Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this article I present experiences of Egyptians too young to have taken part in the street protests and movement of the 2011 revolution. Today in their early twenties, they narrate their experiences during the early months of the uprising. None claimed to be revolutionaries then or now, but the revolution seems to animate them in complex and long-lasting ways. The January revolution failed to bring about change at the level of state power. Yet more is at stake than the political endgame. I turn my attention to how people narrate the revolution as a process of ethical reflection and self-formation through everyday relationships and settings that took on new meanings. These accounts challenge notions of what it means to participate in a revolution and where it is located and generate a conversation between the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of revolutions.

In this article, I examine anthropology's embrace of the informed consent doctrine at the end of the 1990s. Although acknowledging its utility in resolving the tensions between disciplinary ideals of openness in field research and the diverse array of contexts in which anthropologists now work, I argue that it has not been in our best interest to co-opt the concept. Bringing together the prior critiques of the informed consent doctrine's application to ethnography, I criticize the tendency of some ethnographers to characterize ethnographic practice as \"insuperably flawed,\" pointing instead to the problems with the doctrine itself. I tease out underlying assumptions about the nature of research (and researchers and research subjects) that it presumes, and I conclude by suggesting the need for anthropology take a principled stance against the informed consent doctrine. En este artículo, examino la aceptación de la doctrina del consentimiento informado por la antropología a finales de los 1990s. Aunque reconociendo su utilidad para resolver tensiones entre los ideales disciplinarios de apertura en el campo de la investigación y el diverso arreglo de contextos en los cuales los antropólogos ahora trabajan, argumento que no ha sido en nuestro mejor interés el cooptar el concepto. Juntando las críticas anteriores sobre la aplicación de la doctrina del consentimiento informado a la etnografía, critico la tendencia de algunos etnógrafos a caracterizar la práctica etnográfica como \"insuperablemente problemática,\" en vez de señalar los problemas con la doctrina en sí misma. Extraigo los supuestos subyacentes sobre la naturaleza de la investigación (y los investigadores y los sujetos de investigación) que ésta presume, y concluyo sugiriendo la necesidad de la antropología de tomar una posición de principios en contra de la doctrina del consentimiento informado.

At a sparsely populated wake in Luang Prabang, Laos, the guests appeared to restrain themselves from evaluating the deceased’s son-in-law to his face, even as they said to one another that he had neglected his mother-in-law and pocketed the funds for her wake to feed his methamphetamine habit. What are we to do with moments of apparent restraint like this, those meaningful silences in which signs of evaluation seem partially withheld, transfigured, or utterly absent? What do they mean for accounts of ordinary ethics? In unpacking the events of Paa’s wake, I suggest that such moments force us to reckon with the relation between signs of evaluation and meta-ethical accounts of them, as they also give flesh to the descriptive claim that humans are evaluative. Doing so makes clear that, at times, whether a particular person is being evaluative in a particular moment remains uncertain. At other times, people appear to be not only evaluative but so omnivorously evaluative—so fundamentally oriented to evaluation’s possibility—that they keep their evaluations to themselves.

I examine the role of humanitarianism and compassion in an emergent ethical configuration that makes illness a primary means by which undocumented immigrants obtain legal residency (\"papers\") in France. I argue that the sacred place of biological integrity in this ethical discourse leads immigrants to trade in biological integrity for political recognition. I demonstrate first how humanitarianism has been transformed into a form of politics, functioning as a transnational system of governance tied to capital and labor even while purporting to be apolitical. I focus in the second half of the article on the consequences of humanitarianism as politics, which include new biopolitical practices, unexpected diseased and disabled citizens, and a limited version of what it means to be human.

‪This special issue re-envisages the anthropology of ethics from the point of view of “the negative”. Anthropology often overlooks immorality in its study of ethics, privileging “the good” and people’s positive practices of self-cultivation. This elision reflects a broader tendency within the discipline towards viewing sociality as inherently positive or benign. What might moral life look like, we ask, if we begin our analyses with the study of wrongdoing, misconduct, social trespasses, and people’s anxieties about them? Attending to these negative aspects of social life highlights that there is a strong positional dimension to ethical evaluation: whether something appears good or bad is often a matter of perspective. A perspectival approach to moral life allows us to keep the bad and good in view simultaneously through the analysis of our interlocutors’ situated, reflexive use of ethical ideas as conceptual objects. Contrary to dominant disciplinary common sense, we argue that negative, immoral social action and evaluation does not undermine social life, but rather is generative of it: tempting people, provoking outrage, galvanising action, and prompting innovation around ethical conventions. We identify five patterns in how the negative sets social life in motion: as the foundation of sociality; as a focal point for social action; as failure/falling short; as illicit frisson; and as a frosty quality of relations. Returning to the Anglophone anthropological tendency to conceptualise the social as implicitly good, we suggest divesting such normativity through a strategic “misanthropology”. Approaching social relations from the perspective of our interlocutors’ distrust and moral anxieties about them allows us to re-envision human life in ways that take the bad with the good. ‪

What shape does ethical reasoning assume in the face of potentially contradictory commitments? Drawing on fieldwork in a private clinic in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I examine how patients, their families, and the clinic’s staff navigated ethically complex situations in which one was called on as both family member and patient. I argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the relationship between what were experienced as divergent or contradictory commitments—to treatment and to close kin—in terms of what I call hierarchical subsumption. This mode of response worked not simply to recast treatment as noncontradictory with familial obligations; rather, the commitment to therapy became hierarchically subsumed by and therefore necessary to the fulfillment of such kin-based commitments. In attending to those ordinary moments in which commitments are felt to be at odds, I suggest that we might develop a better understanding of the particular styles of ethical reasoning that people employ to manage such conflictual situations, which refuse the kind of tacitness that scholars have associated with everyday life.

In what ways do potentially hostile neighboring groups find a place in each other's moral aspirations? I analyze the arrival of a \"new\" god, the oral-epic deity Tejaji, in the villages of Shahbad (Rajasthan, India) and the modes of relatedness this divine migration expresses between neighboring castes and tribes. How do we conceptualize relations between neighbors? I set out the idea of \"agonistic intimacy\" as a way of engaging the copresence of conflict and cohabitation. Placing Tejaji in relation to longer-term currents of Hinduism, I examine the conflicts, neighborly relations, and shared moral aspirations that animate this form of religious life. I locate spiritual-moral aspirations not necessarily in \"otherworldliness\" but as a political theology of the neighbor, conceiving of the neighbor as human and nonhuman (as deity, spirit, and animal), in ways that widen the definition of \"the political\" and of \"theos.\"

Just as recognition and pursuit of the human good take place in language and action, so too do they unfold in encounter with the material and visual. The ethical crises, projects, and striving we see in everyday religious life are worked out not just in the intersubjective play and politics of language but also in encounter with, in dwelling with, material and visual substances and forms. This essay considers the material conditions that make possible the \"ethical pleasures\" sought by Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous in making and displaying contemporary works of \"Islamic art,\" most especially works that make \"visual recitation\" of passages from the Qur'an.

Christian nationalism, a long-running and arguably increasingly influential political force, appears to consist mainly of an open set of affectively charged but cognitively underdetermined concepts and images that are capable of being constituted in a number of widely divergent forms. Despite this potential variety, the various instantiations of Christian nationalisms documented by the anthropology of Christianity tend to have similar features, even as they are actualized in quite different milieux and understood as being responses to quite different threats. Drawing on ethnographic work in the United States, this article argues that this recurrent crystallization of Christian nationalism into the specific form under certain conditions--the adoption of a temporally ambivalent eschatology, an ethics oriented around mimesis, and, most of all, an outward-facing ressentiment--works to self-catalyze the production of a racialized Christian nationalism that envisions itself at once as an entitled majority and as an embattled minority.