Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology

Obligations and Requirements

Lisette Josephides

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000189643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Inspired by the work of world-renowned anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, this collection of essays features contributions from a range of internationally recognized scholars – including Strathern herself – which examine a range of methodologies and approaches to the anthropology of knowledge.The book investigates the production of knowledge through a variety of themes, centered on the question of the researcher's obligations and the requirements of knowledge. These range from the obligation to connect with local culture and existing anthropological knowledge, to the need to draw conclusions and circulate what has been learned. Taking up themes that are relevant for anthropology as a whole – particularly the topic of knowledge and the ethics of knowing others, as well as the notion of the local in a global world – Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology is key reading for students and scholars alike. A thorough introduction to the key concepts and terms used in Strathern's work is provided, making this a fantastic resource for anyone encountering her work for the first time.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

Obligations and Requirements: The Contexts of Knowledge

Lisette Josephides

This volume is concerned with epistemology (how we know and what we can know) and ethics (knowing through relationships). Its prehistory is to be found in theorizations of ethnographic writing as a form of knowledge, grounded in relationships, and thus calling for an ethical stance. Taking this prehistory as given, the Current volume has an immediate impetus and a broader aim, linked by the inspirational work of Marilyn Strathern.¹ The impetus was to recognize and pay homage to Strathern's enormous contribution to the discipline of anthropology and beyond; the broader aim was to explore knowledge exchange and the different ways in which knowledge is produced. Thus, the chapters (representing regional expertise from Papua New Guinea, Africa, Japan, Europe and the United Kingdom) can be seen as providing material for the delineation of a history of theoretical and ethnographic developments in anthropology and interdisciplinarity. A real bonus that sets this volume apart is the involvement of Strathern herself, in a concluding evaluation of the research directions inspired by her scholarship. Strathern's own voice thus takes forward a joint project to a synthesis which may suggest (though this was not its sole aim) new paths and new questions for research. The Dialogue serves to clarify as well as extend understandings by 'opening up' the language to address broader themes.²

This juxtaposition of 'obligations and requirements' is taken from Stengers (2011); her inspiring formulation must be acknowledged from the outset.

Together, the chapters in this volume offer a distinct theoretical approach to knowledge-production by addressing a range of interconnected questions that open up the field to further debate. In particular, they take up three related themes of topical interest in anthropology (and scholarly thinking more broadly): the formative link between knowledge and the ethics of coming to know (others/through others); the construction of persons and subjects with agency in relations with other persons, institutions or belief systems; and the local in a global world, viewed benignly as moral cosmopolitanism Or discordantly as power based on the moral economy of ethnicity. The first theme only will be elaborated directly in this introduction; the second and third themes can be read off the chapters. Methodologically, each contributor develops insights by re-contextualizing aspects of Strathern's work from several perspectives: vis-à-vis the studied people in the field, in relation to knowledge production and academia, and in relationships with fellow anthropologists. Thus, exchanges and obligations are not only vis-a-vis those studied, but also in relation to inspirational colleagues. These investigations bring into focus the requirements and obligations of knowledge in a general way.

The volume thus engages with themes that are at the heart of theoretical discourse, not only in anthropology but also in sociology, philosophy and psychology: issues of ethics, knowledge production, the subject and subjectivity. Implicitly or explicitly, it builds on several publications on anthropological knowledge that, variously, concentrate on the issues of fieldwork, on different cultural practices framed in broader comparative contexts, on how knowledge is linked to practices, skills, experience, on tacit knowledge and meaning (e.g. Astuti et al. 2007; Halstead et al. 2008; Harris 2007; Lau et al. 2008; Moore and Sanders 2005). Two contributors to the current volume, Henrietta Moore and Nigel Rapport, extend their earlier insights On, respectively, the subject and subjectivity (Moore 2007) and cosmopolitan politesse (Rapport 2012). While demonstrating how the current volume synthesizes and doubles back on themes that have a common source in the scholar who was the inspiration for them, they advance these themes into new territories. Other contributors pursue similar trajectories in translocal engagements with the moral economy (Sykes), extending dividual 'partial connections' to the understanding of sacrifice (Mosko) and subjecting actor-network theory to a critical evaluation through the prism of power (Sedgwick). Andrew Moutu, meanwhile, as the one Papua New Guinean scholar in this volume, draws on two chapters from The Gender of the Gift to unravel a multiplicity of discourses whose 'requirements' and 'obligations' as knowledge are intertwined in a myriad epistemological, ethical and personal ways. The volume thus Contains chapters that appear to come from different genres or be in different registers, but always with the common aim of probing the possibilities of the extension/expansion of knowledge and its conceptual apparatuses. Early in the volume, a doubt is introduced about the possibilities of human 'togetherness' and the ethics of relations, in the form of the disjunctive synthesis (JoscphiJcs, Chapter Two).

Pursuing the volume's substantive theme (of exploring knowledge exchange and the different ways in which knowledge is produced), each chapter implicitly approaches knowledge practices from two perspectives: the perspective of the scholarly requirements of the knowledge itself and the perspective of the obligations which accrue in the course of its formation/development. The two perspectives (of requirements and obligations) relate to two types of exchange: one circulating, and the other leading to closure. An ethnographer must connect with the conditions of the local culture during fieldwork and contextualize herself/himself in the written corpus of the discipline while writing; this is 'circulating exchange', the obligations of knowledge.³ But as a scholar, she/he must achieve a degree of closure in order to formulate and communicate what she has learned, in an account (or narrative) that neither constructs nor is subsumed by universals (i.e. it retains its specificity and integrity) and, moreover, can be transmitted effectively. These are the requirements of knowledge, its internal necessity or sine qua non. They entail both translation and interpretation and contain the seeds of betrayal. As philosopher Isabelle Stengers (2011) has argued, the risk of betrayal is the fate of all practitioners of the sciences of contemporaneity, who share the same temporality with those about whom they produce knowledge. Anthropologists are aware of these conditions, and in this volume, they attempt to take inspiration from them.

The rest of this introductory chapter is divided into four sections. 'Obligations of knowledge' tackles ethics in knowledge-production; 'requirements of knowledge' considers the kind of 'closure' needed for the production of knowledge as a coherent unit; 'some notes on the context of Strathern's scholarly oeuvre' lays out the key perspectives in Strathern's work which speak across disciplines. I conclude with a section on the structure of the volume and the place of each chapter.

Obligations of knowledge (ethics)

Knowledge exchange is all about transformation. In the Dialogue, Strathern expressed her appreciation for the way in which the creativity and labour of scholars 'change the contours' of what was written at any one moment. It moves her to recover a specific sense of the person as 'one's critic', who has a decisive role in 'recalibrating' the significance of arguments in a new direction or form. Her further reflections lead to a recontextualization of the pair 'obligations and requirements' as 'two modes of responsibility, recognizing both the reaching out entailed in any study and its counterpart in an orientation to an end product', neither excluding ethics. She notes that following 'the detached nature of any specific object of enquiry', the knowledge produced by that enquiry likewise becomes detached and enables us to Create something else (for instance, an ethnography). Thus the requirement of knowledge 'precipitates its own context', and in this, it starkly identifies detachment as a necessary aspect of knowledge-creation.

This detachment is part of what I understand by the requirement of knowledge. The requirements/obligations pair is not envisaged as a simple opposition between exchanges that are open and circulating (good) and those that are seemingly closed off (bad). Nonetheless, it is worth pursuing the question of the difference between the two. I would put it this way: one mode of responsibility ('requirement') prioritizes the requirements of knowledge itself, as each epistemological enquiry has its own core ethical imperatives. As Daston and Galison put it, these imperatives include 'the humility of the seeker, the wonder of the psalmist who praises creation, the asceticism of the saint' (Daston and Galison 2010: 40).⁴ In the case of science, they argue, an 'ethos must be grafted onto a scientific persona, [and] an ethical and epistemological code imagined as a self'. Thus, 'epistemology and ethos fuse' (2010: 204), and the mastery of scientific practices requires self-mastery: as long as knowledge posits a knower, 'the self of the knower will be at epistemological issue' (2010: 40).

But knowledge exchange is full of ethical pitfalls. To paraphrase Strathern in the Dialogue: Our citations allow us to put persons together as authors, just like our ethnographies 'invent' cultures; while remaining 'true' to the author or the people we study, the rules of ethnographic writing and citation enable us to create something else; the detachment involved in all these processes as a necessary aspect of knowledge-creation.⁵ But while Strathern felt she could be Critical of Margaret Thatcher (in After Nature), she would be more circumspect when it came to open criticism of Papua New Guinea politicians. She cites 'incomplete knowledge' and a good awareness of the consequences and entailments of speaking as the biggest deterrents to feeling free to be a critic. The bar she sets for the 'requirements of verifiable knowledge' is so high that it becomes clear that what is at issue is the moral right to speak at all in certain circumstances. The heightened sense of obligation may also be extended to Melanesian (or African – see CODESRIA 2008) academics, in apology or gratitude for their reception of Certain kinds of knowledge produced with reference to Melanesian (or African) lives. The role of ethics, then, stretches beyond knowledge-production in a primary site.

The concern in this section turns out to be not with ethics in general, or even ethics in anthropology, but with ethics from the perspective of the person as a knower; making them ethical in their very essence and construction. The second point, about how relations of knowledge exchange may confer Or withhold 'rights to speak' on the anthropologist (about what Badiou would term 'the real' – see Chapter Two), at first seem 'meta-ethical' or even strategic in character. They recall Rapport's question in the Dialogue about whether there are some truths that ought not to be enunciated. But on closer inspection, layers of conundrums (posing as veils of ignorance) interpose themselves: as Strathern is aware, 'the right to speak' the truth too easily assumes that the truth can be known unequivocally, whereas in reality it is embroiled in rights and perspectives from the outset, when ethnographic subjects are pre-empted from self-objectification in print by ethnographic descriptions with which they must first engage.

I started off my investigation of the requirements of ethics in knowledge-building by asking whether it was possible that negative relations may destroy or hold up the unfolding of knowledge (see Dialogue, Chapter Nine, written before this Introduction was finalized). I saw knowledge then to some extent as a relay race, passed on from knower to knower, but 'recontextualization' captures more of the complexity and creativity that knowledge exchange entails. Witness my reliance on Marilyn Strathern's Dialogue entries in this section: she has adopted my retooled Concepts of 'obligations and requirements' troni Stengers (2011) and at one moment appropriated, synthesized and taken them forward, recapturing them both as modes of responsibility. In my turn, I let her 'recontextualized' concepts speak for this volume.

Requirements of knowledge (epistemology)

Obligations and requirements are both modes of responsibility (Strathern); epistemology and ethics are intertwined (Daston and Galison 2010: 4). Why then the imperative to insert distinctions that problematize knowledge exchange in terms of the requirements of knowledge itself, and the obligations imposed by the relationships necessary for its production? My brief response below selects some recent writings that can be used to take this debate forward.⁶ But first, a few words on philosophical approaches.

Philosophy

When I first started thinking about this project, I spent some time searching for sources in academic philosophy and its treatises on epistemology but found very few relevant studies. Philosophical debates link knowledge with value, virtue and goodness (see Josephides n.d. for more details). Classical philosophy combines capability of rational thinking with a type of knowledge that includes the ability to reflect about living well. Modern philosophy of knowledge identifies three types of knowledge: prepositional knowledge (knowing-that, factual or descriptive knowledge), experiential knowledge and knowing-how (practical knowledge as well as moral knowledge) (Chappell 2014: 270-271). Though none of these address the ethics of knowledge exchange, Chappell moves in this direction when he defines 'objectual knowledge' in terms that describe the anthropologist's trade: knowledge of objects, which may be material or abstract things ('tables, houses, bicycles, and laptops'; 'molecules, mathematical structures, philosophical theories, musical symphonies, novels, poems, persons') or dispositions (such as virtues) (Chappell 2014: 284). As opposed to propositional knowledge, whose aim is control and domination, objectual knowledge is 'humble and unending pilgrimage towards the demands set by an external reality' (2014: 288-289). This is reminiscent of the description of fieldwork as 'characterized by a series of apprenticeships' (Jenkins 1994: 442, citing Bloch). It became clear to me following this search that anthropologists had an important contribution to make to a neglected field.⁷

Anthropology

Traditionally anthropological knowledge has been tied to ethnography, with 'participant observation' fieldwork providing the data ('facts') on which ethnographic monographs were built and theorizations grounded. Over the years, theoretical work has refined understandings of the mechanics of this relationship, in response to perceptions of creative and epistemological gaps between ethnographic and anthropological knowledge and redefinitions of fieldwork itself (see e.g. Ingold 2013; Josephides 2008; Rabinow 2003; Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2013).⁸ Ingold's strong statement, that ethnography and anthropology are antithetical ways of knowing, can be seen as a defence of anthropology's ability to create 'a transformational space for generous, open-ended comparative and critical enquiry' (Ingold 2013: 4). His intention is actually to refute the separation between knowing and being, or data-collecting and theory-building. It responds to critiques of the authenticity and legitimacy of anthropology's knowledge-building, from arguments that question the possibility of representation from epistemological, political and ideological perspectives, or restrict the rights of the anthropologist to speak at all. By recasting the field as one of 'transformational engagements' with people beyond the settings of fieldwork, Ingold (2013: 6) also bypasses the relationship implied by the pair 'obligations and requirements'.

Ingold's insightful comments open up a discussion on what is the field, what are different 'fields' corresponding to different ways of creating knowledge, and what is the role of fieldwork in contemporary anthropology. Rabinow and Stavrianakis's Demands of the Day: On th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction Obligations and Requirements: The Contexts of Knowledge
• PART ONE Epistemology, Subjectivity and the Ethics of Knowing Others
• PART TWO Persons, Sociality and Value: Partibility as Sacrifice, Consumption and Investment
• PART THREE Mobilizing Power and Belonging: The Local in a Global World
• PART FOUR Knowledge Exchange and the Creativity of Relationships: Contextualizing and Recontextualizing Knowledge
• Index