Paper short abstract:

This paper asserts that sociality is fundamentally ethical and political, invested with values and interests. It explores how visiting, sharing and other forms of sociality among the Bentian of Indonesian Borneo work as means of moral cultivation and strategic utilization of relationships.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asserts that sociality is fundamentally ethical and political, invested with values and interests, negating any assumptions about its nature as disinterested, self-purposive activity even in restricted and intimate social settings. These qualities are often prominent in loosely organized small-scale societies characterized by open aggregation - ease of initiation and termination of social relations and group affiliation - in which relationships and polity have to be enacted through social activity to become established. In such societies, sociality commonly work as a means of both moral cultivation and strategic utilization of relationships, imbuing it with ambiguity. This paper exemplifies this predicament by discussing visiting, sharing and other examples of sociality among the Bentian, a group of shifting cultivators of Indonesian Borneo, where, while valued, it often falls short of exhibiting the gaiety and convivial effervescence typically attributed to Indonesian sociality. As in many similar societies, sociality works here to create a condition of immediacy and intimacy among close consociates, and serves as the principal source of an experience-based relatedness and social solidarity. Yet, by the same means, sociality is associated with demands, obligations, and the exercise of authority, encouraging aspirations for self-sufficiency and autonomy, its ineluctable "shadow values." Out of necessity, sociality takes the form of a "proportional sociality" qualified in scope and intensity, and by continuous re-negotiation of relationships, calling for artful apportionment of limited resources, and creative deployment of what Henrietta Moore calls the "ethical imagination."

Paper short abstract:

Villagers in Ara, Indonesia, are simultaneously members of ranked houses, of the Islamic umma, and of the nation state. Each institution generates a distinct mode of sociality and regime of value that interacts with the others to produce complex fractal forms of subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the concepts of value and sociality in the lives of subjects located in the village of Ara, South Sulawesi, Indonesia during the 1980s. During that time, every individual was engaged in a number of distinct modes of sociality. As members of ranked houses, humans interacted with other humans, ancestor spirits, and non-human spirits according to a hierarchical schema of ascribed and achieved ranks. As Muslims, the faithful interacted with fellow members of the umma, and with a range of subjects not tied to human space-time, including Allah, jinn, angels, saints and demons. As members of the nation, citizens interacted with fellow citizens, and with civil servants, police, schoolteachers, and other functionaries. Each mode of sociality generated incommensurable value regimes, along with diverse forms of subjectivity, affectivity, motivation, temporality, and ontology. Each mode of sociality is a historically particular assemblage of human and non-human subjects and objects, each with a distinct genealogy. Each mode operates to produce certain outcomes, such as traditional kingdoms, ethical individuals and national development. They interact with one another to produce complex fractal hybrids of these outcomes, or to produce sudden displacements of one dominant mode of sociality by another within a social formation. The paper concludes that far from it being possible to identify some atemporal, pan-human mode of sociality, no stable mode of sociality or system of values can be identified within the activities of even a single human being.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how changing patterns of sociality and values reflect changing patterns of production and appropriation of nature in the context of environmental change. It argues that value production is indivisible from the production of social relations and the material means of livelihoods.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how shifting patterns of sociality and related value orientations reflect changing conditions and patterns of production and appropriation of nature in the context of rapid environmental change and commodification of nature. The paper is based on research in a Ngaju Dayak village in the province of Central Kalimantan in Indonesia. In Central Kalimantan, extensive environmental degradation due to large scale-projects of natural resource extraction and associated forest fires have brought about a severely disturbed environment and conditions under which the local population are finding it difficult to maintain traditional forms of production. Historically, a range of different forms of production - subsistence-based shifting cultivation, forest product collection, hunting - provided the basis for a pattern of sociality based on a collective orientation. New forms of value orientation and sociality have emerged following decreased possibilities and legal restrictions for practising subsistence-based modes of production. I examine how the new forms of production and appropriation of nature promote economic value and instrumental social relationships, which have an uneasy relationship with historically developed Ngaju ethical values and the collective forms of sociality that they inform. Understanding value as the reflection of the investment of energy through action into what is considered meaningful or important, the paper suggests a close connection between modes of production, sociality, and values. It is argued that value production is indivisible from the production of social relations and the material means of livelihood.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the local concept of pasin in Goroka alongside Honneth's notion of recognition in order to argue that maintaining sociality is critical in Goroka in spite of and resulting from the increasing focus on cash and commodities in people's social, material and emotional lives.

Paper long abstract:

In and around the Goroka marketplace, Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, men and women demonstrate recognition of other's well-being in daily interactions. These are expressed through the sharing of food, money, embodied gestures of mutuality and words of concern or compassion - referred to as soim pasin in Tok Pisin. The notion of pasin has both elements of Bourdieu's habitus, the social values that structure individual behaviours and motivations, serves as a descriptor of individual personality but in terms of everyday practices of generosity also demonstrates the importance of mutual recognition, as Axel Honneth argues is key to human well-being. To show pasin involves a set of moral and ethical behaviours by which people, especially women, are judged by and are valued. My research focuses on the position of market women and their place in various aspects of the local economy. By exploring the importance of pasin to their lives, I argue that women must distribute and circulate material items, and immaterial gestures and affects in order to maintain a reputation of having good 'pasin'. To have nogut pasin, or to demonstrate waitman's pasin, is to be selfish, to think only of oneself, and to cut off future possibilities of help or mutuality, especially those which are costly within the commodity economy. It is these everyday exchanges which make up a major aspect of sociality, as relationships are continuously reinforced and made through small everyday acts of mutual recognition, a key aspect of local social values.

Paper short abstract:

This paper asserts that while sociality is not disinterested, by being an integral part of many collaborative projects, it acquires crucial work and professional value. I will illustrate this through case studies coming from the independent theatre and cinema milieu in France.

Paper long abstract:

Searle asserts that collective intentionality is sufficient for engaging in joint action, no pre-notion of togetherness or sense of common identity being needed. This seems particularly true in the case of volatile, often short-term collaborations which are the basis of professional practices in the independent precarious milieu of theatre and cinema in France. Going further and discussing John Searle from a normative angle, Margaret Gilbert notes that when we form collective intentions, we create obligations and responsibilities and these mutual obligations (more than shared goals) constitute what allow joint actions to actually take place. While my ethnographic material fully supports both Searle's focus on intentionality as motor for joint action and Gilbert's insistence on mutual obligations as condition of its continuity, it also shows how sociality became the actual means through which mutual obligations are formed.

Despite the expectation that the strongest bonds are formed in the process of actual work, even in such cases of collaboration as are live performances, where the shared goal is to create a common body on stage- a strong emotional experience for each participant, the endurance of this collaborative body is dependent on the sociality established outside the stage and the backstage- in cafés, social networks, other projects. I will thus show how the chain of work and production in this highly competitive milieu depends on sociality, despite the awareness that this sociality is fraught with utility, and how, as a result, sociality acquires professional and even moral value.

Paper short abstract:

In forming minds of their own, the company children keep is important. Teaching religion in Danish public school is marked by efforts to engage deities as cultural ancestors but not as real interlocutors. The paper explores the sociality such simultaneous absence/presence, real/unreal gives on to.

Paper long abstract:

Danish educational debates reveal two understandings of value: one, the foundational values that buttress Danish society, and two, the comparative value of educational programs for Denmark's economy. The cherished goal of cultivating critical thinking such that children manifest 'minds of their own' is thought to bolster both democratic dialogue and market-oriented innovation. Although microhistorial minds are inevitable, educators work to fashion particular manifestations of 'independent' mind by marshalling children into permanent classes that delimit the company they keep, and encouraging them to engage imaginatively with their interiority, with Danish culture/society, the globalized world, nature, and spiritual dimensions of life.

Exploring one aspect of this, I focus on the obligatory teaching of religion, predominantly Evangelical Lutheranism, in Danish public school. In contrast to private Christian schools, where children and deities move easily in each others' company, extending sociality to deities in public school elicits more self-conscious exchange, marked by efforts to engage deities as esteemed cultural ancestors without quickening their spirits. Children are invited to acknowledge the existential depth and moral sway of biblical persons/narratives, but not to engage them as respected interlocutors.

This double insistence on the cultural value of teaching Christianity as the official heritage site of societal values, and the democratic value of cultivating rightful ownership of mind leads to playful ways of dealing with simultaneous absence/presence, esteem/mockery, subordination and insubordination. I argue that the double valence of this exercise may develop proclivities for market-oriented innovation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the different modes of Luangan ritual sociality and how they are informed and qualified by moral values. It shows how a "conditional ontology" of not-knowing and the unpredictability of real-life events motivate the extension of sociality and the diversification of its forms.

Paper long abstract:

In one of the many origin myths told by the Luangan shifting cultivators of Indonesian Borneo, eight shamans - so magnificent that when treating a patient that patient would not not-become cured, so powerful they could awaken people from death - were killed on behalf of their relatives because of becoming too occupied in their trade, failing to take care of their children. A metacommentary on the conditions of shamanic efficacy, suggesting that sociality has intrinsic value and is indivisible from well-being, yet insufficient for its realization, and sometimes at odds with its attainment, the myth presents the eight shamans as morally ambiguous, potent, but ultimately destructive. The paper uses the Luangan myth as a vantage point for discussing sociality as a value and its role in promoting well-being in contemporary Luangan healing rituals. In these, sociality with nonhuman beings and between ritual participants, exemplified by a variety of activities involving collective participation, commensality, and exchange, is considered crucial to their success. The paper explores the multiple modes and valences of this ritual sociality, and shows how it is fundamentally predicated on a "conditional ontology" of not-knowing, qualified by human finitude. This motivates its continuous extension and the diversification of its forms. An inherent risk of "reversibility" of ritual sociality propagates constant efforts and cautionary measures, such as the recurrent dramatized ritual acts of "undoing and redoing" (pejiak pejiau), whereby attempts to counter the inevitable uncertainty of ritual outcomes are made.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the dynamic character of sociality in Ifugao, the Philippines, and demonstrates the ways in which values gave shape to sociality's dynamics after the murder of an innocent foreign visitor to a village in Ifugao, the Philippines.

Paper long abstract:

In Ifugao, the Philippines, the scope of sociality constantly extends and contracts. Humans and non-humans, villagers and outsiders, enter into, become partially included in and are drawn in and out of sociality in a dynamic that is only partially controlled by those implicated in it. Sociality is thus never totalized, always conditional, proportional and involved in a pulsating shifting dynamic. This paper examines how values and ethical judgements give shape to this dynamics and how values imbue this process with both specific historical and political dimensions. The ethnographic focus point for this paper is the actions taken by villagers before and after a quite unfortunate event: the allegedly accidental murder in an Ifugao village of a foreign visitor by one of the villagers. I discuss how this event got entangled in an ongoing dispute between families in the village and thus was drawn into the political tensions of sociality's extension and contraction. I examine the actions taken by those involved in the event, both those leading up to the murder and those that followed after it, as well as the explicit ethical judgments of these actions by other villagers in an attempt to elicit the different values that shaped and transformed sociality's form throughout the events.