Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action by Michael Lambek, ed., and: The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research: Reporting on Environmental Degradation and Warfare by Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza, eds. (review)

Lambek, Michael, ed., Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, 458 pages.Chacon, Richard J., and Ruben G. Mendoza, eds., The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research: Reporting on Environmental Degradation and Warfare, New York: Springer, 2012, 521 pages.In recent years anthropologists have taken up study of ethics in increasing numbers, and these two edited volumes present an interesting sample of various topics addressed. The older work, Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, edited and introduced by Michael Lambek, contains 20 essays presented at workshop held at University of Toronto in 2008. The contributions are arranged into seven thematic sections-theoretical frameworks, ethics of speaking, responsibility and agency, punishment and personal dignity, ethics and formality, ethical subjects, and ethical life-and cover vast ethnographic and topical territory. What ties them together is attention each author was asked to pay to ethics. This concept is elucidated in introduction, which also serves as an elegantly written but, for readers lacking firm foundation in moral philosophy, rather challenging orientation to intersections of anthropology and philosophy that Lambek and colleagues explore in this reader. Central to this project is proposition that ethics ought to be studied within realms of ordinary speech and action, following Aristotelian insistence on seeing ethics as a dimension of action (14) rather than as formal set of rules and obligations. According to Lambek, since anthropology provides insight into the diverse practices that passionately engage people in particular settings (22)-be they kula in Trobriand Islands, art and ceremony in Bali, witchcraft among Azande or headhunting for Ilongot-it is well-positioned as source of universally valid insights into ways in which people everywhere use daily speech and social interaction as stuff of ethics.Lambek elaborates these guiding principles in first chapter of section devoted to theory, where he extends Roy Rappaport's interpretation of ritual as canonization of order to other spheres of social life, notably speech. Unlike sacred and thus highly formalized ritual action, profane speech and acts of everyday life come across as commonplace and therefore ordinary. Nevertheless, Lambek argues, they serve same function as ritual insofar as they guide human conduct into predictable channels according to certain ethical principles.Most of essays make more or less explicit contribution to this elucidation of ethical from ordinary, humdrum and commonplace stuff of daily human interaction. They do so by touching on and often engagingly describing situations from variety of ethnographic settings, such as speech patterns in Papua New Guinea (Alan Rumsey), pollution beliefs in Taiwan (Charles Stafford), changing cosmologies among Australian Aborigines (Francesca Merlan), relationship between aesthetics and ethics among Hopi (Justin Richland), personhood in Colombian Amazonia (Carlos Sulkin), ethics of sex workers in London (Sophie Day), business ethics in Sri Lanka (Nireka Weeratunge), Muslim-Hindu love affairs and marriage in India (Veena Das), ritual commemoration of former enemies in Vietnam (Heonik Kwon) and several more.Given vast ethnographic scope of book, single reviewer cannot appreciate or critically evaluate contribution made by each individual author. Yet, there are some surprising gaps in supporting literature that ought to be mentioned. In his essay, Abu Ghraib and Problem of Evil, Steven Caton claims that it bears repeating that philosophy and anthropology have all but abandoned [evil] as an analytical construct (166), but back in 1980s-though that's perhaps not modern enough? …

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