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9 - Making the Ethical in Social Interaction

from Part II - Aspects of Ethical Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Webb Keane  and
Michael Lempert
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has charted alternatives to some prevailing philosophical, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This engagement forces anthropologists to reconsider old antinomies such as constraint and agency, relativism and universalism, individualism and collectivism. Like other anthropologists of ethics, we resist forms of determinism that would reduce ethical life to the putatively universal constraints of biology and psychology, the logic of rationality, or the workings of power and ideology. Instead, we consider the processes through which what seem to be constraints or universals serve as affordances that are ethicalized through historically contingent reflexive practices. Rather than being forced to choose between the individual and the collective in terms of who (or what) the ethical subject is, we demonstrate how social interaction is a critical site in which and through which such ethicalization occurs.

Keywords

ethicalizationsocial interactionmoral psychologyaffordanceslanguagestanceconversationreflexivitysubjecthistory
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 231 - 250
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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