Description
Book Synopsis 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
