The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June r995 ttl 1995 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved oo32041~5136o3·ooo3S2.oo The Primacy of the Ethical Propositions for a Militant Anthropology! by Nancy Scheper-Hughes In bracketing certain Western Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoreti­ cally a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be suspending the ethi· cal in our dealings with the other. Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imag­ ine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged an· thropology might take. NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A.). Born in 1944, she was educated at Berkeley (Ph.D., 19761. She has taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, at Southern Methodist University, at the University of Cape Town, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her research interests include the application of critical theory to medicine and psychiatry, the anthropology of the body, illness, and suffering, the political economy of the emo­ tions, and violence and terror. Among her publications are Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ire­ land (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979l, the edited volume Child Survival: Anthropological Per­ spectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children [Dor­ drecht: D. Reidel, 1987), and Death Without Weeping (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992l. The pres­ ent paper was submitted in final form 25 x 94. I. This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the Israel Anthropological Association Meetings, Tel Aviv University, on March 23, 1994, where the conference theme was Politically Committed Anthropology. On my return to South Afriea I pre­ sented the paper to my colleagues at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, on May 13, 1994, where it achieved a certain notoriety and generated a strong response, aspects of which have worked their way into this revision. In No­ vember r994 parts of this paper were read at the AAA symposium Rethinking the Cultural: Beyond Intellectual Imperialisms and Parochialisms of the Past (see Winkler 1994:AI8). I am grateful to my Israeli, South African, and North American colleagues for their contributions and criticisms. Finally, at a crucial moment in my failed attempts to make sense of the useless suffering of the multitudes of Northeast Brazilian angel-babies, T. M. S. Evens introduccd me to certain key writings of Emmanuel Levinas [1986}. Although I originally rejected these with the vehemence of the For much of this century cultural anthropology has been concerned with divergent rationalities, with explaining how and why various cultural others thought, reasoned, and lived-in-the-world as they did. Classical anthropo­ logical thinking and practice are best exemplified, per~ haps, in the ~reat witchcraft and rationality debates of decades past. Ideally, modernist cultural anthropology liberated truth from its unexamined Eurocentric and Orientalist presuppositions. But the world, the objects of our study, and consequently, the uses of anthropology have changed considerably. Exploring the cultural logic of witchcraft is one thing. Documenting, as I am now, the burning or necklacing of accused witches, politi~ cal collaborators, and other ne'er-do~wells in belea­ guered South African townships-where a daily toll of charred bodies is a standard feature of news re­ ports-is another. 3 A more womanly-hearted anthropol­ ogy might be concerned not only with how humans think but with how they behave toward each other, thus engaging directly with questions of ethics and power. In South African squatter camps as in the AIDS sana­ toria of Cuba and in the parched lands of Northeast Bra­ zil, I have stumbled on a central dilemma and challenge to cuIrural anthropology, one that has tripped up many a fieldworker before me (for example, Renata Rosaldo [r989:r-2rl in his encounters with Ilongot headhunt­ ers): In bracketing certain Western Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically with a multiplicity of alter­ native truths encoded in our reiRed notion of culture, anthropologists may be suspending the ethical (Buber 1952:147-56) in our dealings with the ((other, espe­ cially those whose vulnerable bodies and fragile lives are at stake. Moreover, what stake can anthropologists expect to have in current political debates in rapidly de­ mocratizing nations in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa where newly drafted constitutions and bills of rights-and those of Brazil and South Africa are exem­ unreflexive cultural relativist, Levinas's notion of a pre-cultural moral repugnance toward unnecessary human suffering came back to haunt me with a vengeance, along with the specter of three-year­ old Mercea, who died abandoned by both her mother and her an­ thropologist during Brazilian Carnival celebrations in 1989. 2. Excellent reviews of these debates in anthropology can be found in Mohanty (1989), Hollis and Lukes (1982J, Wilson (1985), and Tambiah (1990J. 3- Here is how the death of suspected police collaborators and witchcs is described in the local white newspaper in Cape Town (my emphasis): Dozen Bodies Removed from Guguletu in Week­ end Casualties ; The charred bodies of seven people, including a 50 year old woman and her teenage daughter, were found in Tho­ koza hostel and Katlehong on Friday. The burned and blackened bodies of two young men were found at the Mandela squatter camp in Thokoza and another body at Katlehong railway station (Cape Times, September 1993); Another 40 bodies found on the East Rand ; finally, Charred bodies of two witches found in Nyanga (Argus, January 21, 1994l. The women accused of witchcraft had been bound together with rope and were badly burnt. While white deaths counted -as, for example, in the extensive and personal coverage of the white victims of the St. James Church massacre in Cape Town in late July r994-the black victims of township violence were merely counted, recorded as body counts.