Anthropology as Ethics: Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Organization and Key Usages Introduction: Nondualism, Ontology, and Anthropology PART I: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SELF: THE SOCIO-POLITICAL PATHOLOGY OF MODERNITY Chapter 1. Anthropology and the Synthetic a Priori: Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty Chapter 2. Blind Faith and the Binding of Isaac—the Akedah Chapter 3. Excursus I: Sacrifice as Human Existence Chapter 4. Counter-Sacrifice and Instrumental Reason—the Holocaust Chapter 5. Bourdieu’s Anti-dualism and “Generalized Materialism” Chapter 6. Habermas’s Anti-dualism and “Communicative Rationality” PART II: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC OTHER: THE ETHICAL OPENNESS OF ARCHAIC UNDERSTANDING Chapter 7. Technological Efficacy, Mythic Rationality, and Non-contradiction Chapter 8. Epistemic Efficacy, Mythic Rationality, and Non-contradiction Chapter 9. Contradiction and Choice among the Dinka and in Genesis Chapter 10. Contradiction in Azande Oracular Practice and in Psychotherapeutic Interaction PART III: FROM MYTHIC TO VALUE-RATIONALITY: TOWARD ETHICAL GAIN Chapter 11. Epistemic and Ethical Gain Chapter 12. Transcending Dualism and Amplifying Choice Chapter 13. Excursus II: What Good, Ethics? Chapter 14. Anthropology and the Generative Primacy of Moral Order Conclusion: Emancipatory Selfhood and Value-Rationality Notes References Index

About the Author :
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.