Ethical immanence

Sidnell, Jack; Meudec, Marie; Lambek, Michael

doi:10.1177/1463499619836328

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…If agency is related to how individuals “impress themselves on [the] social environment” (Sapir 1917, 441) and can be held accountable for doing so, emphasizing the place of agency in discussions of scale can also highlight how people’s moves or utterances at any given moment may be tied to ethical projects that “extend further than the present moment” (Sidnell, Meudec, and Lambek 2019, 306). Social actors like the Latina high schoolers (Clonan‐Roy et al 2016), the “more American” Hispanic student (O’Connor 2016), and the English‐speaking Indonesian youth (Zentz 2017) are aware that others may hold them accountable for their words and actions, and the consequences of their words and actions, owing to the flexibility that exists within their relatively constrained interactional circumstances.…”

Section: Implications For Linguistic Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Americanist Arguments and Rethinking Scale in Linguistic Anthropology

O’Connor

2020

J Linguistic Anthropol

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The concept of "scales of space and time" (Lemke 2000) has been tremendously influential in linguistic anthropology and related fields, and scalar approaches have proved useful for illuminating connections between what used to be called "micro" and "macro" phenomena. This paper disrupts "rhetorics of discontinuity" (Darnell 2001) in present-day work, arguing that many of the ideas in contemporary work on scales were already implicit in early Americanist anthropology. Through renewed engagement with the debate among the Boasians A.L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict on questions of individuality, culture, and social action, we can rethink "scale" and bring forth both the useful and problematic aspects of scale as a heuristic. I argue that linguistic anthropologists' reliance on scalar metaphors should be examined carefully, since the apparent scalability or nonscalability of talk and social action is, itself, a cultural phenomenon that emerges from decisions to scale our analytic vision in particular ways. Revisiting Americanist arguments about the nature of culture reveals some of the limitations of "scale," as currently conceived, but also suggests that scalar analysis might be fruitfully integrated with linguistic anthropological understandings of agency, visa -vis voice, and temporality. [scales, scalar analysis, temporality, agency, history of anthropology] S calar analyses, or those that seek to attend simultaneously to phenomena unfolding on different spatial and temporal "scales," have become increasingly prevalent in sociocultural studies of language. The concept of "scales of space and time" (Lemke 2000) has been influential in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics (e.g.

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Section: Implications For Linguistic Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Americanist Arguments and Rethinking Scale in Linguistic Anthropology

O’Connor

2020

J Linguistic Anthropol

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“…At times, whether a particular human is being evaluative in a particular moment is uncertain (cf. Sidnell, Meudec, and Lambek 2019). At other times, people appear to be not only evaluative but so omnivorously evaluative-so fundamentally oriented to evaluation's possibility-that they keep their evaluations to themselves.…”

Section: ***mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Part of the appeal of so‐called ordinary ethics is the notion's ambiguity (Clarke 2016). In Michael Lambek's (2010) and Veena Das's (2012) original work, it underpins the idea that life—even ordinary life—is suffused with the ethical (see also Sidnell 2010b; Das 2015, 116; Sidnell, Meudec, and Lambek 2019, 304; Lambek 2015a). In other adoptions, it is used as a simple call to explore ethics in situations not stereotypically associated with ethical discussion, for example, outside of religious institutions, rituals, and Internal Review Board applications.…”

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confidence: 99%

When Ethics Can't Be Found: Evaluative Gaps in Ordinary Life

Zuckerman¹

2022

Cult. Anthropol.

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At a sparsely populated wake in Luang Prabang, Laos, the guests appeared to restrain themselves from evaluating the deceased’s son-in-law to his face, even as they said to one another that he had neglected his mother-in-law and pocketed the funds for her wake to feed his methamphetamine habit. What are we to do with moments of apparent restraint like this, those meaningful silences in which signs of evaluation seem partially withheld, transfigured, or utterly absent? What do they mean for accounts of ordinary ethics? In unpacking the events of Paa’s wake, I suggest that such moments force us to reckon with the relation between signs of evaluation and meta-ethical accounts of them, as they also give flesh to the descriptive claim that humans are evaluative. Doing so makes clear that, at times, whether a particular person is being evaluative in a particular moment remains uncertain. At other times, people appear to be not only evaluative but so omnivorously evaluative—so fundamentally oriented to evaluation’s possibility—that they keep their evaluations to themselves.

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“…Jan and Bente's desire for closure and their efforts to manage the ambiguity of everyday life in the meantime as best as they could, grappling with what they considered a good life, mark an ethical aspiration in the ordinary. In recent debates on where to 'find' the ethical, Das and others argue that the ethical is immanent in the ordinary and resides in both practice and reflection (Das 2015b;Sidnell, Meudec, and Lambek 2019). The ordinary is continuously achieved and, as such, is at stake (Das 2007(Das , 2015aOffersen, Vedsted, and Andersen 2017).…”

Section: Ending the Meantime-notions Of The Good Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘In the Meantime’: Ordinary Life in Continuous Medical Testing for Lung Cancer

Frumer

Andersen²,

Vedsted³

et al. 2021

MAT

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Danes undergoing CT scans as part of follow-up testing for potential lung cancer, we explore how access to technologies generates diagnostic uncertainty and trends of continuous testing. Our research is set in the context of a welfare state that has cultivated forms of government whose public health branches focus on early diagnosis and cancer control. Many studies on biotechnologies emphasise subject-making and power relations. Inspired by the work of Veena Das, we adopt an approach that focuses on the entanglement of diagnostic investigations with everyday life. We argue that being followed establishes a mode of being which we call ‘in the meantime’. Life in the meantime is equally characterised by a dramatic mode of being—that is, waiting for death—and an ambiguous mode of being: feeling quite well. As with any life crisis, it involves some sense of agency. We show in this paper how life in the meantime informs an ordinary ethics that encourages three ethical concerns in everyday life: firstly, how to inhabit life in the meantime? Secondly, what good is the testing for? And finally, what is a good death?

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Ethical immanence

Cited by 12 publications

References 23 publications

Revisiting Americanist Arguments and Rethinking Scale in Linguistic Anthropology

Revisiting Americanist Arguments and Rethinking Scale in Linguistic Anthropology

When Ethics Can't Be Found: Evaluative Gaps in Ordinary Life

‘In the Meantime’: Ordinary Life in Continuous Medical Testing for Lung Cancer

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