Anthropology As Ethics

Cutting directly across social science and the humanities, "Anthropology as Ethics" presents an intensive project in philosophical anthropology, which rethinks anthropology by rethinking ontology. It develops the ontological implications of the defining thesis of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology: that all social order necessarily betrays conflicting underlying principles. Drawing especially on Continental philosophy, such as the work of Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Bourdieu, Habermas, and Foucault, and pre-modern thought, such as that of the Nuer, the Dinka, the Azande, and the Hebrew bible, the book mounts a radical study of the ontology of self and other in relation to dualism, on the one hand, and non-dualism, on the other. At heart the book is a plea for a new kind of reason, one that bears on value.

T. M. S. (Terry) Evens is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester in 1971. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the University of Calcutta, and Asmara University, Eritrea. He is author of Two Kinds of Rationality: Kibbutz Democracy and Generational Conflict (1995), and co-editor of the collections, Transcendence in Society: Case Studies (1990) and The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology (2006). Drawn especially to theory and phenomenology, he has sought from the beginnings of his professional career to isolate, identify, and critically explore philosophical underpinnings of empirical anthropology.