Lara Deeb and Mona Harb
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691153650
- eISBN:
- 9781400848560
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691153650.003.0005
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Cafés are places where people are essentially forced to take a stance on the morality of specific activities, not only by choosing whether to partake, but also by passively accepting others' ...
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Cafés are places where people are essentially forced to take a stance on the morality of specific activities, not only by choosing whether to partake, but also by passively accepting others' participation in their presence. Because many of the moral “rules” about the sorts of things one can do in a café—like listen to music or smoke argileh—are not clear-cut, cafés require people to navigate complex moral terrain in order to have fun while feeling good about themselves. This chapter takes up a number of these debatable activities in order to show how more or less pious Shi'i Muslims, especially youths, employ moral flexibility in their discourses and practices of leisure. In some cases, people negotiate among different rubrics of morality, while in others they choose to ignore particular tenets or disagree about the accuracy of a rule in the first place.Less
Cafés are places where people are essentially forced to take a stance on the morality of specific activities, not only by choosing whether to partake, but also by passively accepting others' participation in their presence. Because many of the moral “rules” about the sorts of things one can do in a café—like listen to music or smoke argileh—are not clear-cut, cafés require people to navigate complex moral terrain in order to have fun while feeling good about themselves. This chapter takes up a number of these debatable activities in order to show how more or less pious Shi'i Muslims, especially youths, employ moral flexibility in their discourses and practices of leisure. In some cases, people negotiate among different rubrics of morality, while in others they choose to ignore particular tenets or disagree about the accuracy of a rule in the first place.
Emily Katz Anhalt
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300217377
- eISBN:
- 9780300231762
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300217377.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines how the Ajax tackles the problem of rage and highlights the dangers of democratic decision making. In Ajax, Sophocles shows that democratic institutions alone cannot eradicate ...
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This chapter examines how the Ajax tackles the problem of rage and highlights the dangers of democratic decision making. In Ajax, Sophocles shows that democratic institutions alone cannot eradicate the burning desire for vengeance because they do not address the fundamental problem. Ajax rejects not only the flexibility of democratic values and decision-making procedures, but also the cyclical processes of nature and the movement of time itself. The chapter considers how, following Ajax's death, the Ajax exposes the double nature of moral flexibility. It also considers how Odysseus's awareness of human vulnerability and mortality infuses the concept of justice with humanity and compassion. Ajax's rage reminds us to approach consensus and compromise carefully, with a farsighted, Odyssean understanding of self-interest.Less
This chapter examines how the Ajax tackles the problem of rage and highlights the dangers of democratic decision making. In Ajax, Sophocles shows that democratic institutions alone cannot eradicate the burning desire for vengeance because they do not address the fundamental problem. Ajax rejects not only the flexibility of democratic values and decision-making procedures, but also the cyclical processes of nature and the movement of time itself. The chapter considers how, following Ajax's death, the Ajax exposes the double nature of moral flexibility. It also considers how Odysseus's awareness of human vulnerability and mortality infuses the concept of justice with humanity and compassion. Ajax's rage reminds us to approach consensus and compromise carefully, with a farsighted, Odyssean understanding of self-interest.
