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Anthropology as Ethics

Anthropology as Ethics

T. M. S. (Terry) Evens

(2008)

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Abstract

Anthropology as Ethics is concerned with rethinking anthropology by rethinking the nature of reality. It develops the ontological implications of a defining thesis of the Manchester School: that all social orders exhibit basically conflicting underlying principles. Drawing especially on Continental social thought, including Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Dumont, Bourdieu and others, and on pre-modern sources such as the Hebrew bible, the Nuer, the Dinka, and the Azande, the book mounts a radical study of the ontology of self and other in relation to dualism and nondualism. It demonstrates how the self-other dichotomy disguises fundamental ambiguity or nondualism, thus obscuring the essentially ethical, dilemmatic, and sacrificial nature of all social life. It also proposes a reason other than dualist, nihilist, and instrumental, one in which logic is seen as both inimical to and continuous with value. Without embracing absolutism, the book makes ambiguity and paradox the foundation of an ethical response to the pervasive anti-foundationalism of much postmodern thought.


T. M. S. (Terry) Evens is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester in 1971. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the University of Calcutta, and Asmara University, Eritrea. He is author of Two Kinds of Rationality: Kibbutz Democracy and Generational Conflict (1995), and co-editor of the collections, Transcendence in Society: Case Studies (1990) and The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology (2006). Drawn especially to theory and phenomenology, he has sought from the beginnings of his professional career to isolate, identify, and critically explore philosophical underpinnings of empirical anthropology.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Title page-Anthropology as Ethics i
Contents vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Organization and Key Usages xix
Introduction 1
Part IThe Ethnographic Self 15
Chapter 1-Anthropology and the Synthetic a Priori 17
Chapter 2-Blind Faith and the Binding of Isaac-The Akedah 47
Chapter 3-Excursus I 76
Chapter 4-Counter-Sacrifice and Instrumental Reason-The Holocaust 83
Chapter 5-Bourdieu's Anti-Dualism and \"Generalized Materialism 107
Chapter 6-Habermas's Anti-Dualism and 'Communicative Rationality' 131
Part II-The Ethnographic Other 151
Chapter 7-Technological Efficacy, Mythic Rationality, and Non-Contradiction 153
Chapter 8-Epistemic Efficacy, Mythic Rationality, and Non-Contradiction 162
Chapter 9-Contradiction and Choice among the Dinka and in Genesis 176
Chapter 10-Contradiction in Azande Oracular Practice and in Psychotherapeutic Interaction 197
Part III-From Mythic to Value-Rationality 215
Chapter 11-Epistemic and Ethical Gain 217
Chapter 12-Transcending Dualism and Amplifying Choice 241
Chapter 13-Excursus II 256
Chapter 14-Anthropology and the Generative Primacy of Moral Order 273
Conclusion 294
Notes 301
References 364
Index 376