This semester has focused on the relationship between morality and culture. We have explored whether morality might be culturally relative and hence vary according to cultural context, how people come to make moral choices in particular situations, how the relationship between structure and agency shapes those choices, and how we individually might understand and confront conflicting notions of what is right.

This paper asks you to consider exactly how morality and culture are related by critically examining the arguments of FOUR authors we have read this semester. Your essay should focus on the following questions: Is morality indeed relative to particular cultural contexts? Should it be? If it is relative, does that mean that we can't judge other people's notions of what is right or appropriate because we don't share their experiences or perspectives on the world? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a view? If morality is not culturally relative, then how should we understand the role of cultural context in shaping people's views of what is right? How should we understand and assess different conceptions of what is right, good, and moral?

You should choose four authors who can easily be placed in dialogue with each other. Two of the authors should be chosen from List A, and two from List B. Please note that some of the authors listed below are separated by a slash. This means that you may discuss one or more of the authors listed, but they would count as only one example.

List A (Please discuss two of these authors in your essay)
Ahmadu/Walley
Shakespeare/Bohannan
Bourgois
Gutmann
Scheper-Hughes
Farmer

List B (Please discuss two of these authors in your essay)
Galbraith/Schor
Hinton
Ginsburg
Bales
Tolstoy
Greene

Use the dialogue between the four authors to formulate your own argument in answer to the questions. Be sure to include a clear, interesting thesis statement in your opening paragraph. You might find it helpful to focus your essay around a particular moral theme, such as family, gender, or sexual relationships, violence (physical or symbolic), death and dying, or poverty and inequality. While your essay should focus primarily on four authors, feel free to refer to other relevant readings.

In framing your discussions, pay particular attention to such issues as definitions, analytical frameworks, underlying assumptions, and evidence -- these will help you to critique each author's approach, enable comparison between them, and help you to develop a thesis statement which explains how your analysis of the four authors points to specific conclusions.

REFERENCES:
As this is a seminar in anthropology, you will be expected to follow the citation guidelines set by the American Anthropological Association. A complete copy of these guidelines is available on-line, but the following examples should be sufficient for this essay:

TEXT REFERENCES
These (including references to personal communications) are placed in the body of the text, not as notes. For each quotation or statement specific enough to need a reference, place the citation in parentheses (author's name, year of publication of work quoted or referred to, page(s) cited), thus: (Doe 1968) or (Rowe 1893:115-119).

NOTES
All notes follow the text as endnotes, beginning on a new page, and are restricted to material that cannot be included in the text. Notes are numbered consecutively throughout the text by superscript numerals.

REFERENCES CITED
Do not include any publication not cited in the text. References Cited must begin on a new page, and all entries must be double-spaced, listed alphabetically by last name of senior author, and chronologically for two or more titles by the same author(s). The typed layout should conform to the printed layout as follows:

Driver, Harold E.

1956 An Integration of Functional, Evolutionary, and Historical Theory by Means of Correlations. Bloomington: Indiana University Publication in Anthropology and Linguistics, Memoir 12.

1966 Geographical-Historical versus Psycho-Functional Explanations of Kin Avoidances. Current Anthropology 7:131-182.

Miller, George A.

1954 Psycholinguistics. In Handbook of Social Psychology II. Gardner Lindey, ed. Pp. 693-708. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Thibault, John W., and Harold H. Kelley

1959 The Social Psychology of Groups. New York: John Wiley.

 

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