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E-book How Is It Between Us? : Relational Ethics and Care for the World

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Penilaian

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“How is it between us?” is the question I would like to consider as the most fundamental of all ethical questions. I will take this consideration up through an engagement with a debate concerning transcendence and the transcendental that has arisen recently within the anthropology of ethics1—though what is at stake within this debate has repercussions for the discipline of anthropology in general; indeed, for any study of so-cial life. Ultimately, this is a debate about relationality and the relational structure of social existence. By entering this debate, I contrast what I call relational ethics with ordinary ethics. In doing so, I hope to show not only that relational ethics is a more convincing anthropological theory of ethics, but also that it offers a conception of relationality, situatedness, and sensibility that is more appropriate for contemporary anthropologi-cal concerns in general. The chapter unfolds in two movements. First, I engage extensively with the transcendence debate, through which I lay out some of the basic theoretical concepts of relational ethics. Here I ask for readers’ patience—I promise that the work will pay off as you make your way through the various chapters of the book. For the second movement of the chapter, I offer some examples from a long-term research project of mine to show how the ethnographic theory of relational ethics I begin delineating in this chapter has emerged from my fieldwork. Ultimately, I hope to make clear that relational ethics begins with a demand that emerges from a situation within which one finds oneself with others, a demand that pulls one out of oneself to respond in a mo-dality of concern and care for the between, where we dwell together. This response is both an ethical and a political one; it is a response that opens possibilities for being-together-otherwise. Such possibilities, I will argue throughout, can only begin with a relational ethics. The issue of transcendence and the transcendental within the anthropol-ogy of ethics was first explicitly raised, to the best of my knowledge, by Veena Das. In doing so, Das made a dichotomous distinction between conceptions of the ethical focused on “orienting oneself to transcenden-tal, objectively agreed-upon values” and done in “a domain that is set apart,” and an anthropology of ethics conceived as ordinary ethics.2 In response to this claim, Joel Robbins has asked: “what is the matter with transcendence?” He continues by arguing for the place of religion in the anthropology of ethics and concludes that “the ways ritual allows people to touch transcendent values in their fullest forms . . . enables the desir-ability of single values to gain a hold on people that it can rarely manage to secure in everyday life . . . [such that] even in the course of everyday life, some of the desirability of values that is produced in transcendent encounters with them must surely still be felt.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

301 ZIG h

Penerbit

USA : HAU Books., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

150 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

978191436085

Klasifikasi

301

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Sociology and Anthropology, Society

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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