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Accepted Paper:
Inherent Virtue - the emergent political implications of anthropological methods
James McMurray
(University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
I argue both that prioritising the goods by which anthropology is defined is inherently productive of particular ethical values, and that these values have progressive political implications of their own.
Paper long abstract:
From the first, the applications of anthropology - its imagined social purposes - have been diverse and often contradictory. Efforts to utilise the discipline have included military support (González, 2018), improving the efficiency of businesses enterprises, and aiding colonial administration (e.g. Malinowski, 1929; Schapera, 1947), as well as - for example - aiding native interests against exploitation, or in 'making the world safe for human differences'. In Macintyrean terms, all such ends are 'external' goods - achievable without the use of anthropology, and in no sense intrinsic to its practice.
Here, with reference to historical cases of 'applied anthropology' and the current efforts of anthropologists to ameliorate the conditions in Xinjiang, China, I argue both that prioritising the goods by which anthropology is defined - the (continued) production of reliable ethnographic data and theory - is inherently productive of particular ethical values, and that these values have progressive political implications of their own.