Journal ArticleDOI
Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change
TLDR
The authors argue that a model of cultures as structured by values can help explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as they show with data from Papua New Guinea.Abstract:
Two broad trends mark the emerging anthropology of morality. One, following Durkheim, sees all routine, normative social action as moral. The other, in direct opposition to this, defines an action as moral only when actors understand themselves to perform it on the basis of free choices they have made. I argue that both approaches capture aspects of the social experience of morality. In light of this, a key question becomes how to explain why in any given society some cultural domains are dominated by Durkheimian moralities of reproduction while others encourage people to construe moral action in terms of freedom and choice. I argue that a model of cultures as structured by values can help us explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as I show with data from Papua New Guinea.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good
TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace the change from the anthropologists' focus on the "other" to the "the other" and suggest that some strengths of earlier work were lost in the transition.
Book
The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom
TL;DR: The anthropology of ethics has become an important and fast-growing field in recent years as mentioned in this paper and it represents not just a new subfield within anthropology but a conceptual renewal of the discipline as a whole, enabling it to take account of a major dimension of human conduct which social theory has so far failed adequately to address.
Journal ArticleDOI
Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in Social Life
TL;DR: In this article, an alternative solution to the problem of conceiving the distinction between a nonconsciously enacted morality and the conscious awareness of ethical dilemmas and moral questioning is proposed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Two virtue ethics and the anthropology of morality
TL;DR: The authors examine points of convergence and crucial differences between a first-person or humanist virtue ethics and a post-structural one inspired largely by Foucault, and argue that despite their many convergences, poststructural and firstperson versions of virtue ethics make not only distinct but in some cases irreconcilable claims.
Journal ArticleDOI
Moral economy: Rethinking a radical concept:
Jaime Palomera,Theodora Vetta +1 more
TL;DR: The authors argue that the original thrust of the moral economy concept has been understated and attempt to cast it in a new light by bringing class and capital back into the equation, arguing that it has been cast in a negative light.
References
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Book
From Max Weber: Essays in sociology
TL;DR: A collection of Max Weber's key papers is presented in this article with a new preface by Professor Bryan S. Turner, who was one of the most prolific and influential sociologists of the twentieth century.
MonographDOI
The gender of the gift : problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia
TL;DR: In the most original and ambitious synthesis yet undertaken in Melanesian scholarship, Strathern argues that gender relations have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike.
Book
Homo hierarchicus : the caste system and its implications /Louis Dumont ; translated by Mark Sainsbury
TL;DR: The second edition of Dumont's "Homo Hierarchicus" is presented in an enlarged, revised, and corrected second edition as discussed by the authors, which provides the reader with the most cogent statement on the Indian caste system and its organizing principles and a provocative advance in the comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies.