Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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friend Lee Schlesinger, on whose provocative and perspicacious commentary one can always count. I must also mention the late Godfrey Lienhardt, who upon my request took the time to comment caringly on what is now the chapter on the Dinka (chap. 9), and Steven Lukes, who, in his capacity as a member of a journal editorial board, furnished exceptionally useful comments on what has become the chapter on the Azande (chap. 10). Because previous versions of chapters 5, 8, 9, and 10 have appeared as journal articles,1 I have, in respect of these chapters, benefited from anonymous reviews submitted by readers for the journals.
Earlier renderings of some of the chapters were presented to the Equipe de Recherche d'Anthropologie Sociale of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. I remain eternally grateful to Louis Dumont, Daniel de Coppet, and Jean Claude Galey for inviting me to their seminaire. Daniel and his wife, the anthropologist Cécile Barraud, were a wonderfully warm and gracious host and hostess during my stay in Paris, and I was terribly saddened to learn of Daniel's sudden death. I need also thank the following institutions, where I delivered prior versions of a number of these chapters: the Centre for the Study of the Social Sciences, Calcutta; Vishva Bharati University, Santineketan; the Research Colloquium of the Department of Sociology, at the University of Delhi; the Department of Anthropology, University College, London; and my own Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition, I am grateful to my university's Institute of Arts and Humanities, where during my tenure as a Chapman Fellow, I wrote a substantial portion of my interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac (chap. 2). I also wish to thank the many students in my long-standing seminar, “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” who in recent years were forced to read and comment on certain of the chapters of this book, as well as the many more undergraduates who found my course lectures on some of the topics in this book provocative enough to press me to try, and try again, to clarify my ideas.
Lee Diener deserves special thanks for taking on the tedious task of checking my textual references against my bibliography, while she herself was about to deliver a (highly original) project of her own.
Don Handelman and Bruce Kapferer read and commented on a number of the early chapters of this book. I am warmly indebted to both of these outstanding thinkers. My friendship with them runs deep and goes back to our days as fellow graduate students at Manchester University. Were it not for their unstinting encouragement and advice, I cannot help but wonder if this project would ever have seen publication.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Christopher Roberts, who magnanimously and scrupulously read critically and in its entirety the penultimate draft of this book. His comments and insights, even when they expressed doubts about my ideas, were invaluable: immensely perceptive, richly knowledgeable, and ever constructive. Indeed, they were so incisive and thoughtfully put that in responding to them, I often found myself employing his vocabulary and phraseology. Although I have credited him specifically in some of the notes, the impact of his close and critical reading greatly exceeds these citations. My argumentation remains involved, but I believe that his comments have helped me immeasurably to bring greater clarity to what I have done here.
Carie Hersh and Tim Elfenbein produced the index between them, and I am obliged to them for their thoughtful, painstaking labors. I am also indebted to Marion Berghahn for her independence and willingness to publish a work that sits squarely between anthropology proper and philosophical deliberation. Finally, I remain grateful to Shawn Kendrick for her splendid copy-editorial work. It is my belief that her conscientious, engaged, and intelligent reading; her clear eye for problems of grammar, consistency, and usage; and, above all, her concern that the interested reader be able to comprehend the text have helped to make a highly complex argument more accessible than it would otherwise be. Needless to say, for the final result, the eminent intellectual inspirations all the same, and whatever the defects, I must take responsibility.
ORGANIZATION AND KEY USAGES
Organization
Because this book tries to do many things at once, putting forward numerous topics and intertwined strands of thought, it is imperative to clarify at the outset the dual nature of its structure. From one perspective, the book's chapters tend separately to present diverse topics of analysis. Thus, the chapters respectively lay out arguments about Kant's philosophical notion of the synthetic a priori as reinterpreted by Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, the Akedah or binding of Isaac, the Holocaust, Pierre Bourdieu's idea of practice, Habermas's notion of communicative rationality, Foucault's understanding of selfhood, Charles Taylor's of Foucault as well as of scientific rationality, Derrida's of ethics and the Akedah, the genesis stories of the Hebrew Bible and the Dinka, Zande oracular practice as opposed to psychotherapeutic interaction, the classical anthropological question of primitive mentality in relation to the logical law of non-contradiction, the force of ethics, and the question of ethnographic authority. In light of this wide array of topics, the chapters constitute a rhizomorphic rather than tree-like structure. Nevertheless, they do not make a motley, for each finds its ultimate sense in a critical rethinking of basic categories of anthropological thought—most particularly the self- other relation—in light of ontological nondualism. One way of reading this book, then, is as an assemblage of essays, each of which is meant to show the anthropological advantage and credibility of embracing nondualism when conceiving reality.
However, the premise of the critical importance of ontology for doing anthropology provides a second, no less substantial organizing principle, one that allows the chapters to read in meaningful sequence instead of mere assemblage. The principle of which I speak consists of the question of the relation between dualism and nondualism with respect to ethics. This principle organizes the book into three broad discursive steps: first, a critique of dualism and modernity (part 1: “The Ethnographic Self”); second, a comparative examination of nondualism in the context of so-called primitive society (part 2: “The Ethnographic Other”); and, third, a commentary on nondualism in relation to the unfulfilled promise of modernity (part 3: “From Mythic to Value-Rationality”). This tripartite structure features the central argument that arises out of the ontological premise and from which the book takes its title. The claim for the anthropological superiority of nondualism blurs but does not remove the distinction between self and other, subject and object, theory and practice, and structure and process. In doing so, it follows a phenomenological approach and theory of practice, in which, respectively, existential experience and process are featured analytically. Based on this theory and approach, the diacritical human experience is identified as confrontation with the question of relative indebtedness as between self and other. This confrontation makes a chronic and unavoidable lived experience that projects human existence as fundamentally an ethical dynamic of sacrifice and affords an unconventional sense of rationality. Sacrifice, ethics, and rationality, then, compose the thematic burden of the book's other structure, disposing a general linear argument (the topical variety of chapters notwithstanding) in which these themes are discussed for the most part in relation first to dualism, then to nondualism, and finally to a promise of modernity. Here, in the dependence on the thesis of nondualism, this structure of the book intersects directly with the other, rhizomorphic structure.
Key Usages
Nondualism
This book aims to expose ontological dualism as no less perilous for humankind than it is instrumentally powerful. It is argued that dualism promotes performative contradictions, which in turn foster a felt need to reduce one of the poles of whatever particular dualism is at stake—say, the real and the ideal—to the other, thus eradicating one of the poles altogether.