Anthropological Theory

Ethical judgement suffuses everyday life: it is not only objectified in rules or codes, experienced as duty, or realised as reason distinct from action. Nor in its primary manifestations is the ethical realised as a separate domain of thought, activity or expertise. The possibility that we explore in this collection is that ethics is immanent to action and to social life more generally, within it rather than at arm’s length from it. Our intention is not to reach unanimity, claim an exclusive truth or build a consistent model, but to follow the diverse paths along which thinking about the ethical in this way leads us.

In this paper I provide an analysis of how the then-imminent event of the Ghanaian 2016 elections operated within and interrupted a born-again Christian understanding of social and political change. I argue that much can be gained from understanding Pentecostal Christianity in Ghana by paying close attention to how born-again Christians anticipate and participate in shaping the near future. My analysis of this period, just before (and after) the 2016 elections—from the perspective of born-again Christians in Ghana—contributes to an engagement with the immanent and imminent qualities of ethical life. In accounting for the ways in which the Christian “God” and the “nation” overlap or collide in born-again Pentecostal discourse and practice in Ghana, I propose that the precise configuration of how these forces come together and come apart has a force that complicates how we imagine ethics as something explicit in discourse or about the ability to step back in reflection.

In this article, I address the editors’ (Sidnell and Lambek) arguments about the immanence of the ethical, in contrast to different questions concerning ‘ordinary ethics’ recently raised in anthropology. I will do so by asking what an ‘ordinary realism’ might entail for anthropology, and the way it could possibly help us to appreciate the difficulties inherent in our work of approaching the issues at stake in the reality we face, whether during fieldwork or back home. I will proceed and develop this questioning with the help of some contemporary philosophers who have sustained and enriched the debates on ethics in anthropology. I will illustrate the difficulty of ordinary realism for anthropology with an example taken from a particular moment during my field in Zanzibar where dreams and witchcraft entered the scene.

This article takes a Talmudic parable as the starting point to consider the ethical as immanent and imminent in an ethnographic case study of contemporary Jewish prayer. I consider the role of blessings and curses at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, as speech acts in protests over Jewish legal interpretation and state-sanctioned laws. I demonstrate how women’s prayer performances, directed to the divine, also reflect judgments about felicitous gendered worship, and, at the same time, passionately solicit ongoing engagement in argumentation and debate with those who have seemingly incommensurable interpretations. Drawing on Das and Lambek’s notions of ordinary ethics, together with Jewish thinkers, I suggest a reading of what happens at the Western Wall that locates ethics not in transcendent, rationally formalized religious rules that frame women’s visits to this sacred site; rather, ethics is immanent and imminent in their practices of interpretation, judgment, and encounter with those statutes.

Anthropologists have engaged in a sustained discussion on the parameters and temporality of ethical life. If one understands the ethical as intrinsic to ordinary acts and practice, rather than solely evident in moments of crisis or ‘discursive interaction’, then ethnographers have been tasked with better describing and locating practical judgment in the lived experiences of their interlocutors, who daily encounter existential ambiguity. In situations where chronic violence makes crisis itself quotidian, and the appearance of ‘moral breakdown’ is mundane, the waters of anthropological ethics become even more muddy. This article takes up that consideration by examining ongoing ethical projects amongst Acholi residents of socially disrupted northern Uganda, where ethnographers are also called to relate and deliberate. It describes the problem of purported spirit attacks and witchcraft at a secondary school for girls in the town of Gulu, which many of the pupils judge to be the work of lute ceto pii (‘those who go underwater’), a category of devil worshippers thought by many Ugandans to be the source of ill-gotten wealth, power and fame, to cause misfortune, and to signal an imminent end to life as they know it. Reminiscent of the slave revolt detailed by Nietzsche, wherein a new type of morality is founded upon a ressentiment of the powerful, in contemporary Uganda acts of acknowledgment, passion, irony and ritual nevertheless reflect ethical underdeterminacy. I argue that interpreting and responding to such rancour is a question not just of tracing the genealogy of moral sentiment or indignation, but of acknowledging and acting (despite) the underdeterminacy of affective forces that inflect the palimpsest of Acholi ontologies.