In many African societies today Christian churches, Pentecostals in particular, are an important source of information on sexuality, relationships, the body, and health, motivated in part by the HIV/AIDS pandemic but also related to globally circulating ideas and images that make people rethink gender relations and identities through the lens of ‘romantic love’. Contextualizing the contemporary situation in the history of Christian movements in Africa, and by applying Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, this introduction and the subsequent papers show that Christian doctrines and practices are creating social spaces of altering relational ethics, identities and gender roles that appeal especially to upwardly mobile women.

This paper recounts and reflects on conversations about love and sexuality conducted with young people in Kumasi and Endwa, Ghana. It examines the settings of these conversations -in a kinship-based household, secondary schools and Pentecostal churches -and explores young people's reticence to talk about such matters in the light of intergenerational respect. Analysing young people's strategies of silence and provocative speech, the paper shows that, paradoxically, schools and churches provide institutionalised spaces for young people's subversive outspokenness that contrasts with the ethical codex of decency as the expression of hierarchical relations.

Throughout history, people on the African continent have experienced momentous transformations of their lifeworlds and ways of living, some of them irruptive, uncompromising and cataclysmic, others of a more subtle and negotiable nature. What remains to be dealt with in more detail by anthropologists are the manifold ways in which these transformations are reflected in, and have a bearing on, people's ethical demeanours, commitments and debates. Given the complexity and variability of these processes, it is not possible or even desirable to give a conclusive answer to this question. Instead, taking account of historical and sociocultural specificities, this special issue features in-depth case studies of ethics as ideals in practice from several countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Botswana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania). In doing so, the contributions combine a presentation of ethnographic findings with a discussion of a new conceptual approach for a practice-oriented anthropological study of 'ordinary ethics' (Lambek 2010).In this introduction, we argue for a rather fluid notion of ethics that entails people's convictions, value judgements and sentiments on how to live a morally good and/or just life. We suggest that the making and unmaking of ethical fields takes place within the context of state politics, the influence of international organizations and the emergence of new publics and local NGOs that provide people with new ideas about what is 'right' and 'wrong'. We show that these ethical fields emerge in dialectical processes between what we call the 'implication' and 'explication' of ethics.In what follows, we first briefly reflect on previous anthropological work on ethics in Africa. We then delineate the parameters of our conceptual approach, before finally commenting on how the articles in this special issue broaden our understanding of everyday struggles in contemporary Africa to achieve or to maintain a certain ethical composure, to win relevant others over to committing themselves to particular ethical principles, or to position oneself in relation to the (un)ethical claims of others.Astrid Bochow is a social anthropologist at the Georg-August Universität Göttingen. She researches and publishes on the family, youth, religion and health in Kumasi, Ghana, and Gaborone, Botswana. Since September 2015 she has held a DFG-funded project grant on 'Social and Religious Activism: Health and Family in Law and Politics'. Email: a.bochow1@ gmail.com Thomas G. Kirsch is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Konstanz. He has published two books on African Christianity in Zambia and articles in some of the major refereed anthropology journals. Since 2003, he has conducted fieldwork on issues of security, crime prevention and volunteering in South Africa. Email: thomas.kirsch@uni-konstanz. The anthropology of ethics in Africa: a selective reviewBroadly speaking, in the history of anthropology, the study of ethics in the everyday lives of people in Africa has most promin...

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