Excerpts from James Fernandez: Rhetoric in the moral order
Reinvigorating rhetoric and poetics in anthropology
…..Let us begin, in any event, with some intercommunicating clusters and with attempts in anthropology in the late sixties and seventies of the last century to attention in our discipline to matters of and to their relation to moral order. This, at least, was an interest of a group of us expressed in a foundational, for us, session on Metaphor held at the 1971 American Anthropological meetings in San Diego. One of the most attentive members of the audience in that now far off session and sharpest questioners was Victor Turner. Not so long after, in 1974 he published his Dramas Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, at Cornell Press, while, the ambiguities of clustering being what they are the group of us who had organized the session had to wait until 1977 to find a publisher and to bring out our papers with Penn Press under the editorship of David Sapir and Christopher Crocker and with the title The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric. (Penn Press). The plans for this particular session as I recall were laid with Chris Crocker in the spring of 1969 in discussions at Duke University where I offered a paper on "Metaphor Theory" and perhaps even earlier when David Sapir and I had drinks together at various annual meetings of the mid to late sixties of the American Anthropological Association and talked about the challenge to anthropological interpretation and understanding of 'subtle' and 'revitalized' words in the communication and 'playing out' of culture. I don't want to pretend that these interests sprung whole cloth and pristine from our brows, that we were the only cluster then at work, or that we were unaffected by other circumstances than the important one of just having returned from the field and struggling with our field notes. I for one had been much affected by Kenneth Burke, by Ogden and Richards in college and by Roman Jacobsen and Levi- Strauss in Graduate school. And of course, the late sixties were times were alive with revolutionary and inter-generational accusatory and revitalizing rhetoric. …
That we certainly had the role of rhetoric in culture very much in mind as seen in the sub-title of our collection, though we largely concentrated our attention on the constitutive and persuasive power of the tropes in social action and hardly upon the full panoply of oratorical techniques and training that Europeans inherit from the Ancients; the declamatory disciplines of the classical world, which to a considerable degree constituted one of the dominating and consolidating concerns of mental training for the practice of public culture, applied Bildung as it were, among the patrician classes and their progeny in the intellectual life of antiquity. That Greco-Roman Empire wide consolidation of minds by dedication to rhetorical training and rhetorical practice in the use of the topos might well be a consolidation which a major conference like this sponsored by a multi national corporation like Volkswagen should have in mind as well. At this time of building a European identity in place of the ethnocentrisms that have been such a torment to Old Europe over so many centuries we cannot forget E.R Curtius' hope, an exercise of both the Intellectual and the Moral Imagination I think we might say, to revitalize the cultural unity of Europe, lost in the Reformation, through the heritage of Greco Latin rhetoric. A major European Conference on Rhetoric/Culture may itself be understood as making a rhetorical statement about the cultural identity of Europe. Indeed, as communication or mis-communication is the nexus of all concord or discord and resultant cooperation and collaboration (or their refusal) in the construction and maintenance of culture the understanding of the shaping of that communication whether for persuasive or actionable ends, in the light of the ancient European interest in that understanding, might well, indeed, be a basis, in this time of a new but uncertain common currency (in the various senses of the word to include the currencies of talk and writing as well as of monetary exchange) , by which to recapture a more coherent European past and make it a palpable present.
But, of course those of us who sought to energize the study of metaphor and revitalize the approach to ritual at the turn of the nineteen seventies had no such ambitious geo-politics of communicative practice in mind. To begin with, and perhaps to end with, we were all fundamentally ethnographers coming off extended field trips of several years duration at least, with abundant field texts describing situations which we had actually witnessed or participated in and where persuasive powers were at work and which we were desirous of understanding better. Secondary ethnocentrism being what it is we felt a strong allegiance , not to say 'moral obligation', to these texts and the people that had generated them. We were committed to more adequate interpretation while at the same time being relative striplings in the discipline we were anxious to find, at once, an Archimedean point by which we might both leverage our careers and the discipline itself to greater purchase upon our materials and, in the end, more meaningful methods. This notion of meaning was not altogether free of the moral implications of studying others in ways more meaningful to them. We may not have fully appreciated at that point, I think, the degree to which the arguments we were seeking to make about master metaphors and their supportive and derivative structures were part of a general move to get down from Archimedean postures and to recognize that any point of purchase we might achieve in any act of anthropological understanding was inevitably perspectival and very probably poetic. The point, as it came to be articulated, and it later came to be articulated with particular pungency and learned subtlety, is that one wanted to avoid buying into the exploitation of master narratives and 'final vocabularies', as they came to be called. One wanted to avoid self-fulfilling and self-arrogating explanatory schemes. The accompanying loss of authority that such hesitancy and caution in the self-sufficiency of our explanations was nailed down smartly by apologists for our discipline in the eighties. The consequence of this shift in authoritative postures, Archimedean or other wise, didn't make our tropological approaches, or anthropology itself, any less interesting and important to us, of course, just less pretentious. It doesn't make it less important because the rhetorical dynamics by which conviction is gained in social life, other than in anthropology or even within the discipline itself, by the use of language becomes, thereby, the very center of our interest.
To be sure there had been a long history of seeking to substitute an attention to the constituents of effect and affect, that is to say of conviction, in communicative action for the declining value of religious conviction in modern thought, to develop, that is, a moral philosophy for religious commandment, or perhaps an understanding of the dynamics of conviction and commandment as replacement for the declining luster of the real thing. This was seen early in Francis Bacon whose own definition of and dedication to scientific method carried him beyond the constraints, bound in revelation, in religious conviction to an interest in the convictions themselves, that is to say an interest in moral philosophy. This is seen particularly among the Moral Philosophers of the 18th century, Hume, Smith, Ferguson etc. and their inquiry into human nature, its propensities and possibilities, an inquiry that was conceived of under the rubric of moral philosophy, and more particularly as the study of the dynamic of the moral sentiments, the play of feelings of antipathy and sympathy in society. From Bacon on down moral philosophy was pronouncedly interested in the role of rhetoric in exciting or depressing the moral sentiments. I am not sure that in the seventies we would have characterized our interests in the place of metaphor in social rhetoric as being encompassed by the phrase 'moral philosophy' although that is what I am suggesting here that it is!
Having now held my listeners feet to the fire Bor lingering embers -- of precedence, that is, of our past commitments to the study of the figurative facets of rhetoric force, I would now like to take up the topic of the moral sentiments. I do this at some risk because the whole issue of morality and the moral has long dwelled under a cloud in the social sciences as at once too philosophical and too reminiscent of the antiquated atmosphere of conviction propagated in sacred societies from which the Enlightenment had escaped. But we don't have to necessarily espouse a specific morality while being interested in the rhetoric of morality and moral order. In particular I want to address the intertwining of the moral imagination and the moral order….
Beidelman' subtle ethnography of rhetoric culture
……Beidelman takes as his task that of teasing apart the complexities of these narratives and the way they confront the dilemmas, contradictions and ambiguities of social life so as to aid people in their comportment. Of course that aid is itself most often set out in quite ambiguous terms. That is to say while these folk narratives provide characters with whose thoughts and actions the audience can empathize, sympathize or reject just as often the thoughts and actions of the heros, villains or fools portrayed offer no easy polar or oppositional choices and, in fact and in part, excite the moral imagination by subverting any direct and ready application of moral principle. They thus cultivate a sense of the challenging ambiguity of everyday life. Indeed, one might argue (Karp in Beidelman: 1993: ii) that Beidelman's work focuses not on successful moral practice but on subversion and failure and blight. In respect to the straightforwardness of moral conduct the narratives and statements of belief he has elicited focus on the 'pathos'as the author says and not upon the 'ethos' of everyday life. Focusing on these materials, the author seeks to reveal the real challenge to the moral imagination.
In any event it is in this narrated lore that the anthropologist has most direct access to the images by which cosmologies are both constructed and criticized. They are a prime if not the best material and means by which an anthropologist's own imagination can be guided in his or her interpretations. For it is a part of the maturity of Beidelman's judgement that the anthropologist's own interpretations, confronted by the ultimately unresolvable contradictions of social life, are also an exercise of the moral imagination! (Ibid: Chapter 1). In respect to the 'Moral Space' of the House and the bodily etiquette appropriate to it, Chapter 4, 'Moral Space: the House, Settlements and Body Etiquette', the author points up the tensions between the conduct appropriate to the private intimacies of the house and public obligations. At the same time he points up the importance and challenge of these private conducts to the individuals= and families= sense of its public moral identity. In Chapters 10. (Speculation about the Social Order: Stories and Society) and 11. (Humans and Animals: Stories and Subversion) Beidelman focuses on story telling not as charters for right action but as explorations of the problems of right conduct, explorations usually provoked by subversive behavior in which, for example, sexual etiquette and morally respectful relations between generations, siblings, and brothers and sisters is violated. For in the end Kaguru life, like life in any culture, has many puzzling features not susceptible to an easy moral casuistry. For Kaguru, particularly, it is 'the puzzle of matrilineality' where children must learn to love and respect their mother's brother more than the father that engendered them. And the father himself finds his love for his offspring subverted by the claims upon them of his brother-in-law.
There are two methodological, which is to say analytic, issues that Beidelman confronts: 1. the evocation of the emotions through the moral imagination and 2. the interlinkage of elements within the imagination to the terrain of social action. There is almost always an emotional charge as the proverbial wisdom of lore and story is brought forth into social life for meditation and comment. Proverbs, themselves, for example, are often introduced during heightened moments of argument and contribute, thus to the agonizing even agonistic atmosphere of these moments. And tales myths and legends heighten awareness in their presentation of a panoply of characters which are provocative of sympathy and antipathy in any case empathy positive or negative. The emotions aroused by these presentations of imagined comportments and meditations upon them are influential, one deduces, in conditioning if not directing actual comportment in the extent social world. They are effective in stimulating thought about the moral order if not commitment to just the right behaviors that can instantiate that order!
Very central to the power of these narratives is the fusing of different domains of experience accomplished by metaphor, their most central rhetorical device. Though Beidelman does not, to any great degree, enter into an analysis of the systematicity of these linkages he seems to posit in the notion of 'evocation' and, with virtually a nuclear reaction model in mind, a release of affect and feeling from the very act of linkage itself. But an analytic systematics of narrative or of tropological analysis is not a dominant or even an especially salient concern of this ethnographer and his ethnography whose focus is on the details of ethnographic interpretation itself, which is to say, on the challenge of understanding how informants in their folklore activate often by subversion and make use of the moral imagination in making their way through, for the ethnographer, the obvious puzzling complexities of the social order. Powerful simplicities of interpretation, if any simplicities are to be found beyond these complexities, are inevitably strained by the very fine and very thick filter of social life and social experience. They run up against a moral imagination challenged by the subversiveness of that life evoked if not celebrated in local lore and narrative …..
Critique of the cognitivists
An ethnography of the Kaguru kind which seeks to be true to its subject matter is caught up almost from the first moment in the complexity of lived interaction both that observed and testified to by informants and that experienced, day in and day out by the ethnographer. The second approach which focuses on the experiential gestalt, as it is called by the cognitivists, of being in the world by virtue of that focus much more readily discovers the simplicities upon which the moral imagination or preferentially in their parlance, the Moral Metaphor System, is grounded. Or at least Lakoff and Johnson in their discussion of Morality (1999: Chapter 14) up front and from the first moment tell us that "the range of metaphors that define our moral concepts is fairly restricted (probably not more than two dozen basic metaphors) and that there are substantial constraints on the range of possible metaphors" (Ibid: 290). These constraints and limitations arise because the set of metaphors are all grounded in the experience of well being and particularly physical well being in our diurnal, annual, life cycle gravitational world of ups and downs, light and dark, health and disease, cleanliness and impurity, prosperity and impoverishment etc. in short the physical-ecological states that most directly constitute well-being and ill-being for the living and adapting organism.
I can not enter into here the cognitivists working out of the moral metaphor system and their argument for the metaphorical nature of moral understanding except to indicate 1. that they believe that what is revealed is a "widespread if not universal folk theory of what well being in physical terms is" although in the same breath they recognize that this theory has not really been tested cross-culturally (Ibid: Pgs 311-312, 325, 332) and, 2. that the system is not perfectly self consistent with itself. The system not only itself envisions contrarieties and dilemmas that such a system of understanding generates but that itself as system inevitably has moral choices to make, advertently or inadvertently. In respect to point 1, of course, it is just here, as regards cross cultural implications that tropologists in anthropology have been most uncomfortable with the theory (Quinn 1992). For example, one of the most important metaphors for moral well being and moral judgement turns out to be the wealth and accounting metaphor. Moral bookkeeping and moral judgement as book balancing and the paying of moral debts may be, as it is, a convincing and resonant set of metaphors in Western Culture, to be sure, and with the creation of a world marketplace and the globalization of acquisitive and market minded mentalities it may approach universality among certain classes. But it is harder to argue that it is a universal in culture, and, as an aside, with the contemporary scandals among accounting firms, in mind, the negative valences of accounting itself as a trope could well come to the fore as predominant, making it a trope of falsification or of dubious or ironic use in moral calculation.. The culture-centric nature of the limited set of metaphors identified in the moral metaphor system is one thing, and in any case the theory is recognized by the cognitivists to be in need of cross cultural testing, but the content and self consistency of the system proposed is altogether more challenging.
Here we have an interesting issue which brings the cognitivist approach into more direct comparison with the ethnographic. Now the cognitivists theory recognizes and works out the details, in a particularly clear way, of the kinds of dilemmas that moral systems anchored or grounded in metaphor get themselves into and the consequent choices posed for moral casuistry. For the metaphors themselves are never perfectly compatible. One is obliged by a rule of retribution to pay or repay moral debts, for example, while, by the rule of absolute goodness one is obliged to forgive debts. One has to make a choice and the cognitivists approach to the moral system is particularly valuable in pointing out just what some of these choices are and, indeed, their argument, recurrently points up such challenging contrary situations: the many different metaphorical models for distributive justice, for example, with "no overarching neutral conception of fairness available to resolve the conflict" (Ibid: 297); moral authority as dominance (a la Moses) or moral authority as submission (ala Christ or St. Francis) (Ibid pg 301); moral character as an essential (ascribed) or as an acquired condition (pg 307); absolute empathy as against egocentric empathy (309-311). So this metaphor based system of understanding morality and moral judgement does not obviate choices it works rather to point then up.
But the question arises whether it itself has made some choices that are less clearly recognized and which are subject to anthropological appraisal. For example, the metaphor (other than the wealth and accounting trope) which overall ties together the moral system of the metaphors of Western culture is the 'Family' or 'Family of Man' metaphor which grounds moral behavior and moral casuistry in family experience, and more particularly the disciplinary atmosphere of the family whether one of strictness and unquestioned authority or one of nurturing openness... the 'Strict Father' vs 'Nurturing Parent' models which Lakoff finds primary and pervasive in moral reasoning in the home but also especially in politics. Here there is a clear choice and for the cognitivists the choice seems clearly in favor of a moral guidance in parenting and politics, and in the conduct of human relationships generally, based on greater openness and nurturance, based, that is, on the parental nurturance model although not, as they insist, to the point of pathological permissiveness.
Now the cognitivists in discussing the metaphor of moral order do not hesitate to express moral repugnance for that order based on the strict father model even to the point of finding the idea of moral order itself unacceptable especially insofar as it is identified with the natural order of things and thereby rendered absolute and free of careful casuistry ….
Emily Martin, or the Moral Imagination in action
….. Emily Martin, as always in her papers, is interested, as we should all be, in the ideological work done by certain choices of tropes, say the choice of the neural mechanism as the explanatory engine of all behavior, and the relationship of such choices to, 1. the current cultural context in which they may be strategic and adaptive and to, 2. anthropology's enduring task to focus ethnographically not only on the complexity of social behavior in its actual cultural context, but on the socially self serving nature of apparently foundational arguments in culture. In this case she finds the reduction of human social life to the structures of reason embodied in the neuro mechanism as a compensatory turn to interior stability amidst the manic irrational energy of our present exterior world of an ultimately uncontrollable and unpredictable marketplace, entrepreneurial to the point of self indulgent irresponsibility. (All this was written before the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the scandal of the Enron Corporation, two manic enterprises, victims of illusory expectations and/or the depredations of the energy robber barons maniacally engaged in creating offshore empires hidden from a reasoned accounting practice.) In a moral economy, she points out that increasingly removes from the individual the former governmental and institutional protections of his long term well being, removes, that is, social safety nets of every kind, leaving him or her like a miniature corporation, every boat on its own bottom, to sail on very uncertain seas, a turn to the certainties and logic lodged in the neural mechanism has clear compensatory benefits.
Martin compares the present social context and its compensatory thought about human nature with the 18th century and the compensatory thought of the Moral Philosophers. They too were faced with a time of insecurity, the collapse of the Ancien Regime with all its securities of religion and aristocratic right and rank. They too turned to philosophize about the interiority of human nature discovering there the universality of enlightened reason and an apparatus of sentiments that, freed from the superstitions privileges and other constraints of the past would, if understood properly enable self rule and social order. Not so long ago of course we heard in the halls of congress the argument that if the burden of government controls were only lifted from the backs of business, financial acumen, the present manifestation of universal reason in human nature, coupled with the age old discipline of self-interested competition, Darwinian in nature, would bring unparalleled prosperity and brilliance to our polity!! It remains to be seen. It certainly brought prosperity to a managerial elite!
Without wishing to overstretch the comparison of the Enlightenment and Universal Reason of the Moral Philosophers with the enlightened argument of our contemporary Money Managers , that is to say the neo-liberal free market argument of the present day business gurus anxious to be given the green light to social betterment through self-improvement, nevertheless we may wish to now pick up on Martin's argument, which is to say her own Moral Philosophy about anthropology's task and do so by brief reference to another, not unrelated Moral Philosophy, which is rhetorically very much part of our times and which is also of inevitable interest to anthropology. I refer to the human ecology movement and its particular efforts to relate nature to culture and Darwinian views of human evolution to an ethical commitment to a holistic view of nature and mutual respect for quality of life consilience Wilson calls it -- in all life forms. Their arguments constitute an unusually salient instance of the Moral Imagination in action ….
Moral imagination, an enduring interest of anthropology
In any event that awareness of the different tropes and different weighting of tropes that animate the imagination, and the insights obtained into the commitments or lack of commitment generated, is part of the value, I believe, of maintaining the moral imagination as a useful concept in our inquiry into the other; an inquiry into the other which takes them as beings themselves animated by the moral imagination.
But quite beside this question of methodological posture and engagement or distancing from the other already well treated in the anthropological literature of post-modernism the argument is to be made that by giving interpretive credence to the role of the imagination and the images it both generates and is stimulated by we are provided with insight into visions of orderly and disorderly worlds, of comfort or discomfort levels or, if one prefers of our easy and/or 'dis-easy', vital or moribund interactions with selves and others in these worlds. That is to say that we are given insight into relationships, the basic subject matter, in the end, of any envisioned social science, as true of the moral philosophers of the 18th century as of as of the contemporary thinkers considered in this paper, whether Darwin or Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, Bateson or Lockyard, the cognitivist linguists or Emily Martin. For the moral imagination has above all to do with visions of the perfection or imperfection, of the well being and ill being of human relationships in the world and of the obligations, account-abilities or liabilities these visions carry. Above all the moral imagination has to do with what we are calling the 'dynamic of the categorical', a dynamic surely of the most enduring interest to anthropology ….
The Role of the Ethnographer
.... So let me again in reflective discussion and conclusion, having evoked for better or for worse the manes and interests in moral order of R-B, recapitulate an argument that insofar as it is itself rhetorical -- we do not escape the rhetorical in discussing rhetoric -- seeks to speak persuasively of the ethnographic task ... to speak of it as one that is, at once, obligated to the complexity and contrariety of the human condition ,as well as to the well being of the moral order or, better, moral orders of the world in which anthropologists live. These are not, alas perfectly compatible tasks although to recognize that incompatibility is simply to recognize that in the human condition the weighing of incompatible claims that is the nature of moral casuistry is an inescapable presence ultimately irreplaceable by the clearer calculations of purely prudential reasoning! .
Insofar as the moral order is embodied in narrative and the moral imagination is expressed through narrative I have argued for an ethnography that, always attuned to both local and analytic narratives, is written with narrative in mind and with the way that narratives, as White has argued, in order to obtain closure eventually must suggest commitment to some moral vision or other of social order and the social formation. So we do not escape the problem of moral order, both theirs, that is to say those who we study, and ours, in the narrative discharge of our ethnographic task.
The anthropologists= dedication to the narrative interpretation of lived experience through ethnography, and through close attention to local narrative and story telling, makes of Beidelman (and his works which are based on the most lengthy field study and the most fruitful collection of local narrative), a character of particular interest and emulation in our narrative here. He is given a role, of course, among a much larger and diverse cast of ethnographically skilled anthropologists we might have more extensively considered. Beidelman and his work comes to possess here a particular protagonism in our story. The cognitive linguists, on the other hand, no doubt very worthy in their own right and without question producers of important tropological theory have taken on a certain antagonism in our argument. They are adversaries to our ethnographic task because in their parsimonious passions, and particularly in their proclivity for the explanatory power of the neuro mechanism, they shift or subvert our ethnographic attention away from the dynamic sociality of the human condition, the particular ongoing struggles over orderliness, usually perceived as moral orderliness, in social relations as these occur in particular times and particular places. It is these struggles which give our social life in culture its special quality and its special tension, as common places, we might say, confront particular places.
So we have given the cognitivists a role of a certain antagonism to play against our ethnographic and narrative interests in corroborative detail and thick description with all the contradictions in the human condition that such description of life in culture necessarily apprehends. We have not, to be sure, pardoned the cognitivists themselves from that condition. And we have found evidence of a tension, that is to say evidence of the complexity and contrariety of the human condition, in their own argument. We noted contradictory commitments in the exercise of their moral imaginations, complexities of commitment worthy of ethnographic exploration because of ethnography's ultimate interest in the very complexity of social participation and exclusion and in the invariable often complicitous presence of both the 'Said and the Unsaid', the explicit and the implicit, the overlying platitude and the underlying attitude in the human situation.
From the conclusion
…. We know and value the kind of narrative ethnography being discussed in the case of Beidelman because it is, in its descriptions and interpretations, as true as we anthropologists (or anthropologists of talent and dedication such as Beidelman) can make it to the life and times of those with whom we participate and observe. But to what degree must any such dedication inevitably reflect and conform, in a larger sense, to the moral economy of its times? Times change and rhetorical times change as well as the moral order and the moral economy changes. That is why we took some time at the beginning to speak of former times -- those unsettled times of the Vietnam years in which we first began to see an interest in tropology rise to the surface in anthropology. Our interest in rhetoric at that time was surely influenced by the strong rhetorical currents and the protagonisms and antagonisms, the accusations of relevance and irrelevance, of engagement and complicity, characteristic of that period of sharply contested moral order.
In any event the rhetorical times we find ourselves in now at the turn of the millennia are much different than the late sixties. I have wanted to suggest, for this Volkswagen sponsored Conference, that Europeanization is presently and quite evidently a theme of moral order to inspire the moral imagination and suggest a rhetoric apt for the contemporary state of the moral order. And indeed with Curtius in mind our very subject matter and theme, rhetoric itself, can be seen as a consolidating theme in this respect. But beyond that coincidence the major theme of our time about which many a moral imagination is inspired to weave its stories is the challenge to moral order that lies in the quantification and commodification of the world as marketplace. It is an imagination itself stimulated by an entrepreneurial era of manic activity endlessly focused on the bottom line.
We have turned to Emily Martin as our Ciceronian critic here and to share with Thomas Beidelman protagonism in our argument. That is because in compliment to the ethnographic task that challenges us all and which she defends she is also engaged as a public intellectual. She is skilful in pointing up and denouncing, without the burden of pathos, the over-determined reductionism and commitment to the neuro-mechanism of the cognitivists who seek to find a permanent safe harbor compensatory for the oceanic presence of the endlessly changing, endlessly obsolescent, endlessly individualized, perpetually manic marketplace. Martin argues forcefully for returned attention in the end to the enduring requirements of the social contract. She argues against that neuro-reductionism that ignores or makes disappear the complexities of the social and cultural context of human experience. It is a defense of the existential human condition and anthropology's responsibilities to it, which, as I have argued here, it seeks to grasp imaginatively and to present imaginatively, and in all cases necessarily with attention to the ever presence of the play of rhetoric Indeed Martin sees ethnography as a 'technology of sociality' and compares it to the 18th Century Essays of the Moral Philosophers which draw the reader into engagement or participation or identification with the dynamics of so rhetorical a document as the social contract itself a document which renders individuals thinkable only as social beings constantly negotiating relationship. (Ibid:584-585) Constantly, we would add here, exercising the moral imagination in favor of or against extant moral order.
By taking once again seriously the interests in moral order and the moral sentiments of the 18th century and adding to these a focus on the social dynamics of the moral imagination in the context of human well being we are putting at the center of ethnography the dynamic of human conviction about or complicity with the social order, a conviction very often resting on rhetorical devices that if they do not act to convince us about where our well being is best served, and where our contractual obligations lie, still enable us, at the least, to make our way through the myriad and often contradictory claims of our life in society. Of course the neuro mechanism is involved in all this figuring out of our obligations and our temporizing of them. But it is a gross reduction of the reality and complexity of the moral choices that endlessly confront us and challenge our rhetoric if it acts to shift our attention away from the rhetorical realities of the moral order that is endlessly, and in large measure rhetorically, constructed and re-constructed by the recurrent casuistry of everyday life.
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