Premium
On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology
Author(s) -
Muehlebach Andrea
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.12011
Subject(s) - precarity , sociology , attunement , ethnography , politics , sociocultural evolution , anthropology , gender studies , law , political science , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology
I dedicate this essay to anthropologists’ heightened attunement to precarity but also to what Michel‐Rolph Trouillot, who passed away last year, called our “moral optimism.” As I show, much of our work is written from within and against precarity while at the same time being committed to this specifically anthropological ethic. This ethic permeates many of the articles surveyed here and can be found in all of the sections into which they are grouped: On Capital and How We Can Know It; Ethical Encounters; Politics and Protest; Religious Ethics; and Anatomies of Relatedness. I ask what the task of ethnography is now that “things are falling apart, again.” This question is crucial because precarity has inserted itself into the very heart of anthropology itself.