Uneasy Experiments in Radical Cultural Comparison: Gang Violence, Ethical Cultivation and Sade's Moral Universe

ABSTRACT

During a workshop at Aarhus University, participants were asked to carry out an anthropological experiment modelled upon an artistic one. The artistic experiment involved one filmmaker presenting a series of obstructions to another, in effect setting unfamiliar and even abhorrent artistic tasks. My obstruction involved drawing upon Marquis de Sade's writings to consider urban gang violence among the African Americans I have studied. This paper represents my uneasy response. It is fashioned as series of dialogues, rather in the manner of a theatre piece. I offer an ethnographic case where a child is murdered and his older brother, Ralph (a gang member), exhorts his fellow ‘homies’ to stop the killings. Dialogues extracted from Sade's fictional debates between the virtuous and the libertines are juxtaposed against a fictional dialogue between Ralph and gang members who speak to the pleasures of violence and gang life.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtue ethics
• African Americans
• Marquis de Sade
• urban violence
• anthropology of morality

Acknowledgements

The comments, and obstructions, from Lotte Meinert and Rane Willerslev, as well as reviewers, are gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

I want to acknowledge grant support from the United States National Institutes of Health [grant number HD38878] as well as support from a Dale T Mortensen fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University.