Faubion Book Review2

James Faubion (2011), An Anthropology of Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press The anthropology of ethics has become a well-travelled field over the last decade, with major contributions from authors such as Joel Robbins, Saba Mahmood, Michael Lambek, James Laidlaw and Jarrett Zigon. During this decade, James Faubion has also been a central participant in these discussions. The problem of the ethical was the object of an important theoretical article (Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis) of his in 2001, as well as an element of Lights and Shadows of Waco, his ethnographic biography of a Post-Waco Branch Davidian Millenarian prophetess; it has also come up tangentially in essays on both kinship (2001) and fieldwork (2009). In all these works he has been adroit but determined in thinking through the problem through the later works of Michel Foucault, and his latest book is no exception. However, this is his most sustained work on the subject (if I can be forgiven the pun), and this particular intervention occurs at a time when the decade-long conversation seems to have hit a critical mass, where the field of an anthropology of ethics is rapidly maturing and when a new way of theorizing (as opposed to simply a new theory) is needed. It is perhaps because of the timing that this book comes across as being so welcome. This books core plank in putting forth an anthropology of ethics (the author is quite explicit that there can be no one anthropology of ethics, and that other anthropologies of ethics will follow) is that the contributions that Foucault can make to this field have not yet been exhausted. This claim is demonstrated in two parts. The first half of the book consists of an extended theoretical essay that closely reads Foucaults final books and lectures; this reading is informed by and in dialogue with both the existing philosophy and anthropology of ethics and morality, as well as against the existing scholarship on Greek antiquity that was Foucaults source for much of his later work. The second half of the book consists of revisiting two already existing ethnographic cases. The first is Ocasio, the epistolary ethnography/exchange between George Marcus and Fernando Mascarenhas, a Portuguese Nobleman; the second is Faubions own Lights and Shadows of Waco (an additional section, on the 19th century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, is referred to but not included; it should be available on the internet shortly). It may seem that a revisiting of Foucaults works on ethics, followed by a Foucauldian reading of two works that were themselves no strangers to Foucault, would be going over some already well-mined areas. That is incorrect. What distinguishes Faubions work here from other anthropological uses of Foucault is a simultaneous loyalty to, and suspicion of, its Foucaultian inspirations; as Faubion himself says, in this work he is a shameless revisionist (24). Faubion takes seriously the problem of applying Foucault in an ethnographic idiom, acknowledging that Foucault cannot be simply ported over to the social sciences. Faubion is careful to develop aspect that were underdeveloped, latent, or even at times absent from the original Foucaultian formulation. In furtherance of this work, Faubion addresses ethics as socialization, recruitment/selection, the category of value and forms of social justification, the problem of

Faubion Book Review2

ethical others and of intersubjectivity, the relationship between the ethical and the antinomian phenomenon of Weberian charisma, and (in the most interesting section of the work) the possibility of a composite ethical subject, comprised of multiple constitutive actors. These are all developed here to a far greater extent than they were in Foucaults original traces of these concerns in the History of Sexuality. Furthermore, these concepts, in the process of being given metaphorical flesh by Faubion, often take forms that would be difficult to imagine Foucault himself anticipating. This simultaneous translation and expansion also requires Faubion to juxtapose Foucaultian ethics with other articulations of social theory, marking space of resonance, compliment, or incompatibility between them and Faubions target domain of Foucault. Some of the names invoked in these discussions (always as figures for forms of thought - as conceptual personae) are perhaps unexpected, but not too jarring: Niklas Luhmann and systems-theory in general is often relied on as a means of thinking through how the ethical can participate in, or at times destabilize, the autonomous self-reproduction of social systems, with Bourdieu at times also being recruited into this project as well. Other allies are more eye-brow raising; Faubion emphasizes the inevitable interpretive aspects of a project like his anthropology of ethics; this admission results in the final pages of the book with an acknowledgment of a commonality with Clifford Geertz - a seemingly unlikely kinship in the wake of the debates around ethnography and anthropological theory that grew out of the nineteen eighties and nineties. But it is moments of surprise such as this that suggest what is so welcome in Faubions book. This book is a return not to theory - something that has not been absent in any way over the past thirty years - but rather to a kind of programmatic (268) yet parsimonious analytic thought that keeps itself in a constructive dialogue with other vying formulations, rather than merely trying to oust them. Such an approach does not make for an easy read. This is a demanding book, and both Faubions erudition and his exhaustiveness in teasing out where his argument stands in relation to numerous different literatures does not leave a lot of purchase for those who might wish to read this book with less than their full attention. However, for those interested in the Anthropology of Ethics, in anthropological uses of Foucault, or even for those who are looking for possible Ley lines leading out of the current theoretical doldrums, this book is an essential read.