Who’s Responsible? EASA 2012 Workshop Convenors: Karolina S. Follis (Lancaster University) Thomas Strong (NUI Maynooth)
Bibliography and Selected Resources on Responsibility These resources have been roughly grouped to represent different, although related currents of inquiry within the social sciences and the humanities into issues of responsibility, accountability, guilt and blame. Each section takes on a set of questions that are explored with reference to specific empirical material or purely theoretically. The list was put together with the participation of the panelists of the ‘Who’s responsible?’ workshop.
Anthropological Genealogies: Forebears The problem of responsibility is one way of looking at the structure of different sociocultural orders. Patterns of accountability and blame can reveal important social values that typify particular times and places: Does a particular society vest responsibility for misfortunes, harms, or well-being in individuals or in groups? Do patterns of blame flow outward to mystical or natural dangers, or do they point inward at fractious social relations or poor moral character? There is a long sociological and anthropological tradition of using notions of responsibility, accountability, and various practices of punishment or restitution associated with these as ways to ‘index’ underlying structures of society.
Maine, Henry. (1861) Ancient Law. Durkheim, Emile (18xx) Division of Labor in Society. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1976 (1937)) Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Douglas, Mary. (1980) Edward Evans-Pritchard. London: Viking. Douglas, Mary. (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge.
Anthropological Genealogies: Contemporary anthropology of morality and ethics A number of anthropologists in recent years have turned to the question of morality in contemporary sociocultural life. Rather than joining the chorus of those who declare this or that act, politics, or social structure moral or immoral, egalitarian or exploitative, anthropologists often bring an ethnographic approach to how morality and ethics work and what they do. They track the norms and forms these phenomena take, and they consider the ways that as sociocultural forms, morality and ethics stitch together, structure, and cross-cut social domains, including for example ‘public’ and ‘private’ or different cultural systems (secular and religious, Christian and non-Christian, and so on). Thus, apart from considering the various concrete and historically-specific ways in which ‘the normative’ shapes politics or social change, anthropologists are also concerned with what constitutes ‘the moral’ in the first place. What kind of phenomena are morality and ethics? How do they work? How do people experience them?
Fassin, Didier (2011) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fassin Didier (2012) A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Faubion, James (2011) An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howell, Signe (1997) The Ethnography of Moralities (EASA monograph). London: Routledge. Robbins, Joel (2004) Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robbins, Joel (2007) Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change. Ethnos 72:293- 314.
Robbins, Joel (2010) On the Pleasures and Dangers of Culpability. Critique of Anthropology 30: 122-128. Zigon, Jarrett 2007. Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities. Anthropological Theory 7:131-150. Zigon, Jarrett (2008) Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Zigon, Jarrett (2010) “HIV is God’s Blessing”: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Anthropological Genealogies: political-legal-medical anthropology These ethnographic accounts engage with the notion of responsibility by exploring the shifting politics of blame and accountability within the empirical realities of complex political transitions, economic change and the replacement of old power structures with new ones. How to locate responsibility for harm and secure retribution, apology and material compensation when old institutions lose relevance? Do new accountability structures emerge as part of global capital flows? If so, what is new about them and what may be their deficits?
Borneman, John (1997) Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Borneman, John (2003) Responsibility after Military Intervention: What is Regime Change? PoLAR 26(1).
Jain, Sarah S. Lochlann (2006) Injury: The Politics of Product Design and Safety Law in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Petryna, Adriana (2002) Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Petryna, Adriana (2009) When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Strathern, Marilyn (2000) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (European Association of Social Anthropologists). London: Routledge.
Ethnography of Corporate Social Responsibility What does it mean for corporations to assume “social responsibility�? Can capitalism be compassionate and business ethical, or are these oxymorons? Is the concept of CSR really an antidote to the social and environmental damages wrought by the expansion of global capitalism? These works explore the practices associated with corporate responsibility and ask what kinds of moralities can markets accommodate.
Benson, Peter and Stuart Kirsch. (2010) Capitalism and the Politics of Resignation. Current Anthropology 51(4):459-486. Benson, Peter and Stuart Kirsch (2010) Corporate Oxymorons. Dialectical Anthropology 34(1):45-48.
Benson, Peter (2011) Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rajak, Dinah (2011). In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shamir, Ronen (2008) The age of responsibilization: on market-embedded morality. Economy and Society 37(1). Welker, Marina (2009) Corporate Security Begins in the Community: Mining, the Corporate Social Responsibility Industry, and Environmental Advocacy in Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 24(1):142-179. Welker, Marina, Damani Partridge, & Rebecca Hardin (2011) Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form. Current Anthropology 52(S3):S3-S16.
Reflexive Anthropology and Ethnographic Responsibility What kind of responsibility do anthropologists and other qualitative social scientists bear in relation to those they study? While some anthropologists of ethics have taken an abstracted and distant stance in relation to the question of the morality of inquiry and the ethics of representation, others have prefered modes of relationship between anthropologist and research subject that are more ‘engaged,’ more attuned to the political repercussions of scholarship, and more in line with notions of advocacy. This is an ongoing and passionate debate in the discipline.
Barth, Frederick (1974) On Responsibility and Humanity: Calling a colleague to account. Current Anthropology 15(1). Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1995) The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology. Current Anthropology 36(3):409-440.
Moral Responsibility in Philosophy How has the notion of responsibility developed within the religious and philosophical traditions of the West? What is the relationship between its juridical and moral aspects and between the concepts of responsibility and free will? What would be the principles of an ethics of responsibility in the post-totalitarian age?
Arendt, Hannah (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking. Buber, Martin (1970). I and Thou. New York: Scribner. Derrida, Jacques (1995). The gift of death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fischer, John Martin (1999) Recent Work on Moral Responsibility. Ethics 110(1): 93–139. Levinas, E. (2003) Humanism of the Other, trans. N. Poller, with an introduction by R.A. Cohen, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press Jonas, H. (1984) The imperative of responsibility. In search of an ethics for the technological age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press McKeon, Richard (1957) The Development and Concept of Responsibility. Revue International de Philosophie 11(39):3-32. {Kelty, Chris (2008) Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur. ARC Working Paper no. 12.} Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1997). On the genealogy of morals: a polemic: by way of clarification and supplement to my last book, Beyond good and evil. The world’s classics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul (1995) The Concept of Responsibility: An Essay in Semantic Analysis,’ in The Just, tr. David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 11-36. Weber, Max (2004). The Vocation Lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Collective Responsibility and Political Memory Does collective responsibility exist? If so, how is it established and what are its limits? From the the Holocaust and more recent mass atrocities to industrialized slaughter and abuses of the war on terror, the questions of guilt and innocence, complicity in violence and duty to intervene have been explored from a variety of historical, sociological and ethnographic perspectives. These debates often lead to a new question: how to settle collective memory and relationships in the present when ascribing responsibility for acts perpetrated in the past remains a fraught and contested process?
Arendt, Hannah (1987) ‘Collective Responsibility’, in James W. Bernauer (ed.), Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt (Boston, Hingham, MA: Martinus Nijhoff): 43–50. (Response to Feinberg 1968) Bauman, Z. (2000) Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Elison, Julie, 1996. A Short History of Liberal Guilt. Critical Inquiry 2(2):344-71. Feinberg, Joel (1968) Collective Responsibility. Journal of Philosophy 65(21): 674–88.
French, Peter A. (1972) Individual and Collective Responsibility: Massacre at My Lai. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Pub. Co. Goldhagen, Daniel J. (1997) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage. Gross, J.T. (2001) Neighbors: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pachirat, Timothy (2011) Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven: Yale University Press. (http://boingboing.net/2012/03/08/working-undercover-in-a-slaugh.html) Polonsky, Antony & J. B. Michlic (2003) The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Santner, Eric (1993) Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Udombana, N. (2005) “When neutrality is a sin: The Darfur Crisis and the Crisis of Humanitarian Intervention in Sudan” Human Rights Quarterly 27, 1147-1199.
Sociology of Risk We appear to live in an era defined by fear of new risks, often those of a technological nature. Debates about global warming, nuclear power, biomedical manipulation of life itself, financial instruments/transactions of enormous complexity, and so on typify our current politics. How do we manage the risks associated with these technologies? Indeed, how do we even come to know them? Critics claim that this ‘risk society’ demands a new politics transcending the older divisions of industrial society. Right across the discourse of risk, questions of responsibility hover and reverberate. Where before it seemed that the dangers people faced were
attributable to unseen forces, including mystical ones, ‘today’ we hold ourselves responsible for our (mis)fortunes. Responsibility and risk are tightly intertwined as themes that obsess our contemporary zeitgeist.
Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New York: Sage Publications. Giddens, Anthony (1991) The Consequences of Modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Giddens, Anthony (1999) Risk and Responsibility. Modern Law Review 62(1): 1-10. Luhmann, Niklas (2005) Risk: A Sociological Theory. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Lupton, Deborah (1999) Risk. London: Routledge. Strydom, Piet (1999) The Challenge of Responsibility for Sociology. Current Sociology 47(3): 65–82.
Foucault, Governmentality, and the Responsible Subject While notions of collective responsibility circulate in consequential ways, it is also true that ‘personal responsibility’ has become a touchstone for contemporary ways of thinking about how best to live together. For some, invocations of ‘personal responsibility’ indicate a radical reorganization of society, shifting responsibility for well-being from the state to the individual, and licensing the ‘death of the social’ through the putative benefits of market-oriented solutions to social problems. At the same time, some point out that ‘personal responsibility’ indicates a newly active relationship between citizen and society: where before, people may have passively received the dictates of experts and authorities, today they actively educate
themselves and agitate for reform, benefits, and so on. Thus, as in the long tradition of the sociology of morality, contemporary critical analysis of neoliberalism shows how invocations of ‘responsibility’ expose larger moral visions for society and the underlying structures that secure (or undermine) them. Empirical work continues to track ways in which the relationship between collective and personal forms of responsibility are negotiated, and the ways in which we enact or perform responsibility for ourselves and various others. Bauman, Zygmunt (2001) The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel (1976) The History of Sexuality Volume 1. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel (2008) Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79, Security, Territory and Population. London: Palgrave. Miller, Peter and Nikolas Rose (2008) Governing the Present: administering economic, social and personal life. Cambridge: Polity Press. O’Malley, Pat (1996) ‘Risk and Responsibility’, in A. Barry, T. Osborne & N.S. Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 189–208. Rose, Nikolas (2008) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
‘Mainstream’ Political Debate Today --Essays and articles on ‘personal responsibility’- conservatism --Discourses of responsible consumption, green lifestyles, everyday environmentalism --Collective guilt debates on the crisis in Ireland --The responsibilities and irresponsibilities of activism, (see e.g. the Kony 2012 debate, as discussed by Teju Cole: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-saviorindustrial-complex/254843/ ) --Morality and neuroscience: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/may/29/will-neuroscience-changecriminal-justice
Creative Work Murakami, Haruki. (1997) The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. New York: Knopf. (http://www.exorcising-ghosts.co.uk/windupbird.html) Schlink, Bernard (1997 (1995)) The Reader. New York: Vintage Books.