Toward a Marxian anthropology? Bare,abstract, mobile,global

Anthropology has conventionally taken as some of its most cherished foundational categories the precise opposites of the key concepts that animate this inquiry: rather than “bare life,” anthropology has tended always to emphasize the fullness and complexity of social and political life; instead of labor in the abstract, which we recognize in its commodified form as “labor-power,” anthropology has produced exquisite inventories of concrete laboring activities and the “cultural” content of productive work; against the impermanence and mutability of lives characterized by their mobility, the ethnographic enterprise has been deeply attached to the sedentarist presuppositions of lasting settlement, dwelling, and “community”; and contrary to the task of apprehending space on a global scale, ethnographic study has been overwhelmingly localized and place-bound. Rethinking these elementary premises of the ethnographic endeavor and situating these critical concepts at the center of our epistemological frameworks are crucial theoretical and practical tasks for any meaningful social inquiry today. In this regard, the Marxian theoretical arsenal is simply indispensable. But, in the derisive words of so many disciplinary forebears and overseers, is this properly “anthropological”? The prospective convergence of genuinely critical sociopolitical inquiry with the techniques and insights of anthropology must remain for us the locus of an urgent problem—an open question on an open horizon.     

Cough sweets and angels: the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary in Sufi practice in Lebanon

This article presents an ethnographic account of the social production of the miraculous in Sufi practice in Lebanon, including displays of bodily mortification. It examines the interdependence of the extraordinary and the ordinary/everyday, following, but problematizing, Max Weber's classic discussion of charismatic authority. For Weber the extraordinary lies outside the bounds of rules. Adopting the terms of some recent interventions in the anthropology of ethics, I claim on the contrary that the extraordinary has its ordinary ethics too. In so doing I not only add to the anthropology of wonder but also challenge those who would argue that anthropology's especial focus is on the ordinary, to the exclusion of its opposite. If this is not to be mere piety, sorting out what belongs to which category will prove challenging. Especially within the anthropology of religion, one can hardly do with one without the other.     

The Excavation of American Indian Burial Sites: A Problem in Law and Professional Responsibility

The excavation of Indian burial sites poses serious ethical problems. Many American Indians regard the excavation of such sites as an affront to their actual and spiritual ancestors, while many archaeologists believe that scientific investigation should take absolute priority. This paper explores the judicial and legislative aspects of this practice in the United States and discusses attempts by professional associations to resolve the conflict. The paper suggests specific guidelines that could be followed by courts and legislators depending on whether the burial site is on reservation or nonreservation property, or whether the physical remains are recent or ancient. [archaeology, applied anthropology, ethics, anthropology and law, anthropology and public policy]     

In memoriam: Napoleon A. Chagnon

Anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon was a central figure in the development and foundation of evolutionary approaches to human behavior. We highlight his ethnographic fieldwork, contributions to studies of kinship and marriage, and his foundational role in the development of evolutionary approaches to human behavior. As a holistic anthropologist Chagnon led anthropology toward the integration of cultural and evolutionary theory. Finally, his leadership was central in the foundation of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.EpigraphRicardo, a Brazilian Protestant missionary who was assisting the scientific team and who has worked with the Yanomami for over 25 years … told me to run and get my camera. “There's going to be a fight,” he said. Then he turned to leave. “Aren't you going to stay?” I asked. “Nah, happens all the time. You stay, you're an anthropologist, should be interesting. Call me if anyone gets hurt.”     

The Anthropology of Authenticity: Everyman His Own Anthropologist

Anthropology, the contributors to the recent volume Reinventing Anthropology tell us, is suffering from severe hardening of the intellectual arteries. In order for it to be revitalized, they say, the discipline must be de-professionalized and de-institutionalized, made more personal and existential. This involves a rejection of the pose of "objectivity" and "value-free" inquiry and an open admission of the inherently ideological nature of the discipline. In a word, anthropology will have to become politically and morally partisan. This essay explores some of the implications of the recommendations made by the reinventors of anthropology. The stance taken in Reinventing Anthropology, this paper contends, would not only undermine anthropology as a systematic field of inquiry but would also negate whatever "relevance" the discipline might have to the contemporary world.     

Earliest Phases in the Evolution of Sickness and Healing

Sickness and healing constitute the root concepts that center medical anthropological inquiry and give the field its identity. Here, they are held to manifest a biological adaption designed by evolution that requires culture for its final realization. Sickness and healing thus provide anthropology with a bioculturalform that has changed in content and expression during cultural evolution. The early phases of this evolution, those bearing the most apparent influences of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, are reviewed and analyzed in the article. Some of the implications of this for medical anthropology are discussed.     

The Anthropologist as Expert Witness

Anthropologists representing each of the subfields of the discipline have appeared as expert witnesses in a wide range of legal cases. Their appearance raises a number of significant questions about the appropriateness of anthropological knowledge to adversary proceedings, and poses difficult ethical problems for the participant and the profession. The present article reviews a series of cases in which anthropologists have served as expert witnesses and proposes a set of recommended standards and reforms for this activity . [ethics, expert testimony, legal anthropology, American society, applied anthropology]     

The poetics of wisdom divination: renewing the moral imagination

This article makes a critical contribution to interpretive anthropology by recovering its interest in the moral imagination, while linking this to the poetics of wisdom divination, primarily among Tswapong of Botswana and more widely across a vast part of Southern Africa. This mode of divination appeals to imaginative moral reflection and ethical deliberation along with practical wisdom in the quest for well‐being. The esoteric oral literature in wisdom divination is rich in cross‐cultural understandings, transmitted over considerable barriers, and re‐created over centuries. Its evocative praise poetry, having no known author, is archived in the memories of experts, the diviners, and is recited and interpreted selectively during diagnostic séances. Yet anthropologists and literary scholars have not paid serious attention to the oral poetry and its remarkable wide‐ranging archive. Against that, this article documents the acrobatic stylistics of the divinatory poetry and shows how it appeals artfully for reflexivity, for heightened consciousness, and for unmasking the hidden in everyday life. The main analysis carries forward an anthropology of ethics that overcomes the usual division of labour between the study of ethics and aesthetics.     

Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good

In the 1980s, anthropology set aside a focus on societies defined as radically ‘other’ to the anthropologists' own. There was little consensus at the time, however, about who might replace the other as the primary object of anthropological attention. In important respects, I argue, its replacement has been the suffering subject. Tracing this change, I consider how it addressed key problems of the anthropology of the other, but I also suggest that some strengths of earlier work – particularly some of its unique critical capacities – were lost in the transition. The conclusion considers how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses.     

Features of the Bioethical Regulation of Human Studies in Aerospace and Maritime Medicine

The author considers the specific features of applying the universally accepted standards of biomedical ethics to human research in aerospace and maritime medicine. The extreme factors that act on human subjects may be a menace to their health and physical and mental well-being. Therefore, medical information that comes from human studies is important not only scientifically, but also practically as the basis for revealing and preventing the risks related to such factors and for ensuring the safety of both human subjects and members of missions who may be exposed to such impacts in the future. This makes it necessary to not only strictly adhere to the basic standards of biomedical ethics, but also adapt some of them to the priority task of ensuring human safety under extreme conditions. Among other problems, the author discusses possible ways of correcting the scope of application of bioethical principles, such as confidentiality, voluntariness, and the right to refuse from or stop taking part in an experiment.     

Handedness in nature: first evidence on manual laterality on bimanual coordinated tube task in wild primates

Handedness is a defining feature of human manual skill and understanding the origin of manual specialization remains a central topic of inquiry in anthropology and other sciences. In this study, we examined hand preference in a sample of wild primates on a task that requires bimanual coordinated actions (tube task) that has been widely used in captive primates. The Sichuan snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana) is an arboreal Old World monkey species that is endemic to China, and 24 adult individuals from the Qinling Mountains of China were included for the analysis of hand preference in the tube task. All subjects showed strong individual hand preferences and significant group-level left-handedness was found. There were no significant differences between males and females for either direction or strength of hand preference. Strength of hand preferences of adults was significantly greater than juveniles. Use of the index finger to extract the food was the dominant extractive-act. Our findings represent the first evidence of population-level left-handedness in wild Old World monkeys and broaden our knowledge on evaluating primate hand preference via experimental manipulation in natural conditions.     

Anthropology at the heart of medicine

Anthropology and medicine share many concerns, but have had trouble collaborating in the past. The anthropologist has had to plead both with his colleagues and physicians to move beyond a < culturalist > vision that would confine him to the study of traditional or alternative medicines and representations of populations and the sick. The anthropologist's approach perceived as intrusive has also raised fears in the medical world. These reciprocal misunderstandings and stereotypes need to be overcome by an anthropology that studies the practices and knowledge of modern medicine as they are elaborated daily. Anthropology will dialogue with medicine without judging it. In its turn, medicine will open its sites of healing and teaching to the anthropologist. Anthropology at the heart of medicine is organized around the idea that the paths and expectations of health professionals reflect the specicifities of the local system of health. The individual dimensions of practices cannot be divorced from the functioning of structures of health and decision. Finally, like any other kind of anthropology, medical anthropology must scrutinize its own methods and ethics in a critical way.     

For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom

There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest – hitherto largely absent from anthropology – in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethnographically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism.     

The ethics of efficacy in North India's goonda raj (rule of toughs)

This study of goondas (gangsters or toughs) in North Indian politics comes by way of a comment on intellectual method in the anthropology of moralities. More especially, it offers critical remarks on the recent adoption of ‘virtue’ as the cardinal moral co‐ordinate of human life. Drawing on field research conducted across northern India, we show that when people celebrate goondas as leaders, they do so not because they see in them virtuous men, but because they think them capable of ‘getting things done’. This ethics of efficacy is neither merely instrumental nor is it but another variant of virtue ethics. It presents, instead, an altogether different moral teleology orientated towards effective action rather than excellent character. While challenging the self‐centred bent of the late anthropology of ethics, we also make preliminary remarks on the contrast between ‘moral’ and ‘practical’ judgement, and the limits of ‘the moral’ as such.     

Interior Landscapes and External Worlds: the Return of Grand Theory in Anthropology1

This paper argues that the retreat from ‘theory’ characteristic of the postmodernist turn in anthropology has not had the impact on the ethics and politics of disciplinary practice that was hoped for. One reason for this is the problematic relationship between cultural relativism and identity politics which has paralysed the critical project in the discipline and prevented a more radical interrogation of two fundamental questions: ‘what is anthropology?' and ‘who is the anthropologist?'. Discussions in anthropological writing on hybridity and postcoloniality have more often highlighted the hybrid nature of `informants' than that of ‘anthropologists’. Feminist, native and minority writing in the discipline are areas where these questions have been seriously addressed through debates on positionality and location. However, the impact of these discussions on the politics of knowledge in the discipline are rarely recognised by ‘mainstrean anthropology’. One particularly noticeable lacuna is the fact that so little attention is paid to disciplinary education and its impact on theorising. Anthropology, rather than turning away from theory, should spend more time ‘anthropologising’ the concepts of ‘value’, ‘relativism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘comparison’ which underlie disciplinary theorising. The paper concludes by arguing for a return to theory in anthropology accompanied by a critical politics.     

Fear of selfing in the American cultural imaginary or "you are never alone with a clone"

Recently the New York Times reported that scientists had "cloned" a human embryo. The alarmed response of journalists, bioethicists, and the general public focused a spotlight on the ethics of human embryo research. The popular debate reiterated the critiques of cultural theorists that humans not be figured as (marketable) products. But the debate's attribution of an unproblematic value for individual personhood illustrates the importance of a more powerful engagement by anthropology.     

Moral Horizons of Land and Place

ABSTRACT

A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.     

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.     

What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

A focus on ordinary or everyday ethics has become perhaps the dominant concern in the rapidly developing anthropology of ethics. In this article, I argue that this focus tends to marginalize the study of the ways in which religion contributes to people's moral lives. After defining religion and transcendence in terms that make them less uncongenial to the study of ethics than many proponents of ordinary ethics suggest, I examine values as one sometimes transcendent cultural form that often informs ethical life. I draw on Victor Turner (along with Durkheim) to develop an account of how rituals often both present people with and allow them to perform transcendent versions of values. These encounters, in turn, shape people's ethical sensibilities, including those they bring to bear in everyday life, in ways we cannot understand unless we accord religion a more central role in the anthropology of ethics than it has played to this point. I illustrate my arguments with material drawn both from Turner's Ndembu ethnography and from my own research on Christianity in Papua New Guinea.     

Epigenetics: localizing biology through co-laboration

This paper reports on a co-laborative laboratory ethnography in a molecular biology laboratory conducting research on environmental epigenetics. It focuses on a single study concerned with the material implications of social differentiation. The analysis briefly raises biopolitical concerns. Its main concern lies with an understanding of the human body as local in its working infrastructure or “inner laboratory”, an understanding that emerges from the co-laborative inquiry between biologists and anthropologist. This co-laborative mode of inquiry raises productive tensions within biology as to the universal or local nature of human nature and within anthropology as to the status of human biology within social theory. The paper cannot resolve this tension. Rather it explores it as an epistemic object in the context of interdisciplinarity, ontography and co-laboration. In concluding, it specifies co-laboration as temporary, non-teleological joint epistemic work aimed at producing new kinds of reflexivity.