In the empirical exploration of ethical pedagogies, a quartet of themes are salient. The classic theme of and debate over the relative weighting of nature over nurture is inescapable. A second concerns the extent to which any given repertoire of norms, values, exemplars, and ideals are written in sociocultural stone versus the extent to which they are malleable, fluid, of unstable valence, and liable to elimination or supplementation. A third concerns the degree to which the techniques of the ethical pedagogue are informal or formal. A fourth concerns the place that ethical students occupy within the dynamics of incorporation and objectification. Neglect any of these themes and infelicities can result. Among them, the crucial role that childhood socialization plays in ethical formation might not receive the acknowledgement it is due. The distinction between ethics and ethos might suffer conflation. Worst of all, the anthropologist of ethics might run the risk of slipping into methodological or – even worse – ontological individualism. Proper attention to ethical pedagogies can ameliorate such infelicities. It can also facilitate recognizing that pedagogies, at whatever stage in the life course, are foundational to ethical formation, deformation, and reformation.

To reiterate: neither methodologically nor ontologically does an anthropology of ethics have its ground in the individual. The population of its interpretive universe is instead one of subjects in or passing through positions in environments. It is thus a population not of atomic units but of complex relata. Its subjects are for their part already highly complex. They may be individual human beings (though never human beings in their pure individuality). They may be the individualized subjects of the formally egalitarian society; Homines hierarchici, the holistic dividuals of the caste-structured social system (Daniel 1984; Dumont 1980, 1986); the relationalist subjects that Robbins and many others have encountered in Melanesia (Robbins 2004: 13). They may be human collectives, or even human and non-human collectives or assemblages of one or another kind. Nothing in principle precludes the possibility of a cyborgic ethics, an ethics of quasi-objects (Latour 1993), an ethics of corporations of an economic or of some other sort. The only proviso is that the subject occupying or passing through its position in an environment be at or beyond the threshold of the complexity requisite of any system capable of autopoiesis, though such a requirement is never the sufficient condition of an ethical subject position, even a potentially ethical one. Individual human beings typically display such complexity, yet do so only after a considerable course of socialization has taken place, only after a considerable dose of the intersubjective has already been incorporated, already become part of the self (and hence are never individuals in their pure individuality).

In his dismissal of the historical anthropology that Jean-Paul Sartre develops in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Claude Lévi-Strauss pronounces of historical inquiry itself:

I do not advocate a return to the high rationalism that in part motivates Lévi-Strauss' relegation of historical inquiry to the domain of the mail clerk and short order cook. I do, however, want to suggest (and have good reason to believe that I am following Lévi-Strauss in doing so) that much of what Lévi-Strauss pronounces of such inquiry should also be pronounced of ethnographic inquiry, into which what used to be thought of as sociocultural anthropology has increasingly dissolved from the mid-1970s forward. The catalysts of that dissolution are diverse.

Justness and the other

The elaboration of the dimensions of the mode of ethical subjectivation just completed has one of its primary motivations in the recognition that ethical discourse and ethical practice are intersubjective and that both require the services of another, and especially of the other in the specific guise of the agent of socialization, the ethical pedagogue. The other in less qualified guise – the ethical subject tout court – remains in need of further attention. Such an other is the second party, the addressee, of the Greek virtue of dikaiosunê, “justness” or “justice.”

What first brought me to the bit of property in the near middle of the Texas prairie known as Mount Carmel was a curiosity bordering on the lurid that had as fuel a long-standing interest in millenarianism, a widely publicized and lethal confrontation, a lecture, an unexpected academic appointment, and the possibility of a day trip in a new home state. In 1980, I graduated with a BA in anthropology and philosophy from Reed College. While at Reed, I joined a long line of anthropology majors before me in coming under the spell of the formidable Gail Kelly, who was herself under the spell of the anthropology of millenarianism. Enough said, except that Professor Kelly was under its spell for what she unabashedly regarded as its primitivism, its exoticism and its irrationalism – the binary opposite, thus, of all that she regarded herself to be (exoticism excepted). I was not thus bewitched. In 1990, I returned to Reed to teach in the anthropology department and in the program in the humanities. On March 2 or 3, 1993, I was slated to offer a lecture in the humanities program on early Christian millenarianism. Some three days prior to that lecture, agents of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raided the Branch Davidian compound and engaged those inside in a gun battle that left four of the agents and six inside the compound dead. A standoff ensued.

The anthropology of ethics that I seek to develop has many precedents. Those that are theological, those that are grounded in an aprioristic rather than an empirical and thus unresolved concept of human nature and those that pursue the reduction of ethics to or its dissolution into alleged psychological or biological interests or instincts or needs are of little relevance. Or to be more precise: it does not follow but instead diverges from them. Its central precedent resides in the second and third volumes of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality and in several of the interviews that Foucault saw published while he was engaging in the thinking and the research that resulted in those volumes.

Framing Foucault's work of that period are several versions of the concept of governmentality, a concept ranging over not merely such formal and often directly coercive apparatuses of intervention as state administrations and their police but also the great variety of more informal incitements and incentives that ask or invite human actors to govern themselves. Among such incitements and incentives are those that ask or invite actors to make themselves into subjects of esteemed qualities or kinds. Actors who take up such requests and invitations freely and self-reflexively are ethical actors, and their distinctive domain is the ethical domain, of which Foucault identifies four basic parameters. One of these he calls “ethical substance.”

From flesh to virtue

Sojourner in Sidi Bou Said, Uppsala, Warsaw, San Francisco, Michel Foucault to my knowledge never visited Athens even for a day. Nor is there anything in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1978) that anticipated so long a stay as he passed in the ancient world in the last years of his life. In Foucault's initial conception of it, the genealogy of the ethico-medical and biopolitical inscription of sexual desire as and at the heart of our modern being was not historically deep. It was instead a largely nineteenth-century affair. It involved the secularization and psychiatrization of the confessional, the pathologization of masturbation and other putatively wasteful and enervating sexual practices, the development of the diagnostics and theory of female hysteria, the elaboration of a constellation of perversions and, informing it all, the gradual elaboration of an apologia discrediting the “peculiarity” of aristocratic blood in favor of the vitality and fecundity of an ascendant bourgeoisie (1978: 126). The second (1985) and the third (1986) volumes of The History are testaments to Foucault's recognition that certain strands of the genealogical fabric of sexuality were in fact historically woven at much greater length than he had at first considered. Even in its earliest establishment, the confession establishes that talk of sex which the scientia sexualis of the nineteenth century will codify into genera, species and sub-species of healthy and unhealthy, normal and abnormal pleasures and their correlative types of character.