Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations

Beyond Morality in the Anthropology of Africa

Dados Bibliográficos

ID18953874
AutoresH Englund (0000-0001-6063-4986, autor correspondente)
Ano2008
Volume52
Fascículo3
Data de publicação2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSocial Analysis (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0155-977X • E-ISSN: 1558-5727
EditoraBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/sa.2008.520302
OpenAlexW1978322146
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas47

The suggestion that the anthropological study of morality is theoretically undeveloped carries with it the risk of caricaturing ideas of moral obligation in mid-twentieth-century social anthropology. The need for recovering aspects of these ideas is demonstrated by the tendency of moral philosophers to reduce the issue of world poverty to a question of ethical choices and dilemmas. Examining the diplomatic tie that had existed for almost 42 years between Malawi and Taiwan and an ill-fated project of Taiwanese aid in rural Malawi, this article maintains that honoring obligations indicates neither a communitarian ethos nor rule-bound behavior. As the mid-twentieth-century anthropology of Africa theorized ethnographically, the moral and existential import of obligation lies in its contingent materiality rather than in social control. Such insights, the article concludes, can enrich debates on world poverty with alternative intellectual resources

Embeddedness · Environmental ethics · Ethos · Existentialism · Moral obligation · Morality · Obligation · Political science · Poverty · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies