Paper short abstract:

After introducing the idea of an ethical project, this presentation focuses on one particular example involving students at a yoga school in South India who, by the use of techniques of asana (pose), attempt to dissolve the self and, in so doing, cultivate a particular form of ethical subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

In his later works Foucault characterized ethics as the relationship one establishes with oneself or, alternately formulated, the various ways in which the individual seeks to constitute him or herself as a particular kind of ethical subject. While the Ancient Greek ethics described by Foucault is strongly teleological and characterized by a high degree of personalism (the cultivation of self-mastery), the ethical project pursued by students at a yoga school in Southern India is much more focused on techniques which, although understood to operate on each individual separately, are employed as part of a collective undertaking. In this presentation I first introduce the idea of an ethical project as an explicit, collective, and teleological form of action that persons take up in their efforts to transform themselves and the worlds they inhabit. I then turn to consider the particular project that students at a yoga school in Southern India are engaged in. I suggest that the ultimate goal (teleology) of this project is an effect of asana (postural) practice that the guru of the school describes as "getting rid of the I" but which can also be understood as a particular form of self-effacement or ego-dissolution. Through a series of ethnographic observations I will show how asana practice serves as a means to accomplish this goal and, in so doing provides a tool of ethical reflection and self-cultivation.

Paper short abstract:

This self-reflective essay on the case of Rachel Dolezal, a woman who had posed as black before being ‘outed’ as white, explores my reaction - as a self-identified black woman - to this ‘controversy.’ It reflects on questions of racial identity and the interplay between self-formation and intersubjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I transport myself back to the summer of 2015 when Rachel Dolezal, the then president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, who had long presented herself as black, was "outed" as white by her parents. The Dolezal 'controversy' spurred a media frenzy and many dinner-table conversations as it challenged normative understandings of racial identity. As a self-identified black woman, I reflect here on my initial, 'visceral' reaction to this case as well as how it led me to think critically about my identity. This paper should be seen as an essai, or perhaps askēsis work - as an effort to think within, through and tentatively beyond my conceptions of racial identity and self. By askēsis is meant 'an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought', an intimate intellectual exercise on subjective conceptions of identity and race. I suggest that Dolezal's pursuit to mold her body to express her 'true' self-identical racial (psychic) core can be likened to an ascetic concern for authenticity and 'knowing thyself'. In contrast, I argue that those critical of her project instead likened racial identity as the deployment of a genealogical self, placing the self at nexus of (re-)occurring forces and relations of power and knowledge. I also briefly consider what I argue is the bounded relationship between the perceived sincerity and authenticity of one's self-expression (or performance.) I end this paper by suggesting the interplay between self-care (and self-knowledge) and how it is ultimately both shaped and (de-)limited by others.

Paper short abstract:

Online world-making necessitates the reconstitution of ethics, often allowing for the prevalence of discussion tabooed offline. This paper will examine the growing prominence of hate speech within online communities, and reflexive practices of justification through re-made ethics.

Paper long abstract:

Within the past 10 years, anthropological work has proposed that there is something significant about online world-making. Digital practice is not merely a reflection of our offline life, but instead a refraction of ourselves; a distorted reformation of cultural and ethical norms in spaces not censored by face-to-face interaction. Subsequently, when addressing ethics as the reflexive process encapsulated by questions such as "what kind of person should one be?" we must consider how the answer may be two-fold to one individual: referring to how one should conduct themselves as a public individual in certain online spheres verses within offline interactions. This paper presents an anthropological tracing of digitally mediated practices of shaping narratives, and the ethical permissions that follow. Specifically, I will examine the emergence of violent anti-feminist abuse online, as was seen in high profile cases such as #Gamergate and Reddit vs Ellen Pao. As well, I plan to briefly investigate the correlation between these cases and the emergence of the Alt-Right, exposing their re-branding of terms such as "Counter-Semite" as reflexive maintenance of their ethical personhood while touting White nationalist ideology. In this discussion, I will stress how it is increasingly important for academics ask questions such as: "How are ethics re-formulated within online worlds?", "To what extent do the textual practices of online communities influence the evolution of ethics in digital discursive spheres?" and "What happens when these re-constituted digital ethics enter the offline world?"

Paper short abstract:

Suicide in Guyana cannot be approached as merely a product of mental illness; to create functional suicide prevention strategies, suicide must be understood as a product of cultural and political discourses. In addressing suicide, the differing modes of ethical thinking must be acknowledged.

Paper long abstract:

According the WHO's most annual report, Guyana, a small country in South America, has the highest suicide rate in the world. What is more, talk of people committing suicide is both ubiquitous and exceedingly casual. Although there are a variety of mental health awareness programs and campaigns in Guyana, they do not seem to be affecting the country's rampant suicide rate. My research on Guyana seeks to approach this issue from a non-western viewpoint in which suicide is not necessarily a product of long-term mental illness or depression—there is, in fact, a very low percentage of identification with, or correlation to, mental illness. Suicide is represented as an impulsive action that is most commonly caused by love loss, and which seeks to articulate a protest against that loss. As well, due to Guyana's corrupt and complex political history, in which majority of citizens are unable attain any common capabilities, suicide can be viewed as a way for one to assert the agency they lack within their political system and communities. When we cease to view suicide as a universal label, we can see that it emerges as a locally attached complex, deeply rooted in cultural discourse. I investigate Guyana's societal norms, cultural divides and political infrastructures in order to better understand why the rate of suicide is so high is a country where mental illness diagnosis is so low, thus contributing to recent academic conceptualizations of suicide's differing relationships to personal hardship, despair, and public protest.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces how doctor-activists and their patients in ‘nature cure’ (prakriti jeevanam) camps in Kerala, south India reimagine being ‘prakriti’ or natural in ethical opposition to the region’s modern toxins: processed foods, vaccinations, and pesticide-based environmental pollution.

Paper long abstract:

While tourist companies celebrate Kerala as "God's Own Country", citizens are becoming increasingly suspicious regarding environmental toxicity and medical authority in this lush south Indian state. Resulting from rapid development since the 1970s, Kerala's emergent middle class have witnessed a shocking increase in lifestyle diseases, dangerous pesticide uses, and severe water pollution. Through education-based activist gatherings and social media, patients aim to transform into liberated self-doctors, who are also activists in opposition to Kerala's modern toxins: processed foods, vaccinations, and pesticide-based environmental pollution. Based upon examining the discourses and lives of three camp organizers, I will explore how within residential nature cure (prakriti jeevanam) camps held throughout the region, participants are invited to reimagine 'Western' lifestyle illnesses and habits as 'scientifically' manageable through raw food diets, natural 'eco-therapy' farming, and group meditations that 'detoxify' their immunity or 'vital power' (jeevashakti) from modern social and environmental illnesses. Through analysis of participant and media narratives of detoxification that draw on Gandhian and 'secular Buddhist' virtues of self-rule (swaraj) and nonviolence (ahimsa), I will trace how participants reimagine the virtue of being 'prakriti' or natural in ethical opposition to three 'outside' regional developments: processed food, vaccinations, and pesticides. For the largely middle-class, urban participants, these reorientations facilitate a larger questioning of normative understandings of scientific and religious knowledge, and posit a new understanding of the body-environment relationship that is connected to a larger ethical critique of the consumer market economy and associated aspirations of affluence and mobility.

Paper short abstract:

Among mindfulness practitioners in the UK, health and happiness are at stake in their capacity to manoeuver from one way of being-in-the-world to another. In this very manoeuvrability between worlds, rather than unreflective inhabitation of one, practitioners enact the imperative of askesis itself.

Paper long abstract:

The definitional ground of the ontological turn has been increasingly disputed since Mol's (2002) 'body multiple'. 'Ontologies are not simply linguistic or mental…phenomena', claims Pedersen (2012), yet to Laidlaw the ontological turn 'delivers…merely the familiar old idea that different peoples have different theories about the world' (Laidlaw 2012). However 'ontology' next manifests, a question remains: 'What on earth happens at the boundaries between…different ontologies, and when things or people cross from one to another?' (Laidlaw 2012).

Although Laidlaw offers this in a spirit of critique, my fieldwork among mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) practitioners in the United Kingdom leads me to take his question seriously. MBCT is an evidence-based treatment for recurrent depression and stress, derived from Buddhism and cognitive therapy. Practitioners learn to reshape their minds through extended meditation, but mindful selves are not simply 'transformed' from one state of being to another. Instead, practitioners' reality is a perpetual series of shifts among multiple 'worlds' of practitioner personhood. These worlds are ethnographically discernable through context-dependent (re)definitions: at different times, 'mindfulness' is an object, a practice, or an innate capacity; the 'practitioner' is a passive recipient, self-responsibly active, or 'inherently' mindful. Although practitioners rarely acknowledge such multiplicity, their worlds are not merely 'conceptual artifacts internal to anthropological argument' (Candea and Alcayna-Stevens 2012). Indeed, health and happiness are at stake in the practitioner's capacity to manoeuver from one way of being-in-the-world to another. In this very manoeuvrability between worlds, rather than unreflective inhabitation of one, practitioners enact the imperative of askesis itself.

Paper short abstract:

Incarceration holds particular implications and affordances for the ethical self. This paper engages with anthropological and philosophical conversations, questioning some of the theoretical limitations on personhood, selfhood, and ethically-oriented self-transformation within carceral space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the theoretical implications of imprisonment on selfhood, personhood, and the domain of the ethical, engaging with conceptualizations and conversations in the fields of philosophy, criminology and anthropology. Bridging off of this theoretical investigation, I consider what the particular affordances (Keane, 2015) are toward ethical projects within prison, comparing and contrasting obligatory, institutionalized rehabilitative programming that responsibilizes the individual to transform their-self versus self-led individual and collective efforts toward the transformation of the self, and society. In line with Saba Mahmood's (2011) parochialization of liberal, humanist conceptualizations of freedom, agency, and the ethical, I argue that freedom, while constrained in particular ways, exists within carceral contexts, and that the exercise of agency within these spaces is not limited to acts of resistance to, or subversion of carceral authority. The "ethical prisoner" is not an oxymoron, but a reality that challenges our theoretical assumptions about the effects of incarceration on the person, and the self.

Paper short abstract:

The participants in Kula exchange (of Papua New Guinea) have recently decided on a set of written rules to improve and revitalize this system of delayed reciprocity. My paper will describe this process and outcome.

Paper long abstract:

In early 2016, a team of kula masters and anthropologists circulated the kula "ring" to meet with every community and discuss ways to prevent kula from extinction within the next generation. The growing impact of the global cash economy, mass tourism, technological advances, evangelical preaching, and the school curricula are distracting the young generation and cause them to reject "old custom".

In ca. 30 meetings on 20+ islands, a "constitution" for kula exchange was drafted based on general consent. While people are aware of the rules for kula exchange, they increasingly disregard them as they are less fearful of sorcery as retribution. If one could complain to the local village court, the islanders said, a better enforcement can help to rebuild a strong kula network. These rules fall into three categories relating to proper attitudes towards the exchange partner and to the valuable objects in circulation. The draft is now being further discussed and in some places implemented at the village court level.

The paper will describe the process and its outcome while also asking if cooperation in such a conversion from oral to written rules is an ethically appropriate for an anthropologist.