Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology: Obligations and Requirements

249 Pages·2015·0.94 MB·English

by  Josephides

Knowledge
and Ethics in
Anthropology

Knowledge
and Ethics in
Anthropology
Obligations and Requirements
EDITED BY
LISETTE JOSEPHIDES
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2015
© Selection and Editorial Material: Lisette Josephides, 2015
© Individual Chapters: Their Authors, 2015
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CONTENTS
List of Contributors vii
1 Introduction
Obligations and Requirements: The Contexts of
Knowledge Lisette Josephides 1
PART ONE Epistemology, Subjectivity and
the Ethics of Knowing Others
29
2 Together We Are Two: The Disjunctive Synthesis
in Affirmative Mode Lisette Josephides 31
3 Desire, Agency and Subjectivity: A Renewal of Theoretical
Thinking Henrietta L. Moore 61
4 Apologetics of an Apology and an Apologia
Andrew Moutu 79
PART TWO Persons, Sociality and Value: Partibility as
Sacrifice, Consumption and Investment
93
5 The Christian Dividual and Sacrifice: Personal Partibility
and the Paradox of Modern Religious Efflorescence among
North Mekeo Mark S. Mosko 95
6 Priceless Value: From No Money on Our Skins to a Moral
Economy of Investment Karen Sykes 123
vi CONTENTS
PART THREE Mobilizing Power and Belonging:
The Local in a Global World
143
7 ‘Cutting the Network’: Mobilizations of Ethnicity/
Appropriations of Power in Multinational Corporations
Mitchell W. Sedgwick 145
8 ‘Real Britons’: Idiom and Injunctions of Belonging for
a Cosmopolitan Society Nigel Rapport 171
PART FOUR Knowledge Exchange and the
Creativity of Relationships: Contextualizing and
Recontextualizing Knowledge
189
9 Dialogue Lisette Josephides, Nigel Rapport and Marilyn
Strathern 191
Fourteen questions to Marilyn Strathern Lisette Josephides
and Nigel Rapport 191
The first round: Questions 1–9 Lisette Josephides 193
Response: The first round Marilyn Strathern 196
The second round: Questions 10–14 Nigel Rapport 213
Response: The second round Marilyn Strathern 214
Bringing the dialogue to a conclusion 218
Final round Lisette Josephides 218
Last response Marilyn Strathern 222
Index 230
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Lisette Josephides is Professor of Anthropology at Queen’s University
Belfast. Previously, she taught at the University of Papua New Guinea, the
London School of Economics and the University of Minnesota. She trained
in anthropology and philosophy and conducted lengthy fieldwork in Papua
New Guinea. Her two major books on her PNG fieldwork (The Production
of Inequality 1984 and Melanesian Odysseys 2008) trace the development
of her interests from gender and politics to theories of the self, morality and
emotions, cosmopolitanism and the philosophy of knowledge. Her co-edited
volume We the Cosmopolitans: Moral and Existential Conditions of Being
Human (Berghahn 2014, co-editor Alex Hall) grounds cosmopolitanism in
understandings of what it means to be human as exemplified in everyday
practices and life experiences. Currently, she is working on a co-edited
volume developing further aspects of the conditions of knowledge building.
Professor Henrietta L. Moore is Director of the Institute for Global
Prosperity, University College London and Chair of Culture, Philosophy
and Design.
Mark S. Mosko is Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National
University. Over the past four decades, he has conducted four years of
ethnographic research among North Mekeo and, since 2006, nearly two
years at Omarakana, the site of Malinowski’s path-breaking Trobriand
studies. His research interests span kinship and social organization,
symbolism and structuralism, chieftainship, religion and Christianity, gift
exchange, personhood and agency, and social change. His publications
include Quadripartite Structures (Cambridge UP 1985), numerous articles
and book chapters and On the Order of Chaos (Berghahn 2005, co-
edited with Fred Damon). His recent publications include the RAI 2008
Curl Prize Essay, ‘Partible Penitents’ (JRAI 2010), ‘The Fractal Yam’ (JRAI
2009), ‘Omarakana Revisited’ (JRAI 2013), ‘Malinowski’s Magical Puzzles’
(HAU 2014) and ‘Unbecoming Individuals: The Partible Character of the
“Individual” Christian Person’ (HAU in press).
Andrew Moutu received training in philosophy and anthropology from
the University of Papua New Guinea before proceeding on to undertake
graduate training in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
He subsequently received two postdoctoral fellowship awards that helped
towards the publication of his monograph, Names Are Thicker than Blood
(Oxford University Press 2013). He taught briefly in anthropology at the
University of Adelaide before returning home in 2010. He is presently the
Director of the PNG National Museum & Art Gallery.
Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at
the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he is Founding Director of
the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held the Canada Research
Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University of
Montreal. Recent books include Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters
Achieving Wellness at Work (Carolina Academic Press 2008); Anyone, the
Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (Berghahn 2012); and as editor:
Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification
(Berghahn 2010); Reflections on Imagination: Human Capacity and
Ethnographic Method (Ashgate 2015). Currently, he is working on the
concept of ‘distortion’ as an atom of human processes, personal and social,
and on the art of British painter Stanley Spencer.
Mitchell W. Sedgwick is Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of
Anthropology at the LSE. He was formerly Director, Europe Japan
Research Centre, and Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Oxford
Brookes; Executive Director, US-Japan Relations Program, Harvard; and
Yasuda Fellow, Faculty of Oriental Studies, and attached to King’s College,
Cambridge, where he received his PhD in social anthropology. Along with
fieldwork on the aged and Japan’s Korean minority, Mitch has conducted
ethnographic projects at home offices of Japanese corporations and at their
subsidiary factories in Thailand, France and on the US-Mexican border.
Areas of current research include cross-cultural dynamics; communication
and control of engineering knowledge; authority, autonomy and personhood
at work and leisure; and retirement among Japanese elites. During Japan’s
11 March 2011 disaster, Mitch’s ethnographic work was unexpectedly
turned towards an account of loss, recovery and memory among long-term
informants/friends in northern Japan, including fieldwork in 2011–2012
and 2014.
Marilyn Strathern had the good fortune to receive initial training in Papua
New Guinea, which led to work on kinship and gender relations. In the
United Kingdom, she subsequently became involved with anthropological
approaches to the new reproductive technologies, intellectual property and
audit cultures. She is probably most well-known for The Gender of the
Gift (1988), a critique of theories of society and gender relations applied
to Melanesia, which she pairs with After Nature (1992), a comment on the
cultural revolution at home. Her most experimental work is an exercise
on the comparative method (Partial Connections 1991). Now retired from
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix
the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology, she is (honorary)
life president of the ASA. Strathern is currently working on issues in the
conceptualization of relations, some of which were sketched out in her 2005
book, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Often a Surprise.
Karen Sykes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester.
Her research in Papua New Guinea extends to research amongst Papua
New Guineans resident in Australia. She is currently PI of the ESRC-funded
project, The Domestic Moral Economy: An Ethnographic Study of Value
in the Asia Pacific Region. She is a Partner Investigator to the Australian
Research Council funded project, which extends the themes of the DME
project Planning for Later Life: Aging, Human Capital and Value amongst
Papua New Guineans in Far North Queensland. Her most recent book is
Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning (Palgrave Macmillan 2009).