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- Convenors:
-
Luigigiovanni Quarta
(Università di Bergamo)
Lorenzo Urbano (Politecnico di Milano)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/026
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What are the local articulations of moral concepts? This panel aims to explore the way morality and ethics "come to life" through relationships and creative acts of subjects, and to reflect on how key concepts in moral discourse are shaped and transformed through the experience of the everyday.
Long Abstract:
Since the so-called "ethical turn" at the beginning of the 21st century, anthropological interest in morality and ethics has exploded, with multiple authors and perspectives on the way people live their moral/ethical life (Laidlaw 2002; Zigon 2008; Fassin 2014; Keane 2016). Even with the variety of this relatively amorphous "field", one suggestion has been constant: if words like "good" or "right" have meaning, this meaning is determined by their situated and contingent use in everyday life.
In his introduction to the Companion to Moral Anthropology, Didier Fassin (2012) argues that an anthropology of morality, a "moral anthropology", must pay attention to how morality and ethics are embedded in the social, the political, the economical: these dimensions never come to us as disconnected. And they are never disconnected from our own practices and representations as ethnographers. We are agents in the field, and we help shape moral and ethical concepts and narratives as much as any other person that inhabits that field.
We invite contributors to problematise these two dimensions, and the different theoretical and ethnographic horizons they open, reflecting on their own fieldwork. What are the articulations of moral concepts that we find in the field, and where can we find them? What is the line that separates the descriptive and the prescriptive, when we talk about morality and the ethical life of subjects? We are, in particular, interested in the intersection between epistemology and (ethnographic) practice in the study of the moral and the ethical (Lambek 2015).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the dynamics of moral and ethical concerns in e-waste management that are awakened by the indeterminant presence of the researcher. Building upon the concept of moral and ethical assemblages, it aims to show how these beliefs establish themselves within specific relations.
Paper long abstract:
Working in an e-waste (electronic and electrical waste) processing company involves handling the things that may be of various value and raise various interests. When disassembling electronics, some good-looking devices are tested by workers to see if they are functional. The functional devices are then appropriated by a testing worker, offered to somebody else or used in a workshop. This activity is carried out in secret, hidden from the eyes of management, and provokes moral and ethical questions. These questions are particularly urgent in the presence of a researcher whose position and commitment are indeterminant (Alexander and Sanchez 2019). In e-waste management, several actors are involved and have different obligations towards each other. Based on the ethnographic research at an e-waste processing company and a company operating in a compliance take-back scheme in Czechia, I reflect on my position within the bundle of relations and my influence on the translation of various moral and ethical concerns. Using the concept of moral and ethical assemblages (Zigon 2010), I perceive the situation of e-waste management as being composed of different layers of moral and ethical beliefs. The researcher then contributes to the awareness and transcendence of these beliefs. I show how moral and ethical negotiations occur in specific relations and interactions.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines recycling as an arena for enacting ethics among environmental activists in Western Siberia. Through a discussion of the concept "prefigurative politics", the paper provokes questions about the kind of practices we, as ethnographers, identify as having transformative potential.
Paper long abstract:
Based on fieldwork with environmental activists in Western Siberia, my paper studies recycling as an arena for enacting ethics. I suggest that in their accounts of recycling, my interlocutors formulated what could be called "an ethics of starting from small" - a future oriented ethics directed to gradual transformation of the society. I argue that the "ethics of starting from small" not only helps us to move beyond the idea of a cynical subjects in authoritarian contexts such as Russia (Pomerantsev 2019) but is also an important addition to anthropological accounts of "political possibilities" (Rethmann 2013). Instead of viewing my interlocutors focus on recycling as tokenism or internalization of neoliberal logic, I suggest that it shares much with anthropological accounts of prefiguration or prefigurative politics (Graeber 2009, Maeckelbergh 2009&2011, Razsa 2015) - a concept, which has usually been applied to political and social movements that could be described as radical and progressive. Exploring the concept of prefiguration in an ethnographic context and in relation to a practice it usually hasn't been applied to, the goal of the paper is to provoke questions about the kind of practices we, as ethnographers, identify as having transformative potential.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses farming stress in post-1991 Slovenia. Drawing on theorisations of moral economy and social suffering, contrasting narratives of farmers convey common imperatives of what should be done. They demand abolishing the welfare state and setting fairer prices to improve their wellbeing.
Paper long abstract:
Agriculture and farming in Slovenia has been dramatically changed and restructured since proclaiming independence from socialist Yugoslavia in 1991 and joining the EU and the Common Agricultural Policy in 2004. Since then, the farmer-entrepreneur has become a role-model of various agricultural developmental orientations. Yet the newly defined ‘moral economy’ expected farmers to follow contrasting imperatives of pursuing constant economic growth, environmental and social sustainability propagated through the ‘normative person’, who should be simultaneously a productive, efficient, innovative and competitive but also a just, healthy and satisfied farmer-entrepreneur.
This paper discusses some results of the ongoing anthropological project Changes in Agriculture through the Farmers’ Eyes and Bodies. The author argues that farmers have been squeezed between contrasting sets of values and moral imperatives of constantly changing agricultural developmental orientations since 1991 on the one hand, and their moral worlds of farming practices on the other. Drawing on theorisations of moral economy and social (emotional) suffering, the paper discusses ethnographically observed worries and anxieties (distress) among the farmers through examining their moral and immoral reflections and sentiments about the question of what should be done to improve their wellbeing and good farming. In this line, the observed sentiments and reflection of good/bad farming will not be treated just as forms of affect but as evaluative judgements, that is, things they consider to affect their wellbeing. In their contrasting narratives, farmers demand the abolishment of the welfare state and the setting of fairer prices rather than the introduction of psychological support.
Paper short abstract:
Two dominant ‘moral orientations’ underpin collective organising in community development. These orientations are entangled with dispositions to interact and organise in particular ways. Thus, the negotiation of organising practices is fundamental to debates around how to organise, and why.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on multi-sited ethnographic investigation into a UK-based community development initiative. As part of the initiative, residents in ‘deprived’ areas were invited to form community groups to take charge of the funding awarded to their neighbourhood, and to make decisions about how that funding should be spent. Residents arrived with a wide range of interests, as well as different interpretations of the purpose of the initiative, and how best to organise collectively to achieve that purpose. These interpretations were driven by varied assumptions about what was the right thing to do with the responsibility granted to the groups over collective resources; what ought to happen with the funding. The ‘moral orientations’ presented in this paper were not grounded in conscious beliefs: beliefs do not precede practice (Mahmood, 2012). Rather, they were informed by actors’ dispositions to interact in some ways and not others, and their preference towards certain practices of collective organising, such as how they felt evidence should be processed, procedures developed, and decisions made. The paper therefore shows how these moral orientations were entangled with interactive dispositions and practices of collective organising, thereby contributing to understanding of ‘ordinary ethics’ (Das, 2012) by showing how ethical subjectivities emerge through everyday practice.