words, individuals submit to society and this submission is the condition of their liberation – it is society that helps them both define and reach their full potential. Further, because for Durkheim individuals do not constitute in themselves a moral end, no act which has individual perfection from a purely egotistic point of view as its object can be deemed moral. In other words, society constitutes both the ground of morality and the ends of morality. Before I move on to Laidlaw’s influential critique of Durkheim’s conflation of morality and society, I want briefly to place Durkheim’s understanding of freedom in conversation with Malinowski’s. Even though both scholars agree that individual freedom is only to be attained through culture (Malinowski) or society (Durkheim), Malinowski’s bibliography in Freedom and Civilization does not include Durkheim. Perhaps this is because here Malinowski is most closely concerned with political freedom, and thus with political systems that decrease freedom (totalitarianism) and those that increase freedom (democracy): the latter are to be promoted, the former to be challenged. His focus is the state and its promise and dangers. Indeed, the book ends with a list of suggestions for a federation of nations along with the partial abrogation of state sovereignty (1947: 334). Durkheim’s interest is in society. While he recognizes that society to

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a certain extent invades and violates the individual, this is not a matter of concern because his interest is not in freedom, individual or political, but in how individuals take society’s ends as their own ends such that socially derived morality is not only an imperative but positively desired. In other words, both Durkheim and Malinowski endorse freedom in a positive sense, with society and (the right) culture determining human flourishing.

Freedom and Ethics While Malinowski’s Freedom and Civilization was more or less ignored by anthropologists (Srivastava 1993), Durkheim’s valorization of society has continued to influence anthropology to the extent that James Laidlaw argued two decades ago that inevitably anthropologists who are interested in morality end up studying society, more or less ignoring ethics: ‘Durkheim’s conception of the social so completely identifies the collective with the good that an independent understanding of ethics appears neither necessary nor possible’ (2002: 312). This, he suggested, restricts the focus to collectively sanctioned rules, beliefs, and opinions. Discussions about morality then focus on answering questions about moral rules: how and by whom are such rules formulated? What function do such rules serve? How are they enforced and transmitted over time? By whom are they challenged? Who decides what is in breach of a rule? What are the consequences of breaking rules? While these questions are important, what is left out are the ways in which people (not only as individuals but also in their relations) reflect on and work out the right thing to do, and what constitutes the good, in their view. This latter, Laidlaw insists following Foucault (1988), must take into account the possibilities of human freedom – always located in particular social milieux and exercised in relation to these, and having at its heart the person’s ability to reflect on and cultivate the good. Such a good may be entirely focussed on the individual’s quest for self-perfection and realization. It does not have to have societal benefit as its primary motivation (e.g. in soteriological religious projects aimed at liberation) or the pursuit of artistic authenticity or scientific truth (although Durkheim would argue that these too indirectly aim towards social good; 2010: 17). It neither has to be bound by a system of rules of conduct nor be obligatory or desirable across a social group of which the individual is a member. In order to allow a space for a striving for the good that is not wholly tied up with society and which takes into account reflection and freedom, Laidlaw draws on Bernard Williams (1985) to make a distinction between morality and ethics. Ethics are any way of answering the question ‘How ought one to live?’; morality is one way of answering the ethical question and does so through a focus on rules and law-like obligations (2002: 316; see also 2014: 110–19). The place of freedom in each varies: in some morality systems,

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freedom is a product of following the rules, which are themselves obligatory; ethical projects are shot through and through with the reflexive exercise of freedom. They may involve conscious adherence to morality systems or to social norms, but they may also run against them. They may be socially supported or condemned – indeed, they are always in some relationship to the social, broadly conceived. While it is individuals who act according to ethical projects, they are often pursued precisely though social relations, which may involve elements of persuasion and pedagogy. Groups of people committed to the same ethical projects may come together and press for wider changes, perhaps formulating rules in the process that may take on Morality System-like force. Values and valuations are crucial in the formation of ethical purposes and projects. Indeed, the Jains upon whom Laidlaw (1995, 2002) draws to outline his thesis on ethics and freedom hold non-violence as their highest value. At its simplest, adherence to this value involves the adoption of vegetarianism; at its most elaborated, some Jains embrace death through progressive inaction and non-consumption, thus performing no violence on living creatures (2005). How particular Jains incorporate non-violence in their life is a matter of ethical freedom and involves juggling competing values – of providing for one’s family, for instance, or succeeding in worldly pursuits. In direct conversation with Laidlaw, Joel Robbins (2007) argues that a key question within the anthropology of morality (he does not distinguish between morality and ethics) is to explain why in any given society some cultural domains are dominated by what he calls Durkheimian moralities of reproduction, while others are marked by moralities of freedom. The answer, for Robbins, lies in a model of cultures as structured by values, following Dumont (see also Sommerschuh and Robbins, Chapter 19 of this volume). In cultures where the values are fairly clear, well integrated in relation to each other, with one paramount value that encompasses other lesser values which are themselves hierarchically ordered and generally accepted, what we tend to find, he argues, are moralities of reproduction; that is, the routine performance of normative moral acts without reference to freedom or choice. Robbins then turns to Weber’s understanding of culture as made up of different value spheres (e.g. economic, political, religious, and intellectual), each governed by different imperatives. Further, each value sphere tries to realize its own values to the maximum extent without regard for the values of the other spheres. Thus, the different value spheres stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other. Under such circumstances, Robbins argues, ‘a morality of freedom and choice comes into play and people become consciously aware of choosing their own fates. And it is because in such cases people become aware of choosing between values that they come to see their decisionmaking process as one engaged with moral issues’ (2007: 300).

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Robbins’s intervention is welcome because it engages with the question of freedom at a cultural level. It helps us understand why freedom and choice are emphasized in some societies, particularly those in which value spheres are highly differentiated. It also enables us to understand why moralities of freedom obtain within some spheres, for example the political which is constantly emergent in relation to particular events and to contestations about access to resources and power, while moralities of reproduction might obtain within more settled spheres, such as the religious, where values are set up hierarchically in stable conflicts. Importantly, Robbins shows us how moralities of freedom might cause existential angst, such as among the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea, where the conflicts between different value spheres are so deep that people simply cannot work out the right way to live, particularly as making a choice in relation to one value sphere means giving up something just as important in another value sphere. This is similar to Isaiah Berlin’s notion of value pluralism, in that there is no objective reason to choose one value over a competing one; each is good in its own right. This may lead to subjective angst. How desirable freedom may be, therefore, depends on the conditions within which one chooses or is forced to exercise it. It is, I think, very hard to find pure examples of moralities of reproduction; that is, where individuals never feel called upon to make ethical choices about how they want to live and what is considered a good thing to do. Even where values and rules are clear, we can see the emergence of new ways of doing good. In other words, even what appear to be moralities of reproduction can involve ethical reflection and freedom. Conducting fieldwork among temple consecration priests in Tamilnadu, South India, I noticed an innovation that some priests had adopted. When a temple is re-consecrated, priests ‘empty’ divine presence from the images inside the temple, moving it into water pots which they then ‘recharge’ with presence through the performance of a fire sacrifice and the chanting of consecration-specific Sanskrit mantras (Venkatesan 2013). This water is then poured over the statues and the temple finial. During the ‘recharging’, the images of the gods in the temple are deemed to be ‘just statues’; that is, no worship is carried out to them and worshippers do not have any access to embodied deities. Some priests I was working with had noticed the disappointment of worshippers at the absence of the embodied deities, and had begun to fashion and temporarily induce divine presence into images, made by pasting sandalwood and turmeric onto a wooden frame, so that worshippers could still see and worship the gods. This practice, increasingly common, does not appear in the ritual manuals priests use for re-consecration ceremonies. It is an invention. When I asked about it, one priest said: ‘they come to see the gods and worship. They come out of love. It is not good to disappoint them. So, we

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make these images (murti or embodied deities)’. Other priests present agreed. The priests’ reasoning is explicitly ethical – worshipful love should not be thwarted; people should not be disappointed. Here there is no conflict within the value sphere of religion; overall moralities of reproduction obtain, and priests follow explicit textual rules in their conduct that they claim ensure well-being in the world; that is, they are for the wider good. Notwithstanding this, and even though they know that following the rituals is sufficient, priests are moved to acts of care that come out of their understanding of the disappointment worshippers feel when there is nothing for them to worship. We come, then, to care. The reconsecration rituals are seen to create sorrow, which priests make a matter of concern to alleviate. Their acknowledged expertise frees them to innovate in ways that deploy the rituals but go beyond the texts to enact ethical caring purposes.

Freedom as an Emic Term Priests do not explicitly invoke freedom in this case, rather emphasizing their ability as ritual experts to care both for the deity and worshippers by manipulating divine presence. In other words, it is I who identifies their making of paste images as an act that brings together the burden of care for another’s disappointment, reflection, and the subsequent exercise of the freedom to innovate. I will return to the usefulness of the term from an etic point of view; for now, let us stay with emic invocations. For example, priests explicitly speak about freedom in relation to moksha or liberation of the soul from the cycle of rebirths through human endeavours, usually renunciation. Priests, like many other Hindus, actively support the efforts of renouncers, recognizing their quest for moksha as righteous and worthy. In order to do so, they may constrain their own impulses vis-a`-vis renouncers and also evaluate renouncers by how strictly they hold themselves back from the world (Venkatesan 2016). Anthropological studies show that people around the world desire and organize to achieve freedom for themselves, for others, or for goods that they believe should be unconstrained or unfettered. This ranges from this-worldly invocations of freedom – liberty, emancipation, the freedom of institutions like the market or of things like software, the ability to follow a course of action or to lead one’s life as one sees fit – to conceptions in terms of other-worldly aims – freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth, from the body, from earthly cares, and so on. As a substantial topic of study, then, freedom requires no special pleading. Indeed, there have been a number of studies that have variously focussed on the promises and pitfalls of freedom (e.g. Englund 2006; Hansen 2012); on free software (e.g. Coleman 2004; Kelty 2008, 2014); on evaluations of

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freedom in changing socio-political times (e.g. High 2013); and on freedom in and through religious discipline (Cook 2010; Mahmood 2005), as well as both free markets (Carrier 1997; Jonsson and Saemundsson 2015; Keshavjee 2014) and freedom from markets (Barnard 2011, 2016; Farkas 2017) and the freedom to connect with the world (Pedersen 2018) and to refrain from ‘reading’ and therefore impinging on others (Stasch 2008), to name a few. These studies variously interrogate the meanings of freedom, the desire for and attempts to achieve freedom, and the consequences of achieving freedom. They ask what people mean by freedom when they invoke it. They also ask when freedom becomes a motivating factor, for whom and for what purposes. Importantly, some of these studies evaluate the effects of such invocations and movements towards freedom in the lives of differently positioned people. Noting the diversity of the meanings that freedom attains in use, Wardle and Lino e Silva (2017: 24) suggest that awareness of the existence of freedom, as a topic to be investigated, seems often to start ‘from the presence of a signifier of freedom in the concrete research context extending from there into the various meanings that freedom acquires in daily use’. While different emic invocations of freedom might be radically different in their content, any project that explicitly keeps freedom/free at its heart, I want to suggest, is an ethical project that often involves social critique. Comparing different systematic invocations of freedom and attempts to further it advances the anthropology of ethics by focussing on how people reflexively identify matters of concern to them and attempt to create the conditions to do something about them. This does not have to involve resistance, but it does have to contain a considered reflection of the world or of oneself as presently constituted, a normative vision and some plan to achieve it. Freedom may be invoked variously to protect an existing way of life from threats to it, to challenge existing arrangements, or to change one’s relation to the world in ways deemed good or right. I ground the above observations in the following discussion of three different activist groups for whom freedom/free are emic terms. The content of freedom varies from case to case, but each, as we will see, perceives itself as an ethical project – one that is right and good. None is easy, and all require individual commitment, coordinated action, and wider support that needs to be actively mobilized. Freegans and dumpster-divers forage food that has been thrown away by shops either because it is past its best-by date or because it is not selling quickly enough. Practised in many places from Seattle to New York to Barcelona to Manchester, the noteworthy point about both freegans and dumpster-divers (see Lotman 2013 for the differences between the two) is that they actively choose to root around in skips to find food, both to consume it and implicitly and explicitly to critique capitalist structures that valorize the exchange rather than the use value of food-commodities,

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leading to food waste even as people go hungry. This distinguishes them from the large numbers of people throughout the world who have to rummage in rubbish dumps in order to eat and who would rather not do so. Freeganism, in particular, is an ethical and ethicized way of life, spawning reading groups, redistribution centres, foraging walks, and public protests (Barnard 2011, 2016; Shantz n.d.; Edwards and Mercer 2007; More 2011). It runs counter to socially accepted ideas about waste as dirty, focussing on the potential of some waste to be a good that should be available to anyone who wants it. It also breaks property laws – rooting around in skips that are fenced off on private land can lead to arrests (Balmer 2014). Freeganism is a continuously evolving project that is orientated both towards the individual self and to the wider world. Its aim is freedom from complicity in exploitative and destructive market economies. Freegans, we learn, progress from dumpster-diving to other activities such as bicycle maintenance and repair, sewing, and other forms of self-provisioning. Their understandings of their bodies change and their senses become more and more attuned to finding usable things in a world of waste. In other words, the ethical project expands to encompass more and more areas of life as individuals reflect, in light of their ideals and values, on the world in which they live and seek to change, and how they themselves want to live. My second case study focusses on people and practices that cluster around Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS). This is the antithesis of proprietary software where access to the software source code is heavily restricted, even to users who purchase the software. Kelty (2008: 2) describes F/OSS as ‘a set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation of software source code that is then made openly and freely available through a clever, unconventional use of copyright law’. The cultural significance of F/OSS, Kelty argues, goes far beyond computer programmers and their concerns. Rather, it constitutes a reorientation of power and knowledge extending into various realms that are concerned with intellectual property (music, film, publishing, etc.). F/OSS also speaks to questions of access, is drawn into power struggles between multi-national corporations and nation-states, and is related to development initiatives. It plays strongly into ideas about the gift (Raymond 2001) and questions of freedom – to, from, and of (Kelty 2014). While many people around the world use F/OSS for various reasons – some of it is freely available to download and use – users with the skills can reconfigure the software to suit their particular needs. For significant numbers of self-identified ‘geeks’ (i.e. those who are committed to F/OSS), it is an ethical project rooted in technical capacities. At the heart of this ethical project is the recognition of the importance of computers and the internet in contemporary life, and the attempt to keep the infrastructure that makes information available and knowledge

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possible accessible and modifiable rather than closed off. Anyone can participate in this ethical project; participants do not have to subscribe to a particular politics. A common analogy is with free speech (www .gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html). The mandatory openness of the source code guarantees negative freedom: no restrictions bar one – that the source code must remain open – are placed on what one does with it. Coleman writes: The moral and semiotic load of free software is a commitment to prevent limiting the freedom of others. This is done to realize a sphere for the unfettered circulation of thought, expression, and action for software development . . . freedom underscores an individual’s right to create, use, and distribute software in a manner that will allow exactly the same for others, so long as license rules are followed – the goal of which is to enact a universal sphere for the flourishing of free forms of action and thought. (2004: 509–10) It should be little surprise that the free software movement does not endorse any positive freedoms. Indeed, developers are clear that F/OSS is politically agnostic and neutral – its only concern is ensuring openness and modifiability (Coleman 2004: 509–10). F/OSS adherents and publics, then, look very different in different places. In the USA they range from large corporations to Silicon Valley libertarians to anti-capitalist activists (Coleman 2004: 513–14; Kelty 2008). In India, Folz (2019) shows how F/OSS is harnessed to diverse projects, from those initiated by the Communist parties to anti-Facebook movements, to governmental land registration projects, to giving Dalit school children access to computers. Here, it is not so much the individual’s liberty to know, modify, improve, and control technology that is emphasized as it is the possibility of escaping from the influence of corporations that exert a stranglehold over governments, which increasingly rely on computerized technology and the internet to govern, and thus over people. UNESCO, too, suggests that F/OSS can play an important role in development (https://en.unesco.org/foss). In both F/OSS and freeganism, activists explicitly aim to make certain things free as part of a considered ethical endeavour to improve or change what they regard as unjustifiable. While both attempts play on the notion of free as in gratis, the bigger effort is no less than an attempt to transform existing arrangements by questioning attempts to fence off goods through property logics. Both F/OSS and freeganism/dumpster-diving are ethical projects: they bring together the triad of care, the formation and enactment of purposes, and freedom. Each represents a reflexive and thoughtful attempt to answer the question: ‘how ought one to live?’ Further, they ask: ‘how ought the world to be organized?’ They involve individual effort and, in some cases, sacrifice. Dumpster-diving is illegal in many places; F/OSS activists find themselves unwilling or morally unable to work with

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proprietary software, thus jeopardizing careers in conventional companies. Neither freeganism nor F/OSS understand freedom in terms of individual autonomy, unlike the right-wing libertarians discussed earlier. However, even with the right-wing libertarians, the ideology of individual autonomy sits within a larger project of the freedom of the market, which is seen as more able to promote general prosperity and reward individual effort than does ‘state interference’, however well intentioned. Here, the dangers of positive freedom – that is, the ‘freedom to’ – appear much more clearly emphasized. As we have seen in the opposition to a no-risk banking system and also to taxes on consumer items, such as sugary drinks, this is based on the argument that states can lead people to believe that they would rather forgo individual responsibility than take the freedoms and rewards (albeit risky) afforded by the market. Negative freedom or ‘freedom from’, on the face of it, does not carry such a danger, but people have to be persuaded that their best interests, individually and as an agglomeration of rational individuals, lie with free markets. Individuals may arrive at these ways of thinking either by themselves or in discussion with others. Further, each of the above socio-political projects involves pedagogy and persuasion – adherents want to teach others why their way is good. They therefore involve hierarchies of value: this good is higher and more important than that good, and not just for any single individual but more universally. Anthropological studies of political projects that headline freedom can be compared with each other to understand the content of freedom in each case. Such comparisons can show how each project is not only constructed as ethical but also how ethics forms the ontological grounds for activism (see also Lazar, Chapter 31 of this volume). Finally, we can study how the same national or global settings can spawn completely different kinds of political projects with very different normative purposes and ethical underpinnings. We can thus begin to ask, for instance, how the freedom of the freegans compares with the property- and capitalism-orientated freedom of the right-wing activists and how each attempts to shape the political space according to its notions of the good. This opens up studies of pluralist democracies in interesting ways.

Thinking with Freedom What does a focus on freedom add to our understanding of ethical endeavours when people do not use the term themselves? In ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, James Laidlaw argued that ‘there cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest . . . in freedom’ (2002: 311). We have already seen what Laidlaw understands by ethics: any way of answering the question, ‘how ought one to live?’ Ethics involves the capacity (even

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if intermittently exercised) for reflection – a stepping back from life as it is currently lived or organized – and the capacity (even if severely limited by circumstances) to imagine and work towards a better kind of life. The life one feels one ought to live may be a matter of self-cultivation to embody and enact a better, purer, or more perfect self in accordance with extant values and ideals. It may be a matter of working out and enacting alternatives to current arrangements that are found lacking in some crucial aspect, or deplorable (e.g. Dave 2012). Such attempts may be supported or not by wider society – but the point remains that the individual or groups of individuals concerned understand these alternatives as better. Note that the anthropologist does not have to agree with these projects. We have already seen how particular ethical imperatives lie at the heart of both freeganism and the F/OSS movement. Indeed, as both actively draw on the concept of freedom, it is not too far a stretch to think through what they mean by freedom and how particular notions of freedom underpin their efforts either to critique wasteful capitalism (in the case of the freegans) or to challenge the exclusivity of property rights in software creation and circulation (as in the case of the F/OSS geeks). Likewise, albeit in a very different way, we can see how the freedom of markets underpins the political activism of right-wing libertarians who conceive of themselves as autonomous individuals, but whose collective efforts are orientated towards societal changes that support the ‘free’ flourishing of said individuals. But what does freedom as an analytical concept add to our understanding of ethical projects when participants do not explicitly invoke freedom in their own accounts? Let us turn to the dilemma of the good Samaritan in contemporary China, where individuals who assist unrelated strangers are subjected to extortion attempts by the very person they have helped (Yan 2009). Thus, we hear of a young man, Chen, who helps an elderly woman who has been injured in a road accident. Having taken the woman to hospital and paid for her treatment, Chen is amazed when the woman demands compensation from him, arguing that he must have been responsible in some way for her accident; there would be no other reason for him to help her, a stranger. Yan traces twenty-six such incidents. My interest here is in his argument that people increasingly become scared and unwilling to help strangers, even if their ethical reasoning urges them to do so. When I was discussing this paper in a lecture on the anthropology of ethics, a Chinese student told me that increasingly young people who tend to hold more universalistic moral values (this is something Yan (2009: 20) also suggests) were using their mobile phones to document their attempts to help strangers by collecting video testimonies and contact details from passers-by to prove their non-involvement in the accident itself, leaving them able to assist victims without fear of extortion. In other words, they were exercising their ingenuity in order to secure the freedom to act towards suffering humans in what they felt

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were the right and good ways. Such ethicized motivations to help strangers were neither recognized by the victims they were helping nor by the state apparatus, but clearly motivated these good Samaritans who found ways to enact them. Let us turn to a very different case. Kathryn Paxton George (1994) describes how she became a vegetarian on feminist and animal-rights grounds. Having made this considered ethical choice about how she wanted to live, she was not, however, sure that her ten-year-old daughter should be raised as a vegetarian. George’s dilemma appears to be two-fold: (1) Will a vegetarian diet be nutritionally sufficient for her growing child? (2) If not, and she believes feminists should be vegetarian, should she as a feminist give her daughter meat? In her article, George critically examines the feminist argument for vegetarianism. Her exploration is wide-ranging: she draws on studies about nutritional needs for diverse demographics and analyses what she sees as the male bias in moral theory and thus the inequities inherent in valorizing vegetarianism as a moral ideal. The conflation of ethical vegetarianism with feminism, she argues, is problematic because it presupposes the nutritional needs of a young and healthy adult male and ignores those of females at various developmental stages, children, and the elderly. In other words, she questions the setting up as a moral ideal of a practice that works best for certain male bodies, and which disadvantages people who either cannot live up to the ideal or, if they do, find that it is damaging to them. George concludes that vegetarianism and feminism are not compatible. Thus, while she would continue to be a vegetarian (presumably on animal-rights grounds), she ‘could not restrict her daughter’s diet’ (1994: 417). I read this article as one where the author feels the need to put in a fair bit of work to free herself from imposing her own voluntarily claimed ethical imperative on her child for whose bodily development she feels responsible. She does so by questioning the very basis of feminist support of vegetarianism. While she retains her own freedom to make a positive choice for herself, she also frees herself sufficiently to refrain on ethical grounds from making it for her dependent child. What about the freedom to refuse something to ensure the long-term welfare of the self and another? In 2009–10, during fieldwork among Hindu consecration priests in Tamilnadu, India, I was talking to an elderly woman in a temple that was being re-consecrated. In the middle of our conversation, she called out to her daughter, who was busy with something, to bring her some water. Observing the crowd around the taps, I offered the elderly woman my own (reusable) bottle of water. She refused. I tried to press her to take it, saying that I had not put my lips to it and so it carried no saliva pollution (Tamil yecchal). She refused again, saying that if she, a non-Brahmin, drank from my bottle, then she would reap the sin of polluting me (a Brahmin), as I would go on to use the bottle later. We would both suffer. Nothing I could say, including that I did not subscribe to

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Brahmanical notions of purity, could shake her resolve. Her daughter also failed to convince her. She would rather go thirsty than drink from my bottle. I might not believe in caste, but that did not make the facts of caste less true. This incident bears analysis from two perspectives – the elderly woman’s and mine. Let us begin with hers. Ethically and morally, she is committed to upholding the rules of caste commensality. This is how she thinks she ought to live and, because these rules are generally seen as good and right in this rural part of Tamilnadu, she has the strength to insist that she, at least, will uphold them. My value system is egalitarian. I do not subscribe to caste rules that place Brahmins higher than non-Brahmins. Further, I believe that it is right and good to share water with a thirsty person. What the incident produced in me was a feeling of unfreedom, albeit not in Bauman’s sense. This feeling of unfreedom comes from the inability to exercise the product of one’s ethical reasoning in the social world which one shares with others. It is important to focus on such unfreedom because it reveals that ethical freedom is not a matter of individual will or autonomy – it is exercised in relation to others who might thwart the exercise of one’s ethically derived understandings, not out of malice, but simply because they hold to different truths. I want to put these three examples in conversations with ‘ordinary ethics’ approaches (Lambek 2010), which refuse to treat the ‘ethical’ as a separate domain of human life. Among the distinguishing features of ordinary ethics approaches is their focus on everyday interactions and language, and on the kinds of responsibility people take for each other. The goal is neither transcendence nor revolution; rather, it is to smoothen, to repair, and to make collective life liveable. Because freedom is often associated with transcendence, autonomy, or revolution, ordinary ethics approaches rarely draw on the concept to think with. However, choices about what one ought to do that is good and right for oneself or another – dependant, stranger, or acquaintance – run through social life. Thinking through these three very different cases through the lens of freedom and ethics allows us to see how, in completely different contexts, very different people come to understandings of how they ought to live their lives and find ways to exercise their freedom to act or not in certain ways. In George’s case, we see how worries about the right diet for one’s child may push an individual to question and reject the orthodoxy that couples feminism with vegetarianism. Ideas about shared humanity may guide the ways in which young Chinese people understand their responsibilities to suffering strangers and enact them, despite the risks of being financially stung. The elderly Tamil woman exercises her freedom to refuse my offer because she wants to protect herself and me. In all of these cases, individuals decide what the right course of action is and try and make it possible for themselves to follow it in their current lives as they lead them. This, of course, is well within the purview of ethics, but it is also within the

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purview of freedom because, in each case, the individuals involved could have acted in another way but consciously chose not to, despite their choice not being the easier one. In each case, also, people are able to justify their particular choices in terms of their felt responsibilities towards themselves, or towards others. These justifications are value-laden, and they are about the ways in which people exercise their freedom to take responsibility for the well-being of others. Even where ethics is ‘tacit’ and enacted in the midst of the hurly-burly of life and not a product of reflexive stepping back, I argue, a focus on freedom is not misplaced. Das (2012: 138) draws on Khare’s (1976) ethnography to discuss the difference between inviting poor relatives to a wedding in a manner that does the invitees honour (‘please come and partake of the feast’) compared to one that dishonours them (‘please come – you too partake of the feast’). The rich relative is obligated to invite all kin; how he or she does it is a matter of ethical choice. A badly worded invitation reveals his/her evaluation of the poor relative and, because he/ she was free to make the invitation in a nicer way, is evaluated in turn. Not quite championing ordinary ethics approaches, but also interested in what he calls ‘the rough ground of the everyday’ in which people make their lives in Basra, Iraq, Al-Mohammad (2015) also locates the ethical in acts of care. We hear of Abu Hibba who, though not wealthy, secretly pays the rent of a cook in a restaurant he frequents to help the cook avoid eviction. Abu Hibba’s reason for his generosity is explicit: ‘these people we’ve grown-up and lived with, we have to try to take care of each other as much as we can’ (Al-Mohammad 2015: S112). Abu Hibba couches his generosity as an imperative, but it is a reasoned ethical choice, one that he makes in discussion with his wife and children. Further, while Al-Mohammad does not discuss Abu Hibba’s reasons for his secrecy, again I read this as an ethical choice that seeks to ensure that the cook does not feel under obligation to him. Ordinary ethics, then, ceases to be quite so tacit and unmarked (Lempert 2013), albeit still geared towards making life liveable, bearable, or pleasant even in difficult situations or within asymmetrical relations. It involves the exercise of reflection, evaluations of need, and the extension of care. Importantly, freedom as an analytical concept remains useful because there is no script in terms of how we should act ethically towards others (Keane 2016). Drawing on freedom (and its flip side of unfreedom) as a conceptual lens to think through these very different cases enables both comparison and analyses that go beyond a notion of the atomized individual, locating the individual in responsible and meaningful relations with others without losing sight of people as individuals.

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Conclusion For various reasons, anthropologists have neglected freedom as an object of study. One of these is the common understanding of freedom as pertaining to individual autonomy. Another is the assumption that the concept of freedom is implicated in desires for transcendence or radical change. As I have discussed, neither has to be the case. Further, the prevalence of freedom or freedom-like concepts in different ethnographic settings means that it is imperative that anthropologists engage with this concept – its contents, valences, and relationship to other key concepts such as duty, obligation, and morality. Freedom as a substantive topic of anthropological attention does not require special pleading when it appears as an emic concept. Mobilizing freedom as an analytical concept appears to require some justification. Freedom enters the picture in ethical life in two ways: firstly, in Malinowski’s sense of the freedom to form purposes in terms of the larger invitations and injunctions about a good life that exist in wider social groupings of which the individual is part; secondly, in terms of the freedom to enact such purposes given prevailing norms and practices. In both cases, freedom can only be understood in relational terms, even where the ideatypical free person might be locally understood as an autonomous individual. This is because the ideal of the autonomous individual, whether the renouncer of Hinduism, the hermit of Christianity, or the self-owning libertarian, arises always within specific social settings and requires institutional or interpersonal support to be accepted and enacted. The purposes can be considered ethical when, in Keane’s (2016) terms, they are ‘oriented toward historically specific visions of human flourishing – of what a life should and could be, something that is less constraining than enabling, not abstract but embodied and concrete’. This places the anthropology of ethics and freedom firmly within the purview of care. Such care may be for the self but, as I have sought to show, it can extend beyond the self to care for others (strangers, kith, or kin), for institutions such as markets, or for things such as the creation and continued circulation of F/OSS and access to edible and other useful waste. When people feel unable to realize their purposes, they can feel unfree. This may lead them to find ways to enact these purposes; by recourse to technology, as in the case of the Chinese good Samaritans, by breaking the link between feminism and vegetarianism, by organizing themselves via the creation and use of legal tools as in the case of F/OSS enthusiasts, or, as in the case of the right-wing libertarians, by attempting to shift the entire political direction towards their ideals. In other words, people have to work at creating the conditions to form, articulate, and enact their purposes. Such work can involve pedagogy, persuasion, and sacrifices, for example when freegans sacrifice their physical freedom in pursuit of their avowed ethical (albeit in some places, illegal) purpose of extracting useful waste.

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In her discussion of Held’s (2006) care ethics, Friedman (2008: 548) argues that ‘care is a substantial moral concern of moral agents in practice. Care ethics has the particular strength of developing a plausible account of how moral agents immersed in daily practice go about understanding their situations and determining what to do’. While Held’s focus is to develop a feminist ethics of care that is focussed on emotional and other forms of responsibility towards dependent others (also see Mattingly and McKearney, Chapter 22 of this volume), this way of thinking about care and ethics lends itself both to socio-political and interpersonal ethical projects of the kind I have been discussing, with the addition of freedom in the analytical mix. Even where there is no clear formulation of purposes but rather a ‘thrownin-ness’, because care is ongoing and does not accede in practice to some formulaic understanding, caring does involve choices that can be evaluated and can require the kinds of justification that frees people to do what they feel is right or good for a particular other or in more universal terms, albeit always located in particular settings. Mattingly’s (2014) description of a mother who has to free herself from her fears in order to let her disabled son play soccer can then be placed alongside a neophyte freegan who knows that it is right to take edible food from a skip and has to free herself from her fears of arrest or inadvertent harm to do so. While the mother is thrown into the situation of caring for a disabled child, the freegan has chosen her ethical purpose. Neither is fully supported by wider society and there is no fixed template to follow. Everyone has to work out what is right for the object of care and free themselves to act accordingly, either individually over time or by finding like-minded others. To conclude, it is clear that freedom is central to an anthropology of ethics both as an emic and an etic concept. If, as Mattingly and McKearney argue in this volume (Chapter 22), ‘care is not merely one ethical concern or good, among others, but the ontological ground of ethics’, then freedom has also to be core to discussions of care, not necessarily headlined but as a thread that runs through the ways in which people work out and strive to lead good lives or, at the very least, do right by themselves and others. For the anthropologist, this has the advantage of freeing freedom from its associations with autonomous individualism and also from an overemphasis on resistance.

Acknowledgements My thanks to the right-wing activists, who generously gave me their time and thoughts. My thanks also to James Laidlaw and to the reviewers, who helped me wrestle with this massive subject. All errors and infelicities, of course, remain my responsibility.

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Keshavjee, Salmaan. 2014. Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health. Oakland: University of California Press. Khare, R. S. 1976. The Hindu Hearth and Home. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2000. ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4): 617–34. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 8: 311–32. 2005. ‘A Life Worth Leaving: Fasting to Death as Telos of a Jain Religious Life’. Economy and Society, 34: 178–99. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press: 1–36. Lempert, Michael. 2013. ‘No Ordinary Ethics’. Anthropological Theory, 13(4): 370–93. Lotman, Aliine. 2013.‘Dumpster Diving’. Material World. www.material worldblog.com/2013/01/dumpster-diving. Lovett, Frank. 2018. ‘Republicanism’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (summer edition). https://plato.stanford.edu /archives/sum2018/entries/republicanism. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’. Cultural Anthropology, 16(2): 202–36. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1947. Freedom and Civilization. London: George Allen and Unwin. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1932 [1859]. On Liberty. London: Everyman’s Library. More´, Victoria C. 2011. ‘Dumpster Dinners: An Ethnographic Study of Freeganism’. The Journal of Undergraduate Ethnography, 1: 43–55. Nahmias, Eddy, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner. 2005. ‘Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility’. Philosophical Psychology, 18(5): 561–84. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2018. ‘Incidental Connections: Freedom and Urban Life in Mongolia’, in James Laidlaw, Barbara Bodenhorn, and Martin Holbraad (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject: Freedom, Creativity and Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 115–30. Raymond, Eric S. 2001. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

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Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72(3): 293–314. Shantz, Jeff. n.d. ‘One Person’s Garbage . . . Another Person’s Treasure: Dumpster Diving, Freeganism and Anarchy’. https://citeseerx.ist.psu .edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.603.1451. Srivastava, Vinay Kumar. 1993. ‘Malinowski and a Reading of His “Freedom and Civilization”’. Dialectical Anthropology, 18(2): 177–204. Stasch, Rupert. 2008. ‘Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology’. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(2): 443–53. Strathern, Marilyn. 1985. ‘Discovering “Social Control”’. Journal of Law and Society, 12(2): 111–34. Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2013. ‘From Stone Statue to God and Back Again’, in Penny Harvey et al. (eds.), Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion. London: Routledge: 72–81. 2014. ‘Auto-Relations: Doing Cosmology and Transforming the Self the Saiva Way’, in A. Abramson and M. Holbraad (eds.), Cosmologies: Making Contemporary Worlds. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 129–58. 2016. ‘Giving and Taking without Reciprocity: Conversations in South India and the Anthropology of Ethics’. Social Analysis, 64(2): 36–56. 2020. ‘Afterword: Putting Together the Anthropology of Tax and the Anthropology of Ethics’. Special Issue, ‘Tax Beyond the Social Contract’, eds. Nicolette Makovicky and Robin Smith.’. Social Analysis.64(2): 141–154. Wardle, Huan and Moses Lino e Silva. 2017. ‘Testing Freedom: Ontological Considerations’. Etnofoor, 29(1): 11–27. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Collins. Woodburn, James. 1982. ‘Egalitarian Societies’. Man (NS), 17(2): 431–51. Yan, Yunxiang. 2009. ‘The Good Samaritan’s New Trouble: A Study of the Changing Moral Landscape in Contemporary China’. Social Anthropology, 17(1): 9–24.

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11 Responsibility Catherine Trundle

Introduction Calls to ‘be responsible’ summon us to action, to attention. They render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims, on others, and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to live within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to live up to the ethical dilemmas that emerge from the sociality of life, be they in families, friendships, communities and nation states, or in relation to non-human worlds. Enactments and assertions of responsibility are thus central to our everyday ethical and moral life-worlds. As anthropological research on ethics has amply revealed, in diverse ethnographic contexts ‘high order principles, virtues, and norms are always already relational. They get mobilized only when people start to figure their responsibility, and hence their proper conduct, in concrete circumstances’ (Brodwin 2013: 17; see also Gluckman 1972; Douglas 1980; Mattingly 2014; Laidlaw 2014). Yet responsibility has rarely been the central focus of the anthropology of ethics. This chapter seeks to critically foreground the ways in which anthropologists have explored practices of responsibility, to spotlight responsibility’s diverse ethnographic hues, so that we might develop a sharper use of this idea as an anthropological concept and better understand the distinct ethnographic ways that ideas and practices of responsibility shape the worlds we study. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility can hinge upon diverse assertions and enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remain no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these aspects of the phenomena; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. Much prior theorizing of responsibility, from a legal

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and philosophical standpoint in particular, has sought to fix the meaning of responsibility in ways that enable us to define universally, in precise and immutable terms, which agents are truly responsible, and for which specific acts, objects, relations, and realities they bear accountability (e.g. Eshleman 2014; Meloni 2007; Tadros 2007). Yet as anthropologists show, how we come to be responsible, claim responsibility, and demand responsibility reflects a diverse array of social, cultural, linguistic, and political practices. After explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter shifts to explore how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life. An anthropology of ethics offers us a rich vantage point from which to explore responsibility. While the ability to think, act, speak, plan, interact, and imagine according to notions of the good life is culturally universal (Mattingly 2014: 11; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2015; Keane 2015; Faubion 2011), ideas about what constitutes a good life, and the right way to achieve it, vary widely. As Laidlaw points out, It is important not to confuse the claim that the ethical dimension is pervasive in human life with the quite different question of how often people meet or disappoint their own or anyone else’s expectations or hopes. The claim on which the anthropology of ethics rests is not an evaluative claim that people are good: it is a descriptive claim that they are evaluative. (2014: 3)

The Origins and Language of Responsibility According to Bernard Williams (1993 [2008]), in all conceptions of responsibility four dimensions are present: ‘cause, intention, state and response’. Yet he makes clear that ‘there is not, and there never could be, just one appropriate way of adjusting these elements to one another’ (55). Indeed, the very notion of a cause, the cultural conception of what constitutes an intention and whether it is even a moral consideration, and the effects and the responses that ensue or do not ensue, are so varied that such a typology struggles to hold across time and space. As this chapter makes clear, we continually butt up against the conceptual confines of language in discussing responsibility. The English word ‘responsibility’, as Christopher Kelty points out, is a concept that emerged in the late eighteenth century to draw together concerns around two moral ideas: agency and answerability. The increased use of the word ‘responsibility’ in subsequent decades reflected shifting conventions and conversations in society, politics, law, religion, and

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philosophy around ‘issues of causes and consequences (imputation) on the one hand, and on the other, intention, effects and understanding (accountability)’ (2008: 2). And ‘while the former signifies a controversy concerning the nature of free will, determinism, necessity, and the definition of human nature, the later signifies a controversy concerning punishment, justice, obligation and duty’ (2008: 4; see also Lacey 2016). Kelty points out that this concept was never a neutral or natural descriptor of the world but rather a culturally imbued set of claims, a framework for action that reflected the social challenges of the historical period in which it emerged (cf. Hage and Eckersley 2012). Responsibility thus appeared in the English language as a morally freighted concept at a moment when new ethical ideas and problems were surfacing, new ideas concerning justice and natural law, citizenship and human rights, governance, the power and limits of leaders and the state, universal suffrage, individual liberty, freedom, rationality, and new political and civic institutions. As Richard McKeon shows, responsibility emerges as a politically potent idea, working according to two symbiotic logics: the individual and the state mutually constitute each other’s responsibilities in ways that ensure the just workings of modern society. ‘A man is responsible under law if he is not subject to arbitrary charge or enforcement; officials are responsible to rulers or to citizens, and a citizen is responsible if he possesses the political means of influencing the politics of government’ (McKeon 1990: 81). Such a logic gradually shifted to extend suffrage, and in the process to transform the logic of responsibility further. While at first only certain groups of people were deemed ready and innately responsible enough to drive the political process (men, property owners), slowly this idea was reversed, and ‘responsible governments depended on a responsible people, but a people acquired responsibility only by exercising it’ (1990: 81). In contrast to authoritarian norms of moral action, ‘free choice’, the competition of ideas, and notions of freedom, became the ideal bedrock upon which a people are able fully to exercise political responsibility. Today, this ideal of responsibility does not simply underpin democracy but also determines it limits. Depending on context, democratic responsibility is still earned by reaching the culturally prescribed age of adulthood. And in many contexts it can be lost, when a person is convicted of a crime. The ‘will of the people’ also can remain conditional when it butts up against the checks and balances of constitutions, human rights doctrines, or rules of law. Parallel to these political shifts were cultural and psychological transformations in the idea of self-responsibility. The philosopher Charles Taylor (2001 [1989]) charts the rise of a new reflexive mode of being, a form of radical objectivity through ‘disengagement’, by which a new subjectivity of the individual self was constituted. While modes of introspection can be traced back much longer, exemplified, for example, in the traditions of Plato and Augustine, in the modern ‘turn inward’ (as

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emergent in the writings of Descartes and later Locke) the self becomes the moral locus of agency, and reflexivity a new method of self-control, freedom, and rationality. ‘It calls on me to be aware of my activity of thinking or my processes of habituation, so as to disengage from them and objectify them’ (Taylor 2001 [1989]: 175), and in the process to develop a new first-person stance towards ethical life. Such a stance links self-exploration with self-control and dignity as the basic of a new individualized identity, and the locus of agency. Corresponding to this shift, Taylor notes shifting religious doctrines and practices in Christian Europe from the time of the Reformation. Human salvation and godliness had been connected to sacred spaces, the expertise of religious and monastic specialists, and the hierarchies of the Church; the relationship between God and humans was a mediated relationship. Slowly this gave way to a more direct, personal, lay, and profane understanding that religious salvation and a good life could occur in ordinary spheres, in the sites of family, labour, and marriage. Ordinary people could practise a private and direct relationship with God, and consequently could cultivate their own morality accordingly. ‘What was needed was personal discipline first, individuals capable of controlling themselves and taking responsibility for their lives; and then a social order based on such people’ (Taylor 2001 [1989]: 229). Such examples risk simplifying the competing and complex crosscurrents of responsibility that have developed historically. And such accounts do not mean that Anglo societies before the eighteenth century, or indeed societies outside of the Anglo world, have not conceptually contended with ideas of accountability and imputation before these wider societal shifts. All societies have ways of holding people to account and assigning agency to them (see, e.g. Gluckman 1972; Douglas 1980). Rather, as Kelty shows, the particular way in which accountability and imputation became fused into the English-language notion of responsibility was culturally and historically emergent. Indeed, even within Anglo settings, what responsibility means, and the practices carried out in its name, are diverse. As an analytical category, the English word ‘responsibility’ does not ethnographically map the breadth of ethical categories we might hope to describe. Rosalind Shaw’s (2017) research on post-war systems of justice in Sierra Leone exemplifies this point. Her research explores how, within Truth and Reconciliation Commission events, ex-combatants were expected to demonstrate the virtue of responsibility for repairing the social fabric in the wake of war, in contrast to prior morally transgressive behaviour. These narratives of ‘subsumed agency’, as Shaw labelled them, constituted excombatants as moral persons able to be reintegrated into society. Rather than have their personal stories of involvement in the civil war interrogated for truth or guilt, ex-combatants had to exemplify responsibility in the form of a ‘cool/settled heart’ (kol at or ka-buth ke-thofel), no longer ‘warm’ or enflamed by the influence of past commanders (2017: 164). Such narratives

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were not ‘signs of responsibility’s absence, but rather of its presence in a register different from that of discursive verbal narration. Instead of being a product of telling the truth, responsibility emerges as a set of dispositions embodied in present actions, self, control, humility . . . and a cool heart – through which moral personhood is manifest’ (Shaw 2017: 166). In a very different form, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski (2017) explores the creation of new forms of sociality, care, and citizenship during older age in post-socialist Poland. By examining participation in University of the Third Age classes, she tracks the emergence of a new constellation of moral values in an increasingly neoliberal sphere, in which a liberalized market took on roles previously performed or controlled by the state. Being a responsible older person involved avoiding isolation and passivity by seeking kolez˙en´stow (collegiality, friendship, camaraderie) alongside aktywnos´c´ (activeness). Here, responsibility cannot be separated from ideas of care, both of the self and others. Robbins-Ruszkowski’s and Shaw’s careful ethnographic and linguistic unpacking of what we might call responsibility both exemplify the necessary readiness within an anthropology of ethics to seek local idioms of seemingly self-evident Anglo categorizes of moral life and personhood, and in the process to question the assumption that we can hold a conceptually consistent idea of responsibility.

Responsibility, Agency, Freedom, and Constraint A focus on responsibility, for some anthropologists, is to concern ourselves with the human capacity to express or subsume agency. Such conundrums are inherently relational. Barry Barnes thus argues that human agency stems from the fact that we live within a ‘system of social institutions and social relationships wherein individual persons are accountable to others for what they do and what is done on their authority . . . to be responsible for a decision or an action is to be answerable and accountable in relation to it, liable to praise and blame for it, obliged to respond to claims ensuing from it’ (2000: 6). As an analytical category, then, responsibility allows anthropology to explore from a new angle some of the foundational debates of our discipline concerning relationality and personhood, structure and agency, and freedom and constraint. As an ethnographic category, when responsibility gets invoked, diverse constellations and understandings of agency, freedom, intention, or action emerge. In understanding agency through the lens of responsibility, James Laidlaw (2014) sets out to overcome the limitations of two prominent approaches to agency within anthropology. One, associated with Sherry Ortner and practice theory, fixes agency within the interiority of an actor and links it to intentionality, power, resistance, and purpose. Such an approach is a commonplace understanding within Anglo settings. The

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other, more counter-intuitive to Anglo common sense and associated with Latour and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), ties agency to causality, assigning agency to both human and non-human things that have effects within chains of causation and which shape the flow of events. As Laidlaw shows, while a practice-based approach based on intentionality narrows agency to the realm of individual subjectivity (to ideas of authentic self-expression, consciousness, and empowerment), an ANT approach is ethically flat. It obscures from view the human ability to reflect, judge, and make sense of actions and events; in other words, the human capacity to assign responsibility. Laidlaw points out that ‘our routine, everyday interaction is shot through with, and its course pervasively effected by, our ongoing judgments about whose presence or absence, whose actions or omissions, whose words or silences, have contributed in which ways to things turning out as they are doing, and by our assigning responsibility accordingly’ (2014: 146). Responsibility framed this way requires us, as Peter Strawson argued, to foreground the ‘non-detached attitudes and reactions of people directly involved in transactions with each other; of the attitudes and reactions of offended parties and beneficiaries; of such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love and hurt feelings’ (1993: 48). Our judgements as to whether someone should be held or made responsible, he argues, thus hinge on our reactive, emotionally layered assessments of their intentions and attitudes, not just the outcome and effects of their actions upon us. Other scholars also emphasize responsibility as an ethical mode of agency hinged to notions of freedom. Andrew Walsh points out, building on Fischer and Ravizza’s conception of ‘the freedom to do otherwise’ (1993), that ‘to be responsible for an act . . . one must have the option not to do it – that is, “the freedom to do otherwise”’ (Walsh 2002: 453). As Walsh demonstrates in relation to taboos in the Anakarna region of Madagascar, ‘that people are responsible or accountable to others and/or for their behavior is indicated by the fact not that they behave in certain ways but that they behave in certain ways when they might behave in others’ (Walsh 2002: 453). This freedom – the possibility of failure or noncompliance – is indeed at the heart of some assertions of responsibility, but it is always culturally coded, and often unevenly ascribed or assumed. While it is universal, as Mattingly claims, that people build towards good lives that work ‘with the odds but also in important ways, against them’ and where ‘the possible is pitted against the predictable’ (2014: 16), as Soumhya Venkatesan argues in her chapter on freedom in this volume (Chapter 10), freedom is not always synonymous with resistance. Freedom, she points out, can entail not only the possibility to act otherwise and against the grain but also the ability to not act at all, or to act in accordance with norms (see also Mahmood 2006). Walsh’s conception of freedom thus

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narrows responsibility to a particular conception of agency unbound from the constraints and power of others. And yet such assumptions about freedom can be central to public accounts of responsibility. Lionel Wee introduced the idea of intentionality and choice alongside freedom in his linguistic analysis of the ascription of responsibility to hunger strikers in Britain, Turkey, and Ireland. While hunger strikers and public commentators commonly assign intention to the hunger strikers, the notion of choice is central to whether they will be held responsible for the consequences of such actions and intentions. In such politically fraught settings, such claims of choice and its lack are asserted, contested, or denied by each side, and the struggle to win popular support for the causes at stake often depends upon the ability to assert virtuous intentions while also controlling the narratives around freedom and its lack. Because the hunger striker presents himself or herself as an actor who has no other choice but to embark on the strike, there is an implicature [sic.] that the actor has been forced into this course of action by the other, more powerful side of the ideological battle. Thus right from the beginning of the strike, the actor, though acting intentionally, is doing so with little or no choice at all. Precisely because of this, the actor cannot be held responsible for the outcome of the action. (Wee 2007: 70) In these cases, intentionality matters, but it can be distinguished from choice and freedom in the attribution of responsibility. Yet in other contexts intentionality and freedom can be downplayed in the social distribution of responsibility. In exploring the linguistic dimensions of the Samoan fono (formal meeting), Alessandro Duranti (2015) explores how individual intentions are not always central in the judgement and imputation of responsibility. Instead, the effects and consequences of what is said, regardless of the speaker’s intention, are key to the allocation of responsibility. ‘Samoans have strong feelings about responsibility and obligations. Individuals and groups may be criticized, punished, or expelled from a community for not having matched the expectations associated with their positional role in society, but they will not be forced to explain themselves in terms of their motivations or intentions’ (2015: 45). Duranti thus argues that he observed in institutional linguistic practices a ‘discursive dispreference for introspection’ in ways that seek to uncover ‘individual-specific psychological explanations of past behaviors’ (2015: 68). Even in English-speaking contexts where intentions are foregrounded in attributions of responsibility, understandings of intentions in moral evaluations of others’ actions are often inconsistent. Psychological studies reveal how the study subjects (often Western college students) judge a person’s intentions less by any internal qualities of the actors themselves

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and more based on whether they evaluated the behaviour itself as morally good or bad. Moreover, how subjects attribute blame to others depends in part on their relationships with them, and they tended to assign less blame to those whom they were close with, or whose views aligned with their own. In other words, ‘people may arrive at different attributions [of responsibility] depending on whether the agent is a beloved partner, a bitter enemy, or a complete stranger’ (Knobe and Doris 2010: 345). Just as anthropology tracks the diverse cultural ideals of attribution, agency, and intentionality, the discipline has also contended with its own politics and ethics of responsibility. How we theorize and represent communities to wider public and political audiences, how we understand, assign, or deny agency, blame, freedom, and choice in our theories of social life, have their own social consequences. Ethnographic discussions of agency and responsibility commonly attempt to show how a group may act in ways that appear irresponsible to an outsider observer, but which are in fact otherwise. The anthropologist thus sees their role here to argue against the wider moral condemnation of the people described, to counter any guilt and blame that is assigned to them by others. Instead, the anthropologist seeks to uncover a localized mode of responsibility that is not easily recognized within the outsider’s own cultural and moral frames, and/or show that their acts may stem from a restriction of agency and thus demonstrate a limit to culpability. In her famous ethnography Death without Weeping (1989), Nancy ScheperHughes defends the seemingly callous indifference of north Brazilian women living in poverty, women who do not openly grieve the deaths of their infants, and indeed sometimes appear fatally to neglect sick infants. She explains their fatalistic attitudes to death as a coping mechanism reflective of the structural violence of poverty, over which they have little control, as cultural practices that ‘defend women against the ravages of grief’ (Scheper-Hughes 1989: 430; see also Castle 1994: 314), and as a strategy to divest emotionally from children unlikely to survive in a resource-deprived community suffering from high infant mortality rates. Such an account describes their behaviours as an adaptive strategy. It reveals them to act responsibly, by which she means rationally, in nonobvious ways – how they channel resources towards those children likely to survive, to continue mothering those who need care in the face of terrible loss – while also casting the women as victims of forms of structural violence and thus (for Scheper-Hughes) not responsible for their children’s deaths. Part of the assumed responsibility of anthropological and ethnographic research and writing has often involved this delicate balance: of casting responsibility in a particular light to grant certain (usually socially marginalized) people freedom and moral agency for their strategies of survival or thriving, but to deny them blame for the suffering that emerges from the powerful political-economic systems shaping their actions. Anthropologists have thus worked to tell stories that refuse to render people passive, but

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which shine a light on injustice and inequality and which critique liberal discourses of personal responsibility or the irresponsible poor. One powerful such critique has centred on contemporary discourses of responsibilization.

Self-Reliant Subjects and Responsibilization Responsibilization refers to a form of governmentality emergent out of Western liberal democracies from the late 1970s, but which scholars argue is now ideologically embedded within a plethora of global and state level institutions. Ideas of responsibilization hold that individual freedom and flourishing is tied to autonomous self-reliance on the part of actors who can assume responsibility for their own welfare, well-being, and circumstances. Responsibilization denotes a particular stance by the state in which citizens are ‘empowered’ towards self-management and self-care. Ideologies of responsibilization are often accompanied by policies in which the social safety nets of welfare, health, pensions, and poverty alleviation programmes, built up after World War II, are increasingly withdrawn, privatized, or transformed. Policies thus aim to discourage dependency and encourage private enterprise and self-reliance. State services, increasingly outsourced by the state to third parties, have been in many Western nations incentivized towards a set of moral values that encourage individual accountability and an active, entrepreneurial attitude towards one’s future and achievements, and which stress the need for individuals to self-manage and take responsibility for the risks they might encounter. Ideas of responsibilization were central to the neoliberal economical political ideologies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and subsequent governments on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The promise of responsibilization was neatly encapsulated in Reagan’s pitch for election in 1980: ‘Vote for me if you believe in yourself, if you believe in your right to control your own destiny and plan your own life’ (PBS 2019). In a similar vein, Thatcher believed that economic dynamism and prosperity, as well as community compassion, depended on recovering or renewing recently neglected forms of responsibility. In an interview in 1987 in which she criticized welfare dependency in Britain, she cautioned against the dangers of the state, under the guise of ‘society’, always being held responsible for social ills and their remedies. It went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society, there is a living tapestry of men and women and the beauty of that tapestry, and the quality of our lives, will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and to turn round and help, by our own efforts, those who are unfortunate. (Quoted in Wintour 2013)

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As Nikolas Rose (1996) notes, the ‘death of the social’ did not signify a simple shift from collective to individual responsibility, but rather the constitution of new collectives that could shoulder responsibilities for the well-being of citizens once assumed by the state. These collectives took the form of new ‘communities’, which today include family, neighbourhood, school, workplace, church, ethnic community, nongovernmental organization, and charity. This shift was not simply directed by the state but also demanded from the ground up, as exemplified in the 1970s and 1980s during the deinstitutionalization of residential care facilities for ‘the unfit’, ‘the infirm’, and ‘the delinquent’ in many countries. Here, disability rights movements, mental health social movements, and youth justice reform movements all sought greater autonomy from the institutional confinements, and at times abuses, of the state (e.g. MacKinnon and Coleborne 2003). The moral trope of responsibilization is evident in Linda Liebenberg, Michael Ungar, and Janice Ikeda’s examination of child welfare, adolescent mental health, and juvenile justice service providers in Canada (2015). They found a ‘systematic discourse of youth responsibility’ (1011) within case-note files in which the onus for change and improvement was placed on clients and their families. When clients’ situations, behaviours, or health did not improve, case workers commonly blamed clients for a lack of effort, willingness, compliance, engagement, or commitment. Indeed, it was commonplace for caseworkers to conclude that youths’ lives were not improving because they were refusing to ‘take responsibility’ for their lives and actions and to work towards their own betterment. The authors thus argue that such case notes ignored what they saw as salient forces in young people’s lives: the wider social pressures, structural inequalities, and hardships that young people and their families faced. Such bureaucratic objects located responsibility for the risks that youths encounter in their own agency, as well as with parents for their lack of parenting skills. In a similar vein, Natai Valdez (2018) argues, in a discussion of epigenetic health research, how the ‘environment’ that epigenetics imagines to interact with genetic processes is highly circumscribed. In prenatal health interventions scientists produce a type of reproductive responsibility by limiting responsibility to the realm of the maternal environment, that of the individual ‘choices’ of the mother regarding diet, exercise, and weight, as well as the home and neighbourhood of the mother. Environmental factors that are harder to quantify and follow, such as racism, stress, violence, class, and pollution, tended not to feature in such models. Thus, Valdez argues that a ‘hyper focus on maternal environments justifies targeting women’s bodies and behaviors for intervention as if they were the only environments responsible for the adverse health outcomes in future generations’ (2018: 428). Such arguments, therefore, are attempts to recast responsibility by visualizing a constellation of wider forces that

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shape human behaviour by constituting ‘the environment’ as a new agentive object. While these studies may appear at first sight as perfect examples of a neoliberal ethos of responsibilization, Liebenberg et al. and Valdez reveal the ways in which responsibility is both individualized and rendered relational in the same moment. They illustrate how calls for responsibility can reflect the values of autonomy alongside obligation and interdependence. In both examples, they argue that discourses of responsibilization focus upon the actions and consequences of individuals in ways that elide the wider influences of environmental and social forces. Yet both child welfare and maternal epigenetics are examples of programmes that focus upon the ‘social good’ and are underpinned by ideas of social well-being and welfare. And as their studies reveal, the care work and shared responsibility within kin networks are crucial to the creation of healthy, autonomous, self-managing individuals (see also Trnka 2017). Moreover, epigenetic healthcare and at-risk youth services are domains within which debates about the ongoing and mutual responsibilities of the state and citizens to protect each other play out, in the form of monitoring and health policy. Such ethnographic cases illustrate the ‘competing responsibilities’ at play in contemporary life. As Susanna Trnka and I have argued elsewhere (Trnka and Trundle 2017), responsibilization discourses are indeed powerful features of modern forms of governmentality, but to cast them as the overarching way in which we have come to understand responsibility is to simplify the diverse meanings and practices associated with an ethics of responsibility in both statecraft and everyday life-worlds. We argue that responsibilization is but one of many projects of self-cultivation that exist today, or have existed historically (see Foucault 2000) and, moreover, that such projects of the self crosscut, intersect, and compete with two other prominent and relational modes of responsibility: those that are underpinned by an ethics of care for the Other, and those that rely upon the mutual dependencies and obligations that exist within social contract ideologies. Such an approach thus pushes us to shift beyond a simplistic version of neoliberal responsibilization as simply the withdrawal of the state and the abandonment of the individual, in ways that can account for the varied claims to responsibilities that exist. Put simply, despite the pervasive and diverse deployments of neoliberal rhetoric of responsibilisation, in everyday practice responsibility – including selfresponsibility – entails a much broader range of meanings. The autonomous, responsibilized subject idealized by advanced liberal theory is in fact enmeshed in a variety of interdependencies within their families to the schools and workplaces, to the environment, to the state, or to global communities. (Trnka and Trundle 2017: 3)

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Reflexivity and Responsibility At the heart of an anthropological approach to ethics is an attention to reflexive process. It is through mundane processes of reflection and practice that people ‘discern their own commitment to collective ideals’ (Brodwin 2013: 11). For Mattingly, reflection is central to her notion of ‘moral laboratories’, those ‘spaces of possibility, ones that create experiences that are also experiments in how life might or should be lived. Each experiment holds its perils. Each provokes moments of critique, especially self-critique’ (2014: 15). In centring reflection, the anthropology of ethics has drawn on Michel Foucault (2000) to explore how the self is actively fashioned into an ethical project. Foucault explores this theme both in antiquity and in the modern era. For example, classical thinkers wrote on the reflective process, a set of ‘technologies of the self’ or a mode of ‘care of the self’, which constituted the ideal ethical subject. These were subjects who ‘effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (1988: 18). In taking a Foucauldian approach, the anthropologist Paul Brodwin (2013) describes how mental health psychiatrists and social workers in the USA grapple with the question of how they should best bear responsibility for the vulnerable members of society they serve. Brodwin shows how even when experiencing a high sense of futility and constraint, such workers cultivated an everyday ethics of decision-making within community psychiatry. As Brodwin reveals, through ongoing reflection each worker chooses ‘a moral goal and then moves towards it through practices of self cultivation: a matter of monitoring, improvising, and transforming oneself’ (Brodwin 2013: 20). One scholar to place reflection at the heart of responsibility is Hannah Arendt (2003). Arendt writes about personal and collective responsibility under totalitarianism and dictatorship. In the aftermath of Nazi genocide, she asks: how much can individuals and whole populations be held responsible for the murderous actions of the Third Reich? In answer Arendt proposes an idea of responsibility that shifts us away from universal normative codes. She makes a distinction between ‘Knowing and thinking, truth and meaning’ (Arendt 2003: 167–8). While the thirst for knowledge can be ongoing, she argues that the desire to know certain things can reach its goal. Knowledge can be stored, it leaves traces of itself, it can be settled and codified. People can accrue and acquire knowledge, and some can even acquire more knowledge of a particular topic than others. Thinking by contrast, is a capacity all humans share, regardless of education, class, or social opportunities. Thinking is deeply reflexive in that ‘if Kant is right and the faculty of thought has a “natural aversion”

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against accepting its own results as “solid axioms”, then we cannot expect any moral propositions or commandments, no final code of conduct from the thinking activity, least of all a new and now allegedly final definition of what is good and what is evil’ (Arendt 2003: 167). For Arendt, thinking is an iterative process upon which ethical life depends. ‘The need to think can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts which I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I can think them anew’ (Arendt 2003: 163). In trying to understand what divided those in German society who accepted Hitler’s persecution of Jews and other minority groups and those who did not, Arendt argues that an ability to engage in reflexive conversation with the self was key. ‘The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself . . . that is, to be engaged in a silent dialogue between me and myself, which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking’. She explains: The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences. In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during Hitler’s regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. More reliable will be the doubters and the sceptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting is wholesome, but because they are used to examine and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves. (Arendt 2003: 45) Arendt helps us to view ethics as a recursive mode of critical practice, rather than a set of steady rules or an established system of knowledge. And by privileging reflexivity, she comes close to the approach taken by anthropologists who seek to understand the contemplative, dialogical dilemmas and decisions that people face in concrete situations. Arendt argues that responsibility emerged when people reflected upon the ways that certain acts would redefine a person’s understanding of self. ‘They asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds . . . they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command, “thou shall not kill” but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer – themselves’ (Arendt 2003: 44). Yet Arendt’s proposition still leaves us with some stubborn universals. It treats thinking as an inherent good, ignoring how deep thinking can be

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put to a range of ends, including dubious, harmful ones – the way in which complex thought and reflection is undertaken to justify a wide range of behaviours, not simply the heroic. It also privileges the more elitist domain of isolated thought over the messy praxis of everyday life and decision-making. Moreover, Arendt does not solve the problem or how one decides what actions and deeds it is possible to live with. Charles Taylor (1989) offers one framework for acknowledging the relational situatedness of ethical reflection. For Taylor, identity is ‘a kind of orientation. To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary’ (Taylor 1989: 28). While many social scientists frame questions of identity in relation to membership of particular communities, Taylor argues that a key aspect of identity concerns the cultivation of an ethical point of view. It is an understanding of what is of crucial importance to us. To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand. (Taylor 1989: 27) And while Taylor’s argument appears to mirror Arendt when he states that ‘to be able to answer for oneself is to know where one stands’ (Taylor 1989: 29), he also contends that ‘one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation to those conversation partners who were essential to my achieving selfdefinition . . .. A self exists only within what I call “webs of interlocution”’ (Taylor 1989: 36). Taken together, Arendt and Taylor posit responsibility as emergent from a reflexive process that links the ongoing work and ethics of self-formation to the negotiation and cultivation of identity, community, and the good life. In contrast to Arendt, in my own research on charitable practices in Florence, Italy (Trundle 2014), I argue that acts of reflection are not a precultural process that leads to better, truer, or more effective knowledge of the world. Rather, there are diverse cultural modes of ethical reflection that have the capacity both to reveal certain courses of actions and to obscure others, to articulate certain forms of responsibility and foreclose others. In exploring the workings of an American church foodbank, I show how financially secure, English-speaking migrant volunteers built up an everyday charitable ethic. They focussed their ethical reflection on face-to-face moments of fairness within the foodbank space, and in the process cultivated an ethos of ‘disinterested equality’ in their treatment of foodbank

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recipients that ensured all participants would receive fair, commensurate treatment. Yet this stance meant the women’s ethical frame was focussed on the immediacy of fleeting interactions between themselves, middle-class and wealthy migrant women, and the financially precarious, often undocumented migrants they served. As a consequence, the wider politics of class, inequality, and social exclusion that created food insecurity among Florence’s marginalized communities was precluded from view, action, or responsibility. In another moment of charitable giving, an English-speaking migrant women’s charity group hosted a fundraiser to support women recently released from prison. Here migrant women of colour from developing nations gave testimonials of their prior precarious lives, their time in Italian prison, and their work at a migrant sewing collective as they rebuilt their lives post-incarceration. In reflections afterwards, those in the audience described both a sense of deep compassion and an inability to truly understand the women’s lives because of the gulf in lived experience. Despite this lack of understanding, and indeed because of it, the women felt compelled towards acts of limited responsibility. They provided money to the women’s group, but most felt unable to engage with them much more. Philanthropic responsibility here relied upon a reflective sense of detachment and privilege, in assertions of the distinct roles of charitable giver and recipient. Like the foodbank, this type of ethical reflection did not lead Anglo women towards wider modes of social and political responsibility across the lines of class and race. Contra Arendt, being more reflexive does not necessarily make one more responsible. Rather, specific modes of reflexivity lead to particular forms of responsibility, and these can shore up certain obligations, relations, and modes of action over other types of action. Reflexivity is never ethically or politically neutral, just as responsibility never is.

Responsibility as Mutuality, Response, and Recognition Claims of responsibility are often entangled with assertions of mutuality. Andrew Walsh (2002) describes mutual responsibility as a process by which different actors or entities develop and come to recognize their reciprocal reliance. And while not necessarily placing them in equitable relations, it undergirds the reciprocal roles and interdependencies between them. ‘Mutual responsibilities’ proves a useful concept for considering the negotiation of obligations that emerge across a range of relations – within communities, between the living and their ancestors or spirits, between human inhabitants and their natural environment. Modes of mutuality mean responsibility hovers between two forms, that of responsibility for and responsible to (e.g. Lomawaima 2013). Responsibility for implies a position of authority, stewardship, or care,

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while being responsible to connotes the ways in which one is called to act by others, of duty, of being beholden to particular obligations, of the specific needs of care recipients that dictate the interaction of care that occur. Claims of responsibility often depend on being able to evoke both of these positions at once. This is visible in Patrick McKearney’s (2018) study of the healthcare workers at a Christian home, L’Arche, for people with cognitive disabilities. He describes how carers learn to act on behalf of those they care for based on an attention to the limitations of those in their care. Simultaneously, they also learn how to act in ways that they believe will support a care recipient’s own agency and responsibility. This is achieved through valuing non-normative models of personhood that do not depend on the rational mind, and which recognize forms of charisma and intuition as unusual and positive abilities that allow those with cognitive disabilities to engage and interact with the world, make choices, and be responsible for the self. Mutual responsibilities are also visible in Elizabeth Davis’s study of psychiatric care in contemporary Greek society (2010). Here she describes a type of therapeutic responsibility that exists outside of the liberal idea of the autonomous self and the individual will. As psychiatric patients are usually enrolled into care by others and often against their own volition, the ‘paradoxical ethical task patients face here is to assume responsibility for an ideal, or duty, or desire, that is determined elsewhere than in the self, and otherwise than by the self, but that is discovered and directed through self-reflection and self-transformation’ (2010: 135). Thus the therapist acts as a proxy for the enactment of individual responsibility, a process that is deeply relationally entangled, and riven with unequal agency. As Davis shows, like their fellow citizens, these patients are expected to function as responsible members of community; but unlike them, are ‘disabled’ from the subjective capacities and desires that define responsible citizenship. The demand for patient responsibility thus initiates a collaborative mode of therapeutic ethics, by which therapists in a sense complete the subjectivity of their patients as they enlist them in treatment. In these relationships, designed to expand the responsibility of patients in proportion to their freedom, therapists occupy a shaky ground between ethical guidance and coercion. (2010: 135) Davis’s study reveals how calls for responsibility, even in settings of vastly unequal power and even when they involve coercion, rely upon the mutual constitution of selves and the mutual recognition of subjectivity. Responsibility can reflect the ways in which we become beholden to each other as we enact our own agency and constrain or enable it in others. Parallels can be drawn here with Cheryl Mattingly and Patrick McKearney’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 22). Here, they reveal how

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asymmetrical relations of dependence lie at the heart of many practices of care. To think about responsibility as a type of mutuality involves, as Mattingly argues, ‘acknowledging our responsivity vis-a`-vis the world, or put differently, the way the world and our responses to it are inextricably entangled’ (2014: 13). Assertions of responsibility commonly involve assumptions about responsiveness, about how one should respond to duties, dilemmas, wrongdoing, unexpected events, risks, and opportunities. Responsibility involves chains of responsivity, as responses call forth further responses. And such sequences are often laden with uncertain potential. Calls for responsibility are thus imbued with the recognition of possible harm, of considering how one’s responses travel and effect future worlds (Hetherington 2013: 70–1). The philosopher Gareth Williams remarks, In the first place, responsibility represents the obligation of each actor to know the world into which s/he acts and – as we usually think it ought to follow – to understand the act s/he proposes. In the second, our attention is drawn to the temporal continuity of our agency, to the fact that our deeds are not the work of a moment, but involve an ongoing responsiveness to the world, including the need to respond for what has been done. We may need to carry forward what has begun, or somehow draw a line under what we judge ought not to have been started. (Williams 1998: 946–7) Here the ability to respond ‘responsibly’ can be tangled up with acts of recognition. And who gets recognized as being able to respond and who is in need of a response often depend upon cultural ideas of personhood, duty, and agency. Across societies, agency can be invested unevenly depending on when a person is recognized as being a moral agent. And in turn this capacity to be recognized and call forth a response from others is dependent on the social power one can marshal or the social position one can occupy, and the material or economic resources that a person can wield in mounting such claims. Some members of a community are always invested with more agency than others, in some domains over others. As Laidlaw points out, being seen as a responsible subject not only carries with it modes of social recognition, agency, and acknowledgement but it also burdens one to act and care and respond to others (2014). Mary Amuyunzu’s research among the Duruma women in Kenya vividly reveals this point (1998). Here women are responsible for protecting their children’s health, and are thus seen as having much agency over this domain of life. To support their children’s health, they sometimes utilize local healers who perform exorcisms to heal sickness in their families. Duruma women believe that a woman’s spirit will control her child,

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its spirit, and its health until the child reaches an age at which they can recognize their own spirit. Thus women ‘represent their ailing children in healing sessions by facilitating a link between themselves, the healer, the spirits and their children’ (Amuyunzu 1998: 499). Children do not have responsibility, and are unable to respond to the threat of illness because they fail to recognize themselves, and thus assume agentive personhood.

Responsible for Whom? Temporality, Spatiality, and Relational Boundaries of Collective Responsibility When entailing chains of response, responsibility’s relational entanglements play out within varied temporal and spatial scales. As Mattingly notes, ‘we are called to respond. And our response has a history, and becomes part of history’ (2014: 19). Responsibility thus dwells within what Mattingly describes as the ‘moral ordinary’, the ‘contingencies of the ordinary can present resources for moral creativity and experimentation’ (Mattingly 2014: 26), as well as what Richard Werbner describes as the ‘alternative world of the imagination’ (2017: 96), those ethical projects as much directed towards dealing with the past, and anticipating the future, the possible, and the desired, as they are concerned with pressing conundrums in the present. Scales of responsibility can shift based on new technologies and techniques that remake chains of agency and causation. James Laidlaw (2014) argues that it has become possible to redistribute responsibility more widely in contemporary life due in part to the effects of new technologies of knowledge. Specifically, he charts how statistical reasoning reconstituted understandings of social inequality by drawing new links between quotidian labour practices and theories of subconscious prejudice. He gives the example of how the implicit bias in job hiring that may disadvantage women or minorities was made statistically and numerical persuasive through the aggregation of new forms of data. These shifting visibilities are not only technological and technical but also political, spatial, and environmental. The contemporary challenges of climate change and the now global reach of pollution and species decline have transformed the way in which the actions of consumers, corporations, and governments now collectively have global consequences. Actions in one locale affect distant and planetary-level populations with increasingly obvious, concrete, and perilous effects. The exponential and increasing pace of climate change in recent years, and the urgency with which it must be addressed, demands of political and economic systems a new and unfamiliar temporal responsiveness and responsibility that can match the pace of current ecological transformation.

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Such expanding global scales of responsibility are not, however, limited to late twentieth-century environmentalism. As Thomas Haskell argues, the rise in a humanitarianism sensibility behind the anti-slavery abolitionist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be traced in part to in the rising tide of the economic order of capitalism. The norms of ‘promise making’ that underpinned the legal contracts within emergent capitalist marketplaces linked consumers, producers, and merchants around the world in new interdependencies (1985b). This is turn led to a ‘change in cognitive style – specifically a change in the perception of causal connections and consequently a shift in the conventions of moral responsibility’ (1985a: 342). As Arendt argues, claims to and for responsibility can link people across time in ongoing and intergenerational relations of obligation, blame, care, and dependence. This is especially so in what she refers to as collective responsibility. According to Arendt, this means being held responsible for an act and event which one did not act in directly, but rather vicariously or indirectly through association with and membership of a group being held responsible. It can involve ‘when a whole community takes it upon itself to be responsible for whatever one of its members has done, or whether a community is being held responsible for what has been done in its name’ (Arendt 2003: 149). This includes forms of political responsibility, in which a government assumes responsibility for the ‘deeds and misdeeds of its predecessor’, or when nations are called to be responsible for ‘the deeds and misdeeds of the past’ (Arendt 2003: 27). Arendt contrasts guilt, as individual legal culpability for direct acts, with the complex social systems of injustice and accountability that emerge over time and for which ongoing collective responsibility may or may not be assumed, but which elide accusations of direct culpability. Yet ethnographically responsibility and guilt are not always parsed. And if they are, then they are separated and reconstituted in diverse ways. Moreover, calls for collective responsibility can sometime hinge upon speech acts that explicitly and publicly assume and admit guilt. Recent political speech in Australia offers one ethnographic example. In 1997, the Bring Them Home national inquiry report revealed in devastating detail the effects of historic policies separating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, commonly referred to as the Stolen Generation. When the report was tabled in parliament, then Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologize directly and in a way that many in Aboriginal communities found satisfying, and he denied that the policy amounted to genocide, as the report claimed. Over the next eleven years a growing Sorry Movement grew nationally, organizing marches, bridge walks for reconciliation, and a national Sorry Day. In 2008 incoming Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized. In his maiden parliamentary speech, he strategically deployed a language of guilt and

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collective responsibility to describe the role of the political domain, and to constitute the links between historical policies and current inequities. He said: We, the parliaments of the nation, are ultimately responsible, not those who gave effect to our laws. And the problem lay with the laws themselves. As has been said of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings from our ancestors; therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well. Therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history . . .. To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification. . . . We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied. (Rudd 2008) Rudd’s apology reflects a specific articulation of responsibility qua political agency. Here the nation state, and by extension its laws, are understood as a corporate entity – in the anthropological sense of a collective body that is continuous through time irrespective of its individual members – and can thus more directly assume agency for the deeds of the past than could citizens or individual state officials, who enacted such policies. By bounding such acts in historical time in this way, Rudd’s politics of responsibility abstracted responsibility (as culpability and blame), distancing it from the interpersonal, the contingent, the agentive, and the improvisational realms of historical specificity. Even as Rudd gave responsibility a human face (his own), he simultaneously located it at an impersonal bureaucratic, legal level, and reflected ideas of social causation that hold no particular historical agents responsible. Some in Australia argued that the above-mentioned performances of responsibility and contrition replace or even stall other forms of ongoing responsibility and function to detract from or stand in for acts that might lead to material restitution. In line with this argument, Janet Wilson thus asks, in the Australian case, ‘who is reconciliation for, the white settler or the Indigene? . . . settler shame is merely a way of redeeming the white settlers’ own unease, not improving the conditions of Aboriginal people, a point which the apology throws into even greater relief’ (Wilson 2017: 309–10). An anthropological vantage on the ethics of responsibility needs to consider the varied discursive registers of responsibility, evident, for example, in the various sides in this debate, and the ways in which communities define or debate the appropriate or inappropriate modes of

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sentiment, contrition, shame, and guilt that need to be displayed, and the ideal symbolic, ritualized, and performative dimensions of such expressions. Such acts reflect the ways in which societies must grapple with the links between individual and collective responsibility, and the boundaries that are drawn and redrawn across time between personal and group responsibility, and between action and consequence. In other contexts, particularly those associated with societal crimes, grappling with collective responsibility can involve the often uneven and complex distribution of guilt within a group, from the individual level through to the entire social structure. Such a process constitutes different types of culprits who display diverse types of agency, freedom, and will, but whose actions nonetheless are made to reflect the pull of wider social pressures and the power of authority. Debates about responsibility thus can reflect a contested collective process of ‘making sense’ of the past in the wake of social upheaval. Calls for responsibility reflect people’s attempts both to enact modes of specific accountability and to find the ‘true’ agentive source of events. But this is often balanced by the need to abstract responsibility, to make the present liveable for those who must go on existing side by side after violence or conflict has ended or simmered back beneath the surface of daily life. Jean Hatzfeld’s (2003) study of Hutu men convicted for the mass murders of Tutsis during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide offers one startling example. In making sense of their own acts of atrocities, these men expressed a sense of there being something larger than themselves, a wider social fervour within which they were swept up. As Hatzfeld recounts, in 1991, in the wake of civil unrest between Tutsi insurgents and the ruling Hutu clan, political speeches and rallies by the ruling elites consisted ‘entirely of threats made against Tutsis . . . [university] professors vied with one another to publish historical screeds and anti-Tutsi diatribes. In the broadcasts studies of popular radio stations . . . the Tutsis were referred to as “cockroaches.” Announcers . . . used humorous sketches and songs to call openly for the destruction of the Tutsis’ (2003: 55). This dehumanization created a population receptive and desensitized to acts of ethnic violence. Yet the violence still needed initiators. Before the massacres the militias, trained by the army and ruling clan, arrived to lead the genocidal ‘operations’, intimidating those ‘who seemed uneasy with the work of killing’ (2003: 36), as one prisoner recalled. Local judges and village officials helped assemble the local men at soccer fields and ordered them to kill. ‘They lectured us, they threatened in advance anyone who bungled the job’ (2003: 15). As one described: The first day, a messenger from the municipal judge went house to house summoning us to a meeting right away. There the judge announced that the reason for the meeting was the killing of every Tutsi without exception. It was simply said and it was simple to

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understand. So the only questions were about the details of the operation. For example, how and when to begin, since we were not used to this activity, and where to begin too, since the Tutsis had run off in all directions . . .. The judge answered sternly: there is no need to ask how to begin. The only worthwhile plan is to start straight ahead into the bush, and right now, without hanging back anymore behind questions. (2003: 11) Those who refused to kill risked execution on the spot or being forced to kill a Tutsi publicly. Often, however, the pressures were more subtle. ‘If you proved too green with the machete, you could find yourself deprived of rewards, to nudge you in the right direction. If you got laughed at one day you did not take long to shape up. If you went home empty handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children’ (2003: 38). Those who refused to kill were fined. Poverty thus was a driving force in participation. As one farmer recalled: The farmers were not rich enough, like the well-to-do city people, to buy themselves relief from the killing. Some doctors and teachers in Kigali paid their servants or other employees so as not to dirty themselves. On the hills, many killed simply to get around their poverty. If they went along with the killings, they did not risk fines, and besides, it could pay off big on the way home. Whoever found a chance to sheet-metal a roof, how could he hesitate? (2003: 74) As Hatzfeld makes clear, the genocide was coordinated and thus enacted at a societal level, and the killers themselves were the violent edge of a much wider collective effort to eradicate Tutsi neighbours. Shop owners, for example, provided supplies and transportation to the killers, and women often supported their husbands. As one participant explained, ‘during the killings, the women continued to prepare the meals in the morning, and during the rest of the day they went looting’ (2003: 109). And yet, despite this abdication of fulsome individual responsibility among killers, the task of reconciling individual agency within acts of collective crimes remained a moral dilemma for many of the men whom Hatzfeld interviewed. As Arendt reminds us, even when responsibility gets meted out in ways that highlight societal levers, in ways that collectivize blame, individuals can still be left haunted by the memory of their own acts, left with the task of living with themselves, their past actions central to the stories they must construct about their moral worth. As Hatzfeld reveals, at one level the men’s stories downplayed their own connections to the crimes they committed, and blurred the notion of

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social madness with experiences of individual pathology, deviancy, and self-alienation. As two interviewees reflected: It is as if I had let another individual take on my own living appearance, and the habits of my heart, without a single pang in my soul. This killer was indeed me, as to the offense he committed and the blood he shed, but he is a stranger to me in his ferocity. I admit and recognize my obedience at that time, my victims, my fault, but I fail to recognize the wickedness of the one who raced through the marches on my legs, carrying my machete. That wickedness seems to belong to another self with a heavy heart. (2003: 48) It became a madness that went on all by itself. You raced ahead or you got out of the way to escape being run over, but you followed the crowd. One man, who rushed off machete in hand, he listened to nothing anymore. He forgot everything, first of all his level of intelligence. Doing the same thing every day meant we didn’t have to think about what we were doing. We went out and came back without a single thought. We hunted because it was the order of the day, until the day was over. (2003: 50) Here the act of not thinking resonates with Arendt’s ideas about the banality of evil, that responsibility in the face of violence is premised upon the ability to think, particularly against the grain of destructive social pressures. Yet Hatzfeld also challenges Arendt’s notion of the thinking, responsible subject. In Hatzfeld’s interviews, the men’s memories and stories remained saturated with ideas of personal initiative, creative agency, individual expression, and crafty will. They are not unthinking social automatons. They understood that even within the sharp pull of history, people manoeuvre in ways that enact forms of freedom and push events forward towards particular devastating ends. Thus, in Rwanda they recalled how ‘natural’ leaders and enthusiastic killers gravitated towards leadership roles during the genocide and tried to ingratiate themselves with militia leaders in order to win favours and rewards. While the militia had at first to pressure groups of famers to go out ‘hunting’ each day, soon these groups self-organized and became accustomed to and self-motivated in the ‘work’. As one killer explained: There were some who turned out to be easy killers, and they backed up their comrades in tough spots. But each person was allowed to learn in his own way, according to his character. You killed the way you knew, the way you felt, each at his own speed. There were no serious instructions on know-how, except to keep it up. (2003: 37)

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Such reflections stand in contrast to Arendt’s ideas of the unthinking subject, and perhaps reflect how her ideas of responsibility were shaped by a very different context, that of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel. An official in the Nazi party who was executed in Israel for his part in the Holocaust, Eichmann asserted in his trial that he was simply following orders, doing his job, fulfilling his duty, and obeying the law (Arendt 1963). While such claims of ‘command responsibility’ are often asserted in military contexts, and indeed in military law (Chantal 2007), Hatzfeld’s case reveals the very diverse contexts of conflict and collective violence that exist, and indeed the range of ethical reflections of responsibility and agency that can emerge from them. The Rwandan case study reflects, in all its devastating detail, the knotty crux in claims of collective responsibility. It reveals how communities grapple with the questions of how to integrate the past into the present and future in ways that apprehend and respond to the variegated shades of responsibilities being claimed. These in turn are underpinned by diverse accounts of what people did and the types of choices and freedoms these acts expressed or enabled, with some acts seen as expressing the true interiority of a person, some floating more abstractly at the level of ‘society’ or associated with the will of ‘others’, and many situated uneasily somewhere in between. In contrast to philosophical ideas such as Arendt’s, which try to define and prescribe the contours of collective responsibility and its distinction from guilt, ethnographic studies uncover the uneasy contestation of collective responsibility in which guilt, culpability, freedom, good, and evil are not easily assigned or fixed. The Rwanda case reveals how evoking ideas about responsibility can lay bare a deep set of tensions in the narratives we try to tell about our actions and the actions of others. They illustrate the complex links and disjunctures that claims of responsibility can create between our sense of freedom and our experiences of constraint, between the sense of our own intentions and our acts, and between our private histories and the flow of social events.

Conclusion Because of the immediacy of their emotional pull, public calls for responsibility often appear self-evident, simple in meaning, and morally persuasive. Yet, as this chapter has sought to reveal, within claims of responsibility the diverse cultural ways that particular ethical claims assign personhood and subjectivity, understand relational obligations, constitute freedom, choice, and intention, and impute actions to actors across time and space become evident. As this chapter argues, responsibility is a concept that describes an array of sometimes competing modes of ethical practice.

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In arguing that responsibility can express myriad possible meanings and actions, I have not sought to undercut the power of this concept. I am not suggesting that it means everything and thus it means nothing. Rather, I have sought to spotlight how responsibility gets pulled into a range of arenas to do significant political and social work, and to suggest an anthropology of ethics should be far more careful in unpacking the precise meanings of these deployments, and indeed remain critical in our own deployments of this term. Moreover, by uncovering the ethnographically diverse range of ways that people attempt to hold each other and themselves responsible, what might emerge is an anthropology of ethics that can more powerfully contribute to wider debates about the different possibilities for responsibility in the social, political, and ecological challenges that we currently face. Calls for responsibility are socially pervasive because they speak to pressing concerns and dilemmas. In a plethora of contemporary settings, the ethical legitimacy of political institutions, economic organizations, family and community ties, and individual conduct are evaluated according to notions of responsible action. Ideas about responsibility are powerful in part because of their ability to stretch across vastly varied scales, from the intimate ties that exist between a parent and child to the obligations of the human species to protect the environment on a planetary scale. For an anthropology of ethics, our work lies in excavating beneath the ideological veneer of responsibility, of identifying its constituent ideals and practices, of revealing the conflicts that such claims generate and seek to resolve, and in understanding the localized life-worlds that specific calls for responsibility enable. By doing so, an anthropology of ethics can reveal the varied relations that we build, comprehend, and sometimes undo through the lens of responsibility.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to the editor of this volume, James Laidlaw, for his incisive advice and careful reading of multiple drafts of this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge my prior work with Susanna Trnka, who, through multiple conversations, helped me to develop an anthropological engagement with the concept of responsibility.

References Amuyunzu, Mary. 1998. ‘Willing the Spirits to Reveal Themselves: Rural Kenyan Mothers’ Responsibility to Restore their Children’s Health’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12(4): 490–502. Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.

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Knobe, Joshua and John M. Doris. 2010. ‘Responsibility’, in John Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 321–54. Lacey, Nicola. 2016. In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2015. The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Janice Ikeda. 2015. ‘Neo-Liberalism and Responsibilisation in the Discourse of Social Service Workers’. British Journal of Social Work, 45: 1006–21. Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. 2013. ‘Relationships and Responsibility’. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 44(1): 11–14. MacKinnon, Dolly and Catharine Coleborne. 2003. ‘Histories of Psychiatry after Deinstitutionalisation: Australia and New Zealand’. Health and History, 5(2): 1–16. Mahmood, Saba. 2006. ‘Feminist Theory, Agency, and the Liberatory Subject: Some Reflections on the Islamic Revival in Egypt’. Temenos, 42(1): 31–71. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2014. Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. McKearney, Patrick. 2018. ‘Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 36(1): 40–60. McKeon, Richard. 1990. Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon. Edited by Zahava K. McKeon. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Meloni, Chantal. 2007. ‘Command Responsibility: Mode of Liability for the Crimes of Subordinates or Separate Offence of the Superior?’ Journal of International Criminal Justice, 5(3): 619–37. Public Broadcasting Services (PBS). 2019. Commanding Heights. Episode One. www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ tr_show01.html. Robbins-Rubszkowski, Jessica. 2017. ‘Responsibilities of the Third Age and the Intimate Politics of Sociality in Poland’, in Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle (eds.), Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 193–212. Rose, N. 1996. ‘The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government’. Economy and Society, 25: 327–56. Rudd, Kevin. 2008. ‘Kevin Rudd’s Sorry Speech’. Sydney Morning Herald. www .smh.com.au/national/kevin-rudds-sorry-speech-20080214-gds0xh.html. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1989. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Shaw, Rosalind. 2017. ‘Justice and Its Doubles: Producing Postwar Responsibilities in Sierra Leone’, in Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle (eds.), Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 156–80. Stewart, Michelle. 2016. ‘Fictions of Prevention: Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and Narratives of Responsibility’. North American Dialogue, 19 (1): 55–66. Strawson, Peter. 1993. ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza (eds.), Perspectives on Moral Responsibility. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 45–66. Tadros, Victor. 2007. Criminal Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2001 [1989]. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modem Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trnka, Susanna. 2017. One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility and the Politics of Global Health. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Trnka, Susanna and Catherine Trundle. 2017. Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trundle, Catherine. 2014. Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion and Belonging. Oxford: Berghahn. Valdez, Natali. 2018. ‘The Redistribution of Reproductive Responsibility: On the Epigenetics of “Environment” in Prenatal Interventions’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 32(3): 425–42. Walsh, Andrew. 2002. ‘Responsibility, Taboo and the Freedom to Do Otherwise’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 451–68. Wee, Lionel. 2007. ‘The Hunger Strike as a Communicative Act’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 17(1): 61–76. Werbner, Richard. 2017. ‘The Poetics of Wisdom Divination: Renewing the Moral Imagination’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23: 81–102. Williams, Bernard. 2008. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Williams, Garrath. 1998. ‘Love and Responsibility: A Political Ethic for Hannah Arendt’. Political Studies, XLVI: 937–50. Wilson, Janet. 2017. ‘(Not) Saying Sorry: Australian Responses to the Howard Government’s Refusal to Apologize to the Stolen Generations’, in Geoffrey V. Davis, Marc Delrez, Benedicte Ledent, and Gordon Collier (eds.), The Cross -Cultural Legacy: Critical and Creative Writings in Memory of Hena Maes-Jeline. Leiden: Brill Rodopi: 295–312. Wintour, Patrick. 2013. ‘Thatcher Funeral Address Prompts Tory Praise for Bishop of London’. The Guardian. 17 April. www.theguardian.com/pol itics/2013/apr/17/thatcher-funeral-address-bishop-london.

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12 Emotion and Affect Teresa Kuan

What is an emotion and what kind of work does it do? This chapter reviews how philosophers and anthropologists have engaged this question in their challenges against various academic and common-sense ideas. They include a view of emotion as an obstruction to reason, emotion as a set of psychobiological facts, emotion as something natural, individual, private, and arising from inside a person – a universal substrate on which culture acts. Where emotion is taken seriously as an area of human life that exposes the limits of ethical inquiry, or as a research object in the study of social organization and social process, emotion is instead shown to be very much in the world and not simply in the person. The concept of affect, referring to a moving energy that binds unlike things, makes the point even more robust. My intention in this chapter is not to take a position against the first set of views. Instead, I wish to demonstrate by way of building on the latter the significance of the study of emotion and affect to the anthropology of ethics. Emotion is a relation in which something is at stake in a first-person way. To think in terms of at-stakeness is to engage the language of moral experience; that is, how morality is lived by actual people in concrete historical circumstances (Kleinman and Kleinman 1991; Kleinman 2014). The study of emotion and affect reveals the way in which things matter to people, and it is in this mattering that we discover a moral agent who is responsive and vulnerable, trying to act well in a bewilderingly complex world. The anthropology of ethics seems to have given to some anthropologists the impression that a rational, decision-making subject has been presumed (Good 2019a: 55–6, 2019b: 423),1 as if the anthropological approach has been conflated with the ethical theories it in fact sets out to challenge or complicate. But let us be clear that where reasoning has been the focus, it is a mode of reasoning more accurately characterized as vulnerable reasoning, although, once vulnerability is introduced, 1

Some of the remarks I have observed were made in unpublished conference papers.

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reasoning no longer appears to be an accurate term.2 What we are then left with is vulnerability. What I present in this chapter is a caring subject, someone whose relation to a field of action is characterized by ‘hot’ involvement (James 1981 [1890]: 303) rather than cool detachment, vulnerability rather than rational control. Insofar as the caring subject is also a conscious, intentional subject, their consciousness of self is no cause for celebration. To care and to be acutely aware is a heavy burden and responsibility. This aspect of the human experience is the very antithesis of moral autonomy and freedom.

An Emotion Is a Relation in Which Something Is at Stake In the anthropology of ethics, emotion is rarely a keyword. In raising the question of where to locate ‘the moral drives in human life’ now that the self has been emptied of the ‘naturally constituted ethical drive’ Aristotle had presupposed, one reason being the ‘death of the subject’ (Dyring, Mattingly, and Louw 2018: 11–12), anthropological contributions to the volume Moral Engines locate moral drives in all sorts of places. They are in the ‘hauntings’ that shadow the pursuit of Sufi piety (Louw 2018), in the historically constituted experience of regret (Throop 2018), in the daily pragmatics of forgiving past wrongs in a post-war situation so as to repair broken relationships (Meinert 2018), and in the life contingencies that present themselves in experience; that is, those challenges or ‘ethical demands’ moral actors find themselves having to respond to because the care of an intimate other is at stake (Mattingly 2018). Each answer is lodged in the particular ethnographic context in which the question is engaged, hence the multiplicity of answers given and the irreducible uniqueness of each. One contribution engages Martha Nussbaum’s theory of emotion directly (Louw 2018), while another elaborates a theory of ‘moral mood’ with reference to regret (Throop 2018). But ‘emotion’ is not the key analytic term of the volume, even though, one might argue, it is a perfectly viable candidate for exploring the question: ‘what actually commits and drives us to understand our lives in ethical terms?’ (Dyring, Mattingly, and Louw 2018: 1). This question is related to an old one: what moves a human person to act? What is the nature of moral motivation? Indeed, in anthropology the answer has long been located somewhere outside the subject – culture, society, discourse, and institutional arrangements (if following Foucault), or collective representations and the symbolic practices that revitalize 2

The term ‘vulnerable reasoning’ is from a small talk Cheryl Mattingly gave in 2003 to her research team in Los Angeles; the talk eventually became the chapter ‘Moral Tragedy: The Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother’ in Moral Laboratories (2014). Vulnerable reasoning is no longer the key phrase in the analysis of this case, but Martha Nussbaum remains central to it.

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attachment to the group (if going back to Durkheim). Where emotion becomes a matter of theoretical concern, it is often conceived of as a site for social regulation – named and shaped in relation to broader social, political, and economic imperatives (to be discussed later). Meanwhile, in mainstream moral philosophy, emotion does not occupy a significant place. Where morality is defined in relation to reasoning and judgment, and reasoned judgment is said to consist of impartiality, disinterest, and indifference, emotion is not only rendered irrelevant, it is an obstruction to clear away, a miring to transcend or wall oneself off from. In the Platonic view, ‘The perfect god’s-eye standpoint is the only reliable one from which to make adequate and reliably true judgments’ (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]: 242). It is as if Plato’s ascent from the cave requires a ‘departure from human concerns altogether’, freeing oneself from external attachments and bodily demands (Bernard Williams, quoted in Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). In Kant, the perfect moral agent is an agent ‘noumenally free, so outside space, time, and causality entirely’ (Urban Walker 1991: 22). In this view, ‘moral motivation’ is an oxymoron, if motivation is pictured not in terms of duty but instead in terms of how a subject moves in and is moved by a world. While Bernard Williams does not use the word ‘emotion’ in his argument, his work is indispensable for understanding the ethics of emotion. Arguing against a Kantian view that rests on the separation of agents and a utilitarian view that reduces the individual to a ‘causal lever’ in a satisfaction system (1981: 4), Williams contends it is neither reasonable nor realistic to ask a man to give up his interests (14). The conatus of a person’s desires and concerns, his web of personal relations, ‘propels’ him (12–13). They constitute the ‘condition of his having any interest in being around in that world at all’ (14). ‘Something rivets my attention fatally’ is how William James put it (1981 [1890]: 305). The empirical self follows the destinies of certain things ‘with an excitement that owes nothing to a reflective source’ (304). Harry Frankfurt, picking up on Williams’s line of argument, chooses ‘love’ to think with. For Frankfurt, love is morally significant, though its commands are not grounded in a source ‘constituted by judgments and reasons, but rather by a particular mode of caring about things’ (2006 [2004]: 29). The ‘commands of love’ explain why any person is capable of acting at all, because without love there would be no interest, and without the fusion of interests that occurs in a captivation that ‘binds the will’ there would be no direction but instead an impairment in the capacity to choose and to act – ‘aimless floundering’ (64–6). Martha Nussbaum’s early work is even more indispensable for understanding the ethics of emotion, given how extensively she has written about it (Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). The Fragility of Goodness, to begin with, is a repudiation of the self-sufficient moral subject imagined in mainstream philosophy (2001 [1986]). Aristotle, who serves as her companion, locates moral subject-making in practical

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activity, and he understood that the most cherished of human goods are subject to chance and reversal; that is, things often do not turn out the way we want or expect because of contingencies we have no control over. The two points are related: flourishing depends on externalities which complete us, common to all living beings who share an ‘element of reaching out for something in the world, grasping after some object in order to take it to oneself’ (275). This must be the naturally constituted ethical drive that has been emptied, which, I shall later show, has been restored in certain corners in the world of affect theory. The point to make here is that the very reaching and stretching forward that constitutes practical activity (to absorb sunlight) is the same yielding and opening that makes life vulnerable (no sunshine to be had this season) (340). What further complicates this movement is that the creature has a ‘point of view’ and is selective about what is taken in. ‘The “good” and the “possible” must come together in order for movement to result’ (277). In human life, according to Aristotle, the most cherished of goods are primarily found in two domains of interdependency: political activity and personal love. Nussbaum writes, ‘There is no loving action without someone to receive and return it; there is no being a good citizen without a city that accepts your claims to membership’ (2001 [1986]: 381). This means that the practical activity that gives form to moral character ‘leaves no selfsufficient kernel of the person safely intact. It strikes directly at the root of goodness itself’ (2001 [1986]: 381). In this line of thought, a realistic, empirically grounded moral theory (or anti-theory in the case of Bernard Williams) must reckon with the problem of luck and contingency. Bernard Williams does so in his writings on ‘moral luck’ and the first-person problem of agent-regret (1981, 1993), recognizing how it is possible for an agent to take responsibility for consequences for which they are not responsible, even though it violates the ‘control condition’, subsequently wishing – with tremendous anguish (Kuan 2017, 2021) – one could have acted or done otherwise. Martha Nussbaum, meanwhile, goes on to develop a full-fledged theory showing the entanglement of moral emotions with luck, moving from Greek tragedy to modern literature. In Love’s Knowledge (1990), the significance of the experience of emotions is twofold: emotion is a mode of response and it is a mode of perception. The two are interrelated in that fine perception cannot be taken for granted (148), and when it does happen, it ought to be seen as a moral response to matters at stake. Admirable is the protagonist who feels bewilderment and hesitation because her confusion is a perception of the complexities that make up her situation. She cares too much about too many things, trapping her in a conflict of incommensurable goods (63–4). Rather than try to make a reasoned choice when faced with conflict by ‘picking the top point on a single ordered line’ (65), rather than ‘rewrite the nature of the conflict’ (90), this moral agent takes in what is there (152). To be responsive in this way is to be responsible. Nussbaum

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writes, ‘a willingness to surrender invulnerability, to take up a posture of agency that is porous and susceptible of influence, is of the highest importance in getting an accurate perception of particular things in the world’ (180). These particular things are of course not just any particular things but things on which an agent’s flourishing depends. They make a ‘special contribution to the richness and fullness of the good life’ (60), which consists of activities chosen for their own sake (59). There are many ways ‘the world can impede our efforts to act well’ (1990: 64), but act or move in the world we must. Nussbaum returns to this theme in Upheavals of Thought (2006 [2001]), joining the Stoics with animal studies and psychology in a ‘comprehensive theory of the emotions as cognitiveevaluative instruments of moral reasoning’ (Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). The emotion is a record of our imperfect control over objects that relate to our most ‘cherished relationships and projects’ (31), and we experience this vulnerability as embodied creatures with a point of view (65). Nussbaum’s reading of the vulnerability of parenthood in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder epitomizes the Aristotelian predicament of trying to act well in a world one does not control, adopting on this occasion the language of psychology to make her point: ‘To be a parent is to wish to be omnipotent, and to regain infantile omnipotence: one is supposed to be able to prevent death and harm. Thus the realization of the parent’s own finitude is shameful and a reminder of the more fundamental shame attached to being merely human’ (289). Perhaps what makes Nussbaum’s early work so remarkably salient for the anthropology of ethics is her love for the particular and the importance she gives it in revealing moral-existential themes. Only in narrative, she consistently argues, may we discover ‘things such as much happen’ (2006 [2001]: 240). Whether the question is ‘how one should live?’ (the philosophy question) or ‘what does it mean to be human?’ (the anthropology question), the Aristotelian approach shares with anthropology a conviction that the answers ought to be empirically grounded. Because what counts as the good or the meaningful depends on practical circumstance and cultural context, and because these things cannot be known ahead of time, the possible is entirely a contingent matter. Aristotle defended his method with defiance in the face of ancient philosophy’s hostility against the ordinary, the lived, and the shared (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]: 240–63). In a critique against the Eleatics, a preSocratic school that got lost in the ‘internal progress of their argument’, Aristotle contends, ‘[t]heory must remain committed to the ways human beings live, act, see – to the pragmata, broadly construed’ (247). Taking narrative as a guide exposes the limits of ethical inquiry, replete as Greek tragedy and modern literature is with complexity, variety, and singularity. In other words, we learn the most not from decontextualized formulas but instead from seeing how situated actors dance and negotiate with reality (cf. Mattingly 2014: 99–121).

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Ethnography is also a form of literature in depicting situated, concrete individuals with lives to live and constraints to contend with. Ethnography, too, ought to be counted as a viable candidate for ‘best ethical criticism’ by showing the limits of preconceived theories – theories that either reify human nature or reify social forces. If a good agent is one who grasps their ‘causal inextricability’ and responds to the problem of moral luck with integrity, grace, and lucidity (Urban Walker 1991: 17, 21), then ethnography is full of such characters. They constitute moral agents as we find them rather than as philosophers imagine them (Kuan 2021). Before turning to the anthropological literature on emotion and affect, I wish to make one final point to acknowledge that moral significance can be located not only in tragedy and suffering, where indeed we find the most intense of emotion experiences, but also in the most mundane and unremarkable details of everyday life. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, as demonstrated in Veena Das’s argument for a ‘descent into the ordinary’ (2007, 2012) and in Cheryl Mattingly’s ‘perplexing particular’ (2019). I aim to undertake a similar project in relation to ‘emotion’ in this chapter, in dialogue with Nussbaum. In the final part of Upheavals in Thought, Nussbaum goes in search of a normative ethics for the betterment of plural, liberal democracies, ‘purifying’ love in support of ‘general social aims’ (2006 [2001]: 469). This is just one instance on a trajectory that would take Nussbaum towards ends that are rather baffling in light of her earlier work (see Laidlaw and McKearney, Chapter 4 of this volume). Here, love for the particular is framed by an ‘idealism that also shows mercy and love to the real’ by recognizing how the grand co-exists with the banal (712). As odd as this appears, a deep respect for the ordinary remains, epitomized in her discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses: Bloom’s day, June 16, 1904, like most human days, is a day full of accidents, a day that eludes all of the reader’s most resourceful attempts to compose it into an orderly plot. Tragedy is philosophical because its plots manifest the essential nature of the human soul in its attempt to live well. Bloom’s day is philosophical because it contains fried kidneys, a greedy cat with ‘avid shameclosing eyes’, four slices of bread and butter; because Bloom, obeying in his own way the laws of probability and necessity, eats, defecates, masturbates, urinates, sleeps. (2006 [2001]: 684)

Emotion in Anthropology: From Ethnopsychology to Cultural Politics The anthropology of emotion experienced its heyday the 1980s. Feminist in spirit, the anthropologists who contributed to this sub-field found the study of emotion and sentiment in other fields thoroughly centred in

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psychobiological frameworks (Lutz 2017: 181; see also Lutz 1988: 3–4). They rebelled, and destabilized a set of assumptions that include a materialist view of emotion as a set of natural facts that are essentially universal, its pattern of response ‘stored’ in a biological program (Lutz and White 1986: 406–7, 410); the ‘two layers’ approach found in psychodynamic and psychiatric studies which presumes natural emotions are secondarily shaped, filtered, channelled, and so on by culture (Lutz and White 1988: 407); and a so-called common-sense Western view, which psychoanalytic theory no doubt helped to shape, locating emotion in a private, psychological interior – its ‘leakages’ betraying an authentic inner world (Rosaldo 1980; Lutz 1988: 72). In hindsight, it may be more accurate to say the so-called Western view does not denote the view of a civilization but instead a certain ‘emotional style’ that has come to prominence with the making of capitalism and modernity. As Eva Illouz has explained, ‘Freud’s theory of the self was part and parcel of the bourgeois cultural revolution which moved away from contemplative or heroic definitions of identity and situated it in the realm of everyday life.’ His achievement lies in the way he ‘bestowed on the ordinary self a new glamour, as it was awaiting to be discovered and fashioned’ (2007: 8). As much ethnography as culture critique, studies from the 1970s and 1980s argued for seeing emotion as pre-eminently social and cultural. Starting with Robert Levy’s early classic The Tahitians (1973), the anthropology of emotion came to understand the self and the person – that is, the locus of individual experience – as ‘culturally constituted, positioned at the nexus of personal and social worlds’ (Lutz and White 1986). Contributions analytically synthesized personal experience and social organization in arguing for understanding emotion categories as local idioms for symbolically organizing social life and relationships, and as providing interpretative schemes for making sense of things (e.g. Rosaldo 1980; Lutz 1988). These accounts may be read as portraits of ‘local moral worlds’, unique worlds of meaning in which social experience is deeply felt (Kleinman and Kleinman 1991). From the perspective of emotion research, the major contribution rested in the point that emotion is very much in the world and not simply in the person. Catherine Lutz said it best when she deployed a dramatistic metaphor to theorize how emotion terms order relations and give shape to experience. Emotion terms evoke ‘scenes’, Lutz argued, replete with the basic elements of drama – for example, actors, facial expressions, goals, differing points of view, and relationships in a state of repair (1988: 10). As we find in drama, there is tension and dynamism in the scenes of daily life Lutz describes in Ifaluk: ‘One person’s anger (song) entails another’s fear (metagu); someone’s experiencing grief and frustration (tang) creates compassion/love/sadness (fago) in others’ (1988: 82). Michelle Rosaldo makes a similar point in her classic account of anger/passion, liget, central to Ilongot’s understanding of the energy that drives social life forward

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(1980). The scene of liget also consists of a dyadic relationship: one person’s success is another’s envy and disturbance. This envy is like a fire that could destroy if improperly focussed. Like the partial interest that gives purpose to life and direction for action as discussed in philosophy (Williams 1981; Frankfurt 2006 [2004]), for Ilongot liget makes life possible because it motivates a person to work and to strive. Ilongot conceive of this ambiguous energy as the ‘source of beauty and life’, finding its highest expression in headhunting – a practice that gives meaning to all other practices (60). The anthropological challenge to a psychological view of emotion, namely the idea that emotions originate from a deep interior, has been taken up once again in recent research on the cultural politics of emotion. Here, the target of critique is not other fields of study but instead ‘neoliberalism’, a reflection of broader trends in the field. Allen Tran, writing about the way young, middle-class people in Ho Chi Minh City invoke ‘emotion’ (cam xuc) and corresponding notions of freedom and authenticity in managing their relationships with others and with themselves, argues that ‘the acceptance of cam xuc as the foundation for new types of relationships . . . is not merely the result of Vietnam’s version of neoliberalism but instead is critical to the process of neoliberalization itself’ (2015: 481). A special issue on ‘Emotion Pedagogies’ in the journal Ethos brings attention to the way in which emotional literacy has become ‘curricularized’, teaching participants how to manage the self ‘just as one would manage a business’ (Wilce and Fenigsen 2016: 86). While anthropologists writing about the cultural politics of emotion do not go so far as to argue ‘there is no subjectivity outside the compass of capitalism’, as Eva Illouz has in theorizing how emotions and commodities are co-produced (2018: 22), a common theme may be discerned in an otherwise diverse body of work. The teaching of emotion in formal, institutional settings often consists of imagining and objectifying emotions in a group setting, creating the very objects that are then taken as existing prior to the work of selfdiscovery. While some, though not all, have drawn for help on the Foucauldian insight that the subject is made in and through incitement to discourse, the research, generally speaking, critically interrogates the idea that humans have emotions that are discrete and object-like, things one could take an inventory of in working on the self. Writing about a training camp called ‘ReGeneration’ for children of the elite in Russia, Tomas Matza describes a series of pedagogical activities in which eleven- to thirteen-year-old children are taught to articulate ‘what had been posed as an unarticulated interior’ (2012: 806). In the inner-child workshops Sonya Pritzker (2016) has observed in Beijing, participants – mainly professional white-collar women – are taught to excavate, differentiate, name, and experience putatively buried emotions. In Zigon’s account of a drug addiction rehabilitation program (2010), also in Russia, rehabilitants learn to ‘thaw out’ their ‘frozen feelings’ rather than excavate something buried,

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but here too emotions are objectified in activities such as drawing out emotional conflicts on paper. These practices – minor as they are – are problematized for diverting investment of attention away from the real causes of suffering, adapting people to the needs of a market society rather than engaging them in social change. In trying to understand the psychotherapeutic turn in Russia, Tomas Matza employs the term ‘precariousness of care’ to describe the way psychological idioms and practices ‘oscillate’ between normalization, on the one hand, and something more openended on the other (2018). He takes therapeutic care to be a Janus-faced political-ethical formation through which people ‘wrestle with social concerns’ and ‘seek lines of flight’ (13), himself oscillating between interpreting what is meaningful for his informants, on the one hand, and social critique on the other; that is, noting when practices are ‘not quite radical’ (194) or downright reactionary. While a number of excellent counter-arguments have complicated how modern subjectivity and power relations are to be understood (Kipnis 2007; Cook 2016; Mazzarella 2017b; Trnka and Trundle 2017; Pritzker and Duncan 2019), what I would like to point out here is that an insight from classic studies of emotion has been lost, one that happens to articulate with Martha Nussbaum’s early work. I have in mind emotion’s relation to the question of how people manage to live and to act well in a world one does not control. On the surface, classic studies of emotion put their focus on themes such as selfhood, personhood, meaning, and cultural construction, but read through the lens of an anthropology of ethics, the cognitive and pragmatic dimension of emotion comes to the fore – cognitive in the sense that emotion constitutes a source of understanding of self and world, pragmatic in the sense that such knowledge informs how events are engaged with or responded to. In fact, Lutz and White suggest in their 1986 review of the anthropology of emotion that a framework, not yet realized at the time, for studying emotion anthropologically should not start with the comparison of emotion categories but instead with a set of life problems (1986: 427–9). That emotion is pragmatic, entailing what I think of in terms of the twin questions of ‘what is important to me?’ and ‘what could I do about it?’, was intuited early on when Robert Levy wrote, ‘Emotions seem to be feelings which convey and represent information about one’s mode of relationships as a total individual to the social and nonsocial environment’ (1973: 271). Levy was invited to join a multi-investigator study to the Society Islands of French Polynesia to take up the labour of investigating the ‘private’ aspects of behaviour (xv). He found instead a nexus, writing ten years later: ‘in an “emotion”, say anger, there is an emphasis on something wrong in the relationship of the person to his external physical and social context’ (1984: 221). With Unni Wikan’s Managing Turbulent Hearts (1990) we get a full articulation of how emotion and ethics intersect in the sense the author’s

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interlocutors had – a woman named Suriati in particular – that ‘“there is so much to care about’ (liu anu kenehange)’ (27). There is a multiplicity of concerns at any given time – black magic, limited resources, stakes to defend, preserving mental calm – and no realistic way to compartmentalize problems so as to tackle each one by one (14, 27, 108). For Wikan’s interlocutors, the problems of life are not to be approached with indifference, though such an approach may be valued in other times and places (e.g. Cassaniti 2015). ‘Balinese insist that knowledge must be felt-thought or else one will be bereft of moral guidance and unable to think rationally’ (276). Mirroring the simultaneity of life problems, this view suggests a simultaneity in what occurs in having a feeling-thought: perceiving a situation, gathering information, and sensing the pressure to act. In other words, the moral agent simultaneously feels there is something to do and knows that something is not just anything. The ‘emotion is the whole story’, Richard Shweder has argued (2003: 155). In early Chinese thought, a view that emotion and situation are inseparably continuous is indicated by the fact that the same character, qing, is found in both terms (Kuan 2015: 102). More than patterns of thought and behaviour, the main staple of the ‘classic mode’ in the anthropology of emotions, we have from these early studies a picture of the variable and universal qualities of life predicaments in different locales. They are so often related to the unequal distribution of power and resources – a missing piece in the Aristotelian approach (Mattingly 2014: 118–19). A relation in which something is at stake in a firstperson way, emotion may anticipate and capacitate the active response, like an energy that ‘propels’ (Williams 1981: 12–13), driving movement forward like the fire of liget (Rosaldo 1980). The emotion itself is not action, but it belongs to the same dynamic whole of which it is constituent. Recent ethnographies that have problematized the way in which human emotion has become a site for social regulation, particularly in the context of societies undergoing market transition, may be re-read in this light. In Unknotting the Heart (Yang 2015), a compelling ethnography of the use of psychology to manage the discontent of the unemployed and underemployed in market reform China, it is clear the author takes issue with the promotion of ‘happiness’ and positive thinking on the part of state organizations and representatives. Yang does so for good reason; her outrage extends from the anger of the informants she came to know, who find it hard to smile, having to endure the situation of ‘killing the mule immediately after it finishes work’ (xiemo shalu) (55). Ethically speaking, outrage is an appropriate human response to an unjust socioeconomic situation (cf. Scheper-Hughes 1995), and it informs the book’s theoretical framework, ‘therapeutic governance’. Meanwhile, the anger and the discontent of the unemployed is sharp and lucid, ethical and pragmatic in the sense that the anger has everything to do with what is at stake (dignity and the basic necessities of life), and what one could do to

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pursue what is important (negotiate or fight). Take majie as an example, a ‘local speech genre’ that has ‘distinctive pragmatic features’ – in the linguistic sense – involving cursing on the street and, in some cases, kicking at doors in an effort to obtain resources or waivers for utility payments (99, 184, 189). As a ‘womanish’ genre of speech, majie is a last resort for the men who do it (185). It is an ‘eruption’ (179) of suppressed anger that may be seen as perfect in measure, an expression of the speaker’s fullest humanity, and an intelligent response to an unbearable situation. No amount of anger will bring back the golden days laid-off workers feel nostalgic for, but the effort officials put into promoting positive thinking – what Yang’s informants call out as ‘hoodwinking’ (huyou) – did not achieve its purpose either. The strong emotions in the ethnography point to the ‘distinctive surplus of life’ that is found in a living being’s struggle to maintain a meaningful relation to its circumstances (Guenther 2013: 118, 121). This surplus is extinguished only in the most extreme of situations.

Affect, Mood, and History: The Stuff That Hangs between Us While the previous section ended by highlighting the pragmatic dimension of emotion – what it does – this section will explore what emotion is, in order to make the key point more robust: emotion is a relation in which something is at stake in a first-person way. To explore this question, I turn to the theory of affect. A much more recent development, the affective turn’s connection to the anthropology of emotion is either implicit or it is contentious. It is implicit because anthropological work deploying the concept of affect similarly locates subjective life in the world rather than in the person, understanding affect as a moving, transpersonal force or energy that moves and propels (Rutherford 2016), binding the most impersonal of social forms with the most intimate of sensory experiences (Rutherford 2016: 291; Mazzarella 2017a: 201, 2017b). It is contentious because critics of affect theory understand it as a ‘project of the ruination of other theories’ (Lutz 2017: 186), having located the origin, if you will, of human action below the cognitive level, outside of social processes. For Catherine Lutz, prioritizing the body and the inchoate over language and representation has the effect of reinstating the binaries feminist anthropology worked so hard to undo (2017: 187). For Emily Martin, the humanities scholars who developed the concept of affect have aligned themselves too closely with neuroscience, losing sight of how the social in fact goes ‘all the way down’ (2013: 157). Danilyn Rutherford, in her excellent review of anthropological work taking up the concept of affect, is both sympathetic and cautious – cautious because such work tends towards universalism in its search for ‘the forces at play in the making of social worlds’ (2016: 295), forces that are not themselves social. Rutherford suggests the affective

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turn in anthropology may be related to an ‘insecurity that humanities disciplines are feeling’ in the face of shrinking funds and support, thus a turn towards science (2016: 295). Affect theory in fact refers to a diverse body of writings (Martin 2013: 154; Rutherford 2016: 287), and the way in which anthropologists have used it no less so. While Rutherford’s review comprehensively identifies three majors areas in which affect theory’s impact on anthropology may be observed – studies of immaterial labour and neoliberal self-making, studies of the political, and multispecies ethnography – what I will focus on here is how and why I take affect to be related to ethics. My reading of affect theory is partial to my own contention with the way its deployment has tended towards arguments claiming to show how an economic order goes ‘all the way down’: yet another human capacity, totally instrumentalized. I share with other scholars the view that affect theory offers a productive and vitalizing antidote to social constructivism and determination (Brown and Tucker 2010: 248; Rutherford 2016: 287–8). Because my understanding of ethics begins with the premise that the caring subject acts in a vital web of relations (Kuan 2015), I find in certain strands of affect theory helpful resources for an anthropology of ethics. In my view, thinking with affect is a matter of keeping up with the messy vitality of actual life, tracing, to borrow from Kathleen Stewart, ‘a series of precisions’ that always unfold as a ‘transmogrification of things’ (2017: 193). It offers another avenue for attending to the particular, as Nussbaum does with the details of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, with the theoretical understanding that the particular exposes the limits of grand theories that either decontextualize or reify, returning ethical inquiry to the ‘data of human experience’ (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]: 245). If there is a predisposition towards universalism in affect theory, it is a universalism that presupposes contingent relations and flux, emergence and particularity, in the unfolding of human affairs. Where there is a turn towards science, such turning involves a kind of ‘poaching’, taking what is useful and discarding what is not (Massumi 2002: 19). The strand of affect theory I take to be most relevant to the anthropology of ethics can be traced to the biologist Jakob von Uexku¨ll, whose ideas have informed Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Baruch Spinoza, affect theory’s fountainhead. Affect is good to think with because a social and historical process is a dynamic living process that consists of intimate relations between a multiplicity of actors and materials, not all of them human, all far from inert in the sense that objects are in life (Ingold 2018). The affective turn offers another occasion for locating mind in ecology, as Gregory Bateson would have put it, in a way that takes the felt as seriously as the systemic. In Bateson, the tree, the axe, the eyes of the woodcutter, and each and every cut face constitutes a feedback system ‘that has the characteristics of immanent mind’ (2000 [1972]: 317). Too much system, not enough feelings. There is, on the other hand, more ‘poetry’ in Deleuze

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(Hurley 1988: ii), which may be illustrated in an image he gives in conceptualizing affect, inspired by von Uexku¨ll. In any corner of an immense forest one may find affective relations composed of unlike things, relations in which something is of interest: ‘the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the least hairy place it can find’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 257). The light and the tick, the tick and a smell, and finally the tick nestled close to the body of a hairy terrestrial animal: these are ‘just three affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 257; see also Deleuze 1988 [1970]: 124–5). In this tiny illustration, affect is presented as a relation in which something is at stake in a first-person way, or to put it in von Uexku¨ll’s terms, affect concerns the singular perspective of a living being towards its Umwelt (Guenther 2013: 109). A human is, like other living beings, a being for whom some things matter more than others. Accommodation of the non-human world marks a critical difference between the theory of affect, on the one hand, and the anthropology of emotion on the other, thereby offering a resource for expanding our understanding of emotion and ethics. The non-human world here can include virtually anything, as the notion of affect only requires two bodies in relation, and a body that enters into a relation can be anything: ‘it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (Deleuze 1988 [1970]: 127; see also Seigworth and Gregg 2010). What requires specification, according to Deleuze, is what happens when two bodies enter into a relation: is it a relation of composition or decomposition? Is it a relation of diminishing or flourishing? Whether the effect is either cannot be known ahead of time because what combines is always a contingent surprise. This unknowability creates the space for empirical inquiry and it concerns ethics because an inquiry into what Deleuze calls the ‘order of causes’ ought to inform how to work out the practical problem of arriving at a ‘maximum of joyful passions’ (28): vitality and action rather than impotence, life rather than ‘slavery’ and death. For anthropologists, the project is less a matter of practical ethics than of scientific description – that is, the practical ethics of people observed. But the anthropological project shares in the Spinozist sensibility in that one cannot know ahead of time what a body can do. In other words, one cannot know what human experiences (or emotions) are possible ahead of time since affections are necessarily contingent on relations that are always only ever historical. What Deleuze calls ‘immanent modes of existence’ anthropologists call ‘forms of life’ (e.g. Rosaldo 1980: xiii; Das 2007). Yael Navaro-Yashin (2009) thickly describes a situation in northern Cyprus where Turkish-Cypriots live their everyday lives with the things their enemies have left behind, and with scenes of ruin in the horizon. She

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draws in part on Deleuze’s understanding of affect as ‘intensities that may move through human bodies, but that do not necessarily emerge from them’ (12) to understand how the power of the material world to affect combines with the human propensity to interpret, to produce a discharged energy she calls the ‘affect of melancholy’. In doing so, Navaro-Yashin lodges what was for Freud an intra-psychic, interpersonal phenomenon in a broader context that includes left-behind furniture and household objects, rusted cars in a landscape of ruin, and a shared history that binds Turkish-Cypriots to Greek-Cypriots. With a military border drawing a sharp line between enemies, Turkish-Cypriots relate to the other community through objects (2009: 3). This relation is an outcome of historical contingency, and it is suffused with the affect of melancholy because making life with the plunder of the other made it difficult for people in this community to ‘think well of themselves’ (T. S. Eliot quoted in Wikan 1990: 107). Ethnographic description diverges from the sort of ethics Deleuze proposes as the situation of Turkish-Cypriots is ambiguously one of composition and decomposition, diminishing and flourishing. ‘Everyone’s hand has been dirtied with plunder’, they say (3), but social life in a landscape of ruin is still a form of life. Self-critique appears to be a way to actively keep moral distance from the violence of appropriation even when one is an agent of it (16). Such is the sort of ethics we find in ethnographic work.3 Drawing from affect theory has not only allowed anthropologists to situate deeply felt desires and experiences within broader historical circumstances but has also facilitated theorizations of diffuse, roughly articulated desires and experiences that do not fit well in any emotion category (Throop 2014; Jarrı´n 2017; Collu 2019). In some ethnographic accounts, affect is not the theoretical framework but the descriptions are rich in implications for a re-reading for affections, just as classic studies of emotion may be re-read for moral experience. Generally, anthropologists are no longer writing about emotion in the context of a sub-field defined by the category of emotion itself, and many who are doing so implicitly work at the intersection between medical anthropology and the anthropology of ethics (Garcia 2010; Han 2012; Throop 2014). Notably, the work reflects a shared theme – more states of de-pression which may nonetheless be construed as a form of ethical life. They say something about the capacity to be affected, to merge even, in a situation in which something is existentially and morally at stake. One might say it is an achievement in being ‘a person on whom nothing is lost’ (Henry James quoted in Nussbaum 1990: 152). Borrowing from Sara Ahmed (2010), Jason Throop writes of moral moods as being ‘atmospheric’ (2014: 70). A mood is a feeling that is both inside and outside, as much a ‘surrounding influence’ with no form as a moral 3

My appropriation of Deleuze is informed by Mazzarella’s (2017b) critique of Deleuze’s anti-dialectical vitalism.

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orientation to what is existentially at stake. Throop reads what he calls ‘moodedness’ in the slouched shoulders and despondent tone of voice of his informant Fal’aeg, a sixty-year-old Yapese man who laments ‘the impossibility of returning to a traditional way of life’, yet was vague about what exactly has changed (75). Meanwhile, like Navaro-Yashin, Angela Garcia also gives an account of melancholic subjects living in a landscape of ruin, in this case abandoned irrigation systems filled with discarded heroin needles (2010). The setting is Espan˜ola Valley, the state of New Mexico, southwest United States, where a heroin epidemic was raging. Although the thrust of Garcia’s argument is to underscore the ethics of melancholia in the wake of the death of loved ones, she also writes of a feeling that is as much in the person as it is in the land. In these accounts, there is a circumstance of devastation. In Yap, the ongoing decline and imminent end of American aid will be replaced by Chinese capital. The state governor has already signed an agreement with a company that would bring to an island of 12,000 people 10,000 Chinese workers for the building of massive infrastructure for Chinese tourism. In Espan˜ola Valley, Hispanos are surrounded by a natural beauty that is no longer theirs (Garcia 2010: 83). Land once used for grazing, agriculture, and doing kinship had been expropriated by the federal government for establishing a National Forest and for building the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Although Garcia does not formulate her argument using this term, the kind of melancholy she describes exemplifies many features of a ‘moral mood’. The endlessness of melancholy, a condition her informants say is unalterable and ‘has no end’ (no termina, sin fin), appears to be ‘totalistic’, like Fal’aeg’s mood. The feeling is vague in the sense that it is ‘disconnected from specific recollections of the past’ (79), yet intensely orientated towards something that matters. While Throop argues that moral mood is a way of perceiving a state of emergency (2014: 71–2), Garcia understands melancholy as a way of ‘keeping watch’ over loss (80), and attending to the past as such (110), in a community where addicts fear their own deaths will be quickly forgotten (95–6). In these accounts, it is not clear where a feeling ends, where the person ends, and where the social atmosphere and external historical circumstance begins. While a mood is more diffuse, the pragmatic dimension of emotion discussed in the previous section is still there. In the perception of a state of emergency, in keeping vigil over lives lost, an assertion is made about what matters from a first-person perspective, in a situation where nothing much can be done other than to care, to at least live as a being still animated by the capacity to be affected. The true antithesis of vitality may not be states of de-pression but instead a total withering away of this capacity to care, which may be glimpsed in writings on what happens to a prisoner cut off from social relations – his capacity to ‘comport himself toward something that matters . . . evacuated’ (Guenther 2013: 20).

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My re-reading of ethnographies that do not explicitly draw on affect theory, or do so to a limited degree, stems from my own interest in redeploying it for a mode of inquiry that is not quite the mainstream. What is at stake, from the perspective of anthropological scholarship, is how we understand and theorize the human subject. If humanities scholars have erred too far on the side of trying to find hope and potentiality in pre-social affects ‘located subcortically in the brain’ (Martin 2013: 157), then some anthropologists may have erred too far on the side of social critique in using affect theory to show how the imperatives of changing economic arrangements are reaching ‘all the way down’ (Martin 2013: 157). In the literature on ‘affective economies’ or ‘economies of affect’, indeterminate potential and bodily capacities become salient as the key ingredient in the production of value in the wake of major transformations, variously characterized in terms of a shift to post-Fordist, ‘Toyotist’, or neoliberal economies, or to ‘societies of control’ from ‘societies of discipline’ (Hardt 1999; Negri 1999; Shouse 2005; Clough 2007). Whether we are talking about getting models to do something that will make an impact in a saturated marketplace of images (Wissinger 2007), or the television industry’s shift to lifestyle-orientated programming in recessionary Japan (Luka´cs 2010), or raising the kind of children who will contribute to China’s shift towards an innovation-driven economy (Kuan 2014), or binding non-governmental organization (NGO) workers from the global North to sites in the global South (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009), or getting poor Brazilians to invest in beauty (Jarrı´n 2017), analysts invoke the notion of affect to show how vitality itself has become a form of capital in systems of production that depend on the rapid circulation of information and images. Such work points to how affect provides the fuel for new systems of capture, as if to say the tyranny of capital does not look anything like tyranny because it thrives on free movement and play. With the emergence of affective economies, it has been argued, there is a ‘real subsumption’ of life itself (Clough 2007). You must live even if it kills you! Sometimes, the most illuminating of studies as far as affect is concerned do not invoke affect theory at all. The theoretical point is lodged in a ‘ series of precisions’ (Stewart 2017: 193) that unfurl in thick descriptions of social processes that are historically conditioned yet remain open-ended. Affect theory offers a way to polish the lens (Deleuze 1988 [1970]: 14), to more fully appreciate the immanent quality of ethnography, which, like novels, presents ‘samples of something that might happen in human life’, other lives and situations that bear ‘universal significance’ for the reader (Nussbaum 1990: 166, emphasis original). Rich ethnographic work is philosophical because it illuminates what it means to be an affective human being in a nexus of surprising combinations that have happened in a given historically contingent social formation. Recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s description of an imagined forest scene, just the three affects enumerated, I would argue that

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Emotion and Affect

the more details there are, the more relations described, the more the affects brought to light: because affects are immanent to ‘things such as might happen’ (Nussbaum 2006 [2001]: 240). Take Clara Han’s (2012) ethnography Life in Debt as an example. It is a vitalist account of kin relations and house-making in the Chilean context of severe credit card indebtedness and economic precariousness. The account is thick with misery, to be sure. But there is also at the same time a something-else in its detailed descriptions of everyday life, found in the constant effort people make to be in the present of the other against all the forces constantly tearing relations apart – effort that is not necessarily the exertion of an individual alone but instead ‘drawn forth’ by a web of care relations (cf. Bruya 2010). Han describes one particular household as pervaded with a ‘thick glue of affects’ (154). It is as if the house has an ‘agentive force’ of its own – as suggested by the neighbour who avoids visiting because she feels choked when she is there, and by the daughter’s feeling that a ‘spell’ has been cast on it: ‘It’s always the same: going in circles in the same space.’ Here we find a household thick with sad passions, a stasis and an immobilization of human action in relations of ‘decomposition’ (Deleuze 1988 [1970]). Why that thickness is there relates to a whole series of precisions that have accumulated into an indistinct feeling of ineluctability, situational particularities that are as intimate as they are historical, as much a matter of political economy as they are of human experience. They include a mother’s political exile from Chile, her difficulty in reconciling activism with motherhood, a daughter’s interpretation of her real reason for going to Argentina, and the mounting credit card debts and abandoned bolts of fabric that were supposed to help in paying them off. Add to this a daughter’s sense of existential debt towards the mother she resented for having adopted her from a biological parent who was an alcoholic, and we have a pile of sticky affects that combines resentment with ‘loyalty, guilt, and care’ (150). Han ends this chapter, titled ‘Neoliberal Depression’, with a luminous ethnographic detail. It is a backyard party for the son Oscar who has married, and Julieta the daughter had refused to join because of a squabble with her new sister-in-law over missing money. Just as Han was about to sit with Julieta in the one-room shack the latter rents from her mother at the back of the family property: Oscar knocked on the door, pleading with Julieta to come out and at least greet her grandmother. Sighing, Julieta opened the door and stepped out into the celebration in her pajamas. Oscar handed her a glass of champagne, which Julieta held in her hand without drinking. She sat down next to her grandmother for the next few hours, holding her hand, in silence. (Han 2012: 166, emphases added)

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A brother and a sister, an open door and a glass of champagne, a granddaughter and her visiting grandmother – just three affects in this one description, embedded in an ethnographically dense warp and weft of political and intimate histories. Earlier in the chapter Han argues against ‘taking subjectivity as an initial property of a subject’ in favour of taking it as a ‘singular weave of relations’ (143). I would only add that sometimes a weave of relations becomes so dense it ossifies as a state of stuckness. Then sometimes a tiny shift, a transmogrification, will appear out of nowhere; not necessarily because of an actor’s motivation to move something along. The movement is instead drawn forth by a web of relations. It is an image I borrow from Brian Bruya and the distinction he makes between saying that wind ‘blows’ in a tunnel versus is ‘drawn forth’ in relation to changes in other variables (2010: 216). It is a matter of understanding the world in terms of force mechanics versus fluid mechanics, and revising our models of human action accordingly. In this spirit, it seems important to leave the weave intact – the immense forest of affects as it is so as to avoid introducing discontinuities where discontinuities do not exist – with the understanding that emotion and affect is immanent to morality as people live and experience it. Orientating oneself towards the things and people that matter, the moral agent takes up ‘a posture of agency that is porous and susceptible of influence’ (Nussbaum 1990: 180).

To Extend or to Retreat, to Retreat in Order to Extend In an essay titled ‘Senses and Values of Oneness’, historian of Chinese thought Philip J. Ivanhoe begins his inquiry into why we care and how by critiquing a hypothesis from experimental psychology known as ‘the empathy-altruism hypothesis’. This starts with the notion of an atomistic individual who (1) is endowed with a capacity to have regard for an other, then (2) learns to feel and respond in relation to another individual, and finally (3) develops the capacity to behave altruistically (2015: 238). Ivanhoe offers the ‘oneness hypothesis’ as an alternative, based on neoConfucian ideas of a self ‘coextensive’ with ‘other people, creatures, and things’ – the whole universe (236). This hypothesis differs from the psychological one in starting with the whole rather than the part: ‘We are moved by aspects of Nature because in a fairly direct and intricate way we are one with it’ (241), articulating, Ivanhoe argues, a sensibility that corresponds with ‘our best scientific understanding’ (239). There are many iterations of this kind of argument, and they need not come from East Asia. William James offers one, expressed in the idea that we have as many selves as there are individuals and groups we would like to please (1981 [1890]: 282). For James, these multiple selves constitute a single unity, though not in a 1 + 1 = 2 kind of way. As he writes,

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Emotion and Affect

In its widest possible sense, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. (1981 [1890]: 279–80) Similar to the idea expressed by Ivanhoe above, the self is found in the extension, not in some pre-formed capacity that pre-exists a meeting with the world, and, in this extension, established with the taking of ‘selfish’ interest in material and social objects (e.g. recognition from others), there is freedom, ease, even a ‘delicate rapture’ (298). In this chapter, I have emphasized relationality and connection in thinking about what emotion is and what it does. Emotion can be an orientation, a mode of perception and judgment, a trace of vulnerability, an investment of interest, a mode of care or participation, a force of propulsion, an energy, or the ‘stuff’ between bodies. It might consist of dynamics of ‘hot’ involvement and immersion, influence and emergence, or entanglement and near-total fusion. It is sometimes a target for social manipulation and control, and here, too, there is relationality. But relationality is not everything and the strong attachments that bind a person to other bodies – human and non-human, including one’s own – are not fixed. In different times and places, the intensities that bind are problematized and worked upon with the aid of sociocultural technologies and practices for ‘detachment’, if you will. One may say detachment is still a relation of attachment, for a project to wall oneself off from worldly fluctuations and frustrations makes detachment itself an object of partial orientation, investment, and participation. These practices are worth acknowledging and briefly discussing because they point to the human capacity to exercise power over the experience of relations – relative to existing repertoires, materials, idioms, technologies, and aspirations. Well exemplified in Indic religious practice (Cassaniti 2015; Laidlaw 2015), they constitute another way to approach the ethics of emotion, since practices of detachment are also a response to the problems of life – social, political, and existential. That the practice of science and public administration in a mass society rests on a foundation of cool detachment is already a well-worn trope (C