Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change

Abstract

Two broad trends mark the emerging anthropology of morality. One, following Durkheim, sees all routine, normative social action as moral. The other, in direct opposition to this, defines an action as moral only when actors understand themselves to perform it on the basis of free choices they have made. I argue that both approaches capture aspects of the social experience of morality. In light of this, a key question becomes how to explain why in any given society some cultural domains are dominated by Durkheimian moralities of reproduction while others encourage people to construe moral action in terms of freedom and choice. I argue that a model of cultures as structured by values can help us explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as I show with data from Papua New Guinea.

keywords:

• Morality
• freedom
• values
• cultural change
• Durkheim

Acknowledgment

An earlier version of this paper was given at the conference ‘Rethinking Morality’ organized by Monica Heintz and Johan Rasanayagam at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. I thank the organizers and participants at that conference for their comments. I also thank the three reviewers for Ethnos, as well as the editors, for comments that led to important revisions. I am particularly grateful to James Laidlaw, who provided an especially rich set of comments that have led to many revisions and raised a number of stimulating questions, only some of which I was able to tackle here.

Notes

1. Reproduction can of course at times be experienced as a choice, but I am referring here to those times when people experience it simply as a matter of doing what is routine or ‘natural,’ without conscious awareness that they might do otherwise.

2. One of the reviewers of this article notes that Dumont rarely uses the word culture and thus perhaps cannot be read as a cultural theorist. Instead, as the reviewer points out, Dumont tends to write of ‘ideology.’ Yet the term ‘ideology’ is in English so freighted with the baggage of theoretical positions quite distinct from Dumont's that it makes little sense to assimilate his usage to common English connotations of the term — indeed, I think in English the word ‘culture’ more closely captures what Dumont means by ‘ideology.’ In the present case, furthermore, this is perhaps not a crucial concern. My goal in this article is to enrich cultural theory by drawing on Dumont's work, rather than simply to reproduce his position. I hope, then, that the argument I make can be judged in terms of its success in using Dumont's ideas to do new things rather than on the basis of its terminological fidelity to him.

3. For a brief mention of Weber's influence on Dumont, see Allen 1998: 3.

4. Sahni (2005: 10) recognizes this point when he writes that, for Weber, ‘conflict is a necessary condition for morality.’

5. One can find examples of such shifting relations between values in much of Dumont's work on the West. They are apparent, for example, in his discussions of the Christian origins of individualism (Dumont 1986: 23–59) and of the historical transformations of German ideology (Dumont 1994). This raises the question of why one associates Dumont's work with the idea that cultures tend to be marked by settled hierarchies of value. It is perhaps because even as he describes contest and change in value hierarchies, in his work the dominance of the paramount values of holism in India and individualism in the West are taken to be stable (though even in this regard his arguments about the rise of pseudo-holism in Germany are perhaps an interesting exception — see Dumont 1986, 1994).

6. In this article, terms that are underlined are in Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea and an important language of Urapmin Christianity. Terms in the Urap language, still the dominant language in Urapmin and the first language of all Urapmin, are given in italics.

7. One of the reviewers of this article makes the valuable point that it is important to distinguish between heightened moral consciousness and the prevalence in a society of moralizing public rhetoric. Indeed, as he/she points out, the latter can at times aim to foreclose the very sense of freedom upon which the former depends. It is the way public and private moral discussion so closely track each other in Urapmin, and the way both of them stress processes of choice making as much or more than specific rules that leads me to define their case as one in which people's experience is marked by heightened moral consciousness rather than simply a high degree of public moralizing.

8. I have described Urapmin ritual life and its relationship to their ideas about morality much more fully in Robbins 2004 a, chapter 7.

9. It might appear strange to see shame, so often linked to modesty, reckoned as a sin in Christian terms. For the Urapmin, however, shame refers to a wide range of feelings of social discomfort, and is thought to be often linked to anger in the person who feels it or those around him/her. I once followed a long discussion after church of the problematic way in which feelings of shame prevented most young women from preaching. As the discussion evolved, those present began to work with a newly minted distinction between good and bad shame (fitom tangbal and fitom mafak, respectively): good shame is a response to being caught out doing bad things, while bad shame is the kind that leads one to fear doing things one should do. This discussion indicates that there is something of an unsettled quality to the way Urapmin currently think about shame in relation to their Christian moral system. Generally, however, shame is thought to be socially disruptive, or at a minimum to be connected to the occurrence of such disruption, and hence to be sinful in itself.

10. Urapmin notions of the state are related in complex ways to their Christian ideas, and to the limited extent that they can imagine the state as a productive force in their lives it is in Christian terms. This is something I hope to write about elsewhere (for a start in this direction see Robbins 1997).