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Negative Ethics
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Bad Binaries and Negative Strategies: A Brief Reply to Didier Fassin and Marilyn Strathern

Mauvaises binarités et stratégies négatives : une brève réponse à Didier Fassin et à Marilyn Strathern
Corinna Howland and Tom Powell Davies
p. 217-222

Excerpt

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We thank Didier Fassin and Marilyn Strathern for their generous and generative responses to the volume. Fassin and Strathern both identify the complexity of embarking on an anthropological study of “negative ethics”, and the productive limitations of disciplinary practices of representation, particularly as they pertain to ethical evaluation. Both authors raise important questions about how we make use of concepts to analyse moral life. In this reply, we address three of their helpful prompts. First, Fassin queries our use of the terms “bad” and “negative” as appropriate descriptors with which to capture emic moral experience. Second, he questions whether dualistic concepts, such as “bad/good” or “negative/positive”, do justice to the complexity of ethical life. Third, we draw on Strathern’s account of how binaries can be used creatively to model the sites that we study and revitalise existing disciplinary positions. Responding to these enabling critiques, we highlight the value of ...

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References

Bibliographical reference

Corinna Howland and Tom Powell Davies, “Bad Binaries and Negative Strategies: A Brief Reply to Didier Fassin and Marilyn Strathern”L’Homme, 243-244 | 2022, 217-222.

Electronic reference

Corinna Howland and Tom Powell Davies, “Bad Binaries and Negative Strategies: A Brief Reply to Didier Fassin and Marilyn Strathern”L’Homme [Online], 243-244 | 2022, Online since 25 December 2022, connection on 18 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/44044; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.44044

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About the authors

Corinna Howland

Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington – Anthropology Programme, Wellington (New Zealand) – corinna.howland[at]vuw.ac.nz

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Tom Powell Davies

University of Sydney – Oceania Journal, Sydney (Australia) – tom.powelldavies[at]sydney.edu.au

By this author

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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