Morality Morality An Anthropological Perspective Jarrett Zigon Oxford • New York First published in 2008 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Jarrett Zigon 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Zigon, Jarrett. Morality : an anthropological perspective / Jarrett Zigon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-658-1 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-84520-658-4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-659-8 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-659-2 (pbk.) 1. Ethics—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Anthropology—Psychology. 3. Anthropological ethics. I. Title. GN468.7.Z54 2008 170—dc22 2008025876 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84520 658 1 (Cloth) ISBN 978 1 84520 659 8 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn www.bergpublishers.com Contents Introduction 1 Some Early Works in the Anthropology of Moralities 4 Relativism 9 Outline of Book 19 Part I The Philosophical and Theoretical Foundations of the Anthropological Studies of Morality 1 The Philosophical and Theoretical Foundations of Social Scientific Studies of Morality – From Plato and Aristotle to Durkheim, Weber, and Foucault 23 Philosophical Theories of Morality 23 The Roots of a Social Scientific Theory of Morality 32 Some Final Words 45 Part II Religion and Law 2 Religion 49 Witchcraft 49 Moral Consciousness and the Ethics of Self 52 Change, Religion, and Moralities 59 Some Final Words 63 3 Law 65 State and Law 66 Moral Economies, Inequality, and Property 70 Human Rights 75 Some Final Words 79 Case Study 1 Moral Torment in Papua New Guinea 81 Part III Sexuality, Gender, and Health 4 Gender and Sexuality 87 Gender and Moralities 87 Sexuality 95 vi • Contents Family, Children, and Morality 102 Some Final Words 106 5 Illness, Health, and Medicine 107 The Morality of Biomedicine 107 HIV/AIDS and Morality 111 Narrative and Medical Encounters 117 Bioethics 121 Some Final Words 125 Case Study 2 Morality and Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia 127 Part IV Language, Narrative, and Discourse 6 Language, Discourse, and Narrative 133 Discourse, Performativity, and Moral Communication 133 Narrative 146 Some Final Words 152 Case Study 3 Narratives of Moral Experience in Moscow 155 Part V Closing 7 Some Closing Words 161 Morality and Ethics 162 References 167 Index 179 Introduction Morality is a concept that has been of philosophical interest for over 2,000 years. Rarely, however, did these philosophical explorations take much notice of the everyday moral lives of actual, living people (some important exceptions are: Brandt 1954; Ladd 1957; Nordenstam 1968). In other words, moral philosophy tends to consider the concept of morality at an abstract level. At the beginning of the twentieth century sociocultural anthropology as we know and practice it today began to shape itself. In contrast to philosophy, modern anthropology took on the task of describing and analyzing the everyday life experiences and conceptual worlds of different peoples around the world. Yet, as several have argued, until recently there have been very few explicit anthropological studies of local moralities (Wolfram 1982: 274; Pocock 1986: 7; Faubion 2001a; Laidlaw 2002; Robbins 2007; Zigon 2007). This, no doubt, is a contested claim. For many anthropologists will say that in having studied, for example, the various religious, gender and kinship systems from around the world, they have been studying morality all along (Parkin 1985: 4). This, however, is a question of definition. According to those anthropologists who would claim that the discipline has, at least to some extent, been studying morality all along, it would seem as though they would agree with Ruth Benedict’s claim that morality “is a convenient term for socially approved habits” (1956: 195). Unfortunately, such a definition does not differentiate morality from any of the other concepts anthropologists generally use. For if morality is just another term for socially approved habits, then morality becomes a synonym for, for example, religious practice, ritual, reciprocity, or kin relations. It is a central contention of this book that it is this confusion of definition that has stood in the way of a more subtle and in-depth anthropological study of moralities.1 In exploring various examples of anthropological approaches to the study of moralities, we will leave behind this confusion and set out a more focused approach to this study. This book, then, is an exploration of the anthropology of moralities. Its main task is to forge a new path for this important line of research. This will require new and more precise definitions of what is to be studied. For I think it is fair to say that the history of our discipline has shown that it is only with this kind of focused 1. Wolfram points out that this confusion of definition stems from anthropology’s theoretical foundations in Durkheimian sociology and Durkheim’s confusion and poor philosophizing on morality (1982). This point is also made in Laidlaw 2002 and Robbins 2005. 1 2 • Morality study that our methods are appropriate. But new paths always depend on what was already there. Because of this, it is important that we carefully consider the various anthropological studies that claim, to varying degrees, to be studies of morality. Therefore, a significant amount of what follows in this book will be an overview of these studies, including three case studies that explore the work of three anthro- pologists in more detail. While I focus on the most recent works in the discipline, it will be important to mention those few earlier anthropological studies of local moralities that serve as the foundation for this new disciplinary focus. What will become clear almost immediately as we begin this exploration of the literature is that very few of these studies were originally conceived as anthropo- logical studies of local moralities. In itself this is not a problem, for it is quite common and even expected that the fieldwork experience will bring about new and unexpected discoveries and analyses. Nevertheless, because morality is an undertheorized and confused concept within the discipline, it often leads to, in my view, one of several misuses. One misuse is that which I have already mentioned, namely, that morality is conflated with, in the words of Benedict, “socially approved habits.” As we will see, this has its roots in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century social theories of Emile Durkheim, whose ideas still hold much influence in the social sciences. A second common misuse of the analytic concept of morality is to impose some Western philosophical view of morality onto the everyday moralities of the people we study. Because anthropology has not yet provided a view of morality that goes much beyond Benedict’s definition, we often rely on some version of a Western philosophical view. Thus, for example, it is not uncommon to come across Habermasian rational communicators, Taylorian agents, or Aristotelian social virtu- osos in the anthropological literature. While there is no doubt that anthropologists of moralities have much to gain with engagement with moral philosophy, imposing these philosophies more or less in whole onto anthropological data and the lives of our informants does little to move the discipline forward or, more importantly, to adequately describe the moral lives of the people we study. A third misuse of the concept of morality is the imposition of the anthropologist’s personal moral views onto the lives of the people they study. This is particularly true for some Marxian and feminist anthropologists who, although I agree with their views to a great extent, unfortunately too often seem to analyze their data through preconceived theoretical lenses. Throughout this book we will have ample opportunity to see each of these misuses of the analytic concept of morality in the works we consider. As I have already said, I suggest one reason why these misuses are so common is because so few anthropological studies begin as explicit studies of local moralities. Therefore, one way of avoiding these mistakes is to engage in anthropological studies of local moralities from the start. For in doing so, the anthropologist is forced to consider more thoroughly just what it is she means by morality. It is my hope that this book will help in this consideration, and in the final Introduction • 3 chapter I will offer a guideline for conceiving of morality and the moral lives of our interlocutors in a more subtle manner so as to help bring about this kind of more focused research and analysis. To summarize, then, this book will be an exploration of the anthropology of moralities. It is my contention that despite claims to the contrary, this is a very recent explicit and more sophisticated research agenda for anthropologists. Therefore, this book will focus on more recent anthropological (as well as a few other social scientific) works that take morality as either their explicit and intended focus of research, or use morality as an after the fact analytic concept. Because the latter works still remain more common, we will have an excellent opportunity to see the differences and respected merits of both approaches. Let me also add that this book is not a work on the ethics of anthropology as a discipline or its research methods. There are already numerous works that address this important issue (for example, see: Cassell 1980; Fine 1993; Robben and Sluka 2007). Rather, this book is, to the best of my knowledge, the first to provide an overview of the work that has already been done and suggests ways to move ahead in the increasingly important anthropological study of local moralities. The question of the book, then, is not how we as anthropological researchers should morally engage with the peoples we study, for that is the realm of the ethics of anthropological fieldwork, but instead how the peoples we study conceive of, negotiate, and practice morality in their everyday lives. This does, however, raise the important question of the distinction between morality and ethics. Ethics has its origins in the ancient Greek word ethos, meaning way of life or custom and habit, and morality comes from mos, which is simply the Latin translation of ethos. Here, of course, it is easy to see why Benedict’s definition might be appealing. But it is important to note that there has been over 2,000 years of philosophical discourse on the concept that has taken it well beyond this simple view. This discourse cannot be simply dismissed out of hand. More to the point, as this word origin suggests, with few exceptions, there has been very little distinction either philosophically or anthropologically between morality and ethics. It should be pointed out, however, that increasingly ethics has come to be associated with the proper and expected way of doing a certain profession, such as, the ethics of anthropological research or medical ethics or business ethics. Despite this distinction of professional ethics, there is generally little other distinction made (for an example of a social theorist who does make a distinction, see Bauman 1993). Because of this, throughout this book while discussing others’ work, I too will make no distinction between morality and ethics and will do my best to keep to the term used by the author about whom I am writing. Nevertheless, because I believe a real distinction between these two terms is in fact helpful for the future of an anthropology of moralities, in the concluding chapter I will offer what I see as a helpful distinction between morality and ethics. 4 • Morality Some Early Works in the Anthropology of Moralities Discounting late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century evolutionary anthropology, which produced a good deal of text on the evolution and development of morality cross-culturally – one example of this is Marett’s “Rudimentary Ethics,” in which he argued that there are two stages of society, the first stage is that of non-moral custom and habit and the second of rational decision-making where morality ap- pears in society for the first time – it is difficult to find ethnographic works that explore the moral worlds of local peoples explicitly and in depth. This, as I have already mentioned, is a contested statement; it is, however, one that I believe is true if we consider morality to be more than “socially approved habits.” K. E. Read, an anthropologist who did one of the first focused anthropological studies of morality, agrees. Read argues that the failure of anthropologists through most of the twentieth century to explicitly study local moralities is twofold (1955: 235–47). First, he suggests, there was a general reaction against the evolutionary theories that often made a priority of showing the superiority of Western morality and civilization, and therefore, it was a theme and concept that became, if you will, taboo. Second, Read argues that the fact that modern anthropology was modeled on the natural sciences led to the eschewing of the study of those things considered to be non-objective, such as morality. If Read is correct in his twofold explanation, which I believe he is, it is interesting to note that it has only been after the so-called interpretive and hum- anistic turn in anthropology in the last twenty years or so that anthropologists have begun to explore with more subtlety the moral worlds of their informants. Despite this lack of ethnographic focus on morality, there are still some important works we can look to as having made an attempt to consider the moral worlds of local peoples. One of the earliest examples is that of E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s work on witchcraft among the Azande (1968[1937]). I will discuss this text in more detail in Chapter 2, but for now it is important to note that Evans-Pritchard saw witchcraft as central to the moral value system of the Azande, and as he put it, “‘It is witchcraft’ may often be translated simply as ‘It is bad’” (1968[1937]: 107). Although Evans- Pritchard does not go into much detail about the moral world and its concepts of the Azande, by showing that witchcraft can be interpreted as a moral concept he laid the groundwork for decades of anthropological research on witchcraft. An even earlier work that is often cited as an anthropological exploration of a local moral world is Malinowski’s book on crime and custom among the Trobriand Islanders (1926). In response to the general perception of his day that so-called savages lived in a lawless and anarchic state of being, Malinowski argued that the Trobriand Islanders lived in a well-ordered society without the need for institutionalized law akin to that of Euro-American societies. This could be shown, so he argued, by discovering and analyzing “all the rules conceived and acted upon as binding obligations, to find out the nature of the binding forces,” and to classify “the norms and rules of a primitive community” (Malinowski 1926: 15). While this may