A Companion to Moral Anthropology E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Anthropology
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1737

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A Companion to Moral Anthropology is the first collective consideration of the anthropological dimensions of morals, morality, and ethics. Original essays by international experts explore the various currents, approaches, and issues in this important new discipline, examining topics such as the ethnography of moralities, the study of moral subjectivities, and the exploration of moral economies. * Investigates the central legacies of moral anthropology, the formation of moral facts and values, the context of local moralities, and the frontiers between moralities, politics, humanitarianism * Features contributions from pioneers in the field of moral anthropology, as well as international experts in related fields such as moral philosophy, moral psychology, evolutionary biology and neuroethics

Leseprobe

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Toward a Critical Moral Anthropology

THE TROUBLE WITH MORALS

PHILOSOPHICAL AFFINITIES

OPENING TERRITORIES

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART I Legacies

CHAPTER 1 Durkheim and the Moral Fact

DETERMINATION BY “SANCTION”

HOW DURKHEIM’S THINKING IS RELATED TO KANT’S

THE SACRED

THE INDIVIDUAL, THE IDEAL OF THE PERSON

VALUE JUDGMENTS

SOCIETY IN ACTUALITY AND SOCIETY IN ACTION

CHAPTER 2 Weber and Practical Ethics

ETHICAL SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCE OF ETHICS

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THEOLOGY

ETHICS AND ETHOS: THE “RATIONALITY” OF ACTION

ETHICS, CAUSALITY, AND CULPABILITY

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 3 E. P. Thompson and Moral Economies

EARLY LIFE ON THE LEFT

THOMPSON’S “ANTHROPOLOGIES” AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS’ NEGLECT

THE MORAL ECONOMY

THE “MIGRATION” OF MORAL ECONOMY

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 4 Foucault and the Genealogy of Ethics

TOWARD ETHICS

TOWARD ATHENS

THE GROUNDS AND PARAMETERS OF THE ETHICAL DOMAIN

THE CARE OF THE SELF

PARRHESIA AND THE GOVERNANCE OF OTHERS

CODA: A GENEALOGY OF THE ETHICS OF THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 5 Relativism and Universalism

MORAL UNIVERSALISM: THE STANDARD CHARACTERIZATION

DESCRIPTIVE WORK IN MORAL ANTHROPOLOGY: A SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND LIMITS

BACK TO MONTAIGNE: ON BEING SLOW TO JUDGE LITTLE-KNOWN OTHERS

MORAL JUDGMENT IN TWO TEMPLE TOWNS

MORAL PLURALISM AS UNIVERSALISM WITHOUT THE UNIFORMITY (IN BRIEF)

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 6 Anthropology and Ethics

DO NO HARM

FRAGMENTS OF HISTORY

DEBATES ABOUT CODES

INDIGENOUS COLLEAGUES, OFTEN OVERLOOKED

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: FROM RESEARCH “SUBJECTS” TO “PARTICIPANTS”

INFORMED CONSENT AS A PROCESS OF MORAL ENGAGEMENT WITH PARTICIPANTS

IS SECRET OR CLANDESTINE RESEARCH IMMORAL?

A PUBLIC MORAL SYSTEM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY: CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND UNIVERSAL RIGHTS

CONCLUSION

PART II Approaches

CHAPTER 7 Cultural Values

CULTURAL VALUES AND MORALITY

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF VALUE AND THE MORALITY OF REPRODUCTION

ON VALUE INTEGRATION, PLURALISM, AND MORALITY

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 8 Ordinary Ethics

MORAL LIFE, RULES, CUSTOMS, AND HABITS

DETECTING THE HUMAN

THEN, WHAT ABOUT GOOD AND EVIL?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 9 Moral Sentiments

MORAL SENTIMENTS AND MORAL SENSE THEORY IN PHILOSOPHY

ON BEING INTERNALLY DIVIDED

ANTHROPOLOGY AND MORAL SENTIMENTS

TOWARD A CULTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE

MORAL SENSIBILITIES IN YAP

AN ENCOUNTER WITH SUFFERING

MORAL BREAKDOWN, SENTIMENTS, AND ETHICS OF SUFFERING

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 10 Moral Reasoning

MORAL REASONING ABOUT THE SOCIAL GOOD: ANTHROPOLOGY’S BLACK BOX

COMMONPLACE CONTRADICTIONS: MORAL REASON, MORAL ECONOMY, AND THE GOOD

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 11 Virtue

A PRACTICE APPROACH TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF VIRTUE

CLEARING THE GROUND: CONCEPTUAL OBSTACLES

VIRTUE IN TERMS OF ARTFUL AGENCY AND SKILL

PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

THE UNIVERSALITY OF VIRTUE AND THE PARTICULARS OF ETHNOGRAPHY

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 12 Narratives

NARRATIVE – FROM MEANING TO BEING TOGETHER WITH

UNDERSTANDING AS CHARITABLE LIVING THROUGH

CONCLUSION

PART III Localities

CHAPTER 13 Ethics and Piety

RELIGION AND SUBJECTIVITY

INTERIORITY AND EXTERIORITY

MEANS AND END

FOUCAULDIAN ETHICS

ETHICAL ENGAGEMENTS

CHAPTER 14 Care and Disregard

WHEN NOTHING CAN BE DONE

FAMILY COMPLEXES

TECHNOLOGIES OF CARE AND DISREGARD

EX-HOME

COMMON MORAL SENSE

EVILNESS

CONCLUSION: WOMEN, ECONOMIC INSECURITY, AND SOCIAL DEATH

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 15 Mourning

TWO MODELS FOR MOURNING

ENGAGING WITH LIFE

SECULARIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

LIFE-CENTERED GRIEVING

CONCLUSION: THE MORAL GROUND FOR GRIEVING

CHAPTER 16 Poverty

THREATS, OBLIGATIONS, AND AUTONOMY

VARIETIES OF AFRICAN POVERTY

THE MAKING OF A POOR COUNTRY

TARGETED AID

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MORALITY

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 17 Inequality

DIFFERENCE AND INCOMMENSURABILITY

PRECEDENCE AND HIERARCHY

INCOMMENSURABILITY AND EXCLUSION

FAIRNESS RHETORIC AS AN ENGINE OF INEQUALITY

FAIRNESS AND RECOGNITION OF INEQUALITY

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 18 Sexuality

MODELS OF NATURE, CULTURE, AND SELF IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF SEXUALITY

THE MODERNITY OF THE SEXUAL SUBJECT

MORAL INVESTMENTS IN SEX

MAKING SOCIAL ORDERS: EMPIRES, NATIONS, AND MODERNS

SUBJECTIFICATION AND RECOGNITION

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART IV Worlds

CHAPTER 19 Religion and Morality

RELIGION AND MORALITY ARE NOT ISOMORPHIC OR COMMENSURABLE

THE DURKHEIMIAN STREAM: OBLIGATION, COMMITMENT, AND RITUAL PERFORMANCE

THE WEBERIAN STREAM: PRACTICE AND RELIGIOUS VALUES

A BRIEF ETHNOGRAPHIC INVITATION

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 20 Charity

RECIPROCITY, SHARING, AND GIVING

A SCHOLARLY HIATUS

ISLAMIC CHARITY

CHARITY THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

CONSTRUCTS FOR CROSS-CULTURAL ANALYSIS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 21 Medicine

SICK ROLE UNMADE

“THE DIAGNOSIS WE WRITE IS MONEY”

“WE DON’T SEE PATIENTS, WE SEE DATA”

FROM PATIENTS TO SUBJECTS

ENTRAR NO JUSTICE: PATIENT-LITIGANTS

THE NEW NATURE OF MEDICAL DEVIANCE

SICK ROLE REJOINDERS

A RIGHT TO RECOVERY

CHAPTER 22 Science

TWENTIETH-CENTURY TOOLS OF ANALYSIS

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CRUCIBLES, THIRD SPACES, AND ETHICAL PLATEAUS

CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER 23 Finance

CONTEMPORARY REPRESENTATIONS OF FINANCIAL MORALITY

WALL STREET MORALITIES: A DECADE RETROSPECTIVE

ACADEMIC INTERVENTIONS

CHAPTER 24 Law

“PICTURES OF NOTHING”

LAW IN/AS THE SOCIAL, I: THE LEGAL AS MORAL IRONY

LAW IN/AS THE SOCIAL, II: LEGAL STATUS AS MORAL BOND

LAW AS TECHNE

CONCLUSIONS

PART V Politics

CHAPTER 25 Humanitarianism

“NOT A RELIEF ORGANIZATION”

HUMANITARIANISM BEYOND EMERGENCY

THE DOUBLE EDGE OF INTERVENTION

CONCLUSION: THE SECULAR DISCOMFORT OF ANTIPOLITICS

CHAPTER 26 Human Rights

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD ORDER

LEGACIES OF MORAL MISUNDERSTANDING

HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE POETIC SELF

HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE THREE TRAGEDIES

CONTINGENCY AND NEOLIBERAL SELF-MAKING

CONCLUSION: HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE MORAL PRESENT

CHAPTER 27 War

ANTHROPOLOGY’S ENGAGEMENT WITH WAR’S DOMINANT MORAL MODELS

THE EMERGENT MORAL MARGINS OF WAR AND THE LEGITIMATED CENTER

THE DEMORALIZATION AND MANAGEMENT OF WAR

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 28 Violence

ANTHROPOLOGY, MORALITY, AND VIOLENCE AFTER WORLD WAR II

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

RECENT DIRECTIONS

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF VIOLENCE AND MORALITY

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 29 Punishment

CIVILIZING PUNISHMENT

THE PUNITIVE TURN

FRAMINGS

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 30 Borders

A DILEMMA AT THE HEART OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY: MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHERS ON INTERNATIONAL BORDERS

BORDERS, THE US–MEXICO BORDER, AND THE BORDER

BORDERS AND INTERIORS

FROM DISTANCE TO PROXIMITY: ACTIVISTS AT THE LAND BORDER

FROM DISTANCE TO PROXIMITY: MIGRANTS AND ENFORCERS

BORDERLANDERS

CONCLUSION

PART VI Dialogues

CHAPTER 31 Moral Philosophy

CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

A PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND

MORAL RELATIVISM: THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

ENVOI

CHAPTER 32 Moral Psychology

DO DIFFERENT KINDS OF MORAL ACTS DEFINE DIFFERENT MORAL DOMAINS?

DO DIFFERENT MORAL RELATIONSHIPS DEFINE DIFFERENT MORAL DOMAINS?

A COMPROMISE: CONTENT AND RELATIONSHIP MATTER

BEYOND HARM AND PURITY

EVIDENCE FROM EMOTIONS

EVIDENCE FROM BEHAVIORAL TENSIONS

EVIDENCE FROM COGNITIVE PROCESSES

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 33 Neuroethics

THE ETHICS OF NEUROSCIENCE

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF ETHICS

PHILOSOPHICAL PUZZLES

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 34 Evolutionary and Cognitive Anthropology

ISSUES IN INTERPRETING ANTHROPOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

FAIRNESS: EVOLUTIONARY, COGNITIVE AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECTS

HOW FAR CAN THE MUTUALISTIC FRAMEWORK BE EXTENDED?

CONCLUSION

Index of Names

Subject Index

The Blackwell Companions to Anthropology offers a series of comprehensive syntheses of the traditional subdisciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry for the field. Taken together, the series represents both a contemporary survey of anthropology and a cutting edge guide to the emerging research and intellectual trends in the field as a whole.

1. A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti

2. A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, edited by David Nugent and Joan Vincent

3. A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, edited by Thomas Biolsi

4. A Companion to Psychological Anthropology, edited by Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton

5. A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, edited by Jennifer Robertson

6. A Companion to Latin American Anthropology, edited by Deborah Poole

7. A Companion to Biological Anthropology, edited by Clark Larsen (hardback only)

8. A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by Isabelle Clark-Decès

9. A Companion to Medical Anthropology, edited by Merrill Singer and Pamela I. Erickson

10. A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology, edited by David B, Kronenfeld, Giovanni Bennardo, Victor de Munck, and Michael D. Fischer

11. A Companion to Cultural Resource Management, edited by Thomas King

12. A Companion to the Anthropology of Education, edited by Bradley A.U. Levinson and Mica Pollack

13. A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by Frances E. Mascia-Lees

14. A Companion to Paleopathology, edited by Anne L. Grauer

15. A Companion to Folklore, edited by Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem

16. A Companion to Forensic Anthropology, edited by Dennis Dirkmaat

17. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, edited by Ullrich Kockel, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Jonas Frykman

18. A Companion to Rock Art, edited by Jo McDonald and Peter Veth

19. A Companion to Border Studies, edited by Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan

20. A Companion to Moral Anthropology, edited by Didier Fassin

Forthcoming

A Companion to Gender Prehistory, edited by Diane Bolger

A Companion to Paleoanthropology, edited by David Begun

A Companion to Chinese Archaeology, edited by Anne Underhill

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to moral anthropology/edited by Didier Fassin.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-65645-7 (hardback)1. Anthropology–Moral and ethical aspects–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Fassin, Didier, editor ofcompilation. GN27.C647 2012306–dc23

2012015861

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Notes on Contributors

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He grew up in Ghana and was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he took undergraduate and doctoral degrees in philosophy. He has written widely in philosophy of mind and language, ethics and political philosophy, and the philosophy of art, of culture, and of the social sciences; as well as in literary studies, where his focus has been on African and African American literature. His current research focuses on questions about the connection between theory and practice in moral life. He is the editor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of the five-volumeAfricana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (Oxford University Press, 2005). His recent publications includeThe Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005);Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton, 2006), which has been translated into more than a dozen languages;Che cos’è l’Occidente? (Fondazione San Carlo di Modena, 2008);Experiments in Ethics (Harvard University Press, 2009); andThe Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (Norton, 2010).Nicolas Baumard is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. After an education in natural sciences (biology and cognitive sciences) and in human sciences (social sciences and philosophy), he completed his PhD at the Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris before joining the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology in Oxford. Inspired by contractualist theories, his work is based on the idea that morality aims at sharing the costs and benefits of social interactions in a mutually advantageous way. This theory has led to a book, Comment nous sommes devenus moraux: une histoire naturelle du bien et du mal (Odile Jacob, 2010) and a series of articles in evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, and cognitive anthropology.Jonathan Benthall is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and an Associate Fellow with the Humanitarian and Conflict Research Institute, University of Manchester. He was formerly Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Founder Editor ofAnthropology Today, as well as Chair of the International NGO Training and Research Centre, Oxford. In 1993 he received the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology in Media Award. Since 2005 he has advised on projects sponsored by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs relating to Islamic charities. His publications includeDisasters, Relief and the Media (I. B. Tauris, 1993; new edn. 2010),The Best of “Anthropology Today” (as editor; Routledge, 2002),The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the Muslim World (with Jérôme Bellion-Jourdan; I. B. Tauris, 2003; new paperback edn. 2008), andReturning to Religion: Why a Secular Age is Haunted by Faith (I. B. Tauris, 2008). He reviews regularly for theTimes Literary Supplement.João Biehl is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Associate at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is also the co-director of Princeton’s Program in Global Heath and Health Policy. He is the author of the award-winning books Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (University of California Press, 2005) and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton University Press, 2007). He is also the coeditor of the book Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (University of California Press, 2007). He is currently writing the history of a religious war – the Mucker war – that took place among German immigrants in nineteenth-century Brazil. He is also coediting When People Come First, a book on evidence, theory, and advocacy in global health. His current research explores the social impact of large-scale treatment programs in resource-poor settings and the role of the judiciary in administering public health.Veena Das is Krieger–Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author and editor of several books, including Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (University of California Press, 2007) and Anthropology and Sociology of Economic Life: The Moral Embedding of Economic Action (with Ranendra Das; Oxford University Press, 2010). Her forthcoming books include Speaking of Violence: Essays on Language, Gender, and Narrative and Estranged Intimacies: To Be a Muslim in Contemporary India. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Academy of Scientists from Developing Countries. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000.James Dungan is a graduate student, pursuing a PhD in social psychology at Boston College under the direction of Liane Young. He received his BS in brain and cognitive sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. His current research attempts to characterize distinct moral domains by investigating their cognitive and neural basis. To this end, he uses common social psychology methods to explore the behavioral and emotional signatures of different moral violations, as well as the tools of cognitive neuroscience, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to explore their neural underpinnings.Marc Edelman is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has also taught or been a visiting researcher at Yale, Fordham, Princeton, Columbia, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the universities of Illinois, Tashkent and Costa Rica. He has a longstanding concern with understanding changing forms of capitalism and with the politics of controlling markets, whether through welfare states, civil society pressure, or global trade rules. His current research is on the campaign of transnational agrarian movements to have the United Nations approve a declaration, and eventually a convention, on the rights of peasants. He is the author ofThe Logic of the Latifundio (Stanford, 1992) andPeasants against Globalization (Stanford, 1999); coauthor ofSocial Democracy in the Global Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and coeditor ofThe Anthropology of Development and Globalization (Blackwell, 2005) andTransnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).Harri Englund is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is also Research Associate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and Docent of African Studies at the University of Helsinki. He has carried out research among Chichewa/Nyanja speakers in south-central Africa for over two decades. He has written and edited several books on rights discourses, Christianity, war and displacement, mass media, and democratization. His current research explores arguments about freedom and belonging in Africa’s vernacular media in both colonial and contemporary contexts. His book Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (University of California Press, 2006) was awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute. His most recent books are Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio (Indiana University Press, 2011) and the edited volume Christianity and Public Culture in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2011).Didier Fassin is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He was the Founding Director of IRIS (Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Social Sciences). His domain of interest is political and moral anthropology. Laureate of the Advanced Grant “Ideas” of the European Research Council, he is currently conducting an ethnography of the state, exploring how ­institutions such as police, justice, and prison treat immigrants and minorities in France. His recent publications include, as editor, De la question sociale à la question raciale? (with Eric Fassin; La Découverte, 2006), Les politiques de l’enquête (with Alban Bensa; La Découverte, 2008), and Contemporary States of Emergency (with Mariella Pandolfi; Zone, 2010); and, as author, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (University of California Press, 2007), The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman; Princeton University Press, 2009), Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (University of California Press, 2011) and La force de l’ordre: une anthropologie de la police des quartiers (Seuil, 2011).James D. Faubion is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. His work addresses reformism and radicalism, religion and politics, the temporal imagination, kinship, classical and contemporary social thought, and the sociocultural dynamics of the variations and the limits of the formation, the maintenance, and the transformations of the ethical subject. He is the author ofModern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism (Princeton University Press, 1993),The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today (Princeton University Press, 2001), andAn Anthropology of Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is the editor ofRethinking the Subject: An Anthology of Contemporary European Social Thought (Westview, 1995),The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), two of the three volumes ofEssential Works of Michel Foucault (New Press, 1999, 2001), and the forthcomingCritical Thinkers Now: Michel Foucault; and coeditor ofFieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition (Cornell University Press, 2009).Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at MIT. A past director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Rice University, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, his domains of interest are anthropological methods for the contemporary world with special attention to the interfaces with ­science and technology; the anthropology of the biosciences and biotechnologies; and the anthropology of media circuits with special attention to Iran and south Asia. He is currently conducting an ethnography of the Genome Institute of Singapore and the Human Genome Organization. His publications include Iran from Religious Dispute to Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1980), Anthropology as Cultural Critique (with George E. Marcus; University of Chicago Press, 1986), Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (with Mehdi Abedi; University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (Duke University Press, 2003), Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Duke University Press, 2004), Anthropological Futures (Duke University Press, 2009), and A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities (coedited; Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He edits (with Joe Dumit) the Duke University Press series “Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices.”Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, PhD, is a Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African Studies at Rhode Island College. She has spent six years since 1970 living and ­conducting research in three different African countries, including the Sudan, Egypt, and Tunisia, and has traveled extensively, including two trips around the world teaching anthropology with the University of Pittsburgh Semester at Sea program. Her research subjects have covered such topics as Islamic law and Islamic society, women’s social and legal status in Muslim societies, ethics and anthropological research, human rights and cultural relativism, and comparative studies in law and society. She is the author or editor of 11 books, including the following works on anthropology and ethics: Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology (AltaMira, 1990, 2003) and a forthcoming textbook Anthropology and Ethics: Ideas and Practice; and works on the Sudan: Shari’a and Islamism in Sudan: Conflict, Law and Social Transformation (I. B. Tauris, 2011), Islamic Law and Society in the Sudan (Routledge, 1987; Arabic translation 2004), Historical Dictionary of the Sudan (coauthored, Scarecrow, 1992, 2002), and Race and Identity in the Nile Valley (Red Sea, 2004). She has authored three textbooks:Race, and Racism: An Introduction (AltaMira, 2005), Female Well-Being (Zed, 2005), and Islamic Society in Practice (University Press of Florida, 1994, 2004).Mark Goodale is an anthropologist, sociolegal scholar, and social theorist. He is currently Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He was formerly the first Marjorie Shostak Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology at Emory University. He is currently working on an ethnographic study of revolution, folk ­cosmopolitanism, and neo-Burkeanism in Bolivia based on several years of research funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He is the author or editor of six books, includingMirrors of Justice (with K. Clarke; Cambridge University Press, 2010),Surrendering to Utopia (Stanford University Press, 2009),Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009),Dilemmas of Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2008), andThe Practice of Human Rights (with S. E. Merry; Cambridge University Press, 2007). Forthcoming books includeHuman Rights at the Crossroads (edited; Oxford University Press) andThe Bolivia Reader (with Sinclair Thomson et al.; Duke University Press). His writings have appeared inCurrent Anthropology,American Anthropologist,American Ethnologist,Law & Society Review,Law & Social Inquiry,Social & Legal Studies,Anthropologie et Sociétés, andEthnohistory, among others.Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair at Princeton University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in the ethnography of law. She is president elect of the American Ethnological Society and past president of the Law and Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology; she is also past editor of the journal American Ethnologist. She has taught at Indiana University Bloomington and Cornell University, and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) as Visiting Chair in American Civilization. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, and has been awarded the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize for distinguished research contributions to sociolegal studies. Her main publications include The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures, Law and Community in Three American Towns (with David Engel and Barbara Yngvesson; Cornell University Press, 1996), and Praying for Justice (Cornell University Press, 1989), as well as edited volumes Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Ethnography in Unstable Places (with Elizabeth Mertz and Kay Warren; Duke University Press, 2002), and Democracy and Ethnography: Constructing Identities in Multicultural Liberal States (SUNY Press, 1998).Josiah M. Heyman is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. Among his publications are States and Illegal Practices (Berg, 1999), Finding a Moral Heart for U.S. Immigration Policy: An Anthropological Perspective (American Anthropological Association, 1998), and Life and Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico 1886–1986 (University of Arizona Press, 1991), as well as over 60 scholarly articles and book chapters. His research interests include migration and border control; states, bureaucracies, and power; and engaged social science.Alexander Hinton is Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution, and Human Rights and Professor of Anthropology and Global Affairs at Rutgers University, Newark. He is the author of the award-winning Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (University of California Press, 2005) and six edited or coedited collections, Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence (Rutgers University Press, 2010), Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation (Duke University Press, 2009), Night of the Khmer Rouge: Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia (Paul Robeson Gallery, 2007), Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (University of California Press, 2002), Genocide: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell, 2002), and Biocultural Approaches to the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999). He is currently working on several other book projects, including an edited volume, Mass Violence: Memory, Symptom, and Response, and a book on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. In ­recognition of his work on genocide, the American Anthropological Association selected Hinton as the recipient of the 2009 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology. He was recently listed as one of Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide (Routledge, 2011). He is also currently President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (2011–13) and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton (2011–12).Karen Ho is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research centers on the problematic of understanding and representing financial markets, sites that are resistant to cultural analysis and disavow various attempts to locate or particularize them. Her domain of interest is the anthropology of economy, broadly conceived, with specific foci on finance capital, capitalism, ­globalization, corporations, inequality, dominant discourses, comparative studies of race and ethnicity, and feminist epistemologies. Her ethnography, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009), based on three years of fieldwork among investment bankers and major financial institutions, has won two honorable mentions from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Recent publications include “Disciplining Investment Bankers, Disciplining the Economy” (American Anthropology, 2009), “Finance” (Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 2010), and “Outsmarting Risk: From Bonuses to Bailouts” (Anthropology Now, 2010). Her latest book project attempts to excavate an alternative cultural history of financial risk.Caroline Humphrey has worked in the USSR/Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal, and India. Her research interests include the anthropology of socialist and postsocialist economies; religion, ritual, and morality; and the contemporary transformations of cities. She is currently Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Recently she completed a book on the maintenance of tradition in a Buddhist monastery in Inner Mongolia (China) and an edited volume on migration and urban life in the Black Sea region. Currently she is carrying out research on the north Asian border between Russia and China. Major publications include: Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge University Press, 1983), The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (with James Laidlaw; Clarendon, 1994), Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Daur Mongols (with Urgunge Onon; Clarendon, 1996), The End of Nomadism? Society, the State and the Environment in Inner Asia (with David Sneath; Duke University Press/White Horse, 1999), The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2002), Urban Life in Post-Soviet Central Asia (coedited with Catherine Alexander and Victor Buchli; UCL Press, 2007).Isabelle Kalinowski is a CNRS Researcher at the Laboratoire Pays Germaniques, École Normale Supérieure, Paris. Her major field of interest is Max Weber’s sociology and anthropology, especially his texts on religion, which she has commented on and translated into French: L’Ethique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme (Champs Flammarion, 2000); Hindouisme et bouddhisme (Champs Flammarion, 2003); Sociologie de la religion (Champs Flammarion, 2006); Le Judaïsme antique (Champs Flammarion, 2010). She has published many articles on Weber in French and German, and a book, Leçons wébériennes sur la science et la propagande (Agone, 2005). She is currently working on a second book on Weber’s theory of charisma (Le charisme: autour de Max Weber). In relation to that religious topic, she also studies the theories on the agency of sacred and primitive arts elaborated by early twentieth-century anthropologists and art specialists, in particular Franz Boas and Carl Einstein (she coedited, with Maria Stavrinaki, a special issue of Gradhiva on “Carl Einstein et les primitivismes,” November 2011).Bruno Karsenti is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris, and Director of the Marcel Mauss Institute. He has taught political philosophy and the epistemology of the social sciences at the Universities of Lyon and Paris-Sorbonne. His latest publications are L’homme total: sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), Politique de l’esprit: Auguste Comte et la naissance de la science sociale (Hermann, 2006), and La société en personnes:Études durkheimiennes (Économica, 2006). He is editor of two book series “Pratiques théoriques” (Presses Universitaires de France) and “Raisons pratiques” (Editions de l’EHESS).Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Ethical Life at the University of Toronto and has also taught at the London School of Economics. He explores questions of action, person, historicity, and religion, especially with respect to the western Indian Ocean (Mayotte, northwest Madagascar) and Switzerland. Single-authored books are Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession (University of Toronto Press, 1993), and The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Edited books include Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (with Paul Antze; Routledge, 1996), Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia (with Andrew Strathern; Cambridge University Press, 1998), A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (Blackwell, 2002; 2nd edn. 2008), Illness and Irony: On the Ambiguity of Suffering in Culture (with Paul Antze; Berghahn, 2003), and Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action (Fordham University Press, 2010).Roger Lancaster is Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at George Mason University, where he directs the Cultural Studies PhD Program. His research tries to understand how sexual mores, racial hierarchies, and class predicaments interact with political economy in a volatile world. He is currently conducting research on gay life in Mexico under neoliberal globalization. His most recent book isSex Panic and the Punitive State (University of California Press, 2011), which won the Ruth Benedict Prize. Other books includeThe Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2003),The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy (coedited with Micaela di Leonardo; Routledge, 1997), andLife is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power (University of California Press, 1992), which won the C. Wright Mills Award and the Ruth Benedict Prize.Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Brown University. She is the author of Carjacked (with A. Fernandez-Carol; Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Breaking Ranks (with M. Gutmann; University of California Press, 2010), The Bases of Empire (as editor; New York University Press, 2009), Local Democracy Under Siege (with D. Holland et al.; New York University Press, 2007), Homefront (Beacon, 2001), Reading National Geographic (with J. Collins; University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Unnatural Emotions (University of Chicago Press, 1988). She is the recipient of the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America and former President of the American Ethnological Society. Her books have received the Leeds Prize, the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, and the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Prize for the Critical Study of North America. She has ­conducted some of her research in conjunction with activist organizations, including a domestic violence shelter, the American Friends Service Committee, and Cultural Survival.Saba Mahmood teaches anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005), and coauthor of Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (University of California Press, 2009). She is the recipient of the Carnegie Corporation’s Islamic Scholar’s award (2007–8), and the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2009–10). She is ­currently working on a book project entitled Politics of Religious Freedom: Geopolitics, Sexuality, and the Minority Question which focuses on the Middle East and Europe. In 2010 she received a three-year grant from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs for a comparative study of the right to religious liberty in a global perspective. Her broader work centers on issues of secularism, religion, ethics and politics, and gender in postcolonial Muslim societies.Kathleen Millar is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Duke University’s Thompson Writing Program where she teaches a seminar called “Writing Poverty: Ethnography and the Politics of Representation.” Her interests include moral anthropology, urban poverty and social inequality, environmental suffering, and the politics of labor within ­neoliberal capitalism. She is currently writing an ethnography that explores the subjectivities and political practices of over 2,000 laboring poor who collect recyclables on the largest garbage dump in Latin America, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Her research has appeared inThe Anthropology of Work Review and in several edited volumes includingCooperation in Economy and Society (ed. Robert C. Marshall; AltaMira, 2010) andRecycling Economies (ed. Catherine Alexander and Joshua Reno; Zed, forthcoming).Adriana Petryna is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. In her anthropological work, she has probed the cultural and political dimensions of science and medicine in eastern Europe and in the United States (with a focus on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and on clinical research and pharmaceutical globalization). Her research has focused on public and private scientific knowledge production and on the role of science and technology in public policy (particularly in contexts of crisis, inequality, and political transition). She is ­currently carrying out an ethnography of the legal and economic aspects of patienthood and recovery in transnational medicine. She is the author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2002), and the ­coauthor of Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices (Duke University Press, 2006). Her recent book When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton University Press, 2009) explores patient ­protections in globalizing clinical research. She is coeditor (with João Biehl) of the forthcoming edited volume, Evidence, Actuality, and Theory in Global Health.Stacy Leigh Pigg is Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University and former editor of the journal Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies of Health and Illness. Her research in Nepal has generated writings on the cultural politics of international development and on the production of public knowledge about AIDS. She is currently looking at the internationalization of contraceptive technologies. With Vincanne Adams, she edited the book Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective (Duke University Press, 2005).Peter Redfield is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Trained as a cultural anthropologist sympathetic to history, he concentrates on circulations of science and technology in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and currently focuses on humanitarian inspired design. The author of Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (University of California Press, 2000) and Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders (University of California Press, forthcoming), he is also the coeditor, with Erica Bornstein, of Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (SAR Press, 2011).Massimo Reichlin is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan, Italy. His interests are in the history of moral philosophy and in contemporary ethical theory, with particular reference to bioethics. He is the author of several books on issues such as euthanasia and assisted suicide, the ethics of abortion, the ethics of artificial reproduction and embryo experimentation, and the main theoretical approaches in practical ethics. He has just completed a book on the history of utilitarianism and is presently writing another on moral issues in contemporary neuroscience. His most recently published books in Italian are Etica della vita: nuovi paradigmi morali (Bruno Mondadori, 2008) and Aborto: la morale oltre il diritto (Carocci, 2007). His recent articles in English include “The Role of Solidarity in Social Responsibility for Health” (Medicine, Philosophy and Health Care, 2011), “Life Extension and Personal Identity” (with G. Barazzetti, in Enhancing Human Capacities (ed. J. Savulescu et al.; Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), “Ordinary Moral Knowledge and Philosophical Ethics in Sidgwick and Kant” (Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics, 2008), and “The Challenges of Neuroethics” (Functional Neurology, 2007).Joel Robbins is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. Much of his work has focused on issues of morality, the anthropology of Christianity, and other topics in the anthropology of religion. He is the author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (University of California Press, 2004). He has recently coedited a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly entitled “Global Christianity, Global Critique.” He is also coeditor of the journal Anthropological Theory.Richard A. Shweder is a cultural anthropologist and the William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He is author of Thinking through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology (Harvard University Press, 1991) and Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology (Harvard University Press, 2003). He is editor or coeditor of many books in the areas of cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, and comparative ethics. His recent research examines the scopes and limits of pluralism and the multicultural challenge in Western liberal democracies. He examines the norm conflicts that arise when people migrate from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to countries in the “North.” He has coedited two books on this topic (with Martha Minow and Hazel Markus) entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (Russell Sage Foundation, 2004) and Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference (Russell Sage Foundation, 2008).Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. He is Emeritus Researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy of the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of numerous articles in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, and of three books: Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge University Press, 1975), On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Explaining Culture (Blackwell, 1996). In these books he has developed a naturalistic approach to culture under the name of “epidemiology of representations.” With Deirdre Wilson, he has developed a cognitive approach to communication known as “relevance theory” and coauthored Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Blackwell, 1986) and Meaning and Relevance (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Both the ­epidemiology of representations and relevance theory have been influential and also controversial. Dan Sperber has edited Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2000) and coedited two books: Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (with David Premack and Ann James Premack; Oxford University Press, 1995), and Experimental Pragmatics (with Ira Noveck; Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).Karen M. Sykes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research career began in 1991 with an extended period of fieldwork investigating the lives of secondary school leavers in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, where she has lived for nearly four years since that first trip. Between 1999 and 2001, she carried out research into the character of intellectual property in New Ireland as the Senior Research Associate on an ESRC-funded project, “Property Transactions Creations: New Economic Relations in Melanesia,” which was directed by Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge) and Eric Hirsch (Brunel). At present she is directing a project funded by the ESRC between 2011 and 2015, entitled “The Domestic Moral Economy: An Ethnographic Study of Value in the Asia Pacific,” which involves scholars working at the Australian National University, Queens University Belfast, and the University of Manchester. She is the author of Arguing with Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift (Routledge, 2005), and Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), as well as the editor of “Interrogating Individuals: The Theory of Possessive Individualism in the Western Pacific,” a special issue of Anthropological Forum (2007).John Symons is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. His recent publications include The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (Routledge, 2009), Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science (Springer, 2010), and The Unity of Science and the Special Sciences (Springer, 2011). He is currently studying computational models and the problem of emergence in ­science and metaphysics.C. Jason Throop is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork on pain, empathy, suffering, and morality on the island of Yap in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia. He is the author of Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (University of California Press, 2010) and coeditor of Toward an Anthropology of the Will (with Keith M. Murphy; Stanford University Press, 2010) and The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies (with Douglas Hollan; Berghahn, 2011).Thomas Widlok is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and Research Fellow at the University of Cologne in Germany. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has taught anthropology at London, Cologne, Heidelberg, Durham, and Zurich. His fields of interest are hunter-gatherer studies (with long-term field research in southern Africa and Australia), cognition and language, religion, and economics. He has published on a wide range of anthropological topics including property relations (Property and Equality, with W. Tadesse; New York University Press, 2005), morality and virtue theory (“Sharing by Default? Outline of an Anthropology of Virtue,” Anthropological Theory, 2004). His recent publications include work on religion and on economic anthropology.Liane Young is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston College, where she is Director of the Morality Lab. She received her BA in philosophy from Harvard University in 2004, her PhD in psychology from Harvard University in 2008, and her postdoctoral training in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Her research focuses on the cognitive and neural basis of human moral judgment and behavior. Her current research focuses on the role of theory of mind and ­emotions in moral cognition. To explore these topics, she uses the methods of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and examination of patient populations with specific cognitive deficits.Everett Yuehong Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He was born in China, and worked for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences before coming to the United States. His previous project on the body is being published under the title Impotence in China: An Illness of Chinese Modernity (forthcoming). His current project compares two major earthquakes in contemporary China – the Tangshan quake in 1976 in the era of Mao, and the Sichuan quake in 2008, three decades into reform – to tell the story of 30 years of change in the governance of life in China and the moral experience of destruction and reconstruction of material as well as psychic life. He is an editor (with Arthur Kleinman and Tu Weiming) of Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience: A Quest for an Adequate Life (Routledge, 2011).Jarrett Zigon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include morality, subjectivity, and institutional spaces of disciplinary practice. These interests are taken up from the perspective of an anthropology strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian phenomenology and critical theory. He has completed two research projects in Russia: one on the relationship between personal experience and moral conceptions, and a second on Russian Orthodox Church drug rehabilitation programs as spaces for moral training. His current research focuses on human rights as a transnational moral discourse. His articles can be found in Anthropological Theory, Ethnos, and Ethos, among other journals. His books include Morality: An Anthropological Perspective (Berg, 2008), Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Narratives of Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow (Brill, 2010), and HIV is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia (University of California Press, 2011).

Introduction: Toward a Critical Moral Anthropology

Didier Fassin

To deal usefully with the relationship between morality and the social sciences one must first realize that modern social science arose to a considerable extent in the process of emancipating itself from the traditional moral teachings.

Albert Hirschman, “Morality and the Social Sciences: A Durable Tension,” 1981

If the moral domain corresponds to what people treat as the ultimate terms of their existence, of their lives together, of their fates, then moral concerns are concerns with the integrity of cultural life, with the nature, significance, potential, and viability of the life that culture makes possible and makes necessary.

Steven Parish, Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City, 1994

The attempt to coin the expression “moral anthropology” seems immediately and irremediably doomed from the start by its Kantian paternity. Indeed, it is often considered that the author of the Metaphysics of Morals invented this phrase to define his project of “applied moral philosophy” as an empirical counterpoint to his theoretical metaphysica pura: “Moral anthropology, he writes, is morality applied to human beings” (Louden 2003: 7). Although Kant never formulated a comprehensive description of this part of his practical philosophy – “the second part of morals,” as he designates it – one can understand, through the lectures he gave, that it is definitely a normative enterprise which aims at contributing to the fulfillment of the moral laws he has characterized. In this sense, anthropology is a tool for the implementation of morals in relation to human beings. But it does not deal with individuals or cultures, as one would expect; rather, it concerns the “human species” as a whole and its ­accomplishment through moral progress. It is universalistic in essence.

Understood in this way, Kant’s anthropology has little to do with Boas’s relativist anthropology, and one can assume that very few of those who think of themselves as anthropologists would view their practice in the filiation of the master of Koenisgberg. Yet, dismissing the moral dimension of anthropology in its Kantian sense might be less facile, since from Mead’s Coming of Age to Lévi-Strauss’s Race et Histoire, to recent public anthropology, the discipline has constantly been involved in producing assessments and assertions which associate theoretical knowledge and empirical ­findings with concerns about judging conducts, reforming society, and improving the human condition – even when these normative postures were not explicitly formulated. The Kantian legacy is indeed more deeply enshrined in the discipline than most of its members would probably admit.

However, when proposing the expression “moral anthropology,” what I have in mind is a radically different project – if not an anti-Kantian, at least a non-Kantian one. It could rather be regarded as a Durkheimian or Weberian scientific program – despite how different these authors may seem in this respect. In the preface to the first edition of The Division of Labor in Society, Émile Durkheim, presenting his general intention to study “moral life according to the methods of the positive sciences,” pleads for a descriptive rather than the usual prescriptive approach: “We do not wish to deduce morality from science, but to constitute the science of morality, which is very different. Moral facts are phenomena like any others” (1984 [1893]: xxv). Indeed, the French sociologist, who died before completing his great book on La Morale, had a view about the “rules for action” and the “laws that explain them” which we may not share, but we can probably still adhere to his idea that morality is an object that can be regarded as any other. In his essay on Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, Max Weber (1949 [1904]: 52), describing the intellectual ambition of the new journal he was launching, establishes even more clearly the distinction between the normative approach in the social science, which he rejects, and the analytical approach of values and evaluations, which he claims. “It can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms and ideals from which directives for immediate practical activity can be derived,” he affirms, adding a clarification: “What is the implication of this proposition? It is certainly not that value-judgments are to be withdrawn from scientific discussion because in the last analysis they rest on certain ideals and are therefore ‘subjective’ in origin.” For the author of The Protestant Ethic, assessing the validity of values is merely “a matter of faith,” whereas making sense of judgments is fully an object of science. “Criticism is not to be suspended in the presence of value-judgments, insists Weber. The problem is rather: what is the meaning and purpose of the scientific criticism of ideals and value-judgments?” It is the project of this volume to deploy this distinction by studying morals through issues, themes, regions of the world, and periods of history from a critical perspective.

THE TROUBLE WITH MORALS

A moral anthropology, in this sense, does not support particular values or promote certain judgments more than political anthropology would favor a given partisan position or recommend a specific public policy. It does not defend the rights of peoples to define and implement their particular values or, conversely, the overarching authority of universal human rights. It neither condemns so-called genital mutilation and forced marriage nor denounces as imperialist the efforts deployed by feminists to combat them. It takes these moral tensions and debates as its objects of study and considers seriously the moral positions of all sides. A moral anthropology has no moralizing project. This preliminary statement may seem perfectly superfluous or, even worse, irremediably naive. After all, is it not the foundational principle of any social science to analyze rather than evaluate, to understand instead of judging? And at the same time, do we not know that perfect objectivity is illusory and that its claim is destined to be immediately refuted by a thorough epistemological analysis? Yet, it is worth reasserting and discussing this apparently obvious position, since the expression “moral anthropology” is problematic in two different ways.

The first problem is semantic. It concerns the meaning and connotation of the adjective “moral,” which is ineluctably and inextricably descriptive and prescriptive, in common sense as well as in scholarly use. It is as if the phrase “moral anthropology” implied not only an anthropology of the good but also a do-gooder’s anthropology, not only an endeavor to analyze moral issues but also a moral engagement in the world with the ultimate intention to make it better. This is certainly worth noticing: the adjective “moral” is in itself distinctively and overwhelmingly normative, an ambiguity which makes it unique. Medical or linguistic anthropologies do not pose similar ­difficulties of interpretation and everyone understands that the former deals with bodies, ailments, and medicines, and the latter concerns communication, codes, and ­languages – although neither of them is completely impervious to normative positions. By contrast, it is much more difficult to comprehend and accept that moral anthropology is simply the study of moral sentiments, judgments, and practices. Probably the legacy of moral philosophy, which is definitely normative in its endeavor to answer questions such as what a virtuous act is, what a good life should be, what one should do under certain circumstances, weighs heavily in this regard. By its genealogical – and indeed moral – proximity with philosophy, anthropology tends to be viewed, even by its ­members, as a discipline dedicated to ameliorating the human condition.

The second problem is historical. It is not simply that anthropology is regarded as morally committed: it is that anthropologists have often acted as moral agents. They have adopted moral views and defended moral causes. This is true from a theoretical perspective, as well as from a practical outlook. Going back to the origins of the ­discipline, contradictory as they are, evolutionism and culturalism share the same ­postulate that anthropology has a moral message to convey, respectively, about the hierarchy or, conversely, the incommensurability of values. Considering the relationships anthropologists had with colonization in the case of Europe or with imperialism in the case of the United States, as well as, symmetrically and more recently, their stance against the oppression of peoples or in favor of human rights, suggests that their axiological neutrality has often been an ideal or even an illusion rather than a faithful representation of their activity. Histories of the discipline often retain the scandals that have marked its development, such as involvement with the military or the intelligence, which is often represented as the “dark side” of anthropology, but they have been less attentive to its “bright side,” that of the denunciation of evil in the world and of the defense of the wretched and the dominated, which is no less revealing of their taking sides on moral grounds and no less problematic precisely because they generally remain unquestioned.

For these semantic as well as historical reasons, one would certainly be tempted to renounce the formulation “moral anthropology.” After all, would it not be preferable to speak of anthropology of moralities in the same way as one refers to the anthropology of religion or the anthropology of science? This is for that matter a designation ­proposed by most authors, such as John Barker (2007) or Monica Heinz (2009), echoing previous similar appellations by Signe Howell (1997), these various collections of papers having in common the consideration of moralities as local moral worlds (Zigon 2008) to use the expression coined by Arthur Kleinman (2006) with a somewhat distinct intention. I consider most disputes over appellations to be futile and would not want to involve myself in a quarrel on terminology: in the end, everyone would certainly agree that no formulation is entirely satisfactory and perhaps even that, far from being an obstacle, this dissatisfaction has the merit to leave interrogations and potentialities open. Still, I would like to defend in this introduction and to illustrate in this volume the payoff of speaking of moral anthropology rather than of the anthropology of moralities. The distinction I suggest here is not lexical – labels are not important – but theoretical: meanings are what count. There are two major ­reasons, in my view, to use the adjective rather than the noun. One has to do with the delimitation of the object, the other one with the reflexivity of the discipline.

First, what the word “morality” designates is too narrow for the object of our inquiry. There is no necessity to confine moral anthropology to local configurations of norms, values, and emotions: the domain under study and the issues that are raised go far beyond local moralities; they include but exceed them. And there is no need to limit its scope to moralities as discrete entities separated from the other spheres of human activities: moral questions are embedded in the substance of the social; it is not sufficient to analyze moral codes or ethical dilemmas as if they could be isolated from political, religious, economic, or social issues. Moral anthropology deals with how moral questions are posed and addressed or, symmetrically, how nonmoral questions are rephrased as moral. It explores the moral categories via which we apprehend the world and identifies the moral communities that we construe, examines the moral signification of action and the moral labor of agents, analyzes moral issues and moral debates at an individual or collective level. It concerns the creation of moral vocabularies, the circulation of moral values, the production of moral subjects and the regulation of society through moral injunctions. The object of a moral anthropology is the moral making of the world. This definition has a practical consequence, to which this book attests. Most authors convened in the present conversation around a moral anthropology would not qualify themselves as anthropologists of moralities or describe their domain of interest as anthropology of moralities. They would rather assert that they work on moral questions, which they might sometimes prefer to characterize as ethical, just as they do on political, religious, medical, scientific issues, and therefore would not restrict themselves to the particular realm of morality. Actually, I must ­confess this also happens to be my own relationship with moral objects. It is my ­conviction that this outsiders’ perspective, which is often a side view, shifting our usual vision of moral facts and questioning what we take for granted about them, is crucial for the development of a moral anthropology.