Dealing with the good and the evil. Introducing morality as an antropological concern
How to cite this publication:
Dag Jørund Lønning (1996). Dealing with the good and the evil. Introducing morality as an antropological concern. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI Working Paper WP 1996:13)
Questions of morality and ethics - good and evil - have not been anthropological favourites. Such issues have been addressed within certain applied environments as well as currently within American cultural anthropology, but more generally they seem to have been pushed aside within a basically very relativist discipline. Global problems like ethnocide, military rule and occupation, accompanied by - or perhaps spurred by - a truly international arms trade, do not appear to have shaken social anthropology out of its insistence on morality being studied in its local context. This paper concludes that such an approach to morality is partly dishonest, limits the scope of our discipline, and serves to make us peripheral in an increasingly global discourse on morality and human rights. The paper seeks, tentatively, to show how morality could be incorporated into anthropology.
