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Paper short abstract:

How do settlers come to understand their decision to make their homes on lands and landscapes dispossessed from natives as fundamentally moral? This paper argues that cultural memory provides the geographical location, historical grounding, and moral cover for displacing natives from their land.

Paper long abstract:

Creating a home and homeland for settler societies necessitates the “elimination of the native” and the occupation of natives' territory (Wolfe 2006). The “colonizing-self” (Kotef 2020) is thus shaped by the need to live comfortably with the violence of dispossession and to affirm homemaking and nation-building in the colony as fundamentally moral (Azoulay and Ophir 2013). Moreover, the moral and symbolic qualities of a home must be produced in situ—locally—through reshaping occupied indigenous land and landscape in the image of the settler (Bishara 2003; Stein 2010). This paper seeks to investigate how settlers come to understand their decision to take up residence and “dwell” (Ingold 2002) on lands and in houses taken from natives, a fundamentally moral act, and what socio-cultural conditions reproduce dispossession over time.

Drawing on interviews with Jewish-Israeli settlers, I argue that cultural memory provides the geographical location, historical grounding, and moral imperative for displacing Palestinians from their land. I focus on the City of David National Park, located at the heart of a Palestinian village that is both a highly popular tourist attraction and an illegal settlement. I examine how settlers narrate the ownership of land, based on archaeological findings embedded in the ground, as the object of religious desire and thus render its occupation a necessary step towards redemption (Abu El-Haj 2001). I reflect on the morality of the “colonizing self” vis-à-vis my own uncomfortable position on the spectrum of settler complicity to consider the difference between colonial “beneficiaries” and “dispossessors” (Rothberg 2019).

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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how Danish student activists negotiate two conflicting moral concepts – feeling safe and feeling offended – and connect them to their self-cultivation and political activities. Ethnographic research, I argue, can work to counter the growing polarisation in such moral positioning.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a Danish university in 2021, this paper analyses how student activists negotiate and combine moral assessments, ethical self-cultivation and political action to promote greater inclusion of minoritised people at the university. In particular, I focus on the ways that student activists and their critics use and negotiate two central moral concepts; namely, the concepts of feeling safe and feeling offended. First, I explore how a group of critical students evokes the Danish notion of ‘tryghed’ (safety/comfort) as they cultivate a sense of caring collective self, and translate their moral concerns into political action. I then show how the meaning of ‘tryghed’ (safety/comfort), which the students link to ideals of decency and respect as non-debatable universally human values, is challenged and criticized in relation to another moral concept, namely of ‘feeling offended’. In Denmark, this concept is often used derogatively to describe a problematic hypersensitivity or ‘readiness for taking offence’ among students. I argue that in the Danish case, due to strong traditions of student involvement and democracy, the students’ moral concerns and claims – like a wish for ‘tryghed’ – are shaped, questioned and adjusted in dialogical spaces where competing moral ideals and institutional values intersect. However, with a growing polarization and aggressiveness in the public debate, such spaces seem increasingly difficult to maintain. Therefore, I maintain, ethnographic research can play a fruitful role in cultivating reflexivity and engagement across different moral positions.

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Paper short abstract:

Does an anthropology of ethics require moral relativism? How can and should one analyse values one considers unethical? Drawing on my research on Brexit I will discuss strategies on how to balance one’s own political agenda and values with an ethnographic depiction of others’ (un)ethical worldviews.

Paper long abstract:

Does an anthropology of the ethics require moral relativism? How can and should one analyse values one considers unethical? In my master’s thesis I researched white middle-class senior Brits’ motivations to vote for or against Brexit. For some, the decision involved a careful negotiation of the moral implications of their vote: Am I racist if I vote to leave the EU? I argue that applying the theoretical lens of an anthropology of ethics to political phenomena like Brexit allows us to make sense of and take seriously the values and concerns that influenced voters at the referendum. In my contribution to this panel, I will discuss dilemmas I encountered during my research: How do you respond if one of your interlocutors expresses racist opinions during an interview? How do you present xenophobic values in your analysis without lending them validity? Is it possible and even ethical to keep an analytical distance and remain descriptive when making sense of interlocutors’ (un)ethical values? I argue that it is, and it has to be. In the face of populism, dialogue is important. However, you cannot encourage dialogue if you do not make space for the existence of others’ (un)ethical views. An anthropology of ethics creates the space not necessarily for sympathising with people’s moral values, but for describing and understanding their evaluations and reflections of their actions. I therefore wish to discuss strategies on how to balance one’s own values with an ethnographic depiction of others’ (un)ethical worldviews.

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Paper short abstract:

What do you answer when a member of a neo-fascist movement asks if you consider her a good person? In this paper, I explore the challenges an anthropologist studying morality encounters when researching far-right activists' everyday moral practices and their socio-political embededness.

Paper long abstract:

“Do you think we are good people?,” a member of a neo-fascist Italian movement asked me during an event I was invited to join during my fieldwork. In this paper, I use this question (as well as a related question I asked myself then, that is: “How should I answer this?”) as a point of departure for a discussion on the challenges the project of moral anthropology encounters when its subject is the far-right moral universe. Drawing on the research with Italian, Polish and Hungarian far-right activists, I illustrate different ways in which a study of far-right movements allows us to explore questions vital for any study of morals, such as: relation between ideas and practices; construction of moral personhood through collective activism; sources of moral exemplars.

In so doing, I aim to reflect on the limits of the project of moral anthropology. First, I argue that despite the calls for less moralizing in the study of morals (e.g. Fassin), we still observe opposition to discussing certain themes in terms of “morals” or “ethics.” Second, inspired by the research on ethics and conservative/fundamentalist religious movements (e.g. Harding; Coleman), I discuss two different modes of engagements with “repugnant others,” that is “political” (militant) and “disciplinary” (call for understanding) ones, and first and foremost an inevitable tension between the two. Third, highlighting the problem the conveners invite us to explore, I discuss the connection between the ethnographer’s own practices and convictions and the moral world she/he explores in course of fieldwork.