On fun and freedom: young women's moral learning in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools

This article analyses the role of fun and freedom in the moral learning of young women students in two Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. Recent debates about Islam and ethical subject formation have centred on the assumed tension between Islam and freedom. I examine decisions about television viewing and dress to illustrate both the flexibility and fixity of moral values and evaluation in girls’ lives. I argue that anthropologists of morality and Islam should take seriously moments of fun as important instances for ‘moral ludus’ or ‘moral play’ – the testing, shifting, and reshaping of the boundaries of moral behaviours that involve balancing the demands of various social fields and the larger ethical community in which a person is embedded. I suggest that these moments be viewed not as ruptures or instances of hypocrisy but as everyday occurrences of embedded agency in the lives of piety-minded individuals.     

Masters of hybridity: how activists reconstructed Nepali society

This article discusses the changes that activists have brought to Nepali society in relation to two key elements of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT): (1) its account of modernity and (2) its radical downplaying of human agency. ANT, contrary to the way it tends to be understood, deserves to be seen, at least in Latour's treatment, as a major theory of modernity. As such, it is important and enlightening, even though its attack on human agency – at least when discussing activism – is unhelpful. On this point Ian Hacking's notion of ‘making up people’ provides a better guide. The main example explored is the new kinds of ethnic identity that have achieved state recognition and become politically influential in Nepal over the last thirty years. The case of one ethnic and religious activist, Dr Keshabman Shakya, is used to illustrate the argument. Based on notions of human rights, rather similar processes of ‘making up people’ have also occurred with other minority groups, most strikingly in the case of the ‘third gender’, a context in which Nepal is famously ‘progressive’ compared to other nation-states in the region.     

Women,warfare, and the life of agency: Papua New Guinea and beyond

‘Agency’ entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed social‐philosophical theorizations (e.g. ‘structure and agency’) as major deterministic theories (e.g. Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography. Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earlier semantic range, it has been more fully retained in some areas of usage than others, especially in analyses of subordination in the face of power. This article considers several different conceptualizations of agency. Ethnographically, it focuses on women's differing forms of action in two episodes of warfare in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrasting these, the article concurs with critiques of approaches to ‘agency’ that turn it into a (liberatory) abstraction, and proposes a view of agency as lived relation of intervention and involvement in social action, inherently linked to values and constraints. The combination may be, but is not always, liberatory. The article considers the life and (partial) expiry of agency as a term of social science art.     

Autonomy,Natality and Freedom: A Liberal Re‐examination of Habermas in the Enhancement Debate

Jurgen Habermas has argued that carrying out pre‐natal germline enhancements would be inimical to the future child's autonomy. In this article, I suggest that many of the objections that have been made against Habermas' arguments by liberals in the enhancement debate misconstrue his claims. To explain why, I begin by explaining how Habermas' view of personal autonomy confers particular importance to the agent's embodiment and social environment. In view of this, I explain that it is possible to draw two arguments against germline enhancements from Habermas' thought. I call these arguments ‘the argument from negative freedom’ and ‘the argument from natality’. Although I argue that many of the common liberal objections to Habermas are not applicable when his arguments are properly understood, I go on to suggest ways in which supporters of enhancement might appropriately respond to Habermas' arguments.     

‘Rules that apply in times of crisis’: time,agency, and norm‐remaking during Nepal's People's War

This article explores how people in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal adopted previously transgressive norms and practices during the decade of the People's War (1996‐2006). By examining the rise in practices of beef‐eating and inter‐caste commensality, this article suggests that the temporal dimension of wartime ‘when different rules apply’ was crucial in making people accept new ideas and break established norms on a scale atypical for the ‘normal’ times of peace. Analysing the agency of Maoist activists, who self‐consciously tried to implement a project of radical social transformation, and those people who were caught in the midst of the Maoist transformative endeavour, this article argues that the contours of the ‘new society’ emerged not only due to revolutionaries’ intentional actions but also because of the ‘exceptional’ nature of wartime, which forced people to radically re‐create their daily lives. By transgressing social norms, ‘ordinary’ people did not deliberately undermine the normative order, but rather responded to the constraints of wartime, when people's agency and ethical choices were mostly driven by the need to secure the survival of their families and ensure the continuity of life itself.     

Nobody likes to sleep alone: aspiring to kinship futures in post-Soviet Cuba

In post-Soviet Cuba, instead of the political future envisioned by Revolutionary authorities, poor residents of Havana aspire to create kinship futures where there is no need to ‘sleep alone’. Here, the idea of ‘sleeping together’ represents a trustworthy social bond that shelters a person from loneliness over time. For these habaneros, sexual love between men and women cannot be trusted, since it is often plagued by suspicions of material interest. By contrast, they view parent-child connections as a way to secure a cared-for future for themselves. Nevertheless, as Cuban socialism undergoes transformations, gendered inequalities create obstacles for many people's aspirations for parenthood. This article explores the contrast between sexual and filial love in Cubans’ efforts to create kinship futures for themselves, thereby adding to our understandings of poor people's life projects.     

Loving recognition: a proposal for the practical efficacy of love as a public virtue

The anthropology of love has tended to focus on the romantic, and to explore its universality. In this article I ask a different kind of question of love. How might love be recruited as a moral force and deployed as a public virtue? I conceive of love not solely or principally as a private and domestic virtue but as a public and civil practice: a structuring of social interaction by means of affective appreciation of individual others. I understand love as the human capacity and the human practice of respecting the individuality of other lives. The desirous appreciation and affirmation of another ‘I’ – the loving attention – serves to surmount the customary ‘category‐thinking’ by which the world is normally apprehended: the generalizing, homogenizing, and stereotyping that characterize a culture's symbolic identification of the world. Loving recognition is such that the individuality of another life, its precious integrity and uniqueness, may be socially accommodated.     

BRAIN,MIND AND MACHINE: WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION FOR PERCEPTIONS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY,AGENCY AND FREE WILL?

Brain implants, such as Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), which are designed to improve motor, mood and behavioural pathology, present unique challenges to our understanding of identity, agency and free will. This is because these devices can have visible effects on persons' physical and psychological properties yet are essentially undetectable when operating correctly. They can supplement and compensate for one's inherent abilities and faculties when they are compromised by neuropsychiatric disorders. Further, unlike talk therapy or pharmacological treatments, patients need not ‘do’ anything for the treatment to take effect. If one accepts, as we argue here, that brain implants are unique among implantable types of devices, then this can have significant implications for what it means to persist as the same person and be the source of one's thoughts and actions. By examining two of the most common indications for DBS in current use, namely in the motor (Parkinson's Disease) and psychiatric (Major Depression) domains, we further argue that although DBS, as it is currently applied, does not necessarily represent a unique threat to personal identity and agency per se, it introduces an unprecedented ‘third party’ into the debate on these concepts. In this way, DBS can be used as a tool to begin probing, both conceptually and empirically, some of philosophy's most perennial metaphysical questions.     

An analysis of folktales of the lenge,Portuguese East Africa*

This article discusses a Japanese advertising agency's attempt to win a prestigious European car manufacturer's account by means of a competitive presentation. It outlines the difficulties facing the agency with regard to competing accounts, the import car market in Japan, coordination of a campaign and strategies to be adopted in preparing the presentation, as well as showing how the ‘social’ side of the advertising world has an important bearing on what is, or is not, include din any advertising campaign. In calling for an approach that focusses on the similarities, rather than differences, between Japan and other (western) advanced industrialized societies, the author analyzes the Japanese advertising industry and argues that competitive presentations are one form of what Appadurai (1986) has termed ‘tournaments of value’.     

‘This is a gathering of lovers’: Islamic self-help and affective pedagogies in contemporary Singapore

In Singapore, the proliferation of Islamic classes drawing from self-help rhetoric, popular culture, the Qur'an, and Hadith allude to the increased appeal of affective pedagogies to Muslim youth. Taught by Singaporean Al-Azhar University graduates, the classes predominantly attracted university-educated, minoritized Malay Muslim women. Through the use of affective pedagogies, the teachers reframed Islamic piety to foreground three forms of love: self, divine, and romantic. Extending scholarship on racialized affect, this article interrogates the ways in which the teachers’ affective pedagogies mediated young women's anxieties within a neoliberalizing context, and the latter's negotiations of their newly acquired religious knowledge as they contended with quotidian precarities. While anthropology's foregrounding of lived materialities complicates some of the theoretical presuppositions of affect theory, the latter expands our understanding of piety projects as not merely concerned with ethical self-discipline, but entangled with broader racialization processes – especially for minoritized subjects whose capacity to transform becomes constitutive of a will to improve. By placing anthropological theory on Islamic piety in a dialogical tension with affect theory, I highlight the forms of affective religious sentiments that circulate through difference and negation, and are integral to particular sites of minoritized Muslim subject formation.     

Researching ethnicity,identity, subjectivity: anything but the four-lettered word

This article gives a frank account of how anthropological research on Cape Verdean migrant experiences of parenthood in Portugal developed from avoiding the use of the analytical concept of ‘race’ to encountering ‘race’ as a category of practice in fieldwork and discusses the implications of this for analysing the data. Although the aim of the research was to look beyond categorizations, in order to explore the emotional dimensions of lived experience, the effects of ‘racial automatisms’ upon migrant subjectivities cannot be ignored. Racist effects are nonetheless distinguished from racist intentions. The ethnography elucidates the political potential of ‘race’ to foment critical reflection upon the relationship between an individual's personal and collective identities.     

‘Destiny is written by God’: Islamic predestination,responsibility, and transcendence in Central Morocco

Tracing the story of Atiqa, a young Moroccan woman in her late twenties, and the revivalist imagination that informs it, I reflect in this article on how responsibility is imagined and reckoned with when human choice and action encounter the transcendental forces of destiny. Far from leading to an abeyance of responsibility in the face of worldly and transcendental powers, I show that it is precisely the idea of a divine predestination based on God's omnipotence and omniscience that triggers an ethical reflection on questions of choice, action, and consequence. Atiqa's story provides insights with regard to the notion of human responsibility under God's will. Revealing the relational dynamics of the encounter (and disjuncture) between human and divine intentionalities, it compels us not only to move beyond the emphasis on the embodiment of divine will present in the paradigm of self-cultivation, but also to reconsider transcendence in current anthropological debates on ethics.     

THE SUBSTANCE VIEW: A CRITIQUE

According to the theory of intrinsic value and moral standing called the ‘substance view,’ what makes it prima facie seriously wrong to kill adult human beings, human infants, and even human fetuses is the possession of the essential property of the basic capacity for rational moral agency – a capacity for rational moral agency in root form and thereby not remotely exercisable. In this critique, I cover three distinct reductio charges directed at the substance view's conclusion that human fetuses have the same intrinsic value and moral standing as adult human beings. After giving consideration to defenders of the substance view's replies to these charges, I then critique each of them, ultimately concluding that none is successful. Of course, in order to understand all of these things – the reductio charges, defenders of the substance view's replies to them, and my criticisms of their replies – one must have a better understanding of the substance view (in particular, its understanding of rational moral agency) as well as its defense. Accordingly, I address the substance view's understanding of rational moral agency as well as present its defense.     

A critique of the principle of ‘respect for autonomy’, grounded in African thought

I give an account how the principle of ‘respect for autonomy’ dominates the field of bioethics, and how it came to triumph over its competitors, ‘respect for persons’ and ‘respect for free power of choice’. I argue that ‘respect for autonomy’ is unsatisfactory as a basic principle of bioethics because it is grounded in too individualistic a worldview, citing concerns of African theorists and other communitarians who claim that the principle fails to acknowledge the fundamental importance of understanding persons within the nexus of their communal relationships. I defend the claim that ‘respect for persons’ is a more appropriate principle, as it is able to acknowledge both individual decision making and the essential relationality of persons. I acknowledge that my preference for ‘respect for persons’ is problematic because of the important debate around the definition of ‘personhood’ in bioethics discourse. Relying on Thaddeus Metz's conception of moral status, I propose a relational definition of personhood that distinguishes between persons with agency and persons without agency, arguing that we have different moral obligations to these distinct categories of persons. I claim that this conception of personhood is better able to accommodate our moral intuitions than conventional approaches, and that it is able to do so without being speciesist or question‐begging.     

Agency,intimacy, and rape jokes: an ethnographic study of young women and sexual risk in Chennai

In this article, I examine the circulation of jokes about sexual violence among young middle‐class women in the South Indian city of Chennai. Drawing on ethnographic research with undergraduate students in this city, I locate the rape joke in an ambivalent discourse of risk that conflates the possibility of sexual assault with the perceived ‘risks’ of women's sexual autonomy. In this context, I argue that humour about sexual violence functions as a form of lateral agency, facilitating a break from the task of reproducing middle‐class respectability.     

The crisscrossed agency of a toast: Personhood,individuation and de‐individuation in Luzhou,China

This article addresses debates over individuation in China through consideration of guanxi‐relational feasting in Luzhou, Sichuan. I draw on Ortner's theorisation of subjectivity and agency to probe the often taken‐for‐granted question of cultural personhood which informs social action. Although the social imaginary in Luzhou is increasingly colonised by symbolic individualism, I propose that dominant local notions of personhood and agency, operating within feast practice, continue to define this process. By attending to three aspects of Yan's ‘individualisation thesis’, I demonstrate how local models of person and agency are indispensible to a fuller understanding of social life. Considering the important role ritual speech habits (largely trained in de‐individuating feasting) continue to play in socialising actors to economic institutions and power relationships more generally, individuation in China today remains a largely nominal and aspirational, if symbolically potent and potentially transformative, project.     

Templates and exclusions: victim centrism in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on ‘survivor’ experience in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of ‘survivor’, ‘cultural genocide’, ‘trauma’, and ‘healing’ became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canada's Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of ‘victim centrism’, including the ways that ‘truth‐telling’ can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canada's TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school ‘survivor’ as the focal point for understanding policy‐driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity.     

‘Who do you want to kill?’ Affectual and relational understandings at a sorcery rock art site in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria,northern Australia

This article explores the affectual and relational contexts in which rock art is embedded through an exploration of the encounters, reactions, and responses to a well‐known sorcery rock art site known as Kurrmurnnyini in northern Australia's southwest Gulf country. These encounters with a culturally powerful place, and the emotions derived from people's personal memories and experiences of Kurrmurnnyini and its sorcery‐infused rock art, are vital to establishing an understanding of contemporary perceptions of what is clearly more than an ‘archaeological site’. We contend that by turning our attention to the often‐overlooked affectual and relational dimensions of rock art and the contexts in which it is found, researchers place themselves in a better position to access and become aware of the agency and affect of graphic imagery as well as the significance these powerful images and places hold for people today.     

Intermarriage and Jewish identity: The implications for pluralism and assimilation in American society*

Born across racial lines, Cedric Dover and Barack Obama both came to identify with the African American community. By contrasting the lives and ideas of two mixed-race individuals, one born in Calcutta and the other in Hawaii, this article examines cosmopolitanism, racial formation and the promise of the ‘post-racial’. A ‘Eurasian’ intellectual born in Calcutta in 1904, Dover developed a coloured cosmopolitanism that mirrors in revealing ways Obama's approach to race. Both men embraced blackness while transcending the boundaries of race and nation. Dover and Obama developed a conception of race as freedom – not freedom from race or of a particular race, but the freedom to embrace race without sacrificing other affiliations.     

Australian alternative spiritualities and a feeling for land

For many Australian practitioners of alternative spiritualities, ‘nature’ and the non‐human environment are alive with significance: they embody a universal divine ‘spirit’ that is both independent of, and continuous with, individual subjects. Particular locations within nature also have special value as a font of powerful personal feelings and as a kind of natural resource of spiritual energy. Moreover, the effect of specifically Australian landscapes is frequently understood by reference to a place’s Aboriginal history or ‘spirit’, with recognition of such places both celebrating and laying claim to the land. However, having a feeling for land is not straightforward. Although Aboriginal people often served as a synonym for the land itself and thus were considered intrinsic to much of the land’s spiritual and personal value, their prior claims to its ownership also sometimes upset non‐Aboriginal feelings of love for the land.