The Ethnography of Moralities

Signe Howell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134785018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Focusing on the social construction of morality, The Ethnography of Moralities discusses a topic which is complex but central to the study and nature of anthropology. With the recent shift towards an interest in indigenous notions of self and personhood, questions pertaining to the moral and ethical origins of beliefs relating to human rights become increasingly relevant.
Some of the questions that the contributors address are:
* How is the ethical knowledge grounded?
* Which social domains most profoundly articulate moral values and which are most affected?
* Who defines and who enforces what is right and wrong?
* What constitutes an ethical breach?
Suggested answers are made with reference to empirical material so that the complexities and varieties of theoretical and methodological issues are highlighted. They are also discussed with reference to a wide array of ethnographic studies from Argentina, Mongolia, Melanesia, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Britain and The Old Testament.

Part I
Discourses on morality

Chapter 1
Exemplars and rules
Aspects of the discourse of moralities in Mongolia

Caroline Humphrey

It is not an immediately easy task to locate ‘morality’ in Mongolian culture. There is no single term in Mongol that corresponds with the European concept, which itself is complex even in everyday usage. I shall adopt a base-line understanding of the word ‘morality’ in this paper, referring to the evaluation of conduct in relation to esteemed or despised human qualities. The combination of terms used by the Mongols to translate the European idea, yos surtakhuun, seems to be of rather recent origin. I shall argue that each of these two terms does, however, denote an area of moral activity which is important in Mongolian culture. Yos means the commonly accepted rules of order, reason and custom, while surtakhuun (literally ‘those things that have been taught’) refers to personal ethics. The two are not unconnected, but I shall argue that, as practices of evaluating conduct, they work in different ways. Through living in Mongolia and talking with Mongols I became aware that, while they of course do have rules, for them the more important arena of morality appears in the relation between persons and exemplars or precedents, that is the general sphere of surtakhuun. The concern here is with cultivation of the self as a moral subject in relation to individually chosen ideals. Morality in this sense is not simply the affirmation of existing cultural ways of life; there needs to be a social space for deliberation about ways of life, amid the pressures that circumscribe the instantiation of personal ideals. The suggestion here is that this is successfully achieved primarily in the discourse of exemplars, despite the fact that Communist governments have attempted to hijack exemplary precedents to their own ends. The sophistication of the relational space constructed in the indigenous discourse of exemplars has enabled Mongols to withstand simplistic party-inspired variants, as will be described later in the paper.

In their emphasis on the exemplar-focused way of thinking about morality, the Mongols can be aligned in a very general way with the Chinese, for whom, especially in Confucian traditions, a prominent discourse of historical exemplars counteracts the learning of right conduct through performing ritual and etiquette. The contrast that I have drawn emerged from considering morality in Mongolia, and I subsequently became aware from the work of Foucault that a distinction somewhat like it could be seen even more broadly as characteristic of morality in general. Foucault (1987:29) writes: ‘Every morality, in the broad sense, comprises the two elements… codes of behaviour and forms of subjectivation’ (by the latter term he refers to moral practices of the self).¹ Foucault likewise suggests that moralities of different societies will vary in their emphasis on one or another of these modes. Whether it is right to divide moralities in general in this way may be a matter of debate, but it does seem significant that in this case a distinction arising from native categories meets theory arrived at on a different basis and in a different context. Thus what this paper attempts is an initial discussion of the ways in which the unfamiliar moral world of the Mongols can be understood, in the hope that this may illuminate the constructions of morality more generally.

To give an idea of what I mean by an exemplar, I shall immediately describe one such case. A Mongolian friend of mine, living in Inner Mongolia, which is a large province of China, had fallen in love. The object of his affections was a young Chinese girl from a very influential family. But the question of marriage with her was a moral dilemma for him. The Mongols in this region are culturally hard-pressed, outnumbered ten to one by a huge population of Chinese, and in danger of losing their language and identity. To marry a Chinese, especially someone from an important family, is not only to take the radical step of betraying one’s ancestors, of extinguishing the possibility of contributing to the Mongol nation by having ‘pure Mongol’ descendants, but is also a step into the camp of those—in some sense contemptible collaborators—who ‘side with the Chinese’ and thereby advance their careers. However, in the end, my friend decided to marry the girl, and taking this decision he thought to himself, ‘The great Emperor Chingghis Khaan, in his strategy for Mongol greatness, married princesses of different nationalities.’ And he told me that he thought he could, by thinking of his marriage in this light, become a better person, and overcome in himself the belittling divisiveness of ethnic exclusivity.

I suggest that using an ideal exemplar like this can be contrasted with the moral issues raised by following rules. The matter is not simple, however, as the idea of ‘rules’ is used in several senses by anthropologists and philosophers. Writing of social rules in general, Wittgenstein noted how they could in principle, in the abstract as it were, always be misunderstood, and he stressed the unarticulated, perhaps even unarticulable, nature of the understanding necessary to follow rules or directions: ‘“Obeying a rule” is a practice’, he wrote (Wittgenstein 1973:202), and ‘My reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reason’ (Wittgenstein 1973:211). If Kripke interprets this to mean that the background knowledge necessary to follow a rule consists of de facto links, such that we are conditioned to react in this way, Taylor (1993:47–48) argues against this that the background is an understanding, a ‘grasp on things that, although unarticulated, may allow us to formulate reasons and explanations when challenged’.² Taylor goes on to question the supposition that rules are always explicit representations, or rather, he writes that it does not matter much whether they are or not. In either case, what we are dealing with is understanding located in practices and largely unexpressed.

This understanding is more fundamental [than formulated representations] in two ways: first, it is always there, whereas sometimes we frame representations and sometimes we do not; and, second, the representations we do make are only comprehensible against the background provided by this inarticulate understanding…. Rather than representations being the primary locus of our understanding, they are similarly islands in the sea of our unformulated practical grasp on the world.

(Taylor 1993:50)

Taylor uses Bourdieu’s idea of habitus to argue that it is an intellectualist mistake to see consciously laid-down rulings as the effective factor in ‘following rules’. This is a mistake equivalent to ignoring the difference between a two-dimensional map of a terrain and our situated, embodied familiarity with the land which allows us to make out way around it.

The problem with such an argument as regards morality, however, is that it seems resigned to the givenness of social structures and inherited practices (a point to which I shall return). Furthermore, this particular discussion of Taylor’s makes no contribution to the problem of the explicit rulings of political powers which might violate ordinary people’s ways of life, nor to that of the wider forces of social change or domination that operate behind the backs of the followers of rules. In effect Taylor is using Bourdieu’s argument against the distortion created by anthropologists’ models, presented to readers as ‘rules’ which ‘they’, the studied people, follow, to slip sideways into the idea that it makes little difference whether indigenous moral ideas are expressed overtly or not, and hence whether they are discussable by the people or not. But the effect of this is to glide past Bourdieu’s discussion of power (let alone that of Foucault or Habermas).

At first sight, however, an approach like that suggested by Taylor might seem appropriate for the case of the Mongols. They make a distinction between rules as socially accepted customs (yos, zanshil) and as edicts (zarlig) of temporal rulers. However, there is a certain cosmological elision between the two, which suggests that both can be taken by Mongols to be largely concerned with power, and there seems to be a sense in which both are thereby removed from the sphere of morality as conceived by the Mongols. From the seventeenth until the early twentieth century the successive edicts through the centuries of khans or feudal rulers curiously took the form of specifying the different penalties applied to various social categories for not observing them. Rather than saying ‘It is forbidden to steal’, such a law would state that if a noble of suchand-such a rank steals horses he must repay X times the number, if a commoner steals horses he must repay Y times the number, and so forth. Rulers regularly let off people from such penalties on account of some counterbalancing positive service they had performed (Jagchid 1988:58). This then was a world of temporal and historical give-and-take, an arena of contingent actions, with very little accent on general values of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

The same can be said, perhaps more controversially, about religious customs (yos, zanshil) in the context of shamanism and the respect paid to objects in nature. Accepted rules such as ‘You must not wash in rivers’ contain some idea of polluting flowing water, but even here the ways that Mongols talk about this show that the action can be considered as much dangerous as wrong. If you pollute the water, the river spirit will take revenge and punish you, so it is better not do it; or alternatively, people might say that you would be lucky to get away with it. The spirits of nature, existing in trees, mountains, rivers, springs, etc., are known as ezen (lord, proprietor). This is the same term as that used for temporal rulers, ranging from the Bogd Ezen Khaan (the Manchu Emperor) and in later times, more colloquially, Communist rulers, to local chiefs, officials and even household heads.

What is unclear is whether all these rulers are understood to have the right to rule, thus delineating a moral universe, or whether the fact of there being rulers is seen simply as part of the general, amoral inequality of the way things are. It seems to me that both understandings are available in Mongol culture. Let us look first at the idea that there is a moral sense of the rightness of the order of power. In the allusive way that Mongols often talk about such matters I have to admit that in some respects they do seem to bear out Taylor’s idea of following rules based on a background understanding that is principally embodied rather than rationalized. An example of this is the following saying, which alludes to the order of power as intrinsically ranked:

If there are two people one of them is senior If there is one person his hat is senior

(Gaadamba and Tserensodnom 1967:8)

One might imagine this to be ironic, were it not for the fact that Mongolians do in fact pay respect to hats—the hat being the material objectification of the idea of ‘above humanity’ in the vertical cosmology that places the person under heaven. In the seventeenth-century chronicle Altan Tobchi we read:

Holy Chingghis Khaan spoke in reverence to Heaven on high [the sky], ‘You have made me, by means of your own government, so powerful that there is no-one other than I who is powerful on the face of the earth. Only my hat is above me.’ So saying, he took off his hat, placed it on the seat of honour, prostrated himself before it, and drank wine that day until he was very hot. Thus did Chingghis speak to his brothers and sons, after granting them subject people, instructing them (zarlig bolugsan) on the support of nations and the gist of government in summary.

(Okada 1993:231–232)

This passage establishes precisely that continuity between human and ‘natural’ powers alluded to above, and shows how the sense of ‘above’ is physically expressed in Chingghis’s prostrations. The language used (‘holy’, ‘respectfully’, ‘honour’) indicates an implicit moral evaluation. More equivocal, however, is the following saying:

Man follows customary rules [yos]
[As] dog follows bone

(Gaadamba and Tserensodnom 1967:9)

This saying plays with the two meanings of ‘follow’, which, in Mongolian even more clearly than in English, combine ‘submission’ with ‘going after’. The sense here is perhaps ironic, since it seems to mock people in the enjoyment and satisfaction that they take in following rules. The analogy is with an ‘embodied’ habitus so deep that it is virtually an instinct, and the sense is conveyed—since people, after all, are not dogs—that things should not be this way. There should be reasons for following rules; or, to put this another way, as some Mongols have explained to me, the idea of ‘rules’ (yos) contains the idea of reasons. This sense of yos appears, for example, in the sentence, ‘Ene xün yosoor xeldeg xün’ (This person gives reasons for what he says). Yos, in this way of thinking, are not simply there to be followed unconditionally, but have to be learned, together with their reasons. The process of learning implies acquiring an explicit rational understanding which can be argued for and debated. In a Buddhist religious context this is particularly developed in nom xeleltsex, the regular disputations about sacred texts by lamas learning them. I was told that learning yos in this sense implies discovering and explaining the intrinsic patterns of the way that things ideally are, providing one’s understanding of these patterns as reasons in one’s argument. To illustrate this idea indirectly I was given an example, namely the intricate grain of wood, which should be studied before one cuts it, and which gives a reason for cutting it in a certain way.

The complexity of the relations between the various ideas briefly outlined here runs against any orientalist tendency to construct Mongols simply as ‘despots’ on the one hand, or thoughtless followers of prevailing political hierarchies on the other. Historically it seems that the value of ‘reasonableness’ as applied to the cases of actual rulings was mostly forced negatively into the open by the abuses of power by rulers. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were a number of petitions of grievances submitted by serfs about the intolerable activities of local lords, presented to higher princes in the hope that the rules would be correctly applied from the senior level. Most of these were complaints about local rulers’ demands for payments or services in the guise of legitimate taxation when they were in fact used to cover the ruler’s personal debts. ‘Reasonableness’ in these practical documents refers to the justification of actions in terms of publicly well-known norms of taxation and the separation of state (‘official’) business from that of the princes acting as private persons. In the midst of the flow of detail about numbers of sheep and ounces of silver, moral ideas like ‘justice’, ‘right’, ‘loyalty’ and ‘truth’ occasionally make their appearance:

When we spoke to Jayisang [an official] Shagdar about the tax I was the only one who argued with him. People who have good connections with Jayisang Shagdar would never complain about him. Is this oppression of the humble people supposed to be only my concern? In spite of the injustice of the penalty inflicted on me because I protected the loyal people, I believe I did right, didn’t I? Even though I was dismissed from my office, I am still a citizen of the district. I dare to say that our people cannot stand it any longer if the taxes remain this way. The people suffer as much as I do, but they are afraid to say anything. I am inflamed with indignation and must make this accusation and let the truth be known at any risk, even if it costs me my head. Therefore, I beg of you my great lords and honourable superiors, to give me orders and I will follow them.

(Rashidondog and Veit 1975:9)

However, despite this evidence that moral arguments surfaced in public life, it still seems to me that this was not the main arena of morality for the Mongols. My reasons for this conclusion require referring again to ideas held in the past which nevertheless still have salience today. For one thing, the public arena revealed by some of the eighteenth- to early twentieth-century petitions of grievances as a space for disagreement about values (what it is to be just, for example) could shrink to something virtually devoid of moral content if people simply reckoned that rules should be followed and the ‘dogs following bones’ attitude prevailed. In most of the documents individuals simply compared conduct to a set of unquestioned rules. For another, even if questions of justice, right, etc., were sometimes raised, such discussions were constantly undercut by another simultaneously available view which saw powers as inevitably pitted against one another. In this view the notion of a morally ordered universe was virtually absent. In this case it was not that social institutions and laws themselves were regarded as immutable. On the contrary, they could be seen as passing affairs. However, there always would be rulings of some kind, and this was because the exercise of power of differently situated beings, with their own necessities for reproducing their existence, was seen as part of nature (the way things are). Thus to summarize, the very same action, a ruler’s excess, could be seen in moral terms, but it could alternatively be seen as both inevitable and arbitrary. The world might be peopled by seniors and juniors, and ‘rightly so’, but this idea was countered by another which acknowledged that any kind of existence had its own force of being, and that each of these existent beings would exercise its own (‘amoral’, we could say) conflictual power. Among human beings this could appear as ‘rebelliousness’ and ‘punish...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Ethnography of Moralities
• European Association of Social Anthropologists
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Discourses on Morality
• Part II: The Gendering of Moralities