Moral Experience: Introduction

Author(s): Jarrett Zigon and C. Jason Throop

Source: Ethos, Vol. 42, No. 1, Special Issue: Moral Experience (March 2014), pp. 1-15
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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 MORAL EXPERIENCE 1
3

Moral Experience: Introduction

Jarrett Zigon
C. Jason Throop

Twenty-four years ago, Ethos published a special issue devoted to the topic of morality. The
volume, guest edited by Fiske and Mason (1990a), included contributions by a number of
leading figures in psychological anthropology, including Richard Shweder, Bradd Shore,
and James W. Fernandez. The core problem interrogated in this issue was the problem of
ethical relativism. That is, in the words of the editors, "What intellectual and moral stance
shall we take toward the diverse practices and goals that people justify with reference to
standards that differ from our own, and that differ among themselves?" (1990b: 132). In a
nutshell, the issue at stake concerned the commensurability, translatability, and relativity of
varying ethical codes, frames of judgment, ideals, standards, and values.

At the time it was published, Fiske and Mason's special issue extended what was a long
standing anthropological fascination with "the obvious and historical diversity in moral
systems" (1990b: 131). And yet, like much of the anthropological work that prefigured it,
what was left unexplored in the volume was an explicit probematization of the very notion
of morality/ethics1 itself. Twenty-four years later, however, anthropologists are increasingly
turning their attention to phenomena they designate as either moral or ethical. Although for
many this designation remains either largely undefined or closely aligned with a Foucauldian
and/or neo-Aristotelian perspective, a few anthropologists have recently provided a more
programmatic approach to the study of morality/ethics (e.g., Fassin 2012; Faubion 2011;
Lambek 2010a; Mattingly, forthcoming; Robbins 2004, 2007; Zigon 2007, 2009,2011). But
even within these programmatic attempts to bring analytic clarity to the ways in which
morality/ethics may come to count in the social world, only a very few have given an ac
count of what it might be like to experience morality/ethics in the world. Rather, remaining
dear to the tendency within anthropology and the social sciences in general, the majority
of these programmatics, as well as the less programmatic studies of morality/ethics, tend to
focus their analysis at a social level that elides the nitty-gritty complexity of actual persons
interacting with one another, as well as other objects and beings, in relations of inter
subjectivity. What is missing, in short, are explicit detailed accounts of moral experience
itself.

The articles in this volume are collected from two different panels that we co-organized in
an effort to consider what an anthropology of moral experience might look like.2 The panels,
held at the 2010 American Anthropological Association meetings in New Orleans and the

ETHOS, Vol. 42, Issue 1, pp. 1-15, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. © 2014 by the American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho. 12035

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2 ETHOS

2011 Society for Psychological Anthropological Association Biennial Meetings in Los An

geles, focused on the following framing questions: What is the relationship between moral
ity/ethics and experience? What varieties of experience are deemed to be morally/ethically
relevant by social actors in communities of practice? Is the moral/ethical realm(s) equally
implicated in bodily, imaginai, memorial, emotional, sensory, evaluative, volitional, and
oneric modalities of existence? What are the ways in which individuals go about recognizing
virtuous forms of being-in-the-world in themselves and in others? How is empathy or other
modes of intersubjective engagement relevant to the experience of morality/ethics for partic
ular social actors? What is the relationship between temporality and morality/ethics? How
does an individual's experience of morality/ethics transform over his or her lifespan? How
are death, insentdence, materiality, and other limit experiences figured into moral/ethical
existence? Is morality/ethics an experience that is deemed to be associated with certainty,
evidence, beauty, or truth? What role does ambivalence and ambiguity play in the experience
of morality/ethics?

What such framing questions anticipated was the recognition that morality cannot simply be
equated with normative social behavior, for as several of the ethnographically rich chapters
of this volume make clear, moral experience occurs at a palpably different modality from such
behavior. This, of course, has already been well recognized by several who helped initiate the
recent "ethical turn" within anthropology (e.g., Laidlaw 2002; Robbins 2004; Zigon 2007);
nevertheless, it remains clear that anthropologists continue to struggle to conceptualize and
articulate what this different modality of moral experience might be like. Thus, for example,
in a recent volume he edited, Michael Lambek argues that "ethics is an intrinsic dimension of
human activity and interpretation irrespective of whether people are acting in ways that they
or we consider specifically 'ethical'" and that such ethics "entails judgment (evaluation) with
respect to situations, actions, and cumulatively, actors, persons, or character" (2010b:42).
As Lambek continues, such ethical judgment is intrinsic to social activity because "there are
always criteria already in place" (2010b:43). In this rendering, it would seem that ordinary
ethics is not much more than the capacity to maintain the equilibrium of social normativity
through the evaluation of criteria already available to all social actors.

Such a view of the evaluative accountancy of social life elides, however, how certain modalities
of existence may entail morally relevant experiences that fall beyond the scope of normative
social behavior. While in the messiness of everyday life the comforting categories of shared
ethical norms, standards, values, and ideals may at times serve as important way stations, they
do so seldom for long and seldom in ways that accurately depict the difficulties, conflicts,
ambivalences, and struggles that are always, we would argue, associated with them. This
raises the question of not only how we recognize such modalities, which this introduction
will begin to address, but also allows us to consider just what is happening in moments of
moral experience.

Both traditional moral philosophy and much recent anthropological focus on morality/ethics
tends to conceive of moral experience as motivated by efforts to realize the "good" or
the "right." Moreover, such forms of moral striving are often held to be accompanied by

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 MORAL EXPERIENCE 3
3

"feelings" of obligation, duty, and responsibility. But as will become clear, we find that critical
attention to ethnographic description of such experiences reveal that these are far from the
only or even the primary motivations, pursuits, aims, or feelings of moral experience. Rather,
and as we will elucidate further below, we argue that the attuned concern for the relationality
that constitutes our very existence is a truer theoretical description of what ethnographic
analysis portrays.

Certainly, then, the response to what constitutes morality/ethics remains contested ground
within anthropology. This volume does not attempt to settle such contestation but rather
humbly seeks to contribute to the ongoing anthropological attempts to investigate the
parameters of the moral/ethical. Our contribution is to give credence to the everydayness
of the moral experiences of actual persons. While fully recognizing the significance of
such larger-scale phenomena as historic, economic, and political conditions, as well as the
variable forms of sharedness entailed in collective experiences, this volume attempts to make
the strong claim that an anthropological concern with morality/ethics must be sensitive to
the everyday moral lives and experiences of the persons we study, analyze, and write about.
For although it is certainly reasonable to speak of such phenomena as moral politics, or a
moral community, we want to emphasize that these can only be manifest through what we
call the moral experience of persons. For ultimately, we believe, if anthropology hopes to
go beyond the analysis of discursive or collective conceptions of morality/ethics, we must
come to understand the place of moral experience in the lives of those we come to know
through our research. That is to say, we must come to understand how one lives through
and by moral experience.

Experience and Morality

If morality is contested ground, so to is experience. As the historian Joan Scott (1991) has
argued, the concept of experience is laden with a number of unrecognized assumptions
regarding its putative transparency, immediacy, authenticity, and depth. Moreover, when
used unreflexively to characterize the experience of particular peoples or groups, the concept
of experience has the potential to become totalizing and homogenizing, insensitive to the
range of differences (gendered, ethnic or class-based, interpersonal, etc.) that necessarily
crosscut such groupings. When used in such ways, Scott suggests that experience may be
further problematic to the extent that it blinds us to the historic, economic, and political
conditions that make particular possibilities for experience to arise in the first place.

In anthropology, Robert Desjarlais (1994,1997) has generatively built upon Scott's critique,
arguing that anthropologists have often relied, in an unexamined way, upon a concept of
experience that presupposes inward reflection, hermeneutical richness, narrative cohesion,
and subjective depth. These qualities are, Desjarlais asserts, the artifact of a particular cultural
and historical framing of subjectivity in the "West" and should not be assumed to encompass
all the various forms of life that arise in, and characterize, our condition as humans. For
his part, Desjarlais brings to bear insights from his ethnographic work with mentally ill

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4 ETHOS

homeless persons in Boston to argue that it is not experience but "struggling along" that
best characterizes the fragmented, punctuated, and sensorial forms of existence emblematic
of the individuals he worked with in the shelter.

Such critical challenges to the taken-for-granted use of the concept of experience in anthro
pology and the social sciences broadly configured are crucial interventions that remind us
of the historical contingencies inherent in many of our assumptions about human existence
as well as the dangers of delimiting foundational concepts that have not been first closely
scrutinized from a socioeconomic-political point of view. And yet, that said, in response to
such critical provocations, a number of scholars have sought to revisit the concept, including
the history of ideas informing contemporary orientations to it, in such a way as to reclaim
the possibility that experience might remain a viable theoretical and analytic construct in
social theory (see Good 1994; Kleinman 2006; Kleinman and Kleinman 1991; Mattingly
1994, 1998; Throop 2003, 2009, 2010a; Willen and Seeman 2012; and Zigon 2009, 2010).
Working to expand the range of its possible articulations to include a spectrum of grada
tions, intensities, and formations, these anthropologists have each, in their own way, argued
against overly reductive renderings of experience, while simultaneously seeking to specify the
conditions under which particular varieties of experience come into being, are perpetuated,
contested, or transformed.

To date, within contemporary anthropology an emphasis upon moral experience has been
most substantively explored in the context of the work of those scholars who have sought to
closely examine the compelling cares, concerns, and predicaments of individuals inhabiting
complex local worlds (see Kleinman and Kleinman 1991; Kleinman 1999, 2006; Wikan
1990, 2013).3 Unni Wikan, (2013) for instance, argues that the existential dilemmas and
multiple compelling concerns of particular individuals are not simply reflections of how
those individuals are positioned and position themselves within their local social worlds.
Such dilemmas and concerns also arise, as T. S. Eliot once phrased it, from the fact that
individuals are absorbed "in an endless struggle to think well of themselves" (cited in Wikan
2013:135). Arthur and Joan Kleinman (1991, 1996; see also Kleinman 1999, 2006) similarly
characterize an individual's moral life as closely tethered to "what is at stake" for them in the
context of their everyday struggles to cope with their shifting passions, hopes, joys, regrets,
losses, suffering, and pain. Moral experience inhabits in this sense, for the Kleinmans, an ever
changing, indeterminate, and uncertain terrain. Efforts to understand moral experience in
light of a sense of "at-stake-ness" and "multiple compelling concerns" have also been closely
tied, in both explicit and implicit ways, to many so-called person-centered approaches within
the field (see Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994; Hollan 2008; Levy and Hollan 1998; Parish
1994, 2008).

What the essays in this volume share with these approaches is a concern for investigating
the complex ways that moral predicaments and orientations intersect with the dynamic
and shifting currents of individuals' lives as lived. They differ in some important respects,
however, in seeking to expand the range and varieties of experience that may have relevance
for forms of moral/ethical existence. As many of the contributions to this special issue attest,

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 MORAL EXPERIENCE 5

while concern, care, predicaments, and "at-stake-ness" certainly mark important parameters
for delimiting moral modes of being, the expanse of experiences potentially relevant to moral
existence may often exceed what is explicidy foregrounded as particularly problematic or
compelling for any given individual in the context of his or her life.

Recently some anthropologists have advocated so-called ordinary ethics as a way of capturing
the existential range of what we are here calling moral experience. Inspired by philosophies
of ordinary language, which according to Veena Das "traces the vulnerability of every
day life to the facts of our being both, embodied creatures and beings who have a life in
language" (2012:133), these anthropologists argue that the ethical is "intrinsic to action"
(Lambek 2010b:39). As such, ethics is not contained in a realm all its own (Das 2012:133)—
transcendent or immanent—but rather is "deeply embedded in the categories and functions
of language and ways of speaking . . . relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than
rule, practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling undue at
tention to itself' (Lambek 2010a:2). All of this—minus the influence of ordinary language
philosophy—is central to every article in this volume. Indeed, the fact of the immanence of
moral experience to everyday life and its nonisolation in some other realm is pretty much
a truism across the spectrum of those anthropologists who have taken up the explicit study
of moralities and ethical practice (e.g., Laidlaw 2002; Mattingly 2010; Parish 1994; Robbins
2004, 2007; Throop 2010a; Zigon 2007, 2009, 2013).

While the everydayness of ordinary ethics may not be particularly innovative among anthro
pological attempts to consider moral experience, its rather narrow focus on the importance
of language, speaking, and voice provide some insights that are not always immediately clear
from other approaches. Thus, for example, Michael Lambek's claim that "ethics is a property
of speech and action" (2010b:61-62) and as such, the criteria for making ethical judgments
are embedded within our use of language and our acts, does much to get us away from mod
els of motivation and judgment that depend on conscious self-awareness of "having to" act
morally. It is this basic assumption of ordinary language/ethics that allows Das (2007:7-8)
to make the provocative claim that the "failure of grammar" is "the end of criteria" for being
in the world morally or otherwise.

Despite the significance of this focus on language in the everydayness of moral experience,
ordinary language philosophy is far from the only model that leads one to make more or less
the same conclusions. For example, Elinor Ochs (2012) has argued that a phenomenological
view of language does not take language to be something symbolically added onto experience
but rather is itself a mode of experience that is central for our ways of morally being-in
the-world. And if it can be said that ordinary ethics both borrows heavily from the basic
concepts of ordinary language philosophy and provides a model for ethics that mirrors
the model of ordinary language, the same can be said for Cheryl Mattingly's (e.g., 1998,
2010) long-time engagement with narrative as both providing content for analysis and a
model for understanding everyday action. Finally, the ordinary ethics model makes a strong
contribution to understanding the nonconscious ways in which everyday moral experiences
are practiced, but the concepts of tacit agreement and embedded categories used by ordinary

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6 ETHOS

language philosophy are far from the only ones available to describe such everydayness. Thus,
for example, some alternate approaches include Jason Throop's (2010a) phenomenologically
intersubjective analysis of the way in which moral values are part and parcel of interactive
communicative experiences, and Jarrett Zigon's (2012) argument that narrative interactions
in moments of moral breakdown are best understood not as attempts at meaning making
and mutual understanding, but as a process of coming to be in the world together again; that
speaking as an act is central to moral experience and not the meaning and understanding
of words, necessarily. Clearly, then, many anthropologists, several of whom are in this
volume, recognize the centrality of language to moral experience, but they also recognize
that ordinary language philosophy may not provide the most compelling model to capture
the full experience of being-in-the-world.

Moral Experience

In light of these distinct efforts to challenge and reclaim concepts of experience and morality
in anthropology, the question arises: Why call for a turn to moral experience? There is, we
argue, something significant to be gained by thinking carefully about the intersection of the
moral/ethical and the experiential. Before we address what we take to be most generative
about this intersection as revealed in the contributions to this collection, however, it is
important to be clear about a few things. In advocating a turn to moral experience, we
do not wish to conflate experience with morality. Nor do we wish to suggest that only
specific kinds of experiences can be moral. Instead, it seems that there are discernable moral
aspects to various registers of experience, and these moral aspects might change through
time as particular life trajectories extend through varying interpersonal, social, ideological,
historical, and cultural contexts (see Parish, Throop, and Zigon all in this volume). Thus,
we consider moments of "aspect-seeing" and "aspect-blindness" (cf. Parish this volume; see
also Duranti 2009, 2010) or alternating moments of revealing and concealing that arise in
the context of discernable phenomenological modifications (Throop 2009, 2010a, 2010b,
this volume: see also Duranti 2009, 2010), central to particular articulations of experience
being variously recognized as moral or ethical affairs (see also Zigon 2007). A focus on
experience foregrounds the fact that our existence as humans is framed by our particular
perspectives, vantage points, and embodied emplacements within a given social world. The
aspectual, partial, perspectival, situated, horizon-defined, and horizon-defining modes of
being that characterize our existence as humans, as well as the particular forms of revealing
and concealing associated with them, is thus necessarily implicated in a turn to examine the
experience of morality.

As is evident throughout many of the articles in this volume, moral experience is experience
qualified, delimited, demarcated, and organized in moral terms. It is also morality realized,
recognized, resisted, and enacted in experiential terms. Inherent in an aspectual understand
ing of moral experience is the recognition that the same object, situation, state of affairs,
action, or quality may, depending on the context at hand, be deemed morally inhabited or
ethically relevant, in differing, even possibly paradoxical, ways. Accordingly, it is not simply

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 MORAL EXPERIENCE 7

pregiven criteria, objects, qualities, acts, situations, or phenomena that necessarily compel
moral encompassment or ethical reflection. Thus, Mattingly's contribution shows well how
a situation may be an intense moral experience for a concerned mother named Dotty, while
at the same time experienced as a medical encounter by her daughter's doctor. Nor is it only
the attitude of the subject that compels moral experience. For as several contributions to this
collection show, it is instead in the intermediary spaces between subject and object, self and
other, actor and situation, that moral sensibilities and moments of ethical reflections arise,
are constituted, contested, or transformed.

What perhaps becomes most clear in the contributions to this volume is that to focus on moral
experience is to situate our ethnographic gaze on the lived predicaments, uncertainties, and
quandaries that arise in particular moments, events, actions, and situations. It is to locate our
analysis within the singular realities that arise from such moments and to resist flattening out
the complexity of such realities in light of our own theoretical commitments. As a result of this

attunement to the singularity of moral experience, we are often confronted, for instance, by
a vocabulary that stands in stark contrast to the language of rules, obligations, duties, rights,
consequences, punishments, good, right, and evil. From the experiential perspective taken
in this volume, we find instead evocations of texture, rhythm, tonality, intensity, presence,
horizon, mood, accompaniment, familiarity, fidelity, comfort, care, hope, struggle, anxiety,
and confusion being used to define the contours of our moral existence. Whether it is
Desjarlais' invocation of rhythm, or Throop's rethinking of anxiety and mood, or Garcia's
intimate portrait of the intricacies of care, or Zigon's focus on attunement and fidelity, a
significant contribution of this volume is the reconceptualization of moral concepts from
the perspective of the complexity of experience.4

Are these merely aesthetically motivated descriptions that operate in the space of the poetic?
We think not. These ways of speaking, poetic at times they may still be, open up new
ways of orienting to the complex constellation of phenomena that have relevance for our
understanding of what is entailed by the concepts of morality and ethics. They open up and
reveal aspects of being that are otherwise concealed by what seem in comparison to be the
overly rigid and reductive designations of many academic accounts of ethics. Importantly,
such an experiential focus brings our attention to intersubjective dimensions of morality,
to conflicts, dilemmas, shortcomings, failures and worries, as well as to anxieties, hopes,
and successes that are embedded in our distinctive ways of being-in-the-world. Rumor and
anticipation, worry, fear, and regret, elation, happiness, and love, this too is the stuff of moral

life as experienced. And it is also, unfortunately, the very "stuff' that seems to escape many
of the long-established moral frameworks in the social sciences and moral philosophy alike.

So again, why a turn to moral experience? To begin, experience, in one reading, brings
our attention to the first-person stance of an experiencing subject—the person for whom,
from whom, and toward whom, moral life emanates. This, for example, is the perspective
taken by Mattdngly in her compelling argument for a first-person approach through her
close ethnographic analysis of a medical encounter. To a great extent, such a perspective
significantly influences nearly all of the contributions to this collection, which begin with

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8 ETHOS

the fact of being-in-the-world as the starting point for anthropologically analyzing moral
ity/ethics. The differences, however, mostly emerge around questions of how to take up
such a person-centered approach. Thus, for example, while much of Zigon's past works are
primarily person centered (e.g., 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013), in this volume, he tries to show
how such an approach still necessitates an ontological perspective of relationality and attune
ment. This focus on relationality and attunement is imperative, so Zigon argues, to avoid
reliance on traditional moral philosophic and social scientific concepts such as "agency" and
"the Good" (cf. Mattingly, this volume).

Be that as it may, a person-centered perspective on experience highlights processes of subject

formation and the moral shaping of our experience of the world. Experience, in this sense of
the term, leads us to examine how moral dispositions and ethical assumptions impact what
we notice, how we react, who we love and hate, the attachments we acquire, the motives
and desires that move us to act, the situations, relationships, activities, and orientations that
we habitually take up. As several contributors including Willen, Throop, and Mattingly
convincingly show, our experiences of the world and how we might struggle to transform
those experiences, to rethink them, to reinterpret them, to reinhabit them, and to reposition
ourselves variously as sufferers or actors on the differing scenes that in part constitute our
social existence, is also an aspect of moral experience. It is an aspect that foregrounds not
only habitual moral ways of being-in-the-world but also explicit ethical reflections upon
such modes of being, as well as possibilities for transforming them (see Zigon 2007).

But as several of the contributions to this collection further reveal, moral experience extends
beyond the perspective of first-person experience to the space of "relational-being" (Zigon,
this volume). Whether understood from the stance of William James' writings on "pure ex
perience" (see Throop 2003) or from the perspective of various phenomenological accounts
of being-with-others (see Jackson 1998), experience in this sense includes the spaces between
subjects and between those subjects and the world itself. As anthropologists have long argued,
experience is an inherently social phenomenon. The modality of "being-together-with," or
more simply "relational-being," is thus central to the analysis of moral experience in many of
the contributions to this collection. Such relational-being, however, needs to be qualified in
at least two ways. First, relational-being is a modality of being that does not necessitate the
copresence of other beings. Thus, for example, Desjarlais (this volume) beautifully describes
how the voicing of prayer and the rhythm of cymbals in Yolmo funeral rites extend not only
the possibilities but also the responsibilities of the moral experience of family and close-ones
of the recently deceased. Through such "active withness," as Desjarlais puts it, it becomes
possible to be caught up in a moral experience even with those who no longer live in this
earthly realm. Arguably, it is also through the lens of death that we most clearly perceive the
second qualification of relational-being; that is, that the modality of being-together-with
is not essentially about being-with-an-Other but first and foremost is about relations. The
"together-with" of being-together-with denotes just that—the relationship that brings into
being those two subjects we mark as oneself and other (see also Jackson 2012). As Steven
Parish (this volume) puts it, a fundamental prerequisite of moral experience must be that
being-together-with is only possible in "the space between persons."

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 MORAL EXPERIENCE 9

Recognizing the centrality of relational-being to moral experience, two other key aspects
emerge in this collection—care and risk. If moral experience arises out of concern for the
constituting relationships that bring our and others' being into existence, then a significant
aspect of this moral experience must be care for those relations. How are relations cared for?
In just the way we normally consider ourselves to be caring for others or for oneself. Thus,
caring for relations is what we are already doing in the midst of moral experience. The issue
here is that because most traditional moral philosophy has had little concern for the actual
lived moral experience of persons, it has tended to conceive of moral experience in terms of
the concerns and agendas of philosophy in general. And because in the western philosophical
tradition these concerns and agendas have mostly assumed some version of monadic, isolated
individuals, the moral philosophies and the vocabulary that has arisen through them tend
to be individual focused. But as several of the contributions to this collection make clear,
an ethnographic sensibility reveals that a good deal of moral experience is about the care of
relations.

What the contributors to this volume further show is that while ethical practices may be
focused, for example, on doing something for, to, or with an Other, what seems to be clear
is that these practices do not end in the Other. To put it another way, such ethical practices
are not for the sake of the Other but rather ultimately work to maintain, repair, or make new

relations that ultimately results in the maintenance, repair, or making anew of both oneself
and all those others constituted through the relationship cared for. Thus, for example, the
promise made and kept that Garcia writes about, and the praying done to calm the dying that
Desjarlais describes, and the vigilant attunement of a mother to her sick child that Mattingly
analyses are all examples of how the ethical work one does vis-à-vis an Other is ultimately
ethical work on the relationality inherent in moral experience. For through this ethical work
she who keeps the promise, he who prays, and she who remains vigilant are all just as much
affected by an enactment of ethics as she who has been promised, she who hears the prayer,
and she who is kept watch over (not to mention all those others who are also caught up in these
constituting relations). As a care-ful concern for relationships, then, moral experience goes
beyond traditional notions of moral motivation such as duty, responsibility, or obligation
and instead reveals how our very existence as always being-relationally-in-the-world stands
as our deepest moral concern.

Such care always entails risk, however. For if moral experience is at least in part a care-ful
concern for being-together-with-relationally-in-the-world, then such ethical care simul
taneously reveals the vulnerability of this relational-being. Moreover, to the extent that
subjects are constituted through relational-being, they too are also rendered vulnerable. As
Cheryl Mattingly puts it in her contribution, moral experience may "require taking a course
of action where we are not only highly unsure of our success but one that could engender a
morally tragic outcome." This uncertainty of moral experience points to the fact that in the
midst of such experiences we risk the already achieved; we risk our being, which already is.
But this is so not only because of the vulnerability of our relational-being, but also because
of the transformational nature of moral experience. For as Zigon argues, in the very process
of caring for relationships those relationships are changed, which in turn alters the subjects

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10 ETHOS

constituted in that now transformed instantiation of relational-being. Accordingly, regard

less of whether or not such transformations result in felicitous or tragic outcomes, moral
experience always entails a risk. Indeed, in the very process of transformation something will
be unrecoverably lost. That particular articulation of relational-being will never be the same
again. And neither will the subjects constituted within it. Whether moral experience ends
in tragedy or felicitousness, then, we risk our already achieved way of being-in-the-world
through moral experience.

Another result of focusing on relational-being is that moral experience is not simply defined
by longstanding binary oppositions between good and bad, right and wrong, structure and
agency, or choice and constraint. Instead, it is the range of experiences included within each
of these binaries, as well as the various shifting experiences gradated between them, that
are. To take a powerful example from Sarah Willen's contribution on migrant's experiences
of illegality in Israel, for instance, the inability of Marlene to seek help from the police
to protect her daughter from harm might be interpreted in one moment, or from one
perspective, as a structural imposition that arises from her position as an illegal Filipina
migrant. From another perspective, and perhaps another moment, however, the self-same
silence, the absence of seeking help, may be viewed as a heroic effort to maintain possibilities
for her daughter to maintain a relationship with her estranged father. These assessments,
both ethical, may not be experienced as conflicting or paradoxical from the perspective of
their experiential unfolding. And yet from the perspective of an outsider, or the perspective of

a particular ethical theory, they might be so construed. As an intersubjectively realized mode

of being-together-with, such moral enactments and ethical assessments may also significantly
shift through time in response to the presence of others, their noticings, actions, reactions,
and suggestions.

This, in turn, reveals another central theme running throughout many of contributions to
this volume; namely, that moral sentiments always partially constitute moral experience (see
also Fassin 2013; Throop 2012; Zigon 2013). As several contributors show, emotions are
oftentimes a key component to moral experience. For example, Sarah Willen, borrowing
from Ghassan Hage, points out in her captivating portrait of an undocumented worker
in Israel that the "augmentation of joy" is a very a significant aim in this worker's moral
experience. So too Angela Garcia carefully reveals how the deep emotional ties between a
heroin-using mother and daughter are not only the basis of their relational-being but that
which works to motivate the ethical promise of the daughter toward her mother that helps
maintain their relationality. As Jason Throop (2010b) has argued elsewhere, emotions—such
as joy, love, passion, as well as hatred and disgust—help to focus our moral experience and
the kind of ethical work that may need to be done within it. But if emotions help focus ethical

attention, moods help us sustain moral experience across time and space. As Throop puts it
in his contribution, "mood is being, being affected" and in this sense can be understood as a
moment wherein existence as such has somehow come into question if not perhaps danger.
Perhaps in this sense mood could be understood as marking the limits of what counts as
moral experience.

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 MORAL EXPERIENCE 11

If mood can be seen as a sign of the limits of moral experience, this suggests that this expe
rience must somehow be differentiated from other kinds of experiences or nonexperiential
ways of being-in-the-world. Referencing Wittgenstein's notion of aspect shifting, Steven
Parish argued in an earlier draft of his contribution to this volume that such shifting is
essential for understanding how one who is caught up in the everydayness of their being
comes to experience a situation, person, or dilemma in moral terms (see also Duranti 2009;
Throop 2009). Similarly Zigon (2007,2012) has elsewhere argued that it is only in moments
of moral breakdown that one's way of being-in-the-world becomes ethically attuned. Such
a breakdown need not be thought of as initiating an immediate throwness into a state of
reflective ethics as opposed to a nonconscious way of being in the world (Zigon 2012). While
in certain "extreme" cases this may in fact be the case, what is more often so, it would seem,
is that a moral breakdown initiates what at first may be an imperceptible gradual shift along
a spectrum of consciousness during which one slowly begins to "work through" whatever
issue(s) may have been evoked by it. One may never actually fall into a full state of ethical
reflection during such a process, as it is very possible to work through a moral breakdown
in some middle ground of consciousness between full and nonreflection. In his contribution
here, Throop makes a compelling argument for why moods may be an important indicator
of moral breakdown being underway.

In this way, a focus on moral experience brings us again, and repeatedly, to the problem of
intersubjectivity and asymmetry, as well as to the shifting perspectives, orientations, notic
ings, and discernments—all of which Zigon in his contribution considers a result of the
world's essential relational-being—that may unfold for particular individuals as they strug
gle to make sense of their own and other's situations and as they make efforts to keep going
through the vicissitudes of life. Indeed, a question always remains as to whether or not, for
whom, and at what point in time particular phenomenological modifications or moments
of "aspect-dawning" may be considered ethically/morally relevant to any given individual's
efforts to reclaim some sense of comfort in their world (see Parish this volume). While
passed over in traditional accounts of morality, from the perspective of moral experience
paying close attention to such intersubjective transitions, fluctuations, and transformations
is key to uncovering how it is that people live with, and through, moral struggles, questions,
and certainties. Significantly, an effort to examine the intersubjective dynamics of moral
experience also forces us to confront issues of ethnographic representation and the moral
dilemmas associated with them. This is not a deficiency in our view, quite the opposite. By
grounding our assessments of moral life in the experiential, we take seriously the charge
that engaging, understanding, communicating, describing, interpreting, depicting, and rep
resenting the experience of others is always, in part, of moral concern to both those who do
the representing and those who are being represented (see Kleinman and Kleinman 1991,
1996).

In a somewhat related way, there is arguably something about the concept of moral experi
ence that suggests, even if at times implicitly, the significance of recognizing that there are
aspects of existence that transcend our efforts at understanding and analyzing moral life from

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 12 ETHOS
c

a strictly scholarly or disciplinary perspective. The expanse of moral life is not restricted to
the academic concerns of certain anthropologists or philosophers but extends well beyond
such analytics to the concrete problems and struggles of actual individuals who must wake up
each day and make efforts to "keep going" (Zigon 2007). These are individuals who cannot
help but be defined by particular social, historical, and cultural conditions and yet who often
work to make such conditions their own, even if simply by virtue of the fact that it is they
themselves who have undergone them.

All of this brings us to questions of typification, to processes of totalizing and homoge

nizing, and to problems associated with speaking of experience in the singular form. Even
an apparently unitary moral orientation is, however, always positioned within, and con
stituted by, divergent moral orders, assemblages, perspectives, and positions. There is in
fact never moral experience as a singular phenomenon but moral experiences in the plural.
In at least one important sense, plurality forms the very "stuff' of moral experience. This
includes the multitude of everyday experiences, noticed and unnoticed, that shape our habit
ual ways of being in the world, our moral existence, our comfortable fidelity to a particular
form of life. Even when rendered a singularity, the concept of experience calls forth such
pluralities, however, for experience itself consists of not one homogenous "stuff' but of
many variable, shifting, dynamic, and complex relations, senses, emotions, moods, tempo
ralities, actions, and events. This is true, even if such pluralities are understood to be plural
singularities.

And yet, as many of the contributors to this volume also suggest, there may still yet be some
attribute or aspect that is discernable through a range of qualitatively different varieties of
experience that gives rise to something we would recognize as an instance of moral and ethical
life. What is it that weaves through a plurality of experiences that contributes to any one
given moment of moral or ethical experience being recognized as such? Is it "at-stake-ness"?
"Compelling concerns?" "Existential imperatives"? "Fidelity"? "Situated-goods"? This is
still contested ground, as it should be. Our hope, however, is that an explicit focus upon
moral experience will help us to better clarify in a more precise form what such aspects are
and entail.

JARRETT ZIGON is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.

C. JASON THROOP is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,

Los Angeles.

Notes

1. We use the form "morality/ethics" here to indicate that to this point there is little agreement among those taking

up an anthropological study of morality/ethics as to their respective meanings, not to mention which, if either, of

these terms should take priority.

2. Each of the contributors to this special issue participated in both sessions. Elinor Ochs' paper, which was part of

our first AAA session, was published elsewhere (Ochs 2012). Regrettably, the extremely important and provocative

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 MORAL EXPERIENCE 13

contributions of Monica Heintz, Saba Mahmood, Joel Robbins, and Yungxian Yan were not able to be included
here.

3. While limiting his focus largely to moral codes, rules, and edicts, with some attention to the role of the
moral imagination in shaping what he terms the "big three of morality (autonomy, community, divinity)," Richard

Shweder and his colleagues also recognize that normative moral discourses elide the complexity of experience
and the aspectual reflections of moral themes (often competing) that are used to represent it (2003:100). It
is, unfortunately from our perspective, not to investigating the concrete "vicissitudes of human ethical expe

rience" (2003:100-101) that Shweder et al. turn but instead to efforts at documenting the various explana
tions, judgments, discourses, and metaphors used to capture the facticity of such experiential dynamism and
complexity.

4. While still closely attuned to the complexity of moral experience, Mattingly stands out from many of the
volume's other contributors in relying upon more traditional moral/ethical conceptual terminology. For instance,

she finds that an explicit taking up of a Neo-Aristotelian notion of a situated "Good" helps her understand and

describe Dotty's moral experience.

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