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The Anthropology of Ethics Anthropological interest in morality has until recently been dominated by the theme of collective rules and norms, seen either as bulwarks for social solidarity or as evidence of irreducible cross-cultural variety: the relativist idea of different cultures each embodying a taken-for-granted moral philosophy, each radically different from western morality. In all this, morality has tended to collapse into society or culture more generally, and to be equated with adherence (or resistance) to rules or norms. By contrast, recent writings under the rubric of the anthropology of ethics have begun from the conviction that when people pursue, or act in the light of, conceptions of human excellence or the good, certain distinctive things (including reflective thought) are going on, which are not explicable in terms of collective norms and which prevalent conceptions of society and culture cannot readily capture. Many, though not all, have been influenced by virtue ethics (including Aristotle, especially as interpreted by MacIntyre) and/or by the later writings of Foucault. Lambek (2000, 2002), for instance, has insisted on the pervasive significance of morality or ethics as reflective striving for the good, requiring the exercise of judgement or practical reason, and has interpreted Aristotles conception of practical reason as achieving a genuine synthesis between the poles of unthinking habit and rational calculation, which practice theory merely oscillates between. He has suggested that we will find reflective striving for the good embodied in practices, such as spirit possession, which like ritual in general involve displacements of intentionality, and where, for instance, individuals may speak in the voice of some conception of a general good. MacIntyre (1981) characterises virtue as the purposeful cultivation of goods that are intrinsic to complex, culturally instituted practices (so strategic intelligence in the case of chess, as distinct from the extrinsic wealth or fame one might achieve through success at chess). Widlok (2004) has suggested that we might study ethnographically the way virtues are not bound to cultures but manifested wherever the varied practices that embody them are undertaken for their own sake, and illustrated how this might work with the example of sharing. Pandian (2008) has observed that MacIntyres conception of a tradition, as a set of ongoing arguments embedded and transmitted in practices, relieves us of the false choice of seeing traditions as either unchanging or invented, and has adapted MacIntyres conception to interpret aspects of ethical practice in rural south India. These approaches have in common the irreducibility of the ethical field to rules and power, and attempts to escape the problem situation of ethical relativism. In his later writings, Foucault (2000) explicitly repudiated the idea, with which he had come to be associated, of power as systematic domination that leaves no room for freedom. Under subjectivation (assujetissement), he included both processes of subjection and practices of self-constitution and self-transformation. In his genealogy of ethics Foucault distinguished moral codes rules that might be imposed, followed, or resisted from ethics, which are projects for making oneself into a certain kind of person (others seek to distinguish ethics from morality in other ways). And he developed an analytical framework for the comparative study of such projects, distinguishing the part of the self that is the object of ethical attention in any given project (ontology), from the mode in which that attention is directed (deontology), the techniques used to work on the self (ascetics), and the state of the self the project is directed towards realising (teleology). Such ethical projects exist only insofar as prevalent modes of domination leave room for the reflective practice of freedom (which takes distinctive historical forms and is not to be equated with ideas of abstract or unconstrained free choice). According to Foucault, a completely subjugated slave

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who could only ever act as someone elses agent would have no ethics in this sense. While this is not incompatible with Lambeks stress on the ubiquity of ethical judgement, it clearly raises as an empirical question the scope and resources people have to engage in projects of self-constitution, and to exercise ethical judgement, in particular social contexts. While some interpreters of the earlier Foucault read him as saying that no such possibility ever exists, anthropologists have found it in perhaps initially surprising places: in the way lay followers of the radically ascetic Indian religious tradition of Jainism negotiate between conflicting conceptions of human excellence (Laidlaw 1995, 2002); in the way Mongols living under Maoist repression chose exemplars by which to live (Humphrey 1997); and in the way the Urapmin people in Papua New Guinea, recently converted to Pentecostal Christianity, respond to experiencing two mutually condemnatory moral codes as simultaneously applicable to them (Robbins 2004). In addition, two ethnographic studies Faubions (2001a) of a follower of the Branch Davidian sect, conducted in the aftermath of the Waco massacre, and that by Mahmood (2005) and Hirschkind (2006) of Islamic reformist revivalism in Cairo have discerned sophisticated ethical projects of self-constitution in apparently authoritarian schools of religious fundamentalism. However, these studies pose searching questions for each other. Faubion (2001b) makes a convincing case for pedagogy as the foundational ethical relationship (it is important to note that ethical projects of self-transformation are not separate from, indeed always involve, ethics as relations with others), and, although all such relationships begin with subordination and proceed through constraint, he offers as a criterion for genuinely ethical pedagogic relationships that their trajectory be one in which the pupil is led towards autonomy from the master. Yet Mahmood and Hirschkind emphasise that the projects they describe, although they begin with reflective decisions of the part of those who join these movements, are directed towards making submission an unreflective, embodied disposition, a pre-subjective and pre-conscious instinct. If this is so, does their telos include the eradication of precisely that practice of freedom which was its precondition? So does this show, as Mahmood and Hirschkind, might claim, that Faubions criterion (and probably Foucaults too) is ethnocentric? Or should we query Mahmood and Hirschkinds claim that the end as well as the beginning of these projects is ethical? There is much still to debate in this emerging field. JAMES LAIDLAW Further Reading Faubion, J.D. (2001a) The Shadows and Lights of Waco, Princeton: Princeton University Press. - (2001b) Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoesis. Representations, 74: 83-104. Foucault, M. (2000) Essential Works. Volume 1. Ethics, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hirschkind, C. (2006) The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics, New York: Columbia University Press. Humphrey, C. (1997) Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia in S. Howell (ed) The Anthropology of Moralities, London: Routledge: 25-47.

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Laidlaw, J. (1995) Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains, Oxford: Clarendon Press. - (2002) For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311-32. Lambek, M. (2000) The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy. Current Anthropology, 41: 309-320. - (2002) Nuriaty, the Saint and the Sultan: Virtuous Subject and Subjective Virtuoso of the Postmodern Colony, in R. Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa, London: Routledge: 25-43. MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue, London: Duckworth. Mahmood, S. (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pandian, A. (2008) Tradition in Fragments: Inherited Forms and Fractures in the Ethics of South India. American Ethnologist, 35: 115. Robbins, J (2004) Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, Berkeley: University of California Press. Widlok, T. (2004) Sharing by Default: Outline of an Anthropology of Virtue. Anthropological Theory, 4: 53-70.