The Ethical Condition

Ethics is currently a topic of great interest in anthropology. Some people speak of an ethical turn' and yet the subject has always been there. The essays inThe Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value chart the trajectory of the distinguished anthropologist Michael Lambek as a contributor to the subject over the course of thirty years. They draw on both his ethnography and his reading in philosophy but this work is neither primarily ethnographic nor philosophical but distinctively anthropological in its contribution. The general argument is that ethics is intrinsic to human being, that our human condition is an ethical condition. This does not mean that we always act well or for the good but that we can only act with respect to criteria; we are subject to ethical judgment. The volume consists of a substantial and newly written introduction that sketches the main themes and issues as Lambek sees them now. It considers such questions as the conversation between anthropology and philosophy, whether to distinguish ethics' from morality', and how to think about ethics with respect to several key words or concepts, including freedom, action, judgment, acknowledgment, ritual, irony, passion, and the ordinary. The essays interweave several themes that form overall a sustained argument, in a sequence that produces a kind of hermeneutic spiral in which a set of issues are revisited over time, each visit adding something new to the emerging approach and simultaneously clarifying and thickening the account.