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25 - Favours

from Part IV - Intimate and Everyday Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
David Henig  and
Nicolette Makovicky
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.

Keywords

actionfavoursgracegratuityincommensurabilityjudgementJulian Pitt-Riversperformative actsvalues
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 629 - 648
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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