This view that religion and ethics are socially derived was shared by Weber and Marx, and it also informed Geertz’s view that religious beliefs are a way in which a social group renders its ethos “intellectually reasonable.”31 The problem with these approaches is that they are at once too abstract and too general. The social is identified with groups and institutions, ethics is confused with moral norms, and religion is made synonymous with belief and meaning.
In many societies—including those in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, where I have done extensive fieldwork—“religion” and “ethics” are not identified linguistically or conceptually as discrete domains, leading one to ask, as Paul Ricoeur does, whether we would do well to focus neither on a neo-Aristotelian ethics based on the idea of a good life nor on a Kantian approach based on duty and obligation, but rather on questions of “practical wisdom” (phronesis) in everyday life, when unprecedented situations arise, problems don’t admit of any solution, perfection remains beyond our grasp, and virtue may reside less in achieving the good than in striving for it.32
My first suggestion is that we dissolve our conventional concepts of the social and the cultural into the more immediate and dynamic life of intersubjectivity—the everyday interplay of human subjects, coming together and moving apart, giving and taking, communicating and miscommunicating. I take my cues here from Levinas’s insistence that ethics begins in our face-to-face encounters with others and our responsiveness to the other,33 as well as Sartre’s late comments that “essentially, ethics is a matter of one person’s relationship to another” and that “ethical conscience” arises from one’s awareness of always being, to some extent, in the presence of another and conditioned by this sense of being-in-relation with him or her.34 Sartre notes, moreover, that classical ethical systems—whether Aristotle’s or Kant’s—leave unresolved the question of whether one lives ethically all the time. “While having a bite or drinking a glass of wine, does one feel ethical or unethical, or doesn’t it matter?” Can we distinguish between an “ethics of everyday life” and an “ethics of exceptional circumstances”?35
I share Sartre’s view that our sense of the ethical derives only partly from normative maxims, categorical imperatives, or cultural codifications, that it reflects also a deep awareness that our very existence is interwoven with the existence of others and that the reciprocal character of human relations gives rise, from the earliest months of life, to inchoate, conflicted, and diffuse assumptions about fairness, justice, rightness, and goodness. Maurice Merleau-Ponty also espoused this view, speaking of the social as always there, existing “obscurely and as a summons”36—a “region” where our lives “are prepared.”37 Recent psychological research in the field of primary intersubjectivity supports this view of the ethical as foreshadowed in the infant’s initial interactions with the mother. Emphasizing the reciprocity of voice, eye contact, touch, smell, and playful interaction between mother and infant, Ed Tronick speaks of a “collaboration” between infant and parent in regulating interaction and laying down the neurobehavioral foundations of a “dyadic consciousness” that incorporates complex information, experience, and mutual mappings into a relatively coherent whole that functions as a self-regulating system, effectively expanding the consciousness of one person into the consciousness of another.38 Dyadic consciousness begins in the stage of primary intersubjectivity; should an infant be “deprived of the experience of expanding his or her states of consciousness in collaboration with the other . . . this limits the infant’s experience and forces the infant into self-regulatory patterns that eventually compromise the child’s development.”39 In brief, the unresponsiveness of a mother or her lack of responsibility for her baby’s well-being—contrived experimentally by the mother feigning indifference to her infant and adopting a “still face”—violates reciprocity and has an immediate traumatic effect on the infant.40
ETHICS AVANT LA LETTRE
In developing an ethics of the intersubjective, we need a method of study that avoids prejudgments as to what is right and wrong, good and bad, and thus draws us deeply into the complexity of everyday situations. Michael Lambek has coined the term “ordinary ethics” to signal this departure from the Kantian tradition of Western moral thought—in which a priori assumptions about autonomy, agency, virtue, and community refer to particular situations cursorily, anecdotally, or not at all. For Lambek, ethics is “fundamentally a property or function of action rather than (only) of abstract reason.”41 There are echoes here of Veena Das’s argument for a “descent into the ordinary”42 and David Graeber’s claim that “if we really want to understand the moral grounds of economic life, and by extension, human life,” we must start not with cosmologies and worldviews but with “the very small things: the everyday details of social existence, the way we treat our friends, enemies, and children—often with gestures so tiny (passing the salt, bumming a cigarette) that we ordinarily never stop to think about them at all.”43
These gestures toward everyday ethics, and the ways questions of what is right and good figure in almost every human interaction, conversation, and rationalization, effectively reinscribe the role of ethnography as a method for exploring a variety of actual social situations before hazarding generalizations. This is not to say that empirical studies of particular events or lives offer no insights into what may be universal. Rather, by locating the ethical in the field of intersubjective life, we call into question the assumption that existence is a struggle to bring one’s life into alignment with given moral norms or a mere enactment of moral scripts, and become more fascinated by our mundane struggles to decide between competing imperatives or deal with impasses, unbearable situations, moral dilemmas, and double binds.
This was the perspective I developed in my 1982 study of ethics in Kuranko storytelling.44 Almost all Kuranko tales involve journeys between town (sué) and bush (fira). As such, the moral customs (namui or bimba kan), laws (seriye or ton), and chiefly power (mansaye) associated with the town are momentarily placed in abeyance, and the wild ethos of the bush, associated with animals, shape-shifters, djinn, and antinomian possibilities, comes into play. Moreover, Kuranko stories are told at night or in twilight zones that lie on the margins of the workaday waking world. There is a close connection, therefore, between the evocation of antinomian scenarios, states of dreamlike or drowsy consciousness, and the narrative suspension of disbelief. Kuranko tilei (fables, folktales, fictions) are make-believe; they are framed as occurring outside ordinary time and space (wo le yan be la—far-off and long ago); they play with reality and entertain possibilities that lie beyond convention and custom. Typically, these tales begin with a dilemma or disturbance in the ideal order of moral relations: three sons of a chief, all born at the same time and on the same day, all claim the right to succeed their father; an elder brother maltreats his younger brother; a senior cowife exploits a younger cowife; a man betrays the trust of his closest friend; a chief abuses his power or imposes an unjust law on his people; a husband neglects his wife; a love affair jeopardizes a marriage. The ethical quandary lies in how to redress a situation in which there is considerable moral ambiguity, for there are always two sides to every story and several possible ways of restoring order or seeing that justice is done. That is to say, ethical dilemmas are never resolved by simply laying down the law, invoking a moral principle that covers every situation, or passing judgment; the dilemmas require collective discussion, in which people attempt to come up with the best solution possible, given the complex circumstances, even though it is understood that any solution may make matters worse and no one is ever in a position to know the repercussions of his or her actions. By not seeking consensus and suspending dogmatic patterns of thinking, Kuranko storytelling creates ethical ambiguity and inspires listeners to think outside the box.45 Accordingly, virtue is less a matter of achieving or exemplifying goodness than a relative question of doing the best one can, given the limits of the situation and considering the abilities and resources one possesses.
In more recent fieldwork, I have seen how the wider world has become, for young African migrants, a symbolic bush46—a place at once of peril and of transformative possibilities, lying beyond the moral and legal space of the “town”
