Sticky ethics: Environmental activism and the limits of ethical freedom in Kerala,India

Walking the edge of ethics

Participant observation among environmental activists in Kerala, India, often made me anxious, on edge. During the year we worked together, my research assistant Sunil described a similar unease. We would joke about this shared anxiety when, glancing over our shoulders, we occasionally snuck away for a cold club soda, a lunch in an AC restaurant, or other such less-than-ecologically-sustainable treats. There was no single event that made us tense; rather, it was a feeling that built up over many months. It was grounded in a basic condition of precarity: with the environmental activists we studied, it was hard to know when one might stumble into ethical trouble. They were contesting the boundaries between the ethical and the non-ethical, making seemingly unimportant aspects of life—like milk, soap, and the alignment of one’s stride—part of a larger normative project of social change. In this shifting moral terrain, Sunil and I were often unsure of our footing and, therefore, ever watchful against missteps. Spotting ethical evaluation became a nervous habit.

In recent years, uncertainty about the boundaries of the ethical domain has become a problem for anthropological inquiry more generally. The field has seen a surge in attention to ethics and morality, but there is no consensus about what we mean by these terms. We write of ethical moods, ethical moments, ethical freedom, and even ethical life—but we lack clarity about what makes all of these things recognizably ethical. One can see concern with this problem in the calls by some for clearer definitions (Cassaniti and Hickman, 2014). But the problem of how to delimit the ethical is also at stake in debates over whether ethics is relatively conditioned or cultivated (Durkheim, 1915; Faubion, 2001, 2011; Laidlaw, 2002, 2014), immanent or interactionally accomplished (Lambek, 2015; Lempert, 2015), atmospheric or ephemeral (Throop, 2014; Zigon, 2008). This literature convincingly demonstrates that ethics can be found in almost any aspect of human life, but it is less conclusive about how we know ethics when we see it.

In its everyday challenges to widespread norms, moral contestation by environmental activists in Kerala brought the indeterminacy of what counts as ethics to the fore. Even as they worked to push the boundaries of ethics among the non-environmentalist public, they also contested these boundaries with one another. Diversity of opinion was endemic to this variety of environmentalism, which is part of a self-described ‘alternative’ (badal) strain of Kerala leftism defined primarily by its opposition to perceived ideological conformity and moral policing in the ‘mainstream’ leftism of Kerala’s major Communist parties. While activists generally shared an opposition to social hierarchy and a vision for living in harmony with nature, they differed on the details and, moreover, on how to differentiate the details from the fundamentals. The ambiguities that irritated Sunil and me were not due merely to our inexperience; activists themselves disagreed about the moral salience of sodas and air conditioning.

What made Sunil and me uncomfortable, however, was not uncertainty as such. Nor was it simply that we did want to be chastised. What made us nervous was that ethics, even when it was only ambiguously there, seemed so difficult to get away from. For example, during an awareness-raising event called the Dialogue Journey (samvaadhayaathra), a fifty-day trek through the Western Ghats mountains during the height of Kerala’s hot season, Sunil and I made a stop for a cold soda. When a few other event participants unexpectedly passed by, we invited them to join. One of them responded by blinking and making a noise like ‘tchk’ with the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth—a ‘no’ that sometimes conveys a tinge of disapproval. They kept on walking. It would be too much to call this ‘tchk’ moral condemnation. Nonetheless, after that, soda stops were somewhat different. Sunil and I began to slip away more discreetly, and we would talk about that little noise and gesture. Even when no one else was around, that response seemed to stay with us. And I felt that it was still with me a little bit even drinking sodas back home, after the Dialogue Journey was over—as if now every soda was stuck to that seemingly evaluative moment, that disapproving ‘no’, on the road weeks before. Over time, I began to realize that this persistent difference, this stickiness, could be part of how formerly unimportant things, like sodas, come to matter in ethical ways.

A similar persistence of ethical import was also sometimes palpable in the interactions I observed. It was as if certain evaluations mattered in ways that others did not, if we think of mattering as the propensity of an evaluation to have a certain force, or momentum, that carries through into further interaction. The Dialogue Journey was thick with such evaluative effects. Modeled on a famous awareness-raising trek that had launched Kerala’s environmental movement twenty-five years before, the explicit mission of this program was to use techniques of conversation to persuade local residents of the value of protecting the remaining rainforests in Kerala’s mountains. The notion of ‘dialogue’ was meant to foreground activists’ opposition to rigidity and openness to dissent; activists aimed to influence residents’ views not through reference to authority or expertise, but through listening to their experiences and building mutual understanding and rapport. However, some Journey participants were equally keen to reshape the values of other activists. Older activists, in particular, saw the Journey as a training exercise for a new generation of environmentalists. Walking through the hills together, activists marked and monitored the boundaries of what an environmentalist ethics should be. This brought differences of opinion to the surface, particularly with regard to aspects of living—like the consumption of club sodas, baked goods, or cigarettes—that were central to the social change efforts of some activists but were not considered important by others. In the midst of the resulting contention, some evaluations seemed to persist even in the responses of those who refuted, transgressed, mocked, or otherwise resisted them. Stickiness appeared to be crucial to how the boundaries of the ethical were being redrawn.

In this paper, I take a closer look at stickiness in light of anthropological discussions on what makes ethics distinct as an evaluative domain. To do so, I examine another ambiguously ethical moment during the Dialogue Journey, initiated when one of the leaders scolded the group for eating cookies as they walked. Tracing a string of responses to this evaluative moment, I show how it was re-interpreted by the justifications and excuses of those who shirked the captain’s scolding, hanging back and continuing to munch. It was among these shirkers, I argue, that the evaluative import of cookies really stuck, as they were rendered accountable to a prohibition they sought to evade. Analyzing this process, I show how evaluative stickiness offers one account of the limits of freedom in ethical life, and thus contributes to debates on how to define ethics for the purposes of anthropological research.

Wait…was that ethics?

On the first morning of the Dialogue Journey, we left without breakfast. The organizers wanted to cover as much ground as possible before the full heat of day was upon us. After a couple of hours, some in the group bought packages of snacks at a roadside shop. Foil rolls of cookies made their way from hand to hand until more than half of the fifty participants were eating them.

‘Hey! One second!’ Ali, the official journey captain, clapped his hands as he came back from the front of the group. Everyone stopped and turned toward him, drawing together and forming a ring in the middle of the road. Looking from one person to another, Ali said that the cookie eating needed to stop. He stammered a little as he spoke, but no one cut in; there was no more chatter, no laughter, no crinkling foil. ‘I have seen many people here, even in environmentalist camps, saying all kinds of things about avoiding this kind of food. You’ve told me yourselves!!! … And yet you, all along this road, you are eating this stuff, eating sweets and walking along like this. All that has got to stop right now!’

‘Okay, okay.’ murmured Nishant, but Ali went on.

‘It's because they see you doing it that the kids are doing it! …What we are doing here is trying to bring the little children along in a certain way. So if this is how we act, how is that right? If we lead them down that road? It’s best if you stop this right now.’

‘Okay, okay,’ repeated Nishant, wobbling his head affirmatively as Ali returned to the front of the group.

‘There are plenty of cashew apples around,’ Ali called back over his shoulder. ‘Eat those!’

‘Okay, okay.’

And with that, the journey began again. The bulk of the group moved ahead and gradually stretched out along the edge of the road. But some hung back for another bite. The remaining packages of cookies drifted toward the very rear of the group.

***

What had just happened to cookie eating? For Sunil and me, sensitized as we were to any whiff or whisper of ethics, the controversy over cookies set the alarms blaring. We had started our audio recorder going even before Ali’s speech, when another journey participant, Jenny, had made a few complaints about cookies that went unheeded. While I videotaped the ensuing action I had that rare, joyous feeling of finally capturing an ethnographic moment that had long eluded me. But later, I found there was room for ambiguity. In the following weeks, when I interviewed other Journey participants about the event, some interpreted it as an ethical matter but others felt strongly that Ali had not meant it that way at all. Later, I returned to my recordings with considerable doubt. Had my own paranoia made me see ethics in non-ethical things?

My own interpretation of the cookie controversy as ethical was not unfounded. The ethical status of many edibles—including cookies and other ‘bakery items’ but also tea, white sugar, medicine, meat, and, of course, club soda—had often been a matter of concern among Kerala environmental activists during the several years I had been visiting them. As others have documented, the problem of what one should take into one’s body has long been an evaluative focal point in South Asia, used to distinguish categories of persons as well as to cultivate desired forms of self (Daniel, 1984; Dumont, 1970; Marriott, 1968). These deep cultural currents were arguably one basis for the prominence given to diet by some environmentalists. But while meat was widely recognized as a substance fraught with ethical import in Kerala, cookies did not usually carry the same weight. By far the most common accompaniment to tea, they could be better or worse in terms of taste or healthiness, or as a marker of social status, but they were not generally taken as good or bad in an ethical way. In taking cookies and other ‘ordinary’ ingestibles to matter in such ways, those I studied marked themselves as activists.

Concern with bakery items among Kerala activists was specifically traceable to a strain of Indian environmentalism called prakṛti jīvitam (‘natural life’), which took the elimination of unnatural toxins, both in one’s own body and in the wider world, as a mechanism for social transformation. While some adherents emphasized the effects of diet on personal virtue (nanma) and others emphasized non-participation in exploitative food industries, the most prominent feature of this moral discourse was the radical scalar integration of ethical stakes for self and society. By making their bodies battlegrounds for environmental and social change, practitioners of natural life could make otherwise small things, like cookies, matters of great social consequence. This scalarity has genealogical roots in Gandhi’s experiments with diet and medicine (Alter, 2000; Gandhi, 1954), but was also tied to contemporary global discourses about ethical consumption, which take acts of purchasing as opportunities (and obligations) to combat geographically distant social and environmental evils (Barnett et al., 2005, 2010; Carrier, 2008).

But while it will come as no surprise to those familiar with environmentalism elsewhere that sugary packaged foods like cookies can be morally problematic, their status during the Dialogue Journey was not obvious. The values of natural life were far from hegemonic among Dialogue Journey participants. As noted earlier, these activists' ‘alternative’ leftism was defined not so much by what they shared as by their opposition to what some activists described as the Stalinism of Kerala’s Communist parties, whose influence on Kerala politics and culture has been well-documented (Gough, 1967; Menon, 1994; Namboodiripad, 1994; Nossiter, 1982). Elements of Gandhianism were important to some variants of this alternative leftism, but other influences included Maoism, the post-Marxist humanism of M.N. Roy and M. Govindan, and the anti-caste universalism of Sri Narayana Guru. In this context, while environmental issues had become a common rallying point, the paramount value was arguably intellectual and moral freedom. The group was diverse in terms of religion, class, and caste. But these social categories were downplayed to the extent that many denied knowing the caste of other activists. ¹ Whereas others have noted the role of group affiliation in South Asian moralities, documenting the degree to which ethical practices are tied to the religion, caste, or political group to which one belongs (Das, 2010; Dumont, 1970; Pandian, 2009; but see Mines, 1994), many of these activists actively resisted the formation of any overarching group and, likewise, denied adherence to any ‘isms’.

Moreover, related to the same opposition to group moralities, the emphasis of natural life on diet (particularly, its vegetarianism) had always been seen by some as having casteist connotations. During the previous few years, a rift had formed between those who saw natural life as the only way to live consistently with environmentalist values and those who considered it puritanical and even borderline Brahminical. By the time of the Dialogue Journey in 2014, some of the activists who had proudly introduced me to ‘natural food’ (prakṛti bhakṣaṇam) during previous fieldwork stints were now talking about such practices as something other people did. Meanwhile, some of those who most identified with natural life said they no longer felt welcome among the environmentalists who organized the Journey.

Were the values of natural life at issue in this case? In his brief speech, Ali seems to point to this moral discourse when he invokes talk at ‘environmentalist camps’ about ‘avoiding this kind of food’. More generally, his appeal to ‘trying to bring the children along in a certain way’ implies that avoiding cookies is part of an ethical way of life. However, he does not repeat what was said at environmentalist camps, nor make the principles of this ‘certain way’ explicit, nor state any reasons why cookies are bad. Such under-specification was characteristic of much evaluative talk I observed, even with regard to topics that were more commonly viewed as ethical. In less contentious cases, the stakes could be assumed. But because the way cookies mattered was, at the time, very much up for debate, the ambiguities in Ali’s speech allowed those he addressed to hear different kinds of claims about what was wrong with cookies.

In the interviews I conducted later, it was Nishant—who had responded with ‘Okay, okay’ to Ali, but had also been among those to fall back and continue eating—who was most adamant that Ali had been talking about ethics. He contrasted his own motive for continuing to eat (hunger) with Ali’s concern about dhārmmikata, a word sometimes glossed by activists in English as ‘morality’. Nishant’s use of this term was somewhat remarkable, in that dhārmmikata was most often used by environmentalists to talk of religious notions of purity and sin (usually negatively), whereas they most often used mūlyaṅṅaḷ (‘values’) to speak of their own evaluative positions. Dumont (1970: 251) defines dhārma, the Sanskrit root of the Malayalam dhārmmikata, as ‘action conforming to universal order’. It is, in part, the connection between this moral concept and social hierarchy—especially, though not exclusively, caste hierarchy—that made dhārmmikata a suitable foil for these activists’ own vision of an ethics freed from regimes of social distinction. Mūlyaṅṅaḷ, on the other hand, can be used broadly to describe orders of value other than the ethical, such as economic value, making it open to re-appropriation as a more liberated evaluative mode. In calling Ali’s concern dhārmmikata, Nishant echoed the accusations of puritanism sometimes made against practitioners of natural life.

Those who had followed Ali, on the other hand, consistently said that the cookie incident had been about other concerns, not ethics. Ali could not have meant it as a claim of that sort, they said, because everyone knew he was not a practitioner of natural life. Some of those who asserted this interpretation echoed Nishant’s contrast between dhārmmikata and his own motives by claiming that Ali had not been concerned about mūlyaṅṅaḷ, but about the bodily effects of cookies on Journey participants. For example, one person suggested that, as an experienced trekker, Ali had recognized that cookies were not adequate nourishment for a strenuous hike. Thus, while their key conceptual contrasts for separating ethics from not ethics were broadly similar, those I interviewed disagreed about whether or not these concepts should be applied to this case.

Why had Sunil and I heard Ali’s speech in the way we had? In part, it was about our own anxieties. Ethical judgements about things that were ordinary to us—like soda and cookies—were what we were most wary of, because such moves had tripped us up before. ² But it was not only that. There was something about the response of those Ali addressed that had made it feel like ethics. Part of this was in the assent Ali had received from the bulk of the group—indication, at least, that his speech mattered enough to be heeded. But what really made the whole thing feel solidly ethical was how those who went on eating responded to Ali’s evaluative move.

As they ate, those who hung back joked about Ali’s speech and justified eating cookies to one another, but the more they tried to make light of Ali’s evaluation or cast it aside, the more their conversation seemed thick with accountability. As with Sunil and me after our soda, ethics seemed to stick to them. And this seemed to cut through the ambiguity, marking cookie eating as an ethical activity in that moment, regardless of how people described the incident thereafter. Here, after all, was a group of people trying to dispute the claim that eating cookies was a big deal and it was not working. Because my own experiences of what I took to be ethical evaluation had often seemed to have a similar stickiness, the persistence of concern about cookies made this feel like ethics as well.

What we talk about when we talk about ethics

One of anthropology’s long-standing contributions to the study of ethics has been the documentation of diversity in human values. Anthropologists have challenged unifying accounts of ethics in philosophy and psychology by presenting ethnographic examples that defy ethical categories which seem intuitive to Western scholars (e.g. Benedict, 1934; Douglas, 1966; Mauss, 1967 [1950]). Indeed, within anthropology, the basic intuition is arguably that anything can be made a matter of ethical concern. Some have taken this great diversity to be evidence of the arbitrariness of ethical values, while others have continued to insist on moral realism or objectivity. Regardless of their positions with regard to debates about moral relativism, however, anthropologists have often been at pains to avoid overly narrow definitions of the moral domain. Most often, the refrain has been ‘This too is ethics.’

At its broadest, then, anthropology’s working definition of ethics has arguably been that it is whatever matters most to those we study (Kleinman, 2006). To be sure, many of those who self-identify with the recent ethical turn have focused on topics long considered weighty by the field, such as violence and suffering (e.g. Kleinman, 2006; Throop, 2014), sex and sexuality (e.g. Dave, 2012; Day, 2010), or reciprocity and kinship (e.g. Keane, 2016; Robbins, 2004). But, in theory, they have also held that less intuitively important things (like cookies) could matter in ethical ways as well. To be recognizable by the discipline as ethics, such things would only have to be taken to matter by someone (for example, environmental activists).

Recent calls for greater attention to freedom and reflection in ethics are consistent with this notion that ethics can be whatever people make of it (Faubion, 2001, 2011; Laidlaw, 2002, 2014; Zigon, 2008). Building on Foucault’s neo-Aristotelean ethical theory and the systems theory of Luhmann, Faubion has described ethics as a process of reflexive self-fashioning, or ‘autopoesis’; actors may be incited to adhere to new norms or moral codes, but they are only ethical actors if they do so ‘freely and self-reflexively’ (2011: 3, 4). Likewise, Laidlaw accuses an older, Durkheimian emphasis on the reproduction of social norms of missing the real action in ethical life by conflating morality with deterministic processes of social ‘unfreedom’ (Laidlaw, 2014). ³ While Faubion and Laidlaw differ somewhat in how they would have anthropologists handle rules, norms, obligations, and less self-evidently voluntary aspects of evaluation in social life, they concur in proposing that the anthropology of ethics should be an inquiry into practices of freedom, with freedom grounded in the possibility of reflection.

If the anthropology of ethics is to be delimited in this way, then the lives of activists would seem to be fertile ground for accounts of ethical life. Dave’s (2012) analysis of activist ethics tells such a story, in which the inventive ‘ethics’ of lesbian activists in Delhi is a struggle for liberation from the socially-enforced norms of ‘morality’. Similarly, other depictions of activist approaches to ethical life have emphasized the agentive efficacy of activists, even when activists’ self-understandings credit change in themselves to others (e.g. Mahmood, 2005). A similar account might be given of environmental activists in Kerala, who were continually engaged in contesting and revising, rather than reproducing, widespread norms and evaluative assumptions.

However, as Sunil’s and my experience suggests, projects of ethical transformation may also include stories that are less amenable to description as practices of freedom. Sunil and I were, of course, free to choose whether or not to spend time with environmental activists. Moreover, in a basic sense, we were free to make what we liked of their reactions to our soda-drinking ways. And yet, the effects of their evaluations on our lives, especially on our evaluative sensibilities, often seemed to be out of our control. The same seemed to be true of those who shirked Ali’s evaluation of their cookie eating—they seemed to want to dismiss his words as unimportant, and yet the evaluation still hung on. Such experiences seemed to be a sort of unfree flipside to activist ethics.

Some would likely argue that this other side of activist ethics, to the extent that it is less free or reflexive, would be better called morality than ethics. For example, Zigon (2008) includes discussion of both reflexive and non-reflexive aspects of evaluation in his theoretical framework, but categorizes the former as ethics and the latter as morality. This distinction parallels Dave’s analysis of Delhi activists as well as, to some extent, Kerala environmentalists’ own distinction between dhārmmikata, which is given by one’s religion, and the mūlyaṅṅaḷ that they arrive at through the reflexive, liberating work of activism. As Faubion (2011) suggests, however, the contrasting terms often mobilized to accomplish such distinctions—such as deliberation and habit, practice and code, or agency and coercion—are complexly and often inextricably tied up with one another in actual social interaction. ⁴ What is most interesting about evaluative stickiness in the soda incident or the cookie incident is how these events are not easily slotted into one side or the other of these binaries.

Another strain in recent attempts to define ethics for anthropology may offer resources for thinking through this aspect of activist ethics. Shweder and Menon (2014) argue that reference to objective standards is a defining feature of moral judgment that sets it apart from other varieties of evaluation (see also Beldo, 2014; Shweder et al., 1985). This argument does not necessarily run counter to the notion that anything can be made ethically important; one could conceivably take anything to be objectively good or bad. Nonetheless, it suggests a kind of paradox in the notion of people ‘making things ethical’: part of what makes an evaluation ethical is that it is not understood to be simply a matter of what we, or others, make of it. A similar notion can be found in a distinct but related proposal that moral values are ‘goods in their own right’, valued without reference to any further value as justification (Keane, 2016). Although of course such goods can be contested, to assert them is also to deny any grounds for contestation. They have an aspect of irrefutability.

Stickiness smacks of this same sort of paradox, in which one is apparently free to take something as an ethical concern or not, and yet the terms of evaluation seem already to be set. Of course, these definitions in no way resolve the question of whether the cookie controversy was an instance of ethics. How can we determine whether Ali and others take cookies to be objectively bad or, alternatively, whether they consider cookies ‘bad in their own right’? Both of these definitions focus on the kinds of reasons invoked by a particular evaluation, but in this case the reasoning behind Ali’s scolding is not clear. And even if Ali had been more explicit, we would still have had to contend with competing interpretations among his addressees.

What these latter definitions do suggest, however, is why Sunil and I both felt that the cookie controversy was so obviously ethical. In addition to the observation that virtually anything can be evaluated as ethically good or bad, anthropologists have also noticed that to take something to matter ethically is to take its goodness or badness to be more than an effect of one's evaluation. And if the first notion suggests freedom, the second would seem to limit that freedom or, at least, to open the process of evaluation to agencies and agendas other than one’s own.

Sticky accountability

In one sense, the efficacy of Ali’s demand to stop eating cookies was extremely limited. Only moments after he turned his back, the crackling of foil could be heard again. To be sure, most of the group turned and followed him. But a small contingent of five or six hung back a bit, drifting to the rear and letting a gap open up between themselves and the rest of the group. When the others were at a safe distance, they began to share the cookies around again, joking with each other about the scolding they had received. I was shooting video, while my research assistant Sunil was taking notes.

‘Open it!’ said Nishant, ‘After this we won’t want to buy any more.’ [Laughter.]

‘Let’s just finish eating all of this,’ Raman agreed. ‘That’s all I can say.’

‘Hey look!’ said Benny, pointing at Sunil. ‘He’s writing names! He’s writing down the names of everyone who is eating cookies!’ [Lots more laughter.]

‘He’s writing the names of everyone who’s eating cookies!’ repeated Ajeesh.

‘Heh-heh!’ Sunil replied. ‘And then I’m going to hand it over up there!‘

Ajeesh handed Sunil a biscuit.

‘Thank you.’

‘From now on, only write your own name!’

Thus, the cookie eating carried on, but not quite in the same way as it had before. There was a new zest in the sharing of cookies now, a new enthusiasm. Now the cookies were eaten with loud praise of their taste and complaints of dire hunger. The jokes were new too; they all played on the prohibition of cookie eating and the fear of being caught. Mock fear, perhaps … but then, why was everyone keeping so far behind?

‘Better if you go slowly!’ said Benny to Paulson, one of the oldest Journey participants, who had just come up from behind us with a packet of cookies under his arm. Benny handed him a cookie from his own pack, and pointed his thumb up the road. ‘As far as cookie eating goes, it’s all swearing and yelling around here!’

But Paulson appeared unconcerned. Already, in the few hours we had been walking, he had positioned himself as a bit of a maverick, stopping to visit nearly every house along the way while the others hurried on. Now, he laughed and opened his own cookie package. He loudly invited the others to have some and ignored their pleas to be quieter about it. Soon, he was at the center of the small group, handing out cookies as he walked.

‘These are arrowroot cookies,’ said Benny. ‘So it’s okay. They aren’t any of that corporate stuff.’

‘So we can eat them, eh?’ said someone else. [More laughter.]

‘Hey! Hey!’ said Benny over the laughter. ‘This approach, all of this promoting corporations, it is not right!’

‘Just eat them up, buddy!’ replied Ajeesh. ‘Eat them up!’

‘Just for that, we’re not giving any more to Benny!’ said Raman.

‘However you like, eat them up!’ said Benny. ‘When your stomach is totally empty, there are no corporations! No schmorporations either! Heh, heh!’

***

The interaction among those who hung back and went on eating cookies has a dual form. At first blush, it may seem that Ali’s evaluative move has had little impact. Those who prefer to keep eating fall back and carry on as before, as if once they are out of sight they are also out of reach of his words. And yet, in their jokes, in their keeping quiet and hanging back, and in their talk about hunger and corporations, Ali’s evaluation sticks. Ali’s speech did not stop these few from eating, but it did change the way they ate. Even if they had split away from the larger group spatially, the cookie eaters’ words and gestures were constantly positioning them in relation to that group. They were not merely ‘out of Ali’s group’ since maintaining a distance, by walking slowly and talking quietly, was a constant point of concern. Likewise, their jokes and invocations of hunger marked the separation between themselves and the others, especially Ali. In these ways, the cookie eaters linked themselves back to the rest of the group, reproducing the disapproval of cookie eating in the ways they walked and talked.

There were two key ways in which the cookie eaters’ discourse recalled Ali’s words. First, the jokes and mimicry figured Ali’s speech as a command to which they could be held accountable. Consider, for example, the jokes about Sunil writing all of their names in his book. Now, all of those present were aware that Sunil and I were conducting research, and even if they had only slight understanding of our fieldwork methods, it was unlikely that they seriously thought Sunil was making a list of culprits. Nonetheless, the joke implied (even if only ironically) that cookie eaters could be held to account. Likewise, Benny’s warning to Paulson to slow down, or the others’ pleas to speak quietly—these all implied that Ali had drawn a line that was not to be crossed.

The second way Ali’s words were recalled clarifies the sort of prohibition with which we are dealing. With their talk of just finishing up the last cookies, being driven by hunger, and not eating ‘corporate stuff’, the cookie eaters variously justified their eating to themselves. Pragmatically, justifications are often responses—they are second-pair parts of what conversation analysts call adjacency pairs, in which one turn at talk provokes the next (Keane, 2016; Sidnell, 2010). Accusations provoke justifications, and justifications recall the accusations that provoke them. Thus, in the ways the cookie eaters justified their actions, we can perceive a sort of mirror image of the ways they took themselves to be accused. ⁵ The image is clearest in Benny’s multiple references to corporations, especially his statement that ‘promoting corporations is not right’, which was closely followed by his equally blunt statement that ‘there are no corporations’ when one’s stomach is empty. In these two seemingly conflicting statements, he reproduced the accusation–justification pair whole, evoking the prohibition of cookie eating as a matter of opposition to corporations. Less explicitly, we might see in Nishant’s assurance that ‘we won't want to buy any more’ the implication that at issue was the buying of cookies more than the eating. Or, from the appeals to hunger, we might infer that, whatever the problem with cookie eating, it was taken to be reasonably justified by the need for sustenance.

What sticks to the cookie eaters—what persists in their interactions despite their apparent attempt to avoid it—is accountability. Following Ali’s speech, cookie eating was treated as an act for which one could be held to account. The cookie eaters did not assent to Ali’s evaluation in the same sense as those who followed Ali apparently did. They made clear that they believed their actions were justifiable. And yet, in the collaborative accomplishment of this justification, they also implicitly admitted that cookie eating was the sort of thing that required justification. The cookie eaters projected Ali’s speech as a counterforce—something that they disobeyed with their eating, undermined with their joking, and refuted with their justifications. But all of these ways of undoing the badness of cookies also reiterated that there was something there to be undone. They transgressed Ali’s words, but they still held themselves to account.

We can see a similar stickiness of accountability in other ethnographic accounts of moral transformation. For example, Robbins (2004) describes how the Urapmin, whose Christian conversion made keeping old taboos sinful, still felt the need to justify themselves to the deities who had established those taboos. The badness of taboo acts, even when denied, still stuck. Similarly, Day (2010) describes how UK sex workers, in seeking to justify their occupation, employed the same ethical distinctions between love and money that had been used to condemn them. In these cases, as in the cookie controversy, certain actions continue to require justification even among those who resist the values according to which these actions are of ethical import. Indeed, as we have seen in the case of the soft-speaking, slow-walking cookie eaters, resistance may make it more obvious that an action matters. The wriggling fly reveals the strength of the web.

To say that the cookie eaters hold themselves as requiring justification is not a statement about their psychology. Instead, we can perceive how accountability to Ali’s supposed accusation had become internal to the cookie eaters’ interaction—to their dialogue with one another, if not to their inner dialogue. Building on Butler’s (2005) work, Keane (2016) describes account-giving as an act of ethical self-awareness most often brought about by the demand of an authority. As he notes, however, ethics is not limited to such explicit, self-aware acts. Likewise, here the stickiness of accountability was perpetuated via semiotic processes that were neither fully explicit nor dependent upon the awareness of those involved.

To demonstrate what I mean, it will help to compare two short interactions, one that occurred only shortly after the vignette above and another that happened ten or fifteen minutes later. In the first interaction, a young woman was doling out cookies to those around her. Among them was Salman, the son of two long-time activists and one of the youngest on the Journey, who hung back with the cookie eaters but did not partake.

‘Salman, [have a] cookie,’ she said, reaching the package out toward him.

‘I don't want any.’

‘Huh? Come on, have a cookie,’ she said, reaching the cookies a bit closer to his face.

‘I don't like them.’

The others laughed and joined in, urging him to take the cookie. ‘Come on, take a cookie,’ Benny said. ‘Your mom will not even know about it. She is not going to say anything.’ [More laughter.]

‘It’s not my mother!’ retorted Salman. ‘I just don’t like that kind, that’s all.’

Here, Benny’s comment once again projected a prohibition of cookie eating into the interaction, interpreting Salman’s refusal of the cookie offer as motivated by fear of being held accountable to that prohibition. The laughter and insistence of the others, moreover, singled Salman out as deviant for not eating.

Compare this to a brief exchange a little later. At that point, the cookies had been finished and those who had fallen back to eat them together had split up. I found myself walking near Salman, who was alone, when Nazriya—who had been absent for the entire cookie controversy thus far—caught up with us from behind. The torn top of a cookie package glittered from her hip pocket. As she came up beside Salman, she pulled it out and put one in her mouth. ‘Want any cookies?’ She asked Salman, who was walking beside her. Besides myself, no one else was close enough to hear.

‘What kind are they?’

She held the package out to him with the label toward his face.

‘No, I don’t want any. I don’t like that kind.’

Nazriya took another cookie herself, and we walked on.

This second interaction very likely would not have caught my attention if it had not been for all of the earlier cookie talk. As it was, however, I was watching closely for any signs of evaluation or judgement—anything that recalled the prohibition of cookie eating, as Benny had in his comment to Salman above. But I could not perceive even the slightest sign that any such judgement had taken place. This does not mean, of course, that neither Nazriya nor Salman were evaluating one another mentally; given Salman’s earlier conversation with the cookie eaters, we have reason to think that he anticipated some evaluation when he turned down Nazriya’s offer. Perhaps his quickness to specify ‘I don’t like that kind’, echoing his words to Benny earlier, was meant to pre-empt such an evaluation. But other than this, I caught no perceptible sign, in speech or gesture, that tied Nazriya’s cookies to prior evaluative position-taking. And since Salman and Nazriya must also rely on perceptible signs for any evaluating to transpire between them, we can well suppose that such position-taking was not part of this interaction. Eating cookies simply did not matter in that way.

Note that what was perpetuated by the cookie eaters’ justifying was not the badness of cookies, but merely that eating cookies required justification. When they teased Salman for not partaking, they seemed to have succeeded in making bad into good and good into bad, but they still played the account-giving game. This is different from what Robbins (2004) describes among the Urapmin, in which what had once been bad could not be made entirely unbad. The stickiness of cookie eating is more like what Day (2010) describes among UK sex workers who argued against those who would condemn their occupation, but found themselves relying on the same set of value distinctions to make their case. Such justifying moves may succeed in challenging dominant evaluative positions while still perpetuating the notion that sex, or eating cookies, are acts for which some account is required.

The contrast between these two cookie-sharing interactions brings accountability into relief. In both cases, cookie eating was an ongoing activity, but in the first case it mattered in a way that it did not in the second. Even though in the first case cookie eating was encouraged, the very act of encouraging Salman to eat reiterated the prohibition it purported to flout. Indeed, a sort of reversal occurred, in which Salman ended up justifying himself to the others for not eating cookies. In the second interaction, by contrast, it seems awkward to even speak of flouting anything, since cookie eating was never considered in light of any prohibition. Cookie eating was simply unimportant in a sense that—despite open and enthusiastic enjoyment of cookies—was never true for the cookie eaters who split off from the larger group. None of their jokes, their displays of enjoyment, nor their justifications would allow them to eat cookies in the manner of Salman and Nazriya, in which cookie eating did not require any justification.

Dynamics of adhesion

What can make accountability stick? In an analysis of how emotions can stick to things and people, Ahmed argues that stickiness is an effect of repetition (Ahmed, 2004: 91, 92). Likewise, in exploring how accountability sticks, I have traced how an evaluation of cookie eating is reiterated, and thereby reinforced, along a chain of interaction. But I have also asked how this process developed an inertia, such that those who did not seem to want cookie eating to matter in an ethical way nonetheless perpetuated their own accountability. This persistence of accountability was not a mere effect of Ali’s original evaluative move, as evidenced by the way the logics of justification among the cookie eaters outstripped Ali’s words. However, as an interactional event, Ali’s speech set up a framework of accountability that fed into these later justifying moves.

To appreciate how this was accomplished, it will help to compare Ali’s speech to another complaint about cookie eating that occurred only a minute earlier. As noted above, it was this complaint—made by Jenny, a long-time activist and mother of several children in the group—that had spurred Sunil and me to start recording. At the time, it seemed that we were perhaps the only ones who took it seriously. Her complaints had been similar to Ali’s own: she had said loudly that cookies should not be eaten on a journey like this and had laid emphasis on not setting a bad example for children. But unlike Ali’s speech, Jenny's complaints had provoked only a couple of smart-alek remarks. No one had stopped eating. The only result appeared to be that Ali had gotten wind of the snacking—though whether from Jenny’s own lips or by some other route I could not be sure.

Austin’s (1962) notion of ‘illocutionary force’, or the power of speech to accomplish social acts, offers one tool for analyzing the differential effects of Jenny’s and Ali’s words and, more broadly, the question of how cookies were made a sticky subject. Anthropology has had a long-standing engagement with this notion (Hall, 1999; Fleming and Lempert, 2014), and Lambek (2015) has recently argued that illocutionary force can bring into play new topics and criteria for ethical accountability (see also Rappaport, 1999). What is most helpful here is Austin’s observation that words never act alone; the conditions, conventions, and procedures accompanying utterances render some words more forceful than others. For example, in initiating his short speech, Ali clapped his hands first and called out ‘Hey! One second.’ Answering Ali’s call, the group, which had been strung out along the edge of the road, gathered to form a circle around him. Jenny, by contrast, spoke as she walked, turning to address those nearby without stopping them and gathering them together. Thus, Ali initiated a structure of participation in which everyone was held accountable to his evaluation in a way that was never true for Jenny’s.

Note, however, that the force of Ali’s evaluation was never entirely of his own making; the resulting framework of participation depended on how others responded to his words. We might say that Ali’s evaluation was publicly ratified—that is, ratified as that to which his addressees could be held to account. Warner notes that, ‘Because a public exists only by virtue of address, it must predicate some degree of attention, however notional, from its members’ (Warner, 2002: 61). ⁶ The formation of a circle around Ali, the silence while he spoke, Nishant’s nodding and okaying—all of this constituted an attentional community of those whom Ali addressed and who consented to be evaluated. Likewise, the jokes and justifications of the cookie eaters, and the care they took to keep back and stay out of sight, can also be seen as ratifying moves. And whether in the moment of Ali’s speech, further down the road, or in interviews days later, responses by Ali’s addressees were never only reactions to his initial performative act; they also reassessed and redefined what kind of act Ali’s speech had been. ⁷ In particular, insofar as they hid their transgression of Ali’s evaluation of cookie eating from the others, those who hung back affirmed that they had been, and still could be, held to account for doing so. They stuck accountability to themselves.

In a discussion of the illocutionary force of ritual that in many ways parallels my analysis here, Rappaport has argued that ‘public acceptance’ of a ritual establishes new moral obligations regardless of whether anyone complies with these obligations (Rappaport, 1999: 121–122). Here we see that transgression, when hidden, can also reaffirm acceptance and, therefore, accountability. This connection between concealment and the stickiness of accountability can be seen in other contexts as well. The organizers of the Dialogue Journey, for example, had forbidden smoking. But many participants, including some of the organizers, were regular smokers. During the Journey, this subset of organizers could often be found smoking around the corner of a house, behind a tree, or just outside a gate—always out of view. It was not that people did not know they were smoking; rather, keeping smoking out of view was a way of marking it as ‘unattended’. We might think of this as the opposite of Ali’s clapping. Heywood (2015) describes a similar situation in his account of Italian ‘double morality’, a concept that condones transgressions of the Catholic moral code so long as those transgressions are ‘properly hidden’. The notion of public ratification helps us to see why the Catholic Church is willing to look the other way. The withdrawal of transgression from public view can have the same ratifying force as explicit affirmation of an evaluation. People might not obey the code, but the code sticks.

If stickiness is an effect of a certain structure of participation, however, that structure also depends entirely on the people who make it up. The divergent responses to Jenny’s and Ali’s condemnations of cookie eating were just as much a matter of who they were as of how they called others to account. Perhaps most obviously, Ali was the designated ‘captain’ of the Journey, the only official title held by anyone on the Journey. However, in a group that explicitly set itself in opposition to social hierarchy, the authority of this post was dubious at best; I only once heard anyone utter his title without irony. What is more to the point is why the organizers saw fit to make Ali captain. And, in this, it is also possible to see the often tacit differentials of authority in the group, particularly between men and women.

A renowned wildlife photographer and environmental essayist, Ali was known for going on long, solitary, barefoot hikes in Kerala’s mountain rainforests—the very forests that the Journey aimed to save. During a training for the Journey, he took a dozen of us out into the woods, barefoot, up a dry stream bed, until we were well out of sight of the path. He had us sit on boulders, close our eyes, and—for what felt like hours—just listen. When we returned from the woods he explained that, because he goes to the forest, he does not need to attend a church, a mosque, or a temple. Through this training exercise, Ali framed the entire event as an enactment of a moral practice in which he excelled. And, indeed, Ali’s deep experiential, even spiritual, connection with the forest gave his opinions a weight that others—even if they teased him about his ‘captaincy’—were unlikely to ignore.

The social location that gave Ali’s evaluations force was his position as an exemplar with respect to the moral practices that the Dialogue Journey was meant to enact (Humphrey, 1997; Laidlaw, 2014; Robbins, 2018). Yet, in the accounting of Ali’s virtues as an environmentalist, we can also see how his authority vis-à-vis Jenny was undergirded by his masculinity. His most distinctive ethical practice, solitary trekking in the woods, was considered out of bounds for women in Kerala—not only inappropriate, but fundamentally unsafe. A college librarian who had recently launched a business manufacturing cotton bags, Jenny was a highly regarded environmentalist in her own right. At one time or another, many of those on the Journey had bunked on her living room floor, and some of the younger participants described these experiences as crucial to their formation. But on the road that morning, trekking down a winding road through Kerala’s rainforest regions, it is not surprising that Ali’s masculine variety of environmental virtue commanded an authority that Jenny’s status did not.

Just as Ali’s position as exemplar prepared the way for ratification of his objections to cookie eating, so the social positions of those who stayed behind were crucial to perpetuating accountability. Indeed, even more than in the different responses to Jenny and Ali, power differentials were bluntly apparent among those who kept eating. As a whole, the cookie eaters were younger than the rest of the group, and none of them had leadership roles in the Journey. The exception was Paulson, who was older than either Ali or Jenny and had helped to organize the event. In his disregard for warnings from Benny (who was in his late twenties or early thirties, and still a ‘youth’ by Kerala standards) to hang back and keep quiet, we can see the relevance of age hierarchy with regard to who could be held accountable and how. Paulson was simply not very concerned about what would happen if Ali saw him eating cookies. He walked on to rejoin the rest of the group, still munching. And what might have happened to Benny, or the other cookie eaters, if they had taken the same tack? There was no clear mechanism of enforcement, but the very possibility of their transgression being known was enough to prevent these younger cookie eaters from taking Paulson’s path.

In the who of accountability, we can read a story about the politics of ethical evaluation. Note, however, that this reading does not require inference about the motives of those involved—i.e. whether they acted out of guilt or shame, deference to authority, or even accident or neglect. For example, given his later actions, we might suspect that Nishant’s repeated ‘Okay, okay’ was insincere; he may never have agreed with Ali. Yet, in view of other addressees, he conceded. The cookie eaters may have fallen back in order to avoid the disapproval of others (e.g. out of shame) or to blunt inner disapproval, or guilt. As I have already noted, the ways they justified themselves made the prohibition on cookie eating internal to their interaction, but that does not necessarily mean that it had a particular psychological effect. For our purposes, the effects that mattered—the effects described above as stickiness—were the material signs by which accountability was made perceptible.

This is not to deny that being stuck accounting for cookie eating had an experiential side. For example, Ahmed (2004) explores how certain evaluative acts (such as saying ‘That is disgusting!’) can entail emotional stickiness both for the evaluating subject (the disgusted) and the object (the disgusting). Not only can evaluation make feelings stick to persons, as to those who hide and become stuck with shame; it can also render entire social categories sticky with emotion, as when identities are stigmatized as shameful (Ahmed, 2004: 107). Though my field notes and recordings at the time gave me little insight into the psychological or emotional dimensions of the cookie incident, my feel for the stickiness in what unfolded was shaped by my own experiences of, for example, trying to drink a soda without shame. But we can see stickiness—and, indeed, stigma—in interaction without positing any particular feelings on the part of those who are stuck. Public ratification operated at this level regardless of how it was felt by those involved.

Such an interactional approach to accountability offers one perspective on the ‘irrefutability’ of ethics—i.e. how ‘what matters’, though radically indeterminate, can nonetheless seem to be beyond our control. For example, the disconnect between public ratification and the reasons supporting it suggests what taking something as ‘good in its own right’ might look like in interaction. To say that everyone assented to be accountable to the injunction against cookie eating is also to say that no one required reasons for this injunction. In further interaction, cookie eating was taken up as bad in its own right. Similarly, we might say that cookie eating was rendered ‘objectively’ ethical by the ratifying moves of Benny and the cookie eaters, who gave accounts of themselves even after Ali and the others were out of earshot. By making accountability internal to their dialogue with one another, those who hung back showed that stickiness was not reducible to the force of Ali’s authority or to anyone’s authority. For a time at least, once the game of accountability had been set in motion, this group took themselves to be accountable for cookie eating not because of who said so, nor who was listening, but simply because cookies mattered.

These linkages to the notions of ‘objectively good/bad’ and ‘good/bad in its own right’ suggest why the cookie controversy may have felt so intuitively ethical. After all, these analytics are attempts to crystalize concepts that have deep Western philosophical and cultural roots. ⁸ Tracking stickiness shows that the special ‘mattering’ of ethics, which these concepts attempt to capture, may hinge less on the grounds given for an evaluation than on how it is taken up in further interaction. In this way, stickiness gives a political edge to these notions, showing how social position and contestation are crucial to which judgments are construed as demanding accountability. This is not a reduction of ethics to politics; as noted, the power of Ali’s position rests in his authority as exemplar of a form of ethical life. Rather, by reframing key notions about ethics in terms of interactional effect, stickiness places moral logics and power dynamics into complex and inextricable entanglement, where they belong.

Hooked on ethics

On an afternoon about two weeks into the Dialogue Journey, some of the youngest participants stopped to rest in the shade of a large bodhi tree. Paulson’s son Milo, about fifteen but tall for his age, came across the road with a yellow package of cookies gleaming in his hands. He tore open the package and asked if anyone wanted any. Immediately, he was pounced on from all sides, small hands reaching up on skinny arms to accept the next cookie in the roll.

‘Hey! We should not be eating cookies!’ This was Benny, once again the oldest in a group of youths. He wagged a scolding finger high over his head. ‘That's a corporate thing!’ he said. ‘In there is white flour, sugar…’

And he began counting off all of the bad ingredients on his fingers. For a moment, things seemed uncertain. The children’s hands still reached, vying for position, but many of their faces were turned toward Benny.

‘You shut up!’ shouted Fathima, who was only a little younger than Benny, and she cocked one arm to smack him while snatching a cookie from Milo with the other. Benny launched into a rant about how the cookies were going to rot all of their stomachs, but Fathima would have none of it. ‘Don’t give any to Benny!’ she cried.

Benny, still scolding, made a grab for the cookies, but Fathima threw herself in his way. A short scuffle ensued, and much laughter. At last, Benny got his cookie. He whisked it through the air and snorted on it with one nostril, as if performing a spell. ‘That will remove the badness in the cookie!’ he cried and, still laughing, popped it in his mouth.

***

Had Benny at last removed the badness of the cookie? Perhaps. Certainly Benny’s invocation of the cookie prohibition had a different tone, and very different effects, than Ali’s earlier scolding, or even the jokes made among the cookie eaters just after that scolding. What is most interesting, however, is that it was Benny who repeated the prohibition, even in mimicry. For Benny, the prohibition was still publicly present—still available to cite. But it was not clear that anyone but Benny caught this interdiscursive link. Many of those beneath the bodhi tree had not even been present on that first day, and no one else indicated any recognition of a connection between the two events. Accountability for cookie eating seemed to have withered away. But its remnants still stuck to the one person who had been most keen to resist the ‘prohibition’ of cookies from the start.

As noted earlier, the recognition of Ali’s concerns as ethical was contingent on uptake thereafter, including uptake by the cookie eaters themselves. Nonetheless, once cookie eating had been picked out as something that mattered, this mattering took on a kind of force of its own—not a sui generis force, but a momentum sustained willy-nilly both by those who thought cookies ought to matter and those who did not. In this sense, one might say that Ali’s initial evaluative move had a barbed quality, a way of catching hold and continuing to be consequential in further interaction. Like a porcupine quill, the more one worried it the further it worked its way in.

As a way that things come to matter to people, the stickiness of accountability draws attention to some limits of freedom in ethics. Eating or not eating cookies on the Dialogue Journey might be seen as an exercise of moral freedom in the case of Jenny and Ali, who condemned; Bashir, who obeyed; Paulson, who shirked unabashedly; or even Benny, who shirked in hiding. But these same actions, particularly those of Benny and the cookie eaters, are also part of a story about the limits to which, even when choosing what to do and say, people can choose what matters and what does not. The power to hold others accountable, or to resist being held accountable, was not equally distributed, but even Ali could not make cookies matter alone; he needed the regard of others and that regard was grounded in criteria he did not choose. Even the leaders of the Dialogue Journey hid when they smoked.

These limits to ethical freedom are particularly notable in light of activists’ own commitments to challenging moral conformity. Here, what made ethics unfree was decidedly not the party discipline, religious authority, caste identity, or other well-organized tools of moral pressure that activists set themselves against. Avoiding cookies was not that kind of social obligation. Rather, activists’ freedom was limited by the inherently intersubjective process of challenging and redrawing the boundaries of moral concern. Many activists talked about this process as a profoundly liberating experience. But it also committed them to accountability where there had been no need to give accounts before.

For my research assistant Sunil and for me, such unfreedom seemed to permeate our interactions with environmental activists. More often than not, we were the shirkers. All along the Dialogue Journey, we looked for opportunities to slip away for a cold soda or to dine in an AC restaurant. Perhaps because ethics stuck more easily than it came unstuck, I gradually came to feel as though it was creeping into everything—as if there were no more ordinary activities that did not matter in that way. Even when we were not spotted, even when we were firm in our convictions that soda and cookies were not bad things, it was hard to feel free. Regardless of the freedom of our choices, the terms of accountability were not our own.