The ethical condition : essays on action, person, and value / Michael Lambek.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lambek, Michael, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics--Anthropological aspects.

Ethics.

Physical Description:

xxv, 361 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, [2015]

Summary:

"This volume contains a selection of my essays that attend ethnographically to ethical life, to the action entailed in becoming and being a person, and to the relationship of acts and persons to value. The essays address central questions of social theory from an assumption and by means of a demonstration of the pervasiveness of what I elaborate as ethical. The ethical in my vocabulary is not an object, not a distinct compartment of the social, so much as a force, dimension, or quality of human existence. To attend to the ethical is to look at social life in a certain way and to put it under a certain kind of description. Ignoring the ethical leaves ethnographicl description thin and risks caricature in place of social analysis"--Preface.

Contents:

The ethical condition

Virgin marriage and the autonomy of women in Mayotte

Taboo as cultural practice among Malagasy speakers

The past imperfect : remembering as moral practice

The anthropology of religion and the quarrel between poetry and philosophy

Just anger : scenarios of indignation in Botswana and Madagascar / coauthored by Jacqueline Solway

Rheumatic irony : questions of agency and self-deception as refracted through the art of living with spirits

On catching up with oneself : learning to know that one means what one does

Sacrifice and the problem of beginning : reflections from Sakalava mythopraxis

Value and virtue

Toward an ethics of the act

Ethics out of the ordinary

The value of (performative) acts

The continuous and discontinuous person : two dimensions of ethical life.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 329-350) and index.

ISBN:

9780226292106

022629210X

9780226292243

022629224X

OCLC:

902656834