Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements
- Part II Aspects of Ethical Agency
- Part III Media and Modes of Ethical Practice
- Part IV Intimate and Everyday Life
- 22 Care
- 23 Kinship and Love
- 24 Cooperation and Punishment
- 25 Favours
- 26 The Inimical Gaze
- 27 Animals and More-Than-Representational Ethics
- 28 God
- Part V Institutional Life
- Index
- References
25 - Favours
from Part IV - Intimate and Everyday Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements
- Part II Aspects of Ethical Agency
- Part III Media and Modes of Ethical Practice
- Part IV Intimate and Everyday Life
- 22 Care
- 23 Kinship and Love
- 24 Cooperation and Punishment
- 25 Favours
- 26 The Inimical Gaze
- 27 Animals and More-Than-Representational Ethics
- 28 God
- Part V Institutional Life
- Index
- References
Summary
What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 629 - 648Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023
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