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The 'ethical turn' in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established and emerging leaders in the field and makes the results of this fast-growing body of diverse research available in one volume. Topics covered include: the philosophical and other intellectual sources of the ethical turn; inter-disciplinary dialogues; emerging conceptualizations of core aspects of ethical agency such as freedom, responsibility, and affect; and the diverse ways in which ethical thought and practice are institutionalized in social life, both intimate and institutional. Authoritative and cutting-edge, it is essential reading for researchers and students in anthropology, philosophy, psychology and theology, and will set the agenda for future research in the field

The 'ethical turn' in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established and emerging leaders in the field and makes the results of this fast-growing body of diverse research available in one volume. Topics covered include: the philosophical and other intellectual sources of the ethical turn; inter-disciplinary dialogues; emerging conceptualizations of core aspects of ethical agency such as freedom, responsibility, and affect; and the diverse ways in which ethical thought and practice are institutionalized in social life, both intimate and institutional. Authoritative and cutting-edge, it is essential reading for researchers and students in anthropology, philosophy, psychology and theology, and will set the agenda for future research in the field.

There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest – hitherto largely absent from anthropology – in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethnographically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism.

The giving of alms to Shvetambar Jain renouncers is a specific institutionalized elaboration of the idea of a free gift, an idea which all the major world religions have their own ways of instantiating, and which in north Indian languages is expressed by the word dan. This example illustrates the inherently paradoxical nature of the idea of a gift, and why it is a mistake to define the gift as necessarily reciprocal and non‐alienated. Like the pure commodity, the pure gift is characterized by the fact that it does not create personal connections and obligations between the parties. This understanding of the gift, which is implicit in Mauss, enables us to resolve the apparent paradox in the ethnography of dan, that although it is a free gift it is often harmful to its recipients.

Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory, however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent modes of religiosity. Although these contributors differ in their methods, their areas of fieldwork, and their predisposition towards Whitehouse's cogniti

"This volume responds to the often proclaimed 'death of the subject' and common debate across the social sciences for post-humanist approaches in a distinctively anthropological manner. It asks: can we use the intellectual resources developed in those debates to reconstruct a new account of how individual human subjects are contingently put together in diverse historical and ethnographic contexts? Anthropologists know that the people they work with think in terms of particular, distinctive, individual human personalities, and that in times of change and crisis these individuals matter crucially to how things turn out. The volume features a classic essay by Caroline Humphrey, 'Reassembling Individual Subjects' that provides a focus for the debate to bring together a range of theoretical approaches and rich and varied ethnography."--