Morals and Moralities Seminar

Credit: Janis Jenkins, Park Avenue NYC, October 2011

Wednesday October 5, 2011.
Durkheim on Morals and Moralities (introduction by Steven Lukes, New York University)

Texts discussed:
Émile Durkheim, “The Determination of Moral Facts”, in Sociology and Philosophy, translated by D.F. Pocock, New York: The Free Press, p. 35-62.
Bruno Karsenti, “Durkheim and the Moral Fact”, in A Companion to Moral Anthropology, Didier Fassin ed., Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming.
Steven Lukes, “Émile Durkheim”, in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Hugh Lafollette ed., Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming.

Wednesday October 12, 2011.
Anthropology of Morality: Between Reproduction and Freedom (guest speaker, Joel Robbins, University of California - San Diego)

Texts discussed:
Joel Robbins, "On the Pleasures and Dangers of Culpability" in Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 30 (1), p. 122-128.
Joel Robbins, "Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change" in Ethnos, Vol. 72:3, Sept. 2007 p. 293-314.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011.
Moral Economies (introduction by Didier Fassin and Joan Scott)

Texts discussed:
E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" in Past and Present, 50 (1), 1971, p. 76-136.
Lorraine Daston, "The Moral Economy of Science" in Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 10, 1995, p. 2-24.
Didier Fassin, "Les économies morales revisitées" in Annales HSS, novembre-décembre 2009, no. 6, p. 1237-1266.
Didier Fassin, "A Contribution to the Critique of Moral Reason" forthcoming in Anthropological Theory.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011.
"Trafficking" and Trafficking: Sex and Kidneys (introduction by Elizabeth Bernstein, Barnard College/Columbia University, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, University of Claifornia - Berkeley)

Texts discussed:
Elizabeth Bernstein, "Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2010, p. 45-71.
Elizabeth Bernstein, "The State, Sexuality, and the Market" in Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex, University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 144-166.
Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke & Brian Roberts, "The Social History of a 'Moral Panic'" in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1978, p. 3-28.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Mr Tati's Holiday and Joao's Safari - Seeing the World through Transplant Tourism" in Body & Society, Vol. 17 (2&3), 2011, p. 55-92.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Face to Face with Gaddy Tauber" in Business Today, Spring 2009, p. 62-67.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011.
Philosophies of Morality (introduction by Jimmy Doyle, University of Bristol)

Texts discussed:
G.E.M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," in Philosophy 33, No. 124, January 1958.
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Chapters 1 and 10, Harvard University Press, 1985.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011.
Individual Choice (introduction by Sherine Hamdy, Brown University, and Janis Jenkins, University of California - San Diego)

Texts discussed:
Janis H. Jenkins & Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, "The New Paradigm of Recovery from Schizophrenia" in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Vol. 29, 2005, p. 379-413.
Janis H. Jenkins, ed., Pharmaceutical Self: The Global Shaping of Experience in an Age of Psychopharmacology, Chapters 1 and 2, SAR Press, 2011.
Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care, Chapters 1-3 and 6, Routledge, 2008.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012.
Perpetrators, Bystanders and Collaborators (introduction by Alex Hinton, Rutgers University, and Kimberly Theidon, Harvard University)

Texts discussed:
Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Harper Collins, 1992.
Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton University Press, 2001.
The seminar was followed by a lecture and discussion, introduced by Steven Lukes, with Jan Gross, Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society & Professor of History at Princeton University, on Thursday, January 19, 2012.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012.
Evil (introduction by Thomas Csordas, University of California - San Diego)

Texts discussed:
Zygmunt Bauman, "A Natural History of Evil," in Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011, p. 128-149.
Steven C. Caton, "Abu Ghraib and the Problem of Evil," in Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, Michael Lambek ed., New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, p. 165-184.
Thomas J. Csordas, "Morality as a Cultural System?" (manuscript).

Wednesday, February 15, 2012.
Ethical Subjects (guest speaker, Michael Lambek, the University of Toronto)

Texts discussed:
Michael Lambek, "Toward an Ethics of the Act," in Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, Michael Lambek ed., New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, p. 39-63.
"How to Make Up One's Mind: Reason, Passion, and Ethics in Spirit Possession," in the University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2, Spring 2010, p. 720-741.
"Nuriaty, the Saint and the Sultan: Virtuous Subject and Subjective Virtuoso of the Post-Modern Colony," in Anthropology Today, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2000, p. 7-12.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012.
Morality and Politics in Tension (introduction by Karuna Mantena, Yale University)

Texts discussed:
Karuna Mantena, "Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence," forthcoming in American Political Science Review.
Reinhold Niebuhr, "Introduction" and "The Preservation of Moral Values in Politics," in Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941, p. XI-XXV and 231-256.
Max Weber, Weber: Political Writings, edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 309-313 and 352-369.
The seminar was followed by a screening of the Iranian film, A Separation (2011).

Wednesday, March 14, 2012.
Critical Studies of Good and Right(s) (introduction by Jarrett Zigon, University of Amsterdam)

Texts discussed:
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Chapters 1 and 2, Verso, 2001.
Jarrett Zigon, "On Love: remaking moral subjectivity in post-rehabilitation Russia," hopefully soon to be forthcoming in American Ethnologist.
Jarrett Zigon, HIV is God's Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia, Chapter 4, University of California Press, 2010.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012.
Moral Argument and Politics (introduction by Michael Walzer)

Texts discussed:
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Introduction and Chapters 1-3, University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012.
Moral Criticism, Between Secularism and Religion (introduction by Kabir Tambar, Stanford University)

Texts discussed:
Talal Asad, "The Limits of Religious Critcism in the Middle East," in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, p. 200-236.
Saba Mahmood, "Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?" in Critical Inquiry 35, Summer 2009, p. 836-862.
Michael Warner, "Uncritical Reading," in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, edited by Jane Gallop, Routledge, 2004, p. 13-38.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012.
Human Rights between Morality and Politics (guest speaker, Samuel Moyn, Columbia University)

Texts discussed:
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Prologue, Chapter 4 and Epilogue, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012.
The Politics of Humanitarianism (introduction by Didier Fassin)

Texts discussed:
Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present, Introduction, Chapters 5 and 9, University of California Press, 2011.