THE PRIMACY OF THE ETHICAL - PROPOSITIONS FOR A MILITANT ANTHROPOLOGY

In bracketing certain ''Western'' Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be ''suspending the ethical'' in our dealings with the ''other.'' Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imagine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged anthropology might take.