Jarrett Zigon

Moral breakdown and the ethical demand: a theoretical framework for an anthropology of moralities

Recently social scientists in general and anthropologists in particular have invoked the concept of morality in their studies. The use of this concept is seen by many as a way to bypass the complexities and contradictions of such traditional social scientific concepts as culture, society and power. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly evident that in many of these studies morality is used in a way that may be more reminiscent of the moral understanding of the social scientist than that of their subjects. Therefore, a well-founded anthropology of moralities must break from this assumption and rethink the ways in which the moral can be explicitly studied. By engaging in a dialogue with 20th-century continental philosophies of sociality and ethics, this article articulates a theory and model by which an explicit anthropology of moralities becomes possible. Two ethnographic examples, utilizing very different methodological techniques and focusing on two very different societies, are used to illustrate the strength of this theory as a framework for a proper anthropological study of local moralities.

Within a range of possibilities: morality and ethics in social life

Despite its now common currency the anthropological concept of morality remains underdeveloped. One anthropologist who has made several important attempts to work out a more precise theoretical concept of morality is Joel Robbins. In his most recent contribution to this endeavor Robbins addresses the tension in anthropology between what he calls the morality of reproduction and the morality of freedom. In this article, I suggest an alternative solution to the problem of conceiving the distinction between a nonconsciously enacted morality and the conscious awareness of ethical dilemmas and moral questioning. I will support this distinction with ethnographic and life-historical material from my research on the moral lives of some Muscovites.

HIV is God's Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Backgrounds 1. HIV, Drug Use, and the Politics of Indifference 2. The Churchs Rehabilitation Program 3. The Russian Orthodox Church, HIV, and Injecting Drug Use 4. Moral and Ethical Assemblages 5. Synergeia and Simfoniia: Orthodox Morality, Human Rights, and the State 6. Working on the Self Part II: Practices 7. Enchurchment 8. Cultivating a Normal Life 9. Normal Sociality: Obshchenie and Controlling Emotions 10. Disciplining Responsibility: Labor and Gender Some Closing Words Notes References Index

Moral and ethical assemblages: a response to Fassin and Stoczkowski

Recently Anthropological Theory (8(4)) published a debate between Didier Fassin and Wiktor Stoczkowski on the question of whether or not anthropology should be moral. This debate joins the growing number of anthropologists who have recently argued that moralities should be a social phenomenon of much interest for the discipline. Fassin and Stoczkowski conclude their debate by agreeing that only when anthropologists become reflectively aware of their own moral positions and assumptions can what they call a moral anthropology be safely carried out to investigate local moralities. This moral anthropology, they also both agree, necessitates a new theoretical and methodological framework. In this response article I outline an anthropological theory of moralities that satisfies this need.

Hope dies last Two aspects of hope in contemporary Moscow

The concept of hope has, for the most part, been neglected by anthropologists. Recently, however, hope has been analyzed by two prominent anthropologists who view it either as a passive attitude or a future-oriented stance toward a good. My research in Moscow, Russia, suggests that hope is not so easily conceived. In this article I suggest that hope is more precisely understood as having two aspects: persevering hope as the temporal structure of unreflective being-in-the-world, and active hope as the temporal orientation of intentional and ethical action. In exploring the ways in which my interlocutors describe hope, I critically engage not only conceptions of hope as passive, but also those that view it as utopian. The majority of my Muscovite interlocutors simply hoped for what they called ‘a normal life’ consisting of, for example, a family, a career, and stability. I suggest that such hoping demystifies the common understanding of hope as both passive and utopian and makes it available to anthropologists as a concept for understanding everyday human practices.

Phenomenological Anthropology and Morality: A Reply to Robbins

I t is rare that we have the opportunity to engage in debates of the open kind that Ethnos has provided here, and for that I thank the editors of this journal. I would also like to thank Joel Robbins for his interest in engaging me on this important anthropological topic, and as always he has provoked a variety of thoughts and concerns within me. Because of the limited space for this reply, however, I will limit myself to just one of these concerns – what I see as a general anthropological misunderstanding, and one articulated by Robbins in his response, of phenomenology. Robbins contends that because my theory is phenomenological it is merely concerned with describing the experience of individuals. As Desjarlais has pointed out, this equation of phenomenology with the ‘lived experience’ of individuals is a common misperception of anthropologists (1997:24). I suggest that this is the result of most anthropologists getting their phenomenology through the likes of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who despite being quite clear about the centrality of intersubjectivity, historicity, and the lifeworld in their analyses, were primarily concerned with describing consciousness and perception, and therefore lend themselves to being misread as focusing primarily on subjectivity. But for those of us who take Heidegger seriously, it is clear that phenomenology is an analytic method for the study of sociality (Brandom 2007). For in his attempt to explicate a phenomenological ontology of Being, Heidegger felt compelled to do so by means of an analysis of the social being of humans, that is, Da-sein, which is not an individual or subjectivity, but rather the capacity for being intersubjectively social within a social world already there. Therefore, phenomenological anthropologists are concerned with individual experience not because we take experience as a ‘matter of . . . idiosyncratic personal characteristics’ (Robbins response p.

An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world-building: a critical response to ordinary ethics

In this essay I provide a critical reading of so-called ‘ordinary ethics’ in order to disclose how it ultimately undoes two of the three major contributions of the anthropology of moralities and ethics: that is, ordinary ethics ultimately equates morality/ethics with all social activity and at the same time only accounts for morality/ethics in terms of the moral concepts already provided by the Western moral philosophical tradition. In the second part of this essay I provide an ethnographic example from anti-drug war political activism that shows how a critical hermeneutics provides a theoretical-analytical framework for the radical rethinking of both the moral tradition and the social and political worlds that mobilize the concepts and assumptions of this tradition.

Making the new post-Soviet person: moral experience in contemporary Moscow

Based on life-historical research with five Muscovites, this book provides an intimate portrait of their experience of the post-Soviet years as a period of intense refashioning of moral personhood. This process is revealed as uniquely personal, socially shared, and globally influenced.

Satin Island: A Novel on the Anthropology of the Contemporary Condition

Satin Island is a trash heap, an offshore processing complex for an exhausted but still dangerous civilization’s excessive excrement. Satin Island is also a parachute that has come undone from the being it was meant to guide carefully to the ground and now drifts aimlessly through the sky, its suspension lines dangling meaninglessly and without use. Satin Island is also a novel by Tom McCarthy about an anthropologist named U. who works for the Company and spends his days thinking about such phenomena and how they might (or might not) be related to the Project he is working on. U. is a corporate anthropologist. “Forget universities!” U.’s boss snorts while expounding on knowledge-production today. “These are irrelevant; they’ve become businesses — and not even good ones. Real businesses ... these are the forge, the foundry where true knowledge is being smelted, cast and hammered out.” And the Company is indeed a real business as it is a key player in the Project known as Koob-Sassen. Although readers are never told precisely, or even imprecisely, what Koob-Sassen actually is, that it is important becomes clear. So important, in fact, that to a great extent Koob-Sassen is (or is a part of the complex that is) the contemporary condition. As U. puts it: