Paper short abstract:

This paper examines what an anthropology of conscience might offer political anthropology. It focuses on the lives of British pacifists during the Second World War, and asks what forms of relationships and persons claims of conscience help to produce.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines what an anthropology of conscience might offer political anthropology, and the anthropology of actually existing liberalism in particular. Freedom of conscience has been central to much liberal political theory, marking the grounds of individual moral autonomy, and mediating the relationship between state, faith and citizens. But there is nothing self-evident in the importance placed in conscience, the forms that it takes, or the issues that it is said to focus on. Rather than being a transcendental experience, or a universal moral quality of all humans, the meanings and implications of conscience need to be rooted in particular times and places. Even in liberal democracies, conscience can be fraught, enigmatic and contradictory. This paper focuses on the lives of British pacifists during the Second World War. As British citizens were mobilised to fight on a scale never seen before, over 60,000 people refused to take up arms in the name of their conscientious convictions. Whereas conscience is often associated with the ability to act for good in the world, refusing to fight fascism in the name of violence produced difficult questions. The paper therefore asks what forms of relationships, persons and experience claims of conscience help to produce. By focusing on the languages and imaginations through which conscience is expressed and understood, the paper hopes to build towards a comparative anthropology of political conviction.