Jarrett Zigon
Biographic Data
| ID | 80066 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jarrett Zigon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jarrett |
| FAMILY NAME | Zigon |
| SIGNATURE | ZIGON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8039-5043 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1110 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
The Anthropology of Moralities
Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other’s morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit an…
Multiple Moralities and Religions in Post-Soviet Russia
In the post-Soviet period morality became a debatable concept, open to a multitude of expressions and performances. From Russian Orthodoxy to Islam, from shamanism to Protestantism, religions of various kinds provided some of the first possible alternative moral discourses and practices after the end of the Soviet system. This influence remains strong today. Within the Russian context, religion and morality intersect in such social domains as the…
A conversation about recovery and political activism
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and has significantly shaped contemporary anthropological and social theory. This entry shows the various ways in which phenomenology has contributed to contemporary anthropology. In so doing, it also shows that a better understanding of the phenomenological tradition and what it offers social and historical analysis could further contribute to the deve…
How is it between us? Relational ethics and transcendence
In this article, I engage the recent debate on transcendence/the transcendental within the anthropology of ethics with the claim that 'How is it between us?' is the most fundamental of all ethical questions. In doing so, I contrast relational ethics with ordinary ethics to show that ethics begins with a demand that emerges from a situation within which one finds oneself with others; a demand that pulls one out of oneself to respond in a modality …
Language, Discourse, and Narrative
This chapter looks at narrative and considers more closely how it is a primary means for the communication and articulation of moral worlds. It discusses the central role that language-use plays in the shaping of local moral worlds. The chapter argues that counternarratives show the agency of the mothers and their resistance to racist and moralizing discourse and narratives, and practice One of the reasons the analysis of narratives is so importa…
Some Closing Words
This chapter outlines some of the author&s;s own thoughts on how anthropologists can approach the study of local moralities with the kind of focus, precision, and subtlety they bring to many of the traditional concepts of anthropological research. It suggests, anthropologists can best undertake the task of an anthropology of moralities. A focused anthropology of moralities is best brought about by beginning with a distinction between morality and…
The Philosophical and Theoretical Foundations of Social Scientific Studies of Morality – From Plato and Aristotle to Durkheim, Weber, and Foucault
This chapter provides a brief overview of the four main theories of moral philosophy. These overviews are in no way comprehensive and serve only as the most basic of introductions in order to provide a background for anthropologists who may not be familiar with these theories and their respective traditions. They also serve as a background for better understanding the context in which Durkheim and Weber’s social scientific theories of morality we…
Religion
This chapter shows various ways in which religious conceptions and practices help shape person’s moral worlds and provide disciplinary tactics for ethical self-constitution and improvement. It looks at some of the themes around which anthropologists have considered the influence of religious beliefs and practices on the moral conceptions and practices of the peoples the study. While prayer is a verbal discipline that can have moral and ethical im…
Law
The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman argues that in the gap between actually existing personal inclinations and the assumed way these persons should act if they properly understood their own self-interests, ethical codes can be utilized for purposes of social domination. This chapter considers various ways in which anthropologists have undertaken the study of law and law-like processes in different societies. It discusses three explicit foci of the…
Illness, Health, and Medicine
Biomedicine is the term generally used to describe the kind of medical knowledge and practice that has come to be dominant in the Western world. Medical anthropologists have thus used the narrative approach as a way to highlight, for example, the social meaning of personal suffering, the difference in the way illness and suffering is conceived between medical personnel and the sick, and as a way of showing the varying views of medical personnel t…
Gender and Sexuality
This chapter discusses the complexities, disjunctures, and contradictions of the relationship between local moralities and notions of gender, sexuality, and kinship. In an insightful paper presented at the workshop on Rethinking Moralities at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Marian Burchardt argues that too often academic studies of sexuality address its moral aspects. An important contribution to the study of sexuality as the st…
Morality
Morality: An Anthropological Perspective provides the first account of anthropological approaches to the question of morality. By considering how morality is viewed and enacted in different cultures, and how it is related to key social institutions such as religion, law, gender, sexuality and medical practice, Morality takes a closer look at some of the most central questions of the morality debates of our time. The book combines theory with prac…
Can Machines Be Ethical? On the Necessity of Relational Ethics and Empathic Attunement for Data-Centric Technologies
Can Machines Be Ethical?On the Necessity of Relational Ethics and Empathic Attunement for Data-Centric Technologies Jarrett Zigon (bio) ethics is a growing concern in the realm of data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and data-centric technologies in general. There are good reasons for this. We are all familiar with concerns over such issues as data privacy, data-driven surveillance, and the increased intertwining of the data industry with …
A War on People
If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity? A War on People takes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors: users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active an…
Hope and Waiting in Post-Soviet Moscow
War on People
A War on People takes up two interrelated concerns increasingly of import to political anthropologists and theorists. The first is the seemingly widespread lack of motivation for participating in political activity. The second is the political and intellectual focus on critique rather than on offering alternatives for possible futures. This book addresses these concerns by offering an ethnographically and theoretically rich look at the political …
A War on People
An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of Worldbuilding
Satin Island
Tom McCarthy. (2015). Satin Island. London: Jonathan Cape. 192 pages.Satin Island is a trash heap, an offshore processing complex for an exhausted but still dangerous civilization's excessive excre
What is a Situation
In this essay, I offer a new conception of situation through a delineation of the situation named the drug war and the politics that have emerged out of it. I explore how what I have learned from the anti-drug war movement in terms of what they see themselves addressing, how they address it, and how their manner of organization may help anthropologists rethink their own objects of study. I hope to show that the concept of situation significantly …
An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world‐building
In this essay I provide a critical reading of so‐called ‘ordinary ethics’ in order to disclose how it ultimately undoes two of the three major contributions of the anthropology of moralities and ethics: that is, ordinary ethics ultimately equates morality/ethics with all social activity and at the same time only accounts for morality/ethics in terms of the moral concepts already provided by the Western moral philosophical tradition. In the second…
Temporalization and Ethical Action
This essay attempts to reconceptualize temporality as it relates to ethics, by interrupting dominant anthropological notions of time-most particularly the temporal coherence of narrative unity-which are homogeneous and empty. Eschewing the more commonly understood notion of anthropology as ethnographic thick description, this essay is a practice of anthropological hermeneutics by which I take a cue from my M uscovite interlocutors to disrupt domi…
Afterword
In raising the question of the relation between the two experiential modalities of friendship and morality, this collection of essays has opened a clearing for novel ways of doing and thinking friendship anthropologically. The path revealed by means of this clearing parallels that of the order of the essays in this collection
Attunement and Fidelity
An anthropology of moralities would do well to move beyond traditional moral concepts in the realization that most moral lives and ethical projects-what we might call moral experience-are lived according to an entirely other set of moral concepts that are concerned with dwelling in the world, that is, with expanding, maintaining, repairing, or even disentangling from constitutive relationships. In this article I suggest attunement and fidelity as…
Moral breakdown and the ethical demand
Recently social scientists in general and anthropologists in particular have invoked the concept of morality in their studies. The use of this concept is seen by many as a way to bypass the complexities and contradictions of such traditional social scientific concepts as culture, society and power. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly evident that in many of these studies morality is used in a way that may be more reminiscent of the moral un…
HIV Is God's Blessing”Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia
Within a Range of Possibilities
Despite its now common currency the anthropological concept of morality remains underdeveloped. One anthropologist who has made several important attempts to work out a more precise theoretical concept of morality is Joel Robbins. In his most recent contribution to this endeavor Robbins addresses the tension in anthropology between what he calls the morality of reproduction and the morality of freedom. In this article, I suggest an alternative so…
Moral Experience
Attunement and Fidelity
An anthropology of moralities would do well to move beyond traditional moral concepts in the realization that most moral lives and ethical projects-what we might call moral experience-are lived according to an entirely other set of moral concepts that are concerned with dwelling in the world, that is, with expanding, maintaining, repairing, or even disentangling from constitutive relationships. In this article I suggest attunement and fidelity as…
Morality
Morality: An Anthropological Perspective provides the first account of anthropological approaches to the question of morality. By considering how morality is viewed and enacted in different cultures, and how it is related to key social institutions such as religion, law, gender, sexuality and medical practice, Morality takes a closer look at some of the most central questions of the morality debates of our time. The book combines theory with prac…
Hope dies last
The concept of hope has, for the most part, been neglected by anthropologists. Recently, however, hope has been analyzed by two prominent anthropologists who view it either as a passive attitude or a future-oriented stance toward a good. My research in Moscow, Russia, suggests that hope is not so easily conceived. In this article I suggest that hope is more precisely understood as having two aspects: persevering hope as the temporal structure of …
Moral and ethical assemblages
Recently Anthropological Theory (8(4)) published a debate between Didier Fassin and Wiktor Stoczkowski on the question of whether or not anthropology should be moral. This debate joins the growing number of anthropologists who have recently argued that moralities should be a social phenomenon of much interest for the discipline. Fassin and Stoczkowski conclude their debate by agreeing that only when anthropologists become reflectively aware of th…
An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world‐building
In this essay I provide a critical reading of so‐called ‘ordinary ethics’ in order to disclose how it ultimately undoes two of the three major contributions of the anthropology of moralities and ethics: that is, ordinary ethics ultimately equates morality/ethics with all social activity and at the same time only accounts for morality/ethics in terms of the moral concepts already provided by the Western moral philosophical tradition. In the second…
What is a Situation
In this essay, I offer a new conception of situation through a delineation of the situation named the drug war and the politics that have emerged out of it. I explore how what I have learned from the anti-drug war movement in terms of what they see themselves addressing, how they address it, and how their manner of organization may help anthropologists rethink their own objects of study. I hope to show that the concept of situation significantly …
On love
Love, I argue, is a demand around which moral experience-and thus moral subjectivity-takes shape. Love entails the struggle to ethically remake oneself, and the response to its unavoidable demand has consequences for both oneself and others. I examine the moral experience of love as it was lived by two former participants in a Russian Orthodox Church-run heroin rehabilitation program in St. Petersburg. My discussion thus contributes conceptually …
Morality and Personal Experience
Use of the concept of morality allows anthropologists to avoid the difficulties of their traditional concepts of culture, society, and power, and provides an intimate perspective on the everyday lives of subjects and interlocutors. Yet the very concept of morality remains undertheorized by anthropologists. As a result there is little agreement or coherence among those anthropologists who study moralities regarding what it is they are attempting t…
How is it between us? Relational ethics and transcendence
In this article, I engage the recent debate on transcendence/the transcendental within the anthropology of ethics with the claim that 'How is it between us?' is the most fundamental of all ethical questions. In doing so, I contrast relational ethics with ordinary ethics to show that ethics begins with a demand that emerges from a situation within which one finds oneself with others; a demand that pulls one out of oneself to respond in a modality …
Phenomenological Anthropology and Morality
It is rare that we have the opportunity to engage in debates of the open kind that Ethnoshas provided here, and for that I thank the editors of this journal. I would also like to thank Joel Robbins
A Moral and Ethical Assemblage in Russian Orthodox Drug Rehabilitation
Substance abuse rehabilitation the world over is often described as a process of self-transformation. The Russian Orthodox Church rehabilitation program where the research for this article was done takes this process to its extreme by characterizing it as a total remaking of participants' moral personhood. The practice of remaking one's moral personhood is most often referred to as working on oneself. Based on in-depth ethnographic research of th…
Human Rights as Moral Progress? A Critique
In this article I critically engage the view that the enactment of human rights is the enactment of moral and political progress. Drawing on my research of international and local harm reductionists in Russia, I focus on these activists' arguments for and suggestions of rights-based legislation. I contend that such arguments are not only made according to the logic of security, prosperity, and normativity, but that the realization of such legisla…
A Disease of Frozen Feelings
In a Russian Orthodox Church drug rehabilitation program in St. Petersburg, drug addiction was often described as a disease of frozen feelings. This image suggests that rehabilitation is a process of thawing emotional worlds and, thus, allows the emotions to flow once again. In this article I argue that "frozen feelings" is better understood as the unsocial emotional worlds many drug users experience, and that rehabilitation in this church-run pr…
Temporalization and Ethical Action
This essay attempts to reconceptualize temporality as it relates to ethics, by interrupting dominant anthropological notions of time-most particularly the temporal coherence of narrative unity-which are homogeneous and empty. Eschewing the more commonly understood notion of anthropology as ethnographic thick description, this essay is a practice of anthropological hermeneutics by which I take a cue from my M uscovite interlocutors to disrupt domi…
Morality and HIV/Aids
This paper compares the different moral approaches taken by the Russian Orthodox Church and secular NGOs to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Russia. The paper consists of two parts. The first is a brief summary of the theoretical approach of the project. In this section I outline the theory of moral breakdown that helps provide a coherent framework to the emerging, but yet under-theorised, subdiscipline of the anthropology of moralities. In doing so, I sho…
Developing the Moral Person
Based on ethnographic research done in Moscow, Russia, this article describes how some Muscovites articulate their moral consciousness, that is, the ways in which persons articulate to themselves and others how they conceptualize morality. While it may be possible, and indeed is often the case, that these concepts influence how people act and help guide individuals toward moral behavior, what is more important for our purposes is that these conce…
Can Machines Be Ethical? On the Necessity of Relational Ethics and Empathic Attunement for Data-Centric Technologies
Can Machines Be Ethical?On the Necessity of Relational Ethics and Empathic Attunement for Data-Centric Technologies Jarrett Zigon (bio) ethics is a growing concern in the realm of data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and data-centric technologies in general. There are good reasons for this. We are all familiar with concerns over such issues as data privacy, data-driven surveillance, and the increased intertwining of the data industry with …
Spreading grace’ in post‐Soviet Russia (Respond to this article at http
The article addresses the revival of Russian Orthodoxy as a prominent domain in the lives of many Russians. The six authors are interested in the underlying question: What makes Russian Orthodoxy a relevent and modern source of morality and identity? The circumstances of this branch of Christianity significantly differ from what has been discussed in recent years as ‘the anthropology of Christianity’. The article proposes a thematic approach in o…
Moral breakdown and the ethical demand
Recently social scientists in general and anthropologists in particular have invoked the concept of morality in their studies. The use of this concept is seen by many as a way to bypass the complexities and contradictions of such traditional social scientific concepts as culture, society and power. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly evident that in many of these studies morality is used in a way that may be more reminiscent of the moral un…
Phenomenological Anthropology and Morality
It is rare that we have the opportunity to engage in debates of the open kind that Ethnoshas provided here, and for that I thank the editors of this journal. I would also like to thank Joel Robbins
Morality and HIV/Aids
This paper compares the different moral approaches taken by the Russian Orthodox Church and secular NGOs to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Russia. The paper consists of two parts. The first is a brief summary of the theoretical approach of the project. In this section I outline the theory of moral breakdown that helps provide a coherent framework to the emerging, but yet under-theorised, subdiscipline of the anthropology of moralities. In doing so, I sho…
Hope dies last
The concept of hope has, for the most part, been neglected by anthropologists. Recently, however, hope has been analyzed by two prominent anthropologists who view it either as a passive attitude or a future-oriented stance toward a good. My research in Moscow, Russia, suggests that hope is not so easily conceived. In this article I suggest that hope is more precisely understood as having two aspects: persevering hope as the temporal structure of …
Developing the Moral Person
Based on ethnographic research done in Moscow, Russia, this article describes how some Muscovites articulate their moral consciousness, that is, the ways in which persons articulate to themselves and others how they conceptualize morality. While it may be possible, and indeed is often the case, that these concepts influence how people act and help guide individuals toward moral behavior, what is more important for our purposes is that these conce…
Morality and Personal Experience
Use of the concept of morality allows anthropologists to avoid the difficulties of their traditional concepts of culture, society, and power, and provides an intimate perspective on the everyday lives of subjects and interlocutors. Yet the very concept of morality remains undertheorized by anthropologists. As a result there is little agreement or coherence among those anthropologists who study moralities regarding what it is they are attempting t…
Within a Range of Possibilities
Despite its now common currency the anthropological concept of morality remains underdeveloped. One anthropologist who has made several important attempts to work out a more precise theoretical concept of morality is Joel Robbins. In his most recent contribution to this endeavor Robbins addresses the tension in anthropology between what he calls the morality of reproduction and the morality of freedom. In this article, I suggest an alternative so…
Moral and Ethical Assemblages
This chapter provides an analysis of the Church-run rehabilitation and HIV prevention and care as a therapeutic process of cultivating new moral persons. The various therapies, ways of speaking, and practices performed are not so much aimed at overcoming addiction, although this certainly can be a consequence of the therapeutic process; rather they are aimed at transforming the moral personhood of the rehabilitants into what the Church would call…
Making the New Post-Soviet Person
The post-Soviet years have widely been interpreted as a period of intense moral questioning, debate, and struggle. Despite this claim few studies have revealed how this moral experience has been lived and articulated by Russians themselves. This book provides an intimate portrait of how five Muscovites have experienced the post-Soviet years as a period of intense refashioning of their moral personhood, and how this process can only be understood …
Spreading grace’ in post‐Soviet Russia (Respond to this article at http
The article addresses the revival of Russian Orthodoxy as a prominent domain in the lives of many Russians. The six authors are interested in the underlying question: What makes Russian Orthodoxy a relevent and modern source of morality and identity? The circumstances of this branch of Christianity significantly differ from what has been discussed in recent years as ‘the anthropology of Christianity’. The article proposes a thematic approach in o…
HIV Is God's Blessing”Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia
Moral and ethical assemblages
Recently Anthropological Theory (8(4)) published a debate between Didier Fassin and Wiktor Stoczkowski on the question of whether or not anthropology should be moral. This debate joins the growing number of anthropologists who have recently argued that moralities should be a social phenomenon of much interest for the discipline. Fassin and Stoczkowski conclude their debate by agreeing that only when anthropologists become reflectively aware of th…
A Disease of Frozen Feelings
In a Russian Orthodox Church drug rehabilitation program in St. Petersburg, drug addiction was often described as a disease of frozen feelings. This image suggests that rehabilitation is a process of thawing emotional worlds and, thus, allows the emotions to flow once again. In this article I argue that "frozen feelings" is better understood as the unsocial emotional worlds many drug users experience, and that rehabilitation in this church-run pr…
Multiple Moralities and Religions in Post-Soviet Russia
In the post-Soviet period morality became a debatable concept, open to a multitude of expressions and performances. From Russian Orthodoxy to Islam, from shamanism to Protestantism, religions of various kinds provided some of the first possible alternative moral discourses and practices after the end of the Soviet system. This influence remains strong today. Within the Russian context, religion and morality intersect in such social domains as the…
A Moral and Ethical Assemblage in Russian Orthodox Drug Rehabilitation
Substance abuse rehabilitation the world over is often described as a process of self-transformation. The Russian Orthodox Church rehabilitation program where the research for this article was done takes this process to its extreme by characterizing it as a total remaking of participants' moral personhood. The practice of remaking one's moral personhood is most often referred to as working on oneself. Based on in-depth ethnographic research of th…
Narratives
Faubion, James D
Anthropos , Seite 248 - 249
Human Rights as Moral Progress? A Critique
In this article I critically engage the view that the enactment of human rights is the enactment of moral and political progress. Drawing on my research of international and local harm reductionists in Russia, I focus on these activists' arguments for and suggestions of rights-based legislation. I contend that such arguments are not only made according to the logic of security, prosperity, and normativity, but that the realization of such legisla…
On love
Love, I argue, is a demand around which moral experience-and thus moral subjectivity-takes shape. Love entails the struggle to ethically remake oneself, and the response to its unavoidable demand has consequences for both oneself and others. I examine the moral experience of love as it was lived by two former participants in a Russian Orthodox Church-run heroin rehabilitation program in St. Petersburg. My discussion thus contributes conceptually …
An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world‐building
In this essay I provide a critical reading of so‐called ‘ordinary ethics’ in order to disclose how it ultimately undoes two of the three major contributions of the anthropology of moralities and ethics: that is, ordinary ethics ultimately equates morality/ethics with all social activity and at the same time only accounts for morality/ethics in terms of the moral concepts already provided by the Western moral philosophical tradition. In the second…
Temporalization and Ethical Action
This essay attempts to reconceptualize temporality as it relates to ethics, by interrupting dominant anthropological notions of time-most particularly the temporal coherence of narrative unity-which are homogeneous and empty. Eschewing the more commonly understood notion of anthropology as ethnographic thick description, this essay is a practice of anthropological hermeneutics by which I take a cue from my M uscovite interlocutors to disrupt domi…
Afterword
In raising the question of the relation between the two experiential modalities of friendship and morality, this collection of essays has opened a clearing for novel ways of doing and thinking friendship anthropologically. The path revealed by means of this clearing parallels that of the order of the essays in this collection
Attunement and Fidelity
An anthropology of moralities would do well to move beyond traditional moral concepts in the realization that most moral lives and ethical projects-what we might call moral experience-are lived according to an entirely other set of moral concepts that are concerned with dwelling in the world, that is, with expanding, maintaining, repairing, or even disentangling from constitutive relationships. In this article I suggest attunement and fidelity as…
Moral Experience
What is a Situation
In this essay, I offer a new conception of situation through a delineation of the situation named the drug war and the politics that have emerged out of it. I explore how what I have learned from the anti-drug war movement in terms of what they see themselves addressing, how they address it, and how their manner of organization may help anthropologists rethink their own objects of study. I hope to show that the concept of situation significantly …
Sociology (33 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Political science (21 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Morality (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Anthropology (12 works) · Environmental ethics (12 works)