February 9, 2007
Request for Help - Culture, Ethos, Ethics
I’m working on a field statement on the anthropology of ethics, ethics here referring not to some specific content, but to different modes for organizing practical reason, justice, and the good.
At present I’m trying to work a the relationship between culture and ethics. I’m intrigued by a sentence in Anthropos Today… “By ethos I refer to that space of practice at the interface of ethics and culture. It is a premise of this work that both of the later terms are very much in question today.” (Rabinow 2003, 4) I was wondering if any of you might be able to help direct me to places in Paul’s writing where this is further elaborated. I’m nearly through with a second reading of Anthropos Today and I’m not finding it. It does however seem that logos and equipment will be two of the other terms which will need to go on this mapping. Are there other articles or working papers?
If either Paul or Gaymon would be willing to send me the working paper on equipment I would be eternally grateful. Or perhaps others have worked through this spot already and might be willing to share your thoughts with me.
A related question came up in a talk I gave earlier this year. I was asked if I wasn’t using “ethics” as a stand-in for “culture.” My response was that ethics referred to embodied practices, whereas culture in most of its anthropological manifestations seemed overly idealist. However, I’ve not done the genealogy of the term ethics, so I’d be very curious to learn of what you come up with. I think that Saba Mahmood does one genealogy coming out of Aristotle in Politics and Piety, but there is no mention of Weber.
I think the practice vs. excessive idealism distinction might be part of it, except for the fact that many anthropologists not using ethics as a tool are talking about practice. I think ethics is also helpful for thinking about assemblages and incoherences within groups. One final advantage might be that it allows for an understanding of actors as rational agents, rather than as agents under the influence of an illusio only penetrable by the social scientist. However, much of ethics often sounds like practice theory and thus becomes confusing on this question. I’m still left wondering about ethos as a term different from either ethics or culture. I’ll keep working on it. Thanks for your thoughts.
Just a stab- doesn’t “ethos,” in the sense Rabinow uses it, refer to something more amorphous than either ethics or culture. To something along the lines of mode/attitude/orientation, etc. (not to conflate these notions). If ethos occurs at the interface of ethics and culture, than we can assume that these notions were once thought to profoundly shape an ethos, and that they are now, perhaps, being subsumed by the notion of ethos as ethics and culture themselves become remediated and reproblematized. Maybe some sort of ethos is the only thing left to point to when describing the “attitude” of the contemporary? I think that this term, ethos, along with mode, needs more conceptualization. We tried to get at mode last term, but I for one am still vague about it, though I think it has great potential.
I had not thought about it that way before. Your comment is helpful as it puts the terms into a less static relationship with one another, one in which the contemporary condition alters the very way in which these terms relate, what they mean, and what content they might include. You’re also right that more work needs to be done on ethos, as well as on describing the problematization of both ethics and culture in the contemporary. Great thinking Amelia!
I wonder what throwing in - or taking it back to - Weber’s conception of ethos would do? For Weber (or Weber through Geertz?), it was in the concept of an ethos that a connection between a community’s belief systems and its mundane or material practices could be established. I’m not sure how this might help, except that tracking the shift from the Weberian ethos to ethos as the interface of ethics and culture might call into clarity the specificity of the latter formulation…