Webb Keane argues that by looking at representations as concrete
practices we may find them to be thoroughly entangled in the
tensions and hazards of social existence. This book explores the
...performances and transactions that lie at the heart of public
events in contemporary Anakalang, on the Indonesian island of
Sumba. Weaving together sharply observed narrative, close analysis
of poetic speech and valuable objects, and far-reaching theoretical
discussion, Signs of Recognition explores the risks
endemic in representational practices. An awareness of risk is
embedded in the very forms of ritual speech and exchange. The
possibilities for failure and slippage reveal people's mutual
vulnerabilities and give words and things part of their power.
Keane shows how the dilemmas posed by the effort to use and control
language and objects are implicated with general problems of power,
authority, and agency. He persuades us to look differently at ideas
of voice and value. Integrating the analysis of words and things,
this book contributes to a wide range of fields, including
linguistic anthropology, cultural studies, social theory, and the
studies of material culture, art, and political economy.
Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb ...Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.
Unrealistic assumptions underlying neo-classical economic theory have been challenged by both behavioral economics and studies of moral economy. But both challengers share certain features with ...neo-classical theory. Complementing them, recent work in the anthropology of ethics shows that economic behavior is not reducible to either individual psychology or collective norms. This approach is illustrated with studies of transactions taking place at the borders between market rationality and ethically fraught relationships among persons-organ donation and sex work. The paper argues that the inherent value accorded to social relations tends to resist instrumentalization and that the biases that dealing with other people introduce into reasoning are not flaws but part of the core functions of rationality.
The project of religious conversion commonly proposes a more or less dramatic transformation of the person. To the extent that this project succeeds or fails, it may offer more general insights into ...the practices by which human subjects are constituted. Keane argues that language ideology, that is, people's assumptions about language, may be linked to ideas about material goods through their respective implications for the presumed nature of the human subject.
This is a speculative essay in comparative possibilities. It looks at some widely separated religious contexts in which a power-laden relationship across ontological difference-for instance, between ...living humans and a world of gods or spirits-is mediated by operations on the materiality of the written sign. These operations typically result in either materializing something immaterial or dematerializing something material. But they may also involve other activities that take advantage of specific physical properties of the written word such as being persistent, transportable, perishable, alienable, and so forth. Once divine words are rendered into script, they possess a distinctively material quality and form. They appear on some physical medium, and so are both durable and potentially destructible. Anything that can happen to another artefact can happen to them. The practices I dub 'spirit writing' subject the written word to radical transformation, taking advantage of its very materiality in order to dematerialize it, even if only in order to be rematerialized in yet some other form (such as a person's body). Many such practices seek to generate or control religious powers by means of transduction across semiotic modalities, material activities that help render experience-transcending forces realistic or at least readily imaginable. Le présent article est un essai spéculatif sur des possibilités comparatives. Il examine quelques contextes religieux très éloignés dans lesquels une relation chargée de puissance, transcendant les différences ontologiques (par exemple entre les humains et le monde des dieux ou des esprits), est médiée par des opérations agissant sur la matérialité du signe écrit. Celles-ci ont habituellement pour effet de matérialiser quelque chose d'immatériel ou de dématérialiser quelque chose de matériel. Elles peuvent cependant aussi impliquer d'autres activités exploitant les propriétés physiques de la parole écrite, laquelle peut être persistante, transportable, périssable, aliénable, etc. Une fois écrites, les paroles divines possèdent une qualité et une forme éminemment matérielles. Elles apparaissent sur un support physique, ce qui les rend durables tout en les exposant au risque d'être détruites. Tout ce qui peut arriver à un autre artefact peut aussi leur arriver. Les pratiques que je nomme « écriture des esprits » soumettent la parole écrite à une transformation radicale, profitant de sa matérialité même pour la dématérialiser, même si ce n'est que pour la rematérialiser ensuite sous une autre forme (telle que le corps d'une personne). De nombreuses pratiques de ce genre cherchent à susciter ou commander à des puissances religieuses au moyen d'une transduction entre modalités sémiotiques; ces activités matérielles aident à rendre réalistes, ou tout au moins facilement imaginables, des forces qui transcendent l'expérience.
Religious practices are commonly treated as evidence for something else, such as beliefs. There are a number of problems with privileging beliefs or ideas when trying to define religion. An ...alternative is to rethink the relationship between the materiality of religious activity and the ideas that have sometimes been taken to define 'religion'. This approach may also be a productive way to look at religious practices across widely differing contexts without eliminating their fundamentally historical character. /// Les pratiques religieuses sont habituellement envisagées comme des preuves d'autre chose, par exemple de croyances. Or le fait de privilégier les croyances ou les idées pour tenter de définir la religion pose plusieurs problèmes. Une autre approche consiste à repenser la relation entre la matérialité de l'activité religieuse et les idées qui ont parfois été employées pour définir la "religion". Cette approche peut être un moyen productif d'examiner les pratiques religieuses à travers des contextes très différents, sans éliminer leur caractère fondamentalement historique.
Any community supposedly identified with a “single” kind of Christianity is likely to contain conflicts and divisions due to the different logics and temporalities associated, respectively, with ...ecclesiastical institutions, popular practices, and scriptural texts. These conflicts may extend even to basic ontological assumptions. This article looks at clashes concerning popular practices surrounding relics and icons in Eastern Orthodoxy. It asks what are the ethical stakes when people insist on the powers of material things even in the face of withering criticism and contempt from inside and outside their church. That criticism, which can have both theological and atheistic bases, often focuses on the allegedly instrumental reasoning and selfish motives of people who expect to receive divine intervention from objects such as relics and icons. I argue that popular practices that focus on the agency of objects may above all be responding to material properties as ethical affordances. These affordances provide ways of treating the world as ethically saturated. In the Eastern Orthodox context, this may be one way for ordinary villagers to take lofty theological claims about the divine nature of humans in concrete terms.
Naturalistic, normative, and ethnographic approaches to ethical life seem to describe very different worlds. Focusing on ordinary social interactions and ideologies surrounding them, this article ...argues the ethnographic stance allows us to look in two directions, where we can see some points of articulation among these worlds. In one, the domain of naturalistic explanations, ethical life draws on affordances offered by psychological, linguistic, and other processes usually described as operating beneath the level of people’s awareness. In the other, the normative domain of reasons, principles, and arguments about them, it is the demands of ordinary social interaction that form some of the most ubiquitous inducements for people to account for themselves in ways that can become conscious, reflexive, and purposeful. When explicit reasons and justifications result they may give rise to historical objects like moral codes and ethical precepts.
Four Lectures on Ethics Lambek, Michael; Das, Veena; Fassin, Didier ...
2015, 2015-12-15, Volume:
3
eBook
Anthropology has recently seen a lively interest in the subject of ethics and comparative notions of morality and freedom. This masterclass brings together four of the most eminent anthropologists ...working in this field-Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane-to discuss, via lectures and responses, important topics facing anthropological ethics and the theoretical debates that surround it. The authors explore the ways we understand morality across many different cultural settings, asking questions such as: How do we recognize the ethical in different ethnographic worlds? What constitutes agency and awareness in everyday life? What might an anthropology of ordinary ethics look like? And what happens when ethics approaches the political in both Western and non-Western societies. Contrasting perspectives and methods-and yet in complimentary ways-this masterclass will serve as an essential guide for how an anthropology of ethics can be formulated in the twenty-first century.
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