Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Rights

Water

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 14:42:27 +0000

Durham University

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

Abstract:

Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its influence on how societies organise themselves socially and spatially; its role in leisure activities and the enjoyment of its aesthetic qualities. Human relationships with water, though culturally and historically specific, share common themes of meaning, recognising water’s essentiality to life, health and well-being at every scale. This often translates into the use of ‘living water‘ in religious rituals, such as baptism or mortuary ceremonies, in which water expresses important ideas about social identity and spiritual movement between material and non-material domains.

The material control of water has long been recognised as vital to gaining and maintaining political power. In recent decades anthropology has focused increasingly on debates about water ownership and rights of access to water, and considered how the control of water reflects social, economic and political relations. There is growing interest in water infrastructures, and how they have often enabled unsustainable practices in water use and management. Today, as the world faces an anthropogenically-created ecological crisis, water issues are central to concerns about climate change, global warming, and increasing volatility and uncertainty in water flows. This has encouraged a new area of anthropological focus on non-human as well as human rights in relation to water. Thus the anthropology of water extends from its multiple uses in everyday life to the major issues that all societies urgently need to address.

Introduction

As the element essential to life and to all processes of production and reproduction, water permeates every domain of human existence. It has always had a background presence in anthropology’s ethnographic literature, where it appears in religious rituals; shapes human spatial organization around water sources; and structures people’s lifeways and modes of production, as well as their ecological knowledge and environmental engagement. However, water itself has not been the focus of anthropological studies until relatively recently. It came to the fore with growing interest in the relationship between the control of water and political power and, more strongly, when environmental anthropology emerged as a lively subfield in response to increasing concerns about sustainability. As societies have begun to realise that the world is facing a human-made ecological crisis, water has become the focus of intense research in multiple disciplinary areas. Anthropology brings to this a vitally important capacity to illuminate its diverse social and cultural dimensions (Hastrup 2011, Hastrup & Hastrup 2015, de Wolff et al. 2019, Wagner 2013).

Human engagements with water take place on every scale, beginning with the most basic physical needs for clean water to maintain health and to ensure bodily and domestic hygiene. Recognition that water is literally essential to all biological organisms means that it has cross-cultural meaning as the ‘substance of life’. This understanding supports important concepts of water as a common good, to which everyone must have rights of access and use, and this fundamental principle permeates many discussions about water ownership and governance. Yet many people lack access to clean water and sanitation for a variety of reasons, including the overuse of limited local resources; disruption of rural lifeways; economic imperatives to migrate to marginal and poorly served urban areas; and insufficient fiscal or technical capacities to create infrastructures for water supply. Such a lack of access to clean water is a key indicator of governmental capacities to provide for people’s most basic needs, and of the deep inequalities existing both within and between societies.

Religion, health and wealth

Anxieties about meeting basic human rights of access to sufficient clean water tend to obscure other aspects of people’s immediate engagement with it, but these are also powerful influences on how people respond to a range of water issues. Water’s essentiality to life means that it has a central place in multiple religious belief systems. In many place-based societies, where what are often described as ‘nature religions’ pertain, its elemental powers are frequently manifested in deities responsible for rain, fertility, and the creation of life. For example, in Africa, Mami Wata, a water goddess valorised in many parts of the continent’s west coast, provides all of these things (Drewal 2008). In Aboriginal Australia, water is the source of cosmogenesis in the creative era known as Dreamtime, in which the world was formed, while the Rainbow Serpent, which is a manifestation of the powers of water, continues to generate life from within the land (Merlan 1998, Strang 2009). In the monotheisms of larger societies, water features as a vital manifestation of a humanised deity’s divine beneficence or, in the form of floods or drought, as an expression of god’s wrath. Thus for many people, access to sufficient and timely water carries an important moral and religious dimension.

Whatever the form of the providing deities, many religious schema also conflate ideas about water and the human spirit, generating visions of ‘living water’, vital to physical and spiritual well-being (Krause & Strang 2013). Such beliefs are central to a host of rituals in which water cleanses, heals, and blesses, and metaphorically carries the spirit between material and non-material domains. The notion of living water is also a response to people’s phenomenological engagement with it as an animated and animating element that is always in motion: shimmering, flowing, appearing, and disappearing. Physical and immediate interactions with water – bathing, drinking, swimming, and observing – provide a range of compelling sensory experiences, which lend emotive weight to people’s thinking about water and what it means (Krause 2016, Strang 2005). Thus, an understanding that water flows through, enlivens, and connects people and places supports important ideas about common substance and identity. These are neatly expressed, for example, in the use of water for rituals of baptism that welcome individuals into particular groups or congregations, or which conjoin them in marriage (Mallery 2011). The inevitable dark side of this understanding is that a vision of identity as literally ‘substantial’ also allows for many anxieties about social and/or physical pollution, and invasions of ‘otherness’ that might compromise individual or collective health and well-being (Strang 2004).

Concepts of holiness, health, and wealth are both etymologically and conceptually related. They express capacities for maintaining (spiritual, bodily, or fiscal) wholeness and flourishing. As well as being seen as fundamental to physical health, the relationship between health and water has seen a transition from assumptions about water’s intrinsic healing qualities (as assumed, for example, in the thousands of holy and healing wells in many parts of the world) to more material notions about the healing properties of water’s mineral content, which led to a major fashion in Europe for spas and baths (Anderson & Tabb 2002). Water’s centrality to processes of production leads to cross-cultural acknowledgement of its essential role in enabling human agency and generating wealth. What constitutes wealth is culturally diverse, but in many societies the relationship between water and wealth is often demonstrated in the ways that the ownership of water, displayed in landscaped gardens, fountains, and pools, provides a key signifier of wealth and social status.

Power and control

As the above implies, the control of water is intrinsically related to economic and political power, and historical and ethnographic research has demonstrated that how water is controlled and distributed provides a precise mirror of social, political, and environmental relations. A classic study of Balinese water temples, for instance, describes the carefully balanced social and hydrological relations mediated by local priests acting as both religious leaders and water managers (Lansing 1991). On a larger scale, it has famously been argued that major infrastructures such as irrigation schemes, requiring the centralisation and coordination of labour, were foundational to the creation of nation states (Hocart 1970). The importance of water in political organization is particularly clear in the historical emergence of ‘hydraulic societies’ dependent upon major irrigation schemes, such as those in Mesopotamia, and in the Indus Valley (Butzer 1976, Giosan et al. 2012, Tvedt & Jakobsson 2006). Karl Wittfogel’s historical analysis of water in China suggested that state capacities to control a vast network of canals was vital for the establishment of powerful imperial dynasties (1957). However, subsequent writers have rejected the argument that the control of water necessarily leads to ‘despotic regimes’, observing that relationships between water and power can take many different forms (Krause & Ley forthcoming).

However, Wittfogel’s more fundamental point, that power and the control of water are inextricably related, remains influential, and contemporary ethnographers have continued to explore how the control of water mediates relations between states and citizens, with access to water often demonstrating persistent social inequalities. For example, the manipulation of weirs, sluices, and water flows in a South Indian irrigation scheme has been shown to reinforce the advantages of village elites (Mosse 2003). In multiple development contexts, gender inequality influences women’s access to and control over water (Coles & Wallace 2005, see also Lahiri-Dutt 2006). The provision of water in Mumbai turns out to be linked to social identity and recognition of ‘hydraulic citizenship’, and leads to the exclusion of marginal groups lacking such recognition (Anand 2017). Shifts in ideology are similarly reflected in water. A strong focus on instrumentalism – a determination to act directively on the material environment – in industrialised societies has been exported, via literal and economic colonialism, to many parts of the world under the guise of development (Lewis & Mosse 2006).

Focusing on the history of the American West, the commodification of water into an asset may mean that ‘capitalism has created over the last 100 years a new distinctive type of hydraulic society, one that demonstrates once more how the domination of nature can lead to the domination of some people over others’ (Worster 2006: 50, see also Escobar 2005, Josephson 2002, Reisner 2001).

Water has its own material powers, of course, in the force provided by water flows. Many societies have harnessed these powers, via channels, water wheels, and mills, to do ‘work’ to support their processes of production, and to direct irrigation to their crops. But water is not always amenable: it also has its own agentive effects in making and unmaking environments and impacting upon human lives. In a world dominated by dualistic ideas of nature as the ‘other’ to culture, water is commonly seen to represent the capacities of the non-human world to reject the authority of human instrumentality. Water’s material forces highlight that such efforts often involve an intrinsic tension – a wrestling for control (Edgeworth 2011). This brings to the fore the reality that every cultural landscape is also a cultural waterscape. Control over water flows is achieved via the imposition of dams, canals, drainage, reservoirs, pipes, and other directive infrastructure that materialises societal ideas, values, and practices in relation to water. As with other forms of infrastructure, such concretization inscribes long-term patterns of human-environmental engagement upon the land and waterscape (Bichsel 2016, Harvey & Knox 2012, Larkin 2013).

Over time, human communities have engaged with water with varying degrees of determination to control its movements and direct its flows into serving their interests. Early societies, and those that have retained pre-industrial economic modes of hunting and gathering, horticulture, and small-scale agriculture, have tended to be conservative in their practices, working with the inherent processes of local ecosystems, and imposing relatively low-key forms of manipulation of the landscape for their purposes. In many larger societies, however, trajectories of human-environmental engagement have been very different, as population growth and technological developments have encouraged more assertive efforts to control water flows. Social and religious changes, in particular movements from nature religions to monotheistic beliefs, have led to notions of ‘dominion’ and the desire to impose patriarchal authority on ‘nature’, often feminised as alternate to male ‘culture’ (Plumwood 1993, 2002). The objectification of nature has also been encouraged by a more scientific lens upon the world, through which ideas about what water is have become ‘disenchanted’, leading to its reconceptualization as H₂O (Illich 1996, Linton 2010).

Greater dominion over water has been realised through new forms of science and technology enabling extensive engineering of the landscape and increasing capacities to direct water flows into supporting the needs and desires of rapidly enlarging human populations. Water usage has risen, in part because of more profligate domestic habits, but also in its use to support societies’ growing dependence on irrigated agriculture, as well as industry itself, which – due to the embodied water in goods and production processes – often results in the movement of water globally from arid environments to densely populated and wealthier temperate regions (Hoekstra & Chapagain 2007, Meissner 2012).

The commoditization of water, and its reductive reframing as a resource or economic asset, has further encouraged utilitarian ideas about the material world as the basis for the provision of ‘environmental services’ or ‘ecosystem services’ to humankind. Patterns of water use in many societies have reflected the dominance of these ideas. In the last century there has been a race to build large dams, canals, and other infrastructures designed to direct water into enlarging urban areas; into hydro-electric generation; and into irrigated agriculture (Khagram 2004). Today over 70% of the Earth’s freshwater is directed into irrigation, and the World Bank has stated that a further 15% will be needed in the next decade to provide sufficient food and energy for the expanding human population.^[1]They are predicting major shortfalls, which raises the prospect of a range of problems, including rising numbers of environmental refugees.

Infrastructure and conflict

Shortfalls in water supply also exacerbate the issues surrounding the management of transboundary water flows which provide opportunities for both collaboration and conflict. The United Nations reports that 145 states share transboundary lakes or rivers (2019). In the last fifty years, 295 international water agreements have been signed, but there have also been thirty-seven ‘acute transboundary water disputes’ and two-thirds of the 263 transboundary river basins lack any framework for cooperative management. With rising demand, and with water flows becoming less reliable (in particular where global warming has diminished the water storage provided by glaciers), there is obvious potential for greater conflict.

Such tensions are readily evident in the controversies relating to the construction of big and ‘mega’ dams, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (built in 1936); the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River (funded by the World Bank in the 1950s); and, more recently, the Sardar Sarovar Damon the Narmada River, and the Three Gorges Dams on the Yangtze River. 57,0000 large dams have been constructed over the last century: these generate nearly 20% of the world’s energy, and assist much of its irrigation. They have supported worldwide population movement into urban areas, and the development of industries. Thus – like the earlier hydraulic infrastructures noted by Arthur Hocart – they have often been seen as integral to the building and flourishing of the nation state (Biggs 2012, Mohamud & Verhoeven 2016, Verhoeven 2015).

However, the human and environmental costs of such large-scale directive engagements with water have also been massive (Rodgers & O’Neill 2012). As well as increasing the potential for transboundary conflicts, their focus on water storage for resource extraction, urban supply, and cheap hydro-electricity has resulted in many human rights violations and, with concomitant social impacts, the displacement of thousands of people living in riparian rural communities (Hwang et al. 2007, Mathur 2006, McDonald-Wilmsen & Webber 2010, Oliver-Smith 2009). Such projects have also resulted in extreme violence at times – such as the massacre of 400 Indigenous people to make way for the Chixoy Dam in Guatamala in 1982. Thousands more have been killed by dam failures; for example the collapse of China’s Banqiao Dam in 1975 killed an estimated 171,000 people.^[2]Huge dams, because of the enormous weight of water that they contain, have also been implicated in causing earthquakes: thus the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan is thought to have triggered a major earthquake in 2008.

Many of the costs of dams and related water infrastructures are less dramatic but no less damaging. Financially, large dams tend to be uneconomic: they typically overrun predicted levels of investment by up to 96% (Ansar et al. 2014). They also incur major social, economic, and environmental costs. In disrupting hydrological flows, dams are hugely destructive to aquatic ecosystems, and there are human costs as well in the loss of access to water for downstream farmers, fisheries, and tourism. More broadly, irrigated agriculture in many regions has led not only to diminishing harvests, but also to widespread land salination, rendering vast areas infertile even for native vegetation. This is particularly the case in ecologically vulnerable areas such as Australia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southern United States, where irrigation has been aimed at producing profitable – but for arid regions, unsuitable – crops, such as cotton, rice, and wheat.

But, as Peter Bosshard, the policy director for International Rivers (an international NGO seeking to protect rivers) notes, ‘[m]any actors have vested interests in building dams’ (2014). It is an area rife with corruption, in which major engineering contractors, irrigation consortia, and others stand to gain considerably, either through huge profits on construction, or through the gaining of water allocations for massive irrigation or hydroelectric schemes.

A notorious example is provided by Cubbie Station: an irrigation venture in south Queensland, so large as to be visible from space (Strang 2013). Cubbie Station’s directors persuaded the Queensland Government to allow it to buy up over 50 water licences, and to build a series of dams along twenty-eight kilometres of the Culgoa River. The station is situated just above the New South Wales border, and diverts about a quarter of the water that would otherwise flow into the Darling River, and thus into the Murray Darling Basin, one of the most intensively farmed and ecologically compromised river basins the world. Unsurprisingly, this upstream abstraction has fuelled considerable inter-state conflict. As well as depriving downstream farmers and other local communities of water, irrigation has destroyed over 90% of the wetlands in the Basin, which formed critical breeding areas for migrating birds. The major beneficiaries are the station’s owners (an international consortia) its directors, and shareholders, and to a lesser extent the rural community for which it provides some employment and other local economic benefits.

Owning water

Major irrigation schemes such as Cubbie Station, and the thousands of other companies and consortia around the world taking control of water through dam building and the acquisition of water allocations, bring to the fore key questions about the ownership of water. For much of human history, water’s status as a common good remained the norm, albeit with some managerial control exercised by powerful groups: for example, the dynastic rulers of hydraulic societies or, in the medieval period, the Church, whose monasteries often provided communities with hydrological expertise and management (Tvedt & Oestigaard 2010). Although many of the traditional common property regimes described by Elinor Ostrom (1990) have undergone major alterations, water continued to be seen, until recently, as a common good.

Patterns of water ownership changed, however, as societies began to build major urban areas which demanded greater investment in technologies for water supply and waste removal. The Industrial Revolution introduced a new level of complexity, both in enlarging conurbations, and generating increasing levels of domestic and industrial pollution. The impacts of these developments were so challenging as to require major reform. In early twentieth century Britain, for example, water supply and waste removal services were initially provided by a mix of municipal authorities and Victorian philanthropists. The results were patchy, leading to considerable inequality within cities, in terms of access to piped supplies, and between cities and rural areas, the latter often remaining reliant upon local wells and pumps well into the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, democratic ideals demanded comprehensive provision of piped supplies and the public ownership of water. A national network of local water authorities was established, with water users paying for services via property rates. This worked well until the costs of maintaining aging water infrastructures became more pressing, and politicians were faced with the vote-losing prospect of raising charges for water. The Thatcher government, in accord with its conservative ideologies, decided (despite angry public protests) to privatise water, leading to a situation in which British water companies today are largely owned by international corporations (Bakker 2003). This proved profitable for water company directors and shareholders, but as water charges jumped by 60% in the following five years, rather less so for domestic water users (Strang 2004). The UK-based water companies made further profits by exporting to many parts of the world their expertise on how to privatise water.

This process proved even more controversial in countries where increases in water charges have more extreme impacts. In 2000, when the government of Bolivia responded to pressure from the World Bank to pay off its international debts through water privatization, and invited an American company, Bechtel, to enact this, citizens revolted and a violent water war erupted that succeeded in retaining public ownership (Albro 2005). However, although governments internationally have subsequently become wary of such wholescale national water privatizations, the process has continued in various forms: for example, through types of public-private partnership, and through mechanisms such as Government Owned Corporations which, as the name suggests, reform local or regional water authorities along the lines of privatised companies, sometimes separating the profitable operational (supply) side from the more costly infrastructural maintainance, with only the latter remaining a wholly public responsibility.

There have also been more covert forms of enclosure, as illustrated by the example of Cubbie Station in Queensland, Australia. Following the colonial appropriation of land and water from Indigenous groups, European settlers’ rights to water generally came with riparian land ownership. As pressure on limited resources increased, farmers were given volumetric water allocations. In the 2000s, these were effectively privatised and transformed into tradeable commodities, which could be bought up en masse (as with Cubbie Station) or, in other cases, traded away from the related land, leaving ‘dry blocks’. The conversion of allocations into profitable assets meant that those using water for the most profitable purposes (mining, cotton, rice, and wheat production) could readily outbid small farmers, or conservation organisations hoping to preserve wetland areas. This has resulted in higher levels of water use and environmental degradation.

In Australia and elsewhere, the creation of virtual water markets, whether in the form of allocation trading or as shareholding in water companies, has effectively detached water from the landscape. This process of ‘disembedding’ material things from their local environments and creating virtual global markets (Polanyi 1957) raises some key questions about social and environmental accountability. There is an important recent trend towards more ownership and trading of water (and other resources) by transnational corporations who are not physically present in the social communities or in the material environments where the water is located. Cubbie Station, for example, was bought up by a Chinese consortium; most large oil and mining companies are owned transnationally, as are other extractive industries. Regulating water users, even when these are locally based, is complex and challenging, and becomes more so when regulators have to deal with major transnational corporations. There are more fundamental questions, too: if a government hands control of the country’s most essential resources to external agencies, how does this affect its decision-making capacities about these resources? And does it uphold democratic processes? (Strang 2016).

Similar patterns can be seen in the use of marine resources, where overfishing has led to a process of formalising quotas and creating virtual trading schemes (Minnegal & Dwyer 2010). Competitive economies have done little to address the inequalities that pertain in both areas: customary rights to fishing have often been overridden by commercial interests, just as local rights to freshwater have been overtaken by the commodification of the water industry.

The loss of customary rights of access and the devastation of local waterways by extractive industries have been particularly distressing for place-based Indigenous communities, who retain close and affective attachment to their homelands, and for whom local land and waterscapes are often both sentient and sacred. As their land and other material resources have been appropriated, enclosed, and privatised, many groups have protested, and continue to do so (Berriane 2017, Strang & Busse 2010). Given the meanings of water within their cultural landscapes, the misuse and despoilation of waterways has evoked particularly anguished protests; exemplifed, for example, in response to the downstream pollution caused by mining on the Ok Tedi, in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch 2003), or in relation to rivers in northern Australia (Rumsey & Weiner 2004).

Over the last several decades, Indigenous communities have created international networks, working with each other, and with conservation organisations, to tackle these issues. In 2016, for example, the Dakota Sioux brought together a range of like-minded groups to stage a major protest at Standing Rock about the impacts of an oil pipeline on their land and water. Indigenous communities are challenging not only the appropriation of their traditional ownership of water (Morphy & Morphy 2009), but also the imposition of ideologies that in their view fail to value it properly. In New Zealand, in the 2000s, the Māori Council, on behalf of all iwi [tribes], fought a legal battle to try to reclaim Indigenous people’s ownership of freshwater, taking a case through the Waitangi Tribunal, the High Court, and the Supreme Court (Strang 2014). Although the claim did not succeed, the debates resulted in a robust co-management agreement, ensuring that Māori iwi would have a substantial voice in decisions about their related waterways (Muru-Lanning 2016, Ruru 2013).

Water in the Anthropocene

There is a readily discernible link between the enclosure and privatization of water and constant growth and intensification in the use of freshwater and other resources. Such intensification, and humankind’s impacts upon the planet, have become so extreme that we have now entered an age described as the Anthropocene (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Stensrud & Hylland-Eriksen forthcoming). It is equally plain that water is a central factor – and a key area of vulnerablity – in climate change. As well as melting the ice caps and raising sea levels, higher planetary temperatures are melting the glaciers that store freshwater for many of the world’s major rivers, and destablising global weather patterns. Meanwhile, the clearance of forests and wetlands for further agricultural expansion continues. The result is much greater volatility in water flows, and higher risks of unmanageable floods and droughts.

The impacts on ecosystems are not only felt by human communities, but also by their non-human inhabitants. The Anthropocene marks the first human-caused mass extinction event on par with earlier planetary devastations. In the last century, species extinctions have spiked dramatically: a report by the World Wildlife Fund (Grooten & Almond 2018) documents the loss of 60% of species since the 1970s, and rates of extinction are continuing to rise.^[3]As Donald Worster observed, this pattern of environmental destruction goes hand in hand with an extremely exploitative mode of environmental engagement, and the widespread control of resources by commercial corporations, rather than by local communities with long-term attachments to places:

Whatever they [major corporations] may accomplish in the manufacture of wealth, they are innately anti-ecological. Immense, centralised institutions, with complicated hierarchies, they tend to impose their outlook and their demands on nature, as they do on the individual and the small human community, and they do so with great destructiveness. They are too insulated from the results of their actions to learn, to adjust, to harmonize. That is another way of saying that a social condition of diffused power is more likely to be ecologically sensitive and preserving (2006: 332).

It is not a given that relocating environmental control locally will necessarily produce less exploitative kinds of engagements with land and water. However, it is useful to consider the alternative values promoted by place-based communities in relation to non-human interests. Many retain traditionally egalitarian and reciprocal positionality towards non-human beings, locating humankind within living systems, rather than as rulers over them. This way of thinking has been inspirational for environmentalists, and interactions between Indigenous peoples, conservation groups, and scholars has produced a serious critique of notions of human dominion, and of the anthropocentricity and the entitlement implicit in exploitative practices (Brightman & Lewis 2016, Kirksey & Helmreich 2010, Orlove & Caton 2010). This critique argues that there is an urgent need for a repositioning that – for both ethical and pragmatic reasons – gives greater parity to non-human interests, with a view to halting (and hopefully reversing) the wholescale destruction of ecosystems and their dependent species, including, of course, human communities (Kopnina & Shoreman-Ouimet 2015, Kopnina & Washington 2019). The proponents of this critique recognise the centrality of water in this regard, and thus protecting waterways has become a key part of their endeavours.

Indigenous communities have approached this challenge in various ways. Some, such as the Kogi in Columbia, have spoken up to warn about the consequences of rampant exploitation of the environment (Ereira 2009, see also de la Cadena 2010, Fienup-Riordan 2005: 233). There have been protests (as in the case of Standing Rock), and some have pushed their governments to make constitutional changes. Thus, in 2008 Ecuador passed legislation affirming the rights of nature, and a few years later Bolivia established the Rights of Mother Earth (Pachamama). Some groups have campaigned for rivers (such as the Atrato River in Colombia, and the Ganges in India) to be acknowledged as living persons with concomitant legal rights. In New Zealand, Māori iwi succeeded in gaining legal rights for the Whanganui River. In 2017, the New Zealand government announced that the river had been granted the status of a living entity, ‘comprising the River from the mountains to the sea, its tributaries, and all its physical and metaphysical elements, as an indivisible and living whole’ (Finlayson 2017: 129(1); see also Strang 2019).

At an international level, there is growing pressure from environmental activists to persuade the UN to make a formal declaration about the rights of nature (Cullinan 2003, Gray & Curry 2016).^[4]Some are trying to establish ‘ecocide’ as an international crime.^[5]There is a widening conversation about ecological justice (Baxter 2005, Schläppy & Gray 2017) and the ethics of human-environmental relations, and for some groups this is connected with ideas about spiritual engagement with the world and, most particularly, with water (Sponsel 2012, Taylor 2010). There has thus been a refocusing on the spiritual meanings of water, which as well as permeating traditional religions, has an important role in New Age movements long aligned to environmental activism. New rituals are appearing to celebrate the spiritual or social meanings of water: in the UK, this has taken the form of well dressing, a revival of an ancient Roman ritual, fontanalia; in Australia, there are events such as the Splash! Festival in Queensland, in which people bring containers of water from their home places, and pour them into a central vessel to celebrate the social and spiritual connections between communities (Strang & Toussaint 2008).

The input from Indigenous, environmental, and related groups into global debates, along with widespread concern about societies’ unsustainable direction of travel, has led international NGOs, state governments, religious leaders, and the United Nations to focus on the issue of values. In 2016, the UN established a High Level Panel on Water to focus on water and values, which, in their terms, meant ‘economic’, ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural and spiritual’ values. Their aim was to produce a set of principles for water to underpin the Sustainable Development Goals declared in 2015, with the aim of encouraging heads of state to rethink their policies and practices in relation to water (UN 2018a). This was followed by a wider World Water Development Report, which advocated an infrastructural turn towards ‘nature-based solutions’ (UN 2018b). These aim to work with the processes inherent in ecosystems and to therefore move towards more sustainable practices (Thomé et al. 2016). There are thus concerted efforts to address the urgent issues that societies face in relation to water. Whether these endeavours will change human engagements with water ecosystems sufficiently, and quickly enough, to avert social and ecological collapse, remains to be seen. It is therefore vital that the anthropological study of water continues to elucidate the relationships between human societies, non-human beings, and the material world, and assists efforts to reform these relationships to ensure that the rights, needs, and interests of all are sustained.

References

Albro, R. 2005. ‘The water is ours, carajo!’: deep citizenship in Bolivia’s water war. In Social movements: an anthropological reader (ed.) J. Nash, 249-68. London: Blackwell.

Anand, N. 2017. Hydraulic city: water and the infrastructures of citizenship in Mumbai. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Anderson, S. & B. Tabb (eds) 2002. Water, leisure and culture: European historical perspectives. Oxford: Berg.

Ansar, A., B. Flyvbjerg, A. Budzier, & D. Lunn 2014. Should we build more large dams? The actual costs of hydropower megaproject development. Energy Policy 69, 43-56.

Bakker, K. 2003. An uncooperative commodity: privatising water in England and Wales. Oxford: University Press.

Baxter, B. 2005. A theory of ecological justice. London: Routledge.

Berriane, Y. 2017. Development and countermovements: reflections on the conflicts arising from the commodification of collective land in Morocco. In Development as a battlefield: International Development Policy volume 8 (eds) I. Bono & B. Hibou, 247-67. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff.

Bichsel, C. 2016. Water and the (infra-)structure of political rule: a synthesis. Water Alternatives 9(2), 356-72.

Biggs, D. 2012. Quagmire: nation-building and nature in the Mekong Delta. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bosshard, P. 2014. Large dams are uneconomic, scientific study finds (5 March 2014). International Rivers (available on-line: https://www.internationalrivers.org/blogs/227/large-dams-are-uneconomic-scientific-study-finds).

Brightman, M. & J. Lewis (eds) 2017. Anthropological visions of sustainable futures. London: Palgrave.

Butzer, K. 1976. Early hydraulic civilisation in Egypt: a study in cultural ecology. Chicago: University Press.

Coles, A. & T. Wallace (eds) 2005. Water, gender and development. Oxford: Berg.

Crutzen, P. & E. Stoermer 2000. The ‘anthropocene’. Global Change Newsletter 41,17-18 (available on-line: http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/NL41.pdf).

Cullinan, C. 2003. Wild law: a manifesto for Earth justice. Totnes: Green.

De Wolff, K. R. Faletti & I. López-Calvo (eds) 2019. Water and the humanities: transforming currents for uncertain futures. Oakland: University of California Press.

de la Cadena, M. 2010. Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflections beyond ‘politics’.Cultural Anthropology 25(2), 334-70.

Drewal, H. (ed.) 2008. Sacred waters: arts for Mami Wata and other water divinities in Africa and the diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Edgeworth, M. 2011. Fluid pasts: archaeology of flow. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press.

Ereira, A. 2009 [1990]. From the heart of the world: the elder brothers' warning. UK: Tairona Heritage Trust.

Escobar, A. 2005. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: University Press.

Fienup-Riordan, A. 2005. Wise words of the Yup'ik people: we talk to you because we love you. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Finlayson, C. 2017. Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) Claims Settlement Bill. Government bill. Parliamentary Counsel Office, Te Tari Tohutohu Pāremata, 129(1). New Zealand government, Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa (available on-line: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2016/0129/latest/DLM6830851.html?src=qs).

Giosan, L., P. Clift, M. Macklin, D. Fuller, S. Constantinescu, J. Durcan, T. Stevens, G. Duller, A. Tabrez, K. Gangal, R. Adhikari, A. Alizai, F. Filip, S. VanLaningham & J. Syvitski 2012. Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(26), E1688–E1694.

Gray, J. & P. Curry 2016. Ecodemocracy: helping wildlife’s right to survive. ECOS 37(1), 18-27.

Grooten, M. & R. Almond (eds) 2018. Living planet report - 2018: aiming higher. Gland, Switzerland: World Wildlife Fund.

Harvey, P. & H. Knox 2012. The enchantments of infrastructure. Mobilities 7(4), 521-36.

Hastrup, K. 2011. Waterworlds: natural environmental disasters and social resilience in anthropological perspective. Copenhagen: European Research Council.

——— & F. Hastrup (eds) 2015. Waterworlds: anthropology in fluid environments. Oxford: Berghahn.

Hocart, A. 1970 [1936]. Kings and councillors: an essay in the comparative anatomy of human society. Chicago: University Press.

Hoekstra, A. & A. Chapagain 2007. Water footprints of nations: water use by people as a function of their consumption pattern. Water Resources Management 21(1), 35-48.

Hwang, S.-S., J. Xia, Y. Cao, X. Feng & X. Qiao 2007. Anticipation of migration and psychological stress and the Three Gorges dam project, China. Social Science and Medicine 65(5), 1012-24.

Illich, I. 1986. H2O and the waters of forgetfulness. London: Marion Boyars.

Josephson, P. 2002. Industrialized nature: brute force technology and the transformation of the natural world. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Khagram, S. 2004. Dams and development: transnational struggles for water and power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kirksey, S. & S. Helmreich 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 545-76.

Kirsch, S. 2003. Mining and environmental human rights in Papua New Guinea. InTransnational corporations and human rights (eds) F. Jedrzej & S. Pegg, 115-36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kopnina, H. & E. Shoreman-Ouimet 2015. Culture and conservation: beyond anthropocentrism. London: Routledge.

——— & H. Washington (eds) 2019. Conservation: integrating social and ecological justice. New York: Springer.

Krause,F. 2016. Making space along the Kemi River: a fluvial geography in Finnish Lapland. Cultural Geographies 24(2): 279-294.

——— & L. Ley (eds) forthcoming. Water, power, infrastructure: ethnographic conversations with Karl Wittfogel. Environment and Planning C. Special Issue: Politics and space.

——— & V. Strang (eds) 2013. Living water: the powers and politics of a vital substance. Worldviews 17(2), 95-185. Special Issue.

Lahiri-Dutt, K. (ed.) 2006. Fluid bonds: views on gender and water.Kolkata, Stree Press.

Lansing, S. 1991. Priests and programmers: technologies of power in the engineered landscape of Bali. Princeton: University Press.

Larkin, B. 2013. The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42(1), 327-43.

Lewis, D. & D. Mosse 2006. Development brokers and translators: the ethnography of aid and agencies. Bloomfield, C.T.: Kumarian Press.

Linton, J. 2010. What is water? The history of a modern abstraction. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press.

Mallery, S. 2011. The Marriage Well at Teltown: holy well ritual at royal cult sites and the rite of temporary marriage. European Review of History 18(2), 175-97.

Mathur, H. 2006. Managing resettlement in India: approach, issues and experiences. New York: Oxford University Press.

McDonald-Wilmsen, B. & M. Webber 2010. Dams and displacement: raising the standards and broadening the research agenda. Water Alternatives 3(2), 142-61.

Meissner, S. 2012. Virtual water and water footprints: global supply and production chains and their impacts on freshwater resources. In People at the well: kinds, usages and meanings of water in a global perspective (eds) P. Hahn, K. Cless & J. Soentgen, 44-64. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Merlan, F. 1998. Caging the rainbow: places, politics and aborigines in a North Australian Town. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Minnegal, M. & P. Dwyer 2010. Appropriating fish, appropriating fishermen: tradeable permits, natural resources and uncertainty. In Ownership and appropriation (eds) V. Strang & M. Busse, 197-216. Oxford: Berg.

Mohamud, M. & H. Verhoeven 2016. Re-engineering the state, awakening the nation: dams, Islamist modernity and nationalist politics in Sudan. Water Alternatives 9(2), 182-202.

Morphy, F. & H. Morphy 2009. The Blue Mud Bay case: refractions through saltwater country. Dialogue 28(1), 15-25.

Mosse, D. 2003. The rule of water: statecraft, ecology, and collective action in South India. Oxford: University Press.

Muru-Lanning, M. 2016. Tupuna Awa: people and politics of the Waikato River. Auckland: University Press.

Oliver-Smith, A. (ed.) 2009. Development and dispossession: the anthropology of displacement and resettlement. Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research Press.

Orlove, B. & S. Caton 2010. Water sustainability: anthropological approaches and prospects. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 401-15.

Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the commons. Cambridge: University Press.

Plumwood, V. 1993. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge.

——— 2002. Environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. London: Routledge.

Polanyi, K. 1957. The great transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.

Reisner, M. 2001 [1986] Cadillac desert: the American West and its disappearing water. London: Pimlico.

Rodgers, D. & B. O’Neill 2012. Infrastructural violence: introduction to the special issue. Ethnography 13(4), 401-12.

Rumsey A. & J. Weiner (eds) 2004. Mining and Indigenous lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Ruru, J. 2013. Indigenous restitution in settling water claims: the developing cultural and commercial redress opportunities in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 22(2), 311-28 (available on-line: http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/bitstream/handle/1773.1/1234/22PRLPJ311.pdf.)

Schläppy, M-L. & J. Gray 2017. Rights of nature: a report on a conference in Switzerland. The Ecological Citizen 1(1), 95-6.

Sponsel, L. 2012. Spiritual ecology: a quiet revolution. Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Stensrud, A. & T. Hylland Eriksen forthcoming. Climate, capitalism and communities: an anthropology of environmental overheating, London: Pluto Press.

Strang, V. 2004. The Meaning of water. Oxford: Berg.

——— 2005. Common senses: water, sensory experience and the generation of meaning. Journal of Material Culture 10(1), 92-120.

——— 2009. Water and indigenous religion: Aboriginal Australia. In The idea of water (eds) T. Tvedt & T. Oestigaard, 343-77. London:I.B Tauris.

——— 2013. Dam nation: Cubbie Station and the waters of the Darling. In The social life of water in a time of crisis (ed.) J. Wagner, 36-60. Oxford: Berghahn.

——— 2014. The Taniwha and the crown: defending water rights in Aotearoa/New Zealand. WIREs Water 1, 121-31 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1002).

——— 2016. Infrastructural relations: water, political power and the rise of a new ‘despotic regime’.Special Issue: Water, Infrastructure and Political Rule. Water Alternatives 9(2), 292-318.

——— 2019. The rights of the river: water, culture and ecological justice. InConservation: integrating social and ecological justice (eds) H. Kopnina & H. Washington, 105-19. New York: Springer.

——— & S. Toussaint (eds) 2008. Special Issue: Water ways: competition and communality in the use and management of water. Special Issue, Oceania 78(1).

——— & M. Busse (eds) 2011. Ownership and appropriation: ASA monographs. Oxford: Berg.

Taylor, B. 2010. Dark green religion: nature, spirituality and the planetary future. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thomé, A., P. Ceryno, A. Scavarda & A. Remmen 2016. Sustainable infrastructure: a review and a research agenda. Journal of Environmental Management 184(2), 143-56.

Tvedt, T. & E. Jakobsson (eds) 2006. A history of water, series 1 volume 1: water control and river biographies. London: I.B. Tauris.

——— & T. Oestigaard (eds) 2010. A history of water, series 2 volume 1: the ideas of water from antiquity to modern times. London. I.B. Tauris.

United Nations High Level Panel on Water 2018a. Making every drop count: an agenda for water action. High Level Panel on Water outcome document (available on-line: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/17825HLPW_Outcome.pdf).

United Nations 2018b. The United Nations World Water Development Report: nature-based solutions for water (available on-line: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/water/wwap/wwdr/2018-nature-based-solutions/).

United Nations 2019. Transboundary waters. UN Water (available on-line: https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/transboundary-waters/).

Verhoeven, H. 2015. Water, civilisation and power in Sudan: the political economy of military-Islamist state building. Cambridge: University Press.

Wagner, J. (ed.) 2013. The social life of water in a time of crisis. Oxford: Berghahn.

Wittfogel, K. 1957. Oriental despotism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Worster, D. 2006. Water in the age of imperialism and beyond. In A history of water, series 2 volume 1: the ideas of water from antiquity to modern times (eds) T. Tvedt & T. Oestigaard, 5-17. London: I.B. Tauris.

[1] Water (1 Jul 2019). Topics: understanding poverty. World Bank Group Water Global Practice (available on-line: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/overview).

[2] Fish, E. The forgotten legacy of the Banqiao Dam collapse (8 Feb 2013). The Economic Observer (available on-line: http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2013/0208/240078.shtml).

[3] Summary statistics. The IUCN red list of threatened species. Version 2019-2. International Union for the Conservation of Nature (available on-line: http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/summary-statistics).

[4] See also Universal declaration of river rights (17 Sept 2017). Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (available on-line: https://therightsofnature.org/rights-of-nature-laws/universal-declaration-of-river-rights/).

[5] See, for example, the work of lawyer Polly Higgins (available on-line: ecocidelaw.com).

Note on contributor

Veronica Strang is the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and a Professor of Anthropology. She is the author of The Meaning of Water (Berg, 2004), Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009), and Water, Nature and Culture (Reaktion 2015). She is currently working on a major volume about long-term trajectories in human engagements with water. See https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/staff/?id=10491.

Professor Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Cosin’s Hall, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RL, UK. veronica.strang@durham.ac.uk

Ethics / morality

Felix Stein — Fri, 19 May 2017 14:09:20 +0000

James Laidlaw

University of Cambridge

Initially published 19 May 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17ethics

Abstract:

It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both are true. It describes how moral life has long been generally understood in anthropology, how this came to seem insufficient, and the ways that have been proposed recently for improvement. We review the main intellectual traditions that have inspired these new departures – virtue ethics, ordinary language philosophy, the later thought of Michel Foucault, phenomenology, and experimental moral psychology – and outline briefly emerging debates within the field.

Introduction

To understand the anthropology of ethics, and its place in the wider discipline, it helps to know that two apparently contradictory things are both true. It is true that the academic discipline of anthropology has been centrally concerned with morality or ethics (these words will be used here interchangeably) throughout its whole history. It is also true that until the last couple of decades there was nothing that could reasonably be called the anthropology of ethics. Its advent has been felt to be such a discontinuity that we are routinely said to be experiencing an ‘ethical turn’, yet people also feel moved, equally routinely, to point out that anthropologists have been writing about morality all along; and they are indeed correct in saying this. So what exactly is new?

Partial engagements: Durkheimian, Boasian, and Marxist

Influential early anthropologists with otherwise widely different approaches, such as Westermarck (1906-8, 1932) and Marett (1902, 1931), put the study of the evolution and variation of morality in different societies at the centre of their work. But the view that most profoundly influenced anthropology was that of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who proposed the replacement of ‘speculative’ moral philosophy with a positivist science of ‘moral facts’. For Durkheim, the social changes brought about by modernization were so rapid and far-reaching as to produce unprecedented dislocation and the potential for discord and disorder. A science of social life was necessary to inform state policy in order to restore social solidarity. Early in his career, Durkheim thought that the newly complex division of labour might itself be the basis of a new form of social order (1933 [1893]), but he later concluded that modern societies would need, in addition, to incorporate updated, rationally designed versions of the religious institutions that had been the basis of consensus and solidarity in pre-modern societies. His monumental Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1995 [1912]) was to provide the basis for the design of a religion for modernity, being an analysis of the religious foundations of social order in what he supposed to be the earliest and most primitive societies. What was required, Durkheim argued, was for the rules of good behaviour, including those variously relevant for people in different walks of life, to be rendered sacred: endowed with a kind of inviolable authority so that people would follow them willingly. For this to happen they must be associated with the ultimate Good, that in virtue of which all human flourishing is possible. In the past, that Good had been misrecognised as a supernatural reality, or God. It is in fact not supernatural, although it is super-organic, being nothing other than society itself. It is in ritual, Durkheim argued, that people enjoy their most direct experience of the reality of society as a thing greater than the sum of its parts, and it is there too that specific values, ideas, and rules are endowed with society’s authority. Under modern conditions, the state would need to institute rituals and design a secular religion so that the rules of conduct necessary to maintain harmony and solidarity come to be widely embraced and voluntarily followed. Sociologists must therefore replace not only philosophers but also priests, and serve the state by ensuring that the institutions of modern societies are matched by the correct values and rules, and that these are inculcated through the education system as well as in its collective civic life (1957 [1937], 1961 [1925]).

As Durkheim himself observed (1953 [1906]), his basic conception of morality in many ways closely paralleled the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s account of the moral law, but it differed not only in being fully secularised, with society (in practice, the state) occupying the role of divine legislator, but also in being naturalised and mechanical. What for Kant was a profound philosophical problem about the relation between the human being as part of the natural world, subject to cause and effect, and that same being as a free and rational subject, is transformed for Durkheim into a crucially different conception of the ‘double existence’ of mankind: the individual, subject to ungovernable and egoistic biologically-driven desires, becomes capable of meaningful and satisfied life only insofar as he or she is incorporated into a well-functioning society. ‘Freedom’ is a matter merely of how willingly people do what society anyway requires.

Thus ‘morality’ was absolutely central to Durkheim’s conception of society, and on his account to describe a society would necessarily involve describing its shared moral rules and values. Indeed, for Durkheim, the social just is the moral (which is to say the sacred) as opposed to the individual and biological. But if this makes morality central, the cost of this particular way of doing so, it could be argued, is a strikingly streamlined and impoverished conception of ethical life. Gone is any philosophical perplexity (as in Kant) about human freedom or about what might be a good life, in light of our nature and limitations or our place in the cosmos. Gone equally (or at best, reduced to mechanical ‘forces’ acting on the individual) are all the paradoxes and tragic conflicts involved in what T. S. Eliot has one of his characters describe as ‘the endless struggle to think well of ourselves’ (1969: 402). It is a conception of ethical life as much without tragedy and conflict as it is without sainthood and striving. Morality is that mechanical process whereby individuals become a functioning ‘part’ of society.

The anthropology influenced by Durkheim’s ideas, which is to say to some degree most anthropology, especially in Europe, through the twentieth century, thus conceived of morality as consisting of the socially-sanctioned rules of conduct that tamed individual desires in the service of society. And the central problem (see, for example, the essays in Fortes 1987), in addition to showing how rule-governed behaviour functioned in an integrated system, was to explain the mechanisms by which people are brought to follow these rules: how do customary rules and roles become compelling for the individual?

In American anthropology, where Durkheim’s influence was less powerful, the Boasian conception of bounded cultures, each with its own distinctive values and modal personalities, resulted in a remarkably similar treatment of morality as the approved ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are taken for granted and habitual in each culture (Benedict 1934). The problem, strictly comparable to Fortes’s though in a less mechanical idiom, was how processes of ‘enculturation’ ensured that individuals came to embody the values of their culture. Here the internal consistency, distinctiveness, and autonomy of individual cultures replace social integration and solidarity as the functional goods that morality serves, but the flattening of ethical life it implies is remarkably similar.

Marxist anthropologists introduced a couple of minor variations in the general approach. For some, since what Durkheimians called social solidarity is always in fact achieved in the interests of a dominant class, the problem was to explain how subordinated groups (such as young men in a gerontocracy) were induced to follow kinship and other ‘moral’ rules that were fundamentally against their interests. How was the dominant ideology inculcated (e.g. Meillassoux 1981; Bloch 1989)? For others, the focus should be on the limits to such ideologies: when exploited groups engage in violent rebellion or quiet everyday resistance, they enact values that are contrary to the dominant ideology. The anthropologist’s task here was to give articulate voice to this popular ‘moral economy’, which not coincidentally tended to coincide with the anthropologist’s own egalitarian and anti-capitalist views (e.g. Scott 1976; Taussig 1980). In both these variants, morality functions as an idiom for the tactical expression of class interest, and thus as in Durkheimian and Boasian approaches, it remains fundamentally a matter of the collective representations and rules that define and enforce group membership, whether of a whole society or of a specific class.

The limitations of these general views of ethical life did not prevent anthropologists from giving rich and insightful descriptions of the morality, as they conceived it, of diverse societies. Studies of kinship explicated the complementary rights and duties of different kinship roles, and how these are reinforced in rituals such as initiations, marriage, and ancestor worship. Studies of economic life showed how cooperation is achieved and how competition is regulated, by shared norms and values. More darkly, accusations of witchcraft, and divination and other methods of identifying malefactors, were shown to enforce moral values and mediate structural conflicts of interest. And all these studies, along with studies of political and religious life, showed how common values as well as structural principles cut across and integrated these never-actually-separate domains of life. In addition, within the terms set by this understanding of morality as collectively shared values, habits, and rules in relation to social structure, anthropologists achieved some notably sophisticated and original insights, including Leach’s ideas about how conflicting complexes of values might be dynamically related (1954), Fortes’s comparison of ideas of Fate and Justice in both scriptural and oral religions (1959), and Gluckman’s suggestion that the social dynamics of moral life can be mapped by describing the processes involved in the allocation of responsibility (1972).

The sense that all this, while valuable in its own terms, simply bypassed much of what is most important about the ethical dimension of human life, was never far from the surface. Might it be possible to broaden the range of what was included under ‘morality’ to include more than the following of obligatory rules? How do we understand what happens when people doubt or question the dominant values of their social milieu? And what about when they face irreconcilable conflicts of values, or aspire to alternative ideals and values, or respond to what they take to be ethical demands than run contrary to accepted rules and values? Can people’s sense of responsibility and freedom in relation to their own character and conduct really be written off, with a causal story about how, generally speaking, they come to do what society (or their culture or their class) requires of them? Could not anthropologists’ knowledge of the diversity of forms of moral life contribute something to debates among philosophers and others about how to understand ethics?

So punctuating the history of anthropology in the twentieth century, we find calls, sometimes by anthropologists, more often by philosophers, and on one memorable occasion by a husband-and-wife team of philosopher and anthropologist, for a more reflective focus on ethics in anthropological thought and, as part of this, a dialogue with moral philosophy (e.g. Westermarck 1932; Firth 1951, 1953; Kluckhohn 1951; Macbeath 1952; Brandt 1954; Read 1955; Ladd 1957; von Fürer-Haimendorf 1967; Vogt & Albert 1967; Edel & Edel 1968; Mayer 1981; Evens 1982; Wolfram 1982; Pocock 1986, 1988; Moody-Adams 1997; Cook 1999). But none of these various initiatives and proposals generated much of a response. No sustained debates developed within anthropology, so there was no conceptual innovation or argument that could attract much attention from other disciplines. It remained the case that when philosophers mentioned anthropology at all, it was merely as the professional exponents of cultural relativism, which meant of course that there was no substantive conversation to be had.

New departures: The anthropology of ethics

Around the turn of the millennium, a newly sustained interest in ethics began to be evident in anthropology: one that was liberated by a broadening of scope well beyond problems of social control and enculturation, and by a loosening of the commitment to cultural relativism that enabled a more rounded and productive engagement with moral philosophy. A few ethnographies and collections of essays indicated a growing interest (e.g. Parish 1994; Laidlaw 1995; Howell 1997, Briggs 1998). Then, three programmatic essays written independently of each other (Lambek 2000; Faubion 2001b; Laidlaw 2002) made overlapping cases for anthropologists to take the problem of understanding ethical life much more seriously, and each surveyed some intellectual resources they suggested might be drawn upon to help with this. For reasons that will surely not be fully understood until we have rather more hindsight (inevitably, the suggestion has already been made that it is a facet of ‘neoliberalism’, but then since scarcely anything has not been explained that way by someone recently, this is hardly significant), these suggestions seem to have struck a chord, or at any rate shortly afterwards workshops and symposia began to be held on the subject (for example, those published as Barker 2007; Corsín Jimenez 2007; Brown & Milgram 2009; Heintz 2009; Sykes 2009; Lambek 2010; Pandian & Ali 2010), what are now classic monographs began to appear (e.g. Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006), as did synoptic accounts and readers aiming to introduce students to the emerging field (Zigon 2008; Faubion 2011; Fassin 2012; Fassin & Lézé 2014; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek et al. 2016).

Surveying all this and the subsequent literature, which has continued to grow at a still gathering pace, it is possible to identify two salient features: first, a range of work that engages systematically with intellectual traditions, many in other disciplines, where there has been a sustained engagement with ethics, in an effort to develop a conceptual vocabulary for anthropology and to advance a general understanding of the nature of ethical life; and second, a series of emerging debates taking place more or less within anthropology, on topics ranging from very general theoretical matters to substantive controversies about ethical change in specific societies, as well as a series of established topics of anthropological research that have been materially enriched by being subject to ‘the ethical turn’.

Under the first of those two headings, the main philosophical orientations or disciplinary sources anthropologists of ethics have explored are: virtue ethics, ordinary language philosophy, and Michel Foucault’s ‘genealogy of ethics’, and, to a lesser extent and more recently, phenomenology and experimental psychology.

Intellectual traditions

a. Virtue ethics

In the middle of the twentieth century, two schools of thought dominated Anglophone moral philosophy: consequentialism (primarily utilitarianism), according to which courses of action are judged by calculating their relative effects (e.g. on aggregate happiness or well-being), and deontology (predominantly Kantian), which is concerned with identifying the duties and obligations necessarily pertaining to a (rational) moral agent. Both these traditions are largely abstract, deductive, normative, and ahistorical, so establishing dialogue between either and anthropology would encounter obvious difficulties. But the most significant development in moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, usually seen as beginning with Anscombe (1958), was a reaction against just these features of those traditions. What became known as ‘virtue ethics’ emphasises the careful description of linguistic categories, especially those describing aspects of character, conduct, and social relations, and therefore contextually sensitive interpretive descriptions of exactly the kind referred to by Clifford Geertz, in his prescription for interpretive anthropology, as ‘thick description’ (1973). For virtue ethicists, the central task is the explication of the virtues and vices that are central to the ability to thrive and flourish within a socially- and historically-located form of ethical life, with the supposed fact-value dichotomy being overcome by the fact that these concepts of good and bad conduct and character are inextricably both descriptive and evaluative. The virtue ethics revival involved a conscious recuperation of a good deal of the form, and not a little of the content, of the moral philosophy of the classical world, with Aristotle being a particularly pervasive influence. And exponents have frequently called for moral philosophy to proceed on an ethnographic or anthropological (or historical or sociological) basis. Unquestionably the philosopher writing in this tradition who has had the widest direct influence on anthropologists has been Alasdair MacIntyre, whose seminal and widely-read After Virtue (1981) directly inspired Talal Asad’s (1986) prescription for an anthropology of Islam, which in turn has been the framework in which Saba Mahmood (2005), Charles Hirschkind (2006), and others have written ethnographies of ethical (or ‘piety’) movements in Islam that have transformed the anthropological study of that religion. Anand Pandian’s ethnography of the Piramilai Kallar caste in south India (2008, 2009), which also takes the form of an explication of virtues and moral reasoning and is in some ways indebted to MacIntyre, makes in addition a persuasive argument for rejecting some of the more crudely normative elements of MacIntyre’s philosophy, accepted by these other authors, in particular the implicitly authoritarian assertion that only a tradition that is internally consistent and coherently integrated, and where orthodoxy is effectively enforced, can provide a sustainable framework for ethical life (on this, see Laidlaw 2014: Chs 2 and 4). Also influenced by MacIntyre, but more extensively drawing directly on Aristotle, Michael Lambek (2002, 2008) and Cheryl Mattingly (2012, 2014) have carefully worked out and exemplified virtue-ethical analytical methods for anthropology. Virtue ethics remains a rich and developing field, and is much more diverse than anthropological engagements have yet fully reckoned with; there has been little engagement with the important work of Martha Nussbaum (1986, 1994), Christine Swanton (2003, 2015), Charles Taylor (1989, 2014), and others. My own work has proceeded in part through an engagement with various works by Bernard Williams (e.g. 1985, 1993), and increasingly virtue ethics is developing in a self-consciously interdisciplinary direction, in which awareness of cultural diversity and the theoretical challenges this represents call directly for productive dialogue with anthropology (e.g. Snow 2015; Annas, Narvaez & Snow 2016).

b. Ordinary language philosophy

Overlapping with the virtue ethics revival is the school of thought known as ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (both were the work initially of disciples of the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and both derived in part from his later teachings). This philosophical tradition had long been influential in anthropology, both from anthropologists’ readings of Wittgenstein and as mediated especially through the writings of J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and others, in the so-called ‘interpretive turn’ in general and specifically in manifold uses of the idea of performativity. Indirectly, through Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983), the influence of Wittgenstein’s later thought has been very wide indeed, even if not all anthropologists have been impressed (see especially Gellner 1959, 1998). Two authors in particular have recently championed the importance of ordinary language philosophy specifically for the anthropology of ethics, and their proposals for ‘ordinary ethics’ have attracted a good deal of interest and comment. For Michael Lambek (2010, 2015b) and for Veena Das (2010, 2012, 2015), following Wittgenstein and Austin and also later interpreters such as Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, it is impossible to separate action from the concepts that structure its intentional content, which means that even apparently unthinking or habitual conduct is subject to criteria and embodies ethical judgement. They conclude accordingly that ethics is immanent in human action as such. Further, Das in particular insists that while the ethical is therefore properly to be located in the ordinary or everyday, we should be intensely suspicious of all claims to represent any extraordinary or transcendent ‘good’, whether made by individuals or religious or state institutions or in the name of formalised, aspirational ethical projects: these are emphatically not where the ethical is to be sought. Many have found these arguments persuasive and ethnographically productive (e.g. Jackson 2013; Stafford 2013; Singh 2015). Debate on the position has focused on two main sets of questions: just what it means to say that the ethical is ‘immanent’ in all human action, and whether this risks once again collapsing ethics into ‘the social’ (on this see Lempert 2013; Lempert 2014; Laidlaw 2014b; Zigon 2014; Lambek 2015a; Lempert 2015); and whether it unhelpfully treats the categories of the ordinary and extraordinary normatively rather than ethnographically, and so forecloses prematurely on what it makes sense to include within the ethical, by assuming it must contain only phenomena of which one approves (Clarke 2014; Venkatesan 2015; Robbins 2016; Laidlaw 2017).

c. Michel Foucault

A third formative source of ideas in the development of the anthropology of ethics has been the later writings of Michel Foucault: the project he referred to as his ‘genealogy of ethics’. This project shows both continuities and discontinuities from his earlier and better-known studies of asylums, clinics, and prisons. In his genealogy of ethics, Foucault continues and extends his influential rethinking of the concept of power, pursued in those earlier studies, but now encompassing an equally radical rethinking of that of freedom, such that these two concepts are not defined negatively as what the other excludes, and such that freedom emerges as a central term in the analysis of how subjects are constituted in diverse historical and social contexts. Power is a pervasive aspect of human relations not in spite of the fact that, but only because, human subjects are free (Foucault 1982). They have the capacity to reflect, to stand back from their own conduct and constitute it as an object of knowledge, and to act so as to change themselves; and this reflective freedom is the basis of ethics.

Substantively, Foucault seeks to trace the genealogy of what he calls ‘the desiring subject’: how did it come to be that in the modern West people think of themselves as defined by their desires, such that the modern concept of ‘sexuality’ seems to reveal one’s inner nature and destiny? To tell this story properly requires beginning from a form of thought and practice constituted altogether differently. The ethical life of classical Athens, Foucault seeks to show, was not yet based as is the modern complex on what he calls ‘a hermeneutics of desire’. Instead, it was ‘an ethics of existence’. What he means by this is that citizens of classical Athens were invited, in the dominant ethical discourses of their time, not to discover who and what they were by uncovering their hidden desires – perhaps with the aid of therapists, priests, or psychiatrists, as we are invited to do – but instead consciously to fashion themselves, and to do so, in particular, with regard to their fitness to exercise both freedom and power in relation to others. In the two last published volumes of his History of Sexuality (1986, 1988), and in a number of essays, interviews, and posthumously published lectures (1980, 1997, 2005, 2010, 2011), Foucault sets out to describe this radically different form of ethical thought and practice, and the millennium-long process whereby it was replaced by the hermeneutics of desire, from which our own taken-for-granted assumptions – including those of Foucault’s Marxist and Freudian contemporaries who fancied themselves radicals – derive.

Of course, Foucault’s diagnosis of the infirmities of our political discourse and the sources of our identity are a challenging provocation for anthropologists, as they overturn many of the accepted understandings widely shared in modern societies. But these writings also provide a more focused impetus to the anthropology of ethics, because in the course of pursuing these arguments, Foucault develops a number of conceptual resources for the ethnographic and comparative analysis of forms of ethical life, including a distinction between forms of moral life dominated by rules and codes, and those organised around more optative projects of ethical self-fashioning, and a formal scheme for making comparisons among the latter.

The conceptual and analytic resources Foucault developed in his genealogy of ethics (for extended commentary see Faubion 2011 and Laidlaw 2014) have been productively used by anthropologists in a range of ethnographic studies (e.g. Laidlaw 1995; Rabinow 1996; Faubion 2001; Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005; Cook 2010; Dave 2012). Perhaps the most widely shared reservation among anthropologists about Foucault’s analytics of ethics concerns the extent to which it relies on the notion of freedom. Despite the fact that the Foucauldian concept of freedom is necessarily limited, and socially and historically variable, anthropologists are made ‘nervous’ and ‘uneasy’ because it plays such a prominent part in what they tend to call ‘Western common sense’ (for sophisticated expressions of these concerns see Robbins 2007 and Keane 2014) and therefore use of the notion analytically might be ethnocentric. My own view is that the real danger of ethnocentrism here lies not in taking for granted a supposedly Western common sense about freedom, since there is in fact no such agreement, but rather in allowing the fiercely contested place of the idea of freedom in Western political debate to give rise to an intellectual taboo, preventing both the acknowledgement of the ethnographic prevalence of concepts of freedom well beyond the modern West and serious analytical engagement with the question of the place of freedom in ethical life.

d. Phenomenology

Anthropologists have been influenced by philosophers who fall under the designation ‘phenomenological’ for a very long time indeed: Lévi-Strauss’s great book The Savage Mind (1966 [1962]) was dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, after all. The category ‘phenomenology’ covers a wide range of thinkers, who have in common only that they take as their subject matter structures of experience and consciousness. Those who identify themselves as part of this tradition typically qualify the designation in one of a number of overlapping ways (hermeneutic, existentialist, dialectical, or transcendental phenomenology, etc.) and those identified as its major thinkers (variously Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler, Sartre, Levinas, Schutz, Arendt, Dilthey, Garfinkel, Derrida – some even include James and Dewey) adopted a wide range of conflicting positions. Nevertheless, there are those who have argued in recent decades that there is enough of common substance in phenomenology to provide the basis for a distinctive project of ‘phenomenological anthropology’ (e.g. Jackson 1996; Desjarlais & Throop 2011). A common objection, of course, is that so much of what phenomenological thinkers say is couched in universal and culture-free terms and is concerned with ostensibly universal dimensions of human experience, and although some proponents of ‘cultural phenomenology’ have attempted to link questions of selfhood and experience to specific social and cultural settings (e.g. Csordas 1999), the increasingly dominant tendency has been to comment on what are seen as existential challenges of human being as such, or in the context of very generally conceived global circumstances (Weiner 2001; Jackson 2005, 2013; Ingold 2011, 2013).

Unsurprisingly, some anthropologists of this persuasion have proposed that phenomenology also provides the basis for a distinctive approach to the anthropology of ethics (Kleinman 2006; Zigon 2009, 2014; Jackson 2013; Throop 2010, 2012, 2016; see also Wentzer 2016). A difficulty here is that these anthropologists owe primary allegiance to different foundational phenomenological thinkers, and therefore divergent intellectual programmes, and these imply rather different trajectories for the anthropological study of ethics. Thus, while Kleinman’s phenomenology is mediated through American pragmatism, and Jackson draws most concertedly on Merleau-Ponty, Zigon by contrast speaks up in particular for ‘those of us who take Heidegger seriously’ (2009) and his ‘theory of moral breakdown’ (2008) is presented as being directly derived from Heidegger. Given these differences, calls for a specifically phenomenological approach to morality perhaps sometimes express a general preference for a certain theoretical vocabulary in anthropology, more than a commitment to specific ideas or concepts in relation to ethics. And given how differently ethics figures in the writings of major phenomenological thinkers – while for some it is a central concern, Heidegger was, as it seems to me, almost as much a stranger to ethics in thought as in his life – some considerable conceptual work would be required to reconcile divergent starting points into a unified research programme, if the prospect of a distinctive, comprehensively phenomenological anthropology of ethics is to be realised. But even if that is not to come to pass, phenomenological ideas and concepts are already being productively deployed, as variously dominant or subsidiary conceptual components, in ethnographies of ethical life of otherwise quite divergent character (e.g. Parish 1994; Lester 2005; Marsden 2005; Prasad 2007; Mattingly 2014; Throop 2010; Simon 2014; Schielke 2015; Keane 2016).

e. Experimental psychology

A different kind of challenge is presented by the burgeoning research carried out by experimental psychologists in recent years on how people in varied situations make moral judgements and decisions, and the role especially of emotions in shaping those decisions (for a thoughtful survey, see Appiah 2008). Many of the methodological assumptions made in that research strike most anthropologists as unrealistic; it also often makes decidedly parochial assumptions about what counts as ‘morality’; and genuinely cross-cultural research is extremely difficult, and therefore rare. But the difficulties are not insuperable, as demonstrated by pioneering research using experimental methods by anthropologists Rita Astuti and Maurice Bloch (2015). For several years, Richard Shweder and others have been developing a synthesis of anthropological and psychological research, which they refer to as ‘cultural psychology’ (1991), and this has included a distinctive approach to the question of cultural variation in moral reasoning. In a challenge to the most influential psychological accounts of moral development (e.g. Kohlberg 1981; Turiel 1983), which focused entirely on the supposedly universal moral principles of justice, emphasising autonomy and protection from harm, Shweder and his colleagues (Shweder et al. 1997) argue that there are three distinct areas of concern in moral reasoning – autonomy (which encompasses justice/harm), community, and divinity – and that these are balanced differently in more individualistic and more collectivist cultures. So far at least, this analysis has seemed to most anthropologists of ethics to be overly schematic, and not much other anthropological research has been guided by it (although see Cassaniti & Hickman 2014 for anthropological attempts to follow Shweder’s lead). However, a modified form has been adopted by one of the most innovative psychologists of moral development writing today (Haidt 2013), and this work is formulated in such a way that it both invites and enables dialogue with anthropology. The intellectual basis for such cooperation has been greatly strengthened by Webb Keane’s recent book, Ethical Life (2016), which achieves a critical synthesis of a wide range of psychological research with anthropological and historical perspectives. Perhaps the most salient and interesting challenge in all of this literature for the anthropology of ethics is the foundational role much of it implies, in ethical thought and practice, of emotions and sentiments. A serious engagement with this literature, and with the broad Smith/Humean tradition in moral philosophy that emphasises moral sentiments, might have the potential to enrich the anthropology of ethics while at the same time breathing new life into the anthropology of emotions.

Emerging debates

With intellectual resources drawn largely from these five broad and diverse sources, what briefly are the concepts, questions, and topics of debate anthropologists of ethics and morality are beginning to explore? Having realised that collective rules do not exhaust the ethical dimension of social life, they are exploring a range of other ways in which ethical thought is organised socially. More or less voluntary projects through which people work to fashion themselves and cultivate ethical qualities have been studied mostly in religious contexts (e.g. Lester 2005; Mahmood 2005; Marsden 2005; Eberhardt 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Cook 2010; Bender & Taves 2012; Fisher 2014; Cassaniti 2015), but also in fields as diverse as parenthood (Paxson 2004; Clarke 2009; Kuan 2015) and activism (Dave 2012; Heywood 2015a, 2015b; Lazar 2016). There is also a renewed interest in the concepts of value and values (Robbins 2012, 2013). And following a pioneering early paper by Caroline Humphrey (1997), there has been interest in the part played in ethical life by modelling one’s conduct on a chosen ‘exemplar’ (who might be a known, historical, or mythical individual), rather than, or in addition to, the following of moral rules (Højer & Bandak 2015; Robbins forthcoming). All of this has also prompted the appropriate corrective: the realization that when the specificity of rules as a mode of organising ethical life is recognised, elaborate attention to rules, when and where it occurs, becomes interesting in its own right (Dresch & Skoda 2012; Pirie & Scheele 2014; Dresch & Scheele 2015, especially Clarke 2015). Anthropologists have long found more rich and subtle resources for thinking about moral life in the writings of Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and sometime collaborator, than in Durkheim himself (see, for example, Carrithers et al. 1985). The stimulus of the new anthropology of ethics has, however, also prompted a creative and careful re-reading of Durkheim, with a view to finding insights in relation to ethical life quite other than those derived by mainstream anthropology through the twentieth century (e.g. Stavrianakis 2016).

Although it is occasionally suggested (in seminars and informal discussion) that the very category of ethics may be inapplicable in this or that part of the world (the usual candidates being Melanesia and Amazonia, and conditions of extreme poverty and exclusion), a sustained exposition of that position has yet to be attempted, and persuasive ethnographic accounts of ethical life in just such places and situations have been published (Robbins 2004; Londoño Sulkin 2012; Roberts 2016; see also Lear 2006, 2015). But if the ethnographic range of the anthropology of ethics is global, there is something of a special case, in terms of density, with China. The idea has gained some currency in popular discourse in China itself that in the wake of the catastrophes of Maoism and the lurching dislocations of the ‘reform’ era, the country might be enduring an especially profound ‘moral crisis’. It is perhaps for this reason that a strikingly rich and varied ethnographic literature on aspects of moral life in China has appeared in the last few years, with emerging debate on what, if anything, a notion of civilizational moral crisis might mean, and in what ways, if any, it might apply (Liu 2002, 2009; Jankowiak 2004; Yan 2009a, 2009b, 2014, 2016; Oxfeld 2010; Zhang, Kleinman & Yu 2011; Kleinman 2011; Steinmüller 2013; Fisher 2014; Xu 2014; Kuan 2015).

So, the development of the anthropology of ethics has not seen the emergence of a new sub-discipline. It has instead constituted both a renewal (and in some cases rediscovery) of concerns with deep roots in the discipline, and a fairly radical re-thinking of the fundamentals of anthropological theory, in which perennial questions of human agency and social causation have been revisited in new ways. For instance, it has been a theme in the anthropology of ethics (see Laidlaw 2016) to pay attention to the specific modes and moods of people’s personal striving, resisting the all-too-common reflex in much recent anthropology of reducing all such phenomena to mere expressions of neoliberalism: some thought-provoking examples, strikingly different from each other, include Kuan (2015), Schielke (2015), Singh (2015), Cook (2016), and Marsden (2016). And of course, renewed interest in ethics in the discipline has profoundly inflected anthropological analysis and critique of the two most newly powerful discourses and sets of institutions and practices through which ‘doing good’ is organised in the contemporary world: human rights and humanitarianism, respectively (see Bornstein 2003, 2012; Englund 2006; Ticktin 2006; Bornstein & Redfield 2011; Elisha 2011; Fassin 2012; Keane 2016: 248-59). Other topics that have proven amenable to new and interesting forms of anthropological analysis, once approached in part as an aspect of the ethical dimension of social life, include happiness (Kavedžua & Walker 2016), the giving and receiving of favours (Henig & Makovicky 2017), and the varied practices and phenomena of detachment (Candea et al. 2015). A further development to note, however, lies outside anthropology itself, in highly encouraging signs of considerably more informed and considered use of anthropological writings than heretofore in discussions of morality in other disciplines, including in psychology (e.g. Haidt 2013), moral philosophy (Lear 2006, 2015; Lillehammer 2014), and theology (Banner 2014). Finally, the rich potential for productive interdisciplinary conversation is illustrated by recently published symposia, on ethical conversations conducted across cultural borders (Mair & Evans 2016) and on the fundamental sources and forms of ethical life (Mattingly et al. 2017).

References

Annas, J., D. Narvaez & N. E. Snow (eds) 2016. Developing the virtues: integrating perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.

Anscombe, G. E. M. 1958. Modern moral philosophy. Philosophy 33, 1-19.

Appiah, K. A. 2008. Experiments in ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Asad, T. 1986. The idea of an anthropology of Islam. Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.

Astuti, R. & M. Bloch 2015. The causal cognition of wrongdoing: incest, intentionality, and morality. Frontiers of Psychology 6, 136.

Banner, M. 2014. The ethics of everyday life: moral theology, social anthropology, and the imagination of the human. Oxford: University Press.

Barker, J. (ed.) 2007. The anthropology of morality in Melanesia and beyond. London: Ashgate.

Bender, C. & A. Taves (eds) 2012. What matters? Ethnographies of value in a not so secular age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bloch, M. 1989. Ritual, history, and power: selected papers in anthropology. London: Athlone.

Bornstein, E. 2003. The spirit of development: Protestant NGOs, morality, and economics in Zimbabwe. London: Routledge.

——— 2012. Disquieting gifts: humanitarianism in New Delhi. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

——— & P. Redfield (eds) 2011. Forces of compassion: humanitarianism between ethics and politics. Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR Press.

Brandt, R. 1954. Hopi ethics: a theoretical analysis. Chicago: University Press.

Briggs, J. L. 1998. Inuit morality play: the emotional education of a three-year old. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Brown, K. E. & L. Milgram (eds) 2009. Economics and morality: anthropological approaches. Lanham, Md.: Altamira.

Candea, M., J. Cook, C. Trundle & T. Yarrow (eds) 2015. Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking. Manchester: University Press.

Carrithers, M., S. Collins & S. Lukes (eds) 1985. The category of the person: anthropology, philosophy, history. Cambridge: University Press.

Cassaniti, J. 2015. Living Buddhism: mind, self and emotion in a Thai community. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

——— & J. R. Hickman (eds) 2014. New directions in the anthropology of morality. Anthropological Theory 14(S1), 3.

Clarke, M. 2009. Islam and the new kinship: reproductive technology and the Shariah in Lebanon. Oxford: Berghahn.

——— 2014. Cough sweets and angels: the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary in Sufi practice in Lebanon. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, 407-25.

——— 2015. Legalism and the care of the self: Shari’ah discourse in contemporary Lebanon. In Legalism: rules and categories (eds) P. Dresch & J. Scheele. Oxford: University Press.

Cook, J. 2010. Meditation in modern Buddhism: renunciation and change in Thai monastic life. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 2016. Mindful in Westminster: the politics of mediation and the limits of neoliberal critique. In Values of happiness: toward an anthropology of purpose in life (eds) I. Kavedžua & H. Walker. Chicago: HAU Books.

Cook, J. W. 1999. Morality and cultural difference. New York: Oxford University Press.

Corsin Jimenez, A. (ed.) 2007. Culture and well-being: anthropological approaches to freedom and political ethics. London: Pluto Press.

Csordas, T. J. 1999. Embodiment and cultural phenomenology. In Perspectives on embodiment (eds) G. Weiss & H. F. Haber. New York: Routledge.

Das, V. 2010. Engaging the life of the other: love and everyday life. In Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language, and action (ed.) M. Lambek. New York: Fordham University Press

——— 2012. Ordinary ethics. In A companion to moral anthropology (ed.) D. Fassin. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

——— 2015. What does ordinary ethics look like?. In Four lectures on ethics (eds) M. Lambek, V. Das, D. Fassin & W. Keane. Chicago: HAU Books.

Dave, N. N. 2012. Queer activism in India: a story in the anthropology of ethics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Desjarlais, R. & C. J. Throop 2011. Phenomenological approaches in anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 40, 87-102.

Dresch, P. & H. Skoda (eds) 2012. Legalism: anthropology and history. Oxford: University Press.

——— & J. Scheele (eds) 2015. Legalism: rules and categories. Oxford: University Press.

Durkheim, Emile 1933 [1893]. The division of labour in society. New York: Macmillan.

——— 1953. The determination of moral facts [1906], Value judgements and judgements of reality [1911]. In Sociology and philosophy (ed.) D. Pocock. London: Routledge.

——— 1957 [1937]. Professional ethics and civic morals. London: Routledge.

——— 1961 [1925]. Moral education: a study in the theory and application of the sociology of education. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

——— 1979 [1920]. Introduction to ethics. In Essays on morals and education (ed.) W.S.F. Pickering. London: Routledge.

——— 1995 [1912]. The elementary forms of the religious life. A study in religious sociology. New York: Free Press.

Eberhardt, N. 2006. Imagining the course of life: self-transformation in a Shan Buddhist community. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Edel, M. & A. Edel 1968 [1959]. Anthropology and ethics: the quest for moral understanding, 2nd edition. Cleveland: Case Western Press.

Eliot, T. S. 1969. The cocktail party. In The collected poems and plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber.

Englund, H. 2006. Prisoners of freedom: human rights and the African poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Elisha, O. 2011. Moral ambition: mobilization and social outreach in evangelical megachurches. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Evens, T.M.S. 1982. Two concepts of 'society as a moral system': Evans-Pritichard’s heterodoxy. Man 17, 205-18.

Fassin, D. (ed.) 2012a. A companion to moral anthropology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

——— 2012b. Humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fassin, D. & S. Lézé (eds) 2012. Moral anthropology: a critical reader. London: Routledge.

Faubion, J.D. 2001a. The shadows and lights of Waco: millennialism today. Princeton: University Press.

——— 2001b. Toward an anthropology of ethics: Foucault and the pedagogies of autopoiesis. Representations 74, 83-104.

——— 2011. An anthropology of ethics. Cambridge: University Press.

Firth, R. 1951. Moral standards and social organization. In Elements in social organization. London: Athlone.

——— 1953. The study of values by social anthropologists. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 53, 146-53.

Fisher, G. 2014. From comrades to bodhisattvas: moral dimensions of lay Buddhist practice in contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Fortes, M. 1959. Oedipus and Job in West African religion. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 1987. Religion, morality and the person: essays on Tallensi religion. Cambridge: University Press.

Foucault, M. 1980 [1977]. The confessions of the flesh. In Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-77 (ed.) C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon.

——— 1982. The subject and power. Critical Inquiry 8, 777-95.

——— 1986 [1984]. The use of pleasure: the history of sexuality, volume 2. London: Viking.

——— 1988 [1984]. The care of the self: the history of sexuality, volume 3. London: Viking.

——— 1997. Ethics, subjectivity, and truth: essential works of Foucault 1954-1984, volume 1 (ed.) P. Rabinow. New York: New Press.

——— 2005. The hermeneutics of the subject: lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

——— 2010. The government of self and others: lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

——— 2011. The courage of truth (The government of self and others II). Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

von Fürer-Haimendorf, C. 1967. Morals and merit: a study of values and social controls in South Asian cocieties. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Geertz, C. 1973. Thick description: essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

——— 1983. Local knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Gellner, E. 1959. Words and things: an examination of, and an attack on, linguistic philosophy. London: Gollancz.

——— 1998. Language and solitude: Malinowski, Wittgenstein, and the Habsburg dilemma. Cambridge: University Press.

Gluckman, M. (ed.) 1972. The allocation of responsibility. Manchester: University Press.

Haidt, J. 2013. The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Heintz, M. (ed.) 2009. The anthropology of moralities. Oxford: Berghahn.

Henig, D. & N. Makovicky (eds) 2017. Economies of favour after socialism. Oxford: University Press.

Heywood, P. 2015a. Freedom in the code: the anthropology of (double) morality. Anthropological Theory 15, 200-17.

——— 2015b. Agreeing to disagree: LGBTQ dctivism and the Church in Italy. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5, 59-78.

Hirschkind, C. 2006. The ethical soundscape: cassette sermons and Islamic counter-publics in Egypt. New York: Columbia University Press.

Højer, L. & A. Bandak (eds) 2015. The power of example: anthropological explorations in persuasion, evocation, and imitation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(S1).

Howell, S. (ed.) 1997. The Ethnography of moralities. London: Routledge.

Humphrey, C. 1997. Exemplars and rules: aspects of the discourse of moralities in Mongolia. In The ethnography of moralities (ed.) S. Howell. London: Routledge.

Ingold, T. 2011. Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. Abingdon: Routledge.

——— 2013. Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Abingdon: Routledge.

Jackson, M. (ed.) 1996. Things as they are: new directions in phenomenological anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

——— 2005. Existential anthropology: events, exigencies and effects. Oxford: Berghahn.

——— 2013. The wherewithal of life: ethics, migration, and the question of wellbeing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jankowiak, W. 2004. Market reforms, nationalism, and the expansion of urban China’s moral horizon. Urban Anthropology 33, 167-210.

Kavedžua, I. & H. Walker (eds) 2016. Values of happiness: toward an anthropology of purpose in life. Chicago: HAU Books.

Keane, W. 2014. Freedom, reflexivity, and the sheer everydayness of ethics. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, 443-57.

——— 2016. Ethical life: its natural and social histories. Princeton: University Press.

Kleinman, A. 2006. What really matters: living a moral life amidst uncertainty and danger. Oxford: University Press.

——— et al. 2011. Deep China: the moral life of the person. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kluckhohn, C. 1951. Values and value-orientations in the theory of action: an exploration in definition and classification. In Toward a general theory of action (eds) T. Parsons & E. Shils. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Kohlberg, L. 1981. The philosophy of moral development: moral stages and the idea of justice. San Francisco: Harper Row.

Kuan, T. 2015. Love’s uncertainty: the politics and ethics of child rearing in contemporary China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ladd, J. 1957. The structure of a moral code: a philosophical analysis of ethical discourse applied to the ethics of the Navaho Indians. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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.

——— 2014a. The subject of virtue: an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 2014b. Significant differences. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, 479-506.

——— 2016. Through a glass, darkly. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, 47-73.

——— 2017. Fault lines in the anthropology of ethics. In Moral engines: exploring the ethical drives in human life (eds) C. Mattingly et al. Oxford: Berghahn.

Lambek, M. 2000. The anthropology of religion and the quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Current Anthropology 41, 309-20.

——— 2002. Nuriaty, the saint, and the sultan: virtuous subject and subjective virtuoso of the postmodern colony. In Postcolonial subjectivities in Africa (ed) R. Werbner. London: Zed Books.

——— 2008. Value and virtue. Anthropological Theory 8, 133-157.

——— 2015a. On the immanence of the ethical: a response to Michael Lempert’s ‘No ordinary ethics’. Anthropological Theory 15, 128-32.

——— 2015b. The ethical condition: essays on action, person, and value. Chicago: University Press.

Lambek, M. (ed.) 2010. Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language, and action. New York: Fordham University Press.

——— V. Das, D. Fassin & W. Keane 2015. Four lectures on ethics. Chicago: HAU Books.

Lazar, S. 2016. Politics beyond ‘interest’: ethics, kinship, and the collective self in Argentine labour unions. Malinowski Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics (available on-line: http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=3506).

Leach, E. 1954. Political systems of highland Burma: a study of Kachin social structure. London: G. Bell and Sons.

Lear, J. 2006. Radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

——— 2015. Waiting with Coetzee. Raritan 34, 1-26.

Lempert, M. 2013. No ordinary ethics. Anthropological Theory 13, 370-93.

——— 2014. Uneventful ethics. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, 465-72.

——— 2015. Ethics without immanence: a reply to Michael Lambek. Anthropological Theory 15, 13-40.

Lester, R. J. 2005. Jesus in our wombs: embodying modernity in a Mexican convent. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1966 [1962]. The savage mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Lillehammer, H. 2014. Minding your own business? Understanding indifference as a virtue. Philosophical Perspectives 28, 111-26.

Liu, X. 2002. The otherness of self: a genealogy of self in contemporary China. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.

——— 2009. The mirage of China: anti-humanism, narcissism, and corporeality of the contemporary world. Oxford: Berghahn.

Londoño Sulkin, C.D. 2012. People of substance: an ethnography of morality in the Colombian Amazon. Toronto: University Press.

MacIntyre, A. 1981. After virtue: a study in moral theory. London: Duckworth.

Macbeath, A. 1952. Experiments in living: a study of the nature and foundation of ethics or morals in the light of recent work in social anthropology. London: Macmillan.

Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: University Press.

Marett, R. R. 1902. Origin and validity in ethics. In Personal idealism: philosophical essays by eight members of the University of Oxford (ed.) H. Sturt. London: Macmillan.

——— 1931. The beginnings of morals and culture. In An outline of modern knowledge (ed.) W. Rose. London: Victor Gollancz.

Marsden, M. 2005. Living Islam: Muslim religious experience in Pakistan’s north-west frontier. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 2016. Trading worlds: Afghan merchants across modern frontiers. London: Hurst.

Mattingly, C. 2012. Two virtue ethics and the anthropology of morality. Anthropological Theory 12, 161-84.

——— 2014. Moral laboratories: family peril and the struggle for a good life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— R. Dyring, M. Louw & T.S. Wentzer (eds) 2017. Moral engines: exploring the ethical drives in human life. Oxford: Berghahn.

Mair, J. & N.H.A. Evans (eds) 2016. Special section: ethics across borders: questioning incommensurability and affinity. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, 201-365.

Mayer, A.C. (ed.) 1981. Culture and morality: essays in honour of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Meillassoux, C. 1981. Maidens, meal and money: capitalism and the domestic community. Cambridge: University Press.

Moody-Adams, M.M. 1997. Fieldwork in familiar places: morality, culture, and philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Nussbaum, M. 1985. The fragility of goodness: luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 1994. The therapy of desire: theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics. Princeton: University Press.

Oxfeld, E. 2010. Drink water, but remember the source: moral discourse in a Chinese village. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pandian, A. 2008. Tradition in fragments: inherited forms and fractures in the ethics of South India. American Ethnologist 35, 466-80.

——— 2009. Crooked stalks: cultivating virtue in South India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

——— & Daud Ali (eds) 2010. Ethical life in South Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Parish, S. M. 1994. Moral knowing in a Hindu sacred city: an exploration of mind, emotion, and self. New York: Columbia University Press.

Paxson, H. 2004. Making modern mothers: ethics and family planning in urban Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pirie, F. & J. Scheele (eds) 2014. Legalism: community and justice. Oxford: University Press.

Prasad, L. 2007. Poetics of conduct: oral narrative and moral being in a South Indian town. New York: Columbia University Press.

Pocock, D. 1986. The ethnography of morals. International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 1, 3-20.

——— 1988. Persons, texts, and morality. International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 3, 203-16.

Rabinow, P. 1996. Essays in the anthropology of reason. Princeton: University Press.

Read, K. E. 1955. Morality and the concept of the person among the Gahuku-Gama. Oceania 25, 233-82.

Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2007. Between reproduction and freedom: morality, value, and radical cultural change. Ethnos 72, 293-314.

——— 2012. Cultural values. In A companion to moral anthropology (ed.) D. Fassin. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

——— 2013. Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, 447-62.

——— 2016. What is the matter with transcendence: on the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, 767-81.

——— forthcoming. Where in the world are values: exemplarity, morality, and social process. In Recovering the human subject: decision, freedom, and creativity (eds) J. Laidlaw, B. Bodenhorn & M. Holbraad. Cambridge: University Press.

Roberts, N. 2016. To be cared for: the power of conversion and the foreignness of belonging in an Indian slum. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schielke, S. 2015. Egypt in the future tense: hope, frustration, and ambivalence before and after 2011. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Scott, J.C. 1976. The moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shweder, R. 1991. Thinking through cultures: expeditions in cultural psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Shweder, R.A., N.C. Much, M. Mahapatra & L. Park 1997. The ‘big three’ of morality and the big three explanations of suffering. In Morality and health: interdisciplinary perspectives (eds) A.M. Brandt & P. Rozin. New York: Routledge.

Simon, G. M. 2014. Caged in on the outside: moral subjectivity, selfhood, and Islam in Minangkabau, Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Singh, B. 2015. Poverty and the quest for life: spiritual and material striving in rural India. Chicago: University Press.

Snow, N.E. (ed.) 2015. Cultivating virtue: perspectives from philosophy, theology, and psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stafford, C. (ed.) 2013. Ordinary ethics in China. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press.

Stavrianakis, A. 2016. Obstinacy and suicide: rethinking Durkheim’s vices. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, 163-188.

Steinmüller, H. 2013. Communities of complicity: everyday ethics in rural China. Oxford: Berghahn.

Swanton, C. 2003. Virtue ethics: a pluralistic view. Oxford: University Press.

——— 2015. The virtue ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Sykes, K. (ed.) 2009. Ethnographies of moral reasoning: living paradoxes of a global age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Taussig, M. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the self: the making of modern identity. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 2014. Dilemmas and connections: selected essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Throop, C.J. 2010. Suffering and sentiment: exploring the vicissitudes of experience and pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2012. Moral sentiments. In A companion to moral anthropology (ed.) D. Fassin. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

——— 2016. Aspects, affordances, breakdowns: some phenomenological reflections on Webb Keane’s Ethical life: its natural and social histories. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, 469-75.

Ticktin, M. 2006. Where ethics and politics meet: the violence of humanitarianism in France. American Ethnologist 33, 33-49.

Turiel, E. 1983. The development of social knowledge: morality and convention. Cambridge: University Press,

Venkastesan, S. (ed.) 2015. There is no such thing as the good: The 2013 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory. Critique of Anthropology 35, 430-80.

Vogt, E.Z. & E.M. Albert (eds) 1967. People of Rimrock: a study of values in five cultures. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Weiner, J.F. 2001. Tree leaf talk: a Heideggerian anthropology. Oxford: Berg.

Wentzer, T.S. 2014. ‘I have seen Königsberg burning’: philosophical anthropology and the responsiveness of historical experience. Anthropological Theory 14, 27-48.

Westermarck, E. 1906-8. The origin and development of the moral ideas, two volumes. London: Macmillan.

——— 1932. Ethical relativity. London: Kegan Paul.

Williams, B. 1985. Ethics and the limits of philosophy. London: Collins.

——— 1993. Shame and necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolfram, S. 1982. Anthropology and morality. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 13, 262-74.

Xu, J. 2014. Becoming a moral child amidst China’s moral crisis: preschool discourse and practices of sharing in Shanghai. Ethos 42, 222-42.

Yan, Y. 2009a. The individualization of Chinese society. Oxford: Berg.

——— 2009b. The good Samaritan’s new trouble: a study of the changing moral landscape in contemporary China. Social Anthropology 17, 9-24.

——— 2014. The moral implications of immorality: the Chinese case for a new anthropology of morality. Journal of Religious Ethics 42, 460-93.

——— 2016. New and old moralities in changing China. Anthropology of this Century 15 (available on-line: http://aotcpress.com/articles/moralities-changing-china/).

Zigon, J. 2008. Morality: an anthropological perspective. Oxford: Berg.

——— 2009. Phenomenological anthropology and morality: a reply to Robbins. Ethnos 74, 286-88.

——— 2014. An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world-building: a critical response to ordinary ethics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, 746-64.

Zhang, E., A. Kleinman & T. Weiming (eds) 2011. Governance of life in Chinese moral experience: the quest for an adequate life. Abingdon: Routledge.

Note on contributor

James Laidlaw is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College. He has conducted fieldwork in India, Inner Mongolia, Bhutan, and Taiwan. His most recent book is The subject of virtue: an anthropology of ethics and freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Prof. James Laidlaw, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. jal6@cam.ac.uk

Citizenship

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Sian Lazar

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16citizenship

Abstract:

What is citizenship? The word itself is now used in a wide range of arenas, from citizenship education in schools to development agencies’ programmes of good governance, and public statements from multinationals about their ‘corporate citizenship’. It is being used, it seems, to evoke virtues such as equality in rights, respectful engagement between citizen (individual or corporate) and wider national society, participation in and knowledge about institutions of government, the right to vote and be elected, etc. Yet at its most fundamental, citizenship names political belonging, and here I argue that to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community.

Introduction

The sociologist T.H. Marshall gave the following definition of citizenship in 1950:

Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed (Marshall 1983 [1950]: 253).

He equated community with the nation, and viewed membership of that community as primarily an individual ownership of a set of rights and corresponding duties. His version of citizenship has a distinguished pedigree: from Locke onwards, liberal citizenship has been seen as a status of the individual. The rights associated with this status in theory allow individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good life, as long as they do not hinder other’s similar pursuits, and the state protects this status quo. In return, citizens have minimal responsibilities, which revolve primarily around keeping the state running, such as paying taxes, or participating in military service.

However, liberal citizenship is not the only form of citizenship that we can find globally. Indeed, insights from ethnography complicate this normative picture of liberal citizenship, as anthropologists have insisted on the specificity of citizenship in different contexts. Alternative possibilities might be civic republican or communitarian forms of citizenship. This is because political membership is related in complex ways to day-to-day practices of politics, and citizenship is a mechanism for making claims on different political communities, of which the state is just one. One important consequence of this is that anthropologists denaturalize liberal citizenship and ask questions about the actual constitution of political membership and subjectivity in a given context. In the move from political philosophy to anthropology, we see an important analytical shift take place from the normative to the descriptive: from what citizenship and citizens should be to a critical analysis of what they are.

The political community

The concept of citizenship has a long trajectory within political philosophy. Like anthropologists, political philosophers ask: how should we live with others in a political community? Here I trace some key moments in this enduring debate within political philosophy, a debate which informs most anthropological discussions of citizenship today. Aristotle (2013) is my starting point, as the most celebrated proponent of a civic republican tradition of citizenship that began in the early Greek city states. In the Politics, he discusses three very important issues: first, the question of how precisely to constitute membership – and exclusion; second, the nature of the citizen as person; and third, the nature of politics itself. The first question of membership was a particular problem in early Greek philosophical thought because of the presence of slaves, often in important bureaucratic positions in the government of the city. Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics that ‘man is a political animal’ was not an inclusive one, but referred only to certain men, those who were not slaves (women were quickly dismissed and then ignored, along with children). He described the citizen: a member of the political community (polis) who participates in government in the sense that he ‘gives judgement and holds office’. Secondly, Aristotle discussed in great depth the development of the citizen as a particular kind of man capable of living in the collectivity, who held and cultivated the associated virtues, such as respect for law and for others and a passion for politics. Finally, politics itself was intimately linked with speech in Aristotle’s thought. Discussion and debate were absolutely central to Athenian politics and personhood. So, citizenship was constituted through political practice, and political practice was constituted through speech and deliberation.

The key points here are, first, that citizenship is more than simply a status denoting membership of a polity but is constituted through a set of practices associated with participation in politics. Second, political subjectivity is something that cannot be assumed to exist but that must be created. For Aristotle, political subjects – citizens – are inherently collective and also eminently moral.

The second set of foundational philosophical texts I want to highlight are those of the social contract philosophers and the Liberal tradition. For Rousseau and Locke, social order can only be achieved through the acceptance of all to live via the agreement of the majority for the benefit of all. This is principally in order to protect property rights, as in the state of ‘natural freedom’ (Rousseau 1971) prior to the establishment of a state, property is always subject to the threat of what Locke called ‘the Invasion of others’. To overcome this danger each individual ‘puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will’, thus creating ‘civil freedom’ (Rousseau 1971). The political community therefore comes into being when individuals voluntarily subject themselves to the collectivity (meaning the state and the rule of law). As with Aristotle, political subjectivity is not to be assumed, but is created, and is intimately linked to moral questions of personal virtue. The American Declaration of Independence^[1] (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man^[2] (1789) were more radical, in their willingness to question the inevitability of the existing regime of state power and sovereignty; and then to claim sovereignty for ‘the people’. They did so by claiming the equality of men (sic.) in the name of individual rights, especially those to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ and ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’. The political context meant that they needed to claim liberty so that they could change sovereign power, but liberty could also be interpreted in the light of Rousseau and Locke’s position that true freedom comes through the respect for the rule of law, not through the absence of law (for Locke, see his Two Treatises of Government, 2003).

The question of property was also fundamental for the authors of these Declarations, and the role of the state as guarantor of individual property rights became a central question of citizenship in Republican and Liberal regimes from the late eighteenth century on. In the first place, property was a fundamental criterion for membership, as only male property holders were defined as citizens. But also questions of property-holding often created practical difficulties for the implementation of individual, universal ideals of citizenship. For example, Latin American constitutions and legislation of the nineteenth century often attempted to abolish collective land-holding in favour of individual property rights, but this proved very unpopular, especially for indigenous communities in the region. For example, Andean communities were less keen on equal individual rights as defined by their rules, than they were on retaining customary forms of land-holding that protected their members and shared out access to resources (Platt 1984). Anthropologists have done a great deal to illuminate our understanding of the complexities of these processes in the contemporary world, giving due import to their historical, economic, and political background.

In the dominant Liberal narrative of the nineteenth century, liberty of one’s own person would be achieved through citizenship based on individual rights, which superseded institutions perceived as backward, such as slavery or collective property-holding. However, in practice, citizenship was continually negotiated, and collective traditions were not peculiar only to indigenous communities. In fact, the historical development of citizenship is linked to the coalescing of modern nation-states (which often took liberal forms) out of earlier city-state formations built on civic republican traditions. But even the most radical of modern nation-states mixed the two traditions of citizenship together.

One common aspect of both traditions has been the inherent connection of citizenship to exclusion from membership. The exclusion of women from liberal citizenship was denounced from its beginnings by early feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Olympe de Gouges. Contemporary feminist political philosophers, historians, and other social theorists also point out that the ‘abstract’ individual citizen of Liberal ideals turns out to be in fact a very particular kind of white male property-holding individual citizen.

The debate about the abstract individual of contemporary Liberalism has provoked responses from communitarian political philosophers as well as from feminists. Both emphasize the embedding of subjects within collectivities; they recognize that in real life we are not merely individual subjects or ‘unencumbered selves’ (Sandel 1984). Rather, and now I use more anthropological language, we are part of a whole network of social relations of care, obligation, rights, kinship, and so on.

However, as anthropologists are only too well aware, a community is not always welcoming and egalitarian. Feminist and queer political theorists, among others, have pointed out how the notion of community often leaves little space for individual variability. More importantly, it hides from view the internal power relations that constrain the ability to define what ‘a community’ is and what ‘it’ thinks best. Who speaks for ‘a’ community? Are any communities so homogeneous as to suppress difference within them, and what does that mean for their members?

For anthropologists, this is a crucial point, which has come out in debates as varied as those centred on individual or collective notions of the self, the interplay between ‘indigenous’ or ‘customary’ legal jurisdictions and national ones, human rights and property rights, and the practice of ‘development’. While many anthropologists have felt an affinity with subaltern groups and so have defended group rights from a perspective of cultural relativism, it has long been acknowledged that societal and legal recognition of group rights may inhibit individual claims to justice. Anthropological study takes the discussion beyond abstract principles, not least through the recognition that conflicts between group rights and legal regimes that are based upon Liberal notions of individual rights often happen in grey zones imbued with complex power relations. Examples of these grey zones are issues of land rights and the exploitation of natural resources.

In a classically liberal approach, individual rights constitute citizenship of the national political community and group rights undermine that civic belonging; while in political thought more influenced by communitarianism, smaller communities define their members. Contemporary liberals have modified the first position, to argue for liberal versions of community membership that protect both individual and group rights. Yet the tension remains largely unresolved. Anthropology’s distinctive disciplinary history and methodological approach, relying as it does on comparisons between different kinds of cultural, social, and economic practices, means that anthropologists are well placed to explore these contrasting notions of political community in both urban and rural spaces.

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

When we study how citizenship operates in different contexts, we see that political subject formation is a key element. Ethnographic work shows that political subject formation happens through both top-down and bottom-up processes. Aihwa Ong summed up this insight in an important early article, when she suggested that citizenship is a ‘process of self-making and being-made’ (1996: 737).

One prominent thread in the anthropology of citizenship uses a Foucauldian analysis to examine how states and other entities make citizens under various citizenship regimes. To research this, we can examine encounters between people and state officials or policy, and one area where a considerable amount of work of this type has been done is in immigration. Immigration is perhaps where boundaries between citizen and non-citizen are most contested, but immigration encounters are not solely punitive and exclusionary: governments also put in a lot of work to ‘assimilate’ different groups of migrants and refugees.

The interaction between assimilation and respect for difference was investigated early on through the concept of ‘cultural citizenship’, first brought to an anthropological audience by Renato Rosaldo. For Rosaldo, cultural citizenship ‘refers to the right to be different (in terms of race, ethnicity or native language) with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the nation-state’s democratic processes’ (1994: 57). In a series of research and activist projects with Latino immigrants to the US, he and his collaborators discussed immigrants’ experiences of second-class citizenship, and their struggles for better citizenship quality, which they often defined in terms of respect and dignity. He firmly located the struggle for cultural citizenship within a political struggle for rights in the face of exclusionary definitions of national identity.

State policies towards immigrants are not the only form of cultural citizenship regime in operation today. By citizenship regime, I refer to legal, bureaucratic, ideological, and material frameworks that condition practices of, and ideas about, government and participation in politics. States and NGOs all attempt to construct particular kinds of citizen, in policy areas such as development intervention globally and welfare policy at home.

One of the most important ways that states create citizens is education – or, better, schooling. National schooling systems have long been recognised as central to the development of national identity and civic commitment. Although so closely associated with nation-building projects, today education is transnational, and a key area for development intervention: from provision of universal primary education to human rights education programmes, for example. Still, the virtues promoted through schooling vary from country to county, valuing different languages, bodily and emotional dispositions. Schooling may create specific kinds of citizens explicitly through civics classes but also in the ways that pupil–teacher relationships are constructed and students’ bodies disciplined. They may promote certain gender roles, a hierarchical relationship with authority or a commitment to democracy as a value in itself. Schooling is always a moral project, even when that moral quality is hidden behind seemingly technocratic language as with the example of ‘human capital’. However, schools may not always succeed in producing the kinds of citizens envisaged by dominant ideologies, and anthropological analysis is very good at exposing the unintended consequences of educational policies.

Education continues to be inherent to citizenship, whether implemented through schooling or political participation, participation in local voluntary projects, or citizenship classes for immigrants. Other cultural and moral projects of citizenship construction include those that produce the citizen as consumer – of public services, goods, lifestyles; as knowledge worker in the information economy; as auditor of transparent government; as soldier or ex-soldier. These projects work in the interface between people, policy, markets, and the state.

Importantly, though, the processes of subject construction are not only top-down. Ordinary people frame and make claims of the state – for example, for disability benefits for those affected by the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (Petryna 2002), or for regularization of land titles in the peripheral neighbourhoods of São Paulo (Holston 2008). These studies bring out the complex relationships between people and state bureaucracy, and between people and law. The room for manoeuvre that citizens enjoy is not completely free, but constrained by legal and political regimes.

Citizen action is also shaped by the languages of political action available to actors. In some spaces, the processes of claims-making are articulated through a local language of citizenship, as in South Africa, where HIV/AIDS activists have successfully mobilized using the language of citizenship to demand antiretroviral treatment from the state. The language of citizenship as a means of articulating claims usually names a claim to rights: rights to medical treatment, to legalization of property, to self-government, etc. As a result, for many theorists of citizenship, including anthropologists, the link between citizenship claims-making and rights is irrefutable and exclusive.

However, although the connection between citizenship and rights is often assumed, citizenship is in fact linked to languages of rights in quite specific political contexts. Indeed, political claims and talk of membership (i.e. citizenship) can also be articulated through different languages, such as obligations, or the naturalized membership of a collectivity. This may reflect a non-liberal vision of citizenship. The recognition of languages of citizenship other than that of rights opens up analytical space for research into non-normative citizenship formations themselves.

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

People are members of varying political communities, not just those governed by national or even local states, and they are subject to forms of government that originate from different entities. Therefore, although citizenship is classically considered as related to the state, anthropological study reveals that this applies under particular political conditions of belonging, but is not always the case. This is especially evident when we take globalization into account. Given the contemporary importance of transnational and sometimes global political entities such as corporations or religious networks in the government of citizens of different nation-states, can we argue that citizenship is merely the relationship between the individual and the state? If we wish to argue that citizenship is participation in government, in the taking of decisions that affect our lives, then the citizen’s position regarding a range of governing entities becomes crucial in an assessment of the quality of his or her citizenship under a given political regime.

For most citizens, the dominant political community is the nation-state. In practice, though, there is no reason to yoke citizenship solely to the nation-state, and indeed we should question the scale at which we perceive a given political community.

In early modern Europe, the dominant political community was the city, and today some of the most relevant political communities of advanced capitalism operate on a supra-national scale. This may be global, as in the ideas of cosmopolitanism, world citizenship and human rights, but also transnational as for activist groups, citizen-migrants, diasporic groups and religious networks. Work on transnational migrants links many of the questions of citizenship discussed here, including membership, nationality, identity, cultural citizenship, and political practice.

As with the transnational dimension, local citizenship of the city is of equal theoretical importance to citizenship of the nation. David Harvey (2012) has argued that claiming the right to define the city is a crucial contemporary site for resistance to capital. Such action may not simply be urban protest or social movements, but may also be citizens making a life for themselves in the city. Urban public spheres include the streets, where people demonstrate and work, but also the many forms of association where citizens negotiate the building and defining of society, even act violently towards one another. Thus, the location for the practices of citizenship is a key question for the analysis of citizenship. The logical realm for political action for most citizens has always been their local area, and people are often suspicious of those who choose to extend their political action beyond that, and become professional politicians rather than citizens. Through ethnography we can examine which political collectivities are important in citizens’ lives at any given time and place.

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

However we define the political community, though, it is clear that citizenship as a language names membership. It is also a means of claiming membership, and commenting on the quality (or content, extent) of membership, as we can see when people make distinctions between full- and second-class citizenship or formal and substantive citizenship.^[3] Liberal citizenship has held out the promise of universal equality achieved through universal formal citizenship, at least for particular categories of persons; but despite this promise, citizenship regimes have developed differently in different historical contexts.

Holston (2008) shows how Brazilian citizenship developed historically as differentiated, but suggests that occupants of peripheral settlements of São Paulo have challenged their differential treatment from the mid-twentieth century onwards by claiming citizenship rights to property. They do so by struggling to legalize their homes, which have been built on land that was first occupied illegally. Holston calls this an ‘insurgent citizenship’, and their demand to legalize property ownership is a claim to hold rights just like elite citizens do. There is an irony here, since land-holding has been one of the most important aspects of citizen inequality in Brazil throughout its history.

Rights claims have been a feature of campaigns by other, more organized, social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially since the 1990s. Specifically, the concept of citizenship has been used in campaigns by indigenous, feminist, urban, and LGBTQ+^[4] social movement activists, who demand that they be recognized as active social subjects with the right to have rights and – crucially – the right to define what those rights are. This is a claim to participate in government and decision-making; to participate in political processes too often closed to these groups.

As non-citizens claim citizenship, or second-class citizens claim full citizenship, the nature of citizenship itself changes. Indeed, often the struggle for inclusion (or against exclusion) is what changes the nature of the political system. This could be by creating new laws or constitutions, new categories of people and political subjects, or by changing public opinion. Social and political practices of membership are a crucial part of this dynamic.

But if citizenship is a means of claiming membership or better quality membership, it is also a means of excluding others from that membership or shaping them in contrast to the normative citizen. Citizenship is constituted by both the virtue of the individual citizen as political actor and the nature of political practice. Recognising that non-citizens are excluded from the political community can lead to a positive politics of dissent and resistance and to the broadening of citizenship, but the ‘othering’ can also be highly restrictive, not to say violent.

The archetypal non-citizen is the foreign migrant, but ‘migrant’ is in practice not a simple identity category, not least because migration is often constituted within the force field of colonial and neo-colonial relations. The transformation from colonial subject to imperial citizen and then immigrant other is the outcome of a set of political choices that have a history. Most migrants have travelled to their host country for reasons of labour, and restrictions on their citizenship status that keep them as resident aliens often enable exploitation in the form of low wages and poor working conditions. They are especially vulnerable to abuse by state officials and, where migrants are kept wholly illegal, they are subject to the insecurity of constant risk of deportation. Culturally, the presence of ‘outsiders’ within an imagined ‘national body’ is often not constituted as a problem for the dominant group of citizens, but for the non-citizens themselves. They become ciphers, representing threat, hypersexuality, cultural backwardness, or diversity and multiculturalism (e.g., Partridge 2008). They are marked out, subject to discrimination and racism, which persists even when they have become fully legal citizens, over generations.

Such operations of sovereignty are the other side of the coin to the operations of top-down subject creation discussed earlier. They may become violent, as when groups use languages of native belonging to justify attacks on others, who are seen as migrant interlopers regardless of long-standing histories of mobility and transnationalism. Thus, as boundaries are drawn between citizens and non-citizens, and legal frameworks mobilized to emphasize one group’s otherness, the status of citizen and non-citizen can become hardened, and citizenship restricted not amplified.

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

One of the results of recent developments in the anthropology of citizenship has been a proliferation of new concepts which work by adding a qualifying adjective to the term citizenship. Scholars have studied biological citizenship, flexible citizenship, agrarian citizenship, insurgent citizenship, therapeutic citizenship, urban citizenship, pharmaceutical citizenship, formal and substantive citizenship, etc. The qualifying adjective is important, because it recognises the diversity of citizenship today and acknowledges that liberal citizenship is one form among many. However, in the proliferation of adjectives we still risk assuming that we know what citizenship itself is, that the key is the ‘biological’, ‘urban’, ‘differentiated’ aspect, and that citizenship does not require explanation as a concept in its own right. Indeed, we should be wary of all essentialisms and acknowledge that ‘liberal citizenship’ must itself be plural, as attested by the varieties of liberalism both in historical reality and political thought.

At its most elemental, a focus on citizenship is a way of approaching the political, and one of the most exciting anthropological contributions to the debate is the way that we come to put into question the normative formulations of citizenship and explore the languages and practices of political membership, agency, and constitution of varied political communities, without assuming Liberal parameters for either. However, we must be careful, for two reasons. First, although it is important to take a critical position to normative understandings of citizenship, we do risk ending up in an enclave of cultural relativism where the only argument we can make is that citizenship there is different from citizenship here. While this is undoubtedly an important argument, anthropology has significantly more to contribute to our understanding of citizenship. Second, we should not lose sight of the political implications of such a strategy. Studying citizenship as political practice often obliges us to take a political stand, whether that be alongside those advocating for rights at individual or group level, or critical of mainstream (or even counter-hegemonic) notions of citizenship.

Nonetheless, if we recognize that from time to time our view of what citizenship is can be heavily coloured by a normative assumption about what it should be, we are then better placed to see how citizenship is configured in practice, and to explore the historical, material, and cultural reasons for that configuration.

References

Aristotle, 2013 [1984]. Politics (trans. C. Lord). Chicago: University Press.

Harvey, D. 2012. Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso.

Holston, J. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: University Press.

Locke, J. 2003. Two treatises of government and a letter concerning toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marshall, T.H. 1983 [1950]. Citizenship and social class. In States and societies (ed.) D. Held, 248-60. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ong, A. 1996. Cultural citizenship as subject-making: immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology 37, 737-62.

Partridge, D. 2008. We were dancing in the club, not on the Berlin Wall: black bodies, street bureaucrats, and exclusionary incorporation into the New Europe. Cultural Anthropology 23, 660-87.

Petryna, A. 2002. Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: University Press.

Platt, T. 1984. Liberalism and ethnocide in the Southern Andes. History Workshop Journal 17, 3-18.

Rosaldo, R. 1994. Cultural citizenship in San Jose, California, PoLAR 17, 57-63.

Rousseau, J.J. 1971 [1782] The Social Contract (trans. M. Cranston). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Sandel, M. 1984. The procedural republic and the unencumbered self. Political Theory 12, 81-96.

Note on contributor

Sian Lazar is author of El Alto, rebel city: self and citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2008) and editor of The anthropology of citizenship: a reader (Wiley, 2013). She works on social movements, political activism, and citizenship in Bolivia and Argentina.

Dr Sian Lazar, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. sl360@cam.ac.uk

[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration

[2] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp

[3] Substantive citizenship is the ability that citizens have in reality to claim rights that they possess through their formal status as citizen: ‘formal membership, based on principles of incorporation in to the nation-state’ contrasts with ‘the substantive distribution of the rights, meanings, institutions, and practices that membership entails to those deemed citizens’ (Holston 2008: 7).

[4] LGBTQ+ is an umbrella term for a wide spectrum of gender identities, sexual orientations and romantic orientations that experience discrimination.

Human rights

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Harri Englund

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16rights

Abstract:

Human rights, as described in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a set of moral and legal principles that apply to all human beings irrespective of their age, sex, religion, nationality, and other such characteristics. Yet they can only ever be claimed and applied in specific historical and cultural circumstances. It is from recognising this basic paradox between a universal principle and its practical application that the anthropological study of human rights arises. It allows anthropologists to confront some of the fundamental questions in their discipline, while also contributing a distinct perspective to actual human rights controversies. How wedded is the discipline to cultural and moral relativism? What can be learned from those anthropological studies of justice and morality that were written before the current interest in human rights began in the 1980s? What form of human rights activism can anthropological knowledge foster, or is anthropological analysis a necessarily separate type of pursuit from activism?

This essay addresses these and other questions by considering anthropologists’ varied responses to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and their efforts to harness anthropological knowledge in the service of human rights advocacy. Critical perspectives on actually existing human rights administrations are also discussed. While some anthropologists identify problems in activists’ and governments’ efforts in order to make human rights more acceptable locally, others demonstrate the extent to which the emphasis by human rights activists on liberties rather than socio-economic rights has been compatible with the continuing influence of political and business elites, in particular postcolonial contexts. Anthropological work has also asserted its separation from the human rights agenda by exploring what other means ordinary people have at their disposal to make their claims and grievances heard. The essay concludes by considering the future of human rights in the light of the penetration of human rights law into ever more intimate spheres of life, such as sexuality and gender relations. Anthropology’s particular strengths are also apparent here: kinship, the body, and personhood are classic themes that can provide unique perspectives on controversies over intimate human rights.

Introduction

For many of its practitioners, socio-cultural anthropology has come a long way since the period when cultural relativism seemed to undermine its contribution to understanding and advocating human rights. The 1999 Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the largest professional association of anthropologists, made the case for a positive contribution in no uncertain terms.^[1] It swore ‘a commitment to human rights consistent with international principles’, for which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was said to provide ‘the base line’. The specifically anthropological contribution was to insist on human diversity and to argue that ‘human rights is not a static concept’. ‘Our understanding of human rights’, the AAA Declaration concluded, ‘is constantly evolving as we come to know more about the human condition’.

It is this insistence on the provisional, historically contingent nature of the human condition that distinguishes anthropology from many other academic and practical approaches to human rights. At the same time, particularly over the past three decades when the end of the Cold War has given the human rights agenda a new lease of life, anthropologists’ personal commitments to that agenda have varied greatly. Some anthropologists have given less emphasis than others to the provisional nature of human rights, fully embracing the cause by serving as expert witnesses or advocates on behalf of the people they have studied (Sanford 2003; Speed 2006; Tate 2007). Other anthropologists, while not necessarily any less committed to social justice, have maintained a measure of scepticism about the extent to which human rights provide the most cogent framework for analysis as well as activism (Englund 2013; Jean-Klein & Riles 2005). These critical studies of human rights include further differences according to the ways in which scholars envisage the role of anthropology overall. While some are keen to locate progressive alternatives to the human rights agenda, others pose the question of what, if any, consequence is the topic of human rights to anthropological knowledge – what, in other words, does this topic contribute to anthropology rather than the other way around?

This essay starts by going back further in time than 1999 in order to take anthropology back to the future of human rights. The AAA issued its first statement on human rights in 1947 as a response to the invitation by the United Nations to comment on the possibility of an official declaration of universal human rights. This statement has subsequently (and only subsequently, as we will see) been much debated by anthropologists for its alleged cultural relativism, a position that the 1999 declaration was supposed to dislodge. Although cultural relativism has been seen as a particular trait of American cultural anthropology, as opposed to the comparative and even generalising thrust of much British and French social anthropology, the 1947 statement deserves renewed attention for its view on the historical and political conditions of universalist idealism. Some of its lessons bear revisiting as a framework within which to explore activism and critique as the two main prongs of anthropological work on human rights since the 1990s.

Anti anti-relativism

The author of the 1947 statement was Melville Herskovits, a member of the AAA’s executive board, who condensed his contribution into the following question: ‘How can the proposed Declaration be applicable to all human beings, and not be a statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in the countries of Western Europe and America?’ (AAA 1947: 539). Subsequently, once human rights had made a comeback in the arena of international diplomacy and transnational advocacy, from the 1980s onwards, anthropologists also confronted their disciplinary biases that may have advised scepticism about the possibility of universal human rights. However, their silence on this question in the intervening years after the 1947 statement amounted to a rejection of that possibility and was characterised less by their embarrassment (Engle 2001) than their neglect of the topic itself (Goodale 2009b: 18-39). When the time came for the AAA to formulate a new policy on human rights, the actual views taken by the 1947 statement received less attention than the fact that it had been written by one person only and published as an AAA statement without a vote having taken place among its membership.

The rejection of universalist idealism came to be seen as disengagement, an ill-advised act of withdrawal from a process that was steaming ahead, whether or not anthropologists wished to take part in it. Yet this reading of Herskovits's reflections misses the point he made about history. Far from assuming a static, unbridgeable difference in cultural terms between the West and the Rest, he emphasised a long history of contact and mutual influence, a history that had, more often than not, taken the form of occupation rather than accommodation. At issue was a ‘process of demoralization begun by economic exploitation and the loss of political autonomy’ (AAA 1947: 541). As a consequence, ‘professions of love of democracy, of devotion to freedom have come with something less than conviction to those who are themselves denied the right to lead their lives as seems proper to them’. Herskovits acknowledged the ‘noble’ intent of earlier documents, now seen as precursors to the Universal Declaration, such as the American Bill of Rights, only to note their origin in the writings by men who were themselves slave owners. Here was Herskovits's challenge to the process of drafting a Universal Declaration of Human Rights: after a history of unequal exchange, it was a very tall order indeed to expect ‘the Indonesian, the African, the Indian, the Chinese’ (AAA 1947: 543) to become signatories to a document upholding the standards developed in the recently dominant part of the world.

The subsequent refusals to own the Universal Declaration, typically by the new political and military elites in Asia and Africa, made Herskovits’s statement nothing short of prescient. Much trouble may have been averted had the authors of the Declaration attended to his concerns. Be that as it may, the lesson for anthropology is to recognise how such reflections on the historically contingent nature of so-called universal declarations do not necessarily amount to cultural and moral relativism (Dembour 2001; Goodale 2009b: 40-64). As an anthropologist associated with the teachings of Franz Boas, an advocate of ‘cultural particularism’ in American anthropology, Herskovits is too easily given the epithet ‘relativist’ (Simpson 1973). Would a relativist point out that cultural differences actually became a means of governing colonised people, so much so that ‘the hard core of similarities between cultures [were] consistently overlooked’ (AAA 1947: 540, original emphasis)? This acknowledgement that similarities across obvious differences carried subversive potential hardly warrants a reputation for relativism. Rather, the question posed by these early disciplinary reflections on human rights is what anthropology’s sensibility to human diversity and historical contingency amounts to when it is not dismissed as cultural and moral relativism.

Clifford Geertz, while not addressing the topic of human rights as such, provided one answer to this question with his thesis about anti anti-relativism. It was ‘an effort to counter a view rather than to defend the view it claims to be counter to’ (Geertz 1984: 263). By defying ‘the law of the double negative’, Geertz proposed to reject anti-relativism without thereby committing himself to what it opposes, namely cultural and moral relativism. Anti-relativists, especially when they trade in absolutes, are no more palatable interlocutors than relativists. Here is, in fact, one indication of the extent to which human rights can help to clarify anthropology’s particular claims to knowledge. A debate between a relativist and an anti anti-relativist from the period when human rights were not at the forefront of anthropologists’ thoughts can serve as an example. Staged within the sub-discipline of legal anthropology and revolving around the translation of concepts such as ‘justice’, it nevertheless seems highly pertinent to the issue of human rights.

The debate between Max Gluckman (1965, 1969) and Paul Bohannan (1957, 1969) continues to intrigue, because while working in different parts of the African continent, they both discovered that local idioms for ‘debt’ played an important role in the ways in which justice was pursued. At the same time, working in the same continent and sharing similar analytical interests did not guarantee consensus on the nature and purpose of anthropological knowledge (see Englund & Yarrow 2013). Gluckman could hope for greater precision about the meaning of debt through a comparative analysis involving material not only from his own Barotse study in present-day Zambia but also from other ethnographies of ‘tribal law’ as well as from studies of Roman and early English law. ‘What is the difference between debt in these contexts’, he asked, ‘and the fact that any obligation establishes a state of indebtedness, in another sense of the word, while clearly obligation is basic to any system of law?’ (1965: 245). The question was skewed neither towards particularity nor generality as such but sought to elicit specificity through a comparative exercise. By contrast, Gluckman felt frustrated with the cultural particularism of Bohannan’s ethnography. Bohannan (1957) also emphasised the importance of debt to the idea of justice among the Tiv of Nigeria, but he insisted that the uniqueness of their system meant that it could not be examined in terms of the concepts of Western jurisprudence. The anthropologist could do no better than leave a number of vernacular idioms untranslated, so unique was the ‘folk-system’ ensconced within a particular culture (Bohannan 1957: 69). ‘The insistence on uniqueness constantly obscures problems’, Gluckman (1965: 255) complained in response, pointing out the many not-so-unique features of Tiv language on justice and debt.

It was the ‘lack of perspective’ in cultural relativism that troubled Gluckman (1965: 251), the inability to identify ‘similarities within differences’ (1965: 254) that would permit a more precise understanding of what was specific about the case in hand. To mark his intellectual debts, Gluckman dedicated his book to ‘the jurists of Barotseland and of the Yale Law School’, thus deviating from the established hierarchy between informants in the field and colleagues in academia (see Fabian 1983). A close ethnographic study of a particular judicial system was, in other words, more than the result of intensive fieldwork in Zambia. Gluckman understood universals to be specific in their historical scope and, therefore, the results of careful comparative work. In certain respects, his understanding prefigured anthropologists’ interest in ‘situated universals’ in the twenty-first century, not least in the study of various activisms in the wake of human rights claims (see Tsing 2005). Whether, on the other hand, he prefigured anti anti-relativism in Geertz's sense is a moot point. To the extent that Geertz came to be identified with cultural particularism in his interpretative approach to anthropological knowledge (Keesing 1987), Gluckman was perhaps more consistently an anti anti-relativist than Geertz himself was. When Edmund Leach (e.g. 1976) had developed an interest in structuralism as a matter of decoding the ‘grammar’ of cultures, Gluckman saw a troubling parallel to the division of humanity into so many mutually exclusive cultures in South Africa, the country of his birth. Memorably, he remarked that it was ‘possible in the cloistered seclusion of King’s College, Cambridge, to put the main emphasis on the obstinate differences: it was not possible for “liberal” South Africans confronted with the policy of segregation within a nation into which “the others” had been brought, and treated as different – and inferior’ (1975: 29).

What the foregoing indicates is the rich disciplinary legacy which the anthropology of human rights can draw on. On the one hand, anthropology’s alleged attraction to cultural relativism is not dispelled simply by swearing allegiance to the cause of universal human rights. At the same time, the comparative project, rendered impossible by the more extreme forms of cultural relativism, remains critical to any anthropological engagement with the possibility of human universals. Moreover, the substantial issues that sparked debate between Bohannan and Gluckman also serve to remind us that despite their silence on human rights, anthropologists had all along maintained a keen interest in the study of justice, obligation, and social order. In this regard, much could be gained by revisiting studies that addressed such issues before they were all subsumed under the compass of human rights (Englund 2008). An evolving notion of relational rights, from Henry Maine (1913 [1861]) to Bronislaw Malinowski (1926), is one example of intellectual resources obscured by a dogged insistence on the autonomous individual as the bearer of human rights. The location of rights in social relations, in the contentious practices of membership as well as obligation, suggests a perspective on situated universals rather than on an absolute universal which, with its roots in possessive individualism, may be little more than a principle adopted from one particular tradition.

Enter the activists

These intellectual resources in the discipline largely fell by the wayside when anthropologists embraced the human rights agenda in earnest. They did so, as mentioned, from the 1980s onwards, if only in response to the shifting political languages in the world they shared with the subjects of their research. While criticising the status quo had until then often involved identification with some aspects of Marxism in the Western world, the human rights agenda lost its politically naïve associations among these critics in the post-Cold War era. Conor Gearty (2006), a legal scholar, has commented on the way left-leaning intellectuals shifted from seeing human rights law as a reactionary force to advocating its enforcement. He has pointed out how progressives might have lost their confidence to persuade voters to embrace social and economic reform and have, instead, come to see value in what he calls ‘the attractions of a short-cut via judicially enforceable social and economic rights’ (2006: 80). Anthropologists would naturally emphasise the recursive effect of their fieldwork situations on their research and activism. Indeed, the skills and knowledge that the anthropologist was able to profess could become the basis of activism in their own right.

Victoria Sanford’s work in Guatemala and Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti are among the most prominent examples of anthropology as a kind of human rights activism. Sanford (2003) worked as a forensic anthropologist in Guatemala in the wake of its civil war. By documenting the exhumation of secret mass graves, she was able to participate in debates about genocide, truth and reconciliation, with a voice that combined anthropology with activism. Farmer’s (2003) influential work, extending from Haiti to a powerful argument about global inequalities, concerned health as a human right. Here anthropology combined with medical practice to issue a challenge to the way in which human rights had come to be regarded in the post-Cold War world. Farmer saw the health effects of displacement caused by political and economic violence and drew upon a long-standing controversy within the human rights movement by asserting social and economic rights as human rights on a par with the so-called first generation rights of expression, assembly and worship. Just as the documenting and witnessing involved in Sanford’s forensic anthropology enabled her to contribute to activist agendas, so too was it a short step from Farmer’s engagement in medical practice to an engaged anthropology. In both cases, simply by practising anthropology, they were practising activists.

The engaged anthropology of human rights has taken other forms too, notably advocacy within the movement for indigenous rights (see e.g. Speed 2006; Turner 1997). But activists – and more broadly the bureaucracies that human rights advocacy has spawned – have also become subjects of ethnographic research in their own right. It is this development within the anthropology of human rights that has often veered more towards critique than activism, although significant differences of emphasis exist within this literature. Sally Engle Merry (2005) provided a valuable perspective into the local and transnational aspects of human rights activism around the issue of gender-based violence in five countries. Her key interest was to examine how certain recurrent institutional and legal provisions – such as training programs, domestic laws, shelters and counselling services for battered women – got translated, as global activists helped them to travel across the globe. Common to activists was the notion that poor communities did not generally understand the principles of human rights, but Merry’s focus was on what might make advocacy succeed in historically and culturally diverse contexts. She proposed a perspective on ‘vernacularization’, in which activists’ knowledge of, and respect for, local cultural codes was essential to any success in their transformative work. By focusing on a single country emerging from authoritarian rule, Harri Englund (2006), on the other hand, described a situation in which human rights activism became entangled in long-established habits of elitism, by which the Malawian ‘grassroots’ had often been seen to lack any positive moral or intellectual resources of their own. Among other examples, translation, not in Merry’s metaphorical sense but in the linguistic sense of rendering human rights accessible in Malawian languages, was a top-down process in which condescension displaced consultation. By emphasising civil and political liberties rather than social and economic rights, Malawian activists also entered an unlikely alliance with the political and business elites, including their foreign creditors. As a result, the very concept of human rights acquired negative connotations among the country’s impoverished majority.

These studies begin to give some idea of the range of positions – from co-construction to denunciation – that anthropologists have taken towards human rights activism (see Jean-Klein & Riles 2005). On one hand, human rights activism in its many forms is prominent enough in the contemporary world to warrant a series of ethnographic studies, dedicated to investigating it from a comparative and analytical point of view. As with any ethnographic project, the researcher has to be mindful of how their own convictions may prejudice them in the research process. On the other hand, it is also necessary to ask whether the anthropology of human rights, beyond its varied involvement with activism, can enrich the discipline as a whole. One way of addressing this dilemma is to suggest that anthropologists also attend to the question of what can constitute a productive subject for the anthropology of human rights, apart from transnational activism and outright human rights violations. We can discover a set of neglected topics in anthropology overall, such as when the apparent liberal roots of the human rights agenda compel the anthropologist to examine the diverse ways in which such grand ideas as freedom (Englund 2006) and equality (Englund 2011) have actually been deployed and experienced in particular ethnographic settings. The anthropology of human rights may thereby begin to appear much less as another sub-discipline and more like a continuing conversation about anthropology’s core concepts, including, as mentioned, justice, debt, obligation, and so on.

Intimate human rights

While welcoming an expansive view on what human rights are, and what subjects they suggest for anthropological research, it is easy to forget that their origin, as far as the Universal Declaration is concerned, lies in an effort to prevent states from inflicting again on human beings any of the horrors of the Second World War. Human rights law, as opposed to the more diffuse human rights talk, continues to be at the core of many activists’ and scholars’ understanding of human rights. Among anthropologists, Richard Wilson has taken the view that the proliferation of disputes expressed in terms of human rights has been facilitated by the ignorance (or at least neglect) of the legal character of human rights. With some despair, he has noted how ‘human rights have gone from a general list of what governments should not do to their citizens in the 1940s to a full blown moral-theological-political vision of the good life’ (2007: 349). The issues covered can be as diverse as the treatment of prisoners in US military jails, access to anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, and instruction in one’s mother tongue in schools. ‘New rights are added all the time’, Wilson has remarked, ‘thus expanding the rights framework into areas for which it was not originally designed or intended’ (2007: 350).

Such expansion cannot be attributed only to the near-hegemonic hold of human rights talk in many contemporary settings. Human rights law itself appears to permeate ever more intimate spheres of life. Sexual orientations, disabilities, children, gender relations, and old age are all domains that lawyers and activists are increasingly determined to bring within the reach of human rights legislation. The prospects for anthropological engagement are again bright. Just as indigenous rights, for example, may seem particularly congenial to anthropological comments, so too do many of the intimate human rights evoke fields of relationships long studied by anthropologists. One striking instance is the way in which kinship may become relegated to tradition in human rights campaigns. When a court in Papua New Guinea declared that using a young woman in a compensation payment between quarrelling clans contradicted the modern national constitution, it put all obligations entailed by having kin on the side of tradition (Strathern 2004: 208). Lost from view were the many competing values and practices that compelled people to meet their obligations. By lumping them all together as unconstitutional ‘bad custom’, the human rights-inspired court also asserted a divide between tradition and modernity, as though the two belonged to different historical epochs.

Likewise in Tanzania, feminist and non-governmental human rights organizations have condemned and even criminalised Maasai for one specific cultural practice – female genital modification (Hodgson 2011). Their zeal contrasts with rural Maasai women’s broader set of priorities in their quest for survival in an increasingly hostile world. Over the past century, government policies targeting men as political leaders, household heads and livestock owners have eroded women’s moral authority and spiritual significance. At the same time as men have found pastoralism economically less viable than before, they have left in increasing numbers to work in mines and towns, leaving women responsible for feeding and caring for their children and animals. For activists to enter the scene at this point, with their focus on one very intimate practice, is to turn a deaf ear to what Maasai women might really be saying about the circumstances in which they try to survive. Their desire to access quality education and health services may not receive enough attention when they are seen as the traditionalist and ignorant perpetrators of a harmful cultural practice.

What makes intimate human rights an issue of particular interest to anthropologists is not only the tendency to insert concepts of culture and tradition into these campaigns. Apart from providing opportunities to draw upon the rich legacies of anthropological work on kinship, the body and personhood, these campaigns call for further nuance in the study of human rights activism. Much as activists and lawyers may present themselves as fighting entirely modern causes, their preferred methods and meanings in making claims are likely to have been preceded by, and to co-exist with, other ways to frame and make claims. In India, for example, legal activists’ efforts to promote women’s reproductive rights – in their ability to determine their fertility, body, and childbearing – use different modes of speech depending on who is being addressed (Heitmeyer & Unnithan 2015). While universal reproductive rights may be the language to use in claims aimed at the state, familial and religious contexts demand other strategies to make the claims audible. The comparative questions here include how this plurality of claims-making fares in countries where civic activism has weaker roots than in India and where, as in Malawi and Tanzania, campaigners may regard the communities on whose behalf they supposedly work with thinly veiled condescension. It is incumbent on the anthropologists in such situations to follow the ethnographic imagination where it leads him or her, possibly even entirely away from the worlds of transnational human rights activism to popular media such as the radio (Englund 2011).

This final point bears some elaboration by way of a conclusion. For it is not just the human rights violators, victims, and activists that are the subjects of the anthropology of human rights. If the human rights concept is forever evolving, as the AAA's statement suggested, then what lies outside of it now may well have something to contribute to its development in the future. The outside of the human rights concept may be located, as suggested, in earlier anthropological works on justice and morality. Or it may emerge ethnographically in fieldwork that is suitably open-minded about what constitutes its subjects. Either way, whether the human rights concept can absorb that which lies outside of it is perhaps less important than what humanity will learn about itself.

References

AAA (American Anthropological Association) 1947. Statement on human rights. American Anthropologist 49, 539-43.

Bohannan, P. 1957. Justice and judgment among the Tiv. London: Oxford University Press.

——— 1969. Ethnography and comparison in legal anthropology. In Law in culture and society (ed.) L. Nader, 401-18. Chicago: Aldine.

Dembour, M.-B. 2001. Following the movement of a pendulum: between universalism and relativism. In Culture and rights: anthropological perspectives (eds) J.K. Cowan, M.-B. Dembour & R.A. Wilson, 56-79. Cambridge: University Press.

Engle, K. 2001. From skepticism to embrace: human rights and the American Anthropological Association from 1947–1999. Human Rights Quarterly 23, 536-59.

Englund, H. 2006. Prisoners of freedom: human rights and the African poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2008. Extreme poverty and existential obligations: beyond morality in the anthropology of Africa? Social Analysis 52(3), 33-50.

——— 2011. Human rights and African airwaves: mediating equality on the Chichewa radio. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

——— 2013. Cutting human rights down to size. In Human rights at the crossroads (ed.) M. Goodale, 198-209. Oxford: University Press.

——— & T. Yarrow 2013. The place of theory: rights, networks, and ethnographic comparison. Social Analysis 57(3), 132-49.

Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Farmer, P. 2003. Pathologies of power: health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gearty, C. 2006. Can human rights survive? Cambridge: University Press.

Geertz, C. 1984. Anti anti-relativism. American Anthropologist 86, 263-78.

Gluckman, M. 1965. The ideas in Barotse jurisprudence. Manchester: University Press.

——— 1969. Concepts in the comparative study of tribal law. In Law in Culture and Society (ed.) L. Nader, 349-400. Chicago: Aldine.

——— 1975. Anthropology and apartheid: the work of South African anthropologists. In Studies in African social anthropology (eds) M. Fortes & S. Patterson, 21-39. London: Academic Press.

Goodale, M. (ed.) 2009a. Human rights: an anthropological reader. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

——— 2009b. Surrendering to utopia: an anthropology of human rights. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Heitmeyer, C. & M. Unnithan 2015. Bodily rights and collective claims: the work of legal activists in interpreting reproductive and maternal rights in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, 374-90.

Hodgson, D.L. 2011. ‘These are not our priorities’: Maasai women, human rights, and the problem of culture. In Gender and culture at the limits of rights (ed.) D.L. Hodgson, 138-57. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jean-Klein, I. & A. Riles 2005. Introducing discipline: anthropology and human rights administrations. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28, 173-202.

Keesing, R. 1987. Anthropology as interpretive quest. Current Anthropology 28, 161-76.

Leach, E. 1976. Culture and communication: the logic by which symbols are connected. Cambridge: University Press.

Maine, H.S. 1913 [1861]. Ancient law: its connection with the early history of society and its relation to modern ideas. London: George Routledge & Sons.

Malinowski, B. 1926. Crime and custom in savage society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.

Merry, S.E. 2005. Human rights and gender violence: translating international law into local justice. Chicago: University Press.

Sanford, V. 2003. Buried secrets: truth and human rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave.

Simpson, G.E. 1973. Melville J. Herskovits. New York: Columbia University Press.

Speed, S. 2006. At the crossroads of human rights and anthropology: toward a critically- engaged activist research. American Anthropologist 108, 66-76.

Strathern, M. 2004. Losing (out on) intellectual resources. In Law, anthropology, and the constitution of the social: making persons and things (eds) A. Pottage & M. Mundy, 201-33. Cambridge: University Press.

Tate, W. 2007. Counting the dead: the culture and politics of human rights activism in Colombia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tsing, A.L. 2005. Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Princeton: University Press.

Turner, T. 1997. Human rights, human difference: anthropology’s contribution to an emancipatory cultural politics. Journal of Anthropological Research 53, 273-91.

Wilson, R.A. 2007. Tyrannosaurus lex: the anthropology of human rights and transnational law. In The practice of human rights: tracking law between the global and the local (eds) M. Goodale & S.E. Merry, 342-69. Cambridge: University Press.

Note on contributor

Harri Englund is a Professor in Social Anthropology. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Southern and East Africa, primarily in Malawi but also in Mozambique and Zambia. His research interests range from the anthropology of law, human rights and morality to the study of religion and popular culture. His initial fieldwork was among refugees who had fled Mozambique’s civil war. He became interested in the impact of large-scale political and economic developments on the relationships and livelihoods of African peasants. This interest has involved further work on the political culture of emerging democracies, the relation between urbanisation and rural poverty, and the appeal of charismatic Christianity among the urban poor. His most recent projects have examined vernacular broadcast and print media in Malawi, Zambia and Finland.

Prof. Harri Englund, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. hme25@cam.ac.uk

[1] This declaration, and the 1947 statement discussed below, have also been published in Goodale (2009a).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Rights

Water

Introduction

Religion, health and wealth

Power and control

Infrastructure and conflict

Owning water

Water in the Anthropocene

References

Note on contributor

Ethics / morality

Introduction

Partial engagements: Durkheimian, Boasian, and Marxist

New departures: The anthropology of ethics

Intellectual traditions

Emerging debates

References

Note on contributor

Citizenship

Introduction

The political community

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

Further reading

References

Note on contributor

Human rights

Introduction

Anti anti-relativism

Enter the activists

Intimate human rights

References

Note on contributor