Ordinary ethics : anthropology, language, and action / edited by Michael Lambek.

Format
Book
Language
English
Εdition
1st edition
Published/​Created
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, 2010.
Description
xvii, 458 pages ; 23 cm.

Availability

Copies in the Library

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Firestone Library - Stacks GN33.6 .O74 2010 Browse related items Request
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      Details

      Subject(s)
      Summary note
      Annotation 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 ethicalpractice, 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.
      Bibliographic references
      Includes bibliographical references and index.
      Contents
      • Toward an ethics of the act / Michael Lambek
      • Mind, surfaces, and reasons in the anthropology of ethics / Webb Keane
      • From the ethical to the themitical (and back): groundwork for an anthropology of ethics / James D. Faubion
      • Ethics, language, and human sociality / Alan Rumsey
      • The ordinary ethics of everyday talk / Jack Sidnell
      • Agency and responsibility: perhaps you can have too much of a good thing / James Laidlaw
      • Abu Ghraib and the problem of evil / Steven C. Caton
      • The punishment of ethical behavior / Charles Stafford
      • Ordinary ethics and changing cosmologies: exemplification from north Australia / Francesca Merlan
      • Philosophical comments on Charles Stafford and Francesca Merlan / Judith Baker
      • Natural manners: etiquette, ethics, and sincerity in American conduct manuals / Shirley Yeung
      • "They did it like a song": ethics, aesthetics, and tradition in Hopi legal discourse / Justin B. Richland
      • People of no substance: imposture and the contingency of morality in the Colombian Amazon / Carlos David Londoño Sulkin
      • Ethics between public and private: sex workers' relationships in London / Sophie Day
      • On the pragmatics of empathy in the neurodiversity movement / Paul Antze
      • Being Sadharana: talking about the just business person in Sri Lanka / Nireka Weeratunge
      • Engaging others: religious conviction and irony in the holy lands / Donna Young
      • Between queer ethics and sexual morality / Naisargi N. Dave
      • Engaging in the life of the other: love and everyday life / Veena Das
      • The ghosts of War and the ethics of memory / Heonik Kwon.
      ISBN
      • 9780823233168 ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
      • 0823233162 ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
      • 9780823233175 ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))
      • 0823233170 ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))
      • 9780823233182 ((ebook))
      • 0823233189 ((ebook))
      LCCN
      2010033983
      OCLC
      630467973
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