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The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology

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The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology Nancy Scheper-Hughes Current Anthropology, VaI. 36, No. 3 (Jun., 1995),409-440. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0011-3204%28199506%2936%3A3%3C409%3ATPOTEP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions ofUse provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of ajoumal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the sarne copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. Current Anthropology is published by The University of Chicago Press. Please contact the publisher for further permissions regarding the use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.j stor.org/joumals/ucpress.html. Current Anthropology ©1995 The University of Chicago Press JSTOR and the JSTOR logo are trademarks of JSTOR, and are Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. For more information on JSTOR [email protected]. ©2003 JSTOR http://www.j stor.org/ Tue Sep 23 18:27:05 2003 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June 1995 © 1995 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropoIogicaI Research. AlI rights reserved 003204/~5/36o3-0003$2.00 For much of this century cultural anthropology has been concemed with divergent rationalities, with explaining 2 how and why various cultural others thought, reasoned, and lived-in-the-world as they did. Classical anthropo­ logical thinking and practice are best exemplified, per­ The Primacy af haps, in the great witchcraft and rationality debates of decades past.2 Ideally, modernist cultural anthropology liberated "truth" from its unexamined Eurocentric and the Ethical Orientalist presuppositions. But the world, the objects of our study, and consequently, the uses of anthropology have changed considerably. Exploring the culturallogic Propositions for a Militant of witchcraft is one thing. Documenting, as I am now, the buming or "necklacing" of accused witches, politi­ Anthropologyl caI collaborators, and other ne'er-do-wells in belea­ guered South African townships-where a daily toll of "charred bodies" is a standard feature of news re­ by Nancy Scheper-Hughes ports-is another.3 A more womanly-hearted anthropol­ ogy might be concerned not only with how humans think but with how they behave toward each other, thus engaging directly with questions of ethics and power. ln South African squatter camps as in the AIDS sana­ ln bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment truths we hold toria of Cuba and in the parched lands of Northeast Bra­ and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoreti­ cally a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified zil, I have stumbled on a central dilemma and challenge notion of culture, anthropologists may be "suspending the ethi­ to cultural anthropology, one that has tripped up many cal" in our dealings with the "other." Cultural relativism, read a fieldworker before me (for example, Renato Rosaldo as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in [1989:1-21] in his encounters with Ilongot headhunt­ which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at ers): ln bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment alI, must be ethicalIy grounded. This paper is an attempt to imag­ ine what forms a politicalIy committed and moralIy engaged an­ truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in thropology might take. order to engage theoretically with a multiplicity of alter­ native truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES is Professor of Anthropology at the anthropologists may be "suspending the ethical" (Buber University of Califomia, Berkeley (Berkeley, Calif. 94720, 1952:147-56) in our dealings with the "other," espe­ U.S.A.). Born in 1944, she was educated at Berkeley (Ph.D., cially those whose vulnerable bodies and fragile lives 1976). She has taught at the University of North Carolina, ChapeI Hill, at Southem Methodist University, at the University are at stake. Moreover, what stake can anthropologists of Cape Town, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences expect to have in current politicaI debates in rapidly "de­ Sociales, Paris. Her research interests include the application of mocratizing" nations in Eastern Europe, Latin America, criticaI theory to medicine and psychiatry, the anthropology of and Africa where newly drafted constitutions and bills the body, illness, and suffering, the politicaI economy of the emo­ of rights-and those of Brazil and South Africa are exem- tions, and violence and terror. Among her publications are Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ire­ land (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, unrefiexive cultural relativist, Levinas's notion of a "pre-cultural" 1979), the edited volume Child Survival: Anthropological Per­ moral repugnance toward unnecessary human suffering came back spectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children (Dor­ to haunt me with a vengeance, along with the specter of three-year­ drecht: D. Reidel, 1987), and Death Without Weeping (Berkeley old Mercea, who died abandoned by both her mother and her an­ and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). The pres­ thropologist during Brazilian Carnival celebrations in 1989. ent paper was submitted in final form 25 x 94. 2. Excellent reviews of these debates in anthropology can be found in Mohanty (1989), Hollis and Lukes (1982), Wilson (1985), and Tambiah (1990). 1. This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the 3. Here is how the death of suspected police collaborators and Israel Anthropological Association Meetings, Tel Aviv University, witches is described in the local white newspaper in Cape Town on March 23, 1994, where the conference theme was "Politically (my emphasis): "Dozen Bodies Removed from Guguletu in Week­ Committed Anthropology." On my return to South Mrica I pre­ end Casualties"j "The charred bodies of seven people, including a sented the paper to my colleagues at the Department of Social 50 year old woman and her teenage daughter, were found in Tho­ Anthropology, University of Cape Town, on May 13, 1994, where koza hostel and Katlehong on Friday.... The bumed and blackened it achieved a certain notoriety and generated a strong response, bodies of two young men were found at the Mandela squatter camp aspects of which have worked their way into this revision. ln No­ in Thokoza and another body at Katlehong railway station" (Cape vember 1994 parts of this paper were read at the AAA symposium Times, September 1993); "Another 40 bodies found on the East "Rethinking the Cultural: Beyond IntelIectual Imperialisms and Rand"i finalIy, "Charred bodies of two witches found in Nyanga" Parochialisms of the Past" (see Winkler 1994:A18). I am grateful (Argus, January 21, 1994). The women accused of witchcraft had to my Israeli, South Mrican, and North American colleagues for been bound together with rope and were "badly bumt." While their contributions and criticisms. Finally, at a crucial moment in white deaths "counted"-as, for example, in the extensive and my failed attempts to "make sense" of the "useless suffering" of personal coverage of the white victims of the St. James Church the multitudes of Northeast Brazilian angel-babies, T. M. S. Evens "massacre" in Cape Town in late July 1994-the black victims introduced me to certain key writings of Emmanuel Levinas (1986). of township violence were merely "counted," recorded as body Although I originally rejected these with the vehemence of the counts. 4 10 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, Tune 1995 plary-speak to a growing global consensus ("Western," "my" anthropological subjects. On the day that I was "bourgeois," "hegemonic," if you will) defending the about to leave the field in Northeast Brazil in 1982 a rights of women, children, sexual minorities, the ac­ fight broke out between my research assistant, "Little cused, and the sick against "traditional and customary Irene," and several women of the shantytown of the Alto law," cultural claims increasingly viewed as hostile, op­ do Cruzeiro (aptly named Crucifix Hill) that was to pressive, and exploitative? change irrevocably the course of my life and work as an anthropologist. The women-all of them shantytown mothers-were waiting outside the creche and social Framing the Issue and Calling the Bluff center of the squatters' association where I was gather­ ing the sad reproductive histories that would eventually ln the introduction to Death Without Weeping (1992b: result in the publication of Death Without Weeping a 21) I suggest that cultural relativism, read as moral rela­ decade later. tivism, is no longer appropriate to the wprld in which When I emerged to see what the commotion was we live and that anthropology, if it is to be worth any­ about, the women were prepared to turn their anger thing at alI, must be ethically grounded: "If we cannot against me. Why had I refused to work with them when begin to think about social institutions and practices in they had been so willing to work with me? Didn't I care moral or ethical terms, then anthropology strikes me as about them personally any more-their lives, their suf­ quite weak and useless." The specific instance I treat at fering, their struggle? This was a reference to my previ­ length in Death Without Weeping concerns the llloral ous history in the community when, during the mid­ thinking and social practices of poor shantytown 1960s, I lived and worked in the Alto do Cruzeiro as a women toward some of their small, hungry babies politically committed community organizer, helping to viewed as "wanting" to die or "needing" to die, as filling found UPAC, the squatters' association, and attending the role of "generative scapegoats" (Girard 1987) and dy­ to the community's perennial quest for clean water, gar­ ing, like Jesus, so that others might live.
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