Ethical Life in South Asia

Breaking from prevailing conceptions of ethics and morality as matters of moral rule or principle, this volume calls attention to ethical life in South Asia -- the moral dispositions at work in lived experience, and the embodied practices of ethical engagement through which such dispositions may be cultivated and shared. Taking up themes such as the transmission of tradition, ethical engagements with modernity, ethical practices of the self, and moral relations between selves and others, this volume puts South Asian traditions of ethical life into conversation with the Aristotelian, Christian, and liberal traditions that have been so consequential for ethical life in the West.

Anand Pandian is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and author of Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Daud Ali is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India.