FOR AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF ETHICS

AND FREEDOM*

James Laidlaw
University of Cambridge

There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being
also an ethnographic and theoretical interest – hitherto largely absent from anthropology
– in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethno-
graphically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism.

The argument I present here begins from the observation that despite the in-
terest shown in the matter by some of the very greatest anthropologists our
discipline has not developed a body of theoretical reflection on the nature of
ethics. I shall assume that this is a deficiency, and that it would therefore be
an advance if it could be rectified. And my claim will be that in order to do
so we shall need a way of describing the possibilities of human freedom: of
describing, that is, how freedom is exercised in different social contexts and
cultural traditions. However, freedom is a concept about which anthropology
has had strikingly little to say. Malinowski was an honourable exception here
– both in his insistence, in Crime and custom (1926), that the Trobriander in
particular and the ‘savage’ in general is not an unthinking slave of custom but
a free agent exercising his own judgement and choice; and also in his posthu-
mously published book, Freedom and civilisation (1947), where he considers the
social conditions of political freedom. As Ernest Gellner remarked (1998: 141),
the case of Malinowski illustrates that it is possible to be a believer in freedom
– in its existence and in its value – without necessarily subscribing to an
atomistic social ontology, and without denying the importance of the social
or cultural in human flourishing.
I have said that there is no anthropology of ethics, and I am aware that
viewed in a certain light this may seem controversial. I do not mean of course
that no anthropologists have ever written about morality. What I mean is that
there is no sustained field of enquiry and debate.There is no connected history
we can tell ourselves about the study of morality in anthropology, as we do
for a range of topics such as kinship, the economy, the state, or the body.There
is no history, that is to say, that includes sustained debate on specific inter-
pretive problems, or distinctive concepts contributed by particular authors or
schools, or which reflects changes in general theoretical orientation, as one

* Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2001

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2002.

J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 8, 311-332
312 JAMES LAIDLAW

‘ism’ gives way to the next. There are no equivalents of descent theory and
alliance theory, no formalism and substantivism, no instrumentalism and pri-
mordialism, no symbolist and phenomenological approaches.
It is also striking that no serious dialogue has developed with moral phi-
losophy.1 There, as in more general public debate, the usual way in which our
discipline appears in discussion is where someone cites, as being what ‘anthro-
pologists say’, the basically incoherent position that the facts of cultural
variation lend ‘empirical support’ to moral relativism.2 Less frequently, but
perhaps increasingly, studies of hunter-gatherer co-operation and reciprocity
are cited by utilitarian animal liberation theorists, to help bridge the gap
between human and other species.3 Probably most anthropologists are not
entirely comfortable with either of these representations, but in the absence
of sustained argument within the discipline we are more entitled to regret
than to complaint.
This unhappy situation persists even though there have unquestionably been
some individually brilliant discussions of morality by anthropologists. Some
of the greatest ethnographies are dominated by the explication of moral con-
cepts and reasoning. And several anthropologists have recognized that sustained
theoretical reflection on ethics would enrich the discipline.4 And then, of
course, there is Durkheim.
As is well known, Durkheim’s later work announced the ambition of sub-
suming what had been moral philosophy into an empirically grounded science
of ‘moral facts’. Indeed, given the extent to which Durkheim set the intel-
lectual agenda for twentieth-century anthropology, it might seem at first sight
surprising that an anthropology of morality does not stand at the centre of
the discipline (and at the core of every undergraduate course). Durkheim, after
all, understood society to be based on moral obligation, and indeed defined
it as being a system of moral facts.
But this, I want to suggest, is part of the problem. Durkheim’s conception
of the social so completely identifies the collective with the good that an inde-
pendent understanding of ethics appears neither necessary nor possible. There
is no conceptual space for it.5 His subsequent influence on anthropologists
and others has waxed and waned, and in some respects it is unfair to single
out Durkheim for criticism. He did not invent the collectivist conception of
society (though he does remain one of its most eloquent exponents). But
just because he devoted so much explicit attention to morality, and seems at
first sight to have achieved its integration into the study of society, his writ-
ings reveal the disabling consequences of identifying the social with the moral
as he did. Durkheim’s ‘social’ is, effectively, Immanuel Kant’s notion of the
moral law, with the all-important change that the concept of human freedom,
which was of course central for Kant, has been neatly excised from it.The cat-
egory of the moral has, accordingly, almost invariably collapsed in the hands
of anthropologists into whatever other terms we have been enthusiastically
using to explain collectively sanctioned rules, beliefs, and opinions: sometimes
‘culture’, sometimes ‘ideology’, sometimes ‘discourse’. The questions that then
get asked are ones that are appropriate for these other concepts. If these are
the rules, how and by whom are they formulated? How are they re-enforced
and transmitted through time, and how and by whom are they challenged?
Who gets to say what counts as a breach of them? And so on. In this situa-
 JAMES LAIDLAW 313

tion the concept of the moral means everything and nothing. It does no dis-
tinctive conceptual work and therefore it is not surprising that, despite occa-
sional attempts to arouse some interest in it, it keeps going out of focus and
fading away.6
To explain what I think the remedy is I need to expand on my condensed
indictment of Durkheim – the claim that what he has left us with is Kant
with the freedom taken away.
In his essay ‘The determination of moral facts’ and elsewhere, Durkheim
explicitly and self-consciously developed his definition and discussion of mor-
ality in parallel with Kant’s arguments, in order to bring out the fact that
he was explaining the same thing, in different terms (1953: 35-62).7 Where
Kant’s was a prescriptive and a priori argument, his own was, he claimed, to
be descriptive and empirical (1953: 36, 43; 1933: 411-35). Kant, Durkheim
asserts, was correct that in speaking of the moral we are speaking of a certain
kind of rule; the problem is to explain why such rules receive sanction and
compel obedience in the way that they do (1933: 424-7; 1953: 35-6; 1957:
1-3).Where Kant tries to show that the moral law is binding on us by showing
that it is commanded by practical reason, and therefore that it holds for all
rational beings as such (1996a: 62), Durkheim’s explanation is that moral rules
derive from society. It is because society is ‘a moral being qualitatively differ-
ent from the individuals it comprises and from the aggregation from which
it derives’ (1953: 51), that it is the source of ‘the best part of ’ the individual
(1915: 388). We therefore feel it to be an authority over us (1953: 36-7, 54-
9; 1957: 73).
In The elementary forms, Durkheim again echoes Kant’s language from the
Groundwork and elsewhere but gives a distinctively different meaning to the
words when he explains the power of society over the individual as founded
on ‘respect’. ‘An object … inspires respect when the representation expressing
it in the mind is gifted with such a force that it automatically causes or inhibits
actions’ (1915: 237-8). The respect inspired in us by society ‘is naturally
extended to all that comes from it’. Therefore, by reason of their origin in
society, ‘its imperative rules of conduct’ are invested with authority and dignity
(1915: 298).
Durkheim observes that as a source for his moral law, Kant found it nec-
essary to postulate God (1953: 51), and this is indeed a position Kant puts
forward in the Critique of practical reason (though it is absent from his later
writings: see 1996c [1793]). Durkheim, of course, had shown to his own satis-
faction that ‘God’ is merely ‘society transfigured and symbolically expressed’
(1953: 52). Similarly, he believed he had shown Kant’s categories of reason
to be variable social products (1915), so he could regard Kant’s dependence
on reason as the basis of morality as ‘an irrational act of faith and submission’
(1973: 47). Durkheim’s theory therefore explained why Kant should have mis-
taken both reason and God for the source of morality, as well as pointing
directly to what he believed to be the real source.
In illustrating, as he saw it, how morals derived directly from social collec-
tivities, Durkheim distinguished different systems of ethics by the size and
character of the groups from which they derive (1953: 56-7; 1957: 3-8). ‘In
general, all other things being equal, the greater the strength of the group
structure, the more numerous are the moral rules appropriate to it and the
314 JAMES LAIDLAW

greater the authority they have over their members’ (1957: 7). Sexual and
interpersonal morality depended on family groups (1957: 25-7). The state
was the ‘organ of moral discipline’ for the nation (1957: 72), and thus the
source and guarantor of the ethics that govern civic life, and of rights enjoyed
by individuals (1957: 42-109, see also 1933: 173; 1953: 58-9). The profes-
sions of his day (doctors, lawyers, academics like himself, and so on) were
organized, Durkheim noted, into strong professional bodies, but he observed
with disapproval that the worlds of manufacturing, business, and finance lacked
such organizations (1957: 28-30). And he asserted, without feeling the need
for supporting evidence, so much did this seem to him to be a statement of
the obvious, that these fields were therefore an unregulated chaos, a scene of
social ‘sickness’, demoralization, and therefore likely imminent collapse (1957:
9-13).8
Further differences from Kant follow from Durkheim’s equation of the
moral with society. For Kant, the question of whether or not we follow the
dictates of the moral law was a matter of the free exercise of our will. That
is why he begins the Groundwork by declaring that the subject matter of ethics
is ‘the laws of freedom’ (1996a: 43). For Durkheim, on the other hand, the
question of whether we obey the dictates of social collectivities was a matter
of how well arranged and integrated those collectivities are, and of how well
we are socialized into them (1957: 14-15). So what in Kant is a problem of
great theoretical difficulty and importance – what is the relation between
man as a part of the natural world, subject to cause and effect, and man as a
free and rational being, moved instead by reasons – is no problem at all for
Durkheim.
For Kant, only free acts of a rational agent could be moral, and therefore
the idea of political action designed to make people or communities behave
morally was a dangerous contradiction, and bound to lead towards tyranny
(1996c). Durkheim, by contrast, followed Rousseau in regarding the moral
condition of society as a legitimate goal of state policy, and saw the role of
the sociologist, presented with cases where people fail properly to follow
ethical codes, as proposing reforms to re-engineer the system (1953: 38, 59-
62; 1957: 31, 37-41; see also 1933: 33). His confidence in his reform pro-
posals rested on a frankly mechanical conception of the relation between
group structure and ethics. ‘Now, once the group is formed, nothing can
hinder an appropriate moral life from evolving, a life that will carry the mark
of the special conditions that brought it into being’ (1957: 23-4). People, in
this vision, can be caused to behave one way or another, by placing them in
appropriate social arrangements, and ethical rules are a seamless part of this
broader causal system.
Durkheim saw it as an advantage of his own views over those of Kant that
he was able to explain not only why moral rules are felt to be obligatory,
but also why following them seems an attractive thing. As the products of
society we not only feel that we ought, we also want to follow its dictates
(1953: 36-7, 44-7). Thus what for Kant was a conundrum that stood at the
centre of his moral theory – what is the nature of human freedom and of
the moral will – is entirely spirited away by Durkheim. Quite logically,
Durkheim also wrote at times as if freedom were an insignificant practical
issue too. His favoured remedy for the assumed absence of ethics from com-
 JAMES LAIDLAW 315

mercial life was the creation of a comprehensive system of modern guilds

(1957: 28-41, 105-9; see also 1951: 379-84). He pauses at one point in his
discussion to ask whether or not, since this is a real practical proposal, mem-
bership should be compulsory.The chilling fact is not so much that his answer
is a clear ‘yes’; it is that he regards it as a question which is ‘only of limited
interest’. Once constituted, ‘a collective force draws into its orbit those who
are unattached’ (1957: 39). If the system is well designed, then, since they are
members of the collectivities to which they refer, people will necessarily want
to join. The obligatory will necessarily become the desirable and people will
act accordingly.
I hope it will be agreed that, whatever the merits of Kant’s ethics (and I
shall return briefly to why he was not the best starting-point to have chosen),
this vision of human life, which simply lacks ethical complexity, dilemma, rea-
soning, decision, and doubt, does not constitute an advance. It is not just that
this kind of sociology is a charter for authoritarian corporatism, though that
is also true. The relevant point is that it is impossible, if this is your vision
of human life, to see how specifically ethical considerations might be distin-
guishable from the other causal factors that make the bits of the system – the
people – function as they do.
I want therefore to argue that an anthropology of ethics will only be pos-
sible – will only be prevented from constantly collapsing into general ques-
tions of social regularity and social control – if we take seriously, as something
requiring ethnographic description, the possibilities of human freedom.
Why will the concept of ‘agency’ not do just as well? It is necessary briefly
to address this question because this concept is so routinely cited these days
as if it were the mandatory solution to nearly every problem, with self-evident
virtues that are moral and political as well as theoretical. The problem with
this, of course, is that perspicuous description can easily give way to wish-
fulfilment: it is a temptation to describe the world as we would like it to
be, rather than as it is. In any case, even if it is accepted that agency is a
good thing, and worth describing, where it is present, it is not the only good
thing, and not the same good thing as is freedom.
What the concept of agency, as it has become popularized in anthropol-
ogy, picks out is a matter of the effectiveness of action – specifically its effec-
tiveness in producing, reproducing, or changing the structures within which
people act. Agency is therefore a means of pinpointing whose acts are, to
various degrees, structurally or transformatively important, or powerful. In so
far as talk of agency raises the question of whether persons’ choices are gen-
uinely their choices – in so far, that is, as it points to questions of freedom –
it does so in a way that is necessarily and systematically conflated with the
question of the capacity or power which their choices have in causal terms.
This means that, as an index of freedom, the concept of agency is pre-
emptively selective. Only actions contributing towards what the analyst sees
as structurally significant count as instances of agency. Put most crudely, we
only mark them down as agency when people’s choices seem to us to be the
right ones.
So I want to insist that there is important conceptual work that ‘agency’
cannot do, and it remains therefore to try to show how the concepts of
ethics and freedom might enrich the anthropological understanding of human
316 JAMES LAIDLAW

conduct. I am going to look for help, in doing this, to two perhaps initially
surprising authors, namely Nietzsche and Foucault. Both of these authors have
been fashionable recently, although only the latter in anthropology, and he for
reasons that are different from those that interest me here. I shall also draw,
perhaps less surprisingly, on the writings of the moral philosopher Bernard
Williams.
Nietzsche9 may seem a surprising choice, because apart from his (or anyway
his ‘madman’s’) declaration of the death of God (GS: 125, 343), the thing for
which he is perhaps most celebrated is declaring himself to be an immoral-
ist (BGE: 23, 32, 226). However, this does not mean that he rejects all ways
of evaluating human conduct as more or less admirable. On the contrary his
concern is critically to assess the value of the values we think of as morality
(OGM: 1.6). What he does is to identify, and try to explain, what is distinc-
tive about moral as distinct from other non-moral values, claiming that there
have been in the past and could be in the future systems of values other than
‘morality’.10
Although they are a pervasive and recurring feature of human history, the
self-denying values of morality required explanation for Nietzsche because he
regarded them as in an obvious sense unnatural.11 You do not need to share
his evaluation of this (to Nietzsche it was obvious that what is contrary to
‘life’ is to be deplored) to see that he was making a very important point.
That people might really wish and strive to be meek, humble, poor in spirit,
chaste and unmoved by sexual passion, indifferent to pleasure, welcoming of
pain and privation, and act in ways which undermined their own strength or
survival: all this is certainly extraordinary. It calls for explanation. Those tra-
ditions of thought that have succeeded, in so far as they have succeeded, in
getting some of us to think this way have achieved something very con-
siderable. It is right – even, again, if we do not accept his evaluation – that
Nietzsche regards these values as in an important sense negative. People pos-
sessed of them can come to see life negatively. They can come to see their
own life as at best a preparation for death, and to see everything that is truly
excellent – real purity and perfection – as possible only with death. And even
where it does not result in quite such extreme reactions, these concepts of
good and evil do underlie much of what we take for granted about moral-
ity – that it seems natural, for instance, to see the moral as typically opposed
to expediency or practicality.
Williams, in terms which are influenced by Nietzsche, suggests that we dis-
tinguish ethics, which are any way of answering the Socratic question ‘How
ought one to live?’, from morality, which is a certain kind of answer to that
question, one which, though it has come to play a major part in the ethical
life of the modern West, is none the less in broader historical and compara-
tive terms a ‘peculiar institution’ (1985: 174-96).12 Where Nietzsche charac-
terizes morality mostly in terms of the self-denying values it upholds,Williams
approaches the matter by pointing to the formal characteristics that distin-
guish it among ethical systems. The distinctive thing about morality, for
Williams, is that judgement is in terms only of obligations – a specific set of
so-called moral obligations – and these can be outweighed only by other such
obligations. All ethical considerations tend therefore to be phrased in moral-
ized forms of judicial language – rules, rights, duties, commands, and blame.
 JAMES LAIDLAW 317

Moral thinking, then, is a matter of weighing obligations and deciding where

one’s duty lies, and moral judgement rests on whether one chooses, whatever
one’s desires or inclinations, to act in accordance with this duty. These dis-
tinctive features of ‘the morality system’ are found in much of our social and
political life, but they do not exhaust how we actually make ethical choices.
Our lives would be greatly impoverished, and in even greater confusion, if
they did (Williams 1981; 1995). They are found, too, in the writings of many
thinkers, but are most comprehensively and influentially articulated by Kant.
So on this view Durkheim, in taking Kant as his starting-point, was already
beginning from a peculiarly narrow conception of ethical life. Following both
Nietzsche and Williams (though their usages are not identical), I shall reserve
the term ‘morality’ from now on for ethical systems where self-denying values
inform law-like obligations in this way.
As Nietzsche tells the story, the emergence of morality is a complex process.
One crucial turning-point is described in the first essay in the Genealogy of
morality, where Nietzsche explores how the idea of specifically moral good-
ness could have developed out of a different non-moral idea of the good: one
which was opposed not to evil but to the simply inadequate, low, or bad.
In pre-moral societies (paradigmatically heroic Greece) as Nietzsche imagines
them, the word ‘good’ conveyed the sense of natural superiority enjoyed by
members of the elite. The use of ‘good’ to describe psychological and other
attributes of a person developed from this original socio-political meaning. It
was a value judgement, but not yet a moral one. Possessing good qualities, in
this meaning of good, is its own good fortune.To be high placed, strong, rich,
beautiful, or assertive is not thought of as the reward for some other and pre-
existing merit, nor do these qualities call for a further reward or commenda-
tion. It would not make sense to say that one had a duty to be like this.
Correspondingly, weaker and lower-status people, possessing qualities that are
bad (weakness, poverty, ugliness, timidity, and so on), were not ‘to blame’ for
having them. The fact that they possessed them did make these people less
impressive and effective, in short less good people, but there was no idea that
these were failings which they had an obligation not to have, or for which
they ought to feel guilty or deserved punishment.
Nietzsche’s account of how morality came into being takes the form, of
course, of a quasi-mythological story. He calls it a genealogy, because it is a
story of couplings: of how at different points in time different formerly unre-
lated elements came together, and how their combination produced each time
something new. Thus morality, the eventual product of this series of unions,
has many ancestors. A large part of the point for Nietzsche in telling the story
in this way is to help him to insist that such a value system is not inevitable,
and that just as it was produced from change, so it too might give way to
something new. But though a narrative, Nietzsche’s account obviously is not
in a straightforward sense a history. He hardly begins to pin down the various
stages in his genealogy to actual historical events. It is something that has
happened ‘over the past ten thousand years’ (BGE: 32), in battles fought and
refought, with occasional reversals, and with different ideas and developments
occurring at different times in different places.13
So although Nietzsche himself was concerned most directly with Judaism
and Christianity, his project and the ways in which he went about it have a
318 JAMES LAIDLAW

more general application. This is something of which he was aware, as his

frequent references to Brahmanical Hinduism and Buddhism make clear.14 He
sought to illustrate the contingency and specificity not so much of Christian
morality, as of the ascetic ‘moral’ values that have come to dominate Chris-
tianity. And in so far as something comparable is true of many other religious
traditions and other cultural settings, then his problem and approach are ap-
plicable to them too. After all, Nietzsche was powerfully aware that the moral-
ity he railed against was not dependent on Christian belief (OGM: 3.27). God
is dead, and still Europeans go on reaffirming Christian morality (no one
more so than supposedly secular socialists).This can only be because they have
forgotten that there can be other ideals and values by which to live. Hence
the rhetorical necessity of his claim that the Genealogy is an attack on moral-
ity as such: so successful have these values been that we think ascetic or ‘slave’
morality is the only kind of ethical values there are (see also BGE: 202, 263).
In so far as Nietzsche’s purpose, then, was to liberate us intellectually from
the parochialism that equated a particular kind of value system with ethics
as such, his thinking is an entirely appropriate starting-point for an anthro-
pological approach.15
The most useful way to interpret Nietzsche’s genealogy is therefore as set-
ting out for us the problem of understanding what is distinctive about ascetic
values, as we find them in so many cultural traditions. What is the relation
between the active espousal of the self-denying systems of values we call mor-
ality, and the other ethical values with which they always coexist? I want to
consider how these questions might be answered when applied to the case
of Jainism.
Jainism, very briefly, is a first-cousin to Buddhism – like it a religion which
emerged in north India in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. A small number
of celibate, mendicant renouncers practise a rigorous life of asceticism, sup-
ported by a larger number of lay families. Lay Jains are relatively high caste
and mostly engaged in some kind of trade or business – in the average village
in many parts of rural India the village shopkeeper-cum-moneylender is fairly
likely to be a Jain. But most Jains live in towns and cities, and most of them
are part of the successful upper-middle classes, and are not easily distinguish-
able in terms of lifestyle from similarly flourishing families among their Hindu
neighbours.
In terms of theology, their religion could hardly be more different from
Christianity. There is no creator God – indeed, the world was not created at
all but has existed from beginningless time. The human figures who are wor-
shipped in Jain temples – there are conventionally twenty-four of them and
they are referred to as Jinas (Conquerors) or Tirthankars (Ford-Builders), and
addressed as Bhagwan (Lord/God) – all lived many previous lives as human
beings, but also as animals and even insects and plants. Finally, each was born
as a remarkable human, destined to discover, through his own effort, the rig-
orous path of asceticism, fasting, and meditation that would lead to enlight-
enment, and destined then to attain complete omniscience and perfection.16
Central to this achievement is the practice of non-violence, which is im-
mensely demanding because living things, each possessed of an immortal soul
which will be born again in another and different body, include not only
animals and plants, but uncountable tiny creatures living for instance in water
 JAMES LAIDLAW 319

and in the air. Thus non-violence as practised by Jain renouncers involves ela-
borate and detailed restrictions on their diet, bathing, and movement.
Statues in Jain temples show these twenty-four exemplars as they were
during the time they taught the eternal truths of Jainism to their followers,
once they themselves had attained omniscience. They are indistinguishable
from each other: identical, austerely perfect male figures in one of two medi-
tational postures (sitting cross-legged with palms turned upwards on the lap,
or standing bolt upright with arms held out from the sides). Their triumph
comes after this and only with death, when their souls, freed forever from
the polluting encumbrance of embodied life, float to the summit of the uni-
verse, there to exist forever in omniscient tranquillity. The perfection and
purity of these released souls is conveyed by their being represented either
simply as a dot, or as the outline of a human figure, with no actual substance
within.17
How far does Nietzsche’s account of the genealogy of morality – of the
relation between morality and other ethical values – apply to the case of
the Jains? I have written elsewhere about how lay followers of this religion –
the people who do not actually give up all their material possessions, abandon
their families, and take to a life of wandering barefoot in emulation of these
ascetic exemplars – combine a partial participation in this strong example of
self-denying asceticism with adherence also to quite different values, in the
pursuit of wealth, prestige, personal fulfilment, fecundity, and so on. Living in
the light of such starkly conflicting values, Jain communities have developed
religious practices that can make them seem compossible, but individuals still
have to make choices.18 The asceticism prescribed in Jain religious teaching
is plainly a powerful influence in everyday life. But only to a limited degree
does it make itself felt through moral rules. For the most part, instead, people
voluntarily place themselves under ascetic obligations by taking temporary
vows, though they may also do so permanently. We do have here a version
of the general problem situation with which Nietzsche is concerned. How
well then does his account of the genesis of ascetic morality illuminate the
Jain case?
Nietzsche often refers to the transvaluation of values that gives rise to
morality as the ‘slave revolt’. The expression is somewhat misleading since he
is not imagining a violent uprising but the process whereby everyone, includ-
ing the nobles in what had been pre-moral heroic societies, come to subscribe
to the values espoused and promoted initially by the lowest in the society.
The source of the creativity that makes this possible lies in the powerful re-
sentment – Nietzsche says ‘ressentiment’ – articulated for them by their priests.19
Ressentiment ‘turns creative’ and gives rise to new values (OGM: 1.10). In place
of the nonchalant and even pitying disdain of the nobles for their inferiors,
the slaves regarded their superiors as dangerous enemies. So was born the
concept of evil. What had been good characteristics were now ‘re-touched,
re-interpreted, and re-viewed through the poisonous eye of ressentiment’
(OGM: 1.11, see also 3.14). They were seen not just in a negative light but
as the malevolent expression of an unseen agency. So where force, vitality, and
formidableness had been inseparable natural expressions of strength, they are
now seen, as if strength had the choice of not being strong, as ‘aggression’.
Correspondingly, being weak was also represented as if it were from choice,
320 JAMES LAIDLAW

and therefore as an accomplishment.Weakness now becomes, in the new moral

sense, good.
How could this happen? Something had already to be in place and this
something – guilt – is the subject of the second essay in the Genealogy. Guilt
is the emotion that drives ascetic self-denials and Nietzsche suggests that its
origin lay in the different, non- or pre-moral notion of debt (OGM: 2.4).
Debt – the idea that in return for a harm I cause you, you are entitled to
extract from me an equal amount of pain, cost, or injury – relies on notions
of equivalence, of the substitutability of different goods and bads, of fairness
and desert.These ideas – and the practices of punishment that went with them
– Nietzsche sees as evaluative, and in our terms therefore ethical (OGM: 2.8),
but not as moral. Guilt is different, because in place of the notion of arith-
metical equivalence, it substitutes a kind of debt that is never fully quantifi-
able and therefore not fully payable. Guilt cannot be got rid of simply by
repayment. Instead, it leaves a residue of ‘inner pain’ (OGM: 2.14) that is essen-
tial to morality, and which Nietzsche refers to as the ‘bad conscience’ – the
lingering sense of intrinsic fault and unworth.20
What transforms debt into guilt? Nietzsche’s answer, which I think is
only a partial one, is for an anthropologist rather interesting. He develops it
from the idea that the relation between each individual and the group or
society of which he is part can be imagined as a debt relation – one is
indebted for the protection afforded by the existence of the group (OGM:
2.9). Anticipating Durkheim’s idea that gods are representations of society,
Nietzsche observes that these debts are paid as offerings to deities (OGM:
2.19). But what if the god is such that one’s debt can never be discharged?
This is the condition that Nietzsche believes gives rise to guilt. What if the
deity is conceived not just as a super-strong or super-human person, but as a
standard before which one must always be judged wanting – such as where
God has sacrificed Himself for our sake (OGM: 2.21)?21 The gods of the
Greeks had exemplified all that their devotees found most admirable about
themselves, and in particular they were ‘reflections of noble and proud
men in whom the animal in man felt deified’ (OGM: 2.23). By contrast the
Judeo-Christian God represents, according to Nietzsche, an idea that real
human beings cannot come close to achieving, because it is systematically the
opposite of their real ‘ineluctable animal nature’. It is an image of a being
composed entirely of ‘spirit’, which is to say the essence of life, without any
of its real characteristics.
In Jainism, as in the other Indic religions, the idea of debt is moralized in
the notion of karma. Good and evil actions have definite and quantifiable ef-
fects that can cancel each other out. Your present suffering is accounted for
by your own past actions. So ressentiment is redirected, as an ascetic impulse,
against yourself (cf. OGM: 3.15-20).The imagery of karma can be very direct,
as when in children’s books good and bad actions are shown as weighing on
opposite sides of a balance, or where people keep ledgers in which they record
the good and bad things they have done, as if making up an account. Or a
qualitative notion of equivalence may be used, as when someone who mis-
treats animals is reborn as a beast of burden. The general idea of karma is also
given a further turn in Jainism, as Nietzsche would lead us to expect, by the
application of the ascetic ideal of an absolutely pure soul – as represented by
 JAMES LAIDLAW 321

those twenty-four exemplary figures and by the empty outline of the liber-
ated soul. Here, quite as clearly as in the Christian case, is an ideal of human
perfection and completeness that is a systematic negation of actual human life
– achievable only through the most extreme self-denial, and even then only
with death. Even the karma resulting from good actions – even ethically pos-
itive attributes such as generosity, success, and ability – are impediments to
reaching that perfection. They will inevitably lead one to commit further
actions, which will inevitably involve harm to other living things. So attain-
ing perfection involves ridding oneself even of ‘good’ karma. Even good qual-
ities, therefore, are a kind of debt.22
However, Jainism appears to lack the idea that any of these debts are owed
to God. The perfected souls worshipped by Jains do observe the continuing
karmik drama of everyone else’s good and bad deeds being rewarded and pun-
ished, but it is not they who make or carry out these judgements, and nor
are the judgements in any sense made for their sake or on their behalf. They
are instead the automatic doing of the uncreated universe. This means that
asceticism in the Jain case is not so much a matter of obedience to God’s
law or commands as it is of enlightened self-interest, where the ‘self ’ whose
interest is at stake is not that of the living person but the imagined future
purified soul one could become after enlightenment and death.23 What
would have to be the case for this hypothetical possibility to give rise to def-
inite moral obligations, as Nietzsche envisages?
If one were finally to achieve liberation, one would become a pure soul,
devoid of all the characteristics of one’s present self, and identical to those
souls one now worships. As the Jains say, one would ‘become God’. As they
also say, it is already your soul’s inherent nature to achieve this goal: your
soul already in some sense ‘wants’ to be free of everything that makes you the
person you are.You could be said then, in Nietzsche’s terms, to owe it to the
God you might become to practise ascetic morality. Someone for whom the
idea of a pure and liberated soul was present, not just as a believed-in ideal,
but as the ‘I’ that stands at the centre of his sense of self, such a person’s
body, identity, thoughts, acts, and character – his karma – would be debts
he owed to himself and, indistinguishably, to God. For such a person Jain
asceticism would be, in Nietzsche’s and Williams’s terms, a matter of moral
obligation.
So we can pose Nietzsche’s question about the genealogy of morality –
of the relation between morality and non-moral ethics – as a question, for
the case of Jainism, of how such a person could come to be. What would
make it the case that ‘I’ was not James Laidlaw, thirty-eight years old, five foot
nine and a half, and so on, but a pure and perfect soul somehow trapped in
that person and fundamentally alien to everything that makes him up?
An anthropology of ethics – of which the anthropology of morality would
be a part – would seek to answer this question; and to show what an answer
might look like, I want to turn now to the later writings of Michel Foucault.
From him I want to take two things. The first is a way of writing about the
aspects of ethical life that cannot be captured in a history of moral codes or
social rules. Like Williams, Foucault insists that the domain of ethics is wider
than the following of socially sanctioned moral rules, in Durkheimian terms.
It also includes our response to invitations or injunctions to make oneself into
322 JAMES LAIDLAW

a certain kind of person. Self-fashioning of this kind is described by Foucault,

in my view rightly, as a practice of freedom. So the second point I want
to take from Foucault is a way of studying ethical freedom ethnographically.
For Foucault, freedom is exercised in different ways in different historical
circumstances, and so studying it involves describing the ethical practices –
Foucault calls them also ‘techniques of the self ’ – through which this may
be done.
Foucault may seem to be as unlikely an ally for me in the argument I have
been pursuing as was Nietzsche. His works have been enormously influential
in anthropology, but the Foucault who has had this influence has been the
advocate of a bleakly totalizing vision of societies as systems of power/knowl-
edge, where domination and resistance are necessary, pervasive, and mutually
implicating aspects of all social relations.24 There is some warrant for this
reading of Foucault, especially in Discipline and punish. But Foucault himself
spent the remaining years of his life, from the moment that book was deliv-
ered to its publisher, thinking himself out of that conception.25 Among anti-
Foucauldians, Foucault was the original, and in many ways the best.
At times (as in an interview in 1984) Foucault was clear in repudiating the
way he was already coming to be read. ‘The idea that power is a system of
domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot
be attributed to me’ (1984c [2000: 293]). However, in two published pieces
deriving from talks given in 1981 and 1982, he also admitted that he had left
himself open to such misrepresentation (1981b [2000: 176-84]; 1988b [2000:
281-301]). In his studies of asylums and prisons he had laid too much empha-
sis on techniques of domination. Citing in one case Habermas’s classification
of three kind of social techniques – techniques of production, signification,
and domination – Foucault adds that there is also a fourth kind, which he
calls techniques or technologies of the self. He characterizes these in the two
talks in nearly identical words. ‘They permit individuals to effect, by their own
means, a certain number of operations on – their own bodies, their own souls,
their own thoughts, their own conduct – and this in a manner so as to –
transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state – of per-
fection, happiness, purity, supernatural power’ (Foucault 1981b [2000: 177]; cf.
1988b [2000: 225]).
In the second and third volumes of his History of sexuality (Foucault 1985a;
1988a), and in a number of essays and interviews from the final years of his
life (1981b; 1982; 1984a; 1984b; 1984c; 1985b; 1988b; see also 2000: 87-106),
Foucault analyses a considerable range of these ‘techniques of the self ’, mostly
from the ancient classical world, although he asserts that they exist in all
societies (1984b [2000: 277]; 2000: 87).26 His examples include what he calls
the ‘use of pleasure’ by male citizens in classical Greece (this involves their
manner of walking as well as diet, the conduct of marriage, and erotic rela-
tions with boys), practices advocated by Stoic philosophers (such as systemat-
ically anticipating the worst possible future events, and writing systematic
reviews of each day’s activities), and different forms of confession and penance
in early Christianity. All are analysed as part of the pursuit of ethical projects:
projects to make oneself a certain kind of person. Indeed, the uncompleted
History of sexuality turns out not to be a story about sex acts, but instead doc-
uments across the centuries different conceptions of, and methods of con-
 JAMES LAIDLAW 323

structing, ethical agents. It is told as a story about sex for the contingent reason
that, in Foucault’s view, through Christianity and into post-Christian moder-
nity the ethical subject has come to be organized around the question of
sexual desire. And it is in this form that a specifically moral project of self-
denial became a central part of Western ethical life. But at the beginning of
Foucault’s story this is not so: ethics was not then exclusively or even pre-
ponderantly about sex.The conceptual apparatus he develops therefore reflects
this, and includes formal categories designed to frame comparison between
ethical systems.27
The notion of freedom is central to this project, and it is important to note
how this contentious term appears in Foucault’s writings. He does not propose
a prescriptive account of human freedom, or offer criteria for its full realiza-
tion. He speaks not of achieving but of exercising freedom, and does so to
refer to the extent to which and the ways in which people can exercise choice
or are subject to coercion. One can have more or less freedom, and it takes
different forms, in different historical situations.This is consistent with his view
that human nature is not fixed, and waiting to be discovered and realized, but
instead perpetually reinvented through human choice and action: hence his
hostility to the rhetoric of ‘liberation’, with its implication of releasing a for-
merly suppressed true nature (1981a; 1984b; 1984c). Thus, while Foucault
remains studiedly non-committal with respect to a philosophical characteri-
zation of freedom, he does persistently distance himself from two utopian ideas
about freedom (ideas which, being utopian, often lead in practice to the oppo-
site of freedom): the idea that to act freely is to act in conformity with reason
(or one’s ‘true’ interests – this is the idea that lurks behind much anthropo-
logical use of ‘agency’), and the idea that freedom is only possible in the total
absence of constraint or relations of power. This latter idea, of freedom as
something akin to randomness or being uncaused, finds expression in many
articulations of morality, where moral judgement attaches only to the will,
and therefore only to actions in so far as they are, in a very strong sense, vol-
untary (Williams 1985; 1995: 3-76, 241-7; see also BGE: 21).28 It is only in
so far as acts are voluntary that the idea of peculiarly moral responsibility –
responsibility that can inspire moral guilt because, as Williams puts it, it ‘goes
all the way down’ – has purchase. This means that morality tends to take a
particularizing view of human actions. It looks at specific, singular acts and
choices and, taking the agent and his or her character as given, assigns praise
or blame to what he or she decides to do. If one looks outside the singular
act, one sees that the agent and his or her character are not givens, but respond
instead to what Williams describes as ‘practices of encouragement and dis-
couragement, acceptance and rejection, which work on desire and character
to shape them into the requirements and possibilities of ethical life’. These
practices provide the context in which an agent can exercise some ‘freedom
to have chosen some other character’ (1985: 194). Foucault is making the same
point when he says that, when ‘the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion
through practices of the self ’, these practices are ‘models that he finds in his
culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his
society, his social group’ (1984c [2000: 291]).This does not mean that his doing
so is not an exercise of freedom, but that the freedom he exercises is of a
definite, historically produced kind. There is no other kind.
324 JAMES LAIDLAW

‘Ethics’, Foucault writes, ‘is the conscious (réfléchie) practice of freedom.’ It

is, ‘the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection’
(1984c [2000: 284]). The ‘reflection’ in this formulation is equivalent to
‘thought’, as Foucault used the word in the designation he chose for himself
as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France.
What does he mean by ‘thought’? He describes it as ‘not just representations
that inhabit conduct’, so not the stuff in which anthropology often deals, the
taken-for-granted cultural representations, or habitus, or ‘discourse’. Instead,
it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to
oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its
goals.Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches
oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem (2000: 117).

(Note that it is possible to exercise ‘agency’ without doing any of this.)

Elsewhere, he says that thought is ‘what establishes the relation with oneself
and with others, and constitutes the human being as an ethical subject’ (1984a
[2000: 200]). Therefore the freedom of the ethical subject, for Foucault, con-
sists in the possibility of choosing the kind of self one wishes to be. Actively
answering the ethical question of how or as what one ought to live is to
exercise this self-constituting freedom.
Foucault’s great achievement in my view was to see, and to show, how we
can have a history of this: that by describing the different techniques of the
self, one can tell the story of different ways in which people have purpose-
fully made themselves into certain kinds of persons, and therefore of the
historically specific and definite (and of course always limited) forms which
that ethical freedom has taken.
Foucault never puts the matter in the way I have here, and indeed he never
raises the question in quite this way, but I think that his analysis of ethics and
his notion of techniques of the self enable us to describe, in more detailed
and intricate terms than does Nietzsche’s language about values and theo-
logical ideas, how certain ethical projects can become that very singular thing
– a self-denying morality. A late seminar by Foucault includes an analysis of
two kinds of Christian monastic techniques of confession and penance – called
the exomologenesis and exagoreusis – the latter especially as set out in the writ-
ings of the fifth-century monastic writer Cassian (Cassian 2000; Foucault
1988b [2000: 223-51]; see also Foucault 2000: 81-6). I shall use this discus-
sion as a sounding-board for some brief and programmatic remarks on the
most important confessional rite in Jainism, a practice called pratikraman.
Foucault remarks that techniques of the self generally involve some kind of
obligation to truth (1981b [2000: 177-8]; 1988b [2000: 223]). In Christianity,
there is a double truth obligation. There is an obligation to affirm ‘the Truth’
as revealed by God and as contained in scripture; and there is the obligation
to discover the truth about yourself. This double obligation is also found, he
observes, in Buddhism, but he insists upon a difference (1981b [2000: 178]).
In Buddhism, the truth you discover about the self is that the self is an illu-
sion. This is not so in Christianity, where the self that you discover is a real
one. Actually, Foucault’s point about Buddhism (which anyway he does not
pursue) is not without its difficulties, but, however the case may be there, in
Jainism it is clear. The self is emphatically not an illusion – it is the very real
 JAMES LAIDLAW 325

result of all one’s former actions, in this and in previous lives. Actions have
this effect because they give rise to karma: matter which attaches to and pol-
lutes the soul with the definite, substantive characteristics one has made for
oneself through one’s various lives: caste and kin identity, longevity and health,
body, mind, emotions, habits, and dispositions. In Jainism as in Christianity
there is the idea that in order to purify the soul, one must not only affirm
the truth of scripture, but also establish the truth about oneself, and come to
live by and act upon that truth. Knowing oneself is a centrally important
means of self-transformation. And in both cases – and this I think is the crucial
thing – the process of discovering the truth about the self leads to a cumu-
lative and increasingly intense renunciation of that self. One becomes, in
Nietzsche’s terms, moral. How does this come about?
In Cassian, as it comes to be in Christianity in general, the self that
must be known comes to be seen increasingly as a self with secret desires –
paradigmatically and most persistently sexual desires. Unlike the Pagan world
(as Foucault describes it), the way sex was problematized for Cassian and
his Christian monastic contemporaries focused hardly at all on actual sex acts
or sex relations between persons (Foucault 1981b; 1985b; 1988b). Abstention
from sexual intercourse did not in itself constitute chastity, which required in
addition the progressive stilling of all even involuntary stirrings of the flesh.
This required the dissociation of the mind and the disengagement of the will
from any sexual desire, and was pursued through techniques of self-analysis.
Confession therefore tended towards the verbalization not just of specified
sins, but of all one’s thoughts and impulses, to bring them to scrutiny so that
their source and nature could be divined – does this thought come from God?
Or does it come from the Devil?
The Jain confessional practice of pratikraman is performed every morning
and evening by renouncers, and by lay people as often as they choose – this
varies radically between individuals depending on the extent to which they
take on the ethical project of making themselves truly Jain.29 Pratikraman
involves a long, complex series of prostrations and other bodily postures, which
are understood to be penances for the sins being enumerated. These sins are
listed in a recitation which continues during the whole performance (which
can take up to three hours) and this involves not a spelling out of what you,
individually, have done that day or that week or that month. Instead, it is a
comprehensive catalogue of all the things that could ever be done. All the
emotions and passions that can be felt, all the actions that can be undertaken,
and, crucially, all the kinds of living things there are, and which you might
have harmed or killed, whether by thought, word, or deed, intentionally or
unintentionally: all are catalogued. By performing the penances, you acknowl-
edge that you will, even in spite of yourself, necessarily have committed these
acts; you declare that you cast off the unaware and careless or wanton self that
did so. And because the air is inhabited by uncountable millions of invisible
living things, you must necessarily have killed a great many of these, even in
the course of performing this very confession and penance. Here, knowledge
of the self includes knowledge, derived from religious teaching but experi-
enced in bodily practice, of the destructive effects your living, breathing, and
acting have on other living things. So the confession itself contains within it
confession and penance for the sins committed in the course of it.
326 JAMES LAIDLAW

In the Christian practice of exagoreusis, you piece together the truth about
yourself by registering all the ways in which that self makes itself felt, even
in the merest stirrings of the flesh or the most indistinct thoughts and desires.
The injunction to find the truth of oneself is therefore part of a self-forming
and self-transforming practice in which, as Foucault puts it, ‘self-revelation is
at the same time self-destruction’ (1988b [2000: 245]). In pratikraman and in
Jain ascetic practice a similar dynamic of self-revelation and self-destruction is
generated, in a different but related way. The self that is discovered and
renounced includes all one’s kinship and other social relations, and it is not
principally about sexual desire. It is again the case that the cause of sin is
desire, and desires must again be enumerated, identified, repudiated, and extin-
guished, so that again the self is renounced even as it is discovered. This is
clearly expressed in the Jain idiom according to which one ‘casts off ’ the self
that committed the sin. But the way in which desire makes itself known is
not so much in sex, as in all the carelessness of physical motion – motion that
causes one routinely to slaughter one’s fellow creatures. It is violence, rather
than sex, that is the unavoidable sin, the sin that can only finally come to an
end with the end of one’s physical life. So the techniques by which one puri-
fies the self involve minute care about how one moves, walks, sits and stands,
speaks, washes, and defecates; then learning to remain absolutely still in one’s
sleep, learning to regulate and limit what one eats, to fast for long periods,
and in the end to give up eating entirely.30
The Jain ascetic treats his life, in Nietzsche’s vivid phrase, as a wrong path
that he has to walk along backwards (OGM: 3.11). Progressively, the con-
stituents of the person, from one’s caste and family relations, to one’s name
and personal identity, one’s habits and mannerisms, preferences and sentiments,
and finally one’s bodily needs, are all by degrees known and renounced, leaving
in the end only the pure soul, which is, finally, identical with every other
purified soul.
The pursuit of this project of self-knowledge and self-renunciation may
seem to be a very singular thing to do with one’s freedom. But if the word
‘freedom’ is reserved only for choices one approves, then it loses its meaning.
So the project’s singularity should not prevent us from acknowledging that an
exercise of freedom is indeed what it is. The adoption of even this extremely
severe and literally self-destructive asceticism is a voluntary ethical project.
Moral obligation is its end-point, not its beginning; and although it is pursued
through instituted social practices, it is not a socially imposed code of rules.
Of course, some such rules deriving from this ethical project are to be
found in Jain communities: for people brought up in a Jain milieu vegetari-
anism is a more-or-less compulsory rule, for example. And for people who
take the most serious permanent vows and become Jain renouncers, quite a
lot of their daily routine becomes prescribed. It would be reasonable to call
both of these kinds of rules ‘Jain morality’, and to understand that expression
in the way Durkheim would have done. But nothing in the content of the
rules would make sense without understanding the ethical project from which
they derive. And to think that they encompassed the ethical lives of practis-
ing Jains would be an error.
In formalized religious techniques of the self such as exagoreusis or pratikra-
man the ambition of shaping the self is explicit, and is informed by sophisti-
 JAMES LAIDLAW 327

cated theoretical reflection, as it is not, perhaps, when people join a volun-

tary association of some kind, or change the way they dress, or take to buying
recycled washing power. They are doubtless much more powerful techniques
of the self than these more do-it-yourself activities. But these, too, may be
instances of the exercise of ethical freedom.
Wherever and in so far as people’s conduct is shaped by attempts to make
of themselves a certain kind of person, because it is as such a person that, on
reflection, they think they ought to live, to that extent their conduct is ethical
and free. And to the extent that they do so with reference to ideals, values,
models, practices, relationships, and institutions that are amenable to ethno-
graphic study, to that extent their conduct becomes the subject matter for an
anthropology of ethics.

NOTES

I am grateful to Professor C.J. Fuller and the Department of Anthropology at the London
School of Economics and Political Science for their invitation to deliver the 2001 Malinowski
Memorial Lecture. It was a most enjoyable privilege. While revising the lecture for publication,
I have attempted to take account of generous but penetrating comments from Brian Didier,
Chris Fuller, and two JRAI readers.
1
It is odd, for instance, that MacIntyre (1981; 1988; 1990) and Taylor (1985; 1989; 1997),
who have argued in their different ways that morality can only be understood through a study
of concrete social arrangements, have not found themselves engaged in fruitful dialogue by
anthropologists. A recent exception, with respect to MacIntyre, is the interesting paper by
Lambek (2000).
2
Williams (1972: 34-9) provides a classic discussion of what he calls the ‘anthropologist’s
heresy’. At the time of writing, the most recent introductory reader on ethics I have found
(Sommers & Sommers 2001) includes as the only contribution from an anthropologist an
extract from Ruth Benedict under the title, ‘A defence of moral relativism’. Similar examples
could be multiplied. Boas (1928) and his followers, especially Benedict (1935; 1967 [1946]);
Herskovits (1948; 1972) and Mead (1928), are the most commonly cited authors, but more
recently Cook (1999), Geertz (1984), Hatch (1983), and Shweder (1989) have continued the
tradition. Indeed, the idea of relativism as an article of professional faith seems very strong. So,
for example, just five years after a rivetingly intemperate paper (1995) attacking ‘cultural rela-
tivism’ in the name of ‘the ethical’ (unhesitatingly identified with the author’s own political
opinions), Nancy Scheper-Hughes was recommending that ‘anthropologists must intrude with
our cautionary cultural relativism’ into debates on bioethics (2000: 197).
3
Examples of this include Singer (1981), and the use by Singer of excerpts from early- to
mid-century anthropologists (Westermarck, Marshall, Malinowski) in a section on ‘Common
themes in primate ethics’, in one of his many readers on ethics (Singer 1994), and those by
Midgley and Silberbauer in another (Singer 1991).
4
See, for instance, Firth (1951; 1953). In Morals and merit, Fürer-Haimendorf lamented the
absence of an ‘agreed framework of reference’ for integrating our knowledge of morals in dif-
ferent societies (1967: 9). Unfortunately, his framework in that volume involved an evolution-
ary scheme of stages of technical and socio-political development, and explaining beliefs,
practices, and institutions in terms of the requirements of those respective stages. Edel and Edel
(1959) made less systematic use of the same idea. Among interesting recent discussions of
anthropology and ethics, see Howell (1997), Lambek (2000), Parkin (1985), Pocock (1986), and
Wolfram (1982).
5
Versions of this point are made briefly, in different ways, by Parkin (1985: 4-5), Pocock
(1986: 8), and Wolfram (1982: 268). For critical discussion of their arguments and a contrary
view, see Didier (1996).
6
Howell’s The ethnography of moralities (1997) may serve as a recent illustration. The editor,
in an attempt in the introduction to draw some general theoretical themes from the ethno-
graphic contributions to the volume, notes that the Edels’ (1959) notion of ‘ethics wide’ is
328 JAMES LAIDLAW

basically equivalent to traditional anthropological conceptions of culture. She defends the latter
against some recent criticisms, and suggests that the use of the concept of morality is equally
defensible, without saying what if anything she takes the difference between the two to be, or
why we might need both.
7
The themes that I emphasize in this discussion of Durkheim run through all his writings.
I rely heavily on his lectures, published in English as Professional ethics and civic morals. Versions
of these lectures were first delivered in the 1890s at Bordeaux, but Durkheim gave them again
repeatedly at the Sorbonne from 1904, and the version published posthumously probably dates
from shortly before his death in 1917. It appears, from the projected table of contents
(Durkheim 1979; see also Pickering’s notes at pages 93-5) that these lectures were to con-
stitute a significant part of La morale.
8
As Haskell has noted (1998: 84), Durkheim appears to have thought in terms of a pecu-
liarly narrow conception of self-interest, one that included only pecuniary advantage and was
blind to self-interest in pursuit of non-monetary advantages, such as bureaucratic power. It
seems clear, in addition, that he was oblivious to Weber’s insight that the pursuit of business
success might not be motivated simply by the desire for financial gain.
9
Many editions/translations of Nietzsche’s works are in use. I shall follow standard
scholarly practice and refer to them using conventional abbreviations and paragraph/section
numbers.
10
See EH: 768-9. Sometimes Nietzsche distinguishes the morality he attacks from a pro-
spective future ‘higher’ kind (BGE: 202) or ‘wider’ morality (BGE: 32). He also distinguishes
morality in this sense from ‘the morality of custom’, which is ‘much older and more primi-
tive’ (OGM: 4).
11
OGM: 1.6, 3.11, 3.21. See also BGE: 46, 62 (where Christianity and Buddhism are analysed
in these terms), 197-203. ‘The prospect of an animal soul turning against itself, taking a part
against itself, was something so new, so profound, unheard-of, puzzling, contradictory and
momentous on earth that the whole character of the world changed in an essential way’ (OGM:
2.16).
12
On Nietzsche’s influence on Williams, see Clark (2001).
13
The conflict between ‘Rome’ and ‘Judea’ in ancient times has become a symbol, says
Nietzsche, of the conflict between the values of master and slave (OGM: 1.16). References to
more or less specific changes or events in more or less specific times and locations are scat-
tered through Nietzsche’s writings, but they serve always as judgements on the events men-
tioned rather than being elements of a sustained narrative. The Renaissance was a temporary
victory for Rome, reversed by the Reformation (OGM: 1.16). The fixing of modern usage of
the German ‘Schlecht’ is identified as happening ‘round about the time of the Thirty Years War’
(OGM: 1.4). The ‘last great slave revolt’ is described as having begun with the French Revo-
lution (BGE: 46) with Napoleon representing ‘the last signpost to the other path’ (OGM: 1.16).
14
For discussion, see Parkes (1991; 1996).
15
In Beyond good and evil, Nietzsche argues that a ‘science of morals’ has not developed because
philosophers have sought to provide what they hoped would be a rational ground for moral-
ity, but have taken the content of ‘morality’ as given (a claim also made in MacIntyre 1981).
‘It is precisely because moral philosophers knew the facts of morality only somewhat vaguely
in an arbitrary extract or chance abridgement, as morality of their environment, their class,
their church, the spirit of their times, their climate and zone of the earth, for instance – it was
precisely because they were so ill-informed and not even very inquisitive about other peoples,
ages and former times, that they did not so much as catch sight of the real problems of moral-
ity – for these come into view only if we compare many moralities’ (BGE: 186).
16
There is disagreement among Jain traditions about whether all twenty-four Jinas were male
or whether one of them was female (Jaini 1991). Here, for simplicity, I refer to Jinas as male.
17
See Banks (1999), Jaini (1979: 170-1), and Laidlaw (1995: 230-74).
18
Laidlaw (1995). The excellent ethnographies by Babb (1996) and Cort (2001) are orga-
nized around the same issue. See also Chapple (2001).
19
Nietzsche emphasizes in fact that the priestly proponents of ascetic values have come from
all classes (OGM: 3.11).
20
In a similar vein, Williams suggests that guilt differs from shame because, among other
things, it is ineradicable. ‘Shame … is not even the wish, as people say, to sink through the floor,
but rather the wish that the space occupied by me should be instantaneously empty.With guilt,
 JAMES LAIDLAW 329

it is not like this; I am more dominated by the thought that even if I disappeared, it would
come with me’ (1993: 89).
21
Compare Nietzsche’s comments on the nature of Brahman (OGM: 3: 17).
22
Anthropological studies have shown how in different communities and localities karma plays
varying roles in the explanation and judgement of events. Its application always requires inter-
pretation and it is never the only possible framework or concept that can be used (Keyes &
Daniel 1983). On Jain thinking with respect to karma, see Dundas (1992: 85-90), Jaini (1979:
107-33; 1980), and Laidlaw (1995: 25-47, 65-80).
23
The difference is nowhere near absolute, however, for just as versions of Pascal’s wager have
always been a part of popular Christian moral thinking, so too in Jainism there are subordi-
nate deities – deities in the sense of being supernatural beings possessed of miraculous powers
– who do as it were make it a rule for their devotees to observe Jain moral precepts and
will only confer the worldly benefits their miraculous power makes possible on people who
venerate and follow the teachings of the Jinas. They may even punish those who do not. But
these deities, unlike the Christian God, enjoy limited moral authority themselves. In some Jain
traditions they are of almost no importance, and even in the traditions where they are a pro-
minent part of popular religious practice, those who most strenuously practise Jain asceticism
are generally those who worship these deities least.
24
This style of analysis, as Sahlins (1993; 1999) has been insisting, is really just a modified
crude functionalism.
25
See the intriguing discussion in Miller (1993).
26
Foucault’s notion of techniques of the self is among other things an adaptation of Hadot’s
work on ‘spiritual exercises’ in the ancient world (1995: 81-125). There has of course been
dispute among specialists over the soundness of Foucault’s readings of ancient texts. Hadot
himself voiced some queries (1995: 206-13). Brown (1988) builds on Foucault’s analyses and
is sympathetic, as is Nehamas (1998). Davidson (1997) is more critical, and is justified in being
so, in so far as he takes issue especially with the power-functionalist strain in Foucault’s writing,
something that has been emphasized and amplified by classicists influenced by him (Halperin
1990; Halperin, Winkler & Zeitlin 1990; Keuls 1985; Winkler 1990). The greater part of
Davidson’s excellent book seems compatible with Foucault’s general approach, at least as I
interpret it here.
27
See especially 1984b, 1985a, 1988a. The analysis of four aspects of an ethical system, which
Foucault develops in these works, is used to frame ethnographic description by Laidlaw (1995)
and Rabinow (1996: 15-25, 162-87).
28
One of Williams’s purposes in Shame and necessity is to show that the ancient Greeks oper-
ated with a more realistic notion of responsibility (1993: 50-74). He shows that they had notions
of cause, intention, state, and response – the basic elements of a conception of responsibility –
but did not try to give the notion of the voluntary ‘metaphysical depth’ (1993: 55). ‘Just as
there is a “problem of evil” only for those who expect the world to be good, there is a problem
of free will only for those who think that the notion of the voluntary can be metaphysically
deepened’ (1993: 68).
29
Laidlaw (1995: 204-15). See also Cort (2001: 122-7), Dundas (1992: 146-9), Jaini (1979:
189-91, 209-17), and R. Williams (1963: 203-7).
30
On the way in which Jain asceticism and specifically non-violence requires comprehen-
sive bodily control and fasting, see Laidlaw (1995: 151-72, 216-29). On the practice of fasting
to death, see Dundas (1992: 155-6), Jaini (1979: 227-40), and Settar (1990).

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Pour une anthropologie de la morale et de la liberté

Résumé
Il ne peut y avoir une anthropologie morale développée et soutenue sans qu’un intérêt ethno-
graphique et théorique – jusqu’à présent absent de l’anthropologie – soit aussi porté à la
notion de la liberté. Une approche possible à l’étude comparée et ethnographique de
l’éthique et de la liberté est proposée, et quelques commentaires succincts sur le Jainisme
servent à l’illustrer.

Dept of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF.
jal6@cus.cam.ac.uk