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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lambek, Michael, author.

Contributor:

Jacqueline, Solway, Contributor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics--Anthropological aspects.

Ethics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (388 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Written over a thirty-year span, Michael Lambek’s essays in this collection point with definitive force toward a single central truth: ethics is intrinsic to social life. As he shows through rich ethnographic accounts and multiple theoretical traditions, our human condition is at heart an ethical one—we may not always be good or just, but we are always subject to their criteria. Detailing Lambek’s trajectory as one anthropologist thinking deeply throughout a career on the nature of ethical life, the essays accumulate into a vibrant demonstration of the relevance of ethics as a practice and its crucial importance to ethnography, social theory, and philosophy. Organized chronologically, the essays begin among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar. Building from ethnographic accounts there, they synthesize Aristotelian notions of practical judgment and virtuous action with Wittgensteinian notions of the ordinariness of ethical life and the importance of language, everyday speech, and ritual in order to understand how ethics are lived. They illustrate the multiple ways in which ethics informs personhood, character, and practice; explore the centrality of judgment, action, and irony to ethical life; and consider the relation of virtue to value. The result is a fully fleshed-out picture of ethics as a deeply rooted aspect of the human experience.

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:

Description based upon print version of record.

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

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780226292380

022629238X

OCLC:

1233041268