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This chapter makes a case for ordinary ethics as distinct from normative ethics. Rather than assigning a separate domain for ethics with its own specialized vocabulary for moral life deployed by experts, this chapter argues that we could think of ethics as a spirit that suffuses everyday life, somewhat like logic, as it permeates everyday activities. Much discussion on ethics accords a centrality to moments of breakdown and to principles for making choices in hard cases. While there is a place in social life for occasions that demand a muscular definition of the good, the bad, and the righteous, an exclusive emphasis on such moments eclipses those other moments when moral sensibilities are displayed in quotidian acts of care and sustenance. While recognizing the importance of habit as the fly-wheel of society, the chapter argues that sedimentation of experience is only one aspect of habit, the other being the innovations and improvisations through which the particularity of the concrete other is recognized

This chapter examines the ethical and political dimensions of violence by looking at the practices and routines that Arquitecto Tucci residents engage in to protect themselves and their loved ones. It considers the routines, akin to “making toast,” that the people of Tucci deploy to deal with surrounding danger. It argues that these routine and nonroutine practices, including those that involve the deployment of violence, can be understood as the expression of “ordinary ethics,” revealing an ethics of care at work. It concludes with a discussion of a peaceful form of collective action that is slowly emerging in Tucci to tackle the issue of public safety as well as the character of this incipient social movement.

This chapter reflects on the broad implications of an ethnography of young mothers who are placed by the state into a residence run by an international humanitarian organization. It concludes by discussing the lives of young women once they leave Palomitáy, and argues that attention to moral experience and intimate involvement enables a deeper understanding of the entanglement of affective relationships and social, political, and economic inequality in individual lives. The chapter suggests that attention to young mothers challenges anthropological research on relatedness in the Andes. Highlighting youth as social agents who do the labor of care, even as they are positioned as vulnerable and in need of care, extends understanding of intimate arenas and state power and the emergence of moral experience in ordinary interactions.

Within anthropological folk theory, rapport has often been understood as pivoting on unproblematic notions of co-presence, fuzzy relations of friendship, and the centrality of denotation—that is, what people talk about, rather than how they talk (see Goebel, Chapters 1 and 2, this volume). Contrary to this conventional view, this chapter focuses on the semiotic and meta-pragmatic components of the ethnographic encounter. Drawing on her gradual and unplanned involvement in the domestic chores of the household where she was hosted, the author describes how during her fieldwork in upland Sulawesi she learned how to make offers and elicit preferences in a pragmatically acceptable way. As her role shifted from being a guest to being a host of her host’s guests, she discovered, through a series of misunderstandings, the role of food-mediated commensality in the reproduction of local hierarchies and developed a new understanding of how ethnographic rapport is built through minute, yet meaningful, instances of conversational exchange.

This book focuses on the collective trauma created by the constant and implacable interpersonal violence in Arquitecto Tucci, a marginalized neighborhood in the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It examines the hows and whys of the copresence and concatenations of different forms of violence that encircle the lives of the urban poor in the community. It considers the ways in which scared residents—men and women, adults and children—establish routines and weave relations to cope with (and respond to) the constant danger that besieges them and their beloved ones by exercising what anthropologists Veena Das and Michael Lambek call “ordinary ethics.” This introduction provides an overview of violence in urban areas in Latin America, the book's ethnographic reconstruction of violence at the urban margins, the research method used, and the chapters that follow.

This chapter examines the effects of recent attempts by right-wing Hindu nationalists to forge, through legislative action as well as vigilante violence, a Hindu community and nation unified by the symbol of the mother cow. The chapter describes how villagers in the mountains viewed such attempts to impose kinship between them and cows at large as an act of coercion. However, such coercive framings of kinship did not go unchallenged; villagers responded to them by imagining alternate forms of relatedness that emphasized a common mountain identity over transcendental Hinduness as the grounds of connection between themselves and their cows. The chapter argues that these alternate forms of relatedness were based in the fact that the distinctive characteristics and tendencies of individual cows were incommensurate with the homogeneous metaphor of the mother cow.