Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements
- Part II Aspects of Ethical Agency
- 9 Making the Ethical in Social Interaction
- 10 Freedom
- 11 Responsibility
- 12 Emotion and Affect
- 13 Happiness and Well-Being
- 14 Suffering and Sympathy
- 15 Ambiguity and Difference
- Part III Media and Modes of Ethical Practice
- Part IV Intimate and Everyday Life
- Part V Institutional Life
- Index
- References
11 - Responsibility
from Part II - Aspects of Ethical Agency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements
- Part II Aspects of Ethical Agency
- 9 Making the Ethical in Social Interaction
- 10 Freedom
- 11 Responsibility
- 12 Emotion and Affect
- 13 Happiness and Well-Being
- 14 Suffering and Sympathy
- 15 Ambiguity and Difference
- Part III Media and Modes of Ethical Practice
- Part IV Intimate and Everyday Life
- Part V Institutional Life
- Index
- References
Summary
Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 281 - 308Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023
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