Moral Anthropology

The volume "New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions," edited by Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman, undertakes a comparative analysis of "spiritual kinship" (such as God-parenthood) in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. My chapter, "Kinship as Ethical Relation," starts by questioning the usefulness of spiritual kinship as a category for the understanding of Judaism and expands that critique into an alternate model that might be more useful for comparative purposes. I argue that the idea of "Spiritual Kinship" emerges precisely from an a set of Christian taxonomies that are often implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish (kinship of the flesh vs. kinship of the spirit, the letter and the spirit of the law, etc.) which makes it unsuitable as an "Abrahamic" category. Moreover, the specific ways in which it is unsuitable for comparative purposes actually demonstrate the importance of this category for understanding of Christianity and of the anthropological kinship categories (affinal, consanguineal and fictive)  that were in large measure adapted from European Christian sources. Viewing kinship as a set of ethical relations, by contrast, does indeed allow for useful comparison across these religious divides and makes better sense of the ethnographic and textual data. Examples are brought from both modern and medieval Jewish life.

Se a antropologia está sempre discutindo a moral, poucos autores tentaram teorizar a “questão moral” em si mesma. Contudo, sua onipresença contemporânea demanda nossa re exão sobre esse impensado das ciências sociais. Problematizar as diversas dimensões da moral é o propósito desta antologia crítica, que reúne, traduz e apresenta textos que balizam um campo de pesquisa em pleno desenvolvimento: a antropologia moral.
A obra é composta por cinco partes, cada uma associada a uma discussão crítica. O conjunto restabelece a genealogia que leva a  loso a moral à constituição de uma ciência moral e social; reúne as principais tentativas antropológicas de pensar a moral, entre relativismo e universalismo; desenvolve os conceitos importantes de morais locais e de economias morais; analisa o encontro entre os antropólogos e a moral tal como eles a descobrem durante suas pesquisas; explicita, en m, a ética da antropologia e os paradoxos morais das codi cações éticas atuais.

In his philosophical research, Karol Wojtyla manifests his intention to rethink ethical issues in a way which is more adequate to the circumstances of contemporary man, without departing from traditional Christian doctrine. We believe that his intention leads, first of all, to a discovery of the profound unity between ethics and anthropology and to the need to have metaphysics as the solid foundation of anthropology. Finally, he tries to create an appropriate method to achieve this.

This essay argues that Adam Smith's political economy is premised upon a moral anthropology, and that greater attention to Smith from religious ethicists may both improve Smith scholarship and deepen dialogue on economic themes within the field of religious ethics. It does so first by surveying common readings of Smith and noting that engagement of his work within religious ethics and theology tends to rely on misconceptions prevalent in these readings. It then outlines the moral psychology that links Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations and explains the importance of this moral psychology for Smith's ambivalent analysis of commercial society. Reflecting on the case of Smith's work, it concludes by arguing that attention from religious ethicists may also improve contemporary political economic debates, given that they are often premised upon latent assumptions about moral anthropology.

The anthropological debate on morals and moralities, recently revived by the discussion on the notion of moral economy, oscillates between reluctance and dis- comfort. The relationship between anthropology and moral seems characterised by a paradox: moral issues are seen with suspicion by anthropologists, while these same issues are at the very core of their discipline and its methodological praxis of ethnography. This text retraces the elements of this heuristic paradox and its double source, epistemological and historical, observing how anthropologists dealt and are dealing with the empirical study of local and global moralities.

While cultural anthropology has a well-established tradition of studying armed conflict and postconflict societies, its consideration of morality in this context has hitherto been granted a tangential, rather than central role. Addressing this gap, the present thesis draws on qualitative data collected during four weeks of fieldwork carried out in the rural inland of Colombia’s Urabá region between June and July of 2018 to explore the ways in which morality is locally constructed in communities afflicted by a history of armed violence and rebel governance. Relying on the informal nature of networks and social relations identified by extant anthropological research, it develops an inductive analytical framework intended to examine the moral dimension of life in conflict-affected communities. More specifically, it explores how communities come to construct and share a moral framework passible of sustaining cooperative and interdependent relationships in light of the strain that protracted armed violence exertson social relationships and institutions. The obtained results highlight the existence of a binding sense of ‘moral intimacy’, which stems from the collective awareness of the contextual pressures that shape people’s moral judgments and often narrow the scope of personal agency. Individual morality and the constant challenges posed to it by life in conflict-afflicted areas are found to converge into a particularly adapted ‘extra-ordinary situational ethics of conflict’, characterized by ambiguity and mistrust, but also by tolerance and understanding for other people’s—and one’s own—moral shortcomings. Finally, the role of moral leaders is explored and differentiated with respect to its relation to the above-mentioned extra-ordinary situational ethics of conflict. The figure of ‘moral moderator’ is proposed in order to describe the articulating role of central figures that serve as reference points for the informal ethics that arise in surroundings characterized by pervasive and protracted violence. Overall, this thesis sheds light on the peculiar nature of morality in conflict-afflicted societies, and provides an empirical and theoretical contribution to its future systematic study.

This chapter examines the decline of Roman Catholic practice, belief and affiliation in Ireland, a country long considered Western Europe’s secularisation outlier. Existing literature demonstrates that changes in social expectations led to a collapse in devout, embodied religiosity in favour of laissez faire “cultural Catholicism.” At the same time, the Church retains significant institutional influence. A series of scandals has acted as a lightning rod for the tensions implicit in this situation, morally contaminating the Church and enabling discourse around the rectitude of Catholic affiliation. Together, these contribute to morally charged secularism focussed on severing the default link between Irish ethnic and religious identity to erode lingering Church influence. Against this background, Irish ex-Catholics do not simply leave the Church; many also depict themselves as repudiating “inauthentic” cultural Catholicism which irresponsibly supports the status quo.

Cultural anthropology shows a significant interest in the study of morality and ethics with its aim to understand the local contexts and human narratives. Actions and practices pertaining to the domain of morality create not only questions for cultural anthropologists to take into consideration but also immensely construct the social worlds in which the individual subjects for our anthropological inquiry are shaped. Considering how distinct cultural localities result in various ways in which morality is manifested and experienced, this article is concerned with current debates and critiques of moral anthropology as well as the essential function of cultural values within the anthropological study of morality.

In Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds). 2018.Moral Anthropology: A Critique (Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Vol. 16). Berghahn Books. 
In this essay we reassess some of the analytical potential of the concept of " empathy " and, in particular, the concept's ability to address the tension between a humanitarian ethos (seen as representative of normative, often conservative values) and grassroots political action, which is expressed as solidarity towards troubled others. We invite the reader to join us in a journey that unites ideas from seemingly disparate thinkers—philosophers, sociologists and, anthropologists—in an attempt to salvage empathy from the semantic nexus of pity, compassion, sympathy, and related sentiments that form the basis of humanitarian antipolitics (Ticktin 2011). We argue that empathy, despite its mistaken association with neoliberal-ism, can be used as a politically nuanced analytical notion that has the potential to subvert power and play a role as an affective, ethical technology of resistance. One of our main aims is to stress the value of " empathy " as a conceptual tool that can potentially evade typologies of humanitarian action conceived as either " moral code " or " moral agency " (see Fassin 2014). The empathetic point of view triggers an auto-didactic and

Paternalism is no longer the best moral attitude to convey good care. This moral consensus between the physicians and the social scientists is becoming, in medical education, a moto. The aim of this chapter is to describes how a local version of this moral economy of care organizes medical education in France to Humanizing physicians. The first section is an auto-ethnography of my first lecture during freshman year, medical students being often seen as a wild horde. The second section specifies medical education in France and the introduction of Human science into this curriculum in the 90'. The third section shows how Humanities joined Medical Humanism as a moral education based on the same complaint to humanize a discipline too close to the natural sciences, inhuman by nature. Beyond this moralism, instead to repeat the usual complaints, the fourth section highlight how psychiatrists, as a paradigmatic case, can become anthropologists because the gap between theory and practice is experienced as difficult to assume in order to judge what the good care is, a care that is also the subject of much polemic about semiology, since psychoanalysis has become less and less the reference model.

Keywords: Moral anthropology, Curriculum, Mindset, Clinical practice, Care, Psychiatry

Keywords: curriculum, clinical practice, mindset, moral criteria, psychopathology

Dr. Linda Zagzebski's virtue theory, Exemplarist Moral Theory, proposes that through the emotion of admiration we seek moral exemplars who we then emulate and become virtuous ourselves. It is those whom we have admiration for upon reflection that we consider to be exemplars. However, admiration is an emotion and thus is susceptible to cultural forces and other problems. My hypothesis is that if admiration is a tool that allows us to detect moral goodness, then there needs to be a natural orientation to the good that human beings naturally have. I use Thomas Aquinas moral anthropology and Philippa Foot's naturalized virtue ethics to give this claim a theoretical background. I then use this theoretical background to make arguments that will hopefully vindicate the emotion of admiration and also Zagzebski's moral theory. My research gives an overview of Zagzebski's theory, then brings up some problems with the faculty of admiration. Next, I outline Aquinas's and Foot's virtue ethics before finally applying their theories to the problems I brought up previously.

In this dissertation, I defend the Judgement View of conscience and claim that Kant’s theory of conscience is best understood as a theory about self-reflecting judgements. I respond to the following research question: What is the function of conscience in Kant’s ethical thought? And what is the relation between conscience’s judgements and moral? In order to defend the Judgement View, I argue in chapter 1, that Kant’s theory of conscience describes reason’s capacity of higher-order judgements evaluating our first-order moral judgements. While our moral judgements present an action as a case falling under the moral law, conscience’s judgement evaluates our process of moral deliberation. As such, conscience is a cognitive capacity, which can give rise to feelings, from which it is itself distinct. In chapter 2, I argue that Kant’s theory of conscience holds a central role in Kant’s ethics because of his idea of the dual command of the moral law. Conscience evaluates whether we have acted in conformity with and out of respect for the moral law. I then argue that the evaluation of conscience should be understood in relation to Kant’s enlightenment motto, in that we have a duty to think for ourselves. On this basis, I claim that conscience evaluates whether our moral deliberation has been an instance of what Kant calls independent thinking. In chapter 3, I expand on the notion of independent thinking and show that conscience compares our thinking with the ideal of the maxims of common human understanding. I then argue that conscience’s judgements are best understood as reflective judgements searching for the rule by which we formed our moral judgement, that is, the way of thinking that underlies our active moral deliberation. In chapter 4, I argue that Kant’s claim about an unerring conscience should be understood the dismissal of a higher principle of evaluation than reason, and the claim that the evidence which could prove conscience to be erring or unerring evades us.

Este artigo pretende elucidar como são articulados e experienciados os usos morais das práticas comerciais no camelódromo da cidade de Porto Alegre/RS. Através da recente configuração comercial do espaço popularmente conhecido como “camelódromo” – local em que foram realocados os camelôs que trabalhavam nas ruas – meu interesse foi o de perceber, através de pesquisa etnográfica, a economia moral enquanto agência criativa e produtora do próprio comércio popular em questão. Os dados que fundamentam este trabalho foram realizados entre os anos de 2009 a 2014 através do emprego de técnicas como a observação participante, a pesquisa documental e entrevistas estruturadas e semi-estruturadas. A moralidade no camelódromo porto-alegrense se mostrou, nesta pesquisa, não como categoria acessória, mas como categoria ativa constituinte do próprio comércio, construindo, desconstruindo e reconstruindo relações sociais, normatividades locais, práticas comerciais e identidades em tal espaço.

Palavras-chave: economia moral; agência; normatividades; camelôs; camelódromo.

Caregivers’ quotidian actions challenge prevailing views of care that rely on the emotional or attentive orientation of the caregiver. The routinized care tasks provided by two middle-aged women for their bedridden mother in northern Thailand reveal the realities of long-term caregiving. For these sisters, care transforms “merit” and “karma” without reliance on internal conviction. This context in turn reflects how people enact values and maintain social worlds through habituated physical practices of providing for others. Ordinary care in practice—termed “rituals of care”—dislodges fixation on particular personal sentiments and affirms the study of care as a powerful tool for assessing enduring modes of moral experience as well as subtle forms of social change.  American Ethnologist 43(1): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12265/full

It seems that nowadays everybody is talking about morality, using words and images relating to it. Didier Fassin and Samuel Lézé provide their readers with the opportunity to dwell on the topic of moral anthropology with their anthology ranging from works dating to previous centuries and up to very recent papers. In this reader, anthropological and philosophical engagements with morality are combined, in which philosophy is crucial
as a discipline that has long been reflecting on the topic and which has inspired many anthropological works. With their anthology, Fassin and Lézé attempt a critique of moral anthropology while simultaneously demonstrating how intensively morality emerges in the field of anthropology. Despite targeting a mainly scientific audience, the book is also relevant to a general audience interested in moral or ethical questions.

A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  This article explores anthropology, power, and political engagement first by examining Eric Wolf's approach to power. His concern with structural power challenges our understanding of power as involving imposition and unequal outcomes. It then moves on to consider how ethnographers identify power, from overt conflicts to subtle hegemonies. Although the various ethnographic strategies are insightful, the full extent of structural power does not and cannot emerge directly from empirical material. It requires, in addition, comparisons to other possible states of affairs arising from the theories and values of the social analyst. They function as the inverse of power, illustrating its presence and workings by contrasts. These `counterpart ideals' are ever-present in anthropology and other social sciences, yet we rarely talk about them openly or acknowledge their role in our analysis. One cannot identify a single true or foundational counterpart ideal, yet we can have an open dialogue about them, grounded in rigorous empirical and analytical knowledge. Hence, the article finishes by outlining various possible counterpart ideals for anthropologists and their uses in helping to identify power. The goal is to stimulate further dialogue on the social sciences, power, and political engagement.

Comment devient-on sujet de Dieu dans une société considérée comme l'une des plus sécularisées du monde ? Comment rendre compte en termes anthropologiques du pouvoir qu'exerce le dieu du christianisme sur ceux qui déclarent y croire ? Cet ouvrage étudie les milieux pentecôtistes en Suède, pays rarement exploré par l'anthro-pologie internationale, et offre un contrepoint heuristique pour l'an-thropologie du christianisme et les nombreux travaux menés dans les « pays du Sud ». En Suède, les pentecôtistes engagent une conversation avec d'autres forces que celles qui sont si prégnantes en Afrique et en Amérique latine. Les variables économiques, sociales et politiques y sont bien différentes et les agents de la surnature des systèmes de croyances coutumiers en sont absents. C'est le « séculier », en tant que régime de subjectivation et figure imaginaire de l'altérité pour le croyant, qui devient le point de référence dans la construction des subjectivités chrétiennes. Émir Mahieddin analyse ces techniques de subjectivation comme autant de manières de rendre Dieu présent au monde. Il montre comment ce dispositif de construction de soi et de transformation du monde, que les pentecôtistes appellent le « travail de Dieu », se renouvelle en permanence le long de la frontière instable et poreuse entre le religieux et le séculier.

Le scandale peut-il faire office de cadre d’analyse ? Tel est le point de départ du dernier livre de l’anthropologue Samuel Lézé sur le freudisme et ses contestations : l’indignation est toujours relative à une hiérarchie des valeurs, le scandale est un révélateur puissant des normes admises dans notre société.

Cette anthologie critique de la « question morale » est le résultat d’un programme scientifique du conseil européen dirigé par D. Fassin entre 2009 et 2013. Ce projet intitulé : Towards a critical moral anthropology fut réalisé par une équipe pluridisciplinaire qui ont entre autres selon D. Fassin : « […] Tenté de reconstituer les principaux lignages théoriques dans l’approche de la question morale, au sein de l’anthropologie bien sûr, mais également dans les disciplines connexes […] ».

Can a Christian organisation with colonial roots work towards reproductive justice for Kenyan women and resist sexist interpretations of Christianity? How does a women's organisation in Africa navigate controversial ethical dilemmas, at the same time as dealing with the pressures of imperialism in international development?

Based on a case study of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Kenya, this book is an interdisciplinary exploration of ethics, religion and gender offers answers to these questions. It also introduces a theoretical framework drawn from postcolonial feminist critique, narrative identity theory and African theology —‘everyday Christian ethics’—and explores its implications as a cross-disciplinary theme in feminist studies of religion and theology.

Based on a case study of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Kenya, this book is an interdisciplinary exploration of ethics, religion and gender offers answers to these questions. It also introduces a theoretical framework drawn from postcolonial feminist critique, narrative identity theory and African theology —‘everyday Christian ethics’—and explores its implications as a cross-disciplinary theme in feminist studies of religion and theology.

Today, will be addressing the question of whether or not Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French Jesuit paleoanthropologist and mystic, should be considered a transhumanist. This question is important, I think, for two reasons: first, as Catholics, if we consider transhumanism dangerous or not; second, Teilhard, as a prominent Catholic thinker addressing issues of science and technology, may provide a guiding lens for Catholics who wish to address new technologies in an informed way.

I. Theological Ethics of Technology (TEoT) has had a rocky start.
II. Transhumanism impresses the need for a good TEoT
III. TEoT has been abortive because ethicists often operate under deficient theological anthropologies.
IV. Teilhard outlines a theological anthropology which can be taken as a model for future thinking on this issue.

Kim Fortun's Advocacy After Bhopal uses a dramatic incident on which to build its ethnography around. The Bhopal disaster of 1984 had far-reaching reverberations, affecting the citizens of Bhopal, India, and the world; and across different contexts and institutions, such as corporate, governmental, civic, and social. Fortun, while researching for the ethnography, quickly realized that Bhopal cannot be regarded as a discrete event or a " separate unit of analysis. " It is a product of deep-rooted systems of neoliberalism, racist conceptions of whose lives are worth more, and corporate negligence. At the center of this book is a story of how advocacy developed following the disaster on behalf of the gas victims, who mainly sought to overturn the out-of-court settlement decision that Union Carbide and the Indian government reached. Fortun was actively involved in this advocacy, and as such, developed her own meanings of what advocacy means to her and how its meaning is changing. I will be examining her passage on her meaning of advocacy, and looking at other examples where this meaning can apply.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Beirut’s southern suburbs (Dahiye) and northern Lebanon (Akkar) between 2011 and 2013, this chapter advances a critical reflection on humanitarian lifeworlds in Lebanon and their encounters with war-stricken local citizens and refugees. Defining Southism as a structural relationship that cements the ‘global South’ as the key symbolic capital of Northern empowerment, accountability and capability, the chapter discusses the attitudes and thinking that have characterised the Lebanese humanitarian economy during the Israel–Lebanon July 2006 war and the Syrian refugee influx into Lebanon from 2011. While it defines ‘epistemic failure’ and ‘material discrimination’ as the actual encounters between humanitarian providers and their beneficiaries, this chapter proposes that ‘humanitarian tourism’, ‘politics of blame’, and the ‘betrayal of the international community’ represent the local and refugee imaginary encounters with global humanitarian lifeworlds. With the purpose of problematising ethnic and political geographies in provider–recipient power relations, it finally theorises a de-geographicised notion of Southism that can better capture the complex role of international and local humanitarian workers in crisis settings, as well as the ad hoc relevance of nationality within humanitarian economies.

Vulnerable narratives of fatherhood are few and far between; rarer still is an ethnography that delves into the practical and emotional realities of intensive caregiving. Grounded in the intimate everyday lives of men caring for children with major physical and intellectual disabilities, Worlds of Care undertakes an exploration of how men shape their identities in the context of caregiving. Anthropologist Aaron J. Jackson fuses ethnographic research and creative nonfiction to offer an evocative account of what is required for men to create habitable worlds and find some kind of “normal” when their circumstances are anything but. Combining stories from his fieldwork in North America with reflections on his own experience caring for his severely disabled son, Jackson argues that care has the potential to transform our understanding of who we are and how we relate to others.

There has been growing interest in the topic of meditation adversities amongst mindfulness communities in recent years. In this paper, I document some of those adversities for contemporary US meditators, raising some questions for the anthropology of ethics about how to think about practices of ethical self-cultivation when the traditions supporting them seem to fail.

What general lessons can we learn from moral anthropology’s approach to, or more specifically from all these anthropological readings of, the “moral question” as outlined in the introduction to this volume?
In order to answer this question and underline its current relevance, it is necessary, in our view, to distinguish three such lessons. Firstly, there is the lesson for social anthropology; what can it gain from studying morality in a more direct fashion today? Then there is the lesson for moral philosophy: can moral anthropology allow a new dialogue to be opened up, and if so, on what basis? And finally, there is a wider lesson to be drawn from this for everyone, because the moral question is now an issue that is aired and debated in the public sphere: how can the particular light shed on the issue by moral anthropology contribute to an understanding of the many moral stakes that arise today in contemporary societies?