Morality

Abstract Can we tell the story of the anthropology of morality without using its own rhetoric? Most existing summaries of the anthropology of morality tell a remarkably similar tale of neglect, rediscovery, and then rupture. Where did this standard narrative come from, and why do so many theorists who agree about very little else echo each other with a common origin story about their sub-field? The chapter introduces a case study from the anthropology of Islam to show how this rhetoric may be obscuring deeper continuities within the discipline, the most important of which is a desire on the part of many anthropologists to separate the religious from the moral. It concludes by asking whether the morals of anthropologists have dampened the much-celebrated and revolutionary potential of the anthropology of the moral.