Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:44:23.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Making the Ethical in Social Interaction

from Part II - Aspects of Ethical Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Webb Keane  and
Michael Lempert
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has charted alternatives to some prevailing philosophical, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This engagement forces anthropologists to reconsider old antinomies such as constraint and agency, relativism and universalism, individualism and collectivism. Like other anthropologists of ethics, we resist forms of determinism that would reduce ethical life to the putatively universal constraints of biology and psychology, the logic of rationality, or the workings of power and ideology. Instead, we consider the processes through which what seem to be constraints or universals serve as affordances that are ethicalized through historically contingent reflexive practices. Rather than being forced to choose between the individual and the collective in terms of who (or what) the ethical subject is, we demonstrate how social interaction is a critical site in which and through which such ethicalization occurs.

Keywords

ethicalizationsocial interactionmoral psychologyaffordanceslanguagestanceconversationreflexivitysubjecthistory
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 231 - 250
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy, Rickford, John R., and Ball, Arnetha F., eds. 2016. Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Appiah, Anthony. 2008. Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Benedict, Ruth. 1934. ‘Anthropology and the Abnormal’. Journal of General Psychology, 10: 59–82.Google Scholar
Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Miami, FL: University of Miami Press.Google Scholar
Bergmann, Jörg R. 1998. ‘Introduction: Morality in Discourse’. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 31(3–4): 279–94.Google Scholar
Briggs, Jean L. 1970. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Carr, E. Summerson. 2011. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Carr, E. Summerson 2013. ‘“Signs of the Times”: Confession and the Semiotic Production of Inner Truth’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 34–51.Google Scholar
Darwall, Stephen. 1998. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Das, Veena 2010. ‘Moral and Spiritual Striving in the Everyday: To Be a Muslim in Contemporary India’, in Pandian, Anand and Ali, Daud (eds.), Ethical Life in South Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 232–53.Google Scholar
Das, Veena 2012. ‘Ordinary Ethics’, in Fassin, Didier (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Drew, Paul. 1998. ‘Complaints About Transgressions and Misconduct’. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 31(3–4): 295–325.Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. and Sidnell, Jack. 2017. The Concept of Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. and Kockelman, Paul. 2017. Distributed Agency: Foundations of Human Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Errington, J. Joseph. 1998. Shifting Languages: Interaction and Identity in Javanese Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1997. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, Gros, Frédéric, Ewald, François, Fontana, Alessandro, Davidson, Arnold I., and Burchell, Graham. 2011. The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Gershon, Ilana. 2010. ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Media Switching and Media Ideologies’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(2): 389–405.Google Scholar
Gibson, James J. 1977. ‘The Theory of Affordances’, in Shaw, R. and Bransford, J. (eds.), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum: 67–82.Google Scholar
Goebel, Zane. 2010. Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighborhood Talk in Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1955. ‘On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction’. Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, 18(3): 213–31.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving 1956. ‘Embarrassment and Social Organization’. The American Journal of Sociology, 62(3): 264–74.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving 1957. ‘Alienation from Interaction’. Human Relations, 10(1): 47–60.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 2006. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Haidt, Jonathan. 2001. ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment’. Psychological Review, 108(4): 814–34.Google Scholar
Hillewaert, Sarah. 2020. Morality at the Margins: Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Howell, Signe. 1989. Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious Language: The Political Economy of Gender and Speech in Japan. Oakland,CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos. 1979. ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’. Econometrica, 47(2): 263–91.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 1997. Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb 2002. ‘Sincerity, “Modernity,” and the Protestants’. Cultural Anthropology, 17(1): 65–92.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb 2010. ‘Minds, Surfaces, and Reasons in the Anthropology of Ethics’, in Lambek, Michael (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham Press: 64–83.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb 2014. ‘Affordances and Reflexivity in Ethical Life: An Ethnographic Stance’. Anthropological Theory, 14(1): 3–26.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb 2018. ‘Perspectives on Affordances, or the Anthropologically Real: The 2018 Daryll Forde Lecture’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8(1–2): 27–38.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb 2019. ‘How Everyday Ethics Becomes a Moral Economy, and Vice Versa’. Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, 13: 1–25.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2): 311–32.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, James 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lambek, Michael, ed. 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham Press.Google Scholar
Lambek, Michael 2015. ‘On the Immanence of the Ethical: A Response to Michael Lambek, “No Ordinary Ethics”.’ Anthropological Theory, 15(2): 128–32.Google Scholar
Lave, Jean. 1988. Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lempert, Michael. 2012. Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lempert, Michael 2013. ‘No Ordinary Ethics’. Anthropological Theory, 13(4): 370–93.Google Scholar
Lempert, Michael 2015. ‘Ethics without Immanence: A Reply to Michael Lambek’. Anthropological Theory, 15(2): 133–40.Google Scholar
Lempert, Michael 2016. ‘Interaction Rescaled: How Buddhist Debate Became a Diasporic Pedagogy’, in Summerson Carr, E. and Lempert, Michael (eds.), Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Oakland, CA: University of California Press: 52–69.Google Scholar
Lempert, Michael n.d. From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale. (ms)Google Scholar
Love, Heather. 2016. ‘Small Change: Realism, Immanence, and the Politics of the Micro’. Modern Language Quarterly, 77(3): 419–45.Google Scholar
Luong, Hy Van. 1988. ‘Discourse Practices and Power Structure: Person-Referring Forms and Sociopolitical Struggle in Colonial Vietnam’. American Ethnologist, 15(2): 239–53.Google Scholar
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Mathias, John. 2019. ‘Sticky Ethics: Environmental Activism and the Limits of Ethical Freedom in Kerala, India’. Anthropological Theory, 20(3): 1–24.Google Scholar
Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12(2): 161–84.Google Scholar
Mattingly, Cheryl and Throop, Jason. 2018. ‘The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47: 475–92.Google Scholar
Mead, George Herbert. 1967. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Morris, Charles W.. Vol. 1. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mercier, Hugo and Sperber, Dan. 2019. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pierce, Chester. 1970. ‘Offensive Mechanisms’, in Barbour, Floyd B. (ed.), The Black Seventies. Boston, MA: Sargent: 265–82.Google Scholar
Reed, Adam and Bialecki, Jon. 2018a. ‘Special Section 1: Anthropology and Character’. Social Anthropology, 26(2).Google Scholar
Reed, Adam and Bialecki, Jon. 2018b. ‘Special Section 2: Anthropology and Character’. Social Anthropology, 26(3).Google Scholar
Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change’. Ethnos, 72(3): 293–314.Google Scholar
Robbins, Joel 2009. ‘Value, Structure, and the Range of Possibilities: A Response to Zigon’. Ethnos, 74(2): 277–85.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey. 1972. ‘Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character’, in Sudnow, David N. (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press: 280–93.Google Scholar
Shohet, Merav. 2021. Silence and Sacrifice: Family Stories of Care and the Limits of Love in Vietnam. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Shweder, Richard A., Mahapatra, Manamohan, and Miller, Joan G.. 1990. ‘Culture and Moral Development’, in Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. New York: Cambridge University Press: 130–204.Google Scholar
Sidnell, Jack, Meudec, Marie, and Lambek, Michael. 2019. ‘Ethical Immanence’. Special Issue of Anthropological Theory, 19(3).Google Scholar
Siegel, Jerrold E. 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Steinem, Gloria. 1995. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: H. Holt.Google Scholar
Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Yin, Cheryl. 2021. Khmer Honorifics: Re-emergence and Change After the Khmer Rouge. PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Zigon, Jarrett. 2009. ‘Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in Social Life’. Ethnos, 74(2): 251–76.Google Scholar
Zuckerman, Charles H. P., ed. 2021. ‘The Generic. Special Issue 4’. Language in Society, 50(4): 509–621.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×