Engaging Moral Lifeworlds
Welcome to Engaging Moral Lifeworlds!
Course posts
See the most recent posts from class below.
- Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology, by Todd D. Whitmore
Summary
In his monograph, Whitmore takes his readers through a series of phases along his ethnographic journey: (1) attention (ch. 2-3), (2) discernment (ch. 4-6), (3) commitment (ch. 7), and (4) return (ch. 8). These phases organize the book and thus warrant basic definitions. Attention involves using sensory perception to notice “the way of being” in a community. Discernment refers to the reshaping of the researcher’s own worldview. Commitment is the decision to incorporate key dimensions of the worldview of subjects. And finally, return signals the going from “field” to “home” as a changed researcher (24). Whitmore’s delineation of these four moments evinces a reflexivity that runs throughout his book.
He describes his methodology as mimesis or “mimetic theology,” which further correlates with “anthropological theology.” Mimesis is the “reenactment” and “revivifying” of Jesus Christ “in whom God and human meet” as to further inspire others to imitate Christ (imitatio Christi) (2). Relatedly, “mimetic theology” is decidedly “unsystematic theology” as it prioritizes the full array of sensory experience–especially orally/auditorily–as the site of theological knowledge over a textualized and systematized theology (3). Finally, “anthropological theology” is Whitmore’s intervention to classical articulations of theological anthropology as a “theologically inflected” philosophical account of the human person. With recourse to ethnography, Whitmore proffers “anthropological theology” whereby a theological account of the human person emerges at the site of lived religion (4). All of this, mimesis and anthropological theology, is conducted in media res (in the middle of things), on the go, a living tradition, not yet solidified, that is, between systematic and practical theology, between fieldwork and the textual analyses, between researchers and subjects.
For Whitmore, gospel mimesis is not only for the Litter Sisters but is also an invitation to academics where ethnography can be a form of apprenticeship (135). Whitmore also sees the Little Sisters, the Acholi peoples (i.e., “cultures that have key elements in common with that of ancient Palestine” as a “bridge culture” to the early Jesus followers, p. 154), and their neighbors as correcting his “Western academic encultured faith” (140). This goes against the convention of maintaining “objective” distance between anthropologist/ethnographer and their subjects, but it is analogous to Whitmore’s notion of anthropological theology as apprenticeship to the Other (140). For instance, Whitmore learns from Cecilia, who imitates the Good Samaritan in taking care of Santo in Pabbo by bathing and feeding him.
Reflections and Questions
Whitmore’s reflexivity on mimesis/mimetic theology pierces the core of his project. The title of his book may have been Imitating Christ in Magwi and in the American Academy. At times, he is clearly investigating the mimetic practices of his subjects such as the Little Sisters and their devotions to Bishop Nigri and Mother Angioletta. Yet, at other times, Whitmore is also the subject of his mimetic ethnography, that is, an auto-ethnography on the mimetic practices of the Christian ethnographer. Whitmore evinces interest in both questions: (1) How do the Acholi imitate Christ? As well as (2) How do academic ethnographers imitate Christ in their fieldwork? Simply put, who is the primary subject of this ethnographic theology?
(Question) Whitmore’s reflexivity permeates the core of his project. Does this permeation simply embody the rubric of mimesis his project champions, or does this permeation detract from his project (i.e., does Whitmore as subject eclipse the Acholi and their communities as subjects)? Examined in the other direction, had Whitmore not sought to embody mimesis but merely espoused it rhetorically, how might this be consequential to his project?
Chapter 5 explicitly makes Whitmore, specifically, or the academic researcher, more generally, the primary subject. It is a chapter devoted to Whitmore’s reflexivity and concern regarding the power dynamic he brings as a white, Western, male academic (see p. 163). Contra. Loïc Wacquant (French sociologist), Whitmore wants to maintain the integrity of human difference in resisting “sameness” within the theological practice of mimesis both of Christ of the “bridge cultures” he identifies the Acholi and the Little Sisters to be for him. Whitmore suggests that theology has resources to prevent the error of collapsing ourselves into sameness of the Other or vice versa (164). The “limits of mimesis” include the gap between self and Other where we risk collapsing ourselves to the Other or Other with ourselves, especially in Whitmore’s case a white man in Africa (191).
(Question) Whitmore’s reflexivity indicates the inherent contradictions in the field of ethnography, especially when the ethnographer is Western, white, and male. What do we make of these inherent contradictions? How do we alleviate them? Or, are they just part and parcel with the discipline of ethnography? (see pp. 206-7 for an explicit discussion of reflexivity and power relations).
Whitmore testifies to his own epistemic conversion/reversal by the other from the “objectifying [white] gaze of ethnography” to a “magical world” without its pejorative connotations (204-5).
(Question) Recalling Timothy Jenkins’ central question: Is fieldwork capable of representing the objective reality outside the subjectivism of the ethnographic researcher? And Fadeke Castor’s question “How do African Diaspora religions (ADR) add an interesting dimension to our debates and understandings of religious subjectivities?” How might these enter conversation with Whitmore’s wrestling of “discernment” or “commitment” (where as a “modern/post-modern Western academic” he struggles to but ultimately accepts the emic epistemology of the spirit visitation)? (It seems multiple subjectivities take one two meanings: (1) there are two “Todds” in Whitmore, the Western/modern Todd, and (2) the magical world Todd, but also there are multiple subjectivities in the sense of spirit possession or spirit crossings/transgressions as Whitmore describes in chapter 6 “Crossings: The Surprise of Mimesis”).
- Saba Mahmood: The Politics of Piety
It is impossible to read Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety in an American context without noting its publication year, 2005. While the book’s ethnographic research took place prior to 9/11, its theoretical contribution is inextricable from it. Specifically, Mahmood confronts the problem of feminist participation in the subsequent militant reaction to 9/11. She mounts a critique of normative liberal feminist ethics through a thick ethnography punctuated by philosophical excurses, which aims to explicate the role that Islamic practices have in creating the women’s subjectivity.
The mosque movement in Egypt that Mahmood observes is an outgrowth of a transnational Islamic revival that began in the 1970s. The specific groups she observes consist of women who gather in mosques for weekly lessons in piety, often consisting of textual study and moral advisement. This movement is simultaneously anti-modern in its political orientation and facilitated by modern increases in education and literacy. Recent developments in Muslim scholarship also enable the movement by defining da’wa (the duty of Muslims to call one another to greater piety) as a general vocation rather than a specific employment. Women can, therefore, fulfil this general duty to one another.
With Western eyes, it is easy to assume that the external practices of Muslim piety that these women exhibit are forms of cultural or national signification, designed to delimit belonging and social cohesion. But Mahmood’s close observation of these women reveals that these practices (such as prayer, veiling, and fasting) are directed toward the cultivation of inward dispositions. Participating in prayer creates the desire for prayer, weeping creates fear of God, and veiling creates modesty. Ultimately, the goal of these practices is the creation of a pious self.
This ethnographic data is keyed to Mahmood’s theoretical framework, critiquing liberal conceptions of the individual as an autonomous moral agent. Foucault’s notion that the subject does not precede power relations is a cornerstone of this theory. Ethics, as cultivation of one’s own subjectivity, occurs in the matrices of one’s living. Taking this notion seriously leads Mahmood to critique theories of moral agency that prioritize subversion and resistance as their paramount examples. Indeed, if liberal feminists take seriously the primacy of particularity, they will allow their normative ideas to be revised through contact with locality.
The titular question of politics hovers in the background for the majority of the text. Mahmood argues that religious movements like the one she studies bear a transformative power that exceeds many political groups. And that the creation of subjects that occurs through practices has intrinsic political consequences. And contra to Western misconceptions, the intensity of this piety occasionally engenders the suspicion of Egypt’s government. This coheres with Mahmood’s agential point, that political change is not merely a result of radical adversarial resistance.
While Mahmood takes both philosophical conceptions of the self and the women’s mosque movement in Egypt as the objects of her study, The Politics of Piety also contains subtly important autobiographical data. She opens the book by explaining her context as a member of the progressive left in Pakistan. And she closes by saying that her analytic method caused her to understand practices that she had initially found objectionable. This autobiographical component, which admits to the unsettling of certainties, explains in part why the book never shifts back into a normative mode. Mahmood wants to honor the analytical task without collapsing it into the normative political one. While she calls for a revision of normative paradigms, she consigns this work mostly to their critique, concluding with a brief gesture toward the possibility of coexistence.
Questions
- Mahmood is highly critical of the terms of liberal normative political ethics. She problematizes them through her ethnographic observations and argues that they should be remade through this critique. Do you think that she leaves room for this? Or does she simply prefer a different sort of analytic project that is incommensurable with the normative projects that she critiques?
- Mahmood is staunchly against philosophical concepts of normativity and universality. But in her analysis, she argues that the religious practices she observes function as a means of virtue cultivation, rather than as identity signifiers. While she does this to parochialize these practices, does it render them legible to other religious practitioners to the point of gesturing toward universality?
- Mattingly went out of her way to distance herself from Foucault in an effort to underscore her study subjects as moral agents. Mahmood employs Foucault to underscore her subjects’ creation of moral subjectivity. How do their definitions of agency differ? Which do you find more philosophically compelling?
- Cheryl Mattingly: Moral Laboratories
Version 1.0.0 In Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life, Cheryl Mattingly employs years’ worth of ethnographic research with African American families facing illness and poverty to offer a moral anthropology that takes seriously the moral “experimentation” and even transformation that is a part of the everyday lives of the families she observed.
In this book, Mattingly focuses on the lives and decisions of a few key families with children who have disabilities or life-threatening illnesses. She observes how these family members actively discern and seek the best version of a “good life” amid the challenges of illness, poverty, racism, death, and other tragedies (5).
In the vein of Lambek and Das, Mattingly contends that ethics are not merely worked out in practices of “moral apprenticeship” but also in the daily moral discernment that addresses the specific circumstances humans confront, such as caring for one another in the midst of suffering (55).
While Mattingly maintains the importance of the cultural resources, traditions, and communities that form our morality, she observes that these forces do not predetermine moral choices (166). Instead, people draw from cultural resources to experiment in the “moral laboratories” of everyday life (63). One example of this is how Darlene and Andrew utilize both their trust in God and medical science and yet use these resources to make decisions for their child’s life that medical staff find confounding (166).
Mattingly sees anthropology as ideal for taking seriously the nitty-gritty and unique circumstances people must contend with in their daily lives. She notes that it is the “ethnographic messiness” that provides resistance to abstractions and a continued insistence on attending to local cultural discourses” (118).
Mattingly uses her ethnographic work to offer thick descriptions of specific realities. However, Mattingly moves beyond mere description to make a broader argument about the transformational potential of the everyday practices and routines employed in responses to hardship (10-11). For example, Mattingly sees the transformational potential in how Delores’s family uses household chores as a way of experimenting with roles and responsibilities in a changing multi-generational family (66-67).
Mattingly draws heavily from neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, seeing the importance of the everyday practices that cultivate our moral selves. Hers, however, is a “first-person virtue ethics” grounded in the unique and specific experiences of individuals and their communities (9-10). It is important to note, that while Mattingly calls our attention to the unique moral discernment of individuals, she attends to how these individuals are situated in and rely upon communities. In Mattingly’s understanding, the first-person “I” is part of a “we” that communally discerns and supports (47).
Some Key Takeaways from Mattingly in the Ongoing Conversation about Moral Lifeworlds and Everyday Ethics
Mattingly offers us the image of a “moral laboratory” where people work out and “experiment” with the moral options and cultural resources they’ve been given to address hardship. In this image, while many things are out of individual control, people use what is available to experiment and try out moral frameworks that seek the best possible life even amid the worst possible circumstances. While these experiments may be informed by traditions and cultural resources, human actions are not necessarily determined by them. The laboratory image gets at how humans can “try things out” with the potential for opening up new possibilities or transforming their lives (even minimally) to work toward something good.
Mattingly shows us that cultural resources can sometimes provide the materials for new possibilities and experimentations (207-208). Humans draw from multiple resources and can use them creatively (166). In moral discernment, there is not just reproduction of moral frameworks, but sometimes experimentation (207).
Mattingly’s first-person virtue ethics honors the complications of seeking a good life when there is no one path forward and multiple “non-ideal” options. Instead of a “journey,” the “laboratory” gets at the often non-linear, experimental nature of getting through the ups and downs of daily life. Still, Mattingly maintains that the everyday routines that try to work toward some semblance of a better life can have bigger transformational potential, nonetheless (77-79).
While Mattingly values the narrative aspect of how humans understand their lives, she notes how these narratives are not always cohesive. Sometimes there are multiple potential futures in play or multiple ethical frameworks in tension. Here an experimental narrative self can serve as a means of ethical discernment that seeks a form of a good life even amid tragedy (73, 123, 148)
Mattingly’s examples show us that everyday moral experimentation is not always an act of political resistance, though the political implications are often in sight (186).
Like Beste, Mattingly gives us another example of drawing from humans’ lived experiences to inform our ethics. Mattingly’s research spans years, during which she spends significant amounts of time with individuals and accompanies them in a multitude of social situations.
Questions for Discussion:
While Mattingly proposes that her moral anthropology looks at the “every day,” her work focuses on families struggling with extraordinarily difficult circumstances and choices. It is easier for people to engage in “moral experimentation” when things are going poorly (87)? Even if they unfold in everyday responses, are changes, transformation, and experimentation mostly catalyzed by the extraordinary we confront in life?
How does Mattingly’s understanding of “everyday ethics” resonate with previous conversations we have had about this concept? Mattingly employs several authors we’ve engaged in this (and other) classes (Das, Lambek, Foucault, MacIntyre, Anscombe, Biehl, Williams, etc.). What does Mattingly contribute to or challenge about our understandings of everyday ethics thus far?
Mattingly’s “moral anthropology” aims to do more than mere thick description. She aims to not only show us examples of people doing ethical work in the everyday circumstances of life but to also make a case for the transformative potential embedded in the ordinary. What are the strengths and limitations of Mattingly’s specific first-person foci? Do they effectively carry her normative claims?
Mattingly spent time with the families that informed her work for years and is transparent about the strong bond of friendship she developed with Andrena in particular. In considering our own future projects, I am curious about what we make of the complicated nature of the relationships formed through ethnographic work. Mattingly expresses moral outrage at Andrena’s poverty as well as the systemic injustices stacked against her. She also confesses to being Andrena’s friend (213-216). What are our responsibilities to our “subjects” when they become lifelong friends? What is our ethical responsibility to those who contribute to our research? Can we practically experiment in the moral laboratories of ethnography? What might that look like?
- Jennifer Beste: College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics
In College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics, Jennifer Beste engages the experiences and perspectives of college students, in conversation with Christian ethicists and social science researchers, to reflect on the morality of contemporary sexual norms and behavior on campus. To do so, she enlists members of her classes as “student ethnographers”; much of the book consists of these students’ descriptive accounts as well as their ethical reflection on their experiences and observations. Overall, she finds a profound misalignment between these students’ experience of “hookup culture” and Christian imaginings of relationality and human flourishing; her findings on the prevalence of sexual assault and lack of support victims or accountability for perpetrators are particularly disturbing. She ends with a series of constructive recommendations aimed at addressing these problems and creating sexually just campus cultures.
Beste’s methodology and approach to Christian ethics aligns with several ideas about ordinary or everyday ethics that we’ve encountered in our readings this semester. Thinking in terms of Banner’s Ethics of Everyday Life, for example, she focuses not on “hard cases” or extreme situations but on common, frequently observed behaviors (in fact, she notes that she removed descriptions of behaviors that her classes deemed “extreme and not representative of typical college parties,” 7). Following Banner, her goal is less to determine the licitness of particular behaviors than to bring Christian imaginings of ethical life into dialogue with social realities; she wants to avoid “characterizing certain sexual acts like hookups as ‘bad’ and ‘impure’” and instead encourages religious traditions to “share their rich and distinctive theological and spiritual resources to encourage critical deconstruction of dehumanizing, reductive narratives of sex, relationships, success, and happiness” (303). In her attention to particular behaviors, interactions, and contexts, rather than abstract principles, Beste is working in the direction advocated by many of the theorists we’ve read, including Das, Lambek, Nanko-Fernandez, and others. In my opinion, her methodology not only follows this tradition but embodies it in a way that few of the other authors have, as I will explain below.
The most interesting and generative aspect of Beste’s methodology is her engagement of students not merely as research subjects but as collaborators. This methodology privileges lived experience in a radical way, centering the students’ experiences as moral subjects. She isn’t just employing students as “informants” who can help her understand the norms and behaviors of spaces that she, as a college professor, can’t access; instead, she positions them as ethnographic researchers and ethicists, reflecting on their lives and communities. Through the students’ accounts, we see them struggle to navigate the ethical challenges of everyday life, critically analyze the social structures and norms that influence their behavior, and try to make better choices—in Das’s words, we see their “moral striving in the everyday” (“Ordinary Ethics,” 134).
Of course, Beste is not merely recording and synthesizing the students’ accounts; she is also engaging with them critically from her own normative stance. She alerts the reader, for example, to the fact that the students’ observations and analysis of racial dynamics at parties “were influenced by white privilege and deeply entrenched racist stereotypes about African Americans’ bodies and sexuality” (26). She also emphasizes that the majority of students fail to accurately label instances of sexual assault, and she reframes their narratives in these terms. She doesn’t only reframe these issues for the reader; she does so in dialogue with the students, in the context of their professor-student relationship. She describes conversations she had with a student whose roommate was sexually assaulted and a student who confessed that he was a perpetrator of sexual assault. In both conversations, she uses questions to push the students toward a reframing of the experiences they’ve described (eg. “I asked whether Colleen and Christina had talked about whether the sexual activity that occurred that night met the university’s definition of rape,” 59) and suggests actions they might take to address the harm.
These conversations made me think of Margaret Walker’s “alternative epistemology” for feminist ethics, which “does not imagine our moral understandings congealed into a compact theoretical instrument…but as deployed in shared processes of discovery, expression, interpretation, and adjustment between persons” (“Moral Understandings: Alternative ‘Epistemology’ for a Feminist Ethics,” 16). Throughout the book, we see “shared processes” of understanding as Beste and her students learn from each other and challenge each others’ ideas. Beste is in no way an “objective” or neutral observer, and she is not describing an inert reality in which she plays no part; rather, she too is a moral subject implicated in the situations she describes. I was also struck by the deep relationship-building and trust required to engage in such vulnerable, risky conversations. In this way, the book models its own ethical vision of vulnerable, authentic relationships.
Questions I’m left with after reading:
- What is the relationship between the descriptive and normative elements of Beste’s analysis? How does she see the normative elements of Christian ethics interacting with the realities of her students’ lives—some of whom are Christian and some of whom are not?
- At several points, Beste contrasts contemporary sexual norms and behaviors to those of earlier generations, often with the suggestion that today’s norms are more harmful than those of the past (eg. “I am convinced through my own and others’ research studies and years of class discussion that there has actually been a significant decline in gender equality when it comes to sex,” 101). Is this historical/comparative analysis warranted by the data she presents? What are its implications?
- The central focus of the book is “hookup culture,” with its norms of excessive drinking and low-commitment sex; Beste seems to frame sexual assault largely as a consequence of this culture (while acknowledging sociocultural influences like sexism, heteropatriarchy and racism). What are the implications of treating sexual assault as a side effect of hookup culture, rather than a problem with its own, independent causes? Given that the most disturbing and ethically challenging elements of the students’ experiences relate to sexual assault, does the book adequately address their root causes and possible remedies?
- Michael Banner: The Ethics of Everyday Life – Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human
The Alder Hey Hospital case, where heart, fetuses, and thyme gland specimens were revealed to have been harvested and stored at the hospital without the knowledge of the parents of the deceased children, informed Banner’s research. The harvesting of the specimen was coupled with the bioethicists’ nonattendance to the parents’ needs and understanding of what mourning is for them – describing their decries as sentimental. This controversial development becomes a key informant in his consideration of the need for everyday ethics.
Banner critiques the centralization of the notion of hard cases as the dominant framework for ethical consideration – and its lack of attention to the social context out of which moral or ethical concerns emerge. Thus, Banner places moral theology and moral philosophy under scrutiny for being abstract and removed from concrete lived experiences. For Banner, moral theology needs to develop an ethics of everyday life’ (p. 3) or the life course (p. 4). This is because moral theology only classifies an action as right or wrong, even if it backs up this identification with the form directions of a stringent confessional or other pastoral practice, has thereby offered nothing by way of treatment, and at best, it is simply a cosmetic (p. 13). Thus, there is no attendance to the underlying notion of influential in moral action.
The critique lodged by Banner is meant to help us understand the (Christian) imagination of being human. Thus, Banner centers on one of the critical Christian components – the credal recitation and centralization of the life of Jesus. As it pertains to moral theology, this Christian imagination of being human is thus put in conversation with social anthropology. For Banner, moral theology should pay attention to frameworks of social anthropology, which allows for an understanding and examination of the everydayness of life and ethical concerns therein. This helps us to understand that morality is a social practice (p. 18). His methodical approach allows us to assess contemporary circumstances and complex life situations. Banner seeks to construct an ethics of everyday life from a Christian perspective.
For Banner, social anthropology helps illuminate moral theology because the former is an avenue for cultural engagement pertinent to understanding the dynamics and patterns within that cultural context. For him, deep cultural engagement by way of social anthropology helps attend to deeper individual, cultural, and social drives and offers therapeutic healing for a context – this then allows moral theology to function from a concrete place, as in the case of the Alder Hay hospital where the medical experts could not understand the concerns and sentimentality of the parents demanding the return of the clandestinely removed specimens.
For Banner, Christian moral theology means that the shape of human life must be juxtaposed with the Christ-shaped life. When critically assessed in relation to contemporary complex everyday circumstances, the Christ-shaped life allows us to go beyond the right or wrong evaluation. Banner brings into the discussion core topics such as conception, allowing us to assess the logic behind ‘chasing the bloodline,’ kinship, and the practices of godparenting. Juxtaposing these allows us to understand conception in broader frames, especially as we examine issues of ‘childlessness’ IVF, and ARTS.
With his allusion to moral theology and social anthropology, Banner seems to place them as discussant or conversation patterners – the conversation must help expand our thinking of moral theology. This is useful in that anthropology highlights the patterns of life, while theology must be “psychologically and socioculturally realistic” (p. 17). Thus, theology must be situated within and speak about and from a given context.
Question(s)
- It seems Banner does not adequately outline what he means by the social context. What does this represent to him? What dominant patterns can be considered in his formulation of an everyday ethic? What is the ‘everyday’ to Banner? What are the constituents of such?
- Thinking in line with humanitarianism, Banner points towards a turning to each other in suffering – what does this mean in contexts where institutionalism prevents such an individualistic turning toward understanding another’s suffering? (p. 96).
- While Banner calls it ethics of everyday life, he is utilizing a Christian perspective. However, because many of the issues he raises occur within a plural/multi-context, what are the limitations of approaching moral theology from Banner’s perspective in the Alder Hay hospital?
Ordinary ethics holds as central moral practices on the ground which, to …. quote Veena Das, are “the small disciplines that ordinary people perform in their everyday life to hold life together.” For [Das], ethics involves the “cultivation of sensibilities within the everyday . . . threads woven into the weave of life.”.
Liz Bounds
“Learning to ‘Dress for the Weather’: Ordinary Ethics Through Prison Bars”