James Laidlaw
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 104405 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | James Laidlaw |
| NOMBRES | James |
| APELLIDO | Laidlaw |
| FIRMA | LAIDLAW J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1035-4799 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1075 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1994 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Large questions from a brief encounter
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
The 'ethical turn' in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established and emerging leaders in the field and makes the results of this fast-growing body of diverse researc…
An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange
Social Anthropology is a vibrant discipline of relevance to many areaseconomics, politics, business, humanities, health and public policy.This series, published in association with the Cambridge William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology, focuses on key interventions in Social Anthropology, based on innovative theory and research of relevance to contemporary social issues
Part Three. Responsibility and Agency
Imperfect Accomplishment
Fo Guang Shan (佛光山; Buddha's Light Mountain), an international Buddhist movement headquartered in Taiwan, regularly runs what it calls a short-term monastic cultivation retreat, a week-long residential program designed to provide lay members with an opportunity for intensive cultivation (修養; xiuyang or 修行; xiuxing). Contributions to the anthropology of ethics have recently drawn sharp distinctions between ordered, systematic ethics associated esp…
Recovering the Human Subject
This volume responds to the often-proclaimed 'death of the subject' in post-structuralist theorizing, and to calls from across the social sciences for 'post-humanist' alternatives to liberal humanism in a distinctively anthropological manner. It asks: can we use the intellectual resources developed in those approaches and debates to reconstruct a new account of how individual human subjects are contingently put together in diverse historical and …
Fault Lines in the Anthropology of Ethics
Ethics / Morality
It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both are true. It describes how moral life has long been generally understood in anthropology, how this came to seem insufficient, and the ways that have been proposed recently for improvement. We review the main intellectual traditions that have inspired these new d…
The Indian Gift
IntroductionIn 1986 Jonathan Parry's 'The Gift, the Indian Gift and the "Indian Gift"' claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and…
Through a glass, darkly
Comment on Ortner, Sherry. 2016. "Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47-73
The interactional foundations of ethics and the formation and limits of morality systems
Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Social Anthropology
The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century
The following discussion developed from a debate held on the motion: ‘The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century’, held at the 2012 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the University of Manchester. The debate was organized and edited for publication by Soumhya Venkatesan. A full transcription of the debate is hosted on the JRAI website: http…
Significant differences
Response to HAU Book Symposium on Laidlaw, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
A generous pluralism
Previous articleNext article FreeA generous pluralism Lloyd, G. E. R. 2012. Being, humanity, and understanding. Oxford: Oxford University PressJAMES LAIDLAWJAMES LAIDLAWUniversity of Cambridge Search for more articles by this author University of CambridgePDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt is clear what Geoffrey Lloyd is…
The Subject of Virtue
James Laidlaw's *The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom* argues for a conceptual renewal of anthropology through a deeper engagement with ethics. Laidlaw contends that anthropology has often overlooked the crucial role of ethical concepts in shaping human conduct. The book explores how notions of virtue, character, freedom, and responsibility can be integrated into anthropological analysis, offering a framework for understan…
Morality
Jarrett Zigon. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg. vi+1-180 pp. This is an enterprising work, which observes a growing interest in morality among anthropologists, and seek
Sacrifice and Ritualization
A life worth leaving
This paper describes the practice of fasting to death in the Indian religion of Jainism. It shows how and why this form of self-killing is a highly regarded and publicly celebrated positive aspiration in Jainism. Through comparisons with some other forms of self-killing found in South Asia, it highlights the moral complexities of issues around volition and agency. And it illustrates how the practice embodies positions on some universal ethical is…
Ritual and Memory
Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory, however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent mode…
For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom
There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest - hitherto largely absent from anthropology - in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethnographically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism
A free gift makes no friends
The giving of alms to Shvetambar Jain renouncers is a specific institutionalized elaboration of the idea of a free gift, an idea which all the major world religions have their own ways of instantiating, and which in north Indian languages is expressed by the word dan. This example illustrates the inherently paradoxical nature of the idea of a gift, and why it is a mistake to define the gift as necessarily reciprocal and non-alienated. Like the pu…
L'art de Dictier. Eustache Deschamps , Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi
Riches and Renunciation
Riches and Renunciation
How can one live by impossible ideals and values? The Jains of India are a flourishing and prosperous community, but their religion is focused on the teaching and example of ascetic renouncers, whose austere regime is actually dedicated to ending worldly life and often culminates in a fast to death. This book draws upon a detailed study of an urban Jain community in Jaipur, north-west India, to offer the fullest account yet given of Jain religiou…
The Subject of Virtue
James Laidlaw's *The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom* argues for a conceptual renewal of anthropology through a deeper engagement with ethics. Laidlaw contends that anthropology has often overlooked the crucial role of ethical concepts in shaping human conduct. The book explores how notions of virtue, character, freedom, and responsibility can be integrated into anthropological analysis, offering a framework for understan…
For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom
There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest - hitherto largely absent from anthropology - in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethnographically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism
A free gift makes no friends
The giving of alms to Shvetambar Jain renouncers is a specific institutionalized elaboration of the idea of a free gift, an idea which all the major world religions have their own ways of instantiating, and which in north Indian languages is expressed by the word dan. This example illustrates the inherently paradoxical nature of the idea of a gift, and why it is a mistake to define the gift as necessarily reciprocal and non-alienated. Like the pu…
The archetypal actions of ritual
What happens in religious traditions when the nature of the ritual is questioned, but the practice of performing rituals is not itself abandoned? How is it that people can accomplish ritual successfully without belief, and even without attributing any meaning to it? This book draws on the authors' observations of such reactions among Jains in western India, and asks what they can tell us about ritual as a mode of human action. Most anthropologist…
The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century
The following discussion developed from a debate held on the motion: ‘The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century’, held at the 2012 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the University of Manchester. The debate was organized and edited for publication by Soumhya Venkatesan. A full transcription of the debate is hosted on the JRAI website: http…
A life worth leaving
This paper describes the practice of fasting to death in the Indian religion of Jainism. It shows how and why this form of self-killing is a highly regarded and publicly celebrated positive aspiration in Jainism. Through comparisons with some other forms of self-killing found in South Asia, it highlights the moral complexities of issues around volition and agency. And it illustrates how the practice embodies positions on some universal ethical is…
Significant differences
Response to HAU Book Symposium on Laidlaw, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Imperfect Accomplishment
Fo Guang Shan (佛光山; Buddha's Light Mountain), an international Buddhist movement headquartered in Taiwan, regularly runs what it calls a short-term monastic cultivation retreat, a week-long residential program designed to provide lay members with an opportunity for intensive cultivation (修養; xiuyang or 修行; xiuxing). Contributions to the anthropology of ethics have recently drawn sharp distinctions between ordered, systematic ethics associated esp…
Through a glass, darkly
Comment on Ortner, Sherry. 2016. "Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47-73
Ethics / Morality
It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both are true. It describes how moral life has long been generally understood in anthropology, how this came to seem insufficient, and the ways that have been proposed recently for improvement. We review the main intellectual traditions that have inspired these new d…
The Indian Gift
IntroductionIn 1986 Jonathan Parry's 'The Gift, the Indian Gift and the "Indian Gift"' claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and…
Ritual and Memory
Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory, however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent mode…
Scripture and Community
The interactional foundations of ethics and the formation and limits of morality systems
Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange
Social Anthropology is a vibrant discipline of relevance to many areaseconomics, politics, business, humanities, health and public policy.This series, published in association with the Cambridge William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology, focuses on key interventions in Social Anthropology, based on innovative theory and research of relevance to contemporary social issues
A generous pluralism
Previous articleNext article FreeA generous pluralism Lloyd, G. E. R. 2012. Being, humanity, and understanding. Oxford: Oxford University PressJAMES LAIDLAWJAMES LAIDLAWUniversity of Cambridge Search for more articles by this author University of CambridgePDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt is clear what Geoffrey Lloyd is…
Morality
Jarrett Zigon. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg. vi+1-180 pp. This is an enterprising work, which observes a growing interest in morality among anthropologists, and seek
The Disconnection of Purpose and Form
One learns many ritual acts in puja, as physical movements, by being shown what to do and copying it. But unlike learning some other physical operations (those which require skill, like playing the piano, cooking, sewing, or driving a car) the notion of excellence or expertise cannot be applied unmodified to the performance of ritualized action; for ritualization itself tends to undermine the link between the purposes for which an action is perfo…
Apprehension and Cognition
With ritualization there is a new state of affairs which can be summed up by saying that actors both arc and are not the authors of their acts. The relation between intention and action is transformed. This does not mean, as we have already remarked, that a person does not have thoughts and intentions when performing ritual. Such a person is not turned into an automaton or an unconscious subject of habit. Ritual acts are publicly stipulated cultu…
Stances of the Self
In ritual action, while people perform archetypal acts which are socially prescribed, they do not thereby leave aside the selves which are their everyday or ‘real’ selves. Indeed, ritual action seems to require some kind of awareness or situating of the self in relation to the act. This is true, at least in the Indian context, even of automatically efficacious ritual of the Vedic type.
What Kind of Theory Do We Need?
Ritual has been seen by anthropologists and others in broadly two ways: as a distinct category of events; and as an ever-present aspect of all actions. In this chapter we explain why we think both these approaches are mistaken. In both cases, moreover, the assumption has been that ritual is intrinsically a form of communication, and we further argue that ritual can be characterized without reference to communication. On these general conceptions,…
Jainism and the Puja Ritual
The central objects of veneration in a Jain temple are statues of human figures in marble, stone, or metal. These austere and rigid figures, always sharply sculpted and finely polished, sit with their hands folded on their lap or stand bolt upright in meditation. They are the Jinas or Tirthankars, the twenty-four divine ascetic renouncers who have founded and refounded the Jain religion.
Meaning to Mean It
Murti Pujak Jains insist that it is necessary that one means to mean. This idea was acknowledged by virtually all our informants at the Dadabari temple. At the same time however, there was no confidence that not having meant disqualifies the/?w/« as a, puja. It is no help to think of this as a ‘contradiction’ to be explained away as the result of a ‘pure’ intention-oriented Jainism having been corrupted by a ritual-oriented Hindu world. For it co…
Glossary
Subject Customs and Traditions Religious Studies Jainism Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Title Pages
Getting It Right
In previous chapters we made some brief remarks on the nature of prescription in ritual. Now we shall enlarge on these remarks and try to give an account of the kind of rules which govern the puja. While it is one of the most obvious things about ritualized action that it is prescribed, it is not so obvious quite how this compulsoriness or rigidity should be characterized.
Notes on the Text
Subject Customs and Traditions Religious Studies Jainism Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Conclusion
This book has been an account of ritualization, and of the responses to it. The pivotal transformation which ritualization effects is to sever the link, which is present in everyday life, between the actors’ intentions and the identity of the acts they perform. Commonly when this happens in everyday life, when you say something you do not intend to say, for example, it is a mistake. But ritual action is anything but a mistake: one of the definiti…
The Evocation of Mood
We said earlier that people coming to the temple for puja encounter ritualized acts, as it were, ready for them to perform. These acts have no intrinsic meaning but the)’ are ‘apprehensible’, waiting to be acted out in different modes and given symbolic meanings by the celebrants. This is an observation about the acts, not about the actor who performs them. But there are a few ritualized acts that are sometimes treated differently.
Looking for Meanings
The Jains of modern Jaipur are a highly literate community and behind them stand two and a half millennia of religious speculation. Puja has never been central to Jain doctrinal tradition and contemporary religious writing is devoted mostly to ethics and philosophy, but as we noted in Chapter 2, there is now also a substantial body of literature giving instruction on the subject of puja: treatises by learned ascetics, small manuals for the perfor…
The Ritual Commitment
In this chapter we begin to answer the question, ‘What is the difference between acting in a ritualized and in an unritualized way?’. In attempting to describe what is distinctive about ritual action, we start with the subtle and yet pivotal transformation which ritualization effects in the relation between intention and action. The present chapter focuses on the theoretical delineation of this shift and some of its implications.
The archetypal actions of ritual
What happens in religious traditions when the nature of the ritual is questioned, but the practice of performing rituals is not itself abandoned? How is it that people can accomplish ritual successfully without belief, and even without attributing any meaning to it? This book draws on the authors' observations of such reactions among Jains in western India, and asks what they can tell us about ritual as a mode of human action. Most anthropologist…
Scripture and Community
Riches and Renunciation
How can one live by impossible ideals and values? The Jains of India are a flourishing and prosperous community, but their religion is focused on the teaching and example of ascetic renouncers, whose austere regime is actually dedicated to ending worldly life and often culminates in a fast to death. This book draws upon a detailed study of an urban Jain community in Jaipur, north-west India, to offer the fullest account yet given of Jain religiou…
L'art de Dictier. Eustache Deschamps , Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi
Riches and Renunciation
A free gift makes no friends
The giving of alms to Shvetambar Jain renouncers is a specific institutionalized elaboration of the idea of a free gift, an idea which all the major world religions have their own ways of instantiating, and which in north Indian languages is expressed by the word dan. This example illustrates the inherently paradoxical nature of the idea of a gift, and why it is a mistake to define the gift as necessarily reciprocal and non-alienated. Like the pu…
For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom
There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest - hitherto largely absent from anthropology - in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethnographically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism
Ritual and Memory
Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory, however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent mode…
A life worth leaving
This paper describes the practice of fasting to death in the Indian religion of Jainism. It shows how and why this form of self-killing is a highly regarded and publicly celebrated positive aspiration in Jainism. Through comparisons with some other forms of self-killing found in South Asia, it highlights the moral complexities of issues around volition and agency. And it illustrates how the practice embodies positions on some universal ethical is…
Sacrifice and Ritualization
Morality
Jarrett Zigon. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg. vi+1-180 pp. This is an enterprising work, which observes a growing interest in morality among anthropologists, and seek
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