Moral breakdown and the ethical demand

Abstract

Recently social scientists in general and anthropologists in particular have invoked the concept of morality in their studies. The use of this concept is seen by many as a way to bypass the complexities and contradictions of such traditional social scientific concepts as culture, society and power. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly evident that in many of these studies morality is used in a way that may be more reminiscent of the moral understanding of the social scientist than that of their subjects. Therefore, a well-founded anthropology of moralities must break from this assumption and rethink the ways in which the moral can be explicitly studied. By engaging in a dialogue with 20th-century continental philosophies of sociality and ethics, this article articulates a theory and model by which an explicit anthropology of moralities becomes possible. Two ethnographic examples, utilizing very different methodological techniques and focusing on two very different societies, are used to illustrate the strength of this theory as a framework for a proper anthropological study of local moralities.