Ordinary Ethics

What is the place of the ethical in human life? How do we render it visible? How might sustained attention to the ethical transform anthropological theory and enrich our understanding of thought, speech, and social action? This volume offers a significant attempt to address these questions. It is a common experience of most ethnographers that the people we encounter are trying ...

(展开全部)

What is the place of the ethical in human life? How do we render it visible? How might sustained attention to the ethical transform anthropological theory and enrich our understanding of thought, speech, and social action? This volume offers a significant attempt to address these questions. It is a common experience of most ethnographers that the people we encounter are trying to do what they consider right or good, are being evaluated according to criteria of what is right and good, or are in some debate about what constitutes the human good. Yet anthropological theory has tended to overlook all this in favor of analyses that emphasize structure, power, and interest.Bringing together ethnographic exposition with philosophical concepts and arguments and effectively transcending subdisciplinary boundaries between cultural and linguistic anthropology, the essays collected in this volume explore the ethical entailments of speech and action and demonstrate the centrality of ethical practice, judgment, reasoning, responsibility, cultivation, commitment, and questioning in social life. Rather than focus on codes of conduct or hot-button issues, they make the cumulative argument that ethics is profoundly ordinary,pervasive-and possibly even intrinsic to speech and action. In addition to deepening our understanding of ethics, the volume makes an incisive and necessary intervention in anthropological theory,recasting discussion in ways that force us to rethink such concepts as power, agency, and relativism.Individual chapters consider the place of ethics with respect to conversation and interaction; judgment and responsibility; formality, etiquette, performance, ritual, and law; character and empathy; social boundaries and exclusions; socialization and punishment; and commemoration, history, and living together in peace and war.Together they offer a comprehensive portrait of an approach that is now critical for advancing anthropological theory and ethnographic description, as well as fruitful conversation with philosophy.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Contributors xiii
Introduction Michael Lambek 1
Part 1 Theoretical Frameworks
Toward an Ethics of the Act Michael Lambek 39
· · · · · · (更多)

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Contributors xiii
Introduction Michael Lambek 1
Part 1 Theoretical Frameworks
Toward an Ethics of the Act Michael Lambek 39
Minds, Surfaces, and Reasons in the Anthropology of Ethics Webb Keane 64
From the Ethical to the Themitical (and Back): Groundwork for an Anthropology of Ethics James D. Faubion 84
Part 2 The Ethics of Speaking
Ethics, Language, and Human Sociality Alan Rumsey 105
The Ordinary Ethics of Everyday Talk Jack Sidnell 123
Part 3 Responsibility and Agency
Agency and Responsibility: Perhaps You Can Have Too Much of a Good Thing James Laidlaw 143
Abu Ghraib and the Problem of Evil Steven C. Caton 165
Part 4 Punishment and Personal Dignity
The Punishment of Ethical Behavior Charles Stafford 187
Ordinary Ethics and Changing Cosmologies: Exemplification from North Australia Francesca Merlan 207
Philosophical Comments on Charles Stafford and Francesca Merlan Judith Baker 225
Part 5 Ethics and Formality
Natural Manners: Etiquette, Ethics, and Sincerity in American Conduct Manuals Shirley Yeung 235
"They Did It like a Song": Ethics, Aesthetics, and Tradition in Hopi Legal Discourse Justin B. Richland 249
Part 6 Ethical Subjects: Character and Practice
People of No Substance: Imposture and the Contingency of Morality in the Colombian Amazon Carlos David Londoño Sulkin 273
Ethics Between Public and Private: Sex Workers' Relationships in London Sophie Day 292
On the Pragmatics of Empathy in the Neurodiversity Movement Paul Antze 310
Being Sadharana: Talking about the Just Business Person in Sri Lanka Nireka Weeratunge 328
Part 7 Ethical Life: Encounters with History, Religion, and the Political
Engaging Others: Religious Conviction and Irony in the Holy Lands Donna Young 351
Between Queer Ethics and Sexual Morality Naisargi N. Dave 368
Engaging the Life of the Other: Love and Everyday Life Veena Das 376
The Ghosts of War and the Ethics of Memory Heonik Kwon 400
Bibliography 415
Index 451
· · · · · · (收起)