ISSN:
0001-9720
Language:
German
Titel der Quelle:
Africa : journal of the International African Institute : revue de l'Institut Africain International
Publ. der Quelle:
Cambridge : Cambridge Univ. Press
Angaben zur Quelle:
Vol. 87, No. 3 (2017), p. 572
DDC:
390
Abstract:
Not only are missionaries supplemented by NGOs of various kinds, but topics of concern embrace such matters as education, public health and security as well as faith. The social uncertainty (precarity, political unrest, crime, HIV, and so on) that many commentators on contemporary Africa have described generates what were once called revitalization movements in anthropology, attempts at reviving a sense of direction and purpose within one's own community, as well as attempts to reform other communities or categories of persons, ones whose states of ostensible disarray appear threatening to one's own well-being. To follow through requires close ethnographic attention and sensibility, as perhaps best realized here in the article by Thomas G. Kirsch.1 The contributors invoke the ordinary but they also wish to correct my correction, as it were, and to return attention to the public, institutionalized and politicized dimensions of the ethical (by 'correction' here, think of the navigator adjusting the rudder to keep the ship on course). [...]ideals in practice' are located in these articles in the public sphere and the authors attend to what one might call the public life of ethics - in weddings, schools, trafficking, policing, medicine and public health. [...]the point of Ordinary Ethics was never to objectify ethics as a discrete province of social life, distinct from politics, or to sever the ordinary from the public domain; on the contrary, it was to understand the ethical as a dimension of all forms of social action, pervasive in and intrinsic to all spheres of...
DOI:
10.1017/S0001972017000122
URL:
https://search.proquest.com/docview/1920633524
