the space hitherto associated with bush spirits and the ancestral dead. Why should Africans languish in poverty when the Western world enjoys such abundance? Will a young woman’s desire to marry for love jeopardize interfamily relations based on arranged marriage? How one can reconcile going abroad in search of one’s fortune when this means losing touch with one’s homeland and possibly neglecting one’s obligations to family back home? By what right do politicians amass wealth for themselves and neglect the welfare of ordinary people?47
Methodologically, then, an anthropology of ethics seeks to locate ethics within the social—without, however, reifying society, religion, and morality or regarding them as sui generis phenomena. As Fasching, Dechant, and Lantigua put it, “The study of ethics must be more than an ‘objective’ survey of abstract theories. . . . The primary and most persuasive ways religious traditions shape ethical behavior are through storytelling and spiritual practices.”48 This implies a focus on “the life stories of [individuals] who have wrestled with questions of justice, non-violence, and ecological well-being in an age of racism, sexism, religious prejudice, nationalism, colonialism, terrorism, and nuclear war.”49 Whereas Fasching, Dechant, and Lantigua emphasize the life stories of “extraordinary persons” like Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, my focus is on the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, all migrants, whose experiences bring into sharp relief the ethical quandaries, qualms, and questions that all human beings encounter in the course of their lives, regardless of their religious, ethnic, cultural, or class identities. To capture this protoethical sense of rightness or goodness, we need to be especially attentive to the ontological metaphors with which people capture a sense of what is ethically at stake for them in any given situation. Such metaphors remind us that an ethical sensibility inheres in our relations with others (mitwelt) as well as our relationship to the objective environment (umwelt). Just as the presence of others brings us continually back to ourselves, so the architecture of the world and the things we touch, taste, see, smell, and hear offer a fund of images with which to objectify and articulate our inchoate sense of the right, the true, and the good. People in many societies identify straightness with virtue and crookedness with vice, or invoke images of physical symmetry in expressing the idea of reciprocity (being all square, or fair and square). And commonplace allusions to true lines, fine work, good ideas, upright posture, sweet tastes, or harmonious sound suggest that ethical ideals are never plucked out of thin air but originate in our quotidian, bodily, and practical experience of being-in-the-world.50
Emmanuel
I LIVED AND WORKED IN COPENHAGEN, Denmark, for six years. After moving to the United States in 2005, I returned to Denmark every year to give talks, see old friends, and attend the PhD defenses of my former students.
When Susanne Bregnbaek successfully defended her doctoral thesis in the fall of 2010, I was invited to her apartment in Christianshavn to celebrate the rite of passage with family and friends. Curiously enough, Susanne’s thesis, though based on fieldwork in Beijing, resonated with a conversation I would have later that evening with Emmanuel Mulamila, a Ugandan who was married to one of Susanne’s closest friends. Susanne had written at length of an ethical dilemma experienced by many tertiary students in Beijing, who were torn between a desire for self-realization and family pressures to take care of elderly parents or government pressures to contribute to the well-being of the nation. This conflict between self-sacrifice and self-actualization weighed so heavily on the minds of many young Chinese students that some chose suicide as the only way of freeing themselves from the double bind.
Susanne’s friend Nanna had also been a student of mine at Copenhagen University, and had met Emmanuel in 2002 while doing fieldwork in Uganda. After introducing me to Emmanuel, Nanna explained that he had been reluctant to accompany her to Susanne’s graduation party. His situation was depressing, and he did not go out much. Emmanuel was thirty-nine. After marrying and securing a work permit in 2003, he completed an eighteen-month course in Danish language and culture, followed by a second degree, in applied economics and finance, at the Copenhagen Business School. But the only work he had been able to find was as a tour guide in the summer of 2004 and, more recently, a night job sorting mail in the central post office. It wasn’t only the hypercritical rejection letters from potential employers that had worn him down; it was the dispiriting effect of having to negotiate ever-changing state decrees and regulations governing aliens and the unemployed. As Emmanuel described to me the Kafkaesque rigmarole that circumscribed his life, I found it easy to understand his bitterness. “I have given up on ever getting a job that matches my qualifications. I have lost my self-worth. I am at the end of the rope, and there seems to be more pressure now than ever from the government in regard to immigrants getting and staying in jobs. I have become completely demoralized.”
I was drawn to Emmanuel and deeply moved by his story. I said I wished I could help in some way. I wanted to suggest that I apply for research funds, offer him a stipend, and publish his story, but I did not wish to seem opportunistic or voyeuristic. I said I would like to keep in touch and left it at that.
Over the next six months, I drafted and submitted an application for a grant to cover the costs of fieldwork among African migrants in three European cities—Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and London. When my application was rejected on the grounds that it was “thinly conceptualized,” lacked any “specific research questions,” and failed “to engage sufficiently with the extensive existing anthropological literature of migration from Africa,” I was thrown, for despite repeated efforts I had not succeeded in getting an anthropological research grant for thirty years. However, I consoled myself that my experiences of negotiating the world of professional anthropology brought me closer to Emmanuel’s experiences of trying to find a way through the labyrinth of a society in which he felt himself to be a persona non grata.
In late August 2011, I traveled to Denmark for yet another PhD defense, this time at Aarhus. My modest honorarium allowed me to spend a weekend in Copenhagen, where I was determined to spend as much time as possible with Emmanuel and Nanna.
When I visited their apartment on Smallegade, I found Emmanuel in an upbeat mood. “We hardly recognize him,” Nanna said, laughing. “We’re only now getting used to the old Emmanuel again.” Emmanuel explained that he had recently found work. It was unpaid and probationary, but there was a very real probability that if he did well the position would be made permanent.
I spent that Saturday with Emmanuel, Nanna, and Alice Maria, their three-year-old daughter, enjoying their company and getting acquainted. Emmanuel cooked Ugandan food—rice with vegetables and peanut sauce. Nanna made cinnamon rolls, which we ate with cups of herbal tea. I talked about my experiences in Sierra Leone and with Kuranko friends in London. And that evening, as I prepared to return to my lodgings, I felt comfortable asking Emmanuel if he had thought more about my suggestion that we record his story and explore ways of publishing it. Emmanuel agreed without hesitation, and when I turned up at his apartment the following morning with a borrowed digital recorder, we began work immediately, sitting at the kitchen table while Nanna and Alice Maria read books, watched TV, or did jigsaw puzzles in the adjacent room.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
Every biography entails some history. Events that occurred before one was born or in a faraway country may shape one’s destiny as much as more immediate events that one had a hand in shaping. This was immediately evident as Emmanuel began recounting his story.
He was born on 23 September 1971, in Mbale, his mother’s hometown in eastern Uganda. Had custom determined events, Emmanuel’s mother would have been living in her husband’s place, and her son would have been born and raised among his father’s kin. But Emmanuel’s father was living in Tanzania, where he had a job in the Department of Agriculture of the East African Community (EAC), an intergovernmental organization comprising the five East African countries of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. After returning to Uganda for the birth of his second-born, Emmanuel’s father decided that the family should return with him to Tanzania. When the EAC collapsed
