Finding again anthropology’s moral voice and vision
SUNDAY, JUNE 22 2014
convened by
Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle
This year’s conference of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies takes place in collaboration with the 2014 Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists, sited at Edinburgh.
SPEAKERS:
Anne Line Dalsgaard (Aarhus University),
David Shankland (Royal Anthropological Institute),
Diane Austin-Broos (University of Sydney),
Ronald Stade (University of Malmo),
Huon Wardle and Nigel Rapport.
THEME:
As a method and a practice, and as an accumulation of knowledge, anthropology can reasonably lay claim to be the most cosmopolitan of all the human science disciplines in its reach for universalism. Anthropologists are in many ways exemplary intellectual individualists; often discontented with the limited value-set presented to them as their ‘own culture’, they set out to seek alternatives. There is an irony, though, to how the cultural relativistic (or ‘perspectivalist’) phrasings anthropologists often deploy act to box the lives of others into hermetic worlds: denying the very people who have hosted the anthropologist true moral and intellectual equality, autonomy and contemporaneity. One aim of this panel is to interrogate this contradiction.
It may be the case that ‘mobility, egalitarianism and free choice of identity have better prospects in the modern world than they had in the past’ as Ernest Gellner argued, but establishing this as a set of universal moral propositions, as opposed to a merely fortunate outcome of the rise of Western liberalism, has raised multiple difficulties. Recently, yet again, it has taken anthropology back to its Enlightenment roots. (It was, after all, Immanuel Kant who first developed the term ‘anthropology’ to depict a modern scientific endeavour, and part of a cosmopolitan project that would study how human beings make themselves as free-acting social beings.) Kant, and David Hume—the culmination of a British Enlightenment—both sought to formulate universal moralities. For Hume, impartial feeling was key: to treat all like cases in a like way. For Kant, reason was key: to be moral was to abide by rules and make no exceptions; but achieving a sense of universal commonality with others draws in issues that demand judgement—both aesthetic and teleological. For both Hume and Kant, the need was to eschew cultural specificities of caprice, arbitrariness, ignorance and partiality or special pleading.
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith deployed Hume’s ‘experimental method’ (the appeal to human experience) but sought to refine his thesis of impartial feeling. The psychological motives behind a moral sense were surely multiple and ‘interested’, and found their essence in a ‘principle of sympathy’. ‘Sympathy’ was the core of moral sentiments: the feeling-with-the-passions-of-others, arising from an innate desire to identify with others’ emotions. Sympathy operated through a logic of mirroring, in which a spectator imaginatively reconstructed the experience of the person being watched. Smith wrote: ‘As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. (…) [Our senses will never] carry us beyond our own person. (…) By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation.’
There is much here with which anthropology can interest itself. Smith’s emphasis on mirroring calls to mind the more recent theorisations of Rene Girard; the emphasis on an innate identification with the human other recalls Emmanuel Levinas’s theorisations of ‘face’; while the emphasis on imagining concurs with Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the imaginative as that which effects a transcending of current life-worlds. A second aim of this panel is to ask what contemporary ethnography, and what contemporary anthropological theory, can deliver concerning the roots of a moral sensibility. How does recognition of fellow human beings and extending ‘sympathy’ towards them and the institutionalising of humane norms of social interaction actually take place? What are the origins of moral human behaviour and how can these be given a universal authority?