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.     

Might there be a medical conscience?

I defend the feasibility of a medical conscience in the following sense: a medical professional can object to the prevailing medical norms because they are incorrect as medical norms. In other words, I provide an account of conscientious objection that makes use of the idea that the conscience can issue true normative claims, but the claims in question are claims about medical norms rather than about general moral norms. I further argue that in order for this line of reasoning to succeed, there needs to be an internal morality of medicine that determines what medical professionals ought to do qua medical professionals. I utilize a constructivist approach to the internal morality of medicine and argue that medical professionals can conscientiously object to providing treatment X, if providing treatment X is not in accordance with norms that would have been constructed, in light of the end of medicine, by the appropriate agents under the appropriate conditions.     

White cruelty or Republican sins? Competing frames of stigma reversal in French commemorations of slavery

Abstract

This paper explores how French activists use claims about the history and legacies of slavery to combat stigmas associated with their group membership. Using a case study of a French Caribbean association (CM98) and a pan-African association (COFFAD), I examine how two organizations produce competing models for challenging and reversing the stigma of slavery. Through a process of normative inversion, activists assert the moral inferiority of dominant groups. CM98 rejects both a racial and an African identity, and seeks recognition for ‘French descendants of slaves’, using the language of citizenship to criticize the French government. COFFAD, by contrast, asserts an Afro-centric black identity and stigmatizes white Europeans. I argue that both destigmatization strategies unwittingly reinforce the stigma of historical enslavement.     

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.     

WHY MORAL PHILOSOPHERS ARE NOT AND SHOULD NOT BE MORAL EXPERTS

Professional philosophers are members of bioethical committees and regulatory bodies in areas of interest to bioethicists. This suggests they possess moral expertise even if they do not exercise it directly and without constraint. Moral expertise is defined, and four arguments given in support of scepticism about their possession of such expertise are considered and rejected: the existence of extreme disagreement between moral philosophers about moral matters; the lack of a means clearly to identify moral experts; that expertise cannot be claimed in that which lacks objectivity; and that ordinary people do not follow the advice of moral experts. I offer a better reason for scepticism grounded in the relation between moral philosophy and common‐sense morality: namely that modern moral philosophy views even a developed moral theory as ultimately anchored in common‐sense morality, that set of basic moral precepts which ordinary individuals have command of and use to regulate their own lives. Even if moral philosophers do nevertheless have a limited moral expertise, in that they alone can fully develop a set of moral judgments, I sketch reasons – grounded in the values of autonomy and of democracy – why moral philosophers should not wish non‐philosophers to defer to their putative expertise.     

It is better to be ignorant of our moral enhancement: A reply to Zambrano

In a recent issue of Bioethics, I argued that compulsory moral bioenhancement should be administered covertly. Alexander Zambrano has criticized this argument on two fronts. First, contrary to my claim, Zambrano claims that the prevention of ultimate harm by covert moral bioenhancement fails to meet conditions for permissible liberty-restricting public health interventions. Second, contrary to my claim, Zambrano claims that covert moral bioenhancement undermines autonomy to a greater degree than does overt moral bioenhancement. In this paper, I rebut both of these arguments, then finish by noting important avenues of research that Zambrano’s arguments motivate.     

Property as sovereignty in micro: the state/property nexus and the Cyprus Problem

This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of ‘community’ offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's ‘communal’ character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypriot constitutional communities of the Republic. Focusing on the moral and political claims that ensue from this premise, I show how refugee Cypriots encounter and rearticulate the state in a variety of institutions as they lay claims to property (periousia) – their own or others’. Consequently, I argue that thinking through ‘community’ contributes to understandings of the linkage between property and statecraft (what I call the state/property nexus). In turn, this allows us to better comprehend statehood in post-conflict domains.     

Carnivore conservation under land use change: the status of Zimbabwe’s cheetah population after land reform

Large terrestrial carnivores especially have experienced substantial declines in range and numbers. Changes in land use are a main driver of such declines, yet various developing countries have accelerated land use change through state-led land reform programmes. One of the most renowned land reform programmes is Zimbabwe’s fast track land reform programme (FTLRP), which resulted in fast and compulsory subdivision of large commercial farms into indigenized small scale commercial and subsistence farms. Several case studies have shown an impact of the FTLRP on wildlife, however, its effect on wildlife populations at a nationwide scale remains largely unknown. Due to its wide-ranging nature, the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is particularly vulnerable to changes in land use. In this study I used questionnaire survey and citizen science data to determine the population status and distribution of the cheetah 15 years after introduction of the FTLRP. I also assessed the level of human-cheetah conflict, and attitudes of commercial and subsistence farmers towards cheetah. I found dramatic range contractions and population declines, particularly in the landscape outside protected areas. Despite minimal conflict, subsistence farmers were less tolerant to cheetah than commercial farmers. Consequently, land reform is likely to have increased the hostility of the cheetah landscape outside protected areas. This study is one of the most comprehensive species assessments to date. It provides valuable empirical data on the implications of land use change and emphasizes how a lack of knowledge impedes our ability to recognize a species vulnerability to (local) extinction risk.     

Categorical inequality,institutional ambivalence,and permanently failing institutions: the case of immigrants and barriers to health care in America

Abstract

I draw on the theories of Charles Tilly, Robert K. Merton, Eleanor Barber, Marshall Meyer, and Lynne Zucker to develop a three-part framework for understanding the organizational and institutional interface between social services like health care and disadvantaged minorities like immigrants. Tilly's theory of durable inequality is transposed to categorical inequalities in organizations and law. His vocabulary of motives is expanded to include categorical entrenchment, restitution, and compensation. These embedded inequalities lead to institutional ambivalence in the provision of services and to permanently failing institutions that work poorly, waste resources, or provide uneven quality, yet do not collapse but endure while resisting reform. One rationale for resistance is ‘moral hazard’ by individuals; but the theory of moral hazard is biased and partial, because provider moral hazard and insurer moral hazard are more prevalent. The specific manifestations of these concepts and dynamics between them warrant further research in different contexts.     

Rights and responsibilities in rural South Africa: implications for gender,generation, and personhood

In the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa, contests over the meaning and merit of human rights feature prominently in intergenerational and intergendered conflicts. In this article I identify and analyse a tension between amalungelo (a socially embedded and relational form of rights) and irhayti (a Xhosaization of the English ‘[human] right’) as a means of exploring the interpersonal tensions that arise through the production and contestation of the subject positions that human rights set in motion. Using the examples of elders’ complaints of neglect, and of young men's accusations of human rights violations on the part of women, I ground this investigation in men's and elders’ explanations of how human rights enable morally reprehensible actions, and are implicated in what they perceive to be a climate of interpersonal neglect. In analysing these claims, I show that gendered and generational conflict in this region is grounded in uncertainty about the content of gendered and generational subject positions themselves, and speaks to the relative moral value of autonomous versus relational forms of personhood. Moreover, I show that where inequality and interdependence are intrinsic to the ways in which gendered and generational subject positions are constituted and understood, human rights serve both to destabilize the content of these subject positions in ways that render appropriate gendered and generational sociality unclear, and also to bring into question the relative moral value of autonomous versus more relational forms of personhood.     

Assessment of farmers on their knowledge regarding pesticide usage and biosafety

PurposeInappropriate application of pesticides is quite common in the study area, causing health issues and in some cases fatalities. The intent of the current study is to gauge the farmers’ level of knowledge on the safe usage of pesticides and biosafety to keep the famers healthy through the focused extension programs.MethodologyThe study is carried out in 41 union councils of Tehsil Sahiwal, District Sahiwal, Punjab, Pakistan. Data are collected through a cluster sampling technique by conducting face-to-face interviews. Statistical analysis is used to determine relationships and interpret them.ResultsThe findings show that the majority of farmers (87.2%) earn their livelihoods from farming and 2.1% are traders. More than half of the respondents (51.8%) own small land-holdings with an area of 4–8 ha, with only 16.4% having a land area of more than 12 ha. The results also reveal that the majority of respondents obtain information from private agents and only about one third (34.4%) respondents get information on the safe usage of pesticides from the Department of Agriculture (Extension). The internet has emerged as a fast and reliable source of information in the new paradigm; however, only 14.4% of the respondents take advantage of this economical and fast information tool/medium. The findings also reveal that the farmers employ unhealthy and poor practices by not following the recommendations regarding the safe usage of pesticides. The study also reveals that more than half of the farmers (54.4%) use unsafe storage practices on their farms, and about 48.2% do not follow the instructions.ConclusionsInappropriate application of pesticides can have negative effects on human health and the adoption safety measures are necessary to avoid the harmful effects of pesticides. Due to high illiteracy in the area, farmers mainly seek advice of neighboring farmers, having ignorance on the biosafety issues. Variables like education level, land ownership, total land size and the trainings on safe pesticide usage significantly influence the knowledge level of farmers on the safe usage of pesticides.RecommendationsFarmers do not follow the recommendations of the extension department or the instructions printed on pesticide bottles/containers, therefore educational (formal and informal) and training programs are necessary on the safe pesticide usage to upgrade their skills and expertise on safe usage of pesticides and the importance of biosafety.     

The Unbounded Space and Moral Transgression: Capitalist Expansion in West New Britain

ABSTRACT

Capitalist transformations in West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, have focused on setting boundaries on land and social relations as an efficient way to generate productive relations. But for the Maututu around Bialla town where the palm oil industry has been established the perception of productivity rests not on establishing boundaries but on exploring horizons. Recent dramatic changes to the economy and demography of this area have introduced moral conflict into Maututu endeavours to generate well-being. Maututu have responded to these conflicts in ways that continue to bring their indigenous morality to bear on the moral strategies pursued by state and capitalist forces.     

Framing the Loss of Solace: Issues and Challenges in Researching Indigenous Compensation Claims

The 2016 judgment in the ‘Timber Creek’ compensation case (Griffiths v Northern Territory of Australia (no. 3) (2016) FCA 900) signals an end to an era of extinguishment-related injustice and inequality, representing, as it does, the first litigated Federal Court award of compensation for the loss or impairment of rights and interests, under the 1993 Native Title Act. In this paper, I explore some of the methodological challenges and conceptual issues confronting anthropologists involved in researching compensation claims. In drawing upon my experience in researching two such claims, I discuss how the issues of gender, resource development, environmental transformation, the Stolen Generation, and the history of Indigenous-European relations in remote and rural Australia impact upon investigations into the loss or diminution of traditional attachments to land. In conceptualising this loss of connection, I discuss material relating to the ‘anthropology of emotions’, and I point to some of the obstacles encountered when talking about emotions cross-culturally. In conclusion, I explore research undertaken into the social and psychological impacts of ecosystem distress, loss of place, and environmental change, and I posit the value of Glenn Albrecht’s concept of ‘solastalgia’ (2005. “Solastalgia, a New Concept in Human Health and Identity.” Philosophy Activism Nature 3: 41–44) in framing research into the loss of solace, and in expanding upon the legal notion of this loss as ‘inconvenience’ and ‘injured feelings’.     

‘We have been awake for years’: conflicting ecologies in an indigenous land management scheme in Indonesia

As access to and control of land is increasingly contested, indigenous land management schemes promise to secure formal land rights. This article is concerned with one such scheme, Dayak, Wake Up (Dayak Misik) in Indonesia. The implementation of the scheme, orchestrated by a Dayak farmers’ organization, was rejected by the semi-nomadic Punan Murung as they did not share the same notions and conceptions of land and resources, which are intertwined with struggles over access and control. Framed with the concept of conflicting ecologies, thereby combining material political ecology with phenomenological and relational approaches, this article elaborates on different conceptions, relations, and terms of engagement with nature by the Punan Murung and representatives of the Dayak farmers’ organization, which are strongly interlinked with power relations. I show that the ecology of ethnically framed territorialization by the organization is hegemonic and subordinates the Punan Murung's alternative place-based ecology.     

‘It's not how it was’: the Chilean diaspora's changing landscape of belonging

Abstract

The increasingly diverse character of London's multicultural landscape has shaped how migrants interact with(in) the different spaces of the city. This process entails both settled and incoming migrants' participation in place-making; a mutual imbrication that might promote the long-settled migrants' evocation of a lost terrain. This article unpacks that process by looking at the Latin American social football scene of South London, specifically a space known as la cancha (the pitch). This was founded by Chilean political refugees during the 1970s and it has incorporated Latin American ‘economic’ migrants and ‘local’ Britons through time. Starting from the evocation of a lost ‘golden age’ of la cancha, the paper unpacks this space's contested, complex and changing nature. It presents diaspora space, community and belonging as lived processes. Through this depiction, the assumptions of homogeneous and isolated migrant communities are challenged, as are the diaspora's nostalgic claims that also emerge from them.     

Playing through differences: black–white racial logic and interrogating South Asian American identity

Abstract

This article examines how South Asian American communities ascribe meaning to the category of ‘race’ while adding their own sensibilities to racial categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’. Drawing upon ethnographic methods, I analyse leisure spaces of basketball to demonstrate how racial formation in the US for non-white ethnic American subjects engages the black–white racial binary while simultaneously critiquing this racial logic. Racial categories provide a lexicon for comprehending South Asian American difference, while South Asian idioms perpetuate racializing discourses.     

The evolution of moral progress and biomedical moral enhancement

In The Evolution of Moral Progress Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell advance an evolutionary explanation of moral progress by morality becoming more ‘inclusivist’. We are prepared to accept this explanation as far as it goes, but argue that it fails to explain how morality can become inclusivist in the fuller sense they intend. In fact, it even rules out inclusivism in their intended sense of moral progress, since they believe that human altruism and prosocial attitudes are essentially parochial. We also respond to their charge that the possibility of moral enhancement by biomedical means that we have defended in numerous publications assumes that moral attitudes are biologically hard‐wired to an extent that implies that they are resilient to the influence of cognitive or cultural factors. Quite the contrary, we think they are more open to such influence than they seem to do.     

The Dolezal affair: race,gender, and the micropolitics of identity

ABSTRACT

This article treats the pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” in the intertwined discussion of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal as an intellectual opportunity rather than a political provocation. I situate the Dolezal affair in the context of the massive destabilization of long taken-for-granted categorical frameworks, which has significantly enlarged the scope for choice and self-fashioning in the domains of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexuality. Anxieties about opportunistic, exploitative, or fraudulent identity claims have generated efforts to “police” unorthodox claims – as well as efforts to defend such claims against policing – in the name of authentic, objective, and unchosen identities. Instead of a shift from given to chosen identities, as posited by theories of reflexive modernity, we see a sharpened tension between idioms of choice, autonomy, subjectivity, and self-fashioning on the one hand and idioms of givenness, essence, objectivity, and nature on the other.     

Settler Postcolonial Ecologies and Native Species Regeneration on Banks Peninsula,Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

The 2050 Ecological Vision for Banks Peninsula, New Zealand is ‘to create an environment in which the community values, protects and cares for the biodiversity, landscape and special character of Banks Peninsula’. Its aspirational goals point to the peninsula conservation trust’s vision for success on the moral horizons of land and place. These horizons stretch visually from the volcanic crater ridgelines to the outer coastal bays and the sea beyond. Temporally they span 175 years of cultural encounters of peoples and biota, and reveal community-based strategies designed to support thriving biodiversity on land that has been used primarily for production. This article draws on the event, textual and interview data as well as fieldwork conducted in 2015 during the 175th anniversary of organised European settlement. Settler pasts and presents are negotiated in natural heritage preservation through the restoration of native flora and fauna in natural areas and protected connectivity corridors. A settler postcolonial ecology for these hill country lands is committed to the simultaneous conservation of biological and cultural diversity in which indigenous flora and fauna, landscapes and people, are irreversibly hybridised, and endemic species become constitutive of a postcolonial national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand.     

Social Responsibility and the State's Duty to provide Healthcare: An Islamic Ethico‐Legal Perspective

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights asserts that governments are morally obliged to promote health and to provide access to quality healthcare, essential medicines and adequate nutrition and water to all members of society. According to UNESCO, this obligation is grounded in a moral commitment to promoting fundamental human rights and emerges from the principle of social responsibility. Yet in an era of ethical pluralism and contentions over the universality of human rights conventions, the extent to which the UNESCO Declaration can motivate behaviors and policies rests, at least in part, upon accepting the moral arguments it makes. In this essay I reflect on a state's moral obligation to provide healthcare from the perspective of Islamic moral theology and law. I examine how Islamic ethico‐legal conceptual analogues for human rights and communal responsibility, ?uqūq al‐’ibād and far? al‐kifāyah and other related constructs might be used to advance a moral argument for healthcare provision by the state. Moving from theory to application, I next illustrate how notions of human rights and social responsibility were used by Muslim stakeholders to buttress moral arguments to support American healthcare reform. In this way, the paper advance discourses on a universal bioethics and common morality by bringing into view the concordances and discordances between Islamic ethico‐legal constructs and moral arguments advanced by transnational health policy advocates. It also provides insight into applied Islamic bioethics by demonstrating how Islamic ethico‐legal values might inform the discursive outputs of Muslim organizations.