An Anthropology of Ethics (review)

How are we to do cultural anthropology when distinct communities with long-established customs and moralities are giving way to free market individualism and ever-changing commercialized lifestyles? James D. Faubion addresses this critical question with a framework for studying ethics or "subjectivation," that is, how individuals fashion themselves through work on the self. His approach, however, is decidedly not psychological. To the contrary, he begins by rejecting psychological reductionism in favor of a Foucauldian perspective on how reflexive social actors "govern" their selves (3). He is concerned not with psychic interiority but rather with "subject positions," that is, with subjects "passing through positions in environments," whether as part-selves, individuals, dyads, human or non-human collectivities, corporations, or even cyborgs (119).

Faubion draws particularly on Foucault's history of sexuality where ethics and morality are separate aspects of morals. In contrast to morality or moral code, ethics is said to concern the subject's care of the self (not the usual way of defining ethics in Anglo-American circles). For Foucault, it includes "substance" (e.g., carnal appetite), mode of subjection or how the subject relates to morality, self-forming activity, and aim or purpose. Faubion elaborates on these four components throughout his monograph, although he refers to morality as the "themitical" and subsumes it within a broader ethical domain. He also draws on Niklas Luhmann and Max Weber. In agreement with Foucault, Luhmann contends that individual psychology is irrelevant to social-systemic communication. In a manner reminiscent of Foucault's treatment of capillary power and discursive practices, he views social systems as loose connections of semi-autonomous subsystems each with its own "autopoiesis" of codes and understandings. And like Foucault, he privileges ethics over morality; indeed, for Luhmann, shared moral orders in modern societies are dysfunctional. Drawing on Weber, Faubion finds ethics originating with charismatic leaders in social crises. In such "primal scenes" of social life, the themitical and rationalization are in abeyance as sovereign charismatic leaders fashion and purvey new ethical values.

After introducing this approach, Faubion reviews Foucault's survey of ethics and subjectivation in ancient Athens. He then presents several case studies: 1) Fernando José Mascarenhas, a Portuguese aristocrat; 2) Amo Paul Bishop Roden, a leader in the Branch Davidian group in Waco, Texas; and, briefly, 3) Constantine Cavafy, a expatriate Greek poet of the 19th and early 20th century. The discussion of Fernando relies on a monograph by George E. Marcus as well as Faubion's own interviews with Fernando, while the chapter on Ms. Roden builds on Faubion's earlier The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millenarianism Today (2001). Faubion portrays Fernando as a composite figure and Ms. Roden and himself as forming a "dyad-subject."

Fernando was twice in psychoanalysis. He found men more attractive sexually, but ultimately regarded women as more interesting. He was twice married. He was a communist. Faubion nicely describes how Fernando conscientiously tried to fulfill his aristocratic obligations to society, but he ignores how psychoanalysis influenced Fernando and is more interested in his one serious homosexual affair than his two marriages. Fernando's communism also receives scant attention, unfortunately since it was no doubt part of his ethical perspective. Faubion pities Fernando's lack of enthusiasm for homosexuality, and admits that he did not connect well with him (209).

Ms. Roden was a divorced, single parent; leader among the Branch Davidians; and proponent of polygyny. Fernando was not only an aristocrat, but also unusual in his sexuality and politics. Ms. Roden was, if anything, even more eccentric. She will strike many readers as rather paranoid, although Faubion opines that paranoia is a social phenomenon and even implies that social theorizing is "paranoid" inasmuch as it looks for hidden influences on the individual! That is, we too are paranoid in some sense. Faubion sees Ms. Roden resisting psychotherapy even though she sought it specifically, as she put it, to keep her head "straight" (238). His disregard for whatever it was she learned from therapy seems to go along with the emphasis...