Charity and grace

This essay attempts to reconcile charity with grace, the central concepts of two thinkers whose views may seem irreconcilable to many: Donald Davidson, an analytical philosopher and the most distinguished follower of Quine; and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an Europeanist anthropologist, who wrote at length on Spain and Southern France. The latter's historicist exegesis of gracia points to basic aspects of human experience that are also salient in the reduction to basics that Davidson carried out concerning interpretation and truth. For Davidson, in the face of ultimate indeterminacy, interpretation is made possible due to the rational accommodation that charity sparks off. For Pitt-Rivers, gratuity highlights how processes of personal interaction depend on the drawing of shared trajectories: that is, not only do I have to grant others charity to make sense of them, I also have to frame others as subjects with a future by relation to myself as already in existence. The paper proposes that human interaction involves processes of sensemaking that integrate shared intentionality (i.e. the credit with which we respond to the indeterminacy of meaning) with shared experience (i.e. the debt implicit in the ultimate underdetermination of the world's entities). Thus, it brings both concepts together under the label of charis, their common etymological root, suggesting that the dynamic it represents is a broader feature of life itself.

Sovereignty as new beginnings: Action beyond the liberal subject, among undercover police investigators in Europe, for example

This article argues that Schmitt's “state of exception” is only one expression of the deeper sovereign phenomenon, specifically the human capacity to inaugurate new beginnings in shared space. Sovereign action thus includes anything from Schmitt's vertically-imposed state of exception, which eliminates political subjecthood, to the thrill of horizontally-arranged movements, which enable it. To make this argument, the article foregoes the idea of the bounded, internally coherent liberal subject in favor of a relational subject, who is both internally divided and inherently tied to others. The subject's instability and relationality make new beginnings possible and renders sovereign action promising, even if risky. An unexpected example of this fuller view of sovereignty appears in an undercover police team in southern Europe that investigates global human smuggling and trafficking rings. Based on extensive ethnographic research, this article shows how they often act on their own ethical judgments, reached by considering the standpoints of people tied to their investigations, rather than through obedience to law, policy, or superior command. Acting outside constitutional order, these investigators, (re)constitute themselves as particular persons through their joint actions and simultaneously constitute modest sovereign spaces, however tentatively.

Ethical infrastructure: Halal and the ecology of askesis in Muslim Russia

This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of ‘ethical infrastructure’: the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists’ striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the ‘profane’, often unassuming or religiously unmarked, yet essential material scaffolding constituting the ‘material conditions of possibility’ for pious life in the lifeworld of late modernity. Halalness is conceptualised not as an inherent quality of a clearly defined set of things, but as a (sometimes complicated) relationship between humans, ethical intentionality, and infrastructurally organised habitats. Pointing beyond the case of halal, this article syncretises theories of self-cultivation, material religion, ethical consumption, and infrastructure to address current lacunas and explore fresh theoretical and methodological ground. This ‘ethical infrastructure’ framework enables us to conceptualise the embeddedness of contemporary ethicists in complex environments and the process by which processes of inner self-fashioning change and are changed by material worlds.

The ontological turn revisited: Theoretical decline. Why cannot ontologists fulfil their promise?

Holbraad and Pedersen have revisited the ontological turn, suggesting that it is strictly concerned with methodology only. Holbraad goes even further, accepting an aesthetic criterion for ethnography only. This is a sign of theoretical decline. In my paper, I claim that ontologists’ tendency to overestimate the significance of ethnographic experience causes theoretical confusion. I claim that neo-pragmatic analysis can eliminate this confusion. I also argue that there is only one remaining issue from the ontological turn that is not entirely lost. A careful evaluation of all folk categories, with all its possible consequences, can boost the robustness of all competitive theories, Cognitive Evolutionary Science included.

Corporate sovereignty: Negotiating permissive power for profit in Southern Africa

The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of ‘corporate sovereignty’ and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. This contrasts with claims made by other (non-state) actors who operate in a permissive space that (regularly) lacks this legally grounded relationship with the state. By unpacking this state-sanctioned permissive space and highlighting the role of the state as the arbiter, our approach to corporate sovereignty offers a new comparative analytical perspective to theorize how sovereignty is performed and opens ethnographic avenues to explore how sovereignty is negotiated and co-produced across diverse localities. To elucidate our argument, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on coal mining companies in Mozambique and private security companies in South Africa. By focusing on cases that differ, we want to show the multitude of ways in which corporate sovereignty is enacted and takes shape.

Eleven Namibian rains: A phenomenological analysis of experience in time

The Damara pastoralists ( ǂnūkhoen) in Namibia distinguish a diverse range of rains. Some rains kill livestock, others care for insects and still others wash away the footprints of the deceased, allowing the person to exist in the spirit realm. While anthropologists have documented cultural classifications like the Namibian rains for decades, we still lack a convincing theory to explain how they come to exist. To address this, I develop a phenomenological perspective and theorise how experience contributes to what rain becomes. I argue with Husserl that the present in which we experience the rain is not a discrete moment, but a unity across a succession of ‘nows’. In the process, perceptions, images, memories and expectations about past and future events blend. In other words, a web of meaningful relationships connects the rain we experience ‘now’ with multiple past and future entities, including people, plants, spirits and animals. I refer to this as network formation. Combining the analyses of the people's pastoral being-in-the-world and their historical–political context, including post-colonialism, allows an explanation as to why some of those combinations are singled out and become distinct ontological entities. I refer to this as node selection. Combining the two processes – network formation and node selection – allows for an explanation as to why precipitation becomes discernible and meaningful as eleven different Namibian rains.

Fabulous: Remarks on scenarism, simulations, and scenarios

In “Governing the Future,” Limor Samimian-Darash does much to illuminate scenarism and the divergence between the simulations and the scenarios that constitute the chief apparatuses of anticipatory governance. She renders both of them fabulations, drawing the concept as well as the divergence between simulations and scenarios from the epistemological and ontological precedents that Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze have set. Her renderings are compelling, but leave many epistemological and ontological issues unresolved. I address three of these issues. First, it has to do with what sort of concept scenarism might be. Second, it has to do with the poetics of simulations and scenarios. Third, it has to do with the virtuality or actuality of simulations and scenarios, in their planning as in their enactments.

Anthropology and the politics of alterity: A Latin American dialectic and its relevance for ontological anthropologies

Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.

Value moves in multiple ways: Ethical values, the anthropology of Christianity, and an example of women and movement

How can anthropologists describe ethical values—that is, what emerges as important—in the social, material worlds of Christianity? This article considers the question by working along interfaces. The first part of the article discusses two diverging approaches to values in the anthropology of Christianity (realizing values and producing values) and situates these in relation to three groupings in the anthropology of ethics and morality (deontological ethics, first-person virtue ethics, and poststructuralist virtue ethics). The second part of the article follows one value—the value of movement—in a historical example: the writings of a group of Christian women in 1880s and 1890s Norway. I argue that ethical values move in multiple ways through this social world: people realize values, people produce values and people work on values.

Classification revisited: On time, methodology and position in decolonizing anthropology

Renewed calls for decolonizing anthropology in the 21st century raise the question of what work earlier waves of decolonization since the 1960s have left undone. Some of this work should focus on the classification of human differences, which figured prominently in all phases of the discipline’s history: as a methodology in its racist phases, as an object of study during its late colonial phase of professionalization, as self-critical reflexivity in the 1980s and 1990s, and as a renewed critique in the 21st century. Can a universal methodology of studying classifications of human kinds arise from the discipline’s past of colonial stereotyping? I argue affirmatively, through an approach that recognizes time as the epistemic condition that connects past and present positions to present and future methodologies. Firstly, my analysis distinguishes the parochial embedding in colonial culture of Durkheim and Mauss’ ideas about classification from their more universal intentions. This is then developed into a threefold reflexive and timeful methodology of studying classification’s nominal-descriptive, constructive, and interventionist dimensions—a process of adding temporality to the study of classification. Subsequently, Anténor Firmin’s 19th-century critique of racial classifications, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness help to show how this threefold methodology addresses the insufficiently theorized process of being classified and discriminated against through racial categories wielded by the powers that be. These arguments radicalize the essay’s timeful perspective by concluding that we need to avoid modernist uses of time as classification and adopt the aforementioned threefold methodology in order to put time in classifications of human kinds. This reverses modern positivism’s subordination to methodological rules of the epistemic conditions posed by contingent history and shows instead that the universal goals of methodology should be understood as a future ideal.