Synopses & Reviews
Written over a thirty-year span, Michael Lambek’s essays in this collection point with definitive force toward a single central truth: ethics is intrinsic to social life. As he shows through rich ethnographic accounts and multiple theoretical traditions, our human condition is at heart an ethical one—we may not always be good or just, but we are always subject to their criteria. Detailing Lambek’s trajectory as one anthropologist thinking deeply throughout a career on the nature of ethical life, the essays accumulate into a vibrant demonstration of the relevance of ethics as a practice and its crucial importance to ethnography, social theory, and philosophy.
Organized chronologically, the essays begin among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar. Building from ethnographic accounts there, they synthesize Aristotelian notions of practical judgment and virtuous action with Wittgensteinian notions of the ordinariness of ethical life and the importance of language, everyday speech, and ritual in order to understand how ethics are lived. They illustrate the multiple ways in which ethics informs personhood, character, and practice; explore the centrality of judgment, action, and irony to ethical life; and consider the relation of virtue to value. The result is a fully fleshed-out picture of ethics as a deeply rooted aspect of the human experience.
Review
“Lambek has come to be identified with a distinctive position within the anthropology of ethics—one that recognizes the ethical as an immanent dimension of all human social life, that sees the human condition as necessarily and pervasively an ethical one. The argument for this position is richly developed across the essays in this collection and rooted in Lambek’s exemplary, detailed ethnography and fine readings of a distinctive range of thinkers. The result is beautifully written, scrupulous scholarship of the highest order that will be indispensible for this important and growing field of anthropology.”
Review
“Lambek is an outstanding anthropologist whose work has shaped the directions of anthropological thinking, especially in the fields of religion, ethics, and spirit possession—each field inflected creatively by the other. As one reads these essays, one begins to engage not only with the evolution of Lambek’s thought but with the pivotal controversies that mark the emergence of a vigorous debate on ethics, freedom, obligation, and the making of the moral person in anthropology. Throughout we are made aware not only of the theoretical sophistication and the fidelity to the ethnographic record in Lambek’s writing but also of the fact that these ideas on ethics are not just intellectual games for him—they are ways of living and working. This collection is a truly outstanding account of the various pathways open for anthropology to think about ethics and morality.”
Synopsis
"This Reader is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in the anthropology of morality. The collection includes classical and more recent material, carefully chosen to provide a critical and historical overview of an important and developing field. The selections are contextualized with lucid editorial material, including a substantial introduction"--
Synopsis
This Reader is the first anthology to cover the growing field of moral anthropology and will be an essential resource for students and scholars interested in exploring the important issues involved. Morality and ethics are increasingly invoked in the most diverse domains, from politics to economics, from war to sexuality, from international justice to biological research. To interpret this phenomenon from a critical standpoint, anthropology offers unique perspectives. This volume includes classical as well as recent material and sheds light on continuing debates about relativism and universalism, values and emotions, moral duty and ethical freedom, human rights and humanitarianism, the responsibility of the researcher and the regulation of research. The carefully chosen texts are contextualised with lucid editorial material, including a substantial introduction.
Synopsis
Ethics is currently a topic of great interest in anthropology. Some people speak of an ethical turn and yet the subject has always been there. The essays in The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value chart the trajectory of the distinguished anthropologist Michael Lambek as a contributor to the subject over the course of thirty years. They draw on both his ethnography and his reading in philosophy but this work is neither primarily ethnographic nor philosophical but distinctively anthropological in its contribution. The general argument is that ethics is intrinsic to human being, that our human condition is an ethical condition. This does not mean that we always act well or for the good but that we can only act with respect to criteria; we are subject to ethical judgment. The volume consists of a substantial and newly written introduction that sketches the main themes and issues as Lambek sees them now. It considers such questions as the conversation between anthropology and philosophy, whether to distinguish ethics from morality, and how to think about ethics with respect to several key words or concepts, including freedom, action, judgment, acknowledgment, ritual, irony, passion, and the ordinary. The essays interweave several themes that form overall a sustained argument, in a sequence that produces a kind of hermeneutic spiral in which a set of issues are revisited over time, each visit adding something new to the emerging approach and simultaneously clarifying and thickening the account.
About the Author
Michael Lambek is professor of anthropology and a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the author of several books, most recently The Weight of the Past, and editor or coeditor of several more, including Ordinary Ethics and A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
One. The Ethical Condition
Two. Virgin Marriage and the Autonomy of Women in Mayotte
Three. Taboo as Cultural Practice among Malagasy Speakers
Four. The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice
Five. The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy
Six. Just Anger: Scenarios of Indignation in Botswana and Madagascar
Coauthored by Jacqueline Solway
Seven. Rheumatic Irony: Questions of Agency and Self-Deception as Refracted Through the Art of Living with Spirits
Eight. On Catching Up with Oneself: Learning to Know That One Means What One Does
Nine. Sacrifice and the Problem of Beginning: Reflections from Sakalava Mythopraxis
Ten. Value and Virtue
Eleven. Toward an Ethics of the Act
Twelve. Ethics Out of the Ordinary
Thirteen. The Value of (Performative) Acts
Fourteen. The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life
References
Index